“YOU seem to have managed your little affair rather clumsily,” said
Baltazar.
“What’s he doing here?” she asked wildly.
“Probably catching you and Godfrey.”
“He mustn’t see Godfrey here.”
“That’s easily managed,” said Baltazar. “I’ll send him flying out of the
telephone box. But what on earth could have put your husband on the
track? What indiscretion have you been committing?”
“I left a letter for him telling him I wouldn’t stay any longer in his
house. He’s a traitor to his country.”
Baltazar threw up his hands. “Oh, Lord! The usual idiocy. For a clever
woman—well! Anyhow, I’ll head off Godfrey. When your husband spots you,
use your brains. Don’t say a word to give yourself away.”
“You’ll come back?” she cried, losing her head.
“I’ll see,” said he.
He left her, and fetched a compass round the station, mingling as much
as possible with the never-ceasing throng of soldiers and civilians and
women and luggage, until he arrived at the row of telephone boxes. There
he found Godfrey, waiting his turn and fuming at the delay.
“My boy,” said he, “here are all the elements of a first-class farce.
The injured husband, Edgar Donnithorpe, has turned up. You had better
make tracks as quick as you can.”
“I suppose you gave him the hint,” snarled the young man, with set
teeth.
“You’re insulting your own blood to make such a damfool remark,” said
Baltazar. “Go home, and stay there till I come.”
Godfrey met the infernal eyes and, for all his anger and humiliation,
knew that he had accused basely.
“I apologize, sir,” said he, in his most haughty and military manner,
and marched off.
Baltazar hesitated. Should he or should he not return to Lady Edna? If
he had escaped the eye of Edgar Donnithorpe, it were better to leave
Lady Edna, injured innocent, to tell her tale of solitary retirement to
sylvan depths where she could be remote from the consequences of his
political turpitude. On the other hand, if he had been observed, or if
Lady Edna had avowed his presence, his abandonment of her might be
idiotically interpreted. He decided to return.
He saw them at once through the moving traffic: the husband, his back
towards him, gripping a handle of the truck on which the luggage was
piled; the wife facing him, an ironical smile on her lips. A devilish
handsome woman, thought Baltazar. The boy had taste. There she stood,
slim, distinguished in her simple fawn coat and skirt and little hat to
match, beneath which waved her dark brown hair, very cool, aristocratic
and defiant. Baltazar came up to them.
“Ah, Donnithorpe!”
The thin, grey man wheeled round, and then Baltazar realized that he had
made the wrong decision, for he was the last man the other expected to
see.
“You? What are you doing here?” he shouted.
“Hush!” said Lady Edna, with a touch on his arm. “You’re not at home or
in the House of Commons. You’re in a public place, and you’ll get a
crowd round us in no time. Let us pretend we’re a merry party going on a
holiday.”
Edgar Donnithorpe threw an anxious glance round to see if they had
attracted undesired attention. But people passed them by or stood in
knots near them, unheeding, intent on their own affairs.
“I ask you,” he said in a low voice, “what you are doing at this railway
station with my wife?”
Baltazar, his felt hat at the back of his head and his hands thrust into
his trousers’ pockets beneath the skirts of his buttoned-up,
double-breasted jacket, eyed him in exasperating amusement.
“I am seeing Lady Edna off on a railway journey. Was it necessary to ask
your permission?”
Lady Edna laughed mockingly. “As far as I can make out, my husband
expected to find me eloping with your son Godfrey.”
Donnithorpe shifted his eyes from one to the other, looking at them
evilly.
“He was with you for nearly a couple of hours to-day. I had my own very
good reasons for suspicion. I went round to your house, Mr. Baltazar,
and asked for your son. I saw your Chinese secretary——” He caught
Baltazar’s involuntary sudden frown and angry flush. “In justice,” he
continued in his thin, sneering manner, “I must absolve him from
indiscretion. He knows my position in the Government, and when I
informed him that it was imperative I should see your son on important
political business, he told me I should find him at Waterloo station.”
“You overreached yourself,” said Baltazar with a bantering grin.
“Godfrey knows no more about politics than a tom-cat. Quong Ho naturally
thought you meant me. You came. Here I am, seeing your wife off. She
telephoned me that she was leaving your house—going to stay with
friends—wanted a man of the world’s advice on the serious step she was
taking—woman-like, of course, she took the step first, and asked for
advice afterwards—and I naturally put myself at her ladyship’s
disposal. Don’t you think you had better let Lady Edna get on with her
journey? Here’s her porter. Come with me and see her safe into her
carriage.”
He was enjoying himself amazingly. Donnithorpe, baffled, tugged at his
thin grey moustache. The porter came up, touching his cap.
“Time’s getting on, ma’am. I’ve reserved the two seats——”
“One seat,” said Lady Edna swiftly.
“Beg your pardon, ma’am. I thought you said the gentleman was going with
you.”
“One seat. I said I was meeting a gentleman.”
The porter wheeled off the luggage. Lady Edna turned to follow, but her
husband gripped her viciously by the wrist.
“Not yet.”
“Drop that,” growled Baltazar.
Donnithorpe released her, plunged his hand into his breast pocket and
drew out a couple of sheets of paper.
“You did say two seats. You meant to go off with him. There’s some
damned trickery about it. But I’ve got the whip hand, my lady. Just look
at this before you go.”
Lady Edna turned ghastly white and clutched Baltazar’s arm to steady
herself from the sickening shock. In the desperate rush, after Godfrey’s
departure, the scheming, the packing, the telephoning, the temporary
straightening of affairs, the chase over London for the complaisant
friend whose connivance was essential, the eagerness to get free of the
house before her husband should return, she had forgotten the scrap of
paper in her secret drawer, with its obsolete information. Now the
horror flashed on her. Her husband had gone to the drawer before. Hence
the article in Fordyce’s paper. Her first instinct had been right. He
had gone to the drawer again. Her swaying brain wondered how he had
discovered the secret of the spring. But he had found the paper which in
her folly she had not destroyed—and what else besides? She heard, as in
a dream, her husband saying:
“If he isn’t your lover, what about these? Here’s proof. Here’s a matter
of court-martial and gaol.”
She regained her self-control with a great effort, still holding to
Baltazar. “You hound!” she whispered.
Baltazar, smitten with the realization that comedy had vanished—the
comedy in which he had played so debonair and masterly a part—vanished
in the flash of a cinematographic film, and that something very near
tragedy was staring him in the face, stretched out his hand for the
papers.
“Let me see.”
But Donnithorpe smiled his thin, derisive smile. “No. They’re too
precious. I’ll hold them for you to look at. Keep away.”
And there, in the airless glass-roofed railway station, on that hot
summer afternoon, in the midst of the reverberating noises of trains
letting off steam, of a thousand human voices, of scurrying feet, of
grating luggage trunks, in the midst of a small town’s moving and
lounging population, surging now, at that hour’s height of the suburban
traffic with home-going streams; there, with hundreds of eyes to watch
them, hundreds of ears to hear them, hundreds of successive ears of
people darting bee-like around the busy bookstall not ten yards away,
there three quietly talking human beings stood at grips with destiny.
“This is written on your notepaper. It is a War Office secret. It
reveals the whole strategy of the High Command.”
Baltazar’s lips grew grim and his eyes bent on the little man burned
like fires. In Donnithorpe’s hands the document was Godfrey’s death
warrant.
Then Baltazar remembered the shock he had received in Sheepshanks’s room
at Cambridge when first he saw a letter of Godfrey’s, and Godfrey’s
after explanation of the identity of their handwriting.
“Don’t you see? It gives the whole thing away,” Donnithorpe continued.
“I’m quite aware of it,” said Baltazar. “I drew it up for your wife.”
“You?” exclaimed Donnithorpe in incredulous amazement, while Lady Edna
caught a sharp breath and clung more fiercely to Baltazar’s arm. “Where
did you get your information from?”
“I am to be Minister of the new department in a day or two,” said
Baltazar, “and I’m in the inner confidence of the War Cabinet.”
“But it’s in your son’s handwriting!”
“It’s my handwriting,” said Baltazar calmly.
He drew from his pocket a sheaf of notes for a speech and handed them to
Donnithorpe. “Compare, if you like.”
Donnithorpe returned them with a curious thin snarl and held out the
other paper.
“Then you wrote this too?”
Baltazar glanced at it. It was the first sheet of a letter from which
the other sheet had been torn. Lady Edna saw it and again swayed, half
fainting with sickening humiliation. The only one of Godfrey’s
letters—and only part of one—which she had kept: two pages breathing
such a passionate love as she had never dreamed that a man in real life
could express to woman. She had forgotten that she had left that, too,
in the secret drawer. She stared haggardly into Baltazar s face. His
lips twisted into a smile.
“Yes. I wrote that too,” said he.
“Then you’re a damned villain!” cried Donnithorpe.
“Very possibly,” said Baltazar.
Donnithorpe turned in his rat-like way to his wife.
“What have you to say about it?”
Suddenly recovered from her fit of terror and shame, she withdrew her
grip from Baltazar’s arm and held herself up with the scornful poise of
her head.
“Nothing,” she said. “You can flatter yourself now you know everything.”
He did not heed her words, but once more looked from one to the other
with a thin, chuckling laugh.
“You’re a pretty pair. You, my lady. And you, Mr. Minister of Publicity.
It strikes me you’ll have to postpone your elopement.”
“You’ve got elopement on the brain, my good fellow,” said Baltazar. “A
Minister of Publicity doesn’t elope with a lady with nothing but what he
stands up in. Where’s my luggage?”
“There,” replied Donnithorpe, pointing to the barriers to the platform.
“Didn’t the porter say she had ordered two seats—one for a gentleman?”
“This is getting wearisome,” said Lady Edna. “I’ve already told you how
the mistake arose.”
The solicitous porter, already rewarded with five shillings, and
belonging to a race as richly endowed with human failings as any other
in the world, hurried up.
“I’ve found a corner seat, ma’am. Put everything into the carriage.
You’ve not much time left.”
Suddenly she became aware of the awful desolation that awaited her in
the remote cottage in the New Forest with one horrible old servant woman
for company. Within her feminine unreason clamoured. No, no! She
revolted against the grotesque absurdity of such comfortless living
burial. She would go mad, cut off from every opportunity of hearing
instant developments of this nerve-racking situation. She couldn’t stick
it.
“I’ve changed my mind, porter. I’m not going. Get my things out and
bring them back.”
“Certainly, ma’am.”
The porter ran off. Baltazar thrust his hands again into his trousers’
pockets. His face was a grim mask.
“Why don’t you get your luggage out too?” sneered Donnithorpe.
“Don’t be a brainless fool,” said Baltazar.
The fingers in his pockets twitched, and Lady Edna caught a malevolent
flash in his eyes that made her shiver. He would have liked to wring her
neck. Why the devil didn’t she play the game and go to the cottage and
the old woman? He read her through and through. And mingled with his
contempt ran a thrill of gladness. Godfrey was well rid of her.
Donnithorpe cackled at his abjuration. He turned to Lady Edna.
“You haven’t condescended to tell me where you were going.”
“I was going, if you want to know, to stay with Sybil Manning at her
little place in the New Forest.”
“Indeed?” said her husband, in his rasping voice, and a gleam of triumph
sparkled in his crafty eyes. “Now it happens that I, not being quite the
fool you and Mr. Baltazar have thought me, rang up Lady Manning. It was
the first thing I did when I read your letter. I knew you would bolt,
straight to her. I’ve often thought of bringing in a Bill in Parliament
to deprive her of existence. She answered me herself. She had heard
nothing of you, knew nothing of you.”
“Naturally,” she said jeeringly. “But,” she added, carrying the war into
enemy’s quarters, “she knows everything about you. Everything, my
friend. So will the Prime Minister.”
“I was with the Prime Minister this morning,” said Donnithorpe. “I told
him all about my Saturday evening’s effort in the cause of solidarity.
We parted the best of friends, and my position is secure.”
“What about Fordyce’s article this morning?”
“This morning I couldn’t conceive how the fellow had got the
information. This evening or to-morrow morning”—he tapped his breast
pocket—“if I am asked, I can point to a dual source of leakage.”
He folded his arms, the crafty political intriguer, thin and triumphant.
“Of us two,” said Baltazar, “it strikes me that you are the damnder
scoundrel.”
“What you think is a matter of perfect indifference to me,” retorted
Donnithorpe. “What does interest me is the fact that my wife was going
to stay with Lady Manning in the New Forest while Lady Manning is in
London, and that when I find her here with you, she decides not to go to
the New Forest after all.”
Lady Edna flushed angrily. She was out-manœuvred, outclassed, beaten on
all sides by the thin grey man whom she despised. She had acted like a
brainless, immoral schoolgirl.
“Where do you propose to go now?” asked Donnithorpe.
She spat her venom at him. “Anywhere to get out of the sight of you.
Yes, I was going alone to Sybil Manning’s cottage. I had just left her
when you telephoned. I wanted to get as far away from you as I could and
from the disgusting impressions of the last few days. Now the whole
thing would be spoiled by this abominable insult. I shall stay with my
mother to-night and go down to Moulsford to-morrow.”
“I’m glad,” replied Donnithorpe acidly, “you’re not thinking of
returning to my house. I’m not going to have any plea of condonation.”
Lady Edna moved away haughtily toward the barriers.
“I see my porter. Mr. Baltazar, will you kindly put me into a taxi?”
“No, he shan’t. You shall go in my car.”
Baltazar, in a cold fury, stood over him threateningly.
“You stay here,” said he, “or by the living God I’ll half kill you!”
He caught up Lady Edna and followed with her in the wake of the porter.
She said: “I owe you a debt of gratitude which I can’t ever repay.”
He felt merciless towards her, murderous. “You let that boy alone, do
you hear? You’ve come within a hair’s-breadth of blasting his life. It
remains yet to be seen whether that hair’s-breadth will save him——”
“I’d do anything in my power——” she began.
“For God’s sake stop doing things. Hold your tongue. You’ve been
criminal in your piling folly on folly. You’ve done enough.”
“But you——?”
“I can take care of myself—and the boy, if you keep quiet. You’ve got
to remember the position. I’m your lover. Avowed before your husband by
both of us—you implicitly. You’re not to lose sight of that fact.
Understand? If you hold any communication with Godfrey, you’ll get him
court-martialled. Disgraced, probably imprisoned. And then, by God! I
won’t have any pity on you.”
Talking thus they reached the outer platform of the station and waited
while the porter secured a taxi. She whispered, for they were brushed by
the throng of passengers arriving and departing:
“If Edgar brings a divorce action——? He’s vindictive——”
“He’ll bring no action, if you stop playing the fool. I’d advise you not
to interfere with my game.”
The porter swung from the step of the taxi bringing a new arrival, and
as soon as the latter, a young officer with a suit-case, had alighted
and paid his fare, he piled in Lady Edna’s belongings. She entered the
cab very white and scared. Godfrey had told her enough about his father
for her to realize the unyielding nature of the man. She was terrified,
cowed. He blazed before her irresistibly elemental. . . . She carried
away with her a blurred impression of his thatch of brown hair coarse
and strong like the crown of some relentless beast as he lifted his hat
when the taxi drove off. She shuddered, and hated him.
* * * * *
Baltazar let himself into the house in Sussex Gardens, and went straight
to Godfrey’s room. He found him writing hard. When the young man sprang
up, his quiet eye noted the desk strewn with many sheets of notepaper.
“Writing to her, I suppose.”
“It’s not altogether unnatural,” Godfrey replied in stiff hostility.
“Where are you going to address it?”
Godfrey, looking into the infernal eyes, saw that it was not an idle and
impertinent question. Besides, he had spent a very agitated hour, gnawed
by bitter disappointment and impotent anger and torturing his brain with
conjecture as to what had happened.
“Where is Lady Edna, sir?” he asked.
“She has gone to stay with Lady Ralston.”
“Her mother?”
“The Dowager Countess of Ralston is, I believe, her mother,” said
Baltazar.
He threw himself into a chair and mopped his forehead.
“Why the devil don’t you open a window?”
“I didn’t notice,” said Godfrey, and went and threw up the sash.
It was a cosy room at the back of the house, the smoking den of the late
dead owner, furnished with green leather arm-chairs drawn up at each end
of a green leather-covered fender-seat, with a great green
leather-cushioned Chesterfield, with solid comfortable mahogany tables,
writing-desk and bookcases. On the walls hung well-framed old engravings
of solid worth, and Godfrey had added a little armoury of war trophies,
Hun helmets, rifles, flare pistols, gas-masks, bayonets, gleaming shell
cases of all sizes, a framed blood-stained letter or two in German
script. . . . A cosy room more suitable for a winter’s evening than a
close summer afternoon. Baltazar filled his lungs with the fresher air.
“That’s better,” said he.
Godfrey stood by the fireplace, his face set and unyielding.
“Perhaps you might tell me, sir, what has happened. What brought
Donnithorpe to the station?”
“The hope of catching you, my son, _in flagrante delicto_ of elopement.”
“Quong Ho was sure that he wanted you.”
“Quong Ho made a mistake. Donnithorpe was exceedingly surprised to find
me.”
There was a long pause, during which Baltazar bent his disconcerting and
luminous gaze on the young man.
“Godfrey,” he said at last, “what made you such an infatuated fool as to
give away War Office secrets in writing to that woman?”
A look of horror dawned in the young man’s eyes and he took a step
forward. He gasped:
“What do you mean?”
And then, when Baltazar described the disastrous paper, he cried
passionately:
“It can’t be! It can’t possibly be! Only this morning she told me she
had destroyed it.”
“She lied, my son,” said Baltazar.
“But she knew it was my honour, my everything——”
“Of course she did. Do you suppose that matters to her?”
Godfrey repeated in a dazed way: “There must be some mistake. She told
me she had destroyed it.”
“Well, she didn’t,” said Baltazar. “She kept it—to gratify some vanity
or ambition. I don’t know. Our talk was too concentrated to divagate
into motives. Anyway, care for your honour didn’t affect her. She left
it about, and Edgar Donnithorpe has got it and means to use it.”
The distracted young man sat down, his head in his hands, and groaned.
“My God! That’s the end of me.”
Baltazar deliberately filled and lit a pipe, and said nothing. Better
let the consequences of the lady’s betrayal soak in. . . . Presently
Godfrey rose to his feet and his face was haggard.
“I’ll go to Donnithorpe and get it back. He daren’t show it. It’ll be
accusing himself of giving away the information to _The Morning
Gazette_.”
But Baltazar held him with his inscrutable eyes.
“You’re a brilliant soldier, my son, but you’re no match for a foxy old
politician—a past master of dirty craft. He put himself right with the
Prime Minister this morning. Besides, there’s the lady to be
considered—not that I think she deserves much consideration. Still,
it’s a convention of honour.”
Godfrey flashed: “I’m not going to bring her name into it!”
“He will. He’ll get the whole story out of you.”
“What the devil am I to do?” asked Godfrey with a helpless gesture.
Baltazar rose. “My boy,” said he, “in two or three days’ time they’re
going to make me, a man suddenly sprung from nowhere, a Minister of the
Crown. That shows I’m not altogether a silly fool.”
In spite of the welter of disillusion and catastrophe in which the boy
foundered, he detected in his father’s voice the pathetic, apologetic
note which he had never been able to resist, the note conveying his
father’s yearning desire to make good in his eyes.
“You know I’m proud of you, sir,” he said. “Which is a lot more,” he
added with a break in his voice, “than you can say of me.”
Baltazar put his arm round his son’s shoulders very tenderly.
“My boy,” said he, “I’d give my life for you.” And the young man hung
his head. “The only thing is, will you trust me?”
Ten minutes afterwards Baltazar, cheery and confident, stood at the door
preparing to depart from a chastened though more hopeful Godfrey. Love
had conquered. What had passed between his father and the Donnithorpes
the boy did not know. Of his father’s assumption of the part of
indiscreet lover he had no suspicion. But his father had fascinated him,
dominated his will, evoked in him a blind, unquestioning confidence,
compelled from him a promise of implicit obedience. Of course there were
conditions. He was to petition the War Office to be allowed to sacrifice
his leave and start for France, at the earliest opportunity, the next
day if possible. He was not to communicate with Lady Edna until his
return to England, whenever that might be. He gave the latter
undertaking readily, her lie rankling in his heart, her callous
disregard of his honour monstrous in its incomprehensibility. Whatever
might be his revulsion of feeling afterwards—and his clear young brain
grappled with the possibility—whatever might be his unregenerate
torment of longing, he accepted the condition as his punishment. She, so
his father said, was bound by the same condition. . . . Baltazar stood
by the door.
“It’s all damned hard, old man, I know. But you’ll worry through. It’s
the English way.”
He walked out, humming “Tipperary” out of tune, the only modern air he
knew, and ascended the stairs and thrust his head into the drawing-room.
There, as he expected, he found a desolate Marcelle, who, throwing down
the book which she was trying to read, jumped up and ran to the door.
What had happened? Quong Ho had told her of Edgar Donnithorpe’s call.
Godfrey was in black anger against her.
“Go down,” said he, “and make your peace with him. You’ll stay and dine.
I must go now and finish my work before dinner.”
He left her and, still humming “Tipperary,” entered his library, where
Quong Ho was patiently and efficiently working at the proofs.
“Miss Baring and Captain Godfrey have upbraided me for indiscretion in
that I informed Mr. Donnithorpe of your whereabouts,” said Quong Ho.
“The best day’s work you ever did in your life,” said Baltazar, seating
himself at the table and taking up his pen.
* * * * *
The dinner was not quite the success for which Baltazar had hoped, in
spite of his efforts to set a tone of light-hearted gaiety. His best
champagne flowed to little purpose. Godfrey acknowledged the toast to
his promotion and appointment with irreproachable politeness and
lamentable lack of fervour. Marcelle confessed afterwards that she had
never sat through so unjoyous a meal. To make her peace with Godfrey had
been no easy matter. It was but an armistice that she had patched up.
Twice that day had he been betrayed by women, and he felt sore against
an untrustworthy sex. He had admitted her not an inch further into his
confidence. Of the incriminating scrap of paper he told her nothing. She
sat at the table puzzled and unhappy. Quong Ho ate philosophically when
he was not drinking in the words of wisdom that came from the master’s
lips.
They broke up early. Godfrey retired to his room. Quong Ho departed to
the printers to correct the proof of the editorial. Baltazar walked home
with Marcelle: a somewhat silent and miserable little journey. In vain
he assured her that she had been Godfrey’s salvation. She only realized
that the boy’s faith in her had gone. Of the extent of the salvation he,
like Godfrey, said nothing. The position for the moment was too delicate
and grotesque to be told to another person—even to Marcelle, and his
forthrightness scorned half confidences. He walked back disappointed,
ever so little depressed. Hadn’t he told everybody to put their trust in
him and worry their heads no more about the matter? And they were
worrying considerably.
At the end of the passage beyond the hall he saw a streak of light
signifying that Godfrey’s door was ajar. He went down, opened the door
and looked in. There was Godfrey, huddled up on the Chesterfield, his
head in his hands, his fingers clutching his crisp fair hair. As he
seemed unaware of intrusion, Baltazar closed the door quietly and
tiptoed away. No one knew better than he that every man must go through
his little Gethsemane alone. But the pity of it! He crept upstairs with
an aching heart. Papers by the last post in connection with the new
ministry lay on his desk. He sat down and tried to deal with them; but
at last abandoned them and sucked a gloomy pipe. Had he saved the boy
after all? Would the woman hold her tongue? Was Donnithorpe such a fool
as to believe his story? Meanwhile he was the avowed lover of the
detested woman and the betrayer of official secrets. And the vindictive
little rat held the proofs. What use was he going to make of them?
Yet the situation had a grimly humorous aspect. If he had not seen the
boy huddled up in grief and shame downstairs he would have envisaged it
with one of his great laughs. . . .
The next day passed quietly. Godfrey was absent till the evening. He had
been to the War Office and arranged to leave for France on the morrow by
the staff train. An agreeable evening was marred by no reference to Lady
Edna or the scrap of paper. They spoke of books and mathematics and the
war and the probable scope of Godfrey’s duties.
Only when they shook hands for the night did Godfrey say:
“I think, sir, you’re the best father that ever a man had.”
And Baltazar, with gladness leaping into his eyes and a grin on his
face, replied:
“God knows I try to be.”
On the following morning the post brought him a letter from
Donnithorpe’s solicitors. Would Mr. Baltazar make an appointment to meet
Mr. Donnithorpe and themselves, at his earliest convenience, on a matter
of very serious importance? He bade Quong Ho ring up and fix the
appointment for three o’clock that afternoon.
“Will you not,” hazarded Quong Ho, “be also accompanied by your
solicitor?”
“No,” said Baltazar in his grand self-confidence. “Damn lawyers.”
When the long train moved out of Charing Cross station amid the waving
of handkerchiefs and hats, he drew a breath of unutterable relief. As
far as God would allow, the boy was safe. Safe, at any rate, from the
woman with whom he had pledged his honour not to communicate while he
was in France. And the boy would keep his word. He had been disentangled
from the imbroglio. It was all that mattered. He made his powerful,
almost ruthless way through the sobered crowd of lately cheerful friends
seeing off those dear to them, almost heedless of the streaming eyes of
women who but a moment ago had been so brave and smiling. He was unique
among them. His son was not seeking, but escaping death.
Jubilant he walked across the station yard, up Cockspur Street and Pall
Mall. He felt strong—nay, more—all-powerful. A force before which all
the rats of Donnithorpes and lawyers in the world must crumble. He had
no plan; no idea how he should counter Donnithorpe’s machinations. He
had been accustomed all his life long to wait for the perilous moment
and then get in his grip. He had glorious faith in his destiny. His and
Godfrey’s. The destiny of the House of Baltazar. The war over, Godfrey
would find some sweet English girl and marry her; and there would be a
son to carry on the torch and hand it, in his turn, to the next
generation. Striding up St. James’s Street, he saw the babe; made
calculations of dates. He would last at least till seventy-five. The
grandson then would be on the verge of manhood. . . . He laughed. Odd
that he should have lived for fifty years before dreaming of the
continuance of his race. Those infernal years in China! He cursed them.
Never mind. If he had gone on in the humdrum certainty of the
perpetuation of his name he would have missed the present glory of the
conception. It was a wonderful world.
He lunched at his club with Weatherley and Burtenshaw, optimistic to
gasconade, prophesying the speedy end of the war; then the millennium;
the world ruled by Anglo-Saxon fibre of brain and body inspired by Latin
nervous force—the combination towards which civilization had been
groping for centuries. At ten minutes to three he waved them farewell
and drove in a taxi to his appointment in Bedford Row.
He was shown into a room where Edgar Donnithorpe and an impassive
elderly man with a face like a horse awaited him. He felt that he
entered like an irresistible force.