His tone was compelling, and after a moment’s hesitation, she pushed the glass over to him. “Will you pour it out?” she said, and he saw that she was trembling all over.
“Did you—did you hear—anything?” With a vain endeavour to speak calmly, his host looked at Hugh.
“That night-bird?” he answered easily. “Eerie noises they make, don’t they? Sometimes in France, when everything was still, and only the ghostly green flares went hissing up, one used to hear ’em. Startled nervous sentries out of their lives.” He talked on, and gradually the colour came back to the other man’s face. But Hugh noticed that he drained his port at a gulp, and immediately refilled his glass....
Outside everything was still; no repetition of that short, strangled cry again disturbed the silence. With the training bred of many hours in No Man’s Land, Drummond was listening, even while he was speaking, for the faintest suspicious sound—but he heard nothing. The soft whispering night-noises came gently through the window; but the man who had screamed once did not even whimper again. He remembered hearing a similar cry near the brickstacks at Guinchy, and two nights later he had found the giver of it, at the edge of a mine-crater, with glazed eyes that still held in them the horror of the final second. And more persistently than ever, his thoughts centred on the fifth occupant of the Rolls-Royce....
It was with almost a look of relief that Mr. Benton listened to his tale of woe about his car.
“Of course you must stop here for the night,” he cried. “Phyllis, my dear, will you tell them to get a room ready?”
With an inscrutable look at Hugh, in which thankfulness and apprehension seemed mingled, the girl left the room. There was an unnatural glitter in her father’s eyes—a flush on his cheeks hardly to be accounted for by the warmth of the evening; and it struck Drummond that, during the time he had been pretending to look at his car, Mr. Benton had been fortifying himself. It was obvious, even to the soldier’s unprofessional eye, that the man’s nerves had gone to pieces; and that unless something was done soon, his daughter’s worst forebodings were likely to be fulfilled. He talked disjointedly and fast; his hands were not steady, and he seemed to be always waiting for something to happen.
Hugh had not been in the room ten minutes before his host produced the whisky, and during the time that he took to drink a mild nightcap, Mr. Benton succeeded in lowering three extremely strong glasses of spirit. And what made it the more sad was that the man was obviously not a heavy drinker by preference.
At eleven o’clock Hugh rose and said good-night.
“You’ll ring if you want anything, won’t you?” said his host. “We don’t have very many visitors here, but I hope you’ll find everything you require. Breakfast at nine.”