“Don’t, Tony, don’t.”
She said that she did not really know what happened in that horrible room, except that she was crazy with fear. She never wanted to think of the place again, and it would be unkind of him if he did not help her to forget the agony she felt during the moment when he was rolling about the floor and she was trying to get the revolver into his hand. She knew that, despairing, she had pulled the trigger once. But surely not more than once? It had seemed to her then that all the people in the room and in the house were firing together—not merely revolvers but large cannon. It was hot, too, as if the house was on fire. She remembered no other sensations of any kind whatever, until the choking smoke lifted and she felt cold air upon her face and Dyke’s hand dragging her along.
They left the carriage at the nearest railway town, and went on by train to Santiago. Here, in perhaps the most beautiful city of the world, they stayed three days, washing themselves, sleeping, eating. Here too they bought clothes, and became once more Mrs. Fleming the journalist and Mr. Dyke her guide.
At Santiago he learned, in telegraphic communication with his agent at Buenos Ayres, that Australia was clamouring for him as much overdue. Important work awaited him; and he was at once in a fever to be off, willing to forgo or indefinitely postpone bone-breaking vengeance on muleteers, thinking only of the new adventure. He flushed with delight when he found that a steamer was on the point of sailing from Valparaiso for Brisbane. Since Emmie showed a strong disinclination to recross the mountains by herself and go home the shortest way via Buenos Ayres, he said she must travel in one steamer to Panama, in another to San Francisco; and thence in a train to New York, where she would have a choice of Atlantic liners.
They parted at Valparaiso; and six weeks later she was sitting at breakfast in the coffee-room of a private hotel in the Cromwell Road, Kensington.
CHAPTER XI
OTHER people having breakfast in the room glanced from time to time at the lady with the short hair who was sitting all alone at a table near the window. Gently stirred by the vapid curiosity that would seem to be the atmosphere itself in private hotels, they had already put themselves to the trouble of ascertaining that she was a Miss Verinder who had arrived last night from foreign parts, and they wondered if the oddly shortened hair meant that she had suffered from a fever while abroad. One or two of the old ladies determined, since she was obviously quite proper and genteel, to make her acquaintance before luncheon—by rolling a ball of crochet silk across the floor at her, by inquiring if they had inadvertently taken her chair, or by some other polite method usual in such places.
A large proportion of the visitors were old ladies, some of them very old indeed, and each had a comparatively young lady as attendant or companion—a granddaughter or great-niece, or merely a nice girl glad to see London under any conditions—who readjusted the white woollen shawl, cut bread into convenient slices, and made herself generally serviceable. There was talk about the inclemency of the weather, the unusualness of it so late in the year; and these juvenile aids were sympathetic and thoughtful, saying “Auntie, you won’t venture out, of course.” At a table larger than the others there was a family group, father, mother, governess, and well-grown children, visitors from the northern provinces. The father stood in the window to eat his porridge, and without searching for pretexts, spoke genially to the solitary breakfaster; telling her that his way of eating porridge was the only correct one, and advising her to adopt the method. “At hoam ’tis always served to us on the sideboard, never on the table.” Then he jerked his head towards the windowpanes. “Give it an hour, an’ all that snow will have turned to fair sloosh. I’ve ben watching those la’ads shoovel away wi’ it off the steps and the footway.”