“I see nothing of my car,” she murmured at last. “It will soon be dusk. We must take no more chances. Please send for that benzine right away.”
Smith was dispatched forthwith on what he knew to be a fool’s errand, since both he and Marigny were practically sure of their ground. The nearest petrol was to be found at Langford, two miles along the Bristol road from the fork, and four miles in the opposite direction to that taken by Smith, who, when he returned empty-handed an hour later, must make another long journey to Langford. The Du Vallon was now anchored immovably until eleven o’clock, and it was well that the girl could not realize the true nature of the ordeal before her, or events might have taken an awkward twist.
The Frenchman meant no real harm by his rascally scheme, for Cynthia Vanrenen, daughter of a well-known American citizen, was not to be wooed and won in the fashion that commended itself to unscrupulous lovers in by-gone days. Yet his design blended subtlety and daring in a way that was worthy of ancestors who had ruffled it at Versailles with the cavaliers of old France. He trusted implicitly to the effect of a somewhat exciting adventure on the susceptible feminine heart. The phantom of distrust would soon vanish. She would yield to the spell of a night scented with the breath of summer, languorous with soft zephyrs, a night when the spirit of romance itself would emparadise the lonely waste, and a belated moon, “like to a silver bow new-bent in heaven,” would lend its glamor to a sky already spangled with glowing sapphires.
In such a night, all things were possible.
In such a night
Stood Dido with a willow in her hand
Upon the wild sea-banks, and waft her love
To come again to Carthage.
Marigny had indeed arranged a situation worthy of his nurturing among the decadents of Paris. He believed that in these surroundings an impressionable girl would admit him to a degree of intimacy not to be attained by many days of prosaic meetings. At the right moment, when his well-bribed servant was gone to Langford, he would remember a bottle of wine and some sandwiches stored in the car that morning to provide the luncheon that he might not obtain at a wayside inn. Cynthia and he would make merry over the feast. The magnetism that had never yet failed him in affairs of the heart would surely prove potent now at this real crisis in his life. Marriage to a rich woman could alone snatch him from the social abyss, and the prospect became doubly alluring when it took the guise of Cynthia. He would restore her to a disconsolate chaperon some time before midnight, and he was cynic enough to admit that if he had not then succeeded in winning her esteem by his chivalry, his unobtrusive tenderness, his devoted attentions—above all, by his flow of interesting talk and well-turned epigram—the fault would be his own, and not attributable to adverse conditions.
It was not surprising, therefore, that he failed to choke back the curse quick risen to his lips when the throb of the Mercury’s engine came over the crest of the hill. Never was mailed dragon more terrible to the beholder, even in the days of knight-errantry. In an instant his well-conceived project had gone by the board. He saw himself discredited, suspected, a skulking plotter driven into the open, a self-confessed trickster utterly at the mercy of some haphazard question that would lay bare his pretenses and cover his counterfeit rhapsody with ridicule.
If Cynthia had heard, and hearing understood, it is possible that a great many remarkable incidents then in embryo would have passed into the mists of what might have been. For instance, she would not have deigned to notice Count Edouard Marigny’s further existence. The next time she met him he would fill a place in the landscape comparable to that occupied by a migratory beetle. But her heart was leaping for joy, and her cry of thankfulness quite drowned in her ears the Frenchman’s furious oath.
Mrs. Devar, having had time to gather her wits, made a gallant attempt to retrieve her fellow-conspirator’s shattered fortunes.
“My dearest Cynthia,” she cried effusively, “do say you are not hurt!”