CHAPTER XL
THE LAST OF THE "TATTER OF SCARLET"
Rhoda Polly was on her way to see her friend Alida, and knowing well that parental permission would be refused her in the troublous state of the neighbourhood, she had taken it and followed unobtrusively in the wake of Jack Jaikes and his party.
I had trouble even now to get her away from the scene of the execution. She would have sat down on the very spot, save that I hastened her departure, saying that I must go back and see her father. I had, I said, both news and a message for him.
So we walked through the woods to Gobelet, very quietly and without much talk between us. We reached there to find that Dennis Deventer had just arrived from the Château, that Chardon had disappeared, and that Hugh was in the full flush of his morning's triumph. His father nodded approval. As for Alida she clung to his arm and looked up in his face. I do not think she was conscious of my presence in the room, and even upon Rhoda Polly she only bestowed a left-handed greeting without letting go her hold upon Hugh Deventer. Verily the manners of the East are strange.
I knew very well that she would find her hero one day, but I never supposed he would come to her in my poor Hugh's likeness.
I felt a sudden leap of loneliness in my heart and moved nearer to Rhoda Polly. She would never look at me like that. But instead she stood on tiptoe till her lips were near my ear and whispered, "I have always known it would be so--don't they look silly?"
It was a point of view, though at that moment hardly mine, but who was I that I should grudge Hugh Deventer his one hour of triumph? He was telling his story.
"I heard them all about us, and I knew they were getting ready for the rush. There were about forty of us, professors, pions, and seniors, to whom rifles could be served. I tell you I had a time finding out who could shoot even a bit. I had to try each with a dummy gun to see how he handled it. They lied so--yes, even the professors!
"But your old Renard was a brick. He spotted the sportsmen as if by magic and remembered the boys whose fathers had shootings. He helped a lot, I can tell you--and tucked up his black gown and hopped about on his thin legs (which were black too) as lively as a cricket.