Читать книгу The Phantom Car - Fred M. White - Страница 7

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For hours it seemed to Peggy that she had been listening and waiting in the seclusion of her room. She had gone to bed earlier than she had intended, because, for once in a way, the pleasant chatter of her aunt and companion had driven her almost wild, so that she was fain to shut down her wireless set and seek the seclusion of her room. Here, by means of a switch, she was able to work a second loudspeaker from the set downstairs and listened more or less abstractedly to the dance music from the Royal Thames Hotel, where on many a happy occasion, she and Trevor had danced together before the shadow of trouble had come between them.

Quite two nights a week they had been in the habit of running up to Town in the two-seater and dining at the hotel in question, after which they turned into the ballroom for an hour or two and whiled away the time with the aid of what Peggy regarded as the best band in London. She could see it now, as she sat near the loudspeaker, see the lounge and the gardens beyond, into which it was possible to steal on a summer's night and sit watching the lights rippling on the river.

It all came back to Peggy with double force as she sat there with one ear for the music and the other for the signal which seemed as it it would never come. Then, as it grew later and the world outside became still, Peggy rose from her seat and moved restlessly about the room.

Then, suddenly, without any warning, the signal came. She heard the first three hoots on the weird, cracked horn, and just for a moment it seemed as if her heart was standing still. Then Trevor had managed after all, to satisfy his superiors and his own conscience at the same time. It was only for an instant, and then come the other three notes, like a passing knell; it brought her almost to her knees and caused the tears to rise into her eyes. It was as if the whole of her universe lay in ruins about her feet.

But only for a brief spell, which was succeeded almost at once by hardening lines about the corners of her mouth and a resolution that she proceeded to put into effect.

She switched off the dance music that was now mocking her ears and, crossing the room to a table in one of the windows, she sat down and wrote a letter.

And this was what the letter said:—

"Dear Trevor,—

"It is just five minutes past twelve and I heard your message. There was no mistaking it, because I should recognise that cracked note anywhere, and I believe it will ring in my ears till the end of time.

"So, after all, you have decided that I take a second place in your affections. It is just as well to know that, because I might have married you and discovered the fact when it was too late. At any rate I am free now to do as I please, and I want you to regard yourself as absolved from any promise you ever made. In other words, our engagement is at an end.

"I did think, when you hit upon that happy idea of telling me that I was to listen in my bedroom for the message of your horn, that love was to have all its own way, and that your personal ambition would be relegated into obscurity. But it seems it was not to be. I give you credit for believing that you would be successful in getting out of your obligation and coming back to me a free man. That is, free, as far as you and I were concerned. And I think, even now, if I had been firm with you this morning and had implored you with my arms around your neck and my kisses on your lips, you would have declined to go to London and written the Air Ministry that, so far as you were concerned, the thing was finished.

"And I came very near to doing so. I know you could not have refused me if I had allowed my natural feelings to run away with me. But, because I am as proud in my way as you are in yours, I managed to restrain myself and, all the more so, because I hoped that you would realise that you owed for more to me than you did to a mere Government department. And even as I sit here writing these words without passion and without anger, I am not sure whether I am glad or sorry.

"But it is no use to dwell upon that. For better or for worse, our romance is finished. I am leaving this letter so that you can get it the first thing in the morning by one of the servants. I presume that you will be on your way back again to London soon after breakfast and I think it is just as well that it should be so.

"Because I don't want to see you again, if you will do me one last favour, it is to keep out of my way. Don't make the slightest attempt to see me, because it will be only a painful thing for both of us. My mind is absolutely made up, and that is the last word I have to say.

PEGGY."

Very quietly and calmly, as if she were doing nothing out of the common, Peggy placed the letter in an envelope and sealed it. Then, on a separate sheet of paper, she wrote the words "To be delivered at once" and placed this, together with the letter, on the hall table. After that, she returned to her room again, and, much to her own astonishment, undressed and slept peacefully throughout the night.

When she came downstairs to breakfast in the morning, the note was no longer there, so she came to the natural conclusion that one of the servants had seen to it that the letter had been delivered. In the dining-room Miss Bancroft, her aunt and companion, was awaiting breakfast for her with her usual cheery smile. Nothing ever disturbed her serenity.

"Well, my dear," she said. "You are late. I have been out in the garden the last two hours. Do you know, Trevor has actually gone to London again. But, of course, you are aware of that."

"I wasn't," Peggy said with a thin smile.

"Perhaps he did not know till the post was in. I happened to be standing by the gate when he went by. When he told me he wouldn't be back for at least a month, you could have knocked me down with a feather. Now I come to think of it, I am not sure he didn't say three months. My dear, you haven't had——"

"A quarrel," Peggy said swiftly. "Oh, dear no. You can disabuse your mind of that, aunt. I expect Trevor has gone to London in connection with that new aeroplane of his. No doubt we shall hear more about it in the course of a day or two. And now, will you help me to some of those fried eggs?"

All unsuspecting, the benevolent old lady who presided over Peggy's household did as she was asked, little dreaming of the tragedy which had wrecked the girl's life during the past few hours. And Peggy had not the least intention of alluding to the matter, unless circumstances forced her to do so. And so the days went on, until the best part of a month had elapsed, without further sign from Trevor. He had taken Peggy at her word and gone out of her life as if he had been no more than a mere episode in her career.

But, naturally, she did hear a good deal about him from the daily press. For some days he had occupied a prominent space in the news and more than one photograph of the new 'plane of his had appeared in the pictorial journals. He was on his way to Australia, with the intention of more or less following the famous Hinckler route, only that his alighting place before reaching the continent "down under" would be Singapore. In a vague, numbed sort of way, Peggy followed him from Croydon to Rome and from thence all across Asia Minor and, eventually to Singapore, where, according to a brief cablegram, he had arrived in safety. So far, he had succeeded in his attempt to lower the record, and now it looked as if he would reach his destination well inside the standard time.

And then came an ominous pause. Two days elapsed with no further sign from the airman, and those interested in his flight were beginning to get anxious. Followed the next day in the press an account of a great storm in the Pacific, in which more than one ship had foundered.

"It is feared," said the paper from which Peggy was reading, "that Captain Trevor Capner has been caught on the fringe of one of the greatest hurricanes which have been recorded in the Pacific for many years. At the time the airman left Singapore, the weather was fine and clear, and there was no sign of any atmospheric trouble. But in those tropical latitudes such phenomena are by no means rare, and frequently arise unexpectedly out of nowhere in the course of an hour. It is early yet to prophesy the worst, but we understand that Captain Capner's friends are by no means sanguine. At the present moment, the Government at Singapore and also off the Australian coast are doing everything to get in contact with the missing 'plane. It would indeed be a thousand pities if such a splendid flight should end in tragedy just when——"

The paper fluttered from Peggy's hand.

"My fault," she told herself. "My fault entirely. I could have stopped him if I had not been so proud and vain and foolish. Oh, it would have been so easy to do so. And I was telling myself that I had ceased to love him. What a lie!"

And so another day or two drifted on with no news and hope growing more and more faint. Then came the third evening when Peggy was sitting in her own room listening idly to the nine o'clock bulletin from 2LO that the blow fell with a force that seemed to crush her into the earth.

"The Admiralty regret to announce that all hope of Captain Capner's safety must be abandoned. A fragment of the 'plane has been picked up two hundred miles south of Singapore by a tramp steamer, which seems to prove conclusively that the airman has been lost."

The speaker droned on, but Peggy heard not another word.