Gwendolen Page 16

  It was not, she told herself vehemently, that, like Jane, she wished to marry someone else! No, indeed! Nothing of that sort entered into the matter! But somehow the idea of going through the rest of her life as a marchioness, which had seemed, on the whole, a rather alluring thought, had suddenly become far less attractive, now that it was upon the point of becoming a reality, and even the excitement of participating in a midnight elopement, exactly like the heroine in a novel, appeared to have lost its romantic charm. To tell the truth, she did not feel in the least romantic, but only a little frightened and slightly sick.

  The cheerful profile of her uncommunicative lover, at which she stole a glance from time to time, did little to reassure her. The thoughts occurred to her, in fact, in disagreeable sequence, that after all she knew very little about the Marquis of Lyndale, that no doubt one picked up some very queer ideas about marriage in Morocco—or was it Algeria?—and that Bluebeard might very well have whistled quite as cheerfully as Lyndale was doing as he conducted his latest victim to his castle.

  There were thirty-four miles of good pike road from Gloucester to Bristol—a circumstance that had no doubt induced the Marquis to choose that route instead of taking the shorter, but very bad road that led south by way of Nailsworth, and the curricle sped along at a spanking pace, his lordship's own peerless team of Welsh greys, as he had informed her, being good for two stages, so that they were obliged to change horses only once, at Falfield, before they reached Bristol.

  Here, unfortunately, rain, which had been threatening all the way south from Gloucester, began to fall rather heavily as they turned east towards Bath. Campaspe's spirits suddenly rose. The arrangements for their marriage, it occurred to her, had been made for Bath, and if they should be prevented from reaching that town by the inclemency of the weather, it would certainly be impossible, at this hour of the night, for Lyndale to find a clergyman to perform the ceremony elsewhere.

  And if, she asked herself, her spirits rising even further, the fatal knot were not actually tied that night, how could one know what obstacles might arise to prevent it from ever being tied at all? Her father, apprised by Gwendolen of the contents of the note she had left behind her, might come after them, breathing fire and prohibitions; even Neil, a small hopeful voice inside her said, might somehow learn what she was proposing to do and decide that, in spite of their horrid quarrel, he could not bear to have her marry someone else and arrive, like young Lochinvar, to snatch her from Lyndale's arms at the last moment.

  "We shall have to stop now—shan't we?" she enquired of Lyndale, putting her hopes into words as the rain pelted down upon them more heavily and she huddled under the rug with which he had provided her.

  "Stop? Why so?" Lyndale said encouragingly. "Who ever heard of stopping an elopement for a little rain?"

  "But it isn't a little rain," Campaspe pointed out. "It is pouring." She added, in as coaxing a tone as she could manage, "I am getting very wet, and I really should like to stop, my lord."

  "My lord? You are very formal!" said Lyndale, continuing to drive on quite as rapidly as before. "Wouldn't you feel it more appropriate to say David at this stage of the game?"

  Campaspe frowned. Neil, she felt sure, would not have replied to a perfectly reasonable request from her to be taken in out of a heavy rain by making inappropriate remarks about his name.

  "David, then," she said rather shortly, and continued with some emphasis, "and I should really like to stop. There must be any number of inns in Bristol."

  "I am quite sure that there are, but we are not going to stop at any of them," said the Marquis with infuriating calm. "You forget, my love, that there is a clergyman awaiting us at the White Hart in Bath, and that without his services we shall not be able to be married tonight."

  Campaspe said rebelliously that they could be married just as well tomorrow, and that meanwhile they would at least not be taking their death of cold.

  “Nonsense!" said his lordship bracingly. "A fine, healthy girl like you doesn't take her death of cold so easily."

  "Well," said Campaspe vengefully, acknowledging defeat as Lyndale kept his horses moving as steadily as before towards Bath, "I can tell you one thing: you ought to be very glad you aren't eloping with Jane. She would have the vapours if you kept her out in this weather."

  Lyndale said politely that in that case he was very glad, too, that Jane was not to be his bride, and then compounded the injury implicit in the offhand manner in which he had made this remark by observing that he thought she, Campaspe, would take to camel-riding in Morocco rather better than Jane would, as well.

  "Are—are we going to Morocco?" Campaspe asked in a somewhat faltering voice. Four-and-twenty hours ago, she knew, she would have jumped with joy at the thought of exotic adventures in a foreign land, but somehow, sitting in the rain in the middle of the night beside a man who was, after all, a comparative stranger, and who was driving her inexorably towards married doom, the thought of leaving England, her sisters, her parents, and above all Neil, suddenly appeared fraught with danger to her. "I—I don't know that I should very much like that," she said in a rather small voice. "I thought you wished to stay in England."

  "Well, we shall at least go to Morocco on our wedding trip," Lyndale said decisively. "No doubt you will find living in a harem very entertaining, at least for a time."

  "In a—a harem!" Campaspe stared at him, horrified. “But— you have not got a harem!" she exclaimed. "Gwen says you told her so—"

  "That is quite correct," Lyndale said equally. "At the present time I have not got a harem. But now that I have got in the way of being married, I see that there is perhaps some point in the saying that one can't have too much of a good thing. There is nothing for you to be concerned about upon that score, though," he added kindly. "As my first wife, you would of course bear the title of Marchioness of Lyndale, and your children would take precedence in inheriting the title."

  Campaspe said nothing; indeed, at the moment she was so overwhelmed by a variety of emotions that she could not speak. Foremost among them seemed to be shocked disapproval, not to say outrage, at a pair of parents and an aunt who had been so blind as to thrust this man—or, rather, this monster—upon their respective daughter and niece as a suitable husband. That they had not thrust him upon her, but upon Jane, made it even worse, for Jane would have been far less capable than was she to cope with the situation, once she found herself in his clutches. She, Campaspe—so she vowed to herself, sitting huddled in the rain while Bath, the White Hart, and an unknown clergyman duped, or bribed, by Lyndale into assisting him in his fell purpose, came inexorably closer-would have the will and resolution to extricate herself from those clutches, if she had to make a scandal in doing so that would set all Bath by the ears.

  She glanced over at Lyndale, who seemed quite content with her silence and, indeed, had gone back to whistling again. Should she, she debated, jump down from the curricle when they reached the White Hart and demand protection from the first person she encountered there? Unfortunately, at this hour of the night she would undoubtedly encounter no one but ostlers, and she was more than a little dubious about the response these essentially slow-witted and, she feared, unchivalrous persons would give to a request by a highly bedraggled young lady in evening dress to be rescued from the gentleman with whom she had driven into the yard.

  It might be better, she thought upon consideration, to wait until she and Lyndale had entered the inn, where the landlord might appear, or at least some servant to whom she might appeal. And then there was the clergyman, of course, who perhaps had not the least notion that his services had been engaged for the purpose of marrying an innocent young girl to a fiend in human form who intended to carry her off to Morocco and shut her up in a harem.

  On the whole, however, she was more inclined to place her dependence upon the landlord or the servant, as the clergymen involved in such situations in the lending-library novels she had read had frequently turned out not to be clerg
ymen at all, but tools of the villain in clerical disguise.

  By the time she had come to these conclusions, the curricle had covered the dozen miles between Bristol and Bath, and they were entering the sleeping town. All too soon Stall Street and the White Hart were reached, and she found herself, with a beating heart, being assisted by Lyndale, who had flung the reins to a sleepy ostler, to alight from the curricle. He was smiling, she saw, as she mistrustfully gave him her hand, but it was a smile that struck a chill to her heart. Others, she thought, might merely see a handsome man with very blue eyes and a determined chin when they looked at him, but she knew the fiendish plans that lurked behind that agreeable smile and that prepossessing face.

  "Come along," he urged her. "You will be warm and dry in a trice, and then we shall see about this wedding."

  Campaspe, propelled towards the door by a strong hand under her elbow, said inspirationally, grasping at straws, that she was very hungry.

  "Good! You shall have a splendid wedding breakfast after the ceremony," Lyndale assured her. "The very best the White Hart has to offer."

  "But I—I feel quite famished now," Campaspe said, glancing desperately about her as she was impelled across the inn yard towards the entrance. But the ostler had already unharnessed the horses and disappeared in the direction of the stable, and the only living creature she saw was a very large black cat gazing crossly out at the rain as it crouched beneath the shelter of a farm cart. "I really think I ought to have something to eat at once," she went on to Lyndale, as her reluctant feet approached the door.

  She was interrupted by the sound of a sudden clatter of hooves behind her. A lathered horse was galloping full tilt into the inn-yard, and as its rider reined it in and hastily jumped down, shouting for an ostler to take it in charge, Campaspe, with a thrill of joy, recognised a familiar voice and figure.

  "Neil! Neil!" she cried, pulling her arm free of Lyndale's grasp and running across the inn-yard towards the new arrival, "Oh, Neil, you have come to save me! Oh, do take me away!"

  And she flung herself so impetuously into young Lieutenant Fairhall's arms that, almost bowled over, he saved himself from falling only by embracing her as tightly as she was embracing him.

  "Here—don’t knock a fellow off his feet, flying at him like a dashed hurricane!" he remonstrated. "You're all right now. Where's Lyndale? I must speak to him at once!"

  To Campaspe's indignation, he hastily detached her clinging arms from him and turned to the Marquis, who had also come across the inn-yard in long strides and was now regarding him grimly.

  "What the devil does this mean, Fairhall?" he demanded, before Neil could open his mouth to speak. "Where is Miss Quarters?"

  Campaspe looked from one to the other of them in astonishment.

  "Miss Quarters?" she said. "Do you mean Gwen? What has she—?"

  But her questions were overborne by Neil, who, disregarding them completely, said quickly, in an agitated voice, to Lyndale, "I don't know where she is, sir! I came as fast as I could to tell you—cross-country, and the deuce of a ride it was by night! You see, she gave me the slip before I could carry out our plan, and by the best I can learn, she has gone off with Lord Wilfrid Boulting!"

  “The devil you say!"

  Campaspe, hearing the sudden harsh note in his lordship's voice and seeing the menacing glint in his blue eyes, thought, with a little shudder of relief at her escape, that he probably really was a Bluebeard; but relief was almost immediately driven out of her mind by the equally strong emotions of curiosity and anxiety that young Lieutenant Fairhall's peculiar remarks about Gwendolen had aroused in her.

  "Gone off with Lord Wilfrid! But she can't have-" she began, at the same moment that Lyndale continued, in that same urgent voice, to Neil, "Gone off where? And why? Speak up, boy! You don't mean to tell me she has eloped with him?"

  Neil, who was now looking extremely guilty as well as agitated, said he couldn't tell, but it looked very much to him as if that was the case.

  "When I went to find her—exactly as we had arranged, sir! —she had simply disappeared, you see," he said. "So I began asking questions, and some people said they had seen her leaving with Lord Wilfrid, and then I went outside and asked the coachmen, and they said she's driven off with him in his phaeton and that he'd looked devilish pleased with himself, and why not, with such a prime article smiling up at him like he was the Regent himself—Well, you know how they will talk, sir, and I'm only repeating it because it seems to show how the land lies.'*

  The Marquis swore, briefly but effectively. "Damn the girl!" he said. "I might have known she'd throw us all into a bumblebath somehow or other! And why the devil," he added sternly to Neil, "didn't you try at once to find the direction they had taken, instead of haring off here to Bath?"

  "B-but I thought— Campaspe—" Neil stammered. "You said— You'd planned—"

  “What I'd planned was to have you bring Miss Quarters here!" Lyndale said scathingly. "You knew Campaspe was safe enough with me! If you'd had the brains of a monkey, you'd have realised that it was Miss Quarters who stood in need of your protection!"

  "But she wanted to elope with him," Neil protested, defending himself. "He couldn't force her to go with him! And a fine nodcock I should have looked, trying to interfere between them—"

  "You look a fine nodcock now, my lad," Lyndale said grimly, "for you've made mice feet of this business and no mistake! Now listen to me! I'm off for Cheltenham at once, and as for you, you are going to strike off north as fast as you can! If he intends marriage, they may take the Great North Road to Gretna; but it's more likely, I think, that marriage is the last thing he has in mind, and in that case he may have taken her anywhere! I shall have to try to pick up a clue in Cheltenham." He drew out his pocketbook, extracted several bank-notes from it, and thrust them into Campaspe's hands. "Here—take this!" he said. "You will find a private parlour and bedchamber bespoke in my name inside; you may stop here for the night, and in the morning take a post-chaise back to Cheltenham."

  Campaspe, who was by this time so totally bewildered by the events of the past few minutes that all she could really grasp was the fact that Lyndale had apparently not the least intention of marrying her that night, and instead was bent upon rescuing Gwendolen from Lord Wilfrid, blinked at the money in her hand.

  "But I don't understand!" she said vehemently. “Why was Neil to bring Gwen here tonight? And why has she run off with Lord Wilfrid? And why-?"

  'There's no time for that now," Lyndale said peremptorily. "Go on into the inn! Fairhall, fetch one of those ostlers and tell him I want a fresh team fitted out—"

  He broke off abruptly as a smart phaeton, spattered generously with mud, turned into the inn-yard at a gallop. It was driven by a gentleman in evening dress under a drab benjamin; a lady, likewise formally attired and wrapped in a rug, sat beside him.

  "Gwen!" cried Campaspe, recognising her eldest sister, as the lady, scarcely waiting for the horses to be brought to a halt, jumped down from the phaeton.

  Gwendolen, seeing her standing there transfixed in the light of the carriage lamps, came towards her quickly across the cobblestones.

  "Cammie!" she exclaimed in tones of the greatest relief, sweeping her sister into a protective embrace. "Thank God I have come up with you before it is too late! Dearest, you have been duped! Lyndale has no intention of marrying you!" She caught sight of the Marquis, who also seemed to be transfixed by some strong emotion as he stood beside Campaspe, and surveyed him with a scorching glance. "Let me tell you, sir," she addressed him scathingly, "that I consider your conduct infamous, and that if I were a man, I should certainly take it upon myself to demand satisfaction of you! Attempting to seduce an innocent young girl—" She broke off suddenly as she became aware of the presence of Lieutenant Fairhall, also standing transfixed beside the others in the rain. "Neil!" she exclaimed in tones of the greatest disbelief. "What are you doing here? How did you know what Lyndale was planning to do? Did you come to resc
ue Cammie? And if you did, why haven't you—?"

  "Very well—that's quite enough now!" Lyndale cut in, in tones of authority not unmixed with amusement. In point of fact, he seemed, to Gwendolen's resentful eyes, to have got over the disconcerting effect of her abrupt arrival upon the scene with remarkable rapidity, and now appeared to find the situation one of high comedy rather than of high drama. "We had best discuss all of this inside," he said, "where we can dry ourselves before a comfortable fire, for I foresee that it may take considerable time to sort this tangle out. And, at any rate, the Reverend Mr. Broadfute may be growing a trifle impatient. So come along. Miss Quarters—Campaspe—Fairhall," he addressed them in turn. "You, too, Wilfrid," he added, turning with a sudden touch of grimness in his voice to Lord Wilfrid. "I should like very much to have your part in this affair explained to me."

  Lord Wilfrid, who had given a sort of convulsive start at the mention of a clergyman—a point that appeared to absorb him to the extent that even the scarcely veiled menace in Lyndale's last words seemed to have no effect upon him—hastily said, no, he wouldn't go inside, as it was quite imperative for him to return to Bristol that night.

  "I—I am going abroad, you see," he said, backing away in a rather crablike fashion towards his phaeton. "And as Miss Campaspe appears to be quite safe—"

  To the astonishment of several of the parties present, who had never seen his aplomb so shattered, he then made a kind of dash for the phaeton, snatched the reins from the gaping ostler, and drove out of the inn-yard, whipping up his horses as if the devil himself were after him.