A Safety Match Part 19

In due course the Belton motor conveyed its owner to Kilchester and left him there.

"Shall I come back for you, sir?" inquired Mr Vick, the chauffeur. He was a kindly man, despite his exalted station.

"No, thanks--I'll take the train. But I believe Lady Carr wants you to take her over to Croxley Dene this afternoon."

"Her ladys.h.i.+p shall be took," said Mr Vick, with an indulgent smile--Lady Carr was a favourite of his--and forthwith returned to Belton.

On running the car into the yard he found the coachman, Mr Windebank, a sadly diminished luminary in these days, putting a polish upon an unappreciative quadruped.

"You and your machine, Mr Vick," announced Mr Windebank, "is wanted round at twelve sharp."

It was then eleven-fifteen.

"Ho!" replied the ruffled Mr Vick, feeling much as the Emperor Nero might have felt on being requested by the most recently immured early Christian to see that the arena lions were kept a bit quieter to-morrow night--"ho, indeed!"

"Them's your orders, Mr Vick," said Mr Windebank, resuming the peculiar dental _obligato_ which seems to be the inseparable accompaniment of the toilet of a horse, temporarily suspended on this occasion to enable the performer to discharge his little broadside.

Mr Vick turned off various taps and switches on his dash-board, and the humming of the engine ceased.

"I take my orders," he proclaimed in majestic tones, "from the master and missus direct, and from n.o.body else."

Mr Windebank, after spending some moments in groping for a crus.h.i.+ng rejoinder, replied--

"Well, you'd better go inside and get 'em. And you'd better 'ang a nosebag on your sparking-plug in the meanwhile," he added, with sudden and savage irrelevance.

Mr Vick adopted the former of these two suggestions, with the result that at the hour of noon the car slid submissively round to the front of the Hall. Presently Daphne appeared, and disregarding the door which Mr Vick was holding open for her, stepped up into the driver's seat--the throne itself--and took the wheel in her vigorous little hands.

"I am going to drive, Vick," she observed cheerfully.

Mr Vick preserved his self-control and smiled faintly.

"I suppose you have a licence, my lady?" he inquired.

"Gracious, no! I am only just beginning," replied Daphne, who regarded a driver's licence as a sort of reward of merit. "I want you to teach me. Which of these things is the clutch-pedal?"

"The left, my lady. I am afraid," added Mr Vick, with the air of one who intends to stop this nonsense once and for all, "that you will find it very stiff."

"Thanks," said Daphne blandly. "And I suppose the other one is the brake."

"Yes, my lady; but----"

"Then we can start. How do I put in the first speed?"

Mr Vick, in what can only be described as a _moriturus-te-saluto!_ voice, gave the required information; and the car, after a dislocating jerk, moved off at a stately four miles per hour. Presently, with much slipping of the clutch and buzzing of the gear-wheels, the second, and finally the third speed went in, and the car proceeded with all the exuberance of its forty-five horse-power down the long straight drive.

Fortunately the lodge gates stood open, and the road outside was clear.

Certainly Mr Vick behaved very well. Although every wrench and jar to which his beloved engines were submitted appeared to react directly upon his own internal mechanism, he never winced. Occasionally a m.u.f.fled groan or a muttered exclamation of "My tyres!" or "My differential!" burst from his overwrought lips; but for the most part he sat like a graven image, merely hoping that when the crash came it would be a good one--something about which it would be really grateful and comforting to say "I told you so!" He also cherished a strong hope that his name would appear in the newspapers.

But Daphne drove well. She had a good head and quick hands; and steering a middle course between the extreme caution of the beginner and the omniscient recklessness of the half-educated, she gave Mr Vick very little excuse for anything in the shape of a genuine shudder. She experienced a little difficulty in getting the clutch right out of action in changing gear; and once she stopped her engine through going round a corner with the brakes on--but that was all. Mr Vick began to feel distinctly aggrieved.

There was a spice of _abandon_ in Daphne's present att.i.tude. She had burned her boats; she had flown in the face of authority; and she intended to brazen it out. The breeze whistled in her ears; her eyes blazed; her cheeks glowed. She felt in good fighting trim.

Presently, fetching a compa.s.s, the car began to head towards Belton again, and having been directed in masterly fas.h.i.+on through the narrow gates by the back lodge, sped along the final stretch which led to home and luncheon, at a comfortable thirty miles an hour.

At the end of the dappled vista formed by the overarching trees of the avenue appeared a black object, which presently resolved itself into Mr Dawks, lolling comfortably in a patch of sunlight pending his mistress's return.

"Mind the dog, my lady!" cried Mr Vick suddenly.

Daphne had every intention of minding the dog; but desire and performance do not always coincide. Suddenly realizing that Mr Dawks, who was now sitting up expectantly in the middle distance, wagging his tail and extending a welcome as misplaced as that of Jephtha's daughter under somewhat similar circ.u.mstances, had no conception of the necessity for vacating his present position, Daphne put down both feet hard and endeavored to bring the car to a standstill. But thirty miles an hour is forty-four feet a second, and the momentum of a car weighing two tons is not lightly to be arrested by a brake constructed only to obey the pressure of a masculine boot. Next moment there was a pathetic little yelp. Daphne had a brief vision of an incredulous and reproachful doggy countenance; the car gave a slight lurch, and then came to full stop, as Mr Vick, having already snapped off the ignition switch on the dashboard, reached across behind Daphne's back and jammed on the side brake.

III.

It was Mr Dawks who really showed to the greatest advantage during the next half-hour. He a.s.sured his mistress by every means in his power that the whole thing was entirely his fault; and, like the courteous gentleman that he was, he begged her with faintly wagging tail and affectionate eyes not to distress herself unduly on his account. The thing was done; let there be no more talk about it. It was nothing! By way of showing that the cordiality of their relations was still unimpaired he endeavored to shake hands, first with one paw and then the other; but finding that both were broken he reluctantly desisted from his efforts.

They carried him--what was left of him--into the house, where Daphne, white-faced and tearless, hung in an agony of self-reproach over the friend of her youth--the last link with her girlhood. Dawks lay very still. Once, opening his eyes and evidently feeling that something was expected of him, he licked her hand. The tears came fast after that.

Presently Windebank arrived. He loved all dumb beasts, and was skilled in ministering to their ailments--wherein he transcended that highly educated automaton Mr Vick, to whom the acme of life was represented by a set of perfectly timed sparking-plugs--and he made poor mangled Dawks as comfortable as possible.

"Is he badly hurt, Windebank?" whispered Daphne.

"Yes, miss," said Windebank, touching his forelock. He was a man of few words in the presence of his superiors.

"Will he die?"

Windebank gazed down in an embarra.s.sed fas.h.i.+on at the close coils of fair hair, bowed over the dog's rough coat. Then he stiffened himself defiantly.

"He'll get well right enough, miss," he said with great a.s.surance.

"Just wants taking care of, that's all."

It was a lie, and he knew it. But it was a kind lie. To such much is forgiven.

Daphne sat with her patient until three o'clock, and then, overcome with the restlessness of impotent anxiety, and stimulated by an urgent telephonic reminder, ordered out the horses--not the motor.

"Good-bye, old man," she said to Dawks, caressing the dog's long ears and unbecoming nose. "I'll be back in an hour or two. Lie quiet, and you'll soon be all right. Windebank says so."

Mr Dawks whined gently and flapped his tail upon the floor, further intimating by a faint tremor of his ungainly body that if circ.u.mstances had permitted he would certainly have made a point of rising and accompanying his mistress to the door and seeing her off the premises. As things were, he must beg to be excused.

Daphne drove to Croxley Dene, where for an hour or so she exchanged ba.n.a.lities with the rest of the county and played a set of tennis.

She drove home in the cool of the evening, more composed in mind. The fresh air and exercise had done her good. Windebank had said that the dog would live: that was everything. Less satisfactory to contemplate was the approaching interview with her husband in the matter of the car. Until now she had not thought of it.

On reaching home she hurried to the library, where she had left the invalid lying on a rug before the fire. Mr Dawks was not there.

"I wonder if Windebank has taken him to the stable," she said to herself. "I'll go and----"

She turned, and found herself face to face with her husband.

"Jack," she asked nervously, "do you know where Dawks is? I suppose you have heard----"