A Butterfly on the Wheel Part 10

"Followed?"

He plunged his hands into the pockets of his dinner-jacket and bent his head, thinking deeply. Then he looked up at Peggy. "Peggy," he said at length, "rumour--he has been ridiculed into action--the crash has come."

The girl held out both hands towards him as if warding off a blow. "Go, go!" she cried; "please go! I sha'n't speak another word to you to-night. Go at once!"

"I can't leave you now, Peggy. I just worship you."

"I shall ring for my maid," she said, and moved towards the bell-push.

"No, don't do that. Don't be cruel, Peggy!" he said, in a voice instinct with agonised pleading. "Don't be cruel, Peggy! No, no! Don't ring!"

"I shall," she said firmly, and stretched out her hand.

"Peggy, trust me. I love you better than anything in the world--better than myself. For you I will sacrifice wealth, honour."

"Honour!" she cried.

"I'll do anything to win you. Everything I have done has been to win you--to have you for my own. You know it is true. Peggy, before G.o.d, I believed that you loved me too. Don't judge me harshly--oh, don't do that!"

Peggy put out her hand and pressed the bell-push.

"I must be alone," she said in a dull, m.u.f.fled voice.

He saw that it was useless, that he had failed, that the plans of months had all miscarried, that everything was over for him as far as she was concerned. Undisciplined as his nature was, baffled and disowned as he felt, he nevertheless showed himself rather fine in that moment. He made an almost superhuman effort at self-control--and succeeded.

"All right, Peggy dear," he said. "Don't be afraid. Everything will come right. Good night." With one last lingering look at her he left the room, closing the door which led into his own.

Peggy sank down upon the sofa almost over-mastered by her rising hysteria, limp and half unconscious.

She lay there breathing hurriedly, and with her eyes closed, when the corridor door opened and Pauline came rapidly into the room.

"Madame!" she cried.

Peggy gave one great sob of relief.

"Pauline!--you have not gone to bed?"

"No, madame! I was so anxious about you I could not sleep."

"Oh, my head is bursting!" the girl cried; "there is a pain like the thrust of a sword in my head."

"Poor darling!" Pauline said, her voice guttural with excitement, her trembling hands pa.s.sing over the young girl's form with loving, frightened caresses. "Poor darling! There is something altogether wrong.

Just now, when I came down, I saw a man standing at your door listening."

"At that door?"

"Yes. Twice I have seen him to-day. He was at Boulogne; I saw him looking at your boxes. Then just after supper he came in--when I was speaking to the waiter."

"Then we have been followed," Peggy answered, breaking down utterly.

"Pauline, I feel that something dreadful is going to happen. Stay with me--don't go back to your room. Soothe me, Pauline, as you used to when I was little and afraid of the dark."

CHAPTER IV

It was about nine o'clock the next morning. The heat of the night before had given place to that incomparable freshness which spring mornings have in Paris.

The windows of Mrs. Admaston's sitting-room were open, and a delightfully scented air, from the lilac blossoms and all the flowers of the gardens in the Tuileries, flooded and floated into the room.

Rooms have an aspect of this or that emotion according to the hour in which the events of the soul have taken place within them.

There are some rooms which always have the same mood. When one goes into them one doesn't impose one's mood, one's fancy, or one's ideas upon the place, but is dominated by one lasting personality--of furniture, of aspect, of general _mise en scene_.

It would be impossible, for example, to have a merry breakfast-party in the hangman's ante-room to the gallows; and one has known rooms in hotels which one enters gladly, unconscious of the pervading gloom which seems to cling to floor and ceiling and rises up like a spectre into the heart and brain after a few minutes' sojourn there.

The sitting-room in the Hotel des Tuileries, which had been the theatre of such tragic emotions on the last spring midnight, was now ordinary and comfortable enough.

The chairs and settees were all in their proper places. The carpet had been brushed, and its dull blues, greys, and brick-dust reds were all essentially artistic.

And they had brought new flowers there also. The bowls and vases were filled with fresh purple and white lilac. The silver candlesticks had been polished--there were no drippings of wax upon them any more. Tall white candles, fresh, virginal, and unfired, filled all the candlesticks.

In the middle of all this freshness two people were--a man and a woman.

One, Lord Ellerdine, was very tall and lean. He was dressed in a suit of very immaculate grey flannel--not the greyish-green which the ordinary person who wears flannels imagines to be the right thing, but the real grey-grey which costs a good deal of money; if the tailors in Sackville Street and Waterloo Place, from whom we suffer, are to be believed.

Lord Ellerdine's hair--and he hadn't much of it--was what he himself would have described as "the same old dust-colour." He wore a stiff double collar with blue lines upon it, a tie of China silk, and a big black pearl, stuck right down at the bottom, so that it only peeped out from the opening of his waistcoat now and again.

Lord Ellerdine had red eyes--that is to say, that there was a sort of red glint in them. The brows which overhung them were straight and dark, and contradicted with an odd grotesquerie the flickering attempt to really be at home and happy with the world. The face itself was rather tanned and brown, lean in contour and suggesting the explorer and the travelled man; and all this was oddly contradicted by an engaging little b.u.t.ton of a mouth, which twitched and lisped and was always rather more jolly than the occasion warranted.

By the side of Lord Ellerdine--or rather standing in the middle of the room and looking down upon him, for he had thrown himself upon the sofa--was a tall, slim, and gracious woman, perfectly dressed in a travelling coat and skirt of tweed. She looked round her rather fretfully.

Her face was radiant--there is no other word for it. Although she had been travelling all night, she appeared to be as fresh as paint--and that exactly describes her.

The complexion was perfect. It had that creamy _morbidezza_ one sees in a furled magnolia bud. Two straight, decisive lips seemed like a "band of scarlet upon a tower of ivory." Lady Attwill's eyes were sapphire-blue and suspicious, but entirely charming. She was, in short, a thoroughly handsome woman, and the sunlight struck curious radiances from the little pearls she wore in the sh.e.l.l-like lobes of her ears.

"Tell madame, will you, Pauline?" she said.

"I'll tell madame that you have arrived," the maid said with a little bow. She crossed the room, knocked, opened the door leading into Mrs.

Admaston's bedroom, and disappeared.

Almost immediately Lady Attwill's face changed from its quiet calm and became vivid.

"Cheer up, d.i.c.ky!" she said to Lord Ellerdine; "you've been in many a worse fix than this."

The diplomatist looked at her for a moment, his whole silly--but somehow distinguished--face covered with a sort of desperate cheerfulness.

"Worse!" he said. "I should say so. I don't mind gettin' into a 'fix,'