The maid was so healthful in her appearance, so reasonable in her argument, that Hillyard"s terrors, fostered by solitude, began to lose their vivid colours.
"I understand that," he stammered. "Yet, Jenny----"
Jenny Prask smiled.
"You are Mr. Hillyard, I think?"
"Yes."
"I have heard my mistress speak of you." Hillyard knew enough of maids to understand that "mistress" was an unusual word with them. Here, it seemed, was a paragon of maids, who was quite content to be publicly Stella Croyle"s maid, whose gentility suffered no offence by the recognition of a mistress.
"If you wish, I will wake her."
Jenny Prask went up the stairs, Hillyard at her heels. She knocked upon the door. No answer was returned. She opened it and entered.
Stella Croyle was up and dressed. She was sitting at a table by the window with some sheets of notepaper and some envelopes in front of her, and her back was towards Hillyard and the open door. But she was dressed as she had been dressed the evening before when he had left her; the curtains in the room were drawn, and the electric lights on the writing-table and the walls were still burning. The bed had not been slept in.
Stella Croyle rose and turned towards her visitors. She tottered a little as she stood up, and her eyes were dazed.
"Why have you come here?" she asked faintly, and she fell rather than sat again in her chair.
Hillyard sprang forward and tore the curtains aside so that the sunlight poured into the room, and Stella opened and shut her eyes with a contraction of pain.
"I had so many letters to write," she explained, "I thought that I would sit up and get through with them."
Hillyard looked at the table. There were great black dashes on the notepaper and lines, and here and there a scribbled picture of a face, and perhaps now and again half a word. She had sat at that table all night and had not even begun a letter. Hillyard"s heart was torn with pity as he looked from her white, tired face to the sheets of notepaper.
What misery and unhappiness did those broad, black dashes and idle lines express?
"You must have some breakfast," he said. "I"ll order it and have it ready for you downstairs by the time you are ready. Then I"ll take you back to London."
The blood suddenly mounted into her face.
"You will?" she cried wildly. "In a reserved compartment, so that I may do nothing rash and foolish? Are you going to be kind too?"
She broke into a peal of shrill and bitter laughter. Then her head went down upon her hands, and she gave herself up to such a pa.s.sion of sobbing and tears as was quite beyond all Hillyard"s experience. Yet he would rather hear those sobs and see her bowed shoulders shaking under the violence of them than listen again to the dreadful laughter which had gone before. He had not the knowledge which could enable him to understand her sudden outburst, nor did he acquire that knowledge until long afterwards. But he understood that quite unwittingly he had touched some painful chord in that wayward nature.
"I am going to take you back in my motor-car," he said. "I"ll be downstairs with the breakfast ready."
She had probably eaten nothing, he reckoned, since teatime the day before. Food was the steadying thing she needed now. He went to the door which Jenny Prask held open for him.
"Don"t leave her!" he breathed in a whisper.
Jenny Prask smiled.
"Not me, sir," she said fervently.
Hillyard remembered with comfort some words which she had spoken in appreciation of the loving devotion of her maid.
"In three-quarters of an hour," said Jenny; and later on that morning, with a great fear removed from his heart, Hillyard drove Stella Croyle back to London.
CHAPTER XII
IN BARCELONA
It was nine o"clock on a night of late August.
The restaurant of the Maison Doree in the Plaza Cataluna at Barcelona looks across the brilliantly-lighted square from the south side. On the pavement in front of it and of its neighbour, the Cafe Continental, the vendors of lottery tickets were bawling the lucky numbers they had for sale. Even in this wide s.p.a.ce the air was close and stale. Within, a few people left over in the town had strayed in to dine at tables placed against the walls under flamboyant decorations in the style of Fragonard. At a table Hillyard was sitting alone over his coffee. Across the room one of the panels represented a gleaming marble terrace overlooking a country-side bathed in orange light; and on the terrace stood a sedan chair with drawn curtains, and behind the chair stood a saddled white horse. Hillyard had dined more than once during the last few months at the Maison Doree; and the problem of that picture had always baffled him. A lovers" tryst! But where were the lovers? In some inner room shaded from the outrage of that orange light which never was on sea or land? Or in the sedan chair? Or were their faces to be discovered, as in the puzzle pictures, in the dappling of the horse"s flanks, or the convolutions of the pillars which supported the terrace roof, or the gilded ornamentations of the chair itself? Hillyard was speculating for the twentieth time on these important matters with a vague hope that one day the door of the sedan chair would open, when another door opened--the door of the restaurant. A sharp-visaged man with a bald forehead, a clerk, one would say, or a commercial traveller, looked round the room and went forward to Hillyard"s table. He went quite openly.
The two men shook hands, and the new-comer seated himself in front of Hillyard.
"You will take coffee and a cigar?" Hillyard asked in Spanish, and gave the order to the waiter.
The two men talked of the heat, the cinematograph theatres at the side of the Plaza, the sea-bathing at Caldetas, and then the sharp-faced man leaned forward.
"Ramon says there is no truth in the story, senor."
Hillyard struck a match and held it to his companion"s cigar.
"And you trust Ramon, Senor Baeza?"
Lopez Baeza leaned back with a gesture of unqualified a.s.sent.
"As often and often you can trust the peasant of my country," he said.
Hillyard agreed with a nod. He gazed about the room.
"There is no one interesting here to-night," he said idly.
"No," answered Lopez Baeza. "The theatres are closed, the gay people have gone to St. Sebastian, the families to the seaside. Ouf, but it is hot."
"Yes."
Hillyard dropped his voice to a whisper and returned to the subject of his thoughts.
"You see, my friend, it is of so much importance that we should make no mistake here."
"_Claro!_" returned Lopez Baeza. "But listen to me, senor. You know that our banks are behind the times and our post offices not greatly trusted.
We have therefore a cla.s.s of messengers."
Hillyard nodded.
"I know of them."
"Good. They are not educated. Most of them can neither read nor write.