Tall, lithe, vigorous, masterful, they confronted each other across the gulf that suddenly opened between them—the bottomless chasm that yawns between Faith and Unbelief.
In the fitful uncanny light, the darker side of Patrine started into sinister prominence. Her defiant face was masked by shadow, but the fierce vibrating voice and towering shape had something of the fallen angel. Had wide sable pinions sprung and bannered from her shoulders, Sherbrand would hardly have been surprised.
"Let us draw the line at that. If we are to be friends—and I would like us to be!—agree to it! But since you have what I have not—you would call it Faith, no doubt," he guessed the wide mouth curving in a jeering smile, "there is nothing to prevent you from praying for Aunt Lynette and for Bawne too! Unless you are the kind of physician who draws the line at taking his own drugs!"
If she had thought to disconcert Sherbrand she erred. He said instantly:
"I give you my word of Honour that I will pray for them! But there is one other person much dearer to me than either. You don't ask me for her, but all the same..."
"You kind, dear boy! Pray for me all you want to!"
She was his big, smiling girl of the Milles Plaisirs, and the Pat young Bawne worshipped, as she stretched out her beautiful, massive arm and offered him a cordial hand.
"Shake, Mister! Making love to me one minute and bally-ragging me the next! ... Great Scott! Ah!—I've said it again—and I gave you my word I'd not!"
He took the hand in a close grasp, sought for the other and took it also....
"Thank you! Why, how you're shivering! You have nothing but that feather thing over your thin gown! Wait half a minute—I'll get you a wrap!"
He was gone in an instant, leaving her standing on the border-line of one of the oases of black-velvet shadow, swayed by the violence of her emotion as some tall young birch might have been shaken by the fury of a south-west gale.
His touch.... She had not dreamed.... Her head drooped, and a long sigh went fluttering after him into the darkness, like some night-moth whose wings are wrought of hues more gorgeous than the peacock butterfly's, whose scent is on the alert, and whose diamond eyes pierce the blackest midnight in search of the partner of its kind.
A footstep she knew approached. A familiar voice called her:
"Uncle Owen." The spell broke. Her mind leaped up alert and quivering. "Have you any news—of Bawne?"
"I have news!"
"Not——"
"Not the worst news," said Saxham's harsh voice, "but not—hopeful!"
"They are not coming back?" She strove to set her heel on the treacherous hope that he would say No! For how could she bring herself to desire the enemy's return. And yet the thought of Bawne was a stab of anguish in her bosom. What was the Doctor saying?
"The last definite intelligence received of them confirms the certainty that Captain von Herrnung is now over the North Sea. He alighted nowhere; that we have positively learned from many different news-centres. A tractor-monoplane answering to the description and carrying two-passengers passed the Bull Light on Spurn Head, at a few minutes before eight. The lighthouse-keeper signalled that bad weather might be expected. The pilot paid no attention. And later on——"
As Saxham spoke, with that strange hoarseness, Patrine took his arm tremblingly. Her heart plunged as though it would burst its prison as the Doctor went on:
"An hour or more later a Wireless came in. It had been sent on to Sir Roland from the Admiralty!—I will not puzzle you with technical details. But at 8.30 the officer on duty on the upper-bridge of the second-in-line of a Battle Squadron steaming through Northern Waters on the way to a Southern rendezvous, reported having heard an aëroplane pass overhead, crossing the course of the Squadron diagonally—apparently flying due east——"
Saxham added:
"The aviator made no signal for assistance. But the engine-beat told of trouble developing.... There is nothing to do but wait and hope!"
What had really happened on board H.M.S. Rigasamos, maintaining her appointed speed of fifteen knots, and her statutory two-cable-lengths from the stern of the Flagship ahead, and the bows of the sister-ship following her, had been that as the ship's band struck into The Roast Beef of Old England, and the Owner took his place at the head of the Ward-room mess-table, his Second in Command on the fore-bridge got a speaking-tube message from the Navigating Lieutenant on the upper-bridge, to say that the drone of an aëroplane, flying at about four hundred overhead, had been picked up by Warrant Officer So-and-So, of the gun and searchlight control, per medium of the microphone.
The Second in Command called back through the voice-tube:
"An aëroplane.... You're sure? Could hear her racket myself, without assistance. But put it down to a Fleet Seaplane taking a flip round the Squadron for exercise, or one of the Goody-Two-Shoes from the R.N.A.S. Station at Rosforth, blown out to sea doing Coast Patrol."
An answer rumbled down the pipe:
"It was an aëro all right, sir! The rattle of her floats 'ud have given away a Goody.... Travelling east against the side-drive of a forty-mile-an-hour north-west gale.... And with engine trouble well developed. Missing and back-firing like the gayest kind of hell!"
The Second in Command took his ear from the mouth of the speaking-tube, and with a glance that included the figures of his Sub-Lieutenant, the Midshipman, signalmen, and lookouts at their posts swung into the chart-house and logged the occurrence in the plain language of the sea. The clock told 8.35 P.M. as he finished, capped his fountain pen, and slipped it in an inside pocket, soliloquising:
"Travelling east against a forty-mile-an-hour gale from the north-west, and with engine-trouble to top up with ... Little Willie will be seeing the angels pretty soon at this rate! Or piling himself up somewhere on the coast of Holland! Wonder who the bally idiot is?"
Saxham continued, and now he croaked as hoarsely as a raven:
"Sir Roland has little doubt that the aëroplane heard on the Rigasamos was Sherbrand's 'Bird of War.' If so, there would be very little hope left, unless it had been previously arranged that a vessel belonging to—a foreign Power!—was to watch for and give help if she should require it. Now you know as much as I do. I have telephoned to both Lady Beauvayse and your mother that you return with me to Harley Street. We shall go presently. First, I want you to speak on the telephone to Lynette."
"To—Lynette!" Patrine breathed. The Doctor told her: "I have kept the worst from Lynette hitherto.... I shall do so until the ultimate hope is abandoned. My wife knows my voice so well.... You understand.... She would suspect something ..."
His voice stumbled and broke. And clinging to the arm of the big man standing quietly beside her, potent in inertia as a lump of raw iron, Patrine realised that her anguish was a drop in the ocean of his. She took his hand and said in a tone he had never before heard from her:
"Come, dear! We will go and speak to her now."
So they went across to the telegraph-cabin, raw with unshaded electric light and littered with papers. The Chief was there, looking livid and careworn, leaning one elbow on the edge of the stand that supported the Wireless, and wearing the telephone head-band with the ear-pieces, as he dictated to the pallid clerk who occupied a Windsor chair at a stained deal desk, and wrote with a spluttering pen on a depleted paper-pad. At first sight there seemed to be nothing else in the place but a low voice speaking, a Railway Key instrument, a file for telegrams and an overpowering odour of rum.
The odour of rum consolidated to Patrine's view into a stocky thickset man with a square heavy yellow face set into a tragic mask of despair. It was Macrombie, ex-Petty Officer telegraphist, whom the Royal Navy had spat forth for being D.O.D. fifteen full years before. Sacked now from his civil employment, for the old glaring, unblinkable offence.
The liquor had barely faded out in him; his breath came across the little cabin like a flaming sword, and his eyes under their beetling coal-black eyebrows looked burnt-out. He rose from the debilitated office-stool he had been sitting on, saluted Patrine stiffly and said:
"Mem, this is no place for a leddy, wi' a drucken wastrel like mysel' in it. Ay! I hae lat ower a drap too mony, I am awa' the noo wi' my weicht o' wyte. But no wi'oot a warstle have I yielded to the Enemy!" His anguish broke the flood-gates in a rumbling roar. "Like Job I hae cried oot in the nicht-watches to my Creator, speiring o' Him why He made weak men an' strong rum? He didna' gie me ony answer—and I am ganging down the Broad Road's fast as my bluidy thirrst can carry me—a disgraced and ruined man!"
"Mr. Sherbrand will give you another chance. I know he will!—I'll ask him!" came impetuously in the big warm womanly baritone.
"You're a grand woman to luik at, and the lad'll gie in—an' the haill deil's dance to begin ance mair.... Na, na, my bonny leddy!" said Macrombie, "ye can never lippen to the promises o' a drunkard. Best lat me gang my gait to muckle Hell. Ay! I'll no' be lonesome there for want o' company.... Toch! what a regiment o' Macrombies deid an' damned will answer 'Present' to auld Satan's rollcall! Guid-nicht, my leddy, an' thanks to ye a' the same."
He took his cap from a peg, and from the corner a bundle of miscellaneous possessions, rolled up in apparently a worn alpaca office-coat, and girt about with knotted string. He saluted the Chief and Saxham, and nodded to the telegraph clerk, and went out of the cabin in a plodding kind of hurry as though no grass should grow under his feet before he set them for good upon the dreadful downward Road.
His vice had played into an enemy's hands, and he would trust himself no longer. He meted out judgment to rum-soaked Macrombie, assuming for himself the prerogative of the One Judge. But he got his chance in spite of himself, when Britain's Hour came.