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to Chiltern: the night being fine and the road, I am told, exceptionally
good. Miss Dorothy, what do you think?”
Instinctively the girl looked to Kirkwood; then shifted her glance to their
host. “I think you are wonderfully thoughtful and kind,” she said simply.
“And you, Philip?”
“It’s an inspiration,” the younger man declared. “I can’t think of anything
better calculated to throw them off, than to distance them by motor-car. It
would be always possible to trace our journey by rail.”
“Then,” announced Brentwick, making as if to rise, “we had best go. If
neither my hearing nor Captain Stryker’s car deceives me, our fiery chariot
is panting at the door.”
A little sobered from the confident spirit of quiet gaiety in which they
had dined, they left the table. Not that, in their hearts, either greatly
questioned their ultimate triumph; but they were allowing for the element
of error so apt to set at naught human calculations. Calendar himself had
already been proved fallible. Within the bounds of possibility, their turn
to stumble might now be imminent.
When he let himself dwell upon it, their utter helplessness to give
Calendar pause by commonplace methods, maddened Kirkwood. With another
scoundrel it had been so simple a matter to put a period to his activities
by a word to the police. But he was her father; for that reason he must
continually be spared … Even though, in desperate extremity, she should
give consent to the arrest of the adventurers, retaliation would follow,
swift and sure. For they might not overlook nor gloze the fact that hers
had been the hands responsible for the theft of the jewels; innocent
though she had been in committing that larceny, a cat’s-paw guided by an
intelligence unscrupulous and malign, the law would not hold her guiltless
were she once brought within its cognizance. Nor, possibly, would the
Hallams, mother and son.
Upon their knowledge and their fear of this, undoubtedly Calendar was
reckoning: witness the barefaced effrontery with which he operated against
them. His fear of the police might be genuine enough, but he was never for
an instant disturbed by any doubt lest his daughter should turn against
him. She would never dare that.
Before they left the house, while Dorothy was above stairs resuming her
hat and coat, Kirkwood and Brentwick reconnoitered from the drawing-room
windows, themselves screened from observation by the absence of light in
the room behind.
Before the door a motor-car waited, engines humming impatiently,
mechanician ready in his seat, an uncouth shape in goggles and leather
garments that shone like oilskins under the street lights.
At one corner another and a smaller car stood in waiting, its lamps like
baleful eyes glaring through the night.
In the shadows across the way, a lengthy shadow lurked: Stryker, beyond
reasonable question. Otherwise the street was deserted. Not even that
adventitous bobby of the early evening was now in evidence.
Dorothy presently joining them, Brentwick led the way to the door.
Wotton, apparently nerveless beneath his absolute immobility, let them
out—and slammed the door behind them with such promptitude as to give
cause for the suspicion that he was a fraud, a sham, beneath his icy
exterior desperately afraid lest the house be stormed by the adventurers.
Kirkwood to the right, Brentwick to the left of Dorothy, the former
carrying the treasure bag, they hastened down the walk and through the gate
to the car.
The watcher across the way was moved to whistle shrilly; the other car
lunged forward nervously.
Brentwick taking the front seat, beside the mechanician, left the tonneau
to Kirkwood and Dorothy. As the American slammed the door, the car swept
smoothly out into the middle of the way, while the pursuing car swerved in
to the other curb, slowing down to let Stryker jump aboard.
Kirkwood put himself in the seat by the girl’s side and for a few moments
was occupied with the arrangement of the robes. Then, sitting back, he
found her eyes fixed upon him, pools of inscrutable night in the shadow of
her hat.
“You aren’t afraid, Dorothy?”
She answered quietly: “I am with you, Philip.”
Beneath the robe their hands met…
Exalted, excited, he turned and looked back. A hundred yards to the rear
four unwinking eyes trailed them, like some modern Nemesis in monstrous
guise.
XIXI–-THE UXBRIDGE ROAD
At a steady gait, now and again checked in deference to the street traffic,
Brentwick’s motor-car rolled, with resonant humming of the engine, down
the Cromwell Road, swerved into Warwick Road and swung northward through
Kensington to Shepherd’s Bush. Behind it Calendar’s car clung as if towed
by an invisible cable, never gaining, never losing, mutely testifying to
the adventurer’s unrelenting, grim determination to leave them no instant’s
freedom from surveillance, to keep for ever at their shoulders, watching
his chance, biding his time with sinister patience until the moment when,
wearied, their vigilance should relax….
To some extent he reckoned without his motor-car. As long as they traveled
within the metropolitan limits, constrained to observe a decorous pace
in view of the prejudices of the County Council, it was a matter of no
difficulty whatever to maintain his distance. But once they had won through
Shepherd’s Bush and, paced by huge doubledeck trolley trams, were flying
through Hammersmith on the Uxbridge Road; once they had run through Acton,
and knew beyond dispute that now they were without the city boundaries,
then the complexion of the business was suddenly changed.
Not too soon for honest sport; Calendar was to have (Kirkwood would have
said in lurid American idiom) a run for his money. The scattered lights of
Southall were winking out behind them before Brentwick chose to give the
word to the mechanician.
Quietly the latter threw in the clutch for the third speed—and the fourth.
The car leaped forward like a startled race-horse. The motor lilted merrily
into its deep-throated song of the open road, its contented, silken humming
passing into a sonorous and sustained purr.
Kirkwood and the girl were first jarred violently forward, then thrown
together. She caught his arm to steady herself; it seemed the most natural
thing imaginable that he should take her hand and pass it beneath his
arm, holding her so, his fingers closed above her own. Before they had
recovered, or had time to catch their breath, a mile of Middlesex had
dropped to the rear.
Not quite so far had they distanced Calendar’s trailing Nemesis of the four
glaring eyes; the pursuers put forth a gallant effort to hold their place.
At intervals during the first few minutes a heavy roaring and crashing
could be heard behind them; gradually it subsided, dying on the wings of
the free rushing wind that buffeted their faces as mile after mile was
reeled off and the wide, darkling English countryside opened out before
them, sweet and wonderful.
Once Kirkwood looked back; in the winking of an eye he saw four faded disks
of light, pallid with despair, top a distant rise and glide down into
darkness. When he turned, Dorothy was interrogating him with eyes whose
melting, shadowed loveliness, revealed to him in the light of the far,
still stars, seemed to incite him to that madness which he had bade himself
resist with all his strength.
He shook his head, as if to say: They can not catch us.
His hour was not yet; time enough to think of love and marriage (as if he
were capable of consecutive thought on any other subject!)—time enough to
think of them when he had gene back to his place, or rather when he should
have found it, in the ranks of bread-winners, and so have proved his right
to mortal happiness; time enough then to lay whatever he might have to
offer at her feet. Now he could conceive of no baser treachery to his
soul’s-desire than to advantage himself of her gratitude.
Resolutely he turned his face forward, striving with all his will and might
to forget the temptation of her lips, weary as they were and petulant with
waiting; and so sat rigid in his time of trial, clinging with what strength
he could to the standards of his honor, and trying to lose his dream
in dreaming of the bitter struggle that seemed likely to be his future
portion.
Perhaps she guessed a little of the fortunes of the battle that was being
waged within him. Perhaps not. Whatever the trend of her thoughts, she did
not draw away from him…. Perhaps the breath of night, fresh and clean and
fragrant with the odor of the fields and hedges, sweeping into her face
with velvety caress, rendered her drowsy. Presently the silken lashes
drooped, fluttering upon her cheeks, the tired and happy smile hovered
about her lips….
In something less than half an hour of this wild driving, Kirkwood roused
out of his reverie sufficiently to become sensible that the speed was
slackening. Incoherent snatches of sentences, fragments of words and
phrases spoken by Brentwick and the mechanician, were flung back past his
ears by the rushing wind. Shielding his eyes he could see dimly that the
mechanician was tinkering (apparently) with the driving gear. Then, their
pace continuing steadily to abate, he heard Brentwick fling at the man a
sharp-toned and querulously impatient question: What was the trouble? His
reply came in a single word, not distinguishable.
The girl sat up, opening her eyes, disengaging her arm.
Kirkwood bent forward and touched Brentwick on the shoulder; the latter
turned to him a face lined with deep concern.
“Trouble,” he announced superfluously. “I fear we have blundered.”
“What is it?” asked Dorothy in a troubled voice.
“Petrol seems to be running low. Charles here” (he referred to the
mechanician) “says the tank must be leaking. We’ll go on as best we can and
try to find an inn. Fortunately, most of the inns nowadays keep supplies of
petrol for just such emergencies.”
“Are we—? Do you think—?”
“Oh, no; not a bit of danger of that,” returned Brentwick hastily. “They’ll
not catch up with us this night. That is a very inferior car they have,—so
Charles says, at least; nothing to compare with this. If I’m not in error,
there’s the Crown and Mitre just ahead; we’ll make it, fill our tanks, and
be off again before they can make up half their loss.”
Dorothy looked anxiously to Kirkwood, her lips forming an unuttered query:
What did he think?
“Don’t worry; we’ll have no trouble,” he assured her stoutly; “the
chauffeur knows, undoubtedly.”
None the less he was moved to stand up in the tonneau, conscious of the
presence of the traveling bag, snug between his feet, as well as of the
weight of Calendar’s revolver in his pocket, while he stared back along the
road.
There was nothing to be seen of their persecutors.
The car continued to crawl. Five minutes dragged out tediously. Gradually
they, drew abreast a tavern standing back a distance from the road,
embowered in a grove of trees between whose ancient boles the tap-room
windows shone enticingly, aglow with comfortable light. A creaking
sign-board, much worn by weather and age, swinging from a roadside post,
confirmed the accuracy of Brentwick’s surmise, announcing that here stood
the Crown and Mitre, house of entertainment for man and beast.
Sluggishly the car rolled up before it and came to a dead and silent halt.
Charles, the mechanician, jumping out, ran hastily up the path towards the
inn. In the car Brentwick turned again, his eyes curiously bright in the
starlight, his forehead quaintly furrowed, his voice apologetic.
“It may take
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