Cynthia's Chauffeur

“No number. Just drive slowly round the square and return to the Savoy Hotel.”

He eyed her curiously, but made no comment. Soon she was speeding up Regent Street, bent on gratifying the truly curious whim of seeing what manner of residence it was that Fitzroy occupied in London. Fate had failed in her weaving during the previous evening, but on the present occasion she combined warp and weft without any error.

The cab was crawling past the Fairholme mansion, and Cynthia’s astonished eyes were regarding its style and general air of magnificence with some degree of heart-sinking – for it did then seem to be true that Mrs. Devar’s original estimate of Fitzroy was correct – when a man sprang out of another taxi in front of the door, and glanced at her while in the very act of running up the steps. Recognition was mutual. Dale muttered under his breath a wholly unjustifiable assumption as to his future state, halted dubiously, and then signaled to Cynthia’s driver to stop. He strode towards her across the road, and thrust his head through the open window.

“Of course, miss,” he said roughly, “you don’t know what has happened?”

“No,” she said, too greatly surprised to resent his strange manner.

“Well,” he growled, “somebody’s been nearly killed on your account, that’s all.”

“Somebody,” she repeated, and her lips went white.

“Yes, you ought to guess well enough who it is. He and that rotten Frenchman fought a duel this morning on the sands near Calais, and Marinny as good as murdered him.”

Dale’s heart was sore against her as the cause of his master’s plight, but even in his own distress he was quick to see the shrinking terror in the girl’s eyes.

“Are you speaking of Mr. Fitzroy?” she demanded. “Are you telling the truth? Oh, for Heaven’s sake, man, tell me what you mean.”

“I mean what I say, miss,” said he more softly. “I have left him almost at death’s door in an hotel at Calais. That damned Frenchman … I beg your pardon, miss, but I can’t contain myself when I think of him – ran a sword through him this morning, and would have killed him outright if he hadn’t been stopped by some other gentlemen. And now, there he is, a-lying in the hotel, with a doctor and a nurse trying to coax the life back into him, while I had to scurry back here to tell his people.”

Some women might have shrieked and fainted – not so Cynthia. At that instant there was one thing to be done, and one only. She saw the open road, and took it without faltering or thought as to the future.

“When is the next train to Calais?” she asked.

“At nine o’clock to-night, miss.”

“Oh, God!” she wailed under her breath.

Dale’s voice grew even more sympathetic.

“Was you a-thinking of going to him, miss?” he asked.

“Would that I could fly there,” she moaned.

He scratched the back of his ear, for it was by such means that Dale sought inspiration.

“Dash it all!” he cried. “I wish I had seen you half an hour earlier. There is a train that leaves Charing Cross at twenty minutes past two. It goes by way of Folkestone and Boulogne, and from Boulogne one can get easy to Calais. Anyhow, what’s the use of talkin’ – it is too late.”

Cynthia glanced at her watch. It was just twenty-five minutes to three.

“How far is Folkestone?” was the immediate demand generated by her practical American brain.

“Seventy-two miles,” said the chauffeur, who knew his roads out of London.

“And what time does the boat leave?”

A light irradiated his face, and he swore volubly.

“We can do it!” he shouted. “By the Lord, we can do it! Are you game?”

Game? The light that leaped to her eyes was sufficient answer. He tore open the door of the cab, roaring to the driver:

“Round that corner to the right – quick – then into the mews at the back!”

Within two minutes the Mercury was attracting the attention of the police as it whirled through the traffic towards Westminster Bridge. Dale’s face was set like a block of granite. He had risked a good deal in leaving his master at the point of death at Calais; he was now risking more, far more, in rushing back to Calais again without having discharged the duty which had dragged him from that master’s bedside. But he thought he had secured the best physician London could bring to the sufferer’s aid, and the belief sustained him in an action that was almost heroic. He was a simple-minded fellow, with a marked taste for speed in both animals and machinery, but he had hit on one well-defined trait in human nature when he decided that if a man is dying for the sake of a woman the presence of that woman may cure when all else will fail.

CHAPTER XVI

THE END OF ONE TOUR: THE BEGINNING OF ANOTHER

Cynthia found him lying in a darkened room. The nurse had just raised some of the blinds; a dismal day was drawing to its close, and more light was needed ere she could distinguish marked bottles, and doses, and the rest of the appurtenances of dangerous illness.

An English nurse would have forbidden the presence of a stranger; this French one acted with more discretion if less of strict science.

“Madam is his sister, perhaps?” she whispered.

“No.”

“A relative, then?”

“No; a woman who loves him.”

That heartbroken admission told the whole tale to the quick-witted Frenchwoman. There had been a duel; one man was seriously injured; the other, she had heard, was also receiving medical attention in another hotel – the témoins, wistful to avoid the interrogation of the law, had so arranged – and here was the woman who had caused the quarrel.

Well, such was the will of Providence! These things had been since man and woman were expelled from Paradise – for the nurse, though a devout Catholic, suspected that Genesis had suppressed certain details of the first fratricide – and would continue, she supposed, until the Millennium.

She nodded cheerfully.

“There is every reason to hope, but he must not be disturbed – not excited, that is,” she added, seeing the wan agony in Cynthia’s face.

The girl tiptoed to the side of the bed. Medenham’s eyes were closed, but he was muttering something. She bent and kissed his forehead, and a strange smile broke through the tense lines of pain. Even in his semi-conscious state he felt the touch of those exquisite lips.

“My Lady Alice!” he said.

She choked back a sob. He was dreaming of “Comus” – standing with her in the ruined banqueting hall of Ludlow Castle.

“Yes, your Lady Alice,” she breathed.

A slight quiver shook him.

“Don’t tell Cynthia,” he said brokenly. “She must never know… Ah, if I hadn’t slipped, I would have quieted his viperish tongue… But Cynthia must not know!”

“Oh, my dear, my dear, Cynthia does know! It is you who know not. Kind Heaven, let him live! Grant that I may tell him all that I know!”

She could not help it; the words welled forth of their own accord; but the nurse touched her arm gently.

“It is a little fever,” she whispered with ready sympathy. “Soon it will pass. He will sleep, and, when he awakes, it is perhaps permissible that you should speak to him.”

Well, it was permissible. The age of miracles had not passed for those two. Even the experienced doctor marveled at the strength of a man who at four o’clock in the morning could have a sword driven through the tissues in perilous proximity to the right lung, and yet, at nine o’clock on that same night, was able to announce an unalterable resolution to get up and dress for breakfast next day. That, of course, was a pleasing fiction intended for Cynthia’s benefit. It served its purpose admirably. The kindly nurse displayed an unexpected firmness in leading her to her own room, there to eat and sleep.

For Cynthia had an ordeal to face. Many things had been said in the car during that mad rush to Folkestone, and on board the steamer which ferried Dale and herself to Boulogne she had wrung from the taciturn chauffeur a full, true, and particular account of Medenham, his family, and his doings throughout as much of his life as Dale either knew or guessed. By the time they reached Boulogne she had made up her mind with a characteristic decision. One long telegram to her father, another to Lord Fairholme, caused heart-burning and dismay not alone in certain apartments of the Savoy Hotel, but in the aristocratic aloofness of Cavendish Square and Curzon Street. As a result, two elderly men, a younger one, in the person of the Marquis of Scarland, and two tearful women – Lady St. Maur and Mrs. Leland – met at Charing Cross about one o’clock in the morning to travel by special train and steamer. Another woman telegraphed from Shropshire saying that baby was better, and that she would follow by the first steamer on Sunday. Mrs. Devar did not await developments. She fled, dinnerless, to some burrow in Bayswater.

These alarums and excursions were accompanied by the ringing of telephones and the flight of carriages back and forth through muddy London, and Cynthia was called on to deal with a whole sheaf of telegrams which demanded replies either to Dover or to Scarland Towers in Shropshire.

With a man like Vanrenen at one end, however, and a woman like his daughter at the other, it might be fairly assumed that even the most complex skein of circumstances might be resolved from its tangle. As a matter of curious coincidence, the vessel which carried Marigny to England passed in mid-Channel its sister ship conveying the grief-stricken party of relatives to France. It happened, too, that the clouds from the Atlantic elected to hover over Britain rather than France, and when Cynthia stood on the quay to meet the incoming steamer, a burst of sunshine from the east gave promise of a fine if somewhat blustery day.

Five pairs of eyes sought her face anxiously while the vessel was warping to the quay opposite the Gare Maritime. They looked there for tidings, and they were not disappointed.

“That’s all right,” said Vanrenen with an unwonted huskiness in his voice. “Cynthia wouldn’t smile if she hadn’t good news.”

“Thank God for that!” muttered the Earl, bending his head to examine a landing ticket, the clear type of which he was utterly unable to read.

“I never thought for a minute that any Frenchman could kill George,” cried Scarland cheerfully.

But the two women said nothing, could see nothing, and the white-faced but smiling Cynthia standing near the shoreward end of the gangway had vanished in a sudden mist.

Of course, Marigny was right when he foresaw that Vanrenen could not meet either Medenham or any of his relatives for five minutes without his “poor little cobweb of intrigue” being dissipated once and forever.

With the marvelous insight that every woman possesses when dealing with the affairs of the man she loves, Cynthia combined the eloquence of an orator with the practiced skill of a clever lawyer in revealing each turn and twist of the toils which had enveloped her since that day in Paris when her father happened to suggest in Marigny’s hearing that she might utilize his hired car for a tour in England, while he concluded the business that was detaining him in the French Capital. Nothing escaped her; she unraveled every knot; Medenham’s few broken words, supplemented by the letter to his brother-in-law which he told her to obtain from Dale, threw light on all the dark places.

But the gloom had fled. It was a keenly interested, almost light-hearted, little party that walked through the sunshine to the Hôtel de la Plage.

Dale, abashed, sheepish, yet oddly confident that all was for the best in a queer world, met the Earl of Fairholme later in the day; his lordship, who had been pining for someone to pitch into, addressed him sternly.

“This is a nice game you’ve been playing,” he said. “I always thought you were a man of steady habits, a little given to horse-racing perhaps, but otherwise a decent member of the community.”

“So I was before I met Viscount Medenham, my lord,” was the daring answer. For Dale was no fool, and he had long since seen how certain apparently hostile forces had adapted themselves to new conditions.

“Before you left him, you mean,” growled the Earl. “What sort of sense was there in letting him fight a duel? – it could have been stopped in fifty different ways.”

“Yes, my lord, but I never suspicioned a word of it till he went off in the cab with them – ”

The Earl held up a warning finger.

“Hush,” he said, “this is France, remember, and you are the foreigner here. Where is my son’s car?”

“In the garage at Folkestone, my lord.”

“Well, you had better cross by an early boat to-morrow and bring it here. You understand all the preliminaries, I suppose? Find out from the Customs people what deposit is necessary, and come to me for the money.”

So it happened that when Medenham was able to take his first drive in the open air, the Mercury awaited him and Cynthia at the door of the hotel. It positively sparkled in the sunlight; never was car more spick and span. The brasswork scintillated, each cylinder was rhythmical, and a microscope would not have revealed one speck of dust on body or upholstery.

On a day in July – for everybody agreed that not even a marriage should be allowed to interfere with the Scottish festival of St. Grouse – that same shining Mercury with the tonneau decorously cased in glass for the hour, drew up at the edge of a red carpet laid down from curb to stately porch of St. George’s, Hanover Square, and Dale turned a grinning face to the doorway when Viscount Medenham led his bride down the steps through a shower of rice and good wishes.

Wedding breakfasts and receptions are all “much of a muchness,” as the Mad Hatter said to another Alice, and it was not until the Mercury was speeding north by west to Scarland Towers, “lent to the happy pair for the honeymoon” while Betty took the children to recuperate at the seaside, that Cynthia felt she was really married.

“I have a bit of news for you,” said her husband, taking a letter from his pocket. “I received a letter by this morning’s post. A heap of others remain unopened till you and I have time to go through them; but this one caught my attention, and I read it while I was dressing.”

He had an excellent excuse for putting his arm round her waist while he held the open sheet so that both might peruse it at the same time. It ran:

My Dear Viscount – Of course I meant to kill you, but fate decided otherwise. Indeed, with my usual candor, which by this time you may have learned to admire, I may add that only the special kind of dog’s luck which attaches itself to members of my family, saved me from being killed by you. But that is ancient history now.

I am glad to hear that your wound was not really serious. There was no sense in merely crippling you – my only chance lay in procuring your untimely demise. Having failed, however, I want to tell you, with the utmost sincerity, that I never had the slightest intention of carrying out my abominable threat in regard to the fair lady who is now Viscountess Medenham. Were you other than a heavy-witted and thick-skinned Briton, you would have known that I was goading you into issuing a challenge.

This piece of information is my wedding present; it is all I can give, because, metaphorically speaking, I haven’t a sou!

I am, as you see, domiciled in Brussels, where my car is attached by an unsympathetic hotel proprietor. Still, I am devoid of rancor, and mean to keep a sharp eye for a well-favored and well-dowered wife; such a one, in fact, as you managed to snap up under my very nose.

With a thousand compliments, I am,

Yours very sincerely,Edouard Marigny.

P.S. – Devar went “steerage” to the United States when he heard of our affair. He thought it was all up with you, and with him.

“The wretch!” murmured Cynthia. “Can he really believe even yet that I would have married him?”

“I don’t care tuppence what he believes,” said Medenham, giving her a reassuring hug. “Indeed, I have a mind to write and ask him how much he owes in that hotel. Don’t you see, my dear, that if it hadn’t been for Marigny there was a chance that I might have left you at Bristol.”

“Never!” cooed Cynthia.

“Well, now I have got you, I am beginning to imagine all sorts of terrible possibilities which might have parted us. I remember thinking, when my foot slipped…”

“Oh, don’t!” she murmured. “I can’t bear to hear of that. Sometimes, in Calais, I awoke screaming, and then I knew I had seen it in my dreams… There, you have disarranged my hat!.. But I don’t think much of your budget, anyhow; mine is a great deal more to the point. My father told me this morning that he is sure he will feel very lonely now. He never meant, he said, to put anyone in my dear mother’s place, but he will miss me so greatly – that, perhaps, Mrs. Leland – ”

“By Jove,” cried Medenham, “that will be splendid! I like Mrs. Leland. At one time, do you know, I rather fancied she might become my step-mother, now it seems I shall have to greet her as a mother-in-law. She was bound to come into the family one way or another. When is it to be?”

Cynthia laughed delightedly.

“Father looked so confused when I asked him. Say, wouldn’t it be a joke if Simmonds brought them to Scarland Towers one day, and they were announced by some solemn footman as ‘Mr. and Mrs. Vanrenen’?”

“Cynthia, you know,” he teased her.

“I don’t know, but I am a good guesser,” she said.

And she was.

THE END

1

“But needs must when the devil drives.”