A light breeze blew from the sea and tempered the rays of the sun with its freshness. The further she advanced the more distinctly she saw the jagged contours of the five promontories and of the peninsula in which they were rooted in a mass of bushes and green rocks. The meager outline of a half demolished tower rose above the tops of the trees; and here and there among them one caught sight of the gray stones of a ruin.
But the slope became steeper. The Vannes’ road joined hers where it ran down a break in the cliff, and Dorothy saw that the sea, very high up at the moment, almost bathed the foot of this cliff, covering with calm, shallow water the causeway to the peninsula.
On the top were standing, upright, the old gentleman and the lady of whom the widow Amoureux had told her. Dorothy was amazed to recognize Raoul’s grandfather and his old flame Juliet Assire. The old Baron! Juliet Assire! How had they been able to get away from the Manor, to escape from Raoul, to make the journey, and reach the threshold of the ruins?
She came right up to them without their even seeming to notice her presence. Their eyes were vague; and they were gazing in dull surprise at this sheet of water which hindered their progress.
Dorothy was touched. Two centuries of chimerical hopes had bequeathed to the old Baron instructions so precise that they survived the extinction of his power to think. He had come here from a distance, in spite of terrible fatigues and superhuman efforts to attain the goal, groping his way, in the dark, and accompanied by another creature, like himself, demented. And behold both of them stopped dead before a little water as before an obstacle there was no surmounting.
She said to him gently:
“Will you follow me? It’s a mere nothing to go through.”
He raised his head and looked at her and did not reply. The woman also was silent. Neither he nor she could understand. They were automata rather than living beings, urged on by an impulse which was outside them. They had come without knowing what they were doing; they had stopped and they would go back without knowing what they were doing.
There was no time to lose. Dorothy did not insist. She pulled up her frock and pinned it between her legs. She took off her shoes and stockings and stepped into the water which was so shallow that her knees were not wet.
When she reached the further shore the old people had not budged. With a dumbfounded air they still gazed at the unforeseen obstacle. In spite of herself, with a compassionate smile, she stretched out her arms towards them. The old Baron again threw back his head. Juliet Assire was as still as a statue.
“Goodbye,” said Dorothy, almost happy at their inaction and at being alone to prosecute the enterprise.
The approach to the peninsula of Périac is made very narrow by two marshes, according to the widow Amoureux reputed to be very dangerous, between which a narrow band of solid ground affords the only path. This path mounted a wooded ravine, which some faded writing on an old board described as “Bad Going” and came out to a plateau covered with gorse and heather. At the end of twenty minutes Dorothy crossed the debris of part of the old wall which ran round the château.
She slackened her pace. At every step it seemed to her that she was penetrating into a more and more mysterious region in which time had accumulated more silence and more solitude. The trees hugged one another more closely. The shade of the brushwood was so thick that no flowers grew beneath it. Who then had lived here formerly and planted these trees, some of which were of rare species and foreign origin?
The road split into three paths, goat-tracks, along which one had to walk in a stooping posture under the low branches. She chose at random the middle track of the three and passed through a series of small enclosures marked out by small walls of crumbling stone. Under heavy draperies of ivy she saw rows of buildings. She did not doubt that her goal was close at hand, and her emotion was so great that she had to sit down like a pilgrim who is about to arrive in sight of the sacred spot towards which he has been advancing ever since his earliest days.
And of her inmost self she asked this question:
“Suppose I have made a mistake? Suppose all this means nothing at all? Yes: in the little leather bag I have in my pocket, there is a medal, and on it the name of a château, and a given day in a given year. And here I am at the château at the appointed time; but all the same what is there to prove that my reasoning is sound, or that anything is going to happen? A hundred and fifty or two hundred years is a very long time, and any number of things may have happened to sweep away the combinations of which I believe I have caught a glimpse.”
She rose. Step by step she advanced slowly. A pavement of different-colored bricks, arranged in a design, covered the ground. The arch of an isolated gateway, quite bare, opened high above. She passed through it, and at once, at the end of a large courtyard, she saw—and it was all she did see—the face of a clock.
A glance at her watch showed her that it was half-past eleven. There was no one else in the ruins.
And truly it seemed as if there never could be anyone else in this last corner of the world,
