Chapter XI: Part 11

"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:

"We must not give in! We must not fail him! To abandon hope too soon would be to fail!"

Courage had come to her with the paling of the stars and the greying in the East that meant the dayspring. She was full of solicitude for Saxham's weariness, as he rose up stiffly as a knight who has watched his armour through the long hours, kneeling on the threshold of the Sanctuary, and knows with the waning of the flame in the lamp before the Tabernacle that his vigil is over and done.

"You are tired--so tired! Dear Owen, go to bed now, if only for an hour or two. There will be news of him very soon now--there _must_ be news!"

Saxham took a delicate fleecy wrap from a chair and put it about her, for she shivered in the raw chill of the unsunned morning air. Then he touched the blind, and it rolled up upon a vista of backyard and garage. The shriek of an engine and the vibrating passage of an early train through Portland Road Tube Railway came into their ears, standing together at the open window, as Dawn in her streaming crocus veil peeped shyly through the vast smoke-bank that broods upon the morning face of London, engendered by the innumerable little fires of those among her five millions who must rise and eat, and go forth to labour ere yet it is fairly day.

"Owen, tell me! What is coming? What is it I feel, here and here?"

She turned upon her husband suddenly with the question, touching her brow and heart lightly and fixing on him her widely opened eyes. The haunted look of Beatrice had come back to them. His wife's strange likeness to the Guido portrait in the Barberini Palace Gallery--the tragic face with the wistful eyes, that despite the asseverations of the learned and critical will be associated as long as its canvas hangs together with the Daughter of the Cenci--leaped up in her at this hour to startle him afresh.

"What is in the air?" she asked. "What changes are taking place about us? What great and horrible Thing is moving,--moving towards us as we stand together here?"

Saxham's powerful arm went round her protectingly. He answered:

"You shall know, my love, my comrade. In confidence--I am permitted to tell you this much. We stand upon the very brink of international War!"

She looked at him and in the golden eyes he read courage, endurance and tenderness. Love that would be changeless. Fidelity through life beyond Death to the Life that is for evermore.

"You mean that Austro-Hungary will attack Servia, and that Russia will intervene?"

"As Austria intends, no doubt," said Saxham shrugging, "prompted by her Mentor and Ally at Berlin. In him we have a personality blatantly vain, immensely egoistic, feverishly energetic, imbued to the verge of monomania with the idea of his own appointment by the Almighty--as they understand Him in Germany--to be Imperial leader of nations and arbiter of the destinies of Kings!"

He went on:

"Suppose the Great Powers of the World a row of straw bee-skeps, susceptible of being upset by a Hohenzollern kick! Will the mailed toe of Imperial Germany refrain from giving it--invading France through the lost Alsace-Lorraine provinces, the moment Austria-Hungary gets to grips with the Russian bear? Britain is France's ally, bound in Honour to support her. Now you understand what vital questions the Chancellories of the world were burning electric light and brain-power and eyesight over, the long night through, while you and I----"

She stopped him:

"You make me think!--You have told me--That man who has taken my darling is a German Flying Officer. He may have had some urgent, secret reason for quitting England at once!"

"It is more than probable that he carried dispatches of importance. But I can answer no questions on that point. I should be verging, if I did, on a betrayal of confidence."

Lynette Saxham looked at her husband earnestly, and the change wrought in her by the long night's vigil of sorrow sent a pang through the man's heart. That line of anxiety between the slender eyebrows and the bluish shadows round the golden eyes came to him, like the sorrowful sweetness of the exquisite lips, out of the past.

"Why do the Germans hate us?" she asked, and he answered wearily and sombrely:

"As the nation with which Germany runs neck and neck in military armament, national wealth and influence, Germans pay us British the compliment of dislike. German ambition, spreading rank and high, is checked in the attainment of its ends even by our geographical position. We carry in our veins too large a share of Teutonic blood, to be ingratiating or subservient to our arrogant and domineering neighbours. What hatred is bitterer than racial hatred? Where is enmity deadlier than that one finds existing between women and men of kindred blood?"

The face of David, fair and debonair, rose up before Saxham as he said it. Strange! that even while he thanked his stars for David's ancient treachery, the fact of the betrayal should rankle in the Doctor still.

"Nowhere is there hatred more terrible. Listen, Owen--there is something I want to tell you----"

Lynette shivered and drew the fleecy shawl more closely about her white bare throat, and the slender shoulders and arms that were revealed through the laces of her filmy dinner-gown:

"In the first days of the Siege of Gueldersdorp, a woman from the native stad, the wife of a Barala herd, who came to the Convent for medicine and soup for a sick _piccanin_--told the Mother that long before the Orange Free State threw in its lot with the Transvaal--long before Oom Paul and Vader Steyn ordered that all _rooinek_ soldiers sent by Groot Brittanje to South Africa should quit the country--the Barala could not sleep in their kraals at night '_for the going of the creatures_.' Not all the creatures of prey--the Eaters of Flesh--the crows and the _aasvogels_, the wild dogs and jackals, the _aard_-wolves, and hyaenas. But the hartebeest and springbok and prongbuck and rietbuck; with the little gazelles and tiny antelopes, the _dassies_ and hares, and all the shy, wild harmless things that are stalked and shot for what is called sport, by most men and some women--they passed away in multitudes each night until just before the dawn. Even the _meerkat_ and the leopard went, the baboons and snakes and the big lizards. Barala trackers followed the trails North to the Marches of the Okavango--and farther still into the Mabunda country--the woman told us--and their wise men had warned them that it was a _teeken_ of War to come."

Her wistful eyes strained towards the East, where between the crowded roofs of the vast City and the shadowy purple day-brow, showed a clear wide band of crocus-yellow, melting into exquisite hyacinth-blue.

"Perhaps I am like the antelope and the hares and the wild-bucks and the other creatures. It may be that this nameless Thing that I have felt coming nearer and nearer is War," said Lynette. Then she winced as though the net had whirled and fallen, and the trident pierced, and cried out irrepressibly: "If so--Bawne will be out there unprotected--in the midst of it! Owen!--do you hear me? How can you stand there so calmly when such a thing may be? How--oh!--how could you consent to his going?"

Saxham's square face was set like a mask in the stern effort for self-control. He was in spirit with the Navigating Lieutenant on the upper bridge of H.M.S. _Rigasamos_, hearkening to the drone of an aeroplane struggling against the thrust of a north-west gale.... He heard the double knock of a back-fire, and heard men talking about engine-trouble. Even as he brought himself back to say quietly:

"I did as you would have done in the same circumstances. If the same voice that spoke to me had virtually said to you: '_Here stands your only son, a child in years and yet a man for England! Will you let him go?_' Would you not have consented? If you deny, I shall tell you that I know my wife better than she knows herself!"

"'_A child in years--a man for England_....'" The fold between her slender eyebrows deepened and the delicate sensitive upper-lip lifted, showing the white, slightly irregular teeth. "I do not understand," she said piteously; "Was there any question of an order to be carried out?--a duty to be done?"

"There was a question to be settled," said Saxham, "involving Bawne's whole future. Here and Hereafter--and the question was this: Whether the son you have given me is worthy of his mother, or whether he has inherited any twist of brain, any degenerate and wretched weakness from the father whom your pure hand saved and led back, my guardian Saint, my heart's beloved!--from the very threshold of the gates of Hell."

"Owen! Don't speak so of yourself. I will not hear it. You had been so wronged--driven beside yourself by misfortune and betrayal. You were not responsible----" She covered the little ears with the slender hands. He took the hands down and kissed them, and held them in his own, as he went on:

"That is what I should like to believe. But--the truth is very different. There was--there is still, I suppose--a spot of weakness in me. A bubble of air in the casting--a flaw in the wrought steel." He looked like wrought steel as he spoke; "I had to be sure our boy is sound, mentally and morally as he is physically. Fit--in the fullest and highest sense of the word. Rather than have the doubt," said Saxham, "or the knowledge that confirms the doubt, I would----"

"No, no!" She tried to free her slender hands, but the Doctor's hold was as inexorable as gentle. "You must not say--that! I cannot bear----"

"Ah, my poor love, you, too, have feared lest the sins of the father might some day be visited on the son!" said Saxham with a strange mingling of pity and sorrow and exultation. "Well, now for your comfort, believe they will not be. Bawne is all yours, Lynette. Young as he is, he has learned to master Self and conquer Fear. Obedience, Duty, and Honour are welded into the metal of his character. If I had not been my boy's father, I should have envied that man--knowing what I have learned to-day. And therefore I do not grudge--I give freely----"

"You give--you do not grudge----" She suddenly wrenched away her hands and said in a tone that chilled Saxham:

"Owen, do you speak like this because you believe Bawne is--dead?"

The Doctor made answer:

"I believe that if God so decree our boy will yet be given back to us. As far as knowledge goes--except for one fact I am little wiser than you."

"I must know what that one thing is! You will tell me now, and all!"

The sun was rushing up over East London in a gloriole of golden fire. To her husband's thought she was like some slender Roman patrician at the stake, as she stood up against the background of flaming splendour, and waited to hear the worst.

*CHAPTER XLIII*

*THE PLUNDERED NEST*

If that story of the aeroplane over the North Sea in the thickening dark, fighting East against the side-thrust of the nor'-west gale, with the dropping revolutions and the hiccuping engine, had seemed desperate before, it was ghastly now. Saxham's last hope died as he told. When he had done, Lynette said with strange, unnatural composure:

"Perhaps I have loved our child too much, and that is why he is taken from me.... And yet how can a mother love by measure and by rule? Did Our Lady withhold any part of her love from her Divine Child? Did not the dearest of all earthly mothers say to me--in that waking Vision, the God-given reality of which I have never doubted--'_Be to a son of Owen's what I have been to you!_'"

Her strained composure gave way. Her face quivered and the tears broke forth. She nipped her trembling lips close and shut her quivering eyelids with her fingers, but the fountains were unsealed, and she wept. Perhaps it was better so. She dried her eyes presently, and yielding to Saxham's persuasions in that she consented to go and lie down, she came into his embrace and laid her arms about his neck and kissed him with wifely tenderness, saying:

"I will answer now, what you said a little while ago. You shall see under the only leaf of my heart, Owen, that has ever been folded down over a secret kept from you. When my boy was to be born, and I was weak and suffering, the doubt--the dread, that has haunted and tortured you, assailed me and made me wretched--for a little while. Then I gathered together, jealously, every noble, true and brave thing you had ever done for me or for others; every good deed of kindness, every unselfish tender thought. I asked you to take me with you to visit your poorer patients. I saw their hollow eyes brighten and heard them bless you when you turned from their bedsides to carry comfort and help elsewhere. And I wrote down these things in a book. They shine from its pages like jewels. When I die it was to be given to Bawne.... It will be if he lives to come back to us.... There is a prayer at the end that, in His goodness, God might give me in my boy a man like you!"

He went with her to the door and looked after her earnestly as she passed down the corridor out of his sight.

Then he locked himself in, and went back to his chair at the consulting-room table. The bright boy had stood there beside him a few short hours before. He was there now, pleading with a silent voice, coaxing with unseen looks, tugging with invisible hands. He always would be. Though Time softened the mother's anguish of loss, there would be no forgetfulness for Saxham, the grim stern man whose nature was Fidelity. Other children might yet call the Dop Doctor father, but their little fingers would never blur the imprint of the firstborn's babyish hand upon his heart.

Perhaps you can see the man, wan and haggard and unshaven, trying to attend to the pressing correspondence that had accumulated since the previous noon. Even as, to the shrill crying of the Fleet bugles, a windy grey day broke over the choppy Solent, showing the huge pageant of Sea Power ready for the King.

Down forty-mile avenues of floating steel fortresses one might follow Majesty, with a great muster of Naval sea-planes and aeroplanes manoeuvring somewhat wildly overhead.

As Saxham sat there with Fate's trident rankling in him, those lights he had spoken of were burning behind closely-curtained windows at the Admiralty and at the Foreign Office, and at the Belgian and German Embassies. In Berlin and Vienna, in Brussels and Paris and St. Petersburg--later to cast off its Teutonic name in loathing and be Petrograd--similar phenomena might have been observed. "Austria was going to take some step," as Prince Lichnowsky had nervously stated to Britain's Foreign Secretary, adding that he regarded the situation as very uncomfortable. And the German Foreign Secretary ingenuously confided to the British Charge d'Affaires in Berlin that it was the intention of Austria-Hungary to offer Serbia a pill which she could not swallow, in the Note demanding the removal of all officers and functionaries guilty of propaganda against the Dual Monarchy, presented by Baron Giesel at Belgrade, on the 24th of July. The ultimatum was to be accepted or rejected within forty-eight hours, a sweeping proviso, in which one recognises the Hohenzollern touch.

The world trembled on the brink of Armageddon. Men even then were doubtful as to the issue. It might yet, some said, be Peace. But if Man, who arrives at conclusions by intellectual processes, was unsure, not so things that are guided merely by Instinct. Like the wise creatures of Natal and the Transvaal and Bechuanaland in 1900, these knew quite well that War was in the air.

It is on record that in these days preceding the Great Calamity, huge droves of wild pig, great herds of deer and small bands of the rarer elk, with bears, hares, martens, and foxes, evacuated the forests of Bavaria and South Germany for the mountain fastnesses of Switzerland. Immense flights of birds not usually migratory, partridges, pheasants, grouse, plover, wild-doves and water-fowl went South with the animals. Under cover of night the colossal game-preserves of East Prussia emptied into Poland--their furred and feathered peoples passing into the labyrinthine swamps of the Russian Dnieper and Dniester--spreading the news, sending the alarm before them:

"_Man is coming, and with him War!_"

Man was coming. That strange trembling of the earth had warned its creatures, even before the tramp, tramp, tramp of millions of marching feet, the rumbling that betokened the slow but sure approach of Titanic death-engines, told Fine Ears to seek safety in flight, before the cataclysm of human flesh and iron and steel, and chemicals a thousand times more deadly, rolled down to overwhelm, and destroy. Hence through those July nights the sound of rushing wings above, and stealthy pads, and trotting hoofs, and heavy bodies crashing through sedge and brake and underbrush, hardly for a moment ceased. Puffs of sweet wild breath, and musky odours from hidden lairs; tufts of hair upon the thorns, and crowded spoor upon the dust of the forest-paths or the mud of the river-banks, told of their going, to those who were skilled to read such signs. But the same mysterious instinct that urged them to flight, bade the eagle and vulture that prey upon carrion, the raven and owl and crow, the wolf and lynx be on the alert, for the table of Earth would shortly be spread for them as never before in the whole History of War. And their hoarse croaking and hooting and baying and barking answered: War, War, War!

*CHAPTER XLIV*

*PATRINE REMEMBERS*

Patrine knelt beside the bed in her charming chintz-draped, white-enamelled room at Harley Street, and clumsily thanked God for having taken away von Herrnung. She petitioned that darling Bawne might be quickly found and brought back, and that if he were not, Lynette might not die. And she wound up with 'Our Father,' rather imperfectly remembered, and got into bed wondering whether Sherbrand would be pleased if he could know her not quite as irreligious as she had boasted--and lay revelling drowsily in the comfort of cool lavender-scented linen, until she fell asleep.

She had not tasted sleep for nights: age-long nights of broad staring wakefulness. Now Somnos, the gentle brother of Thanatos, took her and lapped her divinely round. She felt herself drifting away on a wide-flowing tide of deep sweet restfulness. Then it was as though an electric light were suddenly switched on in the dark galleries of her brain. Insomnia, the malevolent hag-witch, jests thus merrily with her victims, suffering them to taste sleep, and then whisking the cup away. Like many other practical jests, this ends in breakdown and brain-fever, or drives its victims to the chemist for sleepy drugs, and to the madhouse subsequently.

In the middle of the dazzling cocoon-shaped patch of brightness thus created, Patrine recognized the outlines of an ornamental fountain that occupied the centre of the vestibule leading to the supper-room of the Upas Club. Executed in the New Art style of sculpture, of white and black, and tawny marble, it was shaded by tall palms with gilded leaves.

On low pedestals rising from the rim of the shallow oval basin of the fountain were three nude life-sized shapes delicately tinted, with gilt hair, carmined lips, darkened eyebrows, vague round eyes of pale blue. They had the flattened breasts and narrow hips of masculine adolescence with women's faces and shoulders, arms and thighs. One held a finger hushingly on its lip; another was putting on a black vizard through which its pale eyes peeped slyly, the third was smiling over the rim of a golden drinking-cup. The Three were sharing a pleasant secret between them--or so it had seemed that night to Patrine.

After complying with certain formalities, and paying a heavy fee for admission, Patrine with her friend had passed through to a wonderfully decorated supper-room with a big grill at the end, where white-capped cooks were busy with savoury things. Wind and strings filled the room with great waves of music. Liveried attendants were serving champagne in crystal jugs to men and women seated supping at the daintily-appointed tables. The hot eyes and lividly-pale or purple-flushed faces of many of the revellers, already told their tale of excess.

The champagne at a guinea a jug, a speciality of the Upas, had seemed excellent to Patrine. She was out for enjoyment, and fizz made you feel top-hole. They had supped--was it lobster Americaine or grilled oysters that had preceded the other things?--when there came a change in the music. The unseen orchestra sighing and thrilling forth the amorous phrases of _Samson et Dalila_, leaped all at once into another familiar theme. To wit, the dance of the Jaguars in the Jungle, with its wail, clang, clash and growl as of strange, discordant, exotic instruments.

"Drums covered with serpent-skin, gombos of elephant-tusk, human skull-rattles and all the paraphernalia of Voodoo," to quote Lady Beauvayse.

Couples rose, and began passing out through a wide curtained exit at the farther end of the supper-room. The music grew madder. Patrine, laughing, took von Herrnung's offered arm.

"Now," he told her, "you are going to see something that is very _chic_! We shall dance in the Hall of the Hundred Pillars!"

"How frightfully ripping!" said Patrine.

Thus they joined the mob of people--a singularly quiet mob,--and passed through the heavy, curtained entrance. The much-talked-of Hall was merely a big circular ballroom, lighted by groups of electric lilies, set about with pillars of tinted glass, slanting from a dado of black marble, ending at a broad frieze of black beneath the ceiling-dome. Theatrical and tawdry, gaudy and glittering, the scheme of decoration reminded Patrine of the inside of a solitaire marble. The walls of fierce bright orange were striped in curving oblique and transverse lines of black-and-silver, the silver dome was decorated with similarly curving lines of orange-and-black.

To the strange barbaric music of the dance from Sao Paulo men and women were gyrating and posturing, gliding and pausing, as other men and women had done at the Milles Plaisirs. Presently Patrine and her friend were revolving like the others, in the Valse with the hesitations and the Tango steps in it. You had only to know Tango and the thing came easily--or you imagined it did, after so much champagne. Reflected in the wall and ceiling-mirrors the girl had seen herself, twisting and twirling amidst the mob of dancers, with her head thrown back, and her long eyes blazing, and her wide red mouth laughing wantonly, before the black-and-orange-and-silver walls, the silver-and-black-and-orange dome spun giddily round her with the mob of dancers. Dazed, she had shut her eyes. She had felt herself being hurried somewhere--out of the pillared dancing-hall....

She shivered, lying there in the sunshine remembering.... She recalled von Herrnung's face as they had passed out of velvet-curtained, soundless darkness into a tapestry-hung, softly-carpeted corridor. The inner angles of the eyebrows were lifted, the laughing mouth under the red-rolled moustache displayed the big white teeth in a tigerish way. The pupils of his eyes were dilated, the irises pale as water. He had looked at her curiously, and said with a strange accent:

"So, Isis, you are mine now!"

"I suppose so!"

"I did not suppose so. The experience has been very real for me. Shall we go back--or would you prefer----"

She said with her face turned from him sullenly:

"I should prefer to go--to where I live!"

He had been loth to let her go. Then under a promise of renewal of those strange, shameful, secret relations, he had wrapped her theatre-mantle about her, and helped her arrange her lace scarf about her head, and taken her through a passage back to the vestibule where the three ambiguous statues stood about the central fountain, upon whose restless jet of water played shifting lights of different hues. By some arrangement of those who had planned the Upas, there faced you as you issued with your companion from the furtive side-passage the figure that had its finger on its smiling, carmined lips....

And then--the stale air of London at dawn in midsummer. In the shabby side-street where long ranks of private cars stood waiting, von Herrnung had signalled the chauffeur of one of them--could the man have been the German who had leered at her that day at Hendon?--and then he had put her in, and followed her, and taken her back to Berkeley Square....

It irked her to remember that she had told to the sleepy manservant who had admitted her at 3 A.M. an absolutely supererogatory falsehood to account for her return at that belated hour. For Lady Beau wouldn't have bothered if you'd arrived with the milkman, so long as you turned up smiling at her bedside with your fountain-pen, and her coroneted paper-pad, when she'd had her early grape-fruit, and roll, and coffee, and was ready to tackle her morning mail.

Patrine must be discreet. Cautious. Must tell no lies of the unnecessary kind. For even though von Herrnung had been removed, just when his attitude had become formidable and menacing--there might yet be pitfalls of her own digging to brave and shun.

Pitfalls ... Perils ... As she lay wakeful, conscious through shut eyelids of the white mouldings of the ceiling her face was turned to, suddenly a keen sharp terror ran her through. She had heard her own voice say to von Herrnung:

"My God! Can't you understand that I ask nothing better than never to see nor hear of you again!"

He had mocked her with his hateful smile, and she had not understood.

"Under no--possible conditions? Just think a bit, my dear! Because--to burn one's boats behind one--that is not prudent at all!"

And later:

"You give me to understand that whatever happens--_whatever happens_--you will have nothing more to do with me?"

Idiot!--besotted idiot! She leaped up in the bed, visualising the peril, clearly as though a shutter had snapped back within her brain. Horror froze her, realising the shame she might live to bring upon those who loved Patrine. Uncle Owen ... Lynette ... Bawne....

Mildred and Irma were minor considerations, shadowy silhouettes, negative quantities. Neither Irma nor Mildred had ever loved Patrine. Dad had though. Poor, dear Dad! She was glad he wasn't alive now. And Margot ... Would Kittums cut one if--that happened? And--Sherbrand! A blush burned over her, and she flung herself face downwards, burying her scorching face among the pillows, stifling the scream that the sheer torture wrung from her, by nipping a fold of the smooth linen in her teeth.

So she lay and writhed on the red-hot griddle of her anguished recollection, until a neat housemaid knocked at the door and brought her morning tea. And as she set down the emptied cup, someone else knocked, and opened the door softly, and Patrine turned--to meet the look of Lynette.

And then, though her struggling conscience warned her that she was unworthy to be held in arms so pure, she cried out wildly, and felt herself enfolded, and the fierce emotional tumult within her broke forth in wild sobs and drenching tears. She heard herself saying:

"I would have given my life over and over to have saved you from grief like this!"

And yet these were not the words she would have spoken. We are actors often and often when we least suspect ourselves, even when Calamity with one swift stroke of the scalpel has divided the palpitating flesh and quivering nerves down to the living bone.

"I would have given my life!" she wept, and Lynette seated by the bedside and bending over her, answered tenderly:

"I know it, my kind heart! You have always loved him. You wished him not to go--you begged Owen not to allow----"

There was unutterable loyalty in the breaking of the sentence: "He thought it best. I trust my husband," said the sweet voice. "But yet I thank you, dear one, for your loyalty to me."

"Don't touch me! I'm not fit!" Patrine stammered, resisting the mothering, encircling embrace. But the cup of pure sweetness was held to her feverish lips, she craved it too much to thrust it from her. You can see her coming out of the bed in a galumphing outburst of passionate, remorseful tenderness:

"Here is my place!--here!" she gulped out brokenly, hiding her wet face on the elder woman's knees. Together they made a group not unlike Bouguerau's great canvas of the Consolatrix, save that there was no dead, lovely boy lying amidst the scattered petals of the fallen roses on the stone. Perhaps if there had been and the worst known, Bawne Saxham's mother could hardly have suffered more.

Not to understand ... not to be sure. To be bereaved, and never to know just how the Beloved was taken from you.... Can there be anything more fantastically horrible than this, the fate of thousands of sorrowing women since the beginning of the Great War?

It was Sunday morning, brilliant and hot even for July weather. The clangour of church-bells mingled with the clashing of milk-cans, and the scent of pot-roses mingled with the hot smell of London in midsummer. Lynette shivered in spite of the sultriness, and looked down at the girl, spilt out at her knees under the meretricious splendour of her dead beech-leaf hair. She did not--how could she?--fathom the secret of such wretchedness, but love and pity flooded her heart, thawed out of its frozen misery by the vital warmth of the contact. She drew the unresisting arms upwards and about her, and lifted the prone head and took it to her bosom, saying:

"My poor girl! My dear Patrine!"

They were silent awhile. Then Lynette asked, her soft breath stirring the heavy tresses:

"Why did you do this, dearest? Wasn't it sufficiently beautiful?"

Patrine choked out, blazing crimson to the tips of her little ears:

"No! At least!--It is hideous now and he hated it! I--I had to tell him," a sob and a laugh tangled together, "it was the effect of Paris air!"

Lynette smiled, though the golden eyes were running over: "Bawne thinks so much of you, always!"

"I don't deserve that any one should!"

"Nobody shall speak ill before me of any one I care for! Why did you start?"

For a vision had flashed into the brain of Patrine, of all the world mocking and jeering and vilifying, and Saxham and Lynette upholding and defending David's daughter, who had brought disgrace upon them. She lifted her head and released herself almost roughly from Lynette's embrace. She stooped down and took the hem of Mrs. Saxham's gown and kissed it, and rose up looking wonderfully big and stately, and extraordinarily tall.

"I love you!" she said in her large warm voice. "You are the best woman I ever met or shall meet, and I am a rotten bad hat! Not worth a penn'orth of monkey-nuts, take my word for it! But--if somebody like you had been my mother--perhaps there'd have been something to show for it to-day."

Lynette might have replied, but just then through the quiet house, unnaturally still without the boyish voice and the boyish laughter, and the clumping of little thick-soled brogues upon the stairs and in the passages, there sounded the sharp whirring ting-a-ting of the hall telephone-bell. She turned and was gone with no more noise than a thrush makes in departure. Left alone, Patrine threw on her bathrobe over the thin nightgown of revealing transparency, lined with the opulent beauty that captures the desires of men, and looked at her fair reflection in the long cheval-glass, smiling with something of the subtlety of the androgynous genius of the Upas Club fountain--the figure that faced the guests as they entered, tying a vizard over its mocking eyes.

"You're worse even than I thought you!" Patrine said calmly to Patrine, "but now you know what he meant by what he said, you're not going to trust to Chance and Luck. You're going--for Uncle Owen's sake, and Aunt Lynette's, and Bawne's--and Mother's and Irma's and your own--don't pretend you're a victim!--to marry Sherbrand, the Flying Man!"

Not a notion of any possible or eventual wrong or injury to Sherbrand troubled her conscience. She had yet to develop on the side of moral sensitiveness. Responsibility towards God, and duty towards her neighbour--the sense of these two obligations that are the foundation and cornerstone of Christianity--had not as yet awakened in Patrine.

She liked Sherbrand. It troubled her more that he had not the _cachet_ of one of the great public Schools, than to know him poor, with his four hundred _per annum_--as the proverbial church-mouse. But she herself was not altogether penniless. There would be a hundred and fifty pounds a year for Patrine when she married; derived from moneys bequeathed to his daughter's children by Grandpapa Lee Hailey, strictly tied up and protected by various legal provisos, from depredations on the part of the unknown possessive male.

Five hundred and fifty between them. Anyhow, she told herself, that was better than a jab in the eye with a burnt stick. How soon might the marriage be brought off? One must bend one's energies to the solving of that question. How many sleepless nights--they were horribly unbecoming!--lay between Patrine and Security? The Fear that lurked in her dried her palate at the question. She felt like the runner of a Marathon fainting in sight of the goal.

*CHAPTER XLV*

*FLOTSAM FROM THE NORTH SEA*

On Monday morning, July 20th, under a flying double-column of Naval Goody Two Shoes and aeroplanes, the King led forth his Fleets for tactical exercises in the Channel. There were pictures on the screens at the music-halls that night and for many nights after, that evoked from huge audiences tremendous outbursts of patriotic clapping. Hence first blood in the Great War scores to Lil, belonging to the most ancient of all professions--who had accepted the invitation proffered by a Teutonic stranger to join the familiar crowd on the Empire Promenade.

The German paid for drinks. A friend joined him. There were more drinks, and the two men began to talk, discussing the _ultimatum_ expected from Austria-Hungary, and the inevitable refusal of Belgrade to eat Vienna humble-pie. War with Russia must ensue. They were cheering in Berlin that night for _Krieg mit Russland_.

"It must come sometime," said Lil's patron in an undertone to his crony. "Why then should it not happen now?"

"War with Russia means war with France!" the other returned in the same key.

"And war with France a reckoning with these pig-dogs!" snarled Lil's temporary owner. "If the Serbians and Russes are to be smacked--good! If the French--good also! If the English, a thousand times the better!"

"Let us hope," said the more placable Teuton, emptying his second liqueur-glass of Kuemmel--"that it will not be this time as at the affair of Agadir!"

"We are ready!" said Lil's patron with an oath. "We have seven millions of men ready, and two thousand millions of cartridges, and for shell--one would not have dreamed the world held so much steel packed with super-explosive. No, no! _Diesmal wird es nicht sein wie in der Agadir!_"

He inquired as they left the bar and moved to where Lil, steeped in the Pictures, was standing at the front of the Promenade:

"What are these _Gottverflucht_ jackasses braying about?"

The jackasses were lustily cheering the portrait of Admiral Sir John Rushworth Jellicoe, Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet--now flung upon the screen. And the jackasses got upon their feet with a sound as though the packed house were tumbling to pieces, and the Orchestra changed on the final bar of "Rule Britannia!" and the more belligerent of the two Teutons leaned over the barricade and hissed malignantly, as wind and strings crashed tumultuously into "God save the King!"

The row broke out in the Promenade as the Royal portrait flashed out and faded. A German voice swore shrilly, another expostulated, and a woman screamed and screamed....

"'Ere! What's up, what's up now along o' you, young woman?" demanded a burly gold-braided Commissionaire, thrusting through the staring crowd that had gathered. He dragged Lil, still screeching and clawing, from the windpipe of her dishevelled patron, adding, "Do you call this pretty be'aviour? I'm ashamed o' you--I am!"

"He hissed.... The ---- hissed the King!" Lil gasped, scarlet and vituperative and still clawing. "Let me git at 'im! Let me----"

"No, hold her tight! It is a lie! She is drunk!" snarled the German who had hissed. His necktie, a choice thing in Berlin haberdashery, much sported on the Unter den Linden, was plucked up by the roots, and a broad bleeding scratch adorned his flushed and angry features. But at the suggestion that he should give the offender in charge of the Police, he melted with his companion into the thinnest of thin air, and Lil did not spend the night in the cells at Wine Street Police-Station. There ought to have been a paragraph in the _Daily Teller_ or the _Morning Wire_, but it was crowded out by the report--in leaded type--of von Herrnung's death and that of the boy, his volunteer passenger, the only son of Dr. Owen Saxham, M.D., F.R.C.S., M.V.O., whose distinguished share in the Defence of Gueldersdorp would always be remembered, etc., etc., even now that the frank, manly, and courageous policy of General Botha had established permanent and solid ties of friendship between the Briton and the Boer.