CHAPTER XXIII
I had been offered the help of Celestine and Sidney's man to make up in parcels such clothes as I wished to take for our refugees and their menfolk; but now I determined to do all the work myself. The bored-looking footman who opened the house-door showed no surprise or interest on seeing her Ladyship's sister arrive in advance of the rest. He listened respectfully but dully as I briefly explained my errand and told him that I should need no help until I rang for my trunk and other things to be carried downstairs. When I had made this clear, I ran up to the room above Diana's and shut myself in, meaning to make such haste with what I had to do as to escape with my booty, if possible, before Di and her husband came home.
I was trembling still with excitement which clouded my mind and kept me from thinking clearly; for I was furiously angry and desperately sad at the same time. I said to myself that I didn't care if I never saw Diana again; yet my heart was ready to break because we had come to the parting of the ways. To-night, I thought, I was definitely giving up my family, or my family were giving me up, it mattered very little which. My father had never cared for me, therefore I had not cared for him as most girls care for their fathers. Di had made use of me, but had never loved me, and I had "seen through" her ever since I was a tiny child. Lately we became almost as strangers; and yet the two had been the only ones near to me. Breaking with them was like a small figure in a group on a big canvas suddenly loosening itself and falling off its background, a mere lonely bit of paint.
"What will become of me?" I wondered. "I can never go back to Ballyconal now. Yet I can't spend the rest of my life with the Miss Splatchleys. What shall I do when I'm not wanted there any more?"
Tears began to drop slowly from my eyes, then to rain fast over the clothing I tried to sort. I knew it was silly to think of such things. There would be plenty of time by and by to arrange the future. But I could not concentrate my mind on the work in hand until, as I tossed the neatly folded clothes about with a kind of stupid aimlessness, I came once more upon Sidney Vandyke's khaki uniform.
"This I will not take, anyhow!" I decided. "It would be of no use, and I do believe it might carry a curse with it, because of the evil thoughts of the man who wore it last. I wish I could burn it up!"
That I could not do; but to show spite I wreaked such childish vengeance as I could by dashing the uniform on to the floor and proceeding to trample on the coat with my high-heeled white satin slippers.
As I kicked it away in loathing at last, one of the slippers flew off and seemed spitefully to follow the coat as if to deal one final insult. It turned a somersault on the way, as defiantly as the Golden Eagle had "looped the loop" over German heads at Brussels, and then plumped down on top of the fallen garment, landing with its pointed satin nose poked under the flap of a slightly gaping breast-pocket.
I slipped my silk-clad foot into the shoe where it lay, and pushing the point still further into the pocket, thus lifted the coat on my toe to give it another disgustful toss. As I did this it seemed that something crackled with the sound—or the feel, I could hardly tell which—of stiff paper. Then a very strange thing happened to me: suddenly I saw before my eyes, as clearly as though it were really there, the khaki-coloured notebook I had given Eagle—the notebook out of which he had torn a leaf with a message written on it for Major Vandyke.
I didn't know (I don't know now, and never shall) what painted this picture on my brain: whether it was the high, mysterious Power which had been leading me slowly but very surely to this minute, or whether it was nothing more than a mental association between a khaki coat worn by Eagle's enemy on that disastrous night and a faint crackle of paper jarring tensely on strung nerves. I know which I like to think; but in either case the effect was the same.