The Devil's Paw Part 17

Give it back to me. It is mine. I swear--"

His hands gripped her shoulders. She was conscious that he was looking past her, and that there was horror in his eyes. The words died away on her lips. She, too, turned her head. The door of the sitting room had been opened from outside. Lord Maltenby was standing there in his dressing gown, his hand stretched out behind him as though to keep some one from following him.

"Julian," he demanded sternly, "what is the meaning of this?"

For a moment Julian was speechless, bereft of words, or sense of movement. Catherine still knelt there, trembling. Then Lord Maltenby was pushed unceremoniously to one side. It was the Princess who entered.

"Catherine!" she screamed. "Catherine!"

The girl rose slowly to her feet. The Princess was leaning on the back of a chair, dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief and sobbing hysterically. Lord Shervinton's voice was heard outside.

"What the devil is all this commotion?" he demanded.

He, too, crossed the threshold and remained transfixed. The Earl closed the door firmly and stood with his back against it.

"Come," he said, "we will have no more spectators to this disgraceful scene. Julian, kindly remember you are not in your bachelor apartments.

You are in the house over which your mother presides. Have you any reason to offer, or excuse to urge, why I should not ask this young woman to leave at daybreak?"

"I have no excuse, sir," Julian answered, "I certainly have a reason."

"Name it?"

"Because you would be putting an affront upon the lady who has promised to become my wife. I am quite aware that her presence in my sitting room is unusual, but under the circ.u.mstances I do not feel called upon to offer a general explanation. I shall say nothing beyond the fact that a single censorious remark will be considered by me as an insult to my affianced wife."

The Princess abandoned her chorus of mournful sounds and dried her eyes.

Lord Waltenby was speechless.

"But why all this mystery?" the Princess asked pitifully. "It is a great event, this. Why did you not tell me, Catherine, when you came to my room?"

"There has been some little misunderstanding," Julian explained. "It is now removed. It brought us," he added, "very near tragedy. After what I have told you, I beg whatever may seem unusual to you in this visit with which Catherine has honoured me will be forgotten."

Lord Maltenby drew a little breath of relief. Fortunately, he missed that slight note of theatricality in Julian's demeanour which might have left the situation still dubious.

"Very well, then, Julian," he decided, "there is nothing more to be said upon the matter. Miss Abbeway, you will allow me to escort you to your room. Such further explanations as you may choose to offer us can be very well left now until the morning."

"You will find that the whole blame for this unconventional happening devolves upon me," Julian declared.

"It was entirely my fault," Catherine murmured repentantly. "I am so sorry to have given any one cause for distress. I do not know, even now--"

She turned towards Julian. He leaned forward and raised her fingers to his lips.

"Catherine," he said, "every one is a little overwrought. Our misunderstanding is finished. Princess, I shall try to win your forgiveness to-morrow."

The Princess smiled faintly.

"Catherine is so unusual," she complained.

Julian held open the door, and they all filed away down the corridor, from which Lord Shervinton had long since beat a hurried retreat. He stood there until they reached the bend. Catherine, who was leaning on his father's arm, turned around. She waved her hand a little irresolutely. She was too far off for him to catch her expression, but there was something pathetic in her slow, listless walk, from which all the eager grace of a few hours ago seemed to have departed.

It was not until they were nearing London, on the following afternoon, that Catherine awoke from a lethargy during which she had spent the greater portion of the journey. From her place in the corner seat of the compartment in which they had been undisturbed since leaving Wells, she studied her companion through half-closed eyes. Julian was reading an article in one of the Reviews and remained entirely unconscious of her scrutiny. His forehead was puckered, his mouth a little contemptuous. It was obvious that he did not wholly approve of what he was reading.

Catherine, during those few hours of solitude, was conscious of a subtle, slowly growing change in her mental att.i.tude towards her companion. Until the advent of those dramatic hours at Maltenby, she had regarded him as a pleasant, even a charming acquaintance, but as belonging to a type with which she was entirely and fundamentally out of sympathy. The cold chivalry of his behaviour on the preceding night and the result of her own reflections as she sat there studying him made her inclined to doubt the complete accuracy of her first judgment. She found something unexpectedly intellectual and forceful in his present concentration,--in the high, pale forehead, the deep-set but alert eyes.

His long, loose frame was yet far from ungainly; his grey tweed suit and well-worn brown shoes the careless attire of a man who has no need to rely on his tailor for distinction. His hands, too, were strong and capable. She found herself suddenly wishing that the man himself were different, that he belonged to some other and more congenial type.

Julian, in course of time, laid down the Review which he had been studying and looked out of the window.

"We shall be in London in three quarters of an hour," he announced politely.

She sat up and yawned, produced her vanity case, peered into the mirror, and used her powder puff with the somewhat piquant a.s.surance of the foreigner. Then she closed her dressing case with a snap, pulled down her veil, and looked across at him.

"And how," she asked demurely, "does my fiance propose to entertain me this evening?"

He raised his eyebrows.

"With the exception of one half-hour," he replied unexpectedly, "I am wholly at your service."

"I am exacting," she declared. "I demand that half-hour also."

"I am afraid that I could not allow anything to interfere with one brief call which I must pay."

"In Downing Street?"

"Precisely!"

"You go to visit your friend at the Foreign Office?"

"Immediately I have called at my rooms."

She looked away from him out of the window. Beneath her veil her eyes were a little misty. She saw nothing of the trimly part.i.tioned fields, the rolling pastoral country. Before her vision tragedies seemed to pa.s.s,--the blood-stained paraphernalia of the battlefield, the empty, stricken homes, the sobbing women in black, striving to comfort their children whilst their own hearts were breaking. When she turned away from the window, her face was hardened. Once more she found herself almost hating the man who was her companion. Whatever might come afterwards, at that moment she had the sensations of a murderess.

"You may know when you sleep to-night," she exclaimed, "that you will be the blood-guiltiest man in the world!"

"I would not dispute the t.i.tle," he observed politely, "with your friend the Hohenzollern."

"He is not my friend," she retorted, her tone vibrating with pa.s.sion. "I am a traitress in your eyes because I have received a communication from Germany. From whom does it come, do you think? From the Court? From the Chancellor or one of his myrmidons? Fool! It comes from those who hate the whole military party. It comes from the Germany whose people have been befooled and strangled throughout the war. It comes from the people whom your politicians have sought to reach and failed."

"The suggestion is interesting," he remarked coldly, "but improbable."

"Do you know," she said, leaning a little forward and looking at him fixedly, "if I were really your fiancee--worse! if I were really your wife--I think that before long I should be a murderess!"

"Do you dislike me as much as all that?"

"I hate you! I think you are the most pigheaded, obstinate, self-satisfied, ignorant creature who ever ruined a great cause."

He accepted the lash of her words without any sign of offence,--seemed, indeed, inclined to treat them reflectively.

"Come," he protested, "you have wasted a lot of breath in abusing me.

Why not justify it? Tell me the story of yourself and those who are a.s.sociated with you in this secret correspondence with Germany? If you are working for a good end, let me know of it. You blame me for judging you, for maintaining a certain definite poise. You are not reasonable, you know."