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How about Antoinette, alone at Les Iles? Why had I not thought of her? We had told her nothing that morning, Madame la Vicomtesse and I, after our conference with Nick. For the girl had shut herself in her room, and Madame had thought it best not to disturb her at such a stage. But would she not be alarmed when Helene failed to return that night?
The blows of fortune are differently received according to the different characters of those on whom they fall; and each one of us who in imagination threads the subterranean passages leading to the cells of Pignerol and Exilles, and incarcerates himself in the Iles Sainte-Marguerite and in the Bastille, the successive scenes of that long-protracted agony will give the prisoner a form shaped by his own fancy and a grief proportioned to his own power of suffering.
"You say that we are at Les Iles?" he repeated slowly. I nodded, seeing the deception which Auguste had evidently practised in order to get him here. Then Nick dropped his arms, went to the door, and stood for a long time with his back turned to us, looking out over the fields. When finally he spoke it was in the tone he used in anger. "If I had him now, I think I would kill him," he said.
"I do not know," she replied. "But he will be behind the hedge of the garden at Les Iles at eleven o'clock unless he has lost before then his love of money." "Which is to say " "He will be there unless he is dead. That is why I sent for you, Monsieur." She glanced at me. "Sometimes it is convenient to have a man." I was astounded. Then I smiled, the affair was so ridiculously simple.
She hesitated nay, I should rather say paused, for there was little hesitation in what she did. She paused, as though weighing what she was to say next. "When I came to Les Iles I saw that there was a sorrow weighing upon the family; and it took no great astuteness on my part, Mr. Ritchie, to discover that Antoinette was the cause of it. One has only to see Antoinette to love her.
Something grew within me which is beyond the measure of speech, and so it was meant to be. "I did not know this myself until Helene returned to Les Iles," Monsieur de St. Gre was saying to me. "The letter came to her the day after you were taken ill. It was from the Baron von Seckenbruck, at whose house the Vicomte died. She took it very calmly, for Helene is not a woman to pretend.
How much better, after all, if she had married her Englishman for love! And she is much troubled now because, as she declares, she is dependent upon my bounty. That is my happiness, my consolation," the good man added simply, "and her father, the Marquis, was kind to me when I was a young provincial and a stranger. God rest his soul!" We were drawing near to Les Iles.
'Vous etes les gens qu'il faut pour les Kanaques; vous etes doux, vous et votre famille; vous seriez obeis dans toutes les iles. We had been civil; not always that, my conscience told me, and never anything beyond; and all this to-do is a measure, not of our considerateness, but of the want of it in others.
I dare say I'm a bit of a heathen; but I can't help fancying the dying know more of death and the way to meet it, than any of us can teach them." A group of men-servants stood about the open door, at the further end of the room, with Iles, the steward, and Mr. Tom Chifney, the trainer from the racing stables. The latter advanced a little and, clearing his throat, inquired huskily
Something grew within me which is beyond the measure of speech, and so it was meant to be. "I did not know this myself until Helene returned to Les Iles," Monsieur de St. Gre was saying to me. "The letter came to her the day after you were taken ill. It was from the Baron von Seckenbruck, at whose house the Vicomte died. She took it very calmly, for Helene is not a woman to pretend.
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