Charles Rex Part 55

The wash of the sea came murmurously through the September silence.

His restless eyes flashed hither and thither over the quiet scene, taking in every detail, lingering nowhere. The pine trees stirred in the distance below him, seeming to whisper together, and an owl hooted with a weird persistence down by the lake. It was like the calling of a human voice--almost like a cry of distress. Then it ceased, and the trees were still again.

The spell of the silence fell like the falling of a curtain. The loneliness crept about his heart.

He took the cigar from his mouth and spoke, ironically, grimly.

"There is your kingdom, Charles Rex!" he said.

He turned with the words and leaped down upon the narrow walk between the battlements. The owl began to call again, but the desolation remained. He paced forward with his hands behind him, his head bent. No one could see him here. The garment of mockery could be flung aside. He was like a prisoner tramping the stone walls from which he could never escape.

He paused once to toss away his cigar, but he did not look out again over the fair prospect of his lands. He was looking at other things, seeing the vast emptiness of a life that had never been worth while stretching behind and before him. Like a solitary traveller pausing in the heart of the desert, he stood to view the barrenness around him.

He had travelled far, had pursued many a quest with ardour; but the ardour had all gone out of him now. Only the empty solitude remained. He had lived a life of fevered variety, he had drunk deep of many waters; but he had never been satisfied. And now it seemed to him that all he had ever looked upon, all he had ever achieved, was mirage. Nothing of all that he had ever striven for was left. The fruit had turned to ashes in his mouth, and no spring remained whereat to quench his thirst.

Perhaps few men have ever realized the utter waste of wickedness as Charles Rex realized it that night. He met it whichever way he turned. To gratify the moment's whim had ever been his easy habit. If a generous impulse had moved him, he had gratified that also. But it had never been his way to sacrifice himself--until a certain night when a child had come to him, wide-eyed and palpitating like a driven bird, and had sought shelter and protection at his hands.

That, very curiously, had been the beginning of a new era in his life. It had appealed to him as nothing had ever appealed before. He had never tasted--or even desired--the Dead Sea fruit again. Something had entered his being on that night which he had never been able to cast out, and all other things had been dwarfed to insignificance.

He faced the fact as he paced his castle walls. The relish had gone out of his life. He was gathering what he had sown, and the harvest was barren indeed.

Time pa.s.sed; he walked unheeding. If he spent the whole night on the ramparts, there was no one to know or care. It was better than tossing sleepless under a roof. He felt as if a roof would suffocate him. But sheer physical weariness began to oppress even his elastic frame at last.

He awoke to the fact that he was dead tired.

He sat down in an embrasure between the battlements, and drifted into the numb state between waking and sleeping in which visions are born. For a s.p.a.ce nothing happened, then quite suddenly, rising as it were out of a void, a presence entered his consciousness, reached and touched his spirit. Intangibly, but quite unmistakably, he was aware of the summons, of a voice that spoke within his soul.

He lifted his head and looked about him. Emptiness, stark emptiness, was all he saw. Yet, in a moment, as though a hand had beckoned, he arose.

Without a backward glance he traversed the distance that lay between him and the turret-door. He went through it into utter darkness, and in utter darkness began the descent.

A shaft of moonlight smote through a slit in the stone wall as he rounded the corner of the stair. It lay like a shining sword across his path, and for a second he paused. Then he pa.s.sed over it, sure-footed and confident, and plunged again into darkness. When he reached the end of the descent, he was breathing heavily, and his eyes were alight with a strange fire. He pulled upon the door and put aside the thick curtain with the swift movements of a man who can brook no delay. He pa.s.sed into the long, dim room beyond with its single red lamp burning at the far end. He prepared to pa.s.s on to the door that led out upon the gallery and so to the grand staircase. But before he had gone half-a-dozen paces he stopped. It was no sound that arrested, no visible circ.u.mstance of any sort. Yet, as if at a word of command, he halted. His quick look swept around the room like the gleam of a rapier, and suddenly he swung upon his heel, facing that still, red light.

Seconds pa.s.sed before he moved again. Then swiftly and silently he walked up the room. Close to the lamp was a deep settee on which the spots of a leopard skin showed in weird relief. At one end of the settee, against the leopard skin, something gold was shining. Saltash's look was fixed upon it as he drew near.

He reached the settee treading noiselessly. He stood beside it, looking down. And over his dark face with its weary lines and cynical mouth, its melancholy and its bitterness, there came a light such as neither man nor woman had ever seen upon it before. For there before him, curled up like a tired puppy, her tumbled, golden hair lying in ringlets over the leopard skin, was Toby, asleep in the dim, red lamplight.

For minutes he stood and gazed upon her before she awoke. For minutes that strange glory came and went over his watching face. He did not stir, did not seem even to breathe. But the fact of his presence must have pierced her consciousness at last, for in the end quite quietly, supremely naturally, the blue eyes opened and fixed upon him.

"Hullo!" said Toby sleepily. "Time to get up?"

And then, in a moment, she had sprung upright on the couch, swift dismay on her face.

"I--I thought we were on the yacht! I--I--I never meant to go to sleep here! I came to speak to you, sir. I wanted to see you."

He put a restraining hand upon her thin young shoulder, and his touch vibrated as with some unknown force controlled.

"All right, Nonette!" he said, and his voice had the same quality; it was rea.s.suring but oddly unsteady. "Sorry I kept you waiting."

She looked at him. Her face was quivering. "I've had--a h.e.l.l of a time,"

she said pathetically. "Been here hours--thought you'd never come. Your man--your man said I wasn't to disturb you."

"d.a.m.n the fool!" said Saltash.

She broke into a breathless laugh. "That's--that's just what I said. But I thought--I thought perhaps--you'd rather--rather I waited." She shivered suddenly. "I don't like this place. Can you take me somewhere else?"

He bent lower, put his hand under her elbow and helped her to her feet. She came up from the couch with a spring, and stood before him, half-daring and half-shy.

Saltash kept his hold upon her arm, and turned her towards the wall beside the tall mantel-piece. She went with him readily enough, watching, eager-eyed, as he stretched his free hand up to the oak panelling.

"Now I'm going to find out all your secrets!" she said boyishly.

"Not quite all," said Saltash.

There came the click of a spring and the panel slid to one side, leaving a long, narrow opening before them. Toby glanced up at him and, with a small, nestling movement, slipped within the circle of his arm. It tightened upon her in an instant, and she laughed again, a quivering, exultant laugh.

"I'm glad you've come," she said.

They paused on the edge of darkness, but there was no hesitation about Toby. She was all athrill with expectancy. Then in a flash the room before them was illuminated, and they entered.

It was a strange chamber, panelled, built in the shape of a cone. A gla.s.s dome formed its roof, and there was no window besides. The lights were cunningly concealed behind a weirdly coloured fresco of Oriental figures.

But one lamp alone on a small table burned with a still red glow. This lamp was supported on the stuffed skin of a hooded cobra.

Toby's eyes were instantly drawn towards it. They shone with excitement.

Again she glanced up at the man beside her.

"What a wonderful place!"

"Better than the music-room?" suggested Saltash.

"Oh, yes, far better." Her shining eyes sought his. "It might be your cabin on the yacht."

He stretched a hand behind him and again the spring clicked. Then he drew her forward. They trod on tiger skins. Everywhere were tiger skins, on the floor and on a deep low settee by the table which was the only other furniture the room possessed. Toby was clinging to the arm that held her, clinging very closely. There was unspoken entreaty in her hold. For there was something about Saltash at the moment, something unfamiliar and unfathomable that frightened her. His careless drollery, his two-edged ironies, were nought to her; but his silence was a barrier unknown that she could not pa.s.s. She could only cling voicelessly to the support he had not denied her.

He brought her to the settee and stood still. His face was strangely grim.

"Well--Toby?" he said.

She twisted in his hold and faced him, but she kept his arm wound close about her, her hand tight gripped on his. "Are you--angry with me for coming?" she asked him quiveringly. "I--had to come."

He looked down into her eyes. "_Bien, pet.i.te!_ Then you need--a friend,"

he said.

Her answering look was piteous. "I need--you," she said.

One of the old gay smiles flashed across his face. He seemed to challenge her to lightness. The grimness went out of his eyes like a shadow.

"And so you have come, _ma mignonette_, at the dead of night--at the risk of your reputation--and mine--"

Toby made an excruciating grimace, and broke impulsively in upon him. "It wasn't the dead of night when I started. I've been waiting hours--hours.

But it doesn't matter. I've found you--at last. And you can't send me away now--like you did before--because--because--well, I've no one to go to. You might have done it if you'd come down earlier. But you can't do it--now." Her voice thrilled on a high note of triumph. "You've got to keep me--now. I've come--to stay."