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Updated: June 15, 2025
She turned her mind away from these thoughts and passing her fingers through her hair removed the comb which held it in a rough knot, shaking it free to the sun and wind. She combed it with her fingers and rearranged it and then looked again nothing. It came to her suddenly that though she were to sit there forever the vigil would be useless, that Bompard had gone never to return.
"You may say that," said Bompard, "but that's nothing, it's when we come to make a landing we'll find what we are against." "Oh, we've got so far we'll finish it," said La Touche.
And across all that not a sign of life save the wings of the tireless birds, teal and duck, cormorants, and beyond the seaward rocks the great sea geese fishing and the guillemots flighting and the white tern darting like dragon-flies. Where was Bompard? Had he, by any chance, come back and taken some other road off the beach? There was only one way: the break in the cliffs, beyond the caves.
Bompard with his age and heaviness and patent honesty, despite his stupidity, was a presence not to be despised. If La Touche had been another man she might have awakened him to make enquiries. As it was, she preferred to let him lie. Bompard she had last seen crossing the rocks of the Lizard point. It was there that she must look for him.
Around one of the highest peaks a lead-coloured cloud had wrapped itself turban-wise, and even as they looked the cloud turban increased in volume and height, mournful and monstrous as some djin-born vision of the Arabian story-tellers. "That's snow," said Bompard, "and by the twist of it it's in a whirlwind." "Bon Dieu, what a place," said La Touche.
She reasoned with this feeling, and reason only increased her fears. It was now noon, Bompard was not the man to go on a long expedition by himself; he was too inactive and easy-going. No, something had happened to him and he might at that moment be lying dead at the foot of some cliff or he might have broken a leg and be lying at the foot of some rock unable to move.
There, in a half-amused way, without the least concern, sitting at times on the edge of the Prefect's writing-table, Gabrielle Bompard told how she had been the unwilling accomplice of her lover, Eyraud, in the murder of the bailiff, Gouffe.
He had been the lookout on the Gaston de Paris, his quarrel had sent Bompard to his death, he had nearly unhinged her mind with terror. Had he possessed the evil eye? Then, for the first time, she recalled her premonition of disaster, yet, how she had refused to let the yacht be put off its course. They might now have been at New Amsterdam only for that. Yet it was not her fault.
The ill-humor of La Touche seemed like a contagious disease, even Bompard, the imperturbable, seemed glum. It was the girl who broke the strain. Suddenly she began to speak as if giving voice to carefully thought out ideas. Yet what she said was absolutely spontaneous, the result of a quick, educated mind suddenly grasping the essentials of their position, suggestion breeding suggestion.
The monstrosity of the idea stood fully revealed only now on that beach where there was nothing but sand, nothing but rocks, nothing but gulls. Close in now Bompard let go the sheet and they unstepped the mast, the boat rocking in the trough of the swell. Then they got the oars out.
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