Violet Forster's Lover Part 27

"You've had a what? What's that you're holding?"

"That's the dream."

"The dream? What are you talking about--it's a bag."

"Precisely, it is a bag, and the bag's the dream."

She observed him with a look in her big, wide open eyes which made them seem almost as if they were a child's.

"Are you dreaming still, or am I?"

She replied to his question with another.

"Rupert, do you always believe every word I say?"

"Well"--he made a sound as if he might have been clearing his throat--"that depends."

"At least you must believe every word I am going to tell you now; you hear, Rupert, you must. You know what those people said last night about the things they had lost?"

"Am I likely to have forgotten? Am I ever likely to forget?"

"Rupert--now this is the part which you have to believe--I dreamt that all those things were in a leather bag which was in this chest."

"Great Caesar's ghost!"

"The dream was so real that, when I woke, I had to come downstairs to see if it was true--and it was."

"You don't mean it!"

"There is the chest; in it was this bag; and in the bag I do believe are all the jewels which were lost--including my own. Isn't that--wonderful?"

"It's more than wonderful, young woman, it's----"

She put her small hand up to his lips and stopped him, commenting on his sentence as if it had been finished.

"I quite agree with you, Rupert, it is delightful; nothing more fortunate could possibly have happened."

CHAPTER XXI

An Envelope

What the various ladies who had spent the night at Avonham thought when their presence was desired in Lady Cantyre's boudoir, and they found spread out upon a table an amazing a.s.semblage of triumphs of the jeweller's art, and the countess told them that story about the dream and the bag, was not quite clear. Because, in telling her tale, the countess made it plain, not only that criticism was not invited, but also that questions would be resented, and, more, not answered.

When each lady was requested to choose her own property there ensued an animated scene. It was a regrettable fact that discussion actually arose as to who was the owner of certain trinkets. There were three diamond brooches; three ladies had lost a diamond brooch; the question arose as to which of those brooches belonged to each of them; before it was solved some very undesirable things had been said, and worse had been hinted. Nor was that the only instance of the kind; there were a couple of diamond pendants over which two ladies nearly came to blows.

As one of them was unmistakably much the better of the two, it is difficult to evade the conclusion that one of them must have been a conscious liar, and, it is to be feared, even more than that.

The countess, when her guests would let her, was content to look on and smile; only when she could not help it did she essay the part of peacemaker. Although the choosing of each one's property ought to have been the simplest thing in the world, it would seem, when the task of selection was done, as if no one lady was on the best of terms with any other; a fact on which it is inconceivable that the countess had calculated as likely to prevent any undesirable discussion of her story of the dream.

"They can talk as much as they like about it afterwards," the countess had said to her husband, "but they won't have a chance of talking to me; because you and I are going for a yachting cruise which will occupy us all the spring and summer."

"What! Aren't you going to spend the season in town?"

"I am not."

"But you've had the house done up, and--no end!"

"Rupert, my health will not permit it. You are going to wire to your captain man to have the yacht ready to-morrow. I am going to see Sir James Jeffreys, and he is going to order me on board at once, because I must have sea air, and Violet Forster is coming with us."

"Is she--is that because that ankle of hers must have sea air too?"

"Surely you must be aware that there is nothing so restful to an injured ankle as the sort of life one leads on board a yacht. Please send your wire, or shall I?"

This conversation took place before the lady and gentleman had yet quitted their own apartment; he was dressed, and she had dismissed her maid. When she said that about the wire he began to snap his thumb-nail against his teeth, which was a trick he had when he was worried.

"Aren't you forgetting one thing? It's all very well for you to have a dream about that blessed bag, but I can't have a dream about that fellow Draycott. I can't start off yachting while that's in the wind."

The lady was standing, with her hands behind her back, looking down with a contemplative air at the toe of her tiny shoe as it peeped from under the hem of her dress.

"I don't see why not. Our Easter ball has not been, in all respects, the success I had hoped it would be, and usually is; but I don't see what is to be gained by your hanging about while somebody is looking into that very unpleasant affair. Indeed, it seems in itself to be a sufficient reason why you should go yachting."

The gentleman was still worriedly clicking his thumb-nail.

"It's all very well for you to talk, but things are not going to be so easy for me as they've been for you. I tell you I can't dream about a bag; I don't at all suppose that I shall be able to get away with anything like decency--not what you would call get away--for, at any rate, some days to come."

"Very well, then Violet and I will go alone; we will chaperone each other; and you will join us when you can. I presume you don't suggest that it is necessary that I should stay?"

His lords.h.i.+p pulled a rueful face.

"It certainly isn't necessary, because I don't suppose you'll be able to do anything, but----" He gave a little groan. "Well, I expect you're right, and after all perhaps you'd better go, and, of course, if you like, take Vi with you; she'll be a companion. I shouldn't wonder--I've a feeling in my bones that there will be a fuss made about Noel Draycott; and if there is, you'd certainly better be out of it. Upon my word, I wish we'd never had this ball; I've a kind of a sort of a feeling that the Easter ball at Avonham is going to bulk rather largely in the public eye; I see myself figuring in the public prints, and I certainly don't want to have you there. I'll wire to Sloc.o.c.k right away."

Captain Sloc.o.c.k was the officer in command of the Earl of Cantyre's well-known steam yacht _Sea Bird_.

The prophet was justified, there was a fuss; nothing had yet been heard of Mr. Draycott. It became a moot point whether something ought not to have been done in the matter, even in the dead of the night; it might, more than one person in the establishment became presently aware, become a very awkward subject for unpleasant future comment.

His lords.h.i.+p's point of view was easy to grasp; there really had been nothing to show that anything serious had happened.

Scandal was the thing most to be avoided; if the police had been called in, there would have had to be a scandal, and nothing might have suited Noel Draycott less. There might, his lords.h.i.+p put it, have been a discussion between Noel Draycott and, say, someone else, of a strictly personal kind, in which Draycott might have got the worst of it. It was a most regrettable incident, that such a thing should have occurred at Avonham, on the night of the Easter ball. Mr. Draycott owed an apology to his hosts and their guests; he would be called to a severe account at the very first possible moment.

Of course, Major Reith had been under a misapprehension. In the first shock of his surprise at finding the man in such a dreadful condition on the floor, he jumped to the not unnatural conclusion that he was dead, which, though natural, was absurd. Who had ever heard of a dead man picking himself up and taking himself off? Which was what Noel Draycott had done.

Where he had taken himself to was another story. He was not at the barracks, as they had learned on the telephone, but then it was hardly likely that he would be there. In that discussion with someone else, he had been pretty badly knocked about; the major's story made that clear.

He would doubtless be ashamed of himself; there was probably something not nice at the back of it all. He would probably have preferred to take his broken head somewhere where there was a chance of his wounds being healed without their ever coming to the knowledge of his brother officers. What had to be ascertained was the hiding-place in which he had taken shelter.

And here something a trifle awkward cropped up; it seemed possible that he had never been either at Avonham or in that part of the country before. Then, in his state, at that hour of the night, for what quarter could he have set out, and how?