“He may be but a dupe,” I said; “time and opportunity will tell me. You owe much to him, you say, for many kindnesses received during childhood. I shall not forget that when the day of reckoning comes. Joan, I shall forget no one who has been kind to you.”
Her gratitude was pretty enough to see, and I witnessed it many times during the long hours of those hazardous days. From morn to night she was my little companion of the gardens. I came to know her as a man rarely knows a woman who is not a wife to him. Every bush, every path, every tree and shrub of our kingdom we named and numbered. Grown confident in my protection, her sweet laughter became the music of the valley, her voice the notes of its song, her presence its divinity. If I had discerned the secret of her fearlessness, that must be a secret to me also, locked away as a treasure that a distant day will reveal. My own anxieties were too heavy that I dared to share them with her. The yacht, my friends, my servant, where were they? What happened beyond that monstrous curtain of the mountains, that precipice which hid the island world from us? Had they done nothing, then, those comrades in whose loyalty I trusted? Was it possible that even the faithful Okyada had deserted me? I did not believe it for an instant. My eyes told me that it was not true. A voice spoke to me every day. I read it as a man reads a book of fate—an image cast upon the waters, a sign given which shall not be mistaken.
He who pits his life against the intelligence of criminals, must be equipped with many natural weapons. Nothing, certainly, is more necessary than the habit of observation. To watch every straw the winds of conspiracy may blow, to read every cryptic message the hand of crime may write, to be ever alert, vigilant, resourceful, is something more than mere equipment. It is very salvation to the investigator. Trained in all these qualities by long years of patient study, there were signs and omens of the valley for me which another might have passed by without remark. Strange footprints upon the darkest paths, shrubs disturbed, scraps of paper thrown down with little caution—not one of them escaped me. But beyond them all, the rampart of the foaming water enchained my attention and fascinated me as at some human call to action. Day by day the volume of the water in the boiling river was growing less. I first remarked it on the third day of our imprisonment; I made sure of it on the fifth day. Inch by inch, from ledge to ledge, it sank in its channel. Another, perhaps, would have attributed this to some natural phenomenon. I had too much faith in the man who served me to believe any such thing. Okyada was at work, I said. The hour of my liberty was at hand.
You may imagine how this discovery affected me, and how much it was in my mind when I spoke to Joan of our approaching days of freedom. To my question, whether she would visit me again at my house in Suffolk, she replied chiefly by a flushing of her clear cheeks and a quick look from those eyes which could be so eloquent.
“Your sister did not like me,” she rejoined evasively; “the dear old thing, I could see her watching me just as though I had come to steal you from her.”
“Would you have felt very guilty if you had done so, Joan?”
“Yes,” she said, and this so seriously that I regretted the question; “guilty to my life’s end, Dr. Fabos.”
I knew that she referred to the story of her own life and the men among whom destiny had sent her. Here was a barrier of the past which must stand between us to all time, she would have said. The same thought had disquieted me often, not for my sake but for her own.
“I would to God, Joan,” said I, “there were no greater guilt in the world than this you speak of. You forbid me to say so. Shall I tell you why?”
She nodded her head, looking away to the patch of blue water revealed by the gorge of the mountains. I lay at her side and had all a man’s impulse to take her in my arms and tell her that which my heart had prompted me to say so many days. God knows, I had come to love this fragile, sweet-willed child of fortune beyond any other hope of my life or ambition of the years. Day by day, her eyes looked into my very soul, awakening there a spirit and a knowledge of whose existence I had been wholly ignorant. I loved her, and thus had fallen into the snare my enemies had set upon me. How little they understood me, I thought.