The Archduke laughed.
“Dear Duchess, there are people, even men, to whom, when the affections go wrong, life seems worthless. Of course you do not understand that. Your mission is to inspire despairing passions, not to feel them.
“You are a charming creature,” he thought as he spoke. “But you are as keen after gold as a stoat after poultry. I shall not put you on the track of Vanderlin’s. He is a great capitalist; but such women as you would eat up the treasure of an empire and still cry ‘Give!’—daughter of the horse-leech as you are, with your innocent eyes and your childlike smile.”
Mouse said no more on the subject, but she carefully surveyed the approaches of the château and the shore which stretched immediately beneath its terraces. She had a plan in her fertile mind.
She was as at home in the water as a fish; the family at Faldon had always lived half their days in the sea.
Early the next morning she rowed herself out in a small rowing-boat which belonged to one of her friends; she had Boo with her.
“We will go and have a bathe in deep water,” she said to the child. They frequently did so. But she did not go out very far, and she steered eastward where the woods of Vanderlin’s château rose above the shore. In front of the house, and in sight of it, she took advantage of a moment in which Boo was busy clapping her hands at some gulls to pull up the plug in the bottom of the boat. It began to leak and then to fill. She gave a cry as the water welled up over her ankles, and drawing the child to her rapidly pulled off Boo’s clothes, leaving her in her chemise and drawers.
“Jump on my back and put your arms round my throat. Don’t hold too hard to choke me. Don’t be frightened—I will take you to shore.”
With the little girl on her shoulders she cleared herself of the boat as it filled to its edges, and let herself go into the sea, which was quite calm and not very cold in the noontide. Boo, who had her mother’s high spirit, and was used to dance about in sea surf, was not nervous and did not cling too closely. Mouse struck out toward the beach somewhat embarrassed by her clothing, but swimming with the skill which she had acquired in childish days in the rougher waters of the Irish Channel.
She knew that if anyone was looking through a binocular on the terraces above she must make a very effective picture—like Venus Aphrodite bearing Eros. Boo, who was amused, rode triumphant, keeping her golden hair and her black Gainsborough hat out of the water. Some men who were on the beach holloaed and ran to get a boat out of a boathouse lower on the shore, but before they could launch it Mouse and her little daughter had come ashore laughing and dripping like two playfellows. Their little skiff, turned keel upward, was floating away to the eastward as the wind drove it.