The waning moon came up at last, behind a distant line of trees on the Charente side, lighting up with a silver lining the towering clouds of the storm, which was still travelling eastward, leaving in its wake battered vines and ruined crops, searing the face of the land as with a hot iron. Loo lifted his head and looked round him. The owner of the boat was at the tiller, while his assistant sat amidships, his elbows on his knees, looking ahead with dreamy eyes. Close to Barebone, crouching from the wind which blew cold from the Atlantic, was Dormer Colville, affably silent. If Loo turned to glance at him he looked away, but when his back was turned Loo was conscious of watching eyes, full of sympathy, almost uncomfortably quick to perceive the inward working of another’s mind, and suit his own thereto.
Thus the boat plunged out toward the sea and the flickering lights that mark the channel, tacking right across to that spit of land lying between the Gironde and the broad Atlantic, where grows a wine without match in all the world. Thus Loo Barebone turned his back on the ship which had been his home so long and set out into a new world; a new and unknown life, with the Marquis de Gemosac’s ringing words buzzing in his brain yet; with the warm touch of Juliette’s lips burning still upon his hand.
“You are the grandson of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette! You are the Last Hope of France!”
And he remembered the lights and shadows on Juliette’s hair as he looked down upon her bent head.
Colville was talking to the “patron” now. He knew the coast, it seemed, and, somewhere or other, had learnt enough of such matters of local seafaring interest as to set the fisherman at his ease and make him talk.
They were arranging where to land, and Colville was describing the exact whereabouts of a little jetty used for bathing purposes, which ran out from the sandy shore, quite near to Mrs. St. Pierre Lawrence’s house, in the pine-trees, two miles south of Royan. It was no easy matter to find this spot by the dim light of a waning moon, and, half-mechanically, Loo joined in the search, and presently, when the jetty was reached, helped to make fast in a choppy sea.
They left the luggage on the jetty and walked across the silent sand side by side.
“There,” said Colville, pointing forward. “It is through that opening in the pine-trees. A matter of five minutes and we shall be at my cousin’s house.”
“It is very kind of Mrs. St. Pierre Lawrence,” answered Barebone, “to—well, to take me up. I suppose that is the best way to look at it.”
Colville laughed quietly.