“He would have died if I hadn't brought him food,” she muttered. “I have wept all the tears a woman's broken heart could wring out, beseeching him to come back to me.”
“Yet,” Dominey insisted, “you shared his foul plot for vengeance against a harmless woman. You let him come and make his ghoulish noises, night by night, under these windows, without a word of remonstrance. You knew very well what their accursed object was—you, with a delicate woman in your charge who trusted you. You are an evil pair, but of the two you are worse than your half-witted son.”
The woman made no reply. She was still on her knees, bending over the prostrate figure, from whose lips now came a faint moaning. Then the lights of the car flashed out as it left the garage, passed through the iron gates and drew up a few yards away.
“Help him in,” Dominey ordered. “You can loosen his cords, Johnson, as soon as you have started. He has very little strength. Tell them at the hospital I shall probably be there during the day, or to-morrow.”
With a little shiver the two men stooped to their task. Their prisoner muttered to himself all the time, but made no resistance. Rachael Unthank, as she stepped in to take her place by his side, turned once more to Dominey. She was a broken woman.
“You're rid of us,” she sobbed, “perhaps forever.—You've said harsh things of both of us. Roger isn't always—so bad. Sometimes he's more gentle than at others. You'd have thought then that he was just a baby, living there for love of the wind and the trees and the birds. If he comes to—”
Her voice broke. Dominey's reply was swift and not unkind. He pointed to the window above.
“If Lady Dominey recovers, you and your son are forgiven. If she never recovers, I wish you both the blackest corner of hell.”
The car drove off. Doctor Harrison met Dominey on the threshold as he turned towards the house.
“Her ladyship is unconscious now,” he announced. “Perhaps that is a good sign. I never liked that unnatural calm. She'll be unconscious, I think, for a great many hours. For God's sake, come and get a whisky and soda and give me one!”