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At last the Baronne came out quite up to her knees to call to us "Trémors, c'est défendu de faire des bêtises." I suppose she thought he would let me drown. Jean and the Comtesse de Tournelle watched us from the plage. The old Baron swims splendidly, and went quite out of sight.
"They will have to wait over there in London, till he can tell them what ship it was. See, he has been struck on the head. But he is alive a marvel." He looked up, meeting the priest's eyes, and, remembering his words spoken under the lee of the wall of the Hotel de la Plage, he laughed as a fencer may laugh who has been touched beyond doubt by a skilful adversary.
A troop of soldiers were approaching along the plage. Sheer fun flashed into the girl's face. With a sudden swoop she caught up the lazy Cinders. "Now you are not to say anything," she cautioned him. "Only when I tell you, you are to salute. And mind you do it properly!" Cinders licked the animated face so near his own.
But the misgiving that beset him, as he motored out of Havre in the morning, was of another kind. It was that which attaches to the unlikely and the queer. Once having plunged into a country road, away from railways and hotels, he felt himself starting on a wild-goose chase. His assurance waned in proportion as conditions grew stranger. In vain an obliging chauffeur, accustomed to enlighten tourists as to the merits of this highway, pointed out the fact that the dusty road along which they sped had once and not so many years ago been the border of the bed of the Seine, that the white cliffs towering above them on the left, and edged along the top with verdure, marked the natural brink of the river, and that the church so admirably placed on a hillside was the shrine of a martyred maiden saint, whose body had come ashore here at Graville, having been flung into the water at Harfleur. Davenant was deaf to these interesting bits of information. He was blind, too. He was blind to the noble sweep of the Seine between soft green hills. He was blind to the craft on its bosom steamers laden with the produce of orchard and the farm for England; Norwegian brigantines, weird as The Flying Dutchman in their black and white paint, carrying ice or lumber to Rouen; fishing-boats with red or umber sails. He was blind to the villages, clambering over cliffs to a casino, a plage, and a Hôtel des Bains, or nestling on the uplands round a spire. He was blind to the picturesque wooded gorges, through which little tributaries of the great river had once run violently down from the table-land of the Pays de Caux. He was blind to the charms of Harfleur, famous and somnolent, on the banks of a still more somnolent stream. He resumed the working of his faculties only when the chauffeur turned and said: "Voil
Of course shrapnel but, then shrapnel did not occur by the sea. And on what duty could officers from the shrapnel area be engaged on at Paris Plage? . . . However, let us be discreet in all things. In a few hours that shrapnel scarred car would be carrying its freight back to Boulogne, where a table at the restaurant Mony had already been secured for dinner.
The thunder of their breaking mingled with the roll of muffled drums. The full honours of a soldier's funeral were to be accorded to the man who had died before France could make amends. Slowly the procession wound along the plage, and back upon Chris's memory flashed the day when she and Cinders had waited at the garden gate to see the soldiers pass.
By eleven the heat out of doors grew intolerable, and they would stroll back father and mother and trailing child past the hotels on the plage, along the irregular village lane, to the little house where they had established themselves, with Mary's nurse and a French bonne to look after them; would find the green wooden shutters drawn close; the déjeuner waiting for them in the cool bare room; and the scent of the coffee penetrating from the kitchen, where the two maids kept up a dumb but perpetual warfare.
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