Part 24

The sigh that had escaped her seemed to flutter through the unlighted room like some dusky-winged creature of the darkness. She leaned her face upon his brow, pressing her lips upon the smooth place above the broad meeting eyebrows. The first kiss she had ever given Saxham had been placed just there. Now the sweet lips were cold. He could feel how the delicate white teeth were set behind them. Had she relaxed her grip upon herself he knew she must have cried aloud. Nor could he help her save by his sustaining hold, and the silence of a grief only equalled by her own. Thus they had remained, speechless through the hours; drawn closer than ever by the anguish of mutual loss.

Now she stirred in Saxham's arms, and spoke collectedly:

"Tell me Bawne is not--dead! Give me courage to go on waiting. And yet, do not help me to deceive myself or you, with a false hope."

"If the worst had happened," said Saxham, almost appealingly, "should we not have known it?"

She breathed between stiff lips, trying to control her shuddering:

"Twice to-night I have heard him call me: '_Mother!_' and then again, '_Mother!_' Now I feel"--she closed her eyes and opened them widely, staring through the darkness--"that he is wanting me!--wanting you!--as he never has before. We were always near till now--he could not realise what parting meant!"

She fought with sobs, and the tears she could not keep back fell in the darkness on her husband's face. His own were mingled with them. Perhaps she knew it, as she wiped them away with a touch that was a caress, saying:

"We must not give in! We must not fail him! To abandon hope too soon would be to fail!"

Courage had come to her with the paling of the stars and the greying in the East that meant the dayspring. She was full of solicitude for Saxham's weariness, as he rose up stiffly as a knight who has watched his armour through the long hours, kneeling on the threshold of the Sanctuary, and knows with the waning of the flame in the lamp before the Tabernacle that his vigil is over and done.

"You are tired--so tired! Dear Owen, go to bed now, if only for an hour or two. There will be news of him very soon now--there _must_ be news!"

Saxham took a delicate fleecy wrap from a chair and put it about her, for she shivered in the raw chill of the unsunned morning air. Then he touched the blind, and it rolled up upon a vista of backyard and garage. The shriek of an engine and the vibrating passage of an early train through Portland Road Tube Railway came into their ears, standing together at the open window, as Dawn in her streaming crocus veil peeped shyly through the vast smoke-bank that broods upon the morning face of London, engendered by the innumerable little fires of those among her five millions who must rise and eat, and go forth to labour ere yet it is fairly day.

"Owen, tell me! What is coming? What is it I feel, here and here?"

She turned upon her husband suddenly with the question, touching her brow and heart lightly and fixing on him her widely opened eyes. The haunted look of Beatrice had come back to them. His wife's strange likeness to the Guido portrait in the Barberini Palace Gallery--the tragic face with the wistful eyes, that despite the asseverations of the learned and critical will be associated as long as its canvas hangs together with the Daughter of the Cenci--leaped up in her at this hour to startle him afresh.

"What is in the air?" she asked. "What changes are taking place about us? What great and horrible Thing is moving,--moving towards us as we stand together here?"

Saxham's powerful arm went round her protectingly. He answered:

"You shall know, my love, my comrade. In confidence--I am permitted to tell you this much. We stand upon the very brink of international War!"

She looked at him and in the golden eyes he read courage, endurance and tenderness. Love that would be changeless. Fidelity through life beyond Death to the Life that is for evermore.

"You mean that Austro-Hungary will attack Servia, and that Russia will intervene?"

"As Austria intends, no doubt," said Saxham shrugging, "prompted by her Mentor and Ally at Berlin. In him we have a personality blatantly vain, immensely egoistic, feverishly energetic, imbued to the verge of monomania with the idea of his own appointment by the Almighty--as they understand Him in Germany--to be Imperial leader of nations and arbiter of the destinies of Kings!"

He went on:

"Suppose the Great Powers of the World a row of straw bee-skeps, susceptible of being upset by a Hohenzollern kick! Will the mailed toe of Imperial Germany refrain from giving it--invading France through the lost Alsace-Lorraine provinces, the moment Austria-Hungary gets to grips with the Russian bear? Britain is France's ally, bound in Honour to support her. Now you understand what vital questions the Chancellories of the world were burning electric light and brain-power and eyesight over, the long night through, while you and I----"

She stopped him:

"You make me think!--You have told me--That man who has taken my darling is a German Flying Officer. He may have had some urgent, secret reason for quitting England at once!"

"It is more than probable that he carried dispatches of importance. But I can answer no questions on that point. I should be verging, if I did, on a betrayal of confidence."

Lynette Saxham looked at her husband earnestly, and the change wrought in her by the long night's vigil of sorrow sent a pang through the man's heart. That line of anxiety between the slender eyebrows and the bluish shadows round the golden eyes came to him, like the sorrowful sweetness of the exquisite lips, out of the past.

"Why do the Germans hate us?" she asked, and he answered wearily and sombrely:

"As the nation with which Germany runs neck and neck in military armament, national wealth and influence, Germans pay us British the compliment of dislike. German ambition, spreading rank and high, is checked in the attainment of its ends even by our geographical position. We carry in our veins too large a share of Teutonic blood, to be ingratiating or subservient to our arrogant and domineering neighbours. What hatred is bitterer than racial hatred? Where is enmity deadlier than that one finds existing between women and men of kindred blood?"

The face of David, fair and debonair, rose up before Saxham as he said it. Strange! that even while he thanked his stars for David's ancient treachery, the fact of the betrayal should rankle in the Doctor still.

"Nowhere is there hatred more terrible. Listen, Owen--there is something I want to tell you----"

Lynette shivered and drew the fleecy shawl more closely about her white bare throat, and the slender shoulders and arms that were revealed through the laces of her filmy dinner-gown:

"In the first days of the Siege of Gueldersdorp, a woman from the native stad, the wife of a Barala herd, who came to the Convent for medicine and soup for a sick _piccanin_--told the Mother that long before the Orange Free State threw in its lot with the Transvaal--long before Oom Paul and Vader Steyn ordered that all _rooinek_ soldiers sent by Groot Brittanje to South Africa should quit the country--the Barala could not sleep in their kraals at night '_for the going of the creatures_.' Not all the creatures of prey--the Eaters of Flesh--the crows and the _aasvogels_, the wild dogs and jackals, the _aard_-wolves, and hyaenas. But the hartebeest and springbok and prongbuck and rietbuck; with the little gazelles and tiny antelopes, the _dassies_ and hares, and all the shy, wild harmless things that are stalked and shot for what is called sport, by most men and some women--they passed away in multitudes each night until just before the dawn. Even the _meerkat_ and the leopard went, the baboons and snakes and the big lizards. Barala trackers followed the trails North to the Marches of the Okavango--and farther still into the Mabunda country--the woman told us--and their wise men had warned them that it was a _teeken_ of War to come."

Her wistful eyes strained towards the East, where between the crowded roofs of the vast City and the shadowy purple day-brow, showed a clear wide band of crocus-yellow, melting into exquisite hyacinth-blue.

"Perhaps I am like the antelope and the hares and the wild-bucks and the other creatures. It may be that this nameless Thing that I have felt coming nearer and nearer is War," said Lynette. Then she winced as though the net had whirled and fallen, and the trident pierced, and cried out irrepressibly: "If so--Bawne will be out there unprotected--in the midst of it! Owen!--do you hear me? How can you stand there so calmly when such a thing may be? How--oh!--how could you consent to his going?"

Saxham's square face was set like a mask in the stern effort for self-control. He was in spirit with the Navigating Lieutenant on the upper bridge of H.M.S. _Rigasamos_, hearkening to the drone of an aeroplane struggling against the thrust of a north-west gale.... He heard the double knock of a back-fire, and heard men talking about engine-trouble. Even as he brought himself back to say quietly:

"I did as you would have done in the same circumstances. If the same voice that spoke to me had virtually said to you: '_Here stands your only son, a child in years and yet a man for England! Will you let him go?_' Would you not have consented? If you deny, I shall tell you that I know my wife better than she knows herself!"

"'_A child in years--a man for England_....'" The fold between her slender eyebrows deepened and the delicate sensitive upper-lip lifted, showing the white, slightly irregular teeth. "I do not understand," she said piteously; "Was there any question of an order to be carried out?--a duty to be done?"

"There was a question to be settled," said Saxham, "involving Bawne's whole future. Here and Hereafter--and the question was this: Whether the son you have given me is worthy of his mother, or whether he has inherited any twist of brain, any degenerate and wretched weakness from the father whom your pure hand saved and led back, my guardian Saint, my heart's beloved!--from the very threshold of the gates of Hell."

"Owen! Don't speak so of yourself. I will not hear it. You had been so wronged--driven beside yourself by misfortune and betrayal. You were not responsible----" She covered the little ears with the slender hands. He took the hands down and kissed them, and held them in his own, as he went on:

"That is what I should like to believe. But--the truth is very different. There was--there is still, I suppose--a spot of weakness in me. A bubble of air in the casting--a flaw in the wrought steel." He looked like wrought steel as he spoke; "I had to be sure our boy is sound, mentally and morally as he is physically. Fit--in the fullest and highest sense of the word. Rather than have the doubt," said Saxham, "or the knowledge that confirms the doubt, I would----"

"No, no!" She tried to free her slender hands, but the Doctor's hold was as inexorable as gentle. "You must not say--that! I cannot bear----"

"Ah, my poor love, you, too, have feared lest the sins of the father might some day be visited on the son!" said Saxham with a strange mingling of pity and sorrow and exultation. "Well, now for your comfort, believe they will not be. Bawne is all yours, Lynette. Young as he is, he has learned to master Self and conquer Fear. Obedience, Duty, and Honour are welded into the metal of his character. If I had not been my boy's father, I should have envied that man--knowing what I have learned to-day. And therefore I do not grudge--I give freely----"

"You give--you do not grudge----" She suddenly wrenched away her hands and said in a tone that chilled Saxham:

"Owen, do you speak like this because you believe Bawne is--dead?"

The Doctor made answer:

"I believe that if God so decree our boy will yet be given back to us. As far as knowledge goes--except for one fact I am little wiser than you."

"I must know what that one thing is! You will tell me now, and all!"

The sun was rushing up over East London in a gloriole of golden fire. To her husband's thought she was like some slender Roman patrician at the stake, as she stood up against the background of flaming splendour, and waited to hear the worst.

*CHAPTER XLIII*

*THE PLUNDERED NEST*

If that story of the aeroplane over the North Sea in the thickening dark, fighting East against the side-thrust of the nor'-west gale, with the dropping revolutions and the hiccuping engine, had seemed desperate before, it was ghastly now. Saxham's last hope died as he told. When he had done, Lynette said with strange, unnatural composure:

"Perhaps I have loved our child too much, and that is why he is taken from me.... And yet how can a mother love by measure and by rule? Did Our Lady withhold any part of her love from her Divine Child? Did not the dearest of all earthly mothers say to me--in that waking Vision, the God-given reality of which I have never doubted--'_Be to a son of Owen's what I have been to you!_'"

Her strained composure gave way. Her face quivered and the tears broke forth. She nipped her trembling lips close and shut her quivering eyelids with her fingers, but the fountains were unsealed, and she wept. Perhaps it was better so. She dried her eyes presently, and yielding to Saxham's persuasions in that she consented to go and lie down, she came into his embrace and laid her arms about his neck and kissed him with wifely tenderness, saying:

"I will answer now, what you said a little while ago. You shall see under the only leaf of my heart, Owen, that has ever been folded down over a secret kept from you. When my boy was to be born, and I was weak and suffering, the doubt--the dread, that has haunted and tortured you, assailed me and made me wretched--for a little while. Then I gathered together, jealously, every noble, true and brave thing you had ever done for me or for others; every good deed of kindness, every unselfish tender thought. I asked you to take me with you to visit your poorer patients. I saw their hollow eyes brighten and heard them bless you when you turned from their bedsides to carry comfort and help elsewhere. And I wrote down these things in a book. They shine from its pages like jewels. When I die it was to be given to Bawne.... It will be if he lives to come back to us.... There is a prayer at the end that, in His goodness, God might give me in my boy a man like you!"

He went with her to the door and looked after her earnestly as she passed down the corridor out of his sight.

Then he locked himself in, and went back to his chair at the consulting-room table. The bright boy had stood there beside him a few short hours before. He was there now, pleading with a silent voice, coaxing with unseen looks, tugging with invisible hands. He always would be. Though Time softened the mother's anguish of loss, there would be no forgetfulness for Saxham, the grim stern man whose nature was Fidelity. Other children might yet call the Dop Doctor father, but their little fingers would never blur the imprint of the firstborn's babyish hand upon his heart.

Perhaps you can see the man, wan and haggard and unshaven, trying to attend to the pressing correspondence that had accumulated since the previous noon. Even as, to the shrill crying of the Fleet bugles, a windy grey day broke over the choppy Solent, showing the huge pageant of Sea Power ready for the King.

Down forty-mile avenues of floating steel fortresses one might follow Majesty, with a great muster of Naval sea-planes and aeroplanes manoeuvring somewhat wildly overhead.

As Saxham sat there with Fate's trident rankling in him, those lights he had spoken of were burning behind closely-curtained windows at the Admiralty and at the Foreign Office, and at the Belgian and German Embassies. In Berlin and Vienna, in Brussels and Paris and St. Petersburg--later to cast off its Teutonic name in loathing and be Petrograd--similar phenomena might have been observed. "Austria was going to take some step," as Prince Lichnowsky had nervously stated to Britain's Foreign Secretary, adding that he regarded the situation as very uncomfortable. And the German Foreign Secretary ingenuously confided to the British Charge d'Affaires in Berlin that it was the intention of Austria-Hungary to offer Serbia a pill which she could not swallow, in the Note demanding the removal of all officers and functionaries guilty of propaganda against the Dual Monarchy, presented by Baron Giesel at Belgrade, on the 24th of July. The ultimatum was to be accepted or rejected within forty-eight hours, a sweeping proviso, in which one recognises the Hohenzollern touch.

The world trembled on the brink of Armageddon. Men even then were doubtful as to the issue. It might yet, some said, be Peace. But if Man, who arrives at conclusions by intellectual processes, was unsure, not so things that are guided merely by Instinct. Like the wise creatures of Natal and the Transvaal and Bechuanaland in 1900, these knew quite well that War was in the air.

It is on record that in these days preceding the Great Calamity, huge droves of wild pig, great herds of deer and small bands of the rarer elk, with bears, hares, martens, and foxes, evacuated the forests of Bavaria and South Germany for the mountain fastnesses of Switzerland. Immense flights of birds not usually migratory, partridges, pheasants, grouse, plover, wild-doves and water-fowl went South with the animals. Under cover of night the colossal game-preserves of East Prussia emptied into Poland--their furred and feathered peoples passing into the labyrinthine swamps of the Russian Dnieper and Dniester--spreading the news, sending the alarm before them:

"_Man is coming, and with him War!_"

Man was coming. That strange trembling of the earth had warned its creatures, even before the tramp, tramp, tramp of millions of marching feet, the rumbling that betokened the slow but sure approach of Titanic death-engines, told Fine Ears to seek safety in flight, before the cataclysm of human flesh and iron and steel, and chemicals a thousand times more deadly, rolled down to overwhelm, and destroy. Hence through those July nights the sound of rushing wings above, and stealthy pads, and trotting hoofs, and heavy bodies crashing through sedge and brake and underbrush, hardly for a moment ceased. Puffs of sweet wild breath, and musky odours from hidden lairs; tufts of hair upon the thorns, and crowded spoor upon the dust of the forest-paths or the mud of the river-banks, told of their going, to those who were skilled to read such signs. But the same mysterious instinct that urged them to flight, bade the eagle and vulture that prey upon carrion, the raven and owl and crow, the wolf and lynx be on the alert, for the table of Earth would shortly be spread for them as never before in the whole History of War. And their hoarse croaking and hooting and baying and barking answered: War, War, War!

*CHAPTER XLIV*

*PATRINE REMEMBERS*

Patrine knelt beside the bed in her charming chintz-draped, white-enamelled room at Harley Street, and clumsily thanked God for having taken away von Herrnung. She petitioned that darling Bawne might be quickly found and brought back, and that if he were not, Lynette might not die. And she wound up with 'Our Father,' rather imperfectly remembered, and got into bed wondering whether Sherbrand would be pleased if he could know her not quite as irreligious as she had boasted--and lay revelling drowsily in the comfort of cool lavender-scented linen, until she fell asleep.

She had not tasted sleep for nights: age-long nights of broad staring wakefulness. Now Somnos, the gentle brother of Thanatos, took her and lapped her divinely round. She felt herself drifting away on a wide-flowing tide of deep sweet restfulness. Then it was as though an electric light were suddenly switched on in the dark galleries of her brain. Insomnia, the malevolent hag-witch, jests thus merrily with her victims, suffering them to taste sleep, and then whisking the cup away. Like many other practical jests, this ends in breakdown and brain-fever, or drives its victims to the chemist for sleepy drugs, and to the madhouse subsequently.

In the middle of the dazzling cocoon-shaped patch of brightness thus created, Patrine recognized the outlines of an ornamental fountain that occupied the centre of the vestibule leading to the supper-room of the Upas Club. Executed in the New Art style of sculpture, of white and black, and tawny marble, it was shaded by tall palms with gilded leaves.

On low pedestals rising from the rim of the shallow oval basin of the fountain were three nude life-sized shapes delicately tinted, with gilt hair, carmined lips, darkened eyebrows, vague round eyes of pale blue. They had the flattened breasts and narrow hips of masculine adolescence with women's faces and shoulders, arms and thighs. One held a finger hushingly on its lip; another was putting on a black vizard through which its pale eyes peeped slyly, the third was smiling over the rim of a golden drinking-cup. The Three were sharing a pleasant secret between them--or so it had seemed that night to Patrine.

After complying with certain formalities, and paying a heavy fee for admission, Patrine with her friend had passed through to a wonderfully decorated supper-room with a big grill at the end, where white-capped cooks were busy with savoury things. Wind and strings filled the room with great waves of music. Liveried attendants were serving champagne in crystal jugs to men and women seated supping at the daintily-appointed tables. The hot eyes and lividly-pale or purple-flushed faces of many of the revellers, already told their tale of excess.

The champagne at a guinea a jug, a speciality of the Upas, had seemed excellent to Patrine. She was out for enjoyment, and fizz made you feel top-hole. They had supped--was it lobster Americaine or grilled oysters that had preceded the other things?--when there came a change in the music. The unseen orchestra sighing and thrilling forth the amorous phrases of _Samson et Dalila_, leaped all at once into another familiar theme. To wit, the dance of the Jaguars in the Jungle, with its wail, clang, clash and growl as of strange, discordant, exotic instruments.

"Drums covered with serpent-skin, gombos of elephant-tusk, human skull-rattles and all the paraphernalia of Voodoo," to quote Lady Beauvayse.

Couples rose, and began passing out through a wide curtained exit at the farther end of the supper-room. The music grew madder. Patrine, laughing, took von Herrnung's offered arm.

"Now," he told her, "you are going to see something that is very _chic_! We shall dance in the Hall of the Hundred Pillars!"

"How frightfully ripping!" said Patrine.

Thus they joined the mob of people--a singularly quiet mob,--and passed through the heavy, curtained entrance. The much-talked-of Hall was merely a big circular ballroom, lighted by groups of electric lilies, set about with pillars of tinted glass, slanting from a dado of black marble, ending at a broad frieze of black beneath the ceiling-dome. Theatrical and tawdry, gaudy and glittering, the scheme of decoration reminded Patrine of the inside of a solitaire marble. The walls of fierce bright orange were striped in curving oblique and transverse lines of black-and-silver, the silver dome was decorated with similarly curving lines of orange-and-black.