She waved her hand in protest. “I can’t eat,” she said. “Indeed, I can’t.”
“Well, you can drink,” he answered. “You shall not leave this house alive unless you have a pint of milk with a little dash of what Patsy calls ‘oh-be-joyful’ in it.”
He left the room for a moment, while she sat watching the door as a prisoner might watch for the return of a friendly jailer. He had a curious influence over her. It was wholly different from that of Orlando. Presently he returned.
“It’s all right,” he said. “Patsy and you and I will be at Nolan Doyle’s ranch in another hour. I’ve sent word to Mrs. Doyle. I’ve ordered your milk-punch too, and now I think I’ll make my salad. You never saw me make a salad,” he added, smiling. “I’ve done some successful operations in my day; I’ve played about with bones and sinews, proud of my work sometimes, but the making of a perfect salad is the proud achievement of a master-mind.” He laughed like a boy. “‘Come hither, come hither, my little daughter, and do not tremble so,’” he said so cheerfully as to be almost jeering.
His cheerfulness was not in vain, for a smile stole to her lips, though it only flickered for an instant and was gone. For all that, he knew he had saved the situation, and that another chapter of the life-history of Orlando and Louise had been ended. A fresh chapter would begin tomorrow; but sufficient unto the day was the evil thereof.
CHAPTER XII. MAN UNNATURAL
Mazarine discovered the flight of Louise soon after she had gone. He had not been five hundred yards from the house since she returned with Orlando after the night spent upon the prairie, save when he had been obliged to go in to Askatoon and had taken her with him, dumb and passive. She had been a prisoner, tied to the stirrups of her captor; and he had berated her, had preached at her. As Louise had said, once on the way to Askatoon, he had even tried to make her kneel down in the dust of the trail and plead with Heaven to convict her of sin.
On the evening of Louise’s flight, however, he had been forced to go to a neighbouring ranch, and had commanded Li Choo to keep a strict watch at the windows of her room to see that she did not attempt escape. She could not escape by the door of the room because he had the key in his pocket. Li Choo was not a stern jailer, however. Mazarine had not been gone three minutes before the Chinaman had touch with Louise. He did more; he threw up into the open window of her room a screw-driver, with which she took the old-fashioned door off its hinges, after half an hour’s work. Then, leaving a note on the table of the dining-room, to say that she could not bear it any longer, that she would never come back, and that she meant to be free, she summoned Patsy Kernaghan and fled to the Young Doctor.
When Mazarine returned and found her note, he plunged up the stairs to her bedroom, his pious wrath gurgling in his throat, only to find the door locked; for Li Choo had promptly restored it to its hinges after Louise had gone, afterwards dropping from the high window like a cat, without hurt.