CHAPTER XVIII — I SPEED THE PARTING GUEST
Four o'clock in the morning is a graceless hour. Graveyards may yawn at twelve but even they are content to slumber at four. I don't believe there is anything so desolate in this world as the mental perspective one obtains at four o'clock. Tombstones are bright beacons of cheer as compared to the monumental regret one experiences on getting up to greet the alleged and vastly over-rated glories of a budding day. The sunrise is a pall! It is a deadly, dour thing. It may be pink and red and golden and full of all the splendours of the east, but it is a resurrection and you can't make anything else out of it. Staying up till four and then going to bed gives one an idea of the sunrise that is not supported by the facts; there is but one way to appreciate the real nature of the hateful thing called dawn, and that is to get up with it instead of taking it to bed with you.
Still, I suppose the sun has to come up and perhaps it is just as well that it does so at an hour when people are least likely to suspect it of anything so shabby.
Four o'clock is more than a graceless, sodden hour when it ushers in a day that you know is to be the unhappiest in your life; when you know that you are to say farewell forever to the hopes begot and nurtured in other days; when the one you love smiles and goes away to smile again but not for you. And that is just what four o'clock on the morning of the fourteenth of September meant to me.
Britton and I set forth in the automobile just at the break of dawn, crossing the river a few miles below the castle, and running back to a point on the right hand bank where we were to await the arrival of the boat conveying the Countess and her escort. Her luggage, carefully disguised as crated merchandise, had gone to Trieste by fast express a couple of days before, sent in my name and consigned to a gentleman whose name I do not now recall, but who in reality served as a sort of middleman in transferring the shipment to the custody of a certain yacht's commander.
It was required of me—and of my machine, which is more to the point—that the distance of one hundred and twenty miles through the foothills of the Austrian Alps should be covered and the passengers delivered at a certain railway station fifty miles or more south of Vienna before ten o'clock that night. There they were to catch a train for the little seaport on the upper Adriatic, the name of which I was sworn never to reveal, and, as I have not considered it worth while to be released from that oath, I am of necessity compelled to omit the mention of it here.
Mr. Bangs went on to Vienna the night before our departure, taking with him Helene Marie Louise Antoinette, a rather shocking arrangement you would say unless you had come to know the British lawyer as well as we knew him. They were to proceed by the early morning train to this obscure seaport. Colingraft Titus elected to accompany his sister the entire length of the journey, with the faithful Blake and Rosemary.
Billy Smith was to meet us a few miles outside the town for which we were bound, with a word of warning if there was anything sinister in the wind.