Yes, I wanted her back, I said to myself; but with her mistress, too; but my only answer to mademoiselle was a smile that I think she understood, for she looked quickly away from me.
Then I put her on Fatima's back, who bore a Parisian saddle now instead of a pillion, and out through the stockade we rode, and down the rough path to La Petite Rivière, and through the ford (deeper now, from spring freshets, than it had been when I listened to the whippoorwills), and along the wooded bank on the other side, where we had raced to get away from the redskin (though that she never knew), and still I had not said the words I meant to say.
Under the tree that had been the goal for our race I drew up a minute. Here, I thought, will be a place of happy omen, for here I won my first dance with her, and here I will win her. But suddenly I recalled that this was the spot where I had first seen the chevalier; no, it was of evil omen. "By hairbreadth escapes we always win," he had said. I feared, the "luck of the Le Moynes" and their baleful motto.
Where we had stopped to look at the lake before, I stopped again. It was almost more beautiful in its setting of the soft pinks and greens of early spring than it had been under the golden sun of autumn, and here, I thought, I will say it. But the glimpse of the ivied mill tower among the trees, and the beautiful water and its wooded banks, reminded Pelagie of Ettenheim, and she began to tell me of a letter she had just received from the Duc d'Enghien, which made her very anxious.
"He writes," said Pelagie, "that he is being followed everywhere by an Englishman who, he feels sure, is a spy in the pay of Bonaparte—I will never call him emperor!" said Pelagie, with fiery eye. "And while he says he feels no alarm for himself, he is more and more glad to think that I am so safely away from all dangers."
But the thought of her letter had saddened Pelagie for a while, and I would not speak then. How little we dreamed that on that very day, perhaps at that very hour, the young duke was being seized by Napoleon's emissaries, in violation of all treaties of neutrality, and hurried to the gloomy fortress of Vincennes, where, ten days later, after a mock trial of two hours in the dead of night, with no chance of defense given him, he was taken out and shot and buried in the trench where he fell. When the dreadful news reached us, weeks later, it darkened for a while my sweet Pelagie's life, as it was the one crime not even the friends of Napoleon can excuse or forgive: the one dark blot on his fame time will never erase.
But that afternoon we were in happy ignorance of what was happening four thousand miles away, and Pelagie's sadness was but a passing shadow and in a little while we were both joyous again.
"Rock Spring," I thought, "beloved of lovers, will be the place." But at Rock Spring I could think of nothing but Yorke astride the chevalier's back, the grimy spectacle the chevalier presented when Yorke was dislodged, and then the fearful peril Pelagie had been in when I fled with her in my arms on Fatima's back. No, Rock Spring was not the place.
And so we were once more back at the ford, almost home, and the long shadows lying on the cool water, and a thrush singing his evening-song in the wooded crests behind us, and my tale had not been told. We had had much sweet converse, and many times the words were on my lips, but somehow—I know not how—Pelagie always managed to turn me aside. At least I think she did, for with the words on my lips I would find myself talking of something else.
Now, as our horses swashed their noses in the cool water, and sent the bright drops in showers about us, I looked down upon her, the dark green of her riding-habit making a rich foil to the soft glow of her cheek, and the drooping plume of her hat falling over her snowy neck and mingling with the dark ringlets, and one little hand from which she had drawn the glove playing with Fatima's tawny mane—and I took a sudden resolution.