Lynette was dressed in a delicate, filmy black chiffon dinner-gown, and as Saxham's latch-key clicked in the front door-lock and she rose up out of the tail carved armchair that stood beside the large hall fireplace, her paleness seemed to diffuse light, like the whiteness of the moon.
"Owen ... He is not ... What ..."
Her wide bright glance went past the tall wrapped-up figure of Patrine to the taller shape that bulked behind her. No small active boy-form danced in its wake. She put out her arms, groping blindly—swayed and would have fallen, but that Saxham strode past Patrine, caught the slender figure in his powerful embrace, turned and carried his wife away down the short corridor that led to the consulting-room.
"Miss Pat, my dear! There's cold supper all laid an' ready waitin' in the dining-room. By the Doctor's special orders, and I was to see you eat."
Thus Mrs. Keyse, now for years housekeeper at Harley Street, a little light-haired woman, common of speech and innocent of grammar, but a pearl of price in the Doctor's estimation and her mistress's right hand.
"Don't say they fed you at 'Endon on 'am and salad an' pigeon-pie. Trash is the word," said Mrs. Keyse, "for resturong pastry, and them there piegeons, if language could be given 'em, would bear me out in what I say."
But Patrine refused baked meats, submitting to be escorted to her room and tenderly fussed over by the kind, Cockney-tongued little woman, and yellow-haired pink-cheeked thirteen-year-old Janey, out of whose small triangular face looked the honest grey eyes of W. Keyse.
Both Mrs. Keyse and Janey had been crying, for Keyse, who acted as the Doctor's chauffeur, had broken bad news in the kitchen-regions. Master Bawne, according to Keyse, had been taken for a trip in one of them Hairos by a German flying-bloke, and it was feared—not having returned or been heard of—that Something or Other had gone wrong.
Mrs. Keyse, a born optimist, rejected the idea of accident or casualty with ringing sniffs of incredulity. Master Bawne, the blessed dear! had prob'ly bin kidnup' by some foreign Nobleman wanting a Nair. Trust a German, Mrs. Keyse would never! having when a young woman in service at Alexandra Crescent, Kentish Town, N.W., been treated something frightful by a young man who travelled in shaving-sets of German silver and other fancy articles of Teuton origin. Keyse must often have heard her mention That There Green?
Keyse responded, lighting his pipe, for his wife and daughter had accompanied him to their own private parlour in the basement, looking out across the yard to the garage over which Billy and Janey had been born:
"Twice a day since you and me stood up before the dodger to git married. But you never tipped me as 'ow the bloke was a bloomin' Fritzer before. 'Ow do you make it out? Switch me on to the notion! 'Cos o' somethink in the German nickel 'e drummed in gettin' into 'im an' affectin' 'is blood?"
Mrs. Keyse, impervious to sarcasm as incapable of grammar, maintained that the subject under discussion had spoke wiv' a Naxent particularly noticeable when upset. Broken English, in moments of passion, with red eyes and white 'air simpular to one o' them Verbenas, had in conjunction with a decided bent towards bigamy, and an appetite for other people's savings, distinguished That There Green.
W. Keyse and Janey went off to bed, and the other servants, instructed through the Doctor's consulting-room speaking-pipe, shut up the house and retired, all save the night-maid who answered the telephone, and attended to the midnight rings at the hall-door. But Mrs. Keyse did not follow the household. The Doctor and Mrs. Saxham were still shut up together in the consulting-room. Mrs. Keyse owned to herself that she had talked all that rubbage about That There Green and cetra, to hide that her heart was as water in her bosom, and that she trimbled and shook all over after the fashion of them Fancy shapes of Chicken in Haspeck, or Coffin cream, or Blue Mange coloured with Scotch Anneal.
It grew late and later. The flares on the Flying Ground, many times renewed, had died down to greasy black ash in the scorched and dented buckets, before there was a movement or a sound in the dark consulting-room. Then the woman who sat in the chair sighed, and the long quivering breath she drew, stirred the thick hair of the man who knelt upon the floor before her, holding her in his arms.
"Owen!"
"My wife!"
The sigh that had escaped her seemed to flutter through the unlighted room like some dusky-winged creature of the darkness. She leaned her face upon his brow, pressing her lips upon the smooth place above the broad meeting eyebrows. The first kiss she had ever given Saxham had been placed just there. Now the sweet lips were cold. He could feel how the delicate white teeth were set behind them. Had she relaxed her grip upon herself he knew she must have cried aloud. Nor could he help her save by his sustaining hold, and the silence of a grief only equalled by her own. Thus they had remained, speechless through the hours; drawn closer than ever by the anguish of mutual loss.
Now she stirred in Saxham's arms, and spoke collectedly:
"Tell me Bawne is not—dead! Give me courage to go on waiting. And yet, do not help me to deceive myself or you, with a false hope."
"If the worst had happened," said Saxham, almost appealingly, "should we not have known it?"
She breathed between stiff lips, trying to control her shuddering:
"Twice to-night I have heard him call me: 'Mother!' and then again, 'Mother!' Now I feel"—she closed her eyes and opened them widely, staring through the darkness—"that he is wanting me!—wanting you!—as he never has before. We were always near till now—he could not realise what parting meant!"
She fought with sobs, and the tears she could not keep back fell in the darkness on her husband's face. His own were mingled with them. Perhaps she knew it, as she wiped them away with a touch that was a caress, saying:
"We must not give in! We must not fail him! To abandon hope too soon would be to fail!"
Courage had come to her with the paling of the stars and the greying in the East that meant the dayspring. She was full of solicitude for Saxham's weariness, as he rose up stiffly as a knight who has watched his armour through the long hours, kneeling on the threshold of the Sanctuary, and knows with the waning of the flame in the lamp before the Tabernacle that his vigil is over and done.
"You are tired—so tired! Dear Owen, go to bed now, if only for an hour or two. There will be news of him very soon now—there must be news!"
Saxham took a delicate fleecy wrap from a chair and put it about her, for she shivered in the raw chill of the unsunned morning air. Then he touched the blind, and it rolled up upon a vista of backyard and garage. The shriek of an engine and the vibrating passage of an early train through Portland Road Tube Railway came into their ears, standing together at the open window, as Dawn in her streaming crocus veil peeped shyly through the vast smoke-bank that broods upon the morning face of London, engendered by the innumerable little fires of those among her five millions who must rise and eat, and go forth to labour ere yet it is fairly day.
"Owen, tell me! What is coming? What is it I feel, here and here?"
She turned upon her husband suddenly with the question, touching her brow and heart lightly and fixing on him her widely opened eyes. The haunted look of Beatrice had come back to them. His wife's strange likeness to the Guido portrait in the Barberini Palace Gallery—the tragic face with the wistful eyes, that despite the asseverations of the learned and critical will be associated as long as its canvas hangs together with the Daughter of the Cenci—leaped up in her at this hour to startle him afresh.
"What is in the air?" she asked. "What changes are taking place about us? What great and horrible Thing is moving,—moving towards us as we stand together here?"
Saxham's powerful arm went round her protectingly. He answered:
"You shall know, my love, my comrade. In confidence—I am permitted to tell you this much. We stand upon the very brink of international War!"
She looked at him and in the golden eyes he read courage, endurance and tenderness. Love that would be changeless. Fidelity through life beyond Death to the Life that is for evermore.
"You mean that Austro-Hungary will attack Servia, and that Russia will intervene?"
"As Austria intends, no doubt," said Saxham shrugging, "prompted by her Mentor and Ally at Berlin. In him we have a personality blatantly vain, immensely egoistic, feverishly energetic, imbued to the verge of monomania with the idea of his own appointment by the Almighty—as they understand Him in Germany—to be Imperial leader of nations and arbiter of the destinies of Kings!"
He went on:
"Suppose the Great Powers of the World a row of straw bee-skeps, susceptible of being upset by a Hohenzollern kick! Will the mailed toe of Imperial Germany refrain from giving it—invading France through the lost Alsace-Lorraine provinces, the moment Austria-Hungary gets to grips with the Russian bear? Britain is France's ally, bound in Honour to support her. Now you understand what vital questions the Chancellories of the world were burning electric light and brain-power and eyesight over, the long night through, while you and I——"
She stopped him:
"You make me think!—You have told me—That man who has taken my darling is a German Flying Officer. He may have had some urgent, secret reason for quitting England at once!"
"It is more than probable that he carried dispatches of importance. But I can answer no questions on that point. I should be verging, if I did, on a betrayal of confidence."
Lynette Saxham looked at her husband earnestly, and the change wrought in her by the long night's vigil of sorrow sent a pang through the man's heart. That line of anxiety between the slender eyebrows and the bluish shadows round the golden eyes came to him, like the sorrowful sweetness of the exquisite lips, out of the past.
"Why do the Germans hate us?" she asked, and he answered wearily and sombrely:
"As the nation with which Germany runs neck and neck in military armament, national wealth and influence, Germans pay us British the compliment of dislike. German ambition, spreading rank and high, is checked in the attainment of its ends even by our geographical position. We carry in our veins too large a share of Teutonic blood, to be ingratiating or subservient to our arrogant and domineering neighbours. What hatred is bitterer than racial hatred? Where is enmity deadlier than that one finds existing between women and men of kindred blood?"
The face of David, fair and debonair, rose up before Saxham as he said it. Strange! that even while he thanked his stars for David's ancient treachery, the fact of the betrayal should rankle in the Doctor still.
"Nowhere is there hatred more terrible. Listen, Owen—there is something I want to tell you——"
Lynette shivered and drew the fleecy shawl more closely about her white bare throat, and the slender shoulders and arms that were revealed through the laces of her filmy dinner-gown:
"In the first days of the Siege of Gueldersdorp, a woman from the native stad, the wife of a Barala herd, who came to the Convent for medicine and soup for a sick piccanin—told the Mother that long before the Orange Free State threw in its lot with the Transvaal—long before Oom Paul and Vader Steyn ordered that all rooinek soldiers sent by Groot Brittanje to South Africa should quit the country—the Barala could not sleep in their kraals at night 'for the going of the creatures.' Not all the creatures of prey—the Eaters of Flesh—the crows and the aasvogels, the wild dogs and jackals, the aard-wolves, and hyænas. But the hartebeest and springbok and prongbuck and rietbuck; with the little gazelles and tiny antelopes, the dassies and hares, and all the shy, wild harmless things that are stalked and shot for what is called sport, by most men and some women—they passed away in multitudes each night until just before the dawn. Even the meerkat and the leopard went, the baboons and snakes and the big lizards. Barala trackers followed the trails North to the Marches of the Okavango—and farther still into the Mabunda country—the woman told us—and their wise men had warned them that it was a teeken of War to come."
Her wistful eyes strained towards the East, where between the crowded roofs of the vast City and the shadowy purple day-brow, showed a clear wide band of crocus-yellow, melting into exquisite hyacinth-blue.
"Perhaps I am like the antelope and the hares and the wild-bucks and the other creatures. It may be that this nameless Thing that I have felt coming nearer and nearer is War," said Lynette. Then she winced as though the net had whirled and fallen, and the trident pierced, and cried out irrepressibly: "If so—Bawne will be out there unprotected—in the midst of it! Owen!—do you hear me? How can you stand there so calmly when such a thing may be? How—oh!—how could you consent to his going?"
Saxham's square face was set like a mask in the stern effort for self-control. He was in spirit with the Navigating Lieutenant on the upper bridge of H.M.S. Rigasamos, hearkening to the drone of an aëroplane struggling against the thrust of a north-west gale.... He heard the double knock of a back-fire, and heard men talking about engine-trouble. Even as he brought himself back to say quietly:
"I did as you would have done in the same circumstances. If the same voice that spoke to me had virtually said to you: 'Here stands your only son, a child in years and yet a man for England! Will you let him go?' Would you not have consented? If you deny, I shall tell you that I know my wife better than she knows herself!"
"'A child in years—a man for England....'" The fold between her slender eyebrows deepened and the delicate sensitive upper-lip lifted, showing the white, slightly irregular teeth. "I do not understand," she said piteously; "Was there any question of an order to be carried out?—a duty to be done?"
"There was a question to be settled," said Saxham, "involving Bawne's whole future. Here and Hereafter—and the question was this: Whether the son you have given me is worthy of his mother, or whether he has inherited any twist of brain, any degenerate and wretched weakness from the father whom your pure hand saved and led back, my guardian Saint, my heart's beloved!—from the very threshold of the gates of Hell."
"Owen! Don't speak so of yourself. I will not hear it. You had been so wronged—driven beside yourself by misfortune and betrayal. You were not responsible——" She covered the little ears with the slender hands. He took the hands down and kissed them, and held them in his own, as he went on:
"That is what I should like to believe. But—the truth is very different. There was—there is still, I suppose—a spot of weakness in me. A bubble of air in the casting—a flaw in the wrought steel." He looked like wrought steel as he spoke; "I had to be sure our boy is sound, mentally and morally as he is physically. Fit—in the fullest and highest sense of the word. Rather than have the doubt," said Saxham, "or the knowledge that confirms the doubt, I would——"
"No, no!" She tried to free her slender hands, but the Doctor's hold was as inexorable as gentle. "You must not say—that! I cannot bear——"
"Ah, my poor love, you, too, have feared lest the sins of the father might some day be visited on the son!" said Saxham with a strange mingling of pity and sorrow and exultation. "Well, now for your comfort, believe they will not be. Bawne is all yours, Lynette. Young as he is, he has learned to master Self and conquer Fear. Obedience, Duty, and Honour are welded into the metal of his character. If I had not been my boy's father, I should have envied that man—knowing what I have learned to-day. And therefore I do not grudge—I give freely——"
"You give—you do not grudge——" She suddenly wrenched away her hands and said in a tone that chilled Saxham:
"Owen, do you speak like this because you believe Bawne is—dead?"
The Doctor made answer:
"I believe that if God so decree our boy will yet be given back to us. As far as knowledge goes—except for one fact I am little wiser than you."
"I must know what that one thing is! You will tell me now, and all!"
The sun was rushing up over East London in a gloriole of golden fire. To her husband's thought she was like some slender Roman patrician at the stake, as she stood up against the background of flaming splendour, and waited to hear the worst.