CHAPTER I

THE CUP OF FURY

BOOKS BY RUPERT HUGHES

The Cup of Fury

The Unpardonable Sin

We Can't Have Everything

In a Little Town

The Thirteenth Commandment

Clipped Wings

What Will People Say?

The Last Rose of Summer

Empty Pockets

Long Ever Ago

HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK

Established 1817

[Illustration: "It would be nice to be married," Marie Louise reflected,

"if one could stay single at the same time."]

THE CUP OF FURY

A Novel of Cities and Shipyards

BY RUPERT HUGHES

Author of "We Can't Have Everything" "The Unpardonable Sin" etc.

ILLUSTRATED BY HENRY RALEIGH

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS

NEW YORK AND LONDON

THE CUP OF FURY

Copyright, 1919, by Harper & Brothers

Printed in the United States of America

Published May, 1919

ILLUSTRATIONS

"It would be nice to be married," Marie Louise

reflected, "if one could stay single at the same

time." Frontispiece

Facing p.

He tried to swing her to the pommel, but she fought

herself free and came to the ground and was almost

trampled. 3

"This is the life for me. I've been a heroine and a

war-worker about as long as I can." 75

"'It's beautiful overhead if you're going that way,'"

Davidge quoted. He set out briskly, but Marie

Louise hung back. "Aren't you afraid to push on

when you can't see where you're going?" she

demanded. 91

There was something hallowed and awesome about it all.

It had a cathedral majesty. 166

How quaint a custom it is for people who know each

other well and see each other in plain clothes

every day to get themselves up with meticulous

skill in the evening like Christmas parcels for

each other's examination. 235

"So I have already done something more for Germany.

That's splendid. Now tell me what else I can do."

Nicky was too intoxicated with his success to see

through her thin disguise. 270

Nobody recognized the lily-like beauty of Miss Webling

in the smutty-faced passer-boy crouching at

Sutton's elbow. 282

BOOK I

IN LONDON

[Illustration: He tried to swing her to the pommel, but she fought

herself free and came to the ground and was almost trampled.]

THE CUP OF FURY

CHAPTER I

Then the big door swung back as if of itself. Marie Louise had felt

that she would scream if she were kept a moment outside. The luxury of

simply wishing the gate ajar gave her a fairy-book delight enhanced by

the pleasant deference of the footman, whose face seemed to be hung on

the door like a Japanese mask.

Marie Louise rejoiced in the dull splendor of the hall. The obsolete

gorgeousness of the London home had never been in good taste, but had

grown as lovable with years as do the gaudy frumperies of a rich old

relative. All the good, comfortable shelter of wealth won her blessing

now as never before. The stairway had something of the grand manner,

too, but it condescended graciously to escort her up to her own room;

and there, she knew, was a solitude where she could cry as hard as she

wanted to, and therefore usually did not want to. Besides, her mood

now was past crying for.

She was afraid of the world, afraid of the light. She felt the

cave-impulse to steal into a deep nook and cower there till her heart

should be replenished with courage automatically, as ponds are fed

from above.

Marie Louise wanted walls about her, and stillness, and people shut

out. She was in one of the moods when the soul longs to gather its

faculties together in a family, making one self of all its selves.

Marie Louise had known privation and homelessness and the perils they

bring a young woman, and now she had riches and a father and mother

who were great people in a great land, and who had adopted her into

their own hearts, their lives, their name. But to-day she asked

nothing more than a deep cranny in a dark cave.

She would have said that no human voice or presence could be anything

but a torture to her. And yet, when she hurried up the steps, she was

suddenly miraculously restored to cheerfulness by the tiny explosion

of a child's laughter instantly quenched. She knew that she was about

to be ambushed as usual. She must pretend to be completely surprised

once more, and altogether terrified with her perfect regularity.

Her soul had been so utterly surprised and terrified in the outer

world that this infantile parody was curiously welcome, since nothing

keeps the mind in balance on the tight-rope of sanity like the

counterweight that comedy furnishes to tragedy, farce to frenzy, and

puerility to solemnity.

The children called her "Auntie," but they were not hers except

through the adoption of a love that had to claim some kinship. They

looked like her children, though--so much so, indeed, that strangers

thought that she was their young mother. But it was because she looked

like their mother, who had died, that the American girl was a member

of this British household, inheriting some of its wealth and much of

its perilous destiny.

She had been ambuscaded in the street to-day by demons not of faery,

but of fact, that had leaped out at her from nowhere. It solaced her

somehow to burlesque the terror that had whelmed her, and, now that

she was assailed by ruthless thugs of five and seven years, the

shrieks she had not dared to release in the street she gave forth with

vigor, as two nightgowned tots flung themselves at her with

milk-curdling cries of:

"Boo-ooh!"

Holding up pink fat hands for pistols, they snapped their thumbs at

her and said:

"Bang! Bang!"

And she emitted most amusing squeals of anguish and staggered back,

stammering:

"Oh, p-p-please, Mr. Robbobber and Miss Burgurgular, take my l-l-life

but spare my m-m-money."

She had been so genuinely scared before that she marred the sacred

text now, and the First Murderer, who had all the conservative

instincts of childhood, had to correct her misquotation of the sacred

formula:

"No, no, Auntie. Say, 'Take my money but spare my life!' Now we dot to

do it all over."

"I beg your pardon humbly," she said, and went back to be ambushed

again. This time the boy had an inspiration. To murder and robbery he

would add scalping.

But Marie Louise was tired. She had had enough of fright, real or

feigned, and refused to be scalped. Besides, she had been to the

hairdresser's, and she explained that she really could not afford to

be scalped. The boy was bitterly disappointed, and he grew furious

when the untimely maid came for him and for his ruthless sister and

demanded that they come to bed at once or be reported.

As the warriors were dragged off to shameful captivity, Marie Louise,

watching them, was suddenly shocked by the thought of how early in

life humanity begins to revel in slaughter. The most innocent babes

must be taught not to torture animals. Cruelty comes with them like a

caul, or a habit brought in from a previous existence. They always

almost murder their mothers and sometimes quite slay them when they

are born. Their first pastimes are killing games, playing dead,

stories of witches, cannibalistic ogres. The American Indian is the

international nursery pet because of his traditional fiendishness.

It seemed inconsistent, but it was historically natural that the boy

interrupted in his massacre of his beloved aunt should hang back to

squall that he would say his prayers only to her. Marie Louise glanced

at her watch. She had barely time to dress for dinner, but the

children had to be obeyed. She made one weak protest.

"Fräulein hears your prayers."

"But she's wented out."

"Well, I'll hear them, then."

"Dot to tell us fairy-'tory, too," said the girl.

"All right, one fairy-'tory--"

She went to the nursery, and the cherubs swarmed up to her lap

demanding "somefin bluggy."

Invention failed her completely. She hunted through her memory among

the Grimms' fairy-tales. She could recall nothing that seemed sweet

and guileless enough for these two lambs.

All that she could think of seemed to be made up of ghoulish plots;

of children being mistreated by harsh stepmothers; of their being

turned over to peasants to slay; of their being changed into animals

or birds; of their being seized by wolves, or by giants that drank

blood and crunched children's bones as if they were reed birds; of

hags that cut them up into bits or thrust them into ovens and cooked

them for gingerbread. It occurred to her that all the German

fairy-stories were murderously cruel. She felt a revulsion against

each of the legends. But her mind could not find substitutes.

After a period of that fearful ordeal when children tyrannize for

romances that will not come, her mind grew mutinous and balked. She

confessed her poverty of ideas.

The girl, Bettina, sulked; the boy screamed:

"Aw, botheration! We might as well say our prayers and go to bed."

In the least pious of moods they dropped from her knees to their own

and put their clasped hands across her lap. They became in a way

hallowed by their attitude, and the world seemed good to her again as

she looked down at the two children, beautiful as only children can

be, innocent of wile, of hardship and of crime, safe at home and

praying to their heavenly Father from whose presence they had so

recently come.

But as she brooded over them motherly and took strength from them as

mothers do, she thought of other children in other countries orphaned

in swarms, starving in multitudes, waiting for food like flocks of

lambs in the blizzard of the war. She thought still more vividly of

children flung into the ocean. She had seen these children at her

knees fighting against bitter medicines, choking on them and blurting

them out at mouth and nose and almost, it seemed, at eyes. So it was

very vivid to her how children thrown into the sea must have gagged

with terror at the bitter medicine of death, strangled and smothered

as they drowned.

She heard the prayers mumbled through, but at the hasty "Amen" she

protested.

"You didn't thank God for anything. Haven't you anything to thank God

for?"

If they had expressed any doubt, she would have told them of dozens of

special mercies, but almost instantly they answered, "Oh yes!" They

looked at each other, understood, nodded, clapped their hands, and

chuckled with pride. Then they bent their heads, gabled their

finger-tips, and the boy said:

"We t'ank Dee, O Dod, for making sink dat old _Lusitania_." And the

girl said, "A-men!"

Marie Louise gave a start as if she had been stabbed. It was the loss

of the _Lusitania_ that had first terrified her. She had just seen it

announced on the placards of newsboys in London streets, and had fled

home to escape from the vision, only to hear the children thank Heaven

for it! She rose so suddenly that she flung the children back from

their knees to their haunches. They stared up at her in wondering

fear. She stepped outside the baleful circle and went striding up and

down the room, fighting herself back to self-control, telling herself

that the children were not to blame, yet finding them the more

repulsive for their very innocence. The purer the lips, the viler the

blasphemy.

She was not able to restrain herself from denouncing them with all her

ferocity. She towered over them and cried out upon them: "You wicked,

wicked little beasts, how dare you put such loathsome words into a

prayer! God must have gasped with horror in heaven at the shame of it.

Wherever did you get so hateful an idea?"

"Wicked your own self!" the boy snapped back. "Fräulein read it in the

paper about the old boat, and she walked up and down the room like

what you do, and she said, '_Ach, unser_ Dott--how dood you are to us,

to make sink dat _Lusitania_!'"

He was going on to describe her ecstasy, but Marie Louise broke in:

"It's Fräulein's work, is it? I might have known that! Oh, the fiend,

the harpy!"

The boy did not know what a harpy was, but he knew that his beloved

Fräulein was being called something, and he struck at Marie Louise

fiercely, kicked at her shins and tried to bite her hands, screaming:

"You shall not call our own precious Fräulein names. Harpy, your own

self!"

And the little girl struck and scratched and made a curdled face and

echoed, "Harpy, your own self!"

It hurt Marie Louise so extravagantly to be hated by these irascible

cherubs that her anger vanished in regret. She pleaded: "But, my

darlings, you don't know what you are saying. The _Lusitania_ was a

beautiful ship--"

The boy, Victor, was loyal always to his own: "She wasn't as beautiful

as my yacht what I sail in the Round Pond."

Marie Louise condescended to argue: "Oh yes, she was! She was a great

ship, noble like Saint Paul's Cathedral, and she was loaded with

passengers, men and women and children: and then suddenly she was

ripped open and sunk, and little children like you were thrown into

the water, into the deep, deep, deep ocean. And the big waves tore

them from their mothers' arms and ran off with them, choking and

strangling them and dragging them down and down--forever down."

She was dizzied by the horde of visions mobbing her brain. Then the

onrush of horror was checked abruptly as she saw the supercilious lad

regarding her frenzy calmly. His comment was:

"It served 'em jolly well right for bein' on 'at old boat."

Marie Louise almost swooned with dread of such a soul. She shrank from

the boy and groaned, "Oh, you toad, you little toad!"

He was frightened a little by her disgust, and he took refuge in a

higher authority. "Fräulein told us. And she knows."

The bit lassiky stormed to his support: "She does so!" and drove it

home with the last nail of feminine argument: "So there now!"

Marie Louise retorted, weakly: "We'll see! We'll soon see!" And she

rushed out of the room, like another little girl, straight to the door

of Sir Joseph, where she knocked impatiently. His man appeared and

murmured through a crevice: "Sorry, miss, but Seh Joseph is

dressing."

Marie Louise went to Lady Webling's door, and a maid came to whisper:

"She is in her teb. We're having dinner at tome to-night, miss."

Marie Louise nodded. Dinner must be served, and on time. It was the

one remaining solemnity that must not be forgotten or delayed.

She went to her own room. Her maid was in a stew about the hour, and

the gown that was to be put on. Marie Louise felt that black was the

only wear on such a Bartholomew's night. But Sir Joseph hated black so

well that he had put a clause in his will against its appearance even

at his own funeral. Marie Louise loved him dearly, but she feared his

prejudices. She had an abject terror of offending him, because she

felt that she owed everything she had, and was, to the whim of his

good grace. Gratitude was a passion with her, and it doomed her, as

all passions do, good or bad, to the penalties human beings pay for

every excess of virtue or vice--if, indeed, vice is anything but an

immoderate, untimely virtue.

CHAPTER II

Marie Louise let her maid select the gown. She was an exquisite

picture as she stood before the long mirror and watched the buckling

on of her armor, her armor of taffeta and velvet with the colors of

sunlit leaves and noon-warmed flowers in carefully elected wrinkles

assured with many a hook and eye. Her image was radiant and pliant and

altogether love-worthy, but her thoughts were sad and stern.

She was resolved that Fräulein should not remain in the house another

night. She wondered that Sir Joseph had not ousted her from the family

at the first crash of war. The old crone! She could have posed for one

of the Grimms' most vulturine witches. But she had kept a civil tongue

in her head till now; the children adored her, and Sir Joseph had

influence enough to save her from being interned or deported.

Hitherto, Marie Louise had felt sorry for her in her dilemma of being

forced to live at peace in the country her own country was locked in

war with. Now she saw that the woman's oily diplomacy was only for

public use, and that all the while she was imbruing the minds of the

little children with the dye of her own thoughts. The innocents

naturally accepted everything she told them as the essence of truth.

Marie Louise hoped to settle the affair before dinner, but by the time

she was gowned and primped, the first premature guest had arrived like

the rashest primrose, shy, surprised, and surprising. Sir Joseph had

gone below already. Lady Webling was hull down on the stairway.

Marie Louise saw that her protest must wait till after the dinner, and

she followed to do her duty to the laws of hospitality.

Sir Joseph liked to give these great affairs. He loved to eat and to

see others eat. "The more the merrier," was his motto--one of the

most truthless of the old saws. Little dinners at Sir Joseph's--what

he called "on fameals"--would have been big dinners elsewhere. A big

dinner was like a Lord Mayor's banquet. He needed only a crier at his

back and a Petronius to immortalize his _gourmandise_.

To-night he had great folk and small fry. Nobody pretended to know the

names of everybody. Sir Joseph himself leaned heavily on the man who

sang out the labels of the guests, and even then his wife whispered

them to him as they came forward, and for a precaution, kept slipping

them into the conversation as reminders.

There were several Americans present: a Doctor and Mrs. Clinton

Worthing who had come over with a special shipload of nurses. The ship

had been fitted out by Mrs. Worthing, who had been Muriel Schuyler,

daughter of the giant plutocrat, Jacob Schuyler, who was lending

England millions of money weekly. A little American millionaire,

Willie Enslee, living in England now on account of some scandal in his

past, was there. He did not look romantic.

Marie Louise had no genius for names, or faces, either. To-night she

was frightened, and she made some horrible blunders, greeting the

grisly Mr. Verrinder by the name of Mr. Hilary. The association was

clear, for Mr. Hilary had called Mr. Verrinder atrocious names in

Parliament; but it was like calling "Mr. Capulet" "Mr. Montague."

Marie Louise tried to redeem her blunder by putting on an extra

effusiveness for the sake of Mr. and Mrs. Norcross. Mrs. Norcross had

only recently shaken off the name of Mrs. Patchett after a resounding

divorce. So Marie Louise called her new husband by the name of her

old, which made it very pleasant.

Her wits were so badly dispersed that she gave up the attempt to take

in the name of an American whom Lady Webling passed along to her as

"Mr. Davidge, of the States." And he must have been somebody of

importance, for even Sir Joseph got his name right. Marie Louise,

however, disliked him cordially at once--for two reasons: first, she

hated herself so much that she could not like anybody just then; next,

this American was entirely too American. He was awkward and

indifferent, but not at all with the easy amble and patrician

unconcern of an English aristocrat.

Marie Louise was American-born herself, and humbly born, at that, but

she liked extreme Americanism never the more. Perhaps she was a bit of

a snob, though fate was getting ready to beat the snobbery out of her.

And hers was an unintentional, superficial snobbery, at worst. Some

people said she was affected and that she aped the swagger dialect.

But she had a habit of taking on the accent and color of her

environments. She had not been in England a month before she spoke

Piccadilly almost impeccably. She had caught French and German

intonations with equal speed and had picked up music by ear with the

same amazing facility in the days when certain kinds of music were her

livelihood.

In one respect her Englishness of accent was less an imitation or an

affectation than a certain form of politeness and modesty. When an

Englishwoman said, "Cahn't you?" it seemed tactless to answer, "No, I

cann't." To respond to "Good mawning" with "Good morrning" had the

effect of a contradiction or a correction. She had none of the

shibboleth spirit that leads certain people to die or slay for a

pronunciation. The pronunciation of the people she was talking to was

good enough for her. She conformed also because she hated to see

people listening less to what she said than to the Yankee way she said

it.

This man Davidge had a superb brow and a look of success, but he bored

her before he reached her. She made ready for flight to some other

group. Then he startled her--by being startled as he caught sight of

her. When Lady Webling transmitted him with a murmur of his name and a

tender, "My daughter," Davidge stopped short and mumbled:

"I've had the pleasure of meeting you before, somewhere, haven't I?"

Marie Louise snubbed him flatly. "I think not."

He took the slap with a smile. "Did I hear Lady Webling call you her

daughter?"

Marie Louise did not explain, but answered, curtly, "Yes," with the

aristocratic English parsimony that makes it almost "Yis."

"Then you're right and I'm wrong. I beg your pardon."

"Daon't mention it," said Marie Louise, and drew closer to Lady

Webling and the oncoming guest. She had the decency to reproach

herself for being beastly to the stranger, but his name slipped at

once through the sieve of her memory.

Destiny is the grandiose title we give to the grand total of a long

column of accidents when we stop to tot up the figures. So we wait

till that strange sum of accidents which we call a baby is added up

into a living child of determined sex before we fasten a name that

changes an it to a him or a her.

The accidents that result in a love-affair, too, we look back on and

outline into a definite road, and we call that Fate. We are great for

giving names to selected fragments of the chaos of life.

In after years Marie Louise and this man Davidge would see something

mystic and intended in the meeting that was to be the detached

prologue of their after conflicts. They would quite misremember what

really happened--which was, that she retained no impression of him at

all, and that he called himself a fool for mixing her with a girl he

had met years and years before for just a moment, and had never

forgotten because he had not known her well enough to forget her.

He had reason enough to distrust his sanity for staring at a

resplendent creature in a London drawing-room and imagining for a

moment that she was a long-lost, long-sought girl of old dreams--a

girl he had seen in a cheap vaudeville theater in a Western

state. She was one of a musical team that played all sorts of

instruments--xylophones, saxophones, trombones, accordions,

cornets, comical instruments concealed in hats and umbrellas. This

girl had played each of them in turn, in solo or with the rest of

the group. The other mummers were coarse and vaude-vulgar, but she

had captivated Davidge with her wild beauty, her magnetism, and

the strange cry she put into her music.

When she played the trombone she looked to him like one of the angels

on a cathedral trumpeting an apocalyptic summons to the dead to bloom

from their graves. When she played the cornet it was with a superhuman

tone that shook his emotions almost insufferably. She had sung, too,

in four voices--in an imitation of a bass, a tenor, a contralto, and

finally as a lyric soprano, then skipping from one to the other. They

called her "Mamise, the Quartet in One."

Davidge had thought her marvelous and had asked the manager of the

theater to introduce him. The manager thought him a young fool, and

Davidge had felt himself one when he went back to the dingy stage,

where he found Mamise among a troupe of trained animals waiting to go

on. She was teasing a chittering, cigar-smoking trained ape on a

bicycle, and she proved to be an extraordinarily ordinary, painfully

plebeian girl, common in voice and diction, awkward and rather

contemptuous of the stage-door Johnnie. Davidge had never ceased to

blush, and blushed again now, when he recalled his labored compliment,

"I expect to see your name in the electric lights some of these

days--or nights, Miss Mamise."

She had grumbled, "Much ubbliged!" and returned to the ape, while

Davidge slunk away, ashamed.

He had not forgotten that name, though the public had. He had never

seen "Mamise" in the electric lights. He had never found the name in

any dictionary. He had supposed her to be a foreigner--Spanish,

Polish, Czech, French, or something. He had not been able to judge her

nationality from the two gruff words, but he had often wondered what

had happened to her. She might have been killed in a train wreck or

been married to the ape-trainer or gone to some other horrible

conclusion. He had pretty well buried her among his forgotten

admirations and torments, when lo and behold! she emerged from a crowd

of peeresses and plutocrats in London.

He had sprung toward her with a wild look of recognition before he had

had time to think it over. He had been rebuffed by a cold glance and

then by an English intonation and a fashionable phrase. He decided

that his memory had made a fool of him, and he stood off, humble and

confused.

But his eyes quarreled with his ears, and kept telling him that this

tall beauty who ignored him so perfectly, so haughtily, was really his

lost Mamise.

If men would trust their intuitions oftener they would not go wrong so

often, perhaps, since their best reasoning is only guesswork, after

all. It was not going to be destiny that brought Davidge and Marie

Louise together again so much as the man's hatred of leaving anything

unfinished--even a dream or a vague desire. There was no shaking

Davidge off a thing he determined on except as you shake off a

snapping-turtle, by severing its body from its head.

A little later Sir Joseph sought the man out and treated him

respectfully, and Marie Louise knew he must be somebody. She found him

staring at her over Sir Joseph's shoulder and puzzling about her. And

this made her wretchedly uncomfortable, for perhaps, after all, she

fretted, he had indeed met her somewhere before, somewhere in one of

those odious strata she had passed through on her way up to the estate

of being called daughter by Lady Webling.

She forgot her misgivings and was restored to equanimity by the

incursion of Polly Widdicombe and her husband. Polly was one of the

best-dressed women in the world. Her husband had the look of the

husband of the best-dressed woman in the world. Polly had a wiry

voice, and made no effort to soften it, but she was tremendously

smart. She giggled all the time and set people off in her vicinity,

though her talk was rarely witty on its own account.

Laughter rippled all through her life. She talked of her griefs in

a plucky, riant way, making eternal fun of herself as a giddy fool.

She carried a delightful jocundity wherever she went. She was

aristocratic, too, in the postgraduate degree of being careless,

reckless, superior even to good manners. She had a good heart and

amiable feelings; these made manners enough.

She had lineage as well, for her all-American family ran straight back

into the sixteen hundreds, which was farther than many a duke dared

trace his line. She had traveled the world; she had danced with kings,

and had made two popes laugh and tweak her pointed chin. She wasn't

afraid of anybody, not even of peasants and servants, or of being

friendly with them, or angry with them.

Marie Louise adored her. She felt that it would make no difference to

Polly's affection if she found out all there was to find out about

Marie Louise. And yet Polly's friendship did not have the dull

certainty of indestructibility. Marie Louise knew that one word wrong

or one act out of key might end it forever, and then Polly would be

her loud and ardent enemy, and laugh at her instead of for her. Polly

could hate as briskly as she could love.

She was in one of her vitriolic moods now because of the _Lusitania_.

"I shouldn't have come to-night," she said, "except that I want to

talk to a lot of people about Germany. I want to tell everybody I know

how much I loathe 'em all. 'The Hymn of Hate' is a lullaby to what I

feel."

Polly was also conducting a glorious war with Lady Clifton-Wyatt. Lady

C.-W. had bullied everybody in London so successfully that she went

straight up against Polly Widdicombe without a tremor. She got

what-for, and everybody was delighted. The two were devoted enemies

from then on, and it was beautiful to see them come together.

Lady Clifton-Wyatt followed Polly up the receiving line to-night and

invited a duel, but Polly was in no humor for a fight with anybody but

Germans. She turned her full-orbed back on Lady C.-W. and, so to

speak, gnashed her shoulder-blades at her. Lady C.-W. passed by

without a word, and Marie Louise was glad to hide behind Polly, for

Marie Louise was mortally afraid of Lady C.-W.

She saw the American greet her as if he had met her before. Lady

Clifton-Wyatt was positively polite to him. He must be a very great

man.

She heard Lady Clifton-Wyatt say something about, "How is the new ship

coming on?" and the American said, "She's doing as well as could be

expected."

So he was a ship-builder. Marie Louise thought that his must be a

heartbreaking business in these days when ships were being slaughtered

in such numbers. She asked Polly and her husband if they knew him or

his name.

Widdicombe shook his head. Polly laughed at her husband. "How do you

know? He might be your own mother, for all you can tell. Put on your

distance-glasses, you poor fish." She turned to Marie Louise. "You

know how near-sighted Tom is."

"An excellent fault in a man," said Marie Louise.

"Oh, I don't know," said Polly. "You can't trust even the blind ones.

And you'll notice that when Tom comes to one of these décolleté

dinners, he wears his reading-glasses."

All this time Widdicombe was taking out his distance-glasses,

taking off his reading-glasses and pouching them and putting them

away, and putting on his distance-glasses, and from force of habit

putting their pouch away. Then he stared at Davidge, took off his

distance-glasses, found the case with difficulty, put them up,

pocketed them, and stood blearing into space while he searched for

his reading-glasses, found them, put the case back in his pocket and

saddled his nose with the lenses.

Polly waited in a mockery of patience and said:

"Well, after all that, what?"

"I don't know him," said Widdicombe.

It was a good deal of an anticlimax to so much work.

Polly said: "That proves nothing. Tom's got a near-memory, too. The

man's a pest. If he didn't make so much money, I'd abandon him on a

door-step."

That was Polly's form of baby-talk. Everybody knew how she doted

on Tom: she called him names as one scolds a pet dog. Widdicombe had

the helpless manner of one, and was always at heel with Polly. But

he was a Titan financially, and he was signing his name now to

munitions-contracts as big as national debts.

Marie Louise was summoned from the presence of the Widdicombes by one

of Lady Webling's most mysterious glances, to meet a new-comer whom

Lady Webling evidently regarded as a special treasure. Lady Webling

was as wide as a screen, and she could always form a sort of alcove in

front of her by turning her back on the company. She made such a nook

now and, taking Marie Louise's hand in hers, put it in the hand of the

tall and staring man whose very look Marie Louise found invasive. His

handclasp was somehow like an illicit caress.

How strange it is that with so much modesty going about, people should

be allowed to wear their hands naked! The fashion of the last few

years compelling the leaving off of gloves was not really very nice.

Marie Louise realized it for the first time. Her fastidious right hand

tried to escape from the embrace of the stranger's fingers, but they

clung devil-fishily, and Lady Webling's soft cushion palm was there

conniving in the abduction. And her voice had a wheedling tone:

"This is my dear Nicky I have spoken of so much--Mr. Easton, you

know."

"Oh yes," said Marie Louise.

"Be very nice to him," said Lady Webling. "He is taking you out to

dinner."

At that moment the butler appeared, solemn as a long-awaited priest,

and there was such a slow crystallization as follows a cry of "Fall

in!" to weary soldiers. The guests were soon in double file and on the

march to the battlefield with the cooks.

Nicky Easton still had Marie Louise's hand; he had carried it up into

the crook of his right arm and kept his left hand over it for guard. A

lady can hardly wrench loose from such an attention, but Marie Louise

abhorred it.

Nicky treated her as a sort of possession, and she resented his

courtesies. He began too soon with compliments. One hates to have even

a bunch of violets jabbed into one's nose with the command, "Smell!"

She disliked his accent, too. There was a Germanic something in it as

faint as the odor of high game. It was a time when the least hint of

Teutonism carried the stench of death to British nostrils.

Lady Webling and Sir Joseph were known to be of German birth, and

their phrases carried the tang, but Sir Joseph had become a

naturalized citizen ages ago and had won respect and affection a

decade back. His lavish use of his money for charities and for great

industries had won him his knighthood, and while there was a certain

sniff of suspicion in certain fanatic quarters at the mention of his

name, those who knew him well had so long ago forgotten his alien

birth that they forgave it him now.

As for Marie Louise, she no longer heeded the Prussic acid of his

speech. She was as used to it as to his other little mannerisms. She

did not think of the old couple as fat and awkward. She did not

analyze their attributes or think of their features in detail. She

thought of them simply as them. But Easton was new; he brought in a

subtle whiff of the hated Germany that had done the _Lusitania_ to

death.

The fate of the ship made the dinner resemble a solemn wake. The

triumphs of the chef were but funeral baked meats. The feast was

brilliant and large and long, and it seemed criminal to see such waste

of provender when so much of the world was hungry. The talk was almost

all of the _Lusitania_ and the deep damnation of her taking off. Many

of the guests had crossed the sea in her graceful shell, and they

felt a personal loss as well as a bitterness of rage at the worst of

the German sea crimes.

Davidge was seated remotely from Marie Louise, far down the flowery

lane of the table. She could not see him at all, for the candles and

the roses. Just once she heard his voice in a lull. Its twang carried

it all the way up the alley:

"A man that would kill a passenger-ship would shoot a baby in its

cradle. When you think how long it takes to build a ship, how much

work she represents, how sweet she is when she rides out and all

that--by Gosh! there's no word mean enough for the skoundrels. There's

nothing they won't do now--absolutely nothing."

She heard no more of him, and she did not see him again that night.

She forgot him utterly. Even the little wince of distress he gave her

by his provincialism was forgotten in the anguish her foster-parents

caused her.

For Marie Louise had a strange, an odious sensation that Sir Joseph

and Lady Webling were not quite sincere in their expressions of horror

and grief over the finished epic, the _Lusitania_. It was not for lack

of language; they used the strongest words they could find. But there

was missing the subtile somewhat of intonation and gesture that actors

call sincerity. Marie Louise knew how hard it is even for a great

actor to express his simplest thoughts with conviction. No, it was

when he expressed them best that he was least convincing, since an

emotion that can be adequately presented is not a very big emotion; at

least it does not overwhelm the soul. Inadequacy, helplessness,

gaucherie, prove that the feelings are bigger than the eloquence. They

"get across the footlights" between each player on the human stage and

his audience.

Yes, that was it: Sir Joseph and Lady Webling were protesting too well

and too much. Marie Louise hated herself for even the disloyalty of

such a criticism of them, but she was repelled somehow by such

rhetoric, and she liked far better the dour silence of old Mr.

Verrinder. He looked a bishop who had got into a layman's evening

dress by mistake. He was something very impressive and influential in

the government, nobody knew just what.

Marie Louise liked still better than Verrinder's silence the

distracted muttering and stammering of a young English aviator, the

Marquess of Strathdene, who was recuperating from wounds and was going

up in the air rapidly on the Webling champagne. He was maltreating his

bread and throwing in champagne with an apparent eagerness for the

inevitable result. Before he grew quite too thick to be understood, he

groaned to himself, but loudly enough to be heard the whole length and

breadth of the table: "I remember readin' about old Greek witch name

Circe--changed human beings into shape of swine. I wonder who turned

those German swine into the shape of human beings."

Marie Louise noted that Lady Webling was shocked--by the vulgarity, no

doubt. "Swine" do not belong in dining-room language--only in the

platters or the chairs. Marie Louise caught an angry look also in the

eye of Nicholas Easton, though he, too, had been incisive in his

comments on the theme of the dinner. His English had been uncannily

correct, his phrases formal with the exactitude of a book on syntax or

the dialogue of a gentleman in a novel. But he also was drinking too

much, and as his lips fuddled he had trouble with a very formal

"without which." It resulted first as "veetowit veech," then as

"whidthout witch." He made it on the third trial.

Marie Louise, turning her eyes his way in wonder, encountered two

other glances moving in the same direction. Lady Webling looked

anxious, alarmed. Mr. Verrinder's gaze was merely studious. Marie

Louise felt an odd impression that Lady Webling was sending a kind of

heliographic warning, while the look of Mr. Verrinder was like a

search-light that studies and registers, then moves away.

Marie Louise disliked Easton more and more, but Lady Webling kept

recommending him with her solicitous manner toward him. She made

several efforts, too, to shift the conversation from the _Lusitania_;

but it swung always back. Much bewilderment was expressed because the

ship was not protected by a convoy. Many wondered why she was where

she was when she was struck, and how she came to take that course at

all.

Lady Clifton-Wyatt, who had several friends on board and was uncertain

of their fate, was unusually fierce in blaming the government. She

always blamed it for everything, when it was Liberal. And now she

said:

"It was nothing short of murder to have left the poor ship to steal in

by herself without protection. Whatever was the Admiralty thinking of?

If the Cabinet doesn't fall for this, we might as well give up."

The Liberals present acknowledged her notorious prejudices with a sigh

of resignation. But the Marquess of Strathdene rolled a foggy eye and

a foggy tongue in answer:

"Darlling llady, there must have been war-ships waitin' to convoy the

_Lusitania_; but she didn't come to rendezvous because why? Because

some filthy Zherman gave her a false wireless and led her into a

trap."

This amazing theory with its drunken inspiration of plausibility

startled the whole throng. It set eyeballs rolling in all directions

like a break in a game of pool. Everybody stared at Strathdene, then

at somebody else. Marie Louise's racing gaze noted that Mr.

Verrinder's eyes went slowly about again, studying everybody except

Strathdene.

Lady Clifton-Wyatt's eyes as they ran simply expressed a disgust that

she put into words with her usual frankness:

"Don't be more idiotic than necess'ry, my dear boy; there are secret

codes, you know."

"S-secret codes I know? Secret codes the Germans know--that's what you

mean, sweetheart. I don't know one little secret, but Huns-- Do you

know how many thousand Germans there are loose in England--do you?"

Lady Clifton-Wyatt shook her head impatiently. "I haven't the faintest

notion. Far more than I wish, I'm sure."

"I hope so, unless you wish fifty thousand. And God knows how many

more. And I'm not alluthing to Germans in disguise, naturalized

Germans--quinine pills with a little coating. I'm not referring to

you, of course, Sir Joseph. Greates' respect for you. Ever'body has.

You have done all you could to overcome the fatal error of your

parents. You're a splen'id gen'l'man. Your 'xception proves rule. Even

Germans can't all be perf'ly rotten."

"Thank you, Marquess, thank you," said Sir Joseph, with a natural

embarrassment.

Marie Louise noted the slight difference between the English "Thank

you" and Sir Joseph's "Thang gyou."

Then Lady Webling's eyes went around the table, catching up the

women's eyes and forms, and she led them in a troop from the

embarrassing scene. She brought the embarrassment with her to the

drawing-room, where the women sat about smoking miserably and waiting

for the men to come forth and take them home.

CHAPTER III

There must have been embarrassment enough left to go round the

dining-table, too, for in an unusually brief while the men flocked

into the drawing-room. And they began to plead engagements in offices

or homes or Parliament.

It was not yet ten o'clock when the last of the guests had gone,

except Nicholas Easton. And Sir Joseph took him into his own study.

Easton walked a trifle too solemnly straight, as if he had set himself

an imaginary chalk-line to follow. He jostled against the door, and as

he closed it, swung with it uncertainly.

Lady Webling asked almost at once, with a nod of the head in the

direction of the study door:

"Well, my dear child, what do you think of Nicky?"

"Oh, I don't know. He's nice, but--"

"We're very fond of him, Sir Joseph and I--and we do hope you will

be."

Marie Louise wondered if they were going to select a husband for her.

It was a dreadful situation, because there was no compulsion except

the compulsion of obligation. They never gave her a chance to do

anything for them; they were always doing things for her. What an

ingrate she would be to rebuff their first real desire! And yet to

marry a man she felt such antipathy for--surely there could be some

less hateful way of obliging her benefactors. She felt like a castaway

on a desert, and there was something of the wilderness in the

immensity of the drawing-room with its crowds of untenanted divans and

of empty chairs drawn into groups as the departed guests had left

them.

Lady Webling stood close to Marie Louise and pressed for an answer.

"You don't really dislike Nicky, do you?"

"N-o-o. I've not known him long enough to dislike him very well."

She tried to soften the rebuff with a laugh, but Lady Webling sighed

profoundly and smothered her disappointment in a fond "Good night."

She smothered the great child, too, in a hugely buxom embrace. When

Marie emerged she was suddenly reminded that she had not yet spoken to

Lady Webling of Fräulein Ernst's attack on the children's souls. She

spoke now.

"There's one thing, mamma, I've been wanting to tell you all evening.

Please don't let it distress you, but really I'm afraid you'll have to

get rid of Fräulein."

Lady Webling's voluminous yawn was stricken midway into a gasp. Marie

Louise told her the story of the diabolical prayer. Lady Webling took

the blow without reeling. She expressed shock, but again expressed it

too perfectly.

She promised to "reprimand the foolish old soul."

"To reprimand her!" Marie Louise cried. "You won't send her away?"

"Send her away where, my child? Where should we send the poor thing?

But I'll speak to her very sharply. It was outrageous of her. What if

the children should say such things before other people? It would be

frightful! Thank you for telling me, my dear. And now I'm for bed! And

you should be. You look quite worn out. Coming up?"

Lady Webling laughed and glanced at the study door, implying and

rejoicing in the implication that Marie Louise was lingering for a

last word with Easton.

Really she was trying to avoid climbing the long stairs with Lady

Webling's arm about her. For the first time in her life she distrusted

the perfection of the old soul's motives. She felt like a Judas when

Lady Webling offered her cheek for another good-night kiss. Then she

pretended to read a book while she listened for Lady Webling's last

puff as she made the top step.

At once she poised for flight. But the study door opened and Easton

came out. He was bending down to murmur into Sir Joseph's downcast

countenance. Easton was saying, with a tremulous emotion, "This is the

beginning of the end of England's control of the sea."

Marie Louise almost felt that there was a quiver of eagerness rather

than of dread in his tone, or that the dread was the awe of a horrible

hope.

Sir Joseph was brooding and shaking his head. He seemed to start as he

saw Marie Louise. But he smiled on her dotingly and said:

"You are not gone to bed yet?"

She shook her head and sorrowed over him with a sudden rush of

gratitude to his defense. She did not reward Easton's smile with any

favor, though he widened his eyes in admiration.

Sir Joseph said: "Good night, Nicky. It is long before I see you some

more."

Nicholas nodded. "But I shall see Miss Marie Louise quite soon now."

This puzzled Marie Louise. She pondered it while Nicky bent and kissed

her hand, heaved a guttural, gluttonous "Ah!" and went his way.

It was nearly a week later before she had a clue to the riddle. Then

Sir Joseph came home to luncheon unexpectedly. He had an envelope with

him, sealed with great red buttons of wax. He asked Marie Louise into

his office and said, with an almost stealthy importance:

"My darling, I have a little favor to ask of you. Sometimes, you see,

when I am having a big dealing on the Stock Exchange I do not like

that everybody knows my business. Too many people wish to know all I

do, so they can be doing the same. What everybody knows helps nobody.

It is my wish to get this envelope to a man without somebody finding

out something. Understand?"

"Yes, papa!" Marie Louise answered with the utmost confidence that

what he did was good and wise and straight. She experienced a qualm

when Sir Joseph explained that Nicky was the man. She wondered why he

did not come to the house. Then she rebuked herself for presuming to

question Sir Joseph's motives. He had never been anything but good to

her, and he had been so whole-heartedly good that for her to give

thought-room to a suspicion of him was heinous.

He had business secrets and stratagems of tremendous financial moment.

She had known him to work up great drives on the market and to use all

sorts of people to prepare his attacks. She did not understand big

business methods. She regarded them all with childlike bewilderment.

When, then, Sir Joseph asked her to meet Nicky, as if casually, in

Regent's Park, and convey the envelope from her hand to Nicky's

without any one's witnessing the transfer, she felt the elation of a

child intrusted with an important errand. So she walked all the way to

Regent's Park with the long strides of a young woman out for a

constitutional. She found a bench where she was told to, and sat down

to bask in the spring air, and wait.

By and by Easton sauntered along, lifted his hat to Marie Louise, and

made a great show of surprise. She rose and gave him her hand. She had

taken the precaution to wear gloves--also she had the envelope in her

hand. She left it in Nicky's. He smuggled it into his coat pocket, and

murmuring, "So sorry I can't stop," lifted his hat and hurried off.

Marie Louise sat down again and after a time resumed her constitutional.

Sir Joseph was full of thanks when she saw him at night.

Some days later he asked Marie Louise to meet Nicky outside a Bond

Street shop. She was to have a small parcel and drop it. Nicky would

stoop and pick it up and hand her in its stead another of similar

wrapper. She was to thank him and come home.

Another day Marie Louise received from Sir Joseph a letter and a

request to take the children with her for a long walk, ending at the

Round Pond in Kensington Gardens. The children carried their private

navies with them and squatted at the brim of the huge basin, poking

their reluctant yachts to sea. The boy Victor perfected a wonderful

scheme for using a long stick as a submarine. He thrust his arm under

water and from a distance knocked his sister's sailboat about till its

canvas was afloat and it filled and sank. All the while he wore the

most distant of expressions, but canny little Bettina soon realized

who had caused this catastrophe and how, and she went for Victor of

the U-stick with finger-nails and feet and nearly rounded him into the

toy ocean. It evidently made a difference whose ship was gored.

Marie Louise darted forward to save Victor from a ducking as well as a

trouncing, and nearly ran over a man who was passing.

It was Ross Davidge, whiling away an hour between appointments. He

thought he recognized Marie Louise, but he was not sure. Women in the

morning look so unlike their evening selves. He dared not speak.

Davidge lingered around trying to get up the courage to speak, but

Marie Louise was too distraught with the feud even to see him when she

looked at him. She would not have known him, anyway.

Davidge was confirmed in his guess at her identity by the appearance

of the man he had seen at her side at the dinner. But the confirmation

was Davidge's exile, for the fellow lifted his hat with a look of

great surprise and said to Marie Louise, "Fancy finding you heah!"

"Blah!" said Davidge to himself, and went on about his business.

Marie Louise did not pretend surprise at seeing Easton, but went on

scolding Victor and Bettina.

"If any of these other boys catch you playing submarine they'll

submarine you!"

And she brought the proud Bettina to book with a, "You were so glad

the _Lusitania_ was sunk, you see now how it feels!"

She felt the puerile incongruity of the rebuke, but it sufficed to

send Bettina into a cyclone of grief. She was already one of those

who are infinitely indifferent to the sufferings of others and

infinitesimally sensitive to their own.

When Nicky heard the story he gave Marie Louise a curious look of

disapproval and took Bettina into his lap. She was also already one of

those ladies who find a man's lap an excellent consolation. He got rid

of her adroitly and when she and Victor were once more engaged in

navigation Nicky took up the business he had come for.

"May I stop a moment?" he said, and sat down.

"I have a letter for you," said Marie Louise.

His roving eyes showed him that the coast was clear, and he slipped a

letter into her hand-bag which she opened, and from it he took the

letter she cautiously disclosed. He chatted awhile and moved away.

This sort of meeting took place several times in several places. When

the crowds were too great or a bobby loitered about, Nicky would

murmur to Marie Louise that she had better start home. He would take

her arm familiarly and the transfer of the parcel would be deftly

achieved.

This messenger service went on for several weeks. Sir Joseph

apologized for the trouble he gave Marie Louise. He seemed to be

sincerely unhappy about it, and his little eyes in their fat, watery

bags peered at her with a tender regret and an ulterior regret as

well.

He explained a dozen times that he sent her because it was such an

important business and he had no one else to trust. And Marie Louise,

for all her anxiety, was sadly glad of his confidence, regarded it as

sacred, and would not violate it so much as to make the least effort

to learn what messages she was carrying. Nothing, of course, would

have been easier than to pry open one of these envelopes. Sometimes

the lapel was hardly sealed. But she would as soon have peeked into a

bathroom.

Late in June the Weblings left town and settled in the great country

seat Sir Joseph had bought from a bankrupt American who had bought it

from nobility gone back to humility. Here life was life. There were

forests and surreptitious pheasants, deer that would almost but never

quite come to call, unseen nightingales that sang from lofty nave and

transept like cherubim all wings and voice.

The house was usually full of guests, but they were careful not to

intrude upon their hosts nor their hosts upon them. The life was like

life at a big hotel. There was always a little gambling to be had,

tennis, golf, or music, or a quiet chat, gardens to stroll and sniff

or grub in, horses to ride, motors at beck and call, solitude or

company.

Lady Clifton-Wyatt came down for a week-end and struck up a great

friendship with the majestic Mrs. Prothero from Washington, D. C., so

grand a lady that even Lady C.-W. was a bit in awe of her, so gracious

a personage that even Lady C.-W. could not pick a quarrel with her.

Mrs. Prothero gathered Marie Louise under her wing and urged her to

visit her when she came to America. But Polly Widdicombe had already

pledged Marie Louise to make her home her own on that side of the sea.

Polly came down, too, and had "the time of her young life" in doing a

bit of the women's war work that became the beautiful fashion of the

time. The justification of it was that it released men for the

trenches, but Polly insisted that it was shamefully good sport.

She and Marie Louise went about in breeches and shirts and worked like

hostlers around the stables and in the paddocks, breaking colts and

mucking out stalls. They donned the blouses and boots of peasants, and

worked in the fields with rake and hoe and harrow. They even tried the

plow, but they followed it too literally, and the scallopy furrows

they drew across the fields made the yokels laugh or grieve, according

to their natures.

The photographers were alive to the piquancy of these revelations, and

portraits of Marie Louise in knickers and puttees, and armed with

agricultural weapons, appeared in the pages of all the weeklies along

with other aristocrats and commoners. Some of these even reached

America.

There was just one flaw for Rosalind in this "As You Like It" life and

that was the persistence of the secret association with Nicky. It was

the strangest of clandestine affairs.

Marie Louise had always liked to get out alone in a saddle or behind

the wheel of a runabout, and Sir Joseph, when he came up from town,

fell into the habit of asking her once in a while to take another

little note to Nicky.

She found him in out-of-the-way places. He would step from a clump of

bushes by the road and hail her car, or she would overtake him and

offer him a lift to his inn, or she would take horse and gallop across

country and find him awaiting her in some lonely avenue or in the

twist of a ravine.

He was usually so preoccupied and furtive that he made no proffer of

courtship; but once when he seemed peculiarly triumphant he rode so

close to her that their knees girded and their spurs clashed, and he

tried to clip her in his arms. She gathered her horse and let him go,

and he plunged ahead so abruptly that the clinging Nicky dragged Marie

Louise from her saddle backward. He tried to swing her to the pommel

of his own, but she fought herself free and came to the ground and was

almost trampled. She was so rumpled and so furious, and he so

frightened, that he left her and spurred after her horse, brought him

back, and bothered her no more that day.

"If you ever annoy me again," she said, "it'll be the last you'll see

of me."

She was too useful to be treated as a mere beauty, and she had him

cowed.

It was inevitable that Marie Louise, being silently urged to love

Nicky, should helplessly resist the various appeals in his behalf.

There is no worse enemy to love than recommendation. There is

something froward about the passion. It hangs back like a fretful

child, loathing what is held out for its temptation, longing for the

forbidden, the sharp, the perilous.

Next to being asked to love, trying to love is the gravest impediment.

Marie Louise kept telling herself that she ought to marry Nicky, and

herself kept refusing to obey.

From very perversity her heart turned to other interests. She was

desperately in love with soldiers _en masse_ and individually. There

was safety in numbers and a canceling rivalry between those who were

going out perhaps to death and those who had come back from the jaws

of death variously the worse for the experience.

The blind would have been irresistible in their groping need of

comfort, if there had not been the maimed of body or mind putting out

their incessant pleas for a gramercy of love. Those whose wounds were

hideous took on an uncanny beauty from their sacrifice.

She busied herself about them and suffered ecstasies of pity.

She wanted to go to France and get near to danger, to help the freshly

wounded, to stanch the spouting arteries, to lend courage to the souls

dismayed by the first horror of the understanding that thenceforth

they must go through life piecemeal.

But whenever she made application she met some vague rebuff. Her

appeals were passed on and on and the blame for their failure was

referred always to some remote personage impossible to reach.

Eventually it dawned on her that there was actually an official

intention to keep her out of France. This stupefied her for a time.

One day it came over her that she was herself suspect. This seemed

ridiculous beyond words in view of her abhorrence of the German cause

in large and in detail. Ransacking her soul for an explanation, she

ran upon the idea that it was because of her association with the

Weblings.

She was ashamed to have given such a thought passage through her mind.

But it came back as often as she drove it out and then the thought

began to hover about her that perhaps the suspicion was not so insane

as she believed. The public is generally unreasonable, but its

intuitions, like a woman's, are the resultants of such complex

instincts that they are above analysis.

But the note-carrying went on, and she could not escape from the

suspicion or its shadow of disgrace. Like a hateful buzzard it was

always somewhere in her sky.

Once the suspicion had domiciled itself in her world, it was

incessantly confirmed by the minutiæ of every-day existence. The

interchange of messages with Nicky Easton grew unexplainable on any

other ground. The theory of secret financial dealings looked

ludicrous; or if the dealings were financial, they must be some of the

trading with the enemy that was so much discussed in the papers.

She felt that she had been conniving in one of the spy-plots that all

the Empire was talking about. She grew afraid to the last degree of

fear. She saw herself on the scaffold. She resolved to carry no more

messages.

But the next request of Sir Joseph's found her complying automatically.

It had come to be her habit to do what he asked her to do, and to take

pride in the service as a small installment on her infinite debt. And

every time her resentment rose to an overboiling point, Sir Joseph or

Lady Webling would show her some exquisite kindness or do some great

public service that won commendation from on high.

One day when she was keyed up to protest Lady Webling discharged

Fräulein Ernst for her pro-Germanism and engaged an English nurse.

Another day Lady Webling asked her to go on a visit to a hospital.

There she lavished tenderness on the British wounded and ignored the

German. How could Marie Louise suspect her of being anti-British?

Another time when Marie Louise was almost ready to rebel she saw Sir

Joseph's name heading a war subscription, and that night he made, at a

public meeting, a speech denouncing Germany in terms of vitriol.

After all, Marie Louise was not English. And America was still

neutral. The President had wrung from Germany a promise of better

behavior, and in a sneaking way the promise was kept, with many a

violation quickly apologized for.

Still, England wrestled for her life. There seemed to be hardly room

in the papers for the mere names of the dead and the wounded, and

those still more pitiable ones, the missing.

Marie Louise lost many a friend, and all of her friends lost and lost.

She wore herself out in suffering for others, in visiting the sick,

the forlorn, the anxious, the newly bereaved.

The strain on Marie Louise's heart was the more exhausting because she

had a craven feeling all the while that perhaps she was being used

somehow as a tool for the destruction of English plans and men. She

tried to get the courage to open one of those messages, but she was

afraid that she might find confirmation. She made up her mind again

and again to put the question point-blank to Sir Joseph, but her

tongue faltered. If he were guilty, he would deny it; if he were

innocent, the accusation would break his heart. She hated Nicky too

much to ask him. He would lie in any case.

She was nagged incessantly by a gadfly of conscience that buzzed in

her ears the counsel to tell the police. Sometimes on her way to a

tryst with Easton a spirit in her feet led her toward a police

station, but another spirit carried her past, for she would visualize

the sure consequences of such an exposure. If her suspicions were

false, she would be exposed as a combination of dastard and dolt. If

they were true, she would be sending Sir Joseph and Lady Webling

perhaps to the gallows.

To betray those who had been so angelic to her was simply unthinkable.

Irresolution and meditation made her a very Hamlet of postponement and

inaction. Hamlet had only a ghost for counselor, and a mother to be

the first victim of his rashness. No wonder he hesitated. And Marie

Louise had only hysterical suspicion to account for her thoughts; and

the victims of her first step would be the only father and mother she

had ever really known. America itself was another Hamlet of debate and

indecision, weighing evidences, pondering theories, deferring the

sword, hoping that Germany would throw away the baser half. And all

the while time slid away, lives slid away, nations fell.

In the autumn the town house was opened again. There was much thinly

veiled indignation in the papers and in the circulation of gossip

because of Sir Joseph's prominence in English life. The Germans were

so relentless and so various in their outrages upon even the cruel

usages of combat that the sound of a German name grew almost

unbearable. People were calling for Sir Joseph's arrest. Others

scoffed at the cruelty and cowardice of such hysteria.

A once-loved prince of German blood had been frozen out of the navy,

and the internment camps were growing like boom towns. Yet other

Germans somehow were granted an almost untrammeled freedom, and

thousands who had avoided evil activity were tolerated throughout the

war.

Sir Joseph kept retorting to suspicion with subscription. He took

enormous quantities of the government loans. His contributions to the

Red Cross and the multitudinous charities were more like endowments

than gifts. How could Marie Louise be vile enough to suspect him?

Yet in spite of herself she resolved at last to refuse further

messenger service. Then she learned that Nicky had left England and

gone to America on most important financial business of a most

confidential nature.

Marie Louise was too glad of her release to ask questions. She

rejoiced that she had not insulted her foster-parents with mutiny, and

she drudged at whatever war work the committees found for her. They

found nothing very picturesque, but the more toilsome her labor was

the more it served for absolution of any evil she might have done.

And now that the dilemma of loyalty was taken from her soul, her body

surrendered weakly. She had time to fall ill. It was enough that she

got her feet wet. Her convalescence was slow even in the high hills of

Matlock.

The winter had passed, and the summer of 1916 had come before Marie

Louise was herself. The Weblings had moved out to the country again;

the flowers were back in the gardens; the deer and the birds were in

their summer garb and mood. But now the house guests were all wounded

soldiers and nurses. Sir Joseph had turned over his estate for a war

hospital.

Lady Webling went among her visitors like a queen making her rounds.

Sir Joseph squandered money on his distinguished company. Marie Louise

joined them and took what comfort she could in such diminution of pain

and such contributions of war power as were permitted her. Those were

the only legitimate happinesses in the world.

The tennis-courts were peopled now with players glad of one arm or one

eye or even a demodeled face. On the golf-links crutched men hobbled.

The horses in the stables bore only partial riders. The card-parties

were squared by players using hands made by hand. The music-room

resounded with five-finger improvisations and with vocalists who had

little but their voices left. They howled, "Keep your head down,

Fritzie boy," or, "We gave them hell at Neuve Chapelle, and here we

are and here we are again," or moaned love-songs with a sardonic

irony.

And the guests at tea! And the guests who could not come to tea!

Young Hawdon was there. "Well, Marie Louise," he had said, "I'm back

from France, but not _in toto_. Fact is, I'm neither here nor there.

Quite a sketchy party you have. But we'll charge it all to Germany,

and some day we'll collect. Some day! Some day!" And he burst into

song.

The wonder was that there was so much bravery. At times there was

hilarity, but it was always close to tears.

The Weblings went back to London early and took Marie Louise with

them. She wanted to stay with the poor soldiers, but Sir Joseph said

that there was just as much for her to do in town. There was no lack

of poor soldiers anywhere. Besides, he needed her, he said. This set

her heart to plunging with the old fear. But he was querulous and

irascible nowadays, and Lady Webling begged her not to excite him, for

she was afraid of a paralysis. He had the look of a Damocles living

under the sword.

The news from America was more encouraging to England and to the

Americans in England. German spies were being arrested with amazing

frequence. Ambassadors were floundering in hot water and setting up a

large traffic in return-tickets. Even the trunks of certain

"Americans" were searched--men and women who were amazed to learn that

curious German documents had got mixed up in their own effects. Some

most peculiar checks and receipts turned up.

It was shortly after a cloudy account of one of these trunk-raids had

been published in the London papers that Sir Joseph had his first

stroke of paralysis.

Sir Joseph was in pitiful case. His devotion to Marie Louise was

heartbreaking. Her sympathy had not been exhausted, but schooled

rather by its prolonged exercise, and she gave the forlorn old wretch

a love and a tenderness that had been wrought to a fine art without

losing any of its spontaneous reality.

At first he could move only a bit of the great bulk, sprawled like a

snowdrift under the sheet. He was helpless as a shattered soldier, but

slowly he won back his faculties and his members. The doors that were

shut between his brain and his powers opened one by one, and he became

a man again.

The first thing he wrote with his rediscovered right hand was his

signature to a document his lawyer brought him after a consultation.

It was a transfer of twenty thousand pounds in British war bonds, "for

services rendered and other valuable considerations," to his dear

daughter Marie Louise Webling.

When the warrant was handed to her with the bundle of securities,

Marie Louise was puzzled, then shocked as the old man explained with

his still uncertain lips. When she understood, she rejected the gift

with horror. Sir Joseph pleaded with her in a thick speech that had

relapsed to an earlier habit.

"I am theenkink how close I been by dyink. Du bist--zhoo are in my

vwill, of coorse, but a man says, 'I vwill,' and some heirs says, 'You

vwon't yet!' Better I should make sure of somethink."

"But I don't want money, papa--not like this. And I won't have you

speak of wills and such odious things."

"You have been like our own daughter only more obeyink as poor Hedwig.

You should not make me sick by to refuse."

She could only quiet him by accepting the wealth and bringing him the

receipt for its deposit in a safe of her own.

When he was once more able to hoist his massive body to its feet and

to walk to his own door, he said:

"_Mein_--my _Gott_! Look at the calendar once. It is nineteen

seventeen already."

He ceased to be that simple, primitive thing, a sick man; he became

again the financier. She heard of him anew on war-industry boards. She

saw his name on lists of big subscriptions. He began to talk anew of

Nicky, and he spoke with unusual anxiety of U-boats. He hoped that

they would have a bad week. There was no questioning his sincerity in

this.

And one evening he came home in a womanish flurry. He pinched the ear

of Marie Louise and whispered to her:

"Nicky is here in England--safe after the sea voyage. Be a nize girl,

and you shall see him soon now."

CHAPTER IV

The next morning Marie Louise, waking, found her windows opaque with

fog. The gardens she usually looked over, glistening green all winter

through, were gone, and in their place was a vast bale of sooty cotton

packed so tight against the glass that her eyes could not pierce to

the sill.

Marie Louise went down to breakfast in a room like a smoky tunnel

where the lights burned sickly. She was in a murky and suffocating

humor, but Sir Joseph was strangely content for the hour and the air.

He ate with the zest of a boy on a holi-morn, and beckoned her into

his study, where he confided to her great news:

"Nicky telephoned me. He brings wonderful news out of America. Big

business he has done. He cannot come yet by our house, for even

servants must not see him here. So you shall go and meet him. You take

your own little car, and go most careful till you find Hyde Park gate.

Inside you stop and get out to see if something is matter with the

engine. A man is there--Nicky. He steps in the car. You get in and

drive slowly--so slowly. Give him this letter--put in bosom of dress

not to lose. He tells you maybe something, and he gives you envelope.

Then he gets out, and you come home--but carefully. Don't let one of

those buses run you over in the fog. I should not risk you if not most

important."

Marie Louise pleaded illness, and fear of never finding the place. But

Sir Joseph stared at her with such wonder and pain that she yielded

hastily, took the envelope, folded it small, thrust it into her chest

pocket and went out to the garage, where she could hardly bully the

chauffeur into letting her take her own car. He put all the curtains

on, and she pushed forth into obfuscation like a one-man submarine.

There was something of the effect of moving along the floor of the

sea. The air was translucent, a little like water-depths, but

everything was a blur.

Luck was with her. She neither ran over nor was run over. But she was

so tardy in finding the gate, and Nicky was so damp, so chilled, and

so uneasy with the apparitions and the voices that had haunted him in

the fog that he said nothing more cordial than:

"At last! So you come!"

He climbed in, shivering with cold or fear. And she ran the car a

little farther into the nebulous depths. She gave him the letter from

Sir Joseph and took from him another.

Nicky did not care to tarry.

"I should get back to my house with this devil's cold I've caught," he

said. "Do you still have no sun in this bedamned England?"

The "you" struck Marie Louise as odd coming from a professed

Englishman, even if he did lay the blame for his accent on years spent

in German banking-houses.

"How did you find the United States?" Marie Louise asked, with a

sudden qualm of homesickness.

"Those United States! Ha! United about what? Money!"

"I think you can get along better afoot," said Marie Louise, as she

made a turn and slipped through the pillars of the gate.

"_Au revoir!_" said Nicky, and he dived out, slamming the door back of

him.

That night there was one of Sir Joseph's dinners. But almost nobody

came, except Lieutenant Hawdon and old Mr. Verrinder. Sir Joseph and

Lady Webling seemed more frightened than insulted by the last-moment

regrets of the guests. Was it an omen?

It was not many days before Sir Joseph asked Marie Louise to carry

another envelope to Nicky. She went out alone, shuddering in the wet

and edged air. She found the bench agreed on, and sat waiting, craven

and mutinous. Nicky did not come, but another man passed her, looked

searchingly, turned and came back to murmur under his lifted hat:

"Miss Webling?"

She gave him her stingiest "Yis."

"Mr. Easton asked me to meet you in his place, and explain."

"He is not coming?"

"He can't. He is ill. A bad cold only. He has a letter for you. Have

you one for him?"

Marie Louise liked this man even less than she would have liked Nicky

himself. She was alarmed, and showed it. The stranger said:

"I am Mr. von Gröner, a frient of--of Nicky's."

Marie Louise vibrated between shame and terror. But von Gröner's

credentials were good; it was surely Nicky's hand that had penned the

lines on the envelope. She took it reluctantly and gave him the letter

she carried.

She hastened home. Sir Joseph was in a sad flurry, but he accepted the

testimony of Nicky's autograph.

The next day Marie Louise must go on another errand. This time her

envelope bore the name of Nicky and the added line, "_Kindness of Mr.

von Gröner._"

Von Gröner tried to question Marie Louise, but her wits were in an

absolute maelstrom of terror. She was afraid of him, afraid that

he represented Nicky, afraid that he did not, afraid that he was a

real German, afraid that he was a pretended spy, or an English

secret-service man. She was afraid of Sir Joseph and his wife, afraid

to obey them or disobey them, to love them or hate them, betray them

or be betrayed. She had lost all sense of direction, of impetus,

of desire.

She saw that Sir Joseph and Lady Webling were in a state of panic,

too. They smiled at her with a wan pity and fear. She caught them

whispering often. She saw them cling together with a devotion that

would have been a burlesque in a picture seen by strangers. It would

have been almost as grotesque as a view of a hippopotamus and his mate

cowering hugely together and nuzzling each other under the menace of a

lightning-storm.

Marie Louise came upon them once comparing the envelope she had just

brought with other letters of Nicky's. Sir Joseph slipped them into a

book, then took one of them out cautiously and showed it to Marie

Louise.

"Does that look really like the writing from Nicky?"

"Yes," she said, then, "No," then, "Of course," then, "I don't know."

Lady Webling said, "Sit down once, my child, and tell me just how this

man von Gröner does, acts, speaks."

She told them. They quizzed her. She was afraid that they would take

her into their confidence, but they exchanged querying looks and

signaled caution.

Sir Joseph said: "Strange how long Nicky stays sick, and his

memory--little things he mixes up. I wonder is he dead yet. Who

knows?"

"Dead?" Marie Louise cried. "Dead, and sends you letters?"

"Yes, but such a funny letter this last one is. I think I write him

once more and ask him is he dead or crazy, maybe. Anyway, I think I

don't feel so very good now--mamma and I take maybe a little journey.

You come along with, yes?"

A rush of desperate gratitude to the only real people in her world led

her to say:

"Whatever you want me to do is what I want to do--or wherever to go."

Lady Webling drew her to her breast, and Sir Joseph held her hand in

one of his and patted it with the flabby other, mumbling:

"Yes, but what is it we want you to do?"

From his eyes came a scurry of tears that ran in panic among the folds

of his cheeks. He shook them off and smiled, nodding and still patting

her hand as he said:

"Better I write one letter more for Mr. von Gröner. I esk him to come

himself after dark to-night now."

Marie Louise waited in her room, watching the sunlight die out of the

west. She felt somehow as if she were a prisoner in the Tower, a

princess waiting for the morrow's little visit to the scaffold. Or did

the English shoot women, as Edith Cavell had been shot?

There was a knock at the door, but it was not the turnkey. It was the

butler to murmur, "Dinner, please." She went down and joined mamma and

papa at the table. There were no guests except Terror and Suspense,

and both of them wore smiling masks and made no visible sign of their

presence.

After dinner Marie Louise had her car brought round to the door. There

was nothing surprising about that. Women had given up the ancient

pretense that their respectability was something that must be policed

by a male relative or squire except in broad daylight. Neither vice

nor malaria was believed any longer to come from exposure to the night

air; nor was virtue regarded like a sum of money that must not be

risked by being carried about alone after dark. It had been easy

enough to lose under the old régime.

So Marie Louise launched out in her car much as a son of the family

might have done. She drove to a little square too dingily middle class

to require a policeman. She sounded her horn three squawks and swung

open the door, and a man waiting under an appointed tree stepped from

its shadow and into the shadow of the car before it stopped. She

dropped into high speed and whisked out of the square.

"You have for me a message," said Mr. von Gröner.

"Yes. Sir Joseph wants to see you."

"Me?"

"Yes--at the house. We'll go there at once if you please."

"Certainly. Delighted. But Nicky--I ought to telephone him I shall be

gone."

"Nicky is well enough to telephone?"

"Not to come to the telephone, but there is a servant. If you will

please stop somewhere. I shall be a moment only."

Marie Louise felt that she ought not to stop, but she could hardly

kidnap the man. So she drew up at a shop and von Gröner left her, her

heart shaking her with a faint tremor like that of the engine of her

car.

Von Gröner returned promptly, but he said: "I think we should not go

too straight to your father's house. Might be we are followed. We can

tell soon. Go in the park, please, and suddenly stop, turn round, and

I look at what cars follow."

She let him command her. She was letting everybody command her; she

had no destination, no North Star in her life. Von Gröner kept her

dodging about Regent's Park till she grew angry.

"This seems rather silly, doesn't it? I am going home. Sir Joseph has

worries enough without--"

"Ah, he has worries?"

She did not answer. The eagerness in his voice did not please her. He

kept up a rain of questions, too, but she answered them all by

referring him to Sir Joseph.

At last they reached the house. As they got out, two men closed in on

the car and peered into their faces. Von Gröner snapped at them, and

they fell back.

Marie Louise had taken along her latchkey. She opened the door herself

and led von Gröner to Sir Joseph's room.

As she lifted her hand to knock she heard Lady Webling weeping

frantically, crying out something incoherent. Marie Louise fell back

and motioned von Gröner away, but he pushed the door open and, taking

her by the elbow, thrust her forward.

Lady Webling stopped short with a wail. Sir Joseph, who had been

trying to quiet her by patting her hand, paused with his palm

uplifted.

Before Marie Louise could speak she saw that the old couple was not

alone. By the mantel stood Mr. Verrinder. By the door, almost touching

Marie Louise, was a tall, grim person she had not seen. He closed the

door behind von Gröner and Marie Louise.

Mr. Verrinder said, "Be good enough to sit down." To von Gröner he

said, "How are you, Bickford?"

CHAPTER V

Sir Joseph was staring at the new-comer, and his German nativity told

him what Marie Louise had not been sure of, that von Gröner was no

German. When Verrinder gave him an English name it shook Marie Louise

with a new dismay. Sir Joseph turned from the man to Marie Louise and

demanded:

"Marie Louise, you ditt not theenk this man is a Cherman?"

This one more shame crushed Marie Louise. She dropped into a chair,

appealing feebly to the man she had retrieved:

"Your name is not von Gröner?"

Bickford grinned. "Well, in a manner of speakin'. You might say it's

my pen-name. Not that I've ever been in the pen--except with Nicky."

"Nicky is in the-- He's not ill?"

"Well, he's a bit sick. He was a bit seasick to start with, and when

we gave him the collar--well, he doesn't like his room."

"But his letters--" Marie Louise pleaded, her fears racing ahead of

her questions.

"I was always a hand at forgery, but I thought best to turn it to the

aid of me country. I'm proud if you liked me work. The last ones were

not up to the mark. _I_ was hurried, and Nicky was ugly. He refused to

answer any more questions. I had to do it all on me own. Ahfterwards I

found I had made a few mistakes."

When Marie Louise realized that this man had been calmly taking the

letters addressed to Nicky and answering them in his feigned script to

elicit further information from Sir Joseph and enmesh him further, she

dropped her hands at her sides, feeling not only convicted of crime,

but of imbecility as well.

Sir Joseph and Lady Webling spread their hands and drew up their

shoulders in surrender and gave up hope of bluff.

Verrinder wanted to be merciful and avoid any more climaxes.

"You see it's all up, Sir Joseph, don't you?" he said.

Sir Joseph drew himself again as high as he could, though the burden

of his flesh kept pulling him down. He did not answer.

"Come now, Sir Joseph, be a sport."

"The Englishman's releechion," sneered Sir Joseph, "to be ein

_Sportmann_."

"Oh, I know you can't understand it," said Verrinder. "It seems to be

untranslatable into German--just as we can't seem to understand

_Germanity_ except that it is the antonym of _humanity_. You fellows

have no boyhood literature, I am told, no Henty or Hughes or Scott to

fill you with ideas of fair play. You have no games to teach you. One

really can't blame you for being such rotters, any more than one can

blame a Kaffir for not understanding cricket.

"But sport aside, use your intelligence, old man. _I_'ve laid my cards

on the table--enough of them, at least. We've trumped every trick, and

we've all the trumps outstanding. You have a few high cards up your

sleeve. Why not toss them on the table and throw yourselves on the

mercy of his Majesty?"

The presence of Marie Louise drove the old couple to a last battle for

her faith. Lady Webling stormed, "All what you accuse us is lies,

lies!"

Verrinder grew stern:

"Lies, you say? We have you, and your daughter--also Nicky. We

have--well, I'll not annoy you with their names. Over in the States

they have a lot more of you fellows.

"You and Sir Joseph have lived in this country for years and years.

You have grown fat--I mean to say rich--upon our bounty. We have loved

and trusted you. His Majesty has given you both marks of his most

gracious favor."

"We paid well for that," sneered Lady Webling.

"Yes, I fancy you did--but with English pounds and pence that you

gained with the help of British wits and British freedom. You have

contributed to charities, yes, and handsomely, too, but not entirely

without the sweet usages of advertisement. You have not hidden that

part of your bookkeeping from the public.

"But the rest of your books--you don't show those. We know a ghastly

lot about them, and it is not pretty, my dear lady. I had hoped you

would not force us to publish those transactions. You have plotted the

destruction of the British Empire; you have conspired to destroy ships

in dock and at sea; you have sent God knows how many lads to their

death--and women and children, too. You have helped to blow up

munitions-plants, and on your white heads is the blood of many and

many a poor wretch torn to pieces at his lathe. You have made widows

of women and orphans of children who never heard of you, nor you of

them. Nor have you cared--or dared--to inquire.

"Sir Joseph has been perfecting a great scheme to buy up what

munitions-plants he could in this country in order to commit sabotage

and slow up the production of the ammunition our troops are crying

for. He has plotted with others to send defective shells that will rip

up the guns they do not fit, and powders that will explode too soon or

not at all. God! to think that the lives of our brave men and the life

of our Empire should be threatened by such people as you!

"And in the American field Sir Joseph has connived with a syndicate to

purchase factories, to stop production at the source, since your

U-boats and your red-handed diplomatic spies cannot stop it otherwise.

Your agents have corrupted a few of the Yankees, and killed others,

and would have killed more if the name of your people had not become

such a horror even in that land where millions of Germans live that

every proffer is suspect.

"You see, we know you, Lady Webling and Sir Joseph. We have watched

you all the while from the very first, and we know that you are not

innocent even of complicity in the supreme infamy of luring the

_Lusitania_ to her death."

He was quivering with the rush of his emotions over the broken dam of

habitual reticence.

Lady Webling and Sir Joseph had quivered, too, less under the impact

of his denunciation than in the confusion of their own exposure to

themselves and to Marie Louise.

They had watched her eyes as she heard Mr. Verrinder's philippic. They

had seen her pass from incredulity to belief. They had seen her glance

at them and glance away in fear of them.

This broke them utterly, for she was utterly dear to them. She was

dearer than their own flesh and blood. She had replaced their dead.

She had been born to them without pain, without infancy, born full

grown in the prime of youth and beauty. They had watched her love grow

to a passion, and their own had grown with it.

What would she do now? She was the judge they feared above England.

They awaited her sentence.

Her eyes wandered to them and searched them through. At first, under

the spell of Verrinder's denunciation, she saw them as two bloated

fiends, their hands dripping blood, their lips framed to lies, their

brains to cunning and that synonym for Germanism, _ruthlessness_--the

word the Germans chose, as their Kaiser chose Huns for an ideal.

But she looked again. She saw the pleading in their eyes. Their very

uncomeliness besought her mercy. After all, she had seen none of the

things Verrinder described. The only real things to her, the only

things she knew of her own knowledge, were the goodnesses of these

two. They were her parents. And now for the first time they needed

her. The mortgage their generosity had imposed on her had fallen due.

How could she at the first unsupported obloquy of a stranger turn

against them? Her first loyalty was due to them, and no other loyalty

was under test. Something swept her to her feet. She ran to them and,

as far as she could, gathered them into her arms. They wept like two

children whom reproaches have hardened into defiance, but whom

kindness has melted.

Verrinder watched the spectacle with some surprise and not altogether

with scorn. Whatever else Miss Webling was, she was a good sport. She

stuck to her team in defeat.

He said, not quite harshly, "So, Miss Webling, you cast your lot with

them."

"I do."

"Do you believe that what I said was true?"

"No."

"Really, you should be careful. Those messages you carried incriminate

you."

"I suppose they do, though I never knew what was in them. No, I'll

take that back. I'm not trying to crawl out of it."

"Then since you confess so much, I shall have to ask you to come with

them."

"To the--the Tower of London?"

"The car is ready."

Marie Louise was stabbed with fright. She seized the doomed twain in a

faster embrace.

"What are you going to do with these poor souls?"

"Their souls my dear Miss Webling, are outside our jurisdiction."

"With their poor bodies, then?"

"I am not a judge or a jury, Miss Webling. Everything will be done

with propriety. They will not be torpedoed in midocean without

warning. They will have the full advantage of the British law to the

last."

That awful word jarred them all. But Sir Joseph was determined to make

a good end. He drew himself up with another effort.

"Excuse, pleass, Mr. Verrinder--might it be we should take with us a

few little things?"

"Of course."

"Thang gyou." He bowed and turned to go, taking his wife and Marie

Louise by the arm, for mutual support.

"If you don't mind, I'll come along," said Mr. Verrinder.

Sir Joseph nodded. The three went heavily up the grandiose stairway as

if a gibbet waited at the top. They went into Sir Joseph's room, which

adjoined that of his wife. Mr. Verrinder paused on the sill somewhat

shyly:

"This is a most unpleasant task, but--"

Marie Louise hesitated, smiling gruesomely.

"My room is across the hall. You can hardly be in both places at once,

can you?"

"I fancy I can trust you--especially as the house is surrounded. If

you don't mind joining us later."

Marie Louise went to her room. Her maid was there in a palsy of fear.

The servants had not dared apply themselves to the keyholes, but they

knew that the master was visited by the police and that a cordon was

drawn about the house.

The ashen girl offered her help to Marie Louise, wondering if she

would compromise herself with the law, but incapable of deserting so

good a mistress even at such a crisis. Marie Louise thanked her and

told her to go to bed, compelled her to leave. Then she set about the

dreary task of selecting a few necessaries--a nightgown, an extra day

gown, some linen, some silver, and a few brushes. She felt as if she

were laying out her own grave-clothes, and that she would need little

and not need that little long.

She threw a good-by look, a long, sweeping, caressing glance, about

her castle, and went across the hall, lugging her hand-bag. Before she

entered Sir Joseph's room she knocked.

It was Mr. Verrinder that answered, "Come in."

He was seated in a chair, dejected and making himself as inoffensive

as possible. Lady Webling had packed her own bag and was helping the

helpless Sir Joseph find the things he was looking for in vain, though

they were right before him. Marie Louise saw evidences that a larger

packing had already been done. Verrinder had surprised them, about to

flee.

Sir Joseph was ready at last. He was closing his bag when he took a

last glance, and said:

"My toot'-brush and powder."

He went to his bathroom cabinet, and there he saw in the little

apothecary-shop a bottle of tablets prescribed for him during his

illness. It was conspicuously labeled "_Poison_."

He stood staring at the bottle so long in such fascination that Lady

Webling came to the door to say:

"Vat is it you could not find now, papa?"

She leaned against the edge of the casement, and he pointed to the

bottle. Their eyes met, and in one long look they passed through a

brief Gethsemane. No words were exchanged. She nodded. He took the

bottle from the shelf stealthily, unscrewed the top, poured out a heap

of tablets and gave them to her, then poured another heap into his fat

palm.

"_Prosit_!" he said, and they flung the venom into their throats. It

was brackish merely from the coating, but they could not swallow all

the pellets. He filled a glass of water at the faucet and handed it to

his wife. She quaffed enough to get the pellets down her resisting

throat, and handed the glass to him.

They remained staring at each other, trying to crowd into their eyes

an infinity of strange passionate messages, though their features were

all awry with nausea and the premonition of lethal pains.

Verrinder began to wonder at their delay. He was about to rise. Marie

Louise went to the door anxiously. Sir Joseph mumbled:

"Look once, my darlink. I find some bong-bongs. Vould you like, yes?"

With a childish canniness he held the bottle so that she could see the

skull and cross-bones and the word beneath.

Marie Louise, not realizing that they had already set out on the

adventure, gave a stifled cry and snatched at the bottle. It fell to

the floor with a crash, and the tablets leaped here and there like

tiny white beetles. Some of them ran out into the room and caught

Verrinder's eye.

Before he could reach the door Sir Joseph had said, triumphantly, to

Marie Louise:

"Mamma and I did eat already. Too bad you do not come vit. _Adé,

Töchterchen. Lebewohl!_"

He was reaching his awkward arms out to clasp her when Verrinder burst

into the homely scene of their tragedy. He caught up the broken bottle

and saw the word "_Poison_." Beneath were the directions, but no word

of description, no mention of the antidote.

"What is this stuff?" Verrinder demanded, in a frenzy of dread and

wrath and self-reproach.

"I don't know," Marie Louise stammered.

Verrinder repeated his demand of Sir Joseph.

"_Weiss nit_," he mumbled, beginning to stagger as the serpent struck

its fangs into his vitals.

Verrinder ran out into the hall and shouted down the stairs:

"Bickford, telephone for a doctor, in God's name--the nearest one.

Send out to the nearest chemist and fetch him on the run--with every

antidote he has. Send somebody down to the kitchen for warm water,

mustard, coffee."

There was a panic below, but Marie Louise knew nothing except the

swirling tempest of her own horror. Sir Joseph and Lady Webling, blind

with torment, wrung and wrenched with spasms of destruction, groped

for each other's hands and felt their way through clouds of fire to a

resting-place.

Marie Louise could give them no help, but a little guidance toward the

bed. They fell upon it--and after a hideous while they died.

CHAPTER VI

The physician arrived too late--physicians were hard to get for

civilians. While he was being hunted down and brought in, Verrinder

fought an unknown poison with what antidotes he could improvise, and

saw that they merely added annoyance to agony.

His own failure had been unnerving. He had pursued this eminent couple

for months, trying in vain to confirm suspicion by proof and

strengthen assurance with evidence, and always delaying the blow in

the hope of gathering in still more of Germany's agents. At last he

had thrown the slowly woven net about the Weblings and revealed them

to themselves as prisoners of his cunning. Then their souls slipped

out through the meshes, leaving their useless empty bodies in his

care, their bodies and the soul and body of the young woman who was

involved in their guilt.

Verrinder did not relish the story the papers would make of it. So he

and the physician devised a statement for the press to the effect that

the Weblings died of something they had eaten. The stomach of Europe

was all deranged, and Sir Joseph had been famous for his dinners;

there was a kind of ironic logic in his epitaph.

Verrinder left the physician to fabricate and promulgate the story and

keep him out of it. Then he addressed himself to the remaining

prisoner, Miss Marie Louise Webling.

He had no desire to display this minnow as his captive after the

whales had got away, but he hoped to find her useful in solving some

of the questions the Weblings had left unanswered when they bolted

into eternity. Besides, he had no intention of letting Marie Louise

escape to warn the other conspirators and to continue her nefarious

activities.

His first difficulty was not one of frightening Miss Webling into

submission, but of soothing her into coherence. She had loved the old

couple with a filial passion, and the sight of their last throes had

driven her into a frenzy of grief. She needed the doctor's care before

Verrinder could talk to her at all. The answers he elicited from her

hysteria were full of contradiction, of evident ignorance, of

inaccuracy, of folly. But so he had found all human testimony; for

these three things are impossible to mankind: to see the truth, to

remember it, and to tell it.

When first Marie Louise came out of the avalanche of her woes, it was

she who began the questioning. She went up and down the room

disheveled, tear-smirched, wringing her hands and beating her breast

till it hurt Verrinder to watch her brutality to that tender flesh.

"What--what does it mean?" she sobbed. "What have you done to my poor

papa and mamma? Why did you come here?"

"Surely you must know."

"What do I know? Only that they were good sweet people."

"Good sweet spies!"

"Spies! Those poor old darlings?"

"Oh, I say--really, now, you surely can't have the face, the

insolence, to--"

"I haven't any insolence. I haven't anything but a broken heart."

"How many hearts were broken--how many hearts were stopped, do you

suppose, because of your work?"

"My what?"

"I refer to the lives that you destroyed."

"I--I destroyed lives? Which one of us is going mad?"

"Oh, come, now, you knew what you were doing. You were glad and proud

for every poor fellow you killed."

"It's you, then, that are mad." She stared at him in utter fear. She

made a dash for the door. He prevented her. She fell back and looked

to the window. He took her by the arm and twisted her into a chair. He

had seen hysteria quelled by severity. He stood over her and spoke

with all the sternness of his stern soul.

"You will gain nothing by trying to make a fool of me. You carried

messages for those people. The last messages you took you delivered to

one of our agents."

Her soul refused her even self-defense. She could only stammer the

fact, hardly believing it as she put it forth:

"I didn't know what was in the letters. I never knew."

Verrinder was disgusted by such puerile defense:

"What did you think was in them, then?"

"I had no idea. Papa--Sir Joseph didn't take me into his confidence."

"But you knew that they were secret."

"He told me that they were--that they were business messages--secret

financial transactions."

"Transactions in British lives--oh, they were that! And you knew it."

"I did not know it! I did not know it! I did not know it!"

She realized too late that the strength of the retort suffered by its

repetition. It became nonsense on the third iterance. She grew afraid

even to defend herself.

Seeing how frightened she was at bay, Mr. Verrinder forebore to drive

her to distraction.

"Very well, you did not know what the messages contained. But why did

you consent to such sneaking methods? Why did you let them use you for

such evident deceit?"

"I was glad to be of use to them. They had been so good to me for so

long. I was used to doing as I was told. I suppose it was gratitude."

It was then that Mr. Verrinder delivered himself of his bitter opinion

of gratitude, which has usually been so well spoken of and so rarely

berated for excess.

"Gratitude is one of the evils of the world. I fancy that few other

emotions have done more harm. In moderation it has its uses, but in

excess it becomes vicious. It is a form of voluntary servitude; it

absolutely destroys all respect for public law; it is the foundation

of tyrannies; it is the secret of political corruption; it is the

thing that holds dynasties together, family despotism; it is

soul-mortgage, bribery. It is a monster of what the Americans call

graft. It is chloroform to the conscience, to patriotism, to every

sense of public duty. 'Scratch my back, and I am your slave'--that's

gratitude."

Mr. Verrinder rarely spoke at such length or with such apothegm.

Marie Louise was a little more dazed than ever to hear gratitude

denounced. She was losing all her bearings. Next he demanded:

"But admitting that you were duped by your gratitude, how did it

happen that your curiosity never led you to inquire into the nature of

those messages?"

"I respected Sir Joseph beyond all people. I supposed that what he did

was right. I never knew it not to be. And then--well, if, I did wonder

a little once in a while, I thought I'd better mind my own business."

Verrinder had his opinion of this, too. "Minding your own business!

That's another of those poisonous virtues. Minding your own business

leads to pacifism, malevolent neutrality, selfishness of every sort.

It's death to charity and public spirit. Suppose the Good Samaritan

had minded his own business! But-- Well, this is getting us no

forwarder with you. You carried those messages, and never felt even a

woman's curiosity about them! You met Nicky Easton often, and never

noted his German accent, never suspected that he was not the

Englishman he pretended to be. Is that true?"

He saw by the wild look in her eyes and their escape from his own that

he had scored a hit. He did not insist upon her acknowledging it.

"And your only motive was gratitude?"

"Yes, sir."

"You never asked any pay for it?"

"No, sir."

"You never received anything for it?"

"No, sir."

"We find the record of a transfer to you of securities for some twenty

thousand pounds. Why was that given you?"

"It--it was just out of generosity. Sir Joseph said he was afraid I

might be--that his will might be broken, and--"

"Ah! you discussed his will with him, then?"

She was horrified at his implication. She cried, "Oh, I begged him not

to, but he insisted."

"He said there were other heirs and they might contest his will. Did

he mention the heirs?"

"No, sir. I don't think so. I don't remember that he did."

"He did not by any chance refer to the other grandparents of the two

children? Mr. and Mrs. Oakby, the father and mother of the father of

Victor and Bettina?"

"He didn't refer to them, I'm sure. Yes, I am quite sure."

"Did he say that his money would be left in trust for his grandchildren?"

"No."

"And he gave you twenty thousand pounds just out of generosity?"

"Yes. Yes, Mr. Verrinder."

"It was a fairish amount of money for messenger fees, wasn't it? And

it came to you while you were carrying those letters to Nicky?"

"No! Sir Joseph had been ill. He had had a stroke of paralysis."

"And you were afraid he might have another?"

"No!"

"You were not afraid of that?"

"Yes, of course I was, but-- What are you trying to make me say--that

I went to him and demanded the money?"

"That idea occurs to you, does it?"

She writhed with disgust at the suggestion. Yet it had a clammy

plausibility. Mr. Verrinder went on:

"These messages, you say, concerned a financial transaction?"

"So papa told me."

"And you believed him?"

"Naturally."

"You never doubted him?"

All the tortures of doubt that had assailed her recurred to her now

and paralyzed her power to utter the ringing denial that was needed.

He went on:

"Didn't it strike you as odd that Sir Joseph should be willing to pay

you twenty thousand pounds just to carry messages concerning some

mythical business?"

She did not answer. She was afraid to commit herself to anything.

Every answer was a trap. Verrinder went on: "Twenty thousand pounds is

a ten-per-centum commission on two hundred thousand pounds. That was

rather a largish transaction to be carried on through secret letters,

eh? Nicky Easton was not a millionaire, was he? Now I ask you, should

you think of him as a Rothschild? Or was he, do you think, acting as

agent for some one else, perhaps, and if so, for whom?"

She answered none of these. They were based on the assumption that she

had put forward herself. She could find nothing to excuse her.

Verrinder was simply playing tag with her. As soon as he touched her

he ran away and came at her from another direction.

"Of course, we know that you were only the adopted daughter of Sir

Joseph. But where did you first meet him?"

"In Berlin."

The sound of that word startled her. That German name stood for all

the evils of the time. It was the inaccessible throne of hell.

Verrinder was startled by it, too.

"In Berlin!" he exclaimed, and nodded his head. "Now we are getting

somewhere. Would you mind telling me the circumstances?"

She blushed a furious scarlet.

"I--I'd rather not."

"I must insist."

"Please send me to the Tower and have me imprisoned for life. I'd

rather be there than here. Or better yet--have me shot. It would make

me happier than anything you could do."

"I'm afraid that your happiness is not the main object of the moment.

Will you be so good as to tell me how you met Sir Joseph in--in

Berlin."

Marie Louise drew a deep breath. The past that she had tried to

smother under a new life must be confessed at such a time of all

times!

"Well, you know that Sir Joseph had a daughter; the two children

up-stairs are hers, and--and what's to become of them, in Heaven's

name?"

"One problem at a time, if you don't mind. Sir Joseph had a daughter.

That would be Mrs. Oakby."

"Yes. Her husband died before her second baby was born, and she died

soon after. And Sir Joseph and Lady Webling mourned for her bitterly,

and--well, a year or so later they were traveling on the Continent--in

Germany, they were, and one night they went to the Winter Garten in

Berlin--the big music-hall, you know. Well, they were sitting far

back, and an American team of musicians came on--the Musical Mokes, we

were called."

"We?"

She bent her head in shame. "I was one of them. I played a xylophone

and a saxophone and an accordion--all sorts of things. Well, Lady

Webling gave a little gasp when she saw me, and she looked at Sir

Joseph--so she told me afterward--and then they got up and stole 'way

up front just as I left the stage--to make a quick change, you know. I

came back--in tights, playing a big trombone, prancing round and

making an awful noise. Lady Webling gave a little scream; nobody heard

her because I made a loud blat on the trombone in the ear of the

black-face clown, and he gave a shriek and did a funny fall, and--"

"But, pardon me--why did Lady Webling scream?"

"Because I looked like her dead daughter. It was so horrible to see

her child come out of the grave in--in tights, blatting a trombone at

a clown in that big variety theater."

"I can quite understand. And then--"

"Well, Sir Joseph came round to the stage door and sent in his card.

The man who brought it grinned and told everybody an old man was

smitten on me; and Ben, the black-face man, said, 'I'll break his

face,' but I said I wouldn't see him.

"Well, when I was dressed and leaving the theater with the black-face

man, you know, Sir Joseph was outside. He stopped me and said: 'My

child! My child!' and the tears ran down his face. I stopped, of

course, and said, 'What's the matter now?' And he said, 'Would you

come with me?' and I said, 'Not in a thousand years, old Creepo

Christmas!' And he said: 'My poor wife is in the carriage at the curb.

She wants to speak to you.' And then of course I had to go, and she

reached out and dragged me in and wept all over me. I thought they

were both crazy, but finally they explained, and they asked me to go

to their hotel with them. So I told Ben to be on his way, and I went.

"Well, they asked me a lot of questions, and I told them a little--not

everything, but enough, Heaven knows. And they begged me to be their

daughter. I thought it would be pretty stupid, but they said they

couldn't stand the thought of their child's image going about as I

was, and I wasn't so stuck on the job myself--odd, how the old

language comes back, isn't it? I haven't heard any of it for so long

I'd almost forgotten it." She passed her handkerchief across her lips

as if to rub away a bad taste. It left the taste of tears. She sighed:

"Well, they adopted me, and I learned to love them. And--and that's

all."

"And you learned to love their native country, too, I fancy."

"At first I did like Germany pretty well. They were crazy about us in

Berlin. I got my first big money and notices and attention there. You

can imagine it went to my head. But then I came to England and tried

to be as English as I could, so as not to be conspicuous. I never

wanted to be conspicuous off the stage--or on it, for that matter. I

even took lessons from the man who had the sign up, you remember,

'Americans taught to speak English!' I always had a gift for foreign

languages, and I got to thinking in English, too."

"One moment, please. Did you say 'Americans taught?' Americans?"

"Yes."

"You're not American?"

"Why, of course!"

"Damned stupid of me!"

Verrinder frowned. This complicated matters. He had cornered her, only

to have her abscond into neutral territory. He had known that Marie

Louise was an adopted child, but had not suspected her Americanism.

This required a bit of thinking. While he studied it in the back room

of his brain his forehead self was saying:

"So Sir Joseph befriended you, and that was what won your amazing,

unquestioning gratitude?"

"That and a thousand thousand little kindnesses. I loved them like

mother and father."

"But your own--er--mother and father--you must have had parents of

your own--what was their nationality?"

"Oh, they were, as we say, 'Americans from 'way back.' But my father

left my mother soon after I was born. We weren't much good, I guess.

It was when I was a baby. He was very restless, they say. I suppose I

got my runaway nature from him. But I've outgrown that. Anyway, he

left my mother with three children. My little brother died. My mother

was a seamstress in a little town out West--an awful hole it was. I

was a tiny little girl when they took me to my mother's funeral. I

remember that, but I can't remember her. That was my first death. And

now this! I've lost a mother and father twice. That hasn't happened to

many people. So you must forgive me for being so crazy. So many of my

loved are dead. It's frightful. We lose so many as we grow up. Life is

like walking through a graveyard, with the sextons always busy opening

new places. There was so much crying and loneliness before, and now

this war goes on and on--as if we needed a war!"

"God knows, we don't."

Marie Louise went to the window and raised the curtain. A haggard gray

light had been piping the edges of the shade. Now the full casement

let in a flood of warm morning radiance.

The dull street was alive again. Sparrows were hopping. Wagons were on

the move. Small and early tradesfolk were about their business.

Servants were opening houses as shops were being opened in town.

The big wheel had rolled London round into the eternal day. Doors and

windows were being flung ajar. Newspapers and milk were taken in,

ashes put out, cats and dogs released, front stoops washed, walks

swept, gardens watered. Brooms were pendulating. In the masters' rooms

it was still night and slumber-time, but humble people were alert.

The morning after a death is a fearful thing. Those papers on the

steps across the way were doubtless loaded with more tragedies from

the front, and among the cruel facts was the lie that concealed the

truth about the Weblings, who were to read no more morning papers, eat

no more breakfasts, set out on no more journeys.

Grief came to Marie Louise now with a less brackish taste. Her sorrow

had the pity of the sunlight on it. She wept not now for the terror

and hatefulness of the Weblings' fate, but for the beautiful things

that would bless them no more, for the roses that would glow unseen,

the flowers that would climb old walls and lean out unheeded, asking

to be admired and proffering fragrance in payment of praise. The

Weblings were henceforth immune to the pleasant rumble of wagons in

streets, to the cheery good mornings of passers-by, the savor of

coffee in the air, the luscious colors of fruits piled upon silver

dishes.

Then she heard a scamper of bare feet, the squeals of mischief-making

children escaping from a pursuing nurse.

It had been a favorite pastime of Victor and Bettina to break in upon

Marie Louise of mornings when she forgot to lock her door. They loved

to steal in barefoot and pounce on her with yelps of savage delight

and massacre her, pull her hair and dance upon her bed and on her as

she pleaded for mercy.

She heard them coming now, and she could not reach the door before it

opened and disclosed the grinning, tousle-curled cherubs in their

sleeping-suits.

They darted in, only to fall back in amazement. Marie Louise was not

in bed. The bed had not been slept in. Marie Louise was all dressed,

and she had been crying. And in a chair sat a strange, formidable old

gentleman who looked tired and forlorn.

"Auntie!" they gasped.

She dropped to her knees, and they ran to her for refuge from the

strange man.

She hugged them so hard that they cried, "Don't!"

Without in the least understanding what it was all about, they heard

her saying to the man:

"And now what's to become of these poor lambs?"

The old stranger passed a slow gray hand across his dismal face and

pondered.

The children pointed, then remembered that it is impolite to point,

and drew back their little index hands and whispered:

"Auntie, what you up so early for?" and, "Who is that?"

And she whispered, "S-h-h!"

Being denied the answer to this charade, they took up a new interest.

"I wonder is grandpapa up, too, and all dressed," said Victor.

"And maybe grandmamma," Bettina shrilled.

"I'll beat you to their room," said Victor.

Marie Louise seized them by their hinder garments as they fled.

"You must not bother them."

"Why not?" said Victor.

"Will so!" said Bettina, pawing to be free.

Marie Louise implored: "Please, please! They've gone."

"Where?"

She cast her eyes up at that terrible query, and answered it vaguely.

"Away."

"They might have told a fellow good-by," Victor brooded.

"They--they forgot, perhaps."

"I don't think that was very nice of them," Bettina pouted.

Victor was more cheerful. "Perhaps they did; perhaps they kissed us

while we was asleep--_were_ asleep."

Bettina accepted with delight.

"Seems to me I 'member somebody kissin' me. Yes, I 'member now."

Victor was skeptical. "Maybe you only had a dream about it."

"What else is there?" said Mr. Verrinder, rising and patting Victor on

the shoulder. "You'd better run along to your tubs now."

They recognized the authority in his voice and obeyed.

The children took their beauty with them, but left their destiny to be

arranged by higher powers, the gods of Eld.

"What is to become of them," Louise groaned again, "when I go to

prison?"

Verrinder was calm. "Sir Joseph's will doubtless left the bulk of his

fortune to them. That will provide for their finances. And they have

two grandparents left. The Oakbys will surely be glad to take the

children in, especially as they will come with such fortunes."

"You mean that I am to have no more to do with them?"

"I think it would be best to remove them to a more strictly English

influence."

This hurt her horribly. She grew impatient for the finishing blow.

"And now that they are disposed of, have you decided what's to become

of me?"

"It is not for me to decide. By the by, have you any one to represent

you or intercede for you here, or act as your counsel in England?"

She shook her head. "A good many people have been very nice to me, of

course. I've noticed, though, that even they grew cold and distant of

late. I'd rather die than ask any of them."

"But have you no relatives living--no one of importance in the States

who could vouch for you?"

She shook her head with a doleful humility.

"None of our family were ever important that I ever heard of, though

of course one never knows what relatives are lurking about. Mine will

never claim me; that's certain. I did have a sister--poor thing!--if

she's alive. We didn't get along very well. I was too wild and

restless as a girl. She was very good, hard-working, simple, homely as

sin--or homely as virtue. I was all for adventure. I've had my fill of

it. But once you begin it, you can't stop when you've had enough. If

she's not dead, she's probably married and living under another

name--Heaven knows what name or where. But I could find her, perhaps.

I'd love to go to her. She was a very good girl. She's probably

married a good man and has brought up her children piously, and never

mentioned me. I'd only bring disgrace on her. She'd disown me if I

came home with this cloud of scandal about me."

"No one shall know of this scandal unless you tell."

She laughed harshly, with a patronizing superiority.

"Really, Mr. Verrinder, did you ever know a secret to be kept?"

"This one will be."

She laughed again at him, then at herself.

He rose wearily. "I think I shall have to be getting along. I haven't

had a bath or a shave to-day. I shall ask you to keep to your room and

deny yourself to all visitors. I won't ask you to promise not to

escape. If the guard around the house is not capable of detaining you,

you're welcome to your freedom, though I warn you that England is as

hard to get out of as to get into nowadays. Whatever you do, for your

own sake, at least, keep this whole matter secret and stick to the

story we agreed on. Good morning!"

He bowed himself out. No rattling of chains marked his closing of the

door, but if he had been a turnkey in Newgate he could not have left

Marie Louise feeling more a prisoner. Her room was her body's jail,

but her soul was in a dungeon, too.

As Verrinder went down the hall he scattered a covey of whispering

servants.

The nurse who had waited to seize the children when they came forth

had left them to dress themselves while she hastened to publish in the

servants' dining-room the appalling fact that she had caught sight of

a man in Miss Marie Louise's room. The other servants had many other

even more astounding things to tell--to wit: that after mysterious

excitements about the house, with strange men going and coming, and

the kitchen torn to pieces for mustard and warm milk and warm water

and strong coffee, and other things, Sir Joseph and Lady Webling were

no more, and the whole household staff was out of a job. Strange

police-like persons were in the house, going through all the papers in

Sir Joseph's room. The servants could hardly wait to get out with the

gossip.

And Mr. Verrinder had said that this secret would be kept!

CHAPTER VII

Somewhere along about this time, though there is no record of the

exact date--and it was in a shabby home in a humble town where dates

made little difference--a homely woman sniffed.

Her name was Mrs. Nuddle.

What Mrs. Nuddle was sniffing at was a page of fashion cartoons,

curious human hieroglyphs that women can read and run to buy.

Highly improbable garments were sketched on utterly impossible

figures--female eels who could crawl through their own garters, eels

of strange mottlings, with heads like cranberries, feet like thorns,

and no spines at all.

Mrs. Nuddle was as opposite in every way as could be. She could not

have crawled through her own washtub if she had knocked the bottom out

of it. She was a caricature made by nature and long, hard work, and

she laughed at the caricatures devised by art in a hurry.

She was about to cast the paper aside as a final rebuke when she

caught sight of portraits of real people of fashion. They did not look

nearly so fashionable as the cartoons, but they were at least

possible. Some of them were said to be prominent in charity; most of

them were prominent out of their corsages.

Now Mrs. Nuddle sniffed at character, not at caricature. Leaning

against her washtub and wringer, both as graceful as their engineer,

she indulged herself in the pitiful but unfailing solace of the poor

and the ugly, which is to attribute to the rich dishonesty and to the

beautiful wickedness.

The surf Mrs. Nuddle had raised in the little private sea of her tub

had died down, and a froth of soap dried on the rawhide of her big

forearms as her heifer eyes roamed the newspaper-gallery of portraits.

One sudsy hand supported and suppressed her smile of ridicule. These

women, belles and swells, were all as glossy as if they had been

ironed.

Mrs. Nuddle sneered: "If the hussies would do an honest day's work it

would be better for their figgers." She was mercifully oblivious of

the fact that her tub-calisthenics had made her no more exquisite than

a cow in a kimono.

Mrs. Nuddle scorned the lily-fingered tulip-fleshed beauties. Their

sentimental alarms had nothing in common with her problem, which was

the riddle of a husband who was faithful only to the bottle, who was

indifferent to the children he got so easily, and was poetical only in

that he never worked save when the mood was on him.

Again Mrs. Nuddle made to cast aside the paper that had come into her

home wrapped round a bundle of laundry. But now she was startled, and

she would have startled anybody who might have been watching her, for

she stared hard at a photographed beauty and gasped:

"Sister!"

She in her disordered garb, unkempt, uncorseted, and uncommonly

common, greeted with the word "Sister!" the photograph of a very

young, very beautiful, very gracile creature, in a mannish costume

that emphasized her femininity, in a foreign garden, in a braw hat

with curls cascading from under it, with a throat lilying out of a

flaring collar, with hands pocketed in a smart jacket, and below that

a pair of most fashionable legs in riding-breeches and puttees! She

carried not a parasol nor a riding-crop, but a great reaping-hook

swung across her shoulder, and she smiled as impudently, as

immortally, as if she were Youth and had slain old Time and carried

off his scythe.

The picture did not reply to Mrs. Nuddle's cry, but Mrs. Nuddle's

eldest daughter, a precocious little adventuress of eleven or so, who

was generally called "Sister," turned from the young brother whose

smutty face she was just smacking and snapped:

"Aw, whatcha want?"

Little Sister supposed that her irritating mother was going to tell

her to stop doing something, or to start doing something--either of

which behests she always hated and only obeyed because her mother was

bigger than she was. She turned and saw her mother swaying and

clutching at the air. Sister had a gorgeous hope that mother would

fall into the tub and be interesting for once. But mother was a born

disappointer. She shook off the promising swoon, righted herself, and

began fiercely to scan the paper to find out whose name the picture

bore. The caption was torn off.

Being absolutely sure who it was, she wanted to find out who it really

was.

In her frantic curiosity she remembered that her husband had stripped

off a corner of the paper, dipped it in the stove, lighted his pipe

with it, thrown it flaming on the floor, spat it out with practised

accuracy, and trodden it as he went away. Mrs. Nuddle ran to pick it

up.

On the charred remnant she read:

The Beautiful Miss.... One of London's reigning beaut.... daughter

of Sir Joseph W.... doing farm work on the estate in....

Mrs. Nuddle sniffed no more. She flopped to a backless chair and

squatted in a curious burlesque of Rodin's statue of "The Thinker."

One heavy hand pinched her dewlap. Her hair was damp with steam and

raining about her face. Her old waist was half buttoned, and no one

would have regretted if it had been all buttoned. She was as plebeian

as an ash-can and as full of old embers.

She was still immobilized when her husband came in. Now he gasped. His

wife was loafing! sitting down! in the middle of the day! Thinking was

loafing with her. He was supposed to do the family thinking. It was

doubly necessary that she should work now, because he was on a strike.

He had been to a meeting of other thinkers--ground and lofty thinkers

who believed that they had discovered the true evil of the world and

its remedy.

The evil was the possession of money by those who had accumulated it.

The remedy was to take it away from them. Then the poor would be rich,

which was right, and the rich would be poor, which was righter still.

It was well known that the only way to end the bad habit of work was

to quit working. And the way to insure universal prosperity was to

burn down the factories and warehouses, destroy all machinery and

beggar the beasts who invented, invested, built, and hired and tried

to get rich by getting riches.

This program would take some little time to perfect, and meanwhile

Jake was willing that his wife should work. Indeed, a sharp fear

almost unmanned him--what if she should fall sick and have to loaf in

the horsepital? What if she should die? O Gord! Her little children

would be left motherless--and fatherless, for he would, of course, be

too busy saving the world to save his children. He would lose, too,

the prestige enjoyed only by those who have their money in their

wife's name. So he spoke to her with more than his wonted gentleness:

"Whatta hellsa matter wit choo?"

She felt the unusual concern in his voice, and smiled at him as best

she could:

"I got a kind of a jolt. I seen this here pitcher, and I thought for a

minute it was my sister."

"Your sister? How'd she get her pitcher in the paper? Who did she

shoot?"

He snatched the sheet from her and saw the young woman in the

young-manly garb.

Jake gloated over the picture: "Some looker! What is she, a queen in

burlecue?"

Mrs. Nuddle held out the burned sliver of paper.

He roared. "London's ranging beaut? And you're what thinks she's your

sister! The one that ran away? Was she a beaut like this?"

Mrs. Nuddle nodded. He whistled and said, with great tact:

"Cheese! but I have the rotten luck! Why didn't I see her first?

Whyn't you tell me more about her? You never talk about her none. Why

not?" No answer. "All I know is she went wrong and flew the coop."

Mrs. Nuddle flared at this. "Who said she went wrong?"

"You did!" Jake retorted with vigor. "Usedn't you to keep me awake

praying for her--hollerin' at God to forgive her? Didn't you, or did

you?" No answer. "And you think this is her!" The ridiculousness of

the fantasy smote him. "Say, you must 'a' went plumb nutty! Bendin'

over that tub must 'a' gave you a rush of brains to the head."

He laughed uproariously till she wanted to kill him. She tried to take

back what she had said:

"Don't you set there tellin' me I ever told you nothin' mean about my

pore little sister. She was as good a girl as ever lived, Mamise

was."

"You're changin' your tune now, ain'tcha? Because you think she looks

like a grand dam in pants! And where dya get that Mamise stuff? What

was her honestogawd name? Maryer? You're tryin' to swell her up a

little, huh?"

"No, I ain't. She was named Marie Louise after her gran'-maw, on'y

as a baby she couldn't say it right. She said 'Mamise.' That's what

she called her poor little self--Mamise. Seems like I can see her

now, settin' on the floor like Sister. And where is she now? O

Gawd! whatever become of her, runnin' off thataway--a little

sixteen-year-ol' chile, runnin' off with a cheap thattical troupe,

because her aunt smacked her.

"She never had no maw and no bringin' up, and she was so pirty. She

had all the beauty of the fambly, folks all said."

"And that ain't no lie," said Jake, with characteristic gallantry.

"There's nothin' but monopoly everywheres in the world. She got all

the looks and I got you. I wonder who got her!"

Jake sighed as he studied the paper, ransacked it noisily for an

article about her, but, finding none, looked at the date and growled:

"Aw, this paper's nearly a year old--May, 1916, it says."

This quelled his curiosity a little, and he turned to his dinner,

flinging it into his jaws like a stoker. His wife went slip-slopping

from stove to table, ministering to him.

Jake Nuddle did not look so dangerous as he was. He was like an old

tomato-can that an anarchist has filled with dynamite and provided

with a trigger for the destruction of whosoever disturbs it.

Explosives are useful in place. But Jake was of the sort that blow up

regardless of the occasion.

His dynamite was discontent. He hated everybody who was richer or

better paid, better clothed, better spoken of than he was. Yet he had

nothing in him of that constructive envy which is called emulation and

leads to progress, to days of toil, nights of thought. His idea of

equality was not to climb to the peak, but to drag the climbers down.

Prating always of the sufferings of the poor, he did nothing to soothe

them or remove them. His only contribution to the improvement of wages

was to call a strike and get none at all. His contribution to the war

against oppressive capital was to denounce all successful men as

brutes and tyrants, lumping the benefactors with the malefactors.

Men of his type made up the blood-spillers of the French Revolution,

and the packs of the earlier Jacquerie, the thugs who burned châteaux

and shops, and butchered women as well as men, growling their ominous

refrain:

"Noo sum zum cum eel zaw" ("_Nous sommes hommes comme ils sont_").

The Jake Nuddles were hate personified. They formed secret armies of

enemies now inside the nation and threatened her success in the war.

The thing that prevented their triumph was that their blunders were

greater than their malice, their folly more certain than their

villainy. As soon as America entered the lists against Germany, the

Jake Nuddles would begin doing their stupid best to prevent

enlistment, to persuade desertion, to stop war-production, to wreck

factories and trains, to ruin sawmills and burn crops. In the name of

freedom they would betray its most earnest defenders, compel the

battle-line to face both ways. They were more subtle than the snaky

spies of Germany, and more venomous.

As he wolfed his food now, Jake studied the picture of Marie Louise.

The gentlest influence her beauty exerted upon him was a beastly

desire. He praised her grace because it tortured his wife. But even

fiercer than his animal impulse was his rage of hatred at the look of

cleanliness and comeliness, the environment of luxury only emphasized

by her peasant disguise.

When he had mopped his plate with his bread, he took up the paper

again and glared at it with hostile envy.

"Dammer and her arristocratic ways! Daughter of a Sir and a Lady, eh?

Just wait till we get through with them Sirs and Ladies. We'll mow 'em

down. You'll see. Robbin' us poor toilers that does all the work!

We'll put an end to their peerages and their deer-parks. What Germany

leaves of these birds we'll finish up. And then we'll take this rotten

United States, the rottenest tyranny of all. Gawdammit! You just

wait!"

His wife just waited till he had smashed the picture in the face,

knocked the pretty lady's portrait to the floor and walked on it as he

strode out to his revolution. Incidentally he trod on little Sister's

hand, and she sent up a caterwaul. Her little brother howled in duet.

Then father turned on them.

"Aw, shut up or I'll--"

He did not finish his sentence. He rarely finished anything--except

his meals. He left his children crying and his wife in a new distress;

but then, revolutions cannot pause for women and children.

When he had gone, and Sister's tears had dried on her smutty face,

Mrs. Nuddle picked up the smitten and trampled picture of England's

reigning beauty and thought how lucky Miss W. was to be in England,

blissful on Sir and Lady Somebody-or-other's estate.

CHAPTER VIII

When Mr. Verrinder left Marie Louise he took from her even the props

of hostility. She had nothing to lean on now, nobody to fight with for

life and reputation. She had only suspense and confusion. Agitated

thoughts followed one another in waves across her soul--grief for her

foster-father and mother, memory of their tendernesses, remorse for

seeming to have deserted them in their last hours, remorse for having

been the dupe of their schemes, and remorse for that remorse, grief at

losing the lovable, troublesome children, creature distress at giving

up the creature comforts of the luxurious home, the revulsion of her

unfettered mind and her restless young body at the prospect of

exchanging liberty and occupation for the half-death of an idle

cell--a kind of coffin residence--fear of being executed as a spy, and

fear of being released to drag herself through life with the ball and

chain of guilt forever rolling and clanking at her feet.

Verrinder's mind was hardly more at rest when he left her and walked

to his rooms. He carried the regret of a protector of England who had

bungled his task and let the wards of his suspicion break loose. The

fault was not his, but he would never escape the reproach. He had no

taste for taking revenge on the young woman. It would not salve his

pride to visit on her pretty head the thwarted punishments due Sir

Joseph and his consort in guilt. Besides, in spite of his cynicism, he

had been touched by Marie Louise's sincerities. She proved them by the

very contradictions of her testimony, with its history of keen

intelligence alternating with curious blindness. He knew how people

get themselves all tangled up in conflicting duties, how they let

evils slide along, putting off till to-morrow the severing of the

cords and the stepping forth with freedom from obligation. He knew

that the very best people, being those who are most sensitive to

gratitude and to other people's pains, are incessantly let in for

complications that never involve selfish or self-righteous persons.

As an executive of the law, he knew how many laws there are unwritten

and implied that make obedience to the law an experiment in

caddishness and ingratitude. There were reasons enough then to believe

that Marie Louise had meant no harm and had not understood the evil in

which she was so useful an accomplice. Even if she were guilty and her

bewilderment feigned, her punishment would be untimely at this moment

when the Americans who abhorred and distrusted Germany had just about

persuaded the majority of their countrymen that the world would be

intolerable if Germany triumphed, and that the only hope of defeating

her tyranny lay in joining hands with England, France, and Italy.

The enemies of England would be only too glad to make a martyr out of

Miss Webling if she were disciplined by England. She would be

advertised, as a counterweight to the hideous mistake the Germans made

in immortalizing with their bullets the poor little nurse, "_die_

Cavell."

Verrinder was not himself at all till he had bathed, shaved, and

clothed his person in clean linen and given his inner man its tea and

toast. Once this restoration was made, his tea deferred helped him to

the conclusion that the one wise thing was to restore Marie Louise

quietly to her own country. He went with freshened step and determined

mind to a conference with the eminent men concerned. He made his own

confession of failure and took more blame than he need have accepted.

Then he told his plans for Marie Louise and made the council agree

with him.

Early in the afternoon he called on Miss Webling and found the house a

flurry of undertakers, curious relatives, and thwarted reporters. The

relatives and the reporters he satisfied with a few well-chosen lies.

Then he sent his name up to Marie Louise. The butler thrust the

card-tray through the door as if he were tossing a bit of meat to some

wild animal.

"I'll be down," said Marie Louise, and she primped herself like

another Mary Queen of Scots receiving a call from the executioner. She

was calmed by the hope that she would learn her fate, at least, and

she cared little what it was, so long as it was not unknown.

Verrinder did not delay to spread his cards on the table.

"Miss Webling, I begin again with a question: If we should offer you

freedom and silence, would you go back to America and tell no one of

what has happened here?"

The mere hint was like flinging a door open and letting the sunlight

into a dungeon. The very word "America" was itself a rush of fresh

air. The long-forgotten love of country came back into her heart on a

cry of hope.

"Oh, you don't mean that you might?"

"We might. In fact, we will, if you will promise--"

She could not wait for his formal conclusion. She broke in: "I'll

promise anything--anything! Oh I don't want to be free just for the

sake of escaping punishment! No, no. I just want a chance to--to

expiate the evil I have done. I want to do some good to undo all the

bad I've brought about. I won't try to shift any blame. I want to

confess. It will take this awful load off my heart to tell people what

a wicked fool I've been."

Verrinder checked her: "But that is just what you must not do. Unless

you can assure us that you will carry this burden about with you and

keep it secret at no matter what cost, then we shall have to proceed

with the case--legally. We shall have to exhume Sir Joseph and Lady

Webling, as it were, and drag the whole thing through the courts. We'd

really rather not, but if you insist--"

"Oh, I'll promise. I'll keep the secret. Let them rest."

She was driven less by the thought of her own liberty than the terror

of exposing the dead. The mere thought brought back pictures of

hideous days when the grave was not refuge enough from vengeance, when

bodies were dug up, gibbeted, haled by a chain along the unwashed

cobblestones, quartered with a sword in the market-place and then

flung back to the dark.

Verrinder may have feared that Marie Louise yielded under duress, and

that when she was out of reach of the law she would forget, so he

said

"Would you swear to keep this inviolate?"

"Yes!"

"Have you a Bible?"

She thought there must be one, and she searched for it among the

bookshelves. But first she came across one in the German tongue. It

fell open easily, as if it had been a familiar companion of Sir

Joseph's. She abhorred the sight of the words that youthful

Sunday-school lessons had given an unearthly sanctity as she

recognized them twisted into the German paraphrase and printed in the

twisted German type. But she said:

"Will this do?"

Verrinder shook his head. "I don't know that an oath on a German Bible

would really count. It might be considered a mere heap of paper."

Marie Louise put it aside and brushed its dust off her fingers. She

found an English Bible after a further search. Its pages had seen the

light but seldom. It slipped from her hand and fell open. She knelt to

pick it up with a tremor of fear.

She rose, and before she closed it glanced at the page before her.

These words caught her eye:

For thus saith the Lord God of Israel unto me. Take the winecup of

this fury at my hand, and cause all the nations, to whom I send

thee, to drink it. And they shall drink, and be moved, and be mad

because of the sword that I will send among them.

She showed them to Verrinder. He nodded solemnly, took the book from

her hand, closed it, and held it before her. She put the slim tips of

her young fingers near the talon of his old thumb and echoed in a

timid, silvern voice the broken phrases he spoke in a tone of bronze:

"I solemnly swear--that so long as I live--I will tell no one--what I

know--of the crimes and death--of Sir Joseph and Lady Webling--unless

called upon--in a court of law. This oath is made--with no mental

reservations--and is binding--under all circumstances whatsoever--so

help me God!"

When she had whispered the last invocation he put the book away and

gripped her hand in his.

"I must remind you that releasing you is highly illegal--and perhaps

immoral. Our action might be overruled and the whole case opened. But

I think you are safe, especially if you get to America--the sooner the

better."

"Thank you!" she said.

He laughed, somewhat pathetically.

"Good luck!"

He did not tell her that England would still be watching over her,

that her name and her history were already cabled to America, that

she would be shadowed to the steamer, observed aboard the boat,

and picked up at the dock by the first of a long series of detectives

constituting a sort of serial guardian angel.

BOOK II

IN NEW YORK

[Illustration: "This is the life for me. I've been a heroine and a

war-worker about as long as I can."]

CHAPTER I

Leaving England quickly was not easy in those days. Passenger-steamers

were few, irregular, and secret. The passport regulations were

exceedingly rigorous, and even Mr. Verrinder's influence could not

speed the matter greatly.

There was the Webling estate to settle up, also. At Verrinder's

suggestion Marie Louise put her affairs into the hands of counsel, and

he arranged her surrender of all claims on the Webling estate. But he

insisted that she should keep the twenty thousand pounds that had been

given to her absolutely. He may have been influenced in this by his

inability to see from what other funds he could collect his fee.

Eventually he placed her aboard a liner, and her bonds in the purser's

safe; and eventually the liner stole out into the ocean, through such

a gantlet of lurking demons as old superstitions peopled it with.

She had not told the children good-by, but had delivered them to the

Oakbys and run away. The Oakbys had received her with a coldness that

startled her. They used the expression, "Under the circumstances,"

with a freezing implication that made her wonder if the secret had

already trickled through to them.

On the steamer there was nobody she knew. At the dock no friends

greeted her. She did not notice that her arrival was noted by a

certain Mr. Larrey, who had been detailed to watch her and saw with

some pride how pretty she was. "It'll be a pleasure to keep an eye on

her," he told a luckless colleague who had a long-haired pacifist

professor allotted to him. But Marie Louise's mystic squire had not

counted on her stopping in New York for only a day and then setting

forth on a long, hot, stupid train-ride of two days to the little town

of her birth, Wakefield.

Larrey found it appalling. Marie Louise found it far smaller and

shabbier than she had imagined. Yet it had grown some, too, since her

time.

At least, most of the people she had known had moved away to the

cities or the cemeteries, and new people had taken their place. She

had not known many of the better people. Her mother had been too

humble to sew for them.

Coming from London and the country life of England, she found the town

intolerably ugly. It held no associations for her. She had been

unhappy there, and she said: "Poor me! No wonder I ran away." She

justified her earlier self with a kind of mothering sympathy. She

longed for some one to mother her present self.

But her sister was not to be found. The old house where they had lived

was replaced by a factory that had made suspenders and now was turning

out cartridge-belts. She found no one who knew her sister at all. She

did not give her own name, for many reasons, and her face was not

remembered. A few people recalled the family. The town marshal vaguely

placed her father as a frequent boarder at the jail.

One sweet old lady, for whom Marie Louise's mother had done sewing,

had a kind of notion that one of the sisters had run away and that the

other sister had left town with somebody for somewhere sometime after.

But that was all that the cupboard of her recollection disclosed.

Anatole France has a short story of Pilate in his old age meeting his

predecessor as Proconsul in Jerusalem. During their senile gossip the

elder asks if Pilate had known a certain beauty named Mary of Magdala.

Pilate shakes his head. The other has heard that she took up with a

street-preacher called Jesus from the town of Nazareth. Pilate

ponders, shakes his head again, and confesses, "I don't remember

him."

It was not strange, then, that Marie Louise's people, who had made

almost no impression on the life of the town, should have lapsed from

its memory. But it was discouraging. Marie Louise felt as much of an

anachronism as old Rip Van Winkle, though she looked no more like him

than an exquisite, fashionable young woman could look like a

gray-bearded sot who has slept in his clothes for twenty years.

Her private detective, Larrey, homesick for New York, was overjoyed

when she went back, but she was disconsolate and utterly detached from

life. The prodigal had come home, but the family had moved away.

She took a comfortable little nook in an apartment hotel and settled

down to meditate. The shops interested her, and she browsed away among

them for furniture and clothes and books.

Marie Louise had not been in her homeless home long when the President

visited Congress and asked it to declare a state of war against

Germany. She was exultant over the great step, but the wilful few who

held Congress back from answering the summons revealed to her why the

nation had been so slow in responding to the crisis. Even now, after

so much insult and outrage, vast numbers of Americans denied that

there was any cause for war.

But the patience of the majority had been worn thin. The opposition

was swept away, and America declared herself in the arena--in spirit

at least. Impatient souls who had prophesied how the millions would

spring to arms overnight wondered at the failure to commit a miracle.

The Germans, who had prepared for forty years, laughed at the new

enemy and felt guaranteed by five impossibilities: that America should

raise a real army, or equip it, or know how to train it, or be able to

get it past the submarine barrier, or feed the few that might sneak

through.

America's vast resources were unready, unwieldy, unknown. The first

embarrassment was the panic of volunteers.

Marie Louise was only one of the hundred million who sprang madly in

all directions and landed nowhere. She wanted to volunteer, too, but

for what? What could she do? Where could she get it to do? In the

chaos of her impatience she did nothing.

Supping alone at the Biltmore one night, she was seen, hailed, and

seized by Polly Widdicombe. Marie Louise's detective knew who Polly

was. He groaned to note that she was the first friend his client had

found.

Polly, giggling adorably, embraced her and kissed her before everybody

in the big Tudor Room. And Polly's husband greeted her with warmth of

hand and voice.

Marie Louise almost wept, almost cried aloud with joy. The prodigal

was home, had been welcomed with a kiss. Evidently her secret had not

crossed the ocean. She could take up life again. Some day the past

would confront and denounce her, perhaps; but for the moment she was

enfranchised anew of human society.

Polly said that she had read of Sir Joseph's death and his wife's, and

what a shock it must have been to poor Marie Louise, but how well she

bore up under it, and how perfectly darn beautiful she was, and what a

shame that it was almost midnight! She and her hub were going to

Washington. Everybody was, of course. Why wasn't Marie Louise there?

And Polly's husband was to be a major--think of it! He was going to be

all dolled up in olive drab and things and-- "Damn the clock, anyway;

if we miss that train we can't get on another for days. And what's

your address? Write it on the edge of that bill of fare and tear it

off, and I'll write you the minute I get settled, for you must come to

us and nowhere else and-- Good-by, darling child, and-- All right,

Tom, I'm coming!"

And she was gone.

Marie Louise went back to her seclusion much happier and yet much

lonelier. She had found a friend who had not heard of her disgrace.

She had lost a friend who still rejoiced to see her.

But her faithful watchman was completely discouraged. When he turned

in his report he threatened to turn in his resignation unless he were

relieved of the futile task of recording Marie Louise's blameless and

eventless life.

And then the agent's night was turned to day--at least his high noon

was turned to higher. For a few days later Marie Louise was abruptly

addressed by Nicky Easton.

She had been working in the big Red Cross shop on Fifth Avenue,

rolling bandages and making dressings with a crowd of other

white-fingered women. A cable had come that there was a sudden need

for at least ten thousand bandages. These were not yet for American

soldiers in France, though their turn would come, and their wholesale

need. But as Marie Louise wrought she could imagine the shattered

flesh, the crying nerves of some poor patriot whose gaping wound this

linen pack would smother. And her own nerves cried out in vicarious

crucifixion. At noon she left the factory for a little air and a bite

of lunch.

Nicky Easton appeared out of her list of the buried. She gasped at

sight of him.

"I thought you were dead."

He laughed: "If I am it, thees is my _Doppelgänger_." And he began to

hum with a grisly smile Schubert's setting to Heine's poem of the man

who met his own ghost and double, aping his love-sorrow outside the

home of his dead sweetheart:

"_Der Mond zeigt mir meine eig'ne Gestalt.

Du Doppelgänger, du bleicher Geselle!

Was äffst du nach mein Liebesleid,

Das mich gequält auf dieser Stelle

So manche Nacht in alter Zeit._"

Marie Louise was terrified by the harrowing emotions the song always

roused in her, but more by the dreadful sensation of walking that

crowded Avenue with a man humming German at her side.

"Hush! Hush, in Heaven's name!" she pleaded.

He laughed Teutonically, and asked her to lunch with him.

"I have another engagement, and I am late," she said.

"Where are you living?"

She felt inspired to give him a false address. He insisted on walking

with her to the Waldorf, where she said her engagement was.

"You don't ask me where I have been?"

"I was just going to. The last I heard you were in the London Tower or

somewhere. However did you get out?"

"The same way like you ditt. I thought you should choin me therein,

but you also told all you knew and some more yet, yes?"

She saw then that he had turned state's evidence. Perhaps he had

betrayed Sir Joseph. Somehow she found it possible to loathe him

extra. She lacked the strength to deny his odious insinuation about

herself. He went on:

"Now I am in America. I could not dare go to Germany now. But here I

try to gain back my place in _Deutschland_. These English think they

use me for a stool-pitcheon. But they will find out, and when

_Deutschland ist über alles--ach, Gott_! You shall help me. We do some

work togedder. I come soon by your house. _Auf_--Goot-py."

He left her at the hotel door and lifted his hat. She went into the

labyrinth and lost herself. When her heart had ceased fluttering and

she grew calm from very fatigue of alarm she resolved to steal out of

New York.

She spent an afternoon and an evening of indecision. Night brought

counsel. Polly Widdicombe had offered her a haven, and in the country.

It would be an ideal hiding-place. She set to work at midnight packing

her trunk.

CHAPTER II

Marie Louise tried all the next morning to telephone from New York to

Washington, but it seemed that everybody on earth was making the same

effort. It was a wire Babel.

Washington was suddenly America in the same way that London had long

been England; and Paris France. The entire population was apparently

trying to get into Washington in order to get out again. People wrote,

telegraphed, radiographed, telephoned, and traveled thither by all

the rail- and motor-roads. Washington was the narrow neck of the

funnel leading to the war, and the sleepy old home of debate and

administration was suddenly dumfounded to find itself treated to all

the horrors of a boom-town--it was like San Francisco in '49.

Marie Louise, who had not yet recovered her American dialect, kept

pleading with Long Distance:

"Oh, I say, cahn't you put me through to Washington? It's no end

important, really! Rosslyn, seven three one two. I want to speak to

Mrs. Widdicombe. I am Miss Webling. Thank you."

The obliging central asked her telephone number and promised to call

her in a moment. Eternity is but a moment--to some centrals. Marie

Louise, being finite and ephemeral, never heard from that central

again. Later she took up the receiver and got another central, who had

never heard her tale of woe and had to have it all over again. This

central also asked her name and number and promised to report, then

vanished into the interstellar limbo where busy centrals go.

Again and again Marie Louise waited and called, and told and retold

her prayer till it turned to gibberish and she began to doubt her own

name and to mix the telephone number hopelessly. Then she went into

her hand-bag and pawed about in the little pocket edition of confusion

till she found the note that Polly had sent her at once from

Washington with the address, Grinden Hall, Rosslyn, and the telephone

number and the message.

So glad you're on this side of the water, dear. Do run over and

see us. Perfect barn of a house, and lost in the country, but

there's always room--especially for you, dear. You'll never get in

at a hotel.

Marie Louise propped this against the telephone and tried again.

The seventh central dazed her with, "We can take nothing but gov'ment

business till two P.M."

Marie Louise rose in despair, searched in her bag for her watch,

gasped, put the watch and the note back in her bag, snapped it, and

rose to go.

She decided to send Polly a telegram. She took out the note for the

address and telephoned a telegram, saying that she would arrive at

five o'clock. The telegraph-operator told her that the company could

not guarantee delivery, as traffic over the wires was very heavy.

Marie Louise sighed and rose, worn out with telephone-fag.

She told the maid to ask the hall-boy to get her a taxi, and hastily

made ready to leave. Her trunks had gone to the station an hour ago,

and they had been checked through from the house.

Her final pick-up glance about the room did not pick up the note she

had propped on the telephone-table. She left it there and closed the

door on another chapter of her life.

She rode to the station, and, after standing in line for a weary

while, learned that not a seat was to be had in a parlor-car to-day,

to-morrow, or any day for two weeks. Berths at night were still more

unobtainable.

She decided that she might as well go in a day-coach. Scores of people

had had the same idea before her. The day-coaches were filled. She

sidled through the crowded aisles and found no seat. She invaded the

chair-cars in desperation.

In one of these she saw a porter bestowing hand-luggage. She appealed

to him. "You must have one chair left."

He was hardly polite in his answer. "No, ma'am, I ain't. I ain't a

single chair."

"But I've got to sit somewhere," she said.

The porter did not comment on such a patent fallacy. He moved back to

the front to repel boarders. Several men stared from the depths of

their dentist's chairs, but made no proffer of their seats. They

believed that woman's newfangled equality included the privilege of

standing up.

One man, however, gave a start as of recognition, real or pretended.

Marie Louise did not know him, and said so with her eyes. His smile of

recognition changed to a smile of courtesy. He proffered her his seat

with an old-fashioned gesture. She declined with a shake of the head

and a coldly correct smile.

He insisted academically, as much as to say: "I can see that you are a

gentlewoman. Please accept me as a gentleman and permit me to do my

duty." There was a brief, silent tug-of-war between his unselfishness

and hers. He won. Before she realized it, she had dropped wearily into

his place.

"But where will you sit?" she said.

"Oh, I'll get along."

He smiled and moved off, lugging his suit-case. He had the air of one

who would get along. He had shown himself masterful in two combats,

and compelled her to take the chair he had doubtless engaged with

futile providence days before.

"Rahthah a decentish chap, with a will of his own," she thought.

The train started, left the station twilight, plunged into the tunnel

of gloom and made the dip under the Hudson River. People felt their

ears buzz and smother. Wise ones swallowed hard. The train came back

to the surface and the sunlight, and ran across New Jersey.

Marie Louise decided to take her luncheon early, to make sure of it.

Nearly everybody else had decided to do the same thing. At this time

all the people in America seemed to be thinking _en masse_. When she

reached the dining-car every seat was taken and there was a long

bread-line in the narrow corridor.

The wilful man was at the head. He fished for her eye, caught it, and

motioned to her to take his place. She shook her head. But it seemed

to do no good to shake heads at him; he came down the corridor and

lifted his hat. His voice and words were pleading, but his tone was

imperative.

"Please take my place."

She shook her head, but he still held his hand out, pointing. She was

angry at being bossed even for her own benefit. Worse yet, by the time

she got to the head of the line the second man had moved up to first.

He stared at her as if he wondered what she was doing there. She fell

back, doubly vexed, but That Man advanced and gave the interloper a

look like a policeman's shove. The fellow backed up on the next man's

toes. Then the cavalier smiled Miss Webling to her place and went back

to the foot of the class without waiting for her furious thanks.

She wanted to stamp her foot. She had always hated to be cowed or

compelled to take chairs or money. People who had tried to move her

soul or lend her their experience or their advantages had always

aroused resentment.

Before long she had a seat. The man opposite her was just thumbing his

last morsel of pie. She supposed that when he left That Man would take

the chair and order her luncheon for her. But it was not so to be. She

passed him still well down the line. He had probably given his place

to other women in succession. She did not like that. It seemed a

trifle unfaithful or promiscuous or something. The rescuer owes the

rescuee a certain fidelity. He did not look at her. He did not claim

even a glance of gratitude.

It was so American a gallantry that she resented it. If he had seemed

to ask for the alms of a smile, she would have insulted him. Yet it

was not altogether satisfactory to be denied the privilege. She fumed.

Everything was wrong. She sat in her cuckoo's nest and glared at the

reeling landscape.

Suddenly she began pawing through that private chaos, looking for

Polly Widdicombe's letter. She could not find it. She found the checks

for her trunks, a handkerchief, a pair of gloves, and various other

things, but not the letter. This gave her a new fright.

She remembered now that she had left it on the telephone-table. She

could see it plainly as her remembered glance took its last survey of

the room. The brain has a way of developing occasional photographs

very slowly. Something strikes our eyes, and we do not really see it

till long after. We hear words and say, "How's that?" or, "I beg your

pardon!" and hear them again before they can be repeated.

This belated feat of memory encouraged Miss Webling to hope that she

could remember a little farther back to the contents of the letter and

the telephone number written there. But her memory would not respond.

The effort to cudgel it seemed to confuse it. She kept on forgetting

more and more completely.

All she could remember was what Polly Widdicombe had said about there

being no chance to get into a hotel--"an hôtel," Marie Louise still

thought it.

It grew more and more evident that the train would be hours late.

People began to worry audibly about the hotels that would probably

refuse them admission. At length they began to stroll toward the

dining-car for an early dinner.

Marie Louise, to make sure of the meal and for lack of other

employment, went along. There was no queue in the corridor now. She

did not have to take That Man's place. She found one at a little empty

table. But by and by he appeared, and, though there were other vacant

seats, he sat down opposite her.

She could hardly order the conductor to eject him. In fact, seeing

that she owed him for her seat-- It suddenly smote her that he must

have paid for it. She owed him money! This was unendurable!

He made no attempt to speak to her, but at length she found courage to

speak to him.

"I beg your pardon--"

He looked up and about for the salt or something to pass, but she went

on:

"May I ask you how much you paid for the seat you gave me?"

He laughed outright at this unexpected demand:

"Why, I don't remember, I'm sure."

"Oh, but you must, and you must let me repay it. It just occurred to

me that I had cheated you out of your chair, and your money, too."

"That's mighty kind of you," he said.

He laughed again, but rather tenderly, and she was grateful to him for

having the tact not to be flamboyant about it and not insisting on

forgetting it.

"I'll remember just how much it was in a minute, and if you will feel

easier about it, I'll ask you for it."

"I could hardly rob a perfect stranger," she began.

He broke in: "They say nobody is perfect, and I'm not a perfect

stranger. I've met you before, Miss Webling."

"Not rilly! Wherever was it? I'm so stupid not to remember--even your

name."

He rather liked her for not bluffing it through. He could understand

her haziness the better from the fact that when he first saw her in

the chair-car and leaped to his feet it was because he had identified

her once more with the long-lost, long-sought beauty of years long

gone--the girl he had seen in the cheap vaudeville theater. This slip

of memory had uncovered another memory. He had corrected the

palimpsest and recalled her as the Miss Webling whom he had met in

London. She had given him the same start then as now, and, as he

recalled it, she had snubbed him rather vigorously. So he had kept his

distance. But the proffer of the money for the chair-car chair broke

the ice a little. He said at last:

"My name is Ross Davidge. I met you at your father's house in

London."

This seemed to agitate her peculiarly. She trembled and gasped:

"You don't mean it. I-- Oh yes, of course I remember--"

"Please don't lie about it," he pleaded, bluntly, "for of course you

don't."

She laughed, but very nervously.

"Well, we did give very large dinners."

"It was a very large one the night I was there. I was a mile down the

street from you, and I said nothing immortal. I was only a business

acquaintance of Sir Joseph's, anyway. It was about ships, of course."

He saw that her mind was far away and under strange excitation. But

she murmured, distantly:

"Oh, so you are--interested in ships?"

"I make 'em for a living."

"Rilly! How interesting!"

This constraint was irksome. He ventured:

"How is the old boy? Sir Joseph, I mean. He's well, I hope."

Her eyes widened. "Didn't you know? Didn't you read in the papers--about

their death together?"

"Theirs? His wife and he died together?"

"Yes."

"In a submarine attack?"

"No, at home. It was in all the papers--about their dying on the same

night, from--from ptomaine poisoning."

"No!"

He put a vast amount of shock and regret in the mumbled word. He

explained: "I must have been out in the forest or in the mines at the

time. Forgive me for opening the old wound. How long ago was it? I see

you're out of mourning."

"Sir Joseph abominated black; and besides, few people wear mourning in

England during the war."

"That's so. Poor old England! You poor Englishwomen--mothers and

daughters! My God! what you've gone through! And such pluck!"

Before he realized what he was doing his hand went across and touched

hers, and he clenched it for just a moment of fierce sympathy. She did

not resent the message. Then he muttered:

"I know what it means. I lost my father and mother--not at once, of

course--years apart. But to lose them both in one night!"

She made a sharp attempt at self-control:

"Please! I beg you--please don't speak of it."

He was so sorry that he said nothing more. Marie Louise was doubly

fascinating to him because she was in sorrow and afraid of something

or somebody. Besides, she was inaccessible, and Ross Davidge always

felt a challenge from the impossible and the inaccessible.

She called for her check and paid it, and tipped the waiter and rose.

She smiled wretchedly at him as he rose with her. She left the

dining-car, and he sat down and cursed himself for a brute and a

blunderer.

He kept in the offing, so that if she wanted him she could call him,

but he thought it the politer politeness not to italicize his

chivalry. He was so distressed that he forgot that she had forgotten

to pay him for the chair.

It was good and dark when the train pulled into Washington at last.

The dark gave Marie Louise another reason for dismay. The appearance

of a man who had dined at Sir Joseph's, and the necessity for telling

him the lie about that death, had brought on a crisis of nerves. She

was afraid of the dark, but more afraid of the man who might ask

still more questions. She avoided him purposely when she left the

train.

A porter took her hand-baggage and led her to the taxi-stand. Polly

Widdicombe's car was not waiting. Marie Louise went to the front of

the building to see if she might be there. She was appalled at the

thought of Polly's not meeting her. She needed her blessed giggle as

never before.

It was a very majestic station. Marie Louise had heard people say that

it was much too majestic for a railroad station. As if America did not

owe more to the iron god of the rails than to any of her other

deities!

Before her was the Capitol, lighted from below, its dome floating

cloudily above the white parapets as if mystically sustained. The

superb beauty of it clutched her throat. She wanted to do something

for it and all the holy ideals it symbolized.

Evidently Polly was not coming. The telegram had probably never

reached her. The porter asked her, "Was you thinkin' of a taxi?" and

she said, "Yes," only to realize that she had no address to give the

driver.

BOOK III

IN WASHINGTON

[Illustration: "'It's beautiful overhead if you're going that way,'"

Davidge quoted. He set out briskly, but Marie Louise hung back. "Aren't

you afraid to push on when you can't see where you're going?" she

demanded.]

CHAPTER I

She went through her hand-bag again, while the porter computed how

many tips he was missing and the cab-starter looked insufferable

things about womankind.

She asked if any of them knew where Grinden Hall might be, but they

shook their heads. She had a sudden happy idea. She would ask the

telephone Information for the number. She hurried to a booth, followed

by the despondent porter. She asked for Information and got her, but

that was all.

"Please give me the numba of Mrs. Widdicombe's, in Rosslyn."

A Washington dialect eventually told her that the number was a private

wire and could not be given.

Marie Louise implored a special dispensation, but it was against the

rules.

She asked for the supervisor--who was equally sorry and adamant. Marie

Louise left the booth in utter defeat. There was nothing to do but go

to a hotel till the morrow.

She recalled the stories of the hopelessness of getting a room. Yet

she had no choice but to make the try. She had got a seat on the train

where there were none. Perhaps she could trust her luck to provide her

with a lodging, too.

"We'll go back to the taxi-stand," she told the porter.

He did not conceal his joy at being rid of her.

She tried the Shoreham first, and when the taxicab deposited her under

the umbrellas of the big trees and she climbed the homelike steps to a

lobby with the air of a living-room she felt welcome and secure.

Brilliant clusters were drifting to dinner, and the men were more

picturesque than the women, for many of them were in uniform. Officers

of the army and navy of the United States and of Great Britain and of

France gave the throng the look of a costume-party.

There was a less interesting crowd at the desk, and now nobody offered

her his place at the head of the line. It would have done no good, for

the room-clerk was shaking his head to all the suppliants. Marie

Louise saw women turned away, married couples, men alone. But

new-comers pressed forward and kept trying to convince the deskman

that he had rooms somewhere, rooms that he had forgotten, or was

saving for people who would never arrive.

He stood there shaking his head like a toy in a window. People tried

to get past him in all the ways people try to get through life, in the

ways that Saint Peter must grow very tired of at the gate of

heaven--bluff, whine, bribery, intimidation, flirtation.

Some demanded their rights with full confidence and would not take no

for answer. Some pleaded with hopelessness in advance; they were used

to rebuffs. They appealed to his pity. Some tried corruption; they

whispered that they would "make it all right," or they managed a sly

display of money--one a one-dollar bill with the "1" folded in,

another a fifty-dollar bill with the "50" well to the fore. Some grew

ugly and implied favoritism; they were the born strikers and

anarchists. Even though they looked rich, they had that habit of

finding oppression and conspiracy everywhere. A few women appealed to

his philanthropy, and a few others tried to play the siren. But his

head oscillated from side to side, and nobody could swing it up and

down.

Marie Louise watched the procession anxiously. There seemed to be no

end to it. The people who had come here first had been turned away

into outer darkness long ago and had gone to other hotels. The present

wretches were those who had gone to the other hotels first and made

this their second, third, or sixth choice.

Marie Louise did not go to the desk. She could take a hint at second

hand. She would have been glad of a place to sit down, but all the

divans were filled with gossipers very much at home and somewhat

contemptuous of the vulgar herd trying to break into their select and

long-established circle. She heard a man saying, with amiable anger:

"Ah'm mahty sah'y Ah can't put you up at ouah haouse, but we've got

'em hangin' on the hat-rack in the hall. You infunnal patriots have

simply ruined this little old taown."

She heard a pleasant laugh. "Don't worry. I'll get along somehow."

She glanced aside and saw That Man again. She had forgotten his name

again; yet she felt curiously less lonely, not nearly so hopeless. The

other man said:

"Say, Davidge, are you daown heah looking for one of these dollah-a-yeah

jobs? Can you earn it?"

"I'm not looking for a job. I'm looking for a bed."

"Not a chance. The government's taken ovah half the hotels for

office-buildings."

"I'll go to a Turkish bath, then."

"Good Lawd! man, I hud a man propose that, and the hotel clerk said he

had telephoned the Tukkish bath, and a man theah said: 'For God's sake

don't send anybody else heah! We've got five hundred cots full

naow.'"

"There's Baltimore."

"Baltimer's full up. So's Alexandra. Go on back home and write a

letta."

"I'll try a few more hotels first."

"No use--not an openin'."

"Well, I've usually found that the best place to look for things is

where people say they don't grow."

Marie Louise thought that this was most excellent advice. She decided

to follow it and keep on trying.

As she was about to move toward the door the elevator, like a great

cornucopia, spilled a bevy of men and women into the lobby. Leading

them all came a woman of charm, of distinction, of self-possession.

She was smiling over one handsome shoulder at a British officer.

The forlorn Marie Louise saw her, and her eyes rejoiced; her face was

kindled with haven-beacons. She pressed forward with her hand out, and

though she only murmured the words, a cry of relief thrilled them.

"Lady Clifton-Wyatt! What luck to find you!"

Lady Clifton-Wyatt turned with a smile of welcome in advance. Her hand

went forward. Her smile ended suddenly. Blank amazement passed into

contemptuous wrath. Her hand went back. With the disgust of a sick

eagle in a zoo, she drew a film over her eyes.

The smile on Marie Louise's face also hung unsupported for a moment.

It faded, then rallied. She spoke with patience, underlining the words

with an affectionate reproof:

"My dear Lady Clifton-Wyatt, I am Miss Webling--Marie Louise. Don't

you know me?"

Lady Clifton-Wyatt answered: "I did. But I don't!"

Then she turned and moved toward the dining-room door.

The head waiter bowed with deference and command and beckoned Lady

Clifton-Wyatt. She obeyed him with meek hauteur.