The reckoning of Ronador and the Baron came by the cypress pool.
"It is useless to rave and storm," said Tregar quietly. "I hold the cards."
"Was it necessary to humiliate me in the presence of Miss Westfall?" demanded Ronador bitterly. With all his sullenness there was in his tone a marked respect for the older man.
"It was necessary to end this romantic masquerade!" insisted Tregar. "Why are you here?"
"I—I came in a flash of panic. It seemed to me that after all I—I could not trust to other hands when the dead thing stirred." Ronador's face was white and haggard. In that instant his forty-four years lay heavily upon his shoulders.
"Have I ever misplaced your trust?" reminded Tregar sombrely. "Have I not even kept your secret from your father?"
"Yes."
"Then tell me," asked the Baron bluntly, "why you must come to America and hysterically complicate this damnable mess by—a bullet!"
Greatly agitated, Ronador fell to pacing to and fro. Heavy cypress shadows upon the water moved like pointing fingers.
"Is there nothing I may keep from you?" broke from him a little bitterly.
"Why," insisted the older man, "have you seen fit to conduct yourself with the irrationality of a madman by trundling a music-machine about the country and making love to a girl you tried in a moment of fright and frenzy—to kill?"
"I—I lost my head," said the Prince with an effort. "It—it seemed at first that she must die. The other, I thought to myself, I will leave to Themar and the Baron. This I must do for myself. They will spare her and years hence the thing may stir again. I—I can not bear to think of it even now, Tregar. I have paid heavily for my moment of madness. For nights after, I did not sleep. Even now the memory is unspeakable torture!" And Ronador admitted with stiff, white lips that some nameless God of Malice had made capital of his bullet, stirring his heart into admiration for the fearless girl who had stood so gallantly by the fire in a storm-haunted wood. In the heart of the forest a happier solution had come to him and eliminated the sinister thought of murder.
The Baron coldly heard the passionate avowal through to the end.
"And the Princess Phaedra?" he begged formally. "What of her? What of the marriage that is to dissolve the bitter feud of a century between Houdania and Galituria, this marriage to which already you are informally bound?"
"It is nothing to me. I shall marry Miss Westfall."
"So!" The Baron matched his heavy fingertips. "So! And this is another infernal complication of the freedom of marital choice we grant our princes!"
"Ten years ago," flamed Ronador passionately, "you and my father picked a wife for me! Is not that enough? Now that she is dead, I shall marry whom I choose. Has it not occurred to you that after all it is the sanest way out of this horrible muddle?"
"It is one way out," admitted Tregar, "and by that way lies war with Galituria." He fell silent, plucking at his beard. "I fancy," he said at last, "that you will not go back to the music-machine."
"It was—and is—my only means of following her."
"Do so again," said the Baron dryly, "and the American yellow papers shall blazon your identity to the world. 'Son of a prince regent—nephew of a king—trundles a music-machine about to win a beautiful gypsy!' And Galituria and the Princess Phaedra will read with interest." Then he blazed suddenly with one of his infrequent outbursts of passion, "Is it not enough to have Galituria laughing at a mad king whose claim to the throne by our laws may not be invalidated by his madness? A king so mad that the affairs of a nation must be administered by a prince regent—your father? Must you add to all this the disgrace of breaking faith with Galituria and plunging your country into war? Your father is an old man. With but his life and the life of an aging madman between you and the throne, it behooves you to walk with a full recognition of your future responsibilities. Your father knows you are here in America?"
"No. There was an Arctic expedition. He thinks I have gone hunting with that. At first I thought I could come to America and return with no one the wiser."
"Having murdered Miss Westfall!" completed the Baron quietly.
Ronador's face was ashen.
"Excellency," he choked suddenly, "my little son—"
"Yes," said Tregar with sudden kindness, "I know. Your great love and ambition for the boy drove you to madness." He paused. "You are fully decided to break faith with Phaedra, knowing what may come of it?"
"Yes. Even if my great love for Miss Westfall did not drive me on—"
"To indiscretion!" supplied the Baron dryly.
"As you will. Even then, to me it is now the one way out. With Granberry dead, with the treacherous paper in my possession—"
"It has been burned."
Ronador did not hear.
"With Miss Westfall my wife," he finished, "even if the dead thing stirs again, it can make no difference."
"Then," said the Baron formally, "I am through with it all, quite through. The task was never of my choosing, as you know. When the dead hand reached forth from the grave to taunt you, Ronador, I was willing at first to stoop to unutterable things to save you—and Houdania—from dishonor, but more and more there has been distaste in my heart for the blackness of the thing. Days back I warned you by letter that I would not see Miss Westfall coldly sacrificed for a muddle of which she knew absolutely nothing. There are things a man may not do even for his country—one is murdering women. Now, though I pledged myself through loyalty to my country, my king, my regent and yourself to spying and murder and petty thievery, with a consequent chain of discomfort and misunderstandings for myself, I am through and mightily glad of it!"
"And what have you accomplished?" flamed Ronador passionately. "Granberry, for all your ciphered pledges, lives and mocks me as he did tonight, as he did months back. I could kill him for the indignities he has heaped upon me, if for nothing else. And he knows more than you think. What did he mean to-night?"
"Circumstances," said Tregar coldly, "have made you unduly sensitive and suspicious. Granberry's costume was planned maliciously as an impersonal affront to me. He knew of my plans through a telegram of mine to Themar and made his own accordingly. It was not your past to which he referred. Surely it is not difficult to catch his meaning?"
"Blunders and blunders and quixotic scruples," raved Ronador, "and now this crowning indignity to-night! What has Themar been doing? … What have you done? … Why is Granberry still alive? Hereafter, Tregar, Themar will report to me. I personally will see that the thing is cleared up and silenced forever. I may trust at least to your silence?"
"My word as a gentleman is sufficient?"
"It is."
"Consider me pledged to silence as I have been for a quarter of a century."
"Where is Themar?"
"He is here at my command to-night after an illness of weeks. He has been Granberry's prisoner. His illness alone won his release for him through some inconsistent whim of sympathy on the part of Granberry. He wears the garb of a gray monk."
"Send him here."
The Baron bowed and withdrew. At the path he turned.
"Ronador," he said quietly, "for the sake of the lifetime friendship I have borne your father, for the sake of the position of honor and trust I hold in your father's court, for the sake of my great love for Houdania, let me say that when you find you are sinking deeper and deeper into a pitfall of errors and unhappiness and treachery, I shall be ready and willing to aid and advise you as best I may. I think I know you better than you know yourself. You have an inheritance of wild passion, a nature that swayed by irresistible and fiery impulse, will for the moment dare anything and regret it with terrible suffering ever after. One such lesson you have had in early manhood. I hope you may not rush on blindly to another. Until you come to me, however," he added with dignity, "I shall not meddle again."
"I shall not come!" said Ronador imperiously. But the Baron was gone.
Later, by the cypress pool, the gray monk and the minstrel talked long and earnestly of one who knew overmuch of the affairs of both.
"There is but one thing more," faltered Themar at the end. "I may speak with freedom?"
"Yes," said Ronador impatiently, "what is it?"
"Miss Westfall—I spied upon her camp in Connecticut—"
"Yes?"
"It is well to know all. For days she lived with Poynter in the forest—"
Ronador's eyes blazed.
"Go, go!" he cried, his face quite colorless, "for the love of God go before I kill you! I—I can not bear any more to-night."
Who had scored! For Ronador, at least, in the guileful hands of a traitor who by reason of a strong maternal sympathy desired the alliance of Ronador and Princess Phaedra, there was doubt and bitter suffering. And he might not return to the music-machine.
Themar's thin lips smiled but he wisely retreated.
Northward to Jacksonville had journeyed the camp of the Indian girl, bearing away Diane, to Aunt Agatha's unspeakable agitation. Now, joining forces, these two forest friends, linked in an idle moment by the nameless freemasonry of the woodland, were winding happily south along the seacoast. Nights their camps lay side by side.
Keela, with shy and delightful gravity, slipped wide-eyed into the niceties of civilization, coiled her heavy hair in the fashion of Diane and copied her dress naïvely. Diane felt a thrill of satisfaction at this singular finding of a friend whose veins knew the restless stir of nomadic blood, a friend who was fleeter of foot, keener of vision and hearing and better versed in the ways of the woodland than Diane herself. And Diane had known no peer in the world of white men.
There were gray dawns when a pair of silent riders went galloping through the stillness upon the Westfall horses, riding easily without saddles; there were twilights when they swam in sheltered pools like wild brown nymphs; there were quiet hours by the camp fire when the inborn reticence of the Indian girl vanished in the frank sincerity of Diane's friendship. Of Mr. Poynter and the hay-camp there was no sign.
"Doubtless," considered Diane disdainfully, "he has come at last to his senses. And I'm very glad he has, very glad indeed. It's time he did. I think I made my displeasure sufficiently clear at the exceedingly tricky way he and the Baron conducted themselves at Palm Beach. And the Baron was no better than Philip. Indeed, I think he was very much worse. If Philip hadn't wandered about in the garb of Herodotus and murmured that impertinence about 'frost in Florida' it wouldn't have been so bad. It's a very unfortunate thing, however, that he never seems to remember one's displeasure or the cause of it."
But for one who rejoiced in Mr. Poynter's belated inheritance of common sense, Diane's comment a few days later was very singular.
"I wonder," she reflected uncomfortably, "if Philip understands smoke signals. He may be lost."
But Philip was not lost. He was merely discreet.
A lonely beach fringed in sand hills lay before the camp. Beyond rolled the ocean, itself a melancholy solitude droning under an azure sky. There were beach birds running in flocks down the sand as the white-ridged foam receded; overhead an Indian file of pelicans winged briskly out to sea.
On the broad, hard beach to the north presently appeared a music-machine. Piebald horse, broad, eccentric wagon, cymbals and drum—there was no mistaking the outfit, nor the minstrel himself with his broad-brimmed sombrero tipped protectively over his nose.
Now despite the fact that the Baron had hinted that Ronador's masquerade was at an end, the music-machine steadily approached and halted. The minstrel alighted and fell stiffly to turning the crank, whereupon with a fearful roll of the drum and a clash of cymbals, the papier-mache snake began to unfold and "An Old Girl of Mine" emerged from the cataclysm of sound and frightened the fish hawks over the shallow water. A great blue heron, knee-deep in water, croaked with annoyance, flapped his wings and departed.
When the dreadful commotion in the wagon at last subsided, the minstrel came through the trees and sweeping off his sombrero, bowed and smiled.
"Merciful Heavens!" exclaimed the girl, staring.
It was Mr. Poynter.
"I'm sorry," regretted Mr. Poynter. "I'm really sorry I feel so well—but I've got a music-machine." And seating himself most comfortably by the fire, with a frankly admiring glance at his corduroy trousers, silken shirt and broad sombrero, he anxiously inquired what Diane thought of his costume. Indeed, he admitted, that thought had been uppermost in his mind for days, for he'd copied it very faithfully.
"It's ridiculous!" said Diane, "and you know it."
There, said Mr. Poynter, he must disagree. He didn't know it.
"Well," said Diane flatly, "to my thinking, this is considerably worse than blowing a tin whistle on the steps of the van!"
Mr. Poynter could not be sure. He said in his delightfully naïve way, however, that a music-machine was a thing to arouse romance and sympathy with conspicuous success, that more and more the moon was getting him, and that he did hope Diane would remember that he was the disguised Duke of Connecticut. Moreover, his most tantalizing shortcoming up-to-date had seemed to be a total inability to arouse said romance and sympathy, especially sympathy, for, whether or not Diane would believe it, even here in this land of flowers he had encountered frost! Wherefore, having personal knowledge of the success incidental to unwinding a hullabaloo in proper costume, he had purchased one from a—er—distinguished gentleman who for singular and very private reasons had no further use for it. And though the negotiations, for reasons unnamable, had had to be conducted with infinite discretion through an unknown third person, he had eventually found himself the possessor of the hullabaloo, to his great delight. He had hullabalooed his way along the coast in the wake of a nomadic friend, but deeming it wise to await the dispersal of frost strangely engendered by a Regent's Hymn, had discreetly kept his distance and proved his benevolence, in the manner of his distinguished predecessor, by playing to all the nice old ladies in the dooryards… And one of them had given him a piece of pie and a bottle of excellent coffee and fretted a bit about the way he was wasting his life. Mr. Poynter added that in the fashion of certain young darkies who infest the Southern roads, he would willingly stand on his head for a baked potato in lieu of a nickel, being very hungry.
"You probably mean by that, that you're going to stay to supper!" said Diane.
Mr. Poynter meant just that.
"Where," demanded Diane, "is the hay-camp?"
"Well," said Philip, "Ras is a hay-bride-groom. He dreamt he was married and it made such a profound impression upon him that he went and married somebody. He slept through his wooing and he slept through his wedding and I gave him the hay and the cart and Dick Whittington. I don't think he entirely appreciated Dick either, for he blinked some. All of which primarily engendered the music-machine inspiration. It's really a very comfortable way of traveling about and the wagon was fastidiously fitted up by my distinguished predecessor. The seat's padded and plenty broad enough to sleep on."
Mr. Poynter presently departed to the music-machine for a peace offering in the shape of a bow and some arrows upon which, he said, he'd been working for days. When he returned, laden with luxurious contributions to the evening meal, the camp had still another guest. Keela was sitting by the fire. Philip eyed with furtive approval the modish shirtwaist, turned back at the full brown throat, and the heavily coiled hair.
"The Seminole rig," explained Diane, "was an excellent drawing card for Palm Beach tourists but it was a bit conspicuous for the road. Greet him in Seminole, Keela."
"Som-mus-ka-lar-nee-sha-maw-lin!" said Keela with gravity.
Philip looked appalled.
"She says 'Good wishes to the white man!'" explained Diane, smiling.
"My Lord," said Philip, "I wouldn't have believed it. Keela, I thought you were joint by joint unwinding a yard or so of displeasure at my appearance. No-chit-pay-lon-es-chay!" he added irresponsibly, naming a word he had picked up in Palm Beach from an Indian guide.
The effect was electric. Keela stared. Diane look horrified.
"Philip!" she said. "It means 'Lie down and go to sleep!'"
"To the Happy Hunting Ground with that bonehead Indian!" said Philip with fervor. "Lord, what a civil retort!" and he stammered forth an instant apology.
Immeasurably delighted, Keela laughed.
"You are very funny," she said in English. "I shall like you."
"That's really very comfortable!" said Philip gratefully. "I don't deserve it." He held forth the bow and arrows. "See if you can shoot fast and far enough to have six arrows in the air at once," he said, smiling, "and I'll believe I'm forgiven."
With lightning-like grace Keela shot the arrows into the air and smiled.
"Great Scott!" exclaimed Philip admiringly. "Seven!"
With deft fingers she strung the bow again and shot, her cheeks as vivid as a wild flower, her poise and skill faultless.
"Eight!" said Philip incredulously. "Help!"
"Keela is easily the best shot I ever knew," exclaimed Diane warmly. "Try it, Philip."
"Not much!" said Philip feelingly. "I can shoot like a normal being with one pair of arms, but I can't string space with arrows like that. You forest nymphs," he added with mild resentment, "with woodland eyes and ears and skill put me to shame. You and I, Diane, quarreled once, I think, about the number of Pleiades—"
"They're an excellent test of eyesight," nodded Diane. "And you said there were only six!"
"There is no seventh Pleiad!" said Philip with stubborn decision.
"Eight!" said Keela shyly. And they both stared. Shooting a final arrow, she sent it so far that Philip indignantly refused to look for it.
At dawn one morning a long black car shot out from Jacksonville and took to the open road. It glided swiftly past arid stretches of pine barrens streaked with stagnant water, past bogs aglow with iris, through quaint little cities smiling under the shelter of primeval oaks and on, stopping only long enough for the driver to ask a question of a negro on a load of wood—or a mammy singing plaintively in the flower-bright dooryard of a house.
Sometimes losing, sometimes finding, the trail of a green and white van, the long black car shot on, through roads of pleasant windings flanked by forest and river, beyond which lay the line of green-fringed sand hills which parallel the rolling Atlantic. Past placid lakes skimmed by purple martins, past orange groves heavy with fruit, past fences overrun with Cherokee roses, and on, but the driver, abroad with the sunrise glow, seemed somehow to see little or none of it. Sometimes he stared sombrely at a ghostly palmetto, tall and dark against the sky. Once with a grinding shudder of brakes he halted on the border of a cypress swamp and stared frowningly at the dark, dank trees knee-deep in stagnant water above which the buzzards flew, as if the loathsome spot matched his mood. As indeed it did.
For the words of Themar had done cruel work. Torn by black suspicion, Ronador saw no peace in this tranquil Florida world of sun and flower, of warm south wind and bright-winged bird. He saw only the buzzards, birds of evil omen. Swayed by fiery gusts of passion, of remorse, of sullenness and jealousy, he rode on, a prey to sinister resolution. To confront Diane with his knowledge of those days by the river, this resolution alternated as frequently with another—to put his fate to the test and passionately avow his utter trust in one immeasurably above the rank and file of women. He had racked Themar with insistent questions, he had quarreled again and again with the Baron since that night by the pool, until now he had at his finger-ends, the ways and days of Philip Poynter since the day the Baron had dispatched his young secretary upon the ill-fated errand to Diane. And as there were finer moments when his faith in the girl was unmarred by suspicion, so there were wild, unscrupulous hours of jealousy when he could have killed Philip and taunted her with insults.
Driving steadily, he came in course of time to a narrow, grass-banked creek. The nomads on the winding road beside it were many and beautiful. Here were yellow butterflies, sandpipers and kingfishers, and now and then an eagle cleaved the dazzling blue overhead with magnificent wing-strokes. Sand hills reflected the white sunlight. Beyond glistened a stretch of open sea with a flock of beautiful gannets of black and white whipping its surface. But Ronador did not thrill to the peaceful picture. He glanced instead at the buzzard which seemed curiously to hang above the long black car.
Now presently as he eyed the road ahead for a glimpse of the van, Ronador saw the familiar lines of a music-machine and drove by it with a glance of interest. Instantly the blood rushed violently to his face. For, as the horse and music-machine had been familiar, so was the driver, who swept a broad sombrero from his head and revealed the face of Philip Poynter.
With a curse Ronador abruptly brought the car to a standstill. The very irony of this masquerade fired him with terrible anger.
"You!" he choked. "You!"
Philip nodded.
"I guess you're right," he said.
The blazing dark eyes and the calm, unruffled blue ones met in a glance of implacable antagonism. Not in the least impressed Philip replaced his sombrero and spoke to his horse. Fish crows flew overhead with croaks of harsh derision.
Another buzzard! With a terrible jerk, Ronador drove on, his face scarlet.
So Poynter still dared to follow! By a trick he had bought the music-machine, by a trick he had given the Regent's Hymn to the curious ears at Sherrill's. Very well, there were tricks and tricks! And if one man may trick, so, surely, may another.
Passion had always hushed the voice of the imperial conscience, though indeed it awoke and cried in a terrible voice when passion was dead. So now with stiff white lips fixed in unalterable resolution, Ronador drove viciously on, turning over and over in his fevered brain the ways and days of Philip Poynter… So at last he came to the camp he sought.
It was pitched upon the upland bank of the winding creek and as the car shot rapidly toward it, a great blue heron flapped indignantly and soared away to the marsh beyond the trees. Ronador jumped queerly and colored with a sense of guilt.
There was yellow oxalis here carpeting the ground among the low, dark cedars, yellow butterflies flitted about among the trees where Johnny was washing the van, and the inevitable buzzard floated with upturned wings above the camp. Ronador had grown to hate the ubiquitous bird of the South. Superstition flamed hotly up in his heart now at the sight of it.
Diane was sewing. He had caught the flutter of her gown beneath a cedar as he stopped the car. There was no one visible in the camp of the Indian girl. Ronador sprang from his car and waved to the girl, smiling, she came to meet him.
Now as Ronador smiled down into the clear, unfaltering eyes of the girl before him, he knew suddenly that he trusted her utterly, that the mad suspicion, sired by the words of Themar and mothered by jealousy, was but a dank mist that melted away in the sunlight of her presence. Only jealousy remained and a smouldering, unscrupulous hate for the persistent young organ-grinder behind him.
Chatting pleasantly they returned to camp.
Imperceptibly their talk of the fortunes of the road took on a more intimate tinge of reminiscence and presently, with searching eyes fixed upon the vivid, lovely face of the wind-brown gypsy beneath the cedar, Ronador asked the girl to marry him.
Very gently Diane released her hands from his grasp, her cheeks scarlet.
"Indeed, indeed," she faltered, "I could not with fairness answer you now, for I do not in the least know what I think. You will not misunderstand me, I am sure, if I tell you that not once in the long, pleasant days we journeyed the same roads, did I ever dream of the nature of your pleasant friendship." Her frank, dark eyes, alive with a beautiful sincerity, met his honestly. "There was always tradition—" she reminded.
Ronador's reply was sincere and gallant. Diane was lovelier than any princess, he said, and in Houdania, tradition had been replaced years back by a law which granted freedom.
"Though to be sure," he added bitterly, "each generation seeks to break it. Tregar tried, urging me persistently for diplomatic reasons to take a wife of his choosing. And when I—I fled to America to escape his infernal scheming and spying—he followed. Even here in America I have been haunted by spies—"
His glance wavered.
"And then," he went on earnestly, "I saw you and I knew that Princess Phaedra was forever impossible. There was a night of terrible wind and storm when I planned to beg shelter in your camp and make your acquaintance… You are annoyed?"
"No," said Diane honestly. "Why fuss now?"
"Tregar must have suspected. I met his—his spy in the forest and we quarreled wildly. He tried to kill me but the bullet went wild."
Again his glance wavered but the lying words came smoothly. "My servant, Themar, leaped and stabbed him in the shoulder—"
"No! No!" cried Diane. "Not that—not that!" Her eyes, dark with horror in the colorless oval of her face, met Ronador's with mute appeal. "It—it can not be," she added quietly. "The man was Philip Poynter."
Ronador caught her hands again with fierce resolve. His eyes were blazing with excitement and anger at the utter faith in her voice.
"Why do you think I adopted the stained face—the disguise of a wandering minstrel?" he demanded impetuously. "It was to free myself from his infernal spying—to afford myself the opportunity of gaining your friendship without his knowledge! Why did he follow—always follow? Because at the command of his chief, he must needs obstruct my plan of winning you. There was always Princess Phaedra! Why did he watch by night in the forest. To spy! Can you not see it?"
"Surely, surely," said Diane, "you must be wrong!"
But Ronador could not be wrong. Themar, his servant, whom he had dispatched to seek employment with the Baron when the fortunes of the road had made further attendance upon himself inconvenient, had learned of the hay-camp and of Poynter's pledge to make his victim's advances ridiculous in the eyes of Diane.
"And when Themar followed—to warn me—Poynter beat him brutally," he went on fiercely, "beat him and sent him in a dirty barge to a distant city. All the while when I fancied my disguise impenetrable, he was laughing in his sleeve, for he is as clever as he is unscrupulous. He was even meeting his chief in a Kentucky woods to report. Tregar admitted it. Why did he make me ridiculous at the Sherrill fête? Purely because your eyes, Miss Westfall, were among those who watched the indignity! Why is he driving about now in the music-machine to mock me? Because having forced me from the road, he must needs see to it that I do not return. When I do, he must be near at hand to report to the Baron."
It was an artful network. Somehow, by virtue of the sinister skeleton of facts underlying the velvet of his logic, it rang true. Diane, as colorless as a flower, sat utterly silent, slender brown fingers tightened against the palms of her hands.
Philip false! Philip a spy! Philip—almost a murderer! It could not be!
Yet how insistently he had striven to force her to return to civilization. Away from Ronador? It might be. How insistently the Baron had urged him to linger in her camp! To spy? A great wave of faintness swept over her. And there was Arcadia and the hay-camp and the mildly impudent indignities—they all slipped accurately into place.
"I—I do not know!" she faltered at last in answer to his impetuous pleading. "If you will not see me again until I may think it all out—"
But there was danger in waiting. A hot appeal flashed in Ronador's eyes and eloquently again he fell to pleading.
But Diane had caught the clatter of the music-machine up the road where Philip was good-humoredly unwinding the hullabaloo for a crowd of gleeful young darkies, and suddenly she turned very white and stern.
"No! No!" she said. "It must be as I said."
And presently, with faith in his poisoned arrows Ronador went, pledged to await her summons.
Diane sat very still beneath the cedars, with the noise of the music-machine wild torture to her ears.
The moon silvered the marsh and the creek. Off to the east rippled a silent, moon-white stretch of sea, infinitely lonely, murmuring in the star-cool night.
Restless and wakeful Diane watched the stream glide endlessly on, each reed and pebble silvered. Rex lay on the bank beside her, whither he had followed faithfully a very long while ago, snapping at the insects which rose from the grass. So colorless and fixed was the face of his mistress that it seemed a beautiful graven thing devoid of life.
Now presently as Diane stared at the moon-lit pebbles glinting at her feet, a shadow among the cedars, having advanced and retreated uncertainly a score of times before, suddenly detached itself from the wavering stencil of tree and bush upon the moonlit ground and resolved itself into the figure of a tall, determined sentinel who approached and seated himself beside her.
"What's wrong?" begged Philip gently. "I've been watching you for hours, Diane, and you've scarcely moved an inch."
"Nothing," said Diane. But her voice was so lifeless, her lack of interest in Philip's sudden appearance so pointed, that he glanced keenly at her colorless face and frowned.
"There is something, I'm sure," he insisted kindly. "You look it." Finding that she did not trouble to reply, he produced his wildwood pipe and fell to smoking.
"Likely I'll stay here," said Philip quietly, "until you tell me. Surely you know, Diane, that in anything in God's world that concerns you, I stand ready to help you if you need me."
It was manfully spoken but Diane's lips faintly curled. Philip's fine frank face colored hotly and he looked away.
In silence they sat there, Philip smoking restlessly and wondering, Diane staring at the creek, with Ronador's impassioned voice ringing wildly in her ears.
In the east the sky turned faintly primrose, the creek glowed faintly pink. The great moon glided lower by the marsh with the branch of a dead tree black against its brilliant shield. Marsh and oak were faintly gray. The metallic ocean had already caught the deepening glow of life. Where the stream stole swampwards, a mist curled slowly up from the water like beckoning ghosts draped in nebulous rags.
Suddenly in the silence Diane fell to trembling.
"Philip!" she cried desperately.
"Yes?" said Philip gently.
"Why are you following me with the music-machine?"
"I could tell you," said Philip honestly, "and I'd like to, but you'd tell me again that the moon is on my head."
The girl smiled faintly.
"Tell me," she begged impetuously, "what was that other reason why I must not journey to Florida in the van? You spoke of it by the lily pool in Connecticut. You remember?"
"Yes," said Philip uncomfortably. "Yes, I do remember."
"What was it?" insisted Diane, her eyes imploring. "Surely, Philip, you can tell me now! I—I did not ask you then—"
"No," said Philip wistfully. "I—I think you trusted me then, for all our friendship was a thing of weeks."
"What was it?" asked Diane, grown very white.
"I am sorry," said Philip simply. "I may not tell you that, Diane. I am pledged."
"To whom?"
"It is better," said Philip, "if I do not tell."
Diane sharply caught her breath and stared at the sinister wraiths rising in floating files from the swamp stream.
"Philip—was it—was it Themar's knife?"
"Yes," said Philip.
"And the man to whom you are pledged is—Baron Tregar!"
"Yes," said Philip again.
"Why were you in the forest that night of storm and wind?"
Philip glanced keenly at the girl by the creek. Her profile was stern and very beautiful, but the finely moulded lips had quivered.
"What is it, Diane?" he begged gently. "Why is it that you must ask me all these things that I may not honorably answer?"
"I—I do not see why you may not answer."
"An honorable man respects his promise scrupulously!" said Philip with a sigh. "You would not have me break mine?"
"Why," cried Diane, "did you fight with Themar in the forest? Why have you night after night watched my camp? Oh, Philip, surely, surely, you can tell me!"
Philip sighed. With his infernal habit of mystery and pledges, the Baron had made this very hard for him.
"None of these things," he said quietly, "I may tell you or anyone."
Diane leaned forward and laid her hand upon his arm.
"Philip," she whispered with dark, tragic eyes fixed upon his face, "who—who shot the bullet that night? Do you know?"
"Yes," said Philip, "I—I am very sorry. I think I know—"
"You will not tell me?"
"No."
Diane drew back with a shudder.
"I know the answers to all my questions!" she said in a low voice, and there was a great horror in her eyes. "Oh, Philip, Philip, go! If—if you could have told me something different—"
"Is it useless to ask you to trust me, Diane?"
"Go!" said Diane, trembling.
By the swamp the gray ghosts fell to dancing with locked, transparent hands.
Blood-red the sun glimmered through the pines and struck fire from a gray, cold world.
Philip bent and caught her hands, quietly masterful.
"What you may think, Diane," he said unsteadily, "I do not know. But part of the answer to every question is my love for you. No—you must listen! We have crossed swords and held a merry war, but through it all ran the strong thread of friendship. We must not break it now. Do you know what I thought that day on the lake when I saw you coming through the trees? I said, I have found her! God willing, here is the perfect mate with whom I must go through life, hand in hand, if I am to live fully and die at the last having drained the cup of life to the bottom. If, knowing this, you can not trust me and will tell me so—"
But Ronador's eloquent voice rang again in the girl's ears. Her glance met Philip's inexorably. And there was something in her eyes that hurt him cruelly. For an instant his face flamed scarlet, then it grew white and hard and very grim.
"Go!" said Diane and buried her face in her hands.
With no final word of extenuation Philip went.
Diane stumbled hurriedly through the trees to Keela's camp and touched the Indian girl frantically upon the shoulder.
"Keela," she cried desperately, "wake! wake! It's sunrise. Let us go somewhere—anywhere—and leave this treacherous world of civilization behind us. I—I am tired of it all."
Keela stared.
"Very well," she said sedately a little later. "You and I, Diane, we will journey to my home in the Glades. There—as it was a century back—so it is now."
Southward along the beautiful Kissimmee river, where the fabled young grandee of Spain kissed the plaintive Seminole maid, rumbled the great green van and the camp of Keela. Southward, unremittingly protective, followed the silent music-machine. For though the dear folly and humor were things of the past, like Arcadia, a true knight may surely see that his willful lady comes to no harm though he must worship from afar. And at length they came to the final fringe of civilization edging the Everglades where, despite repeated protests, Johnny must stay behind with the cumbrous van.
And now the Southern woods were gloriously a-riot with blossoms; with dogwood and magnolia, with wild tropical blossoms of orange and scarlet; and the moon hung wild and beautiful above the Everglades.
"Little Spring Moon!" said Keela softly in Seminole.
Diane thought suddenly of a late moon above a marsh.
"He—he can not follow me into those terrible wilds ahead," she thought with sudden bitterness. "I shall be free at last from his dreadful spying."
At sunrise one morning they bade Johnny adieu and struck off boldly with the Indian wagon into the melancholy world of the Everglades.
"It is better," said Keela gravely, "if you wear the Seminole clothes you wore at Sherrill's. They are in the wagon. My people love not the white man."
"But—" stammered Diane.
"They will think," explained Keela shyly, "that you are a beautiful daughter of the sun from the wilderness of O-kee-fee-ne-kee. You are brown and beautiful. Such, they tell, was my grandmother. It is a legend of my mother's people, but I do not think," added Keela majestically, "that the wild and beautiful tribe of mystery who were sons and daughters of the Sun, are half so beautiful as you!"
To the dull baying of the alligators in the saw grass, and the melancholy croak of the great blue herons, Keela's wagon penetrated the weird and terrible wilds of the Everglades, winding by the gloomy border of swamps where the deadly moccasin dwelt beneath the darkling shadow of cypress, on by ponds thick with lilies and tall ghostly grasses, over tangled underbrush, past water-dark jungles of dead trees where the savage cascade of brush and vine and fallen branches had woven a weird, wild lacery among the trees, through mud and saw grass, past fertile islands and lagoons of rush and flag—a trackless water-prairie of uninhabitable wilds which to Keela's keen and beautiful eyes held the mysteriously blazed home-trail of the Seminole.
As Keela knew the trail, so surely from the rank, tropical vegetation of the great Southern marshland she knew the art of wresting food. Bitter wild oranges, pawpaws, oily palmetto cabbage, wild cassava, starred gorgeously now with orange colored blossoms, and guavas; these, with the wild turkeys and mallard ducks, turtles and squirrels and the dark little Florida quail with which the wild abounded, gave them varied choice.
Cheerfully fording miles of mud and water, his discomforts not a few, came Philip, greatly disturbed by the incomprehensible whims of his lady. By day he followed close upon the trail of the canvas wagon, patterning his conquest of the aquatic wilderness about him after that of Keela, hunting the wild duck and the turkey and discarding the bitter orange with aggrieved disgust. And if Keela occasionally found a brace of ducks by the camp fire or a bass in a nest of green palmetto, she wisely said nothing, sensing the barrier between these two and wondering greatly.
By night when the great morass lay in white and sinister tangle under the wild spring moon, when the dark and dreadful swamps were rife with horrible croaks and snaps, the whirring of the wings of waterfowl or the noise of a disturbed puff adder, Philip stretched himself upon the seat of the music-machine and slept through the twilight and the early evening. When the camp ahead, glimmering brightly through the live oaks, was silent, Philip awoke and watched and smoked, a solitary sentinel in the terrible melancholy of the moonlit waste of ooze and dead leaf and sinister crawling life.
So they came in time to the plains of Okeechobee and thence to the wild, dark waters of the great inland sea—a wild, bleak sea, mirroring cloud and the night-lamp of the Everglades. The wind wafting across on night-tipped wings rippled the great water shield and brought its message to the silent figure on the shore.
"So," sighed the wind of the Okeechobee, "he still follows!"
"Yes," said Diane, shuddering at the howl of a cat owl, "he has dared even that!"
"Brave and resolute to plunge into the wilds with a music-machine! Would he, think you, dare all this for the sake of—spying?"
"I—I do not know. I have wondered greatly. Still he has dared much for it before."
"He asked you to remember—his love—"
"I—I dare not think of it. For every admission he made that night by the marsh tallied with the terrible tale of Ronador. I had thought he followed and watched by night for another reason."
"What reason?"
"I—do not know. A finer, holier reason—"
The wind fluttered and fell, and rose again with a plaintive sigh.
"You know, but you will not tell!"
"It—it may be so. He is false—he is false!" cried the voice of the girl's sore heart; "a false sentry and a false protector. I can not bear it. Philip! Philip! It was Themar's knife—and the bullet was his—and all that seemed fine and noble was black and false!"
"You will not trust him as he begged!"
"I can not. For he will not tell me the reason for all these things!"
"You will wed Prince Ronador?"
"Yes. It is the one way out."
"Why?"
"He is a gallant lover and the victim of much that is vile and unfair."
"Yes—he has said so."
"He has suffered much through me."
"Yes."
"And he is honorable and devoted."
"It may be."
"He told me all, though he found it difficult."
"He was not bound by a pledge."
"No."
"Well, there is wisdom, the wisdom of the world, in your choice. Flashing jewels, robes of state, maids of honor—"
"These things," spurned Diane with beautiful insolence, "I may buy with gold."
"Ah!" crooned the wind, "but the vassalage of this elfin nation that plays at empire, the romance and adventure of an imperial court! And when the mad King dies and the Prince Regent, then Ronador will be king—"
"I have thought of it all. I can not go back to the old shallow life with Aunt Agatha. No! No! And I am very lonely. If in the days to come wind and moon and the call of the wilderness stir my gypsy blood to rebellion—if I am ever to forget—"
"What must you forget?"
"It was foolish to speak so. I do not know. Then when the call of the wildwood comes I must have crowded days and fevered gayety to hush it. And surely this will come to me in the court of Ronador."
The wild moon drifted behind a cloud, the sea darkened, something huge and shadowy lumbered down to the water and splashed heavily away, the cat owl hooted. A mist drooped trailing fingers over the water as the wind died away.
A profoundly dreary setting for a dream of empire!