The Safety Curten by Ethel May Dell (good romance books to read .txt) 📕

his hold. Then, called into activity by her unreasoning fury, the devil in him leapt suddenly up and took possession. With a snarling laugh he gripped her by the arms, holding her by brutal force.
"You little wild cat!" he said in a voice that shook between anger and amusement. "So this is your gratitude, is it? I am to give all and receive nothing for my pains. Then let me make it quite clear to you here and now that that is not my intention. I will be kind to you, but you must be kind to me, too. The benefit is to be mutual."
It was premature. In his heart he knew it, but she had provoked him to it and there was no turning back now. He resented the provocation, that was all, and it made him the more brutally inclined towards her.
As for Doris, she fought and tore at his grasp like a mad creature; and when he mastered her, when, still laughing between his teeth, he forced her face upwards and kissed it fiercely and violently, she shrieked between his kisses, shrieked and shrieked again.
The sudden grinding of the brake recalled Brandon to his senses. The fool was actually stopping the car. He relinquished his hold upon the girl to dash his hand against the window in front.
"Drive on, curse you, drive on!" he shouted through the glass. "I'll let you know if we want to stop."
But the car stopped in spite of him. The chauffeur, shining from head to foot in his oil-skins, sprang to the ground. A moment and he was at the door, had wrenched it open, and was peering within.
"What are you gaping there for, you fool?" raved Brandon, his hand upon Doris, who was suddenly straining forward. "It's all right, I tell you. Go on."
"I am going on," the chauffeur responded calmly through his mask. "But I am not taking you any farther, Major Brandon. So tumble out at once, you dirty, thieving hound!"
The words, the tone, the attitude, flashed such a revelation upon Doris that she cried out in amazement, and then with a revulsion of feeling so great that it deprived her of all speech she threw herself forward and clung to the masked chauffeur in an agony of tears.
Brandon was staring at him with dropped jaw.
"Who the blazes are you?" he said.
"You know me, I think," the chauffeur responded quietly. He was pressing Doris back into her seat with absolute steadiness. "We have met before. I was present at your first wedding ten years ago, and--as a junior counsel--I helped to divorce you a few months after. My name is Vivian Caryl."
He freed a hand to push up his mask. His pale face with its heavy-lidded eyes stared, supremely contemptuous, into Brandon's suffused countenance. His composure was somehow disconcerting.
"Suppose you get out," he suggested. "I can talk to you then in a language you will understand."
"Curse you!" bawled Brandon. "Where's Fricker?"
Caryl shrugged his shoulders.
"You have seen him since I have. Are you going to get out? Ah, I thought you would."
He stood aside to allow him to do so, and then stepped back to shut the door. He did not utter a word to the girl cowering within, but that action of his was a mute command. She crouched in the dark and listened, but she did not dare to follow or to flee.


CHAPTER VII
THE MAN AT THE WHEEL

When Caryl came back to the motor his handkerchief was bound about the knuckles of his right hand, and his face wore a faint smile that had in it more of grimness than humour.
He paused at the open window and looked in on Doris without opening the door. The sound of the rain pattering heavily upon his shoulders filled in a silence that she found terrible. He spoke at length:
"You had better shut the window, the rain is coming in."
That was all, spoken in his customary drawl without a hint of anger or reproach. They cut her hard, those few words of his. It was as if he deemed her unworthy even of his contempt.
She raised her white face.
"What--are you going to do?" she managed to ask through her quivering lips.
"I am going to take you to the nearest town--to Bramfield to spend the rest of the night. It is getting late, you know--past midnight already."
"Bramfield!" she echoed with a start. "Then--then we have been going north all this time?"
"We have been going north," he said.
She glanced around. Her eyes were hunted.
"No," said Caryl. "I haven't killed him. He is sitting under the hedge about fifty yards up the road, thinking things over."
He opened the door then abruptly, and she held her breath and became still and tense with apprehension. But he only pulled up the window, closed the door again with a sharp click, and left her. When she dared to breathe again the car was in motion.
She took no interest in her surroundings. Her destination had become a matter of such secondary importance that she gave it no consideration whatever. What mattered, all that mattered, was that she was now in the hands and absolutely at the mercy of the man whom she feared as she feared no one else on earth, the man with whom in her mad coquetry she had dared to trifle.
The car was stopping. It came to a standstill almost imperceptibly, and Caryl stepped into the road. Tensely she watched him; but he did not so much as glance her way. He turned aside to a little gate in a high hedge of laurel, and passed within, leaving her alone in the night.
Soon she heard his deliberate footfalls returning. In a moment he had reached the door, his hand was upon it. She turned stiffly towards him as it opened.
He spoke at once in his calm, unmoved voice:
"A very old friend of mine lives here. She will put you up for the night and see to your comfort. Will you get out?"
Mutely she did so, feeling curiously weak and unstrung. He put his arm around her, and led her into the dim cottage garden.
They went up a tiled path to an open door from which the light of a single candle gleamed fitfully in the draught. She stumbled at the doorstep, but he held her up. He was almost carrying her.
As they entered, an old woman, bent and indescribably wrinkled, rose from her knees before a deep old-fashioned fireplace on the other side of the little kitchen, and came to meet them. She had evidently just coaxed a dying fire back to life.
"Ah, poor dear," she said at sight of the girl's exhausted face. "She looks more dead than alive. Bring her to the fire, Master Vivian. I'll soon have some hot milk for the poor lamb."
Caryl led her to an arm-chair that stood on one side of the blaze, and made her sit down. Then, stooping, he took one of her nerveless hands and held it closely in his own.
He did not speak to her, and she was relieved by his forbearance. As the warmth of his grasp gradually communicated itself to her numbed fingers, she felt her racing pulses grow steadier; but she was glad when he laid her hand down quietly in her lap and turned away.
He bent over her again in a few minutes with a cup of steaming milk. She took it from him, tasted it, and shuddered.
"There is brandy in it."
"Yes," said Caryl.
She turned her head away.
"I don't want it. I hate brandy."
He put his hand on her shoulder.
"You had better drink it all the same," he said.
She glanced at him, caught her breath sharply, then dumbly gave way. He kept his hand upon her while she drank, and only removed it to take the empty cup.
After that, standing gravely before her, he spoke again.
"I am going on into the town now with the motor, and I shall put up there. My old nurse will take care of you. I shall come back in the morning."


CHAPTER VIII
THE SURRENDER OF THE CITADEL

Old Mrs. Maynard, sweeping her brick floor with wide-open door through which the April sunlight streamed gloriously, nodded to herself a good many times over the doings of the night. A very discreet creature was Mrs. Maynard, faithful to the very heart of her, but she would not have been mortal had she not been intensely curious to know what were the circumstances that had led Vivian Caryl to bring to her door that shrinking, exhausted girl who still lay sleeping in the room above.
When Doris awoke in response to her deferential knock, only the reticence of the trained servant greeted her. The motherliness of the night before had completely vanished.
Doris was glad of it. She had to steel herself for the coming interview with Caryl; she had to face the result of her headlong actions with as firm a front as she could assume. She needed all her strength, and she could not have borne sympathy just then.
She thanked Mrs. Maynard for her attentions and saw her withdraw with relief. Then, having nibbled very half-heartedly at the breakfast provided, she arose with a great sigh, and began to prepare for whatever might lie before her.
Dressed at length, she sat down by the open window to wait--and wonder.
The click of the garden gate fell suddenly across her meditations, and she drew back sharply out of sight. He was entering.
She heard his leisurely footfall on the tiles and then his quiet voice below. Her heart began to thump with thick, uncertain beats. She was horribly afraid.
Yet when she heard the old woman ascending the stairs, she had the courage to go to the door and open it.
Mr. Caryl was in the parlour, she was told. He would be glad to see her at her convenience.
"I will go to him," she said, and forthwith descended to meet her fate.
He stood by the window when she entered, but wheeled round at once with his back to the light. She felt that this did not make much difference. She knew exactly how he was looking--cold, self-contained, implacable as granite. She had seldom seen him look otherwise. His face was a perpetual mask to her. It was this very inscrutability of his that had first waked in her the desire to see him among her retinue of slaves.
She went forward slowly, striving to attain at least a semblance of composure. At first it seemed that he would wait for her where he was; then unexpectedly he moved to meet her. He took her hand into his own, and she shrank a little involuntarily. His touch unnerved her.
"You have slept?" he asked. "You are better?"
Something in his tone made her glance upwards, catching her breath. But she decided instantly that she had been mistaken. He would not, he could not, mean to be kind at such a moment.
She made answer with an assumption of pride. She dared not let herself be natural just then.
"I am quite well. There was nothing wrong with me last night. I was only tired."
He suffered her hand to slip from his.
"I wonder what you think of doing," he said quietly. "Have you made any plans?"
The hot blood rushed to her face before she was aware of it. She turned it sharply aside.
"Am I to have a voice in the matter?" she said, her voice very low. "You did not think it worth while to consult me last night."
"You were scarcely in a fit state to be consulted," he