Part 29

So dust-covered was the ex-Justice that the very act of shaking his head rebukingly at the Goblin, raised a cloud that made him sneeze. He uttered the curious composite sound that heralds sternutation, drew out a voluminous, coal-dusty handkerchief, stared at it indignantly, and in the very act of returning it to his pocket--fell asleep again.

"A perfect wreck, as I said just now!" whispered Mrs. Charterhouse to Kittums.

"_How_ I congratulate you, dear Lady Wastwood," said the Goblin, "on not having gone abroad!"

"Was it so horrid?" asked Trixie, sympathetically, arching the eyebrows that resembled musical slurs.

"Was it so--" Lady Wathe shrugged her thin shoulders and gave the ghost of one of her rattling laughs. "If to fight your way back, stage by stage, amidst inconceivable difficulties, obstacles and insults, is horrid!--if to travel for two long days and nights in trains crowded to suffocating excess merits the term--" She loosened the quadruple string of superb Oriental pearls that tightly clipped her stalk-like throat and went on: "If it comes under the heading to find yourself and your friends--in tatters after a suffocating struggle!--packed with sixty other squalid wretches in a luggage-van _en route_ for Dieppe! If to sit for three hours on your jewel-case, waiting, in a crush of congested humanity, for the arrival of the Newhaven boat--if to fight as with beasts at Ephesus to gain its gangway--if to fall in a heap on the sodden deck--to lie there lost to everything but the fact that the waves that drench you are British waves, and the British coast is slowly crawling nearer!--if all this and how much more, can be lumped under the term of horrid, it has been, dear Lady Wastwood, horrid in the extreme!"

Lady Wastwood's small, triangular, white face with the V-shaped scarlet mouth, looked enigmatical. She arched the thick black slurs that were her eyebrows again, and said not without intent, to her crony Cynthia Charterhouse:

"_Who_ would have _dreamed_ only three weeks ago, when that excessively long-legged and extremely good-looking Count von Herrnung sat here and talked to us about German women and German Supermen--that we should be at War to-day with Germany?"

"Poor Count Tido!" Something rattled in the Goblin's meagre throat as though she had accidentally swallowed some of her pearls. "That dreadful report in _The Wire_ made the Franzenbad treatment disagree with me horribly! To be drowned in that commonplace North Sea crossing, upon the very eve of realising the one ambition of his life! For he hated us so thoroughly! His Anglophobia was a perfect obsession. Poor dear Tido! One might call it a wasted career!" The speaker dried a tear and continued: "His family will be frantic. You know he was to have been married in October! Baroness Kriemhilde von Wolfensbragen-Hirschenbuttel. Immensely rich! Her father has large interests in the pearl-fisheries of German New Guinea. Her betrothal gift, a superb black and white pearl, the Count always wore as a mascot. Poor Baroness! She will be inconsolable. Marriage means the first draught of real freedom to young German girls!"

Mrs. Charterhouse said in her sweetly venomous way:

"Miss Saxham bears up--under the circumstances!"

"Under what circumstances, might one presume to ask?" Then, reading aright the ambiguous smile of Mrs. Charterhouse, the Goblin rattled out her characteristic laugh:

"What absurdity! You refer to a mere dinner-table flirtation in Paris. The mere _rapprochement_ of _atomes crochus_! Miss Saxham and Lady Beauvayse dined with us on the night of the Grand Prix. Poor Tido was certainly struck with her. I remember he talked about her eyes and figure afterwards. But her hair being so black and growing so heavily--did not please him. He found the effect--I think his term was--'too crepuscular.'"

"Ah! You throw a ray," said Mrs. Charterhouse in that sugared way of hers, "on a mystery that has intrigued me. Now I know why Miss Saxham went to the Atelier Wiber in the Rue de la Paix and got her crepuscular tresses changed to terra-cotta!"

"_Not_ saffron? Now," said Lady Wastwood, pensively tilting her own green-gold head and elevating her arched black eyebrows, "I should have called that shade saffron or tumeric. Who do you suppose footed the bill for the process? The wretch Wiber simply won't look at you under four hundred and fifty francs!"

"Perhaps Vivie Beauvayse--" suggested Mrs. Charterhouse.

"I think not. Vivie preferred the crepuscular effect. It contrasted capitally with her own style of colouring. You must have noticed, they are seldom seen going about together as they used. Dear Lady Wathe, do you feel faint? Can I get you anything?"

For something had clicked behind the Goblin's pearls, and she had suddenly stiffened in her seat. The superb figure of Patrine Saxham had entered by the swing-doors leading from the vestibule followed by a tall, broad-shouldered young man in loose grey tweeds, whose left sleeve displayed a band of black significantly new.

"Can that be Miss Saxham? It must be!--her type is so unusual! Not having seen her since the night of the dinner I referred to I did not quite grasp the meaning of your references to ingredients common in Indian curries. Of course, I understand now!" The Goblin surveyed the tall, pliant figure with the dead beech-leaf hair through her lorgnette before she leaned forwards and roused the sleeping Brayham by a brisk application of the instrument. "Look, Sir Thomas! Would you have known Miss Saxham?"

"Beparr! ... Wharr? ... God bless my soul, no!"

Brayham, turning in the armchair as the Zoo walrus turns in his concrete pond, surveyed Patrine with a bloodshot stare.

"Silly girl! Spoilt her looks!" he snorted. "Handsome as the dooce with her gipsy-black tresses. Won her bet. Won't get her ring now though, unless von Herrnung paid before he flew!"

"Was there a bet between them? How is it you never told me? Have I deserved this from you?" demanded Lady Wathe indignantly, as Mrs. Charterhouse and Lady Wastwood exchanged glances and smiles.

"Sorry! ... Forgot! ..." Brayham gobbled apologetically. "Man I know happened to be close to 'em leaving Spitz's Restaurant that Sunday night in Paris. Told me he heard von Herrnung lay Miss Saxham his magpie pearl solitaire against a bit o' Palais Royal paste she was wearing--that she wouldn't change the colour of her hair! Made the appointment for her, with Wiber--'_Pastiches Artistiques_,' and so on, _Rue de la Paix_. He bragged of it afterwards at the _Cercle Moderne_! Dam Germans! no idea of decency! Why do Englishwomen intrigue with 'em? Bounders that kiss and tell!"

There was a significant pause, broken by the Goblin's shrillest peal of laughter. The ex-Justice, whose vitality was low, folded his hands and dozed again. Then----

"Now we _know_ who footed the bill," said Cynthia Charterhouse in dove-like accents. While Trixie murmured in the vexed ear of Margot:

"Kitts, my dinkie, you are a pal of the Saxhams. _How_ far had the affair _really_ gone?"

"There was no affair!" said Margot's sweet little voice, very clearly. "Pat rather hated Count von Herrnung than otherwise!"

"Judging by the mute evidence of her hair--" began Mrs. Charterhouse, languidly. How Margot loathed these women, erstwhile her chosen friends and associates, tearing with greedy beaks and vicious claws at the reputation of an unmarried girl....

"Her hair belongs to her! She can bleach it if she wishes!" The little figure rose to its altitude of four feet seven inches and surveyed the scandalmongers with wrathful eyes. "I have said that there was nothing between Miss Saxham and Count von Herrnung"--the little voice was crystal-cold: "I should be extremely obliged to all of you if you will understand this clearly! Miss Saxham is engaged to my husband's cousin, Alan Sherbrand."--Had Franky heard that stately reference to my husband, he would have been "bowled," to quote himself. "Franky likes him, and so do I, tremendously! We're both keen on their bringing off the match!"

There was another resounding silence. Brayham snored melodiously. Then Trixie Wastwood said with her Pierrot smile:

"Really, Kitts, it was--hardly cricket not to have warned us!"

While Mrs. Charterhouse added in tones of iced velvet:

"Regard me also as prone beneath Miss Saxham's Number Eight shoes. Did you say her _fiance_ was a cousin of Lord Norwater's? Not possibly the son of the uncle who died quite recently? Captain the Hon. Noel Sherbrand, late of the Royal Gunners.... My husband used to know him before--people left off!"

"It is the same. He muddled his career somehow, and--most people cut him! But he is _dead_," said Margot very deliberately, "and his son, if we have no--" the delicate cheeks flushed with sudden vivid crimson--"his son is perfectly tophole and Franky's next heir. We met him in June in Paris, and so did Pat Saxham! How do any of you know she didn't tint her hair to please _him_."

"Possibly she did! But, according to Sir Thomas--it was the other man who paid!"

"Odd, isn't it? In this world," said the Goblin with her crackling laugh, "the other man invariably pays the bill! And so the young gentleman over there--who is quite remarkably good-looking in the blond Norman style--and who is going to marry Miss Saxham--succeeds to Lord Norwater in--a certain eventuality! May one be permitted to hope, dear Lady Norwater, that Fate and yourself will combine fortuitously, to keep the cousin out of the House of Peers!"

"Rude, ill-bred, horrid woman!" thought Margot, clenching her little teeth to keep back these epithets. "How dare she twit me with--_that_! How dare--" Then her hot flush sank away and a mist came before her eyes, and she would have fallen, but that Trixie Wastwood jumped up from the sofa and threw about the little figure a kind, supporting arm.

"I've got you! You're not going to faint, Kittums, are you? Forgive us, my dinkie! What _pigs_ we have been!"

"Heckling the tomtit for defending the saffron-crested blackbird! I rather agree with you," admitted Mrs. Charterhouse as Margot freed herself, saying it was nothing, and proudly moved away. "We women are horribly spiteful," continued Cynthia. "Yes, we are spiteful, Lady Wathe! I am perfectly in earnest. What is the reason? Will anything cure us? Do somebody tell me! Colonel Charterhouse would say it is because we eat too much rich food, walk too little, automobile too much, and want some useful work or other to occupy our minds! He is coming here to lunch with me--he was quite touchingly anxious to be invited!" Her beautiful eyes widened as the swing-doors thudded behind three entering masculine figures, "Why, here he is with Lord Norwater, and your boy, Trixie! All three in khaki! What a day we are having!"

She added, as her handsome middle-aged Colonel made his spurred way through the ever-thickening crush to her:

"I am enlightened! So _this_ was your surprise!"

"Not half as big as mine when I found they were willing to take me. 'Fit as a fiddle,' according to the M. O. Gad!"--he went on, as his wife made room for him on the settle by her side--"as willingly as though he had been somebody else's husband," Lady Wathe said subsequently--"It's to my golf I owe it--these A.M.S. sawbones finding me in the pink! And instead of a back-seat, what do you think they've given me? Command of the Third Reserve Battalion of the blessed old Regiment, the Loyal North Linkshires, _vice_ Crowe-Pinckney, kicked out by a gouty toe! ... How's that for an oldster of fifty-five, ... Eh, what?" His chuckle was that of a Fourth Form athlete picked to supply a gap in the School Eleven. And Cynthia's beautiful eyes, as she slipped her hand into the Colonel's, looked at him as the boy's mother's might have looked upon her son.

Lady Wastwood's Pierrot smile might have played upon the reunited couple mockingly, but that the unexpected apparition of her boy Wastwood in single-starred khaki, adorned with the badge of a crack Hussar Regiment, girt with the Sam Browne and narrow officer's shoulder-strap, and clad as to the legs in spurred brown butcher-boots--dimmed her bright green eyes and brought a choke into her throat. Wastwood the son was so like Wastwood the father--killed at Magersfontein in 1900,--whom Trixie, for no reason apparently, had romantically adored. A burly young man, pink as a baby, with thick fair hair growing down within two inches of his eyebrows, small, fierce blue eyes, and a huge roaring voice, softened down now to a tender bellow as he answered a pale girl's eager question with:

"Well, I can't say exactly when we're going to the Front, but I hope to Christmas it'll be soon!"

Wastwood's engagement to the girl had been announced only the week previously in the Society Columns of the leading dailies. Now, while Wastwood's younger brother Jerry anguished in the throes of a final Exam, at Sandhurst, the said Jerry being set upon getting a Commission in time to go to the Front with one of the First Divisions--his elder sat on a Club sofa and made love to the girl Jerry was subsequently to marry. For not only Wastwood's title, but his vacant Commission as a Lieutenant in the Dapple Greys and his sweetheart went to his junior after Mons.

There was a lot of family and regimental re-shuffling and re-dealing, you will remember, after Mons.

The leaven of the Great Awakening was working in the souls of these worldly-minded, ultra-modern men and women, even as the crowd in the rooms grew denser, as the buzz of talk became almost solid, and khaki mingled with the brilliant toilettes. Hardly a man but wore dead-leaf brown. Wives were entertaining their husbands, mothers were lunching their sons, that day, at the multitudinous little tables in the great and lesser dining-rooms,--there was a revival of old code-words, an interchange of almost forgotten pet-names, a resurrection of ancient jokes, when the atmosphere seemed dangerously charged with emotion. How many Last Sacraments of renewed love were eaten and drunk by husbands and wives who, estranged for years, were to be reunited by the War, and parted by the War until the Day when Wars shall be no more.

That a tall young man in grey tweed with a crape armlet should sit opposite Patrine that day at Margot's special table was one of the thousand miracles already wrought.

Sherbrand had shelved all recollection of that June adventure in the Bois de Boulogne, when a flushed young husband in immaculate top-hat and frock-coat had thanked an angry young man in waterproof overalls and gabardine for not chopping his wife into kedgeree.

Could one be angry any more when this little human dragon-fly was what Patrine called "a frightful pal" of hers. Thank Heaven! Patrine had known nothing of the cousinship when she had answered Sherbrand's plain question, "Will you marry me?" with an assent:

"_Sooner than not!_"

"Then--it is settled?"

"Yes, you poor dear! If you think me worth having!"

_Worth having_! Sherbrand's glorious Patrine. Whom to be near was heaven on earth. Whom to obey was a lover's luxury, even when she had issued the mandate:

"Now, you must come to the Club and lunch with me, and meet my friends. Do be decent to them!"

Perhaps you can see Sherbrand bowing rather stiffly to Margot and accepting with the briefest hesitation the smallest of offered hands.

"I thought it must be the same!--I was certain there couldn't be two Flying Sherbrands. Pat!--Mr. Sherbrand can't deny the relationship, though he disapproves of Franky and me most fearfully. You'll have to teach him," went on the coaxing little voice, "that we're lots and lots nicer than he thinks us! For we've got to be friends," said Kittums, "if you and my dear Pat are going to be married! No time like the present! Can't we begin now?"

What a vivid little face it was, though there were tired marks like faint bruises under the great dark eyes, and the rose-flush in the cheeks was less bright than it had seemed in June. He released the tiny jewelled fingers, and found himself presented to the husband.

"Frightfully glad to meet you--more reasons than one!"

Franky, slim, sleek-headed, and dapper in unblemished Regulation tea-leaf, held out his hand, saying as he looked the other squarely in the eyes:

"If I had known your Home address, I should like to have dropped a line to you, when I--when I saw the newspaper yesterday."

"My mother lives at Bournemouth. My father had been an invalid for years. I go down to-day by the afternoon train."

"Ah! Please remember me to my--Aunt Jeannette."

From what dusty shelf of memories had Franky reached down the name of his uncle's unknown wife? But it sounded pleasantly to Mrs. Sherbrand's son. The cloud upon his forehead cleared away, and his cold sea-blue eyes began to thaw into kindness:

"I'd like a word with you in private. Do you mind comin' out of this clackshop into the vest*i*bulee?" Franky went on, quoting his favourite Jimmy Greggson, and with a word to Margot and a glance on Sherbrand's part at Patrine, the two men passed through the swing-doors. Here Franky wheeled, and said with effort:

"This is a bit subsequent! but--if there's time available and the date of my uncle's funeral doesn't happen to be fixed, I should like to say--" He grew furiously red and began to stammer: "My father ... myself ... Dash! how brutally I bungle! But my uncle has a right to--to lie in the family vault with his ancestors. It's at Whins--the Church is in the Castle grounds. I can guarantee that my father--every facility--sympathy--proper respect--" He broke down. Sherbrand answered, now the cooler of the two:

"You are very kind, Lord Norwater. My mother has already received a telegram from Lord Mitchelborough conveying a message to the same effect."

"I engineered that!" thought Franky complacently. But he was fish-dumb. Sherbrand went on:

"She would thank you, as I do, gratefully. But my father--would have preferred to be buried where he died!"

"Good egg! And now there's another thing to get off my chest," said Franky. "You know you stand in for the Viscounty when I succeed my father, or if I get knocked out in this scrap--supposing I should kick without heirs! That being so, suppose you bury the hatchet and lunch with us? Wouldn't in Paris--perhaps you will now? The War seems to rub up old saws like new somehow. That copy-book tag about Blood bein' thicker than water! that's one of the ones I mean. In case my wife got left--do you tumble?"--the ambiguous term was quite expressive--"I'd like to think that you were--would be kind to her!"

"I should certainly--in that case--try to do what I could." A certain physical and mental resemblance showed between these two long-legged, lightly-built, clean-made Sherbrands, standing together talking of grave matters, with candour and simplicity and British avoidance of sentiment and excess of words.

"But,"--Sherbrand found himself yielding to an impulse of confidence in the owner of the brown eyes that were some inches below his own, "this War is my chance! I'm a certified pilot-aviator and constructor and engineer. Perhaps there'll be a chink in the Royal Flying Corps for me--and many another fellow like me--before long--I hope, not very long! For my father's sake as much as for my own, I'm bound to make good--you understand?"

The brown eyes understood. His kindred blood warmed to the look in them.

"He knew--my father knew that he had failed in life through his own fault. He did not resent his brother's attitude. He bore the consequences more or less patiently, and when he died he left the cleansing of his name to me. Not that he was as badly to blame as people thought. He was born without sufficient of the quality called--objectivity. It's the power that keeps a man slogging, slogging in one groove without getting mechanical or stupid, as long as he attain his ends or can serve his country by keeping on. It's _indispensable_!"--he emphasised the word, his strong blue-grey eyes full on Franky's--"as indispensable as lymph in your inner ear-tubes. Without it you can't keep a level balance--whether you stand, or walk, or fly!"

"Miss Saxham--knows, I suppose?"

A flush crept up through Sherbrand's tanning:

"I have told her. It wasn't pleasant. But she--likes me enough to overlook it. She--seems to think I should never fail in that way! I hope to God I never shall!" The old boyish terror of inherited weakness cropped up in the tone of the man grown. "It would be horrible to suspect the bacillus of slackness lurking in my blood! If there is--the sooner I get scrapped, the better for her and for me!"

"Well, you've chosen the--kind of career that is going to use up a good many men pretty quickly." Franky was warming more and more to this big blond, candid cousin. "Not that I think there's much of the slacker about you. Few chaps more fit and nervy--that is, going by looks, you know! But if the Kaiser's Flying Men can shoot on the wing as well as they brag they can"--his brown eyes were watchful for a change in the other's face--"then----"

"Then I tumble out of my sky, a dead bird!" said Sherbrand, squaring his broad shoulders, "and someone luckier fills my place!"

"Thumbs up! Ten to one you'd come down with a broken wing or so." There was something that touched Franky's latent quality of imagination in the fellow's queer way of saying "my sky." "This cousin of mine is a handsome fellow," he said to himself, "and a plucky one. And--by the Great Brass Hat!--now I come to think of it--the livin' image of old Sir Roger Sherbrand--his and my great-grandfather--goin' by the portrait in the gallery at Whins."

"So you're firm on joinin' the Flying Corps..." he went on, feeling for the moustache which had been reduced to Regulation toothbrush size. "Good egg You! Wish you all the sporting chances----"

"And better luck," said Sherbrand drily, "with Bird of War No. II. than I had with No. I.!"

"You're building a new 'plane?" The brown eyes were alight with interest.

"Rather! Come and have a look at her one day."

"Like a shot, if only I'd time! Did she tot to a hatful of money?"

"Something under L700. L500 of that goes for the new 'Gnome' engine. You see that German--" Sherbrand broke off.

"I remember! Pretty rough on you, that North Sea crossin' business. Must have been an awful loss. Look here!" Franky reddened again and began to flounder. "Could I--couldn't I--help with the boodle? Got L700 lying by idle. Frightfully glad if you'd let me chip in!--just in a cousinly sort o' way!"

"I am much obliged to you, Lord Norwater."

Confound the fellow! how he froze at the least hint of patronage. He went on, holding his head high:

"You are very kind, but I am not poor, unless as poverty is understood by people of your world. Apart from what my profession brings me I have something in the way of income. My mother's brother left me a sum of money that brings in yearly over L200." He went on as Franky regarded with unaffected interest the man who wasn't poor on two hundred _per annum_: "The principal--I suppose it tots up to L6,000--I shall naturally settle on my wife."

He warmed and brightened with the utterance of the word. His cold eyes grew soft and his brows smoothed pleasantly. He said with a glowing pride, and a kind of brave shyness that a woman who loved him would have adored:

"I have said nothing yet to Miss Saxham about my hopes of a Commission--I suppose for fear of not pulling the thing off. But the moment it comes along I shall persuade her to marry me. We'll be man and wife before I fly for the Front."