Part 25

To the strange barbaric music of the dance from Sao Paulo men and women were gyrating and posturing, gliding and pausing, as other men and women had done at the Milles Plaisirs. Presently Patrine and her friend were revolving like the others, in the Valse with the hesitations and the Tango steps in it. You had only to know Tango and the thing came easily--or you imagined it did, after so much champagne. Reflected in the wall and ceiling-mirrors the girl had seen herself, twisting and twirling amidst the mob of dancers, with her head thrown back, and her long eyes blazing, and her wide red mouth laughing wantonly, before the black-and-orange-and-silver walls, the silver-and-black-and-orange dome spun giddily round her with the mob of dancers. Dazed, she had shut her eyes. She had felt herself being hurried somewhere--out of the pillared dancing-hall....

She shivered, lying there in the sunshine remembering.... She recalled von Herrnung's face as they had passed out of velvet-curtained, soundless darkness into a tapestry-hung, softly-carpeted corridor. The inner angles of the eyebrows were lifted, the laughing mouth under the red-rolled moustache displayed the big white teeth in a tigerish way. The pupils of his eyes were dilated, the irises pale as water. He had looked at her curiously, and said with a strange accent:

"So, Isis, you are mine now!"

"I suppose so!"

"I did not suppose so. The experience has been very real for me. Shall we go back--or would you prefer----"

She said with her face turned from him sullenly:

"I should prefer to go--to where I live!"

He had been loth to let her go. Then under a promise of renewal of those strange, shameful, secret relations, he had wrapped her theatre-mantle about her, and helped her arrange her lace scarf about her head, and taken her through a passage back to the vestibule where the three ambiguous statues stood about the central fountain, upon whose restless jet of water played shifting lights of different hues. By some arrangement of those who had planned the Upas, there faced you as you issued with your companion from the furtive side-passage the figure that had its finger on its smiling, carmined lips....

And then--the stale air of London at dawn in midsummer. In the shabby side-street where long ranks of private cars stood waiting, von Herrnung had signalled the chauffeur of one of them--could the man have been the German who had leered at her that day at Hendon?--and then he had put her in, and followed her, and taken her back to Berkeley Square....

It irked her to remember that she had told to the sleepy manservant who had admitted her at 3 A.M. an absolutely supererogatory falsehood to account for her return at that belated hour. For Lady Beau wouldn't have bothered if you'd arrived with the milkman, so long as you turned up smiling at her bedside with your fountain-pen, and her coroneted paper-pad, when she'd had her early grape-fruit, and roll, and coffee, and was ready to tackle her morning mail.

Patrine must be discreet. Cautious. Must tell no lies of the unnecessary kind. For even though von Herrnung had been removed, just when his attitude had become formidable and menacing--there might yet be pitfalls of her own digging to brave and shun.

Pitfalls ... Perils ... As she lay wakeful, conscious through shut eyelids of the white mouldings of the ceiling her face was turned to, suddenly a keen sharp terror ran her through. She had heard her own voice say to von Herrnung:

"My God! Can't you understand that I ask nothing better than never to see nor hear of you again!"

He had mocked her with his hateful smile, and she had not understood.

"Under no--possible conditions? Just think a bit, my dear! Because--to burn one's boats behind one--that is not prudent at all!"

And later:

"You give me to understand that whatever happens--_whatever happens_--you will have nothing more to do with me?"

Idiot!--besotted idiot! She leaped up in the bed, visualising the peril, clearly as though a shutter had snapped back within her brain. Horror froze her, realising the shame she might live to bring upon those who loved Patrine. Uncle Owen ... Lynette ... Bawne....

Mildred and Irma were minor considerations, shadowy silhouettes, negative quantities. Neither Irma nor Mildred had ever loved Patrine. Dad had though. Poor, dear Dad! She was glad he wasn't alive now. And Margot ... Would Kittums cut one if--that happened? And--Sherbrand! A blush burned over her, and she flung herself face downwards, burying her scorching face among the pillows, stifling the scream that the sheer torture wrung from her, by nipping a fold of the smooth linen in her teeth.

So she lay and writhed on the red-hot griddle of her anguished recollection, until a neat housemaid knocked at the door and brought her morning tea. And as she set down the emptied cup, someone else knocked, and opened the door softly, and Patrine turned--to meet the look of Lynette.

And then, though her struggling conscience warned her that she was unworthy to be held in arms so pure, she cried out wildly, and felt herself enfolded, and the fierce emotional tumult within her broke forth in wild sobs and drenching tears. She heard herself saying:

"I would have given my life over and over to have saved you from grief like this!"

And yet these were not the words she would have spoken. We are actors often and often when we least suspect ourselves, even when Calamity with one swift stroke of the scalpel has divided the palpitating flesh and quivering nerves down to the living bone.

"I would have given my life!" she wept, and Lynette seated by the bedside and bending over her, answered tenderly:

"I know it, my kind heart! You have always loved him. You wished him not to go--you begged Owen not to allow----"

There was unutterable loyalty in the breaking of the sentence: "He thought it best. I trust my husband," said the sweet voice. "But yet I thank you, dear one, for your loyalty to me."

"Don't touch me! I'm not fit!" Patrine stammered, resisting the mothering, encircling embrace. But the cup of pure sweetness was held to her feverish lips, she craved it too much to thrust it from her. You can see her coming out of the bed in a galumphing outburst of passionate, remorseful tenderness:

"Here is my place!--here!" she gulped out brokenly, hiding her wet face on the elder woman's knees. Together they made a group not unlike Bouguerau's great canvas of the Consolatrix, save that there was no dead, lovely boy lying amidst the scattered petals of the fallen roses on the stone. Perhaps if there had been and the worst known, Bawne Saxham's mother could hardly have suffered more.

Not to understand ... not to be sure. To be bereaved, and never to know just how the Beloved was taken from you.... Can there be anything more fantastically horrible than this, the fate of thousands of sorrowing women since the beginning of the Great War?

It was Sunday morning, brilliant and hot even for July weather. The clangour of church-bells mingled with the clashing of milk-cans, and the scent of pot-roses mingled with the hot smell of London in midsummer. Lynette shivered in spite of the sultriness, and looked down at the girl, spilt out at her knees under the meretricious splendour of her dead beech-leaf hair. She did not--how could she?--fathom the secret of such wretchedness, but love and pity flooded her heart, thawed out of its frozen misery by the vital warmth of the contact. She drew the unresisting arms upwards and about her, and lifted the prone head and took it to her bosom, saying:

"My poor girl! My dear Patrine!"

They were silent awhile. Then Lynette asked, her soft breath stirring the heavy tresses:

"Why did you do this, dearest? Wasn't it sufficiently beautiful?"

Patrine choked out, blazing crimson to the tips of her little ears:

"No! At least!--It is hideous now and he hated it! I--I had to tell him," a sob and a laugh tangled together, "it was the effect of Paris air!"

Lynette smiled, though the golden eyes were running over: "Bawne thinks so much of you, always!"

"I don't deserve that any one should!"

"Nobody shall speak ill before me of any one I care for! Why did you start?"

For a vision had flashed into the brain of Patrine, of all the world mocking and jeering and vilifying, and Saxham and Lynette upholding and defending David's daughter, who had brought disgrace upon them. She lifted her head and released herself almost roughly from Lynette's embrace. She stooped down and took the hem of Mrs. Saxham's gown and kissed it, and rose up looking wonderfully big and stately, and extraordinarily tall.

"I love you!" she said in her large warm voice. "You are the best woman I ever met or shall meet, and I am a rotten bad hat! Not worth a penn'orth of monkey-nuts, take my word for it! But--if somebody like you had been my mother--perhaps there'd have been something to show for it to-day."

Lynette might have replied, but just then through the quiet house, unnaturally still without the boyish voice and the boyish laughter, and the clumping of little thick-soled brogues upon the stairs and in the passages, there sounded the sharp whirring ting-a-ting of the hall telephone-bell. She turned and was gone with no more noise than a thrush makes in departure. Left alone, Patrine threw on her bathrobe over the thin nightgown of revealing transparency, lined with the opulent beauty that captures the desires of men, and looked at her fair reflection in the long cheval-glass, smiling with something of the subtlety of the androgynous genius of the Upas Club fountain--the figure that faced the guests as they entered, tying a vizard over its mocking eyes.

"You're worse even than I thought you!" Patrine said calmly to Patrine, "but now you know what he meant by what he said, you're not going to trust to Chance and Luck. You're going--for Uncle Owen's sake, and Aunt Lynette's, and Bawne's--and Mother's and Irma's and your own--don't pretend you're a victim!--to marry Sherbrand, the Flying Man!"

Not a notion of any possible or eventual wrong or injury to Sherbrand troubled her conscience. She had yet to develop on the side of moral sensitiveness. Responsibility towards God, and duty towards her neighbour--the sense of these two obligations that are the foundation and cornerstone of Christianity--had not as yet awakened in Patrine.

She liked Sherbrand. It troubled her more that he had not the _cachet_ of one of the great public Schools, than to know him poor, with his four hundred _per annum_--as the proverbial church-mouse. But she herself was not altogether penniless. There would be a hundred and fifty pounds a year for Patrine when she married; derived from moneys bequeathed to his daughter's children by Grandpapa Lee Hailey, strictly tied up and protected by various legal provisos, from depredations on the part of the unknown possessive male.

Five hundred and fifty between them. Anyhow, she told herself, that was better than a jab in the eye with a burnt stick. How soon might the marriage be brought off? One must bend one's energies to the solving of that question. How many sleepless nights--they were horribly unbecoming!--lay between Patrine and Security? The Fear that lurked in her dried her palate at the question. She felt like the runner of a Marathon fainting in sight of the goal.

*CHAPTER XLV*

*FLOTSAM FROM THE NORTH SEA*

On Monday morning, July 20th, under a flying double-column of Naval Goody Two Shoes and aeroplanes, the King led forth his Fleets for tactical exercises in the Channel. There were pictures on the screens at the music-halls that night and for many nights after, that evoked from huge audiences tremendous outbursts of patriotic clapping. Hence first blood in the Great War scores to Lil, belonging to the most ancient of all professions--who had accepted the invitation proffered by a Teutonic stranger to join the familiar crowd on the Empire Promenade.

The German paid for drinks. A friend joined him. There were more drinks, and the two men began to talk, discussing the _ultimatum_ expected from Austria-Hungary, and the inevitable refusal of Belgrade to eat Vienna humble-pie. War with Russia must ensue. They were cheering in Berlin that night for _Krieg mit Russland_.

"It must come sometime," said Lil's patron in an undertone to his crony. "Why then should it not happen now?"

"War with Russia means war with France!" the other returned in the same key.

"And war with France a reckoning with these pig-dogs!" snarled Lil's temporary owner. "If the Serbians and Russes are to be smacked--good! If the French--good also! If the English, a thousand times the better!"

"Let us hope," said the more placable Teuton, emptying his second liqueur-glass of Kuemmel--"that it will not be this time as at the affair of Agadir!"

"We are ready!" said Lil's patron with an oath. "We have seven millions of men ready, and two thousand millions of cartridges, and for shell--one would not have dreamed the world held so much steel packed with super-explosive. No, no! _Diesmal wird es nicht sein wie in der Agadir!_"

He inquired as they left the bar and moved to where Lil, steeped in the Pictures, was standing at the front of the Promenade:

"What are these _Gottverflucht_ jackasses braying about?"

The jackasses were lustily cheering the portrait of Admiral Sir John Rushworth Jellicoe, Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet--now flung upon the screen. And the jackasses got upon their feet with a sound as though the packed house were tumbling to pieces, and the Orchestra changed on the final bar of "Rule Britannia!" and the more belligerent of the two Teutons leaned over the barricade and hissed malignantly, as wind and strings crashed tumultuously into "God save the King!"

The row broke out in the Promenade as the Royal portrait flashed out and faded. A German voice swore shrilly, another expostulated, and a woman screamed and screamed....

"'Ere! What's up, what's up now along o' you, young woman?" demanded a burly gold-braided Commissionaire, thrusting through the staring crowd that had gathered. He dragged Lil, still screeching and clawing, from the windpipe of her dishevelled patron, adding, "Do you call this pretty be'aviour? I'm ashamed o' you--I am!"

"He hissed.... The ---- hissed the King!" Lil gasped, scarlet and vituperative and still clawing. "Let me git at 'im! Let me----"

"No, hold her tight! It is a lie! She is drunk!" snarled the German who had hissed. His necktie, a choice thing in Berlin haberdashery, much sported on the Unter den Linden, was plucked up by the roots, and a broad bleeding scratch adorned his flushed and angry features. But at the suggestion that he should give the offender in charge of the Police, he melted with his companion into the thinnest of thin air, and Lil did not spend the night in the cells at Wine Street Police-Station. There ought to have been a paragraph in the _Daily Teller_ or the _Morning Wire_, but it was crowded out by the report--in leaded type--of von Herrnung's death and that of the boy, his volunteer passenger, the only son of Dr. Owen Saxham, M.D., F.R.C.S., M.V.O., whose distinguished share in the Defence of Gueldersdorp would always be remembered, etc., etc., even now that the frank, manly, and courageous policy of General Botha had established permanent and solid ties of friendship between the Briton and the Boer.

A sudden freak, perhaps a private bet, had induced the deceased officer, Captain Count von Herrnung of the Prussian Field Flying Service, son of a distinguished official of the German Imperial Foreign Office, and hero of the two days' flight from Hanover to Paris in the previous April,--to essay the crossing to Germany at a late hour, and in the face of a threatening gale. Another paragraph recorded how the wreck of the monoplane, "Bird of War" (wrongly described as "the property of Fanshaw's Flying School"), "had been found by a passenger-steamer of the Hamburg Line, bound for Newcastle, floating derelict in the North Sea."

A telephone-call followed the ring that had heralded the stroke of Fate's scimitar on that thick bull-neck of Saxham's. He answered it through the roaring in his ears of the North Sea waters that had drowned the boy.

"Are you there?" came in the voice of the friend so toughly tried, so faithfully trusted. "You have heard the report? Your voice tells me you have! Hope, man!--hope!--against everything go on hoping!"

The thick slow answer came stumbling over the wire:

"Have I--grounds for hope?"

Came the prompt reply:

"I say yes! Dare to despair, when you hear that from me!"

"God bless you, General!"

"Have you--you have not told her?"

Saxham answered, steadying his twitching lips:

"No!--I thought I should like to keep my wife for another hour or two!"

There was a crisp, sharp order:

"Go to her now, and steel her with this from me--that the aeroplane, when found, had been thoroughly gutted. The First Officer, who is English and one of our men, swears positively to this. The 'Gnome' engine had been taken out of the stirrups, and the gyroscopic hovering-gear removed wholesale. Do you comprehend that this means--a pre-arranged thing? Listen!--I'll pound it into you, confound you! Once--they have been picked up! Twice--they have been picked up! Three times--they have been picked up! Go to your wife and tell her so from me!"

The speaker rang off.

But he knew discouragement. The rapid march of events across the page of History since the Saturday of von Herrnung's flight from Hendon had elicited a check from Official Headquarters.

Without signing the book that all visitors must sign, and cooling your heels in the anteroom, you are to be admitted to the private sanctum at the War Office, Whitehall, and the presence of Britain's Secretary of State for War. See him, seated square and upright in a high-backed leather-covered arm-chair behind a big green cloth covered mahogany desk, a thinnish, wide-shouldered man, with a nose of the beaky type, brown crisp hair sprinkled with grey receding from tall sunburned temples, and deep-set smallish blue eyes, a little weakened by much recent poring over State documents by electric-light.

The British Government found it incompatible with its present line of Foreign Policy to take steps towards the recovery of the Foulis Papers. For forty-five years their duplicates had lain in safe-keeping at the War Office. They were there now. That was the Minister's chief point.

The Foulis War Engine had never been patented--never acquired by the British War Office. Such distinction or favour as the tenth Earl had received from Government had been conferred in recognition of the dead man's gallant services to his country, not as the reward of his inventive gift. _Ergo_, the British Government could not concern itself with the theft of the original Plans from Gwyll Castle. To pursue and arrest the thief was the affair of the Head of the Clanronald family. If his lordship chose to drop the matter!--the Colonel's celebrated Parliamentary shrug and smile conveyed the rest.

There was another point still. If the Plans of the War Engine of Clanronald had once been seen by--alien eyes, the possession of the formulas did not matter two pence. The cat that had grown grey in the bag was out of it for good. In the Colonel's opinion--a priceless asset in the highly delicate condition of International Politics--a more formidable document than the Foulis Plan was the Note which was even then being placed by Austria's Representative at Belgrade before the Serbian Council of Ministers. This, in conjunction with Germany's deferred answer to our proposal of a Conference of Representatives of the Great Powers, and the sudden, secret return of the Emperor of Germany to Berlin--"justifies Admiralty orders that have been issued," said the Minister, "directing our First--ahem!---Battle Fleet, concentrated--as it happens!--at Portland, not to disperse for Manoeuvre Leave."

The speaker, who had pushed back his chair and crossed his legs, looked very steadily at Sir Roland as this last sentence very quietly left his thin lips. Not a muscle twitched in the other's lean, keen face. The Minister went on:

"Thus I may hope I have made clear to you my view of the situation. As for the Flying-officer, Count von Herrnung--we may presume him to have been--for no doubt he is drowned--a military spy. The German General Staff have a preference for employing men belonging to the higher social circles for work of this kind. Wonderfully organised, their system of strategical and political investigation!"

Sir Roland agreed:

"Wonderfully organised, when one goes closely into its ramifications--tracing and following them to their Headquarters in a certain underground office at the Wilhelmstrasse! But they fail in one thing. The kind of operations they contemplate can usually be deduced from the line of their reconnaissance!"

"And yet in the instance under consideration," hinted the Minister, "Count von Herrnung's intention of commandeering a machine from the Hendon Flying Ground seems to have been fairly well disguised!"

"Pardon me!" opposed Sir Roland, with quiet assurance. "He had no such intention when he arrived at Hendon. His orders were conveyed to him on the ground! And the haste with which he was got out of England with the brown satchel proves that his superiors did not dare to delay even for the precautionary measures, and that no copies nor photographs have been made of the Foulis MSS. and plans! Take it from me that the cat, if she has not already got to Germany, remains in the brown bag!"

"And the bag is somewhere in the North Sea. But it may be recovered," said the Minister, "with the body of von Herrnung."

The General returned, with a deepening of the lines upon his forehead, and at the angles of his mobile nostrils:

"It may be recovered, as you say. But _if_ so, it will be found upon the body of the boy." He added, meeting the question in the tired eyes of the other man: "Some objection was made by Mr. Sherbrand--the owner of the now wrecked aeroplane--to von Herrnung's taking the satchel with him in the pilot's pit. So--Mr. Sherbrand informs me--von Herrnung strapped it to the safety-belt that secured Saxham in his seat."

A gleam of interest warmed the frostiness of the Ministerial countenance:

"The boy ... Ah! yes, as I think I mentioned before, I sympathise deeply with the boy's parents. He is a son of a personal friend of your own, I understand?"

"Dr. Saxham, sir, late attached to the Medical Staff at Gueldersdorp."

"Saxham--that is the name--and the child is the only one? Most sad and regrettable. And I think the paragraph in the _Wire_ mentioned--one of your Boy Scouts?"

"One of my Scouts!" The Chief's bright eyes snapped as he added, "Very much to the honour of his troop. Very greatly to the credit of the Organisation--as I mean to prove to him should he happily survive to return!"

"Indeed? You interest me! Pray tell the story."

It was told, succinctly and crisply. He said quite warmly:

"I could hardly have credited! What pluck and energy! And to dare the thing--on the strength of a second flight! A boy like that should have lived! Good-bye, my dear General!"

He added, accompanying the visitor to his door:

"These are pleasant summer evenings to be wasted in London! A shower or so--and one could do a great deal of execution with the White Coachman on our Hampshire trout-rivers, sir!"

He spoke like an angler mildly peeved by deprivation of the sport he loved best, and even paused to tap the glass of a barometer hanging by the wainscot, on his way back to the writing-table littered with State papers, in defiance of the thin, shrill summons of the telephone-bell....