Part 16

Tall, young, and lightly built, with long active limbs and a physique suggestive of youth and courage and enterprise, as he stood motionless, his eared and goggled cap now in hand, the play of sunlight upon his thin brown waterproof gabardine and overalls made him look like a statue of Mercury wrought in pale new bronze. And with a lifting of her sick heart as though it had suddenly spread wings, and soared into a region of unlimited space and glorious freedom, Patrine recognised her Flying Man of the Jardin des Milles Plaisirs.

From what airt, of what world unknown, did it blow, that cool, fragrant wind that then and always heralded for Patrine his coming? It took her by surprise; lapped her delicately about; enveloped her from head to foot in its pure invisible waves. The hot, sore places in her heart were bathed and healed, the deep caverns filled, the little thirsty rock-pools set awash and brimming. When the sough of it was no longer in her ears or the tug and flutter of it among the folds of her garments; when she ceased to be conscious of the cool resilient pressure upon cheek and neck and forehead--her brief sweet hour of joy was over. Sherbrand had gone away again.

"_Cela ira-t-il, monsieur? Je suis pret a faire une nouvelle demonstration si vous n'etes pas satisfait._"

His clear, strong voice speaking in laborious public school French gave her a delicious shock of pleasure. He was addressing the stout, bearded Frenchman who, accompanied by the thinner man who had timed Sherbrand by the stop-watch, now walked across the turf to shake the aviator's hand. As Sherbrand spoke, he drew a white handkerchief from the sleeve of his gabardine and wiped from the corners of his mouth some little blobs of foam, slightly bloodstained. The stout, friendly Frenchman glanced at him, and uttered an exclamation. Sherbrand shook his head in vigorous protest and laughed, repeating his offer to demonstrate again. Upon which the bearded man, who had also a moustache with thick, stiff waxed ends, and wore a large checked-pattern summer suit with a white drill waistcoat, a low collar and a necktie with flowing ends, and was topped with a high-crowned straw hat that suggested Trouville in mid-season, negatived the proposal with a vivacious gesture, pouring forth a stream of words:

"_Au contraire, Monsieur, je suis convaincu que vous avez une idee superbe. Nous vous avons observe avec la lunette Zeiss, pendant votre vol, et nous avons constate le temps tres soigneusement: vous avez maintenu le bruit et la stabilite pendant cinq minutes de plus que les vingt-cinq minutes stipulees. Permettez moi comme une simple formalite de voir votre altimetre?_"

"By all means!" Sherbrand returned.

They went back to the aeroplane together, and Sherbrand reached over and unhooked the altimeter from a board in the pilot's cockpit, and the bearded man examined it, and then cordially shook hands.

"Within two days, at latest. Possibly sooner!" Patrine heard the straw-hatted, bearded gentleman say in English, pronounced with a strong French accent. "Believe me," he added, "I shall represent most strongly the usefulness of your invention to the Chief of the Etat de l'Aviation. _Au revoir, Monsieur, et encore mes felicitations!_"

Then he went away with the small dark man who had used the stop-watch, and who carried the Zeiss binoculars slung in their case.

During this business interview Patrine had felt Bawne panting and wriggling close beside her, like an excited, but well-mannered fox-terrier waiting to be whistled for. But Sherbrand, though he glanced at the boy smilingly, had turned aside to engage in conversation with Saxham, and the Chief Scout, whom Sherbrand saluted in orthodox Scout fashion, flushing red under the clear sunburn that darkened his fair skin.

"He's one of Us!" Bawne whispered to Patrine, his own young face alight with pleasure. "He was Scoutmaster of a troop in the North, he told me, and I know he must have been a splendid one. He's the kind of chap who'd be prepared for anything. Don't you think he looks like that?"

Patrine did not answer. She was feeling "cheap," as Lady Beauvayse would have expressed it. She had put the man out of her thoughts because she had taken it for granted that Fanshaw's instructor could not be a gentleman. Now, as she watched Sherbrand in conversation with the elder man, his manner of quiet, well-bred deference, mingled with a pleasant courtesy, showed her beyond all doubt that his place was above the salt.

He had looked towards her, when he had smiled at Bawne, and his glance had swept over her without recognition. She would have known him anywhere, while he----! She had forgotten her preposterously-coloured hair.

How sweet the breeze was, bringing from the west the smell of strawberry-fields and red and white clover. Yet she had not noticed it until now. Her mood had changed. She had put away the thing she most hated to remember. She felt almost like the Patrine of two days ago.

"Miss Saxham!"

It was von Herrnung's voice speaking behind her, and with a shock of loathing horror she remembered all. She turned to see his tall figure approaching. The first impression was that he was ill; the next, that he was furiously angry. His florid complexion had bleached to an ugly, greenish pallor, even the blue of his eyes had faded to a curious lilac hue. He carried in his gloved left hand, and with evident care, a flat strapped wallet of brown leather, fastened with two Bramah locks and a lock-strap. He said to Patrine in a jarring voice of resentment and impatience:

"I have been looking for you. Could one not leave you for a minute but you must go off by yourself? _Sapperlot_! Whom has one here? Where did you pick up the boy?"

Her heart swelled as Bawne looked up at her in astonishment, then transferred his stare to von Herrnung, puckering his brows in disapproval of the rude, strange man. She answered as calmly as was possible:

"This is my cousin, Bawne Saxham, Count von Herrnung."

"Why did you leave me?" von Herrnung grumbled as Bawne stiffly saluted, and she told him:

"Because I saw you occupied in conversation with your German friends."

"Women are incomprehensible creatures! ... How do you know that they were German? At any rate, whether they were or not, they have gone away now! You find me annoyed. It is because they are--what shall I call it?--perhaps a little exigent. Now I will have a smoke. I suppose you do not mind?"

He had not freed his hand from the brown leather satchel to remove his hat when he had mopped his perspiring forehead, with a big cambric handkerchief scented with the _tres persistent_ perfume that always clung about his clothes. Nor did he relinquish it to help himself to a cigar, but opened the gold case containing the weeds with the hand that drew it from his pocket, extracted a cigar with his teeth, and returned the case to his pocket; then produced a matchbox, opened it in the same way, picked out a match, shut the box, and struck the match upon it, saying to Bawne, as he blew out the first mouthful of smoke: "What do you think of that, my fine fellow? Should I not make a famous one-handed man?" But Bawne's suffrages remained unwon, although the dexterity of the thing had secretly pleased him. He remained doggedly silent, scowling with his reddish-fair brows, thrusting out his chin.

"Should I not? Tell me!" von Herrnung persisted. "Or is it that British boys are cowards and afraid to answer when they are spoken to?"

"I am not afraid--of anything or anybody!"

Bawne reddened and looked the taunting big man between the eyes, squarely. The look added--_And least of all of anybody like you_! He went on:

"But I think it takes more than--that kind of being clever--to make a famous man."

"_Nicht so schlimm!_" Von Herrnung nodded. "But all the same these little tricks are worth knowing. You might be bound with ropes to a post, or tree, or waggon by the enemy, and if he happened to have left your matches on you--and you could get one hand free--there is no knot man could tie that I could not wriggle myself out of!--you might burn the rope and get away! I did that once when I was a gunner-boy of seventeen in South Africa----"

Von Herrnung stopped short. Bawne asked simply, and with the same straight look between the eyes:

"Did you fight with the Boers against us in the War?"

Von Herrnung did not seem to have heard. He had caught the drift of a sentence spoken by Sherbrand, who was answering to a question of the Chief Scout.

"Oh yes! I live here--have quarters over Mrs. Dunlett's restaurant--you could communicate with me practically at any time. We've the 'phone and a private telegraph-office, and the wireless--under the usual licence from the Postmaster-General."

He pointed towards the well-known tall posts with the short cross-pieces, china insulators and lines of thick wire, standing beside the telegraph-cabin, over the roof of which straddled the wireless installation's tall, latticed steel mast.

"We find it useful for business as well as instructional purposes," he went on. "Macrombie--the man in charge--is a one-time Royal Navy Petty Officer Telegraphist and a first-class operator." Sherbrand's mouth twisted a little at the corners as he added: "About twenty-four days out of thirty, let us say!"

The quick rejoinder came:

"Then he's D.O.D. two working days in the month, not counting Sundays. I've met plenty of Macrombies in my time. This doesn't happen to be the monthly pay-day, by any chance, or one of the other close days in its neighbourhood?"

"No, no! He's as right as rain and as sober as a seal," said Sherbrand. "And--this tall fellow with red hair must be the man who has written to me upon business. I shall have to go to him."

They exchanged a left-handed grip, mutually smiling.

"Good old habits stick," said the Chief, and Sherbrand answered:

"Fortunately, they do. Let me say again how much and how gratefully I have to thank you for the teaching that has helped me to find myself!" His clear light glance reverted to Saxham. "The Doctor too, for giving me this chance of meeting you. Please tell him the story if you think it would interest him. I hope with all my heart, sir, that you will soon come here again!"

"I had already taken the permission for granted," the Chief said, as Sherbrand saluted and went forward to meet "the fellow with red hair." "There is big business in that gyroscopic stabiliser of his," he added to Saxham, "and our friends at the French War Ministry have tumbled to it as one might naturally expect. So much the worse for our bungling bigwigs at Whitehall, who've let a good thing slip, for the millionth time, out of their claws. But taking for granted the value of the patent, and recognising the likelihood of the French bid stimulating Teutonic competition----"

The gentle, modulated voice broke off. Von Herrnung had stepped out upon the green and was striding towards the lightly-moving, less stiffly-carried figure of Sherbrand, the approximation of the two somehow suggesting a salute of gladiators previous to the fight. Now the big, grey-clad German was arrested in the middle of his stride by the sudden kling-a-ling of a motor-gong, a sharp crystal vibration that stiffened him to attention, and pricked his ears for a repetition of the sound.

It did not immediately come. He raised the left hand that held the leather satchel, and swung it from front to rear, so that it was for a moment clear of the outline of his body, as who should signal: "_I have it safe!_" Quick, watchful eyes noted this. Took in also the ornate bulk of the dark blue F.I.A.T. touring-car, as with the characteristic, noiseless smoothness of its make, it glided between the ranks of parked and waiting automobiles, and stopped in the open, perhaps some forty yards away.

A fat yellow hand, with a twinkling solitaire upon it, waved. A brown hand, with a massive gold curb-chain watch-bracelet on the wrist of it, beckoned imperiously. Something had been forgotten, something was still to say. Von Herrnung wheeled, and went back in his traces as obediently as the pointer that has been called to heel. He did not uncover, perhaps he had been told not to. He saluted, and stood stiffly, listening to a harsh German voice that yapped at him. All his arrogance and swagger seemed to have been juggled out of him by the gestures of the brown hand with the flashing wrist-bracelet, emerging from the white cuff with jewelled sleeve-links and the snowy sleeve with its broad bands of glittering golden braid.

"_S'th!_"

The slight sound pulled Saxham's head round. He had not been looking at the occupants of the blue F.I.A.T. His eyes were intent on the tall white figure of the woman standing beside his boy. Her black lace sunshade was closed. She held the tall-sticked thing at arm's-length, leaning upon it, and the westering light smote a myriad of multi-coloured sparkles out of the tinsel spangles of the hat with the single black cock's plume. The queer headgear crowning her barbaric hair, and her full white oval face with its wide, low, arched black brows and long eyes, made her seem strange, alluring, as some tall-stemmed, exotic flower, sprung at the incantation of an Oriental conjuror, from a green stretch of English turf.

In the same instant von Herrnung touched his hat, stepped back from the blue car, wheeled and walked away toward the waiting figure of Sherbrand, the sallow man in the Homburg hat gave an order, the chauffeur touched the electric starter, and the F.I.A.T. turned and smoothly bowled away. But in the instant of its turning, the bearded man in the white naval uniform rose in his place, and obtruding half his short, bulky body across the lean person of his sallow neighbour, scrutinised the face and figure of Patrine Saxham with a cool, appraising deliberateness that tortured the wincing flesh it enveloped like the cut of a carriage-whip.

They were full, bright, and rather handsome grey-blue eyes shadowed by the white cap-peak, and they had the indefinable expression of authority and power. Their glance said--and the face with the perfectly-trimmed beard and the upturned moustache wore a curious smile that bore out the glance's meaning:

"So! That's the woman!" And a surge of scalding shame and bitter resentment rose in the heart of Patrine Saxham and filled it to the brim.

She could not have explained why she felt certain that her shameful secret was known to the man with the powerful eyes, the cast of whose face with its pointed beard faintly reminded one of the King and the Tsar.

Patrine had always abominated cheap sentiment. She had once laughed until she cried at a revival of an old four-decker drama, whose hero, waking to the knowledge of a committed, irrevocable deed cried in throaty, stagy tones of anguish upon God to put back the dreadful clock of Time and give him yesterday.

Now she perceived the deep, vital interest of the common-place human story. If asking Him on whom that other sinner cried would wipe from Time's register a span of hours between twelve P.M. and three o'clock in the morning--blot one deed from the Roll of things that done, are beyond Humanity's undoing--Patrine told herself that it would be worth while to wear sackcloth, live on boiled field-peas, drink brook-water, and pray--until her knees were worn to the bone.

She caught Saxham's piercing glance across the intervening strip of greensward. He turned away his eyes, and a shudder went through her frame. Had he suspected--could anyone have found out and told him? The Doctor's head was bent now as the General talked to him. It seemed to her that a muscle in his lean cheek twitched, a characteristic sign with him of excitement, or emotion. She wondered what the General had said to Uncle Owen to make him look like that.

As a fact, the quiet voice was saying in Saxham's ear: "And prepare against a surprise, Doctor--for though your nerves are tough as aluminium bronze, a few million gallons of water have rolled under the Thames bridges since you and I held Council of War.... As I mentioned before, the interest taken by the French Government in Sherbrand's gyroscopic hoverer may well have stimulated the interest of our Teuton neighbours. But it doesn't explain the presence on Fanshaw's Flying Ground of Lieutenant-General Count Helmuth von Moltke, Chief of the German Great General Staff, and--Grand Admiral Prince Henry of Prussia, brother of the Kaiser--in a F.I.A.T. touring-car!"

*CHAPTER XXIX*

*A SECRET MISSION*

"Can it be possible----" Saxham checked himself. "You see how rusty I am getting, General. You refer to that machine that turned out from where cars are parked just now. The German fellow went up to it.... It had a groom beside the chauffeur and three other men inside it.... While I was looking--elsewhere--it must have moved away!"

"It has only turned the corner of the cafe-restaurant," the Chief said in his quiet tones. He glanced in the direction of the squat block of gaily painted wooden buildings devoted to the inner needs of Fanshaw's clients. "The awning hides it, but I can see a bit of it still. Until it moves, I can go on talking. Frankly, I am in the position of the High Church curate who went out wild-pig shooting in the territories of the Limpopo with a single-bore hammer-gun of grandpapa's pattern--and got his choice of pot-shots between a lion and a rhino. Prinz Heinrich is my royal lion and von Herrnung,--who counted for little more than a bush-pig--has suddenly swelled into a rhinoceros."

He pulled the grizzled moustache thoughtfully, keeping his eyes glued on the back of the big blue car.

"If I could get hold of Sherbrand!--but the chance is dead for the rhino and lion winding me. Old von Moltke with the big wart on his ginger-coloured face, and the charming manner that makes you forget that you don't like him!--would certainly recognise me--and the nautical Hohenzollern and I have met once or twice before. I must lay low like Brer Rabbit, and take a single-handed chance. No, no, Doctor, you have your patients to look after! I am not going to drag you into this. But if I'd got a couple of my Boy Scouts handy----" He broke off, encountering Bawne's bright eyes. "By George, Doctor! I'm going to chance it! I'm going to give your youngster an opportunity to prove his Saxham blood!"

The Master-hand gave the Scout's Sign, and Bawne shot across like a brownish streak of swiftness. He drew himself up, gave the Full Salute, and stood waiting, his rigid attitude in sharp contrast with his dancing, expectant eyes. The Doctor looked at his watch and moved away silently. The Chief said in a clear undertone:

"You see that tall, red-haired man in grey clothes over there with Mr. Sherbrand? Don't look at him openly, or he will know we are talking about him, but take a sidelong gliff, and say."

"I see him, sir."

"Do you know anything of him? Stand easy and answer carefully."

The hand came down from the hat-brim. The boy said:

"I've heard him talk, sir, and I think he is German. I'm learning that and French at Charterhouse."

"He is a German. Do you speak enough of the language to understand him, suppose he were talking to one of his countrymen?"

"_Ich--kann--lesen, aber Ich kann es--nicht sprechen._" The answer came slowly. "And if they weren't using crack-jaw words, sir, or talking very quick, I might manage--I could make out a lot of what they said."

"Very well, keep your man under close observation and--you see that brown satchel he has in his hand?"

"I've seen it close, sir. A flat brown leather despatch case thing--with a criss-cross pattern on the leather, and two locks, and another lock on the strap that goes round. He hadn't it with him when first I saw him talking to--a lady. Then a man--a servant--came and called him away to speak to some gentlemen in a big blue motor-car. One of them--fat and old and bald--with a wart on his cheek, who wore a white topper, and yellowy clothes, and a red necktie, and looked rather like a--like an Inspector of Sunday Schools in shooting-clothes--passed him the leather case. That's how I know he didn't bring it, sir. Oh! and the yellow car he drives isn't British. She's got an oval International plate with the German 'D' in black on a white ground."

"I am glad my Scout knows how to use his eyes!"

The Chief's own eyes were crinkled with merriment. That Moltke, the Chief of the German Great General staff, bosom friend of the All Highest, should resemble a stout Inspector of Sunday Schools in the estimation of a small British boy, was lovely in the extreme.

"Well, I want to know what the big German officer--he is an officer!--does with that leather satchel he's carrying so carefully. Where he goes with it, whom he talks to, and what he says to them. Find out whether it is light or heavy, if it is what I believe it to be, you might be rendering good service to your country in destroying it. But you'll be doing all I want or expect, if you stick to the man who carries it!"

"I'll do that, sir, on my Honour!"

"Good! Make your little German serve you. I may have to leave here upon this business, but I'll be back within, at least--half an hour. If he goes before I get back, find out where he is going. If you can't find out, follow him. On foot if he walks, in a taxi if he doesn't. Here are six separate shillings--in that case you'll want money for fares. Remember, if things take a puzzling turn and you find yourself in a tight place, whisper a quiet word to Sherbrand, though I'd prefer you to carry through on your own! Report to me, in case he goes before I get back here--at Headquarters, Victoria Street. Have you got all this tucked away safe in your head?"

"Yes, sir."

"Then quit yourself like a man. My signal to you that I have left will be a dog's yelping. Ah!" The keen bright eyes, glued on the distant back of the blue car, had seen the rear wheels moving. Before the F.I.A.T. glided smoothly out of eyeshot the Chief had hurried away.

In the opposite direction to the archway of exit, the slight, active figure in the perfectly-cut blue serge morning clothes and pot hat of Bond Street block, was rapidly walking. Bawne doubted his eyes for a moment before he remembered that the Collingwood Avenue ran along that side of the Flying Ground fence. There was a smaller gate in charge of a commissionaire, in the fence, about a hundred yards along it. Taxi-cabs were standing outside the gate. Any person on foot or awheel, leaving the Flying Ground, must pass the gate and the taxi-stand. You could see through the chinks in the fence when they passed, nip out when they were well by, and follow in a green-flagged chuffer. Bawne had settled this to his satisfaction before a wrench at the rein of duty pulled his head round to the business on hand.

"I'm not spying on Mr. Sherbrand," the boy told himself, gritting his small square teeth doggedly. "I've _got_ to listen, so as to understand the German's game. And I'm going to. This is how I'm going to!"

He began to turn hand-springs after the fashion of the London street Arab, thus lessening the distance between himself and the talking men. They glanced at him, and Sherbrand grinned, but they looked back again directly at each other. Then Bawne threw himself down and panted, rolled over and lay, still panting. Now he was near enough to hear what passed between the two.

Sherbrand said: