Part 34 (2/2)
She heard the man laugh, and in confusion wondered why. If anything, she felt more sleepy than before.
He climbed back into his seat. A question crawled in her brain, tormenting. Finally she managed to enunciate a part of it:
”How much longer ...?”
”Oh, not a great ways now.”
The response seemed to come from a far distance. She felt the car moving beneath her and ... no more. Sleep possessed her utterly, heavy and dreamless....
There followed several phases of semi-consciousness wherein she moved by instinct alone, seeing men as trees walking, the world as through a mist.
In one, she was being helped out of the motor-car. Then somebody was holding her arm and guiding her along a path of some sort. Planks rang hollowly beneath her feet, and the hand on her arm detained her. A voice said: ”This way--just step right out; you're perfectly safe.”
Mechanically she obeyed. She felt herself lurch as if to fall, and then hands caught and supported her as she stood on something that swayed.
The voice that had before spoken was advising her to sit down and take it easy. Accordingly, she sat down. Her seat was rocking like a swing, and she heard dimly the splash of waters; these merged unaccountably again into the purring of a motor....
And then somebody had an arm round her waist and she was walking, bearing heavily upon that support, partly because she sorely needed it but the more readily because she knew somehow--intuitively--that the arm was a woman's. A voice a.s.sured her from time to time: ”Not much farther ...” And she was sure it was a woman's voice.... Then she was being helped to ascend a steep, long staircase....
She came to herself for a moment, probably not long after climbing the stairs. She was sitting on the edge of a bed in a small, low-ceiled room, cheaply and meagrely furnished. Staring wildly about her, she tried to realise these surroundings. There were two windows, both open, admitting floods of sea air and sunlight; beyond them she saw green boughs swaying slowly, and through the boughs patches of water, blue and gold. There was a door opposite the bed; it stood open, revealing a vista of long, bare hallway, regularly punctuated by doors.
The drumming in her temples pained and bewildered her. Her head felt dense and heavy. She tried to think and failed. But the knowledge persisted that something was very wrong with her world--something that might be remedied, set right, if only she could muster up strength to move and ... think.
Abruptly the doorway was filled by the figure of a woman, a strapping, brawny creature with the arms and shoulders of a man and a great, coa.r.s.e, good-natured face. She came directly to the bed, sat down beside the girl, pa.s.sed an arm behind her shoulders and offered her a gla.s.s.
”You've just woke up, ain't you?” she said soothingly. ”Drink this and lay down and you'll feel better before long. You have had a turn, and no mistake; but you'll be all right now, never fear. Come now, drink it, and I'll help you loose your clothes a bit, so 's you can be comfortable....”
Somehow her tone inspired Eleanor with confidence. She drank, submitted to being partially undressed, and lay down. Sleep overcame her immediately: she suffered a sensation of dropping plummet-wise into a great pit of oblivion....
XIII
WRECK ISLAND
Suddenly, with a smothered cry of surprise, Eleanor sat up. She seemed to have recovered full consciousness and sensibility with an instantaneous effect comparable only to that of electric light abruptly flooding a room at night. A moment ago she had been an insentient atom sunk deep in impenetrable night; now she was herself--and it was broad daylight.
With an abrupt, automatic movement, she left the bed and stood up, staring incredulously at the substance of what still wore in her memory the guise of a dream.
But it had been no dream, after all. She was actually in the small room with the low ceiling and the door (now shut) and the windows that revealed the green of leaves and the blue and gold of a sun-spangled sea. And her coat and hat and veil had been removed and were hanging from nails in the wall behind the door, and her clothing had been unfastened--precisely as she dimly remembered everything that had happened with relation to the strange woman.
She wore a little wrist-watch. It told her that the hour was after four in the afternoon.
She began hurriedly to dress, or rather to repair the disorder of her garments, all the while struggling between surprise that she felt rested and well and strong, and a haunting suspicion that she had been tricked.
Of the truth of this suspicion, confirmatory evidence presently overwhelmed her.
Since that draught of champagne before the roadside inn shortly after sunrise, she had known nothing clearly. It was impossible that she could without knowing it have accomplished her purpose with relation to Alison Landis and the Cadogan collar. She saw now, she knew now beyond dispute, that she had been drugged--not necessarily heavily; a simple dose of harmless bromides would have served the purpose in her overtaxed condition--and brought to this place in a semi-stupor, neither knowing whither she went nor able to object had she known.
The discovery of her handbag was all that was required to trans.m.u.te fears and doubts into irrefragable knowledge.
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