The House of Dreams-Come-True. Margaret Pedler

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СКАЧАТЬ do put me down!” she urged him. “I’m sure I can walk it—really I am.”

      He halted for a moment.

      “Look down!” he said. “Think you could travel in that?”

      The snow was up to his knees, above them whenever the ground hollowed suddenly.

      “But you?” she protested unhappily. “You’ll—you’ll simply kill yourself!”

      “Small loss if I do! But as that would hardly help you out of your difficulties, I’ve no intention of giving up the ghost just at present.”

      He started on again, pressing forward slowly and determinedly, but it was only with great difficulty and exertion that he was able to make headway. Jean, her cheek against the rough tweed of his coat, could hear the labouring beats of his heart as the depth of the snow increased.

      “How much further?” she whispered.

      “Not far,” he answered briefly, husbanding his breath.

      A few more steps. They were both silent now. Jean’s eyes sought his face. It was ashen, and even in that bitter cold beads of sweat were running down it; he was nearing the end of his tether. She could bear it no longer. She stirred restlessly in his arms.

      “Put me down,” she cried imploringly. “Please put me down.”

      But he shook his head.

      “Keep still, can’t you?” he muttered between his teeth. She felt his arms tighten round her.

      The next moment he stumbled heavily against some surface root or boulder, concealed beneath the snow, and pitched forward, and in the same instant Jean felt herself sinking down, down into a soft bed of something that yielded resistlessly to her weight. Then came a violent jerk and jar, as though she had been seized suddenly round the waist, and the sensation of sinking ceased abruptly.

      She lay quite still where she had fallen and, looking upwards, found herself staring straight into the eyes of the Englishman. He was lying flat on his face, on ground a little above the snow-filled hollow into which his fall had flung her, his hand grasping the strap which was fastened round her body. He had caught the flying end of it as they fell, and thus saved her from sinking into seven or eight feet of snow.

      “Are you hurt?”

      His voice came to her roughened with fierce anxiety.

      “No. I’m not hurt. Only don’t leave go of your end of the strap!”

      “Thank God!” she heard him mutter. Then, aloud, reassuringly: “I’ve got my end of it all right. How, can you catch hold of the strap and raise yourself a little so that I can reach you?”

      Jean obeyed. A minute later she felt his arms about her shoulders, underneath her armpits, and then very slowly, but with a sure strength that took from her all sense of fear, he drew her safely up beside him on to the high ground.

      Eor a moment they both rested quietly, recovering their breath. The Englishman seemed glad of the respite, and Jean noticed with concern the rather drawn look of his face. She thought he must be more played out than he cared to acknowledge.

      Across the silence of sheer fatigue their eyes met—Jean’s filled with a wistful solicitude as unconscious and candid as a child’s, the man’s curiously brilliant and inscrutable—and in a moment the silence had become something other, different, charged with emotional significance, the revealing silence which falls suddenly between a man and woman.

      At last:

      “This is what comes of stealing a day from Mrs. Grundy,” commented the man drily.

      And the tension was broken.

      He sprang up, as though, anxious to maintain the recovered atmosphere of the commonplace.

      “Come! Having shot her bolt and tried ineffectually to down you in a ditch, I expect the old lady will let us get home safely now. We’re through the worst. There are no more drifts between here and the hotel.”

      It was true. Anything that might have spelt danger was past, and it only remained to follow the beaten track up to the hotel, though even so, with the wind and snow driving in their faces, it took them a good half-hour to accomplish the task.

      Monsieur and Madame de Varigny, a distracted maître d’hôtel, and a little crowd of interested and sympathetic visitors welcomed their arrival.

      “Mon dieu, mademoiselle! But we rejoice to see you back!” exclaimed Madame de Varigny. “We ourselves are only newly returned—and that, with difficulty, through this terrible storm—and we arrive to find that none knows where you are!”

      “Me, I made sure that mademoiselle had accompanied Madame la Comtesse.” asseverated Monsieur Vautrinot, nervously anxious to exculpate himself from any charge of carelessness.

      “We were just going to organise a search-party,” added the little Count. “I, myself”—stoutly—“should have joined in the search.”

      Weary as she was, Jean could hardly refrain from smiling at the idea of the diminutive Count in the rôle of gallant preserver. He would have been considerably less well-qualified even than herself to cope with the drifting snow through which the sheer, dogged strength of the Englishman had brought her safely.

      Instinctively she turned with the intention of effecting an introduction between the latter and the Varignys, only to find that he had disappeared. He had taken the opportunity presented by the little ferment of excitement which had greeted her safe return to slip away.

      She felt oddly disconcerted. And yet, she reflected, it was so like him—so like the conception of him which she had formed, at least—to evade both her thanks and the enthusiasm with which a recital of the afternoon’s adventure Would have been received.

CHAPTER VI—THE MAGIC MOMENT

       Table of Contents

      JEAN, surprisingly revived by a hot bath and a hot drink, and comfortably tucked up beside the fire in her room, was recounting the day’s adventure to Madame de Varigny.

      It was a somewhat expurgated version of the affair that she outlined—thoughtfully calculated to allay the natural apprehensions of a temporary chaperon—in which the unknown Englishman figured innocuously as merely having come to her assistance when, in the course of her afternoon’s tramp, she had been overtaken by the blizzard. Of the stolen day, snatched from under Mrs. Grundy’s enquiring nose, Jean preserved a discreet silence.

      “I don’t know who he could be,” she pursued. “I’ve never seen him on the ice before; I should certainly have recognised him if I had. He was a lean, brown man, very English-looking—that sort of cold-tub-every-morning effect, you know. Oh! And he had one perfectly white lock of hair that was distinctly attractive. It looked”—descriptively—“as though someone had dabbed a powdered finger on his hair—just in the right place.”

      Madame СКАЧАТЬ