What would have been, after all, the end of our adventure, whether the sunshine might not have softened us into finally abandoning the enterprise altogether—to my lasting shame and grief!—I cannot take upon myself to say. All I know for certain is, that if our hands had not been, in a measure, forced—if circumstances had not made it rather more dangerous for us to go back than to go on—our party would at any rate have needed an amount of whipping into line which would as likely as not have driven them into restive retirement, instead of the somewhat alarmed advance which was ultimately forced on us and turned out so entirely successful.
And as it is my particular pride to think I owe the undertaking, in the first place, to my love for Lucy, so it is my joy to reflect how the final carrying of it out was due to her affection for me, that drove her to journey—quite unused to foreign parts as she was—right across Europe, alone, and give me timely warning of the dastardly scheme on foot for our capture and ruin.
It was the very afternoon following the morning of our brief conversation on the terrace that I went back early to the hotel, with some natural feelings of depression and irritation at the growing callous inertia of our party.
I was going up to my room, when from the reading-room I heard the sound of the piano. I stopped in some amazement, for there was being played an air I never heard any one but Lucy play. It was an old Venetian piece of church music (by Gordigiani, if I remember right), and I had never heard it anywhere but at “The French Horn,” on the rather damaged old cottage piano in the little room behind the bar.
I stole down-stairs again, and, my heart beating, opened the glass door noiselessly.
It was Lucy! and the next moment, with a little scream, she was in my arms. I took her to the sofa; for some moments she was so agitated she couldn’t speak, nor could I, believing, indeed, it was a ghost, till I felt the soft pressure of her arms and the warmth of her cheek as her head lay on my shoulder, while she trembled and sobbed.
“Don’t be frightened,” I murmured. “It’s really I. Now, don’t cry; be calm and tell me all about it. We are both safe; we love each other. Nothing else in the world matters.”
At last, in broken tones and at first with many tears, she told me the whole story. I listened as though I were in a dream, and my bones stiffened with anger and apprehension.
The gist of it was briefly this: that one day Mr. Crage had come down to “The French Horn” and had an interview with her father in the bar-parlor. He had come to put an end to Mr. Thatcher’s tenancy, a yearly one, and turn him out of the inn, unless, as he suggested, exactly like a villain on the stage, Lucy would, for her father’s sake, engage to marry him, in which case he might remain, and at a reduced rent. Thatcher, who, after all, is a gentleman, declared the idea preposterous, more particularly as his daughter was already engaged, with his full consent and approbation.
“Oh, ah!” snarled Crage—“to that young cockney who was down here at Christmas. Suppose you call her in, however, and let her speak for herself.”