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Updated: May 13, 2025
He heard Guida's footstep now, and standing up he parted the apple boughs for her entrance. She was dressed all in white, without a touch of colour save in the wild rose at her throat and the pretty red shoes with the broad buckles which the Chevalier had given her. Her face, too, had colour the soft, warm tint of the peach-blossom and her auburn hair was like an aureole. Philip's eyes gleamed.
The night and morning after Guida's marriage came and went. The day drew on to the hour fixed for the going of the Narcissus. Guida had worked all forenoon with a feverish unrest, not trusting herself, though the temptation was sore, to go where she might see Philip's vessel lying in the tide-way.
He had no idea that Guida's descent from the noble de Mauprats of Chambery would weigh with the Duke, who would only see in her some apple-cheeked peasant stumbling over her court train.
Her father, whom she did not remember, had been a ship-builder, and she knew that he had been a notable man; every one had told her that. "She has met her destiny," say the village gossips, when some man in the dusty procession of life sees a woman's face in the pleasant shadow of a home, and drops out of the ranks to enter at her doorway. Was Ranulph to be Guida's destiny?
She caught the needle quickly from the finger, wrapped her kerchief round the wound, threw away the sewing from Guida's lap, and running an arm about her waist, made as if to lay a hot cheek against the cold brow of her friend.
But the walls of the cottage were dry, for, many years before, Guida's mother had herself seen it built from cellar-rock to the linked initials over the doorway, stone by stone, and every corner of it was as free from damp as the mielles stretching in sandy desolation behind to the Mont es Pendus, where the law had its way with the necks of criminals.
Guida's eyes were upon the Bailly. "And the child?" she cried with a broken voice "the child?" "The child goes with its mother," answered the Bailly firmly. The day that saw Guida's restitution in the Cohue Royale brought but further trouble to Ranulph Delagarde. The Chevalier had shown him the lost register of St. Michael's, and with a heart less heavy, he left the island once more.
Her father, her grandfather, might have killed Philip d'Avranche any one but himself, he the man who had but now declared his love for her. Clearly his selfishness had blinded him. Right was on his side, but not the formal codes by which men live. He could not avenge Guida's wrongs upon her husband, for all men knew that he himself had loved her for years. "Forgive me," he said in a low tone.
Four things were always apparent in the girl's character: sympathy with suffering, kindness without partiality, a love of nature, and an intense candour. Not a stray cat wandering into the Place du Vier Prison but found an asylum in the garden behind the cottage. Not a dog hungry for a bone, stopping at Guida's door, but was sure of one from a hiding-place in the hawthorn hedge of the garden.
She tenderly put the water to Guida's lips, with comforting words, though her own brain was in a whirl, and dark forebodings flashed through her mind. "Ah, man gui, man pethe!" she said in the homely patois. "There, drink, drink, dear, dear couzaine." Guida's lips opened, and she drank slowly, putting her hand to her heart with a gesture of pain. Carterette put down the hanap and caught her hands.
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