The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories Part 25

The touch fired him. He considered that he had been patient long enough. Abruptly he caught her to him.

"Come, I say," he said, half-laughing, half in savage earnest, "I can't have you crying on what's almost our wedding trip!"

He certainly did not expect the absolutely furious resistance with which she met his action. She thrust him from her with the strength of frenzy.

"How dare you?" she cried pa.s.sionately. "How dare you touch me, you--you hateful cad?"

For the moment, such was his astonishment, he suffered her to escape from his hold. Then, called into activity by her unreasoning fury, the devil in him leapt suddenly up and took possession. With a snarling laugh he gripped her by the arms, holding her by brutal force.

"You little wild cat!" he said in a voice that shook between anger and amus.e.m.e.nt. "So this is your grat.i.tude, is it? I am to give all and receive nothing for my pains. Then let me make it quite clear to you here and now that that is not my intention. I will be kind to you, but you must be kind to me, too. The benefit is to be mutual."

It was premature. In his heart he knew it, but she had provoked him to it and there was no turning back now. He resented the provocation, that was all, and it made him the more brutally inclined towards her.

As for Doris, she fought and tore at his grasp like a mad creature; and when he mastered her, when, still laughing between his teeth, he forced her face upwards and kissed it fiercely and violently, she shrieked between his kisses, shrieked and shrieked again.

The sudden grinding of the brake recalled Brandon to his senses. The fool was actually stopping the car. He relinquished his hold upon the girl to dash his hand against the window in front.

"Drive on, curse you, drive on!" he shouted through the gla.s.s. "I'll let you know if we want to stop."

But the car stopped in spite of him. The chauffeur, s.h.i.+ning from head to foot in his oil-skins, sprang to the ground. A moment and he was at the door, had wrenched it open, and was peering within.

"What are you gaping there for, you fool?" raved Brandon, his hand upon Doris, who was suddenly straining forward. "It's all right, I tell you.

Go on."

"I am going on," the chauffeur responded calmly through his mask. "But I am not taking you any farther, Major Brandon. So tumble out at once, you dirty, thieving hound!"

The words, the tone, the att.i.tude, flashed such a revelation upon Doris that she cried out in amazement, and then with a revulsion of feeling so great that it deprived her of all speech she threw herself forward and clung to the masked chauffeur in an agony of tears.

Brandon was staring at him with dropped jaw.

"Who the blazes are you?" he said.

"You know me, I think," the chauffeur responded quietly. He was pressing Doris back into her seat with absolute steadiness. "We have met before.

I was present at your first wedding ten years ago, and--as a junior counsel--I helped to divorce you a few months after. My name is Vivian Caryl."

He freed a hand to push up his mask. His pale face with its heavy-lidded eyes stared, supremely contemptuous, into Brandon's suffused countenance. His composure was somehow disconcerting.

"Suppose you get out," he suggested. "I can talk to you then in a language you will understand."

"Curse you!" bawled Brandon. "Where's Fricker?"

Caryl shrugged his shoulders.

"You have seen him since I have. Are you going to get out? Ah, I thought you would."

He stood aside to allow him to do so, and then stepped back to shut the door. He did not utter a word to the girl cowering within, but that action of his was a mute command. She crouched in the dark and listened, but she did not dare to follow or to flee.

CHAPTER VII

THE MAN AT THE WHEEL

When Caryl came back to the motor his handkerchief was bound about the knuckles of his right hand, and his face wore a faint smile that had in it more of grimness than humour.

He paused at the open window and looked in on Doris without opening the door. The sound of the rain pattering heavily upon his shoulders filled in a silence that she found terrible. He spoke at length:

"You had better shut the window, the rain is coming in."

That was all, spoken in his customary drawl without a hint of anger or reproach. They cut her hard, those few words of his. It was as if he deemed her unworthy even of his contempt.

She raised her white face.

"What--are you going to do?" she managed to ask through her quivering lips.

"I am going to take you to the nearest town--to Bramfield to spend the rest of the night. It is getting late, you know--past midnight already."

"Bramfield!" she echoed with a start. "Then--then we have been going north all this time?"

"We have been going north," he said.

She glanced around. Her eyes were hunted.

"No," said Caryl. "I haven't killed him. He is sitting under the hedge about fifty yards up the road, thinking things over."

He opened the door then abruptly, and she held her breath and became still and tense with apprehension. But he only pulled up the window, closed the door again with a sharp click, and left her. When she dared to breathe again the car was in motion.

She took no interest in her surroundings. Her destination had become a matter of such secondary importance that she gave it no consideration whatever. What mattered, all that mattered, was that she was now in the hands and absolutely at the mercy of the man whom she feared as she feared no one else on earth, the man with whom in her mad coquetry she had dared to trifle.

The car was stopping. It came to a standstill almost imperceptibly, and Caryl stepped into the road. Tensely she watched him; but he did not so much as glance her way. He turned aside to a little gate in a high hedge of laurel, and pa.s.sed within, leaving her alone in the night.

Soon she heard his deliberate footfalls returning. In a moment he had reached the door, his hand was upon it. She turned stiffly towards him as it opened.

He spoke at once in his calm, unmoved voice:

"A very old friend of mine lives here. She will put you up for the night and see to your comfort. Will you get out?"

Mutely she did so, feeling curiously weak and unstrung. He put his arm around her, and led her into the dim cottage garden.

They went up a tiled path to an open door from which the light of a single candle gleamed fitfully in the draught. She stumbled at the doorstep, but he held her up. He was almost carrying her.

As they entered, an old woman, bent and indescribably wrinkled, rose from her knees before a deep old-fas.h.i.+oned fireplace on the other side of the little kitchen, and came to meet them. She had evidently just coaxed a dying fire back to life.

"Ah, poor dear," she said at sight of the girl's exhausted face. "She looks more dead than alive. Bring her to the fire, Master Vivian. I'll soon have some hot milk for the poor lamb."

Caryl led her to an arm-chair that stood on one side of the blaze, and made her sit down. Then, stooping, he took one of her nerveless hands and held it closely in his own.