Monday was the day of the great deliverance, the day that was fixed
for Frida Tancred's flight. And, as if it meant to mark an era and a
hegira and the beginning of revolution, it distinguished itself from
other days by suitable signs and portents. It dawned through a
brooding haze that threatened heat, then changed its mind, thickened
and massed itself for storm. While he was dressing, Durant was made
aware of the meteorological disturbance by an incessant tap-tap on
the barometer as the Colonel consulted his oracle in the hall. The
official announcement was made at breakfast.
"There is a change in the glass," said the Colonel. "Mr. Durant
brought the fine weather with him and Miss Chatterton is taking it
away."
"I'm taking something else away beside the weather," said she.
But the spirit of prophecy was upon him.
"To judge by to-day's forecast, I think we shall see Frida back
again before the fine weather."
Whereupon Durant smiled and Miss Chatterton laughed, which gave him
an agreeable sense of being witty as well as prophetic.
By ten o'clock the hand of the barometer had crept far past
"Change"; by noon it had swung violently to "Stormy, with much
rain"; by lunchtime a constrained and awkward dialogue was broken by
the rude voice of the thunder. The Colonel took out his watch, timed
the thunder and lightning, and calculated the approaches of the
storm. "Seven miles away from us at present," said he.
It hung so low that the growling and groaning seemed to come from
the woods round Coton Manor; the landscape darkened to a metallic
purplish green, then paled to the livid color of jade under a sallow
sky. There was a swift succession of transformation scenes, when,
between the bursts of thunder, the park, swathed in sheet lightning,
shot up behind the windows, now blue, now amethyst, now rose, now
green. Then the storm suddenly shifted its quarters and broke
through a rampart of solid darkness piled high in the southwest.
"Fifteen seconds," said the Colonel, "between that flash and the
thunder."
Among these phenomena the Colonel moved like a little gentleman
enchanted; he darted to and fro, and in and out, as if the elements
were his natural home; his hurried notes in the little memorandum
book outsped the lightning. For the last thirty years there had not
been such weather in the meteorological history of Wickshire.
But the storm was only in its playful infancy; the forked lightning
and the rain were yet to come. The last train up, timed to meet the
express at the junction, left Whithorn-in-Arden at 3.10, and it was
a good hour's drive to the station. As they toyed with the lightning
on their plates Durant and Miss Chatterton looked at Frida. Fate,
the weather, and the Colonel, a trinity of hostile powers, were
arrayed against her, and the three were one.
At the stroke of two the Colonel remarked blandly, "There will be no
driving to the station to-day, so I have countermanded the
brougham."
They were dressed ready for the journey, and, as the Colonel spoke
Frida got up, drew down her veil and put on her gloves.
"That was a pity," she said quietly, "seeing that we've got to go."
The Colonel was blander than ever; he waved his hand. "Go, by all
means," said he, "but not in my brougham. There I put my foot down."
("Not there, not there, oh, gallant Colonel," said Durant to
himself, "but where you have always put it, on Frida's lovely
neck.")
She started, looked steadily at her father, then, to Durant's
surprise, she shrugged her shoulders; not as an Englishwoman shrugs
them, but in the graceful Continental manner. The movement suggested
that the foreign strain in her was dominant at the moment; it
further implied that she was shaking her neck free from the
Colonel's foot. She walked to the window and looked out upon the
storm. With the neck strained slightly forward, her nostrils
quivering, her whole figure eager and lean and tense, she looked
like some fine and nervous animal, say a deerhound ready to slip
from the leash.
As she looked there was a sound as if heaven were ripped asunder,
and the forked lightning hurled itself from that dark rampart in the
southwest and went zig-zagging against the pane. "Only ten seconds,"
said the Colonel; "the storm is bursting right over our heads."
Frida too had consulted her watch; she turned suddenly, rang the
bell, and gave orders to a trembling footman. "Tell Randall to put
Polly in the dogcart. He must drive to the station at once."
The answer came back from the stables that Randall had shut himself
into the loose box and covered himself with straw, "to keep the
lightning off of him. He dursn't go near a steel bit, not if it was
to save his life, m'm, and as for driving to the station----"
It was too true; Randall, horse-breaker, groom and coachman,
excellent, invaluable creature at all other times, was a brainless
coward in a thunderstorm.
"If we don't go to-day, we can't go till to-morrow," said Georgie
Chatterton, and she nodded at Durant to remind him that in that case
his departure would be postponed till Thursday.
Frida too turned toward him. "If I don't go to-day, I shall never
go."
He understood. She was afraid, afraid of what might come between her
and her deliverance, afraid of her fate, afraid of the conscience
that was her will, afraid of her own fear, of the terror that would
come upon her when she realized the full meaning of her lust for
life. To-morrow any or all of those things might turn her from the
way; to-day she was strong; she held her life in her two hands. At
any rate, she was not afraid of the weather. She would go straight
to her end, through rain and lightning and thunderbolts and all the
blue and yellow demons of the sky.
"Are you afraid, Georgie?"
"Of thunder and lightning?" asked Georgie pointedly. "No."
"All right, then. We've got forty-five minutes. I must put Polly
into the cart myself. Five for that; forty to get to the station."
She strode off to the stables, followed by the footman and Durant.
Among them they forced Polly into the trap, and led her dancing to
the porch, where Miss Chatterton stood, prepared for all weathers.
"I say," cried she, "this is all very well; but who's going to drive
Polly there and back again?"
"I am," said Durant calmly. He had caught a furtive flash from
Frida's eyes that lighted upon, glanced off him and fell to the
ground. The woman in her had appealed to his chivalry. At the same
instant there was a swish, as if the skirts of heaven were trailing
across the earth, and the rain came down. He hastily thrust Miss
Tancred's arms into the sleeves of her mackintosh and wriggled into
his own. The final speeches were short and to the point.
"Mr. Durant," said Miss Chatterton, "you are a hero."
"Frida," said the Colonel, "you are a fool." And for once Durant
was inclined to agree with him. The more so as Miss Tancred took
advantage of his engagement with his mackintosh to enthrone herself
on the driver's high seat. She said good-by to the Colonel, and
gathered up the reins; Miss Chatterton climbed up beside her; Polly
gave a frantic plunge and a dash forward; and the hero was obliged
to enter the dogcart after the deft fashion of a footman, with a run
and a flying leap into the back seat.
Miss Chatterton was unkind enough to laugh. "Well done!" said she.
"Sit tight, and try to look as chivalrous as I'm sure you feel."
But it is hard to look or feel chivalrous sitting on a back seat in
a wet mackintosh with a thunderstorm pouring down your neck and into
your ears, and a woman, possessed by all the devils, driving
furiously to an express train that she can never catch. In that
lunatic escape from Coton Manor she had not looked back once; she
left Durant to contemplate a certain absurd little figure that stood
under an immense Doris portico, regarding the face of the sky.
The main thoroughfare of Whithorn-in-Arden was scored like the bed
of a torrent, and fringed with an ochreish scum tossed up from the
churning loam. The church clock struck three as they dashed through.
"You'll never do it," said Durant; "it's a good twenty minutes from
here."
"In the brougham it is. Polly will do it in ten--with me driving
her."
She did it in seven. Durant had pictured the two ladies scurrying
along the platform, and himself, a dismal figure, aiding their
unlovely efforts to board a departing train; as it was, the three
minutes saved allowed Frida to achieve her flight with dignity.
For two out of those three minutes he stood outside their carriage
window, beyond the shelter of the station roof, with the rain from
the ornamental woodwork overflowing on to his innocent head. He was
trying to smile.
"Heroic," murmured Miss Chatterton; and her eyebrows intimated that
she saw pathos in his appearance. As for Frida, her good-by was so
curt and cold that Durant, who had suffered many things in redeeming
the discourtesy of his former attitude to her, was startled and not
a little hurt. His plain, lean face, that seemed to have grown still
plainer and leaner under the lashing of the rain, set again in its
habitual expression of repugnance; hers paled suddenly to a lighter
sallow than before; the hand she had given to him withdrew itself in
terror from his touch. He drew himself up stiffly, raising a hat
that was no hat but a gutter, and the train crawled out of the
station.
He stood yet another minute staring at the naked rails, two shining
parallel lines that seemed to touch and vanish, over the visible
verge, into the gray fringe of the infinite where the rain washed
out the world.
And then he saw nothing but Frida Tancred, sitting on the edge of
the fir plantation and gazing into the distance; he heard his own
voice saying to her, "Let yourself go, Miss Tancred; let yourself
go!"
And she was gone.