That Which Hath Wings 9That Which Hath Wings (part 9)
18
Literature · Romance
That Which Hath Wings 9
That Which Hath Wings (part 9)
DehanEnglish
Sherbrand could not speak for pity of the small white face that had grinned at him out of the clumsy woollen helmet. He understood now, that when he had bent to strap the safety-belt about the little body swathed in the flannel-lined pneumatic jacket, he had felt a terrified child-heart bumpity-bumping under his hand. And he struggled with his grief and rage in silence, broken by an utterance from the other man.
"So he followed him into the air, seeing no other course before him. My old friend Saxham has good reason to chortle over such a son. I said to-day, 'I am proud of my Scouts!' Well, to-night I am ten times prouder. I shall tell the Doctor this--when I get a private word with him--and wind up with: 'Thanks to Bawne!'"
"Then the Doctor--" Sherbrand began, a weight lifting with the hope that the news might not have to be broken:
"The Doctor knew. I had said to him, doggily: 'I'll give your pup a fighting chance to prove his Saxham breed.' It's a stark breed--hard as granite, supple as incandescent lava,--with a strain of Berserk madness, and a dash of Oriental fatalism. They can hate magnificently and forgive grandly, and love to the very verge of death."
Could she, Sherbrand wondered, letting his eyes travel to the tall white woman standing by the Doctor, as the Chief went over to them and grasped his old friend's hand. Then both men moved away across the dusky ground together. Those words of thanks and praise were being spoken. Coming from such a source they must be heartening to listen to. But presently when their glow had paled and faded, and the boy did not come back...
Presently, when the empty chair and the vacant bed, and the little garments hanging in the wardrobe should be filled and occupied and worn only by a shadow-child wrought of lovely memories. By and by, when the silence in the house should clamour in the tortured ears of the woman and the man...
Then, Sherbrand knew no praise of their lost darling would console Bawne's parents.... Dry-eyed they might smile until their lips cracked, but their hidden hearts would weep. Their tongues might be silent, but their hearts would cry always; Did we wish our child to be heroic? Had he been a craven we would have had him now beside us! Give us our living boy again! O! keep your empty words!
A cry from Patrine prodded Sherbrand to active sympathy. So at last they had told her. She knew all. And true to her type she was raging at the Doctor and the Chief like a very termagant; upbraiding them with a spate of words rushing over her writhing lips and lioness-frenzy in her blazing eyes.
"I begged you not to let him go!" This was to the Doctor. "Faint! Do you take me for a bally idiot--to faint when there's something to be done! Follow that man and get him back! If he takes him away to Germany--don't you know we shall never see Bawne again! Oh! why--why can't I make you understand!"
The raging voice grew hoarse with sobs, though her furious eyes were dry as enamel. She added with an inflection that made Sherbrand blink and gulp:
"Don't you know--don't you know it will kill Aunt Lynette? And I shall be guilty--I who love them so! Oh, God, I must do something or die raving mad!"
The Doctor's great arm held her firmly round the body. Saxham was strong as an oak-tree, but who can control a woman in the frenzy of hysteria, standing six feet tall in high-heeled No. 7 shoes? She wrestled and fought, and her tawdry hat of silver spangles tumbled off, and her superb hair shed its pins of tortoiseshell, and rolled, yellow-tawny as a South African torrent in flood-time, down over her heaving shoulders, over the supple back and writhing loins, reaching nearly to her knees. Then her strength went from her, and her tears came. She dropped into a chair Sherbrand had got her, and crumpled up there, crying bitterly.
*CHAPTER XXXVII*
*PATRINE CONFESSES*
With her hat off and her hairpins out, and her tawny-coloured mane tumbling over her heaving shoulders, the superb illusion of maturity vanished. The three men viewed Patrine with clear, unprejudiced eyes. Stripped of the magic cloak of Circe, here was no transformer of Man into the hoofed and rooting mammal, but a great galumphing schoolgirl, pouring out a heartful of trouble, without the least concern for her complexion; mopping her streaming eyes with a little sopping handkerchief; temporarily ending its brief career of usefulness with a dismal blast upon the nose.
"Take mine!" said Saxham, thrusting the large-sized square of cambric upon her.
"Th--thank you, Uncle Owen!"
She said it in the voice of a child. The torrent of tears, so different from those shed earlier, had washed her heart clean. Something hard and cynical and evil had passed out of her. She was Bawne's dear Pat again.
A lean brown hand that wore a chipped and ancient signet was next held out to her. She grasped it and was straightway hauled upon her feet.
"Are you better?" said a friendly voice, in a crisp way.
"I--think so. Thank you, Sir Roland!" She added in a tone as tear-soaked as her handkerchief, while Saxham offered her her hat, and Sherbrand tendered tortoiseshell hairpins:
"I'm awfully afraid I have behaved like a fool!"
"Like a woman!" said the friendly voice even more crisply.
"Do you think women are fools?" she was beginning, when she caught his eye and broke off. For she had met Sir Roland's mother and she knew his young wife quite well, and her Aunt Lynette, the one living being whom she worshipped, was one of his closest friends. No! To this man women were sacred. Why had she uttered such a banality? For the life of her she did not know.
She drew a sobbing breath, and looked about her vaguely, and suddenly a mist rolled away from her brain. The net of Tragedy whirled high and fell upon her, and the steel trident was driven deep between her ribs again:
"I--had forgotten!" She stared upon them. "What must you all think of me?"
Saxham's arm came round her, and Saxham's voice answered:
"Nothing, my dear, but that you are human, and have had a tremendous shock!"
She leaned against the Doctor's great shoulder, sighing:
"Thank you! ... I'm all right now! Not going to cry any more.... But Bawne! If we wait long enough there will be news of him? We--shall get him back?"
She felt Saxham's iron muscles jerk, and his ribs heave as though the trident had found a home between them. Perhaps he could not find his voice, for it was the Chief who said:
"We are doing everything possible. Mr. Sherbrand is helping. He has been good enough to place the telegraph installation at our disposal and the Wireless also. A call, Burgin?"
The undersized clerk had waved a hand from the threshold of the cabin. The Chief vanished. Patrine sighed:
"Oh, if there should be news!"
"You are too sensible to be bowled over if there happens to be no news," said the Doctor's voice. But his arm was tense about her waist and she felt the beating of his heart.
"Uncle Owen!"
Sherbrand had withdrawn out of earshot. She squeezed the kind responsive hand, turned her mouth towards the Doctor's ear, and whispered tremulously:
"Uncle Owen! You don't know him as I do. That's why I am so--horribly afraid for Bawne! He would be cruel to anyone you liked, if he hated you. And he is furious with me! I have thwarted him in--something he wishes! He is bad!--dangerous!--do you understand?"
"He cannot be a bad pilot with such a record. And in such calm weather there is little danger of an accident. We must be patient; there is nothing else to do at the moment, but wait!"
Saxham had feigned to misunderstand her, for very pity, you can conceive. Blurting out her miserable secret in this moment of unselfish sorrow, his heart was wrung in him to an anguish of compassion for Patrine. But no less was he wrung by the truth her words conveyed. His son and Lynette's was in the power of an evil man! What was David's daughter saying?
"Uncle Owen!" The tall figure of Sherbrand had moved away into the reddish twilight, and a wild desire of confession spurred on the girl to desperate frankness of speech. She hurried on, nerving herself to the change that would presently show in Saxham. "Uncle Owen! I think you had better know! Since I met him in Paris I----"
"Stop!" said Saxham. But she would not stop. She had his blood in her, and went on, though to have set her naked foot on glowing iron would have been easier than to tell.
"I have flirted with him!--gone alone with him to restaurants and music-halls!--let him take me to the Upas!"--there was a tightness like knotted whipcord about her throat; "That's--not the worst!"
"I guessed it. Stop!" Saxham repeated:
"Who told?"--she faltered brokenly, and shivered at the deep stern whisper:
"No one told, but the reputation of the--man is known to me. His type does not hesitate where a woman's virtue is concerned."
A great sigh burst from her. "And you can speak to me and touch me kindly--you don't hate the sight of me?"
"No, my poor girl, God forbid!"
"How good!--" she began, broke off and said, shuddering: "But--Aunt Lynette! How could I bear it, if she were ever to know----"
Saxham said harshly:
"She shall not know! Who do you dream will tell her? Not I! So set your mind at rest, my girl. You are a girl--though you talk like a woman of thirty!"
She said with a miserable catch in her throat:
"Nineteen is rather young, isn't it? Perhaps things would have been different if only Dada had lived!"
The utterance was as inapposite as it was sentimental. If David had still been in existence his daughter would have had no less cause for regret. But Saxham, inwardly quivering and wrung with pity, could only acquiesce:
"Perhaps things would! What you have got to do now is--Forget! Do you hear me? I order you, and I will be obeyed! And I will have you leave this titled lady who employs you, and who is all kindness and no discretion. Resign your post to-morrow! You need not return to your mother. My house is your home!" He went on in his rare tone of tenderness, "You need no telling that I care for you as a daughter. Come to me, and to Lynette who loves you dearly. She will want comfort--now that--" His voice broke and his mouth twisted. He fought with his anguish, in silence, turning his grim white face away.
"Who will tell Aunt Lynette? Oh! who will tell her?" he heard Patrine whisper. He commanded himself to answer:
"For the present, I have telephoned her that we may be detained here until late. Suppose you twist up your hair now, and put your hat on. Sherbrand!"
A sweet, manly voice answered out of the dimness of the Flying Ground: "Here, Doctor! You called me?"
In the madder and umber light of the dying sunset Sherbrand's tall brown shape came towards them. Saxham said as Patrine swept her tawny tresses into one rough rope:
"I am going to ask you to find out whether the people at the refreshment-place could give my niece something by way of substitute for dinner. A cup of coffee, or cocoa with milk, a roll and butter, and a slice of cold beef or ham?"
Sherbrand said eagerly:
"I am sure Miss Saxham can get anything like that. Mrs. Durrant keeps open house till nine o'clock, or later, if there is reason. She caters for the School Staff, respectably, by contract. I lodge--a very decent berth--over the dining-room, where I have my grub. Noisy by day but quiet enough at night-time. Will you come this way, Miss Saxham? You too, Doctor?"
Saxham declined. They left him standing there, in the wide expanse that was filling up with brooding shadows, with his back to the dying rose of the sunset, looking fixedly to the north.
*CHAPTER XXXVIII*
*THE REBOUND*
Patrine, that magnificent animal, had passed unknowingly through the painful ordeal which accompanies in the human the evolution of a soul. No doubt she had had one before without suspecting it. Now she was conscious of the presence of the guest.
Through the big barbaric halls of her nature, glittering with tinsel over plaster backed with canvas, thronged with vanities, appetites, desires, and ambitions, jostling at the glittering fountains, buying at the tawdry counters, flocking to the dubious restaurants, swooping down the water-chutes, wandering through the painted landscapes, drinking in the dubious atmosphere, had passed a ray of light, pure, vivifying and cleansing, had blown a breeze of crystal mountain air. And through the blare of brass a note had sounded that would never cease to vibrate in Patrine's ears. Having partially confessed, she experienced a disproportionate rebound of spirits. Her fears for Bawne weighed on her less heavily, Saxham's reference to cold ham had awakened in her the pangs of healthy appetite. The proximity of Sherbrand was a vividly keen pleasure. She had always wished for a brother, and here was the very beau ideal of one! She meant to ask him if he had sisters--she was sure they would be awfully nice girls!
One or two electric lights were switched on in the big room full of little white-covered tables, with the counter at the far end piled high with thick white plates. The big nickel urns were cold and empty, but Mrs. Durrant, the stout and smiling proprietress of the restaurant, produced hot coffee and milk in a twinkling, bread and butter, the cold ham, and a cold pigeon-pie.
With her own very fat, very pink hands Mrs. Durrant ministered, voluble the while in sympathy.... The lady had been upset because the dear little boy hadn't come back. People were sometimes kept for hours through a Loose Nut, or a Slack Wire, or a Carburetter, or some little thing or another going wrong.
"You remember when Under-Instructor Davis took Mr. Durrant for an Air Beano all the way to Upavon, Mr. Sherbrand? Flares burning 'alfway through the night, and pore me!--new to the Flying then--wasn't I, Mr. Sherbrand?--going from one fit of astericks into another, and running out to meet Durrant, when he dropped down calmly 'Ome at four in the mornin', with my hair all untidy and hangin' about me--" Patrine swiftly put up a hand to assure herself that her own tawny coils were securely fastened--"for all the world like an Indian Squawk."
"Wives had their feelings, it was only to be expected," said Mrs. Durrant. Mothers had also theirs, and, that was natural too! Patrine found the idea of her own maternal relationship to Bawne so firmly fixed in the mind of Mrs. Durrant, it was barely worth the trouble to endeavour to explain it away. Mrs. Durrant had none of her own, worse luck! but here, just coming with the salad and some fried potatoes, was Mr. Durrant's married niece, Ellen Agnes, and nobody knew better what it was to lose a darling child.
Ellen Agnes, wan-eyed, anaemic, slipshod, and overworked, supported the statement. Only in April it 'ad 'appened, and Ellen Agnes 'ad never 'eld 'er 'ead up properly since. And little Elbert the 'ealthiest of children. Rising three and never a nillness till the pewmonia carried 'im orf. 'Ad only 'ad 'im phortographed three days before it 'appened! with 'is lovely little limbs and body naked, sitting on a fur rug, the blessed dear!
Ellen Agnes not appearing to recognise any connecting link between the nude pose and the pneumonia, Patrine suppressed the obvious suggestion. Both women meant well, but their talkative sympathy oppressed her. She imagined how, when Sherbrand ate alone, the stout aunt and the thin niece would hover round his table, assailing his ears with their Cockney voices, making their common, vulgar comments on the happenings of the day.
Perhaps her disrelish showed, for the kind women presently slackened their attentions. There was nothing then to divert Sherbrand's attention from his guest, beyond the undeniable attractions of the hastily spread board.
So they ate the pie, all of it. Patrine cried, in frank astonishment at the evaporation of her second plateful:
"But I am a wolf or something. No! Not even salad. What must you think of me? Crying my eyes out one minute and stodging pigeon-pie the next! Do the rest of the friends you feed here behave as badly as that?"
Sherbrand returned, ignoring the mention of other guests:
"Now, what should I think? Nothing but that you wanted something to buck you, and I was pretty ravenous myself. It was pretty parky up there at 10,000." He answered to her question how high that was: "Why, comparatively, you might imagine it about nine times as high as the top of St. Paul's Cross from the level of the ground."
Little the speaker dreamed then of aerial battles to be fought at 20,000. She asked whether he had "felt giddy" and he shook his head, saying:
"If I had felt inclined to giddiness I should have put off climbing until I felt fitter. I sympathise with Opera Stars who disappoint full houses, because some high C or lower G is a hairsbreadth off the bull. The singer can't afford a false note. It's death to a reputation. And the Flying Man can't risk brain-swim, because it means possibly nose-dive and smash. So I stay out of my sky unless I'm sure of myself. There's nothing on earth like being sure."
He had a way of saying "my sky" that was queer and rather beautiful. Just as though he had been a lark, occurred to Patrine. And indeed, in the beaky, jutting nose, and the full, bright eyes set forward and flush with the wide orbital arches, there was some resemblance between the man and the bird.
Patrine sunned herself in the lighter moment. She who had lain through the night sleepless--had risen still a bond-slave--realized that her fetters were broken now that her evil genius had flown. Taking with him her beloved, she fully believed in malice. Piercing though that knowledge was, it could not mar the blissful sense of freedom, mental and physical.
Bawne would be brought back. Meanwhile, one's blood sang through one's being, mere living was riotous ecstasy, mere breathing sheerest delight. The joy of life radiated from her. And to Sherbrand, sitting opposite at the little coarse-clothed table, she grew momentarily more and more like the girl of the Milles Plaisirs.
True, instead of cloudy black, her hair vied in tone with the banner of coppery flame that streams from the crater of an active volcano, or burns above some giant crucible of molten metal ready to be poured forth. Her long eyes under her wide level brows looked the colour of peat-water, in the electric light that contracted their pupils to pin-heads, and brought out against the yellow-distempered walls the creamy whiteness of her wonderful skin. When she leaned her round elbows on the table-cloth and smiled at him, it was the frank, generous smile that had warmed his heart when he stood solitary and unfriended on the rose-pink carpet near the gilt turnstile on the Upper Promenade.
He would put it to the test. He beckoned the pallid Ellen Agnes, asked for the bill, slipped his hand into a breast-pocket and drew from it a tiny white silk purse.
"Oh! You found ..."
With an indescribable emotion, half pain, half pleasure, she saw her missing property in the broad extended palm. He said:
"It flashed on me, even as I blackguarded Davis, that you must have paid that Commissionaire-fellow at the turnstile or he'd have been breathing vengeance at my back. So I ran back to find you and ask for an address where I might send the money. You were gone! He had got this purse in his hand. So I--bluffed the brute for all I was worth, and got him to give it me!--a stroke of luck--for I'd no money left to bribe him with! Be kind and tell me how much you gave the fellow!"
The deep dimple Sherbrand remembered showed in the full oval of one of her white cheeks. Slowly the pale rose-flush sweetened and warmed the whiteness. Her eyes were dusky stars under the barbaric wealth of beech-leaf tresses. A slow smile curved her mouth, the scarlet lips parted widely, showing two perfect rows of gleaming teeth.
"Two half-jimmies!" said the rich, mellow woman's baritone. Why did it talk such awful slang? "Half my screw for one whole week of letter-writing, running errands, doing shopping, and generally sheepdogging for my friend, Lady Beauvayse!"
"Then please take this!" This was a fat bright sovereign. "And be kind and say that I may stick to the purse?"
"If you care to--" Patrine began, dubiously.
"I care--most awfully!" He went on quickly. "Lady Beauvayse--your friend--I've seen her--if she's very pretty and tremendously American?"
She nodded.
"You've spotted her! That's Lady Beau--the dear thing! But she only talks Yankee Doodle to bounders or fogies, or people who seem to expect it from her. Her English is as good as mine."
"You don't mean it!" His keen face crinkled with laughter. She was superbly unconscious of its cause. He went on, rather ashamed of having made fun of her: "That accounts for the Old Kent Road-cum-Whitechapel I've heard from the august lips of British duchesses. At cricket-matches when Eton and Harrow were playing 'Varsity."
"Does it? I think not! The duchesses weren't amusing themselves, or trying to snub swankers. They were just mothers--real mothers--trying to talk cricket to their boys. And the boys--the sweets!--grinning up their blessed young sleeves, and saying 'Yes'm!' and 'No'm!' How I do love boys! Don't you?" Her smile contracted with a spasm of anguish. "And I'm sitting here, gobbling and gabbling, when my darling!--" She rose taller than ever, from the little table, caught up her feather stole from a chairback near and slung it vigorously round her, straightened the tinsel hat with a side-glance at the strip of a looking-glass nailed in a frame of cheap gilt beading on the matchboarded wall at her right hand, picked up the vanity-bag and the long-sticked sunshade, and declared herself ready to go.
*CHAPTER XXXIX*
*A NIGHT IN JULY*
She reached the door before him. He had turned to say considerately to the good woman of the restaurant:
"We shall be late.... Frightfully, I expect! Promise me you won't sit up!"
"Oh! but I can't promise! One never knows! Best to have people up an' ready when there might be need of 'em!" Patrine heard, as she wrenched at the handle of the green curtained glass door.
"No--no! Let me!"
His hand touched hers and she drew it away, not before a keen, sharp thrill had traversed her. "Vile, hateful creature!" she said to the Patrine von Herrnung knew--the other woman within her, whom she loathed. "Is not it enough that you have done what you have done?" Then as she passed out into the night, feeling beneath her feet the roughness of the gravel walk that led between grass-plats studded with green painted chairs and little iron tables, a strange roaring filled her ears and hellish tongues of fire licked a sky of vivid blackness. She recoiled, saying in awed and shaken tones:
"Why! What has happened? What does it mean? ... How horrible!"
The door had shut behind them. Now the round dome of the sky showed not black, but velvety purple. Away in the south-east a fierce red moon drifted like some derelict vessel burning away to embers on a waveless midnight sea. And sheaves of dazzling blue-white flames, leaping and roaring, fenced in, or seemed to fence, a dreadful lake of Stygian darkness, upon the surface of which figures--were they men or devils?--moved....
"Don't be scared, Miss Saxham! It's nothing ... though I ought to have wanted you...!"
Not with intent, her heaving shoulder pressed against the breast of the man who had followed her. Perhaps the contact thrilled him, for his voice was unsteady as he went on:
"I was rather a brute to forget! ... It's a night-flare to guide--possible home-comers! ... Wads of tow dipped in petrol, burning in iron buckets round our landing-place.'
"I ought to have guessed," she said ruefully. "Forgive me for being such an idiot!"
His answer was unexpected.
"On condition that you'll leave off saying 'Great Scott!' and things like that."
"All right! But what's the matter with the expression, anyhow?" she demanded. "Do you always get riled when women use slang?"
They had been standing within the gate that led upon the Flying Ground, still girdled by its Valkyr-ring of leaping flame. He said, holding open the gate to let her pass through:
"I use slang myself, habitually, like every other man I know. But I don't know a man who really likes to hear his wife or sweetheart copy him in that respect. For myself who have neither wife, sweetheart, nor even sister, I can only say what I feel. It is--that a beautiful woman should use beautiful language. One of the old Greek poets put the whole thing into two lines. I've forgotten the original, but the translation runs like this:
"From the goddess the speech of Olympus,
From the herd-maid the language of the cows."
"I'm no goddess, God knows!" said Patrine, sorrowfully and sincerely.
Then a light scorching flame seemed to envelop her whole body. She felt Sherbrand's breath upon her cheek.... He said, speaking swiftly, and close to her ear:
"No, you are not a goddess, but something far better! You are a woman one could worship! You could hate magnificently and forgive greatly, and love to the very verge of death! That was said to me of the Doctor, and you are like him!"
"Don't!" she said, wincing. "You don't know me!"
He answered firmly:
"But I do know you! I knew you the moment I saw you in Paris. You're the girl I have been waiting for ever since I read Morris's 'Eredwellers'. You're The Friend! Now I've found you I shall never let you go again!"
What midsummer madness was this, prompting him to sweet audacity? His, "I shall never let you go!" had a convincing, manly ring. She quickened her steps, wading through a shallow sea of shadows, through which the warm short turf came up to meet her feet. He kept by her side, and together they moved towards the Valkyr-ring of fire, changing as they advanced into isolated pillars of towering flame outlining the huge white oval of Fanshaw's landing-place. Here and there the goblin-like shapes moved, stirring the flares with rods, feeding the blaze with something from vessels they carried. And two other figures stood in talk by the telegraph-hut, recognisable, outlined against the oblong of electric radiance framed by the doorway, as Saxham and the Chief.
"This is a bit previous, you think? Headlong--ill-considered on my part--to have spoken like this to a girl I've only met once before? You must understand--a man who follows a risky profession gets into the way of not waiting for to-morrow, because to-day may be the wind-up. Say you are not angry!" Sherbrand pleaded.
"No, you poor dear boy! But you're so awfully mistaken!" There was a rich and exquisite tenderness, it seemed to Sherbrand, in the deep, full, breathy tones. "I'm not a bit what you think me! There is nothing worthy of worship in a woman like me," said Patrine.
He asked, as they walked side by side from patches of brilliant blue-white light into deep oases of shadow:
"May I say more? May I tell you that I've thought of you ever since that Paris night.... What things I've called myself--if you only knew!--for not getting your address. But I swore I'd find you somehow, and I would have! I'd know your voice among a thousand. If I were blind, and forgot other people's faces, I should always see yours painted against the dark. At night--now! when I shut my eyes ... there it is! You are not angry?"
"No--I'm only sorry for you!" she said in her deepest, sweetest tone.
"Sorry?" There was keen anxiety in the face that was illuminated by the petrol-flare they were passing. "You're not--married--or going to be?" he asked.
"Neither!"
"Thank God!" said Sherbrand simply and sincerely. "Now I'll go on! My rank bad luck gives me a kind of right. This morning I got up solid in the conviction that you and I were meant for one another; that we should somehow be brought together; that the French Government would make it possible for me to marry you by buying my hawk-hoverer--for with only the two hundred a year my uncle left me, and the two hundred my Instructorship here brings me--how could I possibly have the nerve to ask you to be my wife? And--" He caught his breath, "And everything I'd dreamed came real. The test succeeded! I dived down out of my sky to find You! Miracle of miracles. And not twenty minutes later--I found myself nearly, if not quite--a ruined man. For if my invention has been swiped off to Germany, France will never buy, for money--what her neighbour gets for nought!"
"I understand. My poor Flying Man, you've been plucked of some of your wing-feathers!"
"I don't care, if you'll wait for me until they grow again!"
How grim a day had been followed by this night of wonder! Woven of the shining stuff of dreams it seemed, then and for long years after, to Patrine. Their intimacy grew and ripened like a magic beanstalk in the light of the red moon and the fierce blue petrol-flares. She said with a catch in her breath--like Sherbrand's:
"You must be serious!"
"I never was more so!"
She amended:
"We must be sensible! Oh! but this has been a close-packed day!"
"Hasn't it!" Sherbrand agreed, as they moved on side by side, from islands of raw, glaring light into broad pools of lustreless darkness, their tall heads level, for Patrine carried her hat of silver spangles swinging from the top of the sunshade with the lengthy stick. "Sometimes, for weeks, the days slip by smoothly as the beads of a Rosary over a baby's finger. Then--bang-bang-bang! they explode--like a rocket fired by a signal-pistol--until things fizzle out into dulness again."
"It's true!" Her bosom rose in a sigh. "But it's possible to get awfully fed up with banging and fizzling. One can learn to long--just for a little dulness, as long as it means quiet and rest, and peace of mind."
That Patrine should voice such an aspiration was incredible even to the speaker. "How changed I must be!" she said to herself, as Sherbrand answered her:
"With heathery moors and towering scaurs, and galloping trout-rivers brabbling over lichened boulders--and Somebody one loves to talk to--one calls that kind of dulness a happy honeymoon!"
She thrilled as his hand, swinging freely by his hip, touched hers, lightly, enclosed, and then released it. He was no tardy lover, this Flying Man. He knew a thousand times better than von Herrnung how a girl should be courted and wooed. For, with her heart in joyful tumult, and her usually pale cheeks warmed and rosy with shy blushes, it was a girl who walked beside Alan Sherbrand that night. I am sorry she could forget so easily the slip that had led her over the frontier line, the Rubicon that can never be recrossed. But in fact she did forget, just as a young man would have forgotten. Though she was to remember as only a woman can remember, and to suffer as only a woman can.
In the midst of the new, wonderful happiness, so strangely threaded not only for Patrine, with bitter loss and tragic possibilities, she suffered a quite intolerable twinge of memory in the sudden recollection of the boldly-scrutinising look cast upon her by the bearded man in the white Naval uniform. She did not realise that an imperious gesture of the brown hand, whose wrist had sported a massive gold watch-bracelet, had whisked von Herrnung off the scene. But she guessed that the huge red-haired Prussian, bowing at the side of the big blue F.I.A.T., had clicked his heels before a master who could break him at his will.
He had boasted.... They knew! Not only the bearded man whose look had stung so, but the close-shaven old Colossus with the tortoiseshell-mounted pince-nez on his thick heavy nose and the huge wart on his yellow cheek. And the sallow diplomat in the Homburg hat shadowing the sly glance and the moustache tucked up by a sinister smile under his drooping Oriental nose. They all knew.... Even the servant had worn the leer that is born of knowledge, as he said in his Teutonic gutturals:
"The lady is a friend of the gentleman who brought her here..."
Horrible! But she would not remember. She banished the hateful, knowing faces with a gallant effort and turned to Sherbrand, asking whether he had been an Eton, or Rugby, or Harrow boy?
For had her Flying Man borne the cachet of the Public School Patrine Saxham would have infinitely preferred it. That it is possible to be a snob even in the most tragic or romantic moment of one's existence, she had not realised before she discovered herself to herself in this way.
"Downside was my school," he said quite proudly. Patrine had no acquaintance with Downside. "My father would have liked me to go to Harrow; but my uncle--my mother's brother--who paid for my education!--being a Catholic, naturally preferred the place where the Faith was taught. And my mother--as naturally--shared his preference. I was happy at Downside. The Fathers were thundering good to me. I worked hard--and I played hard--and when it wasn't Swot, or cricket, or football, or fives, or boxing, it was the making of flying-sticks, just shaved laths with paper wings, at first--and then a dodge much more ambitious, a model Wright in varnished card, with a propeller worked by a rubber release.... My father was pleased at my being a chip of the old block in my turn for mechanics. But when I wouldn't go up for Woolwich--when I entered at Strongitharm's College of Engineering on Tyneside, and spent two years at Folsom's Works at Sunderland--he rather gave me up, I fancy, as a low-minded kind of cad."
He shook himself as though to shake off the adverse paternal judgment.
"I had my reasons for not going in for the Army, though I love it. They weren't easy to explain, and so I didn't try. But my father never liked the idea of my being a civil engineer. Even my mother, and my uncle--dear old fellow--he understands me better now!"
"Why?"
"Because he's dead!" said Sherbrand simply, "and the Holy Souls know everything!"
"The Holy Souls?" By the glare of the flare-light her puzzled eyes questioned him.
"The Holy Souls in Purgatory. They're privileged to help us. We help them--by praying for them. It's--a spiritual intercommunication--a kind of endless chain. A circuit of influence, received and transmitted, not by etheric flashes, but by a medium more subtle. Prayer--in a word!"
His bright-winged intellect had outstripped her heavier, duller intelligence. She suddenly felt like a caterpillar on a cabbage-leaf, slow-moving, groping, but dimly conscious of a distant affinity with the jewel-winged butterfly hovering high in golden air....
"Prayer," she repeated dully, "do you believe in prayer?"
"Naturally!" said Sherbrand--"since I believe in God. Do not you? ..."
"I hardly----"
In the ensuing pause Patrine had a brief retrospective vision of the curate who had prepared her for Confirmation, and who had talked of the Almighty as though He were a crotchety but benevolent old man. And last time she had been to Church--a fashionably attended High Church in the West End--another curate in a black cassock and tufted biretta had preached about the 'Par of Card, the baptismal dar of Grace, the bar of flars,' in which our first parents dwelt in Eden, 'the fatal ar' in which they sinned, and the 'shar of tars' with which Eve lamented her fall.
"No," she said bluntly, "I don't think I believe in God at all now, though it sometimes seems as though there must be Somebody behind things!--Somebody who punishes--Somebody who laughs! As for a religion, I don't suppose I've ever had one. Oh, yes!--my religion is Aunt Lynette!"
A mental picture of Lynette, years ago in the Harley Street nursery, teaching a curly-headed baby Bawne to say his evening prayer, while a great galumphing girl stood in the doorway and looked and listened, rose up and brought with it the horrible choking sensation. She fought with it as Sherbrand said:
"I think you are speaking of Mrs. Saxham? Well, one must have a star to hitch one's waggon to. And she is a star--if ever I saw one! A woman with a face like a Donatello Madonna, or a tall lily growing in the garden-cloisters of some Italian mountain-convent, and who has the Faith,--ought to be able to teach you to believe in God! Why not ask her? I once knelt in a Church near her, and saw her praying. She seemed--very close to what Norman or someone else called the Eternal Verities."
"She will be nearer still," said Patrine with sudden, savage roughness, "if anything happens--if Bawne is killed! She will die of a broken heart!"
"Then why not pray," argued Sherbrand, "that she may get him back again? Why not try it? There's nothing else that helps so well!"
"Pray!" The tall girl stopped short and swung round on him, facing him. A moment since they had walked like lovers. Now the spell was broken--at all events, for the time.
"Pray--pray!" she mocked. "Am I a sneak?--to pray when I don't believe in prayer! And if I did believe, God--if He exists--would not hear me. Even the parsons own He has His favourites. I am not one of them.... I am one of His forgets!"
*CHAPTER XL*
*MACROMBIE IS SACKED*
Tall, lithe, vigorous, masterful, they confronted each other across the gulf that suddenly opened between them--the bottomless chasm that yawns between Faith and Unbelief.
In the fitful uncanny light, the darker side of Patrine started into sinister prominence. Her defiant face was masked by shadow, but the fierce vibrating voice and towering shape had something of the fallen angel. Had wide sable pinions sprung and bannered from her shoulders, Sherbrand would hardly have been surprised.
"Let us draw the line at that. If we are to be friends--and I would like us to be!--agree to it! But since you have what I have not--you would call it Faith, no doubt," he guessed the wide mouth curving in a jeering smile, "there is nothing to prevent you from praying for Aunt Lynette and for Bawne too! Unless you are the kind of physician who draws the line at taking his own drugs!"
If she had thought to disconcert Sherbrand she erred. He said instantly:
"I give you my word of Honour that I will pray for them! But there is one other person much dearer to me than either. You don't ask me for her, but all the same..."
"You kind, dear boy! Pray for me all you want to!"
She was his big, smiling girl of the Milles Plaisirs, and the Pat young Bawne worshipped, as she stretched out her beautiful, massive arm and offered him a cordial hand.
"Shake, Mister! Making love to me one minute and bally-ragging me the next! ... Great Scott! Ah!--I've said it again--and I gave you my word I'd not!"
He took the hand in a close grasp, sought for the other and took it also....
"Thank you! Why, how you're shivering! You have nothing but that feather thing over your thin gown! Wait half a minute--I'll get you a wrap!"
He was gone in an instant, leaving her standing on the border-line of one of the oases of black-velvet shadow, swayed by the violence of her emotion as some tall young birch might have been shaken by the fury of a south-west gale.
His touch.... She had not dreamed.... Her head drooped, and a long sigh went fluttering after him into the darkness, like some night-moth whose wings are wrought of hues more gorgeous than the peacock butterfly's, whose scent is on the alert, and whose diamond eyes pierce the blackest midnight in search of the partner of its kind.
A footstep she knew approached. A familiar voice called her:
"Uncle Owen." The spell broke. Her mind leaped up alert and quivering. "Have you any news--of Bawne?"
"I have news!"
"Not----"
"Not the worst news," said Saxham's harsh voice, "but not--hopeful!"
"They are not coming back?" She strove to set her heel on the treacherous hope that he would say No! For how could she bring herself to desire the enemy's return. And yet the thought of Bawne was a stab of anguish in her bosom. What was the Doctor saying?
"The last definite intelligence received of them confirms the certainty that Captain von Herrnung is now over the North Sea. He alighted nowhere; that we have positively learned from many different news-centres. A tractor-monoplane answering to the description and carrying two-passengers passed the Bull Light on Spurn Head, at a few minutes before eight. The lighthouse-keeper signalled that bad weather might be expected. The pilot paid no attention. And later on----"
As Saxham spoke, with that strange hoarseness, Patrine took his arm tremblingly. Her heart plunged as though it would burst its prison as the Doctor went on:
"An hour or more later a Wireless came in. It had been sent on to Sir Roland from the Admiralty!--I will not puzzle you with technical details. But at 8.30 the officer on duty on the upper-bridge of the second-in-line of a Battle Squadron steaming through Northern Waters on the way to a Southern rendezvous, reported having heard an aeroplane pass overhead, crossing the course of the Squadron diagonally--apparently flying due east----"
Saxham added:
"The aviator made no signal for assistance. But the engine-beat told of trouble developing.... There is nothing to do but wait and hope!"
What had really happened on board H.M.S. Rigasamos, maintaining her appointed speed of fifteen knots, and her statutory two-cable-lengths from the stern of the Flagship ahead, and the bows of the sister-ship following her, had been that as the ship's band struck into The Roast Beef of Old England, and the Owner took his place at the head of the Ward-room mess-table, his Second in Command on the fore-bridge got a speaking-tube message from the Navigating Lieutenant on the upper-bridge, to say that the drone of an aeroplane, flying at about four hundred overhead, had been picked up by Warrant Officer So-and-So, of the gun and searchlight control, per medium of the microphone.
The Second in Command called back through the voice-tube:
"An aeroplane.... You're sure? Could hear her racket myself, without assistance. But put it down to a Fleet Seaplane taking a flip round the Squadron for exercise, or one of the Goody-Two-Shoes from the R.N.A.S. Station at Rosforth, blown out to sea doing Coast Patrol."
An answer rumbled down the pipe:
"It was an aero all right, sir! The rattle of her floats 'ud have given away a Goody.... Travelling east against the side-drive of a forty-mile-an-hour north-west gale.... And with engine trouble well developed. Missing and back-firing like the gayest kind of hell!"
The Second in Command took his ear from the mouth of the speaking-tube, and with a glance that included the figures of his Sub-Lieutenant, the Midshipman, signalmen, and lookouts at their posts swung into the chart-house and logged the occurrence in the plain language of the sea. The clock told 8.35 P.M. as he finished, capped his fountain pen, and slipped it in an inside pocket, soliloquising:
"Travelling east against a forty-mile-an-hour gale from the north-west, and with engine-trouble to top up with ... Little Willie will be seeing the angels pretty soon at this rate! Or piling himself up somewhere on the coast of Holland! Wonder who the bally idiot is?"
Saxham continued, and now he croaked as hoarsely as a raven:
"Sir Roland has little doubt that the aeroplane heard on the Rigasamos was Sherbrand's 'Bird of War.' If so, there would be very little hope left, unless it had been previously arranged that a vessel belonging to--a foreign Power!--was to watch for and give help if she should require it. Now you know as much as I do. I have telephoned to both Lady Beauvayse and your mother that you return with me to Harley Street. We shall go presently. First, I want you to speak on the telephone to Lynette."
"To--Lynette!" Patrine breathed. The Doctor told her: "I have kept the worst from Lynette hitherto.... I shall do so until the ultimate hope is abandoned. My wife knows my voice so well.... You understand.... She would suspect something ..."
His voice stumbled and broke. And clinging to the arm of the big man standing quietly beside her, potent in inertia as a lump of raw iron, Patrine realised that her anguish was a drop in the ocean of his. She took his hand and said in a tone he had never before heard from her:
"Come, dear! We will go and speak to her now."
So they went across to the telegraph-cabin, raw with unshaded electric light and littered with papers. The Chief was there, looking livid and careworn, leaning one elbow on the edge of the stand that supported the Wireless, and wearing the telephone head-band with the ear-pieces, as he dictated to the pallid clerk who occupied a Windsor chair at a stained deal desk, and wrote with a spluttering pen on a depleted paper-pad. At first sight there seemed to be nothing else in the place but a low voice speaking, a Railway Key instrument, a file for telegrams and an overpowering odour of rum.
The odour of rum consolidated to Patrine's view into a stocky thickset man with a square heavy yellow face set into a tragic mask of despair. It was Macrombie, ex-Petty Officer telegraphist, whom the Royal Navy had spat forth for being D.O.D. fifteen full years before. Sacked now from his civil employment, for the old glaring, unblinkable offence.
The liquor had barely faded out in him; his breath came across the little cabin like a flaming sword, and his eyes under their beetling coal-black eyebrows looked burnt-out. He rose from the debilitated office-stool he had been sitting on, saluted Patrine stiffly and said:
"Mem, this is no place for a leddy, wi' a drucken wastrel like mysel' in it. Ay! I hae lat ower a drap too mony, I am awa' the noo wi' my weicht o' wyte. But no wi'oot a warstle have I yielded to the Enemy!" His anguish broke the flood-gates in a rumbling roar. "Like Job I hae cried oot in the nicht-watches to my Creator, speiring o' Him why He made weak men an' strong rum? He didna' gie me ony answer--and I am ganging down the Broad Road's fast as my bluidy thirrst can carry me--a disgraced and ruined man!"
"Mr. Sherbrand will give you another chance. I know he will!--I'll ask him!" came impetuously in the big warm womanly baritone.
"You're a grand woman to luik at, and the lad'll gie in--an' the haill deil's dance to begin ance mair.... Na, na, my bonny leddy!" said Macrombie, "ye can never lippen to the promises o' a drunkard. Best lat me gang my gait to muckle Hell. Ay! I'll no' be lonesome there for want o' company.... Toch! what a regiment o' Macrombies deid an' damned will answer 'Present' to auld Satan's rollcall! Guid-nicht, my leddy, an' thanks to ye a' the same."
He took his cap from a peg, and from the corner a bundle of miscellaneous possessions, rolled up in apparently a worn alpaca office-coat, and girt about with knotted string. He saluted the Chief and Saxham, and nodded to the telegraph clerk, and went out of the cabin in a plodding kind of hurry as though no grass should grow under his feet before he set them for good upon the dreadful downward Road.
His vice had played into an enemy's hands, and he would trust himself no longer. He meted out judgment to rum-soaked Macrombie, assuming for himself the prerogative of the One Judge. But he got his chance in spite of himself, when Britain's Hour came.
*CHAPTER XLI*
*SAXHAM LIES*
At Saxham's nod Patrine rang up Lynette, and the familiar voice that came back, spun out to a spider-thread of sweetness across the distance, stabbed the listener to the heart like a delicate blade of gold-wrought steel. It said, with a quiver in it:
"Of course, I am not nervous at all. And I know how much Bawne would enjoy the night-flying. But if Owen were not there, perhaps I might be--afraid that something was wrong. Owen!"
"Say that I am here," the Doctor signed, and Patrine obeyed.
"Tell my darling to speak to me," said the voice, and Patrine, dropping the microphone from suddenly useless fingers, saw Saxham take it and force his stiff white lips to speech:
"It is not possible--just at this moment. You forget----"
"Of course ... The fireworks!"
"Just so. The fireworks. Expect us in another hour. And--Patrine is here and coming back to Harley Street. To stay. Please tell Mrs. Keyse and Janey to get a room ready."
The cordial answer came:
"I will at once. Dear Pat! how glad I shall be to have her!"
"This is Patrine speaking now!"
Saxham's steady hand touched Patrine's in transferring the receiver of the telephone, and the chill of it stung like the touch of death. She could not control her trembling as she answered:
"You are always so kind to me, dear Aunt Lynette!"
"No, dear! In an hour, then? Take care of my precious," the sweet voice pleaded, "until I see you both..."
"Yes--yes!"
Saxham's hand hung up the receiver, rang off, and steadied Patrine, whose knees were melting under her weight:
"Don't ask me ... any more ... I--can't!" she begged of him brokenly. He said, and with those deep lines that showed in his hard grey face, and his light eyes staring haggardly from caves that grief had dug about them, Saxham looked older by twenty years:
"I know it was hard, but the thing had got to be done. How could I bludgeon her with the truth, whispered over a wire? Once face to face, the first glimpse of me will show her that I have lied to her. God help me!" said the Dop Doctor; "I told her I had stayed on here with Bawne to give him the treat of seeing a night-flying display."
"How--horribly clever of you!"
"So clever," Saxham answered harshly, "that I shall probably regret it to the end of my days. In the whole of my practice I have never known a well-meant deceit do any good--rather the opposite. Consequently, I preach to my patients Truth before everything--and break down and lie when my own turn comes--like the damned coward I am."
"We shall leave here now in a few minutes," went on the Doctor, glowering at his chronometer. "I sent Keyse away with the car upon a message. He will be here to take us home to Harley Street at half-past nine. You have ample time to telephone to Berkeley Square for your clothes and so on.... Lady Beauvayse's maid can pack them for you, I presume?"
"Oh, yes. She's decent in the way of doing things for me."
"Very well."
The Doctor left the telegraph-hut, and Patrine 'phoned to Berkeley Square. Then, with a sudden recollection of an appointment which must be cancelled, she gave the number that meant Margot's newly-furnished mansion, and presently heard the little bird-like voice chirping:
"Yes, this is 00, Cadogan Place. I'm Lady Norwater! ... Is that you, Pat? Yes? What cheer? ... I'm having a long, deadly domestic evening. Franky's reading an improving book aloud to me--at least he was when you rang up--'Matrimony for Beginners. A Handbook to Happiness,' it's called. But I don't believe the man who wrote it ever had a live wife."
"Probably not. Margot, pet, I can't possibly lunch with you to-morrow!"
"Don't say you back out because of the book! Fits has got it now under the sofa." Fits was Franky's lady bull-terrier. "And by the time she's done with it there won't be much left. Say you'll come!" Margot urged. "Franky's got to test a new car--so Rhona Helvellyn's coming with two or three Militant pals of hers. I'll give you lobster Americaine and cold lamb in mint aspic--and strawberry mousse. There!"
"I'm frightfully sorry, my dinkie, but it simply can't be!"
"What tosh! And we're going to talk over ideas for speeches at the Monster Meeting of Women in October at the Royal Hall. And Rhona has a Grand Slam in the way of surprises--did she say anything to you about the Mansion House Banquet demonstration she's thought of for Monday night?"
"Yes, and I'm down on it--like houses!" declared Patrine. "Is Rhona really spoiling for a taste of skilly and yard-exercise? Don't you get mixed up. Think of Franky reading the paragraphs: 'POPULAR YOUNG PEERESS ON THE SUFFRAGE WAR-PATH. SOCIETY BEAUTY HECKLES THE LORD MAYOR! VISCOUNTESS NORWATER BURSTS UPON BANQUETING BISHOPS, IN THE CHARACTER OF A WOMAN WHO WANTS A VOTE!'"
Patrine called good-bye and rang off, turning with the smile upon her lips to see Sherbrand standing behind her with a long white coat upon his arm.
"I have brought you a wrap. A lady forgot it here the other day. Let me help you to put it on."
Patrine shivered as he drew the large loose garment round her. It was a white Malta blanket-coat, very soft and fleecy and warm.
"Shall we have another turn on the Grounds before the Doctor's car----" Sherbrand was beginning, when the Chief removed the Wireless head-band and came forward.
"Miss Saxham, I must detain you for a minute, I am afraid."
Sherbrand went out of the hut. At a sign the pale clerk evaporated. Sir Roland moved nearer to Patrine. How old he looked! she thought.
"You are done up! Esquinte, aren't you?'
"I am tired, but neither done up nor the other thing. Miss Saxham, you just now put me in possession of the details of a Suffragist plot. The friend of a friend of yours, backed by some other viragoes of the militant order, intends--I quote your own words!--to a bid for a diet of skilly, and prison-yard exercise, by interrupting the after-dinner speakers at the Mansion House Banquet on Monday night. Kindly let her know from me that the stewards will be prepared to prevent her doing so,--and tell her that women will never make successful conspirators until they learn to hold their tongues! Now, good-night. Your incautiousness has rendered Miss Helvellyn a service. She will bless it one day if she doesn't now."
He took Patrine's hand in his frank, strong clasp. The haggard lines on the keen bronzed face did not mar the beauty of its kindliness.
"You have given her a chance. Let's hope she makes the most of it. To herd with the--wild she-asses isn't the way to serve her sex. Rowdiness and shrieking will never get the Vote for Women. Burning down empty country-houses won't land a female Member in the House of Parliament. It isn't Propaganda to--behave like an improper goose. Mind you tell her! That you, Saxham?" as a tall figure came towards them out of the glimmering darkness fitfully splashed by the petrol-flares now burnt down and dying out. "Best take your niece home to Harley Street, she is thoroughly tired. Sherbrand and myself and Mr. Burgin here are good for hours yet."
*CHAPTER XLII*
*SAXHAM BREAKS THE NEWS*
"Owen! ..."
Lynette was dressed in a delicate, filmy black chiffon dinner-gown, and as Saxham's latch-key clicked in the front door-lock and she rose up out of the tail carved armchair that stood beside the large hall fireplace, her paleness seemed to diffuse light, like the whiteness of the moon.
"Owen ... He is not ... What ..."
Her wide bright glance went past the tall wrapped-up figure of Patrine to the taller shape that bulked behind her. No small active boy-form danced in its wake. She put out her arms, groping blindly--swayed and would have fallen, but that Saxham strode past Patrine, caught the slender figure in his powerful embrace, turned and carried his wife away down the short corridor that led to the consulting-room.
"Miss Pat, my dear! There's cold supper all laid an' ready waitin' in the dining-room. By the Doctor's special orders, and I was to see you eat."
Thus Mrs. Keyse, now for years housekeeper at Harley Street, a little light-haired woman, common of speech and innocent of grammar, but a pearl of price in the Doctor's estimation and her mistress's right hand.
"Don't say they fed you at 'Endon on 'am and salad an' pigeon-pie. Trash is the word," said Mrs. Keyse, "for resturong pastry, and them there piegeons, if language could be given 'em, would bear me out in what I say."
But Patrine refused baked meats, submitting to be escorted to her room and tenderly fussed over by the kind, Cockney-tongued little woman, and yellow-haired pink-cheeked thirteen-year-old Janey, out of whose small triangular face looked the honest grey eyes of W. Keyse.
Both Mrs. Keyse and Janey had been crying, for Keyse, who acted as the Doctor's chauffeur, had broken bad news in the kitchen-regions. Master Bawne, according to Keyse, had been taken for a trip in one of them Hairos by a German flying-bloke, and it was feared--not having returned or been heard of--that Something or Other had gone wrong.
Mrs. Keyse, a born optimist, rejected the idea of accident or casualty with ringing sniffs of incredulity. Master Bawne, the blessed dear! had prob'ly bin kidnup' by some foreign Nobleman wanting a Nair. Trust a German, Mrs. Keyse would never! having when a young woman in service at Alexandra Crescent, Kentish Town, N.W., been treated something frightful by a young man who travelled in shaving-sets of German silver and other fancy articles of Teuton origin. Keyse must often have heard her mention That There Green?
Keyse responded, lighting his pipe, for his wife and daughter had accompanied him to their own private parlour in the basement, looking out across the yard to the garage over which Billy and Janey had been born:
"Twice a day since you and me stood up before the dodger to git married. But you never tipped me as 'ow the bloke was a bloomin' Fritzer before. 'Ow do you make it out? Switch me on to the notion! 'Cos o' somethink in the German nickel 'e drummed in gettin' into 'im an' affectin' 'is blood?"
Mrs. Keyse, impervious to sarcasm as incapable of grammar, maintained that the subject under discussion had spoke wiv' a Naxent particularly noticeable when upset. Broken English, in moments of passion, with red eyes and white 'air simpular to one o' them Verbenas, had in conjunction with a decided bent towards bigamy, and an appetite for other people's savings, distinguished That There Green.
W. Keyse and Janey went off to bed, and the other servants, instructed through the Doctor's consulting-room speaking-pipe, shut up the house and retired, all save the night-maid who answered the telephone, and attended to the midnight rings at the hall-door. But Mrs. Keyse did not follow the household. The Doctor and Mrs. Saxham were still shut up together in the consulting-room. Mrs. Keyse owned to herself that she had talked all that rubbage about That There Green and cetra, to hide that her heart was as water in her bosom, and that she trimbled and shook all over after the fashion of them Fancy shapes of Chicken in Haspeck, or Coffin cream, or Blue Mange coloured with Scotch Anneal.
It grew late and later. The flares on the Flying Ground, many times renewed, had died down to greasy black ash in the scorched and dented buckets, before there was a movement or a sound in the dark consulting-room. Then the woman who sat in the chair sighed, and the long quivering breath she drew, stirred the thick hair of the man who knelt upon the floor before her, holding her in his arms.
"Owen!"
"My wife!"
The sigh that had escaped her seemed to flutter through the unlighted room like some dusky-winged creature of the darkness. She leaned her face upon his brow, pressing her lips upon the smooth place above the broad meeting eyebrows. The first kiss she had ever given Saxham had been placed just there. Now the sweet lips were cold. He could feel how the delicate white teeth were set behind them. Had she relaxed her grip upon herself he knew she must have cried aloud. Nor could he help her save by his sustaining hold, and the silence of a grief only equalled by her own. Thus they had remained, speechless through the hours; drawn closer than ever by the anguish of mutual loss.
Now she stirred in Saxham's arms, and spoke collectedly:
"Tell me Bawne is not--dead! Give me courage to go on waiting. And yet, do not help me to deceive myself or you, with a false hope."
"If the worst had happened," said Saxham, almost appealingly, "should we not have known it?"
She breathed between stiff lips, trying to control her shuddering:
"Twice to-night I have heard him call me: 'Mother!' and then again, 'Mother!' Now I feel"--she closed her eyes and opened them widely, staring through the darkness--"that he is wanting me!--wanting you!--as he never has before. We were always near till now--he could not realise what parting meant!"
She fought with sobs, and the tears she could not keep back fell in the darkness on her husband's face. His own were mingled with them. Perhaps she knew it, as she wiped them away with a touch that was a caress, saying:
