Five minutes later I was standing on the corner, shivering with interrupted sleep, while four flaming yellow eyes swung toward me down the hill. It was the same big limousine I had noticed the night before. I climbed in beside the chauffeur. With a clash and a grinding lurch the car swung around and pointed up the hill again, toward the Tabors'. There was power and to spare, but I noticed that one cylinder was missing now and again.
"Your ignition isn't very steady," I said to the chauffeur. "What is it—valves?"
He turned and looked at me with supercilious respect. "Poor petrol, sir. I fancy she'll run well enough, sir."
Lady came running out, veiled and muffled. "Come inside," she said, as I sprang down to help her in, "I'd rather have you with me." The door slammed, and we were off with a jerk that threw us back against the deep leather cushions. For a few moments we flashed under lamps and sidled around corners to an accompaniment of growling brakes and squeaking springs; then we ran out upon the smooth macadam of the highway, and settled into our speed with a steady purr. Lady sat up in her corner and patted at her veil.
"It was very good of you to come," she said, "but I knew we could count on you. Here, take this thing—I don't want it."
It was a very serviceable revolver, cold and smooth as I slipped it out of its leather holster. I made sure that it was ready for use.
"It's perfectly ridiculous taking it along," she added. "We're not going on any desperate midnight errand. The mere time of night is the only thing that's even unconventional. But Walter wouldn't let me come without it."
I asked no questions. By this time I had learned better; and besides I did not greatly care what we were doing, or what was to happen next. I would be of service if I could, that was all. Since it was to be hopelessly, it might as well be blindly, too; and the sense of adventure was gone out of me. The car swayed and sidled gently to the irregular mutter of the engine and the drowsy whining of the gears. We might almost have been motionless, except when the flare of some passing light swept across us, filling with an uncanny and sudden illumination the polished interior of the limousine, and showing me as by the glimpse of a lightning-flash the veiled and silent figure by my side. Here was romance beyond my wildest imagination: night, and hurry and mysterious need, the swift rush onward through the warm gloom, the womanhood of the breathing shadow so close to me, whose thought I could not know, whose anxiety I could not seek to fathom, whose trouble I could only help by doing ignorantly what she asked of me and then leaving her in other hands. And all this that should have stirred me to chivalry seemed only dull and weary, a thankless task. The lines of The Last Ride Together began running in my mind, and I turned them over and over, trying vaguely to fill in forgotten phrases, until the rocking of the car reminded me where I was, and the sardonic incongruity of it jarred me back to earth. It was always like that: the deed a parody of the dream, the details of actual happenings making mouths at the truth that lay behind them, life sneering at itself. Here were two lovers hurrying together through the night, held silent by a secret and bound by a blind trust. And they were riding through Westchester in a motor-car, and the thought of a fussy medical man with a bass voice was the naked sword which lay between them.
A trolley car, looking like a huge and luminous caterpillar, hung alongside us for a moment, then fell behind. Our engine had not been running perfectly from the first; and now as we jolted over a section of newly mended road and began to climb a bumpy hill, the trouble suddenly became so much worse that it looked as though it meant delay. Impure gasolene does not make one cylinder miss fire regularly for many revolutions and then explode once or twice with a croupy grunt.
"There's something the matter with the car," said Lady nervously. "I hope we're not going to break down. We mustn't break down."