P. C. Breagh never heard the order given, but next moment his aching
wrists were released from the huge, hard grip of Privates Braun and
Kleiss, and the muscular legs that had affectionately twined about
his own, were withdrawn. Subsequently, singly, and in silence, the
Sergeant handed back the watch, pipe, tobacco-pouch, purse, and
note-case. Last of all, Valverden, making a long arm, returned the
half-sheet of Chancellory note, bearing the signature that had worked
the miracle, without words, and looking coldly in its owner's face.
"Thanks tremendously! ... I've no doubt I'm to blame for not
producing my credentials earlier," said Carolan. "But I'd no notion
of the rather serious turn things were going to take. However, all's
well that ends----"
His smile froze upon his lips, and died out of his eyes as he
encountered the stare the other turned upon him, answering haughtily:
"I regret that you have suffered some rough handling from my
comrades, under the wrong impression that you were an agent of the
French Secret Service. Admitting that our own side act advisedly in
employing persons like you, I must say that to me, personally, a spy
is--a spy!"
"But, hang it! you don't suppose----" Carolan choked out after a
moment of angry bewilderment. And with the Sergeant's piggish little
eyes curiously fixed on him, Valverden answered curtly:
"I suppose nothing. Excuse me from further conversation."
The revolver with its cartridges had not been returned with the other
articles. Its owner asked the Sergeant for it, getting in reply only
a glare. Thenceforward the long night's journey for one traveler was
performed in unbroken silence. P. C. Breagh had been dispatched to
Coventry by one and all.
Men who conversed spoke in barely-audible whispers, their covert
glances, like the frigid indifference of Valverden's regard, and the
extra six inches of seat-space accorded to the holder of the States
Chancellor's written guarantee, testified to the aroma of suspicion
that personage's document exhaled.
So at breathless, baking midnight the troop-train clanked into
Cologne, no longer throbbing with the beat of drums, roaring with
iron-shod wheels, swarming with men in brass-spiked helmets, choked
with continuously shouting patriots, as it had been a few hours
earlier when the Headquarter Staff trains had passed through,--and in
the close, gray dawn of a thundery day, jolted into Bingen.
Here miles of rolling-stock and numberless engines blocked up the
metal roads. Shuttered windows and barricaded doors testified that
house-owners had temporarily abandoned their property. Strings of
barges, laden with Commissariat stores and live-stock, were being
towed up the Rhine by the gaily painted, white-awninged, paddle-wheel
steamers familiar to the British tourist, while others were conveying
voluntarily exiled residents and fugitive visitors down the classic
stream out of harm's way.
Conveyance by railway--of a kind--was to be had upon terms
prohibitory to all but the opulent. And disheveled ladies, pale or
red with panic, besieged the station-master and his master, the Halt
Commandant--with prayers, commands and entreaties, for places, but
for places on some Northward-going train....
Something was in the air besides the short, staccato bugle-calls, the
scream of signal-whistles and the ceaseless beating of the Prussian
side-drums. P. C. Breagh knew it, even as a tall, lean, red-faced
Inspector caught his eye and beckoned him imperiously to quit his
cage, asking:
"You have a _Legitimation_ to proceed with the troops to Kreuznach?
No? Then be good enough to stand aside until I have an opportunity
of ascertaining why you were originally permitted. Here is the
Commandant."
Standing on the whitewashed platform, hot, dusty, unbrushed and
unwashed, burdened with his unstrapped knapsack, a stout
walking-stick, a leather-covered, screw topped sling water-bottle,
some crumpled newspapers and a package of solid sandwiches--thrust
upon him at one of the previous stopping-places, P. C. Breagh was
conscious of cutting a sorry figure. Conscious, too, of Valverden's
supercilious eye-glass, glittering a few yards off, as he stretched
his long legs on the platform and talked eagerly with some comrades
of his own standing, straight-backed, long-legged youngsters, with
arrogant manners, clear eyes, budding mustaches, newly fledged
whiskers, broad shoulders and regulation waists.
No new pupil at a young ladies' boarding school, smarting under the
double stigma of plainness and poverty, no cheaply arrayed debutante
at a suburban subscription-ball, ever blushed more hotly or winced
more painfully under the scrutiny of prettier and richer girls, than
did P. C. Breagh under the glances of these young men.
Not the memory of the Army Service examinations he had failed in
galled him, or that missed shot for the I.C.S., or the University
career foregone. It was the word "spy" that rankled in his memory
and took the starch out of his self-conceit.
Before the discovery of the Minister's written guarantee, Valverden
had gossiped with him as an equal--the other Guardsmen had been
friendly in their rougher way. The fateful half-sheet of Chancellory
note had changed everything. "As though one had blossomed out in
plague or smallpox," P. C. Breagh had said to himself bitterly. "And
I feel like a kind of Ali Baba or somebody, whose talisman would only
work upside down!"
Even his parting salute had met with grudging acknowledgment. The
Sergeant had grunted. Braun and Kleiss had spat, and looked the
other way. Valverden's finger had barely brushed the narrow peak of
his forage-cap. Only Kunz, the spectacled ex-chemist's assistant,
had civilly bidden the parting guest good-day.
He was horribly sore at the treatment received from Valverden.
Susceptible of hero-worship, warm and sincere in feeling, he had
taken a liking to the brilliant youngster, three years his junior,
his superior in social status and in cynical knowledge of the world.
Was it disgraceful to belong to the Prussian Diplomatic Secret
Intelligence Department, that ramifying spider-web of invisible
wires, reaching to the uttermost Kingdoms of the civilized globe, and
emanating from the Chancellory in the Friedrichstrasse, Berlin?
The Army had its secret agents, an army of them, by Jingo! Had not
scraps of conversation reached the ears of P. C. Breagh no later than
the previous day, relative to a certain dandy Colonel of Prussian
Field Artillery, who for the past two years had filled the well-paid
post of lace and ribbon Department Manager at the Paris Bon Marche.
Then why on earth.... But at this juncture the Halt Inspector
returned with the Commandant, a white-whiskered, potty officer, in
blue infantry uniform with distinctive white shoulder-straps, beside
whom stalked a tall, middle-aged Colonel of Uhlans, whose pale eyes,
unshaded by the tufted schlapka, glittered through steel-rimmed
glasses, whose teeth were clenched on a familiar meerschaum--and
whose gaunt, broad-shouldered figure looked better in the dark blue
cavalry uniform with its yellow plastron and white cross-belt, than
in Herr von Rosius's Berlin-made private clothes.
For it was undoubtedly Miss Ling's quiet-mannered first-floor lodger,
who had resigned his post of teacher at the Berners Street Institute
of Languages when the wire had come from Headquarters, bidding him
come back and be a cog-wheel in Moltke's big war-machine. What Mr.
Knewbit would have called "the blank expression" appeared behind his
spectacles when they showed him his young fellow-lodger from Coram
Street. But he paused when the Commandant halted and began to ask
questions--which Carolan answered in the German so frequently tested
on Herr von Rosius.
"How came you to travel from Berlin in a train set apart for the use
of the Guard Infantry? Show me your _Legitimations-Kart_ and
military ticket, if you have one!--You have neither? ... Then how did
you, against the regulations, obtain permission of the authorities to
enter a _militär-zug_? It is inconceivable that you should have
managed to conceal yourself without connivance of some kind!"
Things were getting close to the Chancellory half-sheet, but it would
never be displayed with the consent of P. C. Breagh. He had wild
ideas of feigning idiocy, of appealing to Von Rosius, but the first
resource savored of the theater too strongly for adoption, and the
second--one glance at the hard, ignoring eyes behind the steel-rimmed
glasses disposed of that for good.
At his wits' end, a loud, genial voice hailed him in the English
language, flavored with the County Dublin brogue.
"By the powers! and there's the face I'm looking for. Longer by a
yard than it was when you capped me at Berlin. Faith! and I stared
at you with all my eyes, wondering where in the world I'd last beheld
ye? Till Chris Brotherton quizzed me and I bet him five shillings
the place was Fleet Street. Now, on your honor, was it? Speak, or
forever after hold your tongue!"
"Not quite Fleet Street, sir, but hardly a stone's throw from it!" A
great wave of unreasonable hope lifted the sinking heart of P. C.
Breagh.
The big, warm voice and the kind, bright glance that had wrought the
miracle, belonged to a stout little bearded gentleman of fifty,
topped with a hard gray Derby, and attired in a pepper-and-salt
cutaway coat, brown holland vest and neat white hunting-stock, gray
Bedford cords and shiny black spurred Blucher boots. Had you met him
cantering on some plump and well-fed cob along a green lane in the
Mother Country, you would have taken him--but for the revolver-pouch
that depended from a neat black leather belt, and the wallet that,
with its companioning field-glass, was slung across his
shoulders--for a hard-riding country surgeon or solicitor, of the
good old English kind. But P. C. Breagh knew better, and his drab
world changed to rose-color, as the big voice rolled from the
capacious chest:
"Hardly a minute's ... Hold on! For the life of you, don't refresh
my memory! What would it be to find one's mental legs getting shaky
at the start of a new campaign! Not a stone's throw from Fleet
Street, did you say? ... By the Beadle of Old Trinity! if you don't
mean the Maze at Hampton Court or the Nevski Prospect at Petersburg,
or the garden of the Dilkusha at Lucknow, you're talking of Printing
House Square! Am I right now?"
"You've hit the nail, sir! You were walking arm-in-arm with Mr.
Sala--and I'd been introduced to him before, luckily! and he
remembered my name and presented me to you!"
"And I'm five shillings the richer by the meeting. For if Chris
Brotherton dares to say the _Thunderbolt_ office and Fleet Street are
anything but synonymous, he's a bolder man than I take him to be.
But I'm interrupting a conversation...." He broke off, saluting the
official. "Pray accept my apologies, _Herr_ Commandant, I'll wait
while you finish with my young friend."
The Commandant stiffly returned the genial salute before he wheeled
and walked off with the Inspector and Von Rosius, who, while the king
of British War Correspondents chatted with his glowing vassal, had
exchanged a few sentences with these personages apart. Then said the
kindly little gentleman, with a humorous twirl of the eye at the
three:
"I claimed your acquaintance because I saw you nearing the jaws of a
German guardroom. Though I fancy you'd a friend at Court in that
Uhlan Colonel there! ... I heard him tell the Commandant that he'd no
earthly idea how you got here, but you were simply an English
schoolboy who was crazy to see a war. And the Commandant said
something about turning tail at the first whistle of a
_Bombensplitter_--that's a shell-splinter. Though I'm pretty certain
by the cut of your jib you'd do nothing of the kind!"
He added, as a familiar shout of "Entrain!" and a bugle-call brought
the platform leg-stretchers scampering to their places and the long
train of gray-painted wagons, officers' horse-boxes and baggage
trucks, clanked into motion again:
"Your friends of the Guard have gone without you. Kreuznach will be
their detraining-point--that's all I can tell you. For the
reason--and it's an uncommonly sound one!--that the newly mobilized
men of the infantry battalions want a march to limber their joints
and stretch their new boots a bit. Begad! my own brogues would be
the better of a day or two on the trees. But rheumatism and corns
are the price one pays for experience--and the privilege of talking
like a daddy to harum-scarum gossoons like yourself. You've no
business to be here, boyo! but since you are--use your eyes and
brains to observe with--never be ashamed of running away when you can
get out of danger by doing it! and for your mother's sake, if she's
living--don't be dragged into fighting on a side. Forget that you
have a revolver, if that bulge under your jacket means that you carry
one,--and keep your temper cool and your opinions strictly neutral,
if a fellow with a drop of Irish blood in him can! Twit me with Bull
Run, now, and you'll get the historic answer: 'Do as I advise you to
do, not what I do!'"
He pulled out the battered gold hunting-watch at the end of its
short, strong leather guard, and glanced at it, saying with a sigh of
relief:
"Seven o'clock. Breakfast ought to be ready at the Victoria--barrack
of a hostelry, packed with cocky Prussian officers. Suppose you come
back there with me and have a bite and sup?"
Dazzling prospect! to a young man given to hero-worship, which the
historian of "Cromwell" had positively asserted to be good for
youthful bodies and souls. P. C. Breagh would have given a great
deal if Valverden could have heard the invitation.... However, it
was more likely than not that he had beheld the object of his scorn
in familiar conversation with the most famous of British War
Correspondents, as the gray-painted troop-train carried him away.