The Firefly of France eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 232 pages of information about The Firefly of France.

The Firefly of France eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 232 pages of information about The Firefly of France.

The Englishman and the captain consulted a moment.  Then the former spoke: 

“That will be satisfactory, sir, to Captain Cecchi and to me.  Write out your cables, if you please.  They shall be sent.  And I say, Mr. Bayne,—­I hope you drive that ambulance.  I’m not stationed here to be a partizan, but you’ve stood up to us like a man.”

An hour later as I finished my solitary dinner, the electric lights flickered and died, and the engines began their throb.  Under cover of the darkness we were slipping out of Gibraltar.  I leaned my arms on the table and scanned the remains of my feast by the light of my one sad candle, not thinking of what I saw, or of the various calls for help I had been dispatching, or of the sailor grimly mounting guard outside my door.  I was remembering a girl, a girl with ruddy hair and a wild-rose flush and great, gray, starry eyes, a girl that by all the rules of the game I should have handed over to those who represented the countries she was duping, a girl that I had found I had to shield when I came face to face with the issue.

CHAPTER IX

THE BLACK BUTTERFLIES

The Turin-Paris express—­the most direct, the Italians call it—­was too popular by half to suit the taste of morose beings who wished for solitude.  With great trouble and pains I had ferreted out a single vacant compartment; but as four o’clock sounded and the whistle blew for departure, a belated traveler joined me—­worse still, an acquaintance who could not be quite ignored.

The unwelcome intruder was Mr. John Van Blarcom, my late fellow-voyager, and he accepted the encounter with a better grace than I.

“Why, hello!” he greeted me cheerfully.  “Going through to France?  Glad to see you—­but you’re about the last man that I was looking for.  I got the idea somehow you were planning to stop a while in Rome.”

I returned his nod with a curtness I was at no pains to dissemble.  Then I reproached myself, for it was undeniable that on the Re d’Italia he had more than once stood my friend.  He had offered me a timely warning, which I had flouted; he had obligingly confirmed my statement in my grueling third degree.  Yet despite this, or because of it, I didn’t like him; nor did I like his patronizing, complacent manner, which seemed fairly to shriek at me, “I told you so!”

“Changed my plans,” I acknowledged with a lack of cordiality that failed to ruffle him.  He had hung up his overcoat and installed himself facing me, and was now making preparations for lighting a fat cigar.

“Well,” he commented, with a chuckle of raillery, after this operation, “the last time I saw you you were in a pretty tight corner, eh?  You can’t say it was my fault, either; I’d have put you wise if you’d listened.  But you weren’t taking any—­you knew better than I did—­and you strafed me, as the Dutchies say, to the kaiser’s taste.”

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Project Gutenberg
The Firefly of France from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.