“No. . . . A passing giddiness. . . . I have been badly frightened. . . . And I had no business to be frightened, since you were there and you had promised to save me. Oh, Simon, how grateful I am to you!”
“I have done what any one would have done in my place, Dolores. Don’t thank me.”
He tried to free himself, but she held him and, after a moment’s silence, said:
“She whom the chief calls the fair Indian had a name by which she was known in her own country. Shall I tell you what it was?”
“What was it, Dolores?”
In a low voice, without taking her eyes from his, she replied:
“The Chief’s Reward!”
He had felt, in his inner consciousness, that this magnificent creature deserved some such name, that she was truly the prey which men seek to ravish, the captive to be saved at any cost, and that she did indeed offer, with her red lips and her brown shoulders, the most wonderful of rewards.
She had flung her arms about his neck; he was conscious of their caress; and for a moment they stood like that, motionless, uncertain of what was coming. But Isabel’s image flashed across his mind and he remembered the oath which she had required of him:
“Not a moment’s weakness, Simon. I should never forgive that.”
He pulled himself together and said:
“Get some rest, Dolores. We have still a long way to go.”
She also recovered herself and went down to the river, where she bathed her face in the cool water. Then, getting to work immediately, she collected all the provisions and ammunition that she could find on the wounded men.
“There!” she said, when everything was ready for their departure. “Mazzani and Forsetta won’t die, but we have nothing more to fear from them. We will leave them in the charge of the two tramps. The four of them will be able to defend themselves.”
They exchanged no more words. They went up the river for another hour and reached the wide bend of which the people from Cayeux had told them. At the very beginning of this bend, which brought the waters of the Somme direct from France, they picked up Rolleston’s trail on a tract of muddy sand. The trail led straight on, leaving the course of the river and running north.
“The fountains of gold lie in this direction evidently,” Simon inferred. “Rolleston must be at least a day’s journey ahead of us.”
“Yes,” said Dolores, “but his party is a large one, they have no horses left and their two prisoners are delaying their progress.”
They met several wanderers, all of whom had heard the strange rumour which had spread from one end of the prairie to the other and all of whom were hunting for the fountain of gold. No one could give the least information.
But a sort of old crone came hobbling along, leaning on a stick and carrying a carpet-bag with the head of a little dog sticking out of it.
The dog was barking like mad. The old crone was humming a tune, in a faint, high-pitched voice.
Dolores questioned her. She replied, in short, sing-song sentences, which seemed a continuation of her ditty, that she had been walking for three days, never stopping . . . that she had worn out her shoes . . . and that when she was tired . . . she got her dog to carry her:
“Yes, my dog carries me,” she repeated. “Don’t you, Dick?”
“She’s mad,” Simon muttered.
The old woman nodded in assent and addressed them in a confidential tone:
“Yes, I’m mad. . . . I used not to be, but it’s the gold . . . the rain of gold that has made me mad. . . . It shoots into the air like a fountain . . . and the gold coins and the bright pebbles . . . fall in a shower. . . . So you hold out your hat or your bag and the gold comes pouring into it. . . . My bag is full. . . . Would you like to see?”
She laughed quietly and, beckoning to Simon and Dolores, took her dog by the scruff of the neck, dropped him on the ground and half-opened her bag. Then, again in her sing-song voice:
“You are honest folk, aren’t you? . . . I wouldn’t show it to any one else. . . . But you won’t hurt me.”
Dolores and Simon eagerly bent over the bag. With her bony fingers the old woman first lifted a heap of rags kept there for Dick’s benefit; she then removed a few shiny red and yellow pebbles. Beneath these lay quite a little hoard of gold coins, of which she seized a generous handful, making them clink in the hollow of her hand. They were old coins of all sizes and bearing all sorts of heads.
Simon exclaimed excitedly:
“She comes from there! . . . She has been there!”
And shaking the mad woman by the shoulders, he asked:
“Where is it? How many hours have you been walking? Have you seen a party of men leading two prisoners, an old man and a girl?”
But the madwoman picked up her dog and closed her bag. She refused to hear. At the most, as she moved away, she said, or rather sang to the air of a ballad which the dog accompanied with his barking:
“Men on horseback. . . . They were galloping. . . . It was yesterday. . . . A girl with fair hair. . . .”
Simon shrugged his shoulders:
“She’s wandering. Rolleston has no horses. . . .”
“True,” said Dolores, “but, all the same, Miss Bakefield’s hair is fair.”
They were much astonished, a little way on, to find that Rolleston’s trail branched off into another trail which came from France and which had been left by the trampling of many horses — a dozen, Dolores estimated — whose marks were less recent than the bandits’ footprints. These were evidently the men on horseback whom the madwoman had seen.
Dolores and Simon had only to follow the beaten track displayed before their eyes on the carpet of moist sand. The region of shells had come to an end. The plain was strewn with great, absolutely round rocks, formed by pebbles agglomerated in marl, huge balls polished by all the submarine currents and deep-sea tides. In the end they were packed so close together that they constituted an insuperable obstacle, which the horsemen and then Rolleston had wheeled round.
When Simon and Dolores had passed it, they came to a wide depression of the ground, the bottom of which was reached by circular terraces. Down here were a few more of the round rocks. Amid these rocks lay a number of corpses. They counted five.
They were the bodies of young men, smartly dressed and wearing boots and spurs. Four had been killed by bullets, the fifth by a stab in the back between the shoulders.
Simon and Dolores looked at each other and then each continued in independent search.
On the sand lay bridles and girth, two nosebags full of oats, half-emptied meat-tins, unrolled blankets and a spirit-stove.
The victims’ pockets had been ransacked. Nevertheless, Simon found in a waistcoat a sheet of paper bearing a list of ten names — Paul Cormier, Armand Darnaud, etc. — headed by this note:
“Foret-d’Eu Hunt.”
Dolores explored the immediate surroundings. The clues which she thus obtained and the facts discovered by Simon enabled them to reconstruct the tragedy exactly. The horsemen, all members of a Norman hunt, camping on this spot two nights before, had been surprised in the morning by Rolleston’s gang and the greater number massacred.
With such men as Rolleston and his followers, the attack had inevitably ended in a thorough loot, but its main object had been the theft of the horses. When these had been taken after a fight, the robbers had made off at a gallop.
“There are only five bodies,” said Dolores, “and there are ten names on the list. Where are the other five riders?”
“Scattered,” said Simon, “wounded, dying, anything. I daresay we should find them by searching round? But how can we? Have we the right to delay, when the safety of Miss Bakefield and her father is at stake? Think, Dolores: Rolleston has more than thirty hours’ start of us and he and his men are mounted on excellent horses, while we. . . . And then where are we to catch them?”
He clenched his fists with rage:
“Oh, if I only knew where this fountain of gold was! How far from it a
re we? A day’s march? Two days’? It’s horrible to know nothing, to go forward at random, in this accursed country!”
CHAPTER V. THE CHIEF’S REWARD
DURING THE NEXT two hours they saw, in the distance, three more corpses. Frequent shots were fired, but whence they did not know. Single prowlers were becoming rare; they encountered rather groups consisting of men of all classes and nationalities, who had joined for purposes of defence. But quarrels broke out within these groups, the moment there was the least booty in dispute, or even the faintest hope of booty. No discipline was accepted save that imposed by force.
When one of these wandering bands seemed to be approaching them, Simon carried his rifle ostentatiously as though on the point of taking aim. He entered into conversation only at a distance and with a forbidding and repellent air.
Dolores watched him uneasily, avoiding speech with him. Once she had to tell him that he was taking the wrong direction and to prove his mistake to him. But this involved an explanation to which he listened with impatience and which he cut short by grumbling:
“And then? What does it matter if we keep to the right or to the left? We know nothing. There is nothing to prove that Rolleston has taken Miss Bakefield with him on his expedition. He may have imprisoned her somewhere, until he is free to return for her . . . so that, in following him, I risk the chance of going farther away from her. . . .”
Nevertheless, the need of action drew him on, however uncertain the goal to be achieved. He could never have found heart to apply himself to investigations or to check the impulse which urged him onward.
Dolores marched indefatigably by his side, sometimes even in front. She had taken off her shoes and stockings. He watched her bare feet making their light imprint in the sand. Her hips swayed as she walked, as with American girls. She was all grace, strength and suppleness. Less distracted, paying more attention to external things, she probed the horizon with her keen gaze. It was while doing so that she cried, pointing with outstretched hand:
“Look over there, the aeroplane!”
It was right at the top of a long, long upward slope of the whole plain, at a spot where the mist and the ground were blended till they could not say for certain whether the aeroplane was flying through the mist or running along the soil. It looked like one of those sailing-ships which seem suspended on the confines of the ocean. It was only gradually that the reality became apparent: the machine was motionless, resting on the ground.
“There is no doubt,” said Simon, “considering the direction, that this is the aeroplane that crossed the river. Damaged by Mazzani’s bullet, it flew as far as this, where it managed to land as best it could.”
Now the figure of the pilot could be distinguished; and he too — a strange phenomenon — was motionless, sitting in his place, his head almost invisible behind his rounded shoulders. One of the wheels was half-destroyed. However, the aeroplane did not appear to have suffered very greatly. But what was this man doing, that he never moved?
They shouted. He did not reply, nor did he turn round; and, when they reached him, they saw that his breast was leaning against the steering-wheel, while his arms hung down on either side. Drops of blood were trickling from under the seat.
Simon climbed on board and almost immediately declared:
“He’s dead. Mazzani’s bullet caught him sideways behind the head. . . . A slight wound, of which he was not conscious for some time, to judge by the quantity of blood which he lost, probably without knowing. . . . Then he succeeded in touching earth. And then . . . then I don’t know . . . a more violent hemorrhage, a clot on the brain. . . .”
Dolores joined Simon. Together they lifted the body. No foot-pads had passed that way, for they found the dead man’s papers, watch and pocket-book untouched.
His papers, on examination, were of no special interest. But the route-map fixed to the steering-wheel representing the Channel and the old coast-lines, was marked with a dot in red pencil and the words:
“Rain of gold.”
“He was going there too,” Simon murmured. “They already know of it in France. And here’s the exact place . . . twenty-five miles from where we are . . . between Boulogne and Hastings . . . not far from the Banc de Bassurelle. . . .”
And, quivering with hope, he added:
“If I can get the thing to fly, I’ll be there myself in half an hour. . . . And I shall rescue Isabel. . . .”
Simon set to work with a zest which nothing could discourage. The aeroplane’s injuries were not serious: a wheel was buckled, the steering-rod bent, the feed-pipe twisted. The sole difficulty arose from the fact that Simon found only inadequate tools in the tool-box and no spare parts whatever. But this did not deter him; he contrived some provisional splices and other repairs, not troubling about their strength provided that the machine could fly for the time required:
“After all,” he said to Dolores, who was doing what she could to help him, “after all, it is only a question of forty minutes’ flight, no more. If I can manage to take off, I’m sure to hold out. Bless my soul, I’ve done more difficult things than that!”
His joy once more bubbled over in vivacious talk. He sang, laughed, jeered at Rolleston and pictured the ruffian’s face at seeing this implacable archangel descending from the skies. All the same, rapidly though he worked, he realized by six o’clock in the evening that he could scarcely finish before night and that, under these conditions, it would be better to put off the start until next morning. He therefore completed his repairs and carefully tested the machine, while Dolores moved away to prepare their camp. When twilight fell, his task was finished. Happy and smiling, he followed the path on his right which he had seen the girl take.
The plain fell away suddenly beyond the ridge on which the aeroplane had stranded; and a deeper gully, between two sand-hills, led Simon to a lower, basin-shaped plain, in the hollow of which shone a sheet of water so limpid that he could see the bed of black rock at the bottom.
This was the first landscape in which Simon perceived a certain charm, a touch of terrestrial and almost human poetry; and at the far end of the lake there stood the most incredible thing that could be imagined in this region which only a few days earlier had been buried under the sea: a structure which seemed to have been raised by human hands and which was supported by columns apparently covered with fine carving!
Dolores stepped out of it. Tall and shapely, with slow, sedate movements, she walked in to the water, among some stones standing upright in the lake, filled a glass and, bending backwards, drank a few sips. Near by, a trace of steam, rising from a pannikin on a spirit-stove, hovered in the air.
Seeing Simon, she smiled and said:
“Everything’s ready. Here’s tea, white bread and butter.”
“Do you mean it?” he said, laughing. “So there were inhabitants at the bottom of the sea, people who grew wheat?”
“No, but there was some food in that poor airman’s box.”
“Very well; but this house, this prehistoric palace?”
It was a very primitive palace, a wall of great stones touching one another and surmounted by a great slab like those which top the Druid dolmans. The whole thing was crude and massive, covered with carvings which, when examined closely, were merely thousands of holes bored by molluscs.
“Lithophagic molluscs, Old Sandstone would call them. By Jove, how excited he would be to see these remains of a dwelling which dates thousands and thousands of centuries back and which perhaps has others buried in the sand near it . . . a whole village, I dare say! And isn’t this positive proof that this land was inhabited before it was invaded by the sea? Doesn’t it upset all our accepted ideas, since it throws back the appearance of men to a period which we are not prepared to admit? Oh, you Old Sandstone, if you were only here! What theories you could evolve!”
Simon evolved no theories. But, though the scientific explanation of the phenomenon meant little to him, how acutely he felt its strangeness and how deeply stir
ring this moment seemed to him! Before him, before Dolores, rose another age and in circumstances that made them resemble two creatures of that age, the same desolate, barbarous surroundings, the same dangers, the same pitfalls.
And the same peace. From the threshold of their refuge stretched a placid landscape made of sand, mist and water. The faint sound of a little stream that fed the lake barely disturbed the infinite silence.
He looked at his companion. No one could be better adapted to the surrounding scene. She had its primitive charm, its wild, rather savage character and all its mysterious poetry.
The night stretched its veil across the lake and the hills.
“Let us go in,” she said, when they had eaten and drunk.
“Let us go in,” he said.
She went before, then, turned to give him her hand and led him into the chamber formed by the circle of stone slabs. Simon’s lamp was there, hanging from a projection in the wall. The floor was covered with fine sand. Two blankets lay spread.
Simon hesitated. Dolores held him by a firmer pressure of the hand and he remained, despite himself, in a moment of weakness. Besides, she suddenly switched off the lamp and he might have thought himself alone, for he heard nothing more than the infinitely gentle lapping of the lake against the stones upon the beach.
It was then and really not until then that he perceived the snare which events had laid for him by drawing him closer to Dolores during the past three days. He had defended her, as any man would have done, but her beauty had not for a moment affected his decision, or stimulated his courage. Had she been old or ugly, she would have found the same protection at his hands.
At the present moment — he realized it suddenly — he was thinking of Dolores not as a companion of his adventures and his dangers but as the most beautiful and attractive of creatures. He reflected that she, perturbed like himself, was not sleeping either, and that her eyes were seeking him through the darkness. At her slightest movement, the delicate perfume with which she scented her hair, mingled with the warm emanations that floated on the breeze.
Delphi Collected Works of Maurice Leblanc (Illustrated) (Delphi Series Nine Book 17) Page 378
