This, of course, was a lie, and the fact that it was a lie alarmed Dale quite as much as any of the sinister incidents which had already befallen. For one thing, there was no house into which five men could have gone. On each side of the road were bleak sandhills; to the right was the sea, gray and lowering beneath a leaden-hued sky that seemed to weep above a dead earth. Here, undoubtedly, was the cab, since Dale could swear to both horse and man. Where, then, were its occupants?
Having to depend upon his wits, he gave no further heed to the Frenchman, but, fancying that he saw vestiges of recent footmarks on the right, or seaward, side of the road, and dragging the bicycle with him, he climbed to the top of the nearest dune, as he believed that a view of the sands could be obtained from that point. He was right. The sea was at a greater distance than he imagined would be the case, but a wide strip of firm sand, its wet patches glistening dully in the half-light, extended to the water"s edge almost from the base of the hillock on which he stood.
At first, his anxious eyes strained through the haze in vain, until some circling seagulls caught his attention, and then he discerned some vague forms silhouetted against a brighter belt of the sea to the northeast.
Three of the figures were black and motionless, but two gave an eerie suggestion of whiteness and movement. Abandoning the bicycle, and hardly realizing why he should be so perturbed, Dale ran forward.
Twice he stumbled and fell amidst the stringy heath gra.s.s, but he was up again in a frenzy of haste, and soon was near enough to the group of men to see that Medenham and Marigny, bare-headed and in their shirt sleeves, were fighting with swords.
Dale"s eyes were now half-blinded with perspiration, for he had ridden fast through the mud from Calais, and this final run through yielding sand and clinging sedge was exhausting to one who seldom walked as many furlongs as he had covered miles that morning. But even in his panic of distress he fancied that his master was pressing the Frenchman severely. It was no child"s play, this battle with cold steel. The slender, venomous-looking blades whirled and stabbed with a fearsome vehemence, and the sharp rasp of each riposte and parry rang out with a horrible suggestiveness in the moist air. And then, as he lumbered heavily on, Dale thought he saw something that turned him sick with terror. Almost halting, he swept a hasty hand across his eyes--then he was sure.
Medenham, with arm extended in a feint in tierce, was bearing so heavily on his opponent"s rapier that his right foot slipped, and he stumbled badly. At once Marigny struck with the deadly quickness and certainty of a cobra. His weapon pierced Medenham"s breast high up on the right side. The stroke was so true and furious that the Englishman, already unbalanced, was driven on to his back on the sand.
Marigny wrenched the blade free, and stooped with obvious intent to plunge it again through his opponent"s body. A warning shout from each of the three spectators withheld him. He scowled vindictively, but dared not make that second mortal thrust. These French gentlemen whom he had summoned from Paris were bound by a rigid code of honor that would infallibly have caused him to be branded as a murderer had he completed matters to his satisfaction. Nevertheless, he bent and peered closely into Medenham"s face, gray now as the sand on which he was lying.
"I think it will serve," he muttered to himself. "May the devil take him, but I thought he would get the better of me!"
He turned away with an affectation of coolness which he was far from feeling, while the doctor knelt to examine Medenham"s injury. He saw someone running towards him, but believed it must be one of the witnesses, and his eyes fell to the stained blade in his hand.
"I rather forgot myself----" he began.
But the excuse was stopped short by a blow on the angle of the jaw that stretched him by Medenham"s side and apparently as lifeless.
a.s.suredly, Dale was not versed in the punctilio of the duel, but he knew how and where to hit with a fist that was hard as one of his own spanners. He put weight and pa.s.sion into that punch, and scarcely understood how effective it was until he found himself struggling in the grasp of two excited Frenchmen. He cursed both them and Marigny fluently, and vowed the most horrible vengeance on all three, but soon calmed himself sufficiently to see that Count Edouard could not stir, and his perturbed wits then sought to learn the extent of his master"s injury. Still he swore at Marigny.
"d.a.m.n you!" he cried hoa.r.s.ely, "you would have stabbed him as he was lying there if these pals of yours hadn"t stopped you!"
At last, recovering some degree of self-possession, he a.s.sisted the astounded and rather frightened Frenchmen to carry Medenham to the waiting carriage. One, who spoke English, asked him to help in rendering a like service to Marigny, but he refused with an oath, and the others dared not press him, he looked so fierce and threatening.
"Is he dead?" he asked the doctor brokenly.
There could be no mistaking the meaning of the words, for his red-shot eyes glared fixedly at the limp body of his master. The other shook his head, but pointed in the direction of Calais, as though to suggest that the sooner the injured man was taken to some place where his wound could be properly attended to, the better would be the faint chance of life that remained. By this time the seconds were approaching, and Marigny had seemingly recovered to a slight extent from the knockout blow which he had received so unexpectedly.
The doctor, who was the only self-collected person present, pointed to the bicycle.
"Hotel," he said emphatically. "Go hotel--quick!"
Dale was minded not to desert his master, but the anxiety in the doctor"s face warned him that the request ought to be obeyed. If the spark of vitality still flickering in Medenham"s body was to be preserved not a moment should be lost in preparing a room for his reception.
Gulping down his anguish, Dale mounted and made off. At a distant bend in the road he turned his head and looked back along that dismal heath. All five were packed in the cab, and the coachman was urging the unwilling horse into a trot.
And what of Cynthia?
The break in the weather was the one thing needed to put an abrupt end to all pretense of enjoyment so far as the Windermere tourists were concerned. Strained relations existed from the moment Vanrenen arrived at Chester. For the first time in her life, Cynthia thought that her father was not acting with the open-eyed justice which she expected from him, and for the first time in his life Peter Vanrenen harbored an uneasy suspicion that his daughter had not been quite candid with him. It was impossible, of course, in the close intimacy of long hours spent together in a touring car, that there should not be many references to Fitzroy and the Mercury. They were inevitable as the milestones, and Vanrenen, who was just as p.r.o.ne as other men to look at facts through his own spectacles, failed to understand how an intelligent girl like his daughter could remain in constant a.s.sociation with Viscount Medenham for five days, and yet not discover his ident.i.ty.
More than once, indeed, notwithstanding the caution exercised by the others--engaged now in a tacit conspiracy to dispel memories of a foolish entanglement from the girl"s mind--the identification of Fitzroy with the young Viscount trembled on the very lip of discovery.
Thus, on Friday, when they had motored to Grasmere, and had gathered before lunch in the lounge of the delightfully old-fashioned Rothay Hotel, Vanrenen happened to pick up an ill.u.s.trated paper, containing a page of pictures of the Scarland short-horns.
Now, being a busy man, he gave little heed to the terminological convolutions of names among the British aristocracy. He had not the slightest notion that the Marquis of Scarland"s wife was Medenham"s sister, and, with the quick interest of the stock-breeder, he pointed out to Mrs. Leland an animal that resembled one of his own pedigree bulls, at present waxing fat on the Montana ranch. For the moment Mrs. Leland herself had forgotten the relationship between the two men.
"I met the Marquis last year at San Remo," she said heedlessly.
"Anyone more unlike a British peer you could not imagine. If I remember rightly, he is a blunt, farmer-like person, but his wife is very charming. By the way, who was she?"
Such a question could not pa.s.s Mrs. Devar unanswered.
"Lady Betty Fitzroy," she chirped instantly.
Cynthia, who was looking through the window at the square-towered little church, throned midst the somber yews which shelter the graves of Wordsworth and his kin, caught the odd conjunction of names--"Betty" and "Fitzroy."
"Who is that you are speaking of, father?" she asked, though with a listless air that Medenham had never seen during any minute of those five happy days.
"The Marquis of Scarland--the man from whom I bought some cattle a few years ago," he said, trusting to the directness of the reply to carry it through unchallenged.
Cynthia"s brows puckered in a reflective frown.
"That is odd," she murmured.
"What is odd?" asked her father, while Mrs. Leland bent over the periodical to hide a smile of embarra.s.sment.
"Oh, just a curious way of running in grooves people have in this country. They call towns after men and men after towns."
She was about to add that Fitzroy had told her of a sister Betty who was married to a man named Scarland, a breeder of pedigree stock, but checked the impulse. For some reason known best to her father, he did not seem to wish any mention to be made of the vanished chauffeur, but she did not gauge the true extent of his readiness to drop the subject on that occasion.
Mrs. Leland looked up, caught his eye with a smile, and asked how many miles it was to Thirlmere. Cynthia"s thoughts brooded again on poets and lonely graves, and the danger pa.s.sed.
Mrs. Devar, in these days, had recovered her complacency. The letter she wrote from Symon"s Yat had reached Vanrenen from Paris, and its hearty disapproval of Fitzroy helped to re-establish his good opinion of her. She heard constantly, too, from Marigny and her son. Both agreed that the comet-like flight of Medenham across their horizon was rapidly losing its significance. Still, she was not quite happy. Mrs.
Leland"s advent had thrust her into the background, for the American widow was rich, good-looking, and cultured, and the flow of small talk between the newcomer and Cynthia left her as hopelessly out of range as used to be the case when that domineering Medenham would lean back in the car and say things beyond her comprehension, or murmur them to Cynthia if she happened to be sitting by his side.
Luncheon had ended, but the clouds which had been gathering over the lake country during the morning suddenly poured a deluge over a thirsty land. Thirlmere and Ullswater and the rest of the glories of Westmoreland that lay beyond the pa.s.s of Dunmail Raise were swallowed up in a fog of rain. Simmonds, questioned by the millionaire, admitted that a weather-beaten native had prophesied "a week of it," more or less.
Four Britons might have sat down and played Bridge stolidly, but three of this quartette were Americans, and within two hours of the change in the elements, they were seated in the London-bound train at Windermere Station.
Not one of them was really displeased because of this rapid alteration in their plans. Cynthia was ill at ease; Mrs. Leland wished to rejoin her guests at Trouville; Vanrenen, who was anxious to complete certain business negotiations in Paris, believed that a complete change of scene and new interests in life would speedily bring Cynthia back to her own cheery self; while Mrs. Devar, though the abandonment of the tour meant reversion to a cheap boarding-house, was not sorry that it had come to an end. In London, she would be more in her element, and, at any rate, she was beginning to feel cramped through sitting three in a row in Simmonds"s car, after the luxurious comfort of two in the tonneau of the Mercury.
So it came to pa.s.s that on Friday evening, while Medenham was driving from Cavendish Square to Charing Cross, Cynthia was crossing London on a converging line from St. Pancras to the Savoy Hotel. Strange, indeed, was the play of Fate"s shuttle that it should have so nearly reunited the unseen threads of their destinies! Again, a trifling circ.u.mstance conspired to detain Vanrenen in London. One of his business a.s.sociates in Paris, rendered impatient by the failure of the great man to return as quickly as he had promised, arrived in England by the afternoon service from the Gare du Nord, and was actually standing in the foyer of the hotel when Vanrenen entered with the others. As a result of this meeting, the journey to Paris arranged for Sat.u.r.day was postponed till Sunday, and on this trivial base was destined to be built a very remarkable edifice.
It chanced that Mrs. Leland, too, decided to have a day in London, and she and Cynthia went out early. They returned to lunch at the hotel, and the girl, pleading lack of appet.i.te, slipped out alone to buy a copy of Milton"s poems. From the book-seller"s she wandered into the Embankment Gardens.
She was a dutiful daughter, and had resolved to obey without question her father"s stern command not to enter again into communication with a man of whom he so strongly disapproved. But she was not content, for all that, and the dripping trees and rain-sodden flowers seemed now to accord with her distraught mood. The fine, though not bright, interval that had tempted her forth soon gave way to another shower, and she ran for shelter into the Charing Cross Station of the Metropolitan Railway. She stood in one of the doorways looking out disconsolately over the river, when a taxicab drove up and deposited its occupant at the station. Then some unbidden impulse led her to hail the driver.
"Take me to Cavendish Square," she said.
"What number, miss?" he asked.
"No number. Just drive slowly round the square and return to the Savoy Hotel."
He eyed her curiously, but made no comment. Soon she was speeding up Regent Street, bent on gratifying the truly curious whim of seeing what manner of residence it was that Fitzroy occupied in London. Fate had failed in her weaving during the previous evening, but on the present occasion she combined warp and weft without any error.