The Splendid Folly E-Book

Margaret Pedler

• Herausgeber: Classica Libris
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

The wooing and marriage of a beautiful singer and a successful dramatist, whose happiness is imperiled by a political secret of the husband’s.

Leseprobe

Margaret Pedler

THE SPLENDID FOLLY

Copyright

First published in 1917

Copyright © 2019 Classica Libris

Chapter 1

THE VERDICT

The March wind swirled boisterously down Grellingham Place, catching up particles of grit and scraps of paper on his way and making them a torment to the passers-by, just as though the latter were not already amply occupied in trying to keep their hats on their heads.

But the blustering fellow cared nothing at all about that as he drove rudely against them, slapping their faces and blinding their eyes with eddies of dust; on the contrary, after he had swept forwards like a tornado for a matter of fifty yards or so he paused, as if in search of some fresh devilment, and espied a girl beating her way up the street and carrying a roll of music rather loosely in the crook of her arm. In an instant he had snatched the roll away and sent the sheets spread-eagling up the street, looking like so many big white butterflies as they flapped and whirled deliriously hither and thither.

The girl made an ineffectual grab at them and then dashed in pursuit, while a small greengrocer’s boy, whose time was his master’s (ergo, his own), joined in the chase with enthusiasm.

Given a high wind, and half-a-dozen loose sheets of music, the elusive quality of the latter seems to be something almost supernatural, not to say diabolical, and the pursuit would probably have been a lengthy one but for the fact that a tall man, who was rapidly advancing from the opposite direction, seeing the girl’s predicament, came to her help and headed off the truant sheets. Within a few moments the combined efforts of the girl, the man, and the greengrocer’s boy were successful in gathering them together once more, and having tipped the boy, who had entered thoroughly into the spirit of the thing and who was grinning broadly, she turned, laughing and rather breathless, to thank the man.

But the laughter died suddenly away from her lips as she encountered the absolute lack of response in his face. It remained quite grave and unsmiling, exactly as though its owner had not been engaged, only two minutes before, in a wild and undignified chase after half-a-dozen sheets of paper which persisted in pirouetting maddeningly just out of reach.

The face was that of a man of about thirty-five, clean-shaven and fair skinned, with arresting blue eyes of that peculiar piercing quality which seems to read right into the secret places of one’s mind. The features were clear-cut—straight nose, square chin, the mouth rather sternly set, yet with a delicate uplift at its corners that gave it a singularly sweet expression.

The girl faltered.

“Thank you so much,” she murmured at last.

The man’s deep-set blue eyes swept her from head to foot in a single comprehensive glance.

“I am very glad to have been of service,” he said briefly.

With a slight bow he raised his hat and passed on, moving swiftly down the street, leaving her staring surprisedly after him and vaguely feeling that she had been snubbed.

To Diana Quentin this sensation was something of a novelty. As a rule, the men who were brought into contact with her quite obviously acknowledged her distinctly charming personality, but this one had marched away with uncompromising haste and as unconcernedly as though she had been merely the greengrocer’s boy, and he had been assisting him in the recovery of some errant Brussels sprouts.

For a moment an amused smile hovered about her lips; then the recollection of her business in Grellingham Place came back to her with a suddenly sobering effect and she hastened on her way up the street, pausing at last at No. 57. She mounted the steps reluctantly, and with a nervous, spasmodic intake of the breath pressed the bell-button.

No one came to answer the door—for the good and sufficient reason that Diana’s timid pressure had failed to elicit even the faintest sound—and its four blank brown panels seemed to stare at her forbiddingly. She stared back at them, her heart sinking ever lower and lower the while, for behind those repellent portals dwelt the great man whose “Yea” or “Nay” meant so much to her—Carlo Baroni, the famous teacher of singing, whose verdict upon any voice was one from which there could be no appeal.

Diana wondered how many other aspirants to fame had lingered like herself upon that doorstep, their hearts beating high with hope, only to descend the white-washed steps a brief hour later with the knowledge that from the standpoint of the musical profession their voices were useless for all practical purposes, and with their pockets lighter by two guineas, the maestro’s fee for an opinion.

The wind swept up the street again and Diana shivered, her teeth chattering partly with cold but even more with nervousness. This was a bad preparation for the coming interview, and with an irritation born of despair she pressed the bell-button to such good purpose that she could hear footsteps approaching, almost before the trill of the bell had vibrated into silence.

An irreproachable man-servant, with the face of a sphinx, opened the door.

Diana tried to speak, failed, then, moistening her lips, jerked out the words:

“Signor Baroni?”

“Have you an appointment?” came the relentless inquiry, and Diana could well imagine how inexorably the greatly daring who had come on chance would be turned away.

“Yes—oh, yes,” she stammered. “For three o’clock—Miss Diana Quentin.”

“Come this way, please.” The man stood aside for her to enter, and a minute later she found herself following him through a narrow hall to the door of a room whence issued the sound of a softly-played pianoforte accompaniment.

The sphinx-like one threw open the door and announced her name, and with quaking knees she entered.

The room was a large one. At its further end stood a grand piano, so placed that whoever was playing commanded a full view of the remainder of the room, and at this moment the piano-stool was occupied by Signor Baroni himself, evidently in the midst of giving a lesson to a young man who was standing at his elbow. He was by no means typically Italian in appearance; indeed, his big frame and finely-shaped head with its massive, Beethoven brow reminded one forcibly of the fact that his mother had been of German origin. But the heavy-lidded, prominent eyes, neither brown nor hazel but a mixture of the two, and the sallow skin and long, mobile lips—these were unmistakably Italian. The nose was slightly Jewish in its dominating quality, and the hair that was tossed back over his head and descended to the edge of his collar with true musicianly luxuriance was grizzled by sixty years of strenuous life. It would seem that God had taken an Italian, a German, and a Jew, and out of them welded a surpassing genius.

Baroni nodded casually towards Diana, and, still continuing to play with one hand, gestured towards an easy-chair with the other.

“How do you do? Will you sit down, please,” he said, speaking with a strong, foreign accent, and then apparently forgot all about her.

“Now,” he turned to the young man whose lesson her entry had interrupted, “we will haf this through once more. Bee-gin, please: ‘In all humility I worship thee.’”

Obediently the young man opened his mouth, and in a magnificent baritone voice declaimed that reverently, and from a great way off, he ventured to worship at his beloved’s shrine, while Diana listened spellbound.

If this were the only sort of voice Baroni condescended to train, what chance had she? And the young man’s singing seemed so finished, the fervour of his passion was so vehemently rendered, that she humbly wondered that there still remained anything for him to learn. It was almost like listening to a professional.

Quite suddenly Baroni dropped his hands from the piano and surveyed the singer with such an eloquent mixture of disgust and bitter contempt in his extraordinarily expressive eyes that Diana positively jumped.

“Ach! So that is your idea of a humble suitor, is it?” he said, and though he never raised his voice above the rather husky, whispering tones that seemed habitual to him, it cut like a lash. Later, Diana was to learn that Baroni’s most scathing criticisms and most furious reproofs were always delivered in a low, half-whispering tone that fairly seared the victim. “That is your idea, then—to shout, and yell, and bellow your love like a caged bull? When will you learn that music is not noise, and that love—love,” and the odd, husky voice thrilled suddenly to a note as soft and tender as the cooing of a wood-pigeon, “can be expressed piano—ah, but pianissimo—as well as by blowing great blasts of sound from those leathern bellows which you call your lungs?”

The too-forceful baritone stood abashed, shifting uneasily from one foot to the other. With a swift motion Baroni swept up the music from the piano and shovelled it pell-mell into the young man’s arms.

“Oh, go away, go away!” he said impatiently. “You are a voice—just a voice—and nothing more. You will nevaire be an artist!” And he turned his back on him.

Very dejectedly the young man made his way towards the door, whilst Diana, overcome with sympathy and horror at his abrupt dismissal, could hardly refrain from rushing forward to intercede for him.

And then, to her intense amazement, Baroni whisked suddenly round, and following the young man to the door, laid his hand on his shoulder.

“Au revoir, mon brave,” he said, with the utmost bonhomie. “Bring the song next time and we will go through it again. But do not be discouraged—no, for there is no need. It will come—it will come. But remember, piano—piano—pianissimo!”

And with a reassuring pat on the shoulder he pushed the young man affectionately through the doorway and closed the door behind him.

So he had not been dismissed in disgrace after all! Diana breathed a sigh of relief, and, looking up, found Signor Baroni regarding her with a large and benevolent smile.

“You theenk I was too severe with him?” he said placidly. “But no. He is like iron, that young man; he wants hammer-blows.”

“I think he got them,” replied Diana crisply, and then stopped, aghast at her own temerity. She glanced anxiously at Baroni to see if he had resented her remark, only to find him surveying her with a radiant smile and looking exactly like a large, pleased child.

“We shall get on, the one with the other,” he observed contentedly. “Yes, we shall get on. And now—who are you? I do not remember names,” with a terrific roll of his R’s, “but you haf a very pree-ty face—and I never forget a pree-ty face.”

“I’m—I’m Diana Quentin,” she blurted out, nervousness once more overpowering her as she realised that the moment of her ordeal was approaching. “I’ve come to have my voice tried.”

Baroni picked up a memorandum book from his table, turning over the pages till he came to her name.

“Ach! I remember now. Miss Waghorne—my old pupil sent you. She has been teaching you, isn’t it so?”

Diana nodded.

“Yes, I’ve had a few lessons from her, and she hoped that possibly you would take me as a pupil.”

It was out at last—the proposal which now, in the actual presence of the great man himself, seemed nothing less than a piece of stupendous presumption.

Signor Baroni’s eyes roamed inquiringly over the face and figure of the girl before him—quite possibly querying as to whether or no she possessed the requisite physique for a singer. Nevertheless, the great master was by no means proof against the argument of a pretty face. There was a story told of him that, on one occasion, a girl with an exceptionally fine voice had been brought to him, some wealthy patroness having promised to defray the expenses of her training if Baroni would accept her as a pupil. Unfortunately, the girl was distinctly plain, with a quite uninteresting plainness of the pasty, podgy description, and after he had heard her sing, the maestro, first dismissing her from the room, had turned to the lady who was prepared to stand sponsor for her, and had said, with an inimitable shrug of his massive shoulders:

“The voice—it is all right. But the girl—heavens, madame, she is of an ugliness! And I cannot teach ugly people. She has the face of a peeg—please take her away.”

But there was little fear that a similar fate would befall Diana. Her figure, though slight with the slenderness of immaturity, was built on the right lines, and her young, eager face, in its frame of raven hair, was as vivid as a flower—its clear pallor serving but to emphasise the beauty of the straight, dark brows and of the scarlet mouth with its ridiculously short upper-lip. Her eyes were of that peculiarly light grey which, when accompanied, as hers were, by thick black lashes, gives an almost startling impression each time the lids are lifted, an odd suggestion of inner radiance that was vividly arresting.

An intense vitality, a curious shy charm, the sensitiveness inseparable from the artist nature—all these, and more, Baroni’s experienced eye read in Diana’s upturned face, but it yet remained for him to test the quality of her vocal organs.

“Well, we shall see,” he said non-committally. “I do not take many pupils.”

Diana’s heart sank yet a little lower, and she felt almost tempted to seek refuge in immediate flight rather than remain to face the inevitable dismissal that she guessed would be her portion.

Baroni, however, put a summary stop to any such wild notions by turning on her with the lightning-like change of mood which she came afterwards to know as characteristic of him.

“You haf brought some songs?” He held out his hand. “Good. Let me see them.”

He glanced swiftly through the roll of music which she tendered.

“This one—we will try this. Now,” seating himself at the piano, “open your mouth, little nightingale, and sing.”

Softly he played the opening bars of the prelude to the song, and Diana watched fascinatedly while he made the notes speak, and sing, and melt into each other with his short stumpy fingers that looked as though they and music would have little enough in common.

“Now then. Bee-gin.”

And Diana began. But she was so nervous that she felt as though her throat had suddenly closed up, and only a faint, quavering note issued from her lips, breaking off abruptly in a hoarse croak.

Baroni stopped playing.

“Tchut! she is frightened,” he said, and laid an encouraging hand on her shoulder. “But do not be frightened, my dear. You haf a pree-ty face; if your voice is as pree-ty as your face you need not haf fear.”

Diana was furious with herself for failing at the critical moment, and even more angry at Baroni’s speech, in which she sensed a suggestion of the tolerance extended to the average drawing-room singer of mediocre powers.

“I don’t want to have a pretty voice!” she broke out, passionately. “I wouldn’t say thank you for it.”

And anger having swallowed up her nervousness, she opened her mouth—and her throat with it this time? —and let out the full powers that were hidden within her nice big larynx.

When she ceased, Baroni closed the open pages of the song, and turning on his stool, regarded her for a moment in silence.

“No,” he said at last, dispassionately. “It is certainly not a pree-ty voice.”

To Diana’s ears there was such a tone of indifference, such an air of utter finality about the brief speech, that she felt she would have been eternally grateful now could she only have passed the low standard demanded by the possession of even a merely “pretty” voice.

“So this is the voice you bring me to cultivate?” continued the maestro.

“This that sounds like the rumblings of a subterranean earthquake? Boom! boo-o-om! Like that, nicht wahr?”

Diana crimsoned, and, feeling her knees giving way beneath her, sank into the nearest chair, while Baroni continued to stare at her.

“Then—then you cannot take me as a pupil?” she said faintly.

Apparently he did not hear her, for he asked abruptly:

“Are you prepared to give up everything—everything in the world for art? She is no easy task-mistress, remember! She will want a great deal of your time, and she will rob you of your pleasures, and for her sake you will haf to take care of your body—to guard your physical health—as though it were the most precious thing on earth. To become a great singer, a great artiste, means a life of self-denial. Are you prepared for this?”

“But—but,” stammered Diana in astonishment. “If my voice is not even pretty—if it is no good—”

“No good?” he exclaimed, leaping to his feet with a rapidity of movement little short of marvellous in a man of his size and bulk. “Gran Dio! No good, did you say? But, my child, you haf a voice of gold—pure gold. In three years of my training it will become the voice of the century. Tchut! No good!”

He pranced nimbly to the door and flung it open.

“Giulia! Giulia!” he shouted, and a minute later a fat, amiable-looking woman, whose likeness to Baroni proclaimed them brother and sister, came hurrying downstairs in answer to his call. “Signora Evanci, my sister,” he said, nodding to Diana. “This, Giulia, is a new pupil, and I would haf you hear her voice. It is magnificent—épatant! Open your mouth, little singing-bird, once more. This time we will haf some scales.”

Bewildered and excited, Diana sang again, Baroni testing the full compass of her voice until quite suddenly he shut down the lid of the piano.

“It is enough,” he said solemnly, and then, turning to Signora Evanci, began talking to her in an excited jumble of English and Italian. Diana caught broken phrases here and there.

“Of a quality superb! … And a beeg compass which will grow beeger yet… The contralto of the century, Giulia.”

And Signora Evanci smiled and nodded agreement, patting Diana’s hand, and reminded Baroni that it was time for his afternoon cup of consommé. She was a comfortable feather-bed of a woman, whose mission in life it seemed to be to fend off from her brother all sharp corners, and to see that he took his food at the proper intervals and changed into the thick underclothing necessitated by the horrible English climate.

“But it will want much training, your voice,” continued Baroni, turning once more to Diana. “It is so beeg that it is all over the place—it sounds like a clap of thunder that has lost his way in a back garden.” And he smiled indulgently. “To bee-gin with, you will put away all your songs—everyone. There will be nothing but exercises for months yet. And you will come for your first lesson on Thursday. Mondays and Thursdays I will teach you, but you must come other days, also, and listen at my lessons. There is much—very much—learned by listening, if one listens with the brain as well as with the ear. Now, little singing-bird, good-bye. I will go with you myself to the door.”

The whole thing seemed too impossibly good to be true. Diana felt as if she were in the middle of a beautiful dream from which she might at any moment waken to the disappointing reality of things. Hardly able to believe the evidence of her senses, she found herself once again in the narrow hall, shepherded by the maestro’s portly form. As he held the door open for her to pass out into the street, someone ran quickly up the steps, pausing on the topmost.

“Ha, Olga!” exclaimed Baroni, beaming. “You haf returned just too late to hear Mees Quentin. But you will play for her—many times yet.” Then, turning to Diana, he added by way of introduction: “This is my accompanist, Mees Lermontof.”

Diana received the impression of a thin, satirical face, its unusual pallor picked out by the black brows and hair, of a bitter-looking mouth that hardly troubled itself to smile in salutation, and, above all, of a pair of queer green eyes, which, as the heavy, opaque white lids above them lifted, seemed slowly—and rather contemptuously—to take her in from head to foot.

She bowed, and as Miss Lermontof inclined her head slightly in response, there was a kind of cold aloofness in her bearing—a something defiantly repellent—which filled Diana with a sudden sense of dislike, almost of fear. It was as though the sun had all at once gone behind a cloud.

The Baroni’s voice fell on her ears, and the disagreeable tension snapped.

“A rivederci, little singing-bird. On Thursday we will bee-gin.”

The door closed on the maestro’s benevolently smiling face, and on that other—the dark, satirical face of Olga Lermontof—and Diana found herself once again breasting the March wind as it came roystering up through Grellingham Place.

Chapter 2

FELLOW-TRAVELLERS

“Look sharp, miss, jump in! Luggage in the rear van.”

The porter hoisted her almost bodily up the steps of the railway carriage, slamming the door behind her, the guard’s whistle shrieked, and an instant later the train started with a jerk that sent Diana staggering against the seat of the compartment, upon which she finally subsided, breathless but triumphant.

She had very nearly missed the train. An organised procession of some kind had been passing through the streets just as she was driving to the station, and her taxi had been held up for the full ten minutes’ grace which she had allowed herself, the metre fairly ticking its heart out in impotent rage behind the policeman’s uplifted hand.

So it was with a sigh of relief that she found herself at last comfortably installed in a corner seat of a first-class carriage. She glanced about her to make sure that she had not mislaid any of her hand baggage in her frantic haste, and this point being settled to her satisfaction, she proceeded to take stock of her fellow-traveller, for there was one other person in the compartment besides herself.

He was sitting in the corner furthest away, his back to the engine, apparently entirely oblivious of her presence. On his knee rested a quarto writing-pad, and he appeared so much absorbed in what he was writing that Diana doubted whether he had even heard the commotion, occasioned by her sudden entry.

But she was mistaken. As the porter had bundled her into the carriage, the man in the corner had raised a pair of deep-set blue eyes, looked at her for a moment with a half-startled glance, and then, with the barest flicker of a smile, had let his eyes drop once more upon his writing-pad. Then he crossed out the word “Kismet,” which he had inadvertently written.

Diana regarded him with interest. He was probably an author, she decided, and since a year’s training as a professional singer had brought her into contact with all kinds of people who earned their livings by their brains, as she herself hoped to do some day, she instantly felt a friendly interest in him. She liked, too, the shape of the hand that held the fountain-pen; it was a slender, sensitive-looking member with well-kept nails, and Diana always appreciated nice hands. The man’s head was bent over his work, so that she could only obtain a foreshortened glimpse of his face, but he possessed a supple length of limb that even the heavy travelling-rug tucked around his knees failed to disguise, and there was a certain soigné air of rightness about the way he wore his clothes which pleased her.

Suddenly becoming conscious that she was staring rather openly, she turned her eyes away and looked out of the window, and immediately encountered a big broad label, pasted on to the glass, with the word “Reserved” printed on it in capital letters. The letters, of course, appeared reversed to any one inside the carriage, but they were so big and black and hectoring that they were quite easily deciphered.

Evidently, in his violent haste to get her on board the train, the porter had thrust her into the privacy of some one’s reserved compartment that someone being the man opposite. What a horrible predicament! Diana felt hot all over with embarrassment, and, starting to her feet, stammered out a confused apology.

The man in the corner raised his head.

“It does not matter in the least,” he assured her indifferently. “Please do not distress yourself. I believe the train is very crowded; you had better sit down again.”

The chilly lack of interest in his tones struck Diana with an odd sense of familiarity, but she was too preoccupied to dwell on it, and began hastily to collect together her dressing-case and other odds and ends.

“I’ll find another seat,” she said stiffly, and made her way out into the corridor of the rocking train.

Her search, however, proved quite futile; every compartment was packed with people hurrying out of town for Easter, and in a few moments she returned.

“I’m sorry,” she said, rather shyly. “Every seat is taken. I’m afraid you’ll have to put up with me.”

Just then the carriage gave a violent lurch, as the express swung around a bend, and Diana, dropping everything she held, made a frantic clutch at the rack above her head, while her goods and chattels shot across the floor, her dressing-case sliding gaily along till its wild career was checked against the foot of the man in the corner.

With an air of resignation he rose and retrieved her belongings, placing them on the seat opposite her.

“It would have been better if you had taken my advice,” he observed, with a sort of weary patience.

Diana felt unreasonably angry with him.

“Why don’t you say, ‘I told you so’ at once?” she said tartly.

A whimsical smile crossed his face.

“Well, I did, didn’t I?”

He stood for a moment looking down at her, steadying himself with one hand against the doorway, and her ill-humour vanishing as quickly as it had arisen, she returned the smile.

“Yes, you did. And you were quite right, too,” she acknowledged frankly.

He laughed outright.

“Well done!” he cried. “Not one woman in twenty will own herself in the wrong as a rule.”

Diana frowned.

“I don’t agree with you at all,” she bristled. “Men have a ridiculous way of lumping all women together and then generalising about them.”

“Let’s discuss the question,” he said gaily. “May I?” And scarcely waiting for her permission, he deliberately moved aside her things and seated himself opposite her.

“But you were busy writing,” she protested.

He threw an indifferent glance in the direction of his writing-pad, where it lay on the seat in the corner.

“Was I?” he answered calmly. “Sometimes there are better things to do than scribbling—pleasanter ones, anyway.”

Diana flushed. It certainly was an unusual thing to do, to get into conversation with an unknown man with whom one chanced to be travelling, and she had never before committed such a breach of the conventions—would have been shocked at the bare idea of it—but there was something rather irresistible about this man’s cool self-possession. He seemed to assume that a thing must of necessity be right, since he chose to do it.

She looked up and met his eyes watching her with a glint of amusement in their depths.

“No, it isn’t quite proper,” he agreed, answering her unspoken thought. “But I’ve never bothered about that if I really wanted to do a thing. And don’t you think,” still with that flicker of laughter in his eyes, “that it’s rather ridiculous, when two human beings are shut up in a box together for several hours, for each of them to behave as though the other weren’t there?”

He spoke half-mockingly, and Diana, felt that within himself he was ridiculing her prim little notions of conventionality. She flushed uncomfortably.

“Yes, I—I suppose so,” she faltered.

He seemed to understand.

“Forgive me,” he said, with a sudden gentleness. “I wasn’t laughing at you, but only at all the absurd conventions by which we cut ourselves off from many an hour of pleasant intercourse—just as though we had any too many pleasures in life! But if you wish it, I’ll go back to my corner.”

“No, no, don’t go,” returned Diana hastily. “It—it was silly of me.”

“Then we may talk? Good. I shall behave quite nicely, I assure you.”

Again the curiously familiar quality in his voice! She was positive she had heard it before—that crisp, unslurred enunciation, with its keen perception of syllabic values, so unlike the average Englishman’s slovenly rendering of his mother-tongue.

“Of what are you thinking?” he asked, smiling. And then the swift, hawk like glance of the blue eyes brought with it a sudden, sure sense of recognition, stinging the slumbering cells of memory into activity. A picture shaped itself in her mind of a blustering March day, and of a girl, a man, and an errand-boy, careering wildly in the roadway of a London street, while some stray sheets of music went whirling hither and thither in the wind. It had all happened a year ago, on that critical day when Baroni had consented to accept her as his pupil, but the recollection of it, and the odd, snubbed feeling she had experienced in regard to the man with the blue eyes, was as clear in her mind as though it had occurred only yesterday.

“I believe we have met before, haven’t we?” she said.

The look of gay good-humour vanished suddenly from his face and an expression of blank inquiry took its place.

“I think not,” he replied.

“Oh, but I’m sure of it. Don’t you remember,” brightly, “about a year ago. I was carrying some music, and it all blew away up the street and you helped me to collect it again?”

He shook his head.

“I think you must be mistaken,” he answered regretfully.

“No, no,” she persisted, but beginning to experience some slight embarrassment. (It is embarrassing to find you have betrayed a keen and vivid recollection of a man who has apparently forgotten that he ever set eyes on you!) “Oh, you must remember—it was in Grellingham Place, and the greengrocer’s boy helped as well.”

She broke off, reading the polite negation in his face.

“You must be confusing me with someone else. I should not be likely to—forget—so charming a rencontre.”

There was surely a veiled mockery in his composed tones, irreproachably courteous though they were, and Diana coloured hotly. Somehow, this man possessed the faculty of making her feel awkward and self-conscious and horribly young; he himself was so essentially of the polished type of cosmopolitan that beside him she felt herself to be as raw and crude as any bread-and-butter miss fresh from the schoolroom. Moreover, she had an inward conviction that in reality he recollected the incident in Grellingham Place as clearly as she did herself, although he refused to admit it.

She relapsed into an uncomfortable silence, and presently the attendant from the restaurant car came along the corridor and looked in to ask if they were going to have dinner on the train. Both nodded an affirmative.

“Table for two?” he queried, evidently taking them to be two friends travelling together.

Diana was about to enlighten him when her vis-à-vis leaned forward hastily.

“Please,” he said persuasively, and as she returned no answer he apparently took her silence for consent, for something passed unobtrusively from his hand to that of the attendant, and the latter touched his hat with a smiling, “Right you are, sir! I’ll reserve a table for two.”

Diana felt that the acquaintance was progressing rather faster than she could have wished, but she hardly knew how to check it. Finally she mustered up courage to say firmly:

“It must only be if I pay for my own dinner.”

“But, of course,” he answered courteously, with the slightest tinge of surprise in his tones, and once again Diana, felt that she had made a fool of herself and blushed to the tips of her ears.

A faint smile trembled for an instant on his lips, and then, without apparently noticing her confusion, he began to talk, passing easily from one subject to another until she had regained her confidence, finally leading her almost imperceptibly into telling him about herself.

In the middle of dinner she paused, aghast at her own loquacity.

“But what a horrible egotist you must think me!” she exclaimed. “I’ve been talking about my own affairs all the time.”

“Not at all. I’m interested. This Signor Baroni who is training your voice—he is the finest teacher in the world. You must have a very beautiful voice for him to have accepted you as a pupil.” There was a hint of surprise in his tones.

“Oh, no,” she hastened to assure him modestly. “I expect it was more that I had the luck to catch him in a good mood that afternoon.”

“And his moods vary considerably, don’t they?” he said, smiling as though at some personal recollection.

“Oh, do you know him?” asked Diana eagerly.

In an instant his face became a blank mask; it was as though a shutter had descended, blotting out all its vivacious interest.

“I have met him,” he responded briefly. Then, turning the subject adroitly, he went on: “So now you are on your way home for a well-earned holiday? Your people must be looking forward to seeing you after so long a time—you have been away a year, didn’t you say?”

“Yes, I spent the other two vacations abroad, in Italy, for the sake of acquiring the language. Signor Baroni,” laughingly, “was horror-stricken at my Italian, so he insisted. But I have no people—not really, you know,” she continued. “I live with my guardian and his daughter. Both my parents died when I was quite young.”

“You are not very old now,” he interjected.

“I’m eighteen,” she answered seriously.

“It’s a great age,” he acknowledged, with equal gravity.

Just then a waiter sped forward and with praiseworthy agility deposited their coffee on the table without spilling a drop, despite the swaying of the train, and Diana’s fellow-traveller produced his cigarette-case.

“Will you smoke?” he asked.

She looked at the cigarettes longingly.

“Baroni’s forbidden me to smoke,” she said, hesitating a little. “Do you think—just one—would hurt my voice?”

The short black lashes flew up, and the light-grey eyes, like a couple of stars between black clouds, met his in irresistible appeal.

“I’m sure it wouldn’t,” he replied promptly. “After all, this is just an hour’s playtime that we have snatched out of life. Let’s enjoy every minute of it—we may never meet again.”

Diana felt her heart contract in a most unexpected fashion.

“Oh, I hope we shall!” she exclaimed, with ingenuous warmth.

“It is not likely,” he returned quietly. He struck a match and held it while she lit her cigarette, and for an instant their fingers touched. His teeth came down hard on his under-lip. “No, we mustn’t meet again,” he repeated in a low voice.

“Oh, well, you never know,” insisted Diana, with cheerful optimism.

“People run up against each other in the most extraordinary fashion. And I expect we shall, too.”

“I don’t think so,” he said. “If I thought that we should—” He broke off abruptly, frowning.

“Why, I don’t believe you want to meet me again!” exclaimed Diana, with a note in her voice like that of a hurt child.

“Oh, for that!” He shrugged his shoulders. “If we could have what we wanted in this world! Though, I mustn’t complain—I have had this hour. And I wanted it!” he added, with a sudden intensity.

“So much that you propose to make it last you for the remainder of your life?” smiling.

“It will have to,” he answered grimly.

After dinner they made their way back from the restaurant car to their compartment, and noticing that she looked rather white and tired, he suggested that she should tuck herself up on the seat and go to sleep.

“But supposing I didn’t wake at the right time?” she objected. “I might be carried past my station and find myself heaven knows where in the small hours of the morning! … I am sleepy, though.”

“Let me be call-boy,” he suggested. “Where do you want to get out?”

“At Craiford Junction. That’s the station for Crailing, where I’m going. Do you know it at all? It’s a tiny village in Devonshire; my guardian is the Rector there.”

“Crailing?” An odd expression crossed his face and he hesitated a moment. At last, apparently coming to a decision of some kind, he said: “Then I must wake you up when I go, as I’m getting out before that.”

“Can I trust you?” she asked sleepily.

“Surely.”

She had curled herself up on the seat with her feet stretched out in front of her, one narrow foot resting lightly on the instep of the other, and she looked up at him speculatively from between the double fringe of her short black lashes.

“Yes, I believe I can,” she acquiesced, with a little smile.

He tucked his travelling rug deftly round her, and, pulling on his overcoat, went back to his former corner, where he picked up the neglected writing pad and began scribbling in a rather desultory fashion.

Very soon her even breathing told him that she slept, and he laid aside the pad and sat quietly watching her. She looked very young and childish as she lay there, with the faint shadows of fatigue beneath her closed eyes—there was something appealing about her very helplessness. Presently the rug slipped a little, and he saw her hand groping vaguely for it. Quietly he tiptoed across the compartment and drew it more closely about her.

“Thank you—so much,” she murmured drowsily, and the man looking down at her caught his breath sharply betwixt his teeth. Then, with an almost imperceptible shrug of his shoulders, he stepped back and resumed his seat.

The express sped on through the night, the little twin globes of light high up in the carriage ceiling jumping and flickering as it swung along the metals.

Down the track it flew like a living thing, a red glow marking its passage as it cleft the darkness, its freight of human souls contentedly sleeping, or smoking, or reading, as the fancy took them. And half a mile ahead on the permanent way, Death stood watching—watching and waiting where, by some hideous accident of fate, a faulty coupling-rod had snapped asunder in the process of shunting, leaving a solitary coal-truck to slide slowly back into the shadows of the night, unseen, the while its fellows were safely drawn on to an aiding.

Chapter 3

AN ENCOUNTER WITH DEATH

One moment the even throbbing of the engine as the train slipped along through the silence of the country-side—the next, and the silence was split by a shattering roar and the shock of riven plates, the clash of iron driven against iron, and of solid woodwork grinding and grating as it splintered into wreckage.

Diana, suddenly—horribly—awake, found herself hurled from her seat. Absolute darkness lapped her round; it was as though a thick black curtain had descended, blotting out the whole world, while from behind it, immeasurably hideous in that utter night, uprose an inferno of cries and shrieks—the clamour of panic-stricken humanity.

Her hands, stretched stiffly out in front of her to ward off she knew not what impending horror hidden by the dark, came in contact with the framework of the window, and in an instant she was clinging to it, pressing up against it with her body, her fingers gripping and clutching at it as a rat, trapped in a well, claws madly at a projecting bit of stonework. It was at least something solid out of that awful void.

“What’s happened? What’s happened? What’s happened?”

She was whispering the question over and over again in a queer, whimpering voice without the remotest idea of what she was saying. When a stinging pain shot through her arm, as a jagged point of broken glass bit into the flesh, and with a scream of utter, unreasoning terror she let go her hold.

The next moment she felt herself grasped and held by a pair of arms, and a voice spoke to her out of the darkness.

“Are you hurt? … My God, are you hurt?”

With a sob of relief she realised that it was the voice of her fellow-traveller. He was here, close to her, something alive and human in the midst of this nightmare of awful, unspeakable fear, and she clung to him, shuddering.

“Speak, can’t you?” His utterance sounded hoarse and distorted. “You’re hurt—?” And she felt his hands slide searchingly along her limbs, feeling and groping.

“No—no.”

“Thank God!” He spoke under his breath. Then, giving her a shake:

“Come, pull yourself together. We must get out of this.”

He fumbled in his pocket and she heard the rattle of a matchbox, and an instant later a flame spurted out in the gloom as he lit a bundle of matches together. In the brief illumination she could see the floor of the compartment steeply tilted up and at its further end what looked like a huge, black cavity. The whole side of the carriage had been wrenched away.

“Come on!” exclaimed the man, catching her by the hand and pulling her forward towards that yawning space. “We must jump for it. It’ll be a big drop. I’ll catch you.”

At the edge of the gulf he paused. Below, with eyes grown accustomed to the darkness, she could discern figures running to and fro, and lanterns flashing, while shouts and cries rose piercingly above a continuous low undertone of moaning.

“Stand here,” he directed her. “I’ll let myself down, and when I call to you—jump.”

She caught at him frantically.

“Don’t go—don’t leave me.”

He disengaged himself roughly from her clinging hands.

“It only wants a moment’s pluck,” he said, “and then you’ll be safe.”

The next minute he was over the side, hanging by his hands from the edge of the bent and twisted flooring of the carriage, and a second afterwards she heard him drop. Peering out, she could see him standing on the ground below, his arms held out towards her.

“Jump!” he called.

But she shrank from the drop into the darkness.

“I can’t!” she sobbed helplessly. “I can’t!”

He approached a step nearer, and the light from some torch close at hand flashed onto his uplifted face. She could see it clearly, tense and set, the blue eyes blazing.

“God in heaven!” he cried furiously. “Do what I tell you. Jump!”

The fierce, imperative command startled her into action, and she jumped blindly, recklessly, out into the night. There was one endless moment of uncertainty, and then she felt herself caught by arms like steel and set gently upon the ground.

“You little fool!” he said thickly. He was breathing heavily as though he had been running; she could feel his chest heave as, for an instant, he held her pressed against him.

He released her almost immediately, and taking her by the arm, led her to the embankment, where he stripped off his overcoat and wrapped it about her. But she was hardly conscious of what he was doing, for suddenly everything seemed to be spinning round her. The lights of the torches bobbed up and down in a confused blur of twinkling stars, the sound of voices and the trampling of feet came faintly to her ears as from a great way off, while the grim, black bulk of the piled-up coaches of the train seemed to lean nearer and nearer, until finally it swooped down on top of her and she sank into a sea of impenetrable darkness.

The next thing she remembered was finding a flask held to her lips, while a familiar voice commanded her to drink. She shook her head feebly.

“Drink it at once,” the voice insisted. “Do you hear?”

And because her mind held some dim recollection of the futility of gainsaying that peremptory voice, she opened her lips obediently and let the strong spirit trickle down her throat.

“Better now?” queried the voice.

She nodded, and then, complete consciousness returning, she sat up.

“I’m all right now—really,” she said.

The owner of the voice regarded her critically.

“Yes, I think you’ll do now,” he returned. “Stay where you are. I’m going along to see if I can help, but I’ll come back to you again.”

The darkness swallowed him up, and Diana sat very still on the embankment, vibrantly conscious in every nerve of her of the man’s cool, dominating personality. Gradually her thoughts returned to the happenings of the moment, and then the full horror of what had occurred came back to her. She began to cry weakly. But the tears did her good, bringing with them relief from the awful shock which had strained her nerves almost to breaking-point, and with return to a more normal state of mind came the instinctive wish to help—to do something for those who must be suffering so pitiably in the midst of that scarred heap of wreckage on the line.