The Kingdom Round the Corner Part 36

He shook himself. He was so raw that even her sympathy almost wounded.

"Don't pity me. It's she we've got to help. What's to be done?"

"Done! I haven't thought. What can we----"

"We can follow her and bring her back. We've got to--and we haven't much time. You must have read between the lines what her letter meant. After having turned Braithwaite down, she's gone off to beg him to elope with her. When a girl puts herself at a man's mercy like that, there's no knowing how he'll act. The chances are that, whatever he does, it won't be honorable. We're got to prevent her, not only for her own sake, but for his sake as well. He's just started on a great career; if this story leaks out, he'll be smashed. They'll both be smashed, for that matter.

If she'd give him time to marry her honestly, it wouldn't matter whether her family had consented. But she doesn't intend to--that's why she's asked us to keep quiet for twenty-four hours. What we've got to do is not to stop her from marrying him--no one cares about that; but to catch her before she runs off with him."

"But we don't know where----"

"No, we don't." He spoke rapidly. "But we can find out. Ann can tell us.

Ann's a maid in my house; she was practically engaged to him when he was my valet. Now that I look back, I'm sure she's known everything from the start and has seen this coming. We can get Braithwaite's address from her; when we know that, we shall have laid our hands on Terry."

While he had been speaking, Lady Dawn had been rummaging through her desk. He went and bent over her, his hands on her shoulders. She was fingering a time-table. She looked up at him with her head leant back.

"There's no train--nothing that will reach London till morning."

"Then we must motor."

Her face was still raised to his. She spoke softly. "_We!_ You say _we_ every time. Do you mean---- What do you mean, Lord Taborley?"

His intensity relaxed. Flus.h.i.+ng with confusion, he stared down at the whiteness of her breast, the queenliness of her, her graying hair and her expectant, tender mouth. "I want you to come with me. I ought to have asked you properly. I've been taking you for granted and ordering you about."

She remained very still, gazing directly up into his troubled eyes. He thought she was judging him. At last she whispered, "Don't be sad. I like you to order me."

VI

They had all night before them. If they left the Castle by ten, they could be in Brompton Square by five in the morning. Nothing would be gained by arriving earlier.

Now that the first shock was over, they went into dinner as if nothing had happened. In the long, dim banqueting-hall there were only the two of them. They sat close together at the illuminated high-table like castaways, marooned on an island, in an ocean of brooding shadows. While they dined they conversed in lowered voices to prevent their plans from being overheard. It was decided to take Lady Dawn's Rolls Royce and to leave the runabout behind. The reason acknowledged was that it would be more dependable. The reason unmentioned was that the presence of a chauffeur would lend an air of much needed propriety.

Gradually as they talked, the seriousness of their errand dropped from sight; their journey took on the complexion of an adventure. Its unconvention clothed it with romance. How unconventional it was they realized when Lady Dawn gave the butler orders concerning her departure.

He was an old man, rigid with tradition, who, having served the family for three generations, had acquired the aristocratic bearing of his masters.

"At ten o'clock, your Ladys.h.i.+p. To where? To London! That's a long journey to take at night. And the car will call at the inn first to pick up his Lords.h.i.+p's luggage. Oh, I see, my Lady. I thought at first that your Ladys.h.i.+p was going."

"I am," she corrected with quiet dignity. "Lord Taborley and I are going on an errand of great importance. I don't want this talked about. You understand? And who'll be driving? Witherall! Then warn Witherall to keep silent."

When the butler had withdrawn, she turned to Tabs. "I'm breaking all my precedents for you. I couldn't have told him, if I hadn't had you to keep me in countenance. He looked so shocked that he made me feel as if it were you and I, instead of Terry, who were doing the eloping. I'm sure that's what he thought. There'll be gossip. I shall have to pay the piper; but I'm too happy to-night to look ahead."

"It hadn't occurred to me----" Tabs hesitated. "I've been unpardonably inconsiderate. I see it now--you'll be what they call compromised. In that case, it will be wiser----"

"It won't." She bent towards him laughing. Her pearls, nestling in the white cleft of her bosom, gleamed dully, shaken by her quiet merriment.

In the short time that he had known her, she had become extraordinarily girlish--almost girlish enough to put back the hands of time for the proper man. "It won't. It won't be wiser. It's never wiser to turn your back on happiness. I'd dare anything to-night. You've invited me; you can't wriggle out."

"If that's how you feel----" He checked himself. Her mischief warned him. Instinctively he knew that she was about to ask precisely how he thought she felt. He cancelled what he had intended saying and subst.i.tuted, "It's an ill-wind that blows n.o.body any good. And it's poor Terry we have to thank for this chance of being together a little longer!"

"Is it a chance? You're not bored? You do want me?"

He raised his eyes slowly. Her pain had startled him. Up to that moment he hadn't been awake to how utterly he had come to want her. For an instant he had a glimpse of the emptiness of life, should he find himself deprived of her comrades.h.i.+p.

"You didn't need to ask me that!" he said quietly. "And now it's my turn to be inquisitive. Does it make you glad to hear me own that I want you?"

He watched her color rise. It was like the elfin tiptoeing of her spirit behind the white transparent walls of her flesh. It climbed the smooth ascent of her breast, pa.s.sed up the columned tower of her throat and stared out at him excitedly in the brightness of her eyes.

"Men don't ask things like that," she said reproachfully, "at least, only when they're flirting. I sometimes think---- Don't treat me like all the others who were before me."

"What others?"

She held his gaze. "The emotional women and silly girls---- You must have been loved very often, Lord Taborley."

To have defended himself against her tender jealousy would have been futile. She was plainly anxious to believe her accusation. Perhaps it flattered her a little. Perhaps it lent him an added touch of glamor. He was wondering how he should satisfy her. He could remember no hearts that his fascination had broken. He could rake up absolutely---- She was speaking again.

"And yet I'm glad you compelled me to tell you that I wanted you. You're making me do things that I never did before in my life. I'm supposed to be a cold woman. You'll find people who'll say that I'm remote and domineering. I've only one big affection--my little boy. For your sake I'm leaving him alone to-night."

"For mine?"

"For whose else?"

"I thought for Terry's."

Her lips parted. The laughter died in her eyes. "In your heart you knew better."

Then he left her and went down to the inn to pack his bag.

VII

He had paid his bill. His luggage had been carried downstairs. There was still a full quarter of an hour to wait. He sat in his bedroom smoking furiously. Before he met her again, he wanted to know precisely what had happened to himself--and, perhaps, to her.

He was filled with self-distrust. His newly discovered propensity for falling in love was genuinely alarming. It wasted his time, upset his plans and robbed him of his mental vigor. It made him a rudderless s.h.i.+p at the mercy of any chance winds of sentiment. Up to less than three months ago the solitary woman in his life had been Terry. Throughout the war, while the masculine world had been making an amorous idiot of itself, he had kept his head clear and gone straight. Things had come to a pretty pa.s.s if now, when normality was returning and the excuse for running wild was out-of-date, he should start on his emotional escapades. His love for Terry had been deep-rooted. His fondness for Maisie had been the attempt of a starved heart to satisfy its craving with a subst.i.tute. But where was this pursuit of subst.i.tutes to end? If it went much further he would gain for himself the reputation of being a limpet who attached himself to any chance rock of feminine amiability.

The kind of woman he cared to a.s.sociate with would avoid him. If ever he were to fall in love again, his attentions would be so shop-worn that----

If ever he were to fall in love again! Within the last twenty-four hours his irresponsible heart had committed this disastrous folly for a third time.

He smiled cynically, as though he were two separate persons, one of whom was cool and calculating, while the other was improvident and scape-grace. How Lady Dawn would despise him, were he to reveal to her the stupid commotion of his mind! His excuse for blundering his way into her privacy had been sufficiently fantastic: that her late husband was employing his living brain to communicate with her from the dead. It must have strained her credulity to the breaking-point. If on top of this he were to propose to her, what possible conclusions could she draw? Either that in order to gain her intimacy, he had perpetrated a cruel fraud; or else that he was so lacking in humor as to believe that Lord Dawn, from beyond the grave, was arranging for his wife's second marriage. The drollery of a dead husband acting match-maker made him smile. In the middle of his smiling he pulled himself up. Why not? Why shouldn't a husband who had wrecked his wife's happiness, try to repair the damage, if that were possible, when through death he had attained a kinder knowledge? The Roman Church prayed to the dead whom it canonized.

There were thousands of parents, wives, sweethearts, bereft by the war, who were a.s.serting that their longing had bridged the gulf and penetrated----

He shook himself, as though to struggle free from an invisible a.s.sailant. Hallucinations! All these so-called spiritualistic manifestations were the result of over-taxed imagination. To stick to facts was the only safe course; and these were the facts in his case. He had approached Lady Dawn as a matter of duty to tell her the truth about a husband whom she had not known at his best. She had misinterpreted his motive and had believed that he had come to confess to her his own failure. She had been thrown off her guard, had dropped her mask of stoicism and had lavished on him a reckless kindness. But other women had been reckless to him in their kindness. Terry had: so had Maisie.

Women's kindness had caused his present predicament--their kindness, plus his awkward knack of valuing their kindness at more than its face worth. He had learnt his lesson. Never again would he be lured into the net of feminine fickleness. When he felt the temptation rising, he would suppress and ignore it; at any rate he would ignore it until the woman, who was rousing his affection, had declared her intentions beyond any chance of mistaking.

And Lady Dawn? She was in a cla.s.s by herself. He held her sacred. The mere thought that she should ever fall in love with him was impertinence. To talk cheap sentiment would be insulting. It would cause him to lose her friends.h.i.+p--a loss which he could not bear to contemplate. It would be taking a mean advantage of a situation created for an entirely different purpose.---- And yet, dare he trust himself, now that he was in love with her, in the intimate aloneness of a long night drive to London?

He rose to his feet disgusted. If this was the loss of self-control that peace had brought, better a thousand times the rigors of the sacrifice that was ended. Out there he had been strong; here he was a sick dog, licking his sores and whimpering at his own shadow. Self-pity had wrought this wholesale impotence--an impotence which was infecting the entire world. While individuals and nations had thought only of others, they had been valiant; they had raced in generous compet.i.tion, clean-limbed as athletes, towards the tape, where endeavor ends and eternity commences. And now this lethargy, this cowardice--this monstrous fat of quaking emotion!

A memory flashed back on him--an afternoon in March when he had been obsessed by a similar discontent. It had happened in the Mall, after his interview with Braithwaite and just before his introduction to Maisie.

He had come across a sign-board which had announced that, by following a certain path, one would arrive at the Pa.s.sport Office. That narrow track, vanis.h.i.+ng into the bushy greenness, had seemed to him the first five hundred yards of the road that led to world-wideness and freedom.

At the end of it lay Samoa, Tibet, the Malay Archipelago--jeweled seas and painted solitudes which human disillusions could not wither.

Instantly his will concentrated. By following that road he could become lean-souled again. By reseeking hards.h.i.+ps, he could recover his lost discipline. The idea held him spellbound. It meant escape. It meant a return to monasticism. Then and there he determined that he would commence his preliminary enquiries to-morrow.