"God bless you, Nance. In two hours I shall be back again."
He kissed her, and felt her lips answer his with quick and passionate abandonment.
[XXVI]
Long slants of sunlight came through the trees as Jasper rode into Darvel's Wood. The place was a smother of leaves, for the underwood had not been cut for five years or more, and the hazel tops were up among the lower boughs of the oaks. A broad ride ran through the wood from north to south like a gallery tunnelling through the green gloom.
A jay screamed raucously in the distance, but save for the bird's cry the silence was complete. The very sunlight stealing through shone upon leaves that did not quiver. There was an eeriness about the stillness that suggested treachery and secret threats.
For the first time Jasper felt something that was akin to fear. It was a vast uneasiness; a primitive, physical distrust of his surroundings. The wood threw deep shadows, and the shadows lay across his confidence. Was he trusting De Rothan too much by meeting him alone in the middle of this wood? The man might have been warned, and be tempted by his own danger. Their meeting was avowedly for polite and gentlemanly murder, but it was possible that De Rothan might put his honour in his pocket and pull the trigger of his pistol ten seconds too soon. Jasper shivered with a kind of chilly alertness. He found himself favouring swords rather than pistols. There was less chance of trickery with cold steel.
He was not sorry when he came to the clearing in the centre of Darvel's Wood. A horse tied to a tree, and a tall figure walking up and down in the sunlight gave him something real to look at. De Rothan was waiting for him, and he was alone.
The clearing had been used by charcoal-burners years ago, and it was marked in the centre by a circle of sleek and vivid grass that did not look unlike a great fairy-ring. Half of the clearing lay in shadow, the other half in sunlight. The boles of the oak-trees rose like grey-green pillars round it, curtained in between by the foliage of the hazels.
De Rothan swept off his hat and bowed. His grandiose courtesy made Jasper keep a keener eye on him, for he would not have trusted this child of St. Patrick and St. Louis behind his back. A case of pistols and a sword lay on a black cloak at the foot of a tree.
"The very best health to you, Mr. Benham."