CHAPTER XX
BAR-LEIGHTON
The face that gazed out at the driving October rain was one whose expression of unrelieved misery and hopelessness might well have melted a heart of flint. The wide, grey eyes had lost their languorous melting delight, which had been replaced by one of driven desperation. Dark, unhealthy rings had sunk their way into the young surrounding flesh. They were the rings of sleeplessness, and an ominous indication of the mental attitude behind them. The oval of the cheeks had become pinched and pale, while the drooping lips added a pathos that must have been irresistible to a heart of human feeling.
Vita was a prisoner in the hands of men without scruple or mercy. At least one of them she knew could claim all and more than such words expressed. Of the other she was less convinced. In fact, it was the thought that he was, perhaps, simply under the control of the other which, she told herself, made sanity possible. But even so it was the vaguest, wildest hope, and only in the nature of a straw to which to cling in her desperation.
The window from which she looked out gave upon a wildly desolate scene. She was down deep, almost in the bowels of the earth, she admitted, and the rugged sides of the chasm, clad in a garment of dark conifers and leafless branches, rose up abruptly in every direction her window permitted her gaze to wander.
She had no understanding of where she was. The journey had been long. It had been swift, too, under the skillful driving of Frederick von Berger, beside whom Von Salzinger had travelled. She had a vague understanding that the moon had been shining somewhere behind the car most of the time. Therefore she had decided they were travelling westwards. Then had come the dawn which had found them racing across a wide and desolate moorland, in a gale of wind and a deluge of driving rain, with dense mist clouds filling to overflowing sharp and narrow hollows which dropped away from the high level like bottomless pits of mystery and dread.
There had been nobody inside the car to question but her maid, Francella, and Vita had steadfastly denied herself any form of intercourse with the woman, under the certainty that she formed part of the Secret Service with which all unknowingly she had been surrounded.
Then had come a moment when her straining eyes, striving to penetrate the rain-streaming windows, had detected a distant view of a stretch of water. She had not been certain at first. But later she had detected the hazy outline of a steamboat upon it, with a long streaming smoke-line lying behind it. So she made up her mind it was the sea.
Even this, however, gave her no real cue to her whereabouts. For a moment she thought of Dartmoor, but later on she believed that that desolate wilderness was well inland.