Anxious to cheer her, he said: ‘Come, come, you can dance. You dance well, mother has told me, and she was a judge. You ride, you swim, you have a voice for country songs, at all events. And you’re a bit of a botanist too. You’re good at English and German; you had a French governess for a couple of years. By the way, you understand the use of a walking-stick in self-defence: you could handle a sword on occasion.’
‘Father trained me,’ said Carthinia. ‘I can fire a pistol, aiming.’
‘With a good aim, too. Father told me you could. How fond he was of his girl! Well, bear in mind that father was proud of you, and hold up your head wherever you are.’
He assured her he had a mind to have a bugle blown at the entrance of the Baths for a challenge to the bathers to match her in warlike accomplishments.
She bit her lips: she could not bear much rallying on the subject just then:
‘Which is the hard one to please?’ she asked.
‘The one you will find the kinder of the two.’
‘A gallant old admiral: Admiral Baldwin Fakenham.’
‘I am glad of that!’ Carinthia sighed out heartily. ‘And he is with her? And likes you, Chillon?’
‘A brave officer!’ Such a father would be sure to like him.
At sunset they stood on the hills overlooking the basin of the Baths, all enfolded in swathes of pink and crimson up to the shining grey of a high heaven that had the fresh brightness of the morning.
‘We are not tired in the slightest,’ said Carinthia, trifling with the vision of a cushioned rest below. ‘I could go on through the night quite comfortably.’
‘Wait till you wake up in your little bed to-morrow,’ Chillon replied stoutly, to drive a chill from his lover’s heart, that had seized it at the bare suggestion of their going on.
Is not the lover a prophet? He that fervently desires may well be one; his hurried nature is alive with warmth to break the possible blow: and if his fears were not needed they were shadows; and if fulfilled, was he not convinced of his misfortune by a dark anticipation that rarely erred? Descending the hills, he remembered several omens: the sun had sunk when he looked down on the villas and clustered houses, not an edge of the orb had been seen; the admiral’s quarters in the broad-faced hotel had worn an appearance resembling the empty house of yesterday; the encounter with the fellow on the rocks had a bad whisper of impish tripping. And what moved Carinthia to speak of going on?