It was in Gabriel’s heart to cast the whole truth in her face even as she had flung the rings at his feet. Yet even in his angry irony he remembered Joan and the peril that was drawing about her name. The strongest faith to her lay in silence.
“Some day you may repent of this,” he said, “for they who believe liars tempt shame in turn. Be assured that I have told you the truth this morning.”
“Thanks,” she retorted as he left her, “let me give you a fragment of advice.”
He looked at her over his shoulder a moment and listened.
“Engage a smart K.C. You will need him. Do not forget it.”
XXXII
THE sky was suffused with opalescent vapors rising from the golden bowl of the sea. Joan Gildersedge, with a page of Spenser unread upon her lap, was sitting under the pine-tree on the half-moon of grass in Burnt House garden, looking out towards the south. It was her especial curtilage, her garden of gems, arabesques of brilliant color burning amid the green. Towards the west a screen of purple clematis ran like a frieze above a bank of fuchsias, red, amethyst, and white. Over the warm bosom of the low brick wall a passion-flower clambered to hear the rhapsodies of a rose. To the east Canterbury-bells, a gracious company, wove wondrous textures of purple and snow. Amid the enamelled faces of a myriad pansies, night-stock dowered the evening with a subtle fragrance.
Joan’s heart had opened to the thousand voices of her flowers. She was in a golden mood, sad, yet happy—the mood of one who lives in dreams and forgets the present. The greater burden of the day had been passed with her father; she had found him more human for the nonce, less gray and barbarous. Bodily he was much like a withered leaf that had mouldered to a lacelike skeleton, a traceried image of itself. During the early summer he had weakened, maintaining none the less his mercenary acumen of mind, that like a red spark fed still upon the rotten tinder of the flesh. He was much abed now; his cottages at Rilchester had not tumbled their rents into his leather bag these many months. An agent fingered the blue-leaved ledger and harvested pence in that provincial slum.
Joan had been reading of Britomart, that woman queening it in the pages of romance. This British heroine had ever had a strong hold on the child Joan’s heart, an idyllic foster-mother, pure and fearless. Even now, in the deeper wisdom of her wounded days, the girl had found in this fair woman of legendary lore a sister quickened with a kindred sympathy.
Perhaps there was a suggestive moral in the legend that had startled Joan like the sudden voice of one singing in the woods. She remembered that Artegal the Just had proved vincible, a god of clay with a heart of gold. Despite his manhood, he had fallen into unheroic jeopardy, even to the quaint ignominy of wearing women’s gear. And it had needed Britomart to end his shame.