plight and pursuit.
i left the manor with my eyes dim and my heart beating fast with a sickening pain. i moved down the road without quite well knowing where i went.
my well-beloved had again escaped me. it was my duty to follow her, to learn the truth, to save her—my duty to her, as well as to myself.
mystery followed upon the back of mystery. in those brief days, since the advent of the fugitive italian at shepherd’s bush, i had become enmeshed in a veritable web of entangled events which seemed to grow more extraordinary and more inexplicable every hour.
my meeting with the man shacklock proved, beyond doubt, the source of mr miller’s income. finding lucie’s father such an affable and gentlemanly man, i had entirely refused to credit sammy’s story. nevertheless, lucie herself had corroborated it, inasmuch as she had described her love at enghien and its tragic sequel; while i, myself, had recognised in gordon-wright the clever international thief who had decamped with blenkap’s valuables. and this man was actually miller’s most intimate friend!
to lucie i made no mention of my intention, but half an hour later i was in a dogcart hired from the “lion,” driving at a furious pace over the ballard down into swanage, where, at the hotel i had previously visited on my arrival, i inquired for miss murray.
“the lady left with a party in a motor-car an hour ago,” was the reply of the young person in black satin, whose duty appeared to be to keep the books and order about the waiters.
“gone!” i ejaculated. “where?”
“well, when people go off in a car we don’t generally know their destination. motor-cars are so very uncertain, you see.”
“did they arrive here on the car?” i inquired eagerly. “no. mr murray and his daughter came over by boat from bournemouth. the motor arrived last night with a gentleman, a lady and the chauffeur.”
“pardon me,” exclaimed a man’s voice at my elbow—the hotel proprietor who had overheard all our conversation. “are you a detective?” he asked, in a rather low, confidential tone.
“no. why?”
“well—” he hesitated. “only because there seemed to be something rather funny about mr murray—that’s all.”
“something funny about him? how?”
“well, from the moment he came here, till the moment he went away, he never came out of his room. and when he did, he was wearing a motor-coat with the collar turned up around his chin and goggles which entirely disguised him.”
“not at all a suspicious circumstance, surely?” i remarked, though inwardly much interested. “on these white dusty roads every one must wear goggles.”
“of course. but when people come to swanage they generally go out and look about the town and the bay. mr murray, however, shut himself up and saw nobody, while his daughter drove over to studland, where she stayed the night and returned about an hour before the motor started.”
“i’m going to follow that motor. i have a reason,” i said. “don’t you think the chauffeur might have told one of the stable-hands or garage-men—if you have a garage here—as to his destination? there’s a kind of freemasonry among chauffeurs, by which all of them know each other’s roads.”
“i’ll see,” replied the obliging proprietor. “come with me.”
he conducted me through to the back of the house, where a large courtyard had been recently converted into a garage. there were several cars in the coach-houses around, while in the centre of the yard a clean-shaven young man was turning a hose upon a dark red 16-horse “fiat.”
“gibbs, where has that blue car gone to this morning—the one that left an hour ago?”
“the 40 ‘mercédès,’ sir? gone to some place beyond exeter, sir. they’re on a big tour.”
“you don’t know the name of the place?” i asked the man anxiously.
“the chauffeur did tell me, but it was a funny name, an’ i’ve forgotten.”
“they’ve gone direct to exeter, in any case?”
“yes—by dorchester, chard and honiton. ’e asked me about the road.”
“how far is it to exeter?”
“about seventy-eight or eighty miles.”
“i could get there by train before they arrived,” i remarked.
“ah! i doubt it, sir,” was the man’s reply. “that’s a good car they’ve got, and if you went by train you’d ’ave to go right up to yeovil. they’d be through exeter long before you got there.”
“that’s so,” remarked the hotel proprietor. “from here to exeter by rail is a long cross-country journey.”
“then could i get a car? is any one of these for hire?”
“this one ’ere belongs to saunders, down in the town. ’e lets it out sometimes,” replied gibbs, indicating the red car he had been cleaning.
“then i’ll have it—and you’ll drive me, eh? we must overtake them.”
“very good, sir,” replied the man, and then i returned to the hotel to telephone to the owner and fix the price.
gibbs quickly filled the tank with petrol, poured water into the radiator, examined the tyres, pumping one that he found a little down; then he washed himself, put on his leather jacket and cap, and mounted to the wheel.
a quarter of an hour after i had first entered the garage i was sitting at the chauffeur’s side as the car slowly made its way up the crooked quaint old-fashioned main street of swanage and out on the big white road that ran up hill and down valley, the picturesque highway to dorchester. up to corfe castle the way was nearly all uphill, but the “fiat” ran splendidly, and in the narrow winding road where we met many pleasure parties in chars-à-banc gibbs quickly showed himself a competent driver.
seldom he blew his horn, yet he handled the car with a care that at once convinced me that he was a reliable chauffeur.
as we skirted the great mound upon which stood the cyclopean walls of corfe, magnificent relics of the bygone feudal age, and ran again out of the little village and up on to purbeck hill, he handed me a pair of goggles, saying:—
“you’d better have these, sir. we’re going through a lot of dust presently, and we’ve a dead head-wind.”
i put them on, and as i did so he increased the speed, remarking:—
“fortunately, there ain’t any police traps ’ere. we aren’t like they are in surrey. i got fined a fiver at guildford a month ago, an’ i was only goin’ fourteen miles an ’our. but it ain’t any good defendin’. the police are always in the right,” he added, with a sigh.
“do you think that we shall overtake them?” i inquired anxiously, for at all hazards i wanted to see and speak again with ella. what she had told me excited my curiosity and aroused my determination that she should make no further self-sacrifice.
“it all depends,” was his vague answer. “they’ve got a ‘forty,’ you know, an’ can do these hills much better than we can. but they may get a puncture or a tyre-burst.”
“but as to speed. they won’t go quicker than we are travelling?” i inquired.
“not if they don’t want to get ’ad up,” he grinned, and i then recognised that we were on a wide flat road, travelling at nearly forty miles an hour, and raising a perfect wall of dust behind us. “there’s one or two level-crossings, too, that may delay ’em.”
“and us also, eh?”
“perhaps,” he said. “but what i’m going to do is to go at a greater speed than they’ve gone. we’ve got nearly an hour and a half to make up, by some means or other.”
and lowering his head he set his shoulders in his seat and still increased the speed until we flew at a pace such as i had never before travelled in any motor-car. the engines ticked away with rhythmical music, the machinery hummed with that even tone which tells the practised motorist that his cylinders are working properly, and without once pulling up, we soon found ourselves slowing down to enter the quiet old county town of dorchester.
at charminster, where the two high-roads parted, we had news of the blue car we were following. a man breaking stones at the roadside informed us that it had passed about half an hour in front of us.
“it was going at a terrible speed,” he added, in broad dorset dialect. “they’ll get summoned—you see.”
this caused us to put on more pace, heedless of whether any pair of constables—or hedgehogs as motorists call them—were lurking near the road. gibbs put on all the speed he could get out of his engines, and we literally flew through stratton and frampton. he was, it seemed, determined to earn the couple of sovereigns i had promised him as reward if successful.
the afternoon went slowly by. the sky became overcast, and there was a slight shower, but we did not pull up, tearing ever onward through chard, over the devonshire border and round the big hill of dumpdon to old-fashioned but unpicturesque honiton.
we had now only seventeen miles or so before reaching exeter. slowly we descended the main street which dropped very steeply to a bridge over a small stream, and then out again upon the broad white undulating road, fringed almost continuously by trees and whitewashed and thatched cottages—the main road that runs from london through hounslow to the west.
suddenly we dipped beneath a railway bridge, and the road rising again our eager eyes saw about a mile in front of us a travelling cloud of dust. as we looked the car before us went round a slight bend in the flat open road, and there showed a flash of bright blue.
“look!” cried gibbs excitedly, “that’s the car! we must overtake them,” and setting his teeth again he put on all speed possible.
slowly, almost imperceptibly, we seemed to be overtaking my fugitive love who was, of course, all unconscious of being followed, when, just as we ran over the bridge which crosses the clyst, there was a loud report like a pistol shot, and gibbs was compelled to instantly apply the brake, uttering a loud exclamation of disappointment and chagrin.
our off rear tyre had burst!
my love would be in exeter and beyond reach long before we could put on a new tube and tyre.
i stood watching the fast receding car, my heart sinking within me. ella was before my very eyes, escaping me—never to return.
i knew that the intention was to evade me in future. and yet how madly i loved her. no matter what she said or what she did, she was still mine—mine!
