The Return of the Prodigal Part 53

"Won't she? She's going next Monday. It's all arranged. I've told her that she's in her father's way, that he wants to marry, and keeps single for her sake. And she believes it."

He walked up and down with his hands in his pockets, a prey to bewildering emotions.

"It's ingenious and delightful, your plot," said he. "But I can't say that I grasp all the _minutiae_, the practical details. For instance (it's a brutal question, but), who's going to provide the--the funds for this expedition to Scandinavia--or was it Abyssinia?"

"Funds? Oh, that's all right. She's got any amount of her own, though you wouldn't know it."

"I didn't know it." He champed his upper lip. He could not in the least account for the feeling, but he was bitterly, basely disappointed at this last revelation. Miss Tancred was independent.

Up till now he could not bring himself to believe in her flight; he did not want to believe in it; it would have been a relief to him to know that the strange bird's wings were clipped.

"It was her mother's; what the poor lady traveled on, I suppose.

Frida might have been enjoying it all the time, only, you see, there was the Colonel. That's why she wants him to marry Mrs. Fazakerly, though she'd rather die than own it."

"Why shouldn't she own it?"

"Because she can't trust her motives, trust herself. I never saw a woman fight so shy of herself."

"Then that's what she was thinking of when she said she was afraid of her own feelings."

"Oh! So she _did_ say it, did she?"

"She said that or something very like it. You think that's what she must have meant?" He appealed to her humbly, as to one who had mastered the difficult subject of Frida Tancred.

"Why, whatever else _could_ she have meant, stupid?"

There was an awkward silence, broken, or rather mended, by Miss Chatterton saying, as she stood with her hand on the door:

"Look here, you're not going to back out of it. You've promised to stand by and see us through with it, honor bright."

"I promised nothing of the sort, but I'll stand by all right."

"You may have a bad time. The Colonel will kick up an awful fuss; but remember, you're not in the least responsible. I'm the criminal."

It was as if she had said, "Don't exaggerate your importance. I, not you, am Miss Tancred's savior and deliverer."

He stiffened visibly. "I shall not quarrel with you for the _role_."

XII

Monday was the day of the great deliverance, the day that was fixed for Frida Tancred's flight. And, as if it meant to mark an era and a hegira and the beginning of revolution, it distinguished itself from other days by suitable signs and portents. It dawned through a brooding haze that threatened heat, then changed its mind, thickened and ma.s.sed itself for storm. While he was dressing, Durant was made aware of the meteorological disturbance by an incessant tap-tap on the barometer as the Colonel consulted his oracle in the hall. The official announcement was made at breakfast.

"There is a change in the gla.s.s," said the Colonel. "Mr. Durant brought the fine weather with him and Miss Chatterton is taking it away."

"I'm taking something else away beside the weather," said she.

But the spirit of prophecy was upon him.

"To judge by to-day's forecast, I think we shall see Frida back again before the fine weather."

Whereupon Durant smiled and Miss Chatterton laughed, which gave him an agreeable sense of being witty as well as prophetic.

By ten o'clock the hand of the barometer had crept far past "Change"; by noon it had swung violently to "Stormy, with much rain"; by lunchtime a constrained and awkward dialogue was broken by the rude voice of the thunder. The Colonel took out his watch, timed the thunder and lightning, and calculated the approaches of the storm. "Seven miles away from us at present," said he.

It hung so low that the growling and groaning seemed to come from the woods round Coton Manor; the landscape darkened to a metallic purplish green, then paled to the livid color of jade under a sallow sky. There was a swift succession of transformation scenes, when, between the bursts of thunder, the park, swathed in sheet lightning, shot up behind the windows, now blue, now amethyst, now rose, now green. Then the storm suddenly shifted its quarters and broke through a rampart of solid darkness piled high in the southwest.

"Fifteen seconds," said the Colonel, "between that flash and the thunder."

Among these phenomena the Colonel moved like a little gentleman enchanted; he darted to and fro, and in and out, as if the elements were his natural home; his hurried notes in the little memorandum book outsped the lightning. For the last thirty years there had not been such weather in the meteorological history of Wickshire.

But the storm was only in its playful infancy; the forked lightning and the rain were yet to come. The last train up, timed to meet the express at the junction, left Whithorn-in-Arden at 3.10, and it was a good hour's drive to the station. As they toyed with the lightning on their plates Durant and Miss Chatterton looked at Frida. Fate, the weather, and the Colonel, a trinity of hostile powers, were arrayed against her, and the three were one.

At the stroke of two the Colonel remarked blandly, "There will be no driving to the station to-day, so I have countermanded the brougham."

They were dressed ready for the journey, and, as the Colonel spoke Frida got up, drew down her veil and put on her gloves.

"That was a pity," she said quietly, "seeing that we've got to go."

The Colonel was blander than ever; he waved his hand. "Go, by all means," said he, "but not in my brougham. There I put my foot down."

("Not there, not there, oh, gallant Colonel," said Durant to himself, "but where you have always put it, on Frida's lovely neck.")

She started, looked steadily at her father, then, to Durant's surprise, she shrugged her shoulders; not as an Englishwoman shrugs them, but in the graceful Continental manner. The movement suggested that the foreign strain in her was dominant at the moment; it further implied that she was shaking her neck free from the Colonel's foot. She walked to the window and looked out upon the storm. With the neck strained slightly forward, her nostrils quivering, her whole figure eager and lean and tense, she looked like some fine and nervous animal, say a deerhound ready to slip from the leash.

As she looked there was a sound as if heaven were ripped asunder, and the forked lightning hurled itself from that dark rampart in the southwest and went zig-zagging against the pane. "Only ten seconds,"

said the Colonel; "the storm is bursting right over our heads."

Frida too had consulted her watch; she turned suddenly, rang the bell, and gave orders to a trembling footman. "Tell Randall to put Polly in the dogcart. He must drive to the station at once."

The answer came back from the stables that Randall had shut himself into the loose box and covered himself with straw, "to keep the lightning off of him. He dursn't go near a steel bit, not if it was to save his life, m'm, and as for driving to the station----"

It was too true; Randall, horse-breaker, groom and coachman, excellent, invaluable creature at all other times, was a brainless coward in a thunderstorm.

"If we don't go to-day, we can't go till to-morrow," said Georgie Chatterton, and she nodded at Durant to remind him that in that case his departure would be postponed till Thursday.

Frida too turned toward him. "If I don't go to-day, I shall never go."

He understood. She was afraid, afraid of what might come between her and her deliverance, afraid of her fate, afraid of the conscience that was her will, afraid of her own fear, of the terror that would come upon her when she realized the full meaning of her l.u.s.t for life. To-morrow any or all of those things might turn her from the way; to-day she was strong; she held her life in her two hands. At any rate, she was not afraid of the weather. She would go straight to her end, through rain and lightning and thunderbolts and all the blue and yellow demons of the sky.

"Are you afraid, Georgie?"

"Of thunder and lightning?" asked Georgie pointedly. "No."

"All right, then. We've got forty-five minutes. I must put Polly into the cart myself. Five for that; forty to get to the station."

She strode off to the stables, followed by the footman and Durant.

Among them they forced Polly into the trap, and led her dancing to the porch, where Miss Chatterton stood, prepared for all weathers.

"I say," cried she, "this is all very well; but who's going to drive Polly there and back again?"