The orchestra commenced to play, softly, music by Tchaikovsky. Mallory caught her breath. This was the first time she had seen a real ballet-dancer before a selected audience, and the beauty and the poetry of it all enchanted her. While she watched she was able to forget that it was Sonia Martingale who was performing superbly before her, and that she had every reason to envy her and feel bitterly unhappy because of her.
She looked along the rows of seats in front of her, and with ease she made out one dark, sleek head and slightly arrogant profile, just then quite immobile, while its owner obviously worshipped at the shrine of beauty. Wistfully, in a spirit of true renunciation, she thought that she could quite understand him—as a man who loved beauty he could have done nothing other than capitulate before such flawless beauty, and such undisputable talent, as Sonia Martingale displayed.
Then someone touched Mallory lightly on the shoulder, and she turned to find Darcy standing at her elbow. Darcy looked agitated—so agitated that Mallory looked amazed—and she was making signs to Mallory that she wished to speak to her, and that the matter was urgent.
Mallory slid noiselessly out of her seat and followed the heavier figure of the Belgian nurse out into the corridor. Darcy turned on her and caught her by her arm, and she exclaimed hoarsely:
“It is the child—it is Miss Serena! She is ill, and I do not know what to do for her. We must get the doctor, because she is so sick, and I do not know how or where to find him! He is not here, and he is not at his house...! I have already telephoned! Will you see what you can do...? Mr. Adrian will drive you to the village if we cannot get in touch with him any other way...”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Afterwards Mallory thought it odd that Dr. Harding, who had been invited with his family to the ball, should not be at Morven, and the telephone was certainly dead when she tried to contact him at his house. She raced upstairs to Serena, and saw at once that the child was suffering a sharp attack of something, and she appeared to be running a high temperature. Darcy was genuinely upset, and beside the bed stood Adrian. He had made a brief appearance in his buccaneer costume, but was now in ordinary evening clothes like his brother. He looked at Mallory with a faint hint of appeal in his eyes, as if imploring her to forgive him for the night she had visited his room.
But Mallory scarcely noticed, so full of concern was she for Serena. When she had taken the child’s temperature herself, and discovered how high it was, she decided to waste no more time, and she turned to Adrian.
“We don’t want to disturb Mr. Benedict and his guests if we can help it, and I don’t think I could drive one of the cars here. They’re too powerful for me. But if you...”
“Of course,” Adrian answered immediately “I’m afraid it’s the only thing to do because Harding’s telephone must be out of order, and we’ll have to get hold of him somehow.” He sounded more practical and alert than Mallory had known him before, and. she thought he, too, looked anxious as he surveyed his child. Then the two of them were hastening down the stairs, after he had insisted on her fetching a wrap, and while the sounds of applause from the ballroom reached them—wave after wave of almost hysterical hand-clapping, and loud cries of ‘encore’—they made their way round the corner of the house to the huge modern garages, and within a matter of seconds after that Adrian had his brother’s big grey car purring into life, and they were slipping noiselessly away down the drive.
It was a night of cloud and windless darkness, with only occasionally the pale face of the moon appearing between a rift in the solid bank of clouds. The atmosphere was close and oppressive, too, and Mallory was glad once they started to gather speed to feel a cooler air reaching her through the open roof. The village when they reached it seemed asleep, which was not surprising since it was close upon midnight, and no lights showed in any of the windows. The doctor’s house, a compact Georgian residence standing well back from the main highway, was in utter darkness, but in the short drive before the front door a car was standing. To Mallory’s relief as Adrian brought their car to a halt just behind it, and she sprang out from her seat beside him at the wheel, a dark figure appeared emerging from the house, and in the beam of their headlights she easily recognized Dr. Harding himself, in full evening dress, and he looked considerably astonished as she rushed at him and caught his arm.
She explained in a few words what had happened, and he explained that his telephone was switched to his partner’s house at the other end of the village, and he it was who had agreed to take emergency calls for that one night, while Dr. Harding was attending the ball. He had returned to his house because his wife was anxious about a window left unfastened, and that was the reason why they had been unable to establish contact with him before. But once he heard about Serena he got into his car straight away, and started to lead the way back to Morven, and Mallory uttered a sigh of relief as she climbed into her place again beside Adrian and he instantly let in his clutch.
“Thank goodness we found him!” she exclaimed. “I was wondering what on earth we were going to do if we couldn’t find a doctor—at least, not without wasting a lot of time.”
Adrian agreed with her, but she thought that his voice sounded cooler now, and more detached. She glanced at him in the queer, greenish light from the dash-board, and he was staring straight ahead at the broad, metalled road, an oddly complacent look on his face as his slender capable hands controlled the wheel. She recalled that on the one occasion when she had driven with him before she had been surprised because he was obviously such an excellent driver, and seemed happy at the wheel of a car, and tonight, as the speedometer swung from fifty to sixty miles an hour, and then up to eighty, the impression she received was that, in spite of his recent anxiety—or was it no more than a fancied anxiety, because she herself was so consumed with the same emotion?—an expression of settled contentment was taking the place of every other look on his face, and his hands on the wheel were clutching it almost triumphantly.
The broad road was tree-lined but open until they reached the point at which a narrower lane branched off it and led to Morven. Already the doctor’s car had disappeared up that lane, his red tail light swallowed up in the tunnel-like darkness, but, instead of swinging the grey car round after it, Adrian kept to his course on the smooth main highway and steadily increased his speed.
Mallory felt the wind created by their passage sing past her ears, and the light, gauzy stole about her shoulders was whipped away from them and she had to catch at it with both hands in order to prevent it being blown right out of the car. Her hair streamed behind her like a cloak, and turning to Adrian she exclaimed urgently:
“You’ve missed the turning! We’ll have to stop and go back! Didn’t you see Dr. Harding turn off?”
“Of course I saw him,” Adrian answered calmly, “but there’s no need to be anxious now he’s on his way to Serena, and there’s no reason why we would rush back to the house, either. You’ve had a pretty miserable evening—as I observed when I saw you running round with Carpie and actually carrying trays!—and now we’re going to have a little run on our own, so just sit back and relax and enjoy it!”
He shot a fleeting glance at her, and his white teeth flashed in an obsessed smile. “The trouble with you is that you’re so terribly conscientious you never know when you should be on duty and when you should be off. To-night I decree that you shall be off!”
“But—but, Serena!” Mallory exclaimed, feeling suddenly appalled. It was the look on his face which filled her all at once with such an overpowering sensation of foreboding—something which prickled along her spine like a warning of impending and unavoidable disaster, and caused her even to forget Serena, although she uttered her name—and for a few moments she felt her throat go dry with almost ungovernable fear. “We —we must go back...”she managed.
“Nonsense!” Adrian replied, and she could feel him settling back in his seat while his foot hovered as if magnetised over the accelerator. “This is our night, and we�
�re going to enjoy ourselves. I know you haven’t forgiven me for kissing you the other night, but I don’t regret it for a single moment, and as soon as the opportunity arises I shall repeat the experiment...”
Mallory felt only half convinced that this was not a rather unpleasant dream, and that very shortly she would wake up and find herself safely back in her own comfortable bedroom at Morven, while Adrian coaxed rippling music out of his piano in the silence of the night. But as she sat with her hands clutching at her stole the other part of her knew that it was not a dream, and between reawakening anxiety for Serena and a kind of hollow fear for herself she felt possessed with a kind of frenzy.
She glanced over her shoulder as a light attracted her eyes and saw that a pair of powerful headlights had appeared in the entrance to another by-road which they had just flashed past, and another car swung out on to the main road and came creeping stealthily up behind them. The glare from its head-lamps bathed them in a light like the steady beam of a searchlight, and Mallory was aware that Adrian was suddenly irritated by it.
“Confound it!” he exclaimed. “Who’s that following us? And why on earth can’t the fellow pass?”
But he did not attempt to slow to give the car an opportunity to pass, and instead he increased his speed so that the head-lights behind started to recede, and Mallory felt an almost breathless sensation of disappointment because she was afraid they would disappear altogether.
But Adrian was gritting impatient teeth in his annoyance, and his foot over the accelerator pressed down so hard that Mallory was flung backwards in her seat and by a miracle avoided crashing her head against the glass partition behind her. She gasped, and there was desperation and appeal in her voice as she cried above the shriek of the wind:
“Adrian! Adrian, for goodness sake, stop ...! Please ...! Please, this is madness ...! Let us go back...!”
But Adrian did not even bother to answer, her, let alone pay heed to her request, and the only faint comfort she had was that the car lights behind them were gaining on them again, and by this time she was sure they were following them for a purpose.
But Adrian must have sensed this, too, for his skilful handling of the car became more erratic, and as the road had taken to developing bends there was every need at the rate they were travelling for even greater caution. But Adrian was swearing softly under his breath, and Mallory was sure he was possessed by a demon-like rage. He swung the car round a sharp S bend, and inevitably disaster occurred. Mallory, who was gripping the seat hard, shut her eyes when the moment of impact happened, and after that she was only aware of a tumultuous noise, rather like an explosion of which she was actually a part, and then the car rolled over and over as if it was a kind of bouncing ball, and she herself was flung through the roof and landed on a soft bank where she lay and was perfectly conscious while the explosive noise died away, and was followed by a harsh squealing of violently-applied brakes.
Then, as she lay there dully, thinking that the world around her was intensely quiet after all that hideous noise, footsteps echoed on the hard road, and came moving with lightning speed towards her. Someone climbed the bank and bent over her, and a voice—a man’s voice—called to her with a note of agony in it.
“Mallory! Oh, Mallory, my darling—my darling!”
Mallory looked up at him, and she was quite sure she was merely delirious.
“I’m—all right,” she told him, in a faint voice. “I’m—quite all right.”
She could feel his hands moving over her, passing over her body with miraculous gentleness, feeling for the injuries he dreaded but did not find. She heard him give a long, shuddering sigh of relief, and then he breathed shakily:
“Mallory, my sweetheart, I’ll have to carry you to the car. Do you think you can bear it if I lift you up? I’ll be as gentle as possible, and I promise you I won’t jar you.”
“I know you won’t,” she whispered back, and when she was in his arms she nestled against him like a tired child with a tiny sigh of contentment. “You didn’t hurt me at all,” she whispered, more thinly. “I’m quite sure I could walk...” And then she slipped into unconsciousness.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The room in which she lay was light and bright with sunshine and an enormous quantity of flowers. They occupied vases on all sides of her, or so it seemed, and lying back against her piled up pillows, with a fleecy pink bed-jacket round her shoulders, over one of her own hand-made nightdresses, Mallory could hardly believe that they had all been intended for her. There were blue trails of larkspur, yellow roses, pink roses—and some very deeply scarlet ones on the little table beside her bed.
Mallory put out a hand and touched them, gently, lovingly. She had done that several times that morning since she opened her eyes and discovered than there, almost touching her pillow. The day before the vase had contained crimson carnations, and the day before that some almost purplish red roses. But they were always glowing and palpitating with the same passionate colour, these fragrant smelling floral tributes that were placed so near to her face, where she couldn’t fail but be aware of them, and although she asked no questions about them Mallory felt a tranquil sensation of quiet happiness flooding through her every time she looked at them.
Mrs. Carpenter had been to see her and Rose. Serena, apparently quite recovered from her indisposition of the party night—which, it had been decided, was due to something she had eaten, possibly in too large quantities—asked questions about her, and sent her her dearest love, but was not allowed to visit her. Belinda, the dachshund, and Mark Anthony, who seemed to have become her own property, also sent their love, according to the messages Mrs. Carpenter brought with her when she came. And she had come several times, sitting quietly by Mallory’s bed, smiling at her, looking secretly almost pleased about something, although there was a shadow at the back of her eyes, too—and Mallory knew why that was there.
Only Raife Benedict did not come, but Mallory felt sure he would before very long. The matron had told her that he telephoned every night and first thing every morning. He knew all about her and the rate of progress she was making. And after nearly a week in hospital she was to be allowed out very soon. By nothing short of a miracle she had sustained no serious injuries, and was largely suffering from shock and reaction. And even that was passing now. She was beginning to grow restless as she looked at her flowers.
Then one morning, when it looked very much as if she would be discharged before the one person she longed to visit her would have a chance to do so, the door opened quietly, and he stood there looking across at her, The nurse who had conducted him to the room withdrew at once, returning silently along the corridor by the way she had come, and Mallory and the man who had called her ‘darling’ and ‘sweetheart’ and sounded as if his life would have had no more savour of any kind if she had not responded, were alone together at last for the first time since that dreadful night, which neither of them would ever forget.
He brought her no flowers, and his hands were empty, and he crossed the room with silent strides and sat down on the side of the bed and took both her hands in his. He looked at them, fragile and white and flower-like, and then carried one of them up to his face and held it there, while everything she wanted to know looked at her out of his eyes, and for the first time there was not even a shadow of mockery in them.
“Mallory,” he said, a little huskily. “Mallory, you do understand why I didn’t come before...?”
She nodded, her grey eyes filled with sympathy.
“You’ve had a dreadful time,” she whispered.
“It wasn’t only that.” He looked down at her hands again, trying not to crush them too hard within his own. “I wanted everything to be over before—before I came.” Once again his eyes looked directly down at her, and the strange golden-brown depths were blazing with something that sent little shivers of ecstasy along her spine. “For one thing, I wanted you to be a little stronger...”
“Why?” she barely whisper
ed, hardly daring to meet his eyes.
For the first time he smiled a little.
“Can’t you guess?”
She was about to say ‘No,’ and shake her head, when the sudden realization of how unnecessary that was welled over her, and instead she bravely allowed her long eyelashes to lift and stared back fully into his eyes. He uttered a little sound of almost unbelievable happiness, and then, in spite of the fact that she looked like a piece of Dresden china, caught her by her slender shoulders and drew her close and hard into his arms, holding her so tightly against him that, as he buried shaking lips in her soft hair, she could feel the violent beating of his heart keeping pace with the violent beating of her own.
“Dearest,” he breathed. “Oh, my little beloved...! If anything had happened to you that night...”
“But it didn’t,” she whispered back, managing to free her face and turning it up to his own. So why not forget all about it?”
“But it was my fault! I meant to keep an almost continuous eye on you that night, because I didn’t trust Adrian, and Mrs. Carpenter promised to watch you, too—and then we both failed!” He groaned. “I deserved to have lost you for good and all!”
She gazed at him a little wonderingly. “But, you see,” she said, softly, “I had no idea at all that—that it would have hurt you very much if I’d been lost to you. In fact, I always thought you rather disapproved of me, that I annoyed you for some reason...”
“Only because I could never be certain of you!” he answered. “In the very beginning I knew that you were the one woman out of all the world I wanted—whom I meant to have somehow or other one day!—but you were such an independent little thing, and I formed the idea that you disliked me. I was very sure you disapproved of me sometimes I even thought you detested me!”
The Black Benedicts Page 14
