Part 18

“Shh!” she soothed him. “It was all very beautiful, our life together, Harry dear. Do you remember the holidays we had alone together? Do you remember Switzerland, and the great mountains that towered up behind our hotel, the snow upon their summits orange against deep blue in the first sunshine of the dawn? Do you remember how we used to wake up to look at them, and said it was just like the pictures, only more wonderful because we were actually there? Do you remember being among the great fields of narcissi, with blue gentian higher up, and reminding me that this was what you had promised to show me--those fields on fields of wild flowers which you had seen when you were a young student, years before? Do you remember the mountain stream with the big boulders where we ate sandwiches on a little patch of turf between the rocks, and you kissed me just as those other people came down the path? I remember--I remember how I went hot all over and yet was very proud and happy, because it was the first time that any one else had ever seen you loving me. You used to pretend--do you remember?--to be a little cold and distant toward me when we were in company, your dignity much too big to admit that you were in love.”

“Don’t, Christine--don’t!” he murmured, the breath of a soundless sob escaping him in a broken exhalation. “If only we had had them--those holidays we meant to have!”

“We did, dear,” she pursued. “We did have them. They’re all there--among our dreams. Look at them and you will see that they are true. The memory of them isn’t spoilt by anything that was not just right. Can’t you call them up again--the holidays we used to promise ourselves for the days when you were successful? Can’t you see them? Can’t you see that lovely time in Italy--the big blue lake, with the yellow houses and the red roofs close under the mountains and fairy islands in the middle? Can’t you see Venice and the black gondola in which we sat, urged forward like a living thing over the still water in which the palaces were reflected? Can’t you call back that wonderful night of silent peacefulness when, arms around each other, we leaned out over our balcony and listened to the gondoliers singing to each other under the stars? Don’t you remember the bridge in Florence where you stopped and said: ‘This is where Dante met Beatrice’--and we looked into each other’s eyes and knew that we, too, were a Dante and Beatrice, born for each other’s love? Don’t you remember, dear? Can’t you see them, all those wonderful years together, when you and I were young?”

“Christine, Christine!” he murmured. “If only they were true!”

“They are true, dear--they are true,” she asserted. “They are the truest things we have--the dreams of our souls which they will dream again and again long after we have no body. And not only holidays--our life together had work in it, too, didn’t it, dear?--hard and successful work. Do you remember the big case which made you famous?”

He nodded, a smile of genuine reminiscence on his face.

“The Pembroke case?”

“Yes, dear,” she continued, “the Pembroke case. Do you remember how hard you worked then?”

“By Jove, I do!” he agreed, with an emphatic little laugh. “I never worked so hard in my life!”

“Do you remember how I used to sit by the fire here at night, not daring to make the slightest sound, while you worked at your desk, going through all those masses and masses of papers in readiness for the next day of the trial? Do you remember how sometimes you would look up, not saying a word, but just assuring yourself that I was still there and going on with your work all the fresher because you saw me? Do you remember when at last, in the small hours, you finished for the night, you would come across and kiss me, oh, so quietly, and lay your head against me for comfort because you were so tired!”

He did not answer. His eyes stared into the fire, his lips thinned in a tight pressure against each other, as the mental picture of the fact came up in conflict with this ideality. They had been terrible, those nights of solitary work.

She continued, undeterred.

“And then, on the last day of the trial, when you had made that great speech--the first big speech of your career--and got your verdict, the night when all the newspapers were full of your triumph, do you remember your home-coming, dear?”

“By Heaven, I do!” he interrupted, with a sudden outburst of bitterness. “I came home and looked around me--and wished that I were dead in the hopeless emptiness of it all!”

“No, dear, no!” she corrected him. “You came home and found me waiting for you in my prettiest dress and we had dinner together, just you and I alone, because the moment was so big that we couldn’t possibly share it with any one else. Do you remember how solemn we tried to be, you and I--you looking so dignified in your evening clothes and I just as dainty as I could be? And then suddenly you jumped up like a schoolboy and darted round the table to kiss me--and we kissed and laughed at ourselves, and kissed and laughed again, every time the servants went out of the room--a couple of happy children. And I loved you so much because you were so very clever and yet could be such a boy. And then we got solemn again as the bigness of it all came over us--real, real success at last! The paths of all the world seemed open to us, didn’t they, dear? And we drank to it, success and love! And then, quite close and looking into my eyes, you said the loveliest thing of all the lovely things you ever said to me--you said that your great success, the one success that really mattered to you, was that you had won my love, my real, real love that bound my soul to yours for ever. Oh, Harry, I would have died for you that night!”

She ceased and he was silent. The might-have-been came up before him with intolerable vividness. If one could but begin over again!

“And now,” she gently moved the hand that all this time had lain in his as they crouched close together over the fire, “and now here we are--all the years of hard work, so successful that we need not worry any more, behind us--nothing really important to do except to sit hand in hand and dream over the happy past, an old Darby and Joan who have lived their lives----”

He jumped to his feet.

“Christine! Christine!” he cried. “Let us make it true! Let us forget--forget all the bad dream--go on again together just as if what you said were true!”

She looked up at him, a strange and awful fear coming into her eyes, the face that had gained colour going ashen once more.

“Oh, Harry!” she said, in a tone of infinite reproach. “You’ve broken it! You’ve let go my hand!”

He ignored this infantile remark, went straight to his point in the brutally over-riding manner characteristic of him.

“Let us forget it, Christine, forget that you ever went away from me. I’ll never remind you of it. We won’t argue past responsibilities. We’ll start afresh. Christine, I’m a lonely old man--I want you. I want you to sit by the fire with me, to talk over, if you like, the might-have-beens that we threw away, I as much as you. I want you, anyway. I can’t bear loneliness any more--not now, after you have come back to me!”

She rose to her feet also, shivering, her eyes closing, biting at her lower lip as though in suppressed pain. She shook her head.

“No, Harry, not now. I--I must go away now, go back.”

She turned and moved, with a curious detachment from him that reminded him somewhat of a sleep-walker, toward the door.

He jumped in front of her.

“You shall not go, Christine! You have come back--and you shall not go again!”

She opened anguished eyes at him.

“Harry,” she said in a tone of profound melancholy, “you know you cannot keep me like that. Remember the last time you tried to hold me caged behind a closed door!”

He did remember--the day when, disapproving of some intended excursion, he had, in a cold passion, turned the key upon her--the day he had come back to find a broken lock and curt note. He had learned his lesson. He stood aside from her path, entreated instead of dictating.

“Stay with me, Christine! Stay with me!”

She shook her head.

“I cannot,” she said. “I must go back. It was only for one little hour I came. We have had it, Harry, and I must go.”

“But you will return? I shall see you again?”

She smiled a wan smile at him.

“Who knows, Harry?”

“Where are you going? Where do you live?”

“Please, Harry!--ask no questions. Let me go.”

There was a dignity about her which silenced him. He opened the door for her and they went out into the hall. In a dazed preoccupation, he went up to the outer door and opened it to the night. Then he turned and perceived her coatless condition.

“Good Heavens, Christine, you can’t go out like that! Wait a minute. I’ll lend you my fur coat. It’s better than nothing.”

He darted into the adjoining clothes-lobby, returned with the garment. The hall was empty; the door still open. She had gone.

He ran out and down the drive after her, crying her name: “Christine! Christine!” There was no response, neither sound nor sign of her. She had vanished.

Bitterly disappointed, he returned to the house, closed the door behind him. As he went into the clothes-lobby to replace the unneeded coat he was startled by the telephone bell.

He hastened to the instrument, picked up the receiver.

“Hallo!--Yes--Yes--what is it? Who are you?--_the police_?” He repeated the last word in a tone of bewilderment, listened.

“Yes,” he replied, “Yes--Mrs. Christine Arkwright--yes--that is my wife--yes----”

The silence of the empty hall seemed to envelop him as he listened. He interjected an impatient exclamation.

“Yes!--you found a letter and traced me--yes!--Go on!--What is it all about?”

He frowned, contorted his face as though the distant voice was not clearly audible.

“What?--what do you say?--died suddenly?--I don’t understand.--Where was this?”

He nodded as though now receiving more intelligible information.

“No--I don’t recognize the address at all! What sort of place is it?--oh, a second-rate boarding house. Well, I think there must be some mistake--what?”

He listened again.

“No,” he persisted categorically, “I say I think there must be some mistake. You say that a Mrs. Christine Arkwright died suddenly in a second-rate boarding-house--at that address I don’t know--and you’ve traced me out--I quite understand all that. But I say I have good reason to think there is a mistake somewhere--it couldn’t be---- What?”

He smiled with a grim superiority as he listened.

“What?--You say there’s no doubt of the identity?”

His brows puckered suddenly in the frown with which he prepared the annihilation of a stupid and stubbornly insistent witness.

“Now, pay attention, my friend!--When did this event occur?” He asked the question in the tone of one confident of establishing an impossibility by a counter fact. There was a moment of pause--and then his expression changed. “To-night?--_At eleven o’clock?_”

The clock in the study struck, discreetly, twelve.

FROM THE DEPTHS

The S. S. _Upsal_, 2,000 tons, the Swedish ensign at her taffrail, her one black-spouting funnel still daubed with remains of war-time camouflage, lifted and plunged doggedly into the teeth of the September south-west gale that lashed her with cold rain from the streaming gray clouds which curtained close the foam-topped gray-green waves into which she crashed with recurrent walls of spray high above her forecastle, and which mingled in an indistinguishable whelm with the dirty murk of beaten-down smoke low upon the track of her bared and racing propeller. The men upon her bridge crouched, oilskins to their ears, behind the soaked canvas of the “dodger” which protected them, peering into the mist from which at any moment might emerge the towering bulk of a liner hurrying up-channel to the hungry ports of Europe. They were silent. Conversation was a futile effort in the buffeting blasts that stopped the words in their mouths. The only sounds were the crash and thud of green water that slid off in foaming cascades from the forecastle to the well, the harp-like moaning of the wind-tautened stays, and, in brief lulls, the sizzling of rain and spray upon the heated funnel and the creaking of boat-gear whose serviceable character in such a humble “tramp” was a phenomenon reminiscent of unwonted marine perils that had but recently ceased. No longer did her look-out scrutinize every flitting patch of foam in apprehension of the dreaded periscope. The violences of sea and sky were dangers as of yore. From the depths came now no menace.

The group upon her bridge was more numerous than is customary on a cheaply run little freighter of her class. In addition to the second officer whose watch it was, and the look-out man on the opposite corner of the bridge were three others. Two of them, young men oilskin-clad like their companions, stood close together in an attitude which indicated a personal acquaintanceship independent of the working of the vessel. The third man held himself aloof, his back to them, staring over the troubled sea to a point on the starboard quarter. Somewhere in that direction, wrapped in the mists of rain and trailing cloud the last rocky outposts of England whitened the waves which surged and fell back about them in ceaseless and ever-baffled attack.

The buoyant twist and roll which accompanied the lift and plunge of the _Upsal_, the frequent racing of her propeller, indicated that she was running in ballast. Almost for the first time in her drab, maid-of-all-work career, indeed, the _Upsal_ carried no cargo. She was on a special mission. A Scandinavian salvage syndicate, having come to an arrangement with the underwriters of a few out of the hundreds of vessels which strew the bottoms of the entrances to the British seas, had chartered her to locate and survey a group of promising wrecks, preparatory to more extended operations. The two young men were their technical engineers; Jensen, the taller of the pair, and Lyngstrand, his assistant.

The third man, who stood aloof from them, was Captain Horst, the master of the ship. He was, of course, primarily responsible to his owners and not to the syndicate who had chartered his vessel. Until they reached the location of the wrecks the submarine engineers were merely passengers. Reticent and sombre as he had been since the commencement of the voyage, he ignored them now, stood apparently lost in abstract contemplation of the gray waste of sea. But one who could have looked into his face would have been impressed and puzzled by his expression. The cruel mouth under the little red moustache was curiously twisted. In the haggard eyes which roved around the restricted horizon was an oddly apprehensive uncertainty, unexpected in such a determined countenance. His glance looked down, apparently fascinated, upon the seas which raced below him as the _Upsal_ lifted on yet another crest, as though there were something strange in being so high above them--and then jerked up, automatically, to the horizon as in swift, instinctive doubt of impunity. A psychologist would have suspected that he allowed a fear of some kind, so long abiding as to have become a subconscious mental habit, the relief of free play when he knew himself unwatched.

The two submarine engineers paid no attention to him. They gazed across the untenanted sea ahead to where the white spray leaped, almost lantern-high, in unsuccessful embraces of the tall column of The Bishop. Then, when the lighthouse, loftily unmoved above the eager seas, ascetically alone in the wide desolation of foam-streaked gray, had slipped abeam, had receded into the mist behind them, when there was no object to claim the eye on all the tumultuous stretch of ocean ahead, Jensen turned to his companion and pointed downward. Lyngstrand nodded assent, and they both staggered across the wet, reeling bridge toward the ladder which led below.

The skipper, staring aft, his back on them, blocked their passage. Jensen touched him on the shoulder. He swung round abruptly, with a startled curse. Then, recognizing them, he moved aside grudgingly. His face was turned from them as they passed.

The two young men descended to the deck below. They were berthed in the saloon under the poop, but they took their meals in the charthouse immediately beneath the bridge, in company with the skipper who slept there. In addition to meal-times, the charthouse was a convenient refuge from the weather common to all of them. It was their objective now, and, just dodging a flying sea that fell with a heavy far-scattered splash upon the deck, they flung themselves inside and shut the door. Then, removing and hanging up their dripping oilskins, they slid round to a final seat upon the leather-covered lockers which filled the space between two sides of the walls and the screwed-down centre table.

“Filthy weather!” said Jensen, producing pipe and tobacco-pouch. “But we ought to get there to-night. We’re changing course now to the north-west. Feel it?”

In effect, even as he spoke the _Upsal_ swung round to starboard. A long lurching roll substituted itself for the corkscrew plunges which had been the predominant motion, and the spray flung itself viciously at the port side of the ship to the exclusion of the other.

Jensen, having lit his pipe, produced a type-written sheet of paper from his pocket. It was a list of ships, followed by indications of latitude, longitude, and other particulars.

“No. 1--_Gloucester City_, 7,500 tons, Latitude 50 degrees 55 minutes North, Longitude 9 degrees 14 minutes West, 60 fathoms, torpedoed 20th September, 1918,” he read out. “Get the chart, Lyngstrand, and let us prick down its exact position.”

His fair-haired junior obediently spread out a chart of the exit to the English Channel upon the table.

“20th of September!” he said, reflectively. “That’s curious, Jensen! Exactly a year ago to-day!”

“Coincidences must happen sometimes,” replied Jensen with the superior indifference of three or four years’ seniority. “I see nothing remarkable in it.”

“It just struck me,” said Lyngstrand, apologetically. “No--I suppose there’s nothing remarkable in it--it might just as well have been any other day.”

Jensen threw a cursory glance at the chart.

“You’ve brought the wrong one,” he said, snappily. “This doesn’t go far enough north. Look in the drawer there--there must be another one.”

“It is up in the wheelhouse, I think, Jensen,” demurred the young man, mildly.

“Yes--I know--but old Horst is certain to have a duplicate. Look in the drawer and see!” replied Jensen, with an impatience invited by the docility of his junior.

Lyngstrand obeyed, rummaging among a number of charts in the drawer of the locker under Captain Horst’s bunk.

“Here we are!” he cried at last, unrolling one of them. “This is a special one, evidently! Someone has marked it all over with red ink.”

Jensen snatched it from him, spread it out. In fact, as Lyngstrand said, it was marked in many places with little red-ink crosses, and under each was a date. Jensen ran his finger across it, stopped just off the south coast of Ireland.

“By all that’s wonderful!” he cried in a slow, long-drawn accent of amazement, raising his head and looking at his companion. “_He has marked our wreck!_ Look!--Fifty-fifty-five North, Nine-fourteen West--and there’s the date under it 20/9/18!”

“Then all those other crosses----?” queried Lyngstrand, in a voice of puzzled interest.

“They must be---- Wait a minute!” He compared some of them with the indications on his list. “Yes! They are wrecks, too--all torpedoed ships--look! this and this and this are marked on the chart! There are others not marked--but there are many more marks than there are ships on our list. They must be all torpedoed ships!”

“But why?” asked Lyngstrand. “Why has he got them all marked like this?--Where did he get this chart, I wonder?”

Jensen glanced to the bottom of the sheet.

“_This is a German chart!_” he exclaimed.

Lyngstrand stared at him.

“German----!” he began, and stopped. They looked into each other’s eyes in a long moment when suspicion defined itself as almost certitude. For that moment they forgot the sickly rolling of the ship threshing and wallowing on her way to one of those tragic little red crosses. They forgot everything except the slowly dawning possible corollaries of this discovery.

Before either could utter another word, the lee door of the charthouse opened and Captain Horst stood framed in the entrance. He glared across at them, his face livid with a sudden anger, his eyes blazing. Then, with a scarcely articulate but vehemently muttered oath, he sprang across the little room, snatched the chart from the table, thrust it into the drawer, locked it up and put the key in his pocket. He turned and scowled at them in a silence which they were too awed to break. His eyes, fiercely blue, seemed to search into their very souls. Theirs dropped under the intolerable scrutiny. He uttered an exclamation of angry contempt and, without further speech, walked out of the charthouse.

The two young men looked at each other.

“That is the second time this morning!” said Jensen, at last, glancing toward the door now once more closed on them.

“What is?” asked Lyngstrand, curiously.

“_That he has cursed in German!_--Lyngstrand! I am beginning to see into this!”

“But it’s impossible!” exclaimed Lyngstrand, his mind leaping to his friend’s deduction and then rejecting it. “He is a Swede, like ourselves!”

“He is a German!” said Jensen, positively.

“But he speaks Swedish without a trace of accent!”

“And other languages also, I expect--French and English, as well--better than you or I speak them, I have no doubt. Swedish would much facilitate service in the Baltic--and your German naval officer was linguistically well equipped for any possible campaign.”

“German naval officer!” echoed Lyngstrand, incredulously.

“I will bet on it!” asserted his friend.

“But--a German naval officer commanding a rotten little tramp like the _Upsal?_” said Lyngstrand, emphasizing his incredulity. “I can’t believe it!”

“Even German ex-naval officers have to live, my friend,” responded Jensen, axiomatically. “And--I ask you--what is open to them but to take service in the mercantile marine of other nations? There is no more German fleet--there are not enough merchant vessels left under the German flag to employ all their trained officers. On the other hand, all the Scandinavian nations have multiplied their trading fleets--they cannot find officers enough for them. A first-class seaman like Horst, speaking Swedish like a native, would find plenty of owners only too willing to employ him.”

“It sounds plausible,” agreed Lyngstrand, but somewhat doubtfully.

“Plausible!” repeated Jensen, scornfully. “It is more than plausible--the more I think of it, the more certain I am. Consider! Is Horst the typical rough merchant skipper? You know perfectly well he is not. You said yourself, the first evening we came aboard, that although he had the soul of a pig he had the manners of a gentleman. How does he speak Swedish--like a man who has spent half his life knocking about harbour drinking-shops? No! He expresses himself with that precise accuracy of the man employing a language well learnt, indeed, but nevertheless foreign to him--like you and I speak English, my friend. And his clothes!--Did you ever know the skipper of a tramp steamer wear a stiff white collar while at sea? Then his curt way of giving orders--no question about discipline, but you should see some of our Swedish forecastle-hands stare at him! One of them stared a moment too long just before you came aboard. He knocked him clean out!--He is a German naval officer, I will swear to it!--More than that, I am convinced that he commanded a submarine!”

“That chart, then----?”

“Is the chart of his sinkings!”