CHAPTER IX
HERE, all in a rush of twenty-four hours, was a glut of incident for a young woman out for adventure. Triona had only made his effect on the romantically feminine within Olivia by his triumphant rescue. As to that he need have no misgivings. So once did Andromeda see young Perseus, calm and assured, deliver her from the monster. Triona’s felling of Mavenna appealed to the lingering savage woman fiercely conscious of wrong avenged; but his immediate and careless mastery of the situation struck civilized chords. She could see him dominating the sheepskin-clad tribe in the Urals (see Through Blood and Snow) until he established their independence in their mountain fastness. She could see him, masterful, resourceful, escaping from the Bolshevik prison and making his resistless way across a hostile continent. She could also appreciate, after this wonder-day at Richmond, the suppleness of his simple charm which won him food and shelter where food scarcely existed and shelter to a stranger was a matter of shooting or a bashing in of heads.
As for Mavenna, her flesh still shuddered at the memory of those few moments of insult. What he said she could scarcely remember. The inextricable clutch of his great arms around her body and the detestable kisses eclipsed mere words. Unwittingly his hug had compressed her throat so that she could not scream. There had been nothing for it but the slipper unhooked by the free arm, and the doughty heel. Had she won through alone to her room, she would have collapsed—so she assured herself—from sickening horror. But the Deliverer had been there, as in a legend of Greece or Broceliande, and had saved her from the madness of the nymph terror stricken by Satyrs. The two extravagances had, in a way, counteracted each other, setting her, by the morning, in a normal equilibrium. She had tried to explain the phenomenon by referring to her having spent the night in striking a moral balance-sheet. And then had come the day, the wonderful day, in which the Deliverer had proved himself the perfect, gentle Knight. Can it be wondered that her brain swam with him?
She went the next morning to Lydia’s hat shop, and, in the little room which Sydney Brooke had called her cubby hole, a nine-foot-square boudoir office, reeking with Lydia’s scent and with Heaven knows what scandals and vulgarities and vanities of post-war London, she poured out her tale of outrage. After listening with indulgent patience, Lydia remarked judicially:
“I told you, my dear child, when you came to London, that the first lesson you had to learn was to take care of yourself.”
Olivia flashed. She had taken care of herself well enough. But that brute Mavenna—what about him?
“Everybody knows Mavenna,” replied Lydia. “No girl in her senses would have trusted herself alone with him.”
“And, with that reputation, he’s a friend of yours and Sydney’s?”
Lydia shrugged her plump shoulders.
“Really, my dear, if one exacted certificates of lamb-like innocence, signed by a high celestial official, before you admitted anyone into the circle of your acquaintance, you might as well go and live on a desert island.”