“It’s all very well,” he stammered, with a trace of resentment in his quavering voice—“it’s all very well for people who are used to the filthy beasts; but I tell you, Scarlett, it sickened me. I’m no coward, as men go, but I was afraid—I was terrified!”
“Yet you dragged me out,” I said.
“Who told you that? How could you know—”
“It was not necessary to tell me. You said, ‘We got you away’; but I know it was you, Speed, because it was like you. Look at me! Am I well enough to dress?”
He raised a haggard face to mine. “You know best,” he said. “They tore your coat off, and one of them ripped your riding-boot from top to sole; but the blow Empress struck you is your only hurt, and she 306 all but missed you at that. Had she hit you fairly—but, oh, hell! Do you want to get up?”
I said I would in a moment,... and that is all I remember that night, all I remember clearly, though it seems to me that once I heard drums beating in the distance; and perhaps I did.
Dawn was breaking when I awoke. Speed, partly dressed, lay beside me, sleeping heavily. I looked around at the pretty boudoir where I lay, at the silken curtains of the bed, at the clouds of cupids on the painted ceiling, flying through a haze of vermilion flecked with gold.
Raising one hand, I touched with tentative fingers my tightly bandaged head, then turned over on my side.
There were my torn clothes, filthy and smeared with sawdust, flung over a delicate, gilded chair; there sprawled my battered boots, soiling the polished, inlaid floor; a candle lay in a pool of hardened wax on a golden rococo table, and I saw where the smouldering wick had blistered the glazed top. And this was her room! Vandalism unspeakable! I turned on my snoring comrade.
“Idiot, get up!” I cried, hitting him feebly.