Part 28 (1/2)

Percy followed him. Down the trim gravel walk they pa.s.sed, and up the neat stone steps. Maud, peeping through the curtains, thought herself the victim of a monstrous betrayal or equally monstrous blunder. But she did not know the Rev. Cyril Ferguson. No general, adroitly leading the enemy on by strategic retreat, ever had a situation more thoroughly in hand. Pa.s.sing with his companion through the open door, he crossed the hall to another door, discreetly closed.

”Wait in here,” he said. Lord Belpher moved unsuspectingly forward.

A hand pressed sharply against the small of his back. Behind him a door slammed and a key clicked. He was trapped. Groping in Egyptian darkness, his hands met a coat, then a hat, then an umbrella. Then he stumbled over a golf-club and fell against a wall. It was too dark to see anything, but his sense of touch told him all he needed to know. He had been added to the vicar's collection of odds and ends in the closet reserved for that purpose.

He groped his way to the door and kicked it. He did not repeat the performance. His feet were in no shape for kicking things.

Percy's gallant soul abandoned the struggle. With a feeble oath, he sat down on a box containing croquet implements, and gave himself up to thought.

”You'll be quite safe now,” the curate was saying in the adjoining room, not without a touch of complacent self-approval such as becomes the victor in a battle of wits. ”I have locked him in the cupboard. He will be quite happy there.” An incorrect statement this. ”You may now continue your walk in perfect safety.”

”Thank you ever so much,” said Maud. ”But I do hope he won't be violent when you let him out.”

”I shall not let him out,” replied the curate, who, though brave, was not rash. ”I shall depute the task to a worthy fellow named Willis, in whom I shall have every confidence. He--he is, in fact, our local blacksmith!”

And so it came about that when, after a vigil that seemed to last for a lifetime, Percy heard the key turn in the lock and burst forth seeking whom he might devour, he experienced an almost instant quieting of his excited nervous system. Confronting him was a vast man whose muscles, like those of that other and more celebrated village blacksmith, were plainly as strong as iron bands.

This man eyed Percy with a chilly eye.

”Well,” he said. ”What's troublin' you?”

Percy gulped. The man's mere appearance was a sedative.

”Er--nothing!” he replied. ”Nothing!”

”There better hadn't be!” said the man darkly. ”Mr. Ferguson give me this to give to you. Take it!”

Percy took it. It was a s.h.i.+lling.

”And this.”

The second gift was a small paper pamphlet. It was ent.i.tled ”Now's the Time!” and seemed to be a story of some kind. At any rate, Percy's eyes, before they began to swim in a manner that prevented steady reading, caught the words ”Job Roberts had always been a hard-drinking man, but one day, as he was coming out of the bar-parlour ...” He was about to hurl it from him, when he met the other's eye and desisted. Rarely had Lord Belpher encountered a man with a more speaking eye.

”And now you get along,” said the man. ”You pop off. And I'm going to watch you do it, too. And, if I find you sneakin' off to the Three Pigeons ...”

His pause was more eloquent than his speech and nearly as eloquent as his eye. Lord Belpher tucked the tract into his sweater, pocketed the s.h.i.+lling, and left the house. For nearly a mile down the well-remembered highway he was aware of a Presence in his rear, but he continued on his way without a glance behind.

”Like one that on a lonely road Doth walk in fear and dread; And, having once looked back, walks on And turns no more his head!

Because he knows a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread!”

Maud made her way across the fields to the cottage down by Platt's.

Her heart was as light as the breeze that ruffled the green hedges.

Gaily she tripped towards the cottage door. Her hand was just raised to knock, when from within came the sound of a well-known voice.

She had reached her goal, but her father had antic.i.p.ated her. Lord Marshmoreton had selected the same moment as herself for paying a call upon George Bevan.

Maud tiptoed away, and hurried back to the castle. Never before had she so clearly realized what a handicap an adhesive family can be to a young girl.

CHAPTER 16.