[CHAPTER VI]
The “Heavenly Chariot” was Judy’s name for the Bennetts’ shining gray car. The Pendletons had one of their own, an elderly and dignified Daimler, but for some reason unfathomable by the younger members of the family, it was never allowed out at night, when it was most wanted. Millicent thought that Forbes, the old chauffeur and ex-coachman, required his evenings to himself, and as Forbes had never been known to object to this arrangement, it stood, and the family relied on taxis, or the underground.
So that Judy was feeling uncommonly luxurious close on eleven that night, when the beautiful gray nose of the Heavenly Chariot thrust its way through the fog that had shut London from the sky for three days past. She loved the movement, the mystery of the dark streets, the soft menace of the fog.
“This is the very essence of London,” she thought.
They turned into Pall Mall, and she was sorry to think that the perfect motion would cease in a moment. What happened next, happened with such amazing suddenness that in three seconds it became a problem already to be reckoned with, a situation to be met as best one could.
They had knocked some one down in the fog. An instant before she had been reveling in that smooth slipping along—almost the annihilation of friction—and now, between the ticks of a clock, some one, because of this inconsequential little journey of theirs, was robbed of health perhaps, or life. While her mind was struggling to accept a fact so hateful, her feet had taken her to the front of the car almost before the chauffeur had brought it to a standstill. Their victim had clung to that long gray nose—clung for an instant and then gone down. Another man was bending over him, drawing him gently into the pool of radiance their lights made.
“Chip!” the other man was saying. “Chip, old man, are you badly hurt?”
There was no answer. Judy put her arm under the limp man’s shoulder, and they raised him up. He stood swaying between them.
“Take him to the car,” she said.