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: