CHAPTER
41
THE LAST BUS
Fleurette opened her eyes and looked in the direction where she thought the porthole of her cabin should be.
She closed them again quickly. She saw a small curtained window, but not a porthole. This seemed to be a cottage bedroom, very cleanly and simply furnished. She opened her eyes again.
The room remained as she had first seen it—she was not dreaming.
She clenched her hands tightly and sat up in bed.
Only a few hours before, her brain told her, she had parted from Alan in her cabin on the Oxfordshire. She remembered how much that last smile had cost her, that struggle to restrain her tears. She had heard his footsteps on the deck. And then, she had sat down, she remembered quite well, and had poured out a glass of water . . .
And now, what in heaven’s name had happened? Where was she? And how had she got here?
It was very silent, this place in which she found herself, until a slight movement in an adjoining room told her that there was someone in there.
The room was lighted by moonlight, and although she could see that there was a lamp on the table beside the bed, she was afraid to switch it on. Throwing off the bedclothes she slipped lightly to the floor.
She realized that she was wearing a suit of pyjamas which did not belong to her. But, staring at a heap of garments in an armchair, she recognized the suit which she had actually been wearing when she had parted from Alan on the ship!
Her head ached slightly, and she knew that she had been dreaming. It was difficult to believe that she was not dreaming, now. She stepped to the window, and gently drawing the curtain aside, looked out.
She saw a little hedge-bordered garden with a smooth patch of grass in the centre of which stood a stone bird bath.
There was a gaunt looking apple tree on the left, leafless now, a weird silhouette against the moon. Over the hedge, she could see the tops of other trees; but apparently the ground fell away there. She was, as she had supposed, in a cottage.
Whose cottage? And how had she got there?
Above all, where was Alan, and where was her father?
Was it possible that she had been seriously, dangerously ill?—that there had been a hiatus of which she knew nothing—that now she was convalescent?
Perhaps that person whose movements she had detected in the next room was a nurse. She retraced her steps, her bare feet making no sound upon the carpet, and looked for evidence to support this theory. There were no medicine bottles or cooling draughts upon the table beside the bed; nothing but a cigarette case—her own—and a box of matches.
A further slight movement in the adjoining room indicated that someone was seated there, reading. Fleurette had heard the rustle of a turned page.
She recognized with gratitude that despite this insane, this inexplicable awakening, she was cool and self-controlled. The theory of serious illness did not hold good. She felt perfectly fit except for that slight headache. She seated herself on the side of the bed, thinking deeply.
Her first impulse, to open the door and demand of whoever was in the next room what it was all about, she conquered. Fleurette had had the advantage of a very singular training. She had been taught to think, and this teaching availed her now. She crossed to the door very quietly, and by minute fractions of an inch began to turn the handle.
The door was locked.
Fleurette nodded.
A louder movement in the next room warned her that someone might be approaching. She slipped back into bed, drawing the clothes up close to her chin, but preparing to peep under her long lashes at anyone who should come in.
A key was quietly turned in the lock and the door opened.
Light shone in from a little sitting-room; Fleurette could see one end of it from where she lay. A newspaper and some illustrated magazines were upon a table beside which an armchair was drawn up. Her nostrils were assailed by that stuffy smell which tells of a gas fire. A strange looking old woman came into the bedroom.
She was big and very fat. In the glimpse which Fleurette had of her face in the lamplight, before she crossed the threshold, she saw that this was a puffy, yellow, wrinkled face, decorated by wide rimmed spectacles. The woman wore a costume which might possibly have been that of a hospital nurse. In silence she stood just within the little room, looking down at Fleurette.
To her horror, Fleurette saw that the woman carried a hypodermic syringe in her hand.
“Are you asleep?” she whispered softly.
She spoke in English, but with a strange accent. There was something in the crouching attitude of this huge woman, and something in the tones of her voice so threatening and sinister, that Fleurette clenched her hands beneath the coverlet. She lay quite still.
“Ah hah!” the woman sighed, evidently satisfied.
She returned quietly to the outer room, closing and gently relocking the door.
Fleurette listened intently, and whilst she listened she was thinking hard.
Sounds of subdued movements came from the outer room:—the chinking of glass, that subdued popping sound which indicates that a gas fire has been turned off; then a click—and the streak of light beneath the door vanished. Soft footsteps, evidently the woman wore padded slippers, moved beyond the partition against which Fleurette’s bed was set. A door was closed.
Her guardian had gone to bed.
Controlling her impatience only by means of a great effort, Fleurette waited, her ear pressed to the wooden partition.
She could hear the woman moving about in what was evidently an adjoining bedroom, and at last came the creak of a bed, as the heavily built custodian retired. Finally, she heard the click of an extinguished electric light.
Fleurette got up quietly, and began to dress. It did not take her long, but she could find no hat and no shoes. But she found a pair of red bedroom slippers; these would serve her purpose. A handbag, her own, lay on the cheap dressing-table.
Its contents seemed to be undisturbed since she had laid it on the sofa berth in her cabin.
Dropping cigarette case and matches into the bag, Fleurette very quietly drew the curtains aside from the low square window.
It was latched, and the room, though cold, was stuffy. The latch was a difficult problem—it was a very old fitting, much worn and warped. Once, it emitted a terrifying squeak.
Fleurette stopped dead in her operations, and creeping across the room, applied her ear to the wooden partition.
Sonorous snores sounded from the adjoining bedroom.
She raised the window steadily but firmly. To her great surprise it made very little noise. She looked out and saw a neglected flower border immediately below. Then came a moss-grown, paved path leading on the right to a little pergola. This, in turn, communicated with a gate.
Fleurette dropped her bag on to the flower-bed, put on her slippers, and wriggled through the opening. It was not a particularly easy business, but Fleurette was fit and very athletic. She knew that her hands were filthy dirty and her feet muddy, when at last she stood outside; but these things did not matter.
Picking up her bag, she walked quickly around to the gate, opened it, and found herself in a narrow, hedge-bordered lane.
An oak tree overhung it a few paces back on the left—there were other dark buildings ahead. But in none of them did any light show. She looked around her eagerly, sniffing the cold night air, then climbed the opposite bank and saw that where the ground fell away, there were farm buildings, beyond, backed by trees, and beyond these trees, evidently several miles beyond, a searchlight moved regularly. This, she decided, was an aerodrome.