black, but velvety purple. Away in the south-east a fierce red moon
drifted like some derelict vessel burning away to embers on a waveless
midnight sea. And sheaves of dazzling blue-white flames, leaping and
roaring, fenced in, or seemed to fence, a dreadful lake of Stygian
darkness, upon the surface of which figures--were they men or
devils?--moved....
"Don't be scared, Miss Saxham! It's nothing ... though I ought to have
wanted you...!"
Not with intent, her heaving shoulder pressed against the breast of the
man who had followed her. Perhaps the contact thrilled him, for his
voice was unsteady as he went on:
"I was rather a brute to forget! ... It's a night-flare to
guide--possible home-comers! ... Wads of tow dipped in petrol, burning
in iron buckets round our landing-place.'
"I ought to have guessed," she said ruefully. "Forgive me for being
such an idiot!"
His answer was unexpected.
"On condition that you'll leave off saying 'Great Scott!' and things
like that."
"All right! But what's the matter with the expression, anyhow?" she
demanded. "Do you always get riled when women use slang?"
They had been standing within the gate that led upon the Flying Ground,
still girdled by its Valkyr-ring of leaping flame. He said, holding
open the gate to let her pass through:
"I use slang myself, habitually, like every other man I know. But I
don't know a man who really likes to hear his wife or sweetheart copy
him in that respect. For myself who have neither wife, sweetheart, nor
even sister, I can only say what I feel. It is--that a beautiful woman
should use beautiful language. One of the old Greek poets put the whole
thing into two lines. I've forgotten the original, but the translation
runs like this:
"From the goddess the speech of Olympus,
From the herd-maid the language of the cows."
"I'm no goddess, God knows!" said Patrine, sorrowfully and sincerely.
Then a light scorching flame seemed to envelop her whole body. She felt
Sherbrand's breath upon her cheek.... He said, speaking swiftly, and
close to her ear:
"No, you are not a goddess, but something far better! You are a woman
one could worship! You could hate magnificently and forgive greatly,
and love to the very verge of death! That was said to me of the Doctor,
and you are like him!"
"Don't!" she said, wincing. "You don't know me!"
He answered firmly:
"But I do know you! I knew you the moment I saw you in Paris. You're
the girl I have been waiting for ever since I read Morris's
'Eredwellers'. You're The Friend! Now I've found you I shall never let
you go again!"
What midsummer madness was this, prompting him to sweet audacity? His,
"I shall never let you go!" had a convincing, manly ring. She quickened
her steps, wading through a shallow sea of shadows, through which the
warm short turf came up to meet her feet. He kept by her side, and
together they moved towards the Valkyr-ring of fire, changing as they
advanced into isolated pillars of towering flame outlining the huge
white oval of Fanshaw's landing-place. Here and there the goblin-like
shapes moved, stirring the flares with rods, feeding the blaze with
something from vessels they carried. And two other figures stood in
talk by the telegraph-hut, recognisable, outlined against the oblong of
electric radiance framed by the doorway, as Saxham and the Chief.
"This is a bit previous, you think? Headlong--ill-considered on my
part--to have spoken like this to a girl I've only met once before? You
must understand--a man who follows a risky profession gets into the way
of not waiting for to-morrow, because to-day may be the wind-up. Say you
are not angry!" Sherbrand pleaded.
"No, you poor dear boy! But you're so awfully mistaken!" There was a
rich and exquisite tenderness, it seemed to Sherbrand, in the deep,
full, breathy tones. "I'm not a bit what you think me! There is nothing
worthy of worship in a woman like me," said Patrine.
He asked, as they walked side by side from patches of brilliant
blue-white light into deep oases of shadow:
"May I say more? May I tell you that I've thought of you ever since
that Paris night.... What things I've called myself--if you only
knew!--for not getting your address. But I swore I'd find you somehow,
and I would have! I'd know your voice among a thousand. If I were
blind, and forgot other people's faces, I should always see yours
painted against the dark. At night--now! when I shut my eyes ... there
it is! You are not angry?"
"No--I'm only sorry for you!" she said in her deepest, sweetest tone.
"Sorry?" There was keen anxiety in the face that was illuminated by the
petrol-flare they were passing. "You're not--married--or going to be?"
he asked.
"Neither!"
"Thank God!" said Sherbrand simply and sincerely. "Now I'll go on! My
rank bad luck gives me a kind of right. This morning I got up solid in
the conviction that you and I were meant for one another; that we should
somehow be brought together; that the French Government would make it
possible for me to marry you by buying my hawk-hoverer--for with only
the two hundred a year my uncle left me, and the two hundred my
Instructorship here brings me--how could I possibly have the nerve to
ask you to be my wife? And--" He caught his breath, "And everything
I'd dreamed came real. The test succeeded! I dived down out of my sky
to find You! Miracle of miracles. And not twenty minutes later--I found
myself nearly, if not quite--a ruined man. For if my invention has been
swiped off to Germany, France will never buy, for money--what her
neighbour gets for nought!"
"I understand. My poor Flying Man, you've been plucked of some of your
wing-feathers!"
"I don't care, if you'll wait for me until they grow again!"
How grim a day had been followed by this night of wonder! Woven of the
shining stuff of dreams it seemed, then and for long years after, to
Patrine. Their intimacy grew and ripened like a magic beanstalk in the
light of the red moon and the fierce blue petrol-flares. She said with
a catch in her breath--like Sherbrand's:
"You must be serious!"
"I never was more so!"
She amended:
"We must be sensible! Oh! but this has been a close-packed day!"
"Hasn't it!" Sherbrand agreed, as they moved on side by side, from
islands of raw, glaring light into broad pools of lustreless darkness,
their tall heads level, for Patrine carried her hat of silver spangles
swinging from the top of the sunshade with the lengthy stick.
"Sometimes, for weeks, the days slip by smoothly as the beads of a
Rosary over a baby's finger. Then--bang-bang-bang! they explode--like a
rocket fired by a signal-pistol--until things fizzle out into dulness
again."
"It's true!" Her bosom rose in a sigh. "But it's possible to get
awfully fed up with banging and fizzling. One can learn to long--just
for a little dulness, as long as it means quiet and rest, and peace of
mind."
That Patrine should voice such an aspiration was incredible even to the
speaker. "_How changed I must be!_" she said to herself, as Sherbrand
answered her:
"With heathery moors and towering scaurs, and galloping trout-rivers
brabbling over lichened boulders--and Somebody one loves to talk to--one
calls that kind of dulness a happy honeymoon!"
She thrilled as his hand, swinging freely by his hip, touched hers,
lightly, enclosed, and then released it. He was no tardy lover, this
Flying Man. He knew a thousand times better than von Herrnung how a
girl should be courted and wooed. For, with her heart in joyful tumult,
and her usually pale cheeks warmed and rosy with shy blushes, it was a
girl who walked beside Alan Sherbrand that night. I am sorry she could
forget so easily the slip that had led her over the frontier line, the
Rubicon that can never be recrossed. But in fact she did forget, just
as a young man would have forgotten. Though she was to remember as only
a woman can remember, and to suffer as only a woman can.
In the midst of the new, wonderful happiness, so strangely threaded not
only for Patrine, with bitter loss and tragic possibilities, she
suffered a quite intolerable twinge of memory in the sudden recollection
of the boldly-scrutinising look cast upon her by the bearded man in the
white Naval uniform. She did not realise that an imperious gesture of
the brown hand, whose wrist had sported a massive gold watch-bracelet,
had whisked von Herrnung off the scene. But she guessed that the huge
red-haired Prussian, bowing at the side of the big blue F.I.A.T., had
clicked his heels before a master who could break him at his will.
He had boasted.... They _knew_! Not only the bearded man whose look
had stung so, but the close-shaven old Colossus with the
tortoiseshell-mounted pince-nez on his thick heavy nose and the huge
wart on his yellow cheek. And the sallow diplomat in the Homburg hat
shadowing the sly glance and the moustache tucked up by a sinister smile
under his drooping Oriental nose. They all knew.... Even the servant
had worn the leer that is born of knowledge, as he said in his Teutonic
gutturals:
"The lady is a friend of the gentleman who brought her here..."
Horrible! But she would not remember. She banished the hateful,
knowing faces with a gallant effort and turned to Sherbrand, asking
whether he had been an Eton, or Rugby, or Harrow boy?
For had her Flying Man borne the cachet of the Public School Patrine
Saxham would have infinitely preferred it. That it is possible to be a
snob even in the most tragic or romantic moment of one's existence, she
had not realised before she discovered herself to herself in this way.
"Downside was my school," he said quite proudly. Patrine had no
acquaintance with Downside. "My father would have liked me to go to
Harrow; but my uncle--my mother's brother--who paid for my
education!--being a Catholic, naturally preferred the place where the
Faith was taught. And my mother--as naturally--shared his preference.
I was happy at Downside. The Fathers were thundering good to me. I
worked hard--and I played hard--and when it wasn't Swot, or cricket, or
football, or fives, or boxing, it was the making of flying-sticks, just
shaved laths with paper wings, at first--and then a dodge much more
ambitious, a model Wright in varnished card, with a propeller worked by
a rubber release.... My father was pleased at my being a chip of the
old block in my turn for mechanics. But when I wouldn't go up for
Woolwich--when I entered at Strongitharm's College of Engineering on
Tyneside, and spent two years at Folsom's Works at Sunderland--he rather
gave me up, I fancy, as a low-minded kind of cad."
He shook himself as though to shake off the adverse paternal judgment.
"I had my reasons for not going in for the Army, though I love it. They
weren't easy to explain, and so I didn't try. But my father never liked
the idea of my being a civil engineer. Even my mother, and my
uncle--dear old fellow--he understands me better now!"
"Why?"
"Because he's dead!" said Sherbrand simply, "and the Holy Souls know
everything!"
"The Holy Souls?" By the glare of the flare-light her puzzled eyes
questioned him.
"The Holy Souls in Purgatory. They're privileged to help us. We help
them--by praying for them. It's--a spiritual intercommunication--a kind
of endless chain. A circuit of influence, received and transmitted, not
by etheric flashes, but by a medium more subtle. Prayer--in a word!"
His bright-winged intellect had outstripped her heavier, duller
intelligence. She suddenly felt like a caterpillar on a cabbage-leaf,
slow-moving, groping, but dimly conscious of a distant affinity with the
jewel-winged butterfly hovering high in golden air....
"_Prayer_," she repeated dully, "do you believe in prayer?"
"Naturally!" said Sherbrand--"since I believe in God. Do not you? ..."
"I hardly----"
In the ensuing pause Patrine had a brief retrospective vision of the
curate who had prepared her for Confirmation, and who had talked of the
Almighty as though He were a crotchety but benevolent old man. And last
time she had been to Church--a fashionably attended High Church in the
West End--another curate in a black cassock and tufted biretta had
preached about the 'Par of Card, the baptismal dar of Grace, the bar of
flars,' in which our first parents dwelt in Eden, 'the fatal ar' in
which they sinned, and the 'shar of tars' with which Eve lamented her
fall.
"No," she said bluntly, "I don't think I believe in God at all now,
though it sometimes seems as though there must be Somebody behind
things!--Somebody who punishes--Somebody who laughs! As for a religion,
I don't suppose I've ever had one. Oh, yes!--my religion is Aunt
Lynette!"
A mental picture of Lynette, years ago in the Harley Street nursery,
teaching a curly-headed baby Bawne to say his evening prayer, while a
great galumphing girl stood in the doorway and looked and listened, rose
up and brought with it the horrible choking sensation. She fought with
it as Sherbrand said:
"I think you are speaking of Mrs. Saxham? Well, one must have a star to
hitch one's waggon to. And she is a star--if ever I saw one! A woman
with a face like a Donatello Madonna, or a tall lily growing in the
garden-cloisters of some Italian mountain-convent, and who has the
Faith,--ought to be able to teach you to believe in God! Why not ask
her? I once knelt in a Church near her, and saw her praying. She
seemed--very close to what Norman or someone else called the Eternal
Verities."
"She will be nearer still," said Patrine with sudden, savage roughness,
"if anything happens--if Bawne is killed! She will die of a broken
heart!"
"Then why not pray," argued Sherbrand, "that she may get him back again?
Why not try it? There's nothing else that helps so well!"
"Pray!" The tall girl stopped short and swung round on him, facing him.
A moment since they had walked like lovers. Now the spell was
broken--at all events, for the time.
"Pray--pray!" she mocked. "Am I a sneak?--to pray when I don't believe
in prayer! And if I did believe, God--if He exists--would not hear me.
Even the parsons own He has His favourites. I am not one of them.... I
am one of His forgets!"
*CHAPTER XL*
*MACROMBIE IS SACKED*
Tall, lithe, vigorous, masterful, they confronted each other across the
gulf that suddenly opened between them--the bottomless chasm that yawns
between Faith and Unbelief.
In the fitful uncanny light, the darker side of Patrine started into
sinister prominence. Her defiant face was masked by shadow, but the
fierce vibrating voice and towering shape had something of the fallen
angel. Had wide sable pinions sprung and bannered from her shoulders,
Sherbrand would hardly have been surprised.
"Let us draw the line at that. If we are to be friends--and I would
like us to be!--agree to it! But since you have what I have not--you
would call it Faith, no doubt," he guessed the wide mouth curving in a
jeering smile, "there is nothing to prevent _you_ from praying for Aunt
Lynette and for Bawne too! Unless you are the kind of physician who
draws the line at taking his own drugs!"
If she had thought to disconcert Sherbrand she erred. He said instantly:
"I give you my word of Honour that I will pray for them! But there is
one other person much dearer to me than either. You don't ask me for
_her_, but all the same..."
"You kind, dear boy! Pray for me all you want to!"
She was his big, smiling girl of the Milles Plaisirs, and the Pat young
Bawne worshipped, as she stretched out her beautiful, massive arm and
offered him a cordial hand.
"Shake, Mister! Making love to me one minute and bally-ragging me the
next! ... Great Scott! Ah!--I've said it again--and I gave you my word
I'd not!"
He took the hand in a close grasp, sought for the other and took it
also....
"Thank you! Why, how you're shivering! You have nothing but that
feather thing over your thin gown! Wait half a minute--I'll get you a
wrap!"
He was gone in an instant, leaving her standing on the border-line of
one of the oases of black-velvet shadow, swayed by the violence of her
emotion as some tall young birch might have been shaken by the fury of a
south-west gale.
His touch.... She had not dreamed.... Her head drooped, and a long
sigh went fluttering after him into the darkness, like some night-moth
whose wings are wrought of hues more gorgeous than the peacock
butterfly's, whose scent is on the alert, and whose diamond eyes pierce
the blackest midnight in search of the partner of its kind.
A footstep she knew approached. A familiar voice called her:
"Uncle Owen." The spell broke. Her mind leaped up alert and quivering.
"Have you any news--of Bawne?"
"I have news!"
"Not----"
"Not the worst news," said Saxham's harsh voice, "but not--hopeful!"
"They are not coming back?" She strove to set her heel on the
treacherous hope that he would say No! For how could she bring herself
to desire the enemy's return. And yet the thought of Bawne was a stab
of anguish in her bosom. What was the Doctor saying?
"The last definite intelligence received of them confirms the certainty
that Captain von Herrnung is now over the North Sea. He alighted
nowhere; that we have positively learned from many different
news-centres. A tractor-monoplane answering to the description and
carrying two-passengers passed the Bull Light on Spurn Head, at a few
minutes before eight. The lighthouse-keeper signalled that bad weather
might be expected. The pilot paid no attention. And later on----"
As Saxham spoke, with that strange hoarseness, Patrine took his arm
tremblingly. Her heart plunged as though it would burst its prison as
the Doctor went on:
"An hour or more later a Wireless came in. It had been sent on to Sir
Roland from the Admiralty!--I will not puzzle you with technical
details. But at 8.30 the officer on duty on the upper-bridge of the
second-in-line of a Battle Squadron steaming through Northern Waters on
the way to a Southern rendezvous, reported having heard an aeroplane
pass overhead, crossing the course of the Squadron
diagonally--apparently flying due east----"
Saxham added:
"The aviator made no signal for assistance. But the engine-beat told of
trouble developing.... There is nothing to do but wait and hope!"
What had really happened on board H.M.S. _Rigasamos_, maintaining her
appointed speed of fifteen knots, and her statutory two-cable-lengths
from the stern of the Flagship ahead, and the bows of the sister-ship
following her, had been that as the ship's band struck into _The Roast
Beef of Old England_, and the Owner took his place at the head of the
Ward-room mess-table, his Second in Command on the fore-bridge got a
speaking-tube message from the Navigating Lieutenant on the
upper-bridge, to say that the drone of an aeroplane, flying at about
four hundred overhead, had been picked up by Warrant Officer So-and-So,
of the gun and searchlight control, _per_ medium of the microphone.
The Second in Command called back through the voice-tube:
"An aeroplane.... You're sure? Could hear her racket myself, without
assistance. But put it down to a Fleet Seaplane taking a flip round the
Squadron for exercise, or one of the Goody-Two-Shoes from the R.N.A.S.
Station at Rosforth, blown out to sea doing Coast Patrol."
An answer rumbled down the pipe:
"It was an aero all right, sir! The rattle of her floats 'ud have given
away a Goody.... Travelling east against the side-drive of a
forty-mile-an-hour north-west gale.... And with engine trouble well
developed. Missing and back-firing like the gayest kind of hell!"
The Second in Command took his ear from the mouth of the speaking-tube,
and with a glance that included the figures of his Sub-Lieutenant, the
Midshipman, signalmen, and lookouts at their posts swung into the
chart-house and logged the occurrence in the plain language of the sea.
The clock told 8.35 P.M. as he finished, capped his fountain pen, and
slipped it in an inside pocket, soliloquising:
"Travelling east against a forty-mile-an-hour gale from the north-west,
and with engine-trouble to top up with ... Little Willie will be seeing
the angels pretty soon at this rate! Or piling himself up somewhere on
the coast of Holland! Wonder who the bally idiot is?"
Saxham continued, and now he croaked as hoarsely as a raven:
"Sir Roland has little doubt that the aeroplane heard on the _Rigasamos_
was Sherbrand's 'Bird of War.' If so, there would be very little hope
left, unless it had been previously arranged that a vessel belonging
to--a foreign Power!--was to watch for and give help if she should
require it. Now you know as much as I do. I have telephoned to both
Lady Beauvayse and your mother that you return with me to Harley Street.
We shall go presently. First, I want you to speak on the telephone to
Lynette."
"To--Lynette!" Patrine breathed. The Doctor told her: "I have kept the
worst from Lynette hitherto.... I shall do so until the ultimate hope is
abandoned. My wife knows my voice so well.... You understand.... She
would suspect something ..."
His voice stumbled and broke. And clinging to the arm of the big man
standing quietly beside her, potent in inertia as a lump of raw iron,
Patrine realised that her anguish was a drop in the ocean of his. She
took his hand and said in a tone he had never before heard from her:
"Come, dear! We will go and speak to her now."
So they went across to the telegraph-cabin, raw with unshaded electric
light and littered with papers. The Chief was there, looking livid and
careworn, leaning one elbow on the edge of the stand that supported the
Wireless, and wearing the telephone head-band with the ear-pieces, as he
dictated to the pallid clerk who occupied a Windsor chair at a stained
deal desk, and wrote with a spluttering pen on a depleted paper-pad. At
first sight there seemed to be nothing else in the place but a low voice
speaking, a Railway Key instrument, a file for telegrams and an
overpowering odour of rum.
The odour of rum consolidated to Patrine's view into a stocky thickset
man with a square heavy yellow face set into a tragic mask of despair.
It was Macrombie, ex-Petty Officer telegraphist, whom the Royal Navy had
spat forth for being D.O.D. fifteen full years before. Sacked now from
his civil employment, for the old glaring, unblinkable offence.
The liquor had barely faded out in him; his breath came across the
little cabin like a flaming sword, and his eyes under their beetling
coal-black eyebrows looked burnt-out. He rose from the debilitated
office-stool he had been sitting on, saluted Patrine stiffly and said:
"Mem, this is no place for a leddy, wi' a drucken wastrel like mysel' in
it. Ay! I hae lat ower a drap too mony, I am awa' the noo wi' my
weicht o' wyte. But no wi'oot a warstle have I yielded to the Enemy!"
His anguish broke the flood-gates in a rumbling roar. "Like Job I hae
cried oot in the nicht-watches to my Creator, speiring o' Him why He
made weak men an' strong rum? He didna' gie me ony answer--and I am
ganging down the Broad Road's fast as my bluidy thirrst can carry me--a
disgraced and ruined man!"
"Mr. Sherbrand will give you another chance. I know he will!--I'll ask
him!" came impetuously in the big warm womanly baritone.
"You're a grand woman to luik at, and the lad'll gie in--an' the haill
deil's dance to begin ance mair.... Na, na, my bonny leddy!" said
Macrombie, "ye can never lippen to the promises o' a drunkard. Best lat
me gang my gait to muckle Hell. Ay! I'll no' be lonesome there for
want o' company.... Toch! what a regiment o' Macrombies deid an' damned
will answer 'Present' to auld Satan's rollcall! Guid-nicht, my leddy,
an' thanks to ye a' the same."
He took his cap from a peg, and from the corner a bundle of
miscellaneous possessions, rolled up in apparently a worn alpaca
office-coat, and girt about with knotted string. He saluted the Chief
and Saxham, and nodded to the telegraph clerk, and went out of the cabin
in a plodding kind of hurry as though no grass should grow under his
feet before he set them for good upon the dreadful downward Road.
His vice had played into an enemy's hands, and he would trust himself no
longer. He meted out judgment to rum-soaked Macrombie, assuming for
himself the prerogative of the One Judge. But he got his chance in
spite of himself, when Britain's Hour came.
*CHAPTER XLI*
*SAXHAM LIES*