BUT though the light burned in her room, Cynthia did not sleep till daybreak. For the first few hours there was a strange bustle about the passages of the house, for which she did not seek at all to find a cause. She welcomed it for its companionship. Familiar voices informed her that her friends were awake about her, and she was comforted. She tried to fall asleep before the noise should cease, but gradually the estancia sank into silence, and she was still awake. Then began her hours of terror. Her window was open, and every flutter of the night air which shook the curtains was her father’s coarse, strong hand upon the sill. If she closed her eyes for a moment, his dark and evil face was already bending over her, as she lay helpless in her bed. If she heard a wardrobe crack it was he stepping clumsily about the room. Half the night she spent crouching up in her bed, her eyes wild with fear, her heart racing and stopping, while she listened for the sound of his footsteps outside the house. And she heard them; did a twig snap on a tree in the garden, she heard them. There was he, prowling about the walls, watching, perhaps, for just her light to be put out before he slipped in through a window to take her away. If she heard no sounds, then he was already in the house, creeping along the corridor toward her door. From the moment when this particular fear seized hold upon her, her eyes were fixed in an agony of suspense upon the long mirror in her room. The door was at her right hand, set in the wall against which the head of her bed was placed. A high screen stood by the side of the bed and hid it from her altogether. But across the room the long mirror faced her, and by looking at its bright surface she could see whether the door opened or not. It was a white door, with a round brass handle, and, continually, she was very sure that she saw the handle turn. In her frantic imaginings her father’s very semblance changed. Gross though he was, still more she distorted him, making his likeness fit with the knowledge which she had of him. He meant to drag her away, and batten on what she had of youth and freshness and good looks; and this, out of malice almost as much as for profit, and to punish her for the happiness of her life. He swelled into some grotesque and corpulent thing of evil with a fat, loathsome face and gripping hands.
The night was a night of disillusionment for Cynthia. Romance was stunned in her. All her pretty dreams, wherein she shyly walked with the bright ones of the earth, were rent and blown to space like gossamer. She seemed separated from them by a generation of years. She looked back upon them with derision. A fine heroine she was to be if that door opened. She was to walk—yes—but under the gas-lamps, and not shyly, and with any who would. That was the plan deliberately conceived for her and conceived by her own father. The mere thought of it seemed to sully her, to make her unworthy. She remembered that only that morning she had sent a telegram to Captain Rames, with a thrill of excitement, as though she were doing a remarkable thing. She had actually dared. She sat up, and in the bitterness of her heart laughed at the great significance she had set upon herself. Her father had a different view of her importance, and from head to foot she ached with the pain of her humiliation.
Thus through the long hours she swung between terror and abasement, each one mastering her in turn. Once she started up with a despairing cry as she imagined her father driving her out into the street with blows.
Could she make her living honestly if she ran away from him, she wondered miserably, bethinking that at the worst she must kill herself? At another moment she would recall with a pang of contempt her enchanted garden and scorch its flowers with her ridicule. She would walk in that garden no more. It was closed. She had been an impostor in it always. It was a place of falsities. There was but one true, real thing in it all—the turnstile in the wall which gave admission to its precincts. Yes, that was true, and the turnstile, with all it meant of shame and indifference, became to her a new epitome of life.
Gradually the night wore through. A finger of gray light slipped through the curtains, and was laid upon the ceiling of the room. Birds began to sing in the garden. Cynthia turned out her light and fell asleep at last. She slept late and woke to just such another day of heat as yesterday. She lay for a moment, happily convinced that all which had occurred last night had occurred only in a dream. But she looked into the mirror across the room and saw the door, and the truth was made known to her. These things had happened.
Certainly the door was still closed, the night had passed. But other nights would follow, and through the closed door, not her father, but fear and shame had passed to bear her company. She came down to breakfast pale and heavy-eyed, and found Joan and Robert Daventry already at the table. She was afraid lest they should remark the alteration in her looks, and she set herself to counterfeit an air of gaiety. It was not very successful, but Joan and Robert Daventry were making precisely the same pretence, with still poorer results. They could not meet her eyes any more than she theirs; and they were trying for the sake of her happiness to hide from her a catastrophe, her knowledge of which for the sake of their happiness she was trying to hide from them. Thus they all talked with great speed about things of no importance, and laughed noisily whether laughter was appropriate or not, until Robert Daventry suddenly turned to Cynthia and blurted out with an affected blitheness:
“I hope, my dear, that you haven’t made many absolutely unalterable arrangements for the summer.” And Cynthia turned as white as the table-cloth and looked suddenly down to hide the terror in her eyes. They were going to give her up, then! That was her first despairing thought. No doubt it could not be helped. They were compelled to.
“No,” she answered faintly. “No arrangements that cannot be altered. I was going to stay for a week with—” and as she compared the summer which she had planned with that which awaited her, she stopped, lest the choking of her voice should betray her.
“That’s well,” continued Robert, “for you have a journey to make, Cynthia. I have had a telegram this morning from England. I bought some property in Warwickshire a few years ago. We thought you would not, perhaps, want to live all your life in the Argentine after we had gone. So we bought it for you. But it appears there’s some sort of lawyer’s trouble over the title.”
“We have known there was some trouble,” Joan hastened to explain, “for quite a long time. But until this telegram arrived we did not think it very serious.”
“Now we know what it is,” continued Robert, “and I am afraid that we must go to England and attend to it. Luckily, we have Walton now to look after the estancia.” And since Cynthia made no reply, but still looked upon the cloth, he continued in some perplexity: “I hope, my dear, you won’t be disappointed. Joan and I, indeed, were inclined to be confident that you would enjoy the trip.”
“And, of course, I shall,” cried Cynthia; and now she raised her head and gazed at her friends with shining eyes. She had not dared to yield her face to their scrutiny in the first revulsion of her feelings. Even now the room whirled about her. “I shall be delighted to go with you. When shall we start?”
“Yes, that’s the point,” said Mr. Daventry, uncomfortably. “The telegram is very urgent, and there’s a boat sailing from Buenos Ayres to-morrow. I am afraid, Cynthia, that we must catch it. There’s certain to be no difficulty about cabins just at this time of the year, and, in fact, I have already telegraphed to retain them. So you see we must leave Daventry by the night train. Can you be ready?”
“Of course,” said Cynthia.
The color came back again into her pale cheeks and made them rosy, and the smile returned to her lips. No telegram had come. The bustle in the corridors during the early hours of the evening was explained to her. Over night, Robert and Joan had made up their minds to an instant flight, and had set about their preparations. Cynthia drew her breath again. She resumed life and some part of her faith in life. The world was not peopled with James Challoners, as, in the shock of her horror, she had almost been persuaded. Here were two who, for her sake, were abandoning their home and the place which their labors had made for them in the country of their adoption. Her great trouble during that day of hurried preparation was to avoid blurting out to her two friends her gratitude and her knowledge.
They travelled by night and, reaching Buenos Ayres in the morning, drove straight along the docks to their ship. Once on board, Cynthia noticed that Joan made this and that excuse about the arrangement of her cabin to keep her from the deck until the steamer had warped out into the basin. Then she gave a sigh of relief and sat down in a chair.
“You won’t mind, dear, will you?” she said. “We shall probably be kept some time in England. But you will soon make friends. Robert was speaking about it last night. He said it was a good hunting country, and that we could get you some fine horses and—” and suddenly she felt Cynthia’s arms about her neck, and the girl’s tears upon her cheeks.
“My dear, my dear, you are too kind to me!” cried Cynthia. “I don’t mind about the horses, if only you’ll keep me with you.”
“Of course, of course,” said Mrs. Daventry. “What should we do without you ourselves.”
The screw was churning up the mud of the River Plate, the flat banks dotted with low trees were slipping past the port-holes.
“Let us go out and get the steward to arrange our chairs on deck,” said Mrs. Daventry. She put Cynthia’s outburst down, not to any guess at the true reason of their flight, but to a young girl’s moment of emotion.
The steamer put into Montevideo, and Santos, and Rio, and glided northward along the woods and white sands of Brazil. It passed one morning into the narrows of the Cape Verde Islands, and there was dressed from stem to stern with flags.
Cynthia asked the reason of the first officer, who was leaning beside her on the rail, and for answer he pointed northward to a small black ship which was coming down toward them, and handed to her his binocular.
“That’s the Perhaps, bound for the South,” he said; and he saw the girl’s face flush red.
She put the glasses to her eyes, and gazed for a long while at the boat. The Perhaps was a full-rigged ship, with auxiliary steam, broad in the beam, with strong, rounded bows. She had the trade-wind behind her, and came lumbering down the channel with every sail set upon her yards.
“But she’s so small,” cried Cynthia.
“She has to be small,” replied the first officer. “Length’s no use for her work. Look at us! We should crack like a filbert in the ice-pack. She won’t.”
“But she’s out for three years,” said Cynthia.
“There’ll be a relief ship with fresh stores, no doubt. And there are not many of them on board, twenty-nine all told.”
Cynthia looked again, and held the glasses to her eyes until the boats drew level. She could make out small figures upon the bridge and deck; she saw answering signals break out in answer to their own good wishes; and then the name in new gold letters came out upon the black stern beneath the counter.
“Thank you,” she said as she handed back the glasses. But her eyes were still fixed upon that full-rigged ship lumbering heavily to the unknown South.
“I am very glad to have seen the Perhaps,” she said slowly.
The first officer looked at her curiously. There was a quiver of emotion in her voice.
“Perhaps you have friends on board,” he said. “If you have, I envy them.”
“No,” she said slowly. “I know no one on board. But I am glad to have seen the ship, for I was interested in it in a part of my life which is now over.”
The first officer was about to smile. Here was a remarkably pretty girl of seventeen or so, talking about a part of her life which was over! But the big, dark-blue eyes swept round and rested gravely on his face, and he bowed to her with a fitting solemnity.
Cynthia exaggerated, no doubt, taking herself seriously as young girls will. But the shock of that last night in the estancia had wrought a revolution in her thoughts. Though James Challoner no longer seemed to grip her hand, she walked in the chill shadow of his presence. Nor did that shadow quite lift even when she had landed in England.
They travelled into Warwickshire, and so came to that white house behind the old wall of red brick on the London road which Robert Daventry had once coveted for himself and had afterward bought for Cynthia. The Daventrys made it their home now. Though Cynthia never read a word about it in the papers, that disputed title took a long while in the settling. Robert Daventry resumed the old ties. Joan, with Cynthia at her side, found the making of new ones not the laborious business she had feared, and Cynthia had her horses and as many friends as she had room for in her life. But the shadow was still about her. James Challoner might have found the means to follow them to England. At any corner of a lane she might discover his gross and sinister figure upon the path. A few miles away, the ancient city of Ludsey lifted high its old steeples and its modern chimneys. She was always secretly upon her guard in its climbing streets. There was always in her life a mirror facing a closed door, and at her heart a great fear lest she should see the door open.
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