22
Marie Louise noted the slight difference between the English “Thank you” and Sir Joseph’s “Thang gyou.”
Then Lady Webling’s eyes went around the table, catching up the women’s eyes and forms, and she led them in a troop from the embarrassing scene. She brought the embarrassment with her to the drawing-room, where the women sat about smoking miserably and waiting for the men to come forth and take them home.
23CHAPTER III
There must have been embarrassment enough left to go round the dining-table, too, for in an unusually brief while the men flocked into the drawing-room. And they began to plead engagements in offices or homes or Parliament.
It was not yet ten o’clock when the last of the guests had gone, except Nicholas Easton. And Sir Joseph took him into his own study. Easton walked a trifle too solemnly straight, as if he had set himself an imaginary chalk-line to follow. He jostled against the door, and as he closed it, swung with it uncertainly.
Lady Webling asked almost at once, with a nod of the head in the direction of the study door:
“Well, my dear child, what do you think of Nicky?”
“Oh, I don’t know. He’s nice, but––”
“We’re very fond of him, Sir Joseph and I––and we do hope you will be.”
Marie Louise wondered if they were going to select a husband for her. It was a dreadful situation, because there was no compulsion except the compulsion of obligation. They never gave her a chance to do anything for them; they were always doing things for her. What an ingrate she would be to rebuff their first real desire! And yet to marry a man she felt such antipathy for––surely there could be some less hateful way of obliging her benefactors. She felt like a castaway on a desert, and there was something of the wilderness in the immensity of the drawing-room with its crowds of untenanted divans and of empty chairs drawn into groups as the departed guests had left them.
Lady Webling stood close to Marie Louise and pressed for an answer.
“You don’t really dislike Nicky, do you?”
“N-o-o. I’ve not known him long enough to dislike him very well.”
24
She tried to soften the rebuff with a laugh, but Lady Webling sighed profoundly and smothered her disappointment in a fond “Good night.” She smothered the great child, too, in a hugely buxom embrace. When Marie emerged she was suddenly reminded that she had not yet spoken to Lady Webling of Fräulein Ernst’s attack on the children’s souls. She spoke now.
“There’s one thing, mamma, I’ve been wanting to tell you all evening. Please don’t let it distress you, but really I’m afraid you’ll have to get rid of Fräulein.”
Lady Webling’s voluminous yawn was stricken midway into a gasp. Marie Louise told her the story of the diabolical prayer. Lady Webling took the blow without reeling. She expressed shock, but again expressed it too perfectly.
She promised to “reprimand the foolish old soul.”
“To reprimand her!” Marie Louise cried. “You won’t send her away?”
“Send her away where, my child? Where should we send the poor thing? But I’ll speak to her very sharply. It was outrageous of her. What if the children should say such things before other people? It would be frightful! Thank you for telling me, my dear. And now I’m for bed! And you should be. You look quite worn out. Coming up?”
Lady Webling laughed and glanced at the study door, implying and rejoicing in the implication that Marie Louise was lingering for a last word with Easton.
Really she was trying to avoid climbing the long stairs with Lady Webling’s arm about her. For the first time in her life she distrusted the perfection of the old soul’s motives. She felt like a Judas when Lady Webling offered her cheek for another good-night kiss. Then she pretended to read a book while she listened for Lady Webling’s last puff as she made the top step.
At once she poised for flight. But the study door opened and Easton came out. He was bending down to murmur into Sir Joseph’s downcast countenance. Easton was saying, with a tremulous emotion, “This is the beginning of the end of England’s control of the sea.”
Marie Louise almost felt that there was a quiver of eagerness rather than of dread in his tone, or that the dread was the awe of a horrible hope.
25
Sir Joseph was brooding and shaking his head. He seemed to start as he saw Marie Louise. But he smiled on her dotingly and said:
“You are not gone to bed yet?”
She shook her head and sorrowed over him with a sudden rush of gratitude to his defense. She did not reward Easton’s smile with any favor, though he widened his eyes in admiration.
Sir Joseph said: “Good night, Nicky. It is long before I see you some more.”
Nicholas nodded. “But I shall see Miss Marie Louise quite soon now.”
This puzzled Marie Louise. She pondered it while Nicky bent and kissed her hand, heaved a guttural, gluttonous “Ah!” and went his way.
It was nearly a week later before she had a clue to the riddle. Then Sir Joseph came home to luncheon unexpectedly. He had an envelope with him, sealed with great red buttons of wax. He asked Marie Louise into his office and said, with an almost stealthy importance:
“My darling, I have a little favor to ask of you. Sometimes, you see, when I am having a big dealing on the Stock Exchange I do not like that everybody knows my business. Too many people wish to know all I do, so they can be doing the same. What everybody knows helps nobody. It is my wish to get this envelope to a man without somebody finding out something. Understand?”
“Yes, papa!” Marie Louise answered with the utmost confidence that what he did was good and wise and straight. She experienced a qualm when Sir Joseph explained that Nicky was the man. She wondered why he did not come to the house. Then she rebuked herself for presuming to question Sir Joseph’s motives. He had never been anything but good to her, and he had been so whole-heartedly good that for her to give thought-room to a suspicion of him was heinous.
He had business secrets and stratagems of tremendous financial moment. She had known him to work up great drives on the market and to use all sorts of people to prepare his attacks. She did not understand big business methods. She regarded them all with childlike bewilderment. When, then, Sir Joseph asked her to meet Nicky, as if casually, in26Regent’s Park, and convey the envelope from her hand to Nicky’s without any one’s witnessing the transfer, she felt the elation of a child intrusted with an important errand. So she walked all the way to Regent’s Park with the long strides of a young woman out for a constitutional. She found a bench where she was told to, and sat down to bask in the spring air, and wait.
By and by Easton sauntered along, lifted his hat to Marie Louise, and made a great show of surprise. She rose and gave him her hand. She had taken the precaution to wear gloves––also she had the envelope in her hand. She left it in Nicky’s. He smuggled it into his coat pocket, and murmuring, “So sorry I can’t stop,” lifted his hat and hurried off.
Marie Louise sat down again and after a time resumed her constitutional.
Sir Joseph was full of thanks when she saw him at night.
Some days later he asked Marie Louise to meet Nicky outside a Bond Street shop. She was to have a small parcel and drop it. Nicky would stoop and pick it up and hand her in its stead another of similar wrapper. She was to thank him and come home.
Another day Marie Louise received from Sir Joseph a letter and a request to take the children with her for a long walk, ending at the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens. The children carried their private navies with them and squatted at the brim of the huge basin, poking their reluctant yachts to sea. The boy Victor perfected a wonderful scheme for using a long stick as a submarine. He thrust his arm under water and from a distance knocked his sister’s sailboat about till its canvas was afloat and it filled and sank. All the while he wore the most distant of expressions, but canny little Bettina soon realized who had caused this catastrophe and how, and she went for Victor of the U-stick with finger-nails and feet and nearly rounded him into the toy ocean. It evidently made a difference whose ship was gored.
Marie Louise darted forward to save Victor from a ducking as well as a trouncing, and nearly ran over a man who was passing.
It was Ross Davidge, whiling away an hour between appointments. He thought he recognized Marie Louise, but he was not sure. Women in the morning look so unlike their evening selves. He dared not speak.
27
Davidge lingered around trying to get up the courage to speak, but Marie Louise was too distraught with the feud even to see him when she looked at him. She would not have known him, anyway.
Davidge was confirmed in his guess at her identity by the appearance of the man he had seen at her side at the dinner. But the confirmation was Davidge’s exile, for the fellow lifted his hat with a look of great surprise and said to Marie Louise, “Fancy finding you heah!”
“Blah!” said Davidge to himself, and went on about his business.
Marie Louise did not pretend surprise at seeing Easton, but went on scolding Victor and Bettina.
“If any of these other boys catch you playing submarine they’ll submarine you!”
And she brought the proud Bettina to book with a, “You were so glad theLusitaniawas sunk, you see now how it feels!”
She felt the puerile incongruity of the rebuke, but it sufficed to send Bettina into a cyclone of grief. She was already one of those who are infinitely indifferent to the sufferings of others and infinitesimally sensitive to their own.
When Nicky heard the story he gave Marie Louise a curious look of disapproval and took Bettina into his lap. She was also already one of those ladies who find a man’s lap an excellent consolation. He got rid of her adroitly and when she and Victor were once more engaged in navigation Nicky took up the business he had come for.
“May I stop a moment?” he said, and sat down.
“I have a letter for you,” said Marie Louise.
His roving eyes showed him that the coast was clear, and he slipped a letter into her hand-bag which she opened, and from it he took the letter she cautiously disclosed. He chatted awhile and moved away.
This sort of meeting took place several times in several places. When the crowds were too great or a bobby loitered about, Nicky would murmur to Marie Louise that she had better start home. He would take her arm familiarly and the transfer of the parcel would be deftly achieved.
This messenger service went on for several weeks. Sir Joseph apologized for the trouble he gave Marie Louise. He28seemed to be sincerely unhappy about it, and his little eyes in their fat, watery bags peered at her with a tender regret and an ulterior regret as well.
He explained a dozen times that he sent her because it was such an important business and he had no one else to trust. And Marie Louise, for all her anxiety, was sadly glad of his confidence, regarded it as sacred, and would not violate it so much as to make the least effort to learn what messages she was carrying. Nothing, of course, would have been easier than to pry open one of these envelopes. Sometimes the lapel was hardly sealed. But she would as soon have peeked into a bathroom.
Late in June the Weblings left town and settled in the great country seat Sir Joseph had bought from a bankrupt American who had bought it from nobility gone back to humility. Here life was life. There were forests and surreptitious pheasants, deer that would almost but never quite come to call, unseen nightingales that sang from lofty nave and transept like cherubim all wings and voice.
The house was usually full of guests, but they were careful not to intrude upon their hosts nor their hosts upon them. The life was like life at a big hotel. There was always a little gambling to be had, tennis, golf, or music, or a quiet chat, gardens to stroll and sniff or grub in, horses to ride, motors at beck and call, solitude or company.
Lady Clifton-Wyatt came down for a week-end and struck up a great friendship with the majestic Mrs. Prothero from Washington, D. C., so grand a lady that even Lady C.-W. was a bit in awe of her, so gracious a personage that even Lady C.-W. could not pick a quarrel with her.
Mrs. Prothero gathered Marie Louise under her wing and urged her to visit her when she came to America. But Polly Widdicombe had already pledged Marie Louise to make her home her own on that side of the sea. Polly came down, too, and had “the time of her young life” in doing a bit of the women’s war work that became the beautiful fashion of the time. The justification of it was that it released men for the trenches, but Polly insisted that it was shamefully good sport.
She and Marie Louise went about in breeches and shirts and worked like hostlers around the stables and in the29paddocks, breaking colts and mucking out stalls. They donned the blouses and boots of peasants, and worked in the fields with rake and hoe and harrow. They even tried the plow, but they followed it too literally, and the scallopy furrows they drew across the fields made the yokels laugh or grieve, according to their natures.
The photographers were alive to the piquancy of these revelations, and portraits of Marie Louise in knickers and puttees, and armed with agricultural weapons, appeared in the pages of all the weeklies along with other aristocrats and commoners. Some of these even reached America.
There was just one flaw for Rosalind in this “As You Like It” life and that was the persistence of the secret association with Nicky. It was the strangest of clandestine affairs.
Marie Louise had always liked to get out alone in a saddle or behind the wheel of a runabout, and Sir Joseph, when he came up from town, fell into the habit of asking her once in a while to take another little note to Nicky.
She found him in out-of-the-way places. He would step from a clump of bushes by the road and hail her car, or she would overtake him and offer him a lift to his inn, or she would take horse and gallop across country and find him awaiting her in some lonely avenue or in the twist of a ravine.
He was usually so preoccupied and furtive that he made no proffer of courtship; but once when he seemed peculiarly triumphant he rode so close to her that their knees girded and their spurs clashed, and he tried to clip her in his arms. She gathered her horse and let him go, and he plunged ahead so abruptly that the clinging Nicky dragged Marie Louise from her saddle backward. He tried to swing her to the pommel of his own, but she fought herself free and came to the ground and was almost trampled. She was so rumpled and so furious, and he so frightened, that he left her and spurred after her horse, brought him back, and bothered her no more that day.
“If you ever annoy me again,” she said, “it’ll be the last you’ll see of me.”
She was too useful to be treated as a mere beauty, and she had him cowed.
It was inevitable that Marie Louise, being silently urged30to love Nicky, should helplessly resist the various appeals in his behalf.
There is no worse enemy to love than recommendation. There is something froward about the passion. It hangs back like a fretful child, loathing what is held out for its temptation, longing for the forbidden, the sharp, the perilous.
Next to being asked to love, trying to love is the gravest impediment. Marie Louise kept telling herself that she ought to marry Nicky, and herself kept refusing to obey.
From very perversity her heart turned to other interests. She was desperately in love with soldiersen masseand individually. There was safety in numbers and a canceling rivalry between those who were going out perhaps to death and those who had come back from the jaws of death variously the worse for the experience.
The blind would have been irresistible in their groping need of comfort, if there had not been the maimed of body or mind putting out their incessant pleas for a gramercy of love. Those whose wounds were hideous took on an uncanny beauty from their sacrifice.
She busied herself about them and suffered ecstasies of pity.
She wanted to go to France and get near to danger, to help the freshly wounded, to stanch the spouting arteries, to lend courage to the souls dismayed by the first horror of the understanding that thenceforth they must go through life piecemeal.
But whenever she made application she met some vague rebuff. Her appeals were passed on and on and the blame for their failure was referred always to some remote personage impossible to reach.
Eventually it dawned on her that there was actually an official intention to keep her out of France. This stupefied her for a time. One day it came over her that she was herself suspect. This seemed ridiculous beyond words in view of her abhorrence of the German cause in large and in detail. Ransacking her soul for an explanation, she ran upon the idea that it was because of her association with the Weblings.
She was ashamed to have given such a thought passage through her mind. But it came back as often as she drove31it out and then the thought began to hover about her that perhaps the suspicion was not so insane as she believed. The public is generally unreasonable, but its intuitions, like a woman’s, are the resultants of such complex instincts that they are above analysis.
But the note-carrying went on, and she could not escape from the suspicion or its shadow of disgrace. Like a hateful buzzard it was always somewhere in her sky.
Once the suspicion had domiciled itself in her world, it was incessantly confirmed by the minutiæ of every-day existence. The interchange of messages with Nicky Easton grew unexplainable on any other ground. The theory of secret financial dealings looked ludicrous; or if the dealings were financial, they must be some of the trading with the enemy that was so much discussed in the papers.
She felt that she had been conniving in one of the spy-plots that all the Empire was talking about. She grew afraid to the last degree of fear. She saw herself on the scaffold. She resolved to carry no more messages.
But the next request of Sir Joseph’s found her complying automatically. It had come to be her habit to do what he asked her to do, and to take pride in the service as a small installment on her infinite debt. And every time her resentment rose to an overboiling point, Sir Joseph or Lady Webling would show her some exquisite kindness or do some great public service that won commendation from on high.
One day when she was keyed up to protest Lady Webling discharged Fräulein Ernst for her pro-Germanism and engaged an English nurse. Another day Lady Webling asked her to go on a visit to a hospital. There she lavished tenderness on the British wounded and ignored the German. How could Marie Louise suspect her of being anti-British? Another time when Marie Louise was almost ready to rebel she saw Sir Joseph’s name heading a war subscription, and that night he made, at a public meeting, a speech denouncing Germany in terms of vitriol.
After all, Marie Louise was not English. And America was still neutral. The President had wrung from Germany a promise of better behavior, and in a sneaking way the promise was kept, with many a violation quickly apologized for.
32
Still, England wrestled for her life. There seemed to be hardly room in the papers for the mere names of the dead and the wounded, and those still more pitiable ones, the missing.
Marie Louise lost many a friend, and all of her friends lost and lost. She wore herself out in suffering for others, in visiting the sick, the forlorn, the anxious, the newly bereaved.
The strain on Marie Louise’s heart was the more exhausting because she had a craven feeling all the while that perhaps she was being used somehow as a tool for the destruction of English plans and men. She tried to get the courage to open one of those messages, but she was afraid that she might find confirmation. She made up her mind again and again to put the question point-blank to Sir Joseph, but her tongue faltered. If he were guilty, he would deny it; if he were innocent, the accusation would break his heart. She hated Nicky too much to ask him. He would lie in any case.
She was nagged incessantly by a gadfly of conscience that buzzed in her ears the counsel to tell the police. Sometimes on her way to a tryst with Easton a spirit in her feet led her toward a police station, but another spirit carried her past, for she would visualize the sure consequences of such an exposure. If her suspicions were false, she would be exposed as a combination of dastard and dolt. If they were true, she would be sending Sir Joseph and Lady Webling perhaps to the gallows.
To betray those who had been so angelic to her was simply unthinkable.
Irresolution and meditation made her a very Hamlet of postponement and inaction. Hamlet had only a ghost for counselor, and a mother to be the first victim of his rashness. No wonder he hesitated. And Marie Louise had only hysterical suspicion to account for her thoughts; and the victims of her first step would be the only father and mother she had ever really known. America itself was another Hamlet of debate and indecision, weighing evidences, pondering theories, deferring the sword, hoping that Germany would throw away the baser half. And all the while time slid away, lives slid away, nations fell.
In the autumn the town house was opened again. There was much thinly veiled indignation in the papers and in the33circulation of gossip because of Sir Joseph’s prominence in English life. The Germans were so relentless and so various in their outrages upon even the cruel usages of combat that the sound of a German name grew almost unbearable. People were calling for Sir Joseph’s arrest. Others scoffed at the cruelty and cowardice of such hysteria.
A once-loved prince of German blood had been frozen out of the navy, and the internment camps were growing like boom towns. Yet other Germans somehow were granted an almost untrammeled freedom, and thousands who had avoided evil activity were tolerated throughout the war.
Sir Joseph kept retorting to suspicion with subscription. He took enormous quantities of the government loans. His contributions to the Red Cross and the multitudinous charities were more like endowments than gifts. How could Marie Louise be vile enough to suspect him?
Yet in spite of herself she resolved at last to refuse further messenger service. Then she learned that Nicky had left England and gone to America on most important financial business of a most confidential nature.
Marie Louise was too glad of her release to ask questions. She rejoiced that she had not insulted her foster-parents with mutiny, and she drudged at whatever war work the committees found for her. They found nothing very picturesque, but the more toilsome her labor was the more it served for absolution of any evil she might have done.
And now that the dilemma of loyalty was taken from her soul, her body surrendered weakly. She had time to fall ill. It was enough that she got her feet wet. Her convalescence was slow even in the high hills of Matlock.
The winter had passed, and the summer of 1916 had come before Marie Louise was herself. The Weblings had moved out to the country again; the flowers were back in the gardens; the deer and the birds were in their summer garb and mood. But now the house guests were all wounded soldiers and nurses. Sir Joseph had turned over his estate for a war hospital.
Lady Webling went among her visitors like a queen making her rounds. Sir Joseph squandered money on his distinguished company. Marie Louise joined them and took what comfort she could in such diminution of pain and such contributions34of war power as were permitted her. Those were the only legitimate happinesses in the world.
The tennis-courts were peopled now with players glad of one arm or one eye or even a demodeled face. On the golf-links crutched men hobbled. The horses in the stables bore only partial riders. The card-parties were squared by players using hands made by hand. The music-room resounded with five-finger improvisations and with vocalists who had little but their voices left. They howled, “Keep your head down, Fritzie boy,” or, “We gave them hell at Neuve Chapelle, and here we are and here we are again,” or moaned love-songs with a sardonic irony.
And the guests at tea! And the guests who could not come to tea!
Young Hawdon was there. “Well, Marie Louise,” he had said, “I’m back from France, but notin toto. Fact is, I’m neither here nor there. Quite a sketchy party you have. But we’ll charge it all to Germany, and some day we’ll collect. Some day! Some day!” And he burst into song.
The wonder was that there was so much bravery. At times there was hilarity, but it was always close to tears.
The Weblings went back to London early and took Marie Louise with them. She wanted to stay with the poor soldiers, but Sir Joseph said that there was just as much for her to do in town. There was no lack of poor soldiers anywhere. Besides, he needed her, he said. This set her heart to plunging with the old fear. But he was querulous and irascible nowadays, and Lady Webling begged her not to excite him, for she was afraid of a paralysis. He had the look of a Damocles living under the sword.
The news from America was more encouraging to England and to the Americans in England. German spies were being arrested with amazing frequence. Ambassadors were floundering in hot water and setting up a large traffic in return-tickets. Even the trunks of certain “Americans” were searched––men and women who were amazed to learn that curious German documents had got mixed up in their own effects. Some most peculiar checks and receipts turned up.
It was shortly after a cloudy account of one of these trunk-raids had been published in the London papers that Sir Joseph had his first stroke of paralysis.
35
Sir Joseph was in pitiful case. His devotion to Marie Louise was heartbreaking. Her sympathy had not been exhausted, but schooled rather by its prolonged exercise, and she gave the forlorn old wretch a love and a tenderness that had been wrought to a fine art without losing any of its spontaneous reality.
At first he could move only a bit of the great bulk, sprawled like a snowdrift under the sheet. He was helpless as a shattered soldier, but slowly he won back his faculties and his members. The doors that were shut between his brain and his powers opened one by one, and he became a man again.
The first thing he wrote with his rediscovered right hand was his signature to a document his lawyer brought him after a consultation. It was a transfer of twenty thousand pounds in British war bonds, “for services rendered and other valuable considerations,” to his dear daughter Marie Louise Webling.
When the warrant was handed to her with the bundle of securities, Marie Louise was puzzled, then shocked as the old man explained with his still uncertain lips. When she understood, she rejected the gift with horror. Sir Joseph pleaded with her in a thick speech that had relapsed to an earlier habit.
“I am theenkink how close I been by dyink. Du bist––zhoo are in my vwill, of coorse, but a man says, ‘I vwill,’ and some heirs says, ‘You vwon’t yet!’ Better I should make sure of somethink.”
“But I don’t want money, papa––not like this. And I won’t have you speak of wills and such odious things.”
“You have been like our own daughter only more obeyink as poor Hedwig. You should not make me sick by to refuse.”
She could only quiet him by accepting the wealth and bringing him the receipt for its deposit in a safe of her own.
When he was once more able to hoist his massive body to its feet and to walk to his own door, he said:
“Mein––myGott! Look at the calendar once. It is nineteen seventeen already.”
He ceased to be that simple, primitive thing, a sick man; he became again the financier. She heard of him anew on war-industry boards. She saw his name on lists of big subscriptions.36He began to talk anew of Nicky, and he spoke with unusual anxiety of U-boats. He hoped that they would have a bad week. There was no questioning his sincerity in this.
And one evening he came home in a womanish flurry. He pinched the ear of Marie Louise and whispered to her:
“Nicky is here in England––safe after the sea voyage. Be a nize girl, and you shall see him soon now.”
37CHAPTER IV
The next morning Marie Louise, waking, found her windows opaque with fog. The gardens she usually looked over, glistening green all winter through, were gone, and in their place was a vast bale of sooty cotton packed so tight against the glass that her eyes could not pierce to the sill.
Marie Louise went down to breakfast in a room like a smoky tunnel where the lights burned sickly. She was in a murky and suffocating humor, but Sir Joseph was strangely content for the hour and the air. He ate with the zest of a boy on a holi-morn, and beckoned her into his study, where he confided to her great news:
“Nicky telephoned me. He brings wonderful news out of America. Big business he has done. He cannot come yet by our house, for even servants must not see him here. So you shall go and meet him. You take your own little car, and go most careful till you find Hyde Park gate. Inside you stop and get out to see if something is matter with the engine. A man is there––Nicky. He steps in the car. You get in and drive slowly––so slowly. Give him this letter––put in bosom of dress not to lose. He tells you maybe something, and he gives you envelope. Then he gets out, and you come home––but carefully. Don’t let one of those buses run you over in the fog. I should not risk you if not most important.”
Marie Louise pleaded illness, and fear of never finding the place. But Sir Joseph stared at her with such wonder and pain that she yielded hastily, took the envelope, folded it small, thrust it into her chest pocket and went out to the garage, where she could hardly bully the chauffeur into letting her take her own car. He put all the curtains on, and she pushed forth into obfuscation like a one-man submarine. There was something of the effect of moving along the floor38of the sea. The air was translucent, a little like water-depths, but everything was a blur.
Luck was with her. She neither ran over nor was run over. But she was so tardy in finding the gate, and Nicky was so damp, so chilled, and so uneasy with the apparitions and the voices that had haunted him in the fog that he said nothing more cordial than:
“At last! So you come!”
He climbed in, shivering with cold or fear. And she ran the car a little farther into the nebulous depths. She gave him the letter from Sir Joseph and took from him another.
Nicky did not care to tarry.
“I should get back to my house with this devil’s cold I’ve caught,” he said. “Do you still have no sun in this bedamned England?”
The “you” struck Marie Louise as odd coming from a professed Englishman, even if he did lay the blame for his accent on years spent in German banking-houses.
“How did you find the United States?” Marie Louise asked, with a sudden qualm of homesickness.
“Those United States! Ha! United about what? Money!”
“I think you can get along better afoot,” said Marie Louise, as she made a turn and slipped through the pillars of the gate.
“Au revoir!” said Nicky, and he dived out, slamming the door back of him.
That night there was one of Sir Joseph’s dinners. But almost nobody came, except Lieutenant Hawdon and old Mr. Verrinder. Sir Joseph and Lady Webling seemed more frightened than insulted by the last-moment regrets of the guests. Was it an omen?
It was not many days before Sir Joseph asked Marie Louise to carry another envelope to Nicky. She went out alone, shuddering in the wet and edged air. She found the bench agreed on, and sat waiting, craven and mutinous. Nicky did not come, but another man passed her, looked searchingly, turned and came back to murmur under his lifted hat:
“Miss Webling?”
She gave him her stingiest “Yis.”
“Mr. Easton asked me to meet you in his place, and explain.”
“He is not coming?”
39
“He can’t. He is ill. A bad cold only. He has a letter for you. Have you one for him?”
Marie Louise liked this man even less than she would have liked Nicky himself. She was alarmed, and showed it. The stranger said:
“I am Mr. von Gröner, a frient of––of Nicky’s.”
Marie Louise vibrated between shame and terror. But von Gröner’s credentials were good; it was surely Nicky’s hand that had penned the lines on the envelope. She took it reluctantly and gave him the letter she carried.
She hastened home. Sir Joseph was in a sad flurry, but he accepted the testimony of Nicky’s autograph.
The next day Marie Louise must go on another errand. This time her envelope bore the name of Nicky and the added line, “Kindness of Mr. von Gröner.”
Von Gröner tried to question Marie Louise, but her wits were in an absolute maelstrom of terror. She was afraid of him, afraid that he represented Nicky, afraid that he did not, afraid that he was a real German, afraid that he was a pretended spy, or an English secret-service man. She was afraid of Sir Joseph and his wife, afraid to obey them or disobey them, to love them or hate them, betray them or be betrayed. She had lost all sense of direction, of impetus, of desire.
She saw that Sir Joseph and Lady Webling were in a state of panic, too. They smiled at her with a wan pity and fear. She caught them whispering often. She saw them cling together with a devotion that would have been a burlesque in a picture seen by strangers. It would have been almost as grotesque as a view of a hippopotamus and his mate cowering hugely together and nuzzling each other under the menace of a lightning-storm.
Marie Louise came upon them once comparing the envelope she had just brought with other letters of Nicky’s. Sir Joseph slipped them into a book, then took one of them out cautiously and showed it to Marie Louise.
“Does that look really like the writing from Nicky?”
“Yes,” she said, then, “No,” then, “Of course,” then, “I don’t know.”
Lady Webling said, “Sit down once, my child, and tell me just how this man von Gröner does, acts, speaks.”
She told them. They quizzed her. She was afraid that40they would take her into their confidence, but they exchanged querying looks and signaled caution.
Sir Joseph said: “Strange how long Nicky stays sick, and his memory––little things he mixes up. I wonder is he dead yet. Who knows?”
“Dead?” Marie Louise cried. “Dead, and sends you letters?”
“Yes, but such a funny letter this last one is. I think I write him once more and ask him is he dead or crazy, maybe. Anyway, I think I don’t feel so very good now––mamma and I take maybe a little journey. You come along with, yes?”
A rush of desperate gratitude to the only real people in her world led her to say:
“Whatever you want me to do is what I want to do––or wherever to go.”
Lady Webling drew her to her breast, and Sir Joseph held her hand in one of his and patted it with the flabby other, mumbling:
“Yes, but what is it we want you to do?”
From his eyes came a scurry of tears that ran in panic among the folds of his cheeks. He shook them off and smiled, nodding and still patting her hand as he said:
“Better I write one letter more for Mr. von Gröner. I esk him to come himself after dark to-night now.”
Marie Louise waited in her room, watching the sunlight die out of the west. She felt somehow as if she were a prisoner in the Tower, a princess waiting for the morrow’s little visit to the scaffold. Or did the English shoot women, as Edith Cavell had been shot?
There was a knock at the door, but it was not the turnkey. It was the butler to murmur, “Dinner, please.” She went down and joined mamma and papa at the table. There were no guests except Terror and Suspense, and both of them wore smiling masks and made no visible sign of their presence.
After dinner Marie Louise had her car brought round to the door. There was nothing surprising about that. Women had given up the ancient pretense that their respectability was something that must be policed by a male relative or squire except in broad daylight. Neither vice nor malaria was believed any longer to come from exposure to the night air; nor was virtue regarded like a sum of money that must not be41risked by being carried about alone after dark. It had been easy enough to lose under the old régime.
So Marie Louise launched out in her car much as a son of the family might have done. She drove to a little square too dingily middle class to require a policeman. She sounded her horn three squawks and swung open the door, and a man waiting under an appointed tree stepped from its shadow and into the shadow of the car before it stopped. She dropped into high speed and whisked out of the square.
“You have for me a message,” said Mr. von Gröner.
“Yes. Sir Joseph wants to see you.”
“Me?”
“Yes––at the house. We’ll go there at once if you please.”
“Certainly. Delighted. But Nicky––I ought to telephone him I shall be gone.”
“Nicky is well enough to telephone?”
“Not to come to the telephone, but there is a servant. If you will please stop somewhere. I shall be a moment only.”
Marie Louise felt that she ought not to stop, but she could hardly kidnap the man. So she drew up at a shop and von Gröner left her, her heart shaking her with a faint tremor like that of the engine of her car.
Von Gröner returned promptly, but he said: “I think we should not go too straight to your father’s house. Might be we are followed. We can tell soon. Go in the park, please, and suddenly stop, turn round, and I look at what cars follow.”
She let him command her. She was letting everybody command her; she had no destination, no North Star in her life. Von Gröner kept her dodging about Regent’s Park till she grew angry.
“This seems rather silly, doesn’t it? I am going home. Sir Joseph has worries enough without––”
“Ah, he has worries?”
She did not answer. The eagerness in his voice did not please her. He kept up a rain of questions, too, but she answered them all by referring him to Sir Joseph.
At last they reached the house. As they got out, two men closed in on the car and peered into their faces. Von Gröner snapped at them, and they fell back.
Marie Louise had taken along her latchkey. She opened the door herself and led von Gröner to Sir Joseph’s room.
42
As she lifted her hand to knock she heard Lady Webling weeping frantically, crying out something incoherent. Marie Louise fell back and motioned von Gröner away, but he pushed the door open and, taking her by the elbow, thrust her forward.
Lady Webling stopped short with a wail. Sir Joseph, who had been trying to quiet her by patting her hand, paused with his palm uplifted.
Before Marie Louise could speak she saw that the old couple was not alone. By the mantel stood Mr. Verrinder. By the door, almost touching Marie Louise, was a tall, grim person she had not seen. He closed the door behind von Gröner and Marie Louise.
Mr. Verrinder said, “Be good enough to sit down.” To von Gröner he said, “How are you, Bickford?”
43CHAPTER V
Sir Joseph was staring at the new-comer, and his German nativity told him what Marie Louise had not been sure of, that von Gröner was no German. When Verrinder gave him an English name it shook Marie Louise with a new dismay. Sir Joseph turned from the man to Marie Louise and demanded:
“Marie Louise, you ditt not theenk this man is a Cherman?”
This one more shame crushed Marie Louise. She dropped into a chair, appealing feebly to the man she had retrieved:
“Your name is not von Gröner?”
Bickford grinned. “Well, in a manner of speakin’. You might say it’s my pen-name. Not that I’ve ever been in the pen––except with Nicky.”
“Nicky is in the–– He’s not ill?”
“Well, he’s a bit sick. He was a bit seasick to start with, and when we gave him the collar––well, he doesn’t like his room.”
“But his letters––” Marie Louise pleaded, her fears racing ahead of her questions.
“I was always a hand at forgery, but I thought best to turn it to the aid of me country. I’m proud if you liked me work. The last ones were not up to the mark.Iwas hurried, and Nicky was ugly. He refused to answer any more questions. I had to do it all on me own. Ahfterwards I found I had made a few mistakes.”
When Marie Louise realized that this man had been calmly taking the letters addressed to Nicky and answering them in his feigned script to elicit further information from Sir Joseph and enmesh him further, she dropped her hands at her sides, feeling not only convicted of crime, but of imbecility as well.
Sir Joseph and Lady Webling spread their hands and drew up their shoulders in surrender and gave up hope of bluff.