“How—how terrible,” quavered Mrs. Cheviot.
“One hundred guineas,” roared Mr. Blatchbourne, slamming the arm of his
chair with a hand like a maul. “And another two hundred for another
couple of rooms which I’m afraid to enter.” Blanche made ready to die.
“Once this was a gentleman’s apartment: now it is ‘A Cheviot Room.’
There’s the cipher, madam, they had the effrontery to affix. That set
the seal of their approval upon this—this barbarous pleasantry.” He
rose to his feet and flung clenched fists to heaven. “Oh, if I’d only
been here when the blackguard came down for his cheque.”
He laughed like a madman and, crossing to the hearth, stared violently
upon the fire.
So he stood for a moment. Then, as though to brace himself, he laid
hands upon the mantelpiece.
The screech of agony which instantly succeeded this action would have
done any torturer credit.
For one long hideous moment Mrs. Cheviot, whose knees were knocking,
supposed that insanity had supervened. Then a frightful apostrophe
brought the butler’s warning to her mind.
“Goats and monkeys!” screamed Blatchbourne, uplifting his palms. “_I’ve
done it again._”
That the household had recognized the burden of the plaint was manifest.
Three servants arrived at a run, bearing oil and linen with which they
proceeded to minister to their injured lord.
The latter, half-mad with pain, submitted blasphemously to their
attention, alternately reviling his wife and cursing the house of
Cheviot, root and trunk and bough, till Blanche could have fallen in her
tracks.
“Grievous bodily harm,” he mouthed. “That’s what it is. They’ve
deposited dangerous goods. They’ve done it maliciously. They intended me
to be burned. They hoped I should be burned—burned to hell. It’s a
diabolical plot. They’re poisoners. First they poison the mind and then
the body. They’re proffering robbery and murder, and fools all over
England are buying their treacherous wares. Three hundred guineas I’ve
paid to have my mind diseased and my body burned to hell.”
Here a bell stammered.
That no one heard it but Blanche is not surprising.
Without a moment’s hesitation she slipped unobserved from the hall into
a vestibule, and a moment later she was on the steps.