Part 54 (1/2)

There was a suspicion of tears in her voice as she turned away and left me without another word. She was quite out of sight around the bend in the staircase, and her little boots were clattering swiftly upwards, before I fully grasped the significance of her explanation--or, I might better say, her reproach. It slowly dawned upon me that I had said a great many things to her that it would pay me to remember before questioning her motives in any particular.

As the day for her departure drew nearer,--it was now but forty-eight hours away,--her manner seemed to undergo a complete change. She became moody, nervous, depressed. Of course, all this was attributable to the dread of discovery and capture when she was once outside the great walls of Schloss Rothhoefen. I could understand her feelings, and rather lamely attempted to bolster up her courage by making light of the supposed perils.

She looked at me with a certain pathetic sombreness in her eyes that caused my heart to ache. All of her joyous raillery was gone, all of her gentle arrogance. Her sole interest in life in these last days seemed to be of a sacrificial nature. She was sweet and gentle with every one,--with me in particular, I may say,--and there was something positively humble in her att.i.tude of self-abnegation. Where she had once been wilful and ironic, she was now gentle and considerate. Nor was I the only one to note these subtle changes in her. I doubt, however, if the others were less puzzled than I. In fact, Mrs. t.i.tus was palpably perplexed, and there were times when I caught her eyeing me with distinct disapproval, as if she were seeking in me the cause of her daughter's weaknesses; as much as to say: ”What other nonsense have you been putting into the poor child's head, you wretch?”

I went up to have a parting romp with Rosemary on the last night of her stay with me, to have my last sip of honey from her delectable neck. The Countess paid but little attention to us. She sat over in the window and stared out into the dusky shadows of the falling night.

My heart was sore. I was miserable. The last romp!

Blake finally s.n.a.t.c.hed Rosemary off to bed. It was then that the Countess aroused herself and came over to me with a sad little smile on her lips.

”Good night,” she said, rather wistfully, holding out her hand to me.

I deliberately glanced at my watch. ”It's only ten minutes past eight,”

I said, reproachfully.

”I know,” she said, quietly. ”Good night.”

CHAPTER XVIII

I SPEED THE PARTING GUEST

Four o'clock in the morning is a graceless hour. Graveyards may yawn at twelve but even they are content to slumber at four. I don't believe there is anything so desolate in this world as the mental perspective one obtains at four o'clock. Tombstones are bright beacons of cheer as compared to the monumental regret one experiences on getting up to greet the alleged and vastly over-rated glories of a budding day. The sunrise is a pall! It is a deadly, dour thing. It may be pink and red and golden and full of all the splendours of the east, but it is a resurrection and you can't make anything else out of it. Staying up till four and then going to bed gives one an idea of the sunrise that is not supported by the facts; there is but one way to appreciate the real nature of the hateful thing called dawn, and that is to get up with it instead of taking it to bed with you.

Still, I suppose the sun _has_ to come up and perhaps it is just as well that it does so at an hour when people are least likely to suspect it of anything so shabby.

Four o'clock is more than a graceless, sodden hour when it ushers in a day that you know is to be the unhappiest in your life; when you know that you are to say farewell forever to the hopes begot and nurtured in other days; when the one you love smiles and goes away to smile again but not for you. And that is just what four o'clock on the morning of the fourteenth of September meant to me.

Britton and I set forth in the automobile just at the break of dawn, crossing the river a few miles below the castle, and running back to a point on the right hand bank where we were to await the arrival of the boat conveying the Countess and her escort. Her luggage, carefully disguised as crated merchandise, had gone to Trieste by fast express a couple of days before, sent in my name and consigned to a gentleman whose name I do not now recall, but who in reality served as a sort of middleman in transferring the s.h.i.+pment to the custody of a certain yacht's commander.

It was required of me--and of my machine, which is more to the point--that the distance of one hundred and twenty miles through the foothills of the Austrian Alps should be covered and the pa.s.sengers delivered at a certain railway station fifty miles or more south of Vienna before ten o'clock that night. There they were to catch a train for the little seaport on the upper Adriatic, the name of which I was sworn never to reveal, and, as I have not considered it worth while to be released from that oath, I am of necessity compelled to omit the mention of it here.

Mr. Bangs went on to Vienna the night before our departure, taking with him Helene Marie Louise Antoinette, a rather shocking arrangement you would say unless you had come to know the British lawyer as well as we knew him. They were to proceed by the early morning train to this obscure seaport. Colingraft t.i.tus elected to accompany his sister the entire length of the journey, with the faithful Blake and Rosemary.

Billy Smith was to meet us a few miles outside the town for which we were bound, with a word of warning if there was anything sinister in the wind.

I heard afterwards from p.o.o.pend.y.k.e that the departure of the Countess and Rosemary from the castle in the grey; forlorn dawn of that historic fourteenth was attended by a demonstration of grief on the part of the four Schmicks that was far beyond his powers of description, and he possesses a wonderful ability to describe lachrymose situations, rather running to that style of incident, I may say. The elder Schmicks wailed and boo-hooed and proclaimed to the topmost turrets that the sun would never s.h.i.+ne again for either of them, and, to prove that she was quite in earnest about the matter, Gretel fell off the dock into the river and was nearly drowned before Jasper, Jr., could dive in and get her.

Their sons, both of whom cherished amorous feelings for Blake, sighed so prodigiously all the way down the river that the boat rocked.

Incidentally, during the excitement, Jinko, who was to remain behind and journey westward later on with Mrs. t.i.tus and Jasper, Jr., succeeded after weeks of vain endeavour in smartly nipping the calf of Hawkes'

left leg, a feat of which he no doubt was proud but which sentenced my impressive butler to an everlasting dread of hydrophobia and a temporary limp.

It was nearing five o'clock when the boat slipped into view around the tree-covered point of land and headed straight for our hiding place on the bank.

I shall not stop here to describe the first stage of our journey through the narrow, rocky by-roads that ended eventually in the broad, alpine highway south and west of Vienna. Let it be sufficient to say that we jostled along for twelve or fifteen miles without special incident, although we were nervously anxious and apprehensive. Our guide book pointed, or rather twiddled, a route from the river flats into the hills, where we came up with the main road about eight o'clock. We were wrapped and goggled to the verge of ludicrousness. It would have been quite impossible to penetrate our motor-masks and armour, even for one possessed of a keen and practiced eye. The Countess was heavily veiled; great goggles bulged beneath the green, gauzy thing that protected her lovely face from sun, wind and man. A motor coat, two or three sizes too large, enveloped her slender, graceful figure, and gauntlets covered her hands. Even Rosemary's tiny face was wrapped in a silken veil of white. As for the rest of us, we could not have been mistaken for anything on earth but American automobilists, ruthlessly inspired to see Europe with the sole view to comparing her roads with our own at home. You would have said, on seeing us, that we knew a great deal about roads and very little about home.

Colingraft and Britton,--the latter at the wheel,--sat in the front seat, while I shared the broad cus.h.i.+ons of the tonneau with the Countess, part of the time holding Rosemary, who was clamouring for food, and the rest of the time holding my breath in the fear that we might slip over a precipice. I am always nervous when not driving the car myself.

We stopped for breakfast at a small mountain inn, fifteen miles from our starting place. The Countess, a faint red spot in each cheek and a curiously bright, feverish glow in her dark eyes, revealed a tendency to monopolise the conversation, a condition properly attributed to nervous excitement. I could see that she was vastly thrilled by the experiences of the hour; her quick, alert brain was keeping pace with the rush of blood that stimulated every fibre in her body to new activities. She talked almost incessantly, and chiefly about matters entirely foreign to the enterprise in hand.

The more I see of women, the less I know about them. Why she should have spent the whole half hour devoted to breakfast to a surprisingly innocuous dissertation on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche is--or was--beyond me.