They came close to where she stood and, still cheering, set their burden down. When they saw Clotilde waiting, there fell a silence so complete that the familiar creaking of the hinges could be heard as Gerald opened the gate. The foremost of the crowd looked once at her white face and spoke below his breath to his companions.
“Come away, lads,” he said. “We have no right within there now.”
Not that night nor the next day could Clotilde hear the tale of Gerald’s adventures for oh, what need he had of resting and being tended, how pale and utterly worn out he was! But at last he told the story, sitting under the linden tree in the warm brightness of a perfect Indian summer afternoon. He told how they had met storms, had been delayed by calms and had narrowly escaped being wrecked a hundred times on account of their ignorance of the proper course, but had at last come in safety to the East India Islands and to the great sea-ports of China.
“I can spend all of my declining years in telling you of the wonders we saw,” he said, “so I will not stop in my tale now or I would never come to the end.”
He related further how, on their homeward voyage, they had put in for shelter behind a little island and how two of the men, against his orders had slipped ashore to trade with the natives. When they had set forth again these two sickened with a tropical fever that spread, one by one, to all on board. There were no men to tend the sails for all lay ill, only one had strength to hold the tiller and keep the vessel from destruction, and that one was himself.
“The wind held steady,” he said, “and when I could no longer stand, I lay upon the deck, clinging still to the tiller and wondering whether we should ever come to port. The sky seemed red-hot above us and the water red-hot below, and at last I saw neither sea nor sail nor compass, nor knew whither I was steering. I saw only a cool, green garden with a linden tree and a sundial in its midst, I saw the white flowers nodding in the wind and I vow that I could smell the verbena and mignonette and hear the gurgle of the brook that runs beside the road. And I saw you come down the path, it was straight to you that the Mistress Margeret steered her course, for I had knowledge of nothing else.”