He fancied, as he spoke, that a gleam passed over Miss Smith's countenance; but at that moment the omnibus arrived, and amid good-bys and good wishes Dorothea was forgotten. When the traveler had departed, and when Gardiner had stood on the step waving his hand till the last minute, he turned, and came face to face with Lettice. They looked at each other as the two intimate friends of a common friend do look, when the link (or should it be called a barrier?) is removed from between them. It might be said that this was the first time Gardiner had ever seen Lettice, for, remembering that gleam, he looked with curiosity. He found himself gazing into a pair of perfectly intelligent and faintly derisive hazel eyes.
When you have summed up a person as ordinary and inoffensive, it is a shock to discover that the said person has turned the tables by reading the inmost secrets of your heart. Gardiner felt as though he had suddenly become transparent. Fairly disconcerted, he wheeled round, and almost fell over the chambermaid, who was at his elbow offering him a note. "Tiens!" said Rosalie. The note dropped; the draught from the open door whisked it down the hall to Lettice's feet. Lettice, like her cousin, was a dandy in affairs of honor, and would not willingly have glanced even at the envelope of another person's letter; but in this case, as she stooped, she could not avoid seeing that the handwriting was Dorothea's. She gave it back, and had the unique satisfaction of seeing Gardiner color as he thanked her. Then she slipped away, and left him to enjoy his letter alone.
"Could you possibly give me just five minutes this evening, I have something very important I want to ask you. I will be up at the crucifix at half-past nine on the chance.—D. M. O'C."
Above the gardens of the Bellevue, which had a slope of one in six, there was an orchard of white-stockinged fruit trees, which had a slope of one in four. Above that again rose the grassy hill-side, steeper and steeper, till after a veritable scramble you reached the top, which was marked by a cairn of stones and a crucifix. Beyond the crucifix were level uplands—dry silvery grass, dark knots of furze or bramble, clayey ruts winding away to a wood of stunted firs which leaned, like the grasses, all along the wind. But on the other side of the cross, what a view! This hill was scarcely a mile as the crow flies from the cliffs of Rochehaut, yet it faced a wholly different reach of the river, some ten miles distant, by water, from the ford where Dorothea had cut her foot; the river performed a figure of eight in between. This was no scene of theatrical beauty, no famous pointe de vue, like that above Frahan; yet Gardiner loved it more. It gave him the free wind and the open sky, and it gave them to him alone; no one ever came up here, except perhaps a laborer trudging inland to Rochehaut, the village of the middens. Odi profanum vulgus. For Gardiner, beautiful Frahan was forever tainted by the thousands of admiring eyes which had rested upon it.
The hills here sank down in wide-spreading slopes, great shoulders and flanks all silvery and slippery with grass. At their feet the river rippled, shallow and broad; and on the green floor of the valley were clustered the houses of Poupehan, a tiny gray hamlet with a tiny gray bridge which gathered the stream within its span, though above and below it spread out its rounded pools. On the farther bank, the hills rose like a wall, a sweep of dark woods. That white streak, could it be a road? Yes, it was the bridle track going up to Corbion on the height; it hung against the side-hill like a scarf. At the top you might see the gray extinguisher cap of Corbion church, among trees. But the eye came back to rest on those glorious woods; how rich they were, deep-plumaged, somber, steep as a curtain!
By dint of neglecting his letters, and scamping his flowers, Gardiner managed to keep tryst some minutes before the time appointed. He sat down on the stones and leaned against the crucifix, which shot up over his head, lank and black and forlornly crooked, a ten-foot spar supporting a ten-inch figure. The moon was coining liquid silver in a slate-blue sky; the faint gold lamps of Poupehan showed vague in the gray depth of the valley. There by the river the mists were rising, the meadows drenched and cold and silvery with dew; here on the hill-top the air was velvet-warm and dry, and sweet with honeysuckle. Big grasshoppers whirred all round in the grass, and a corncrake in the fir-wood behind let off at intervals his long mechanical rattle. There were owls, too, hoo-hooing, and one whose note was like a silvery bell, calling from the woods across the valley. It was a night of romance—a night for love.
Gardiner's planets were Mercury and Venus; he incongruously combined the money-getting instinct with a sensuous temperament. He had intended to spend those minutes calmly in reviewing the pros and cons of marriage with Dorothea—for there were a good many cons; marriage, even with a rich woman, did not come into his scheme of life. But the white enchantment of the moonlight was too much for him; he became a lover and nothing more.
Meanwhile Dorothea, climbing the hill, was beginning to wish she had not put on that silver brocade. If she was not careful, he would get out of hand; and if he got out of hand—She had come to Rochehaut, in the first instance, bent on hunting down her enemy, but without any definite plan. True, the Lady Ermyntrude used her attractions for the undoing of the wicked Lord Henry; but it had never entered Dorothea's head to do the like, probably because the idea was instinctively repugnant. It was very repugnant; and when chance, and the accident at the ford, showed her her power, though she used it, it was only after a struggle. Not that she had any scruples of morality: Dorothea was as unmoral a creature as one could find in a Christian land, she was guided solely by her feelings. But, in spite of eight months of marriage, she was still fiercely virginal; she could not with equanimity suffer herself to be desired, above all by Gardiner. Still, being perfectly persuaded that she owed this duty to her dead, she was not going to turn back. Dorothea had the merits of her defects; she was not a coward.
She arrived breathless, with her skirts tucked over her arm, and one glance told her that her naïve plan for dazzling him had succeeded a little too well. His eyes caught sudden fire; he was on his feet in a moment, bowing to her with a dash of foreign extravagance.