The sunlit day that followed the breakfast at the little table laid for three, was full of happiness for Raife. He rapidly planned a motor-car ride. There were many details to be arranged. Lady Remington must be propitiated. The conventionalities of the South are less exacting than those of the North, but some of them must be observed. Lady Remington accepted the specious circumstances invented by Raife, and Doctor Malsano and his niece, Gilda Tempest, were duly introduced to her ladyship. The presentation was a characteristic presentment of difficulties overcome by an astuteness that youth can assume when love is the guide to the occasion. Il dottore displayed a suavity that was charming to Lady Remington, and Raife snatched the opportunity for those small attentions that accompany a youthful courtship. All that had savoured of mystery disappeared when the car bounded over the white roads that clamber over the hill and mountain sides of the sunny Mediterranean shore. To those two young hearts it was Elysium. A discreet Italian chauffeur paid those few attentions necessary to the well-ordered mechanism of a modern motor-car, and smiled once or twice when it occurred to him that so much happiness could not exist without a tragedy—somewhere-sometime. A bend in the steep road, a precipitous declivity with a loose stone wall on either side, and a glorious prospect of blue sea, and rich coloured landscape, brought the happy party to one of those meeting grounds, where perfectly trained waiters and caterers for human comfort assort themselves.
Joyously they alighted, and Raife proceeded to plan the arrangements for an al-fresco entertainment. Happiness was the keynote of the pleasure jaunt, and the stately Lady Remington seemed pleased with the companionship of the dignified doctor. The details of an entertainment are rendered easy in a land where men, women, and children are trained through the centuries to the refinements of pleasure.
Raife and Gilda found themselves wandering alone in a grove of trees, those dark-hued olives with leaf and branch in silhouette against a cerulean sky. This was the first occasion when opportunity had served for the display of a pent-up passion. With a fierceness that belongs to the madness of a love that has been controlled, almost discomforted, by circumstances Raife caught Gilda in his arms! Love may be blind, but love is alert. Crumpling leaves and a footstep brought Raife to his more complete sense. Turning, he saw the uncanny form of the Apache person, the forbidding creature who had spoken to him outside the café, on the night when Gilda had sent the little Italian girl to fetch him to her. With a gesture of impatience, that expressed thwarted opportunity, he said: “Who is that fellow, Gilda? Why is he here? How did he get here?”
Gilda trembled, and held her head between her hands. “I don’t know,” she stammered. “Don’t ask me. I don’t know!”
Brief is the life of golden opportunity, and Raife’s happiness had been broken by this phantom person of the forbidding aspect. A Saxon can love, but a Saxon can sulk. All that was Saxon in Sir Raife Remington induced him to sulk at this moment. They returned to where the tables were laid with that tempting display of napery and polished silver which is so well understood by the continental caterers. Lady Remington and Doctor Malsano were conversing agreeably. Gilda was evidently distressed, and Raife remained sulky. As they met again, the doctor was saying: “Your son was telling me, Lady Remington, that the Baroness von Sassniltz is a friend of yours. She is staying, I understand, at the same hotel with us?”
“Oh, yes, Doctor Malsano, I know the baroness. She visits us at Aldborough Park, my son’s place, you know, near Tunbridge Wells.”
“How very interesting. I have often felt I would like to meet the baroness. They tell me she is a very brilliant lady.” This was said with much unction.
The day that had opened so brightly, and with so much pleasure to Raife, was no longer pleasing to him. He was haunted by that Apache-looking fellow, whose hateful appearance in the olive grove had robbed him of the gratification that he felt should have been his. The course of true love is rarely smooth. It is often very rough. The weird happenings, since Raife and Gilda had met and talked, the brief love way into their souls on the front at Southport, had crowded their lives with mixed joy and sorrow. In these charming al-fresco surroundings, where the daintiness of human service blended with nature’s choicest gifts, there should have been peace and quietude of spirit. It was not to be. The haunting thought of his father’s dying words recurred again and again. “The trap—. She—that woman.”
His whole life’s blood should go out to this woman, whom he loved with a passion that belonged to a fierce nature. Yet at every pace or revolution in the progress of their intimacy there was a dark passage, a sinister obstacle.
The dignified uncle repelled him, although he, apparently, was fascinating his stately and severely exclusive mother. The forbidding figure of the Apache had completed, for a while, his sense of depression. The happiest people were, apparently, Lady Remington, the doctor—and the chauffeur—who had found companionship with a soft-eyed, brainless, dark-skinned maid, of the type that serves, and is happy in serving.