"Quentin Charter! Quentin Charter!"
Then he saw the Wyndam woman on the veranda of the Palms, her face white with agony, her eyes straining toward him.... Turning hastily—he missed death in a savage, sordid reality. Jacques had crept upon him, a maniac in his eyes, dog's slaver on his lips. A rock twice as large as his head was upraised in both arms. With a muscular spasm one knows in a dream, Charter's whole body united in a spring to the side—escaping the rock. Jacques turned and fled like a goat, leaping from level to level.
Charter managed to follow. He felt weak and ill for the time, as though Pelée had punished him for peering into matters which Nature does not thank man for endeavoring to understand.... The three natives pressed about him far down on the slope. Jacques had vanished. The sun was sinking seaward. Charter mounted his mule, turning the recent incident over in his mind for the manieth time. His first thought had been that the indescribable gripping of the mountain had turned mad a decent servant, but this did not stand when he recalled how Pere Rabeaut had importuned him to accept Jacques, and how the latter had fled from his failure. Yet, so far as he could see, there was no reason in the world why a conspiracy to murder him should have origin in the little wine-shop of Rue Rivoli. It was all baffling even at first, that a rock had been chosen, when a knife or a pistol would have been effective. This latter, he explained presently. There was a possibility of his body being found; a smashed head would fall to the blame of Pere Pelée, who was casting bombs of rock upon the slopes; while a knife or a bullet-wound on his body would start the hounds indeed.
He rode down the winding trail apart from the guides. Darkness was beginning, and the lights of Ajoupa Boullion showed ahead. The mountain carried on a frightful drumming behind. Coiling masses of volcanic spume, miles above the craters, generated their own fire; and lit in the flashes, looked like billows of boiling steel. Charter rode upon sheer nerve—nerve at which men had often wondered. At length a full-rigged thought sprang into his mind, which had known but the passing of hopeless derelicts since the first moment of descent. It was she who had called to save him. The woman of flesh had become a vision indeed. The little Island mule felt the heel that moment.... Charter turned back to the red moiled sky—a rolling, roaring Hades in the North.
"I can't help it, Skylark," he murmured, "if you will merge into this woman. She may never know that a man fled from her to the mountain to-day, and is hurrying back—as to the source of all beauty!... Charter, Charter, your thoughts are boiling over——"
He rode into the streets of Morne Rouge, so over-crowded now with the frightened from the lower city, that many were huddled upon the highway where they would be forced to sleep. Here he paid the three guides, but retained his mule.... On the down trail again, he re-entered the bank of falling ash and the sulphurous desolation. Evil as it was, the taint brought a sense of proximity to the Morne and the Palms. Saint Pierre was dark and harrowingly still under the throbbing volcano. The hoof-beats of the mule were muffled in ash, as if he pounded along a sandy beach. Often a rousing fetor reached the nostrils of the rider, above the drying, cutting vapor from Pelée, and the little beast shied and snorted at untoward humps on the highway. War and pestilence, seemingly, had stalked through Saint Pierre that day and a winter storm had tried to cover the aftermath.... He passed through Rue Rivoli, but was far too eager to reach the Palms to stop at the wine-shop. The ugly mystery there could be penetrated afterward. Downward, he turned toward the next terrace, where the solitary figure of a woman confronted him.
"Mr. Charter!" she cried. "And—you are able to ride?"
"Why, what do you mean, Miss Wyndam?" he said, swiftly dismounting. "What are you doing 'way up here alone—in this dreadful suffocation?"
"I was looking for a little stone wine-shop——" She checked herself, a scroll of horrors spreading open in her brain.
"It's just a little way back," he said, in a repressed tone. "I have an errand there, too. Shall I show you?"