"It sounds silly, but it was really quite horrible," she ended with a little laugh. "To feel I was in the creature"s power, and that it didn"t _care_, it had no feeling--I was simply something to be crushed, annihilated."
"He _is_ a cold-blooded sort of person," said Roger thoughtfully. "Not that it matters much, if, as my aunt says, he is so good at his job.
Only, of course, it is pretty apt to prevent his becoming exactly popular."
"That wouldn"t worry him. He only wants to be able to live in order to carry on research."
When the car turned in at the drive Roger fancied he saw a thread of light from one of the drawing-room windows. The next instant it was gone, and he decided he had been mistaken; it must have been a trick of the moonlight. The house loomed dark before them. He garaged the car, and escorting Esther upstairs, parted from her at the end of the short pa.s.sage leading to her room.
"Thanks for a gorgeous time," she whispered, careful not to make a noise.
He thought how lovely she was as she looked up at him, her lashes curving back from her lambent eyes, the soft curls of her hair ruffling back from her warm forehead.
"If you"ve really liked it," he said, detaining her hand a little longer than was necessary, "you"ll come with me again?"
She smiled and was gone, the brief adieu leaving each of them to wonder how much more was meant than the polite commonplaces uttered.
Roger leaned out of his own window for ten minutes smoking, his mind full of a pleasant excitement. Disturbing, too, for with the unaccustomed feeling that perhaps at last he had found a girl he was willing to let himself fall in love with came a doubt, a cautious warning to hesitate, not to go too fast. She was delightful, he firmly believed her to be transparent and sincere, but men have been taken in only too easily when their senses have been stirred as his had been to-night. No, he must not rush things; he must wait a little and be sure, not so much of himself as of her; he must be convinced that she cared for him, that she was not merely dazzled by what he could give her one day.... That was the drawback of having money, if only in prospect. Already, for some years in fact, he had been pursued by mercenary maidens and their mothers. He had a rooted aversion to the whole breed, and a latent fear that one day he would be taken in after all. He knew himself to be impressionable and impulsive; still, behind these dangerous qualities lay a certain hard, deliberate common sense that had saved him in more than one perilous situation. Sternly he informed himself that he had known Esther Rowe about three days. In short, he must not be a fool.
Something, the champagne perhaps, had made him very thirsty. Finding his bottle of Evian water almost empty, he decided to explore the kitchen region below to secure another. He knew where the mineral waters were kept--in a small cupboard next to the wine-cellar. He sallied forth and descended the back stairs very quietly, in order not to disturb anyone. After poking about for a few moments he found what he wanted. There was nothing to open it with, however. Where was the thing kept? Ah, of course, in the sideboard, he remembered.
The swing-door into the dining-room made no noise; he discovered the little implement in the drawer with the table-knives and, wrenching off the metal cap from the bottle, turned to go back the way he had come.
All at once he stopped stock-still and listened. Then he glanced towards the door that led into the drawing-room. Had he heard whispered voices?
For thirty seconds he remained rooted to the spot, his ears strained to catch a repet.i.tion of the fancied sound. It had been only a faint murmur; he might have been mistaken ... yes, there it was again, a sort of choked, sibilant whisper coming from the adjoining room. Hardly had he made sure of it when there fell on his ears a small crash, sharp, as of some object dropped on the parquet. It was followed by a smothered exclamation in a man"s voice, brief and profane.
With but one idea in his mind--burglars--he crossed to the drawing-room door and flung it wide. That he was unarmed did not enter his thoughts.
The drawing-room was in utter darkness. He reached for the nearby switch and flooded the room in a blaze of light.
CHAPTER XVIII
About an hour before this Arthur Holliday left the Restaurant des Amba.s.sadeurs and, with a slight frown on his face, got into his car and drove rapidly to La Californie. When he reached the Villa Firenze all was in darkness. He left his car in a turning out of the main road, then quietly slipped into the garden and walked across the gra.s.s around to the paved terrace at the side of the salon. As he set foot on the flat stones the doors opened softly and Therese Clifford put out her hands and drew him inside.
"Ah, I thought you would never come!" she sighed a little fretfully, standing for a moment with her whole body against his.
His arms held her in a perfunctory embrace, while his eyes glanced restlessly about. The big room was lit by only a single lamp, which shed a pool of rose-coloured light over the satin-covered chaise-longue and a tiny table, upon which was a pile of ill.u.s.trated journals.
"d.a.m.ned silly getting me here like this," he remarked, turning and drawing the thick curtains carefully over the doors behind him. "I don"t half like it."
"There is no risk, none whatever. Everyone is in bed except the night-nurse, and up in that room one can"t hear anything."
"Still, if anyone did find me here, there"d be a devil of a mess.
Roger"ll be coming home, too; I saw him having dinner with that nurse girl."
She made a slight grimace.
"Oh, they will be hours yet. Listen! I sent you that message because I simply had to see you. You were dining with that creature to-night, and I could not have closed my eyes till I had made sure you had done nothing stupid. Tell me, Arthur darling--what has she been saying to you?"
She clutched him tightly with both hands, probing into his shallow eyes as if to tear the truth from them.
"Oh, the usual thing; she"s getting more and more fed up. She suspects now that I"m playing with her. She says she must make arrangements, send cables and so on, and she"s got to have a straight answer--yes or no--at once."
"Yes, and then what?"
Her hold on his shoulders tightened avidly.
"She"s booked sailings for herself and the girl for the 8th, and she wants to book one for me, too. Otherwise she says it"s all off."
"Ah! What did you tell her?"
"I promised I"d go."
She drew in her breath sharply.
"You promised to go--on the 8th!"
"There was nothing else to do. I can"t throw away an opportunity like that. I"ve told you so all along. Of course I could always change my mind at the last minute ... if anything happened."
His wandering gaze came back to her, and for a long moment they looked at each other in silence. Then Therese bit her lip and turned away.
"What did Sartorius say when you talked to him yesterday?"
"Oh, nothing whatever. He won"t express an opinion beyond the fact that the old boy"s age and general condition are against him. There"s not much in that. I wouldn"t mind betting even money that he"ll pull through this and go on for another ten or fifteen years."
She shook her head slowly, looking away from him.
"No ... I do not think he will do that. Somehow I have a feeling ...
I am almost sure this time ... he will not live."
"Why?" he demanded quickly.
"Fleurestine. You know what I told you."
"Rot! Besides, she only said he would be ill; she didn"t pretend to see the outcome."
Again she shook her head.
"What I told you was not quite true. She told me he would not recover; she saw me dressed in black ..."
"Good G.o.d! Why didn"t you say so before?"
She gave him a shrewd glance.
"But, Arthur, you don"t believe in these things."
"Well, I don"t know. I don"t say I disbelieve in them exactly. I--you might have said something before, you know," he explained in an injured tone.