Parminter tore the leaf out, but this time he did not crumple it. He blotted it carefully, folded it, and laid it on the mantle-shelf.
"Let us get him up," he said, and with Barstow"s help they lifted Hine out of his chair. Sylvia caught a glimpse of his face. His mouth was loose, his eyes half shut, and the lids red; he seemed to be in a stupor.
His head rolled upon his shoulders. He swayed as his companions held him up; his knees gave under him. He began incoherently to talk.
"Hush!" said Parminter. "You"ll wake the house. You don"t want that pretty girl to see you in this state, do you, Wallie? After the impression you made on her, too! Get his hat and coat out of the pa.s.sage, Barstow."
He propped Hine against the table, and holding him upright turned to the door. He saw "the pretty girl" leaning over the banister and gazing with horror-stricken eyes into the room. Sylvia drew back on the instant.
With a gesture of his hand, Archie Parminter stopped Barstow on his way to the door.
Sylvia leaned back against the wall of the staircase, holding her breath, and tightly pressing a hand upon her heart. Had they seen her?
Would they come out into the pa.s.sage? What would happen? Would they kill her? The questions raced through her mind. She could not have moved, she thought, had Death stood over her. But nothing happened. She could not now see into the room, and she heard no whisper, no footsteps creeping stealthily along the pa.s.sage toward her, no sound at all. Presently she recovered her breath, and crept up-stairs. Once in her room, with great care she locked the door, and sank upon her bed, shaking and trembling.
There she lay until the noise of the hall door closing very gently roused her. She crept along the wall till she was by the side of the window. Then she raised herself against the wall and peered out. She saw Barstow and Parminter supporting Hine along the street, each with an arm through his. A hansom-cab drove up, they lifted Hine into it, got in themselves, and drove off. As the cab turned, Archie Parminter glanced up to the windows of the house. But Sylvia was behind the curtains at the side. He could not have seen her. Sylvia leaned her head against the panels of the door and concentrated all her powers so that not a movement in the house might escape her ears. She listened for the sound of some one else moving in the room below, some one who had been left behind. She listened for a creak of the stairs, the brushing of a coat against the stair rail, the sound of some one going stealthily to his room. She stood at the door, with her face strangely set for a long while. Her mind was quite made up. If she heard her father moving from that room, she would just wait until he was asleep, and then she would go--anywhere. She could not go back to her mother, that she knew. She had no one to go to; nevertheless, she would go.
But no sound reached her. Her father was not in the room below. He must have gone to bed and left the others to themselves. The pigeon had been plucked that night, not a doubt of it, but her father had had no hand in the plucking. She laid herself down upon her bed, exhausted, and again sleep came to her. And in a moment the sound of running water was in her ears.
CHAPTER XI
SYLVIA"S FATHER MAKES A MISTAKE
Sylvia did not wake again until the maid brought in her tea and told her that it was eight o"clock. When she went down-stairs, her father was already in the dining-room. She scanned him closely, but his face bore no sign whatever of a late and tempestuous night; and a great relief enheartened her. He met her with an open smile.
"Did you sleep well, Sylvia?"
"Not very well, father," she answered, as she watched his face. "I woke up in the early morning."
But nothing could have been more easy or natural than his comment on her words.
"Yet you look like a good sleeper. A strange house, I suppose, Sylvia."
"Voices in the strange house," she answered.
"Voices?"
Garratt Skinner"s face darkened.
"Did those fellows stay so late?" he asked with annoyance. "What time was it when they woke you up, Sylvia?"
"A little before five."
Garratt Skinner"s annoyance increased.
"That"s too bad," he cried. "I left them and went to bed. But they promised me faithfully only to stay another half-hour. I am very sorry, Sylvia." And as she poured out the tea, he continued: "I will speak pretty sharply to Barstow. It"s altogether too bad."
Garratt Skinner breakfasted with an eye on the clock, and as soon as the hands pointed to five minutes to nine, he rose from the table.
"I must be off--business, my dear." He came round the table to her and gently laid a hand upon her shoulder. "It makes a great difference, Sylvia, to have a daughter, fresh and young and pretty, sitting opposite to me at the breakfast table--a very great difference. I shall cut work early to-day on account of it; I"ll come home and fetch you, and we"ll go out and lunch somewhere together."
He spoke with every sign of genuine feeling; and Sylvia, looking up into his face, was moved by what he said. He smiled down at her, with her own winning smile; he looked her in the face with her own frankness, her own good humor.
"I have been a lonely man for a good many years, Sylvia," he said, "too lonely. I am glad the years have come to an end"; and this time he did what yesterday night he had checked himself from doing. He stooped down and kissed her on the forehead. Then he went from the room, took his hat, and letting himself out of the house closed the door behind him. He called a pa.s.sing cab, and, as he entered it, he said to the driver:
"Go to the London and County Bank in Victoria Street," and gaily waving his hand to his daughter, who stood behind the window, he drove off.
At one o"clock he returned in the same high spirits. Sylvia had spent the morning in removing the superfluous cherries and roses from her best hat and making her frock at once more simple and more suitable to her years.
Garratt Skinner surveyed her with pride.
"Come on," he said. "I have kept the cab waiting."
For a poor man he seemed to Sylvia rather reckless. They drove to the Savoy Hotel and lunched together in the open air underneath the gla.s.s roof, with a bank of flowers upon one side of them and the windows of the grill-room on the other. The day was very hot, the streets baked in an arid glare of sunlight; a dry dust from the wood pavement powdered those who pa.s.sed by in the Strand. Here, however, in this cool and shaded place the pair lunched happily together. Garratt Skinner had the tact not to ask any questions of his daughter about her mother, or how they had fared together. He talked easily of unimportant things, and pointed out from time to time some person of note or some fashionable actress who happened to pa.s.s in or out of the hotel. He could be good company when he chose, and he chose on this morning. It was not until coffee was set before them, and he had lighted a cigar, that he touched upon themselves, and then not with any paternal tone, but rather as one comrade conferring with another. There, indeed, was his great advantage with Sylvia. Her mother had either disregarded her or treated her as a child. She could not but be won by a father who laid bare his plans to her and asked for her criticism as well as her a.s.sent. Her suspicions of yesterday died away, or, at all events, slept so soundly that they could not have troubled her less had they been dead.
"Sylvia," he said, "I think London in August, and in such an August, is too hot. I don"t want to see you grow pale, and for myself I haven"t had a holiday for a long time. You see there is not much temptation for a lonely man to go away by himself."
For the second time that day he appealed to her on the ground of his loneliness; and not in vain. She began even to feel remorseful that she had left him to his loneliness so long. There rose up within her an almost maternal feeling of pity for her father. She did not stop to think that he had never sent for her; had never indeed shown a particle of interest in her until they had met face to face.
"But since you are here," he continued, "well--I have been doing fairly well in my business lately, and I thought we might take a little holiday together, at some quiet village by the sea. You know nothing of England.
I have been thinking it all out this morning. There is no country more beautiful or more typical than Dorsetshire. Besides, you were born there.
What do you say to three weeks or so in Dorsetshire? We will stay at an hotel in Weymouth for a few days and look about for a house."
"Father!" exclaimed Sylvia, leaning forward with shining eyes. "It will be splendid. Just you and I!"
"Well, not quite," he answered, slowly; and as he saw his daughter sink back with a pucker of disappointment on her forehead, he knocked the ash off his cigar and in his turn leaned forward over the table.
"Sylvia, I want to talk to you seriously," he said, and glanced around to make sure that no one overheard him. "I should very much like one person to come and stay with us."
Sylvia made no answer. Her face was grave and very still, her eyes dwelt quietly upon him and betrayed nothing of what she thought.
"You have guessed who the one person is?"
Again Sylvia did not answer.
"Yes. It is Wallie Hine," he continued.
Her suspicions were stirring again from their sleep. She waited in fear upon his words. She looked out, through the opening at the mouth of the court into the glare of the Strand. The bright prospect which her vivid fancies had pictured there a minute since, transforming the dusky street into fields of corn and purple heather, the omnibuses into wagons drawn by teams of great horses musical with bells, had all grown dark. A real horror was gripping her. But she turned her eyes quietly back upon her father"s face and waited.
"His presence will spoil our holiday a little," Garratt Skinner continued with an easy a.s.surance. "You saw, no doubt, what Wallie Hine is, last night--a weak, foolish youth, barely half-educated, awkward, with graces of neither mind nor body, and in the hands of two scoundrels."
Sylvia started, and she leaned forward with a look of bewilderment plain to see in her dark eyes.
"Yes, that"s the truth, Sylvia. He has come into a little money, and he is in the hands of two scoundrels who are leading him by the nose. My poor girl," he cried, suddenly breaking off, "you must have found yourself in very strange and disappointing company last night. I was very sorry for you, and sorry for myself, too. All the evening I was saying to myself, "I wonder what my little girl is thinking of me." But I couldn"t help it. I had not the time to explain. I had to sit quiet, knowing that you must be unhappy, certain that you must be despising me for the company I kept."
Sylvia blushed guiltily.
"Despising you? No, father," she said, in a voice of apology. "I saw how much above the rest you were."
"Blaming me, then," interrupted Garratt Skinner, with an easy smile. He was not at all offended. "Let us say blaming me. And it was quite natural that you should, judging by the surface. And there was nothing but the surface for you to judge by."