"He's lost some of his reputation now, anyway," said Downing.
"I can't think how he came to miss," said Murray.
"He shot from the waist without sighting," said Hubbard. "That takes practice."
"But it looked to me," said Murray, "as if he couldn't miss."
"So it did to me, by God," said Hubbard. "Did you hear the bullet, sir?"
"No," said Peabody.
It was a most unpleasant conversation in his opinion, although he could not have said why, seeing that the affair was over. There was Anne standing at the door of the house, and she ran down the path through the rain when she saw them. She threw herself into Peabody's arms without shame, and he kissed her without shame in the presence of his subordinates. He had purged himself of his inward doubts, he had put this happiness of his at the disposition of Providence, and Providence had returned it to him, so that shame had disappeared. Coffee was waiting for them, and the usual glass of rum which they all refused to touch.
"I can drink this coffee now," said Murray, smacking his lips. "I couldn't swallow a mouthful in the ship before I came up this morning. I hadn't the heart for anything."
"The captain drank his," said Hubbard. "I watched him. Not a sign — he might have been getting ready to come on deck at anchor in the Chesapeake."
"The captain's an interesting physiological subject," said Downing, and then, suddenly: "Gentlemen, although this is only coffee, can't we drink his health?"
"The captain!" said Hubbard, raising his cup.
"The captain!" echoed the others — Anne among them — and they drank to him as he grinned awkwardly at the compliment.
"The ship's waiting for us," he said, to change the subject. "I'll see you on board after I've changed my clothes."
The bedroom with its dome of mosquito netting had been put to rights while he was gone; he got himself out dry clothes from the inlaid tallboy — married life played the devil with systematic rotation of his wardrobe when he had to keep half his clothes on land. He laid out a fresh white neckcloth on the dressing table among Anne's tortoise-shell toilet things, shoving aside her reticule to do so. The thing fell with a thump on the floor, and he stooped to pick it up. Two things had rolled out of its open mouth across the polished floor, and he pursued them. Marbles? Beads? He picked them up. They were unexpectedly heavy, of a dull metallic hue. Pistol bullets! He stood looking at the half-inch spheres of lead on his palm, lost in thought.
"Anne!" he called. "Anne!"
She came running — he heard her light step on the stairs — and as she entered the room she saw what he held in his hand and stopped short. The smile that was on her lips remained there, rigid, in shocking contrast with the terror in her eyes. If it had not been for that she might have been able to disarm his suspicions, so utterly incredible had they seemed to him.
"What are these doing here?" he asked, even now more bewildered than stern.
"You — you know," she said. She was sick with fright at the knowledge that her terrible husband had caught her interfering with his precious masculine foolishness — imperiling his precious honor.
"I don't know," he said. "Tell me."
"I took them out," she whispered, faltering. "Aunt Sophie and I."
"But how in the name of — of anything at all ... ?"
"I went into Mr. Hubbard's room," she said. "Aunt Sophie was here. You were asleep, and I crept out. I went into Mr. Hubbard's room when he was asleep. Aunt Sophie waited by the door — I went in my bare feet, and I took the — the pistols. We dug out the — the wads with my stiletto and shook the bullets out."
"But the pistols were loaded — I saw Hubbard test with the ramrod."
"We thought he would. So we had to put in something hard which wouldn't hurt anybody. It was all we could do."
"But what was it you did?"
"It took us a long time to think of something. In the end I got two bits of bread and baked them as hard as I could. I thought they'd fly to powder when the pistols went off and not do any damage."
"You were right," said Peabody, grimly. "And then?"
"That's all. We put the bits of toast into the pistols and stuck the wads in again on top, and I went back into Mr. Hubbard's room and put them back in the case. Mr. Hubbard snored and I nearly dropped them."
"I wish you had," he said bitterly. Her lips had lost their rigidity now and were trembling as he stared at her, the pistol bullets still in his hand. He suddenly remembered their existence and hurled them with a crash across the room.
"I was going to tell you about it," she said. "Not today. Not tomorrow. But sometime I was going to tell you."
"Much good that would do," he sneered.
And then his saving common sense came to their rescue. After all, he had gone through the affair in good faith. He had stood Davenant's fire and he had not trembled. He had spared Davenant's life in the same good faith as Davenant had tried to take his. And the thought of Davenant, the man who could hit a pigeon on the wing, trying to bring down an American captain with a piece of toast was marvelously funny. A laugh rose suddenly within him quite irrepressibly. And what made the joke more perfect was that the new plan he had in mind — a plan of whose success he was quite certain — would never have stood any chance of success if it had not been for the duel. Davenant would never have listened to his new suggestion for a moment if it were not for the mortification of knowing that all the world had heard that his life had been spared. If he had killed Davenant — and most assuredly if Davenant had killed him — the new plan would have had no chance. That was amusing as well. The laugh that was welling up inside him burst out to the surface beyond his control. He laughed and he laughed. He thought of Hubbard's grave dignity, of Murray's scared apprehension, while all the time two fragments of toast lay hidden in the barrels of the pistols, and that made him laugh the harder.
He turned grave again when another thought struck him.
"What about your aunt?" he asked. "Can she keep the secret?"
"Yes," said Anne, after a moment's serious reflection. "Yes. She would always keep a secret for me. And this time it concerns Captain Davenant. She wouldn't want the world to know about this."
"I suppose not," said Peabody.
Mischief danced in his eyes which were so often cold and hard. Anne's steady gaze met his and she could not help smiling back at him. She smiled — and she laughed, and Peabody laughed back at her.
Chapter XXIII
PEABODY'S carefully worded letter had suggested neutral ground for the interview with Davenant, and Davenant's cautious reply had accepted the suggestion; and in the end Peabody had had to make use of "petticoat influence" in violation of his prejudices although by now not of his true judgment. A word to Anne about his difficulty had been passed on to Aunt Sophie, and Aunt Sophie had responded with an invitation to Captain Peabody to drink a dish of tea with her at the Governor's house — a much more private and comfortable place in which to talk to Davenant than any cafe in Fort-de-France or any hillside in Martinique. Women were of some use even in men's affairs, decided Peabody, as he walked past the well-remembered sentry outside the gate and followed the butler into the Countess's drawing room.
Naturally there was some constraint perceptible at the beginning of the meeting. Aunt Sophie was all charm, and she poured the tea with admirable grace, the rings on her fingers flashing back the light which leaked in past the shaded windows; but Davenant was ill at ease, displaying a British surliness vastly emphasized by a not unnatural antipathy towards the man who had condescended to spare his life. Peabody on his side was cautious and uncommunicative, a little afraid of showing his hand prematurely, so that all Aunt Sophie's conversational efforts met with a poor reception — especially as both her guests detested tea and were too polite to say so. But Peabody, noting the Englishman's ill-temper, and clairvoyantly realizing the reasons for it, was glad. It might be easier to induce him to agree to a step which could only be thought of as rash — to goad the bull, so to speak, into making a charge which would lay him open to a sword-thrust.