A great silence, heavy with fear, petrified the hoardes of pillagers. Simon, who was losing consciousness, felt that the weight above him was lightened. Some of the beasts of prey were taking flight.
He half-raised himself, while supporting Isabel, and the first thing that struck him was Antonio's attitude. The Indian, with drawn face, was gazing at Dolores. Slowly and steadily he took a few steps towards her, like a cat creeping up to its prey, and suddenly, before Simon could intervene, he leapt on the crupper behind her, passed his arms under hers and dug his heels into the horse, which broke into a gallop along the barricades, towards the north.
From the opposite direction, through the mist, appeared the sky-blue uniforms of France.
CHAPTER VIII
THE HIGH COMMISSIONER FOR THE NEW TERRITORIES
"My fault! . . . Now aren't you convinced, as I am, that this is a ramification of my fault, ending in a cul-de-sac? So that all the eruptive forces immobilized in the direction of this blind alley have found a favourable position . . . so that all these forces . . . you grasp the idea, don't you?"
Simon grasped it all the less inasmuch as Old Sandstone was becoming more and more entangled in his theory, while he, Simon, was wholly absorbed in Isabel and had ears for hardly anything but what she was telling him.
They were all three a little way outside the barricades, among the groups of tents around which the soldiers, in overalls, and fatigue-caps, were moving to and fro and preparing their meals. Isabel's face was already more peaceful and her eyes less uneasy. Simon gazed at her with infinite tenderness. In the course of the morning the fog had at last dispersed. For the first time since the day when they had travelled together on the deck of the Queen Mary, the sun shone in a cloudless sky; and one might almost have thought that nothing had occurred between that day and this to divide them. All evil memories faded away. Isabel's torn dress, her pallor and her bruised wrists were the reminder merely of an adventure already remote, since the glorious future was opening out before them.
Inside the barricades, a few soldiers scurried round the arena, stacking the dead bodies, while others, farther back, stationed on the wreck of the Ville de Dunkerque, removed the sinister shapes hanging from their gibbets. Near the submarine, in an enclosed space guarded by many sentries, some dozens of prisoners were herded and were joined at every moment by fresh batches of captives.
"Of course," resumed Old Sandstone, "there are many other obscure points; but I shall not leave this until I have studied all the causes of the phenomenon."