The Guests Of Hercules Part 50

When they had bidden their hostess good-night, and their doors were locked, Lord and Lady Dauntrey stood together for a moment at one of the long windows of the larger room. This Eve had taken, and on the bed with the high, carved walnut back lay the night-dress borrowed from Mary.

Through torn clouds a few stars glittered like coins in a gashed purse, and very far away to the west, at the end of all things visible, was a faint, ghostly gleam which meant the dazzling lights of the Casino and its terrace, at Monte Carlo.

Lady Dauntrey rested against her husband's shoulder, as if his companionship were dear and essential to her. She had done this often before their marriage and shortly after; but not once for many months now. It seemed to him that he could remember every one of the caresses which had bound him to her as with ropes from which he could not, and did not desire to, escape. A long time ago in South Africa, when she had first made him love her, she had been pleased when he called her his "beautiful tigress." She had kissed him for the name, and said that of all animals she adored tigers; that she believed she had been a tigress once; and when they were rich--as they would be some time--he must buy her a splendid tiger skin to lie on. This very day the tigress thought of her had been in his heart, but not as a loving fancy. She had seemed to him cruel and terrible as a hungry animal despising her mate because he fails to bring her prey as food. He had said to himself in shame and desolation of soul that she had never cared for him really, but only for what he might give; and because he had disappointed her, giving little, she hated and would perhaps leave him, to better herself. Now the touch of her shoulder against his breast, and the tired, childlike tucking of her head into his neck, warmed his blood that had run sluggishly and cold as the blood of a prisoner in a cell. New courage flowed back to his heart. Vague thoughts of suicide flapped away like night-birds with the coming of light. If Eve cared for him still he had the incentive to live.

"That place seems to haunt us," she murmured, as they stood together in seeming love and need of one another. He knew what she meant. Their eyes were on the distant glimmer of Monte Carlo. "Its influence follows us."

"From here the lights look pure white, like the lights of some mysterious paradise, seen far off across the sea," Dauntrey said.

"No," his wife answered; "to me they're more like the light that comes out of graves at night time; the strange, phosph.o.r.escent light of decayed, dead things. We've done with that lure light forever, haven't we?"

"I suppose so!" A sigh of yearning and regret heaved his breast, under the nestling head. "If you're going to be kind to me again, Eve, I can do anything and go anywhere."

"Good!" she said in the soft, purring tone which had made him think of her as a beautiful tigress, when their life together lay before them. "I _will_ be kind, very kind, if only you'll prove that you really love me.

You never have proved it yet."

"Haven't I? I thought I had, often--to-day, even----"

"Oh! don't let's go back to that. I can't bear to think of it. We weren't ourselves--either of us. If I was cross, forgive me, dear."

"I deserved it all," he said, pressing her against his side. "Now you're making me a man again."

"You must be a man--a strong man--if you want me to love you as I once did, and as I _can_ love. Oh, and I can--I can love! You don't know yet how much."

"What shall I have to do?" he asked. "Do you mean anything in particular, or----"

"Yes, I mean something in particular."

"I'll do it, darling, whatever it may be. I feel the strength."

She wrapped him in her arms and clung to him, talking softly, with her lips against his hollowed cheek, so that her breath fluttered softly past it with each half-whispered word.

"That's a promise," she said. "I won't let you break it. But you won't want to break it. I'll love you so much--enough to make up for everything. Enough to keep you from remembering those lights over there."

"They're nothing to me," he a.s.sured her. "I don't believe I'll ever want to see them again. There are other places where I can do better than at Monte Carlo. Baccarat's a safer game than roulette or trente et quarante, I begin to think, and I could adapt the system----"

"Never mind the system now! You'll have to go back to Monte to-morrow to get your eighty pounds, and a cheque cashed for Mary Grant--a big one, I hope. Then you can redeem some of our things. One trunk for each of us will be enough, for I want to go a long way off and travel quickly."

"Where do you want to go?" Dauntrey asked, indulgently, in a dreaming voice, as if her love and the force of her fierce vitality were hypnotizing him. He spoke as if he were so near happiness again that he would gladly go anywhere, to find it once more with Eve.

"I haven't made up my mind about that yet."

"Oh, I thought you had! You always make up your mind so quickly when you want anything."

"I've been putting my mind to what we must do first, before we go away.

There _is_ a thing to do; and it will have to be done soon, or it will be too late."

Her tone was suddenly sharp as a knife rubbed against steel.

"What thing?" her husband asked, startled out of his dream.

Instantly she softened again and clung to him and round him more closely than before. "Darling," she said, "you've just told me that you'd do anything for my sake."

"So I would. So I will."

"Sometimes men are ready to do anything except the one thing the women who love them ask them to do."

"It won't be like that with me, Eve. Try me and see."

"I will. I want you to go with me far, far away, where we've never been before, to make a new life, and belong only to each other. But before we go, so that we can be happy and not wretched, miserable beggars, we--not you alone--but we two together must do what will give us money to start all over again. And listen to this, dearest: it will be a thing which will draw us so closely together that we'll be one in body and soul forever and ever, in this world and the next."

"You almost frighten me," Dauntrey said.

"Don't be frightened," she implored, her mouth close to his. "If you're frightened, you'll fail me--and then it's all over between us."

"All over between us!"

"Yes, because if you fail, you break your solemn promise, and you're not the man I thought you were--not the man I can love. I'll go out of your life and find some one who is stronger, because I've got too much love in me to waste."

"What do you want me to do?"

"To find a plan, at once--to-morrow, after you come back--for us to get Mary Grant's jewels and all the money you bring to her from Monte Carlo, and then to go safely away--together, where we can be happy."

"Good G.o.d!" He broke loose from her clinging arms, and pushed her off.

"You want me to murder the girl!"

They faced one another in the dreary glimmer of the two candles. For an instant neither spoke, but each could hear the other breathing in the semi-darkness.

"What a horrible thought!" Eve flung herself upon him again and caught his hands, which had been hot as they clasped hers but had suddenly grown cold, as a stone is chilled when the sun leaves it in shadow. He did not s.n.a.t.c.h his hands away, but they gave no answering pressure. He bowed his head like a man who is very tired, having come to the end of his strength.

"Have we sunk to this?" he groaned under his breath, yet Eve caught the words.

"Wait! You've misunderstood me," she rea.s.sured him eagerly. "I don't want you to--take her life. Only--we must have money, and those jewels of hers--she doesn't need them. We do. And we're _meant_ to have them, else why should we have been thrown in her way just at the right moment?

Why should we be now in this lonely house, no one knowing that we're here? It's Destiny. I saw that when she spoke about the jewel-case.

Didn't you guess what was in my mind?"

"I was past guessing," Dauntrey said. "I had enough to think of without putting problems to myself."

"It's lucky my brain kept awake. That was why I proposed driving here instead of coming by train, where somebody might have seen us: that was why I wouldn't call for the luggage at Mrs. Winter's."

"Do you dream for a moment that if--if there were any inquiry the police wouldn't be able find out we were in this thing?" Dauntrey asked in bitter impatience. "How like a woman!"

"I'm not so simple. If we're clever, there won't be an inquiry. And even if there were any accident, we should be all right. There'd be nothing against us. And we'd be out of the way before the fuss began. They couldn't even get at us as witnesses."

"What's in your mind? You talk as if you had some definite plan."

"I have. But it depends on you. Surely with all your knowledge, you know a drug that can temporarily weaken a person's will? There must be something that girl could take which would make her willing to follow our suggestions? She's in such a nervous condition, a sudden illness would seem quite natural. Once she was in the right state, I could persuade her to give us her jewels and some cheque. Then we wouldn't let the gra.s.s grow under our feet. We'd be off--and in no danger."

"There's no drug of that sort," said Dauntrey.