Chapter 7. In Which Dromio Becomes Romeo

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_ CHAPTER VII. IN WHICH DROMIO BECOMES ROMEO

When Cara, waiting at the bridge, had seen the car flash up, a bearded Bedouin at the wheel, she had leaped lightly to the seat beside him, without waiting for the machine to come to a full stop; then she had thrown herself back luxuriously on the cushions with a sigh of satisfaction, and had only said: "Drive me fast."

For a long time she lay back, drinking, in long draughts, the spiced night air, frosted only enough to give it flavor. There was no necessity for speech, and above, the stars glittered lavishly, despite the white light of the moon.

At last she murmured half-aloud and almost contentedly: "'Who knows but the world may end to-night?'"

Above the throbbing purr of the engine which had already done ten miles, the man beside her caught the voice, but missed the words. He bent forward.

"I beg your pardon?" he politely inquired.

At the question she started violently, and both hands came to her heart with a spasmodic movement. Von Ritz carried the car around an ugly rut.

"Don't be alarmed, Your Highness," he said, in a cold, evenly modulated voice which, though pitched low, carried clearly above the noise of the cylinders. "I may call you 'Your Highness' now, may I not? We are quite alone. Or do you still prefer that I respect your incognita?"

The girl's eyes blazed upon him until he could feel their intense focusing, though he kept his own fixed unbendingly on the road ahead. Finally she mastered her anger enough to speak.

"Colonel Von Ritz," she commanded, "you will take me back at once!" She drew herself as far away from him as the space on the seat permitted.

"Your Highness's commands are supreme." The man spoke in the same even voice. "I intend taking Your Highness back--when it is safer for Your Highness to go back."

He turned the car suddenly to the right and sped along the narrower road that led away from the main thoroughfare.

"You will take me back, now. I had not supposed that to a gentleman--" Her voice choked into silence and her eyes filled with angry tears.

"Your Highness misunderstands," he said coldly. "I obey the throne. If I live long enough to serve it in another reign, Your Highness will be Your Majesty. Yet even then will your commands be no more supreme to me--no more sacred--than now. But even then, Your Highness--"

"Call me Miss Carstow," she interrupted in impassioned anger. "I will have my freedom for to-night at least."

"Yet even then, Miss Carstow," he calmly resumed, "when danger threatens you or your throne, I shall take such means as I can to avert that danger, as I am doing now. Even though"--for a moment the cold, metallic evenness left his voice and a human note stole into his words--"even though the reward be contempt."

She did not answer.

"Your High--Miss Carstow,"--Von Ritz spoke with a deferential finality--"believe me, some things are inevitable."

Suddenly the car stopped.

The girl made a movement as though she would rise, but the man's arm quietly stretched itself across before her, not touching her, but forming an effective barrier.

She did not speak, but her eyes blazed indignantly. For the first time he was able to return her gaze directly, and as she looked into the unflinching gray pupils, under the level brows, there was a momentary combat, then her own dropped. He sat for a space with his arm outstretched, holding her prisoner in the seat.

"Your Highness"--he spoke as impersonally as a judge ruling from the bench--"I must remind you again that I am your escort to-night only in order that someone else may not be. What his plans were, I need not now say, but I know, and it became my duty to thwart him. It is hardly necessary to explain how I discovered Mr. Benton's purpose. It was not easy, but it has been accomplished. I have acquainted myself with his movements, his intention, and his preparations; I have even counterfeited his masquerade and stolen his car. There are bigger things at stake than individual wishes. I stand for the throne. Mr. Benton has played a daring game--and lost."

He paused, and she found herself watching with a strange fascination the face almost marble-like in its steadiness.

"Some day--perhaps soon," he went on, the arm unmoved, "you will be Queen of Galavia." She shuddered. "You can then strip away my epaulets if you choose. For the moment, however, I must regard you as a prisoner of war and ask your parole, as a gentleman and an officer, not to leave the car while I investigate the trouble with the motor. Otherwise--" he added composedly, "we shall have to remain as we are."

She hesitated, her chin thrown up and her eyes blazing; then, with a glance at the unmoving arm, she bowed reluctant assent.

"All I promise is to remain in the car," she said. "May I go back into the tonneau?"

Satisfying himself that the engine was temporarily dead, he responded, with a half-smile, "That promise I think is sufficient."

He bent to his task of diagnosis. After much futile spinning of the crank, he rose and contemplated the stalled engine.

"Since this machine went out with lamps unlighted, and I have no matches in this garb, I must go to that farmhouse up the hillside--where the light shines through the trees--. Will Your Highness regard your parole as effective until my return, not to leave the car? Yes? I thank Your Highness; I shall not be long."

The girl for answer honked the horn in several loud blasts, and he stopped with a murmured apology to silence it by tearing off the bulb and throwing it to one side.

The Colonel turned and took his way through the woods, statuesquely upright and spectral in his long Arab cloak.

Benton and McGuire had just passed the crossing where Von Ritz had left the main road, when McGuire's quick ear caught the familiar tooting of the other horn and brought his hand to his employer's arm. The car was stopped, and McGuire, by match-light, examined the road with its frosty mud unmarked by fresh automobile tracks, save those running back from their own tires.

The runabout turned and slipped along cautiously to the rear, watchful for byways. At the cross-road McGuire was out again. His match, held close to the mud and gravel, revealed the tread of familiar tires.

"All right, sir," he briefly reported. "The other edition went this track."

With a twist of the wheel Benton was again on the trail. Back in the side lane stood a car in which a girl sat alone, solemnly indignant.

"Cara!" Benton was standing on the step. His voice was tremulous with solicitude and perplexed anxiety. "Cara!" he repeated. "What does it mean?"

"I don't know," she responded coolly. "Something seems to be broken."

"I don't mean that." McGuire was already investigating. "What does it mean?"

She sighed wearily.

"When I foolishly agreed to play Juliet to your Romeo," she informed him, and her tones were frigid, "I didn't know that your Romeo was really only a Dromio. The other edition of you"--he flinched at the words, and McGuire choked violently--"is back there, I believe, hunting for matches."

"She's all right, sir," interrupted McGuire in triumph. "She'll travel now. It's only disconnected spark plugs and a short circuiting."

"Travel, then!" snapped Benton. "Leave the runabout here. The other gentleman may prefer not to walk home."

As he swung himself into the tonneau, the chauffeur had already seized the wheel and the car was backing for the turn. Far back up the hillside there was a crashing of underbrush. A spectral figure, struggling with the unaccustomed drapery of a Bedouin robe, emerged from the woods into the open, and halted in momentary astonishment.

"I believe I am under parole--to the other Dromio--not to run away," she suggested wearily.

"Oh, that's all right; I'm doing this and I have no treaty with Galavia," replied the gentleman pleasantly. "Hit her up a bit, McGuire."

He took one of the hands that lay wearily in Cara's lap and she did not withdraw it. She only lay back in the leather upholstery and said nothing. Finally he bent nearer.

"Dearest," he said. There was no answer.

"Dearest," he whispered again.

She only turned her head and smiled forgiveness.

"What is the matter?" he asked.

"Oh, I'm so tired--so tired of all of it," she sighed. "Don't you see? I wish someone bigger than I am would take me away to a place where they had never heard of a throne--somewhere beyond the Milky Way."

He took her in his arms, and the spangle-crowned gipsy head fell heavily on his shoulder. She stretched up both arms towards the stars, and the moonlight glinted from her gilt bracelets.

"Somewhere beyond the Milky Way," she murmured, then collapsed like a tired child and lay still.

"Dearest," he whispered, "I'll tell you a secret." He paused and listened to the rhythmic cylinders throbbing a racing pulse; he looked back at the white band of road that was being flung out behind them like thread from a falling spool. He held her fiercely to him and kissed her. "I'll tell you a secret. You are being stolen. The _Isis_ is waiting in a little cove, and there is steam in her engines, and a chaplain on board. If it's necessary I shall run up the skull and cross-bones at her masthead. Do you hear?" Then, with a less piratical voice: "Dearest, I love you."

She looked up drowsily into his eyes. "You don't have to be such a boa-constrictor," she suggested. "You are not a cave-man, after all, you know, if you _are_ taking a lady without asking her." Then she contentedly whispered: "I'm going to sleep." And she did.

As the car at last swept around a curve and took the shore road, Benton caught, far away as yet, the red and green glint of tiny port and starboard lights on the bridge of the _Isis_, and the long ruby and emerald shafts quivering beneath in the calm waters of the bay. In the light of a low moon, swinging down the midnight sky, the trim silhouette of the yacht stood out boldly.

Cara, after sleeping through the rowboat stage of the journey, awoke on the deck of the _Isis_ and gazed wonderingly about. In her ears was the sound of anchor chains upon the capstan.

"Is it a dream?" she asked.

"It is a dream to me, but I am going to make it real," he responded.

She went to the rail. He followed her.

"I shouldn't have let you, but I was so tired," she said, "I hardly knew where the dream began and the reality ended. Ah, I wish the dream could come true."

"This one is to come true, Cara," he whispered.

She shook her head. "Stand still!" she commanded.

He was bending forward with his elbows on the rail. Suddenly, with something like a stifled sob, she caught his head in both arms and held him close, so close that he heard her heart pounding and her breath coming with spasmodic gasps. He put out his arms, but she held him off.

"No, no; don't touch me now--only listen!"

He waited a moment before she spoke again.

"You said I was your prisoner." Her voice dropped in a tremor as though the tears would prevail, but she steadied it and went on. "I wish I were. Always I am your prisoner, but I must go back. It is because it is written."

He straightened up and took her in his arms. "I know how you have settled it," he said, "but I have stolen you. The anchor is coming up. You love me--I have claimed what is mine. It is now beyond your power, your responsibility."

"No, it is not," she softly denied. "I will not marry you--but I love you--I love you!"

"You mean that if I hold you my prisoner you will still not be my wife?" he incredulously demanded.

Slowly she nodded her head.

The man gazed off with the eyes of one stunned and slowly fought himself back into control before he trusted his voice. After a while, he raised his face and spoke in fragmentary sentences, his voice pitched low, his words broken.

"But you said--just now--back there on the road--you wished someone stronger than yourself--would take you away somewhere--beyond the Milky Way."

His tones strengthened and suddenly he almost sang out with recovered resolution, speaking buoyantly and triumphantly.

"Dearest, I am stronger than you, and I'm going to take you away--I'm going to take you beyond the Milky Way, to the uttermost stars of Love. How can it matter to me how far, if you are there?"

Again she shook her head.

"No, dear," she whispered, "you are not so strong as I, in this, because I am strong enough to say No when my heart says only Yes--and because Fate is stronger than any of us."

"Boat ahoy!" came a voice from the crow's nest.

"They have come for you," he said, speaking as through a fog. "Show them here," he shouted to an officer who was hurrying to the gangway.

Two figures came over the side, and slowly followed the first officer forward. One was a Capuchin monk, bearing himself rigidly; at his side strode a Bedouin, bedraggled, but erect and military of bearing. The original Arab turned with a sudden sag of the shoulders and looked helplessly out at the path of silver that stretched across the water below, to the moon, now sunk close to the horizon. He waved one hand in a gesture of submission and despair, and stood silent.

The gipsy girl, standing near, took a sudden step forward and stood close to him us the others approached.

"They may take me back if they wish to, now," she said, with a suddenly upflaring defiance. "But they shall find me like this!" And she flung her arms about his neck and kissed him. _

Read next: Chapter 8. The Princess Consults Jonesy

Read previous: Chapter 6. In Which Romeo Becomes Dromio

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