The Bittermeads Mystery Part 11

When he had done so he stepped back.

"Ready, Ella?" he said.

"Yes," answered the girl's soft and low voice that already Dunn could have sworn to amidst a thousand others.

CHAPTER X. THE NEW GARDENER

"Go ahead, then," said Deede Dawson, and the great car with its terrible burden shot away into the night.

For a moment or two Deede Dawson stood looking after it, and then he turned and walked slowly towards the house, and mechanically Dunn followed, the sole thought in his mind, the one idea of which he was conscious, that of Ella driving away into the darkness with the dead body of his murdered friend in the car behind her.

Did she--know? he asked himself. Or was she ignorant of what it was she had with her?

It seemed to him that that question, hammering itself so awfully upon his mind and clamouring for an answer, must soon send him mad.

And still before him floated perpetually a picture of long, dark, lonely roads, of a rus.h.i.+ng motor-car driven by a lovely girl, of the awful thing hidden in the car behind her.

Dully he recognized that the opportunity for which he had watched and waited so patiently had come and gone a dozen times, for Deede Dawson had now quite relaxed his former wary care.

It was as though he supposed all danger over, as though in the reaction after an enormous strain he could think of nothing but the immediate relief. He hardly gave a single glance at Dunn, whose faintest movement before had never escaped him. He had even put his pistol back in his pocket, and at almost any moment Dunn, with his unusual strength and agility, could have seized and mastered him.

But for such an enterprise Dunn had no longer any spirit, for all his mind was taken up by that one picture so clear in his thoughts of Ella in her great car driving the dead man through the night. "She must know," he said to himself. "She must, or she would never have gone off like that at that time--she can't know, it's impossible, or she would never have dared."

And again it seemed to him that this doubt was driving him mad.

Deede Dawson entered the house and got a bottle of whisky and a syphon of soda-water and mixed himself a drink. For the first time since Ella's departure he seemed to remember Dunn's presence.

"Oh, there you are," he said.

Dunn did not answer. He stood moodily on the threshold, wondering why he did not rush upon the other, and with his knee upon his chest, his hands about his throat, force him to answer the question that was still whispering, shouting, screaming itself into his ears:

"Does she know what it is she drives with her on that big car through the black and lonely night?"

"Like a drink?" asked Deede Dawson.

Dunn shook his head, and it came to him that he did not attack Deede Dawson and force the truth from him because he dared not, because he was afraid, because he feared what the answer might be.

"There's a tool-shed at the bottom of the garden," Deede Dawson said to him. "You can sleep there, tonight. You'll find some sacks you can make a bed of."

Without a word in reply Dunn turned and stumbled away. He felt very tired--physically exhausted--and the idea of a bed, even of sacks in an outhouse, became all at once extraordinarily attractive.

He found the place without difficulty, and, making a pile of the sacks, flung himself down on them and was asleep almost at once. But almost as promptly he awoke again, for he had dreamed of Ella driving her car through the night towards some strange peril from which in his dream he was trying frantically and ineffectively to save her when he awoke.

So it was all through the night.

His utter and complete exhaustion compelled him to sleep, and every time some fresh, fantastic dream in which Ella and the huge motor-car and the dreadful burden she had with her always figured, awoke him with a fresh start.

But towards morning he fell into a heavy sleep from which presently he awoke to find it broad daylight and Deede Dawson standing on the threshold of the shed with his perpetually smiling lips and his cold, unsmiling eyes.

"Well, my man; had a good sleep?" he said.

"I was tired," Dunn answered.

"Yes, we had a busy night," agreed Deede Dawson. "I slept well, too.

I've been wondering what to do with you. Of course, I ought to hand you over to the police, and it's rather a risk taking on a man of your character, but I've decided to give you a chance. Probably you'll misuse it. But I'll give you an opportunity as gardener and chauffeur here. You can drive a car, you say?"

Dunn nodded.

"That's all right," said Deede Dawson.

"You shall have your board and lodging, and I'll get you some decent clothes instead of those rags; and if you prove satisfactory and make yourself useful you'll find I can pay well. There will be plenty of chances for you to make a little money--if you know how to take them."

"When it's money," growled Dunn, "you give me the chance, and see."

"I think," added Deede Dawson, "I think it might improve your looks if you shaved."

Dunn pa.s.sed his hand over the tangle of hair that hid his features so effectually.

"What for?" he asked.

"Oh, well: please yourself," answered Deede Dawson; "I don't know that it matters, and perhaps you have reasons of your own for preferring a beard. Come on up to the house now and I'll tell Mrs. Dawson to give you some breakfast. And you might as well have a wash, too, perhaps--unless you object to that as well as to shaving."

Dunn rose without answering, made his toilet by shaking off some of the dust that clung to him, and followed his new employer out of the tool-house into the open air.

It was a fresh and lovely morning, and coming towards them down one of the garden paths was Ella, looking as fresh and lovely as the morning in a dainty cotton frock with lace at her throat and wrists.

That she could possibly have spent the night tearing across country in a powerful car conveying a dead man to an unknown destination, appeared to Dunn a clean impossibility, and for a moment he almost supposed he had been mistaken in thinking he recognized her voice.

But he knew he had not, that he had made no mistake, that it had indeed been Ella he had seen dash away into the darkness on her strange and terrible errand.

"Oh, my daughter," said Deede Dawson carelessly, noticing Dunn's surprise. "Oh, yes, she's back--you didn't expect to see her this morning. Well, Ella, Dunn's surprised to see you back so soon, aren't you, Dunn?"

Dunn did not answer, for a kind of vertigo of horror had come upon him, and for a moment all things revolved about him in a whirling circle wherein the one fixed point was Ella's gentle lovely face that sometimes, he thought, had a small round hole with blue edges in the very centre of the forehead, above the nose.

It was her voice, clear and a little loud, that called him back to himself.

"He's not well," she was saying. "He's going to faint."

"I'm all right," he muttered. "It was nothing, nothing, it's only that I've had nothing to eat for so long."

"Oh, poor man!" exclaimed Ella.

"Come up to the house," Deede Dawson said.

"Breakfast's ready," Ella said. "Mother told me to find you."