“And now we’re going to make an end of it. The final hand will be played in exactly a week from today.”
These few days were very sweet to the two young people. While still remaining shy, Raoul grew bolder in his talks with her and let her see more clearly the depths of his nature, at once serious and impassioned. Dorothy abandoned herself with a certain joy to this love, of the sincerity of which she was fully conscious. Deeply disturbed, Saint-Quentin and his comrades grew uncommonly gloomy.
The captain tossed his head and said:
“Dorothy, I think I like this one less than the nasty gentleman, and if you’d listen to me. …”
“What should we do, my lamb?”
“We’d harness One-eye’ Magpie and go away.”
“And the treasure? You know we’re hunting for treasure.”
“You’re the treasure, mummy. And I’m afraid that they’ll take you away from us.”
“Don’t you worry, my child. My four children will always come first.”
But the four children did worry. The sense of danger weighed on them. In this confined space, between the walls of Hillocks Manor they breathed a heavy atmosphere which troubled them. Raoul was the chief danger: but another danger was little by little taking form in their minds: twice they saw the outline of a man moving stealthily among the thickets of the hillocks in the dusk.
On the 30th of June, Dorothy begged Raoul to give all his staff a holiday next day. It was the day of the great religious fête at Clisson. Three of the stoutest of the servants, armed with guns, were ordered to come back surreptitiously at four in the afternoon and wait near a little inn, Masson Inn, a quarter of a mile from the Manor.
Next day Dorothy seemed in higher spirits than ever. She danced jigs in the courtyard and sang English songs. She sang others in the boat, in which she had asked Raoul to row her, and then behaved so wildly, that several times they just missed capsizing. In this way it came about that in juggling with three coral bracelets she let one of them fall into the water. She wanted to recover it, dipped her bare arm in the water as high as the shoulder, and remained motionless, her head bent over the lake, as if she was considering carefully something she saw on its bottom.
“What are you looking at like that?” said Raoul.
“There has been no rain for a long while, the lake is low, and one can see more distinctly the stones and pebbles on the bottom. Now I’ve already noticed that some of the stones are arranged in a certain pattern. Look.”
“Undoubtedly,” he said. “And they’ve hewn stones, shaped. One might fancy that they formed huge letters. Have you noticed it?”
“Yes. And one can guess the words that those letters form: ‘In robore fortuna.’ At the mayor’s office I’ve studied an old map of the neighborhood. Here, where we are, was formerly the principal lawn of a sunken garden, and on this very lawn one of your ancestors had this device inscribed in blocks of stone. Since then someone has let in the water of the Maine over the sunken garden. The pool has taken the place of the lawn. The device is hidden.”
And she added between her teeth:
“And so are the few words and the figures below the device, which I have not yet been able to see. And it’s that which interests me. Do you see them?”
“Yes. But indistinctly.”
“That’s just it. We’re too near them. We need to look at them from a height.”
“Let’s climb up on the hillocks.”
“No use. The slope—the water would blur the image.”
“Then,” said he, laughing, “we must mount above them in an aëroplane.”
At lunchtime they parted. After the meal, Raoul superintended the departure of the charabanc, which were taking all the staff of the Manor to Clisson, then he took his way to the pool where he saw Dorothy’s little troupe hard at work on the bank. The captain, always the man of affairs, was running to and fro somewhat in the manner of a Gugusse. The others were carrying out exactly Dorothy’s instructions.
When it was all over, a sufficiently thick iron wire was stretched above the lake at a height of ten or twelve feet, fastened at one end to the gable of a barn, at the other to a ring affixed to a rock among the hillocks.
“Hang it all!” he said. “It looks to me as if you’d made preparations for one of your circus turns.”
“You’re right,” she replied gayly. “Having no aëroplane I fall back on my aërial rope-walking.”
“What? Is that what you intend to do?” he exclaimed in anxious accents. “But you’re bound to fall.”
“I can swim.”
“No, no. I refuse to allow it.”
“By what right?”
“You haven’t even a balancing-pole.”
“A balancing-pole?” she said, running off. “And what next? A net? A safety-rope?”
She climbed up the ladder inside the barn and appeared on the edge of the roof. She was laughing, as was her custom when she began her performance before a crowd. She was dressed in a silk frock, with broad white and red stripes, a scarlet silk handkerchief was crossed over her chest.
Raoul was in a state of feverish excitement.
The captain went to him.
“Do you want to help mummy, Dorothy?” he said in a confidential tone.
“Certainly I do.”
“Well, go away, monsieur.”
Dorothy stretched out her leg. Her foot, which was bare in a cloth sandal divided at the big toe, tried the wire, as a bather’s foot tries the coldness of the water. And then she quickly stepped on to it, made several steps, sliding, and stopped.
She saluted right and left, pretending to believe herself in the presence of a large audience, and came sliding forward again with a regular, rhythmic movement of her legs and a swaying of her bust and arms which balanced
