Matthew Dalbrook turned from the eager face of the police-officer with a short, angry sigh. It was of the reward the man was thinking, no doubt—congratulating himself perhaps upon the good luck which had thrown such a murder in his way. And presently the man from Scotland Yard would be on the scene, keen and business-like, yet full of a sportsman’s ardour, intent on discovery, as on a game in which the stakes were worth winning. Little cared either of these for the one fair life cut short, for the other young life blighted.
CHAPTER VII.
“I saw a Fury whetting a death-dart.”
Lord Cheriton liked to take his summer holiday on a sunny sea-shore where there were not many English visitors. Paramé St. Malo fulfilled both these conditions. It afforded him a vast expanse of golden sands, firm beneath his foot, steeped in sunshine for the most part, on which to pace to and fro, lifting his eyes dreamily now and then to the sea-girt city, with its stony rampart, and its quaint Louis Quatorze mansions, facing the sea in the sober dignity of massive stone façade and tall windows; grey old houses, which seem too good for the age in which they find themselves, solid enough to last through long centuries, and to outlive all that yet lingers of that grandiose France in which they were built. Roof above roof rises the Breton city, steep old streets leading up to Cathedral and Municipal Palace, with the crocketed steeple for its pinnacle, shining with a pale brilliance in the summer sunlight, verdureless, and with but little colour save the reflected glory of the skies, and the jasper green of the sea in its ring of golden sand.
Lord Cheriton affected Paramé because, though it was within a summer night’s journey from his own Isle of Purbeck, it was thoroughly out of the beaten track, and he was tolerably secure from those hourly encounters with his most particular friends, to which he must have submitted at Baden or Spa, at Trouville or Dieppe. Paramé was Parisian or nothing. The smart people all came from Paris. English smartness had its centre at Dinard, and the English who patronize Dinard will tell you there is no other paradise on earth, and that its winter climate is better than that of the Riviera, if people would only have faith. So long as the Cheritons could keep out of the way of exploring friends from Dinard, his Lordship was exempt from the amusements which to some minds make life intolerable.
Lady Cheriton was distinctly social in her instincts, and looked Dinard-wards sometimes from her lotus-land with a longing eye. She would have liked to ask some nice people to luncheon; and she knew so many nice people at Dinard. She would have liked to organize excursions to Mont St. Michel, or up the Rance to Dinan. She would have liked to plunge into all manner of innocent gaieties; but her husband stamped out these genial yearnings.
“It seems such a pity not to have people over to dinner when there are such nice operettas and vaudevilles every night at the Casino,” she sighed.
“And if you had them over to dinner, how do you suppose they would get back?” asked her husband, sternly. “Would you wish to keep them all till next morning, and be bored with them at breakfast?”
That intervening strip of sea, narrow as it was, afforded unspeakable comfort to Lord Cheriton. It was an excuse for refusing to go over and take afternoon tea with people he was supposed to hold in his heart of hearts in the way of friendship.
“You can go, Maria, if you like,” he told his wife; “but I am not a good sailor, and I came here on purpose to be quiet.”