When the ordeal at the police station came to an end, every person there
was extremely on edge--except, you'd say, Miss von Schwarzenberg. Her
dignity under the ordeal would forever, Napier told himself, count in
his mind to Miss Greta's credit. Going home, she soothed the ruffled
spirits of Miss Nan; she was tender, reassuring; she smiled.
Before the party had left the dinner table that night, Julian Grant
walked in. He had arrived late and put up at the Essex Arms.
"I shall complain to his mother about him when I see her," Lady McIntyre
threatened. They all fell to congratulating Julian upon his parents'
arrival in London. The fact of their belated and difficult return from
Germany had been duly chronicled in the newspapers, together with hints
of the unsuitable treatment to which Sir James and Lady Nicholson Grant
had been subjected. But if, as was plainly the case, some of the
Lamborough party waited eagerly to hear the horrid details, Julian
seemed to have no mind to make the most of his opportunities.
"I suppose they told you all about it?" Sir William made no more effort
than Madge to disguise his desire to know the worst.
"Oh, they told me one or two things. It's been no worse for them than
for some of the foreigners over here," was the unfilial answer which
Napier challenged on other grounds. Napier had the facts of the
ill-treatment of English _Kurgaest_ from the Foreign Office.
Julian lolled in his chair. People made a great deal of a little
inconvenience, he said, especially the type of person who was a
_Kurgaest_. It was a speech that did him no good in that company--being
far too much like a reflection upon a highly esteemed pair of whom their
son should speak with an even greater respect than the ordinary person.
Napier, who knew Julian's devotion to his parents, was morally certain
that Lady McIntyre was thinking at that moment of those shining lights
of filial duty, Mr. Carl and Mr. Ernst Pforzheim. _They_ would never
cast such a reflection upon their revered Papa as to suggest he was a
little fussy about small comforts. No, it wasn't nice of Julian.
So little did Julian recognize this, he was asking if anybody seriously
thought inconvenience was avoidable in the vast upheaval of war? He only
wished that inconvenience was the worst that any of them might have to
complain of. A second time he tripped up those "Foreign Office facts" of
Gavan's. Julian knew about those "facts." "And I know certain others.
_They_ relate to ill-treatment too. Facts more easily examined. No
trouble about subjecting those facts to every sort of test! Why? Because
they were nearer home. Yet I doubt if the Foreign Office makes any note
of them. _I_ have--in haphazard way. But enough to sober any man." He
produced two or three. Instances of harsh dismissal at a time when
fresh employment was known to be impossible. Instances of boycott, of
petty persecution, all because of a foreign name. It was the kind of
attempt at sober balancing still possible even under the roof of a
British official. A willingness as yet unshackled to see and to
criticize these spots on the national sun, was accounted an attitude of
mind peculiarly, proudly, British. If this particular circle was readier
than most to admit these minor blames, it was largely because of
sympathy with the particular German who was in their midst. A form of
hospitality.
To Nan Ellis, Julian's espousal of the cause of the stranger within the
gate was as music in the ear and as honey in the mouth. Good! good! She
applauded him with hands and lips and eyes.
On leaving the dining-room, everybody began to put on hats and wraps.
"Oh, yes, hadn't you heard, Mr. Julian? Fearful excitement! A mine has
been washed up on the coast. And you, Madge," urged her father, who
needed no urging whatever, "you've got to come and look at it, too."
They all went down to the beach, and walked in the moonlight, by the
incoming tide, a quarter of a mile north of the pier.
Miss Greta carried her coat on her arm at first. _Would_ Mr. Napier be
so kind? He stopped to help her into the voluminous white canvas ulster.
"It isn't true, is it," she said in a low, earnest voice, "that you've
joined an O. T. C. and go drilling in the park after working hours?"
"Plenty of men do that," he said, struggling to enable Miss Greta to
find the armhole.
"_Not men like you!_" she whispered. "And when you aren't working with
Sir William, you go route marching, or trench digging for a holiday!"
Napier had been one of the first of his world who refused to accept the
fact of not being bred a soldier as an excuse for not becoming one. But
that Miss Greta should be one of the few to know the fact did not please
him. "Oh, the sleeve's wrong side out," he said; "that's why."
The ulster had to come off again. "Surely,"--she turned the sleeve with
deliberation--"surely you know that before you are nearly ready for a
commission, peace will be declared."
"You think peace will come soon, then?"
"Well, of course, when the Germans have taken Paris. There now--" she
stopped short again, making of her compunction an excuse to widen the
distance between themselves and the rest of the party. "I've gone in my
bungling way and said something I oughtn't to. I, who would rather
offend anybody on earth than you."
"I don't know why you should say that." He began to walk on.
"You don't know why?"
There was something unnerving in the appealing sorrow of the question.
Why, in the name of all the gods, hadn't he kept up with the others?
"I think you do know," she said, a pace or two behind his hurrying
figure.
Napier didn't look round, but he was sure that the tears in her voice
had risen to her eyes.
"Do you mind if I go on? I promised Julian--"
"Ah, you've already gone on."
"Gone--" he paused an instant.
"Yes, gone back inside that British arctic circle that you came out of
once--to save my life." She gained on him; she was panting at his elbow.
"I shall never forget that, Mr. Gavan; never as long as I live."
"Oh, you make too much of--"
"Too much of saving such a life as mine! That may be true."
"You know!"--he swung back a step--"that wasn't in the least what I
meant. I--you see--I say! _Julian!_"
When Napier had caught up with the two in front, Miss Greta wasn't far
behind.
Nan turned an excited face. "Does Gavan know?" she asked Julian.
Just as though Greta weren't now at his elbow, Julian jerked out, "He
can easily satisfy himself. Two hundred people on the Fourth of August
simply vanished from our common life. No public charge, no trial that
_was_ a trial according to English ideas--"
"Would you leave known spies free to do their work?" Napier asked
sharply.
"Do you know what happened to them?" Nan intervened.
"We can tell what happened to some of them. Set blindfolded against a
wall and shot."
"How perfectly awful!" breathed Nan.
"Miss Greta isn't as horrified as you are. She knows what Germany would
do with men--yes, and women--arrested on even slighter evidence."
"They'd never do that to _women_!" said Nan, aghast.
"Oh, wouldn't they!"
"Set a _woman_ against a wall and shoot her!"
"It's logical," was Miss Greta's comment.
"Logical!" echoed Nan. "It's--it's devilish."
"Risky but well paid," observed Napier, with his eyes on the rippled
sand.
"It should be well paid," pronounced the quiet voice of Greta von
Schwarzenberg. They had come up with Lady McIntyre, abandoned by the
advance-guard. Nan offered her arm. She and Greta adapted their pace to
the older woman's.
As the two men walked on, Julian spoke of the beauty of ships seen in
that transfiguring light. "Only two or three little fishing-smacks, and
yet the grace, the mystery--"
Napier's eyes had gone farther seaward. What were those other, vaguer
shapes? Was there a mystery more urgent there? The night was
unseasonably warm, but a chill invaded him as he asked, "Are they
English?"
Julian, with his hands clasped behind him, strolled on without troubling
to reply.
It was Napier who again broke silence.
"It's all very well to scoff at amateur detectives. Have you thought why
_we_ are on the coast?"
"Good air."
"And we breathe it just where we could so easily, if we were as
accomplished as some, make signals and receive them."
Julian uttered the audible sigh of much-tried patience.
"Well, think a moment. Little as there is of proscribed area as yet, why
are we in it? Because the McIntyres chose this place?"
"Certainly. Lady McIntyre told me herself about coming down to
inspect--"
"Exactly!--a house selected for her. We are in the proscribed area
because the enemy alien in the McIntyre family chose this place for
them."
"I tell you, Gavan, I'm not going to listen--"
"Yes, you are. I've listened to you often enough. You can listen to me
for once." He told him about the leakage of the shipping secret. The
loss it had been to us. The gain it had been to the enemy. "Old Colonel
McManus is right. She has poked her nose everywhere."
"All this makes me anxious," said Julian, gravely.
His friend breathed a free half-minute.
"Very anxious about _you_, Gavan."
"See here--" Napier stopped short--"because I was wrong about Gull
Island is no reason--"
"So you're satisfied you were wrong, are you?" Julian said lightly.
"Naturally, since you found nothing to report." Then it came out that
Julian had had "more serious things" to think about. He hadn't been near
the Island. It was the first serious quarrel of their lives.
Napier left his friend and caught up with Sir William. The pressure on
his mind did not suffer him to wait till he got his chief alone. When he
had asked and obtained Sir William's reluctant consent "to a few days
off," Napier broke through the little hail of questions, and commented
with, "Isn't that the mine?"
"It is! It is!"
Madge flew on ahead, deaf to Lady McIntyre's, "Wait for your father,
darling,"--as though Sir William's presence might be trusted to exercise
a mollifying effect upon the mine, a theory which, however, she wasn't
long in publicly abandoning.
Fifty yards or so this side of a rock-strewn indentation in the low
coast-line there it lay, that strange, new creature of the deep, with
nothing in its aspect to account for the instantaneous aversion it
inspired in Lady McIntyre. Gray-white, shaped like a great egg or a
pear, according to your angle of vision, seen at closer quarters it
might be taken for a well-stuffed laundry-bag, except for the something
odd protruding from its mouth. Lady McIntyre made no secret of her
intention to give it a wide berth. As the others went toward the Thing,
Lady McIntyre, left alone some yards away, called out, "I _wish_ you
wouldn't, William!"
"Wouldn't what?" he said good-humoredly over his shoulder. "I thought we
had come for the express purpose of examining it."
"Yes, but I--I didn't know it would be like that."
"You can hardly have expected it to look more harmless," Sir William
said as he went closer.
"That's just it." Her wail said she wouldn't have minded it half so much
had it been more frankly infernal. "Anyway, Madge mustn't--" Then, with
a rising terror in her voice, Lady McIntyre betrayed the degree to which
she had lost her bearings at sight of that mysterious messenger of
death. "William," she cried, "_make_ Madge come away."
"It's all right, my dear, as long as they aren't touched. This is the
part, you see--"
As he appeared to be in the act of doing the very thing he himself had
said was likely to have dire results, Lady McIntyre raised her voice
still higher. "Greta, do, _do_ bring Madge here!"
Greta, enveloped in a canvas coat and gray-white motor-veil, was
squatting by the enemy. She seemed to hear nothing, as she crouched
there on the sand. The others listened to Sir William, and they, too,
looked at the Thing, all except Napier. He looked at the huddled figure
staring with that curious expression at the mine. It was canvas-covered
like herself. Like herself, of rounded contour and of incalculable
capacity for harm. It struck Napier rather horribly that there was
kinship between the two, that she hung over the infernal thing like a
mother might over her child.
"Mr. Napier,"--Lady McIntyre's voice shrilled sharply behind
him--"_will_ you get Madge to come away?"
It was Nan who achieved the impossible. "Brr! I'm cold," she announced.
"If you weren't too grand, Mr. Napier, Madge and I would race you to
those rocks."
Mr. Napier wasn't too grand, and Miss Madge was elated by her victory.
"I'll race you back again," she cried, again off like the wind.
They sat down on the rocks where Madge left them. For several moments
there was no sound but the swish and rattle of pebbles as they swept up
shore in the advance, and then, deserted by the force behind, fell back
a little, clinging for a moment to the skirts of the retreating wave.
Nan, with her white veil cloud-like round her face, looked at the track
of light across the water. The moon wore a cloud round her face, too,
but she looked in and out. The girl was very still.
"Oh, my dear! my dear!" Napier's heart cried so loud that in a kind of
terror he fell upon audible speech. "It is the most wonderful night I
ever--" and he stopped. His voice sounded strange. As she turned from
the moon-path on the water to meet Napier's look fastened on her, he saw
that her eyes had brought away some of the restlessness as well as some
of the glitter of the sea. The adorable gentleness in them had given
place to a critical, sharp, little glance that affected Napier like a
breath from a glacier.
"Sir William seems immensely devoted to you--" To his over-sensitive ear
she seemed to imply that being devoted to Gavan Napier implied a
singular stretch of charity. Nor would she accept his silence. As though
he must himself share this view of his scant deserts. "Don't you think
it very nice of Sir William to let you go off on a holiday at such a
time as this?"
"Very nice indeed."
She sat with her chin in her hand, her face upturned again. But the soft
rapture was gone, gone utterly. "Julian is looking very tired, don't you
think?" she said.
"I thought he did look tired."
"He is going to help Mr. Wilkins.
"Who is Mr. Wilkins?"
"Oh, Mr. Wilkins is a splendid person who is organizing stop-the-war
meetings."
"Well," said Napier, shortly, "that's a good way to give Mr. Wilkins a
taste of it."
"You mean a taste of war?" She dropped her hand. "Oh, I _wish_ you
wouldn't say things like that!"
"How I am making her hate me!" he said to himself. "Well, since she
won't love me, what does it matter?"
But it did matter. It mattered to the very core of him. It mattered to
the waking and the sleeping. It mattered for all of life--he knew that
now. It would add a bitterness to the bitterness of death. To die never
having had this--
She sat with hands lying slack in her lap. "I think I'd like to go
home," she said. "I don't like England as much as I did."
"Why is that?"
She looked at him oddly and then away. After another little silence,
"Well, for one thing, I think it's abominable the way they are talking
and writing about the men who didn't approve of the war and were brave
enough to say so, and say it publicly." She turned her eyes from the
curling, crisping foam as if to plead for some little sympathy for these
views. There was no sign on Napier's face. She thrust her iron-pointed
stick into the sand. "What they've given up, some of those men, for the
sake of--oh, it's the most splendid thing I ever came near to! I _love_
those men."
"All of them?" Napier asked drily.
She sprang up. "I won't have you mocking at me. Or at Julian!"
"I don't mock at Julian."
"Oh, only at me?" She laughed a little uncertainly and then became grave
again, but not, Napier felt, unfriendly. "You know, his father has gone
home to Scotland. His mother, too. And Julian is here." They were
silent a moment. "And I just wish they'd stayed in Germany," she burst
out. "They are horrid to Julian. They've as good as told him they're
ashamed of him. But they don't deserve to have a son like Julian. If he
was _my_ son...."
Napier smiled. "Well, if he were your son?"
"I'd know how to treat him. I'd know rather better than I do now," she
wound up, with her astonishing candor.
Hardly two yards away the inrushing surf foamed as white as boiling milk
among the boulders.
"How long," she asked, with something breathless in her manner, "before
the tide reaches as far as where we are?"
"Not long." Even as he spoke, one of those waves that will sometimes
outrace its fellows rushed up the beach and flung itself in thunder
against the outward barrier. In spume and froth it ran whitely in and
out nearly to the upper rocks, filling all the place with motion and a
dazzle of moonlit foam.
"It seems to set the rocks moving. And the noise! Doesn't it make you
dizzy?" she said. "It does me."
"Then come higher up."
She shook her head. He showed a place at his side. "Sit here if you
feel--"
"Oh, but I _like_ to feel dizzy. That's the great difference between you
and me." Her laugh was gone in a second. With her eye on the receding
wave she asked hurriedly, "Where are you going for your holiday?"
His plans were dependent on other people, he said.
"You make me wonder what 'other people' you've got. How little I know
about you." She tumbled the sentences out.
"Well, come to that, how little I know about you."
"There isn't anything I'm not willing to tell you--if--if you cared to
know." She spoke more gently, even with a touch of wistfulness. "You
British are so reticent!" He didn't deny the charge. He felt her eyes on
his face, as she said, "I have an idea you wouldn't be--if you once got
started."
He laughed out again at that shot. "The only safe way then," he said,
"is not to get started."
"Oh, _do_ get started!" She said it with a touch of roguery lightening
her new seriousness. "I should so like to see you indiscreet for once."
Deliberately Napier didn't look at her again, till the danger-point was
safely rounded by her saying, "Greta thinks you're going to Scotland."
"Oh, _does_ she?" He looked at her straight enough now. "And does she
tell you why?"
"No; but you'll tell me that."
"Maybe I will," he answered a trifle grimly, "when I come back."
She studied him. "You are very serious." She leaned a trifle nearer.
"You are more serious, I think, than I ever saw you."
Napier smiled. In his heart he was thinking: "Before she is up in the
morning, I shall be gone. On the errand that will end even her surface
kindness to Greta's enemy. This is the last time. She will never again
stand so near and look at me with those eyes of faith."
"Aren't you rather serious, too?" he asked.
She spoke through his question, impulsively, lifting her voice a little
above the nearing thunder. "Lady McIntyre thinks you are going to see a
lady."
He made his small effort at jocularity. "I must speak to Lady McIntyre."
"_Are_ you such a fickle person?"
"Is that what they say?"
"They think you are fickle about women."
"Well," he said, achieving an effect of jauntiness, "and what's your
opinion, Miss Nan?"
"They don't understand you," she said gravely.
"And do _you_ understand me?" he laughed.
"Yes. Because I'm like that myself. They call me fickle, too. But it's
only that we haven't--_hadn't_"--she amended with that sudden summer
lightning in her eyes--"hadn't met The One." If she came closer still,
it seemed not to be by her own volition, but in the same way as she had
spoken--at the bidding of some influence outside them both. Napier half
turned from the too-disturbing nearness and instinctively put out a hand
to the boulder, shoulder-high, just in front of him. But his hand moved
short of its goal, unguided by a mind that was awhirl in a maelstrom
where duties, inclinations, friendships, loves, all churned in an eddy
of such surpassing swiftness that the brain reeled and the heart forgot
its rhythm.
"Always thinking--but why does your hand shake so?"--the girl's voice
was so low, that he hardly heard it above the surf, as she hurried on.
"Maybe it's this one. No? Then perhaps it's that. And always wrong--till
one day--in the hall--" a very passion of triumph thrilled through her
question, "Wasn't it in the hall at Kirklamont?"
"_Nan!_" he cried out.
And she, on a note that the surf took up and carried out to sea, cried,
"Gavan!" On whose initiative neither knew, they were clinging together.
They cared as little for sea water as did the rocks. The two stood there
like one--as if through all the moons to come they would bide as
steadfast in their rapture as the rocks in foam.
When she drew her face away from his, and they looked at each other, it
was with the knowledge that the wash of a greater sea than this they
stood beside had flung them, companion castaways, on the shore of a new
world.
She had thrown back her head. The scarf fell down over her shoulder to
her feet, a tiny cascade to join the whiteness of sea water. All veils
had been stripped off for that moment of uttermost joy, before the man
cried sharply, "Julian!" and his arms fell down to his sides.
"_Julian!_" the girl echoed, aghast. She stumbled back a step. He didn't
try to save her. She fell against the rock. Her hand, that tried to
break the fall, was wrenched at the wrist. She hardly knew it at the
time.
"Come, let us go back." He was leading her through swirling foam.
"How can we go back?" she whispered. But she followed him. They found
the others waiting for them by the pier.