De Courcelles took her advice, and flung himself, exhausted through excitement and fatigue, upon the late Doctor’s bed, whilst she, with a divine light, almost akin to maternal solicitude, upon her countenance, took a seat in the outer room, and prepared to watch all night against a possible surprise for the man she held prisoner.
CHAPTER VII.
BUT from that moment Lizzie had not a moment’s peace. She dreaded everything and everybody. Each casual visitor she believed to be a spy, and the appearance of a friend made her think that the hour of discovery had come. Rosa made her a thousand promises of fidelity, but the yellow girl, though devoted to her mistress’s interests, was, after all, very much like other women, and found it a hard task to hold her tongue. The whole time she was employed in exercising the baby in the plantation, was a season of torture to Lizzie, who pictured her confiding the whole story to her most intimate friend, under a promise of inviolable secrecy. Meanwhile Henri de Courcelles, though confined to one room during the day time, and only venturing out after dark by means of the window, and with a disguise on, was passing a fairly pleasant time. The two women fed him royally, and waited on him like servants, and he held several conferences with Lizzie as to the possibility of his getting down to the Fort by night, and embarking as a seaman on board one of the Spanish crafts that lay in the bay of San Diego. They would have carried this plan, of which they had arranged all the minutiæ together, into effect at once, had it not been deemed advisable that De Courcelles should lie perdu until it might be supposed by the authorities that their prisoner had perished beyond all doubt in the Alligator Swamp. As soon as the guard of mounted police who watched for him outside the swamp was withdrawn, Lizzie and De Courcelles decided that his first attempt at an escape from the island should be made. He had been concealed in the bungalow for two days when Mr Courtney walked in one morning and took a seat beside Lizzie. The planter looked worn and anxious, and as he removed his hat, and passed his handkerchief across his brow, he seemed to have grown older of late, notwithstanding the brilliant marriage that his daughter had made. The words with which he opened the conversation, had reference to Maraquita.
‘Sir Russell and Lady Johnstone have come to stay with us at the White House, Lizzie.’
‘Indeed, sir,’ she replied. ‘I suppose Quita is nervous of staying at Government House, after what happened there last week. And I don’t wonder at it, poor girl! I should be glad to hear that the Governor had decided to take her to England.’
‘So should we, my dear, and they will go before long—there is no doubt of that—only, it would hardly do for the Governor to run away whilst the island is in this state of ferment. But he judged rightly in thinking that our dear Maraquita would feel safer and happier with her parents, and in her old home. For she has received a terrible shock, Lizzie, and it is telling on her visibly. She seems ten years older to me.’
‘Poor Quita, she cannot fail to feel it,’ replied Lizzie, looking at the matter in a totally different light from that in which Mr Courtney regarded it.