Arrived at the vieille église, the two cousins climbed cautiously up the crumbling walls, Rupert with the string handle of the cement pot between his teeth. The rest of the party, scattered on the sloping cliff-side in the mother-of-pearl moonlight, sat watching them. Below, the sea, a star-spangled mirror, stretched from France to where Alderney humped against the sky-line. On the Jersey coast a powerful light winked spasmodically. The sky, clear in the east, was flecked overhead and in the west with tiny snatches of snowy cloud, regular as knitted stitches, or the scales on a mackerel's back.
Softly the Comtesse began to sing to them:
I
"Au clair de la lune,
Mon ami Pierrot,
Prête-moi ta plume
Pour écrire un mot.
Ma chandelle est morte,
Je n' ai plus de feu.
Ouvre-moi ta porte
Pour 1' amour de Dieu!
II
"Au clair de la lune
Pierrot répondit:
'Je n'ai pas de plume,
Je suis dans mon lit!
Va chez la voisine,
Je crois qu' elle y est,
Car dans sa cuisine
On bat le briquet.'
III
"Au clair de la lune
L'aimable Lubin
Frappe chez la Brune,
Elle repond soudain:
'Qui frappe de la sorte?'
Il dit à son tour:
'Ouvrez votre porte
Pour le dieu d'amour!'
IV
"Au clair de la lune
On n' y voit qu' un peu,
On cherche la plume
On cherche du feu.
En cherchant de la sorte
Je ne sais ce qu' on trouva,
Mais je sais que la porte
Sur eux se ferma!"
"Ah!" she sighed softly in the silence that followed her song. "And now we all go back to Paris! That dear Paris! C'est comme un amant qu'il faut quitter pour un revoir plus chaud, et comme tout neuf! If you do not budge from it, it becomes like a husband, fatiguing and exigeant, who makes you work too much and never gives you room to breathe. But----" she gazed ecstatically towards Alderney in which direction the lieutenant and Rupert happened to be sitting. "Go away for a little while and you find yourself dreaming of the sweet suffocating embrace that exalts the veins----"
"How white the sea looks!" suddenly broke in Val. It troubled her to see how Haidee hung upon the pretty immodest phrases that slipped so easily from Christiane de Vervanne's lips. "What were those lines of yours, Sacha, about when the sea is milk-white and Jersey black as ink and a storm coming to-morrow?"
"Quand la mer est comme le lait, et Jersey tout noir
On peut attendre un orage avant demain soir,"
quoted Sacha sulkily.
The Comtesse shot an icy glance at Val. She did not like her rhapsodies interrupted.
"Épatant, that woman!" she murmured to her cavalry-man.
On the walk home Sacha tried once more to re-arrange the order of the party and get Val to himself, but pitilessly she left him to the mercy of Haidee, furious and vengeful as a Gorgon. When they reached home it would have been hard to say whose was the crossest-looking of their two faces. Trinkling back farewells, the Shai-poo party continued on its way down the Terrasse, but Sacha stayed. He had gripped Val's hand over the little fence that enclosed the yard and would not let it go.