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Updated: June 11, 2025
It was his first present for her. The Son of a Thief! The Countess of Bellaire! That meant David Drennen, son of John Harper Drennen; it meant Ygerne, the girl-woman who had come into David Drennen's life before it was too late, who had made of him another man. He sat down on the log and filled his pipe. The note he let lie, half folded, upon his knee.
Be she what she might, Ygerne Bellaire was not the coward he had once thought all women. He grew angry with himself for harbouring a thought into which a tinge of admiration for her entered. He was coming up with her soon; he sneered at himself and at her and crept on downward. Again and again the way looked impossible; again and again he found the scooped-out handhold which carried him on.
He had forgotten that he and Ygerne Bellaire were not in truth the only two created beings upon the bosom of earth. Garcia's eyes, a little glint of slumbrous fire in their midnight depths, were upon the man and the girl. He paused a moment, stared, bowed deeply with the old dramatic sweep of his hat. A hot spurt of rage flared across Drennen's brain; this was no accidental meeting.
There were tears in her eyes, tears of anger as she thought of the old man dying with his wife weeping over him and his son going sick at the sight of the spurting blood. Drennen, watching her, marvelled at the girl. He remembered her words of the other day: "We of the blood of Paul Bellaire are not shop girls!"
In her voice there was the ringing note of pride, pride of blood, of consanguinity with such a man as her fancy pictured Paul Bellaire to have been. "He was hurt, badly hurt," she went on. "But he found another horse and left the village, following the Lady Louise to the coast and carrying with him both her moneys and his. A ship brought them to America and they made a home in New Orleans.
Ygerne Bellaire, while she and Marshall Sothern had nursed David Drennen, had seen hourly all of the courtly, knightly gentleness and tenderness which was one side of the old man. Now she came swiftly to the edge of the bearskin. She, too, went down upon her knees at Sothern's side, just opposite Drennen. Her hands did not tremble as they grew red with the spurting blood.
In him the simplicity of a normal existence had been phantastically twisted into complication. Before him were Sefton and Lemarc and Garcia . . . and Ygerne Bellaire. Behind him were George and Ernestine with their warped lives, Sothern and Max with their souls upon the verge of convulsion.
"You've done enough damage as it is. If you've any heart, stay here with the only person in the world who has any faith in you." Vacantly the woman watched the motor glide away over the smooth white road, and then limply slid to the floor in a dead faint. All the distance from Bellaire to Mottville Theodore was tortured with doubt.
They did not reason and thus follow a blind goddess; they moved as their swift instincts dictated and made no mistake. Now he did not need to bolster up his purpose with seeking to wander through the thousand lanes of reason's labyrinth; he did not need to seek the fallacies of logic to tell him why he hated Ygerne Bellaire and Marc Lemarc and Sefton and the Mexican. He hated them.
"A great deal of the time; not always." Her brows puckered thoughtfully. "I think," she said at last, "that he loves me and hates me . . . both! But I'll come in and see if I can be of any help. I, too, have good reasons for wanting him to live." So the door to Drennen's dugout was opened to Ygerne Bellaire. But to no one else in the Settlement; Marshall Sothern saw to that.
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