‘Don’t be idiotic! I should be no use. Oh dear, oh dear! Where can Harper be?’
‘Sit down, Louisa!’ said Mr. Cato sternly, barring her way. ‘Lady Wyse has been up all night.’
‘Don’t be so cruel.... Let me go! let me go!’ she screamed in an access of sudden fear, wrenched herself free from him, and ran towards the door.
Then abruptly her horror leaped up and overwhelmed her; the instinct of flying from the incomprehensible—the instinct of the horse which shies at a piece of moving paper—was swallowed up in the nightmare of realising that the impossible had happened, was in this very room with her. This man she had come to nurse, this man with whom she had talked and shaken hands, was suddenly not a man, but something unknown and monstrous, of another world. Her faculties failed, as at sight of a ghost, not in fear of injury, but in the mere awfulness of the alien power. She staggered out at the door crying ‘Save me! save me!’ threw her hands forward in her first natural gesture since childhood, and fell swooning in the hall. When she came back to consciousness, after long journeying in nightmare worlds, she heard angry voices speaking near her.
‘Let me out, d—— you!’ said Hartopp—that dreadful Mr. Hartopp—‘they’re throwing stones at my windows, I tell you. They’ll smash my china! Let me get at the brutes!’
‘This door ain’t goin’ to be opened till the Prince is re-moved.’
It was the American who answered him. He stood with his hat on, leaning against the barred and bolted hall-door, his arms folded and a pistol drooping from either hand.
‘D—— the ——!’ said Hartopp. ‘Why don’t you chuck him out and have done with it? It’s all his fault.’
‘Thank God you’re back!’ said Lady Wyse’s voice right over Lady Lillico’s head. ‘Have you arranged it?’
‘The Boss is agreeable,’ said the American. ‘The “Phineas” will be at Blackwall at twelve o’clock, steam up. One of his vans is waitin’ down back in Butlin Street now, and we must shift the Prince at once, before any onpleasantness begins. There was no other way; the Prince will hev to go as an anamal.’