"I never saw a girl worth the loss of my liberty," he remarked. "Did you, Halkett? And," he continued, "to be tied up to a mentally deficient appendage with only inferior intellectual resources, and no business or professional occupation to be tied fast to something that sits about to be entertained, and that does nothing except nourish itself and clothe itself, and have babies! It's unthinkable, isn't it?"
"It's pretty awful Of course if a woman came along who combined looks and intellect and professional self-sufficiency "
"You don't find them combined. Take a slant at my class. That's the only sort who even pretend to anything except vacuous idleness. There are no Portias, Halkett. There never were. If there were, I'd take a chance myself, I think. But a man who marries the young girl of today has on his hands an utterly useless incubus. No wonder he sometimes makes experiments elsewhere. No wonder he becomes a rainbow chaser. But he's like a caged squirrel in a wheel; the more he runs around looking for consolation the less progress he makes.
"No, Halkett, this whole marriage business is a pitiable fizzle. Until both parties to a marriage contract are financially independent, intellectually self-sufficient, and properly equipped to earn their own livings by a business or a trade or a profession and until, if a mistake has been made, escape from an ignoble partnership is made legally easy marriage will remain the sickly, sentimental, pious fraud which a combination of ignorance, superstition, custom, and orthodoxy have made it.
"I'm rather eloquent on marriage, don't you think so?"
"Superbly!" said Halkett, laughing. "But, do you know, Warner, your very eloquence betrays the fact that you have thought as much about it as the unfortunate sex you have so eloquently indicted."
"What's that?" demanded Warner wrathfully.
"I'm sorry to say it, but you are exactly the sort of man to fall with a tremendous flop."
"If ever I fall "
"You fell temporarily this afternoon."
"With that painted, grey-eyed "
"Certainly, with the girl Philippa. Come, old chap, you were out with her a long while! What did you two talk about? Love?"
"No, you idiot "
"You didn't even mention the word 'love'? Be honest, old chap!"
Warner began to speak, checked himself.
"Didn't you or she even mention the subject?" persisted Halkett with malicious delight.
But Warner was too angry to speak, and the Englishman's laughter rang out boyishly under the stars. To look at them one would scarcely believe they had been a target for bullets within the hour.
"You don't suppose," began Warner, "that "
"No, no!" cried Halkett. " Not with that girl. I'm merely proving my point. You're too eloquent concerning women not to have spent a good deal of time in speculating about them. You even speculated concerning Philippa. The man who mourns the scarcity of Portias wouldn't be likely to care for one if he met her. You're just the man to fall in love with everything you denounce in a girl. And I have no doubt I shall live to witness that sorrowful spectacle."
Warner had to laugh.
"You are rather a terrifying psychologist," he said. "You almost make me believe I have a streak of romance in me."
"Oh, we all have that, Warner. We call it by other names cleverness, logic, astuteness, intelligence but we all have it in us, and it is revealed in every man who marries a woman for love Believe me, no normal man ever lived who was not, at some brief moment in his life, in love with some woman. Maybe he ignored it and it never came again; maybe he strangled it and went on about more serious business; maybe it died a natural but early death. But once, before he died, he must have had a faint, brief glimpse of it. And that was the naissance of the latent germ of romance in him ephemeral, perhaps, but inevitably to be born before it died."
Warner waved his whip and snapped it maliciously:
"So you have been in love, have you?"
"Why? Because I, also, am suspiciously eloquent?"
"That's the reason according to you."
Halkett smiled slightly.
"Perhaps I have been," he said "Hello! Is this your inn?" as they drew up before the lighted windows of a two-story building standing close to the left-hand edge of the highway, under the stars.
"Here we are at the Golden Peach," nodded Warner, as the door opened and a smiling peasant lad came out with a: "Bon soir, Monsieur Warner! Bon soir, messieurs!" And he took the horse's head while they descended.
That night, lying awake on his bed in the Inn of the Golden Peach, Halkett heard the heavy rush of a southbound automobile passing under his window with the speed of an express train.
And he wondered whether the spongy morass by the little brook still held the long, grey touring car imprisoned.
He got up, went to his window and leaned out. Far away down the road the tail lamps of the machine twinkled, dwindled to sparks, and were engulfed in the invisible.
"More trouble south of me," he thought. But he returned to his bed and lay there, tranquil in the knowledge that when he started south alone on the morrow the envelope would not be on his person.
After a while he rose again, walked to the door connecting his room with Warner's, and opened it cautiously.
"I'm awake," said Warner in a low voice.
"Did you hear that car?"
"Yes. Was it the one that chased us?"
"I only guess so. Listen, Warner! When I go south tomorrow, what are you going to do with that envelope until I send a man back for it?"
"I've thought it all out, old chap. I shall take one of my new canvases, lay the envelope on it, cover envelope and canvas with a quarter of an inch of Chinese White, and when the enamel is dry I shall paint on it. By the way, did you do your telephoning to your satisfaction?"
"Entirely, thank you."
"You got your man?"
"I did," said Halkett. "He's on his way here now. Good night. I'll sleep like a fox, old chap!"
"Good night," said Warner cheerily, enamored with his invention for the safety of the envelope, as well as with the entire adventure.
That night, while they both slept, far away southward, on a lonely road in the Vosges, the car which had rushed by under their windows was now drawn up on the edge of the road.
Four men sat in it, waiting.
Just as dawn broke, what they awaited came up out of the south a far, faint rattle announced it, growing rapidly louder; and a motor cyclist, riding without lights, shot out of the grey obscurity, trailing a comet's tail of dust.
Head-on he came, like a streak, caught sight suddenly of the motionless car and of four men standing up in it, ducked and flattened out over his handlebars as four revolvers poured forth streams of fire.
Motor cycle and rider swerved into the ditch with a crash; the latter, swaying wide in his saddle, was hurled a hundred feet further through the air, landing among the wild flowers on the bank above.
He was the man to whom Halkett had telephoned.
He seemed to be very young an Englishman with blood on his fair hair, and his blue eyes partly open.
They searched him thoroughly; and when they could find nothing more they lifted him between two of them; two others carried the wrecked motor cycle out across the fields toward the slope of a wooded mountain.
After ten minutes or so, two of the men returned to the car, drew a couple of short, intrenching spades from the tool box, and went away again across the fields toward the misty woods.
A throstle in a thorn bush had been singing all the while.
CHAPTER V
Halkett had not slept well; all night long in the garden under his window the nightingales had been very noisy. When he slept, sinister dreams had assailed him; cocks crowed at sunrise, cowbells tinkled, outside his drawn blinds a refreshed and garrulous world was awakening; and the happy tumult awoke him, too.