But stronger than his perplexity was his curiosity. He wished to know. In the midst of this imbroglio in which was a very entanglement of opposing actions in which attacks came from opposing quarters, without its being possible to see from which quarter one would come first, he hoped some guiding thread would present itself and allow him, at a given moment, to choose one path rather than another and no longer act haphazardly from an impulse of pity or the lust to avenge.
The girl remained leaning against a tree and played idly with the whistle which she was to use in case of surprise. The youngness of her face, almost a child’s face, though she was certainly not less than twenty, surprised Ralph. At that distance he could not see the color of her strange eyes, but her hair beneath her hat, which she had pushed back a little, shone like curls of gold and formed a halo of light and gaiety.
The moments slipped by. All at once Ralph heard the hinges of the padlocked door creak, and saw, on the other side of the hillock, a country-woman who came up the path, singing, and took her way towards the house, a basket of linen on her arm. The girl with the green eyes had also heard her. She tottered, sank to the ground under the tree, and raised the whistle to her lips. She was so overcome with terror that she had not the strength to blow it; the laundress went on up the path without having perceived that [[86]]figure, hidden behind the trunks of the shrubs which stood at the fork of the path.
Terrible minutes slipped away. There is nothing more terrifying than to wait for an event which every circumstance foretells will be dramatic. What would William do, disturbed in the very middle of his burglary and confronted with this intruder? Did not the thief’s actions during the attack in the express enable one to guess the dénouement?
Ralph made ready to intervene, when there came an unexpected happening: the laundress entered the house by a side door; and the moment she disappeared, William came out of the front door, carrying a newspaper parcel of the shape of a violin case. He and the laundress did not meet.
The girl, hidden among the trees did not at once see this, and during the stealthy approach of her confederate, who was walking noiselessly on the turf, she wore the mask of terror she had worn at Beaucourt, after the murder of Miss Bakersfield and the two men. Ralph filled with detestation of her.
William, if William it was, rejoined the girl, and Ralph saw her tell him of the coming of the laundress. He caught her roughly by the arm and hurried her along into the cover of the path to the worm-eaten door. As they passed the hillock Ralph saw that they were both shaken by this narrow escape and he felt an immense contempt for them. [[87]]
“All right,” he said to himself. “If it is Marescal or his agents who are in ambush behind that door all the better. Let them collar the two of them and stick them into prison! That girl isn’t worth taking any trouble about.”
It may be that he might yet have yielded to a sudden impulse, to an irresistible need to impose his will on these puppets and force an affair he had started to the end he desired. It may be. But this was a day of surprises, on which the events falsified all his predictions, so that he was driven to act almost in spite of himself and at any rate without a moment’s reflection.
Some twenty yards from the door, that is to say some twenty yards from the spot at which he supposed the agents of Marescal to be lurking, the man whose head Ralph had seen rise above the wall, sprang out of the bushes which hung over the path, knocked William out with a swing to the jaw, gripped the young girl and tucked her under his arm as if she had been a parcel, snatched up the violin-case, and started to run, not in the direction of the wooden door, but through the plantation of olive trees at the bottom of the garden, and away from the house. Ralph at once grasped the fact that the man had made a circuit round the walls and entered the garden through some breach in the wall, or some accident of the ground. He dashed off in pursuit. His quarry was at once swift [[88]]and powerful; he ran at a good pace, without looking behind him, as if he had no doubt whatever that no one would be able to prevent him from reaching his goal.