The cleverness with which O'Shea drove her into a glow of enthusiasm for Caius was a revelation of power which the latter at the moment could only regard curiously, so torn was his heart in respect to the issue of the trial. He was so near that their looks told him what he could not hear, and he saw Josephine's face glow with the warmth of regard which grew under the other's sneers. Then he saw O'Shea visibly cast that subject away as if it was of no importance; he went near to her, speaking low, but with the look of one who brought the worst news, and Caius knew, without question, that he was pouring into her ears all the evil he had ever heard of Le Maître, all the detail of his present drunken condition. Caius did not move; he did not know whether the scene before him represented Satan with powerful grasp upon a soul that would otherwise have passed into some more heavenly region, or whether it was a wise and good man trying to save a woman from her own fanatical folly. The latter seemed to be the case when he looked about him at the beach, at the boats, at the lighthouse on the cliff above, with a clothes-line near it, spread with flapping garments. When he looked, not outward, but inward, and saw Josephine's vision of life, he believed he ought to go forward and beat off the serpent from the dove.
The colloquy was not very long. Then O'Shea led Josephine's horse nearer to Caius.
"Madame and my wife will go with ye," he said. "I've told the men to get the boat out."
"I did not say that," moaned Josephine.
Her face was buried in her hands, and Caius remembered how those pretty white hands had at one time beckoned to him, and at another had angrily waved him away. Now they were held helplessly before a white face that was convulsed with fear and shame and self-abandonment.
"There ain't no particular hurry," remarked O'Shea soothingly; "but Mammy has packed up all in the houses that needs to go, and she'll bring warm clothes and all by the time the boat's out, so there's no call for madame to go back. It would be awful unkind to the girls to set them crying; and"—this to Caius—"ye jist go and put up yer things as quick as ye can."
His words were accompanied by the sound of the fishermen putting rollers under the small schooner that had been selected. The old skipper, Pierre, had begun to call out his orders. Josephine took her hands from her face suddenly, and looked towards the busy men with such eager hungry desire for the freedom they were preparing for her that it seemed to Caius that at that moment his own heart broke, for he saw that Josephine was not convinced but that she had yielded. He knew that Mammy's presence on the journey made no real difference in its guilt from Josephine's standpoint; her duty to her God was to remain at her post. She had flinched from it out of mere cowardice—it was a fall. Caius knew that he had no choice but to help her back to her better self, that he would be a bastard if he did not do it.
Three times he essayed to speak; he had not the right words; then, even without them, he broke the silence hurriedly:
"I think you are justified in coming with me; but if you do what you believe to be wrong—you will regret it. What does your heart say? Think!"
It was a feeble, stammered protest; he felt no dignity in it; he almost felt it to be the craven insult seen in it by O'Shea, who swore under his breath and glared at him.