Colonel Harcourt gnashed his teeth and cursed long and deep within himself. For all his libertine theories and Lady Lochore’s denunciations he had never doubted for a moment but that Mrs. Marvel’s favours were a prize as yet untouched. And now—behold! One more audacious than himself had slily reached up and plucked the golden fruit!
“By the Lord, I’ll run that Lovelace to earth!” This was the first articulate thing out of his fury.
He began scrambling through the ruins in his frantic desire to reach a closer point of view. A dangerous way, in truth, but one that would perchance prove more dangerous by daylight, since the perils that are unknown do not exist and the god of chance proverbially favours the reckless. Colonel Harcourt risked his life a score of times and knew it not. Hot in his determination, he scarcely felt the hurt when he fell; and, when he spurned the crumbling, slipping stone beside him, the sound of its drop into unknown vaults evoked no image of what he himself had escaped. As little had he heeded the song of the bullet in his ear or the roar of the mine beside him when he had led his lads up the French lines at Barrosa, a dozen years before. Torn, panting, bruised, he landed at length safely on a poison-plot of the Herb-Garden. Even as he looked up again the light at the gable-end window went out.
With that light went out his own heat of disappointed passion. Homme à bonnes fortunes as he was, he was not the man to care to come second anywhere. Mrs. Marvel’s chief charm after all had been her unattainableness. The colonel, as he stood in the moonlight, was all at once a sober man. It seemed to him now that, culminating with that second bottle, he had gradually been getting drunk this whole fantastic fortnight.
“What, in all the devils’ names, did it really matter that a weak-minded recluse should slight him and his fellow guests, that he should have taken upon himself this absurd challenge, from which there was now no retreat? What was there in the country widow? And why should he have seen red because of the timely discovery that she was wanton and not virtuous? And how the devil was he to get out of this infernal garden?”
A pretty situation wherein to bring his forty-eight years’ experience and his thirteen stone of flesh! As he ruefully felt over his bruised body and damaged garments, his fingers struck against a hard outline in his waistcoat pocket. The key! He gave a soft chuckle. It was a poor end to a summer night’s venture, but an undoubted relief to be able to extricate oneself in commonplace fashion by walking out through an open gate.
Wrapping his philosophical humour round him as the best cloak to cover his sense of moral dilapidation, he was cautiously picking his way, when he became aware of a hasty footstep behind him. As he turned round, the moonlight showed him a tall, slender black figure, a haggard, white face!
“Luke Herrick!”
“Colonel Harcourt!”
The older man was the first to speak. He was not astonished—only (he told himself) highly amused. There was a tone in his voice, however, which belonged less to amusement than to some biting desire to use the keenest-edged weapon wits could provide.