A Fluttered Dovecote

by George Manville Fenn

And then, with the murmur of voices behind, and the bell ringing loudly, we hurried through the wet bushes to the wall, where he placed the ladder, and this time nerving myself, I mounted it boldly, and before I knew where I was I found myself helped down into a carriage drawn close up at the side—that is to say, into the cart; for Achille had been so unfortunate that he could not procure a post-chaise. There, with an umbrella to protect me from the inclemency of the weather, I sat upon the hard seat between Achille and the rough man who was the driver.

“That ere was the pleeceman as we passed,” growled the latter, directly after we had started.

“P’raps they shall want him at de house,” replied Achille, laughing.

Away onward we tore, for fully an hour and a half, through the dark night, and through the rain, which would keep coming, blown by the gusts, right underneath the umbrella, in spite of all he did to protect me. And in spite of all my efforts and the tender words of Achille—whispered to me in his own dear tongue—I could not keep from shivering; for somehow all this did not seem so very nice, and romantic, and pleasant.

Oh, that night! I shall never forget it, though it all seems whirled up together in one strange, gloomy dream of rain, and darkness, and wind, and cold, and a stumbling horse, and a rough, stably-smelling, wet driver, smoking a strong pipe, and shouting to the horse to “Harm!” Of wet straw, and Achille without a great coat, and the umbrella so blown by the wind that it took two hands to hold it, and the points would go into the driver’s eye and make him swear.

Then there was poor Achille, wet and suffering from the cold and waiting in the rain; and his hands so cramped with holding the umbrella; and the dreary, miserable station fire so low that it would not warm him. And after he had dismissed the man, he was too cold to get out his purse; but fortunately I was able to pay for the two first-class tickets to London. And then almost directly there was a vision of steam, and lights, and noise, and the fast train dashed into the wet station, where the rain kept flying from the wind, which seemed to hunt it along; and then we were inside one of the dark blue cloth lined carriages, where I could see by the dim light of the thick, scratchy, bubble lamp that there were two gentlemen. I felt so ill, and cold, and shivery, I should not have known how to keep up, if one them, seeing my wet state, had not kindly passed a little flask of sherry to Achille, who made me drink some.

How I trembled, and felt that they were looking me through and through; and I felt sure that I had seen them both before, and that they knew me, and would go straight off and tell papa; but fortunately they both seemed sleepy, and curled up in their wrappers in the two corners, after one of them had insisted upon lending us a great skin thing, which was nice and warm and comfortable.

But they say that there are a great many hidden things in nature that yet remain to be explained; and really this must be one of them, this which I am now about to mention. Something would keep trying the whole time to make me believe that all this was not very nice, and that I would much rather have been back at the Cedars, snug in my own bed. It was, of course, all nonsense—only a weak fancy prompted by my disordered mind; but still it would keep coming back and back, in spite of all Achille’s whispers and tender words, till at last I really think I had forgotten all about the “sunny South” in the miseries of the present.

But I crushed all those thoughts at last, down, down into the dark depths of oblivion; for I was allowing Achille to hold my cold hand in his, as I tried to make out what the train kept saying, for as distinctly as could be in the noise and rattle, and whirl and rush, there were certain words seeming to be formed, and it sounded to me as if those words were—“Blind, conceited, foolish girl!—blind, conceited foolish girl!” over and over again, till I would not listen to them any longer, as we sped on and on, nearer and nearer to great London.

I supposed that my note had been found, but I felt that it must have been too late to do us any harm; for I knew that the telegraph clerk left Allsham Station at eight o’clock, through Mrs Blunt once wanting to send a message to one of the girls’ parents when she was ill, and they could not have it until the next morning, which was not so soon as they could get a letter. So I felt quite at rest upon that score; while now, thanks to the sherry and the skin rug, I began to get rid of the miserable shivering that had made me feel so wretched.