It suddenly flashed over Napier that he might learn more by letting her
communicate with the Pforzheims than by preventing her. A highly
important conclusion about Miss Greta herself might thus be reached in
the only possible way. And the harm done by the Pforzheims knowing? The
die was already cast. The German Government knew that. The whole world
would know it in a few hours. The Pforzheims couldn't even gamble on the
tip. The stock exchange was closed.
There was yet another consideration very present to Napier's cautious
type of mind. Suppose he were mistaken as to the woman's designs. Such a
mistake, besides being intensely disagreeable to any one of decent
feeling, would "do" for you with the McIntyres. Undoubtedly would "do"
for you with Nan.
All the same, an expressionless intensity of the Schwarzenberg's
stillness, in the midst of the hubbub all about her, kept the observing
mind alert.
She stirred, she half rose. In the midst of his excitement, Napier
caught himself smiling faintly. He caught himself, because Miss Greta
had caught him.
"Devil take her acuteness! She wouldn't be sitting down calmly at the
luncheon-table if she didn't know I had my eye on her," he said to
himself. He might as well have said it aloud. She smiled at him across
the board. The china-blue eyes were as hard as big alley marbles. She
raised her cider-glass to her lips.
Nan turned to her impulsively. "Do you still think--" She stared at the
smashed tumbler and the cascade down Miss Greta's pink frock.
"Oh, Nan dear, my new dress!"
"Me? Do you mean--did I do that? Oh, my! I'm most terribly sorry!"
"If I sponge it off instantly--" Greta rose. Nan rose.
Madge rose. "I'll help you," she said.
"Certainly not!" Miss Greta cast back a look not to be mistaken, and
hurried off, holding her skirt out in front of her and looking at it
with a very passion of concern.
Should he bolt after her? Ridiculous! How could he dog the steps of a
woman going upstairs to sponge her frock!
Should he go outside and waylay the messenger? He hadn't even the
flimsiest excuse, except one that wasn't producible, unless he could
catch her red-handed. To catch her sending a note to Ernst Pforzheim,
what would that prove? Wouldn't any of us in her place want to share
such tremendous news with our compatriots, let alone with a lover?
She was away less than eleven minutes. Napier timed her. When she came
back she had on a different skirt and a subtly different expression.
Whatever had been on her mind as well as on her dress, she had got rid
of both. The others still argued and speculated. The staggering news was
new to them. Curiously, it was already old to Napier, old and grim and
implacable. He shoved it wearily aside. While Miss Greta's head was bent
and she thought him covertly eyeing her, Napier drank refreshment out of
the face at her side. The little girl from over the water, what was it
she did to him? The mystery of these things.
Napier took Julian out on the terrace to cool off, though he said it was
to smoke. "I say, day and night for over a week I've heard nothing but
war. Talk to me about something pleasant," he said. It was a plain lead,
but Julian was a mole of a man.
"What do you call pleasant in a world like this?"
"Oh, several things." From where they sat they could see Nan Ellis under
the trees at the entrance to the park, and Wildfire flying back and
forth through the air--as Nan urged the swing.
Napier remembered that, in all the heady talk before and during
luncheon, Julian had hardly looked at the girl. When she spoke he didn't
hear. Napier sat now studying his friend. "Don't say I didn't warn you.
There's one person who'll be precious tired of all this war-talk if it
goes on."
Julian lifted absent eyes. "Nan? Not a bit of it. You don't know Nan.
Whenever I stray to personal affairs, it's, 'Come and show me on the map
where Luxemburg is,' and, 'Just where have they crossed the French
border?'"
"I suppose you're not by any chance so taken up telling her where the
Germans are in France that you don't know whereabouts you are with
America?"
He _didn't_ know. He'd been waiting till he could see his way clear to
detach the girl from Miss Greta. And then this appalling business--
Napier's silence seemed to convey to Julian some hint of an unspoken
arraignment. She had written to her mother, he said, in extenuation.
"Yes, about me. She is devoted to her mother. Yes, I've been thinking it
over. You see, the Germans--"
"God bless my soul! Let's leave the Germans to stew in their own juice
an hour or two!" Gavan got up and walked back and forth in front of the
two garden chairs and of the man left sitting there. More than by any
previous extravagance of Julian's, some of the things he said at
luncheon had angered Napier. They fairly made Sir William choke. They
were of a character to make Sir James Grant incline to choke the
speaker. _That_ was the knowledge which opened the door to the fear that
clutched at Napier--fear of himself. Fear of the temptation revealed in
this growing conviction of his, that if he let Julian drift on the new
tide that was sweeping in, it would carry him away, far beyond the
securities, the privileges of a favored son of the old order. Almost
certainly it would carry him away from Nan Ellis. Whether an illusion or
not, Napier felt that he had only to sit there in the other chair and do
nothing, to see Julian blindly "do for" himself. As he walked up and
down, Napier discoursed upon woman.
"You mean," Julian said, with the air of the docile disciple receiving a
brand-new doctrine, "you mean that, in spite of feeling sure of
her--bless her!--you think I ought to get something definite settled
this afternoon?"
"You certainly ought to find out where you stand. You _can't_ let it
drift." He knew that what he really meant was that _he_ couldn't. He got
up and walked away toward the loch.
On his way back, Julian was coming with that nervous step to meet him.
Well, he'd spoken to her. She admitted she was fond of him. "But I don't
want to marry you," she had said. "I told her," he went on, "that I
couldn't believe that. Fortunately for me, for I didn't see how I could
bear it. 'You don't want to marry _any_body just now?' I suggested. And
what on earth do you think she said?"
"How do _I_ know!" Napier returned irritably.
"She said, 'Well, I'll just see about that! You mustn't go pulling me up
by the roots to see how I'm growing,' she said. 'It puts me back.' And
then I very nearly took hold of her. But all I did was to sit tight and
say: 'Which _way_ are you growing, Nan? If _I_ can't find out, I'll have
to get Gavan to.' 'You'd ask Gavan!' And she looked so startled, I
laughed. 'So you don't want Gavan to know how you behave,' I said. I
wasn't surprised!"
He brought it out with an incredible lightheartedness. If underneath his
surface equability Julian was really agitated, shaken, torn, it was not
on the score of his own and Nan's future. It was for the immediate fate
of Europe. He swung back to it as they came in sight of the hall. "I was
thinking as I came along that our diplomacy for the last twenty years--"
A servant crossed the lawn to meet them with two telegrams for Sir
William.
"And the telephone, sir. Sir William left word that you--Yes, London,
sir." Napier hurried back to his post.
Tommy Durrant was at the other end--a message for Sir William from the
Prime Minister. Napier wrote it down. He'd ring Tommy up before six. Any
more news? King Albert's letter, asking for the support of England, had
been read in the House with immense effect. "In spite of some labor
opposition, they'll vote the credit to-night; you'll see. If the German
fleet molests the French, we'll be on hand!" cried Tommy along the wire.
"Army? Mobilizing over night. Kitchener's back from Egypt."
Under the renewal of the hammer-strokes, Napier's sense of a world
blindly driven to some incredible doom gave to the family group, when he
rejoined it, an air of unreality. And this in spite of the fact that
Miss Greta did not make the mistake of ignoring the subject which in all
minds usurped the foreground.
She made her own little contribution with an air of engaging frankness.
"If the war were going to be fought out on sea, the British fleet, of
course--But you wouldn't say yourself, would you, that the British were
a military people?"
"Not in the sense that Germany is," Napier agreed.
"In no sense at all," said Julian.
"But Germany! Every son of Germany is a soldier!" Miss Greta's tone was
just a trifle too superior.
But wasn't she right? Even the Pforzheims. They, too, were soldiers.
These friendly, slightly ridiculous neighbors underwent in Napier's mind
a sudden and violent transformation. They stripped off their stage
tweeds, their check shirts, their superabundant jewelry; they stood in
uniform. Severe, infinitely _praktisch_, six foot, each, of formidable
enemy.
After tea there was a general movement.
"Coming for a stroll?" Julian stood looking down at Nan.
"Yes, but it _is_ cold toward sunset in this Scotland of yours. I must
have my jacket."
"Oh, well, where is it?" he demanded, with a touch of his absent-minded
impatience.
She looked at him. "_I_ don't know. In the coat-room, perhaps. You'll
find it somewhere."
"Do you think I shall?" he questioned dubiously. "What's it like?"
"Well, of all things!" She sat up very straight. "You mean to say you
never noticed? It isn't the _very least_ like anybody else's."
"Oh, I dare say I'll remember it all right when I see it." Julian
retired meekly to the coat-room.
Nan brought her eyes down from the florid, gilt molding above the window
to the level of Napier's face.
"You look worried," she announced.
"I am worried."
"Just about the war--nothing particular?"
Yes, there was one thing in particular. "One thing I can't honestly say
I'm happy about." His speech slowed under the quick shifting of light
and shadow in her eyes. What did she think he had been going to say when
he began that brought that darkening as he ended, "I can't honestly say
I am happy about Julian."
"About _Julian_!"
"Yes. He tells me you and he aren't engaged, and he doesn't know why."
"Is that all you've got to worry you?"
"Doesn't it seem to you enough to justify any friend--"
She was dumb.
Napier took refuge in a rapid survey of Julian's character and
advantages.
"Do you know," she broke in, "you're talking to me about Mr. Grant as if
you were recommending a chauffeur. He belongs, I gather, to a reputable
family; he's steady; he was a long time in his last place; sober, very,
_very_ sober! But I really don't need any testimonials to Mr. Grant's
character," she wound up under her breath, as that young man emerged
gloomily from the room at the bottom of the hall.
"I say, there are _millions_ of coats here."
"Oh, very well, I'll come."
He _had_ been an ass! The sole gain, as Napier saw it, out of a rather
ridiculous encounter was to establish the fact of the girl's
sensitiveness for Julian's dignity.
* * * * *
For Sir William, the Kirklamont charm worked well. Again the next
morning he slept late. There was in consequence rather more bustle than
usual attendant on his departure. Nan Ellis had rushed over early to say
good-by. It struck Napier that she was both grave and excited. She
joined him for an instant at the table, where he stood putting some
papers into the despatch box.
"Do _you_ want me to?" she asked in a low voice, as though continuing a
conversation.
"To--"
"Yes, to marry Julian." Then, quick as the darting of a dragon-fly, she
pounced on his possible answer. "I sha'n't do it--not even for you. But
if that's what you _want_, I'd just like to know." She waited. Napier,
too, for once in his life tongue-tied.
"Well, good-by everybody. Isn't that lazy dog Bobby down yet?" Sir
William demanded.
"He's where he always is these days," answered Madge; "gone off to
Glenfallon."
"Wrong!" Bobby was striding into the hall by the side door. He looked
rather glum for Bobby.
"Find your friends out of sorts?" Sir William inquired, with his shrewd
look. "Nasty jar for Carl and Ernst, opening their newspapers this
morning." Sir William was not forgetting to keep an eye on the private
case and the summer mackintosh on their way into the car. "Well, what do
they think about the war _now_? Eh, what?"
"I don't suppose I shall ever know what they think," his son answered.
"I can't think why you say that, dear," his mother remonstrated. "I
don't find them at all reserved. They talk with perfect freedom to
_me_."
"Well, they won't any more. They're gone," said Bobby.
"Gone where?"
"I don't know. And, what's more, the caretaker doesn't know."
"You don't mean to say they've gone for good?" Madge sounded a sharp
regret.
Bobby nodded. "Glenfallon's shut up."
"But they _can't_ be gone for good. _Can_ they?" Lady McIntyre turned to
Miss Greta.
"How should I know?" The answer came a trifle too quickly.
Sir William got into the car. Napier followed him. He leaned over the
slammed door. "When do you say they went?" he asked Bobby.
"Late last night. Bag and baggage."