“You can leave me a cold supper in this room. Then you won’t be kept here in the evening, Denise, and I shan’t be tied to a dinner hour.”
She drove off into the high country with an exhilaration and a sense of lightness which she had not known for a long while. She was glad to be alone, but it was not the mere absence of Corinne which was the secret of her good spirits. She could have discovered that easily enough if she had wished. The mystery of a singing heart is never very profound for the happy person who is blessed with it. But Ariadne was resolute not to pursue any such inquiry. She permitted herself, however, to take a careful note of the road on which she was travelling into the uplands, on the supposition that she might perhaps come that way again in a few days’ time and not alone.
She got back to the Villa Laure as darkness was closing in, and found the great iron gates of the park already shut. Pierre Bochon came out from his lodge and unlocked them for her at the first summons of her horn.
“I am afraid, Pierre, that we must keep you up to-night,” she said with the enchanting smile which made a gift out of an injury. “Mademoiselle Corinne does not reach Avignon until midnight.”
Pierre Bochon was very willing to sit up for these ladies. They were mad, of course, like the rest of their nation, and their ways incalculable, but their madness was pleasant and gay. Ariadne drove along the half-mile of avenue and open pasture to the house, left the car in the garage, and walked round the house to the back where the chief rooms opened on to a broad terrace. Denise Bochon locked and bolted the front door before she left in the evening for the lodge, and, indeed, it might have been left locked and bolted throughout the day for all the use the two girls made of it. Ariadne stood for a few moments on the terrace. A flight of steps led down to a small bridge thrown across a sunk fence on to the pasture ground which sloped slowly down to the Rhône.
Ariadne watched the colours of the swift, broad river change from purple and orange and sparkles of gold to a cold grey as the last of the daylight waned. Strickland, in the house at Kew, had consoled himself with the picture of a summer night which was hardly ever more than dusk — just the dusk of evening shading through the silver of moonlight to the dawn. But he had forgotten in what a hurry eight hundred miles farther south night puts the earth to bed.
Darkness swooped upon the park and the villa. Stars embroidered it, and the faint beam of a planet shimmered on the river like a fine gold rod on a sheet of black marble. Ariadne with a momentary chill turned away towards the house. It was even now not yet nine o’clock. There were to be three hours of uncompromising night before the moon rose and before Corinne’s train drew up at Avignon.
Ariadne opened one of the long windows into the drawing-room, turned on the electric light, ate her cold supper, drank with it a glass of old Burgundy, made herself a cup of coffee, took a liqueur of Armagnac, lit a cigarette and bethought herself of her letters. She turned back the cover of the big vellum-bound folio, and, to her surprise, discovered, shuffled in amongst them, a small blue telegram. She held it in her hands for a moment, wondering how in the world she had come to overlook it. A letter, if it was in an unknown hand, might be neglected, but a telegram, no. There was a thrill in the mere opening of any telegram. Ariadne turned it over; the folds were stuck together with a smear of gum. She tore it open and read Strickland’s message, and the floor seemed to open under her feet. “Most serious and urgent.” Not without the soundest of reasons would he so alarm her. And his telegram had lain twelve hours, more than twelve hours, she reasoned, unopened, between the covers of a book.
Ariadne waked from a daze of fear to realise that the lights of the room were blazing through the open door on to the dark terrace — an invitation. She ran to the switch of the electric light at the side of the big double doors in the inner wall and turned it off. The room was in darkness, and she for the moment blinded by the swift transition. She stood by the door until a panel of faint light showed her where the glass door opened on the terrace, and a gleam here and there of polished furniture hinted the disposition of the room. Then, stepping noiselessly, she crossed to the table on which stood the telephone apparatus.
“I must ring up the hotel and ask for help,” she said, and though she was unaware of it, she spoke aloud. She removed and replaced the receiver twenty times; she rattled again and again the hook on which it hung, and no answer was returned to her. The line was dead. The line, then, was cut. Archie Clutter and his friend, then, were already in the park, already watching it. Ariadne found herself touching her face and covering her mouth with the palm of her hand — experimenting dreadfully, as she had seen Corinne do in her parlour at the top of the house in London; and with a little sob she snatched her hand away again.
She felt horribly alone in that isolated house. She had a little revolver, she remembered, but it was in the pocket of her motor-car in the garage, and since the two men were in the park, watching from some hiding-place amongst the trees, she dared not slip out and make a dash for it. For there was Corinne on her way from Marseilles. Corinne had to be thought of, to be thought for. From the first moment when Ariadne recovered from the daze into which the shock of the telegram had plunged her, Corinne had been in the front of her thoughts. But for Corinne, Ariadne would before now have slipped along the terrace, dived into the shrubbery and run the risk of a flight, from tree trunk to tree trunk, until she reached the thickets by the park wall. But she dared not; desertion was not a word in Ariadne’s vocabulary The idea of it did not occur to her. She had not argued out in her mind a policy of inaction. It stood clear at once before her eyes, indisputable, the law graven upon the tables. Thus:
“If I were to creep out into the shrubberies, then along the bottom of the sunk fence to the screen of trees on the other, the lodge side of the house, I should have to cross the open park. I might win through — perhaps. I might reach the lodge. But the chances are against me. If I were caught and held prisoner, Corinne would be delivered into their hands. Corinne would drive up in a cab from the station. She would pay the driver and send him off. She would come easily into the house here without a thought of danger, and the trap would close behind her. But if I wait until she comes, with the window open so, I shall be at her side before she dismisses the cab. There will be a man driving it. At a word he will turn, and driving at his highest speed carry us both out of danger.”
Thus she reviewed the position. Of course, if Clutter and his friend invaded the house before, why, then — but she would not think of it, lest her heart should sicken with fear. She must take that risk. It was to her mind the lesser risk than flight. Those two wild brutes would wait with the patience of brutes until both the victims were safely housed within walls. But there were three hours to live through. She had a thought that even if she lived through them, Strickland would find a white-haired woman when he came to Avignon — perhaps pass her in the street unrecognised.
There was nothing which she could do...Yes, one thing Ariadne was sitting in a black corner of the room with an oblique view of the open door, and no view at all of the terrace outside. Even now her two enemies might be standing just outside, where she could not see them, though her eyes never left that misty oblong, perfectly silent, perfectly immobile, listening, listening — Ariadne found the mere idea of it unendurable. She flitted across the room to a couch ranged against the back wall, exactly opposite to the window, and sat there staring out into the gloom. The stretch of terrace in front of her was empty.
Ariadne could see very well now. Above the low parapet the sky curved down beautiful with a myriad stars. She could hear the cattle cropping the pasture grass, the hoot of an owl, even the bustle of a bird amongst the leaves of a tree, and very far away the infinitely faint throb and whirr of some belated traveller in his car. But that last sound had no comfort for her ears. It did but add a poignancy to her loneliness, and warn her that she was in the sequestered house, without defence or a link to bind her to a friend.
Meanwhile the minute
s were passing. She nursed no great illusions on that score. They were passing, as they pass in a sick-room for someone in pain, with intolerable deliberation. You say an hour has passed, and the hands of the clock reply “ten minutes.” Still ten minutes have passed, and one has not died. But the next moment a hand so cold clutched Ariadne’s heart that indeed she was near to it. Above the parapet of the terrace something black showed suddenly. It was raised higher. Something white came into view, the higher part of a face, and there it stayed — oh, for an immeasurable time Someone whose eyes she could not see was staring straight through the open door — at her. He must see her, he must, she thought. The head never turned, and gave no sign of life. It was like a mask set there to frighten her. A recollection came to her. Corinne had spoken of Clutter’s terrifying immobility. This was he, then! Staring at her with the eyes of the beasts which see by night. Then slowly the head vanished.
And Ariadne had not moved. Fear had come to her in her turn, in an unimagined shape. She felt the great hand with its fingers of flexible steel bruise her face. She was bound body and legs and arms by fear she sat and waited what would befall her.
She had not long to wait. A shadow at the window obscuring the stars and a fraction of a second later the shadow gone and the stars dancing. But the shadow was now in the room — in the same room with her. She could not see it, for half a dozen feet from the window and the opaqueness of moonless night which it let in, the space was black as before creation. Nor could she hear a sound. Yet it seemed to her that her senses were extraordinarily lucid, that she would have seen the merest flicker of a finger and heard the least vibration of the air.
Did she move? Was it the pale brown of her frock making a misty blot against the dark couch on which she sat, which caught the intruder’s eyes? She was aware of a swift movement towards her, of a form which stooped over her, a form somehow familiar, of a voice which whispered: “Ariadne! So I find you.”
And then her endurance snapped. She giggled like a schoolgirl. The man who heard her had heard nothing so dreadful in all his life. A schoolgirl’s giggle with a catch of the breath and a sob in the middle of it. It was the complete expression of an overwhelming terror. Then she began to speak in a low chiding voice.
“Ariadne, my dear woman, what are you coming to? You see his face on the most singular occasions. It is altogether unmaidenly,” and she giggled again and suddenly fell back, her hands with the palms upturned limp at her sides, her eyes closed.
The man dropped at her side. “Ariadne,” he whispered again, and he tried to set his arm about her shoulders. But something more than her natural strength returned to her. She pushed him away violently, she held him off at arm’s length, he could see the wild strange gleam in her eyes as though in a fierce anger she warded off a stranger.
“My dear,” he said. “You know me, Ariadne!”
It was he who chided her now, but with such a loving tenderness that the mere sound of his voice brought a little quiet to her distracted mind The rigid arms relaxed. She looked at him uncomprehendingly, then turned her head away and shook it in dissent, and so turned back to him.
“You? John Strickland?” she asked, pushing her head forward so that her eyes might make sure. She raised her hand tentatively and laid it against his cheek. Then she uttered a sigh and he caught her close within his arms.
“You! You! John Strickland! I couldn’t believe it!” A small hand stole up to his shoulder and patted it, to make still more sure that it was no phantom born of her sore need which embraced and deluded her. “I thought that I had raised a ghost of you, because I wanted you so much,” and some recollection of the words she had spoken in that moment of delirium came to her. With a little gasp she pressed her face against his coat. A gust of laughter shook her. “I gave myself away when you stooped over me, didn’t I, John Strickland?” she said in a stifled voice. “Will you turn me down, too, for a hussy?”
“I will not,” he replied, and the laughter died away in her throat and she fell to shivering, but shivering in a convulsion of her nerves, whilst little bubbles of sound broke from her lips uncontrollably. She might have been sitting upon some high ice-slope of the Alps waiting for the day to break.
“But you are safe, my dear,” he pleaded with her.
“I know. It’s all that eternity of waiting alone here in the dark, before you came, knowing those two men were outside in the park.”
She flung her arm over his shoulder and held him close, so that he could feel the heaving of her breast and the beat of her heart against his body.
“Why did you wait?”
“I had to wait. There’s Corinne.”
“But I sent you a telegram.”
“I only found it this evening. It wasn’t your fault, my dear. It was mine. The telegram came in time. But it was pushed amongst the letters. Neither Corinne nor I noticed it.”
She told him of her failure that evening to connect with the hotel; of the choice she had to make between the two risks — that of capture in the park or of capture in the house.
“I was terrified out of my wits. You only telegraphed that you were coming, not when you would come. I knew that there were plenty of grim slums in Marseilles where they could keep me for a year and no one would be the wiser. But I couldn’t make a dash for safety and leave Corinne for them, could I? Not to be thought of, Strickland. I had to wait, even if I died of fear.”
She made in her turn her inquiries of him.
“It’s wonderful that you should have come just when I needed you more than anything in the world. How did it happen?” she asked in a voice of wonder; and she nestled in the hollow of his arm like a child asking for a fairy-tale.
“It happened, I suppose,” he replied, “because God didn’t want us to rewrite the Scriptures and say: The wages of loyalty is death.’ It must have happened.”
He told her of his journey. He had reached Avignon at half-past eight and had a qualm of disappointment because she was not at the barrier. “I explained to myself that you had taken my message very literally and were actually waiting in the hotel.”
But at the hotel they were not to be found, and no rooms had been reserved for them. Then, for the first time throughout that journey, Strickland had lost his confidence. He tried to telephone to the Villa Laure from the hotel, and when he failed he was seized with panic. He borrowed a small car from the manager of the hotel and drove himself out to the Villa. At the gate the Bochon family would not let him in.
“They were right, of course. I give them full marks for their fidelity. Even that international passport, a ten-pound Bank of England note, wouldn’t persuade them. But it was maddening. They had received no instructions from the house that a visitor was expected. They didn’t believe a word of what I was saying. Ariadne, it was appalling. There were those two faithful people holding me up, and God only knew what might at that actual moment be happening to you half a mile away.”
He gripped her closer to him in a spasm of terror. In mind, he was still standing outside the gate, arguing, persuading, bribing.
“They were certain I was there for no good. Madame Bochon did her share of the talking from her bed inside the lodge. I was to come back to-morrow morning, and then ‘we’ll have a look at you and see whether we’ll let you in, my cabbage,’ and at each sentence she told the man Bochon to send me away and come into the lodge because she was feeling a courant d’air.”
Ariadne laughed in a happy forgetfulness of her environment. She saw Denise Bochon in a feather bed with a great puffed quilt over her, probably a night-cap on her head, complaining of the draught. Strickland had turned away from the gate, sidled into the driver’s seat behind the wheel and driven the car along the park wall until his headlights had shown him a great pole clamped to the stone. He had stopped his car by this pole and climbed thence on to the top of the wall. He had dropped into a great bed of last year’s leaves in the midst of some trees, and creeping out from amongst them had felt something whip round
his leg and sting him. An adder? But the coil was still about his ankles. A trap? But there was no bite of iron teeth. He stooped and unwound a loose end of thick wire.
“The telephone wire!” Ariadne exclaimed in a low voice. “Then it’s true. They are in the park waiting.” She lifted her head, her eyes shining like quiet stars in the gloom. “John, did they see you?”
Strickland shook his head.
“I kept to the trees, when I could. There’s a screen of them on the left there. From the fringe of that screen I could see all these windows obliquely. Not a light was showing. It seemed to me a house that dreamed; a shrine of deep peace. There was nothing to be afraid of. So intense a relief soothed me that I fancied that all the prayers I had ever uttered since I was a boy were now answered in one splendid benediction. You and Corinne were asleep in that first-floor suite of yours. Very possibly my telegram had gone astray. Very possibly the telephone wire had snapped of its own accord. I had but to stand sentry till the morning in the shadows of those trees.”
But some irrelevant thought of Madame Bochon and her courant d’air had arisen to disturb him. Why, he wondered, should he be thinking of the woman at the lodge? With a shock the answer came. Of all that range of windows upon the first story, the windows of the owners’ suite, not one was open, on this hot summer night. Perfect for Madame Bochon, intolerable to Ariadne, and no doubt to Corinne as well. At once the alarm-bells began to ring once more in his brain. He climbed down into the ditch which ran from the screen of trees below the terrace to the shrubberies on the opposite side of the house. Half-way across he climbed up to the terrace parapet and, looking over it, had been mystified by the black void of the open window.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 84