The Hollow of Her Hand Part 57

He sailed from Cherbourg on the first steamship calling there.

Awake, he thought of her; asleep, he dreamed of Challis Wrandall.

There was something uncanny in the persistence with which that ruthless despoiler of peace forced his way into his dreams, to the absolute exclusion of all else. The voyage home was made horrid by these nightly reminders of a man he scarcely knew, yet dreaded.

He became more or less obsessed by the idea that an evil spell had descended upon him in the shape of a ghostly influence.

The weeks pa.s.sed slowly for Hetty. There were no letters from Sara, but an occasional line or so from Mr. Carroll. She had made Brandon Booth promise that he would not write to her, nor was he to expect anything from her. If her intention was to cut herself off entirely from her recent world and its people, as she might have done in another way by pursuing the time-honoured and rather cowardly plan of entering a convent, she was soon to discover that success in the undertaking brought a deeper sense of exile than she could have imagined herself able to endure at the outset. She found herself more utterly alone and friendless than at any time in her life. The chance companions she formed at Interlaken,--despite a well-meant reserve,--served only to increase her feeling of loneliness and despair. The very natural attentions of men, young and old, depressed her, instead of encouraging that essentially feminine thing called vanity. She lived as one without an aim, without a single purpose except to close one day that she might begin the next.

After a time, she went on to Lucerne. Here the life on the surface was gayer, and she was roused from her state of lethargy in spite of herself. Once, from her little balcony in the National, she saw two of her old acquaintances in the chorus at the Gaiety. They were wearing many pearls. Another time, she met them in the street.

She was rather quietly dressed. They did not notice her. But the prosperous Hebraic gentlemen who attended them were not so careless.

One day a card was brought to her rooms. For the next two weeks she had a true and unavoidable friend in Lucerne. It would appear that Mrs. Rowe-Martin had not been apprised of the rift in the Wrandall lute. She had no reason to consider the exclusive Miss Castleton as anything but the most desirable of companions. Mrs.

Rowe-Martin was not long in finding out (though how she did it, heaven knows!), that Lord Murgatroyd's grandniece was no longer the intimate of that impossible person, Sara Gooch. She couldn't think of Sara without thinking of Gooch.

But at last Mrs. Rowe-Martin departed, much to Hetty's secret relief, but not before she had increased the girl's burthens by introducing her into a cold-nosed cosmopolitan set from which there were but three ways of escape. She refused to marry one of them, denied another the privilege of making love to her, and declined to play auction bridge with all of them. They were not long in dropping her, although it must be said there was real regret among the men.

From Mrs. Rowe-Martin and others she heard that Mrs. Redmond Wrandall and Vivian were to be in Scotland in October, for somebody-or-other's christening, and that Leslie had been doing some really wonderful flying at Pau.

"I am SO glad, my dear," said Mrs. Rowe-Martin, "that you refused to marry Leslie. He is a cad. Besides, you would have been in a perpetual state of nerves over his flying."

Of Sara, there was no news, as might have been expected. Mrs. Rowe-Martin made it very clear that Sara was a respectable person,--but heavens!

The chill days of autumn came and the crowd began to dwindle. Hetty made preparations to join in the exodus. As the days grew short and bleak, she found herself thinking more and more of the happy-hearted, symbolic d.i.c.ky-bird on a faraway window ledge. His life was neither a travesty nor a tragedy; hers was both of these.

Something told her too that Brandon Booth had wormed the truth out of Sara, and that she would never see him again. It hurt her to think that while Sara believed in her, the man who loved her did not. It is a way men have.

On the eve of her departure, an event transpired that was to alter the whole course of her life; or, more properly speaking, it was destined to put her back into an old groove.

She was walking along the quay, in the dusk of early evening, her mind full of the next day's journey over the mountains to Milan.

The wind was cold; about her neck there was a boa of white ostrich feathers, one end of which fluttered gaily over her shoulder. She was continually turning half-way about against the wind to reclaim the truant end of the boa. It was in the act of doing so on one occasion that her attention was drawn to two men who sauntered across the avenue from the approach to the Schweitzerhof.

She stopped still in her tracks, petrified by amazement--and alarm, if we may antic.i.p.ate the sensation by a second or two.

One of the men was Leslie Wrandall, the other--her own father!

In a flash came the impulse to avoid them, to fly before they recognised her. But even as she turned and started off with a sudden acceleration of speed, a shout a.s.sailed her ears, and then came the swift rush of footsteps over the hard pavement.

"Hetty! As I live!" cried Leslie, planting himself in front of her. His astonishment alone kept him from laying hands upon her, to make sure that she was really there. "Well, of all the--"

She extended her hand. "This is a surprise," she said, with admirable control. "I hadn't the faintest notion you were in Lucerne."

"By Jove!" he mumbled, shaking hands with her but still dazed and uncertain. He suddenly remembered his companion. Turning with a shout, he brought the soldierly, middle-aged gentleman about-face with scant ceremony. "Hey! Colonel Castleton! See who's here!

Doesn't this bowl you over completely?"

Colonel Castleton, sallow, ascetic, deliberate in his movements, raised his gla.s.s to his eye as he came toward them.

"'Pon my soul!" burst from his astonished lips a second afterward.

He stopped short and his jaw dropped in a most unmilitary fashion.

"'Pon my soul! It CAN'T be my daughter!" He seemed to be having difficulty not only with his head but with his feet; neither appeared to be operating intelligently. As a matter of fact, he stood for an instant on his toes and then on his heels. He was perilously near to being bowled over completely and literally.

Hetty was the first to recover. She advanced with a fair a.s.sumption of warmth in her manner. Her heart, belying her, was as cold as ice.

"Father!" she cried, holding out her hands.

He grasped them, and looked wildly about.

"Kiss me!" she whispered imperatively.

He stooped and brushed her cheek with his long moustache.

"Good G.o.d!" he muttered, still incredulous.

She turned to the excited Leslie with a quavering smile on her lips.

"We haven't seen each other in twelve years, Mr. Wrandall," she said.

"'Pon my soul!" added her father for the third time, thereby reaching the limit of emphasis, having placed it differently each time.

Leslie surprised himself by rising to the occasion. It occurred to him that they would like to be alone for a little while at least.

"Then, I'll stroll on, Colonel," he said. "By Jove!" The mild expletive was a tribute to Providence.

Not a word was spoken by father or daughter until Wrandall was many rods away.

"Where did you meet Leslie Wrandall?" she demanded, showing which way her thoughts ran. They were far from filial.

"Aviation field--somewhere," said he in a vague sort of way. "Pau, I dare say. What are you doing here? I hear you've cut loose from Wrandall's sister-in-law. Was that a sensible thing to do?"

"I fancy you've been misinformed," said she in an emotionless voice, but offered no further word of explanation.

"Shan't we sit down here on this bench, my dear?" suggested the Colonel, distinctly ill at ease.

"For the sake of appearances, yes," she a.s.sented.

Leslie, looking over his shoulder from a distance, saw them sitting together on one of the outer benches.

"By Jove!" he said to himself once more, this time with acc.u.mulative perplexity.

"See here, Hetty, my child," began the Colonel nervously, "it's all nonsense your taking the stand you do toward me. I am your father.

I repeat, it's all nonsense--d.a.m.ned nonsense. You've got to--"

"Has it taken you all these years to find out that it's nonsense?"

she demanded, her eyes flashing. "It's no good arguing, father. I don't like you. There is a very good reason why I should despise you. We won't go into it. After this meeting, we go our separate ways again. This, it seems, was unavoidable. I shan't ask anything of you, and I advise you to ask nothing of me."

"My G.o.d, that a child should utter such words to a father!" he groaned.

"A father!" she cried so scornfully that he must have shrivelled had he been any one else but Colonel Castleton of the Indian Corps.

As it was, he had the grace to turn a very bright red. "A n.o.ble father you have been! And what a splendid, self-sacrificing husband you were. No! I can't forget how my mother lived and died. You call it nonsense. Well, I call it something else. You took a most effective way to punish my poor mother for having the temerity to marry an English gentleman. Thank G.o.d, I have my mother to look back to for my own ideas of gentility."

"You never understood the way things went wrong between your mother and me," he said harshly. "She wasn't all you may be pleased to think she was. She--"