CHAPTER IV.

(_Reprinted from Hooks of Steel._)

HE stopped when he saw us, stopped dead short on the pavement amidst all the hurrying people. And as he looked at me and D’Arcy, his face changed and grew drawn and old with sharp, sudden misery. I had pierced him to the heart; in his face I saw it. Sick and cold with shame, scarce knowing what I did, I shrank back in the hansom. Only for a moment, but it was a fatal moment.

“Yes, that’s right, keep back, hide, I’ll protect you!” called out D’Arcy to me loudly, so loudly Felix could not fail to hear. Then placing one hand familiarly on my shoulder, he opened the trap-door again with his cane and shouted—“Off!”

Without an instant’s pause the driver whipped up his horse and was off as hard as he could go.

I recovered myself when I found I was being borne away from Felix.

“Stop!” I cried wildly, swinging back the doors in front of me, “let me get out. I must go back! I must go back to Felix!”

D’Arcy leaned forward and hastily swung the doors together again.

“You can never go back to Felix,” he said, seizing me and holding me firmly down in my seat. “You will have to stay with me instead. Felix would not have you now. He has caught you here in London alone with me; _he has found you out_.”

Appalled by his words and manner, I turned upon him. His face was still full of malignant triumph, his small dark eyes burnt as they gazed into mine, his lips were drawn back from his big white teeth in a wide grin. It was a full revelation this time. I knew him as he was; loathsomely, horribly ugly and wicked.

“You are a fiend!” I cried. “I know you now. You arranged it all. You deliberately took me where you knew Felix would see me. It was a vile plot. I see it all, and I hate you, I hate you! Do not dare to touch me. Take your hands off. Let me get out and leave you this instant.”

But D’Arcy only held me down more tightly. I dashed my hand upwards through the opening in the roof and called to the driver to stop. “No use,” said D’Arcy. “The man is in my pay. You may as well sit quiet, Rosamund. I shall be very kind, you have nothing to fear.”

Nearly frantic, I called to a passer-by to help me. Then D’Arcy shouted to the driver to let down the glass, and I found myself more straitly imprisoned than ever. By this time we had left the Strand far behind us, and were dashing up quiet side streets, but in what direction I knew not. It was like a horrible nightmare: on and on we went, and each step took me more hopelessly away from Felix. In vain did I struggle, in vain did I cry to be set down. The driver took no notice of my cries, and D’Arcy, still with that horrible grin on his face, said never another word, only held me back tightly in the hansom. I cannot say how long that terrible drive lasted. My mind throughout was a chaos of horror and despair.

At last, after long hours as it seemed to me, the hansom stopped, and D’Arcy called to the man to open the window. We were in the middle of a broad path bordered with trees, and all around us was silent dreary park-land. A drizzle of rain had begun, and beneath the trees it was already dark with the fast gathering shades of a winter evening. Here D’Arcy loosened his hold of me, and instantly I got out. Where to go and what to do next I knew not, so stood helplessly in the rain. D’Arcy sat looking at me for a moment, as if thinking, then got out also.

“There is the sovereign,” he said, handing up some money to the driver. The man took it, glanced at me, and hesitated.

“You can go,” said D’Arcy sharply.

“And leave the young lady in the rain?”

“Did you hear? You can go,” repeated D’Arcy, still more sharply. The man drove away. I felt too stunned to make any appeal to him. Besides, of what use? Was it not he who had driven me on and on, in spite of my cries, until now miles and miles of unknown streets lay between me and Felix. If I had been in the middle of a wilderness, and Felix the other side of the world, he could not have felt more lost to me than he did at that moment.

“Now, Rosamund,” said D’Arcy, turning to me and speaking very determinedly, “listen to reason and be a sensible girl. _You have lost Felix._ You are not so mad, I suppose, as to imagine he will have anything further to do with you after this. You lead a miserable life at the castle, and it will be still more miserable to go back there now, for Felix will never visit you any more. Neither will I come there after you again. I have had enough of it, I want something better. So if you go back, you go back to be absolutely alone with a madman and his keeper. Mark my words: your uncle is not, and never will be cured. At his best, he’s as mad as a hatter. And he’s liable to these attacks of violent madness which make him absolutely dangerous. Matthew keeps it dark, but it is not the first time your uncle has had to go to the asylum by any means. He’ll break out again as sure as my name is Leigh, perhaps next time without any warning. That happened once, so may well happen again. There’s no method in his madness: a thoroughly unreliable madman, my friend on the common calls him. So that’s the companion you will go home to.

“Now I have it in my power to offer you a very happy life. I love you, and I want you to be my wife. You are just fitted for a London life, and with your beauty and originality might make a perfect furore. Now, will you accept what I offer you and marry me? You have only to say ‘yes,’ and I will take you straight to my sister who will act as chaperon until we can be married: She is a good-natured girl, and will be glad to oblige me, for many reasons. Now say, will you marry me? I’ll be awfully kind to you, Rosamund. After all, you’d have had a slow time of it with that impecunious Felix.”

I had been listening in a dull, stunned way to this speech, but at his last words an hysterical passion of anger awoke within me.

“Marry you! Never! I would rather die,” I cried. “I know you at last for what you are, a wicked, plotting fiend!”

“Now, now! No nonsense,” said D’Arcy angrily. “Remember, Rosamund, you are very much in my power. You don’t know where you are, night is coming on, it is raining faster every minute, and you can’t find your way out of this place, or get a cab, without me. So give me a kind answer, and let me take you off to my sister’s. Come, child, don’t be foolish, we can’t stand here an hour, getting drenched. Be nice, I’ve loved you a long time, and been your most devoted slave, I am sure. Give me a kiss, and say you’ll come.”

“Never! Keep off! How dare you?” I cried, trembling with mingled fear and anger.

“You needn’t be so very particular. I’ll be bound you’ve kissed Felix hundreds of times.”

“Felix! Yes. But you—you!!” Words failed me. I could find none that would express my detestation of him.

He pressed closer, as if determined to kiss me. Then my passion grew beyond my control. I seized the cane he was holding in his hand, and struck him smartly across the face with it. Then I flung the hateful thing from me amidst the trees.

“There!” I cried. “That is to show you how I loathe and detest you now. Go and pick up your cane, the cane you used to help you in your plotting. You have wrecked my life. You have ruined Felix’s. You have persuaded me to deceive, and dragged me down to misery. Go, and never let me see your wicked face again.”

D’Arcy made for an instant as if he were going to strike me in return, but he restrained himself. “All right,” he said, in a voice trembling with suppressed rage. “All right, young lady. You have given me my _congé_, and I’ll take it. I don’t feel so anxious to make you my wife as I did a moment ago. I’d best not saddle myself with a vixen. I’ll leave you, to find your way back to the castle. I hope you will enjoy yourself when you get there.”

Then, without another word, he strode away and left me alone in that strange place in the rain.

I waited until he had disappeared in the darkness, then turned and walked in exactly the opposite direction, neither thinking nor caring where I was going, so dulled was I with misery. But the road went on, and seemed as if it would never end, and at length I stopped, chilled, wet, and weary. Then suddenly it occurred to me that I ought to try and get home; there was just a faint chance that Felix might go down to ask what it all meant. At the thought that he might arrive at the castle, find me still absent, and imagine me still with D’Arcy, I began to burn with fever. I turned, and ne’er through an arch so hurried the blown tide, as I through the rain and the dark did hurry then. Thinking it would now be best, I followed the direction D’Arcy had taken, and after a time came to some big iron gates. Just as I passed through them a hansom came driving towards me. My first impulse was to accost the driver, but I pulled myself up just when about to speak, for by the flickering light of the gas-lamp on the gate I saw it was the man who had driven me away from Felix. With my head down I hurried past him.

“Missy! Missy!” called the man as I passed. I made no answer. He turned and drove after me, walking the horse by my side as I pressed on in the rain. “Missy! Listen. I’m a poor man with a large family, and that gent is a well-known fare of mine so I did not like to go against him. But I didn’t half like the job. It went against my conscience a bit, it did, seeing you so unwilling inside. After I left you, when I’d got well away, who should I see but the gent dashing round a corner in another hansom, with a bad sort of look on him, and, dashed if I could go on, for thinking of the helpless looking young thing I left with him in the rain. So back I came again, just to see what had become of you. And now, Missy, if I can make up to you by driving you anywhere, say the word and jump in, and there you shall go.”

So lost and wretched did I feel, and so consuming was my desire to get home, I could not refuse the offer. The man helped to bring about my misery, but, if I sent him away now, where should I go, what should I do, in this great unknown city? I climbed in, feeling utterly spent.

“Where to?” asked the man, peering down through the now horribly familiar trap-door.

“Oh, take me home, take me home!” I half moaned in answer.

“Yes, Missy, don’t you fret, I’ll take you home. But where is it?”

“On Wildacre Common.”

“Phew! That’s a long way off. I can’t drive you to Wildacre, but I’ll drive you to Waterloo, and you’ll get a train there easy that’ll take you straight to Wildacre.”

He flicked his whip and started. I do not know what streets we passed through, but again I seemed to drive through miles and miles of them. The rain poured down upon the pavements, which shone in murky glossiness beneath the gas-lamps. The people flitted past like black ghosts, beneath the shade of their dripping umbrellas. This was the gay city, the city of my dreams. I had envied Felix his life in this city; I had risked my life’s happiness to spend one day in it. And, behold! its pleasures had turned to ashes in my mouth, and its light into horrible murky darkness. It was a miserable city, a terrible city, a city that made one feel fearfully, utterly alone.

We reached Waterloo at last, and my driver called a porter and asked him to attend to me. Then he drove off instantly, and not until afterwards did I remember that he had gone without even asking for his fare. The porter escorted me to the right platform, but there we found a train to Wildacre had just gone, and there would be no other for thirty-five minutes. I sat down in my wet things upon a bench, and waited with feverish impatience, whilst the clock overhead lagged through the interminable minutes. Then what D’Arcy had said came true. Strange horrible men came up and spoke to me. I sat mute, and answered never a word, and my heart sickened with longing for Felix. The porter came for me when the time was up, and put me into the train, and smiled gratefully at me when I gave him half-a-crown. All through the journey to Wildacre I sat in a kind of stupor, only waking from it when people got in and out at the stations, or when a train whizzed past on its way up to London. Then came the drive up the hill and across the common. It was very cold on the common. The rain had now ceased to fall, and the wind cut my face like a knife, but I was too weary to pull up the cab windows. By the little sunken fence I dismissed the cab, and walked in the darkness across the lawn to the honeysuckle porch. A flood of light greeted me as I opened the door, and Anne Gillotson rushed out of the dining-room looking white and agitated.

“Oh! I _am_ glad to see you safely back again, Miss,” she said. “It is going on for ten o’clock, and I have been so anxious about you ever since it became dark. Mr. Felix Gray has been here. He arrived about nine o’clock, but when he found you were out he did not stay.”

I stood still in the hall, and a deadly sick feeling came over me. “Did he ask where I was?” I managed to say.

“Yes, Miss. Oh, please don’t look like that,” replied Anne, almost weeping. “I hope you’ll forgive me, but he was so stern and asked such sharp questions I was obliged to tell him.”

“You told him——?”

“I told him that you had said you were going to spend the day with an old schoolfellow who was staying near here.”

“And then?”

“Oh, dear! Miss, I am more vexed than I can say that it should have happened, for he looked in a dreadful way and went straight out at the door. I begged him to wait, but he said there would be no use in waiting. Then he changed his mind and came in again, and said he’d leave a note for you. I got him pen and paper and he wrote a short note. ‘Give her this,’ he said, ‘when she returns, if she ever does return.’ Then he went away. He has not been gone half an hour, Miss, if you’d only been a little bit earlier you’d have caught him. My dear, how wet you are, and how white you look; what does it all mean?”

“Where is the note?” I gasped.

She went into the dining-room and brought it out to me. I tore it open. There were but two words written on the paper:

“Good-bye, Rosamund.”

This was the end. Upon me had been laid the punishing hand of God.