There was only the weird sound of the running water through the open trap-door of the floor. He knew how superstitious was every Jerseyman, from highest to lowest, and he would work upon that weakness now.
“You hear that water running to the sea?” he said solemnly. “You tried to kill and drown me to-night. You’ve heard how when one man has drowned another an invisible stream follows the murderer wherever he goes, and he hears it, hour after hour, month after month, year after year, until suddenly one day it comes on him in a huge flood, and he is found, whether in the road, or in his bed, or at the table, or in the field, drowned, and dead?”
The old man shivered violently.
“You know Manon Moignard the witch? Well, if you don’t do what I say—and I shall find out, mind you—she shall bewitch the flood on you. Be still ... listen! That’s the sound you’ll hear every day of your life, if you break the promise you’ve got to make to me now.”
He spoke the promise with ghostly deliberation, and the old man, all the desperado gone out of him, repeated it in a husky voice. Whereupon Detricand led him into the garden, saw him safe out on the road and watched him disappear. Then rubbing his fingers, as though to rid them of pollution, with an exclamation of disgust he went back to the house.
By another evening—that is, at the hour when Guida arrived home after her secret marriage with Philip d’Avranche—he saw the lights of the army of de la Rochejaquelein in the valley of the Vendee.
CHAPTER XVI
The night and morning after Guida’s marriage came and went. The day drew on to the hour fixed for the going of the Narcissus. Guida had worked all forenoon with a feverish unrest, not trusting herself, though the temptation was sore, to go where she might see Philip’s vessel lying in the tide-way. She had resolved that only at the moment fixed for sailing would she go to the shore; yet from her kitchen door she could see a wide acreage of blue water and a perfect sky; and out there was Noirmont Point, round which her husband’s ship would go, and be lost to her vision thereafter.
The day wore on. She got her grandfather’s dinner, saw him bestowed in the great arm-chair for his afternoon sleep, and, when her household work was done, settled herself at the spinning wheel.