Prone to assume strange, angular attitudes when speaking, the Foreign Secretary hung over and clutched at the dispatch-box before him, as though it literally contained that most malignant of all the swarm of Evils that issued from the Box of Pandora, as he told his hearers of the rejection of the German bribe and warned them of the imminence of a Declaration of War. Then, amidst increasing, deepening excitement, the Prime Minister read the appeal of the King of the Belgians, and told of Great Britain's ultimatum to Germany....No wonder those close-packed crowds of sturdy Britons waited under the blue glare of the arc-lamps to hear Big Ben bell the midnight hour. As the great voice boomed Twelve from the illuminated square of the dial amidst the striking of the countless clocks of London, a tremendous roar of cheers acclaimed the pipping of the egg of Fate and Destiny, echoed by other crowds in distant thoroughfares, spreading in waves to the unseen horizon, whose East was pregnant with the Kaiser's Day.That Fourth of August; Eve of the Feast of British Oswald, King, soldier and Saint, whose Address to his Northumbrian warriors before the battle of Denisburn, fought against Pagan Cadwalla in 633, the Catholic Church enshrines in Her Chronicles:"Let us all kneel and jointly beseech the true and living GOD ALMIGHTY in His Mercy to defend us from the doughty and fierce enemy. For He knoweth that we have undertaken a just War....""Whereupon," says the Venerable Bede, "all did as the King commanded. And advancing towards the enemy with the first dawn of day, they won the victory their Faith deserved."And before midnight of this pregnant Fourth of August, from the great Wireless Station of Eilvise in Hanover, Germany flung round the world this vital message to all her mercantile Marine:"War declared on England! Make as quickly as you can for a neutral port!"On the outbreak of War the British Navy cut the All German cables. One by one the German Colonial Wireless Stations were dismantled. When the great station at Kamina in Togoland fell, the only remaining link in the system was between the Fatherland and the United States.Dawn outlining the silken blinds, vied with the blue glimmer of the night-lamp as Margot wakened, to hear, in the hush that precedes the Brocken-hunt of Sloane Street motor-traffic, Franky's low, urgent appeal:"Kittums! Kittums, best child!""What on earth did you wake me for?" said a sleepy and distinctly cross voice."Couldn't help it! I simply had to tell you!" Franky began.The little hand touched the electric clock-button and on the ceiling wavered a gigantic dial of yellow brightness."Hadto! At three o'clock in the morning! When I was having such a tophole dream! Thought I was back at the Club in my three dear rooms with the Adams doors and chimney-pieces—and Pauline came in with a huge basket of white flowers—and I asked: 'Who are they for?' And she said: 'For Mademoiselle!' And I was Margot St. John—and had never been married!" There was infinite wistfulness in the little voice."White flowers mean death, don't they, when you dream of 'em? And I'm sorry your dip in the Bran Tub of Matrimony has turned out such a bad investment. What I came to tell you should revive your hopes of making a better one, my child!"That jarring note of mingled resentment and irony, how new and strange it sounded to Margot! Until this moment Franky's voice had never been anything but gentle. It was gentle now as he said, at his dressing-room door:"Finish your sleep. I was rather a brute to wake you!" He was going without a backward glance."Come back! Come off it! Don't be dignified!" Margot called after the retreating figure. "I'm quite awake now, so you'd better tell. What's on?"He came back to the bedside, looking tall and shadowy in the blue dimness. Margot put up a little hand and patted his cheek. There were wet drops upon the smooth, warm skin.... Perhaps he had walked home, and it had been raining. Or—"Franky! You're not——"He captured the little hand and took it in both his own, and squeezed it. He said in a cheerful but rather choky voice:"Of course not! And—the news could have waited. Only—since midnight England and Germany have been at War. The Big Scrap is three hours old. First battalion of Ours is under orders for the Front—I've exchanged out of the Second with Ackroyd—too sick a man for fightin' just now, luckily for me. You know Ackroyd. Used to flirt with him frightfully—to give me beans when I'd vexed you when we were first engaged. When do we go, did you ask? Liable to be off at any old minute. By-bye, little woman. Too late to go to bed—heaps of things to attend to. God bless you! See you at brekker—or lunch, if I've luck."CHAPTER LTHE EVE OF ARMAGEDDONKittums, upon that fateful morning, coming down to breakfast and finding no Franky, was annoyed. One might just as well have had breakfast in bed. She didn't want any, but Cook would be hurt if the chowder and eggs, and croquettes of chicken weren't eaten. Therefore Margot ate—to avoid wounding the cook. The daily papers she left untouched, knowing that War would leap out from the huge capitals heading the columns and strike her in the eyes.She had herself dressed and 'phoned for the car. The house did not seem a place to stay in, somehow. Dowd was busy in his master's room, ordering Jobling about in loud authoritative tones and being waited upon by the maids. Even Pauline, ordinarily scornful, referred to him as "Monsieur Dowd" instead of "zat man Dow!"Once in Sloane Street, the War rushed at you. Groups of men, young, old or middle-aged, stood talking at every street-corner, newspapers rustled in every hand. You couldn't escape the papers. Huge flaring headlines shrieked from the broad-sheets in the gutters and on the railings: "WAR DECLARED! ULTIMATUM EXPIRED. BRITISH FLEET READY FOR BATTLE. INVASION OF BELGIUM BY GERMAN ARMY CORPS!" The drapery salesman who was to win the Victoria Cross, called from the top of a Knightsbridge motor-bus to the grocer's assistant who was to receive the Médaille Militaire at the doughty hands of Joffre.... The budding airman who was to bring down a Zeppelin single-handed chuffed past on a motor-cycle—the girls who were to make shells for British guns, or pack made ones with T.N.T. and kindred explosives, tripped along in their transparent hobble-skirts, to meet Alf and Ted at the Tube. And neither Alf, who subsequently took five Huns prisoner by the single hand, shepherding them back to the British lines with dunts of the gun-butt and sarcasms more pointed, nor Ted, who threw himself down over the exploding bomb, dying that his comrades in the trench might live, dreamed what kind of chick would pip Fate's egg for him or her presently. Yet the dullest face wore a new expression, in the tamest eyes burned the light of battle! Unquenched it burns in them still, after four dreadful years of War.The Club, already deserted by August holiday-makers, would be utterly abandoned to chimney-sweeps, charwomen and window-cleaners, and yet Margot told the chauffeur to drive to the Club.Turning out of Piccadilly she discovered Short Street to be blocked by taxi-cabs. An endless procession of telegraph-boys plunged in and out between the thudding swing-doors of the vestibule. The vestibule was congested with battered, dusty ladies, ladies' maids even dustier and more battered, and travelling bags battered and dusty to thenthdegree.Some of the bags were bursting, not a few of the maids were hysterical. All the returned travellers were telling their adventures at once. The air was thick with exclamations, explanations, cries and ejaculations. Unfed, unslept, baggageless and penniless in many instances, the members of the Ladies' Social—seeking health, or novelty, in half the pleasure-resorts upon the map of Europe—had come hurtling back to Short Street like leaves driven before the furious blast of War."Has anything happened?"Lady Norwater addressed this query to the Club hall-porter, a bald person of habitually slow movements and singularly bland address. The man gnashed his teeth at her, uttering a sound between a groan and a snarl—made as though to tear non-existent hair,—leaped with astonishing nimbleness over a pile of luggage, and vanished. Margot would have made a note of his conduct in the Complaints register, but that the hall-table was obliterated by heaps of rugs, dust-cloaks and waterproofs. Wondering, she made her way into the big General Room on the ground-floor.Here travel-creased, dust-smeared members sat in voluble rows on the comfortable sofas, or reclined speechless in the capacious armchairs. Medical men, hastily summoned by 'phone, moved noiselessly from patient to patient. Husbands and male friends listened not unmoved, to piteous recitals of adverse experiences undergone on enemy ground.Kittums, snatched into the whirl, moved from friend to friend, gathering experiences. Mrs. Charterhouse, with her Pekinese pug and her maid, had just arrived at Homburg to undergo treatment for a twenty-two-inch waist when the War Cloud gathered monstrous on the horizon. Had not her Swiss doctor written a warning instead of a prescription the white and golden Cynthia, Mademoiselle Mariette and Chin-Chin, would at this moment have been languishing on rye bread and bean coffee in a Teutonic jail."As it is, we've spent a whole week, and every sou we had on us making the journey!" said Cynthia, in her plaintive tones. "They held us up at Frankfurt, Basel, and Geneva! What inquisitions, what scowling suspicious looks! To be hunted and suspect makes you wicked, I've found out! When we got to Paris at four yesterday morning and took a ricketyfiacreto the Palais—all the taxis have vanished!—I could haveprayedfor a cup of tea and a roll! But at the Palais all was confusion. The hotel was shutting up—every male servant called to the Reserve. We got to the 'Spitz'—the same experience there! Exhausted, I sat on something in the vestibule—it moved, groaned, and I found it to be the wreck of Sir Thomas Brayham. He and Lady Wathe, his man and her maid, who have been all through July at Franzenbad in the Egerland,—reaching Paris after awful adventures, had all four been hurled out in the same way. One of those jiggety motor-omnibuses took all of us to the Couronne. They were full to the roofs and cellars, but they wedged us in, somehow! Then, for two days Sir Thomas tore round Paris trying to getlaissez-passers." She turned her lovely eyes upon a large, stertorously-breathing but otherwise inert object reclining with closed eyes and folded hands in the biggest of the Club armchairs. "Didn't you, Sir Thomas?""Beparr?"Brayham, waking with a bewildered stare, regarded the charming Cynthia uncomprehendingly until the Goblin, sitting opposite, centre of a knot of bosom friends, repeated the query:"Didn't you run about Paris for passes for two days?""No!" bounced out Brayham, now aroused, and purpling under the coal-dust that begrimed his large, judicial visage. He added, with a vestige of his King's Bench manner, as the Goblin stared at him in concern for his mental state: "I retain the use of my reason, dear friend! But I WILL NOT consent that the varied tortures of the abominable ordeal I have undergone could possibly be packed within the nutshell limits of forty-eight hours! Mph!"So dust-covered was the ex-Justice that the very act of shaking his head rebukingly at the Goblin, raised a cloud that made him sneeze. He uttered the curious composite sound that heralds sternutation, drew out a voluminous, coal-dusty handkerchief, stared at it indignantly, and in the very act of returning it to his pocket—fell asleep again."A perfect wreck, as I said just now!" whispered Mrs. Charterhouse to Kittums."HowI congratulate you, dear Lady Wastwood," said the Goblin, "on not having gone abroad!""Was it so horrid?" asked Trixie, sympathetically, arching the eyebrows that resembled musical slurs."Was it so—" Lady Wathe shrugged her thin shoulders and gave the ghost of one of her rattling laughs. "If to fight your way back, stage by stage, amidst inconceivable difficulties, obstacles and insults, is horrid!—if to travel for two long days and nights in trains crowded to suffocating excess merits the term—" She loosened the quadruple string of superb Oriental pearls that tightly clipped her stalk-like throat and went on: "If it comes under the heading to find yourself and your friends—in tatters after a suffocating struggle!—packed with sixty other squalid wretches in a luggage-vanen routefor Dieppe! If to sit for three hours on your jewel-case, waiting, in a crush of congested humanity, for the arrival of the Newhaven boat—if to fight as with beasts at Ephesus to gain its gangway—if to fall in a heap on the sodden deck—to lie there lost to everything but the fact that the waves that drench you are British waves, and the British coast is slowly crawling nearer!—if all this and how much more, can be lumped under the term of horrid, it has been, dear Lady Wastwood, horrid in the extreme!"Lady Wastwood's small, triangular, white face with the V-shaped scarlet mouth, looked enigmatical. She arched the thick black slurs that were her eyebrows again, and said not without intent, to her crony Cynthia Charterhouse:"Whowould havedreamedonly three weeks ago, when that excessively long-legged and extremely good-looking Count von Herrnung sat here and talked to us about German women and German Supermen—that we should be at War to-day with Germany?""Poor Count Tido!" Something rattled in the Goblin's meagre throat as though she had accidentally swallowed some of her pearls. "That dreadful report inThe Wiremade the Franzenbad treatment disagree with me horribly! To be drowned in that commonplace North Sea crossing, upon the very eve of realising the one ambition of his life! For he hated us so thoroughly! His Anglophobia was a perfect obsession. Poor dear Tido! One might call it a wasted career!" The speaker dried a tear and continued: "His family will be frantic. You know he was to have been married in October! Baroness Kriemhilde von Wolfensbragen-Hirschenbuttel. Immensely rich! Her father has large interests in the pearl-fisheries of German New Guinea. Her betrothal gift, a superb black and white pearl, the Count always wore as a mascot. Poor Baroness! She will be inconsolable. Marriage means the first draught of real freedom to young German girls!"Mrs. Charterhouse said in her sweetly venomous way:"Miss Saxham bears up—under the circumstances!""Under what circumstances, might one presume to ask?" Then, reading aright the ambiguous smile of Mrs. Charterhouse, the Goblin rattled out her characteristic laugh:"What absurdity! You refer to a mere dinner-table flirtation in Paris. The mererapprochementofatomes crochus! Miss Saxham and Lady Beauvayse dined with us on the night of the Grand Prix. Poor Tido was certainly struck with her. I remember he talked about her eyes and figure afterwards. But her hair being so black and growing so heavily—did not please him. He found the effect—I think his term was—'too crepuscular.'""Ah! You throw a ray," said Mrs. Charterhouse in that sugared way of hers, "on a mystery that has intrigued me. Now I know why Miss Saxham went to the Atelier Wiber in the Rue de la Paix and got her crepuscular tresses changed to terra-cotta!""Notsaffron? Now," said Lady Wastwood, pensively tilting her own green-gold head and elevating her arched black eyebrows, "I should have called that shade saffron or tumeric. Who do you suppose footed the bill for the process? The wretch Wiber simply won't look at you under four hundred and fifty francs!""Perhaps Vivie Beauvayse—" suggested Mrs. Charterhouse."I think not. Vivie preferred the crepuscular effect. It contrasted capitally with her own style of colouring. You must have noticed, they are seldom seen going about together as they used. Dear Lady Wathe, do you feel faint? Can I get you anything?"For something had clicked behind the Goblin's pearls, and she had suddenly stiffened in her seat. The superb figure of Patrine Saxham had entered by the swing-doors leading from the vestibule followed by a tall, broad-shouldered young man in loose grey tweeds, whose left sleeve displayed a band of black significantly new."Can that be Miss Saxham? It must be!—her type is so unusual! Not having seen her since the night of the dinner I referred to I did not quite grasp the meaning of your references to ingredients common in Indian curries. Of course, I understand now!" The Goblin surveyed the tall, pliant figure with the dead beech-leaf hair through her lorgnette before she leaned forwards and roused the sleeping Brayham by a brisk application of the instrument. "Look, Sir Thomas! Would you have known Miss Saxham?""Beparr! ... Wharr? ... God bless my soul, no!"Brayham, turning in the armchair as the Zoo walrus turns in his concrete pond, surveyed Patrine with a bloodshot stare."Silly girl! Spoilt her looks!" he snorted. "Handsome as the dooce with her gipsy-black tresses. Won her bet. Won't get her ring now though, unless von Herrnung paid before he flew!""Was there a bet between them? How is it you never told me? Have I deserved this from you?" demanded Lady Wathe indignantly, as Mrs. Charterhouse and Lady Wastwood exchanged glances and smiles."Sorry! ... Forgot! ..." Brayham gobbled apologetically. "Man I know happened to be close to 'em leaving Spitz's Restaurant that Sunday night in Paris. Told me he heard von Herrnung lay Miss Saxham his magpie pearl solitaire against a bit o' Palais Royal paste she was wearing—that she wouldn't change the colour of her hair! Made the appointment for her, with Wiber—'Pastiches Artistiques,' and so on,Rue de la Paix. He bragged of it afterwards at theCercle Moderne! Dam Germans! no idea of decency! Why do Englishwomen intrigue with 'em? Bounders that kiss and tell!"There was a significant pause, broken by the Goblin's shrillest peal of laughter. The ex-Justice, whose vitality was low, folded his hands and dozed again. Then——"Now weknowwho footed the bill," said Cynthia Charterhouse in dove-like accents. While Trixie murmured in the vexed ear of Margot:"Kitts, my dinkie, you are a pal of the Saxhams.Howfar had the affairreallygone?""There was no affair!" said Margot's sweet little voice, very clearly. "Pat rather hated Count von Herrnung than otherwise!""Judging by the mute evidence of her hair—" began Mrs. Charterhouse, languidly. How Margot loathed these women, erstwhile her chosen friends and associates, tearing with greedy beaks and vicious claws at the reputation of an unmarried girl...."Her hair belongs to her! She can bleach it if she wishes!" The little figure rose to its altitude of four feet seven inches and surveyed the scandalmongers with wrathful eyes. "I have said that there was nothing between Miss Saxham and Count von Herrnung"—the little voice was crystal-cold: "I should be extremely obliged to all of you if you will understand this clearly! Miss Saxham is engaged to my husband's cousin, Alan Sherbrand."—Had Franky heard that stately reference to my husband, he would have been "bowled," to quote himself. "Franky likes him, and so do I, tremendously! We're both keen on their bringing off the match!"There was another resounding silence. Brayham snored melodiously. Then Trixie Wastwood said with her Pierrot smile:"Really, Kitts, it was—hardly cricket not to have warned us!"While Mrs. Charterhouse added in tones of iced velvet:"Regard me also as prone beneath Miss Saxham's Number Eight shoes. Did you say herfiancéwas a cousin of Lord Norwater's? Not possibly the son of the uncle who died quite recently? Captain the Hon. Noel Sherbrand, late of the Royal Gunners.... My husband used to know him before—people left off!""It is the same. He muddled his career somehow, and—most people cut him! But he isdead," said Margot very deliberately, "and his son, if we have no—" the delicate cheeks flushed with sudden vivid crimson—"his son is perfectly tophole and Franky's next heir. We met him in June in Paris, and so did Pat Saxham! How do any of you know she didn't tint her hair to pleasehim.""Possibly she did! But, according to Sir Thomas—it was the other man who paid!""Odd, isn't it? In this world," said the Goblin with her crackling laugh, "the other man invariably pays the bill! And so the young gentleman over there—who is quite remarkably good-looking in the blond Norman style—and who is going to marry Miss Saxham—succeeds to Lord Norwater in—a certain eventuality! May one be permitted to hope, dear Lady Norwater, that Fate and yourself will combine fortuitously, to keep the cousin out of the House of Peers!""Rude, ill-bred, horrid woman!" thought Margot, clenching her little teeth to keep back these epithets. "How dare she twit me with—that! How dare—" Then her hot flush sank away and a mist came before her eyes, and she would have fallen, but that Trixie Wastwood jumped up from the sofa and threw about the little figure a kind, supporting arm."I've got you! You're not going to faint, Kittums, are you? Forgive us, my dinkie! Whatpigswe have been!""Heckling the tomtit for defending the saffron-crested blackbird! I rather agree with you," admitted Mrs. Charterhouse as Margot freed herself, saying it was nothing, and proudly moved away. "We women are horribly spiteful," continued Cynthia. "Yes, we are spiteful, Lady Wathe! I am perfectly in earnest. What is the reason? Will anything cure us? Do somebody tell me! Colonel Charterhouse would say it is because we eat too much rich food, walk too little, automobile too much, and want some useful work or other to occupy our minds! He is coming here to lunch with me—he was quite touchingly anxious to be invited!" Her beautiful eyes widened as the swing-doors thudded behind three entering masculine figures, "Why, here he is with Lord Norwater, and your boy, Trixie! All three in khaki! What a day we are having!"She added, as her handsome middle-aged Colonel made his spurred way through the ever-thickening crush to her:"I am enlightened! Sothiswas your surprise!""Not half as big as mine when I found they were willing to take me. 'Fit as a fiddle,' according to the M. O. Gad!"—he went on, as his wife made room for him on the settle by her side—"as willingly as though he had been somebody else's husband," Lady Wathe said subsequently—"It's to my golf I owe it—these A.M.S. sawbones finding me in the pink! And instead of a back-seat, what do you think they've given me? Command of the Third Reserve Battalion of the blessed old Regiment, the Loyal North Linkshires,viceCrowe-Pinckney, kicked out by a gouty toe! ... How's that for an oldster of fifty-five, ... Eh, what?" His chuckle was that of a Fourth Form athlete picked to supply a gap in the School Eleven. And Cynthia's beautiful eyes, as she slipped her hand into the Colonel's, looked at him as the boy's mother's might have looked upon her son.Lady Wastwood's Pierrot smile might have played upon the reunited couple mockingly, but that the unexpected apparition of her boy Wastwood in single-starred khaki, adorned with the badge of a crack Hussar Regiment, girt with the Sam Browne and narrow officer's shoulder-strap, and clad as to the legs in spurred brown butcher-boots—dimmed her bright green eyes and brought a choke into her throat. Wastwood the son was so like Wastwood the father—killed at Magersfontein in 1900,—whom Trixie, for no reason apparently, had romantically adored. A burly young man, pink as a baby, with thick fair hair growing down within two inches of his eyebrows, small, fierce blue eyes, and a huge roaring voice, softened down now to a tender bellow as he answered a pale girl's eager question with:"Well, I can't say exactly when we're going to the Front, but I hope to Christmas it'll be soon!"Wastwood's engagement to the girl had been announced only the week previously in the Society Columns of the leading dailies. Now, while Wastwood's younger brother Jerry anguished in the throes of a final Exam, at Sandhurst, the said Jerry being set upon getting a Commission in time to go to the Front with one of the First Divisions—his elder sat on a Club sofa and made love to the girl Jerry was subsequently to marry. For not only Wastwood's title, but his vacant Commission as a Lieutenant in the Dapple Greys and his sweetheart went to his junior after Mons.There was a lot of family and regimental re-shuffling and re-dealing, you will remember, after Mons.The leaven of the Great Awakening was working in the souls of these worldly-minded, ultra-modern men and women, even as the crowd in the rooms grew denser, as the buzz of talk became almost solid, and khaki mingled with the brilliant toilettes. Hardly a man but wore dead-leaf brown. Wives were entertaining their husbands, mothers were lunching their sons, that day, at the multitudinous little tables in the great and lesser dining-rooms,—there was a revival of old code-words, an interchange of almost forgotten pet-names, a resurrection of ancient jokes, when the atmosphere seemed dangerously charged with emotion. How many Last Sacraments of renewed love were eaten and drunk by husbands and wives who, estranged for years, were to be reunited by the War, and parted by the War until the Day when Wars shall be no more.That a tall young man in grey tweed with a crape armlet should sit opposite Patrine that day at Margot's special table was one of the thousand miracles already wrought.Sherbrand had shelved all recollection of that June adventure in the Bois de Boulogne, when a flushed young husband in immaculate top-hat and frock-coat had thanked an angry young man in waterproof overalls and gabardine for not chopping his wife into kedgeree.Could one be angry any more when this little human dragon-fly was what Patrine called "a frightful pal" of hers. Thank Heaven! Patrine had known nothing of the cousinship when she had answered Sherbrand's plain question, "Will you marry me?" with an assent:"Sooner than not!""Then—it is settled?""Yes, you poor dear! If you think me worth having!"Worth having! Sherbrand's glorious Patrine. Whom to be near was heaven on earth. Whom to obey was a lover's luxury, even when she had issued the mandate:"Now, you must come to the Club and lunch with me, and meet my friends. Do be decent to them!"Perhaps you can see Sherbrand bowing rather stiffly to Margot and accepting with the briefest hesitation the smallest of offered hands."I thought it must be the same!—I was certain there couldn't be two Flying Sherbrands. Pat!—Mr. Sherbrand can't deny the relationship, though he disapproves of Franky and me most fearfully. You'll have to teach him," went on the coaxing little voice, "that we're lots and lots nicer than he thinks us! For we've got to be friends," said Kittums, "if you and my dear Pat are going to be married! No time like the present! Can't we begin now?"What a vivid little face it was, though there were tired marks like faint bruises under the great dark eyes, and the rose-flush in the cheeks was less bright than it had seemed in June. He released the tiny jewelled fingers, and found himself presented to the husband."Frightfully glad to meet you—more reasons than one!"Franky, slim, sleek-headed, and dapper in unblemished Regulation tea-leaf, held out his hand, saying as he looked the other squarely in the eyes:"If I had known your Home address, I should like to have dropped a line to you, when I—when I saw the newspaper yesterday.""My mother lives at Bournemouth. My father had been an invalid for years. I go down to-day by the afternoon train.""Ah! Please remember me to my—Aunt Jeannette."From what dusty shelf of memories had Franky reached down the name of his uncle's unknown wife? But it sounded pleasantly to Mrs. Sherbrand's son. The cloud upon his forehead cleared away, and his cold sea-blue eyes began to thaw into kindness:"I'd like a word with you in private. Do you mind comin' out of this clackshop into the vest*i*bulee?" Franky went on, quoting his favourite Jimmy Greggson, and with a word to Margot and a glance on Sherbrand's part at Patrine, the two men passed through the swing-doors. Here Franky wheeled, and said with effort:"This is a bit subsequent! but—if there's time available and the date of my uncle's funeral doesn't happen to be fixed, I should like to say—" He grew furiously red and began to stammer: "My father ... myself ... Dash! how brutally I bungle! But my uncle has a right to—to lie in the family vault with his ancestors. It's at Whins—the Church is in the Castle grounds. I can guarantee that my father—every facility—sympathy—proper respect—" He broke down. Sherbrand answered, now the cooler of the two:"You are very kind, Lord Norwater. My mother has already received a telegram from Lord Mitchelborough conveying a message to the same effect.""I engineered that!" thought Franky complacently. But he was fish-dumb. Sherbrand went on:"She would thank you, as I do, gratefully. But my father—would have preferred to be buried where he died!""Good egg! And now there's another thing to get off my chest," said Franky. "You know you stand in for the Viscounty when I succeed my father, or if I get knocked out in this scrap—supposing I should kick without heirs! That being so, suppose you bury the hatchet and lunch with us? Wouldn't in Paris—perhaps you will now? The War seems to rub up old saws like new somehow. That copy-book tag about Blood bein' thicker than water! that's one of the ones I mean. In case my wife got left—do you tumble?"—the ambiguous term was quite expressive—"I'd like to think that you were—would be kind to her!""I should certainly—in that case—try to do what I could." A certain physical and mental resemblance showed between these two long-legged, lightly-built, clean-made Sherbrands, standing together talking of grave matters, with candour and simplicity and British avoidance of sentiment and excess of words."But,"—Sherbrand found himself yielding to an impulse of confidence in the owner of the brown eyes that were some inches below his own, "this War is my chance! I'm a certified pilot-aviator and constructor and engineer. Perhaps there'll be a chink in the Royal Flying Corps for me—and many another fellow like me—before long—I hope, not very long! For my father's sake as much as for my own, I'm bound to make good—you understand?"The brown eyes understood. His kindred blood warmed to the look in them."He knew—my father knew that he had failed in life through his own fault. He did not resent his brother's attitude. He bore the consequences more or less patiently, and when he died he left the cleansing of his name to me. Not that he was as badly to blame as people thought. He was born without sufficient of the quality called—objectivity. It's the power that keeps a man slogging, slogging in one groove without getting mechanical or stupid, as long as he attain his ends or can serve his country by keeping on. It'sindispensable!"—he emphasised the word, his strong blue-grey eyes full on Franky's—"as indispensable as lymph in your inner ear-tubes. Without it you can't keep a level balance—whether you stand, or walk, or fly!""Miss Saxham—knows, I suppose?"A flush crept up through Sherbrand's tanning:"I have told her. It wasn't pleasant. But she—likes me enough to overlook it. She—seems to think I should never fail in that way! I hope to God I never shall!" The old boyish terror of inherited weakness cropped up in the tone of the man grown. "It would be horrible to suspect the bacillus of slackness lurking in my blood! If there is—the sooner I get scrapped, the better for her and for me!""Well, you've chosen the—kind of career that is going to use up a good many men pretty quickly." Franky was warming more and more to this big blond, candid cousin. "Not that I think there's much of the slacker about you. Few chaps more fit and nervy—that is, going by looks, you know! But if the Kaiser's Flying Men can shoot on the wing as well as they brag they can"—his brown eyes were watchful for a change in the other's face—"then——""Then I tumble out of my sky, a dead bird!" said Sherbrand, squaring his broad shoulders, "and someone luckier fills my place!""Thumbs up! Ten to one you'd come down with a broken wing or so." There was something that touched Franky's latent quality of imagination in the fellow's queer way of saying "my sky." "This cousin of mine is a handsome fellow," he said to himself, "and a plucky one. And—by the Great Brass Hat!—now I come to think of it—the livin' image of old Sir Roger Sherbrand—his and my great-grandfather—goin' by the portrait in the gallery at Whins.""So you're firm on joinin' the Flying Corps..." he went on, feeling for the moustache which had been reduced to Regulation toothbrush size. "Good egg You! Wish you all the sporting chances——""And better luck," said Sherbrand drily, "with Bird of War No. II. than I had with No. I.!""You're building a new 'plane?" The brown eyes were alight with interest."Rather! Come and have a look at her one day.""Like a shot, if only I'd time! Did she tot to a hatful of money?""Something under £700. £500 of that goes for the new 'Gnome' engine. You see that German—" Sherbrand broke off."I remember! Pretty rough on you, that North Sea crossin' business. Must have been an awful loss. Look here!" Franky reddened again and began to flounder. "Could I—couldn't I—help with the boodle? Got £700 lying by idle. Frightfully glad if you'd let me chip in!—just in a cousinly sort o' way!""I am much obliged to you, Lord Norwater."Confound the fellow! how he froze at the least hint of patronage. He went on, holding his head high:"You are very kind, but I am not poor, unless as poverty is understood by people of your world. Apart from what my profession brings me I have something in the way of income. My mother's brother left me a sum of money that brings in yearly over £200." He went on as Franky regarded with unaffected interest the man who wasn't poor on two hundredper annum: "The principal—I suppose it tots up to £6,000—I shall naturally settle on my wife."He warmed and brightened with the utterance of the word. His cold eyes grew soft and his brows smoothed pleasantly. He said with a glowing pride, and a kind of brave shyness that a woman who loved him would have adored:"I have said nothing yet to Miss Saxham about my hopes of a Commission—I suppose for fear of not pulling the thing off. But the moment it comes along I shall persuade her to marry me. We'll be man and wife before I fly for the Front."As cocky as though he had landed the biggest catch in the matrimonial waters, thought Franky, instead of that great, slangy, galumphing young woman without a halfpenny at her back. But he did the amiable, in a way characteristic of Franky, ushering the guest back to the luncheon-room, introducing "my cousin" to people worth knowing, doing the honours with a pleasant cordiality that won upon Sherbrand more and more.Sherbrand took leave directly after lunch, saying that he had to catch the afternoon express for Bournemouth. He had left his bag and suit-case in the hall-porter's care. Would Patrine?—Patrine read the entreaty in the hiatus and yielded to it, saying Yes, she would drive with him, and see him off from Waterloo."It's lovely of you!" Sherbrand said to her gratefully as they rose. She gave him her cordial smile and a soft glance from the long eyes. They took leave of their hosts and passed out together, heads slewing as the tall young figures went by.Once in a taxi, spinning down Short Street, Sherbrand possessed himself of the hand he coveted. Its warm strong, answering clasp thrilled him to speechlessness. He looked at the long white fingers intertwined with his own, and asked himself whether he were deserving of a happiness too great to be credited. When her shoulder touched his, its warm creamy whiteness gleaming through the dead-white of her thin sleeve, his heart drummed until it seemed as though she could not but hear it. But his was not the only heart that beat...."Thank you." It was her rich warm voice speaking close by his ear. "Thank you for being so nice to my Kittums! She is the truest little soul going. We have been chums ever since I joined the Club. Never quarrelled once—until she made up her mind to marry Franky——""And now you're going to marry Franky's first cousin." Sherbrand laughed rather breathlessly. "'Marry' ... 'Marriage.' Two splendid words with meanings and meanings beyond meanings packed into them. Isn't it wonderful? ..." He gripped the warm white hand in his strong brown one. "Pat, your pulses are playing a tune!""So are yours," she answered in a low tone."What is it?" He bent his head and set his lips in a swift caress to the back of the white hand. Then he turned it gently over and looked earnestly at the blue wrist-veins. They were full and throbbing tumultuously. Her blood was answering to the call of his. He set a second swift kiss upon them and his voice was unsteady as he said:"I know the name of the tune, my wonder. Patrine! Love!—it's theWedding March!""Whose? Grieg's, or Wagner's inLohengrin, or Haydn's?""Neither Wagner's nor Haydn's nor Grieg's. Yours and mine! I told Lord Norwater to-day that I meant to make sure of you before I fly for the Front.""You're going to the Front? Oh!—why?" Her long eyes looked at him with sharp terror in them. He answered:"When the Powers that be offer me a Commission in the Royal Flying Corps.""I see." She breathed freely. "And so—we are not to be married until then?""Would you—to-morrow, if I——""You know I would!" Her voice broke over him in a wave of tenderness. "You've made me love you—so dreadfully, Alan. Now if the little tin gods hear us—the spiteful little gods who spoil people's lives—something will happen to part us, soon."His arm went round her and gathered her against him. He said with a great thrill of triumph:"If the Great God is for us we can defy the little tin devils! It was He who made us for each other, brought us together—will bring us closer still!"He added, as a handsome boy of nineteen or twenty, dressed at the zenith of the fashion, and already showing the worn lines of habitual dissipation, flashed by driven in a silver-grey Lanchester, with a notorious Cyprian enthroned at his side:"How can I thank Him enough for what He has done for me? How many temptations He has helped me resist, that I might come to you clean to-day!""Were any of the temptations like Mrs. Mallison?" She had freed her hand from his, and now leaned forwards, hiding her clouded face from Sherbrand under the pretext of following the grey car with her eyes. "That was little Wyvenhoe with her.... How young he is! And how old she must be! Why, I've seen her portrait in a Book of Beauty dated forty years back—with a chignon and waterfall. They called her the Marble Marvel in those days, didn't they? Before she pitched her cap over the windmill, and made hay of the Prunes and Prisms. Now she acts in Music Hall sketches—has a voice like a raven's, paints a quarter-of-an-inch thick, and exploits Eton boys. Is anything the matter?"Sherbrand had suddenly started and pulled his watch out. Now he rapped on the glass at the back of the chauffeur, leaned out of the window and spoke to the man, and resumed his seat, answering:"The matter is that I had forgotten an important appointment. I can manage to keep it by the skin of my eyelids by taking the three o'clock train to Bournemouth instead of the two-thirty Express. You won't mind? You'll come with me and wait for me?""Not a little bit! ..." she answered to the one question and to the other: "Of course I will!"
Prone to assume strange, angular attitudes when speaking, the Foreign Secretary hung over and clutched at the dispatch-box before him, as though it literally contained that most malignant of all the swarm of Evils that issued from the Box of Pandora, as he told his hearers of the rejection of the German bribe and warned them of the imminence of a Declaration of War. Then, amidst increasing, deepening excitement, the Prime Minister read the appeal of the King of the Belgians, and told of Great Britain's ultimatum to Germany....
No wonder those close-packed crowds of sturdy Britons waited under the blue glare of the arc-lamps to hear Big Ben bell the midnight hour. As the great voice boomed Twelve from the illuminated square of the dial amidst the striking of the countless clocks of London, a tremendous roar of cheers acclaimed the pipping of the egg of Fate and Destiny, echoed by other crowds in distant thoroughfares, spreading in waves to the unseen horizon, whose East was pregnant with the Kaiser's Day.
That Fourth of August; Eve of the Feast of British Oswald, King, soldier and Saint, whose Address to his Northumbrian warriors before the battle of Denisburn, fought against Pagan Cadwalla in 633, the Catholic Church enshrines in Her Chronicles:
"Let us all kneel and jointly beseech the true and living GOD ALMIGHTY in His Mercy to defend us from the doughty and fierce enemy. For He knoweth that we have undertaken a just War...."
"Whereupon," says the Venerable Bede, "all did as the King commanded. And advancing towards the enemy with the first dawn of day, they won the victory their Faith deserved."
And before midnight of this pregnant Fourth of August, from the great Wireless Station of Eilvise in Hanover, Germany flung round the world this vital message to all her mercantile Marine:
"War declared on England! Make as quickly as you can for a neutral port!"
On the outbreak of War the British Navy cut the All German cables. One by one the German Colonial Wireless Stations were dismantled. When the great station at Kamina in Togoland fell, the only remaining link in the system was between the Fatherland and the United States.
Dawn outlining the silken blinds, vied with the blue glimmer of the night-lamp as Margot wakened, to hear, in the hush that precedes the Brocken-hunt of Sloane Street motor-traffic, Franky's low, urgent appeal:
"Kittums! Kittums, best child!"
"What on earth did you wake me for?" said a sleepy and distinctly cross voice.
"Couldn't help it! I simply had to tell you!" Franky began.
The little hand touched the electric clock-button and on the ceiling wavered a gigantic dial of yellow brightness.
"Hadto! At three o'clock in the morning! When I was having such a tophole dream! Thought I was back at the Club in my three dear rooms with the Adams doors and chimney-pieces—and Pauline came in with a huge basket of white flowers—and I asked: 'Who are they for?' And she said: 'For Mademoiselle!' And I was Margot St. John—and had never been married!" There was infinite wistfulness in the little voice.
"White flowers mean death, don't they, when you dream of 'em? And I'm sorry your dip in the Bran Tub of Matrimony has turned out such a bad investment. What I came to tell you should revive your hopes of making a better one, my child!"
That jarring note of mingled resentment and irony, how new and strange it sounded to Margot! Until this moment Franky's voice had never been anything but gentle. It was gentle now as he said, at his dressing-room door:
"Finish your sleep. I was rather a brute to wake you!" He was going without a backward glance.
"Come back! Come off it! Don't be dignified!" Margot called after the retreating figure. "I'm quite awake now, so you'd better tell. What's on?"
He came back to the bedside, looking tall and shadowy in the blue dimness. Margot put up a little hand and patted his cheek. There were wet drops upon the smooth, warm skin.... Perhaps he had walked home, and it had been raining. Or—
"Franky! You're not——"
He captured the little hand and took it in both his own, and squeezed it. He said in a cheerful but rather choky voice:
"Of course not! And—the news could have waited. Only—since midnight England and Germany have been at War. The Big Scrap is three hours old. First battalion of Ours is under orders for the Front—I've exchanged out of the Second with Ackroyd—too sick a man for fightin' just now, luckily for me. You know Ackroyd. Used to flirt with him frightfully—to give me beans when I'd vexed you when we were first engaged. When do we go, did you ask? Liable to be off at any old minute. By-bye, little woman. Too late to go to bed—heaps of things to attend to. God bless you! See you at brekker—or lunch, if I've luck."
CHAPTER L
THE EVE OF ARMAGEDDON
Kittums, upon that fateful morning, coming down to breakfast and finding no Franky, was annoyed. One might just as well have had breakfast in bed. She didn't want any, but Cook would be hurt if the chowder and eggs, and croquettes of chicken weren't eaten. Therefore Margot ate—to avoid wounding the cook. The daily papers she left untouched, knowing that War would leap out from the huge capitals heading the columns and strike her in the eyes.
She had herself dressed and 'phoned for the car. The house did not seem a place to stay in, somehow. Dowd was busy in his master's room, ordering Jobling about in loud authoritative tones and being waited upon by the maids. Even Pauline, ordinarily scornful, referred to him as "Monsieur Dowd" instead of "zat man Dow!"
Once in Sloane Street, the War rushed at you. Groups of men, young, old or middle-aged, stood talking at every street-corner, newspapers rustled in every hand. You couldn't escape the papers. Huge flaring headlines shrieked from the broad-sheets in the gutters and on the railings: "WAR DECLARED! ULTIMATUM EXPIRED. BRITISH FLEET READY FOR BATTLE. INVASION OF BELGIUM BY GERMAN ARMY CORPS!" The drapery salesman who was to win the Victoria Cross, called from the top of a Knightsbridge motor-bus to the grocer's assistant who was to receive the Médaille Militaire at the doughty hands of Joffre.... The budding airman who was to bring down a Zeppelin single-handed chuffed past on a motor-cycle—the girls who were to make shells for British guns, or pack made ones with T.N.T. and kindred explosives, tripped along in their transparent hobble-skirts, to meet Alf and Ted at the Tube. And neither Alf, who subsequently took five Huns prisoner by the single hand, shepherding them back to the British lines with dunts of the gun-butt and sarcasms more pointed, nor Ted, who threw himself down over the exploding bomb, dying that his comrades in the trench might live, dreamed what kind of chick would pip Fate's egg for him or her presently. Yet the dullest face wore a new expression, in the tamest eyes burned the light of battle! Unquenched it burns in them still, after four dreadful years of War.
The Club, already deserted by August holiday-makers, would be utterly abandoned to chimney-sweeps, charwomen and window-cleaners, and yet Margot told the chauffeur to drive to the Club.
Turning out of Piccadilly she discovered Short Street to be blocked by taxi-cabs. An endless procession of telegraph-boys plunged in and out between the thudding swing-doors of the vestibule. The vestibule was congested with battered, dusty ladies, ladies' maids even dustier and more battered, and travelling bags battered and dusty to thenthdegree.
Some of the bags were bursting, not a few of the maids were hysterical. All the returned travellers were telling their adventures at once. The air was thick with exclamations, explanations, cries and ejaculations. Unfed, unslept, baggageless and penniless in many instances, the members of the Ladies' Social—seeking health, or novelty, in half the pleasure-resorts upon the map of Europe—had come hurtling back to Short Street like leaves driven before the furious blast of War.
"Has anything happened?"
Lady Norwater addressed this query to the Club hall-porter, a bald person of habitually slow movements and singularly bland address. The man gnashed his teeth at her, uttering a sound between a groan and a snarl—made as though to tear non-existent hair,—leaped with astonishing nimbleness over a pile of luggage, and vanished. Margot would have made a note of his conduct in the Complaints register, but that the hall-table was obliterated by heaps of rugs, dust-cloaks and waterproofs. Wondering, she made her way into the big General Room on the ground-floor.
Here travel-creased, dust-smeared members sat in voluble rows on the comfortable sofas, or reclined speechless in the capacious armchairs. Medical men, hastily summoned by 'phone, moved noiselessly from patient to patient. Husbands and male friends listened not unmoved, to piteous recitals of adverse experiences undergone on enemy ground.
Kittums, snatched into the whirl, moved from friend to friend, gathering experiences. Mrs. Charterhouse, with her Pekinese pug and her maid, had just arrived at Homburg to undergo treatment for a twenty-two-inch waist when the War Cloud gathered monstrous on the horizon. Had not her Swiss doctor written a warning instead of a prescription the white and golden Cynthia, Mademoiselle Mariette and Chin-Chin, would at this moment have been languishing on rye bread and bean coffee in a Teutonic jail.
"As it is, we've spent a whole week, and every sou we had on us making the journey!" said Cynthia, in her plaintive tones. "They held us up at Frankfurt, Basel, and Geneva! What inquisitions, what scowling suspicious looks! To be hunted and suspect makes you wicked, I've found out! When we got to Paris at four yesterday morning and took a ricketyfiacreto the Palais—all the taxis have vanished!—I could haveprayedfor a cup of tea and a roll! But at the Palais all was confusion. The hotel was shutting up—every male servant called to the Reserve. We got to the 'Spitz'—the same experience there! Exhausted, I sat on something in the vestibule—it moved, groaned, and I found it to be the wreck of Sir Thomas Brayham. He and Lady Wathe, his man and her maid, who have been all through July at Franzenbad in the Egerland,—reaching Paris after awful adventures, had all four been hurled out in the same way. One of those jiggety motor-omnibuses took all of us to the Couronne. They were full to the roofs and cellars, but they wedged us in, somehow! Then, for two days Sir Thomas tore round Paris trying to getlaissez-passers." She turned her lovely eyes upon a large, stertorously-breathing but otherwise inert object reclining with closed eyes and folded hands in the biggest of the Club armchairs. "Didn't you, Sir Thomas?"
"Beparr?"
Brayham, waking with a bewildered stare, regarded the charming Cynthia uncomprehendingly until the Goblin, sitting opposite, centre of a knot of bosom friends, repeated the query:
"Didn't you run about Paris for passes for two days?"
"No!" bounced out Brayham, now aroused, and purpling under the coal-dust that begrimed his large, judicial visage. He added, with a vestige of his King's Bench manner, as the Goblin stared at him in concern for his mental state: "I retain the use of my reason, dear friend! But I WILL NOT consent that the varied tortures of the abominable ordeal I have undergone could possibly be packed within the nutshell limits of forty-eight hours! Mph!"
So dust-covered was the ex-Justice that the very act of shaking his head rebukingly at the Goblin, raised a cloud that made him sneeze. He uttered the curious composite sound that heralds sternutation, drew out a voluminous, coal-dusty handkerchief, stared at it indignantly, and in the very act of returning it to his pocket—fell asleep again.
"A perfect wreck, as I said just now!" whispered Mrs. Charterhouse to Kittums.
"HowI congratulate you, dear Lady Wastwood," said the Goblin, "on not having gone abroad!"
"Was it so horrid?" asked Trixie, sympathetically, arching the eyebrows that resembled musical slurs.
"Was it so—" Lady Wathe shrugged her thin shoulders and gave the ghost of one of her rattling laughs. "If to fight your way back, stage by stage, amidst inconceivable difficulties, obstacles and insults, is horrid!—if to travel for two long days and nights in trains crowded to suffocating excess merits the term—" She loosened the quadruple string of superb Oriental pearls that tightly clipped her stalk-like throat and went on: "If it comes under the heading to find yourself and your friends—in tatters after a suffocating struggle!—packed with sixty other squalid wretches in a luggage-vanen routefor Dieppe! If to sit for three hours on your jewel-case, waiting, in a crush of congested humanity, for the arrival of the Newhaven boat—if to fight as with beasts at Ephesus to gain its gangway—if to fall in a heap on the sodden deck—to lie there lost to everything but the fact that the waves that drench you are British waves, and the British coast is slowly crawling nearer!—if all this and how much more, can be lumped under the term of horrid, it has been, dear Lady Wastwood, horrid in the extreme!"
Lady Wastwood's small, triangular, white face with the V-shaped scarlet mouth, looked enigmatical. She arched the thick black slurs that were her eyebrows again, and said not without intent, to her crony Cynthia Charterhouse:
"Whowould havedreamedonly three weeks ago, when that excessively long-legged and extremely good-looking Count von Herrnung sat here and talked to us about German women and German Supermen—that we should be at War to-day with Germany?"
"Poor Count Tido!" Something rattled in the Goblin's meagre throat as though she had accidentally swallowed some of her pearls. "That dreadful report inThe Wiremade the Franzenbad treatment disagree with me horribly! To be drowned in that commonplace North Sea crossing, upon the very eve of realising the one ambition of his life! For he hated us so thoroughly! His Anglophobia was a perfect obsession. Poor dear Tido! One might call it a wasted career!" The speaker dried a tear and continued: "His family will be frantic. You know he was to have been married in October! Baroness Kriemhilde von Wolfensbragen-Hirschenbuttel. Immensely rich! Her father has large interests in the pearl-fisheries of German New Guinea. Her betrothal gift, a superb black and white pearl, the Count always wore as a mascot. Poor Baroness! She will be inconsolable. Marriage means the first draught of real freedom to young German girls!"
Mrs. Charterhouse said in her sweetly venomous way:
"Miss Saxham bears up—under the circumstances!"
"Under what circumstances, might one presume to ask?" Then, reading aright the ambiguous smile of Mrs. Charterhouse, the Goblin rattled out her characteristic laugh:
"What absurdity! You refer to a mere dinner-table flirtation in Paris. The mererapprochementofatomes crochus! Miss Saxham and Lady Beauvayse dined with us on the night of the Grand Prix. Poor Tido was certainly struck with her. I remember he talked about her eyes and figure afterwards. But her hair being so black and growing so heavily—did not please him. He found the effect—I think his term was—'too crepuscular.'"
"Ah! You throw a ray," said Mrs. Charterhouse in that sugared way of hers, "on a mystery that has intrigued me. Now I know why Miss Saxham went to the Atelier Wiber in the Rue de la Paix and got her crepuscular tresses changed to terra-cotta!"
"Notsaffron? Now," said Lady Wastwood, pensively tilting her own green-gold head and elevating her arched black eyebrows, "I should have called that shade saffron or tumeric. Who do you suppose footed the bill for the process? The wretch Wiber simply won't look at you under four hundred and fifty francs!"
"Perhaps Vivie Beauvayse—" suggested Mrs. Charterhouse.
"I think not. Vivie preferred the crepuscular effect. It contrasted capitally with her own style of colouring. You must have noticed, they are seldom seen going about together as they used. Dear Lady Wathe, do you feel faint? Can I get you anything?"
For something had clicked behind the Goblin's pearls, and she had suddenly stiffened in her seat. The superb figure of Patrine Saxham had entered by the swing-doors leading from the vestibule followed by a tall, broad-shouldered young man in loose grey tweeds, whose left sleeve displayed a band of black significantly new.
"Can that be Miss Saxham? It must be!—her type is so unusual! Not having seen her since the night of the dinner I referred to I did not quite grasp the meaning of your references to ingredients common in Indian curries. Of course, I understand now!" The Goblin surveyed the tall, pliant figure with the dead beech-leaf hair through her lorgnette before she leaned forwards and roused the sleeping Brayham by a brisk application of the instrument. "Look, Sir Thomas! Would you have known Miss Saxham?"
"Beparr! ... Wharr? ... God bless my soul, no!"
Brayham, turning in the armchair as the Zoo walrus turns in his concrete pond, surveyed Patrine with a bloodshot stare.
"Silly girl! Spoilt her looks!" he snorted. "Handsome as the dooce with her gipsy-black tresses. Won her bet. Won't get her ring now though, unless von Herrnung paid before he flew!"
"Was there a bet between them? How is it you never told me? Have I deserved this from you?" demanded Lady Wathe indignantly, as Mrs. Charterhouse and Lady Wastwood exchanged glances and smiles.
"Sorry! ... Forgot! ..." Brayham gobbled apologetically. "Man I know happened to be close to 'em leaving Spitz's Restaurant that Sunday night in Paris. Told me he heard von Herrnung lay Miss Saxham his magpie pearl solitaire against a bit o' Palais Royal paste she was wearing—that she wouldn't change the colour of her hair! Made the appointment for her, with Wiber—'Pastiches Artistiques,' and so on,Rue de la Paix. He bragged of it afterwards at theCercle Moderne! Dam Germans! no idea of decency! Why do Englishwomen intrigue with 'em? Bounders that kiss and tell!"
There was a significant pause, broken by the Goblin's shrillest peal of laughter. The ex-Justice, whose vitality was low, folded his hands and dozed again. Then——
"Now weknowwho footed the bill," said Cynthia Charterhouse in dove-like accents. While Trixie murmured in the vexed ear of Margot:
"Kitts, my dinkie, you are a pal of the Saxhams.Howfar had the affairreallygone?"
"There was no affair!" said Margot's sweet little voice, very clearly. "Pat rather hated Count von Herrnung than otherwise!"
"Judging by the mute evidence of her hair—" began Mrs. Charterhouse, languidly. How Margot loathed these women, erstwhile her chosen friends and associates, tearing with greedy beaks and vicious claws at the reputation of an unmarried girl....
"Her hair belongs to her! She can bleach it if she wishes!" The little figure rose to its altitude of four feet seven inches and surveyed the scandalmongers with wrathful eyes. "I have said that there was nothing between Miss Saxham and Count von Herrnung"—the little voice was crystal-cold: "I should be extremely obliged to all of you if you will understand this clearly! Miss Saxham is engaged to my husband's cousin, Alan Sherbrand."—Had Franky heard that stately reference to my husband, he would have been "bowled," to quote himself. "Franky likes him, and so do I, tremendously! We're both keen on their bringing off the match!"
There was another resounding silence. Brayham snored melodiously. Then Trixie Wastwood said with her Pierrot smile:
"Really, Kitts, it was—hardly cricket not to have warned us!"
While Mrs. Charterhouse added in tones of iced velvet:
"Regard me also as prone beneath Miss Saxham's Number Eight shoes. Did you say herfiancéwas a cousin of Lord Norwater's? Not possibly the son of the uncle who died quite recently? Captain the Hon. Noel Sherbrand, late of the Royal Gunners.... My husband used to know him before—people left off!"
"It is the same. He muddled his career somehow, and—most people cut him! But he isdead," said Margot very deliberately, "and his son, if we have no—" the delicate cheeks flushed with sudden vivid crimson—"his son is perfectly tophole and Franky's next heir. We met him in June in Paris, and so did Pat Saxham! How do any of you know she didn't tint her hair to pleasehim."
"Possibly she did! But, according to Sir Thomas—it was the other man who paid!"
"Odd, isn't it? In this world," said the Goblin with her crackling laugh, "the other man invariably pays the bill! And so the young gentleman over there—who is quite remarkably good-looking in the blond Norman style—and who is going to marry Miss Saxham—succeeds to Lord Norwater in—a certain eventuality! May one be permitted to hope, dear Lady Norwater, that Fate and yourself will combine fortuitously, to keep the cousin out of the House of Peers!"
"Rude, ill-bred, horrid woman!" thought Margot, clenching her little teeth to keep back these epithets. "How dare she twit me with—that! How dare—" Then her hot flush sank away and a mist came before her eyes, and she would have fallen, but that Trixie Wastwood jumped up from the sofa and threw about the little figure a kind, supporting arm.
"I've got you! You're not going to faint, Kittums, are you? Forgive us, my dinkie! Whatpigswe have been!"
"Heckling the tomtit for defending the saffron-crested blackbird! I rather agree with you," admitted Mrs. Charterhouse as Margot freed herself, saying it was nothing, and proudly moved away. "We women are horribly spiteful," continued Cynthia. "Yes, we are spiteful, Lady Wathe! I am perfectly in earnest. What is the reason? Will anything cure us? Do somebody tell me! Colonel Charterhouse would say it is because we eat too much rich food, walk too little, automobile too much, and want some useful work or other to occupy our minds! He is coming here to lunch with me—he was quite touchingly anxious to be invited!" Her beautiful eyes widened as the swing-doors thudded behind three entering masculine figures, "Why, here he is with Lord Norwater, and your boy, Trixie! All three in khaki! What a day we are having!"
She added, as her handsome middle-aged Colonel made his spurred way through the ever-thickening crush to her:
"I am enlightened! Sothiswas your surprise!"
"Not half as big as mine when I found they were willing to take me. 'Fit as a fiddle,' according to the M. O. Gad!"—he went on, as his wife made room for him on the settle by her side—"as willingly as though he had been somebody else's husband," Lady Wathe said subsequently—"It's to my golf I owe it—these A.M.S. sawbones finding me in the pink! And instead of a back-seat, what do you think they've given me? Command of the Third Reserve Battalion of the blessed old Regiment, the Loyal North Linkshires,viceCrowe-Pinckney, kicked out by a gouty toe! ... How's that for an oldster of fifty-five, ... Eh, what?" His chuckle was that of a Fourth Form athlete picked to supply a gap in the School Eleven. And Cynthia's beautiful eyes, as she slipped her hand into the Colonel's, looked at him as the boy's mother's might have looked upon her son.
Lady Wastwood's Pierrot smile might have played upon the reunited couple mockingly, but that the unexpected apparition of her boy Wastwood in single-starred khaki, adorned with the badge of a crack Hussar Regiment, girt with the Sam Browne and narrow officer's shoulder-strap, and clad as to the legs in spurred brown butcher-boots—dimmed her bright green eyes and brought a choke into her throat. Wastwood the son was so like Wastwood the father—killed at Magersfontein in 1900,—whom Trixie, for no reason apparently, had romantically adored. A burly young man, pink as a baby, with thick fair hair growing down within two inches of his eyebrows, small, fierce blue eyes, and a huge roaring voice, softened down now to a tender bellow as he answered a pale girl's eager question with:
"Well, I can't say exactly when we're going to the Front, but I hope to Christmas it'll be soon!"
Wastwood's engagement to the girl had been announced only the week previously in the Society Columns of the leading dailies. Now, while Wastwood's younger brother Jerry anguished in the throes of a final Exam, at Sandhurst, the said Jerry being set upon getting a Commission in time to go to the Front with one of the First Divisions—his elder sat on a Club sofa and made love to the girl Jerry was subsequently to marry. For not only Wastwood's title, but his vacant Commission as a Lieutenant in the Dapple Greys and his sweetheart went to his junior after Mons.
There was a lot of family and regimental re-shuffling and re-dealing, you will remember, after Mons.
The leaven of the Great Awakening was working in the souls of these worldly-minded, ultra-modern men and women, even as the crowd in the rooms grew denser, as the buzz of talk became almost solid, and khaki mingled with the brilliant toilettes. Hardly a man but wore dead-leaf brown. Wives were entertaining their husbands, mothers were lunching their sons, that day, at the multitudinous little tables in the great and lesser dining-rooms,—there was a revival of old code-words, an interchange of almost forgotten pet-names, a resurrection of ancient jokes, when the atmosphere seemed dangerously charged with emotion. How many Last Sacraments of renewed love were eaten and drunk by husbands and wives who, estranged for years, were to be reunited by the War, and parted by the War until the Day when Wars shall be no more.
That a tall young man in grey tweed with a crape armlet should sit opposite Patrine that day at Margot's special table was one of the thousand miracles already wrought.
Sherbrand had shelved all recollection of that June adventure in the Bois de Boulogne, when a flushed young husband in immaculate top-hat and frock-coat had thanked an angry young man in waterproof overalls and gabardine for not chopping his wife into kedgeree.
Could one be angry any more when this little human dragon-fly was what Patrine called "a frightful pal" of hers. Thank Heaven! Patrine had known nothing of the cousinship when she had answered Sherbrand's plain question, "Will you marry me?" with an assent:
"Sooner than not!"
"Then—it is settled?"
"Yes, you poor dear! If you think me worth having!"
Worth having! Sherbrand's glorious Patrine. Whom to be near was heaven on earth. Whom to obey was a lover's luxury, even when she had issued the mandate:
"Now, you must come to the Club and lunch with me, and meet my friends. Do be decent to them!"
Perhaps you can see Sherbrand bowing rather stiffly to Margot and accepting with the briefest hesitation the smallest of offered hands.
"I thought it must be the same!—I was certain there couldn't be two Flying Sherbrands. Pat!—Mr. Sherbrand can't deny the relationship, though he disapproves of Franky and me most fearfully. You'll have to teach him," went on the coaxing little voice, "that we're lots and lots nicer than he thinks us! For we've got to be friends," said Kittums, "if you and my dear Pat are going to be married! No time like the present! Can't we begin now?"
What a vivid little face it was, though there were tired marks like faint bruises under the great dark eyes, and the rose-flush in the cheeks was less bright than it had seemed in June. He released the tiny jewelled fingers, and found himself presented to the husband.
"Frightfully glad to meet you—more reasons than one!"
Franky, slim, sleek-headed, and dapper in unblemished Regulation tea-leaf, held out his hand, saying as he looked the other squarely in the eyes:
"If I had known your Home address, I should like to have dropped a line to you, when I—when I saw the newspaper yesterday."
"My mother lives at Bournemouth. My father had been an invalid for years. I go down to-day by the afternoon train."
"Ah! Please remember me to my—Aunt Jeannette."
From what dusty shelf of memories had Franky reached down the name of his uncle's unknown wife? But it sounded pleasantly to Mrs. Sherbrand's son. The cloud upon his forehead cleared away, and his cold sea-blue eyes began to thaw into kindness:
"I'd like a word with you in private. Do you mind comin' out of this clackshop into the vest*i*bulee?" Franky went on, quoting his favourite Jimmy Greggson, and with a word to Margot and a glance on Sherbrand's part at Patrine, the two men passed through the swing-doors. Here Franky wheeled, and said with effort:
"This is a bit subsequent! but—if there's time available and the date of my uncle's funeral doesn't happen to be fixed, I should like to say—" He grew furiously red and began to stammer: "My father ... myself ... Dash! how brutally I bungle! But my uncle has a right to—to lie in the family vault with his ancestors. It's at Whins—the Church is in the Castle grounds. I can guarantee that my father—every facility—sympathy—proper respect—" He broke down. Sherbrand answered, now the cooler of the two:
"You are very kind, Lord Norwater. My mother has already received a telegram from Lord Mitchelborough conveying a message to the same effect."
"I engineered that!" thought Franky complacently. But he was fish-dumb. Sherbrand went on:
"She would thank you, as I do, gratefully. But my father—would have preferred to be buried where he died!"
"Good egg! And now there's another thing to get off my chest," said Franky. "You know you stand in for the Viscounty when I succeed my father, or if I get knocked out in this scrap—supposing I should kick without heirs! That being so, suppose you bury the hatchet and lunch with us? Wouldn't in Paris—perhaps you will now? The War seems to rub up old saws like new somehow. That copy-book tag about Blood bein' thicker than water! that's one of the ones I mean. In case my wife got left—do you tumble?"—the ambiguous term was quite expressive—"I'd like to think that you were—would be kind to her!"
"I should certainly—in that case—try to do what I could." A certain physical and mental resemblance showed between these two long-legged, lightly-built, clean-made Sherbrands, standing together talking of grave matters, with candour and simplicity and British avoidance of sentiment and excess of words.
"But,"—Sherbrand found himself yielding to an impulse of confidence in the owner of the brown eyes that were some inches below his own, "this War is my chance! I'm a certified pilot-aviator and constructor and engineer. Perhaps there'll be a chink in the Royal Flying Corps for me—and many another fellow like me—before long—I hope, not very long! For my father's sake as much as for my own, I'm bound to make good—you understand?"
The brown eyes understood. His kindred blood warmed to the look in them.
"He knew—my father knew that he had failed in life through his own fault. He did not resent his brother's attitude. He bore the consequences more or less patiently, and when he died he left the cleansing of his name to me. Not that he was as badly to blame as people thought. He was born without sufficient of the quality called—objectivity. It's the power that keeps a man slogging, slogging in one groove without getting mechanical or stupid, as long as he attain his ends or can serve his country by keeping on. It'sindispensable!"—he emphasised the word, his strong blue-grey eyes full on Franky's—"as indispensable as lymph in your inner ear-tubes. Without it you can't keep a level balance—whether you stand, or walk, or fly!"
"Miss Saxham—knows, I suppose?"
A flush crept up through Sherbrand's tanning:
"I have told her. It wasn't pleasant. But she—likes me enough to overlook it. She—seems to think I should never fail in that way! I hope to God I never shall!" The old boyish terror of inherited weakness cropped up in the tone of the man grown. "It would be horrible to suspect the bacillus of slackness lurking in my blood! If there is—the sooner I get scrapped, the better for her and for me!"
"Well, you've chosen the—kind of career that is going to use up a good many men pretty quickly." Franky was warming more and more to this big blond, candid cousin. "Not that I think there's much of the slacker about you. Few chaps more fit and nervy—that is, going by looks, you know! But if the Kaiser's Flying Men can shoot on the wing as well as they brag they can"—his brown eyes were watchful for a change in the other's face—"then——"
"Then I tumble out of my sky, a dead bird!" said Sherbrand, squaring his broad shoulders, "and someone luckier fills my place!"
"Thumbs up! Ten to one you'd come down with a broken wing or so." There was something that touched Franky's latent quality of imagination in the fellow's queer way of saying "my sky." "This cousin of mine is a handsome fellow," he said to himself, "and a plucky one. And—by the Great Brass Hat!—now I come to think of it—the livin' image of old Sir Roger Sherbrand—his and my great-grandfather—goin' by the portrait in the gallery at Whins."
"So you're firm on joinin' the Flying Corps..." he went on, feeling for the moustache which had been reduced to Regulation toothbrush size. "Good egg You! Wish you all the sporting chances——"
"And better luck," said Sherbrand drily, "with Bird of War No. II. than I had with No. I.!"
"You're building a new 'plane?" The brown eyes were alight with interest.
"Rather! Come and have a look at her one day."
"Like a shot, if only I'd time! Did she tot to a hatful of money?"
"Something under £700. £500 of that goes for the new 'Gnome' engine. You see that German—" Sherbrand broke off.
"I remember! Pretty rough on you, that North Sea crossin' business. Must have been an awful loss. Look here!" Franky reddened again and began to flounder. "Could I—couldn't I—help with the boodle? Got £700 lying by idle. Frightfully glad if you'd let me chip in!—just in a cousinly sort o' way!"
"I am much obliged to you, Lord Norwater."
Confound the fellow! how he froze at the least hint of patronage. He went on, holding his head high:
"You are very kind, but I am not poor, unless as poverty is understood by people of your world. Apart from what my profession brings me I have something in the way of income. My mother's brother left me a sum of money that brings in yearly over £200." He went on as Franky regarded with unaffected interest the man who wasn't poor on two hundredper annum: "The principal—I suppose it tots up to £6,000—I shall naturally settle on my wife."
He warmed and brightened with the utterance of the word. His cold eyes grew soft and his brows smoothed pleasantly. He said with a glowing pride, and a kind of brave shyness that a woman who loved him would have adored:
"I have said nothing yet to Miss Saxham about my hopes of a Commission—I suppose for fear of not pulling the thing off. But the moment it comes along I shall persuade her to marry me. We'll be man and wife before I fly for the Front."
As cocky as though he had landed the biggest catch in the matrimonial waters, thought Franky, instead of that great, slangy, galumphing young woman without a halfpenny at her back. But he did the amiable, in a way characteristic of Franky, ushering the guest back to the luncheon-room, introducing "my cousin" to people worth knowing, doing the honours with a pleasant cordiality that won upon Sherbrand more and more.
Sherbrand took leave directly after lunch, saying that he had to catch the afternoon express for Bournemouth. He had left his bag and suit-case in the hall-porter's care. Would Patrine?—Patrine read the entreaty in the hiatus and yielded to it, saying Yes, she would drive with him, and see him off from Waterloo.
"It's lovely of you!" Sherbrand said to her gratefully as they rose. She gave him her cordial smile and a soft glance from the long eyes. They took leave of their hosts and passed out together, heads slewing as the tall young figures went by.
Once in a taxi, spinning down Short Street, Sherbrand possessed himself of the hand he coveted. Its warm strong, answering clasp thrilled him to speechlessness. He looked at the long white fingers intertwined with his own, and asked himself whether he were deserving of a happiness too great to be credited. When her shoulder touched his, its warm creamy whiteness gleaming through the dead-white of her thin sleeve, his heart drummed until it seemed as though she could not but hear it. But his was not the only heart that beat....
"Thank you." It was her rich warm voice speaking close by his ear. "Thank you for being so nice to my Kittums! She is the truest little soul going. We have been chums ever since I joined the Club. Never quarrelled once—until she made up her mind to marry Franky——"
"And now you're going to marry Franky's first cousin." Sherbrand laughed rather breathlessly. "'Marry' ... 'Marriage.' Two splendid words with meanings and meanings beyond meanings packed into them. Isn't it wonderful? ..." He gripped the warm white hand in his strong brown one. "Pat, your pulses are playing a tune!"
"So are yours," she answered in a low tone.
"What is it?" He bent his head and set his lips in a swift caress to the back of the white hand. Then he turned it gently over and looked earnestly at the blue wrist-veins. They were full and throbbing tumultuously. Her blood was answering to the call of his. He set a second swift kiss upon them and his voice was unsteady as he said:
"I know the name of the tune, my wonder. Patrine! Love!—it's theWedding March!"
"Whose? Grieg's, or Wagner's inLohengrin, or Haydn's?"
"Neither Wagner's nor Haydn's nor Grieg's. Yours and mine! I told Lord Norwater to-day that I meant to make sure of you before I fly for the Front."
"You're going to the Front? Oh!—why?" Her long eyes looked at him with sharp terror in them. He answered:
"When the Powers that be offer me a Commission in the Royal Flying Corps."
"I see." She breathed freely. "And so—we are not to be married until then?"
"Would you—to-morrow, if I——"
"You know I would!" Her voice broke over him in a wave of tenderness. "You've made me love you—so dreadfully, Alan. Now if the little tin gods hear us—the spiteful little gods who spoil people's lives—something will happen to part us, soon."
His arm went round her and gathered her against him. He said with a great thrill of triumph:
"If the Great God is for us we can defy the little tin devils! It was He who made us for each other, brought us together—will bring us closer still!"
He added, as a handsome boy of nineteen or twenty, dressed at the zenith of the fashion, and already showing the worn lines of habitual dissipation, flashed by driven in a silver-grey Lanchester, with a notorious Cyprian enthroned at his side:
"How can I thank Him enough for what He has done for me? How many temptations He has helped me resist, that I might come to you clean to-day!"
"Were any of the temptations like Mrs. Mallison?" She had freed her hand from his, and now leaned forwards, hiding her clouded face from Sherbrand under the pretext of following the grey car with her eyes. "That was little Wyvenhoe with her.... How young he is! And how old she must be! Why, I've seen her portrait in a Book of Beauty dated forty years back—with a chignon and waterfall. They called her the Marble Marvel in those days, didn't they? Before she pitched her cap over the windmill, and made hay of the Prunes and Prisms. Now she acts in Music Hall sketches—has a voice like a raven's, paints a quarter-of-an-inch thick, and exploits Eton boys. Is anything the matter?"
Sherbrand had suddenly started and pulled his watch out. Now he rapped on the glass at the back of the chauffeur, leaned out of the window and spoke to the man, and resumed his seat, answering:
"The matter is that I had forgotten an important appointment. I can manage to keep it by the skin of my eyelids by taking the three o'clock train to Bournemouth instead of the two-thirty Express. You won't mind? You'll come with me and wait for me?"
"Not a little bit! ..." she answered to the one question and to the other: "Of course I will!"