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The Mediterranean sparkling beneath the warm sun of the early autumn sky; the blue waves lapping gently the sides of a French bilander which, with all sail set on both her masts, is running swiftly before a northern breeze past Cape de Gata towards Gibraltar. A northern breeze with a touch of the west in it, that comes cool and fresh from off the Sierra Nevada mountains and brings life and health and strength in its breath. Towards Gibraltar the vessel goes on, its course to be set later due north for the tumbling Bay, and then, at last, to England--to happiness and content.
To obtain that bilander, to find seamen fit to work it, and to assure the owner of his payment when once she should reach our shores (a payment of a thousand louis d'ors being made for the voyage!) had been no easy task for Walter Clarges, who now took his title openly; yet, at last, it had been done. In Marseilles it was impossible; there was no sailor to be discovered fit and strong enough to do so much as to haul upon a halliard, while, in Toulon it was no better; but, at last, at Istres in the mouth of the Rhone, to which they proceeded in an open boat, the ship had been found and their escape from all the tainted neighbourhood around assured. They were free! Free of the poisoned South, free at last.
And now Lord Westover walked the deck of the rolling, pitching craft, saying a word here and there to the rough sailor from Aude, who was the master; another, now and again, to the dark-eyed woman who sat by the taffrail beneath the swing of the after-sheet; and going next to a cabin upon the deck and peering in through the window while speaking to his wife within.
At first it had been hard to persuade that dark-eyed woman to accompany them, to induce her to throw in her lot with theirs and bid farewell to the land in which she had sinned and suffered. For she was, indeed, almost distraught at the thought that never more would she struggle and toil for the woman she had come to love so dearly; that, henceforth, no sacrifice on her part was needed.
"Go back to her," she said to Walter after Vandecque had breathed his last, while, since there was nothing else that could be done in a place so encumbered with the dead as Marseilles was, they had left the dead man lying where he died. "Go back to her. She needs you now. Not me. Return to her," and, as she spoke, she cast herself down near the market place as though about to sleep there.
"And you--Marion?" Walter said softly. "You! What of you? You will come with me?"
"She wants me no longer. She has you."
"She needs you ever. You must never part. What shall become of her without you; what will your life be in the future if you have no longer her to tend and care for?"
"My life! My life!" she cried with an upward glance at him from where she had thrown herself down. "What matters that! Every wreck is broken to pieces at last. So shall I be."