“Please get in—instantly.”
Scarlet the girl went. “Thank you very
much,” she said to George; climbed in beside
the cloud of wrath.
Her companion slammed the door; dabbed at George a
bow that was like a sharp poke with a stick; called,
“Drive on.”
George stepped into the road, held half a crown to
the driver: “The address?”
The man stooped. With a tremendous wink answered,
“Fourteen Palace Gardens, St. John’s Wood.”
Away with a jingle.
Astonishing After-Effects Of A Heroine.
George did not return to St. Peter’s that afternoon;
watched the cab from view; walked back to Waterloo;
thence took train to Paltley Hill with mind awhirl.
Recovering from stunning shock the mind first sees
a blur of events— formless, seething, inextricably
tangled. Deep in this boiling chaos is one fact
struggling more powerfully than the rest to cool and
so to shape itself. It kicks a leg free here,
there an arm, then another leg. Its exertions
cause the whole more furiously to agitate—the
brain is afire. Very suddenly this struggling
fact jumps free. Laid hold of it is a cold spoon
which, plunged back into the seething cauldron, arrests
the turmoil of its contents.
Or again, recovering from sudden shock the mind first
sees a great whirling, blinding cloud of dust which
hides and wreathes about the sudden topple of masonry
that has provoked it. Here the slowly emerging
fact may be likened to a clear gangway through the
ruin up which the fevered owner may walk to investigate
the catastrophe’s cause and extent.
So now with George. If not dazed by stunning
shock, he was at least awhirl by set back of the swift
sequence of events which suddenly had buffeted him;
and it was not until strolling up from Paltley Hill
railway station to Herons’ Holt that one cooling
fact emerged from which he might make an ordered examination
of what had passed.
The address that the cabman had given him was this
fact—14 Palace Gardens, St. John’s
Wood. Here was the gangway through the pile of
disorder, and here George resolutely made a start of
examining events in place of wildly beating about
through the dust of aimless conjectures.
He visualised this Palace Gardens residence.
A gloomy house, he suspected,—prison-like;
its inhabitants warders, the girl their captive.
A beautiful picture was thus presented to this ridiculous
young man. For if the girl were indeed captive,
warder-surrounded, how gratefully her heart must press
towards him who was no turnkey! The more irksomely
her captors held her, the more warmly would she remember
him. Subconsciously he hoped for a rattle of chains,
a scourging with whips. Every bond, every stroke
would speed her spirit to the recollection of their
meeting.
But this delectable picture soon faded. Love—and
this ridiculous George vowed he was in love—love
is a mental see-saw. The nicely-balanced mind
is set suddenly oscillating: now up, commandingly
above the world, intoxicated with the rush and the
elevation; now down to depths made horribly deep by
contrast, wretchedly jarred by the bump.
