Even in his distress he had time for a moment of surprised admiration.
"Oh, Flash!" he groaned, "there's no one like you. Come on, then, and be in at the finish!"
XIX
THE WAGES
The chauffeur was fastening his leather gaiters as they came out.
"Frognal!" was all Bryan said. "And drive like h—ll!"
The lad touched his cap. As they took their seats, the car seemed to bounce and then leap forward. The streets and squares were empty, except for an occasional limping shadow on the pavement that stopped short at their approach and turned to watch them past. From time to time the chauffeur's shoulder dipped to one side, and the piercing wail of a "Gabriel" horn went before them like an admonition of judgment at hand. She knew then that they were nearing a corner, and that she must hold her companion's arm, for the suddenly diverted impetus seemed to heel the car over on two wheels and she could not keep her seat on the inflated cushions except by clinging to him. But he never spoke to her, or seemed to notice the clutch upon his sleeve. The muscles of his forearm were always moving spasmodically, as if the anguish of waiting found relief in some restless, regular motion of the hands. She knew he had a trick of twisting his signet-ring round and round. The carriage lamp was behind his head, and she only saw his face in silhouette. In the dark lanes around Hampstead the car seemed to be plunging giddily into a tunnel of light made by its own lamps.
It stopped, almost as suddenly as it had started, outside a thick hedge of evergreens. Over an unpainted oak gate an electric light was burning inside a tiny drop-lantern of frosted glass. Beneath it three or four men were standing together; one of whom wore a flat braided cap with a peak. Lumsden jumped out almost before the car had pulled up, and, with a hasty word to the man in blue, disappeared. He had not asked her to come in with him, and she was shy of renewing her offer of service. She sat still in the corner where he had left her, and began to look about her and take her bearings. The hedge was so high and the house so far back that she could only see two of its gable windows. A light, turned very low, showed in one of these. Across the road, on the other side from the house, was a pebbled path with a fringe of coarse grass at its further edge. In front of her a few lamps marked out a curved perspective of road. Beneath it and beyond, the heath lay in confused patches of various intensities of blackness. The sky was paling over in the direction of Highgate, and a bird in a tree overhead, roused probably by the glare of the lamps, was beginning to pipe drowsily and tentatively.
A "honk! honk!" like the croak of some old marsh-haunting reptilian bird, began to sound behind her from the direction in which they had come. It grew louder. A motor-cab slowed up behind them, and two men, one of whom carried a large bag, passed quickly into the house. The two chauffeurs, avoiding the whispering group at the gate, walked up and down together on the edge of the heath, smoking the cigarette of freemasonry and stamping their feet, for the morning was turning cold. A French maid-servant brought out a big cat-skin rug. "For mademoiselle," she said. Her beady eyes scanned the girl curiously as she tucked it round her.
It was broad daylight when Fenella woke, and the heath was a dull sodden green under the window. Lumsden was shaking her by her shoulder. She woke suddenly and completely, as we do from a sleep of which we are half ashamed.