The Quest: A Romance

by Justus Miles Forman

It was not a very consequential speech, and to tell the truth it was what, in the girl's own country, would be termed pure "bluff," but to Captain Stewart it rang harsh and loud with evil significance, and he went out of that room cold at heart. What plans were they perfecting among them? What invisible nets for his feet?

And there was another thing still. Within the past two or three days he had become convinced that his movements were being watched. (And that would be Richard Hartley at work, he said to himself.) Faces vaguely familiar began to confront him in the street, in restaurants and cafés. Once he thought his rooms had been ransacked during his absence at La Lierre, though his servant stoutly maintained that they had never been left unoccupied save for a half-hour's marketing. Finally, on the day before this morning by the rose gardens, he was sure that as he came out from the city in his car he was followed at a long distance by another motor. He saw it behind him after he had left the city gate, the Porte de Versailles, and he saw it again after he had left the main route at Issy, and entered the little Rue Barbes which led to La Lierre. Of course he promptly did the only possible thing under the circumstances. He dashed on past the long stretch of wall, swung into the main avenue beyond and continued, through Clamart, to the Meudon wood, as if he were going to St. Cloud. In the labyrinth of roads and lanes there he came to a halt, and after a half-hour's wait ran slowly back to La Lierre.

There was no further sign of the other car, the pursuer, if so it had been; but he passed two or three men on bicycles and others walking, and what one of these might not be a spy paid to track him down?

It had frightened him badly, that hour of suspense and flight, and he determined to remain at La Lierre for at least a few days, and wrote to his servant in the Rue du Faubourg to forward his letters there under the false name by which he had hired the place.

He was thinking very wearily of all these things as he sat on the fallen tree trunk in the garden and stared unseeing across tangled ranks of roses. And after awhile his thoughts, as they were wont to do, returned to Ste. Marie—that looming shadow which darkened the sunlight, that incubus of fear which clung to him night and day. He was so absorbed that he did not hear sounds which might otherwise have roused him. He heard nothing, saw nothing, save that which his fevered mind projected, until a voice spoke his name.

He looked over his shoulder thinking that O'Hara had sought him out. He turned a little on the tree trunk to see more easily, and the image of his dread stood there a living and very literal shadow against the daylight.

Captain Stewart's overstrained nerves were in no state to bear a sudden shock. He gave a voiceless, whispering cry, and he began to tremble very violently so that his teeth chattered. All at once he got to his feet and began to stumble away backwards, but a projecting limb of the fallen tree caught him and held him fast. It must be that the man was in a sort of frenzy. He must have seen through a red mist just then, for when he found that he could not escape his hand went swiftly to his coat pocket, and in his white and contorted face there was murder, plain and unmistakable.

"His hand went swiftly to his coat pocket."

Ste. Marie was too lame to spring aside or to dash upon the man across intervening obstacles and defend himself. He stood still in his place and waited. And it was characteristic of him that at that moment he felt no fear, only a fine sense of exhilaration. Open danger had no terrors for him. It was secret peril that unnerved him, as in the matter of the poison a week before.