To Patrine, when the shadow of the familiar figure of the Doctor mingled with hers upon the dry green grass, and Saxham's voice called her by her name, it was as though his presence had a weight that physically oppressed her, and his scrutiny seared her flesh like the approach of white-hot iron.
Through her mind passed swift sentences: "Yet another of us has disgraced him! My father and mother are not the only traitors of our name!" In the rawness of her mental anguish every sense was unnaturally exaggerated. The ticking of Saxham's watch, that the furious beating of her heart could not drown, tormented by its iteration. And worst of all, was the consciousness of defilement in the physical sense.
"Did not your mother give you my message?"
Always pale, her pallor did not demand particular attention, save that under their ruddy salve the edges of her lips showed white. She answered, forcing the lips to smile, compelling her eyes to meet Saxham's.
"About coming to see you?" She remembered and drew from her gilt-chain vanity bag the letter she had not posted: "This was written to you to-day. Then I thought I would have been able to look in at Harley Street, and in the end——"
"In the end you neither paid the visit nor posted the excuse. Well, be more considerate in future to those who love you. Sincere, clean love does not grow on every gooseberry bush, my dear!"
The curt speech, made in the Doctor's brusquest tone, conveyed to Patrine an impression of exquisite kindness. So many boons, so many benefits had been conferred in that grim, curt way. She had wept and would not weep again, but her hard bright eyes grew misty as she thanked him, and asked after Lynette, with a touch of wistfulness that recalled to the Doctor that unforgettable time when greedy Death had threatened to rob him of his joy. He answered her cheerfully, and they found themselves chatting of familiar, everyday matters across the gulf that yawned between. And then, warned by some swift change of expression in her face, Saxham glanced up to see Sherbrand approaching.
"Doctor!" he called. "Sorry to interrupt, but would you listen a minute?"
The tall, lightly-built, lightly moving figure came swinging towards them. He still carried the eared cap with the goggled visor, his thick, silvery-blonde hair was darkened at the temples with the dampness generated under the close covering of waterproof. His light grey-blue eyes were smiling, yet there was a pucker of anxiety between his eyebrows, as he put von Herrnung's case.
"So," he ended, "instead of taking a second flight in the Bird with me as we arranged, would you trust your boy to this foreign crack who's in a hole for a passenger? He is Captain von Herrnung of the German Flying Service—winner of the two-days' flight from Hanover to Paris in April—a famous run!" He added, "I need hardly say that with such a record as von Herrnung holds you cannot be apprehensive of any rashness or neglect on his part. But I'll own I would rather take Bawne up another day myself. Still, von Herrnung——"
"I am aware of the reputation held by the person you mention. I am going now to speak to him."
The Doctor's face was devoid of all expression. But he battled, as he spoke, with a masterful desire to forbid Bawne the expedition. To assert parental authority on this point would have been the mode of dealing approved by one of the two men who dwelt within the Dop Doctor. The other Saxham said "Hold!"
Dare you place your paternal love, that other Saxham asked—between your son and his duty? Because it would be so easy to do it, is the reason why you should refrain! The Doctor had walked a few paces towards the object of his troubled reflections. He wheeled abruptly, returned, and presented Sherbrand to his niece.
A faint blush rose in Patrine's white cheeks as her eyes met those of the tall young aviator. They looked at her without any sign of recognition, and the conviction, "He has forgotten!" shot stingingly across her mind. "He did not think me worth remembering" came next. And then she could have laughed, recalling that she had dismissed him from her own thoughts on the discovery of his connection with Fanshaw's. She had made so certain that a teacher of Flying couldn't be a gentleman.
Now, face to face with him again, in his upright easy bearing, in his straight and fearless regard, in the pleasant well-bred voice that addressed her in a brief conventional sentence or so, she read his patent of gentlehood.
From whatever root it sprang, the flower was noble. Her swift eyes shot a glance at the bigger figure in grey. What a hoggish knight of the dunghill, what a high-born clown had she not distinguished by her choice and selection. The smile of scorn that curved her mouth was suddenly banished by the sudden recollection of Bawne.
"Uncle Owen, you have not yet told Mr. Sherbrand whether Bawne may go up again or not. I am sure—if you won't think me—if you don't mind my saying so!—that he has had enough for to-day! I think it would be better if you would not——"
It was not the deep warm voice of Patrine's characteristic utterance, but a weaker, thinner voice that hesitated and faltered and trailed away. It recalled nothing to Sherbrand. He looked at her and transferred his gaze to Saxham, who asked:
"Does this German officer intend climbing to any high altitude, or perpetrating anything in the nature of a display?"
Sherbrand explained:
"He does not want to go higher than three thousand. Just to try the hoverer, regarding which some business friends of his are bitten with curiosity. My mechanic is not able to go up with him, and he wants a light-weight passenger. He is over sixteen stone himself, and the Bird has been built to carry me with Davis. I calculated her wing-area to——"
Sherbrand travelled into the realm of technicalities, using terms that were Volapuk and Esperanto to Patrine. He had supple, finely-shaped hands, and used them as he talked with vivid illustrative gestures.
"So," he ended, "as your plucky youngster asked to go, it seemed a way out of the difficulty, provided you weren't dead against the thing. Of course we'll swadd the little chap in a sweater or so under the pneumatic jacket. It'll be a bit parky, even at three thousand, now the sun's beginning to down."
He added:
"I'll see to the strapping myself. You may rely upon it, Doctor."
Saxham said with a look of kindness at the handsome face with the clear candid eyes:
"I am sure of that!" He added, mastering that inward impulse: "I shall not forbid the flight if Bawne is set on it. But first, I must speak to him!"
And the great form with the stern thoughtful face and scholar's stoop moved across the greensward, followed by the tall young figures of Sherbrand and Patrine. Of the two, the man was by a bare inch the taller. This Patrine realised in a swift side-glance. Certain featural characteristics of him, personal impressions received half-unconsciously, retained their clear sharpness then and for many days....
The silvery-yellow hair toning into the pale brown skin. The powerful sweep of the brows over eyes set flush with their large orbits, prominent, brilliant, mobile as the eyes of a bird of flight. The nose, arched and jutting like a kite's beak, with large sensitive nostrils, the somewhat sunken cheek and the sharply-angled jaw, the little ear and the rounded skull superbly set upon the full muscular neck rising out of the collar of the gabardine, made up a portrait upon which some happy woman might well dote and dream.
It was five o'clock and the breeze that smelt of heather and clover-hay and strawberries blew more strongly, straight from under the westering sun. Patrine drank in deep draughts of the buoyant sweetness. The leaden gyves had fallen from her limbs, the leaden weight had lifted from her bosom. She had recovered something of her old, elastic grace of movement, that even the sheath-skirt could not spoil. Looking at her, Sherbrand said to himself:
"She walks like a Highland hill-woman or a native girl of the Philippines. And—did Heaven or a Bond Street specialist give her that extraordinary hair? I rather hate it, and yet I have to go on looking at it. Does she know? I wonder if she knows?"
She felt his eyes on her. And the buoyant sense of well-being that his presence brought to her was mingled with an agony of apprehension. Her heart clamoured, like a brooding thrush attacked by the owl, that Bawne should not be permitted to risk himself with von Herrnung. "Does any other living being know him as I know him?" she asked herself. "If by some misadventure it came to a question of one life or the other, would he scruple—no! he would not scruple for an instant to sacrifice the child?"
Three words to Uncle Owen—if one only dared to speak them—would have put the thing out of the question. But at the thought of the dreadful avowal to which such an utterance might lead, Patrine was stricken dumb. She could not face the music. This was one little ear of wild oats out of the full field that waited for her reaping, sown in the hours that lie between the midnight of pleasure and the dawn of the Day of Remorse.
Perhaps she and Sherbrand had walked more slowly than it had seemed to her. She saw Saxham and his son meet, heard, indistinctly the exchange of a few brief sentences, and then the boy, with a jump to hug his father round the neck, ran to her as she came up.
"Cousin Pat, I'm going to get into my flying-kit in a minute." His heart was thumping so that it shook him, and the short upper lip with the gold-brown dust of freckles on it quivered, hard as he tried to keep it stiff: "One doesn't do it before people generally—but I'd rather like you to kiss me now!"
"My precious, a dozen times!"
She said it impetuously in the deep womanly baritone that Bawne loved, and Sherbrand started as he heard it. She dropped her tall-sticked sunshade, and caught the little boyish figure to her broad womanly bosom, hugged him until he panted, and kissed his pale cheeks red. You do not need to be reminded that Patrine was a galumpher. "Don't go! don't go!" she whispered in her darling's neck. "I hate your going! and I don't believe Uncle Owen likes it.... Say you've been up once and you're 'nuffy! Pretend you funk it. Do, for my sake!"
"I—can't. Ouch! You tickle! Please let me go. This is business!" He squirmed, and she burst out laughing, and released him. The act was a wrench that tore her bleeding heart anew.
He bounded instantly after Sherbrand, seeing him go forward to join von Herrnung, who was standing watching Davis fill the Bird's tank with petrol, and her reservoir with oil.
There was no spurring these lazy devils of English into movement.... The accursed pig-dogs, the stupid sheep's heads! If that fragmentary Wireless message had really to do with the business, within the next ten minutes everything might be ruined. One walked perilously, as amongst pebbles, holding a watch-glass of High Explosive in one's hand. Here came the man and the boy. He joined them with a noisy burst of forced laughter. Presently you saw all three moving in the direction of a building where the "flying-kits of all sorts and shapes and sizes," of which Sherbrand had boasted, were kept for the use of the patrons of Fanshaw's School. As they went in, Bawne cast a wistful glance up at the clock on the front gable of the café restaurant, now supplying afternoon tea served in brown teapots, and rolls and butter on thick white platters, to a thin sprinkling of customers.
"Three minutes to the half-hour," said the clock.
Would the Chief come, or must this thing be carried out by a small boy whose heart lay, a palpable lump of cold lead in the pit of his stomach, and whose knees were turning to jelly as he went?
If Cousin Pat, when she begged him not to go, had known how badly he, Bawne, had wanted to hold her round the neck and beg her not to let him, he would at this moment have been unheroically safe.
She was so big. He had most dreadfully wanted to cling to her and cry—imagine a fellow of twelve doing anything so kiddish. But he had swallowed the unmanly tears, and wriggled out of her strong protecting arms.
He looked back and saw her tall white figure, standing near the hulking black-clad shape of the Doctor, who had pulled his hat-brim low down over his eyes, and did not seem to be talking or laughing at all. Davis was doing something with a spanner to the Bird's under-carriage, and the long, thin shadow of her in combination with the squat shadow of the little stooping Welshman, stretched eastwards over the dry green grass.
He heaved a big sigh and followed his man in. Von Herrnung was already trying on pneumatic coats, swearing in nervous German when they were not big enough. At last he was caparisoned, in a heavy suit of flannel-lined Carberrys and a buttonless hooded jacket. He had stripped the burst glove from his wounded hand, thrown it away, and replaced the magpie pearl ring upon his little finger. He had put on a woollen helmet and tied over that a flapped cap with goggles and ear-pieces. While he attended to his outfit, the leather satchel lay at his feet, or sometimes between them, or he would keep a boot-toe on a corner of it. And his hard blue eyes were vigilantly watchful against surprise.
Sherbrand and the dresser—who presided over a long room of shelves and pegs laden with queer garments, and who looked like a washed mechanic in spotless blue overalls—put Bawne into a woollen sweater, and added to the panoply he had worn already that morning, and which consisted of leggings, slip-strapped to a webbing waistbelt, a pneumatic jacket, a knitted helmet such as von Herrnung wore, and a pair of goggles. They looked like the Eskimo hunter and his little boy in the "Book of The Arctic"—a volume specially beloved of Saxham's small son.
It was five minutes past the half-hour when they emerged from the dressing-shed. Saxham came to meet them, turned and walked by his son's side. Davis, whose weakness as regards the sex we know, had pinched from the visitor's enclosure a green-painted iron chair for Patrine. She half-rose, stung by an impulse of escape, when she saw von Herrnung approaching, and then controlled herself and sat down again.
Nothing escaped her long eyes. They saw Sherbrand glance from Saxham to von Herrnung, and read the intention of an introduction in his look. He had just begun:
"Doctor, I don't think you have met Captain——" when von Herrnung lengthened his long stride, outstripped his companions, and went over swiftly and stood beside Patrine.