Our footsteps sounded on the stones; 'twas all that broke the evening stillness except the song of a roysterer who staggered upon the quays. The moment was fateful in its way and yet it ended farcically, for ere he had gained the foot of the street Kilbride turned and walked back to meet the man that stalked him. We closed upon the Italian to find him baffled and confused.
“Take that for your attentions!” cried Kilbride, and buffeted the fellow on the ear, a blow so secular and telling from a man in a frock that Gordoletti must have thought himself bewitched, for he gave a howl and took to his heels. Kilbride attempted to stop him, but the cassock escaped his hands and his own unwonted costume made a chase hopeless. As for me, I was content to let matters remain as they were now that Father Hamilton's suspicions seemed too well founded.
It did not surprise me that on learning of our experience the priest should determine on an immediate departure from Helvoetsluys. But where he was to go was more than he could readily decide. He proposed and rejected a score of places--Bordeaux, Flanders, the Hague, Katwyk farther up the coast, and many others--weighing the advantages of each, enumerating his acquaintances in each, discovering on further thought that each and every one of them had some feature unfavourable to his concealment from the Jesuits.
“You would be as long tuning your pipes as another would be playing a tune,” said Kilbride at last. “There's one thing sure of it, that you cannot be going anywhere the now without Mr. Greig and myself, and what ails you at Dunkerque in which we have all of us acquaintances?”
A season ago the suggestion would have set my heart in flame; but now it left me cold. Yet I backed up the proposal, for I reflected that (keeping away from the Rue de la Boucherie) we might there be among a good many friends. Nor was his reverence ill to influence in favour of the proposal.
The next morning saw us, then, upon a hoy that sailed for Calais and was bargained to drop us at Dunkerque.
I OVERHEAR THE PLAN OF BRITAIN'S INVASION
I began these chronicles with a homily upon the pregnancy of chance that gives the simplest of our acts ofttimes far-reaching and appalling consequences. It is clear that I had never become the Spoiled Horn and vexed my parents' lives had not a widow woman burned her batch of scones, and though perhaps the pair of shoes in the chest bequeathed to me by my Uncle Andrew were without the magic influence he and I gave credit for, it is probable that I had made a different flight from Scotland had they not led me in the way of Daniel Risk.