In such moments as these, she could look back upon her own agonies with gratitude. She had needed a Bellingham. Should she not be thankful that a beyond-devil had been required to test her soul? In the splendid renewals of her spirit, Paula felt that she could look into the magician's eyes now and command him from her. She was even grateful that she had been swept in the fury of The High Tide, nor would she have had that supreme night of trial when she fled from the Zoroaster, stricken from her past. Just as Quentin Charter, of the terrible thirsts, had required his years of wrath and wandering, so her soul had needed the test of a woman's revelations and man's sublimated passion. Deep within lived a majestic happiness—earned.
At one o'clock, as she was going below for luncheon, the sun gave up trying to shine through the ash-fog, but volumes of dreadful heat found the earth. The Saragossa was invisible in the roadstead; there was no line dividing shore and sea, nor sea and sky. It was all an illimitable mask, whose fabric was the dust which for centuries had lain upon the dynamos of Pelée.
TWENTY-FIRST CHAPTER
CHARTER COMMUNES WITH THE WYNDAM WOMAN, AND CONFESSES THE GREAT TROUBLE OF HIS HEART TO FATHER FONTANEL
"Do you know what I discovered this morning?" Peter Stock asked, after the three had found a table together. "M. Mondet is trying to keep the people in town for political reasons. It appears that there is to be an election in a few days. All my efforts, and, by non-parishioners, the efforts of Father Fontanel, are regarded as a political counter-stroke—to rush a certain element of the suffrage out of the town.... This is certainly Ash-Wednesday, isn't it?"
Charter laughed. "My theory that the Guerin disaster might relieve the craters and give surcease to Saint Pierre—doesn't seem to work out. The air is getting thicker, even."
"It isn't really ash, you know," explained Mr. Stock, "but rock, ground fine as neat in the hell-mills under the mountain and shot out by steam through Pelée's valves——"
"Intensely graphic," said Paula.
"It has been rather a graphic morning," Charter remarked. "Friend Stock is virile from his activities with Father Fontanel."