Running Sands Part 49

So they spent the afternoon in an automobile and came back to town in time for dinner at the famous restaurant close by the Odeon and dined on _croute consomme_, _filet_ of cod, and _canard sauvage a la presse_.

After von Klausen had paid the bill, Stainton, who felt more tired than he had expected to feel, ordered another bottle of burgundy.

When they crossed the river by the Pont de la Concorde and turned from the rue Royale into the boulevards, the crowd that von Klausen had predicted, already possessed the broad streets. It surged from house-wall to house-wall; it shouted and danced and blew tin horns and threw confetti; it stopped the crawling taxicabs and was altogether as riotously happy as only a fete-day crowd in Paris can be.

Von Klausen and his party dismissed their motor at the corner of the rue Vignon and plunged afoot into the midst of the swaying ma.s.s of merrymakers. Amid shrill whistles, loud laughter, and showers of confetti that almost blinded them, they made their way nearly to the rue Scribe. Then, suddenly, Muriel and von Klausen realised that Stainton was lost.

They called, but their voices merged in the general clatter. They stood on tiptoe and strained their eyes. They thought now that they saw him on this side, and again they saw him on that; but, though they shouldered their way, the Austrian vigorously making a path, hither and yon, and though they knew that somewhere, probably only a few yards away, Stainton was making corresponding efforts to discover their whereabouts, he eluded them as if he had been a will-o'-the-wisp.

Tired at last by the long day and its emotions, jostled by the fete-makers, and frightened by the disappearance of her husband, Muriel began quietly to cry. The Austrian at once noticed.

"Do not alarm yourself, dear lady," he said--and, as he had to bend to her to get the words to her ear among the tumult, his cheek brushed a loose strand of her dark hair--"pray do not alarm yourself. We shall find him soon, or he will await us when we return to your hotel."

"We can never find him here!" Muriel declared. She had been obliged, in order not to lose her fellow-searcher, to cling to his arm, and her fingers fastened as convulsively about it as the hands of a drowning man grasp the floating log for rescue. "He'll know that, and I'm sure he'll go at once to the hotel. Let's go there ourselves--at once--at once!

Call a cab."

Not a cab, however, was in sight, and this von Klausen explained to her, bending to her ear.

"We must walk," he said. "It is not so far--if you are not too tired?"

"No, no, I'm not too tired--or I won't be if we can only hurry."

They started slowly, by necessity, on their way.

"But I am sorry," said von Klausen, "that you are afraid. You are afraid--of me?"

His tone was hurt. She looked up at him impulsively and saw genuine sorrow in his bright eyes. They were very young eyes.

"Oh, no," she said, "not of you. I know you wouldn't----"

"Yet," he interrupted, "you were a little afraid of me, I think, this morning."

"_Not afraid_--even then. And now--well, I remember the talk we had afterward. I hope you haven't forgotten it."

Again his lips were near her neck.

"I shall never forget it," he vowed.

Something in his voice made her sure that he had not interpreted her words as she had intended them to be interpreted. Nevertheless, she dared not resume a subject that could be safe only while it was closed.

She said no more, and von Klausen was almost equally silent until they had reached the hotel.

"Has Mr. Stainton returned?" asked Muriel of the first servant that they met.

The servant thought not.

"Ask at the _bureau_."

Stainton had not yet come back.

"He will certainly follow us very shortly," said von Klausen. "It may be better that we await him in your sitting-room."

Muriel had been expecting either that Stainton would have reached the hotel before them or that her companion would leave her at the door. Now a new difficulty presented itself. It is one of the curses of our minor errors--perhaps the greatest--that they inspire us with the fear that the persons about us may be suspecting us of worse offences. Muriel had never before considered what the people of the hotel might think of her.

She was conscious, moreover, of having done nothing further than withhold from her husband the narrative of what most women of the world would consider nothing more than an amusing flirtation; yet now, with the remembrance of that scene in the Bois vividly in her mind, she became immediately certain that the servants regarded with lifted eyebrows this wife who had returned without her husband at an hour not precisely early? To dismiss von Klausen in the hallway would, her method of logic twisted for her, confirm any suspicions that might have been roused.

"Yes," she agreed quietly, "we'll go upstairs." She turned to the servant at the door. "When my husband comes in," she told him, "you will say that Captain von Klausen and I are awaiting him in my--in the sitting-room of the suite that my husband and I occupy."

For a reason that neither could have explained they did not speak on their way to the room, and, after they had entered it, von Klausen shutting the door behind them and switching on the electric light, this silence continued until it became almost committal. Muriel laid off her wraps and sank into a wide chair at some distance from the window. It was she that was first to speak. She spoke, however, with an effort, and she sought refuge in plat.i.tude.

"I am tired," she said; and then, as von Klausen did not reply, she added: "Yes, after all, I find that I am very tired."

"It has been," said the Austrian, "a difficult day for you."

There was again silence. He stood before her, slim, erect, more boyish than ever, his face, none the less, rather pale and set, and his eyes narrowed.

"I wonder what can have happened to Jim," she at last managed to say.

"Only what has happened to us. He--I think he will be here soon."

Von Klausen was looking at her. She wished that he would not do that.

She wished that there would be an end to these interruptions of silence.

She wished devoutly that Jim would return.

"It--it is rather close here," she said.

"Do you think it close?" he responded. He did not take his narrowed eyes from her. He did not move.

"Yes," she answered. "Will you--will you be so good as to open the window?"

He bowed as gravely as if she had required of him a mighty sacrifice, and he turned to the window.

The long velvet curtains were pulled together, and he did not attempt to draw them from the gla.s.s. Instead, he simply slipped his arm between them. Then something went wrong with the k.n.o.b that controls the bolt. He shook the k.n.o.b. His hand slipped and went through the pane. There was a tinkle of falling gla.s.s.

Startled by the sound Muriel rose quickly to her feet.

"What is it?" she asked.

She took an involuntary step forward. Then she saw that von Klausen was trying to conceal from her his right hand, red with blood.

"You are hurt?" she cried.

Her swarthy cheek whitened. There was a swift catch in her throat.

"It is nothing," he answered. "The window is open."

The window was indeed open. The curtain, however, remained drawn.

"But you are hurt!" repeated Muriel.

She put out her hand and seized his own with a slight gash across the knuckles--a gash from which a little of the blood flowed over her white fingers and marked them with a bright stain.