The Sentimental Adventures of Jimmy Bulstrode Part 28

"Oh," she cried furiously, shrinking back from him, "how have you dared ... dared?"

... "To save your Majesty? Well, it _was_ hard!" he acknowledged practically. "Harder than you will ever believe. I may say that no decision was ever more difficult to make. To be so trusted by you, and to feel myself a double-dyed villain wasn't agreeable, but the issue was a warrant for any treachery."

"Great heavens!" she exclaimed. "Who made _you_ judge of my actions, who gave _you_ leave to decide my fate, what a fool I was to trust you--what a fool! You have spoiled my life!" she accused him--"You have taken from me everything in the world."

If she had been alone he knew she would have wept, and he kept his face turned from her for some few seconds. "I have certainly established a precedent for myself," he mused with humor. "_I_ can never run away with a woman now--never."

Small as were the limits of the little carriage she found means to walk it up and down several times, her head thrown back, her eyes flas.h.i.+ng.

She spoke, he supposed, in Poltavian, for he could not follow the meaning of her few staccato, angry words, but he did not recognise among the incoherences that she called him friend!

As the flying scenes grew farm-like and pastoral, and the lines and sweep of what he took to be park property, caught his eyes he once more ventured to speak.

"I am not the cold-blooded traitor I seem, believe me," he tried to plead, "and until we definitely pa.s.sed the station at Redleigh Bucks I was miserable to think I had, as it seems, betrayed your Majesty. But when as we came up to the station I saw the King on the platform----"

She stopped short in front of him: "The King!" she exclaimed incredulously.

Bulstrode nodded in a matter-of-fact way as if stray kings on mid-country platforms were the common occurrence of his travelling experiences.

"He had evidently followed you that far, and if the plan formed to attach your carriage to the Dover express had been attempted, you would have been stopped by your husband himself. As it is you are simply going where you are expected to go--to Westboro' Castle."

This denouement, putting a summary end to her tragic anger, left her no place for ecstatics. She sat down in front of Bulstrode and repeated, dazed:--

"The _King_! The King had followed me! He had been warned then, but by whom? You above all did not....?"

"Oh no!" He was glad to be honestly able to disclaim at least this disloyalty. "I had nothing to do with it. The King had come on with the man who had played your Majesty false all along, the man who is indeed more the King's friend than he is Carmen-Magda's."

And sitting there, bewildered and appealing before him, she heard him say: "I mean Lord Almouth Gresthaven."

She murmured some words in Poltavian, then besought: "Why, why do you play with me?" The tears started to her eyes.

"Lord Gresthaven," Bulstrode hurried now to his confession--"has plainly betrayed you. Either he failed to meet you as planned, or else he came too late and thought better of his connivance against your husband--at all events, both he and the King took the slow train."

"But _you_," she interrupted, staring at him--"You are not Lord Gresthaven?"

"No," he said quietly, "no, I am an American, nothing more than a friend and guest of the Duke of Westboro'. I tried over and over again to tell you this, but you would not hear me and I finally accepted the role you gave me with the firm intention of taking you with me to Westboro' Castle. My name is James Thatcher Bulstrode, I am from Boston, in the United States." Bulstrode thus tardily introduced himself.

And Jimmy, not pretending ever to have counted greatly on the favor of princes, was nevertheless taken aback. Not that he had any preconceived notion of what Carmen-Magda would do--when she eventually knew. He had been too absorbed in his mission, its entanglements, and his climax. He may have been prepared for some exhibition of scorn, but he more than likely looked for a social and commonplace ending to their ride, but for what Carmen-Magda did he was entirely unprepared.

As if in his declaration of himself and his ident.i.ty he had taken a sponge and quite wiped himself off the slate, the Queen, after speechlessly staring at him for a few moments, quietly removed her attention from him altogether. She took from a little bag at her wrist a rouge stick with which she carefully touched her lips; from a tiny gold box she lightly dusted her cheeks with powder; she adjusted her tulle bow and her veil and then sat serenely back waiting until the train should arrive at her forced destination.

Although, one might say, unused to the manners of royalty, Jimmy was dumbfounded; the beautiful woman in forest-brown clothes picked out with hunting green had become as strange to him as in the first moment when she attracted his attention some few miles beyond London. That she should be angry at his interference he could admit, but that she should not be grateful to be saved from her husband's wrath he did not understand. Was he too plebeian for her to notice? He, of course, did not speak to her again, nor did she break the singular silence, and for some reason he did not even care to ask her forgiveness. Finally, he decided that she was thinking solely of Gela, the man at the other end of the route who would wait for her in vain, and when this sentimental view of the case occurred to him, he would have felt _de trop_ had he not seen how completely he was ignored.

They flashed past the last miles of wooded valley and hillside.

Westboro' was very soft in line and very mellow in the evening light.

The landscape, through a half-mist, was as brown and green as the dress of the beautiful silent woman in the opposite corner of the travelling carriage.

Bulstrode, looking at her rather timidly, felt as if he were in a dream.

At Westboro' Abbey the guard unlocked the compartment door and Bulstrode, who got out first, helped the Queen of Poltavia to descend.

As she put foot to the ground she said, half leaning on the arm he gave: "I thank you--very much indeed."

He caught the few words eagerly, and was fatuous enough to fancy that she meant something more than the common courteous acknowledgment of a man's help from a travelling carriage.

The station was deserted. The express having arrived some half hour before without them, there had evidently been no preparation made to meet this train.

Surrounded by her luggage, her brand new luggage, the Queen waited on the side of the station that faced the open country, whilst Bulstrode made inquiries about telephoning or getting word to the castle.

At this juncture, down the lane, between red thickets and golden hedges, a smart dog-cart tooled along driven by a lady. She waved a welcoming hand.

"Jimmy," she said as she drove up and leaned out and nodded to him, "I knew you'd miss the express, you're so absent-minded about trains; and who could be expected to distinguish between a 3.50 and a 3.53? So, as you see, I drove down on the chance."

He had not greeted her in words. The long afternoon, the romantic extravagant episode, of which he had been unwillingly a part, made this woman seem so real. He felt as if from a burlesque extravaganza he had come out into the fresh air; their eyes had met and Mrs. Falconer did not miss any other greeting.

"That lady," he then said, "whom you see standing on the edge of the platform surrounded by her luggage, like a s.h.i.+pwrecked being on a desert island, is the Queen of Poltavia."

"Heavens!" exclaimed Mrs. Falconer.

"Yes," he said indifferently, "we came down from London together."

"Why, the whole castle is in a state about her. A coach and postillion went to fetch her at the express. Telegrams are flying all over the country. Why did she take a local--and with you--Jimmy?"

"Perhaps she is absent-minded about trains as well," he smiled, "at all events here she certainly is and it will be charming of you to drive her up."

"But I don't know her!"

"Oh," he shrugged, "one doesn't exactly _know_ queens, I don't know her either, but that wouldn't prevent my doing her a service. I am sure she'd rather be driven up to a cup of tea and a fire by an American than stand here waiting for a postilion and four. It will be nice of you to speak to her," he suggested, and stepped back.

Gathering up her reins, Mrs. Falconer whisked her horse about and drove up to the lady's side. Bulstrode, from a little distance, watched her graceful inclination and heard her lovely voice. He saw Carmen-Magda lift her disguising veil, displaying her dark, foreign face. Slowly going up to the dog-cart's side, together with the groom's help, he bestowed the Queen's belongings in the trap.

"I will walk on slowly up the road," he suggested, "and most possibly you will send back for me."

"Oh, I'll drive back myself." She was quite certain about it. As he helped the Queen into the dog-cart, as she leaned on his supporting hand, she said:

"Thank you, thank you very much indeed." And he was so vain as to fancy that into tone and words Carmen-Magda put more warmth, more of meaning, than a woman usually puts into the phrase of recognition of a man's helping hand. He could not, moreover, have sworn that at the end of the sentence was not murmured a word in a foreign tongue which might in Poltavian mean "friend," but as he did not understand the language of the country he could not be sure.

As he watched the trap up the hedged lanes out of sight, he rubbed his eyes as if he were not certain whether or not he had not dozed and dreamed in his compartment on the slow train from London.... But at any rate he had the delightful heavenly certainty that this was Westboro' of an Indian summer afternoon--and that of the two women who had just driven up the lane out of sight, one at least was adorably real.

THE SEVENTH ADVENTURE

VII

IN WHICH HE BECOMES THE POSSESSOR OF A CERTAIN PIECE OF PROPERTY

As Bulstrode stood in the window of his room at Westboro' Castle, his face turned toward the country, it seemed to beckon him. It called him from the park's end where suave and smooth the curving downs met the preciser contour of the eastern field; from hedges holding snugly in the roadways, the roads themselves running off on pleasant excursions to towns.h.i.+ps whose names are suggestive of romance, whose gentle beauties have mellowed with the ages which give them value and leave them perfect.