"Look!" Sherbrand had said, pointing to a whitewashed, red-tiled cottage cuddled in a hollow some quarter of a mile distant, girt with a gay frivolous little garden full of bachelor's buttons and sunflowers, lavender bushes and nasturtiums yellow and red. He slipped his hand within her arm and pressed it, whispering: "There's our Eden—and my dream has come true!"
Her heart choked her. They moved on together shoulder to shoulder, her elbow resting in the bend of his strong arm, and her hand lying in his. The air they breathed was sweet with heady, nameless fragrance, the burning golden light that haloed them seemed the effluence of their love. Anguish and rapture mingled in the chalice of the perfect hour for Patrine. Nothing but rapture was in the draught for Sherbrand, though a faint fold showed between his eyebrows as he said suddenly:
"Hang it! I've forgotten to ask the Station fellows to give me a night's shakedown. However, there's a decent hotel in Seasheere. My bag is still in the machine, by the way.... Did you send someone on to the cottage with your traps?"
"I——"
She began to falter. It was coming.... But his eagerness delayed the moment of revelation. The track they followed dipped down and they found themselves in a grassy basin. The turf cupped up on every side and they were alone, lidded by the blazing turquoise sky.
At the bottom of the green nest he stopped, and next moment his embrace enveloped her. She forgot, as an answering flame burned in her blood, all the things that she had meant to say. "I'll have my hour," shot through her whirling brain, "I must have something of him to keep in remembrance. He has never loved me—nor I him—so passionately as now. Oh, my God!"
He released her with a happy sigh, and they sat down on the shadowed side of their green nest, a deep dimple in the cheek of the sunny, smiling Earth, and looked in each other's eyes. He said, as she took off her hat and threw it aside and turned her unveiled, unshadowed face back to his:
"Your dear cheeks are thinner, I fancy, Pat. Have you been worrying much about me?"
She nodded, thinking of her sleepless nights passed after reading his few letters, or when his letters had failed to come.
"Pretty badly—in the days of the Retreat from Mons. You piloted that French officer over the Channel and—whiff!—you vanished. What has become of him?"
"Wing Commandant Raymond? He's riding the storm and directing the whirlwind somewhere on the French Front. I got my orders to join the R.F.C.-unit acting with a rearguard battery of the Second Army Corps as soon as I'd dumped him. As for the work with the battery, it was always the same thing. We flew out against von Kluck's advance, spotting their gun-emplacements and getting the range for our gunners. And under us a dark-brown river with five branches rolled South. And that was the Retreat."
His arm was round her, her cheek was pressed to his, her bosom heaved against him. She turned her lips to his in a quick kiss, and whispered:
"And when you came down out of your sky 'like pigeons homing at nightfall'—that's a sentence in one of your letters—d'you recognise it?—the river went on rolling still?"
"Just the same, without a break. And what a—welter. Remnants of crack infantry brigades tangled with the rags of cavalry squadrons—grimy, hairy, ragged chimney-sweeps with bandaged feet and empty bellies, and blackened tongues hanging out, and blind, blank, staring eyes.... Imagine all the toy soldier outfits in the kiddy-shops of Regent Street emptied into the gutters and you'll get an idea of what the thing was like.... And Transport and Supply-columns jumbled with bits of R.G.A. batteries and R.F.A.—three dying horses to a howitzer, and one gunner left out of six! Bands of refugees and troops of stragglers. Lunatics led along howling and gibbering. Lorries, carts, and motor-vans crammed with swollen-footed cripples—cheek by jowl with bloody spectres evacuated from Field Hospitals that were reddening the sky with their burning in the rear. A day-and-nightmare to haunt one for ever if the end had been different—" He caught his breath. "But when I remember that we straightened the muddle—brought Order out of Chaos—turned on the Germans and bit to the bone—I pray that the memory may stay with me always, so that I may teach your sons and mine what it means to be Englishmen!"
"Oh, Alan! My poor boy! ..." She caught him in her arms with sudden passion, strained him to her and then freed herself from him, and moved away, signing to him that he must not approach. "What you hope for can never be! I'd have told you this before if I'd been decent, but I wanted your kisses—I was hungry for the touch of you—and the sound of your voice in my ears after all these weeks and weeks——"
"Then why do you say it can never be—and tell me in the same breath that you long for me and love me?" His light brows were drawn into a heavy line over his stern grey eyes. "Aren't you and I going to be married? Is it possible that you'd draw back—now?"
"Because your wife should be a pure woman, and I am not, it is possible. Don't move! Don't come nearer! If you do I'll never have the courage to tell—what must be told!"
And he had sat still, as a figure in carved khaki-coloured stone with his knees apart and his knotted hands hanging between them, and his eyes, curiously hard and pale against the strong red sunburn of his face, fixed immovably upon her mouth. When she ended there had been a great silence; and she had looked up at the azure dome lidding their green nest, wondering why the burning, perfumed breeze had suddenly turned cold. His voice recalled her:
"Why have you told me this?"
"To be honest." She hugged her knees. "To give you a chance for freedom before you were handicapped with me for life, poor boy!"
"And how do you suppose it makes me feel?" He breathed roughly, and gritted his teeth, wringing his hands in one another so strongly that the knuckles started death-white against the reddened skin. She heard herself saying lamely:
"I knew you'd be horribly sick about it and hate me!"
"I don't hate you. But I want to kill him! He took you to that damnable place and—" He bit his lip and swallowed. "How long was that before I met you at Hendon? Three days—and our day of meeting—the meeting I thanked God for!—was July 18th. This is October—the 14th—to be particular. You must know what I'm driving at. Is there—any danger——"
She said in a level voice, looking at him steadily:
"I have deserved it—but I think God is going to be kinder to me than to—punish me in that way." Her eyes flickered and fell from his. "It was because—I was so awfully afraid at first that I made up my mind to marry you. And now—and now you know the very worst of me."
"Hardly the worst." He drew breath roughly, and the cloud upon his forehead lightened a little. "We'd have been man and wife before I flew for France—if you'd let me have my way. Why didn't you?"
"I—Oh!—It seemed so mean.... A kind of child-stealing. You were so unsuspecting, and so generous, and so clean!" She bit her lips, and the tears welled over her underlids.... "You shamed me into being straight with you. I'd loved you from the beginning. But it was as though my love had left off crawling and grown a pair of wings."
"Answer me straight." He turned so as to face her. "Did you ever love that German?"
"To my shame be it spoken—never for an instant! After that night at the Upas I hated him unspeakably. Only when I thought he was dead, I began to let up a little on the hate."
He looked at his hands and unknotted them and knotted them, and said suddenly:
"You may be interested to know that he is not dead, but very much the other thing. He is scouting and spotting for von Kluck's gunners on their south and west Fronts, and sometimes bombing positions he has skried out—and doing it all superbly, damn him! He has been degraded to the rank of a Supernumerary Flying officer for some breach of duty that got to the Kaiser. And he has evidently made his mind up to make good in this War. They pick him for all the dangerous missions. He seems unkillable—and we've tried our hardest. And wherever he goes—until now I've kept this from you—he takes—the Saxhams' son!"
"Bawne! ..."
She shaped the name dumbly, with lips that were pale as poplar leaves. "God forgive me!" her conscience whispered. "How little I have thought of Bawne!"
"Yes. I mean Bawne!"
So odd was the contrast between the speaker's grim, set face and the bald simplicity of his language, that her white lips twitched with a crazy desire to laugh, as he added:
"I've been keen for a long time on coming across the man who pinched my hawk-hoverer and kidnapped my friend's son—and putting the fear of God into him with an automatic revolver, or a Maxim.... But now that I know—this!"—the deadly contempt in the voice is inconveyable—"a clean death hardly meets his case. Good cartridges seem wasted in killing that fellow. One wants to set one's heel down—hard on him—and scrunch!"
He had sat silent, staring before him yet a moment longer. Then he gathered himself together and got up from the grass, glanced at his wrist-watch and said, holding out his hand to assist her in rising:
"Well, let's be going. It's half-past three. They'll expect us to tea at the cottage. By the way, you haven't told me. Did you send on your bag from the station when you came?"
She shuddered violently, and leaped up without touching the offered hand. The west was all dappled with tiny pearly cloudlets, their shadows were lengthening momentarily, the salt smell of the sea was on the breeze that came in languid puffs. But the wine of joy that had brimmed their green bowl had been emptied out by her own hand, and the draught now held to her flinching mouth was bitterer than hemlock and blacker than Styx. That change in his face and voice—
"What do you suppose? I brought no bag. I am going home by the next train." She glanced at a little jewelled wrist-watch he had given her and back at the mask-like face, that said:
"You mean we part here, for good! Is that it?"
"For good—or bad. My poor boy——"
He put her "poor boy" from him with a gesture of the hand. He asked in a flat, toneless voice:
"Am I a blackguard like von Herrnung? You came down here to marry me. What will be said afterwards—if——"
"I'm past caring what people think or say!" she flashed at him angrily. "I've told you that I will not marry you!—that I'm not fit to be your wife. Oh! if you suppose it didn't hurt——"
A rush of tears drowned out his altered visage. She turned away, fighting for composure, summoning all her woman's pride to help her at her need. That swaying grace, that alluring physical perfection—had never appealed to Sherbrand's senses so irresistibly....
"Patrine!"
She heard his eager footsteps following her. She was snatched into his masterful embrace, assailed by his stormy kisses, wooed by his passionate words of love beyond her power to resist. The flood in the veins of both was rising, the force of the warm rushing torrent was bearing them away, she cared not whither, so that she might keep those arms about her still.
"Patrine! My woman of women—do you think I'd let you go from me? Not I! I'll have you for my wife whether you will or no! We'll forget—all that! We'll be happy in spite of it. Won't we?"
"No!" she gasped out.
"We will, I tell you!" He laughed out with ringing triumph and bent his head, seeking her evasive mouth with his own. Hard pressed she had panted:
"Don't ask me to marry you! I'd never, never do it! Unless you were poor and sick and a nobody—and wanted a woman to nurse and work for you.... Then—the wag of a finger or the wind of a word would bring me to you. But—I swear it before God!—I won't marry you as you are!"
"You will!"
"I've sworn I won't. But—" She had whispered it in a kiss of fire—"I will give you—what that other man took!"
And Sherbrand had uttered a hoarse sound like a sob, and unwound her arms from about his neck, and said, holding her hands close in his and looking sternly in her swimming eyes:
"I'm no saint, God knows!—but I'm a better man than to take what you offer. Halloa! That's Davis. What's up now?"
A distant whistle had made him prick his ears. He whistled back and ran lightly up to the brink of the grassy punch-bowl in time to meet the little black-avised Welshman—hero of the Paris episode in connection with the girl with the goo-goo eyes. Davis had handed him a paper-pad. Sherbrand had read it, scrawled a reply on the blank side to be dispatched by the Station's Wireless, and hurried back to Patrine.
"We—couldn't have been married to-morrow anyway. The man who undertook to replace me while I went on leave has been killed doing reconnaissance on our new Front in North-West France. I'm recalled."
"Recalled?"
He nodded. The British Force had been deftly transferred from its position on the Aisne to a base at St. Omer, you will remember, thus blocking the Calais Gate. The New Offensive was taking shape. Sherbrand had continued:
"So—if you're to catch the three-fifty from Fearnchurch to Charing Cross—we'll have to run!"
And as the screech of a distant engine had sounded from the direction of Fearnchurch Station, he had caught up the veiled hat and thrust it upon Patrine, grabbed her thin rain-coat and vanity bag and sunshade, and hurried her back to the flinty railway-station by the way she had come. And with the banging of the carriage-door, her woman's heart had broken. She had felt it bleeding drip, drip, drip! as Sherbrand's tall bare head and grave sad eyes had receded out of sight.
And the train had been delayed at the next station, waiting for the passage of a troop-train crammed with eager faced young men of Kitchener's Army, concrete answers to the famous Call to Arms and the First Five Questions—nearly half an hour. So that rounding the curve beyond the last signal-cabin for the clanking journey through the short tunnel, Patrine had seen, some miles to seaward of the glittering white prow of the North Foreland, a biplane with its wings reddened by the sunset, flying south-east.
"Oh! good-bye, Alan!" she had whispered, knowing that she would never see her Bird of War again. He had been caught and dragged back into the fiery whirl of the cyclone without the hope that nerves and supports and brings adventurers back. Sorrowful and stern, baulked of his heart's desire, grimly bent on meeting von Herrnung, and wreaking retribution for a horrible wrong, upon the red head of the Kaiser's Flying Man.