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Page 74
They entered the little wood as he tried to strike the
third match. At last it caught. Harriet poised the
umbrella rightly, and for a full quarter minute they
contemplated the face that trembled in the light of the
trembling flame. Then there was a shout and a crash. They
were lying in the mud in darkness. The carriage had overturned.
Philip was a good deal hurt. He sat up and rocked
himself to and fro, holding his arm. He could just make out
the outline of the carriage above him, and the outlines of
the carriage cushions and of their luggage upon the grey
road. The accident had taken place in the wood, where it
was even darker than in the open.
"Are you all right?" he managed to say. Harriet was
screaming, the horse was kicking, the driver was cursing
some other man.
Harriet's screams became coherent. "The baby--the
baby--it slipped--it's gone from my arms--I stole it!"
"God help me!" said Philip. A cold circle came round
his mouth, and, he fainted.
When he recovered it was still the same confusion. The
horse was kicking, the baby had not been found, and Harriet
still screamed like a maniac, "I stole it! I stole it! I
stole it! It slipped out of my arms!"
"Keep still!" he commanded the driver. "Let no one
move. We may tread on it. Keep still."
For a moment they all obeyed him. He began to crawl
through the mud, touching first this, then that, grasping
the cushions by mistake, listening for the faintest whisper
that might guide him. He tried to light a match, holding
the box in his teeth and striking at it with the uninjured
hand. At last he succeeded, and the light fell upon the
bundle which he was seeking.
It had rolled off the road into the wood a little way,
and had fallen across a great rut. So tiny it was that had
it fallen lengthways it would have disappeared, and he might
never have found it.
"I stole it! I and the idiot--no one was there." She
burst out laughing.
He sat down and laid it on his knee. Then he tried to
cleanse the face from the mud and the rain and the tears.
His arm, he supposed, was broken, but he could still move it
a little, and for the moment he forgot all pain. He was
listening--not for a cry, but for the tick of a heart or the
slightest tremor of breath.
"Where are you?" called a voice. It was Miss Abbott,
against whose carriage they had collided. She had relit one
of the lamps, and was picking her way towards him.
"Silence!" he called again, and again they obeyed. He
shook the bundle; he breathed into it; he opened his coat
and pressed it against him. Then he listened, and heard
nothing but the rain and the panting horses, and Harriet,
who was somewhere chuckling to herself in the dark.
Miss Abbott approached, and took it gently from him.
The face was already chilly, but thanks to Philip it was no
longer wet. Nor would it again be wetted by any tear.
Chapter 9
The details of Harriet's crime were never known. In her
illness she spoke more of the inlaid box that she lent to
Lilia--lent, not given--than of recent troubles. It was clear
that she had gone prepared for an interview with Gino, and
finding him out, she had yielded to a grotesque temptation.
But how far this was the result of ill-temper, to what
extent she had been fortified by her religion, when and how
she had met the poor idiot--these questions were never
answered, nor did they interest Philip greatly. Detection
was certain: they would have been arrested by the police of
Florence or Milan, or at the frontier. As it was, they had
been stopped in a simpler manner a few miles out of the town.
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