XI. A Scandal in the Village (2)

    “Now you know the truth,” he answered, with hard eyes. “I am a cad who has played a crooked trick on a quiet village and a decent woman for a private reason of his own. I might have played it successfully on any other woman; I have hit the one woman on whom it cannot be played. It's just like my damned luck. The plain truth is,” and here when he came to the plain truth he boggled and blundered as Evan had done in telling it to the girl in the motor-car.
    “The plain truth is,” he said at last, “that I am James Turnbull the atheist. The police are after me; not for atheism but for being ready to fight for it.”
    “I saw something about you in a newspaper,” said the girl, with a simplicity which even surprise could never throw off its balance.
    “Evan MacIan said there was a God,” went on the other, stubbornly, “and I say there isn't. And I have come to fight for the fact that there is no God; it is for that that I have seen this cursed island and your blessed face.”
    “You want me really to believe,” said Madeleine, with parted lips, “that you think——”
    “I want you to hate me!” cried Turnbull, in agony. “I want you to be sick when you think of my name. I am sure there is no God.”
    “But there is,” said Madeleine, quite quietly, and rather with the air of one telling children about an elephant. “Why, I touched His body only this morning.”
    “You touched a bit of bread,” said Turnbull, biting his knuckles. “Oh, I will say anything that can madden you!”
    “You think it is only a bit of bread,” said the girl, and her lips tightened ever so little.
    “I know it is only a bit of bread,” said Turnbull, with violence.
    She flung back her open face and smiled. “Then why did you refuse to eat it?” she said.
    James Turnbull made a little step backward, and for the first time in his life there seemed to break out and blaze in his head thoughts that were not his own.
    “Why, how silly of them,” cried out Madeleine, with quite a schoolgirl gaiety, “why, how silly of them to call you a blasphemer! Why, you have wrecked your whole business because you would not commit blasphemy.”
    The man stood, a somewhat comic figure in his tragic bewilderment, with the honest red head of James Turnbull sticking out of the rich and fictitious garments of Camille Bert. But the startled pain of his face was strong enough to obliterate the oddity.
    “You come down here,” continued the lady, with that female emphasis which is so pulverizing in conversation and so feeble at a public meeting, “you and your MacIan come down here and put on false beards or noses in order to fight. You pretend to be a Catholic commercial traveller from France. Poor Mr. MacIan has to pretend to be a dissolute nobleman from nowhere. Your scheme succeeds; you pick a quite convincing quarrel; you arrange a quite respectable duel; the duel you have planned so long will come off tomorrow with absolute certainty and safety. And then you throw off your wig and throw up your scheme and throw over your colleague, because I ask you to go into a building and eat a bit of bread. And then you dare to tell me that you are sure there is nothing watching us. Then you say you know there is nothing on the very altar you run away from. You know——”
    “I only know,” said Turnbull, “that I must run away from you. This has got beyond any talking.” And he plunged along into the village, leaving his black wig and beard lying behind him on the road.
    As the market-place opened before him he saw Count Gregory, that distinguished foreigner, standing and smoking in elegant meditation at the corner of the local café. He immediately made his way rapidly towards him, considering that a consultation was urgent. But he had hardly crossed half of that stony quadrangle when a window burst open above him and a head was thrust out, shouting. The man was in his woollen undershirt, but Turnbull knew the energetic, apologetic head of the sergeant of police. He pointed furiously at Turnbull and shouted his name. A policeman ran excitedly from under an archway and tried to collar him. Two men selling vegetables dropped their baskets and joined in the chase. Turnbull dodged the constable, upset one of the men into his own basket, and bounding towards the distinguished foreign Count, called to him clamorously: “Come on, MacIan, the hunt is up again.”
    The prompt reply of Count Gregory was to pull off his large yellow whiskers and scatter them on the breeze with an air of considerable relief. Then he joined the flight of Turnbull, and even as he did so, with one wrench of his powerful hands rent and split the strange, thick stick that he carried. Inside it was a naked old-fashioned rapier. The two got a good start up the road before the whole town was awakened behind them; and half-way up it a similar transformation was seen to take place in Mr. Turnbull's singular umbrella.
    The two had a long race for the harbour; but the English police were heavy and the French inhabitants were indifferent. In any case, they got used to the notion of the road being clear; and just as they had come to the cliffs MacIan banged into another gentleman with unmistakable surprise. How he knew he was another gentleman merely by banging into him, must remain a mystery. MacIan was a very poor and very sober Scotch gentleman. The other was a very drunk and very wealthy English gentleman. But there was something in the staggered and openly embarrassed apologies that made them understand each other as readily and as quickly and as much as two men talking French in the middle of China. The nearest expression of the type is that it either hits or apologizes; and in this case both apologized.
    “You seem to be in a hurry,” said the unknown Englishman, falling back a step or two in order to laugh with an unnatural heartiness. “What's it all about, eh?” Then before MacIan could get past his sprawling and staggering figure he ran forward again and said with a sort of shouting and ear-shattering whisper: “I say, my name is Wilkinson. You know—Wilkinson's Entire was my grandfather. Can't drink beer myself. Liver.” And he shook his head with extraordinary sagacity.
    “We really are in a hurry, as you say,” said MacIan, summoning a sufficiently pleasant smile, “so if you will let us pass——”
    “I'll tell you what, you fellows,” said the sprawling gentleman, confidentially, while Evan's agonized ears heard behind him the first paces of the pursuit, “if you really are, as you say, in a hurry, I know what it is to be in a hurry—Lord, what a hurry I was in when we all came out of Cartwright's rooms—if you really are in a hurry”—and he seemed to steady his voice into a sort of solemnity—“if you are in a hurry, there's nothing like a good yacht for a man in a hurry.”
    “No doubt you're right,” said MacIan, and dashed past him in despair. The head of the pursuing host was just showing over the top of the hill behind him. Turnbull had already ducked under the intoxicated gentleman's elbow and fled far in front.
    “No, but look here,” said Mr. Wilkinson, enthusiastically running after MacIan and catching him by the sleeve of his coat. “If you want to hurry you should take a yacht, and if”—he said, with a burst of rationality, like one leaping to a further point in logic—“if you want a yacht—you can have mine.”
    Evan pulled up abruptly and looked back at him. “We are really in the devil of a hurry,” he said, “and if you really have a yacht, the truth is that we would give our ears for it.”
    “You'll find it in harbour,” said Wilkinson, struggling with his speech. “Left side of harbour—called Gibson Girl—can't think why, old fellow, I never lent it you before.”
    With these words the benevolent Mr. Wilkinson fell flat on his face in the road, but continued to laugh softly, and turned towards his flying companion a face of peculiar peace and benignity. Evan's mind went through a crisis of instantaneous casuistry, in which it may be that he decided wrongly; but about how he decided his biographer can profess no doubt. Two minutes afterwards he had overtaken Turnbull and told the tale; ten minutes afterwards he and Turnbull had somehow tumbled into the yacht called the Gibson Girl and had somehow pushed off from the Isle of St. Loup.