Upon Miss von Schwarzenberg's reappearance after luncheon, the family
welcomed her with affectionate enthusiasm. Lady McIntyre established the
rescued one on the sofa. Nan Ellis brought a footstool. Sir William
stirred the fire.
Napier was struck by the picture of amenity and cheerfulness presented
by the group.
"No, Miss Greta," said Madge, "you needn't be looking round; the papers
_haven't_ come, I'm glad to say. You've got to rest and be taken care
of." She spread the shawl over Miss Greta's knees. Sir William, from the
hearth-rug, beamed upon the scene.
"Eh? What? Speaking from London?" he said to the servant, who had come
in with a message. "All right." So little was Sir William prepared for
any important communication, he didn't even go into the library to
receive it. He crossed to the telephone on the opposite side of the
hall.
Napier would probably have concerned himself about the message no more
than Lady McIntyre or Madge, but for the chance that made him aware of
how intently Greta was taking in the swift change that came over the
amiable, fussy, little figure with the receiver at his ear.
"What? _What?_ Say that again. _When?_ Six o'clock last night? You
don't mean it was official.... God bless my soul! No, not a word. Our
papers haven't come." Then a pause. "How long did you say they'd give?
Not _this_ Saturday? Why, that's to-morrow!" A pause of thirty seconds
followed, Sir William hanging on to the receiver, listening.
"I'll think it over," he said excitedly. "I'll call you up later.
Good-by." When he had hung up the receiver, he still stood there,
rooted, looking through the wall at some astonishing happening far off.
"William," Lady McIntyre started up, "it's not about the boys!"
"Boys? No. God bless my soul! nothing whatever to do with the boys."
"Oh, only some government matter." With a clearing brow she settled
again in her corner.
Sir William turned about, and went with quick, fussy, little steps into
the library.
Napier followed his chief a moment after, only to be told to go and send
a couple of messages. "Hall telephone." Sir William spoke shortly. He
sat, elbows on table, head in hands, staring straight before him at some
staggering vision.
As Napier stood waiting to get his call through, Miss Greta came over to
the writing-table and took the address-book out of the stand. Madge
hitched herself up on the end of the table nearest the telephone and sat
swinging her long legs.
"What's up?" she demanded, with her laughing impudence.
"Is anything up?" Napier asked.
"There, Miss Greta, didn't I tell you? It's boring enough of _Father_ to
pinch up his lips and go out of the room like that when he gets some
news that would be so nice and interesting for us all."
"Sir William is quite right. A member of the Government never talks in
private about official business."
"Oh, doesn't he?"--Wildfire tossed back her mane. "You know perfectly
well Father's discretion lasts only as long as the first shock of any
piece of news. He thinks he's done all he's called on to do when he
doesn't tell us that minute. If you wait, you're safe to hear what it's
all about."
"My dear Madge!" remonstrated Miss Greta, sweetly. It was taking her a
long time to verify that address.
Patience incarnate at the telephone having refused to deal with two
underlings in turn, waited now for the station master to be fetched. "Is
that the station master? Well, look here. Is the new express running
yet? Yes, what time? I'm speaking from Kirklamont for Sir William
McIntyre. He must catch that train. Yes, motoring to--Yes. You could
hold it a minute or two, I suppose, if--All right." He had no sooner
rung off, than he rang on. "Give me the motor-house." And still Miss
Greta sat there, till she heard that the new car was to come round in
time for Sir William to catch the four o'clock express at the junction.
As Napier rang off again, his chief was back in the hall, giving
directions to a servant about packing a traveling bag. Sir William's
family appeared not the least excited at the prospect of the sudden
journey. They were too well accustomed to his bustling ways. But Sir
William himself had the air of being even more wrought up, now that he'd
had time to think over his news, than he had been on receiving it. He
stood frowning and working his eyebrows as the conversation in the hall
died and the company waited for the enlightenment which Madge had
foretold was sure to come.
"Madness!" He flung it out to an invisible audience. "Madness!"
"Oh, Ireland!" said Lady McIntyre, certain of the inevitable connection.
"Ireland? Not at all. Austria."
Miss Greta, her envelope in hand, had turned about in her chair and
looked over the back of it, her round head slightly on one side in an
attitude of polite attention. Very different from the form adopted by
the ladies of Sir William's own family, secure as they were in their
knowledge that Sir William would unburden himself.
They seemed disposed to look upon the news, when it did come, as
something of an anticlimax, for Sir William preceded his launching of
the fact with an increased activity of eyebrow and a furious jingling of
seals. "Austria," he said, "has sent an ultimatum to Servia."
"Oh, is that all?" Lady McIntyre's last lingering fear was laid to rest.
"Couched in such terms," Sir William went on, "as no self-respecting
nation could accept."
Miss Greta's air of elaborate deference suffered no change. She heard
that the Austrian Government was plainly composed of a set of
Bedlamites, "scratching matches in a powder-magazine."
Sir William seemed to have his excitement, his anxiety, all to himself,
till Mr. Grant came in with Nan Ellis. Even then, Sir William had only
one person with whom to share the graver implications in the news.
You'd say Julian neither heard nor saw the girl he had been frankly
adoring as they came in. Question after question he fired at Sir
William, rather as though that gentleman were responsible for the
_impasse_. "_What!_ Servia is to take it or leave it _en bloc_ by
to-morrow night? Why, that means there's less than twenty hours between
Europe and--" he stopped appalled.
They still called it Servia at this date.
"Europe?" said Miss Greta, gently. "You mean Servia."
The butler came in with the belated papers.
Sir William snatched up the "Times." He glanced quickly at headlines.
"They don't make much of it," Napier said.
"Naturally," Miss Greta excused them. "They are full of their own
difficulty."
"What do you call their own difficulty?" Napier asked, as he paused to
turn the paper.
"Why, Ireland," she answered promptly.
Napier found himself looking at her.
"There are some sane people even in Ireland," Sir William threw out over
the top of his paper. "But this--this Austrian madness. No warning, no
parley; a pistol to Servia's head!"
Julian's voice over-topped Sir William's. "It amounts to the abject
humiliation of Servia--or war."
"Servia will accept Austria's terms," said Miss Greta, quietly.
"Never!" Julian shouted. "All the chancelleries of Europe will join in
protest."
Sir William paused in his trot up and down that end of the hall. "If
Russia goes in, Germany can't stay out. This time to-morrow Europe may
be ablaze."
The supposition, sounding through those piping times of peace, rang
fantastic. Napier remembered, long after, how he had looked round
Kirklamont hall and saw that apart from Sir William there wasn't a soul
there who believed in the possibility of war, except one. That one--Miss
Greta.
"Monstrous as it would be to force Servia into political slavery,"
Julian admitted gravely, "there would be one thing worse."
Nan at last lifted her voice. "What would the worst thing be?"
"War," answered Julian.
"What, what!" Sir William caught him up. "There are worse things than
war, young man."
"There's nothing worse than war. Fortunately, we've reached a place
where the mass of the people know that."
* * * * *
As the awful prospect unfolded, people were not appalled, though they
said they were. They weren't even unhappy. They were far too excited.
And to be excited about matters of world-wide importance is to be lifted
out of the petty round and to catch at the crumbs of greatness.
Napier went up to town with Sir William. At close quarters with official
minds, the younger man shared those hours of anxious hope, bred by the
earlier interchange between Petersburg and Berlin, London and Belgrade.
Still, and without ceasing, though too late, as was seen in the
retrospect, England worked for peace.
Not even the formal declaration of war on Servia, made by Austria on the
Tuesday following that fateful Friday, arrested the effort of the
British Government to avert the catastrophe.
Five days after the ultimatum discussion in Kirklamont Hall, the German
demand was made for British neutrality and the first shots were fired at
Belgrade.
Julian's letters in those days registered merely the seething and
boiling in the caldron of his separatist soul. His horror of the
Mittel-Europa plot, as it began to unroll, was lost in his horror of the
spread, the deliberate inflammation, of what he called the "war cancer."
Napier flung the letters into the waste-paper basket and forgot them.
But as he went about his work, transmitting cryptic telephone calls or
hurrying to and fro with confidential messages, all incongruously a
girl's face would flicker before him like a white flower before the eyes
of one running at top speed through danger-haunted woods at night.
Those were the hours when Great Britain was pressing the most momentous
question ever framed by diplomacy: Was France, was Germany, going to
respect the neutrality of Belgium? Then the moment when France cried,
"Yes," and Germany's silence was louder in the instructed ear than roar
of cannon.
Sir William had sat in the war councils, and hour after hour sat in
smaller groups, laboring with the best minds to find a way to stay the
spread of the contagion. When Sir William came to a place where nothing
more could be hoped for or immediately be done, he found that, for the
first time in his life, he was unable to sleep. Country air, home, if
only for a single round of the clock.
They came back to Kirklamont to find, in outward seeming, all unchanged.
The fact struck sharply on the strained senses of the two men who drove
up from Inverness toward noon on the first Monday in that fateful
August. Late Saturday night Germany had declared war on Russia, and
France was already invaded.
In the hall at Kirklamont Lady McIntyre sat with her family, her Russian
embroidery, and her boarhounds. She came to meet her husband with,
"William, dear! And what's the news?"
Madge ran, her red hair all abroad, to embrace her father. Bobby, on the
point of going upstairs, changed his mind.
Sir William met interrogation testily.
Gavan Napier's first impression on entering the hall had been of the
still intensity of Miss Greta's gaze; perhaps he was the more struck by
it because it wasn't on himself. On Sir William. As she closed the book
she'd been reading aloud and rose, the look was gone. Amid the heats of
midsummer and of war she stood cool, pearl-powdery, sweet, with a smile
for Napier now, and an expression of deferential welcome for Sir
William. Miss Greta left to other folk all worrying questions aimed at
jaded and travel-worn men.
No, Sir William wasn't going to sleep till after luncheon. But he was
hot and dusty, he would go up....
They would have tackled Napier, but he, too, escaped hard upon Sir
William's heels.
As Napier followed his chief down three quarters of an hour later, a
laugh floated up. Nan Ellis.
She and Bobby sat on the sofa, taking and giving lessons in the tying of
sailors' knots. She looked up carelessly enough at Napier's appearance.
"How do you do? Do you know any good knots? I thought you wouldn't."
"She is prettier than I remembered," he said to himself.
Sir William, on the hearth-rug, showed a man already refreshed.
"What's this about the papers?" This raised voice commanded the hall.
"Yes, my dear William, for the third time. That was why we had to try to
get our news from London. But they were horrid, yesterday, about telling
us anything. It's not very pleasant,"--Lady McIntyre revealed her
conception of the use of war news--"when neighbors call, expecting us to
know the latest, and find we haven't heard a word since Saturday
morning."
"Well, then,"--Sir William filled the hiatus with a single sentence--"at
seven o'clock on Saturday evening Germany declared war on Russia."
Instantly the hall was full of hubbub. The excitement bred by that
tremendous fact reached even Lady McIntyre. "Dear me! I wonder what the
Pforzheims will say to that. They _will_ be astonished."
Miss Greta went through the motions of surprise. "Has it really come?"
Napier, observing her narrowly, said to himself. "She knew." And then,
"How did she know?"
Julian Grant came hurrying in with excited face. Before he had spoken to
anybody else or so much as looked at Nan: "Tell us, Sir William; it's
only in the country, isn't it, that people are talking wildly about
England being mixed up in this horrible business?"
"People talk everywhere," Sir William said crustily.
After Sir William's rebuff, Julian had gone over and sat down by Nan. It
was Miss Greta who did the talking.
Napier saw her leaning across Nan to engage Mr. Grant. Most gentle she
was, ingratiating. As he strolled nearer, Napier heard one or two of her
leading questions, put with an air of having no idea how straight they
went to the heart of the matter.
"Oh, you think that? I should _so_ like to know why."
Sir William, pretending not to listen, pretending to talk to Madge, lost
no word; neither Julian's denunciation of the idea of England's
interfering, nor Miss Greta's, "Well, it would be quixotic. And whatever
her enemies may say, England is not quixotic." It was the kind of little
compliment with a sting in its tail that Miss Greta could deliver with
an innocence that must, Napier decided, console her for many an enforced
piece of self-suppression.
"'Quixotic!'" Julian began to tell how much worse it would be than that.
Fury rose in Sir William. Napier saw it getting into his eyebrows. Miss
Greta saw it, too, Napier could have sworn. Oh, she knew perfectly what
she was about. "It _is_ difficult,"--she supplemented Julian's
assurance--"very difficult, to see how England could come in, with civil
war ready to break out at any minute. She would be sacrificing herself
for what?" Miss Greta inquired in her suave voice.
"The statesman who would advocate it," said Julian, "would be committing
suicide."
Sir William swung round. "You're wide enough of the mark _this_ time."
"You don't mean--"
"Our obligations to France--" Sir William began.
"What obligations?" the young man demanded. "The country hasn't endorsed
any obligations." He jumped up and faced Sir William on the hearth-rug.
"If behind our backs they've gone and committed us--" Julian's dark eyes
flashed a threat of dire reprisal. Provisionally he wiped the floor with
those (including, all too flagrantly, the Laird of Kirklamont) who
might, "in their colossal ineptitude, want to commit this nation to
war."
"That's _your_ opinion," said Sir William, growing bright red under the
friction. "You seem to think we have no right to ours."
Julian halted an instant before the problem. "How much right _has_ a man
to the wrong opinion?" Upon the answer to that, he knew, had hung much
of the history of politics and religion. In another mood Julian would
have maintained, till all was blue, that an intelligent bricklayer had
as much right to a voice in the policy of the country as a peer of the
realm. None the less, in his heart of hearts, as Napier was whimsically
aware, Sir Julian felt that, for all Sir William's official position, he
_hadn't_ any such valid right to press his views as had a Grant of
Abergarry. Between mirth and consternation, Napier realized that this
was the key to the renewed outpouring. It was not so much Julian, but a
Grant, very properly telling a McIntyre things good for him to know.
In the heat and fury of the discussion which she had so adroitly
precipitated, Miss Greta stretched out a hand and took up her knitting.
She sat there with bent head.
"Who? The democracy of England!" Julian was crying to Sir William's
angry, "Who is going to prevent?"
"If politicians don't know that, they'll learn it to their cost. English
participation in this war is impossible."
"So little impossible," Sir William barked back, "that we'll be in it up
to the neck."
There was a moment's hush in the hall, before everybody, except Miss
Greta, began to talk at once. Miss Greta never lifted her head. She did
not so much as lift her eyes. Napier saw that she was following the
success of her ruse with an intensity that held her hands immovable, as
though the rapid fingers had been caught, tied fast, in those
"field-gray" filaments she wove, as though her palms had been skewered
through by the shining steel of her long needles. They stuck out at
right angles, seeming to transfix the rigid, death-white hands.
"Never! never!" Julian had cried out at the top of his voice.
"And if we weren't in it," Sir William shouted, "we'd be wiped off the
map. What's more, we'd deserve to be."
"I tell you," Julian vociferated, "England will never consent to be
dragged into this quarrel."
"England won't be dragged in. She will go in because it would be a shame
to keep out. She _is_ in!"
Napier sat damning himself with uncommon vigor. Idiot! that he hadn't
foreseen the Von Schwarzenberg's agile apprehension of this new use to
which Nanchen's lover might be put. Too late the realization that her
baulked eagerness for official news had made her egg on Julian to engage
his fellow Scot at their real "national game"--which isn't golf at all.
Debate's the name of it. Those two played it with passion. Nothing could
stop them now. Sir William trumpeted at Julian, and Julian skirled
wildly back. The hall was in confusion.
"You said England never _would_," Nan cried across to Miss Greta.
"I said she wouldn't be so ill-advised," was the barely audible answer.
The shell-shock of Sir William's bomb had shaken even Greta von
Schwarzenberg. From that first impact she recovered her mental poise at
a price. Her face was white with the cost of it, or under the tension of
some immediate decision. It suddenly came over Napier: she wants more
than anything on earth to warn the Pforzheims.
She made a slight movement. It brought the clock within range. Five
minutes to luncheon time. "Five minutes," Napier said to himself, "in
which to get the news to Glenfallon," if he didn't prevent her.