“Stow that, my pigeon!” it said hoarsely and shortly. But at the first sound of its voice, black inspiration had come upon me in a flood. It was the sweep of my last night’s adventure, and he was bearing me away captive in the very little cart he had lost to my father. Whether he had driven that up, sportingly, to time, or was merely escaping in it, I never learned. Anyhow, temptation had come to him recognising me lying there, senseless and unprotected, in the garden, and moved, perhaps, by some sentiment between cupidity and revenge, he had seized the opportunity to kidnap me.
He swung his fat legs over the sitting board, and lifted me up from the midst of the empty bags where he had concealed me. We were in the thick of a little wood, and the pony was quietly cropping at the trackside grass. The sense of loss and isolation, the filth of my condition, the terror of this startled awakening from happy dreams, wrought a desperation in me that was near madness. I screamed and reviled and fought. The man opposed to my struggles just his two hands; but their large persuasive strength, unctuous as they were with soot, was more deadly than any violence. Alas! how the star that lit last night’s heaven may be found fallen in the mud to-day, my Alcide!
When I was quiet, he put me up between his knees, and smacked my face twice, deliberately, on either side—not hard, but in a lustful, proprietary way.
“Blow for blow,” says he, and lifted the bandage a little from his eye. It was horribly swollen and discoloured.
“Knew how to handle his morleys,” he said. “D’ee see’t? Now it be my turn.”
“What are you going to do with me?” I sobbed.
“Make ’ee my climbing boy,” he answered promptly, and with a hideous grin. “You’re my luck. D’ee see? Say you’re a gurl, and I’ll”— He hissed in his breath, and looked at me like a beast of prey.
“There,” he ended; “get under, and so much’s sniff at your peril!”
Some distant sound, perhaps, startled him. He stuffed me into my former position, and, covering me again with the bags, turned and clicked up his pony. I lay in a half faint, scarce daring to breathe, so utterly had this monster succeeded in subduing me. I cried, incessantly but quietly, hearing hour by hour the wheels grind under my ear, till the sound and physical exhaustion induced in me a sort of delirium. All this time, the hope of pursuit and rescue never occurred to me, I believe. Did they occur to Proserpine having once felt the inhumanity of her sooty abductor?
But now all of a sudden the anguish grew unendurable. I must move or die. And at the moment I became conscious of the vinaigrette still clutched convulsively in my little fist.