Terence O'Rourke/Part 2/Chapter 3
CHAPTER III
THE NIGHT OF MADNESS
O'Rourke was prompt to scramble to his feet. He found himself surrounded by a profound blackness. The place wherein he stood was like the very heart of night itself. But for the quick flutter of the breath of the woman who was near him, he was without an inkling as to where he might be.
But for the moment he was content to know that he was with her. He groped in the darkness with a tentative hand, which presently encountered the girl's, and closed upon it; and he started to speak, but she gave him pause.
"Hush, m'sieur!" she breathed. "Hush—and come with me quickly. You have not an instant to—"
Her concluding word was drowned in the report of a pistol. The girl started, with a frightened cry. A roar of cursing filled the room which the O'Rourke, providentially, had just quitted. It subsided suddenly; and then the two heard the cool, incisive accents of Chambret.
"Not so fast, Monsieur le Prince," they heard him say, warningly. "Take it with more aplomb, I advise you. Upon my word of honor, you die if you move a finger within ten minutes!"
"And then—?" came the wrathful voice of Georges.
"Then," returned Chambret, delicately ironical, "I shall be pleased to leave you to your—devices—shall we call them? For my part, I shall go on my way in my automobile."
They heard no more. The girl was already dragging O'Rourke away.
"Ten minutes!" she whispered gratefully.
"'Tis every bit as good as a year, just now," O'Rourke assured her, lightly—more lightly than his emotions warranted, indeed.
"Ah, m'sieur!" she said fearfully.
"Whisht, darlint," he cried. "Don't ye be worrying about me now. 'Tis the O'Rourke that can care for his head, Mam'selle Delphine—now that ye've given me a fighting chance."
But she only answered, "Come!" tugging impatiently at his hand; and he was very willing to follow her, even unto the ends of the known world, as long as he might be so led by those warm, soft fingers.
But he grew quite bewildered in the following few minutes. It seemed that they threaded a most curious maze of vacant rooms and sounding galleries, all in total eclipse. And once, for some time, they were passing through what seemed a tunnel, dark and musty, wherein the Irishman, by putting forth his free hand, was able to touch a rough, damp wall of hewn stone.
But at the end of that they came to a doorway, where they halted. The girl evidently produced a key, for she released O'Rourke's hand, and a second later he heard the grating of a rusty lock and then the protests of reluctant hinges.
"And where will this be taking us?" he asked at length.
"To safety, for you, I pray, m'sieur."
"Thank ye, Mam'selle Delphine."
"Quick!" she interrupted impatiently.
A rush of cool air and fresh enveloped them. O'Rourke stepped out after the girl, who turned and swung to the door, relocking it.
They were standing under the open sky of night. Absolute silence lay about them; infinite peace was there, under a multitude of clear, shining stars. The change was so abrupt as to seem momentarily unreal; O'Rourke shook his head, as one would rid his brain of the cobwebs of a dream, then looked about him.
"Where would we be, now, me dear?" he asked.
"Hush!" she cried guardedly, pointing.
His gaze followed the line of her arm, and he discovered that they were standing upon a hillside over across from the Inn of the Winged God. Its doors and windows were flaming yellow against the night; and set square against the illumination of the main entrance, O'Rourke could see the burly bulk of Chambret. Without, in the road, loomed the black and shining mass of a powerful automobile, its motors shaking, its lamps glaring balefully—seeming a living thing, O'Rourke fancied, very like some squat, misshapen nocturnal monster.
But Chambret did not stir; and from that the Irishman' knew that his ten minutes was not yet up. Nevertheless, he tightened his hold upon the hilt of the naked saber which he still carried, and started back toward the inn.
The girl caught him by the arm.
"Where are you going?" she demanded.
"Back." O'Rourke looked down upon her in surprise. "Back to my friend. What! Am I, too, a chicken-heart, to leave him there, alone—?"
"M'sieur Chambret," she interrupted, "is master of the situation, M'sieur le Colonel. He can take care of himself."
"You know him?"
"You—you—" For an instant she stammered, at a loss for her answer. "I—I heard you name him, m'sieur," she made shift to say at length.
"Ah, yes. But, for all that, I'm not going to leave him—"
"Too late, m'sieur. See!"
Again she indicated the inn. O'Rourke looked, swearing in his excitement—but under his breath, that she—an inn-maid!—might not be offended.
He saw Chambret, momentarily as he had been—steady and solid as a rock in the doorway. An instant later, he was gone; and from the taproom came a volley of shouts and curses, tempered to faint echoes by the distance.
Promptly the automobile began to move. And as it did the doorway was filled with struggling men. Chambret appeared to stand up in the machine; his revolver spat fire thrice.
The shots were answered without delay, but the machine gathered speed, and swept snorting westwards. Prince Georges and Colonel Charles of the army of Lützelburg were to be seen pursuing it down the road, afoot, peppering the night with futile bullets and filling it with foul vituperation.
Presently they must have realized what feeble figures they were cutting in the eyes of the peasants; for they halted. By then they were near enough for their high and angry tones to be distinguishable to O'Rourke and the girl.
"Back!" they heard Georges cry. "To the horses!"
"But we cannot overtake him, your highness—"
"Fool! The patrol will halt him, and we shall arrive in good time."
As though in answer to Georges' statement, a volley of carbine shots rang sharply from the direction of the frontier, continuing for a full minute, to be followed by a rapid, dying clatter of horses' hoofs.
The Frenchman's automobile had reached the outpost, had dashed through its surprised resistance, and was gone, on to Lützelburg.
So much Georges surmised—and truly. "The fools!" he cried. "They were not alert without us, Charles. Come—let us get back to the inn. At least we have left to us that cursed Irishman and—"
"If so be it they have not already escaped through the fields," interrupted Charles.
Their voices faded into murmurs as they retreated. The girl tugged at O'Rourke's hand.
"Hurry, m'sieur," she implored.
But O'Rourke was thinking of his comrade and the gantlet he had just run. The reports of the carbines still filled his ears with grim forebodings.
"God send that he was not hit!" he prayed fervently. "A true man, if ever one lived."
"Yes, yes, m'sieur. But come, ah, come!"—with an odd little catch in her voice.
Obediently O'Rourke followed her. They trod for a time upon a little path, worn through the open fields, making toward a stretch of forest that loomed dimly vast and mysterious to the southwards.
"I'm wondering, Mam'selle Delphine," said the Irishman, "how we got out there on the hillside."
"By an underground passage," she explained impatiently. "The inn," she added, "is old; it bore not always as good a reputation as it does now."
"Thank ye," he said. "And since ye can tell me that, can ye not go a bit further and tell me how I am to balance me account with ye, mam'selle?"
"Yes," she replied; "I—I will tell you."
There was a strange hesitation in her speech—as though some emotion choked her. O'Rourke wondered, as, silently now, since she did not at once make good her words and inform him, he followed her across the fields.
Nor, indeed, did mam'selle of the inn speak again until she had brought the Irishman to the edge of that woodland, and for a moment or two had skirted its depths. Abruptly, she paused, turning toward him and laying a tentative hand upon his arm.
"M'sieur," she said—and again with the little catch in her tone,—"here lies the frontier of France."
"And there—Lützelburg?" he inquired, unawed.
"Yes—beyond the white stone."
The white stone of the boundary was no more than a yard away. "Come!" cried O'Rourke; and in two steps was in Lützelburg.
"Did ye think me the man to hesitate?" he asked wonderingly. "Did ye think I'd draw back me hand—especially after what's passed between meself and that dog, Monsieur le Prince?"
"I did not know," she confessed, looking up into his face. "M'sieur is very bold; for M'sieur le Prince sticks at nothing."
"Faith, the time is nigh when he'll stick at the O'Rourke, I promise ye!" he boasted, with his heart hot within him as he recalled how cowardly had been the attempt upon him.
She smiled a little at his assurance. There spoke the Irishman, she may have been thinking. But her smile was one heavenly to the man.
Allowances may be made for him. He was aged neither in years nor in heart; and the society of a beautiful woman was Something for which he had starved during the winter just past. And surely mam'selle's face was very lovely as she held it toward his—pale, glimmering in the starlight, with sweet, deep shadows where her eyes glowed, her lips a bit parted, her breath coming rapidly; and so near to him she stood that it stirred upon his cheek like a soft caress.
And he bent toward her quickly. Quickly, but not so swiftly that she might not escape; which she did with a movement as agile as a squirrel's; thereafter standing a little way from him, and laughing half-heartedly.
"Ah, m'sieur!" she reproached him for his audacity.
"I don't care!" he defied her anger. "Why will ye tempt me, Mam'selle Delphine—ye with your sweet, pretty ways, and that toss av your head that's like an invitation—though I misdoubt ye are meaning the half of it? Am I a man or—or what?—that I should be cold to ye—?"
"Ah, but you are a man, m'sieur, as you have to-night well shown!" she told him desperately. "You were asking what you could do to even our score?"
"Yes, mam'selle."
"Then, monsieur—" And now she drew nearer to him, trustingly, almost pleadingly. "Then, monsieur, you have only to continue what you set out to do—even at the risk of your life. Ah, monsieur, it is much that I ask, but—am I not to be pitied? Indeed, I am mad, quite mad with anxiety. Go, monsieur, if you would serve me—go on and save to me the little duke! Think, monsieur, what they may be doing to my son—"
"Your son—Mam'selle Delphine!"
O'Rourke jumped back as though he had been shot, then stood stock-still, transfixed with amazement, "Your son!" he cried again.
"Ah, monsieur, yes. It is true that I deceived you, but at first it was to save you from arrest. I—I am—"
"Madame la Duchesse!" he cried. "Blind fool that I was, not to have guessed it! Pardon, madame!" And he sank upon his knee, carrying her hand to his lips. "Madame!" he muttered humbly. "'Tis the O'Rourke who would go to the ends av the earth to serve ye!"
Was it accident, premeditation—or what more deep—that led the woman's fingers to stray among the soft, dark curls of the man?
"Monsieur, monsieur!" she cried breathlessly. "Rise. I—you—you are very kind to me …"
Her voice seemed to fail her. She paused. O'Rourke rose slowly, retaining his hold upon her hand. His mind cast back in rapid retrospect of the events of the day, since his advent at the Inn of the Winged God. It came to him as a flash of lightning, this revelation, making clear much that might otherwise have been thought mysterious. And he knew that she was indeed Madame la Duchesse de Lützelburg, this girl—she seemed no more—this girl whom he suddenly found himself holding in his arms, who sobbed passionately, her face hidden upon his breast.
For that, too, was his portion there in the infinite quietude of the woodland, under the soft-falling radiance of God's stars. How it came to pass neither could have told. Whether it was brought about by some sudden flush of dawning love on her part for this man whom many had loved and were yet to love, or by the tender, impetuous heart of him, whose blood coursed in his veins never so hotly as when for beauty in distress—who shall say?
But one thing was certain—that she lay content in his arms for a time. All other things were of no account, even Chambret and Madame la Princesse, Beatrix de Grandlieu. In the perilous sweetness of that moment friendship was forgotten, the love of the man's life lost, engulfed in the love of the moment. The world reeled dizzily about him, and the lips of the grand duchess were sweet as wine to a fainting man.