THE DUST OF DEFEAT
THE DUST OF DEFEAT
THEY took their accustomed path beside the strait, walking slowly side by side, each conscious that they would never again be together. The melancholy pines, rising from the water’s edge to the very summit of the mountains, gave that look of desolation which is the salient note of New Caledonian landscape. Across the narrow strait as calm and clear as some sweet English river, the rocky shore rose steep and precipitous, cloaked still in pines. A faint, thrilling roar broke at times upon the ear, and told of Fitzroy’s mine far up on the hill, its long chutes emptying chrome on the beach below. Except for this, there was not a sound that bespoke man’s presence or any sign that betrayed his habitation or handiwork.
“This is our last day,” he said. “Do you not once wish to see the little cabin where I have eaten my heart out these dozen years? Do you never mean to ask me what brought me here?”
“I would like to know,” she answered; “but I was afraid. I didn’t wish to be—to be—”
“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you for that unspoken word. You did not wish to be disillusioned—to be told that the man you have treated with such condescension was a mere vulgar criminal, a garroter perhaps, such a one as you have read of in Gaboriau’s romances. Ah, mademoiselle, when you have heard my unhappy story,—that story which no one has ever listened to save the counsel that defended me,—you will perhaps think better of poor Paul de Charruel.”