The Way of an Eagle Part 17

It did not come very readily. Seconds had pa.s.sed into minutes before she spoke, and then her words did not bear directly upon the matter in hand.

"I hope it was quite convenient to you to come to-night. I was a little afraid you would have an engagement."

He remembered the urgency of her summons and decided that she spoke thus conventionally to gain time. On another occasion he might have humoured such a whim, but to-night it goaded him almost beyond endurance. Surely they had pa.s.sed that stage, he and she.

With an effort he controlled himself, but it sounded in his voice as he made reply.

"My engagement to you stands before any other. What is it you want to say to me?"

Her expression changed slightly at his words, and a shade of apprehension flitted across her face. She threw him a swift upward glance, half-scared, half-questioning. Unconsciously her hands locked themselves together.

"I want you not to be vexed, Nick," she said, in a low voice.

He made an abrupt movement. "My dear girl, don't be silly. What's the trouble? Let me hear it and have done."

His tone was rea.s.suring. She looked up at him with more confidence.

"Yes, I am silly," she acknowledged. "I'm perfectly idiotic to fancy for a moment that it can make any difference to you. Nick, I have been thinking things over seriously, and--and--I find that I can't marry you after all. I hope you won't mind, though of course--" she uttered a little laugh that was piteously insincere--"I know you will feel bound to say you do. But--anyhow--you needn't say it to me, because I understand. I thought it was only fair to let you know at once."

"Thank you," said Nick, and there was that in his voice which was like the sudden snapping of a tense spring.

She saw his hands clench with the words, and an overwhelming sense of danger swept over her. Instinctively she started to her feet. If a tiger had leapt in upon her through the window she could not have been more terrified.

Nick took a single stride towards her, and she stopped as if struck powerless. His face was the face she had once seen bent over a man in his death-agony, convulsed with pa.s.sion, savage, merciless,--the face of a devil.

She shrank away from him in nameless terror, gasping and panic-stricken. "Nick," she whispered, "are you--mad?"

He answered her jerkily in a strangled voice that was like the snarl of a beast. "Yes--I am mad. If you try to run away from me now--I won't answer for myself."

She gazed at him with widening eyes. "But, but--" she faltered--"I--I don't understand. Oh, Nick, you frighten me!"

It was the cry of a child, lost, bewildered, piteous. Had she withstood him, had she sought to escape, the demon in him would have burst the last restraining bond, and have shattered in one moment of unshackled violence all the chivalrous patience which during the last few weeks he had spent his whole strength to achieve.

But that cry of desolation pierced straight through his madness, cutting deeper than reproach or protest, wounding him to the heart.

With a sound that was half-sob, half-groan, he turned his back upon her and covered his face.

For a s.p.a.ce of seconds he stood so, not moving, seeming not even to breathe. And Muriel, steadying herself by the mantelpiece, watched him with a panting heart.

Then abruptly, moving with a quick, light tread that made no sound, he crossed the room to one of the wide-flung windows and stopped there.

From across the quiet garden there came the strains of "The Blue Danube," fitful, alluring, plaintive--that waltz to which countless lovers have danced and wooed and whispered through the years. Muriel longed intensely to shut it out, to stop her ears, to make some noise to drown it. Her nerves were all on edge, and she felt as if its persistent sweetness would drive her mad.

Surely Nick felt the same; but if he did, he made no sign. He stood without movement with his face to the night, gripping the woodwork of the window with both hands, every bone of them standing out in sharp, skeleton lines.

She watched him, fascinated, for a long time, but he did not stir from his tense position. He seemed to have utterly forgotten her presence in the room behind him. And still that maddening waltz kept on and on and on till she felt sick and dazed with listening to it. It seemed as if for the rest of her life she would never again be free from those haunting strains.

The soft shutting of the window made her start and quiver. Nick had moved at last, and her heart began to throb thick and fast as he turned. She tried to read his face, but she could not even see it. There was a swimming mist before her eyes, and her limbs felt powerless, heavy as lead.

In every nerve, she felt him drawing near, and in an agony of helplessness she awaited him, all the surging horror of that night when he had drugged her rushing back upon her with tenfold force.

Again she saw him as she had seen him then, monstrous, silent, terrible, a man of superhuman strength, whose mastery appalled her. Again in desperate fear she shrank from him, seeking wildly, fruitlessly, for a way of escape.

And then came the consciousness of his arm about her, supporting her; and the voice that had quieted her wildest delirium was speaking in her ear.

"The goblins are all gone, dear," she heard him say. "Don't be frightened."

He led her gently to a sofa and made her sit down, bending over her and softly rubbing her cold cheek.

"Tell me when you're better," he said, "and we'll talk this thing out.

But don't be frightened anyway. It's all right."

The tenderness of voice and touch, the sudden cessation of all tension, the swift putting to flight of her fear, all combined to produce in her a sense of relief so immense that the last shred of her self-control went from her utterly. She laid her head down upon the cushions and burst into a storm of tears.

Nick's hand continued to stroke and soothe, but he said no more while her paroxysm of weeping lasted. He who was usually so ready of speech, so quick to console, found for once no words wherewith to comfort her.

Only when her distress had somewhat spent itself, he bent a little lower and dried her tears with his own handkerchief, his lips twitching as he did it, his eyes flickering so rapidly that it was impossible to read their expression.

"There!" he said at last. "There's nothing to cry about. Finish what you were saying when I interrupted you. I think you were in the middle of throwing me over, weren't you? At least, you had got through that part of it, and were just going to tell me why."

His tone was rea.s.suringly flippant.

Looking up at him, she saw the old kindly, quizzical look on his face.

He met her eyes, nodding shrewdly.

"Let's have it," he said, "straight from the shoulder. You're tired of me, eh?"

She drew back from him, but with no gesture of shrinking. "I'm tired of everything--everything," she said, a little pa.s.sionate quiver in her voice. "I wish--I wish with all my heart, you had left me to die."

"Is that the grievance?" said Nick. He sat down on the head of the sofa, and drove his fist into the cushion. "If I could explain things to you, I would. But you're such a chicken, aren't you, dear, and about as easily scared? Since when have you harboured this grudge against me?"

The gentle banter of his tone did not deceive her into imagining that she could trifle with him, nor was she addicted to trifling. She made answer with a certain warmth of indignation that seemed to have kindled on its own initiative and wholly without her volition.

"I haven't, I don't. I'm not so absurd. It isn't that at all."

"You're not tired of me?" queried Nick.

"No."

"If I were to die to-morrow for instance--and there's no telling, you know, Muriel,--you'd be a little sorry?"

Again, though scarcely aware of it, she resented the question. "Why do you ask me that? Of course I should be sorry."

"Of course," acquiesced Nick. "But all the king's horses and all the king's men wouldn't bring me back again. That's the worst of being mortal. You can't dance at your own funeral."

"What do you mean?" There was a note of exasperation in Muriel's voice. She saw that he had an object in view, but his method of attaining it was too tortuous for her straightforward understanding.

He explained himself with much patience. His mood had so completely changed that she could barely recall to mind the vision that had so appalled her but a few minutes before.