CHAPTER VI
Screened by that darkness, and close sheltered by the matted gorse which fringed and dotted the expanse of the nearby heath, he had been an interested witness to the entire proceeding.
“Played, my lad, played!” he commented, putting his thoughts into mumbled words of laughing approval, as Lennard, taking the taxicab under guard, escorted it and its occupants out of the immediate neighbourhood; then, excessive caution prompting him to quell even this little ebullition, he shut up like an oyster and neither spoke, nor moved, nor made any sound until the two vehicles were represented by nothing but a purring noise dwindling away into the distance.
When that time came, however, he rose, and facing the heath, forged out across its mist-wrapped breadth with that long, swinging, soldierly stride peculiar unto him, his forehead puckered with troubled thought, his jaw clamped, and his lips compressed until his mouth seemed nothing more than a bleak slit gashed in a gray, unpleasant-looking mask.
But after a while the night and the time and the place worked their own spell, and the troubled look dropped away; the dull eyes lighted, the grim features softened, and the curious crooked smile that was Nature’s birth-gift to him broke down the rigid lines of the “bleak slit” and looped up one corner of his mouth.
It was magic ground, this heath—a place thick set as the Caves of Manheur with the Sapphires of Memory—and to a nature such as his these things could not but appeal.
Here Dollops had come into his life—a starveling, an outcast; derelict even in the very morning time of youth—a bit of human wreckage that another ten minutes would have seen stranded forever upon the reefs of crime.
Here, too—on that selfsame night, when the devil had been cheated, and the boy had gone, and they two stood alone together in the mist and darkness—he had first laid aside the mask of respectability and told Ailsa Lorne the truth about himself! Of his Apache times—of his Vanishing Cracksman’s days—and, in the telling, had watched the light die out of her dear eyes and dread of him darken them, when she knew.
But not for always, thank God! For, in later days—when Time had lessened the shock, when she came to know him better, when the threads of their two lives had become more closely woven, and the hope had grown to be something more than a mere possibility....