CHAPTER II

THE ALLY

"Ah, my dear, there you are! I was just wondering if I would come over and see you."

Violet Campion reined in her horse with a suddenness that made him chafe indignantly, and leaned from the saddle to greet Olga, who had just turned in at the Priory gates.

Olga was bicycling. She sprang from her machine, and reached up an impetuous hand, as regardless of the trampling animal as its rider.

"Pluto is in a tiresome mood to-day," remarked his mistress. "I know he won't be satisfied till he has had a good beating. Perhaps you will go on up to the house while I give him a lesson."

"Oh, don't beat him!" Olga pleaded. "He's only fresh."

"No, he isn't. He's vicious. He snapped at me before I mounted. It's no good postponing it. He'll have to have it." Violet spoke as if she were discussing the mechanism of a machine. "You go on up the drive, my dear, while I take him across the turf."

But Olga lingered. "Violet, really--I know he will throw you or bolt with you. I wish you wouldn't."

Violet's laugh had a ring of scorn. "My dear child, if I were afraid of that, I had better give up riding him altogether."

"I wish you would," said Olga. "He is much too strong for a woman to manage."

Violet laughed again, this time with sheer amus.e.m.e.nt, and then, with dark eyes that flashed in the sunlight, she slashed the animal's flank with her riding-whip. He uttered a snort that was like an exclamation of rage, and leaped clean off the ground. Striking it again, he reared, but received a stinging cut over the ears that brought him down. Then furiously he kicked and plunged, catching the whip all over his glossy body, till with a furious squeal he flung himself forward and galloped headlong away.

Olga stood on the drive and watched with lips slightly compressed. She knew that as an exhibition of skilled horsemanship the spectacle she had just witnessed was faultless; but it gave her no pleasure, and there was no admiration in the eyes that followed the distant galloping figure with the merciless whip that continued active as long as she could see it.

As horse and rider pa.s.sed from sight beyond a clump of trees, she remounted her bicycle, and rode slowly towards the house.

Old and grey and weather-stained, the walls of Brethaven Priory shone in the hot sunlight. It had been built in Norman days a full mile and a half inland; but more than the mile had disappeared in the course of the crumbling centuries, and only a stretch of gleaming hillside now intervened between it and the sea. The wash and roar of the Channel and the crying of gulls swept over the gra.s.s-clad s.p.a.ce as though already claim had been laid to the old grey building that had weathered so many gales. Undoubtedly the place was doomed. There was something eerily tragic about it even on that shining August afternoon, a shadow indefinable of which Olga had been conscious even in her childish days.

She looked over her shoulder several times as she rode in the direction in which her friend had disappeared, but she saw no sign of her.

Finally, reaching the house, she went round to a shed at the back, in which she was accustomed to lodge her bicycle.

Here she was joined by an immense Irish wolf-hound, who came from the region of the stables to greet her.

She stopped to fondle him. She and Cork were old friends. As she finally returned to the carriage-drive in front of the house, he accompanied her.

The front door stood open, and she went in through its Gothic archway, glad to escape from the glare outside. The great hall she thus entered had been the chapel in the days of the monks, and it had the clammy atmosphere of a vault. Pa.s.sing in from the brilliant sunshine, Olga felt actually cold.

It was dark also, the only light, besides that from the open door, proceeding from a stained-gla.s.s window at the farther end--a gruesome window representing in vivid colours the death of St. John the Baptist.

A carved oak chest, long and low, stood just within, and upon this the girl seated herself, with the great dog close beside her. Her ten-mile bicycle ride in the heat had tired her.

There was no sound in the house save the ticking of an invisible clock.

It might have been a place bewitched, so intense and so uncanny was the silence, broken only by that grim ticking that sounded somehow as if it had gone on exactly the same for untold ages.

"What a ghostly old place it is, Cork!" Olga remarked to her companion.

"And you actually spend the night here! I can't think how you dare."

In response to which Cork smiled with a touch of superiority and gave her to understand that he was too sensible to be afraid of shadows.

They were still sitting there conversing, with their faces to the sunlit garden, when there came the sound of a careless footfall and Violet Campion, her riding-whip dangling from her wrist, strolled round the corner of the house, and in at the open door.

She was laughing as she came, evidently at some joke that clung to her memory.

"Look at me!" she said. "I'm all foam. But I've conquered his majesty King Devil for once. He's come back positively abject. My dear, do get up! You're sitting on my coffin!"

Olga got up quickly. "Violet, what extraordinary things you think of!"

The other girl laughed again, and stooping raised the oaken lid. "It's not in the least extraordinary. Look inside, and picture to yourself how comfy I shall be! You can come and see me if you like, and spread flowers--red ones, mind. I like plenty of colour."

She dropped the lid again carelessly, and took a gold cigarette-case from her pocket. The sunlight shone generously upon her at that moment, and Olga Ratcliffe told herself for the hundredth time that this friend of hers was the loveliest girl she had ever seen. Certainly her beauty was superb, of the Spanish-Irish type that is world-famous,--black hair that cl.u.s.tered in soft ringlets about the forehead, black brows very straight and delicate, skin of olive and rose, features so exquisite as to make one marvel, long-lashed eyes that were neither black nor grey, but truest, deepest violet.

"Don't look at me like that!" she said, with gay imperiousness. "You pale-eyed folk have a horrible knack of making one feel as if one is under a microscope. Your worthy uncle is just the same. If I weren't so deeply in love with him, I might resent it. But Nick is a privileged person, isn't he, wherever he goes? Didn't someone once say of him that he rushes in where angels fear to tread? It's rather an apt description. How is he, by the way? And why didn't you bring him too?"

She stood on the step, with the sunlight pouring over her, and daintily smoked her cigarette. Olga came and stood beside her. They formed a wonderful contrast--a contrast that might have seemed cruel but for the keen intelligence that gave such vitality to the face of the doctor's daughter.

"Oh, Nick is playing cricket with the boys," she said. "He is wonderfully good, you know, and takes immense care of us all."

"A positive paragon, my dear! Don't I know it? A pity he saw fit to throw himself away upon that very lethargic young woman! I should have made him a much more suitable wife--if he had only had the sense to wait a few years instead of s.n.a.t.c.hing the first dark-eyed damsel who came his way!"

"Oh, really, Violet! And fancy calling Muriel lethargic! She is one of the deepest people I know, and absolutely devoted to Nick--and he to her."

"Doubtless! doubtless!" Violet flicked the ash delicately from her cigarette. "I am sure he is the soul of virtue. But how comes it that the devoted Muriel can tear herself from his side to go a-larking on the Continent with the grim and masterful Dr. Jim?"

"Oh, I thought you knew that. It is for the child's benefit. Poor little Reggie has a delicate chest, and Redlands doesn't altogether suit him.

Dad positively ordered him abroad, and when Muriel demurred about taking him out of Dad's reach (she has such faith in him, you know), he arranged to go too if Nick would leave Redlands and come and help me keep house. You see, Dad couldn't very well leave me to look after Dr.

Wyndham singlehanded."

"My dear, of course not!" Up went the violet eyes in horror at the bare suggestion. "You scandalize me. An innocent child like you! Not to be thought of for a moment! Rather than that, I would have come and shared the burden with you myself!"

"That's exactly what I have come to ask you to do," said Olga eagerly.

"Do say you can! You can't think how welcome you will be!"

"My dear, you're so impetuous!" Violet was just a year her junior, but this fact was never recognized. "Pray give me time to deliberate. You forget that I also have a family to consider. What will Bruce say if I desert him at a moment's notice?"

"I'm sure Bruce won't mind. Can't we go and ask him?"

"Presently, my child. He is not at home just at present. Neither is Mrs.

Bruce." The daintiest grimace in the world testified to the opinion entertained by the speaker for the latter. "Moreover, Bruce and I had a difference of opinion this morning and are not upon speaking terms. So unfortunate that he is so _difficile_. By the way, he is hand and glove with the new a.s.sistant. Were you aware of that?"

"I knew that he came to tea here yesterday," said Olga.

"Oh! And how did you find that out?"

"He told me."