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Page 23
I replied that it was some small craft coming in.
"A fishing-boat?"
"Hardly that," I said, "from its lights and position it will be
some swifter power-boat and, I should say, not precisely certain
about the channel."
I have been drawn here into reminiscence that did not, at the
time, detain me in the hall. What my sister had discovered to
me, following Major Carrington's remark, left me distinctly
uneasy. It was very nearly two miles to the village, the road
was wholly forest and there would be no house on the way; for my
father, with an utter disregard for cost, had sought the
seclusion of a large acreage when he had built this absurdly
elaborate villa on Mount Desert Island.
Besides I was in no mood for sleep.
And, over all probability, there might be some not entirely
imaginary danger to Madame Barras. Not precisely the danger
presented in Major Carrington's pleasantry, but the always
possible danger to one who is carrying a sum of money about. It
would be considered, in the world of criminal activities, a very
large sum of money; and it had been lying here, as of no value,
in a drawer of the library table since the day on which the gold
certificates had arrived on my check from the Boston bank.
Madame Barras had not taken the currency away as I imagined. It
was extremely careless of her, but was it not an act in
character?
What would such a woman know of practical concern?
I spoke to the butler. He should not wait up, I would let myself
in; and I went out.
I remember that I got a cap and a stick out of the rack; there
was no element of selection in the cap, but there was a decided
subconscious direction about the selection of the stick. It was
a heavy blackthorn, with an iron ferrule and a silver weight set
in the head; picked up - by my father at some Irish fair - a
weapon in fact.
It was not dark. It was one of those clear hard nights that are
not uncommon on this island in midsummer; with a full moon, the
road was visible even in the wood. I swung along it with no
particular precaution; I was not expecting anything to happen,
and in fact, nothing did happen on the way into the village.
But in this attitude of confidence I failed to discover an event
of this night that might have given the whole adventure a
different ending.
There is a point near the village where a road enters our private
one; skirts the border of the mountain, and, making a great turn,
enters the village from the south. At this division of the road
I heard distinctly a sound in the wood.
It was not a sound to incite inquiry. It was the sound of some
considerable animal moving in the leaves, a few steps beyond the
road. It did not impress me at the time; estrays were constantly
at large in our forests in summer, and not infrequently a roaming
buck from the near preserves. There was also here in addition to
the other roads, an abandoned winter wood-road that ran westward
across the island to a small farming settlement. Doubtless
I took a slighter notice of the sound because estrays from the
farmers' fields usually trespassed on us from this road.
At any rate I went on. I fear that I was very much engrossed
with the memory of Madame Barras. Not wholly with the feminine
lure of her, although as I have written she was the perfection of
that lure. One passed women, at all milestones, on the way to
age, and kept before them one's sound estimates of life, but
before this woman one lost one's head, as though Nature, evaded
heretofore, would not be denied. But the weird fortune that had
attended her was in my mind.
Married to Senor Barras out of the door of a convent, carried to
Rio de Janeiro to an unbearable life, escaping with a remnant of
her inheritance in English bank-notes, she arrives here to visit
the one, old, persisting friend, Mrs. Jordan, and finds her dead!
And what seemed strange, incredible beyond belief, was that this
creature Barras had thought only of her fortune which he had
depleted in two years to the something less than twenty thousand
pounds which I had exchanged for her into our money; a mere
fragment of her great inheritance.
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