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When Blake Shorland stepped from the steamer Belle Sauvage upon the quay at Noumea, he proceeded, with the alertness of the trained newspaper correspondent, to take his bearings. So this was New Caledonia, the home of outcast, criminal France, the recent refuge of Communist exiles, of Rochefort, Louise Michel, Felix Rastoul, and the rest!
He now promptly met the French officer's exuberance of spirits with a hearty gaiety, and drank his wine with genial compliment and happy anecdote. It was late when they parted; the Frenchman excited, beaming, joyous, the Englishman responsive, but cool in mind still. After breakfast next morning Shorland expressed to M. Barre his intention of going to see Gabrielle Rouget.
The vicarious sacrifice seemed none the less noble to the Englishman because it was involuntary and an accident. The only point clear in his mind was that had he not leant back, Barre would be the whole man and he the wounded one. "How goes it, my friend?" said Shorland, bending over him. Alencon Barre looked up, agony twitching his nostrils and a dry white line on his lips.
Her brow might flush with shame of the mad deed that turned her life awry, and of the degradation of her present surroundings; but her eyes looked straight into those of Shorland without wavering, with the pride of strength if not of goodness. "Yes, there is one thing more," she said. "Give me that portrait to keep until the 25th. Then you may take it from the woman in the Morgue."
He remembered it afterwards all too distinctly enough. "The twenty-sixth, the twenty-sixth," she said. Then a pause, and afterwards with a sudden sharpness: "Come to me on the twenty-fifth, and I will give you my reply, M. Shorland." He still held the portrait in his hand. She stepped forward. "Let me see it again," she said. He handed it to her: "You have spoiled a good face, Gabrielle."
On the morning of the twenty-fifth they neared Noumea. Shorland thought of all that day meant to Luke and Clare. He was helpless to alter the course of events, to stay a terrible possibility. "You can never trust a woman of Gabrielle's stamp," he said to himself, as they rode along through valleys of ferns, grenadillas, and limes.
'Tis my winter of joy and my summer of rest, 'Tis my future, my present, my past; And though storms fill the East and the clouds haunt the West, I shall follow my Star to the last." "There, that was to Lucile. What would he write to Gabrielle to Henri's Gabrielle? How droll how droll!" Again she laughed that laugh of eternal recklessness. It filled Shorland this time with a sense of fear.
As the bottle was poised in the air with a fiendish cry of "A baptism! a baptism!" and Shorland was debating on his chances of avoiding it, and on the wisdom of now drawing his weapon and cutting his way through the mob, there came from the door a call of "Hold! hold!" and a young officer dashed in, his arm raised against the brutal missile in the hands of the ticket-of-leave man, whose Chauvinism was a matter of absinthe, natural evil, and Gabrielle Rouget.
You want to see the country, to study our life-well, come with us. We will house you, feed you as we feed, and you shall have your tobacco at army prices." Much as Blake Shorland was moved by the events of the last few hours he was enough the soldier and the man of the world to face possible troubles without the loss of appetite, sleep, or nerve.
He got what was left of my fortune, and I got what was left of hers. For I was dead, you see dead, dead, dead!" She paused again. Neither spoke for a moment. Shorland was thinking what all this meant to Clare Hazard and Luke Freeman. "Where is he? What is he doing?" she said at length. "Tell me. I was I am his wife." "Yes, you were you are his wife.
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