GRATITUDE.
“On se guérit de la bienfaisance par la connaissance de ceux qu'on
oblige.”
“Can you tell me if there is a moon to-night?” Mrs. Vansittart asked a
porter in the railway station at The Hague.
The man stared at her for a moment, then realized that the question was
a serious one.
“I will ask one of the engine-drivers, my lady,” he answered, with his
hand at the peak of his cap.
It was past nine o'clock, and Mrs. Vansittart had been waiting nearly
half an hour for the Flushing train. Her carriage was walking slowly up
and down beneath the glass roof of the entrance to the railway station.
She had taken a ticket in order to gain access to the platform, and was
almost alone there with the porters. Her glance travelled backwards and
forwards between the clock and the western sky, visible beneath the
great arch of the station. The evening was a clear one, for the month
of June still lingered, but the twilight was at hand. The Flushing
train was late to-night of all nights; and Mrs. Vansittart stamped her
foot with impatience. What was worse was Dorothy Roden's lateness.
Dorothy and Mrs. Vansittart, like two generals on the eve of a battle,
had been exchanging hurried notes all day; and Dorothy had promised to
meet Mrs. Vansittart at the station on the arrival of the train.
“The moon is rising now, my lady--a half-moon,” said the porter
approaching with that leisureliness which characterizes railway porters
between trains.
“Why does your stupid train not come?” asked Mrs. Vansittart, with
unreasoning anger.
“It has been signalled, my lady; a few minutes now.”
Mrs. Vansittart gave a quick sigh of relief, and turned on her heel.
She had long been unable to remain quietly in one place. She saw
Dorothy coming up the slope to the platform. At last matters were
taking a turn for the better--except, indeed, Dorothy's face, which was
set and white.
“I have found out something,” she said at once, and speaking quickly
but steadily. “It is for to-night, between half-past nine and ten.”
She had her watch in her hand, and compared it quickly with the station
clock as she spoke.
“I have secured Uncle Ben,” she said--all the ridicule of the name
seemed to have vanished long ago. “He is drunk, and therefore cunning.
It is only when he is sober that he is stupid. I have him in a cab
downstairs, and have told your man to watch him. I have been to Mr.
Cornish's rooms again, and he has not come in. He has not been in since
morning, and they do not know where he is. No one knows where he is.”
Dorothy's lip quivered for a moment, and she held it with her teeth.
Mrs. Vansittart touched her arm lightly with her gloved fingers--a
strange, quick, woman's gesture.
“I went upstairs to his rooms,” continued Dorothy. “It is no good
thinking of etiquette now or pretending----”
“No,” said Mrs. Vansittart, hurriedly, so that the sentence was never
finished.
“I found nothing except two torn envelopes in the waste-paper basket.
One in an uneducated hand--perhaps feigned. The other was Otto von
Holzen's writing.”
“Ah! In Otto von Holzen's writing--addressed to Tony at the Zwaan at
Scheveningen?”
“Yes.”
“Then Otto von Holzen knows where Tony is staying, at all events. We
have learnt something. You have kept the envelopes?”
“Yes.”
They both turned at the rumble of the train outside the station. The
great engine came clanking in over the points, its lamp glaring like
the eye of some monster.
“Provided Major White is in the train,” muttered Mrs. Vansittart,
tapping on the pavement with her foot. “If he is not in the train,
Dorothy?”
“Then we must go alone.”
Mrs. Vansittart turned and looked her slowly up and down.
“You are a brave woman,” she said thoughtfully.
But Major White was in the train, being a man of his word in small
things as well as in great. They saw him pushing his way patiently
through the crowd of hotel porters and others who had advice or their
services to offer him. Then he saw Mrs. Vansittart and Dorothy, and
recognized them.
“Give your luggage ticket to the hotel porter and let him take it
straight to the hotel. You are wanted elsewhere.”
Still Major White was only in his normal condition of mild and patient
surprise. He had only met Mrs. Vansittart once, and Dorothy as often.
He did exactly as he was told without asking one of those hundred
questions which would inevitably have been asked by many men and more
women under such circumstances, and followed the ladies out of the
crowd.
“We must talk here,” said Mrs. Vansittart. “One cannot do so in a
carriage in the streets of The Hague.”
Major White bowed gravely, and looked from one to the other. He was
rather travel-worn, and seemed to be feeling the heat.
“Tony Cornish has probably written to you about his discoveries as to
the malgamite works. We have no time to go into that question,
however,” said Mrs. Vansittart, who was already beginning to be
impatient with this placid man. “He has earned the enmity of Otto von
Holzen--a man who will stop at nothing--and the malgamiters are being
raised against him by Von Holzen. Our information is very vague, but we
are almost certain that an attempt is to be made on Tony's life
to-night between half-past nine and ten. You understand?” Mrs.
Vansittart almost stamped her foot.
“Oh yes,” answered White, looking at the station clock. “Twenty
minutes' time.”
“We have the information from one of the malgamiters themselves, who
knows the time and the place, but he is tipsy. He is in a carriage
outside the station.”
“How tipsy?” asked Major White; and both his hearers shrugged their
shoulders.
“How can we tell you that?” snapped Mrs. Vansittart; and Major White
dropped his glass from his eye.
“Where is your brother?” he said, turning to Dorothy. He was evidently
rather afraid of Mrs. Vansittart, as a quick-spoken person not likely
to have patience with a slow man.
“He has gone to Utrecht,” answered Dorothy. “And Mr. von Holzen is not
at the works, which are locked up. I have just come from there. By a
lucky chance I met this man Ben, and have brought him here.”
White looked at Dorothy thoughtfully, and something in his gaze made
her change colour.
“Let me see this man,” he said, moving towards the exit.
“He is in that carriage,” said Dorothy, when they had reached a quiet
corner of the station yard. “You must be quick. We have only a quarter
of an hour now. He is an Englishman.”
White got into the cab with Uncle Ben, who appeared to be sleeping, and
closed the door after him. In a few moments he emerged again.
“Tell the man to drive to a chemist's,” he said to Mrs. Vansittart.
“The fellow is not so bad. I have got something out of him, and will
get more. Follow in your carriage--you and Miss Roden.”
It was Major White's turn now to take the lead, and Mrs. Vansittart
meekly obeyed, though White's movements were so leisurely as to madden
her.
At the chemist's shop, White descended from the carriage and appeared
to have some language in common with the druggist, for he presently
returned to the carriage, carrying a tumbler. After a moment he went to
the window of Mrs. Vansittart's neat brougham.
“I must bring him in here,” he said. “You have a pair of horses which
look as if they could go. Tell your man to drive to the pumping-station
on the Dunes, wherever that may be.”
Then he went and fetched Uncle Ben, whom he brought by one arm, in a
dislocated condition, trotting feebly to keep pace with the major's
long stride.
Mrs. Vansittart's coachman must have received very decided orders, for
he skirted the town at a rattling trot, and soon emerged from the
streets into the quiet of the Wood, which was dark and deserted. Here,
in a sandy and lonely alley, he put the horses to a gallop. The
carriage swayed and bumped. Those inside exchanged no words. From time
to time Major White shook Uncle Ben, which seemed to be a part of his
strenuous treatment.
At length the carriage stopped on the narrow road, paved with the
little bricks they make at Gouda, that leads from Scheveningen to the
pumping-station on the Dunes. Major White was the first to quit it,
dragging Uncle Ben unceremoniously after him. Then, with his disengaged
hand, he helped the ladies. He screwed his glass tightly into his eye,
and looked round him with a measuring glance.
“This place will be as light as day,” he said, “when the moon rises
from behind those trees.”
He drew Uncle Ben aside, and talked with him for some time in a low
voice. The man was almost sober now, but so weak that he could not
stand without assistance. Major White was an advocate, it seemed, of
heroic measures. He appeared to be asking many questions, for Uncle Ben
pointed from time to time with an unsteady hand into the darkness. When
his mind, muddled with malgamite and drink, failed to rise to the
occasion, Major White shook him like a sack. After a few minutes'
conversation, Ben broke down completely, and sat against a sand-bank to
weep. Major White left him there, and went towards the ladies.
“Will you tell your man,” he said to Mrs. Vansittart, “to drive back to
the junction of the two roads and wait there under the trees?” He
paused, looking dubiously from one to the other. “And you and Miss
Roden had better go back with him and stay in the carriage.”
“No,” said Dorothy, quietly.
“Oh no!” added Mrs. Vansittart.
And Major White moistened his lips with an air of patient toleration
for the ways of a sex which had ever been far beyond his comprehension.
“It seems,” he said, when the carriage had rolled away over the noisy
stones, “that we are in good time. They do not expect him until nearly
ten. He has been attempting for some time to get the men to refuse to
work, and these same men have written to ask him to meet them at the
works at ten o'clock, when Roden is at Utrecht, and Von Holzen is out.
There is no question of reaching the works at all. They are going to
lie in ambush in a hollow of the Dunes, and knock him on the head about
half a mile from here north-east.” And Major White paused in this great
conversational effort to consult a small gold compass attached to his
watch-chain.
The two women waited patiently.
“Fine place, these Dunes,” said the major, after a pause. “Could
conceal three thousand men between here and Scheveningen.”
“But it is not a question of hiding soldiers,” said Mrs. Vansittart,
sharply, with a movement of the head indicative of supreme contempt.
“No,” admitted White. “Better hide ourselves, perhaps. No good standing
here where everybody can see us. I'll fetch our friend. Think he'll
sleep if we let him. Chemist gave him enough to kill a horse.”
“But haven't you any plans?” asked Mrs. Vansittart, in despair. “What
are you going to do? You are not going to let these brutes kill Tony
Cornish? Surely you, as a soldier, must know how to meet this crisis.”
“Oh yes. Not much of a soldier, you know,” answered White, soothingly,
as he moved away towards Uncle Ben. “But I think I know how this
business ought to be managed. Come along--hide ourselves.”
He led the way across the dunes, dragging Uncle Ben by one arm, and
keeping in the hollows. The two women followed in silence on the silent
sand.
Once Major White paused and looked back. “Don't talk,” he said, holding
up a large fat hand in a ridiculous gesture of warning, which he must
have learnt in the nursery. He looked like a large baby listening for a
bogey in the chimney.
Once or twice he consulted Uncle Ben, and as often glanced at his
compass. There was a certain skill in his attitude and demeanour, as if
he knew exactly what he was about. Mrs. Vansittart had a hundred
questions to ask him, but they died on her lips. The moon rose suddenly
over the distant trees and flooded all the sand-hills with light. Major
White halted his little party in a deep hollow, and consulted Uncle Ben
in whispers. Then bidding him sit down, he left the three alone in
their hiding-place, and went away by himself. He climbed almost to the
summit of a neighbouring mound, and stopped suddenly, with his face
uplifted, as if smelling something. Like many short-sighted persons, he
had a keen scent. In a few minutes he came back again.
“I have found them,” he whispered to Mrs. Vansittart and Dorothy.
“Smelt 'em--like sealing-wax. Eleven of them--waiting there for
Cornish.” And he smiled with a sort of boyish glee.
“What are you going to do?” whispered Mrs. Vansittart.
“Thump them,” he answered, and presently went back to his post of
observation.
Uncle Ben had fallen asleep, and the two women stood side by side
waiting in the moonlight. It was chilly, and a keen wind swept in from
the sea. Dorothy shivered. They could hear certain notes of certain
instruments in the band of the Scheveningen Kurhaus, nearly two miles
away. It was strange to be within sound of such evidences of
civilization, and yet in such a lonely spot--strange to reflect that
eleven men were waiting within a few yards of them to murder one. And
yet they could safely have carried out their intention, and have
scraped a hole in the sand to hide his body, in the certainty that it
would never be found; for these dunes are a miniature desert of Sahara,
where nothing bids men leave the beaten paths, where certain hollows
have probably never been trodden by the foot of man, and where the
ever-drifting sand slowly accumulates--a very abomination of
desolation.
At length White rose to his feet agilely enough, and crept to the brow
of the dune. The men were evidently moving. Mrs. Vansittart and Dorothy
ascended the bank to the spot just vacated by White.
Only a few dozen yards away they could see the black forms of the
malgamiters grouped together under the covert of a low hillock. Hidden
from their sight, Major White was slowly stalking them.
Dorothy touched Mrs. Vansittart's arm, and pointed silently in the
direction of Scheveningen. A man was approaching, alone, across the
silvery sand-hills. It was Tony Cornish, walking into the trap laid for
him.
Major White saw him also, and thinking himself unobserved, or from mere
habit acquired among his men, he moistened the tips of his fingers at
his lips.
The malgamiters moved forward, and White followed them. They took up a
position in a hollow a few yards away from the foot-path by which
Cornish must pass. One of their number remained behind, crouching on a
mound, and evidently reporting progress to his companions below. When
Cornish was within a hundred yards of the ambush, White suddenly ran up
the bank, and lifting this man bodily, threw him down among his
comrades. He followed this vigorous attack by charging down into the
confused mass. In a few moments the malgamiters streamed away across
the sand-hills like a pack of hounds, though pursued and not pursuing.
They left some of their number on the sand behind them, for White was a
hard hitter.
“Give it to them, Tony!” White cried, with a ring of exultation in his
voice. “Knock 'em down as they come!”
For there was only one path, and the malgamiters had to run the
gauntlet of Tony Cornish, who knocked some of them over neatly enough
as they passed, selecting the big ones, and letting the others go free.
He knew them by the smell of their clothes, and guessed their intention
readily enough.
It was a strange scene, and one that left the two women, watching it,
breathless and eager.
“Oh, I wish I were a man!” exclaimed Mrs. Vansittart, with clenched
fists.
They hurried toward Cornish and White, who were now alone on the path.
White had rolled up his sleeve, and was tying his handkerchief round
his arm with his other hand and his teeth.
“It is nothing,” he said. “One of the devils had a knife. Must get my
sleeve mended to-morrow.”