The young officer seemed in a hurry and out of temper. At any rate, he jumped into the cab without taking any notice of the two sommeliers and the concierge who stood round expectant of francs, and when the concierge in his stiffest manner asked where the man was to drive, Warkworth put his head out of the window and said, hastily, to the cocher:
“D’abord, à la Gare de Sceaux! Puis, je vous dirai. Mais dépêchez-vous!”
The cab rolled away, and Delafield walked on.
Half-past seven, striking from all the Paris towers! And Warkworth’s intention in the morning was to leave the Gare de Lyon at 7:15. But it seemed he was now bound, at 7:30, for the Gare de Sceaux, from which point of departure it was clear that no reasonable man would think of starting for the Eternal City.
“D’abord, à la Gare de Sceaux!”
Then he was not catching a train?—at any rate, immediately. He had some other business first, and was perhaps going to the station to deposit his luggage?
Suddenly a thought, a suspicion, flashed through Delafield’s mind, which set his heart thumping in his breast. In after days he was often puzzled to account for its origin, still more for the extraordinary force with which it at once took possession of all his energies. In his more mystical moments of later life he rose to the secret belief that God had spoken to him.
At any rate, he at once hailed a cab, and, thinking no more of his dinner engagement, he drove posthaste to the Nord Station. In those days the Calais train arrived at eight. He reached the station a few minutes before it appeared. When at last it drew up, amid the crowd on the platform it took him only a few seconds to distinguish the dark and elegant head of Julie Le Breton.
A pang shot through him that pierced to the very centre of life. He was conscious of a prayer for help and a clear mind. But on his way to the station he had rapidly thought out a plan on which to act should this mad notion in his brain turn out to have any support in reality.
It had so much support that Julie Le Breton was there—in Paris—and not at Bruges, as she had led the Duchess to suppose. And when she turned her startled face upon him, his wild fancy became, for himself, a certainty.
“Amiens! Cinq minutes d’arrêt.”
Delafield got out and walked up and down the platform. He passed the closed and darkened windows of the sleeping-car; and it seemed to his abnormally quickened sense that he was beside her, bending over her, and that he said to her:
“Courage! You are saved! Let us thank God!”
A boy from the refreshment-room came along, wheeling a barrow on which were tea and coffee.
Delafield eagerly drank a cup of tea and put his hand into his pocket to pay for it. He found there three francs and his ticket. After paying for the tea he examined his purse. That contained an English half-crown.
So he had had with him just enough to get his own second-class ticket, her first-class, and a sleeping-car. That was good fortune, seeing that the bulk of his money, with his return ticket, was reposing in his dressing-case at the Hôtel du Rhin.
“En voiture! En voiture, s’il vous plaît!”
He settled himself once more in his corner, and the train rushed on. This time it was the strange hour at the Gare du Nord which he lived through again, her white face opposite to him in the refreshment-room, the bewilderment and misery she had been so little able to conceal, her spasmodic attempts at conversation, a few vague words about Lord Lackington or the Duchess, and then pauses, when her great eyes, haggard and weary, stared into vacancy, and he knew well enough that her thoughts were with Warkworth, and that she was in fierce rebellion against his presence there, and this action into which he had forced her.
As for him, he perfectly understood the dilemma in which she stood. Either she must accept the duty of returning to the deathbed of the old man, her mother’s father, or she must confess her appointment with Warkworth.
Yet—suppose he had been mistaken? Well, the telegram from the Duchess covered his whole action. Lord Lackington was dying; and apart from all question of feeling, Julie Le Breton’s friends must naturally desire that he should see her, acknowledge her before his two sons, and, with their consent, provide for her before his death.
But, ah, he had not been mistaken! He remembered her hurried refusal when he had asked her if he should telegraph for her to her Paris “friends”—how, in a sudden shame, he had turned away that he might not see the beloved false face as she spoke, might not seem to watch or suspect her.
He had just had time to send off a messenger, first to his friend at the Café Gaillard, and then to the Hôtel du Rhin, before escorting her to the sleeping-car.
Ah, how piteous had been that dull bewilderment with which she had turned to him!
“But—my ticket?”
“Here they are. Oh, never mind—we will settle in town. Try to sleep. You must be very tired.”
And then it seemed to him that her lips trembled, like those of a miserable child; and surely, surely, she must hear that mad beating of his pulse!
Boulogne was gone in a flash. Here was the Somme, stretched in a pale silver flood beneath the moon—a land of dunes and stunted pines, of wide sea-marshes, over which came the roar of the Channel. Then again the sea was left behind, and the
