But she made no answer. She did not move from the place where I had set her down. There was a strange look on her face, which I could not fathom; but I carried it with me, treasured and uncomprehended, as the boat slipped rapidly down the tide.
As long as I could discern the wharf at all I could see that white form moveless at its edge. I forgot my errand. I forgot her cruel distrust. I strained my gaze upon her, and knew nothing save that I loved her.
Chapter XVII
Memory is a Child
When I could no longer discern even the shore whence we had started, I in a measure came to myself. Nicole—sagacious Nicole—had left me to my dream. He had got up the mainsail and jib unaided, and now sat like a statue at the tiller. We were in the open basin, running with a steady wind abeam. There was quite a swell on, and the waves looked sinister, cruel as steel, under the bare white moon. A fading glow still marked the spot where the De Lamourie house had stood; but save for that there was no hint of man’s hand in all the wild, empty, hissing, wonderful open. Far to the left lay Blomidon, a crouching lion; and straight ahead a low, square bluff guarded the mouth of the Piziquid. I saw that we were nearing it rapidly, for Nicole’s boat had legs. Once in the Piziquid mouth, we should have a hard run up against the ebb; but the wind would then be right aft, and I felt that we could stem the current and make our landing in time.
“Will this wind carry her against the Piziquid tide?” I asked Nicole. It was the first word spoken in perhaps an hour, and my voice sounded strange to me.
“We’ll catch the first of the flood soon after we get inside, Master Paul,” said he, in the most matter-of-fact voice in the world.
Content with this, and knowing that for the time there was nothing to do but wait, I lapsed back into my reverie.
I felt exhausted, not from bodily effort, but from emotion. My nerves and brain felt sleepy; yet nothing was further from my eyes than sleep. Situations and deeds, mental and physical crises, agonies and ecstasies and dull despair, had so trodden upon one another’s heels that I was breathless. I caught at my brain, as it were, to make it keep still long enough to think. Yet I could not think to any purpose. I was aware of nothing so keenly as the sensation that had intoxicated me as I held Yvonne’s unconsenting body for those few moments in my arms, while removing her from the boat. To have touched her at all against her will seemed a sacrilege; but when a sacrilege has seemed a plain necessity I have never been the one to balk at it. Now I found myself looking with a foolish affection at the arms which had been guilty of that sacrilege—and straightway, coming to my wits again, I glanced at Nicole to see if he had divined the vast dimensions of my folly.
From this I passed to wondering what was truly now my hope or my despair. During all my talk with Yvonne—from the moment, indeed, when Father Fafard had told me of her agitation over Anderson’s peril—I had been as one without hope, in darkness utterly. Only a great love—the great love, as I had told myself—could inspire this desperate and daring solicitude. And against the one great love, in such a woman as Yvonne, I well knew that nothing earthly could prevail. My own bold resolution had been formed on the theory that her betrothal was but the offspring of expediency upon respect. Now, however, either the remembrance of her touch deluded me or something in her attitude upon the wharf held significance, for assuredly I began to dream that remorse rather than love might have been the mainspring of her agitation; remorse, and pity, and something of that strange mother passion which a true woman may feel toward a man who stirs within her none of the lover passion at all. I thought, too, of the wild sense of dishonour she must feel, believing me a traitor and herself my dupe. Strange comfort this, of a surety! Yet I grasped at it. I would prove her no dupe, myself no traitor; and stand at last where I had stood before, with perhaps some advantage. And my rival—he, I swore, should owe his life to me; a kind but cruel kind of revenge.
At last, my heart beating uncomfortably from the too swift self-chasing of my thoughts, I stood up, shook myself, and looked about me. We had rounded the bluff, and were standing up the broad Piziquid straight before the wind; and the boat was pitching hotly in the short seas where the wind thwarted the tide. I glanced at Nicole’s face. It was as plaintively placid as if he dreamed of the days when he leaned at his mother’s knee.