Walls of rock everywhere; no visible gate; no path or road, no crevice or gully by which a man might enter this almost fabulous valley from without! To this conclusion I came at the end of my first tour of the grounds. No prison had ever been contrived so cunningly; no human retreat made more inaccessible. As they had carried me through a tunnel of the mountain last night, so I knew that the owner of the châlet came and had returned, and that, until I found the gate of that cavern and my wits unlocked it, I was as surely hidden from the knowledge of men as though the doors of the Schlussenburg had closed upon me.
Such a truth could not but appal me. I accepted it with something very like a shudder and, seeking to forget it, I returned to the hither garden and its many evidences of scientific horticulture. Here, truly, the hand of civilisation and of the human amenities had left its imprint. If this might be, as imagination suggested, a valley of crime unknown, of cruelty and suffering and lust, none the less had those who peopled it looked up sometimes to the sun or bent their heads in homage to the rose. Even at this inclement season, I found blooms abundantly which England would not have given me until May. One pretty bower I shall never forget—an arbour perched upon a grassy bank with a mountain pool and fountain before its doors, and trailing creeper about it, and the great red flower of begonia giving it a sheen of crimson, very beautiful and welcome amidst this maze of green. Here I would have entered to make a note upon paper of all that the morning had taught me; but I was hardly at the door of the little house when I discovered that another occupied it already, and starting back as she looked up, I found myself face to face with Joan Fordibras.
She sat before a rude table of entwined logs, her face resting upon weary arms, and her dark chestnut hair streaming all about her. I saw that she had been weeping, and that tears still glistened upon the dark lashes of her eloquent eyes. Her dress was a simple morning gown of muslin, and a bunch of roses had been crushed by her nervous fingers and the leaves scattered, one by one, upon the ground. At my coming, the colour rushed back to her cheeks, and she half rose as though afraid of me. I stood my ground, however, for her sake and my own. Now must I speak with her, now once and for ever tell her that which I had come to Santa Maria to say.
“Miss Fordibras,” I said quietly; “you are in trouble and I can help you.”
She did not answer me. A flood of tears seemed to conquer her.
“Yes,” she said—and how changed she was from my little Joan of Dieppe!—“Yes, Dr. Fabos, I am in trouble.”
I crossed the arbour and seated myself near her.
“The grief of being misnamed the daughter of a man who is unworthy of being called your father. Tell me if I am mistaken. You are not the daughter of Hubert Fordibras? You are no real relative of his?”
A woman’s curiosity is often as potent an antidote to grief as artifice may devise. I shall never forget the look upon Joan Fordibras’s face when I confessed an opinion I had formed but the half of an hour ago. She was not the General’s daughter. The manner in which he had spoken of her was not the manner of a father uttering the name of his child.
“Did my father tell you that?” she asked me, looking up amazed.