Part 32

"Not till I've got rid of these things. Call the Commissionaire. Tell him my name and number!--say the orders were given by mistake! ..." Margot went on, when the Alpine range of parcels had melted away under the combined efforts of chauffeur and Commissionaire: "Poor old Wallop will wail, but I've purged myself of the contempt of being a Food Hog. Great Snipe! to think of deserving to be called such an awful name. It made me feel all of seventeen stone, with a row of chins like saddle-bags!" She pinched her own dainty chin between a tiny finger and thumb. "Still, I've enjoyed the scrum," she went on, as the car slid towards Piccadilly. "It's bucked me splendidly! I shall know what to do now, when I want to lay my ghosts. You know one of them"--the little fingers twitched in Patrine's--"what's coming in November. The other started haunting me only a few days back." All the new-won colour had died out of the small oval face and the great dark eyes were tragic in their terror. "You're too good a pal to laugh. Well, then--I'll own up. Franky's my latest ghost of all!"

"But you have heard? You have had letters?"

The answer was strangled between a laugh and a sob.

"Letters. Three post-cards from Somewhere in France and a queer epistle all squares of blacking. Not much between--except that he is tophole and coming Home at Christmas and sends love to us both! That's Franky's way. He always talks as--" A shudder went through the little figure, and shadows were about the great wild eyes, and the pale lips quivered:

"Poor little Kittums!" said Patrine's big warm baritone. She slipped an arm tenderly about the little thing. Who could have dreamed that Kittums could care so about Franky--or any other man. "Are you worrying so badly, my dinkie?" she went on, soothingly: "Try not. It isn't wise!"

"I'm not worrying," came the weary answer. "I'm being haunted--that's all. Day and night since it started, his hands are on me and his eyes are looking at me. When I sleep, I'm wandering through desolate places looking, always looking for him! And thousands of other selfish, silly women are being haunted in the same way. Oh, Pat, be always kind when you're married to your Flying Man!"

"_When!_"--Patrine echoed. But what of sorrow or doubt her tone conveyed was lost upon Margot. She had told her own grief, and the telling had relieved her. Like the child with the kissed bruise, she could prattle of other things. She was twittering and chirping in the gay little voice Franky knew so well, as Williams, the respectable, turned smoothly into Short Street. There was a dense block at the corner by the Aldebaran Hotel, and amidst the swishing of the motor-engines and the fidgeting of plump carriage-horses, loathful of the sudden release of the pungent exhaust from escape-valves under their noses--a little piece of dialogue between two Cyprians on the near sidewalk drove home to both the occupants of the car.

One Cyprian was well-to-do, past thirty-five and expensively caparisoned for conquest, from the tall feather topping her stove-pipe hat and her burnished wig of Angora goat-hair, to her silk stockings of liberally-open pattern and the tips of her high-heeled, buckled shoes. Her hard eyes under their painted brows took critical stock of the other, younger woman, whose make-up could not hide ill-health, and whose flaunting fineries were the worse for wear.

Said Hard Eyes, indicating with a jerk of her powdered double chin, a procession moving down Piccadilly Circus-wards--a publisher's catchpenny advertisement of "WEEP NO MORE, MOTHERS!" ingenious in its employment of robust-looking matrons as bearers of the sandwich-boards plastered with posters of rose-colour and gold:

"You could give some of the swell West End ladies a tip or two, I reckon, Lallie, about that Purple Dreams dope?"

"Honest to God, I could! But I wouldn't!" The haggard eyes leapt viciously out of their languor. "Let 'em run up against it--same as me! Me that went all the way to Brussels to get the new treatment. Great Scott! When I came to I was black and blue and green all over. And my face! It was a fair scream!" She threw an appraising side-glance in a shop window. "No! My skin'll never be what it used, I reckon."

"But the"--the hard eyes between the elder woman's blued lids were hideously significant--"the Trouble, eh?"

"The Trouble"--Lallie's still girlish shoulders shrugged.--"Oh, that's all right! I heard no more of it! There's the one comfort. Good-bye, ducky. I got to meet somebody at the Cri."

"Well, better luck!" And as the block broke and the car moved on, the women nodded and parted. Margot and her friend Patrine did not look at each other as the car stopped before the Club.

A glance showed the vestibule crowded, the second pair of swing-doors thudded momentarily as members and their guests passed on into the Club rooms, without relieving the congestion that fresh arrivals renewed. Some doors above, a piano-organ in charge of two men was jolting out the last bars of the Russian National Anthem. One of the men, olive-skinned, grey-haired, and dressed in threadbare black, sang the words with perfunctory fervour in a cracked tenor voice. As the last chord banged out and the organist jerked the changing-lever over, and the Marseillaise summoned jangling echoes of its lyrical frenzy from the pavement and the surrounding walls, Patrine, meeting Sherbrand's eyes over the crowded heads of people, knew a sudden shock of apprehension in the strangeness of their regard.

For day and night since that strange, impulsive visit she had made to the Confessional--"You must tell him. It is your duty to tell him!" had sounded in her ears. She set her teeth and determined that she would never tell him, none the less knowing that the revelation would be made. A Power infinitely stronger than her woman's will was bearing upon it. Her treasure was in peril, her fairy-gold at any moment might turn to withered leaves at a breath from her own mouth.

*CHAPTER LV*

*NEWS OF BAWNE*

"Pat!--what luck!"

Sherbrand was standing before her, tall and lean and masterful, saluting her with the touch of three fingers to a soldierly forage-cap with three buttons, set jauntily atilt on the broad tanned brow.

Ah! the delight of seeing the cold grey glance warm into sea-blue, the lean, eagle-face flash into smiles. For a little while yet he was hers, she told herself, as the hard hand gripped on hers that answered the swift fierce pressure, and her blood that the sickly chill of fear had stagnated, whirled on its crimson circle singing for joy. And then--a second glance, sweeping from the top to the toes of the tall manly figure, stopped the song.

"Alan! You--in khaki!"

"I suppose so," he said a little clumsily, echoing thousands of other men. "It's the universal wear just now, isn't it? We fellows must make good while we can--and we're all of us joining. Even Macrombie--you can't have forgotten Macrombie--has got his rating, and is acting a P.O.T. on a Destroyer in the North Sea."

Do you see the dour drunkard standing up, under the eye of the smart young inspecting Fleet Surgeon, naked save for the leather bootlace that held a battered silver locket round his harsh and swarthy scrag.

"Your age? ..."

"Ye micht ca' me forty," said the subject, with caution.

"I might, but I'd be a liar!" said the Fleet Surgeon, "so try again, my man!"

"Ye micht pit twa to the forr-ty," came rumbling from the hairy chest.

"And tack eight on to that," thus the Fleet Surgeon, tucking the hooked ends of the stethoscope into his ears, and deftly applying the microphone. "And then I'd be wide of the actual! Breathe deeply, will you!" The effort provoked a volley of coughs sounding like half-bricks pitched against the sides of an empty cistern and the Fleet Surgeon shook his head.

"_Hough--hough--hough!_--why didna' ye--hough! lat weel alane?" gasped Macrombie, with eyes blazing hell-fire through the moisture engendered by the cough. "Dinna ye ken I'll never no' be wanting to breathe deeply whaur ye're needing to send me? There is nae room whatever for lung-play oot o' the ordinar'," he added scornfully, "aboard ane o' thae kittle, cranky, tinpot Destroyers!"

"Hold out your hand!" commanded the arbiter of Destinies. He contemplated the extended member, wavering and fluttering like the indicator-needle on the dial of an atmospheric pressure-gauge. "Pretty wobbly, what?" he commented to the owner with the sarcastic inflection that advertised a keen advocate of Temperance.

"Man, O! man!" broke from Macrombie in a harsh rattling whisper, desperate appeal flashing in his burnt-out eyes, "you that are young enough to be my son, tak' me or leave me, ane or the tither--but shame me nae mair!"

Telegraphists were sorely needed, so Macrombie of the racking hoast and the shaky hand was passed as fit for Service, and duty rated as Petty Officer Telegraphist aboard one of the contemned tin-pots.

The Crown and winged double-thunderbolt must have nerved the arm they came back to. For, on the day of the Battle of Jutland, when a point-blank salvo from an enemy cruiser wrecked the bridge and searchlight platform, carrying away the forward mast and funnel of Macrombie's particular tin-pot, and men in respirators were fighting the smothering fumes of the fire caused by German shells of the incendiary description, a dour, stark man whose clothes were alight and burning on him, stuck grimly to his post among the wreckage of the shattered Wireless room, sending out the message last dictated by the officer who lay dead across the blistering steel plating--for the short circuit set up by the smashed searchlight had created its own separate conflagration, and the electricity was "running out of everything like oil."

When the tin-pot heeled over, and, having duly buried her steel chest and secret documents, went down with colours flying in a smother of oily steam, men who were saved on the rafts told this tale of Macrombie, who sleeps well, after Life's thirsty fever, at his post in the Destroyer's battered Wireless cabin, on the deep-ridged, sandy bottom of the wild, shallow North Sea.

Patrine felt her heart crushed as in the grip of a cold steel gauntlet. Her apprehensions had not been unfounded. She and Alan were to be parted, if not as she had feared.

"I--suppose I ought to congratulate you--" Her unwilling eyes admired the tall manly figure in the plain workmanlike uniform. The buttonless tunic with its Lancer plastron, the riding-breeches of ampler cut than the cavalryman's, the high spurless boots of supple brown leather, and the belt that carried a revolver and no sword. "What--what are you in?" she asked draggingly, and he answered with a smile and a flash of his grey eyes:

"I hope I'm in for some of what's going on!"

"How glad you are!"

"Rather. I should think so! Now that they've let me into the Royal Flying Corps as a T.S.L. Look at my wings!" He touched the white outspread pinions on the tunic-breast with a reverent finger-tip and went on pouring out his story without a break. "It's cost me some badgering of High Officials of Military Aeronautics at Whitehall, and a lot of time wasted in baby tests. Squad drill, Harris tube, bomb-dropping, air-signalling, Webley and Scott practice, and so on. Now I'm teaching trick-flying to Army aviators from 4.30 A.M. till 11 P.M. The Powers that Be have taken over the Flying Schools--Durrant's Cafe is our Officer's Mess now. You should see old Durrant in his glory as Head Waiter. And Mrs. D--" His white teeth flashed as he laughed.

"And they have known of this"--she nodded at the eagle-wings--"while I have been kept in ignorance! How long?"

"Not quite a fortnight. Don't be unreasonable, dear!"

The new tone stung. Did a yellow star upon the cuffs and shoulder-straps and a pair of white wings on the left breast mean so much to him that her just claims upon his confidence seemed wanting in reason now? Anger and resentment choked her as he added:

"I am here now, as it happens, because I'm crossing the Channel to-morrow at peep o' day." Something in her pale face made him add: "Don't worry!--I'm likely to be back again by nightfall. That's what I've rushed in here to tell you, though I've a man in tow, a Wing Commander of the French S. Ae. Hot from the Front and just landed at Hendon. I had to take him in my car to his Embassy, and now I've got to find him a room at an hotel. When I've done it I'm coming back here to talk to you. Where on earth has my man got to? Why, there he is, talking to Lady Norwater. The little chap with the grey moustache and the gold-banded _kepi_."

"I am honoured by Madame's gracious remembrance," the person indicated could be heard protesting, during an instant's lull in the Babel of voices round. "But my own--a thousand pardons! is less accurate."

"Oh!" Margot expostulated, "but you can't have forgotten. That Sunday of the Grande Semaine--when you were in the Bois, timing a Flying Officer who was testing an English invention--a sort of a----"

"But assuredly, Madame!" His quick nod and the gesture of his gloved hand summoned up the scene vividly. "I remember, but perfectly, though much water has rolled under the bridges since that day. And Milord--Madame's husband?"

"He's at the Front," Margot explained, "wherever the Front is!"

"Unfortunately at the moment," returned the suave voice, "the Front is everywhere. It is easy to find without binoculars. _Adieu, Madame_. _Merci bien de la souvenir si gracieuse, dites mes amities a Monsieur._" And in another moment he arrived beside Sherbrand, exclaiming with his vivacious shrug and gesture: "My faith, my friend, your London _Cercle des Dames_ is a veritable Paradise of Mahommed. Now in Paris, at least before the War--instead of ten thousand houris to every true Believer, one counted at least three Adams to every Eve. But I observe your search has been successful. Will you not present me to Mademoiselle your _fiancee_?"

And the dapper middle-aged Wing Commander in the gold-banded _kepi_, whose dark plain uniform displayed the gold badge of the Service Aeronautique under the Cross of the Legion of Honour, was introduced as Captain Raymond by an off-hand young Briton who comprehended not in the least the immense condescension that had prompted the request.

"_Sapristi!_" thought Raymond, as Patrine gave him her large hand and assured him in her big warm voice that she was frightfully pleased to meet a friend of Alan's.--"A magnificent type of the human female animal to have paired with this bluff, simple English boy. Part _femme du monde_, part romping hoyden, part _cabotine_, she should have been a Duchesse of the old Napoleonic regime, or at least the effect that lies behind a _cause celebre_ of the Paris Law Courts of modern days. And she will be expected by this honest fellow to live in a stucco villa at Kensington or the Crystal Palace, and bear and rear his children, and live and die in all the deadly respectability of the British middle-class _milieu_!"

But he made his beautiful bow and murmured some civil phrases. In the spring, at the Hendon Flying Grounds of M. Fanshaw, he, Raymond, had been interested to meet the friend of Mademoiselle. Had been profoundly impressed by the displayed inventions of a young man so gifted as aviator and engineer. Had had the good fortune subsequently to obtain the consent of his own Chiefs of the S. Ae. F. to a test of an invention--the value of which had been hall-marked by the approbation of Messieurs les Allemands. True, M. Sherbrand had been the victim of their unscrupulosity. But Fortune, who knew? might be kinder in the near future. This War so grievous, so brutal, so deplorable, waged by the Prussian against Civilisation and Progress, would open up not only _le metier des armes_, but countless other avenues of prosperity to thousands of ardent and gifted young men. Like M. Sherbrand. To whom Raymond said with an authoritative glance of his blue eye: "My friend, we keep your auto waiting at the door!"

"Ah, but stay!" Patrine began, with a sense of hatred towards the well-used little Ford runabout standing in much grander company by the kerb outside the Club: "do stay and lunch and smoke and tell us things about the War, won't you?"

"A thousand thanks, but impossible, Mademoiselle!"

Raymond shrugged, conscious that her look of disappointment was for Sherbrand, and pleaded fatigue as an excuse.

"For these are iron times, Mademoiselle," he went on in his smooth, musical accents, "and we who live in them are unfortunately of flesh and blood. When the War is done perhaps there will again be social pleasures like the lunch you were so kind as to offer me. That I am tempted to accept I will not conceal from you. I have not eaten since I flew from France at _la pointe du jour_--one of the smallest of the little hours of this morning, and then I broke fast on two fingers of little red wine, and a hunch of soldier's bread."

"You mean to say you're fresh from flying the Channel?"

"Crossing the Channel came near the end of my journey, Mademoiselle. I should have arrived earlier"--he shrugged indifferently--"had not some German aviators caused delay."

"Oh-h!" Her vexation passed like a breath from a mirror. Her long eyes danced with delight under her hat-brim. Her breath came quick, her red lips curled, and a sweet faint pink showed under her creamy skin. "You're a knight of the skies hot from a fray with two flying dragons--and you were going without saying a word! What do you think we Englishwomen are made of?"

"Very desirable flesh, some of you, at least, Mademoiselle," occurred to Raymond, but he suppressed the equivoque and answered with professional brevity:

"Mademoiselle, I regret there is but little to tell you. The enemy possesses an aerial organisation of great effectiveness which is being chiefly employed in the killing of harmless civilians and the destruction of unfortified towns. But small success has hitherto attended his efforts in the Channel. Your British Expedition was conveyed across the water without the loss of one _piou-piou_, or any damage received by the explosion of a German bomb. As for the German aviators of whom I speak, their attitude towards myself and my pilot was modest. Flying their double-seated military Taubes, of which the wings and tail resemble those of the dove after which they have been named, they pursued our biplane half-way from Calais to Dover before deciding to attack."

"Then--" She hesitated, softly clapping her palms together and dimpling like a big child over the telling of a new fairy tale.

"Then one climbed, possessing the advantage of a powerful engine, and dropped a bomb from a height of some 600 _metres_ which exploded without hitting us and went to the bottom of the sea. While the second aviator, who was armed with a repeating-carbine, wounded my pilot so severely that it was only by a miracle of endurance he preserved consciousness long enough to land without a crash. So I left him at Dover and--with a pilot mechanic from the Air Station, completed my passage, descending at Brooklands at twelve _demie_."

"Was your pilot hurt very badly? Will he be able to fly back to France?"

"Mademoiselle, being a pious Catholic, he has already flown to Heaven."

"He is dead.... And you can joke!" Patrine reproached him. His face was very wrinkled as he smiled.

"Mademoiselle, if a soldier could not jest at Death upon occasion, Life for a soldier would be impossible! Of verity, the loss of a good pilot-_aviateur_ is not a thing to joke about, but fortunately I have your friend to fill his place."

"_Alan_! You must not--I will never consent to it!"

All taken aback, her colour banished, she fixed Sherbrand with blazing imperative eyes. He reddened to the hair and his mouth shut firmly. For the first time there was a clash of wills between the pair.

"Alan, why didn't you ask me?"

He was redder than ever.

"Because it wasn't for you to say. It is an order from my Chiefs--don't you understand?"

She did not care that the French officer was smiling. She would have liked to have struck him in his merrily-crinkled face. Wretch! to have blurted the truth at her that Alan had hidden. What was he saying:

"Permit, Mademoiselle, that I make my _adieux_. I go to secure an apartment where I may repose myself." He looked at Sherbrand, saying in his cool tone of authority: "The Aldebaran,--that is in the next street and a good hotel, is it not so? A little sleep will not come amiss after a cutlet and a _demi-bouteille_. And whilst I eat we will settle our _affaires_. Eh, mon lieutenant?"

His gloved hand took Sherbrand neatly by the elbow. He was skilfully steering him towards the doorway when Patrine, white and flaming, placed herself in their path.

"My affairs come first!" she was beginning.

"_Shut up!_" came from Sherbrand, in an exasperated aside whisper. "My duty comes before you--or anything in the world. It should come first for you if you cared a damn for me!"

No one but Raymond had overheard the curious, fierce colloquy. She felt literally scorched by the hot look of anger. She knew an agony like the tearing of the tissues of the flesh when Sherbrand passed her and went out with that gloved hand of authority upon his arm.

"Women are the devil!" he thought bitterly, as he opened the door of the runabout Ford to admit the French Staff Officer. "She'd had a shock in being told the news so suddenly; but to ballyrag me--to make me look such a thundering idiot before _him_!"

He swung the crank with violence and wrenched angrily at the levers when he took the driving-seat. A gloved hand patted his arm, and Raymond's voice said in his ear:

"Bah! You are chagrined, my friend, because a handsome woman has made you a little drama. Think no more of it! I have forgotten, for my part." He added, as they got out at the Aldebaran: "I propose to detain you but a little while, _mon ami_. When we have completed arrangements for the start to-morrow, you will be free to return and make your peace with Mademoiselle."

"Thank you, sir. She was rattled at my telling her so suddenly about my Commission," said Sherbrand, still beclouded. "Women are all like that, I suppose?"

"Except in France," said the agreeable voice of Raymond, "where the love of Country is stronger in our women than the love of lover or even of child. It was so before 1870. They have remembered through the centuries, as their sisters of Britain have not. They--the women of England are patriotic--oh yes! but patriotism is not yet a religion to them. It will cost millions of lives, and of blood an ocean to kindle that flame within their souls. Then, they also will hold the bayonet to the grindstone with their soft white hands and say: 'Become sharp, to drink the blood of Germans!' And they will mend the soldier's ragged breeches and clean the soldier's dirty rifle, and when they do they will not be less womanly. No, by my faith! nor less beloved by men. Try one of these. You will not find them too bad."

He offered Sherbrand a cigarette and took a light from him as they stood under the Aldebaran's tall Corinthian portico.

"One should always be accurate. When I told you that in France there lived no woman who was not patriotic, I was in error. Such a woman existed since three or four days."

He blew out a puff of smoke and watched its mounting spiral. Then he resumed: