Greatheart by Ethel May Dell (best books to read for beginners TXT) 📕

and found herself standing with her partner in a curtained recess of the ballroom from which a glass door led on to the verandah that ran round the hotel.

"Just a glimpse of the moonlight on the mountains," he said, "before we say good-night!"

She went with him without a moment's thought. She was as one caught in the meshes of a great enchantment. He opened the door, and she passed through on to the verandah.

The music throbbed into silence behind them. Before them lay a fairy-world of dazzling silver and deepest, darkest sapphire. The mountains stood in solemn grandeur, domes of white mystery. The great vault of the sky was alight with stars, and a wonderful moon hung like a silver shield almost in the zenith.

"How—beautiful!" breathed Dinah.

The air was crystal clear, cold but not piercing. The absolute stillness held her spell-bound.

"It is like a dream-world," she whispered.

"In which you reign supreme," he murmured back.

She glanced at him with uncomprehending eyes. Her veins were still throbbing with the ecstasy of the dance.

"Oh, how I wish I had wings!" she suddenly said. "To swim through that glorious ether right above the mountain-tops as one swims through the sea! Don't you think flying must be very like swimming?"

"With variations," said Eustace.

His eyes dwelt upon her. They were fierily blue in that great flood of moonlight. His hand still rested upon her waist.

"But what a mistake to want the impossible!" he said, after a moment.

"I always do," said Dinah. "At least," she glanced up at him again, "I always have—until to-night."

"And to-night?" he questioned, dropping his voice.

"Oh, I am quite happy to-night," she said, with a little laugh, "even without the wings. If I hadn't thought of them, I should have nothing left to wish for."

"I wish I could say the same," said Sir Eustace, with the faint mocking smile at the corners of his lips.

"What can you want more?" asked Dinah innocently.

He leaned to her. "A big thing—a small thing! Would you give it to me, my elf of the mountains, if I dared to tell you what it was?"

Her eyes fluttered and fell before the flaming ardour of his. "I—I don't know," she faltered, in sudden confusion. "I expect so—if I could."

His arm slipped round her. "Would you?" he whispered. "Would you?"

She gave a little gasp, caught unawares like a butterfly on the wing. All the magic of the night seemed suddenly to be concentrated upon her like fairy batteries. Her first feeling was dismay, followed instantly by the wonder if she could be dreaming. And then, as she felt the drawing of his arm, something vehement, something almost fierce, awoke within her, clamouring wildly for freedom.

It was a blind instinct, but she obeyed it without question. She had no choice.

"Oh no!" she cried. "Oh no! I couldn't!" and wrested herself from him in a panic.

He let her go, and she heard him laugh as she broke away. But she did not wait for more. To linger was unthinkable. Urged by that imperative, inner prompting she turned and fled, not pausing for a moment's thought.

The glass door closed behind her. She burst impetuously into the deserted ballroom. And here, on the point of entering the small recess from which she was escaping, she came suddenly face to face with Scott.

So headlong was her flight that she actually ran into him. He put out a steadying hand.

"I was just coming to look for you," he said in his quiet, composed fashion.

She stopped unwillingly. "Oh, were you? How kind! I—I think I ought to go up now. It's getting late, isn't it? Good-night!"

He did not seek to detain her. She wondered with a burning sense of shame what he could have thought of her wild rush. But she was too agitated to attempt any excuse, too agitated to check her retreat. Without a backward glance she hastened away like Cinderella overtaken by fate; the spell was broken, the glamour gone.

CHAPTER VIII MR. GREATHEART

It was a very meek and subdued Dinah who made her appearance in the salle-à-manger on the following morning.

She and Billy were generally in the best of spirits, and the room usually rang with their young laughter. But that morning even Billy was decorously quiet, and his sister scarcely spoke or raised her eyes.

Colonel de Vigne, white-moustached and martial, sat at the table with them, but neither Lady Grace nor Rose was present. The Colonel's face was stern. He occupied himself with letters with scarcely so much as a glance for the boy and girl on either side of him.

There was a letter by Dinah's plate also, but she had not opened it. Her downcast face was very pale. She ate but little, and that little only when urged thereto by Billy, whose appetite was rampant notwithstanding the decorum of his behaviour.

Scott, breakfasting with his brother at a table only a few yards distant, observed the trio with unobtrusive interest.

He had made acquaintance with the Colonel on the previous evening, and after a time the latter caught his eye and threw him a brief greeting. Most people were polite to Scott. But the Colonel's whole aspect was forbidding that morning, and his courtesy went no further.

Sir Eustace did not display the smallest interest in anyone. His black brows were drawn, and he looked even more haughtily unapproachable than the Colonel.

He conversed with his brother in low tones on the subject of the morning's mail which lay at Scott's elbow and which he was investigating while he ate. Now and then he gave concise and somewhat peremptory instructions, which Scott jotted down in a note-book with business-like rapidity. No casual observer would have taken them for brothers that morning. They were employer and secretary.

Only when the last letter had been discussed and laid aside did the elder abruptly abandon his aloof attitude to ask a question upon a more intimate matter.

"Did Isabel go without a sleeping-draught last night?"

Scott shook his head.

Eustace's frown became even more pronounced. "Did Biddy administer it on her own?"

"No. I authorized it." Scott's voice was low. He met his brother's look with level directness.

Eustace leaned towards him across the table. "I won't have it, Stumpy," he said very decidedly. "I told you so yesterday."

"I know." Very steadily Scott made answer. "But last night there was no alternative. It is impossible to do the thing suddenly. She has hardly got over the journey yet."

"Rubbish!" said Eustace curtly.

Scott slightly raised his shoulders, and said no more.

"It comes to this," Eustace said, speaking with stern insistence. "If you can't—or won't—assert your authority, I shall assert mine. It is all a question of influence."

"Or forcible persuasion," said Scott, with a touch of irony.

"Very well. Call it that! It is in a good cause. If you haven't the strength of mind, I have; and I shall exercise it. These drugs must be taken away. Can't you see it's the only possible thing to do?"

"Not yet," Scott said. He was still facing his brother's grim regard very gravely and unflinchingly. "I tell you, man, it is too soon. She is better than she used to be. She is calmer, more reasonable. We must do the thing gradually, if at all. To interfere forcibly would do infinitely more harm than good. I know what I am saying. I know her far better than you do now. I am in closer touch with her. You are out of sympathy. You only startle her when you try to persuade her to anything. You must leave her to me. I understand her. I know how to help her."

"You haven't achieved much in the last seven years," Eustace observed.

"But I have achieved something." Scott's answer was wholly free from resentment. He spoke with quiet confidence. "I know it's a slow process. But she is moving in the right direction. Give her time, old chap! I firmly believe that she will come back to us by slow degrees."

"Damnably slow," commented Eustace. "You're so infernally deliberate always. You talk as if it were your life-work."

Scott's eyes shone with a whimsical light. "I begin to think it is," he said. "Have you finished? Suppose we go." He gathered up the sheaf of papers at his elbow and rose. "I will attend to these at once."

Eustace strode down the long room looking neither to right nor left, moving with a free, British arrogance that served to emphasize somewhat cruelly the meagreness and infirmity of the man behind him. Yet it was upon the latter's slight, halting figure that Dinah's eyes dwelt till it finally limped out of sight, and in her look were wonder and a vagrant admiration. There was an undeniable attraction about Scott that affected her very curiously, but wherein it lay she could not possibly have said. She was furious when a murmured comment and laugh from some girls at the next table reached her.

"What a dear little lap-dog!" said one.

"Yes, I've been wanting to pat its head for a long time," said another.

"Warranted not to bite," laughed a third. "Can it really be full-grown?"

"Oh, no doubt, my dear! Look at its pretty little whiskers! It's just a toy, you know, nothing but a toy."

Dinah turned in her chair, and gazed scathingly upon the group of critics. Then, aware of the Colonel's eyes upon her, she turned back and gave him a swift look of apology.

He shook his head at her repressively, his whole air magisterial and condemnatory. "You may go if you wish," he said, in the tone of one dismissing an offender. "But be good enough to bear in mind what I have said to you!"

Billy leapt to his feet. "Can I go too, sir?" he asked eagerly.

The Colonel signified majestic assent. His mood was very far from genial that morning, and he had not the smallest desire to detain either of them. In fact, if he could have dismissed his two young charges altogether, he would have done so with alacrity. But that unfortunately was out of the question—unless by their behaviour they provoked him to fulfil the very definite threat that he had pronounced to Dinah in the privacy of his wife's room an hour before.

He was very seriously displeased with Dinah, more displeased than he had been with anyone since his soldiering days, and he had expressed himself with corresponding severity. If she could not conduct herself becomingly and obediently, he would take them both straight home again and thus put a summary end to temptation. His own daughter had never given him any cause for uneasiness, and he did not see why he should be burdened with the escapades of anyone else's troublesome offspring. It was too much to expect at his time of life.

So a severe reprimand had been Dinah's portion, to which she, very meek and crestfallen, shorn of all the previous evening's glories, had listened with a humility that had slightly mollified her judge though he had been careful not to let her know it. She had been wild and flighty, and he was determined that she should feel the rod of discipline pretty smartly.

But when he finally rose from the table and stalked out of the room, it was a little disconcerting to find the culprit awaiting him in the vestibule to slip a shy hand inside his arm and whisper, "Do forgive me! I'm so sorry."

He looked down into her quivering face, saw the pleading eyes swimming in tears, and abruptly found that his displeasure had evaporated so completely that he could not even pretend to be angry any longer. He had never taken much notice of Dinah before, treating her, as did his wife and daughter, as a mere child and of no account. But now he suddenly realized that she was an engaging minx after all.

"Ashamed of yourself?" he asked gruffly, his white moustache twitching a little.

Dinah nodded mutely.

"Then don't do it again!" he said, and grasped the little brown hand for a moment with quite unwonted kindness.

It was a tacit forgiveness, and as such Dinah treated it. She smiled thankfully through her tears, and slipped away to recover her composure.

Nearly an hour later, Scott, having finished his letters, came upon her sitting somewhat disconsolately in the verandah. He paused on his way out.

"Good morning, Miss Bathurst! Aren't you going to skate this morning?"

She turned to him