CHAPTER XXII

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THE MOONLIGHT PICNIC.

Levallion, contrary to his custom, rose early the next morning and repaired to Mrs. Murray’s house, meaning to strike terror into her soul by threats of withdrawing her allowance.

There was no smoke coming from her chimneys, and, as he was about to dismount and knock her up, an untidy female emerged from the back premises and announced that their late tenant had decamped without the formality of giving notice. She had, to the station-master’s knowledge, taken a ticket for London on the preceding morning, and Levallion decided, with some relief, that it must, after all, have been a kitchen-maid whom he and Tommy had seen looking in the conservatory.

He was not to be pleased on reaching home to find he might have spared himself his journey, for the post brought a letter from Hester, posted in London, in which she implored his forgiveness for her foolish outspokenness, thanked him for his bounty, and hoped “that one so unworthy as she might never set eyes on him again.”

“Too humble,” quoth his lordship, in the seclusion of his drawing-room; “means something.”

But the precise meaning did not occur to him. And Sir Thomas’ bleak face at breakfast put Hester out of his mind. Mr. Jacobs had nearly died in the night, was even now in a parlous state. Sir Thomas was of the opinion that he must have been poaching in the afternoon and eaten poison laid down for marauding cats; an opinion with which the vet. agreed, going so far as to mention prussic acid.

“It could not have been on my land, then,” Levallion informed the gathering that surrounded unlucky Mr. Jacobs. “I don’t allow poisoning.”

“It’s prussic acid, my lord, wherever he got it,” the vet. returned obstinately. “But he’s round the corner.

“It’s likely that soup last night saved him.”

“I dare say,” said Levallion indifferently, but he stroked Mr. Jacobs, who licked his hand. All dogs worshiped Levallion, just as every dog Mrs. Murray ever owned mysteriously pined away and died under her care.

It was a gorgeous morning, clear and cold. Levallion had no special desire to shoot, but anything was better than staying at home as special policeman, under the amused eyes of Gwendolen Brook. He was utterly astounded as he joined the other men to find Adrian, on a fat pony, was going with them.

“Queer thing, honor!” he meditated. “A badly bred man would have stayed at home. I’ll look out he doesn’t overdo himself.”

Afterward Adrian Gordon remembered that never had Levallion been to him as he was that day. No mother could have looked after a child better than Lord Levallion, the man he had good reason to hate. And Jimmy Scarsdale saw it--with a grin that was wasted. Lady Levallion must be as deep as the sea.

Lady Levallion looked anything but deep at that precise moment. She had thankfully sent her flock of women to a golf tournament ten miles away, and was seated in the garden with Tommy and the recovering Mr. Jacobs. Wrapped up in a big cloak she looked very young, dreadfully tired. Sir Thomas saw it downheartedly, and connected it with her silly and marked absence with Captain Gordon the night before, a piece of idiocy he was too angry to mention. Though he would have been angrier still if he had known every word she had said had been overheard by Lady Gwendolen--and others.

“Jacobs was poisoned,” he said moodily. “Just wait till I find out where he got it.”

“Miles off, I dare say. Levallion won’t allow it. What’s he growling at?” for Mr. Jacobs stood bristling, weakly ferocious.

“That beastly cook,” with exasperation, “what on earth do you keep him for? Jacobs, come here, Jacobs!” But the dog had been through the garden, and Tommy raced after him in time to see Monsieur Carrousel launch an enormous stone that barely missed Mr. Jacobs’ head.

Sir Thomas seized his dog by the collar.

“What, the----” he began; and saw Ravenel standing by him, out of breath, but looking inches taller than her height.

“May I ask,” she said to the bearded, elegant person who was kind enough to cook his dinners, “why you are pulling my rockery to pieces?” with a glance at the fern-covered stone on the path.

“The dog is dangerous. He threatened my life,” with a majestic rage.

“You are quite wrong, the dog is harmless. If you are afraid of him, remember that you will be quite safe in your kitchen. This--is my garden!” She turned her back with a manner the duchess would have envied. “Come, Tommy, and bring the dog.”

“Why were you so down on him?” Tommy inquired when they were out of ear-shot. “I really believe Jacobs would have bitten him. Goodness knows why, but he hates the man!”

“So do I,” hotly. “There is not a seat in the garden where I can go without finding him in the neighborhood. I feel as if he had the evil eye on something; he makes me shiver. Levallion’s going to send him away.”

“When’s Gordon going?” said Tommy abruptly.

“To-morrow.” She grew scarlet. “Tommy,” she said miserably, “don’t be horrid to me! I don’t deserve it. I don’t mean even to speak to him before he goes.”

“All right,” gruffly, but he slipped his arm in hers as he had not done since he came. “I say, Ravenel, I’ll be glad when the others go! They’re no good, except the duchess.”

“I can’t bear them,” with sudden viciousness. “I feel all the time that if I were down in the world not one of them would speak to me--even Lady Chayter. The others are--well, her ladyship was a good imitation of them!”

“That reminds me,” he picked up Mr. Jacobs and rolled him in Ravenel’s cloak. “I’m sure I saw the old Umbrella yesterday, in the village.”

“Oh, nonsense!”

“I did, then; looking mighty out at elbows. What do you bet she’ll not be up here, whining to you?”

“She can whine,” deliberately, for whatever Lady Annesley had done, it was sure to be no secret to the Umbrella. “Hateful old wretch!”

“Beats me how Levallion ever was a friend of Sylvia’s,” observed Tommy idly. “By George, I get hot all over when I think how I used to hate him.”

“He’s kind,” in a stifled voice. “But oh, Tommy! Sometimes I feel as if I should scream with the shut-up-ness of being grand! The fine clothes and too much to eat, and--it’s rather awful being Lady Levallion!”

“It’s better than her ladyship,” the boy said dully. “Brace up, Ravenel! Nobody in the world is downright happy, I believe.”

He lit one of Levallion’s cigarettes to avoid conversation, and refused to see she was crying. When he threw away the stump she was sitting quite motionless, but she was dry-eyed.

At dinner he looked at her covertly and wondered why on earth she wore a black gown. It made her eyes look dark and gave the red and white of her face an unearthly clearness.

“She looks awfully old, somehow,” the boy thought uneasily. “I hope she doesn’t go and make another break to-night. She looks----” even to himself he did not say “desperate.” After all, he knew no reason why she should be.

But when he went into the drawing-room, after putting Mr. Jacobs to bed, something caught at his heart. Neither Ravenel nor Captain Gordon were there; and all the women but the duchess had a furtive look.

“Beasts, women!” Sir Thomas retreated as suddenly as he had entered, determined to fetch his sister to her senses, or die. But at an open window in the hall something moving outside in the moonlight caught his eye, and checked his hasty walk. He hung out recklessly, and saw two figures disappear into the shrubbery, a man and a woman in a black dress!

“She’s mad,” said the boy, with something like a sob in his throat. And turned round to see Ravenel and Levallion looking at him.

“I--I felt dizzy,” he stammered, scarcely believing his eyes; for if this were Ravenel, who was that outside?

“I don’t wonder,” said Levallion cheerfully. “In another minute I’d have hauled you in by the legs. Come and play blind man’s buff with the rest of the idiots I have taken into my house.”

“I think I’ll take a stroll. It’s hot in there. Where,” in pure blank desperation, “is Gordon?”

“Gone to bed. He starts at seven,” and just as if he were sorry for the girl who stood by in silence, Lord Levallion did not look at her as he followed her into the lights, the scent, the circle of women--enlightened by Lady Gwendolen--that made his own drawing-room a place of torment.

Sir Thomas, in his thin shoes and no cap, slipped unnoticed out into the moonlight, pure curiosity his only motive. The woman had looked like a lady, a lady’s long dress and voluminous evening cloak had showed plainly where she stood in the clear moonlight. The night was bright as day, the air warm, almost balmy, as if the moon had brought back summer when the sunset chill was gone.

“I don’t believe it was any old kitchen-maid last night,” he thought, as he followed the path by which that mysterious man and woman had vanished. “I could see very well, but I believe it was well--whoever it was now!” rather feebly. No one had told him of the lady who had come to ask for Gordon, and he had never chanced to pass that new bungalow that had given Levallion such an unpleasant surprise. Against his will there cropped up in his mind those old stories of Levallion; if one-half of them were true, there must be several women ready to eat their hearts by staring in at his respectable married windows! Sir Thomas hoped devoutly there was not going to be any fuss. The path led him from the gardens into the park, across the grass among the deer, and into a thick tangled wood. But the boughs were leafless, and the moon showed him that the path went on still, a dark thread between the dead bracken under the crowding trees. It wound on and on, and the night silence of the wood somehow quieted Tommy Annesley. Through the arching boughs overhead he could see the cloudless indigo sky; the moon peeped at him in uncanny suddenness from different directions as the path twisted. He stepped more and more cautiously, as if the noise of a breaking twig under his feet would have been a crime in the stirless quiet of the wood.

“This is rot,” he thought, stopping once. “No one can be here,” but something drove him on again even while he called himself a fool. The curious awe that was on him deepened till, without knowing it, he was moving noiseless as a midnight thief walking a strange road. With a queer thrill he pulled up standing; slipped before the moon caught the telltale black and white of his clothes in the surrounding dimness, behind the trunk of a great girtled oak. The path had stopped, as suddenly as the trees and undergrowth it ran through. Before him was a clear, circular space, covered with wan, short grass, and drifts of brown, dead leaves the moon made fantastic. In the middle of it stood one huge oak-tree, where clusters of dead leaves still hung like banners against the moon on the branches that stretched over a solitary flat rock; dark, high, like an altar.

“What on earth,” thought Sir Thomas, peering cautiously. His bewilderment could not put itself into words.

The oak-tree was between him and the moon. If there was any one beside it, they were blotted out against its thick bulk of darkness. But what was that clear, steady glitter on the rock? A crystal, starry glitter that in one spot turned to worn gold?

A quick rustling behind him made him turn with apprehensive annoyance. No one likes to be caught inspecting the world from behind a tree. But the rustling was Mr. Jacobs.

“Lie down!” whispered Sir Thomas savagely. “What silly fool let you out?” He grabbed the humble Jacobs--who had been vastly proud of escaping from bed and scenting him out--in his arms, that he might not bark; and suddenly felt that he was glad the dog had come. For the place was ghostly.

“It’s impossible, though, to lug him and edge round a bit nearer!” he thought, deeply interested in that glitter which was no business of his. “By George!”

A man had come from against the tree, hoisted himself rather clumsily on the breast-high rock, and seized the golden shining point that had taken Sir Thomas’ eye. A familiar pop, and a quick gurgling came through the quiet air; Tommy nearly dropped Mr. Jacobs as he grabbed his jaws together to stop a bark.

“Champagne! a--well, I’m blowed! I’ve come all the way out here to gaze on a moonlight picnic. Lord knows who they are!” as a woman swung herself lightly, boyishly, beside the man and stretched her hand out for the glass he held.

The two were whispering--and oh! if Tommy Annesley could only have heard those muffled voices!--presently the man laughed, and a woman’s laugh answered him; shrill, hysterical, strained; full of that fierce madness that would change the sound of the laugh of the sister you grew up with, and make it unrecognizable. The incongruous horror that was in that laugh caught Tommy’s nerves, slacked his grip of Jacobs. He had never dreamed any woman’s laugh could sound like the howl of a wild beast.

Mr. Jacobs felt he could not bear it. He gave a low, shivery growl, and before Sir Thomas knew it, was on the ground, running like a wiry white devil straight to that picnic-party that sat unawares. He ran quick--that was what froze Tommy’s voice in his throat. If he had barked it would not have mattered what he rushed at, but a silent Jacobs was another thing, as dogs and cats knew.

Before Sir Thomas could get clear of his hiding-place, the need was over. Jacobs had flown straight at the man’s legs, where they hung over the rock, but with a wild leap his prey had sprung to the top of the mighty slab, where he stood upright, never making the slightest motion toward the woman beside him, whose long cloak had hung over his menaced legs. Tommy heard Jacobs fall back heavily as he missed his spring; saw him pick himself up, trot deliberately back to his master, slowly and with puzzled growling, as of a dog who had been deceived.

The boy stooped and took something from the dog’s shut jaws. He had seized the woman’s cloak.

“Not her, or she’d have yelled!” he thought with relief. And then as the man moved, a living silhouette against the cold moonshine, Sir Thomas Annesley knew him.

“I wonder,” he thought, sick and shaken, “if the moon’s made me crazy?” He made a step toward the pair on the rock--and oh! if he had only gone close to them--and then drew back. It was no business of his. But the thing was so unpleasant that he held his tongue about it.

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