THE MESSENGER
CHAPTER I
"After all, we aren't yet living in the millennium, Julian. What I'm afraid of is that some day you'll be wanting to carry these notions of yours beyond the bounds of what's reasonable."
"You mean," said the other young man, with a flash in his dark eyes, "you mean you're afraid I may just chance to be honest in my 'notions,' as you call them, of a scheme of social justice."
As far off as you saw Gavan Napier, you knew him as a scion not only of the governing class, but in all likelihood of one of the governing families. Exactly the sort of man, you would say, to have Eton and Balliol in the past, a present as unpaid, private secretary to a member of his Majesty's Government, and a future in which the private secretary himself would belong to officialdom and employ pleasant, more or less accomplished, and more rather than less idle, young gentlemen to take down occasional notes, write an occasional letter, and see a boring constituent.
It was no boring constituent he was seeing now, out of those cool blue eyes of his, yet he followed with evident dissatisfaction the figure of a woman who had appeared an instant over the sand-dunes and who, as Napier turned to look at her instead of at his ball, changed her tack and sauntered inland.
"What do you suppose she's always hanging about for?" Napier asked his companion.
"As if you didn't know!"
"Well, if you do," retorted Napier, "I wish you'd tell me."
"I shall do nothing of the kind. You're quite conceited enough." Julian shouldered his golf clubs (it was against his principles to employ a caddie) and trudged on at the side of his unencumbered friend. The eyes of both followed the lady disappearing among the dunes.
"I've seen her only two or three times," Julian said, "but I've seen she hasn't eyes for anybody except you."
"That's far from being so," Napier retorted. "But if it were, I should know the reason."
"Of course you do."
"But you don't," Napier still insisted. "The reason is I'm the only person in the house who isn't Miss von Schwarzenberg's slave."
"Oh! I took her at first for just a governess."
"She's a lot besides that!" Napier wagged his head in a curiosity-provoking way.
"There's been so much to talk about since I got back," Julian went on, "or else I've been meaning to ask about her."
"She interests you?" Napier asked a little sharply.
"I confess," said Julian, "I haven't understood her position at the McIntyres."
"If I haven't—it isn't from lack of data. Only,"—Napier wrinkled his fine brows—"did you ever know a person that nothing you know about them seems to fit? That isn't grammar, but it's my feeling about that young woman."
The two played a very evenly matched game. As they walked side by side after their balls, Julian wondered from time to time whether the subject of Miss von Schwarzenberg had been introduced to prevent his reverting to that vision of his—all the clearer since his tour round the world—of a reconstituted society in which vested privilege should no longer have a leg to stand on. Or could it be that Gavan was seriously intrigued by the Rhine maiden who, more or less as a special favor, had consented to superintend the studies and to share the recreations of "that handful," Madge McIntyre, aged sixteen? This girl, with the boyish face and boyish tastes and boyish clothes (whose mane of flaming hair had helped to fasten on her the nickname of Wildfire McIntyre), Julian already knew slightly as the only and much-spoiled daughter of Napier's chief. Sir William McIntyre, K. C. B., adviser to the Admiralty and laird of Kirklamont, had been the notable chairman of endless shipping companies and prime promoter of numberless commercial enterprises, until he accepted a seat in the cabinet, a man of vigor and some originality of mind, in contrast to his wife—a brainless butterfly of a woman who complained bitterly that she had less trouble with her four sons than with her one daughter. The one daughter, by ill luck, had an inconvenient share of her father's force of character. She had ruled the house of McIntyre till the advent of the lady in question.
That lady's predecessor had been a Miss Gayne. Miss Gayne had been in possession till a fateful morning last summer when Madge, driving along the coast road, came in sight of Glenfallon Castle, and pulled up her pony with a jerk that nearly precipitated poor Miss Gayne out of the cart. "My goodness gracious, the Duke is back!"
Glenfallon, on its cliff above the Firth, commanded a view north and south over the many-bayed and channeled mainland, out over rocky islets—shining jewels of jacinth and jasper and azurite, spilled haphazard into the sea—clear away to that great gray expanse miscalled by the new governess the German Ocean. Nobody had lived at Glenfallon as long as Madge could remember, so that she might perhaps be pardoned for emitting that excited scream at sight of two young men in tennis flannels busying themselves about the net.
"We mustn't sit here staring at them," Miss Gayne remonstrated.
Miss Gayne picked up the reins which Madge had let fall. Madge seized them with an impatient "Don't!" and flung them round the whip.
"It isn't proper to sit like this, staring into a stranger's tennis court. At two strange young men, too!"
"I'm only staring at one. You can have the other."
Presently a tennis ball came over the wall and bounced into the road. Before Miss Gayne could remonstrate, Madge was out of the cart and had sent the ball hurtling back.
The younger man caught it, and the elder advanced to the wall to thank the young lady. He was a very good specimen of fair, broad-shouldered, blunt-featured manhood, but when he opened his mouth he spoke with a foreign accent.
"When are you expecting him?" demanded Madge.
"Expecting whom? We are not expecting anybody, I'm afraid, and the more pleased to see you." He made his quick little bow and turned, to present his brother. "This is Ernst Pforzheim and I am Carl."
Madge nodded, deliberately ignoring Miss Gayne's hurried approach and disapproving presence.
"How do you do? Have you bought Glenfallon?"
No, they had only leased it. They hoped the change and quiet might do their father some good. He hadn't been well ever since ... ever since they lost their mother.
"We have great hopes of this fine air and perfect quiet," said the elder. "The quiet is the very thing for our father—but for us it may become a little triste. So we play tennis. Do you play tennis, Miss ... a ... Miss...?"
"Do I play tennis?" Madge did not long leave any doubt on that score.
The adventure was not smiled on at home, but poor Miss Gayne got all the blame.
There was a touch of irony in the lady's being succeeded by some one recommended by, or at least through, these very undesirable and undoubtedly foreign acquaintances.
The same success which the Pforzheim young men had with their country neighbors generally, they had with Madge. Everybody seemed to like them. Lady McIntyre liked them from the first. "Such charming manners! And so devoted to their poor father!"
With his pleasant malice Napier described the Pforzheims at Kirklamont, and Lady McIntyre's graciousness that "'so hoped to make your father's acquaintance.'" The Pforzheims shook their heads over the poor gentleman's condition, "'confined to a darkened room.'"
"'But we heard that he was out yesterday evening, in your new steam launch.'
"'Ah! that ... yes ... that is because his eyes are very painful. He can't bear the least light. So he gets no exercise and no change of air during the day.'
"'Well, in that case of course he couldn't expect to sleep!' And then Lady McIntyre had an inspiration. 'Doesn't it sound,' she appealed to Sir William, 'extremely like the kind of insomnia Lord Grantbury suffers from? I believe it's the very identical same. And Lord Grantbury has found a cure.'
"Great sensation on the part of the Pforzheims. Oh, would Lady McIntyre tell them.... They'd be eternally grateful if she would only get Lord Grantbury's prescription. But Lady McIntyre could produce it at once. She did produce it. And what did Julian think it was?"
Julian shook his head. He knew quite well now that Arthur was telling him this yarn in order to avoid reopening the subject of their disagreement—the only one in their lives. So he bore with hearing that Lord Grantbury's remedy for insomnia was a combination of motion and absence of daylight. Lord Grantbury had contended that light was a strong excitant. That the consciousness of being seen, of having to acknowledge recognition, or even of knowing your label was being clapped on your back—all that was disturbing in certain states of health. "'So he has himself driven out, they say, about eleven o'clock at night in a sixty-horsepower car, and goes whizzing along lonely roads where there's no fear of police traps, as hard as he can lick. When he comes back, he finds that all that ozone, and whatever it is, has quieted him. He sleeps like a top.' The sons were advised to put Father Pforzheim in a Rolls-Royce car and see what would happen. 'You haven't got a high power car? Till they can send for one,'—Lady McIntyre appealed to her husband—'don't you think, William, we might—?'
"But Carl, profuse in thanks, said that unfortunately his father had a nervous abhorrence of motor cars.
"'How very strange!' said Lady McIntyre.
"'No, it wasn't at all strange. My mother,'—Carl dropped his eyes and compressed his full lips—'our dear mother was killed in a motor accident.'
"'But our father,'—Ernst looked up as he brushed a white, triple-ringed hand across his eyes—'our father finds the water soothing. After all, Carl, swift motion on the water, why shouldn't that do as well as racing along a road?'
"'And darkness,' said Lady McIntyre.
"'And darkness!' the brothers echoed her together. 'We can never thank you enough, Lady McIntyre. We will persevere with your friend Lord Grantbury's remedy.'" The brothers clicked their heels and pressed their lips to her hand and left her in a flutter. The poor young men's anxiety was most touching! Especially Carl's. Lady McIntyre, according to Napier, doted on Carl. He wasn't so taken up by his filial preoccupations either, that he couldn't sympathize with the anxiety of a mother. Lady McIntyre's about Madge. Mr. Carl agreed that Miss Gayne was not the person. He had seen that at once. No influence whatever. Miss McIntyre was a very charming young lady. Full of character. Fire, too. She required special handling.
"'Ah! how well you understand! Now, what do you advise me to do? Seeing you reminds me,' Lady McIntyre said with her infantile candor, 'that we've never tried a German governess. We've had so many French ones. And quite an army of English and Scotch—'
"'Ah! a German governess!'"—he pulled at his mustache. Mr. Pforzheim promised to consult his aunt. The widow of a Heidelberg professor.
By a special providence Frau Lenz knew of a young lady who was at that moment in London, on her way home from America. She would be the very person to consult.
"She was the very person to get," Lady McIntyre said, when she came back from interviewing the paragon. "And, Heaven be praised, I've got her!"
They had gone back to London on account of that commission Sir William had insisted on having appointed. There were a lot of people in London that July, and things going on. Madge in the thick of everything, as though she'd been twenty-five instead of fifteen. That's how the von Schwarzenberg found her, neglecting lessons, ignoring laws, living at the theater, figuring at her father's official parties, sitting up till all hours of the night, smoking cigarettes till her fingers looked as if she'd been shelling green walnuts, gossiping, arguing, on every subject under the sun. That's the situation to which Miss von Schwarzenberg was introduced as the latest in a long and sorry line.
Napier had watched the transformation.
"They've raised the Schwarzenberg's salary twice." She had subdued every member of the minister's household.
"Not you, I hope?" Julian said quickly.
Napier laughed. "She would set your mind at rest on that score. Only the other day she got me into a corner. 'What have you got against me, Mr. Napier?' she said. 'You don't like me.' It took me so by surprise, I stammered: 'I?... What an idea!' 'Why don't you like me, Mr. Napier?' Mercifully just then Wildfire McIntyre flamed across our path."
CHAPTER II
When the young men reached Kirklamont, the McIntyres were already gathered about the tea-table in the hall of the big, ugly, Scotch country house. "The family" consisted at the moment only of three, the fourth person present being Miss von Schwarzenberg, for it was mid-July. In another month the absent sons (two soldiers and a sailor) would come up for the shooting and bring their friends.
All this presupposed—as nobody found the least difficulty in doing—that Sir William's recent "little heart attack" would leave no legacy more destructive of the usual routine than abandonment of London a fortnight or so earlier than had been planned. A more acute anxiety might have touched Lady McIntyre had her husband not deliberately thrown her off the track. He dubbed the great specialist "a verra reasonable fella," who didn't make a mountain out of a molehill. The patient did not add the means by which he had been coerced into turning his back on public affairs at a moment made so critical for the Government by Irish affairs.
"A break in the London strain, at once and often, or else smash."
That was the dour deliverance which had installed the McIntyres in their beloved Kirklamont two weeks earlier than they could have hoped. It was a party which, with a single exception (again Miss von Schwarzenberg), had shaken off London by every token of tweed garment, stout boots, of golf stockings, and of gaiters.
Cup in hand, Sir William, as became the head of the house, stood planted on wide-apart legs in front of the fireplace—a sanguine-colored, plump, little partridge of a man with a kind, rather rusé face.
Lady McIntyre, behind the urn—fair, fluffy-haired, blue-eyed—looked, as such women will, far older in the country than she did in her "London clothes." But she was far too correct not to make any sacrifice called for by the unwritten law of her kind. Behold her, therefore, bereft of all fripperies save the dangling diamond ear-rings, which emphasized painfully an excuse for frivolity which had been outlived. To tell the blunt truth, Lady McIntyre looked like some shrunken little duenna, attendant on the opulent majesty of the heavy-braided, ox-eyed Juno at her side. For Miss von Schwarzenberg shared the High Seat—otherwise Lady McIntyre's carved settle. At her feet sat Madge, her pupil, and an Aberdeen terrier.
"You really!"—the high-pitched excitement in the girl's voice reached the young men depositing their golf clubs and caps in the lobby—"you really and truly want to learn golf—after all?"
"If nobody has any objection," a voice answered, in an accent very slightly foreign, and to the English ear suggesting, as much as anything, Western American.
"Objection! Quite the contrary. Capital idea!" Sir William spoke heartily.
Bobby, fourteen but looking nearer eighteen, spilled over and sprawled out of an arm-chair as he beat the arm, and cried out with animation and a mouth full of griddle cake, "Bags I teach you, Fräulein!"
"I hope you've been taking it out of Gavan," Sir William had called out by way of greeting to Julian. Julian played up by proceeding to describe with mock braggadoccio how he'd completely taken the shine out of the champion. That person, handing tea, contented himself with privately observing yet again how his friend, long and lithe and dark, offered to the rotund little figure of the eminent official a contrast that ministered pleasantly to a sense of the ludicrous. Sir William's bald bullet head barely reached the height of Julian's chest. But it was notorious—and Napier had not worked for two years with Sir William without finding good reason to share the prevalent opinion—that inside the aforesaid bullet was an uncommon amount of shrewd sense and a highly developed skill in organizing power.
Sir William ran his department as he ran his vast commercial enterprises, with an ease that was own child of intelligence of a high degree. But now, as though it were the main factor in life, he talked golf.
The governess, after a perfunctory "how do you do" to the visitor, had leaned over to stroke the Aberdeen. The lady's full-moon face—with its heavy, shapely nose, its smooth apple cheeks, its quiet, beautiful mouth—was bent down till her chin rested on her generous bust. It occurred to Napier that she often adopted this pose. It gave her an air of pensiveness, of submission, the more striking in a person of so much character.
Also, the little tendrils of yellow hair that escaped from under the Gretchen-like banded braids cast delicate shadows on the whitest neck Napier had ever seen. Oh, she had her points.
"Did you hear, Mr. Grant?" Madge called out. "Miss von Schwarzenberg says now she wants to learn our foolish national game."
"Never!" Julian turned back to the tea-table. His tone was faintly ironic—as though the sensation created by this lady's conversion to golf seemed disproportionate to its importance.
Lady McIntyre lifted her appealing eyes. "I wonder if you'd be very kind, Mr. Grant, and help the children to teach Miss von Schwarzenberg?"
The almost infinitesimal pause was cancelled, obliterated, by Miss von Schwarzenberg's promptitude. "Oh, I couldn't think of being such a trouble." She had risen. "Sit here, Mr. Grant," she said. "Yes, please. I've finished." In spite of his protest, she retired to a chair on the far side of the fireplace—Napier's side—and picked up her knitting.
Madge followed, dog-like, and so did the Aberdeen.
"It is a comfort," Lady McIntyre went on, "to find such a terribly clever person"—she nodded significantly in the direction of Miss von Schwarzenberg—"taking an interest in the things ordinary mortals care about. It's been the one fault I've had to find with Greta. She doesn't play games. They don't, you know. But the Germans are a wonderful people! Take this young girl"—she lowered her voice. But, however, little of the conversation was lost on Miss von Schwarzenberg. She knitted steadily. Madge played with the dog.
"Greta's only twenty-five or six," Lady McIntyre went on. "Her father was an officer of Uhlans. An invalid now. And somehow they lost their money. An uncle in America is tremendously rich, and he's had Greta at one of the great women's colleges over there. She insisted on going home every summer ... so domestic, the Germans! I always think it's extremely nice of them to feel affectionate toward such a horrid country as Germany—don't you, Mr. Grant? And such a language to wrestle with, poor things! Do you know, they call a thimble a finger hat? Yes, and a pin a stick needle!"
"Well, well!"—Sir William broke off in the middle of the golf discussion, and rattled his seals with great vigor, as though they were a summons to industry—a simulacrum of factory bell or works whistle. "I must write one more letter. No, I don't need you, Gavan."
"But that translation?"
"It's done."
"Done!" said the astonished Napier.
"And couldn't be better," said Sir William, as he disappeared into the library.
"Miss Greta did it!" triumphed Bobby.
"I wonder," said the lady, smiling, "which of you two would go and get me the rest of my wool?"
Bobby was on his feet, staring helplessly round.
"In your work bag?" asked Madge.
Greta nodded, and the two raced each other upstairs. Miss Greta lifted her candid eyes. "Does it require a great deal of practice, Mr. Napier, to play golf passably?" She blushed slightly as she went on: "I suppose I've hoped that if I watched you, I'd stand a better chance of playing a fair game myself some day. Fair, that is," she added, with her meek droop of the braid-crowned head, "fair for a woman."
"I'm sure you know," Napier returned a little impatiently, "that plenty of women play very well."
"Do you mean," she inquired with her soft persistence, "you'd ever be so kind as to give me a tip or two?"
He didn't answer at once, and she turned in her chair to look at him. Out from her disarranged cushion rolled a large ball of field gray. It bumped against Napier's ankle and rebounded to the wall.
"Isn't this the wool you were looking for?" He took it up by the loose end, and rapidly unrolled several yards of it.
"Thank you so much! I can't think how it got down here." She took the ball from him, and remained standing while she rewound. "After all, I sha'n't much more than have time to get on my things." She glanced at the clock.
"Where are you going?" Lady McIntyre asked the question from habit. Seldom was Greta allowed to leave the room without that question.
"You were so kind as to say I might have the cart."
"Oh, yes," Lady McIntyre remembered.
"What for?" asked Bobby, tumbling downstairs. "Want to be driven somewhere? Bags I—"
"Certainly not!" Madge called out to him. And then in a markedly different tone, "I've turned everything out of.... Oh, you've got it!"
It was all right, Miss Greta said comprehensively. She would go to the station alone.
"Oh, please let me come!" Madge begged.
Miss von Schwarzenberg shook her head. Madge looked at her wistfully. "I wish she wasn't coming!"
Then with a gleam, "I believe you do too!"
Miss von Schwarzenberg smiled.
"Who is it?" demanded Bobby.
"Oh, a little American friend of mine. A girl I went to school with."
"Her name's Nan Ellis," Madge informed the company gloomily, "and she's not much to look at, and not at all rich, and not much of anything that I can discover. Just a millstone round Miss Greta's neck."
"We mustn't say that." Miss Greta was winding the last couple of yards. "You see, she's an orphan, and I rather took her under my wing at school—poor child!"
Bobby asked if the American was going to stay with us.
"Oh, no," said the wool winder, now at the end of her task. "At the inn, of course." Miss Greta glanced again at the clock as she gathered up her knitting.
"Cart wasn't ordered till six," Madge threw in. "Don't you mean to bring her here at all?"
"I should be delighted. But—I can't flatter myself that my little friend would interest you." She swept the circle. "Quite a nice girl, but ..." (a deprecatory wave of one hand), "well, crude. Western, you know. She has grown used to looking to me for the summer. I tried to explain that—" the pause was eloquent of a delicate desire to spare feelings—"that I wasn't taking a holiday myself this year. But,"—on her way out of the hall Miss Greta laughed over her shoulder—"she's not perhaps so very quick at—how do you say it?—not so quick at the uptake." She turned at the sound of a motor car rushing up the drive.
Through the open lobby doors a girl was seen rising from her seat and scanning Kirklamont Hall with a slight frown. As the car swerved round to the entrance she called out to the chauffeur in a voice of appalling distinctness, and most unmistakably transatlantic: "Are you sure this is the place? It isn't my idea of a.... Oh!" She had given one glance through the lobby and was out of the car as a bird goes over a hedge. "It is! It is!"—The girl stood in the hall, holding out her hands, "Greta!"
"My dear Nan!" Miss von Schwarzenberg had hastened forward, more flurried than anybody there had ever seen her.
"Oh, my!" said the newcomer with a face of rapture. "Oh, my!" and she fell to hugging Miss von Schwarzenberg.
Bobby sat contorting his long legs and arms with unregenerate glee at Fräulein's struggle to be cordial and at the same time to disengage herself as rapidly as possible.
Lady McIntyre left her settle and pattered forward with hospitable intent. An instant of indecision on Miss von Schwarzenberg's part, and then Miss Ellis was duly presented.
She wasn't nearly so tall as Napier had thought her when she stood up in the car. This was because the figure was slight and extremely erect. For the rest, a small head, overweighted with a profusion of bright, brown hair; a rather childish face under a little golden-brown hat, guiltless of trimming but for the two brown wings set one on each side, rather far back. "The kind of hat," Napier pointed out afterward, "that Pheidias gave to Mercury. Cheek for a girl to wear a hat like that!"
Even under her manifest excitement, the delicate oval of the girl's face showed only a faint tinge of color. Miss von Schwarzenberg's round cheeks were richest carmine. "Oh, you've kept the car! That's right. I won't stop for a hat. Your scarf, Madge. Then I won't have to keep her waiting."
"But why must you—" Lady McIntyre began.
"She has rooms at the inn," said Miss von Schwarzenberg, with decision, as she wrapped Madge's scarf round her braids.
Yes, Lady McIntyre understood that. "But why should you be in such a hurry?"
"Oh, I'm not in any hurry," said the girl. "Not now. I have been in a hurry—a terrible hurry for sixteen days. But now—" she smiled a bright contentment at her goal.
The instant application of Miss von Schwarzenberg's arm to her friend's waist was less for love, Napier felt sure, than as a means of propulsion. "You'd like to get unpacked, I'm certain."
Lady McIntyre, nervously anxious not to be inhospitable to Greta's visitor, declared she was not going to allow them to go till Miss Ellis had had some tea. Miss Ellis still stood looking at her friend with adoring affection. Plainly she was ready to do anything Greta liked—anything that didn't involve her losing sight of this face she'd traveled five thousand miles to see. Greta unwound her scarf.
"This is my daughter," said Lady McIntyre.
"Oh, are you 'Madge'? Of course, I've heard about you." Miss Ellis put out a hand.
Madge gave it a muscular shake and let go quickly. "How do?"
The stranger seemed not to notice. She accepted a double wedge of buttered scone from Bobby, and with great cheerfulness she deposited three lumps of sugar in her tea.
Miss von Schwarzenberg raised her eyes to Napier's face. He and Julian, several yards away, were leaning against the mantel-piece, pretending to discuss the Ulster situation.
As Miss von Schwarzenberg, across her friend, met Napier's look, she smiled ever so faintly, but with enormous meaning. "Behold a child of nature," the look said. Then, "Did you have a good passage, Nanchen?" she asked.
"Well, they said it was a bad passage. I thought it perfectly glorious." Miss Ellis had taken a large slab of shortbread. Rapid disposal of it did not at all interfere with a description of the amenities of an unchaperoned sea voyage. Miss Ellis did not pause till, to the accompaniment of a crunch of gravel and voices outside, two young men could be descried coming up the middle of the drive. They were leading a couple of great, long-bodied, white dogs.
The hall was instantly a hive of excitement. Bobby and Madge bolted out as one, with cries of rapture. Lady McIntyre, hardly less pleased, prepared to follow, with Julian. Napier sauntered slowly after them.
The elder Pforzheim entered with his brisk ceremoniousness, and bowed low over Lady McIntyre's hand: "My father has sent you those Russian boarhounds he promised. Ernst has got them outside"—he stood back in that empressé way of his that seemed to say, "My manners are far too perfect not to suffer others to precede." And the others, in the careless English way, did precede. They even blocked up the entrance, leaving Mr. Carl and his politeness in the rear. This manœuver so obstructed the view that Miss Ellis rose and came a few paces nearer, hoping for a better sight of those exciting animals. Napier, glancing back, saw that Miss von Schwarzenberg sat perfectly still.
"Did you ever see boarhounds before, Greta? I never did."
What Greta answered, Napier didn't hear; but the moment was not lost upon him when, all view of the spectacle being quite shut out by the crowding at the door, Miss Ellis' attention—about to return to the tea-table—"caught," as it were, on Carl Pforzheim's profile.
"Why, how do you do?" she said with a quick turn. "I'm very glad to meet you."
Carl Pforzheim stared. Miss von Schwarzenberg shot forward and took Nan by the arm.
"In the midst of all the masses of strangers I've been seeing, you seem like an old friend. Tell him, Greta—" At sight of Miss von Schwarzenberg's face, she stopped short.
"I think you are making some mistake," said Mr. Carl.
"Oh, no, I'm not!" that terribly "carrying" voice went on. "It's because Greta has told me such a great deal about you. And you're exactly like your picture, down to the cleft in your chin—" The girl hesitated again as Greta mumbled, and Pforzheim, with a desperate, "I must help my brother," forgot all his fine manners and pushed his way out.
"What's the matter, dearest? Oughtn't I to have said that?" Then in a half whisper: "I never mentioned Ernst. And, after all, it was only Ernst that you—"
"Will you be quiet?"
In another ten seconds they were whirling away in the car.
Napier walked half-way home with Grant as usual. He was amused at Julian's indignation over the von Schwarzenberg's patronage of her "little friend." And then they quarreled a little over Napier's decision that it was cheek for a girl to come "winged like Mercury." Julian defended her. He'd never seen a hat he liked better. It just suited that face of hers.
"'That face!'" Napier mocked. "I suppose, out of pure contentiousness, you'll be saying it's pretty."
"'Pretty!' Pretty faces are cheap. That one has got the fineness of a wood anemone. And the faith of a St. Francis. Did you ever see such faith in any pair of eyes? Ye gods! If I could believe in life as that child does, if I were as serenely sure of everybody's good will,"—he threw out his walking-stick at the prison wall between him and such freedoms, such innocent securities. "It's pathetic—a person like that. Think of the knocks she'll get. Think—"
"What I'm thinking of—I can't get it out of my mind! Every time I go back to it, it seems to me stranger—the expression on the von Schwarzenberg's face when the girl recognized Pforzheim."
"What sort of expression?" said Julian, absently.
"I wish you'd seen it! And the way she looked after Carl with a sort of cowering apology, before she plunged into the car. Now leave off quarreling with me about the Mercury cap, and just tell me: Why the devil should that woman have pretended she'd never seen the Pforzheims before she met them at Kirklamont? I wake up in the middle of the night and ask myself that question."
"How do you know she pretended—?"
"I was there. I saw them introduced."
CHAPTER III
That hall at Kirklamont was for Gavan Napier, as he looked back, forever associated with the most decisive hours in his own fate, as well as that of his closest friend. It meant to him, perhaps more than anything, the abiding memory of that morning after the arrival of Miss Greta's "little friend."
He stood in front of the fireplace, waiting for Andrews to bring in the post. At that particular moment there wasn't anybody else in the hall. There probably soon would be somebody, Napier reflected, with a mingled sense of amusement and uneasiness. For this was about the time Miss von Schwarzenberg was astute enough to choose for her little tête-à-têtes with the private secretary—always elaborately accidental. Sir William would be out riding; Lady McIntyre dawdling over her late breakfast, and Madge in the schoolroom, as Napier could all too plainly hear, practising with that new ruthlessness introduced by Miss von Schwarzenberg.
Miss Greta was never so at a loss as to enter without her little excuse, "I think I must have left my knitting." Or, sans phrase, she would go to the writing table and consult Whitaker or Bradshaw. There was always a semblance of reasonableness in such preoccupation. For Lady McIntyre had fallen into the habit of going to Miss Greta for every sort of service, from somebody's official style and title to looking out trains.
It wasn't the first, by several score of times, that young ladies had shown themselves fertile in pretexts for a little conversation with Mr. Napier. He himself was not in the least averse, as a rule, to a little harmless flirtation—even with a governess. But suppose this particular young woman should, with the fatal German sentimentality, be really falling in love. One day, as he was sorting the letters, she had stood at the table beside him, durchblattering Bradshaw with piteous aimlessness. He suggested: "Shall I look it up for you.... Where do you want to go?"
With a heave of her high bosom she had answered that sometimes she thought the place she'd best go to was the bottom of Kirklamont Loch. Only the timely entrance of a servant with a telegram had, Napier felt, saved him from a most inconvenient scene. He reflected anxiously upon the high rate of suicide in Germany. It would be very awful if for sake of his beaux yeux Miss Greta should find a watery grave.
He looked at the clock. If the post was late, so was Miss von Schwarzenberg.
Suddenly it came over Napier that she timed these entrances of hers, not according to the clock, and not according to his own movements. He was sometimes twenty minutes waiting there alone for the post to come in.
"God bless my soul!" he ejaculated mentally. Wasn't she invariably here about two minutes before Andrews brought in the bag?
Before Napier had time to readjust himself to this new view of the lady's apparent interest in him—there she was!—in her very feminine, rather Londony, clothes; her intensely white, plump neck rising out of a lace blouse; her yellow hair bound in smooth braids round her head; a light dust of pearl powder over her pink cheeks.
She came straight over to the fireplace, "Mr. Napier, I should like to speak to you a moment."
Napier lowered his newspaper, "Yes, Miss von Schwarzenberg."
"I don't know if you gathered yesterday ... the Pforzheims are old friends of my family."
"Oh?" said Napier.
"Their father and my father were brothers-in-arms," she went on in that heroine-of-melodrama style she sometimes affected. "They have been close friends since their university days."
"Really." Napier's calm seemed to detract from her own.
The color surged into her round cheeks, but she held her head dauntlessly on its short white neck as she confessed, "Carl and Ernst have known me since I was a child."
Napier laid down the newspaper. "Indeed!"
"I suppose," she challenged him, "you think, that being the case, it was very odd we should meet like strangers?"
"Oh, I dare say you had your reasons," he said, as Andrews came in. Napier walked the length of the hall to where the man had put down the bag.
Miss von Schwarzenberg did not move till Andrews had gone out. She did not move even then, until Napier found his keys, selected his duplicate, fitted it to the lock, and at last threw back the leather flap and drew out the letters.
That instant, as though she had only just resumed control of her self-possession, Miss von Schwarzenberg, handkerchief in hand, moved softly down the hall and stood at Napier's side. It came over him that this wasn't the first time that she had executed this simple manœuver, if manœuver it was. He knew now that he had been imputing to his own attractiveness her invariable drawing near while he transacted his business with the letter-bag. The little pause before Andrews left the room he had set down as a concession to the proprieties. More than ever—so he had read her—if she laid traps for little talks with the private secretary, was it important that the servants should not be set gossiping. But now, with an inward jolt, he asked, had he been making an ass of himself? His hand, already inserted a second time to draw out more letters, came forth empty. He noticed that her eyes were on it as he turned the palm of his hand toward him, fingers doubled and nails in a line. He studied them.
She studied the letters already lying in an unsorted heap. They seemed not to interest. She pressed her handkerchief to her lips and raised her eyes. "I would have told you before—only—only,"—her beautiful mouth quivered and her eyes fell again—"you ... are difficult to talk to."
"Am I?" said Napier, in a tone of polite surprise, still studying his nails.
"For me. Yes.... You make it difficult. Why do you, Mr. Napier?"
That man must have a heart of stone to resist an appeal so voiced. "Perhaps you imagine it," he said, taking refuge in pulling out the rest of the letters and sorting them into piles.
She stood as though too discouraged to continue, too listless to go away. But when, in the midst of his sorting, Napier glanced at her, he discovered no listlessness in the eyes that kept tally of the letters he was dealing out. What earthly good does it do her to read the outsides of our envelopes? he wondered.
"I've been unhappy," she went on, "most unhappy under my enforced silence. I've wanted so much that you anyhow should know the truth."
"I don't know why I especially—" he began.
"No, no, no!" she said a little wildly, in spite of the hushed softness of her tone, "you don't know. And it's a good thing—a good thing you don't. But I'm too unhappy under the innocent little deceit that's been forced on me. You see, we had quarreled, the Pforzheims and I. That is, they quarreled. They each wanted to marry me. Oh, it was dreadful! They wanted to fight a duel...."
"About...?" Napier laid a long official envelope on the top of Sir William's pile.
"About me," she said with lowered eyes. "That was why I went to America. I couldn't bear it. I said: 'We are strangers from this day!' And so,"—she pressed her handkerchief again to her lips—"and so we met like that. I told them I wouldn't stay here an hour if they swerved a hair's breath from the role of strangers. Now,"—her voice altered suddenly as though out of weariness after immense effort—"now you know."
Napier took out the last letters. "I expect," he said kindly, "it's been hard enough for you—at times."
"The strain is frightful." She swallowed and began again. "I—Maybe you've noticed.... They will write to me from time to time."
She waited. Napier's face as blank as the new sheet of blotting paper in front of the great presentation ink-stand.
"Well, is it my fault?" she demanded. "I've tried to make them see what an equivocal position it puts me in, how unfair—" her face yearned for sympathy.
Napier went on with his sorting.
"It's too nerve-racking," she said with increasing agitation. "Each one thinks the other has got over that old madness. But the letters they write me...! Frantic!" She came closer still. She laid her hand on Napier's sleeve. "Do you know, sometimes I'm afraid...." She drew back, as a step sounded on the gravel.
"The Pforzheims!" Napier said to himself.
But a very different apparition stood there. The girl in the Mercury cap. Not so blithe as the day before—eager still, but wistful.
"Why, my dear Nan!" Miss von Schwarzenberg said again, precisely as she had before. "I told you I would come for you!"
"Yes, in the afternoon, you said. But I couldn't wait. Don't look like that, dearest." She had lowered her voice as Miss von Schwarzenberg joined her in the lobby. "I began to be afraid I'd only dreamed that you were so near again."
Miss von Schwarzenberg answered in a voice lower still. Napier gathered up Sir William's letters and his own. As he went with them into the library, Miss von Schwarzenberg turned hastily. "I'll just go and see if Lady McIntyre can spare me two minutes. I'll meet you out there, by the clump of firs."
"All right," the girl said quietly, and turned away.
Miss von Schwarzenberg knew as well as Napier did that Lady McIntyre was in the breakfast-room looking at the illustrated papers over her second cup of coffee. But Miss von Schwarzenberg hurried upstairs.
Ordinarily Napier would have sat reading and answering his own letters till what time Sir William should come in from his ride. To-day he stood near the library fire—still seeing that face under the cap. What had the von Schwarzenberg been saying to her? It wasn't at all the face she had brought here the evening before. And if Julian Grant had been struck by the happy faith in its yesterday aspect, Napier found something rather touching in the hurt steadfastness it showed to-day.
"It isn't the same face," Napier repeated to himself; and before he had at all made up his mind what he should do next, he was going through the hall.
There she was pulling off her gloves, and holding her hands over the fire.
"It is cold," Napier said, and he seized the poker. The flames sprang up and danced on the girl's face.
"Oh, my! How nice! You are the private secretary, aren't you?"
"What makes you think that?" he asked, a little on his dignity.
"Well, the other one was 'Julian,' wasn't he?"
Napier didn't much like this familiarity with a Christian name on the part of a stranger. "Yes. I'm Gavan Napier."
"I'm glad to meet you, Mr. Napier." She held out her hand.
He said nothing, only glanced round the hall in an undecided fashion after releasing her hand, and then put his letters down on the nearest chair. "I hope I'm not in your way," the girl said. "You see, I don't know at all what private secretaries do. You are the first one I ever met."
He laughed, and said they were a good deal like other people so far as he'd observed, and didn't do anything in particular.
Miss Ellis declared she knew better than that. "That's where you sit, isn't it?"—she nodded at the big table—"writing your state documents. And I suppose everybody goes by on tiptoe. And nobody dares speak to you ... and of course I oughtn't to be here!"
"Oh, yes, you ought."
"No. I ought by rights to be out by the firs. But I was cold. I didn't see why I should wait out by the firs when there was a fire here doing nobody any good."
She misinterpreted his steady look. "Oh, my! you think I ought to have gone out and waited by the...!"
"Nothing of the sort! I shouldn't have thought half so well of you if you'd gone out and waited by the firs."
But the wing-capped head with its overweight of hair turned anxiously toward the staircase by which Greta had vanished. "I've often heard Greta say, 'The great thing is to learn instinctive obedience.'"
"But why on earth should you obey Miss von Schwarzenberg?"
"Because Greta's the cleverest as well as the most splendid person in the world." She glowed with it. "And knows more in a minute than I do in a year."
Napier laughed at that reason, so Miss Ellis produced another. "And then, you see, ever since I was quite young I always have obeyed Greta—when I was good!"—she threw in quickly with a self-convicting laugh.
"How long have you known Miss von Schwarzenberg?"
"Oh, for ages. Ever since I was seventeen."
"That must have been a long time ago!"
"Well, it is. It's going on six years. Will it hold me too?" She looked doubtfully at the brass bar of the fender.
"Oh, yes," he reassured her, "it would hold ten of you." His smiling glance took note of the small-boned hands that clutched the brass. From the delicate ankles and the impossible feet, up to the slim neck, there wasn't enough substance in her to furnish forth a good British specimen of half her age. Yet when she stood up she was not only tall, she was almost commanding. That was partly carriage, he decided, and partly—well, what was it?
"The trouble about Greta," she went on, "is that she's a person everybody is always wanting. Then, added to that, she is the best daughter in the world. Every year she went home for several months. But she always got back in time!" The girl smiled an odd smile, not as though intended for Napier at all. "She always got back (we've often talked about it) just as I was about to commit some awful mistake."
Napier was morally certain he could have got her—if only for the honor and glory of Greta—to enumerate one or two of these timely rescues, if, by a stroke of rank bad luck, Julian hadn't appeared at that moment.
"Oh, my!" said Miss Ellis under her breath—which, was silly as well as slightly irritating.
With a casual "Hello!" Julian came marching over to the fireplace.
"You're being very energetic all of a sudden," Napier said, with his smiling malice. "This early worm, Miss Ellis, is Mr. Grant."
"I'm very glad to meet you." She stood up and held out her hand.
"Hasn't it been a splendid morning?" she asked. And did they have many days so un-Scotch-misty as this?
They went on uttering banalities about the morning and the countryside, and smiling into each other's faces.
Napier sat on the fender-stool, chuckling to himself. Fancy old Julian! Do him all the good in the world to have a girl looking at him like that.
She did so want to see as much as ever she could of "this lovely coast." Perhaps Mr. Grant would advise her what to begin with?
Oh, Julian could advise. There was nothing he was readier at.
"Stop! stop!" the girl interrupted, "I mustn't be made greedier than I am; for I've only got two or three days."
"Two or three—! Where are you going?" Julian demanded.
"Greta thinks London."
"London?"
"Well, there is the National Gallery, and the old city churches," Nan said, with marked absence of enthusiasm. "Oh, I don't doubt really but I shall find it perfectly fascinating.... And then from time to time Greta will run up for a day or two."
"It isn't my business," Julian said, in that tone people use when they have definitely adopted the business in question, "but it sounds to me the very poorest—" He left it hanging there.
"Surely," Napier observed quietly, "when you came, you meant to stay longer?"
"Oh—yes! when I first came. But, you see, I didn't understand. I thought being a governess here was like being a governess at home." And quickly, as though to obliterate any suggestion of odious comparison, "Perhaps it's because we have so few governesses in California."
"Well, does that make it different for them?"
"Well, we give them time to themselves. I—I don't criticize your way," she threw in, a little flustered to find where she was going—"only we—Oh, here is Lady McIntyre!" she ended with much relief.
The manners of the lady of Kirklamont were in marked contrast to her pinched and chilled appearance. Her fairness was the kind that goes with a slightly reddened nose and a faint, bluish tinge about the mouth at this hour of the morning. She was most genial to Miss Ellis, and the girl was, in her turn, won to ease and confidence.
"No, thank you, I won't sit down. I didn't mean to stay but half a minute ... though I'm afraid Greta may think, even now, that I still don't understand that her time belongs to you."
"But we are not such slave drivers!" The little lady shook her diamond ear-rings. Greta could certainly take any day off to be with her friend, and every day, she of course had several hours at her disposal, whenever she wished.
Miss von Schwarzenberg, in the act of descending the stairs, had paused the fraction of a second. "Oh, there you are!" she threw over the banisters toward Lady McIntyre.
It occurred to Napier that the girl standing between him and Julian was a little uneasy at being found so far this side of the firs.
"Yes," Lady McIntyre said, "I was just arranging with Miss Ellis that she must stay to luncheon."
"And I was just going to ask if you'd consent to our plan," Greta said as she joined the group. "We thought of lunching at the inn."
At sight of the smile on Miss von Schwarzenberg's face—still more at her "plan,"—the slight cloud of dubiety vanished from Miss Ellis. She stood in full sunshine.
"But why not lunch here?" urged Lady McIntyre.
"We want to talk America, don't we? And the old days?"
"Yes, yes," said her enraptured friend.
"Well, then,"—Lady McIntyre fell in with what she took to be the previous arrangement—"you'll bring her back to tea."
They all saw Miss Ellis to the door, and Miss Greta saw her to the first gate.
"I say," remarked Julian, when the lady of the house had also disappeared, "why shouldn't we take those two girls around?"
"Sir William. He'd never stand it."
"No, no! But after. He plays before tea, doesn't he?"
"Yes, before."
"Very well, then. We'll take 'em round after. I'll come with the motor." He caught up his cap. "You arrange it with the Paragon." Julian bolted off toward the footpath leading to the inn.
Did she realize that, the woman coming back with the reflective air? Apparently not. She lifted her bent head, and when she saw Napier was waiting there at the door alone she smiled. She was certainly very charming when she smiled.
"I don't want to disparage the golfing powers of either Bobby or Madge," Napier said, "but what do you say to a round with me after tea?"
She looked at him oddly. It struck Napier that she didn't apply her formula, "You are very kind." He was conscious of a slight embarrassment under her scrutiny.
"You say that because Lady McIntyre asked you to."
"Not only for that reason."
Whereat Miss Greta lowered her eyes. "What should I do about Nan Ellis?" she said.
"Oh, we've thought of that. Mr. Grant will look after her while you and I—" he smiled. "Shall we say half-past five?"
The china-blue eyes turned to the open door and to the gaitered rotundity approaching—Sir William coming up from the stable. "Half-past five, then," she murmured. On her way to the schoolroom she caught up a book with the air of one who finds at last a boon long sought.
Sir William was inclined to be facetious over "catching you and the Incomparable One. I've always known the day would come...."
Instead of tackling the letters, he went on with his absurd chaffing.
"The fact is," Napier said, when he had shut the library door, "I've been wanting to say a word about this lady."
"What's up?" Sir William was still smiling roguishly.
"I'm thinking of the matter of the translation. Surely an official document of that description ought not to be in chance hands."
What did he mean? It hadn't been in chance hands.
It had been in the hands of Miss von Schwarzenberg. And Miss von Schwarzenberg, Napier reminded his chief, was an outsider. Or, if not that (hastily he readjusted himself to the McIntyre view) she was at all events outside the official circle.
"My dear boy, of course she is. She is a woman. And beyond knowing an English equivalent for a German word, she understands as much about the bearing of a paper on International Commerce—as much as that Aberdeen terrier."
"I think, sir, you underrate Miss von Schwarzenberg's intelligence."
"Or maybe you," said Sir William, wrinkling his little nose with silent laughter, "maybe you underrate the Aberdeen's."
Miss Greta did not produce her friend at tea time. "Nan doesn't care about tea. Americans don't, you know. She will meet us at the links."
And it so fell out.
If Miss Ellis didn't "take to" tea, she "took to" golf "as if she'd been a born Scot," according to Julian. Why on earth Miss von Schwarzenberg should want to go on trying when the power to hit a ball was so obviously not among her many gifts, passed Napier's understanding. It struck him as rather nice of her that she wasn't the least disturbed by Nan's swinging efficiency. Was that because it got rid of her?—put wide stretches of sand and gorse between the ill-matched couples? Napier would hardly have stood it so amiably but for Julian's disarming frankness as to the satisfaction he, at all events, was deriving from the arrangement.
And Nan—planted high above a bunker, hair rather wild, face sparkling with zest for the game, or for the company, or for that she was Nan Ellis.
"Look at her!" Julian said, on a note so new in Napier's experience of him that he stood silent a moment, looking, not at the girl, but at his friend.
Napier was still in the phase of being immensely diverted at the spiffing progress of old Julian's flirtation—so much better for him than addling his brains over that scheme of internationalism that was going to save the world.
"Look at her," Julian repeated, "did you ever see anybody so, so ... God's-in-His-Heaven,-all's-well-with-the-world!"
"Look here, Julian, I hope you're not...."
"Well, do you know, I'm afraid I am," said his friend. "I don't really quite understand what it is that's happened. But something has."
With that childlike directness that was part of Julian's charm for the more complex mind, he turned to Napier just before the von Schwarzenberg came within earshot. "There's a fly in the precious ointment," he said. "This rot about her going to London. Look here, Napier, the von Schwarzenberg woman would do anything for you. Make her leave the girl in peace here."
"Impossible!" Napier said with decision. "How could I ask such a thing, you unpractical being!"
"That woman" was too near now for more, and Julian sheered off toward the figure on the sky-line.
On the way back to the hall, Miss von Schwarzenberg talked more intimately than ever she had to Napier. She told him about her home in Hanover. About her childhood. Her "years of exile." So she spoke of America. She had a story of how an odious Chicago millionaire had wanted to marry her.
"But why do I tell you all this?"
Napier too had been wondering.
"It must be," she went on, "because you are a little less 'remote' this evening, and I am suffering from Heimweh."
In a sturdy, practical tone Napier advised her not to give way to that! In order to divert her thoughts, "What do you think of ..."—he nodded to the two on in front.
"Of what?" said Miss von Schwarzenberg, dreamily.
"Well, aren't you chaperoning your friend?"
"Chaperoning!" She came to, suddenly. Plainly she hadn't liked the word. "We are too near of an age for chaperoning."
"It's not a question of age, is it?"—Napier extricated himself quickly. "But perhaps it's only that I don't understand. I never can be quite sure about Americans."
"Exactly my feeling," Miss von Schwarzenberg struck in. "They are so old ... and yet so passionate. Oh, there's more than three thousand miles of salt water between us of the Old World and the people of the New. They're a new kind of humanity."
They found Nan and Julian alone in the hall. As Napier stopped to unshoulder the golf bag, Miss von Schwarzenberg lingered too.
"What shall you do in that miserable inn all by yourself the whole evening?" they heard Julian saying.
At the sound of the golf clubs clattering into the corner, Nan called out, "Here they are!" She came running to the lobby. "I wanted to say good-by, dearest." She pressed Greta's hand. "Hasn't it been heavenly, learning golf? I never enjoyed myself so much."
"I wonder," Miss von Schwarzenberg said, smiling, "how many thousand times I've heard you say exactly that."
"Oh, have you, Greta? No matter how many times I've said it before, I never knew what the words meant till this minute. Good-by."
Julian walked on air at the girl's side. "I say," Napier called after him, "don't forget you're dining here."
"Here? Oh, no," said the unblushing Julian. "I'm dining at 'The Queen of Scots.'"
"Are you?" said Nan, stopping short. "I was thinking of asking you, but I didn't know I had."
"You hadn't."
"Oh! and do you in Scotland," she laughed, "invite yourself to dinner?"
"Yes, when it's an inn."
They went off arguing, laughing.
The hall seemed to grow suddenly dark. Miss von Schwarzenberg leaned against the big table as she unwound her scarf.
"Is your friend given to these sudden—a—these flirtations?" Napier asked in his lightest tone.
Miss von Schwarzenberg spoke of "several little affairs." She couldn't say how far they had gone. "You know the American standard in these things isn't ours." She spoke of the sanctity, the binding character, of the German betrothal.
While this recital was going on, Napier's thoughts were nearer the Scots' Inn than the scene of the German Polterabend.
Should he or shouldn't he?
He knew quite well he could prevent this American girl's being shunted on to the London line. Suppose he didn't prevent it? Julian would never know how easily Napier could have kept Nan Ellis in Scotland.
Should he or shouldn't he?
Suddenly it occurred to him how extraordinarily serious he was being about this trifle. What could it matter whether this little American tourist spent a few weeks in Scotland or went to London to-morrow? Napier knew, looking back, that he had no faintest prevision of the difference that the girl's going or her staying would make, even to Julian. And all the same he stood there in the middle of Kirklamont Hall with the oddest sense of compulsion upon him.
He must see to it that the girl didn't go.
"I'm far from being unsympathetic to,"—he moved his head in the general direction of the "Queen of Scots." "But, speaking of flirtation, I can't help hoping your friend won't carry my friend off to London."
Miss von Schwarzenberg's air of dreamy sentimentality dropped from her as the petals of an overblown rose at some rude touch. She stood bare of all but the essential woman with never a grace to clothe her. "What on earth are you talking about? Does she mean to carry him off...?"
Napier shrugged. "I can only say that it's highly probable if Miss Ellis goes to London that Mr. Grant will find an excuse for going too."
"You'd have to prevent that. What would his father, what would Lady Grant think of...." She stopped there, as having indicated some unsuitableness even greater than might appear.
"All the more, then," said Napier, as though she had given out of those close-shut lips some damning fact, "all the more we ought to keep an eye on them. But if they are in London—there'll be only one of us 'to keep an eye'—" She kept both of hers on Napier. "You'd be here," he added, "and I'd be sweltering in London."
"You, too, in Nan's train!"
"Oh, dear, no!" he laughed. "In Julian's, catching up what Miss Ellis designs to let fall."
"You, too!" she repeated, as though the calamity were greater than she could grasp.
He nodded. "I'd have to. Especially after what you ... didn't say. And to go to London now would be an awful sell for both of us."
"For both of us?" she inquired with a little catch.
"For Julian and me. My holiday begins in ten days, and we were counting on having it in Scotland. You see," he explained, "we've looked forward to these next weeks for over a year. We've spent our summers together ever since Eton days. If Julian goes, I've got to go too. And I should look on such a necessity,"—he gazed upon the lady as he spoke, with eyes well practised in conveying tender regretfulness—"I should look on it as a personal misfortune."
The stricture about her mouth relaxed. The lips even trembled a little.
Napier couldn't imagine himself actually making love to Miss von Schwarzenberg. But he could easily imagine himself kissing that beautiful mouth of hers. So easily, indeed, that with some abruptness he turned away.
It was lucky he had.
"There she is!" Out of a fiery cloud, Madge McIntyre, on tiptoe, looked in at the window. Her schoolboy brother, behind her, was grinning. "Bobby's won his bet!" she called out derisively to the world in general. The wind of her scorn stirred in her flaming hair. Wildfire tossed it back to say to her companion, "She has been able to tear herself away from her American!"
"I've been looking for you," said Miss Greta, calmly. "Come round."
"Looking for me! Oh, my!" A final shake of the flaming mane, and as if Wildfire's fury had shriveled her; had burnt both of them up, she and Bobby vanished.
Napier made for the library, thanking his stars for the interruption. What in the name of common sense had he been about to do? To saddle himself with a flirtation—or a relation of some sort—with this foreign young woman from whom, with considerable expenditure of skill, he had kept clear for over a year!
"Mr. Napier,"—she overtook him on the library threshold—"I can't have you thinking me ungrateful. I appreciate—do believe me, how particularly kind and thoughtful—yes, chivalrous, you've shown yourself—"
With genuine amazement Napier faced her again. "What—a—I don't understand...."
"Oh, I can well believe you do these things—these generous, delicate things almost without thinking." Before he knew what she was about, she had found his hand. She was pressing it in both of hers. She held up her face—or, as it seemed, her lips. He backed away. "I shall never forget," she said in her intense whisper, "your putting me on my guard like this. And I may be able to be of use to you before we've done. Meggie, where are you, child?"
CHAPTER IV
The thing happened with a remarkable regularity. An expedition would be proposed by Julian, vetoed by Greta. Julian would stir Nan's enthusiasm. Greta would dampen it. Yet Napier soon realized that, if Nan were determined to come, Miss Greta was equally determined to come, and have an eye on her.
So it fell out that the von Schwarzenberg's schemes, first to banish and later to sequestrate the American, were set at naught through the agency of Mr. Julian Grant. With a perfectly careless transparency he showed that no plan of a social nature stood the smallest chance of enlisting him unless it included the American. Whatever Miss Greta described in the future, she must have known that at that moment her only chance of seeing more of Napier was to fall in with Julian's program. After all, exceptional as her position at Kirklamont was acknowledged to be, she was far too level-headed an expert to leave her special charge out of any proposed diversion. Since Madge had to be included, Bobby would come too—when he wasn't off with the head keeper, or fishing with the Pforzheims. If "those children" were added to the party, Miss Greta would be left the freer to cultivate her cautiously conducted friendliness with the secretary. For the rest, Miss Greta bothered herself extraordinarily little about the friend who had come so far for her sake.
Lady McIntyre and Sir William were everything that was kind and hospitable. No later than the third morning after the arrival of Miss Ellis, Lady McIntyre made Sir William stop the motor at the inn and invite the young lady to dine with them that evening.
Poor Julian! It's all up with him, Napier decided, between sympathy and malicious satisfaction, as the girl slipped her long satin cloak off her shoulders in the hall.
Sir William eyed the apparition with the appraising glance of the connoisseur in feminine good looks. Plainly she passed muster.
"Well, Miss Ellis, and shall I ask you, as your compatriots do me when I've been only a few hours in the place, 'What do you think of this country?'"
"If you did, I could tell you a-plenty right now. And a great deal more to-morrow!"
"Why to-morrow?"
"Because—" She interrupted herself to go forward upon the flustered entrance of the hostess. Lady McIntyre's manner was that of the person so inured to being late that she got no good out of being on time. But to this manifestation Napier had long been accustomed. What mildly intrigued him was the manner of the girl. She had put on a different grace along with her evening gown. Her slower movements had even a touch of stateliness, as though to match the trailing elegance of embroidered chiffons.
"Come now, Miss Ellis," Sir William repeated, "why could you tell me more about your impressions after to-morrow?"
"Because Mr. Grant is going to show us a castle. And Greta has promised to take pictures of it. I suppose you know how splendid Greta is at taking pictures? You don't? Well, she's every bit as good as a professional."
"What castle?" Lady McIntyre asked. "Glenfallon?"
Miss von Schwarzenberg had come into the hall, with Madge clinging on her arm.
"We have some delightful foreigners at Glenfallon. Germans. We owe them a great debt of gratitude—" Every one there, except Miss Ellis, knew that Lady McIntyre was going on to tell, as she invariably did to each newcomer, the story of Frau Lenz and the providential result of taking her advice. No one knew better than Madge how this repetition bored and annoyed Miss Greta. When her mother had got as far as "debt of gratitude," Madge threw in the information that "the old man wore goggles! And goes scudding about the firth in the dead of night in a motor launch. Simply bogey, I call it!"
"It is bogey enough," said Miss Greta, gently, "to be nearly blind and not able to sleep."
Julian's entry did not disturb the group at the fire.
"If they're so kind, those Pforzheims, I wish," Miss Ellis went on, "they'd take us out in their launch some time."
"Take us out? Not they!" said Madge.
"They won't? How do you know, miss?" Sir William pulled Madge's ear.
"They won't take people out in their boat. Won't even take me. Asked 'em."
"Meggie!" Lady McIntyre's tone was shocked, but the look she cast round said, "There's a spirited young person for you!"
Bobby came in, and Julian joined the others in time to celebrate the superior attractions of a sailboat over a beastly launch. "I'll take you out and you'll see!" The person who was apparently to do the seeing was Miss Ellis.
Greta von Schwarzenberg caught Napier's eye. "These innocents!" she seemed to say. It was the sort of cautious interchange that punctuated the entire evening. It went on across the flowers during dinner. It went on across the bridge table after dinner. The silent interchange advanced immeasurably the sense of understanding between Miss Greta and Sir William's secretary. Perhaps he owed himself this relaxation. Though why Napier felt something owing, wasn't yet clear to him. What was clear was the surprise, not unmixed with ironic amusement, of the man accustomed to be first at the goal of feminine interest, who sees a person commonly quite out of the running pass him with easy stride.
Napier found in the unusual experience of looking on at this kind of scene, instead of playing the chief part in it, something that appealed both to his sense of the ludicrous and, since the person concerned was Julian, to his generosity. So good for Julian!
At dinner Napier had almost pointedly ignored Miss Ellis. She must talk to Julian. But by no canon of friendship could Napier be asked not to have a little fun out of the spectacle. It ministered too temptingly (especially with Miss Greta opposite) to that sense of the ludicrous which other people's emotional adventures are apt to inspire in us. And the more acutely and exquisitely is this pleasure provided if either of the "parties" has hitherto neglected or been deprived of this element in human experience. Not to know the ropes is to provide amusement to the old salt. Napier, in the character of the Old Salt upon the seas of sentiment, sat and smiled.
It was only when the party broke up that he stood a minute beside the girl, while Julian discussed his sailing plans with the others.
"Why do you look at Miss Greta like that?" Napier demanded in an undertone.
She laughed a little consciously. "Am I looking at her like that?"
"Yes. As if you didn't know whether Julian's plan was a good plan till she'd endorsed it."
"It's quite true," she answered in a rush of confidence. "I don't always follow her advice, but I always wish I had. Heavens! the things Greta has saved me from!"
"And what were some of your greatest escapes?"
"Oh, the usual things. Thinking I'd better marry this one, and then that."
"But why did you think you'd better marry them?"
"Because I thought they'd be so awfully hurt if I didn't." She joined in his laughter, and then seriously: "You must understand they were quite nice too. I rather loved them, as you say over here."
"And would you always be ready to give up the idea of marrying anybody Greta disapproved?"
"I—don't—know," she said.
"Are you really going to motor her to Abergarry?" Napier demanded, after Miss Ellis' departure.
"Oh, you heard that!" Julian laughed. "We thought it was a secret."
"A secret? 'Oh, my, I'd love to see your home!'" he mimicked. "'And is it really three hundred years old? Oh, my!'"
"Look here, Gavan," Julian stopped short in the middle of the moonlit road—"don't say you aren't going to like her."
"I don't see my way not to liking her," he said grudgingly, "but I felt to-night, if she said, 'Oh, my,' again, I should probably wring her neck."
"What's wrong with it? Bless my soul! It's harmless enough. Some of our up-to-date young women swear."
"Oh, if you don't mind, I suppose I must put up with it. But, I say, you aren't going to take her alone to Abergarry, are you?"
"Why not?" Julian was smiling. "Do you want to come?"
"I was only thinking," Napier said, "it was rather marked, your not including the von Schwarzenberg."
"Why should we always have to lug that German woman along?" The question came out with uncommon rancor.
"Nan," Julian went on, already with the proprietary air, "is under the most complete illusion about the von Schwarzenberg." Something watchful came into the face he showed to the moonlight—almost suspicious, totally un-Julianesque. "I thought the reason Nan was going away so meekly to London was that she was dependent on von Schwarzenberg."
Napier said that he, too, had received the impression that Miss Greta was financing her "little friend."
Madge certainly thought so. But Madge has a way of getting to the bottom of things.
She had done it when she came over to say good night to Julian and Nan.
"Miss Greta was very kind to you at school, wasn't she?"
"Very, very kind."
"And she gives you your holidays? Pays your expenses?"
Miss Ellis stared. "Expenses!"—and then broke into a little laugh. "Why, no. You are a funny girl."
Madge threw back her hair. She didn't relish being called a funny girl. She ached to bring this interloper down off her high horse. "Was it a very expensive school Miss von Schwarzenberg sent you to?"
"Sent me—to school? Oh, you haven't understood her. I had my mother to send me. And she sent Greta, too. Mother used to say,"—Miss Ellis was still talking more to Mr. Grant than to the girl—"she considered it a very great privilege to put opportunities in the way of a person like Greta."
Ever since the days of "wet bob" prowess, Julian was at his best, Napier had always thought, on the water. But sailing was the sport he gave his soul to. He forgot his troublesome theories, his quarrel with the world's ordering, and yielded himself with delight to a comradely tussle with the difficulties of navigation, on a rock-bound, "chancy" bit of coast, as he called it.
He looked his best too. The lithe activity of body, the extraordinary quickness of eye, showed the dreaming gone; instead of it, a mastery in alertness. His girlish brown hands, endowed with a steadiness as of steel.
The person who was distinctly not at her best under these conditions was Miss Greta. She had opposed the boating plan as long as she could. The moment she grasped the fact that Nan and Julian, and probably Napier, were going on the water with or without Miss Greta, Miss Greta saw her course with characteristic clarity. She adored sailing! It was only her "sense of responsibility" which had made her hesitate.
Her sense of responsibility, if it was that, went far to spoil her pleasure. She had a curious idea that, though the coast hereabouts was dangerous, the farther out you went the more you tempted fortune. "Those horrchible, rock-bound islands!"
Napier smiled to himself. He did a good deal of covert smiling during those perfect July days, though he didn't pretend to himself that he was specially happy.
The initial reason he gave himself for his state of mind was the breath-taking speed of your inexperienced person, once he is started. While Napier had been giving a secretly humorous welcome to Julian's little distraction, here was that rash youth planning to motor the girl to Abergarry. The only thing, so far as Napier could judge, that prevented Julian from introducing the girl forthwith as his future wife was the trifling circumstance that Sir James and Lady Grant had just telegraphed to say they would be detained a fortnight longer at Bad Nauheim.
There were times when, if Napier had been forced to stand and deliver the reasons for his secret depression, he would have been inclined to say they rose, not out of the fact that Julian was probably going to marry this girl, but out of a growing conviction that she wouldn't "fit in" in the life over here. She was "crude," as Miss Greta had said. And she was too independent; too impulsive; too ... what was it? No repose. You never knew where she'd break out next, either in speech or act. It wasn't so much that what she said was wrong, or that what she did was amiss; only both might be unexpected. She kept you on the jump. No thoroughly nice woman, certainly no wife, should keep you on the jump.
Curiously, to Napier's mind, Julian was fashing himself on the score of the influence which Greta von Schwarzenberg exercised over Nan Ellis. "I tell you," he said one night, "the woman's hold over her is uncanny. Part of the trouble lies in Nan's sense of loyalty. It's a drawbridge and a moat and an army—horse, foot, and dragoons. I can't get past it. It's a thing I haven't so far been able to talk openly to her about. And there's only one other thing of that kind,"—Julian's face was quite beautiful in that moment—"she doesn't know yet—unless she guesses."
"Oh, you haven't said anything yet?"—Napier breathed freer.
He was only waiting, Julian said, to get one thing clear. Not his caring! And not any doubt of her. It was only that he couldn't share his wife with anybody, least of all with von Schwarzenberg. "I've got to know what that woman counts for."
"Why don't you find out?" Napier said. His own impatience, his sense of suppressed irritation at the idea of the Schwarzenberg's uncanny hold, surprised Napier—though he would have said it was a natural expression of sympathy for his friend. "I'd find out 'what she counts for' ... if it were my affair!"
"I was going to yesterday," Julian said. "I'm thinking I will to-night."
Napier took out his watch. "Ten minutes to eleven," he remarked.
"Hang the Schwarzenberg!" Her inventing to see Nan home in the motor that evening had been a low-down device to cheat Julian Grant of his rights!
But all the same here he was, briskly leading the way along the cross-cut to the inn. "She's often late getting to bed."
"How do you know?" Napier demanded.
"Going over the hill, I've seen the light in her window.... Do you notice," he broke off to say, "how, when we're sailing, Nan always wants to go farther out?" He waited a moment, eager for Napier's tribute to the spirit of the girl. "And not foolhardy either!"
"You are making a very tolerable sailor of her," Napier admitted.
"Steady as any old hand," the other went on eagerly. "And that woman always interfering. 'Be careful, Nanchen; leave it to Mr. Grant.' 'We must turn back now; look how far we've come!'"
There had been, indeed that very afternoon, a spirited argument, in the course of which a number of prickly observations were made, chiefly by Bobby and Miss Greta. With sole exception of the lady, everybody in the boat enthusiastically—Bobby even violently—in favor of going out to the Islands. The project was opposed by the one person with a pertinacity that Julian was sure could mean only one thing. A jealous woman's determination to preserve her ascendancy. To make a test case. She's afraid she's losing hold. She must make a stand somewhere. She makes it at Gull Island. "We aren't to land there if von Schwarzenberg dies for it. I tell you what it is, Gavan. I'll get Nan out to Gull Island to-morrow, or I'll know the reason why!" The face Julian turned to his friend in the starlight was lit with radiances Napier had never thought to see there.
"This way." Julian began to tread his way on in front, among the rocks and underbrush. "I shall go and wait in the gorse by the inn till von Schwarzenberg takes herself off."
A sense of utter joylessness fell on Napier, as for a few minutes longer he kept the pace at Julian's heels. He struggled consciously against the absurd illusion of being left out in the cold. He, with his hosts of friends, his hosts of "affairs," scattered broadcast through the last ten years, the Gavan Napier of enviable worldly lot, had an instant's keen perception of the externality of all these things. He had never lived through an hour like this that was Julian's.
"I'll turn back now," Napier said aloud. The figure in front neither turned nor tarried. On and on.
Napier smiled. His friend was hurrying along under the stars toward a planet mightier for light and leading than any in the heavens—a candle set in the window of a girl.
Before Napier had finished sorting the next morning's letters, the Grants' chauffeur drove up to Kirklamont with a note.
Must see you before the others come. Car will wait and bring you to the landing.
J. G.
The slight figure was prancing up and down the strip of sand between encircling rocks. Never a look toward his beloved boat, riding with transfigured sails at the entrance to the cove. As far away as Napier could see his friend, he felt the nervous force that was being expended in that absorbed prowl.
"I nearly routed you out in the middle of the night," was the way Julian began.
"You remember last night, just to prevent me from taking Nan home, that woman took Nan home herself? Well, she stayed at the 'Queen' a mortal hour. As if that wasn't enough in all conscience, Nan was for seeing her home! 'No, darling, no!' I heard the von Schwarzenberg say. And then with that acrid break in her sugariness, 'I don't want to be taken half-way!'
"There was something I lost. Then, 'My dear child,' I heard her say, 'you must allow me here to know what is appropriate, what is expected. What isn't expected, is that an inexperienced girl, strange to the place, should be running about dark roads this time of night. You would be misunderstood. I should be misunderstood if I let you.' Then Nan was, 'So sorry!' and 'Forgive me, Greta!' They kissed. Nan went slowly back to the inn. Then, instead of turning into the Kirklamont footpath, Schwarzenberg came up the hill. I laughed to myself to think of her surprise when she should come across me. But she turned to the left and cut across the west flank. I thought maybe the woman had got bewildered, going in unaccustomed places at night. But she wasn't walking like a bewildered person at all. Do you know what she was walking like? Like a person who has done the same thing before. She was making straight as a die for that old shepherd's hut the bracken cutters use. She went into that hut and stayed there three quarters of an hour."
"No!"
"And when she came out, Ernst Pforzheim was with her. They came along so near me that I began to be sorry for them. They were heading straight for a nasty jar when they should see me. Well, they didn't see me. They went by not five yards away from the stone pile I was leaning against—talking hard in German, till I lost sound and sight of them."
"God bless me!"
"I'm sorry, Gavan." To Napier's amazement, Julian was looking at him with pitying eyes. Evidently, he thought, in spite of his friend's air of humorous detachment, he had been cherishing some genuine feeling for Miss Greta.
The idea, especially in view of the revelation, offended Napier's amour propre. "I hadn't thought it necessary to tell anybody," he said, "but I knew there was—or there had been—a Pforzheim friendship under the rose."
"You didn't think it necessary to tell...."
"I was in the Schwarzenberg's confidence before ... all this. I couldn't give her away, could I?"
"You needn't have given her away. The merest hint would have warned me. You might have thought of Nan!" he burst out passionately.
"Oh, everybody can't be thinking of Nan, to the exclusion of everybody else."
The other man looked into Napier's eyes. And Napier laughed out. It was so patent that old Julian, newly enlightened as to the part love plays, had conceived the idea that his poor friend was the victim of a tenderness for Miss Greta.
Gavan caught in the toils of a woman like that!—the tragedy of it softened Julian. His face cleared. The motor was coming back with the others.
But the only others who were in the car were Madge, distinctly scowling, and Bobby, cheerful as usual. "Miss Greta's got a headache. Not coming!" the boy called out.
Julian was in the car as soon as they were out. "I'll go and get Miss Ellis."
"You can't. She won't leave 'her friend'!" said Madge, jerking her head away.
They didn't sail that day.
Julian haunted Kirklamont all the afternoon and evening. No sign of either lady.
"I shouldn't have thought she would be so obvious!" Julian burst out, as he and Napier sat smoking at the far end of the terrace. "To stick in bed all day just so as to prevent Nan—"
"What's the good? There's always to-morrow."
"She thinks twenty-four hours will block the business pretty completely, and maybe even take the edge off Nan's keenness about the island for good. Anyway,"—his forehead drew up into lines of anxiety—"twenty-four hours will give her time to draw the reins tighter. She's drawing the reins tighter this minute." Julian looked up at the pile of Kirklamont, somewhere in whose innermost Nan Ellis was in attendance on a so-called sick-bed instead of being, where she ought to be, out sailing with Julian. "I'll tell you what it is, Gavan,"—he drove a fist into the palm of his hand. "You may take my word for it I'll get Nan Ellis out to Gull Island to-morrow somehow. You see if I don't."
"You said that last night."
"No. I said last night I'd get her out there or I'd know the reason why. Well, now I know the reason against it." He nodded toward the two windows whose blinds were drawn.
"The reason doesn't seem to mind so much your wandering about the mainland with her 'little friend,'" Napier reflected out loud. "She seems to have a special scunner against islands. Why?"
"Especially against Gull Island," Julian agreed. And he too echoed, "Why?"
To the general surprise, Nan Ellis had risen early and vanished. Miss Greta had fallen asleep and, opening her eyes at eight—no Nan. The disappearance exercised a strikingly curative effect upon Miss Greta. She rose and dressed, and herself conducted a search. "I know!" she said at last. "Nan has gone to get fresh clothes. She has a mania for never wearing twice what she calls a 'shirt waist.'"
Sir William had already left the breakfast table, and every one but Napier had finished. Still Miss Greta lingered. "She must come soon—after leaving me like that."
And come she did; across the lawn, in full view of the dining-room windows, walking at Julian Grant's side, looking up into his face; Julian, talking with great earnestness, his right hand, palm upward, now raised, now lowered, with that weighing action Napier knew so well. They parted when they reached the path, and Nan came on alone, "Julian," she announced with no apparent self-consciousness in use of his name—"Julian's coming back to take me for a sail, whether anybody else wants to go or not."
"Oh, really!" Miss Greta exchanged a look with Napier.
"Thank you!" said Madge at her prickly pertest. "Since you are so pressing—"
"We must wait for the letters!" It was so that Miss Greta, coming out into the hall, announced her intention of being one of the party. So, too, she betrayed her cherished hope that Napier might join them.
"Of course Gavan must go." He, Sir William, wasn't going to be a spoil-sport! And he announced the fact with a roguish significance that made Miss Greta cast down her eyes. When she lifted them, there was the bag. It proved a light post. Sir William tore open two or three envelopes while he stood there.
"Anything in the papers?" Miss Greta asked Napier.
A glance at the outsides of her own letters seemed to satisfy her. Did she read other people's with the same facility?
"The papers don't seem to have come," Napier answered.
"Not come! I wonder why!" She listened while he explained, in the easy British fashion, "that now and then the fella at the Junction would forget to throw the papers out."
"And you stand that? Sir William doesn't get the man dismissed?"
"What the devil...!" Sir William broke out. Apparently there were things which Sir William could not stand! One of them was in the letter he held as he went fuming toward the library, with Napier at his heels.
"Shut the door! Look here. The fact of that confidential memorandum being in the hands of the British Government is known. Known in the Hamburg shipping center, of all things! Here, you see what they say." Sir William thrust under the eyes of his secretary the highly disconcerting letter he had just received from the Board of Trade. "Well—? It certainly didn't happen in my department. Damned impudence!" Sir William burst out, "to suppose that any of our people...." He glared at an invisible cross-examiner, "It's never been out of our hands!"
"Except," Napier threw in, "to come into the translator's."
"Translator!" his chief echoed pettishly. Sir William, like many men not at home in foreign languages, quite particularly objected to being reminded of the fact. "Translator! They aren't worrying about the translator. It's what you're here for."
"I wasn't the translator of that particular document. You gave it to Miss von Schwarzenberg to do."
"To be sure! But remembering that doesn't help us."
"I wonder!" said Gavan Napier.
"Come, come!" said Sir William. "It's annoying to have secret information go astray, but it needn't warp our common sense."
Napier's duty, as he saw it, to try to turn his chief's mind toward a possible culprit under his own roof was discounted at the start, as the younger man well knew, by Sir William's chivalrous view of women. That wasn't really what was the matter with his view, but that was the name it went by. Sir William had married his butterfly lady for her painted wings. Finding but little underneath the blue and golden dust, he loyally concluded that the only difference between Lady McIntyre and other men's wives was a difference in the hue and the degree of their gold and blue—or their leaden and dun, as the case might be.
Even if women were told things, they could never distinguish what was important from what was trivial, and they forgot as quickly the precise point as the general bearing. Sir William had lived many happy years in the comfort of these convictions.
"I tell you, Gavan, the use of that document would argue a relationship with affairs quite grotesque to suppose on the part of any woman."
The thought of the Pforzheims flashed across Napier, bringing a kind of relief. Miss Greta might quite innocently have remembered and retailed enough to Mr. Ernst for him to turn to account.
For the first hour and a half of that memorable sail, the Kelpie ran lightly before a delicate breeze. An eager girl at the prow, a watchful woman at the stern, youth and manhood on board—a cargo of fair hopes borne along under skies of summer to airs of extreme sweetness. It was the very light opera of seafaring and of life. No faintest hint of the weightier merchandise—for which mankind takes risks.
Julian looked back at the receding coast-line. "How gloriously Glenfallon stands!" He quoted, "'A great sea mark outstanding every flaw!'"
Innocent as it was, the comment seemed not to please Miss Greta. She thought the castle was "probably not so great a 'sea mark' as it looks to us."
Julian assured her that you could see Glenfallon tower, "Well, a long way beyond those cruisers."
"What cruisers?" All eyes except Miss Greta's swept the horizon. And all found it featureless, till Bobby picked out a couple of dun-gray shapes.
Nan looked at Julian with frank admiration. "My! what wonderful eyes you must have! I can't see a thing!"
"Pooh! Mr. Grant isn't a patch on Ernst Pforzheim," said Bobby.
"Oh, you and your Pforzheims!" Julian scoffed.
With his Scotch tenacity, Bobby stuck to his guns. "All I'm saying is, Mr. Ernst can do better than see a ship when it's so far away nobody else knows there's a ship there at all. He can tell you what she is!"
"Any one with good sight," said Miss Greta, "can be trained." In German schools, she went on, a study of silhouettes was just part of the ordinary discipline of the eye.
Julian was deflecting Madge's course to the left of Gull Island.
"Oh, do let us go a little nearer!" the girl implored.
"No!" came from Miss Greta's cushions in the stern; "the ... the channel isn't safe!"
Julian began to tell about bird-nesting over there when he was a boy. And a cave the smugglers had used—
"Oh, my!" came the familiar note. "We simply must go and explore!"
"No," said Miss Greta decisively. "No!"
Napier caught Julian's eye. "Why?" they both asked silently.
And now even the devoted Nan was ready with, "Dearest Greta, why not?"
"Because it—it's too dangerous, I tell you!" She had carried a handkerchief to her lips. Over the handkerchief the eyes looked out to the Gull rocks, with an expression not easy to define. But Napier felt as clearly as ever he'd felt anything in his life: she will do something to prevent those two from wandering away together on Gull Island. What would she do? What could she do? He lay in the boat and speculated.
Certainly Miss Greta's conception of her responsibility for the safety of her charges had produced a curious agitation in that lady. While the others were arguing, she dashed her handkerchief down from her lips, that were seen to be trembling, and called out roughly, "Madge! I forbid it!"
"Why ... Miss Greta?" said the astonished girl, staring at her altered idol with wide eyes.
"You must turn back," said the lady, her bosom heaving.
Whether Julian didn't hear, or wouldn't hear, Napier didn't know. Nan Ellis had turned to look at the island. She leaned far out over the bow. Motionless as a figure-head, she faced the islands and the outer sea. The wind drowned Greta's protest—it blew the girl's loose hair straight back—it made a booming in the sail.
"Mr. Grant, I refuse to let them land!"
Julian stared at her. Miss Greta made an effort to speak in a more normal tone. "It's too—too dangerous," she said hoarsely.
"Oh, very well," Julian said. "They can stay in the boat."
"Then why,"—her voice rose again—"why are you going so near? You just want to tantalize them!"
"They won't be half so tantalized, will you, Madge, if somebody goes and brings back the news. I haven't been there for a dozen years—nor anybody else, I should say."
The boat was cutting through the bright water at a great speed. The wind sang in the sail.
Miss von Schwarzenberg half rose. "Stop!" she cried out. "I—I'm dizzy—I'm sick!" She lurched; she flung out her hands. Before anybody had time to catch her, or, indeed, had any conception of the need to, Miss von Schwarzenberg had lost her balance. She was over the side of the boat.
Napier sprang to his feet just a second too late. Greta, in five fathoms of water, was crying for help.
The first Nan knew of what had happened, Madge was screaming with horror and Julian was tearing off his coat. But Napier was nearer. Miss Greta needn't have lifted her arms out of the water as the foolish do, calling frantically, "Mr. Napier! Mr. Nap—!" before, most horribly, she disappeared. Napier was out of the boat and swimming toward a hat. He dived and came up, supporting a dripping yellow head on one arm.
Julian helped to lift Miss Greta in. They covered her with coats. The two girls chafed her hands. Julian, silent with remorse, as fast as he could was bringing the Water Kelpie home.
As Napier supported Miss Greta down the little gangway, she pressed his arm. Under her breath, "You've saved my life," she murmured. "For all that's left of it, I shall remember."
She wouldn't wait till they could get a motor. In her clinging, soaking clothes she insisted on walking those three quarters of a mile from the landing to Kirklamont.
Oh, Greta von Schwarzenberg was game, for all her pardonable panic at the sudden prospect of death. Napier admitted as much to Miss Ellis, as the heroine of the day hurried on before them, nobly concerned to tone down the story with which Madge and Bobby were so pleasantly occupied in freezing their mother's blood.
Nan lingered a moment at Julian's side in the lobby, but it was to Napier she was talking. "'Peril of death'?" she repeated, under cover of the repercussions of Lady McIntyre's consternation and thankfulness. "Why do you say that?"
"Well, I don't want to make much of the little I did—but suppose I hadn't been there, and suppose Julian couldn't swim!"
"But Greta can."
Both men stared at the girl incredulously.
"It's none the less good of you—what you did. And very horrid for poor Greta, with all her nice clothes on—"
"She can swim?"
"Like a fish."
CHAPTER V
Upon Miss von Schwarzenberg's reappearance after luncheon, the family welcomed her with affectionate enthusiasm. Lady McIntyre established the rescued one on the sofa. Nan Ellis brought a footstool. Sir William stirred the fire.
Napier was struck by the picture of amenity and cheerfulness presented by the group.
"No, Miss Greta," said Madge, "you needn't be looking round; the papers haven't come, I'm glad to say. You've got to rest and be taken care of." She spread the shawl over Miss Greta's knees. Sir William, from the hearth-rug, beamed upon the scene.
"Eh? What? Speaking from London?" he said to the servant, who had come in with a message. "All right." So little was Sir William prepared for any important communication, he didn't even go into the library to receive it. He crossed to the telephone on the opposite side of the hall.
Napier would probably have concerned himself about the message no more than Lady McIntyre or Madge, but for the chance that made him aware of how intently Greta was taking in the swift change that came over the amiable, fussy, little figure with the receiver at his ear.
"What? What? Say that again. When? Six o'clock last night? You don't mean it was official.... God bless my soul! No, not a word. Our papers haven't come." Then a pause. "How long did you say they'd give? Not this Saturday? Why, that's to-morrow!" A pause of thirty seconds followed, Sir William hanging on to the receiver, listening.
"I'll think it over," he said excitedly. "I'll call you up later. Good-by." When he had hung up the receiver, he still stood there, rooted, looking through the wall at some astonishing happening far off.
"William," Lady McIntyre started up, "it's not about the boys!"
"Boys? No. God bless my soul! nothing whatever to do with the boys."
"Oh, only some government matter." With a clearing brow she settled again in her corner.
Sir William turned about, and went with quick, fussy, little steps into the library.
Napier followed his chief a moment after, only to be told to go and send a couple of messages. "Hall telephone." Sir William spoke shortly. He sat, elbows on table, head in hands, staring straight before him at some staggering vision.
As Napier stood waiting to get his call through, Miss Greta came over to the writing-table and took the address-book out of the stand. Madge hitched herself up on the end of the table nearest the telephone and sat swinging her long legs.
"What's up?" she demanded, with her laughing impudence.
"Is anything up?" Napier asked.
"There, Miss Greta, didn't I tell you? It's boring enough of Father to pinch up his lips and go out of the room like that when he gets some news that would be so nice and interesting for us all."
"Sir William is quite right. A member of the Government never talks in private about official business."
"Oh, doesn't he?"—Wildfire tossed back her mane. "You know perfectly well Father's discretion lasts only as long as the first shock of any piece of news. He thinks he's done all he's called on to do when he doesn't tell us that minute. If you wait, you're safe to hear what it's all about."
"My dear Madge!" remonstrated Miss Greta, sweetly. It was taking her a long time to verify that address.
Patience incarnate at the telephone having refused to deal with two underlings in turn, waited now for the station master to be fetched. "Is that the station master? Well, look here. Is the new express running yet? Yes, what time? I'm speaking from Kirklamont for Sir William McIntyre. He must catch that train. Yes, motoring to—Yes. You could hold it a minute or two, I suppose, if—All right." He had no sooner rung off, than he rang on. "Give me the motor-house." And still Miss Greta sat there, till she heard that the new car was to come round in time for Sir William to catch the four o'clock express at the junction.
As Napier rang off again, his chief was back in the hall, giving directions to a servant about packing a traveling bag. Sir William's family appeared not the least excited at the prospect of the sudden journey. They were too well accustomed to his bustling ways. But Sir William himself had the air of being even more wrought up, now that he'd had time to think over his news, than he had been on receiving it. He stood frowning and working his eyebrows as the conversation in the hall died and the company waited for the enlightenment which Madge had foretold was sure to come.
"Madness!" He flung it out to an invisible audience. "Madness!"
"Oh, Ireland!" said Lady McIntyre, certain of the inevitable connection.
"Ireland? Not at all. Austria."
Miss Greta, her envelope in hand, had turned about in her chair and looked over the back of it, her round head slightly on one side in an attitude of polite attention. Very different from the form adopted by the ladies of Sir William's own family, secure as they were in their knowledge that Sir William would unburden himself.
They seemed disposed to look upon the news, when it did come, as something of an anticlimax, for Sir William preceded his launching of the fact with an increased activity of eyebrow and a furious jingling of seals. "Austria," he said, "has sent an ultimatum to Servia."
"Oh, is that all?" Lady McIntyre's last lingering fear was laid to rest.
"Couched in such terms," Sir William went on, "as no self-respecting nation could accept."
Miss Greta's air of elaborate deference suffered no change. She heard that the Austrian Government was plainly composed of a set of Bedlamites, "scratching matches in a powder-magazine."
Sir William seemed to have his excitement, his anxiety, all to himself, till Mr. Grant came in with Nan Ellis. Even then, Sir William had only one person with whom to share the graver implications in the news.
You'd say Julian neither heard nor saw the girl he had been frankly adoring as they came in. Question after question he fired at Sir William, rather as though that gentleman were responsible for the impasse. "What! Servia is to take it or leave it en bloc by to-morrow night? Why, that means there's less than twenty hours between Europe and—" he stopped appalled.
They still called it Servia at this date.
"Europe?" said Miss Greta, gently. "You mean Servia."
The butler came in with the belated papers.
Sir William snatched up the "Times." He glanced quickly at headlines.
"They don't make much of it," Napier said.
"Naturally," Miss Greta excused them. "They are full of their own difficulty."
"What do you call their own difficulty?" Napier asked, as he paused to turn the paper.
"Why, Ireland," she answered promptly.
Napier found himself looking at her.
"There are some sane people even in Ireland," Sir William threw out over the top of his paper. "But this—this Austrian madness. No warning, no parley; a pistol to Servia's head!"
Julian's voice over-topped Sir William's. "It amounts to the abject humiliation of Servia—or war."
"Servia will accept Austria's terms," said Miss Greta, quietly.
"Never!" Julian shouted. "All the chancelleries of Europe will join in protest."
Sir William paused in his trot up and down that end of the hall. "If Russia goes in, Germany can't stay out. This time to-morrow Europe may be ablaze."
The supposition, sounding through those piping times of peace, rang fantastic. Napier remembered, long after, how he had looked round Kirklamont hall and saw that apart from Sir William there wasn't a soul there who believed in the possibility of war, except one. That one—Miss Greta.
"Monstrous as it would be to force Servia into political slavery," Julian admitted gravely, "there would be one thing worse."
Nan at last lifted her voice. "What would the worst thing be?"
"War," answered Julian.
"What, what!" Sir William caught him up. "There are worse things than war, young man."
"There's nothing worse than war. Fortunately, we've reached a place where the mass of the people know that."
As the awful prospect unfolded, people were not appalled, though they said they were. They weren't even unhappy. They were far too excited. And to be excited about matters of world-wide importance is to be lifted out of the petty round and to catch at the crumbs of greatness.
Napier went up to town with Sir William. At close quarters with official minds, the younger man shared those hours of anxious hope, bred by the earlier interchange between Petersburg and Berlin, London and Belgrade.
Still, and without ceasing, though too late, as was seen in the retrospect, England worked for peace.
Not even the formal declaration of war on Servia, made by Austria on the Tuesday following that fateful Friday, arrested the effort of the British Government to avert the catastrophe.
Five days after the ultimatum discussion in Kirklamont Hall, the German demand was made for British neutrality and the first shots were fired at Belgrade.
Julian's letters in those days registered merely the seething and boiling in the caldron of his separatist soul. His horror of the Mittel-Europa plot, as it began to unroll, was lost in his horror of the spread, the deliberate inflammation, of what he called the "war cancer."
Napier flung the letters into the waste-paper basket and forgot them. But as he went about his work, transmitting cryptic telephone calls or hurrying to and fro with confidential messages, all incongruously a girl's face would flicker before him like a white flower before the eyes of one running at top speed through danger-haunted woods at night.
Those were the hours when Great Britain was pressing the most momentous question ever framed by diplomacy: Was France, was Germany, going to respect the neutrality of Belgium? Then the moment when France cried, "Yes," and Germany's silence was louder in the instructed ear than roar of cannon.
Sir William had sat in the war councils, and hour after hour sat in smaller groups, laboring with the best minds to find a way to stay the spread of the contagion. When Sir William came to a place where nothing more could be hoped for or immediately be done, he found that, for the first time in his life, he was unable to sleep. Country air, home, if only for a single round of the clock.
They came back to Kirklamont to find, in outward seeming, all unchanged. The fact struck sharply on the strained senses of the two men who drove up from Inverness toward noon on the first Monday in that fateful August. Late Saturday night Germany had declared war on Russia, and France was already invaded.
In the hall at Kirklamont Lady McIntyre sat with her family, her Russian embroidery, and her boarhounds. She came to meet her husband with, "William, dear! And what's the news?"
Madge ran, her red hair all abroad, to embrace her father. Bobby, on the point of going upstairs, changed his mind.
Sir William met interrogation testily.
Gavan Napier's first impression on entering the hall had been of the still intensity of Miss Greta's gaze; perhaps he was the more struck by it because it wasn't on himself. On Sir William. As she closed the book she'd been reading aloud and rose, the look was gone. Amid the heats of midsummer and of war she stood cool, pearl-powdery, sweet, with a smile for Napier now, and an expression of deferential welcome for Sir William. Miss Greta left to other folk all worrying questions aimed at jaded and travel-worn men.
No, Sir William wasn't going to sleep till after luncheon. But he was hot and dusty, he would go up....
They would have tackled Napier, but he, too, escaped hard upon Sir William's heels.
As Napier followed his chief down three quarters of an hour later, a laugh floated up. Nan Ellis.
She and Bobby sat on the sofa, taking and giving lessons in the tying of sailors' knots. She looked up carelessly enough at Napier's appearance. "How do you do? Do you know any good knots? I thought you wouldn't."
"She is prettier than I remembered," he said to himself.
Sir William, on the hearth-rug, showed a man already refreshed.
"What's this about the papers?" This raised voice commanded the hall.
"Yes, my dear William, for the third time. That was why we had to try to get our news from London. But they were horrid, yesterday, about telling us anything. It's not very pleasant,"—Lady McIntyre revealed her conception of the use of war news—"when neighbors call, expecting us to know the latest, and find we haven't heard a word since Saturday morning."
"Well, then,"—Sir William filled the hiatus with a single sentence—"at seven o'clock on Saturday evening Germany declared war on Russia."
Instantly the hall was full of hubbub. The excitement bred by that tremendous fact reached even Lady McIntyre. "Dear me! I wonder what the Pforzheims will say to that. They will be astonished."
Miss Greta went through the motions of surprise. "Has it really come?"
Napier, observing her narrowly, said to himself. "She knew." And then, "How did she know?"
Julian Grant came hurrying in with excited face. Before he had spoken to anybody else or so much as looked at Nan: "Tell us, Sir William; it's only in the country, isn't it, that people are talking wildly about England being mixed up in this horrible business?"
"People talk everywhere," Sir William said crustily.
After Sir William's rebuff, Julian had gone over and sat down by Nan. It was Miss Greta who did the talking.
Napier saw her leaning across Nan to engage Mr. Grant. Most gentle she was, ingratiating. As he strolled nearer, Napier heard one or two of her leading questions, put with an air of having no idea how straight they went to the heart of the matter.
"Oh, you think that? I should so like to know why."
Sir William, pretending not to listen, pretending to talk to Madge, lost no word; neither Julian's denunciation of the idea of England's interfering, nor Miss Greta's, "Well, it would be quixotic. And whatever her enemies may say, England is not quixotic." It was the kind of little compliment with a sting in its tail that Miss Greta could deliver with an innocence that must, Napier decided, console her for many an enforced piece of self-suppression.
"'Quixotic!'" Julian began to tell how much worse it would be than that.
Fury rose in Sir William. Napier saw it getting into his eyebrows. Miss Greta saw it, too, Napier could have sworn. Oh, she knew perfectly what she was about. "It is difficult,"—she supplemented Julian's assurance—"very difficult, to see how England could come in, with civil war ready to break out at any minute. She would be sacrificing herself for what?" Miss Greta inquired in her suave voice.
"The statesman who would advocate it," said Julian, "would be committing suicide."
Sir William swung round. "You're wide enough of the mark this time."
"You don't mean—"
"Our obligations to France—" Sir William began.
"What obligations?" the young man demanded. "The country hasn't endorsed any obligations." He jumped up and faced Sir William on the hearth-rug. "If behind our backs they've gone and committed us—" Julian's dark eyes flashed a threat of dire reprisal. Provisionally he wiped the floor with those (including, all too flagrantly, the Laird of Kirklamont) who might, "in their colossal ineptitude, want to commit this nation to war."
"That's your opinion," said Sir William, growing bright red under the friction. "You seem to think we have no right to ours."
Julian halted an instant before the problem. "How much right has a man to the wrong opinion?" Upon the answer to that, he knew, had hung much of the history of politics and religion. In another mood Julian would have maintained, till all was blue, that an intelligent bricklayer had as much right to a voice in the policy of the country as a peer of the realm. None the less, in his heart of hearts, as Napier was whimsically aware, Sir Julian felt that, for all Sir William's official position, he hadn't any such valid right to press his views as had a Grant of Abergarry. Between mirth and consternation, Napier realized that this was the key to the renewed outpouring. It was not so much Julian, but a Grant, very properly telling a McIntyre things good for him to know.
In the heat and fury of the discussion which she had so adroitly precipitated, Miss Greta stretched out a hand and took up her knitting. She sat there with bent head.
"Who? The democracy of England!" Julian was crying to Sir William's angry, "Who is going to prevent?"
"If politicians don't know that, they'll learn it to their cost. English participation in this war is impossible."
"So little impossible," Sir William barked back, "that we'll be in it up to the neck."
There was a moment's hush in the hall, before everybody, except Miss Greta, began to talk at once. Miss Greta never lifted her head. She did not so much as lift her eyes. Napier saw that she was following the success of her ruse with an intensity that held her hands immovable, as though the rapid fingers had been caught, tied fast, in those "field-gray" filaments she wove, as though her palms had been skewered through by the shining steel of her long needles. They stuck out at right angles, seeming to transfix the rigid, death-white hands.
"Never! never!" Julian had cried out at the top of his voice.
"And if we weren't in it," Sir William shouted, "we'd be wiped off the map. What's more, we'd deserve to be."
"I tell you," Julian vociferated, "England will never consent to be dragged into this quarrel."
"England won't be dragged in. She will go in because it would be a shame to keep out. She is in!"
Napier sat damning himself with uncommon vigor. Idiot! that he hadn't foreseen the Von Schwarzenberg's agile apprehension of this new use to which Nanchen's lover might be put. Too late the realization that her baulked eagerness for official news had made her egg on Julian to engage his fellow Scot at their real "national game"—which isn't golf at all. Debate's the name of it. Those two played it with passion. Nothing could stop them now. Sir William trumpeted at Julian, and Julian skirled wildly back. The hall was in confusion.
"You said England never would," Nan cried across to Miss Greta.
"I said she wouldn't be so ill-advised," was the barely audible answer.
The shell-shock of Sir William's bomb had shaken even Greta von Schwarzenberg. From that first impact she recovered her mental poise at a price. Her face was white with the cost of it, or under the tension of some immediate decision. It suddenly came over Napier: she wants more than anything on earth to warn the Pforzheims.
She made a slight movement. It brought the clock within range. Five minutes to luncheon time. "Five minutes," Napier said to himself, "in which to get the news to Glenfallon," if he didn't prevent her.
CHAPTER VI
It suddenly flashed over Napier that he might learn more by letting her communicate with the Pforzheims than by preventing her. A highly important conclusion about Miss Greta herself might thus be reached in the only possible way. And the harm done by the Pforzheims knowing? The die was already cast. The German Government knew that. The whole world would know it in a few hours. The Pforzheims couldn't even gamble on the tip. The stock exchange was closed.
There was yet another consideration very present to Napier's cautious type of mind. Suppose he were mistaken as to the woman's designs. Such a mistake, besides being intensely disagreeable to any one of decent feeling, would "do" for you with the McIntyres. Undoubtedly would "do" for you with Nan.
All the same, an expressionless intensity of the Schwarzenberg's stillness, in the midst of the hubbub all about her, kept the observing mind alert.
She stirred, she half rose. In the midst of his excitement, Napier caught himself smiling faintly. He caught himself, because Miss Greta had caught him.
"Devil take her acuteness! She wouldn't be sitting down calmly at the luncheon-table if she didn't know I had my eye on her," he said to himself. He might as well have said it aloud. She smiled at him across the board. The china-blue eyes were as hard as big alley marbles. She raised her cider-glass to her lips.
Nan turned to her impulsively. "Do you still think—" She stared at the smashed tumbler and the cascade down Miss Greta's pink frock.
"Oh, Nan dear, my new dress!"
"Me? Do you mean—did I do that? Oh, my! I'm most terribly sorry!"
"If I sponge it off instantly—" Greta rose. Nan rose.
Madge rose. "I'll help you," she said.
"Certainly not!" Miss Greta cast back a look not to be mistaken, and hurried off, holding her skirt out in front of her and looking at it with a very passion of concern.
Should he bolt after her? Ridiculous! How could he dog the steps of a woman going upstairs to sponge her frock!
Should he go outside and waylay the messenger? He hadn't even the flimsiest excuse, except one that wasn't producible, unless he could catch her red-handed. To catch her sending a note to Ernst Pforzheim, what would that prove? Wouldn't any of us in her place want to share such tremendous news with our compatriots, let alone with a lover?
She was away less than eleven minutes. Napier timed her. When she came back she had on a different skirt and a subtly different expression. Whatever had been on her mind as well as on her dress, she had got rid of both. The others still argued and speculated. The staggering news was new to them. Curiously, it was already old to Napier, old and grim and implacable. He shoved it wearily aside. While Miss Greta's head was bent and she thought him covertly eyeing her, Napier drank refreshment out of the face at her side. The little girl from over the water, what was it she did to him? The mystery of these things.
Napier took Julian out on the terrace to cool off, though he said it was to smoke. "I say, day and night for over a week I've heard nothing but war. Talk to me about something pleasant," he said. It was a plain lead, but Julian was a mole of a man.
"What do you call pleasant in a world like this?"
"Oh, several things." From where they sat they could see Nan Ellis under the trees at the entrance to the park, and Wildfire flying back and forth through the air—as Nan urged the swing.
Napier remembered that, in all the heady talk before and during luncheon, Julian had hardly looked at the girl. When she spoke he didn't hear. Napier sat now studying his friend. "Don't say I didn't warn you. There's one person who'll be precious tired of all this war-talk if it goes on."
Julian lifted absent eyes. "Nan? Not a bit of it. You don't know Nan. Whenever I stray to personal affairs, it's, 'Come and show me on the map where Luxemburg is,' and, 'Just where have they crossed the French border?'"
"I suppose you're not by any chance so taken up telling her where the Germans are in France that you don't know whereabouts you are with America?"
He didn't know. He'd been waiting till he could see his way clear to detach the girl from Miss Greta. And then this appalling business—
Napier's silence seemed to convey to Julian some hint of an unspoken arraignment. She had written to her mother, he said, in extenuation. "Yes, about me. She is devoted to her mother. Yes, I've been thinking it over. You see, the Germans—"
"God bless my soul! Let's leave the Germans to stew in their own juice an hour or two!" Gavan got up and walked back and forth in front of the two garden chairs and of the man left sitting there. More than by any previous extravagance of Julian's, some of the things he said at luncheon had angered Napier. They fairly made Sir William choke. They were of a character to make Sir James Grant incline to choke the speaker. That was the knowledge which opened the door to the fear that clutched at Napier—fear of himself. Fear of the temptation revealed in this growing conviction of his, that if he let Julian drift on the new tide that was sweeping in, it would carry him away, far beyond the securities, the privileges of a favored son of the old order. Almost certainly it would carry him away from Nan Ellis. Whether an illusion or not, Napier felt that he had only to sit there in the other chair and do nothing, to see Julian blindly "do for" himself. As he walked up and down, Napier discoursed upon woman.
"You mean," Julian said, with the air of the docile disciple receiving a brand-new doctrine, "you mean that, in spite of feeling sure of her—bless her!—you think I ought to get something definite settled this afternoon?"
"You certainly ought to find out where you stand. You can't let it drift." He knew that what he really meant was that he couldn't. He got up and walked away toward the loch.
On his way back, Julian was coming with that nervous step to meet him. Well, he'd spoken to her. She admitted she was fond of him. "But I don't want to marry you," she had said. "I told her," he went on, "that I couldn't believe that. Fortunately for me, for I didn't see how I could bear it. 'You don't want to marry anybody just now?' I suggested. And what on earth do you think she said?"
"How do I know!" Napier returned irritably.
"She said, 'Well, I'll just see about that! You mustn't go pulling me up by the roots to see how I'm growing,' she said. 'It puts me back.' And then I very nearly took hold of her. But all I did was to sit tight and say: 'Which way are you growing, Nan? If I can't find out, I'll have to get Gavan to.' 'You'd ask Gavan!' And she looked so startled, I laughed. 'So you don't want Gavan to know how you behave,' I said. I wasn't surprised!"
He brought it out with an incredible lightheartedness. If underneath his surface equability Julian was really agitated, shaken, torn, it was not on the score of his own and Nan's future. It was for the immediate fate of Europe. He swung back to it as they came in sight of the hall. "I was thinking as I came along that our diplomacy for the last twenty years—"
A servant crossed the lawn to meet them with two telegrams for Sir William.
"And the telephone, sir. Sir William left word that you—Yes, London, sir." Napier hurried back to his post.
Tommy Durrant was at the other end—a message for Sir William from the Prime Minister. Napier wrote it down. He'd ring Tommy up before six. Any more news? King Albert's letter, asking for the support of England, had been read in the House with immense effect. "In spite of some labor opposition, they'll vote the credit to-night; you'll see. If the German fleet molests the French, we'll be on hand!" cried Tommy along the wire. "Army? Mobilizing over night. Kitchener's back from Egypt."
Under the renewal of the hammer-strokes, Napier's sense of a world blindly driven to some incredible doom gave to the family group, when he rejoined it, an air of unreality. And this in spite of the fact that Miss Greta did not make the mistake of ignoring the subject which in all minds usurped the foreground.
She made her own little contribution with an air of engaging frankness. "If the war were going to be fought out on sea, the British fleet, of course—But you wouldn't say yourself, would you, that the British were a military people?"
"Not in the sense that Germany is," Napier agreed.
"In no sense at all," said Julian.
"But Germany! Every son of Germany is a soldier!" Miss Greta's tone was just a trifle too superior.
But wasn't she right? Even the Pforzheims. They, too, were soldiers. These friendly, slightly ridiculous neighbors underwent in Napier's mind a sudden and violent transformation. They stripped off their stage tweeds, their check shirts, their superabundant jewelry; they stood in uniform. Severe, infinitely praktisch, six foot, each, of formidable enemy.
After tea there was a general movement.
"Coming for a stroll?" Julian stood looking down at Nan.
"Yes, but it is cold toward sunset in this Scotland of yours. I must have my jacket."
"Oh, well, where is it?" he demanded, with a touch of his absent-minded impatience.
She looked at him. "I don't know. In the coat-room, perhaps. You'll find it somewhere."
"Do you think I shall?" he questioned dubiously. "What's it like?"
"Well, of all things!" She sat up very straight. "You mean to say you never noticed? It isn't the very least like anybody else's."
"Oh, I dare say I'll remember it all right when I see it." Julian retired meekly to the coat-room.
Nan brought her eyes down from the florid, gilt molding above the window to the level of Napier's face.
"You look worried," she announced.
"I am worried."
"Just about the war—nothing particular?"
Yes, there was one thing in particular. "One thing I can't honestly say I'm happy about." His speech slowed under the quick shifting of light and shadow in her eyes. What did she think he had been going to say when he began that brought that darkening as he ended, "I can't honestly say I am happy about Julian."
"About Julian!"
"Yes. He tells me you and he aren't engaged, and he doesn't know why."
"Is that all you've got to worry you?"
"Doesn't it seem to you enough to justify any friend—"
She was dumb.
Napier took refuge in a rapid survey of Julian's character and advantages.
"Do you know," she broke in, "you're talking to me about Mr. Grant as if you were recommending a chauffeur. He belongs, I gather, to a reputable family; he's steady; he was a long time in his last place; sober, very, very sober! But I really don't need any testimonials to Mr. Grant's character," she wound up under her breath, as that young man emerged gloomily from the room at the bottom of the hall.
"I say, there are millions of coats here."
"Oh, very well, I'll come."
He had been an ass! The sole gain, as Napier saw it, out of a rather ridiculous encounter was to establish the fact of the girl's sensitiveness for Julian's dignity.
For Sir William, the Kirklamont charm worked well. Again the next morning he slept late. There was in consequence rather more bustle than usual attendant on his departure. Nan Ellis had rushed over early to say good-by. It struck Napier that she was both grave and excited. She joined him for an instant at the table, where he stood putting some papers into the despatch box.
"Do you want me to?" she asked in a low voice, as though continuing a conversation.
"To—"
"Yes, to marry Julian." Then, quick as the darting of a dragon-fly, she pounced on his possible answer. "I sha'n't do it—not even for you. But if that's what you want, I'd just like to know." She waited. Napier, too, for once in his life tongue-tied.
"Well, good-by everybody. Isn't that lazy dog Bobby down yet?" Sir William demanded.
"He's where he always is these days," answered Madge; "gone off to Glenfallon."
"Wrong!" Bobby was striding into the hall by the side door. He looked rather glum for Bobby.
"Find your friends out of sorts?" Sir William inquired, with his shrewd look. "Nasty jar for Carl and Ernst, opening their newspapers this morning." Sir William was not forgetting to keep an eye on the private case and the summer mackintosh on their way into the car. "Well, what do they think about the war now? Eh, what?"
"I don't suppose I shall ever know what they think," his son answered.
"I can't think why you say that, dear," his mother remonstrated. "I don't find them at all reserved. They talk with perfect freedom to me."
"Well, they won't any more. They're gone," said Bobby.
"Gone where?"
"I don't know. And, what's more, the caretaker doesn't know."
"You don't mean to say they've gone for good?" Madge sounded a sharp regret.
Bobby nodded. "Glenfallon's shut up."
"But they can't be gone for good. Can they?" Lady McIntyre turned to Miss Greta.
"How should I know?" The answer came a trifle too quickly.
Sir William got into the car. Napier followed him. He leaned over the slammed door. "When do you say they went?" he asked Bobby.
"Late last night. Bag and baggage."
CHAPTER VII
Those were the days when all thoughts turned to the fleet. The expected leave of Jim McIntyre, and of many a sailor son, had been cancelled. Terrible and glorious things were happening in the element ruled by Britannia. Only the stern discretion of the Admiralty prevented detailed knowledge. Maintenance of this self-denying ordinance on the part of the authorities could not prevent the rumors, which ran about, of a decisive naval engagement. Lady McIntyre, lying awake at night, distinctly heard the boom of guns off the Dogger Bank. Her beloved Jim (God keep him!) was crumpling up the Germans in the North Sea.
It was something to have Colin home from Aldershot and Neil from Shorncliffe. The fact that the two young soldiers were granted leave because they were going off on active service was hidden from their mother.
The knowledge brought Sir William post-haste from London. His proud eyes went from the natty-looking Neil, to the taller, elder soldier with the ugly, honest face. The father's gaze rested longest there. "If you knew the trouble I had—I sha'n't try it again. This place is too far away at such a time."
Lady McIntyre inquired anxiously for admiralty news.
"Well, the Turks have got the Breslau and the Goeben." Sir William glanced at his sons. They said nothing.
"Oh, that," said his wife. "I mean about the great North Sea engagements."
"The movements of the fleet aren't published."
"Published! Of course not," retorted Lady McIntyre. "But that's no reason they shouldn't tell you."
"Well, I'm afraid they haven't."
"Nonsense! It's just because you've grown so secretive all of a sudden. You're nearly as bad as Colin. I do wish Jim would write!" A rush of tears blurred the blueness of her eyes. Evidently the presence of the other sons only emphasized for the mother the absence of her sailor. "Surely, William, you know about the naval battle. Why, I hear the guns all night long!"
"In your head, my dear," said Sir William, gently.
There was a moment's poignant silence. In truth, the reverberation of those guns of rumor shook all hearts.
"Well, Neil, go on,"—Madge returned to her low chair at Miss Greta's other side. "You were telling us about the new army regulations. Go on."
Miss Greta had fixed her eyes on Napier with that "savior of my life," expression that he was coming to know. He made an ungrateful return. "And how is your 'little friend'?"
"Oh, Nan is well, thank you."
"She ought to be back by now." Lady McIntyre was making a brave effort to put away fears for her sailor. "Nan," she explained to Napier, "very kindly agreed to take the car and do an errand or two which Miss Greta's slight headache—"
The thought flashed across Napier's mind of the far worse pang it would have cost Miss Greta to be away when official news was arriving hot and hot. She listened now to Sir William's reasons why Liège could hold out indefinitely.
Over the shrubberies the winged hat of the girl messenger rose against the landscape, and again, hardly had the car swerved round to the door, before, with that same blackbird-over-the-hedge action, she was out of the car and coming into the hall. "Yes, I did all the commissions, and in about half the time you said. Oh, Sir William!" She went up and shook hands. "You see, I am here still." She stood childishly in front of him, as if waiting for a further extension of playtime.
"That's right, and you look as if it agreed with you."
"Oh, it does!" She gave her hand to Napier. And then, turning with one of her quick movements, she found a singular thing to say to a captain of the Black Watch and a young gentleman who held a commission in the Seaforths. "I've seen soldiers, Scotch soldiers! They did look funny!"
"Funny!" said Sir William. The two elder sons turned away their eyes. Bobby grinned and contorted his legs....
"Yes, soldiers wearing aprons."
"I suppose you mean kilts," said Sir William. "Did you never see—"
"Oh, yes, of course, on the stage, and in pictures. But these soldiers had on the funniest little brown aprons over their kilts."
"Temporary measure," said Colin, slowly. "They'll soon be all in khaki."
"And it was awfully difficult to get your check cashed." She turned toward Lady McIntyre. "They say now there isn't any silver left in Scotland. And in your town there isn't even copper. I hope you don't mind; I had to take stamps in change. There,"—she produced a roll of postal-orders—"are what we'll have to use for money now, they say."
Lady McIntyre protested, but Sir William indorsed the news. Like the khaki aprons, a "temporary measure." Miss Nan made her accounting.
"All these horrid little scraps of paper!" Lady McIntyre complained.
"You can always change them for gold," Neil said.
"If you do, you must keep it circulating," warned Sir William. "No hoarding of gold!"
"But we can't get any more—that's just the trouble."
"You ought to have asked Miss Nan," said Madge.
"But I did, and Nan hadn't any."
"Why, I saw piles of gold on your table when I went up to the inn with Miss Greta's note yesterday!"
"Yes; I'd got it out for her—all I had."
Miss von Schwarzenberg was leaning against the back of the settle. "What a pity!" she said quietly. "I wish I'd known you wanted gold."
"But, dear Greta, I said—"
"Did you? I couldn't have taken it in. It's gone now. To a poor person in desperate straits—A stranded American. That was why I borrowed it."
"Bor-ch-rowed it," she said, with the vanishing "ch" like a ghost of the final sound in the Scots word "loch."
Captain Colin was looking at her from under his thick, whitey-yellow eyebrows—in spite of the fact that his father was talking to him very earnestly about the tactics of the German Army. Beyond a doubt, consciousness of Miss Greta's foreignness was growing. Her slight burring of the "r" had never sounded so marked as it did to-day. For all her long residence in the States, Miss Greta was far more German than anybody in the Kirklamont circle had quite realized until the war. And now very plainly this "Germanism" was taking its place as a bar to conversation, a something still not productive of hostility so much as of gêne.
"I'd be so grateful, my dear," Lady McIntyre said half aside to Nan, "if you'd make Greta bathe her temples and lie down."
"Yes, let us go. All this—" Nan looked round the hall through a sudden bewilderment of compunction which fell like a veil over her brightness—"all this is dreadful for you."
"For me! Oh, no!"—Miss Greta held her head higher than ever—"it's not dreadful for me." She smiled a little fiercely,—to Napier's sense—as she left the hall, Madge on one side and Nan on the other.
When Sir William went off with his three sons for a stroll, Lady McIntyre accompanied them as far as the gate.
She brought back into the hall a face more agitated than Napier had ever seen it. Irresolute, miserable, she paused on her way to the sofa where Napier sat, trying to read. "Colin," she jerked out in a guarded voice, "has the strangest notions!" The pale eyes looked round more helpless than ever. "He says Greta tried to pump him about army matters, and he's sorry he didn't warn Neil! He's going to. Colin said,—oh, in the unkindest way! 'That woman ought to go home!' 'Home?' I said, 'why, this is Greta's home!' 'No, it isn't,' he said; 'Germany's her home, and she ought to go there!' Oh, Colin can be very hard when he likes!" She choked back her tears, as Miss Ellis came running down the stairs. "What is it?" Lady McIntyre started to her feet. "Is Greta worse?"
"Oh, no. It's only Ju—Mr. Grant has got back. We saw him coming across the—"
He stood in the doorway. Nan went forward, hand out, welcome in every lineament, a kind of all-enfolding affection in the forward inclination of the whole, lightly poised figure.
Napier looked on dully.
Though Julian was smiling as he took the girl's hand, she said, with quick intuition of his mood, "What's happened?" And after he'd come in and greeted the others, "Aren't they well, your father and mother?" she persisted gently. "They haven't come? I am sorry! I knew something was wrong." She folded her sympathy round him like a cloak.
"It isn't their not coming." He dropped into a chair. "It's the stuff I've had to listen to in town. And in the railway carriages too. The colossal tomfoolery—the—the indecent way people were jubilating over the greatest disaster in history. This is the kind of fierce test that people go down under. They'd be ashamed to be unfair, lying, and greedy for themselves. They think it's a merit to be unfair, lying, and greedy for England."
Lady McIntyre cast her eye up the staircase, whither her thoughts had already gone. She was in the act of getting up, when Julian broke out moodily, "And the way people already are beginning to talk and behave about the Germans in England!" He had his instances.
Napier pointed out that, regrettable as these manifestations were, they were fewer and of a much milder character with us than in other countries. He spoke of ill-treatment in Germany and Austria of retiring ambassadors and even of neutrals. He turned to Nan Ellis. "Your countrymen could tell you a tale of these last days that would make you open your eyes. Ask your ambassador."
"If the Germans really did," Julian began; but Napier picked him up smartly, "You forget, we know."
"Well, well, it's one proof the more, if we needed the more, that war brutalizes noncombatants as well as combatants."
Lady McIntyre shook her ear-rings desparingly. "Aromatic vinegar," she murmured, as she went upstairs.
While Julian exposed diplomacy and denounced governments, Nan sat, chin in hand, drinking it in, as if she recognized in these doctrines that true faith for which all her life she had been thirsting. Under the subtle flattery, Julian, in spite of weariness, waxed yet more eloquent. Napier pulled out his watch and made a low exclamation, intended to indicate some pressing business overdue. He went up the stairs two steps at a time. And yet the pace wasn't quick enough to please him. Away, he must get away. Julian had been pitying Colin and Neil, "pawns in the great game." Napier knew now that he envied them. Oh, that he too might go and fight! He walked to and fro in his room in the first access of that fever that was to beset him sore until he should be standing in the trenches of the Somme. With Julian's denunciation of war nagging at his ears, Napier hailed war as the Great Simplification. Not only of international troubles, but of private ones. Instead of ten thousand struggles, one.
Well, at all events, he couldn't, as he now realized (and happily, by reason of the great crisis, he wasn't going to be asked to) stay here in Scotland and look on at this love-making! War had its uses, even to the civilian.
An hour later he was still sitting there, back to the window, smoking innumerable cigarettes and trying to read his novel. A light, rattling sound made him turn round. A fine hail on the window-panes this cloudless August evening. He looked out.
Julian was down below with a handful of coarse sand. A sign: Come down.
What now?
The hall was empty, except of the footmen beginning to lay tea. Outside Julian waited.
"You're off to London to-morrow, too," he began. "Is that the idea?"
"Yes, that was the idea."
"Well, then there's precious little time." He was threading a way through the shrubberies to a half-concealed garden bench.
"I've been wanting your advice, Gavan. The fact is,"—he smiled as he made the confession—"I don't know quite where I am."
"I should have thought you must be in a happier place than most mortals." Napier sat down on a half-concealed wooden seat.
Julian joined him with an eager, "What makes you say that?"
"Well, it must be plain to the blindest she is very fond of you."
"You think she is?" He sat wondering. Then he presented the grievance closest to hand. "She wouldn't let me kiss her just now, and I've been away three whole days."
"She has let you before?"
"Yes."
"As if she was in love with you?"
"She must be, or else she wouldn't, would she, now? A girl like that?"
Napier tried to ask if these scenes were of frequent occurrence, whether they were courted or evaded. The question stuck in his throat. And then, exactly as if he had spoken, Julian answered.
"She's a little capricious about that kind of thing. But,"—he turned trustfully to his friend—"girls often are, aren't they?"
Napier sat there without speaking. "I wondered," Julian went on, "if it could possibly mean the sort of disapproval that's putting me into other people's black books—about this devil's mess of a war. But you saw she took quite a rational view about that."
"I saw she took your view. As to its being rational—"
"Oh, well, we won't say any more about that now. I've talked war till I'm sick. I thought I was coming back here to—something I don't find."
Into Napier's silence Julian dropped the suggestion. "It may only be that I don't understand women." In his quandary Napier wondered aloud whether you ever did understand a person brought up in a different country.
"Or in your own," Julian said moodily. "People I've known since I was a baby I begin to realize I've never known at all!"
"Oh, come, it isn't as bad as that, though we're all of us having our eyes opened these days. Those Pforzheims now; I'm persuaded they got hold of the Kirklamont newspapers and kept them back with the express idea of giving Greta an excuse for getting the official news they wanted."
Julian stared, and then he turned his head wearily away. "What rot!"
The tone nettled Napier. "You seem to have forgotten your own suspicions of that woman."
"They were never of that sort, thank God!" Julian flung out. "I didn't like the idea of Nan's friend carrying on a doubtful love affair—But that's all pettiness. The awful actualities of war have brought fine things to the surface in Greta von Schwarzenberg's character."
Napier told himself that he knew what had been brought to the surface, and what effect that bringing had had on Julian.
The spectacle of injustice, or even the danger of injustice, would at any time make Julian Grant forget his own interests and yours and anybody's who wasn't being actively oppressed.
"Have you been to Gull Island since?"
"I've had no time for picnicking," Julian answered shortly.
"Well, since you're championing Schwarzenberg, it's your business to see she isn't made a tool of. You heard how the Pforzheims vanished. I've wondered,"—Napier found it curiously difficult to go on. There was a quality—he had noticed it before—a something in Julian's frankness which put astuteness out of countenance, something that made suspicion seem not only vulgar but melodramatic. Napier felt obliged to throw a dash of whimsicality, of confessed extravagance, into the speculation, "Whether the reason we weren't allowed to land on Gull Island was those Pforzheims. They may have made an emergency camp out of your Smugglers' Cave."
Julian's weary disgust lightened a little. "I had no notion you were so romantic, Gavan."
"Very well, then. If you won't look into the matter, I must get some one else. And set afoot a new crop of rumors. Risk involving Sir William in responsibility for—"
"Oh, see here! I'll go, and hold an inquisition on the gulls and cormorants."
Napier thanked him a little sheepishly. "Of course I don't expect you to find anything. I only feel we've got to make sure."
CHAPTER VIII
Sir William and Napier returned to London to face those days of intolerable suspense, when men carried about like a waking nightmare the new proof that an impregnable fortress was a thing of the past. The defenses of Liège had failed. A vast system of forts had been pounded into ruin. Through breach after breach, the German hosts were pouring. People far away from the scenes of carnage and chaos woke in the night under a clutch of dread. What is it? What's the matter with life? The Germans! On and on they were coming, and nothing, it seemed, could stop them.
Then came the Mons retreat and the Battle of the Marne. Belgium was in ruins, but the German flood had been stayed. Sir William, worn and aged after a second heart attack, carefully concealed from every one except the doctor, and Gavan came down from London to spend Saturday night and Sunday at the place he had taken on the Essex coast. Apart from public anxieties, Sir William had been subject to the annoyance of questions in the House, about his chauffeur—a member of his Majesty's Government couldn't be driven about by an unnaturalized German. A new chauffeur had brought Sir William from town.
"Do say you are going to like the house, William, dear!" his wife implored on the familiar note, before he had time to see anything beyond the entrance and the drawing-room. "Remember how little time we had to find anything near enough for you. But talk about it's being a furnished house!"
"Great luck to find such a place," Napier reassured her. "How did you hear of it?"
Lady McIntyre shook her head, as with an effort to shake some clear recollection out of the inner disorder. "We heard of so many! But this—I think Greta saw an advertisement somewhere about this one. I had to come and do the inspecting because of that silliness about getting a permit for Greta."
"Seems all right," said Sir William, rattling his seals as he joined Napier in the bay-window.
"Well, you wouldn't have said that if you'd seen it as those people left it. When I went back to Kirklamont, I told Greta, the hideous bareness—oh, it would never do! But she simply insisted on my going to bed." Lady McIntyre smiled at confession of that helplessness which for long years had, after her beauty, been her strongest card. "Greta said everything would be all right. You had arranged about the silly permit, and the very next day she came down, all by herself, and just took hold."
Sir William glanced at Napier, as he asked his wife where Miss Greta was now.
"She's closing up Kirklamont. That is, she has closed it up. They're coming at five forty-five, Greta and the children and Miss Ellis. I've come to like that Ellis girl. And I believe Madge has, too, though she won't say so."
Sir William had been walking about, opening doors, looking out of windows. "Seems the very thing. Capital view, too! I congratulate you, my dear."
She beamed, "Don't congratulate me. It's Greta."
"Even the chairs are just right!" Sir William sank down in one by the open French window.
Lady McIntyre laughed, delighted. "It's your own chair! out of the library at Kirklamont."
"Never!" said Sir William, staring down at the arms, first on one side and then on the other.
"Greta said you'd be glad of your own special chair when you came home tired!"
"Well, she's right." He abandoned himself a moment to the embrace of his old friend.
"I knew you'd be surprised!" Lady McIntyre pattered on. "I was. I should have thought of chairs and things myself, if it hadn't been called 'a furnished house.' And charged for as a furnished house! But I should never have thought of furnishing a furnished—And even if I had, I should have been appalled at the idea of packing up heavy furniture and moving it about this way. Linen and silver, of course, and a few vases, and my china cats, just to give a feeling of home, but a thing like a great hulking arm-chair with a reading desk—!"
"Yes," Sir William indulged her, "I should as soon have thought of hoicking up my bed."
"Your bed has been hoicked up," she triumphed. "Greta didn't forget you were very particular about your bed."
"You don't say so."
"Oh, yes. You said once the reason you'd never been back to Germany was because of the beds. I was afraid at the time she'd feel that. But you see how beautifully she's taken it. And what about the war, William?" she said, in exactly the same tone.
Sir William was feeling absently for his cigar-case. "Are they still slaughtering those poor Belgians? Matches? I'm sure there must be matches somewhere." She got up and looked vaguely about the big room, as though she expected the matches to come running like a dog that hears its name called. "Anybody but Greta might forget a little thing like that. There! I told you so!" she exclaimed, as Napier produced a box from the far side of the clock. "What do you say, Mr. Napier? Will it be over by Christmas? Greta is sure it will."
"H'm! H'm! About Miss Greta,"—Sir William struck in with that same exchange of glances the name had called forth at the beginning. "Gavan and I met the inspector of police as we came through the station. New broom. In a great taking. He'd been hauled over the coals, it seems, by an old retired colonel hereabouts—fella called McManus. Has a place a little way down the coast. These retired men are the devil. They don't know they're retired. This fella McManus got wind of a German lady who was here for a week and who, he said, went about poking her nose everywhere."
"She had to poke her nose to get housemaids and an odd man. But McManus! He must be an old horror."
"Well, that's what he said, 'Poking her nose everywhere,' when he lodged his complaint with the inspector. Very decent fella, the inspector."
"Lodged a complaint!" Lady McIntyre echoed. "Against a member of our household."
"Yes, yes. It's all right. I told the inspector we knew all about Miss von Schwarzenberg, and could absolutely vouch for her."
"Here she is," said Napier from the window.
In another minute Madge and Bobby were bursting in, followed by the other two. Miss von Schwarzenberg, wearing a new look of subdued triumph. The American, eager, stirred, smiling in Napier's direction, and yet far from seeming as happy as the girl adored by Julian should be.
Madge and Bobby filled the room with their accounts of the queer journey, the long stoppages, the waiting for government trains to pass, and the way the troops seemed to be moving about the country.
"Miss Greta thought it wasn't soldiers," Bobby threw in. "She says, coal for the fleet."
"That was only at first," Madge defended Miss Greta, "before we found out that we were held up for another—a perfectly thrilling reason! But it's a dead secret, isn't it, Miss Greta?"
"The deadest kind," she answered, as she bent her head for Nan to unpin her veil.
"Russians!" said Madge in a loud stage whisper. "They're sending armies of 'em."
"Russians?" Lady McIntyre blinked rapidly and looked at the door in a perturbed way.
"Yes, to fight the—" Bobby turned tactfully to his father. "I'll be bound you know all about it."
"Not a syllable."
Madge laughed. "Dear old Daddy!" she said patronizingly. "Well, we know, so you needn't keep it up. And it's an awfully good dodge. Think of the surprise it'll be."
"It would be a surprise, right enough," her father admitted.
"You see," Bobby continued, to enlighten his mama, "the North Sea's full of mines, so they've shipped the Russian troops from Archangel, landed 'em in Scotland, and they're rushing 'em through England to the front."
Whether Sir William had any knowledge of this spirited proceeding or not, Bobby had plenty. He'd collected impressions on the journey.
Sir William was occupied in paying facetious tribute to Miss Greta for her manipulation of beds and arm-chairs. "Eh? what?" he interrupted himself to say to a footman whom he discovered unexpectedly behind the barrier of the reading-desk. "Didn't you hear? Tea for these ladies."
"Beg pardon, Sir William, but there's an inspector of police—"
"Inspector! What's he want now?"
"He—a—well, sir, he'd like to speak to you for a moment, sir."
Sir William rose rather testily and went out. He took the precaution to turn back and shut the door, after the footman had followed him across the threshold.
"Well," said Miss Greta brightly to Madge, "I am wondering whether you will like your room. You'll find it next mine. You remember the plan I drew?"
"Oh, yes. I'll go up after tea. Simply ravenous!"
Miss Greta bent toward the girl. "We aren't fit to sit down to tea."
Wildfire turned to protest. She seemed to read in the soft face a resolution no stranger would have detected either there, or in the words, "I'm going up too, in a minute. I'll come for you." Madge went quietly out.
Through the open window only the voices from the next room were audible, not the words. Lady McIntyre was all too aware of them.
Miss Greta joined Napier at the window. "Pretty view, don't you think?" She, too, listened to those accents in the next room.
As the door opened, her eyelids fluttered, but she never looked round. The footman was back again with an excuse instead of tea.
"It's the range, m'lady. It seems,"—hurriedly he appeared to apologize for a stove suspected of an untimely desire for taking a stroll—"it seems to 'ave gone hout. But the tea won't be long. And Sir William says will Miss von Sworsenburg kindly step into the next room."
CHAPTER IX
Miss Von "Sworsenburg" had obliged with a cloudless face. It was Lady McIntyre who looked disturbed, even guilty. She took refuge in a work-bag, which she unhooked from the back of her chair. She jerked it open hurriedly on her knees and bent her head to rummage in the depths. Conversation between Napier and Nan languished. Both were listening to those voices in the next room.
The door opened abruptly and in bustled Sir William, ruffling up the little hair he had left and looking the very picture of discomfort.
"Perfect dolt, that fella!" he threw over his shoulder to Miss Greta.
She followed Sir William with an air of calmness, not to say detachment, that even she, past mistress in the art of conveying the finer shades of superiority, had never excelled. "I left my gloves, I think," she said.
Sir William had gone to the bell and rung twice. "That fella says she ought to go and register. Makes out he'll get into trouble if she doesn't go at once."
"Register, William? What nonsense! Why on earth should she?"
"Why? Oh, the permit was informal, and only for a given time. Silly idiots!"
"Well, well," his wife soothed him, "tell the creatures, if they're in such a ridiculous hurry—she'll motor over to-morrow."
"To-morrow won't do. He's had orders. It's got to be to-night." Sir William spoke in his most testy tone.
Nan had sprung up and gone to her friend. Napier, too, had come forward. He picked up the missing gloves.
"Oh, thank you," said Miss Greta, with her smile. But it was the look on Nan's face that struck Napier—a look that haunted him afterwards. If it hadn't been absurd, he would have thought she was thanking him with all her soul; was giving him something. Something of unbelievable sweetness, "just because I stooped to pick up that woman's gloves!"
It was all in a flash. The next moment Nan stood buttoning up the coat she had so lately unbuttoned, and saying, "If you really must, I'm coming too!"—her eyes angry, her face ashamed. Miss von Schwarzenberg made no answer. Lady McIntyre was jerking out a succession of nervous questions which nobody took the trouble to notice.
"What we're coming to, I don't know." Sir William fumed and strutted up and down.
"Yes, Sir William." The servant stood there.
"Where's the tea?" Lady McIntyre in a sinking ship would have cried, "Where's the lifeboat?" with much the same accent and look of desperation.
"It's coming, m'lady. It's on the way up."
"Didn't I tell you five minutes ago"—the footman was catching it on the other side now—"you were to telephone for the car?"
"Yes, Sir William. It's coming round now, Sir William."
"Come, then," Miss Greta said, as though Nan were the person desired by the police. "I'm afraid I must carry you off."
"Oh, my dear!" Lady McIntyre rose with precipitation. Her work-bag rolled to the ground, but she didn't notice. Her blue eyes were on Greta's face a second, and then turned beseechingly on her husband.
"William!" She hurried over to him. "Surely, William, you—"
"Mere red-tape—mere red-tape, my dear," he said to his wife. "Though, if Lord Dacre wasn't coming over at half-past six on official business—I'd go with you," he said handsomely to Miss von Schwarzenberg. Miss von Schwarzenberg murmured politely in her veil that she wouldn't on any account have Sir William take so much trouble.
Lady McIntyre had jerked her head at Napier. But Napier seemed not to know his part in this scene. He stood silent, looking at the indignant face of Miss Greta's "little friend."
"It's too dreadful to let you go without one of us!" Lady McIntyre wailed. "Shall I come, Greta dear?" And then, a good deal unstrung at the possibility of having her offer accepted: "N-not that I'd be much good, I'm afraid. I was never in a police station in my life."
"I don't imagine," said Miss Greta, with her fine mixture of tolerance and delicate contempt, "that any of us have been much in police stations."
Recollections of Lord Dacre had not brought entire repose to Sir William. He twisted round in the comfortable chair:
"What do you say, Gavan? You won't mind representing me in this little—" he paused as the butler passed between them with a tray. A footman at his heels announced the car.
"Oh, she can't go without tea!" Lady McIntyre cried. Then with extreme felicity she added, "Why, before they hang people they give them tea!" Nan bit her lip.
The incomparable Greta smiled. "It doesn't the least matter about tea, dear Lady McIntyre. And I'd rather get to Newton Hackett before the po—the place shuts." The fraction of an instant her eyes rested on the servants, and then, as she went toward the door, "So good of you, so kind to let me have the motor!"
Miss Greta contrived, with economy of means beyond all praise, to give the expedition an air of being devised for her special convenience.
Sir William was plainly ruffled at Napier's obvious reluctance to accompany Miss Greta to Newton Hackett. Sir William was sorry it was such a bore.... If Colin or Neil had been at home, he wouldn't have had to ask anything so admittedly outside the range of a private secretary's functions. Presented like that, there was nothing for it but that Napier should, in Sir William's phrase, represent him in this little matter.
As the three were getting into the car, Madge leaned out of an upper window. "Well, I do think; sending me up here to wait for you! Where are you going?"
"Newton Hackett, dearest. Back soon." Miss Greta waved her handkerchief.
In a long bare room, a figure in uniform confronted them, on the other side of a table like a counter.
"Are you Inspector Adler?" Napier began.
Yes, the big fair man with a high color and heavy jowl was Inspector Adler.
"You were telephoned to, I believe?"
Yes, Inspector Smith had telephoned from Lamborough.
"Then you know all about this lady's errand." Napier stood aside for Miss Greta.
The interrogation went forward.
"Your surname is Sworsenberg?"
"No; von Schwarzenberg."
He seemed not greatly to like having his pronunciation corrected.
"Will you spell it?"
She spelt it.
"Your Christian name?"
"Johanna Marguerite."
"Please spell them."
She obliged.
"Where were you born?"
"At Ehrenheim."
"Will you spell it?" And when she had done so, he looked at the word with suspicion. "Where is it?"
"In Hanover."
"In Germany, you mean."
"In Hanover, Germany."
"In Germany." He put down the word about which already such a host of new connotations had begun to cling.
Nan lifted her eyes from the register to the man's face. He was taking this business too seriously, with his "Germany, you mean," as if Greta had tried to pretend that Hanover was somewhere else.
"I'm not English, either," said Miss Ellis in an explanatory tone.
"No?" The Inspector fixed her with his serious, blue eyes. "What are you?"
"American."
"Oh," he said, and lost interest.
"Now, Miss—a—Sworsenburger, what is the date of your birth?"
If Miss Greta hesitated a second, it seemed to be from a natural disgust at hearing her name murdered.
"Born 1886—and the name is von Schwarzenberg." She must have been aware of the touch of hauteur in the tone of her correction, for instantly she changed it. "You, too,"—she smiled at the burly inspector—"you have a German name."
"Me?"
"Adler is one of the most com—usual names in Germany."
"My name's not Ahdler. It's Adler."
"That's only a corruption," she said, less cautiously than was her wont.
"No corruption about it," he spoke roughly.
"She only means—" Napier began.
"Never 'eard in me life of a corrupt Adler. What's your business over 'ere?"
"This lady," Napier intervened, "came into the family of Sir William and Lady McIntyre as a governess."
"She has become a valued personal friend," Miss Ellis put in stiffly. "Haven't you heard that by telephone? You have only to ring up Sir William himself—"
"We are not supposed to take our information by telephone. How long do you want to stay in this country?"
"She lives here, as I've told you," said Napier, "in the family of—"
The interrogatory went on, Nan more and more furious, appealing silently to Napier from time to time; Miss Greta taking it all with a dignity that made even Napier feel that he had never yet seen her to such advantage. The inspector, too, must in his way have felt that this foreigner who had accused him of being a German (him, James Adler, for the love of God!) and had accused the Adlers of being corrupted, was somehow getting the best of the interview. He was already accustomed (and the war was as yet counted by weeks) to seeing the few Germans who had presented themselves to be registered adopt an attitude either humorous (accompanied by offers of cigars), or uneasy, or tending toward the apologetic. Napier was sure that Adler lorded it a little even over people who knew how to treat an inspector proper.
"I don't see how you can stay here at all now they've made this into a proscribed area," he said with a touch of pride at being inspector of a place so distinguished.
"Oh, so they have!" Miss Greta smiled. "I ought to have remembered, when Sir William took the trouble to see about a special permit." She opened a bag and took out a paper.
Inspector Adler looked at it with suspicion. Just this kind of case evidently hadn't come his way before.
"Maybe it's regular," he said cautiously as he handed the paper back. "Better take care of it. You'll need it if you do stay and ever want permission to go outside the five-mile radius."
Miss Greta maintained a lofty silence.
"How does she get such a further permission?" said Napier.
"By applying to the proper authority," said Mr. Adler; "in this case to me." The inspector was dabbing some purple ink on a pad. "Now your finger-print, if you please."
Miss Greta drew back, scarlet. "A German is what I am, not a criminal."
"'Ere's where you go." He pointed downwards with a large, blunt thumb.
Napier in his embarrassment looked away from Miss Greta. His glance fell upon Nan. The girl's eyes had filled. "It's an outrage," she said in a choked voice. "That kind of identification is meant for rogues and murderers."
But Miss Greta had recovered herself. "And that sort of person," she said, "of course must object very much. But, after all, why should—people like us?"
Nan pressed close to Greta's side. "Yes, you must finger-print me, too!" she said between pleading and command. "I'm every bit as much an alien as this lady."
"Not if you're an American. She's an enemy alien."
"She's not an enemy. You oughtn't to say such things."
"Maybe you know what I ought to say better than the Gover'ment."
CHAPTER X
When the ordeal at the police station came to an end, every person there was extremely on edge—except, you'd say, Miss von Schwarzenberg. Her dignity under the ordeal would forever, Napier told himself, count in his mind to Miss Greta's credit. Going home, she soothed the ruffled spirits of Miss Nan; she was tender, reassuring; she smiled.
Before the party had left the dinner table that night, Julian Grant walked in. He had arrived late and put up at the Essex Arms.
"I shall complain to his mother about him when I see her," Lady McIntyre threatened. They all fell to congratulating Julian upon his parents' arrival in London. The fact of their belated and difficult return from Germany had been duly chronicled in the newspapers, together with hints of the unsuitable treatment to which Sir James and Lady Nicholson Grant had been subjected. But if, as was plainly the case, some of the Lamborough party waited eagerly to hear the horrid details, Julian seemed to have no mind to make the most of his opportunities.
"I suppose they told you all about it?" Sir William made no more effort than Madge to disguise his desire to know the worst.
"Oh, they told me one or two things. It's been no worse for them than for some of the foreigners over here," was the unfilial answer which Napier challenged on other grounds. Napier had the facts of the ill-treatment of English Kurgäst from the Foreign Office.
Julian lolled in his chair. People made a great deal of a little inconvenience, he said, especially the type of person who was a Kurgäst. It was a speech that did him no good in that company—being far too much like a reflection upon a highly esteemed pair of whom their son should speak with an even greater respect than the ordinary person.
Napier, who knew Julian's devotion to his parents, was morally certain that Lady McIntyre was thinking at that moment of those shining lights of filial duty, Mr. Carl and Mr. Ernst Pforzheim. They would never cast such a reflection upon their revered Papa as to suggest he was a little fussy about small comforts. No, it wasn't nice of Julian.
So little did Julian recognize this, he was asking if anybody seriously thought inconvenience was avoidable in the vast upheaval of war? He only wished that inconvenience was the worst that any of them might have to complain of. A second time he tripped up those "Foreign Office facts" of Gavan's. Julian knew about those "facts." "And I know certain others. They relate to ill-treatment too. Facts more easily examined. No trouble about subjecting those facts to every sort of test! Why? Because they were nearer home. Yet I doubt if the Foreign Office makes any note of them. I have—in haphazard way. But enough to sober any man." He produced two or three. Instances of harsh dismissal at a time when fresh employment was known to be impossible. Instances of boycott, of petty persecution, all because of a foreign name. It was the kind of attempt at sober balancing still possible even under the roof of a British official. A willingness as yet unshackled to see and to criticize these spots on the national sun, was accounted an attitude of mind peculiarly, proudly, British. If this particular circle was readier than most to admit these minor blames, it was largely because of sympathy with the particular German who was in their midst. A form of hospitality.
To Nan Ellis, Julian's espousal of the cause of the stranger within the gate was as music in the ear and as honey in the mouth. Good! good! She applauded him with hands and lips and eyes.
On leaving the dining-room, everybody began to put on hats and wraps.
"Oh, yes, hadn't you heard, Mr. Julian? Fearful excitement! A mine has been washed up on the coast. And you, Madge," urged her father, who needed no urging whatever, "you've got to come and look at it, too."
They all went down to the beach, and walked in the moonlight, by the incoming tide, a quarter of a mile north of the pier.
Miss Greta carried her coat on her arm at first. Would Mr. Napier be so kind? He stopped to help her into the voluminous white canvas ulster. "It isn't true, is it," she said in a low, earnest voice, "that you've joined an O. T. C. and go drilling in the park after working hours?"
"Plenty of men do that," he said, struggling to enable Miss Greta to find the armhole.
"Not men like you!" she whispered. "And when you aren't working with Sir William, you go route marching, or trench digging for a holiday!"
Napier had been one of the first of his world who refused to accept the fact of not being bred a soldier as an excuse for not becoming one. But that Miss Greta should be one of the few to know the fact did not please him. "Oh, the sleeve's wrong side out," he said; "that's why."
The ulster had to come off again. "Surely,"—she turned the sleeve with deliberation—"surely you know that before you are nearly ready for a commission, peace will be declared."
"You think peace will come soon, then?"
"Well, of course, when the Germans have taken Paris. There now—" she stopped short again, making of her compunction an excuse to widen the distance between themselves and the rest of the party. "I've gone in my bungling way and said something I oughtn't to. I, who would rather offend anybody on earth than you."
"I don't know why you should say that." He began to walk on.
"You don't know why?"
There was something unnerving in the appealing sorrow of the question. Why, in the name of all the gods, hadn't he kept up with the others?
"I think you do know," she said, a pace or two behind his hurrying figure.
Napier didn't look round, but he was sure that the tears in her voice had risen to her eyes.
"Do you mind if I go on? I promised Julian—"
"Ah, you've already gone on."
"Gone—" he paused an instant.
"Yes, gone back inside that British arctic circle that you came out of once—to save my life." She gained on him; she was panting at his elbow. "I shall never forget that, Mr. Gavan; never as long as I live."
"Oh, you make too much of—"
"Too much of saving such a life as mine! That may be true."
"You know!"—he swung back a step—"that wasn't in the least what I meant. I—you see—I say! Julian!"
When Napier had caught up with the two in front, Miss Greta wasn't far behind.
Nan turned an excited face. "Does Gavan know?" she asked Julian.
Just as though Greta weren't now at his elbow, Julian jerked out, "He can easily satisfy himself. Two hundred people on the Fourth of August simply vanished from our common life. No public charge, no trial that was a trial according to English ideas—"
"Would you leave known spies free to do their work?" Napier asked sharply.
"Do you know what happened to them?" Nan intervened.
"We can tell what happened to some of them. Set blindfolded against a wall and shot."
"How perfectly awful!" breathed Nan.
"Miss Greta isn't as horrified as you are. She knows what Germany would do with men—yes, and women—arrested on even slighter evidence."
"They'd never do that to women!" said Nan, aghast.
"Oh, wouldn't they!"
"Set a woman against a wall and shoot her!"
"It's logical," was Miss Greta's comment.
"Logical!" echoed Nan. "It's—it's devilish."
"Risky but well paid," observed Napier, with his eyes on the rippled sand.
"It should be well paid," pronounced the quiet voice of Greta von Schwarzenberg. They had come up with Lady McIntyre, abandoned by the advance-guard. Nan offered her arm. She and Greta adapted their pace to the older woman's.
As the two men walked on, Julian spoke of the beauty of ships seen in that transfiguring light. "Only two or three little fishing-smacks, and yet the grace, the mystery—"
Napier's eyes had gone farther seaward. What were those other, vaguer shapes? Was there a mystery more urgent there? The night was unseasonably warm, but a chill invaded him as he asked, "Are they English?"
Julian, with his hands clasped behind him, strolled on without troubling to reply.
It was Napier who again broke silence.
"It's all very well to scoff at amateur detectives. Have you thought why we are on the coast?"
"Good air."
"And we breathe it just where we could so easily, if we were as accomplished as some, make signals and receive them."
Julian uttered the audible sigh of much-tried patience.
"Well, think a moment. Little as there is of proscribed area as yet, why are we in it? Because the McIntyres chose this place?"
"Certainly. Lady McIntyre told me herself about coming down to inspect—"
"Exactly!—a house selected for her. We are in the proscribed area because the enemy alien in the McIntyre family chose this place for them."
"I tell you, Gavan, I'm not going to listen—"
"Yes, you are. I've listened to you often enough. You can listen to me for once." He told him about the leakage of the shipping secret. The loss it had been to us. The gain it had been to the enemy. "Old Colonel McManus is right. She has poked her nose everywhere."
"All this makes me anxious," said Julian, gravely.
His friend breathed a free half-minute.
"Very anxious about you, Gavan."
"See here—" Napier stopped short—"because I was wrong about Gull Island is no reason—"
"So you're satisfied you were wrong, are you?" Julian said lightly.
"Naturally, since you found nothing to report." Then it came out that Julian had had "more serious things" to think about. He hadn't been near the Island. It was the first serious quarrel of their lives.
Napier left his friend and caught up with Sir William. The pressure on his mind did not suffer him to wait till he got his chief alone. When he had asked and obtained Sir William's reluctant consent "to a few days off," Napier broke through the little hail of questions, and commented with, "Isn't that the mine?"
"It is! It is!"
Madge flew on ahead, deaf to Lady McIntyre's, "Wait for your father, darling,"—as though Sir William's presence might be trusted to exercise a mollifying effect upon the mine, a theory which, however, she wasn't long in publicly abandoning.
Fifty yards or so this side of a rock-strewn indentation in the low coast-line there it lay, that strange, new creature of the deep, with nothing in its aspect to account for the instantaneous aversion it inspired in Lady McIntyre. Gray-white, shaped like a great egg or a pear, according to your angle of vision, seen at closer quarters it might be taken for a well-stuffed laundry-bag, except for the something odd protruding from its mouth. Lady McIntyre made no secret of her intention to give it a wide berth. As the others went toward the Thing, Lady McIntyre, left alone some yards away, called out, "I wish you wouldn't, William!"
"Wouldn't what?" he said good-humoredly over his shoulder. "I thought we had come for the express purpose of examining it."
"Yes, but I—I didn't know it would be like that."
"You can hardly have expected it to look more harmless," Sir William said as he went closer.
"That's just it." Her wail said she wouldn't have minded it half so much had it been more frankly infernal. "Anyway, Madge mustn't—" Then, with a rising terror in her voice, Lady McIntyre betrayed the degree to which she had lost her bearings at sight of that mysterious messenger of death. "William," she cried, "make Madge come away."
"It's all right, my dear, as long as they aren't touched. This is the part, you see—"
As he appeared to be in the act of doing the very thing he himself had said was likely to have dire results, Lady McIntyre raised her voice still higher. "Greta, do, do bring Madge here!"
Greta, enveloped in a canvas coat and gray-white motor-veil, was squatting by the enemy. She seemed to hear nothing, as she crouched there on the sand. The others listened to Sir William, and they, too, looked at the Thing, all except Napier. He looked at the huddled figure staring with that curious expression at the mine. It was canvas-covered like herself. Like herself, of rounded contour and of incalculable capacity for harm. It struck Napier rather horribly that there was kinship between the two, that she hung over the infernal thing like a mother might over her child.
"Mr. Napier,"—Lady McIntyre's voice shrilled sharply behind him—"will you get Madge to come away?"
It was Nan who achieved the impossible. "Brr! I'm cold," she announced. "If you weren't too grand, Mr. Napier, Madge and I would race you to those rocks."
Mr. Napier wasn't too grand, and Miss Madge was elated by her victory. "I'll race you back again," she cried, again off like the wind.
They sat down on the rocks where Madge left them. For several moments there was no sound but the swish and rattle of pebbles as they swept up shore in the advance, and then, deserted by the force behind, fell back a little, clinging for a moment to the skirts of the retreating wave.
Nan, with her white veil cloud-like round her face, looked at the track of light across the water. The moon wore a cloud round her face, too, but she looked in and out. The girl was very still.
"Oh, my dear! my dear!" Napier's heart cried so loud that in a kind of terror he fell upon audible speech. "It is the most wonderful night I ever—" and he stopped. His voice sounded strange. As she turned from the moon-path on the water to meet Napier's look fastened on her, he saw that her eyes had brought away some of the restlessness as well as some of the glitter of the sea. The adorable gentleness in them had given place to a critical, sharp, little glance that affected Napier like a breath from a glacier.
"Sir William seems immensely devoted to you—" To his over-sensitive ear she seemed to imply that being devoted to Gavan Napier implied a singular stretch of charity. Nor would she accept his silence. As though he must himself share this view of his scant deserts. "Don't you think it very nice of Sir William to let you go off on a holiday at such a time as this?"
"Very nice indeed."
She sat with her chin in her hand, her face upturned again. But the soft rapture was gone, gone utterly. "Julian is looking very tired, don't you think?" she said.
"I thought he did look tired."
"He is going to help Mr. Wilkins.
"Who is Mr. Wilkins?"
"Oh, Mr. Wilkins is a splendid person who is organizing stop-the-war meetings."
"Well," said Napier, shortly, "that's a good way to give Mr. Wilkins a taste of it."
"You mean a taste of war?" She dropped her hand. "Oh, I wish you wouldn't say things like that!"
"How I am making her hate me!" he said to himself. "Well, since she won't love me, what does it matter?"
But it did matter. It mattered to the very core of him. It mattered to the waking and the sleeping. It mattered for all of life—he knew that now. It would add a bitterness to the bitterness of death. To die never having had this—
She sat with hands lying slack in her lap. "I think I'd like to go home," she said. "I don't like England as much as I did."
"Why is that?"
She looked at him oddly and then away. After another little silence, "Well, for one thing, I think it's abominable the way they are talking and writing about the men who didn't approve of the war and were brave enough to say so, and say it publicly." She turned her eyes from the curling, crisping foam as if to plead for some little sympathy for these views. There was no sign on Napier's face. She thrust her iron-pointed stick into the sand. "What they've given up, some of those men, for the sake of—oh, it's the most splendid thing I ever came near to! I love those men."
"All of them?" Napier asked drily.
She sprang up. "I won't have you mocking at me. Or at Julian!"
"I don't mock at Julian."
"Oh, only at me?" She laughed a little uncertainly and then became grave again, but not, Napier felt, unfriendly. "You know, his father has gone home to Scotland. His mother, too. And Julian is here." They were silent a moment. "And I just wish they'd stayed in Germany," she burst out. "They are horrid to Julian. They've as good as told him they're ashamed of him. But they don't deserve to have a son like Julian. If he was my son...."
Napier smiled. "Well, if he were your son?"
"I'd know how to treat him. I'd know rather better than I do now," she wound up, with her astonishing candor.
Hardly two yards away the inrushing surf foamed as white as boiling milk among the boulders.
"How long," she asked, with something breathless in her manner, "before the tide reaches as far as where we are?"
"Not long." Even as he spoke, one of those waves that will sometimes outrace its fellows rushed up the beach and flung itself in thunder against the outward barrier. In spume and froth it ran whitely in and out nearly to the upper rocks, filling all the place with motion and a dazzle of moonlit foam.
"It seems to set the rocks moving. And the noise! Doesn't it make you dizzy?" she said. "It does me."
"Then come higher up."
She shook her head. He showed a place at his side. "Sit here if you feel—"
"Oh, but I like to feel dizzy. That's the great difference between you and me." Her laugh was gone in a second. With her eye on the receding wave she asked hurriedly, "Where are you going for your holiday?"
His plans were dependent on other people, he said.
"You make me wonder what 'other people' you've got. How little I know about you." She tumbled the sentences out.
"Well, come to that, how little I know about you."
"There isn't anything I'm not willing to tell you—if—if you cared to know." She spoke more gently, even with a touch of wistfulness. "You British are so reticent!" He didn't deny the charge. He felt her eyes on his face, as she said, "I have an idea you wouldn't be—if you once got started."
He laughed out again at that shot. "The only safe way then," he said, "is not to get started."
"Oh, do get started!" She said it with a touch of roguery lightening her new seriousness. "I should so like to see you indiscreet for once."
Deliberately Napier didn't look at her again, till the danger-point was safely rounded by her saying, "Greta thinks you're going to Scotland."
"Oh, does she?" He looked at her straight enough now. "And does she tell you why?"
"No; but you'll tell me that."
"Maybe I will," he answered a trifle grimly, "when I come back."
She studied him. "You are very serious." She leaned a trifle nearer. "You are more serious, I think, than I ever saw you."
Napier smiled. In his heart he was thinking: "Before she is up in the morning, I shall be gone. On the errand that will end even her surface kindness to Greta's enemy. This is the last time. She will never again stand so near and look at me with those eyes of faith."
"Aren't you rather serious, too?" he asked.
She spoke through his question, impulsively, lifting her voice a little above the nearing thunder. "Lady McIntyre thinks you are going to see a lady."
He made his small effort at jocularity. "I must speak to Lady McIntyre."
"Are you such a fickle person?"
"Is that what they say?"
"They think you are fickle about women."
"Well," he said, achieving an effect of jauntiness, "and what's your opinion, Miss Nan?"
"They don't understand you," she said gravely.
"And do you understand me?" he laughed.
"Yes. Because I'm like that myself. They call me fickle, too. But it's only that we haven't—hadn't"—she amended with that sudden summer lightning in her eyes—"hadn't met The One." If she came closer still, it seemed not to be by her own volition, but in the same way as she had spoken—at the bidding of some influence outside them both. Napier half turned from the too-disturbing nearness and instinctively put out a hand to the boulder, shoulder-high, just in front of him. But his hand moved short of its goal, unguided by a mind that was awhirl in a maelstrom where duties, inclinations, friendships, loves, all churned in an eddy of such surpassing swiftness that the brain reeled and the heart forgot its rhythm.
"Always thinking—but why does your hand shake so?"—the girl's voice was so low, that he hardly heard it above the surf, as she hurried on. "Maybe it's this one. No? Then perhaps it's that. And always wrong—till one day—in the hall—" a very passion of triumph thrilled through her question, "Wasn't it in the hall at Kirklamont?"
"Nan!" he cried out.
And she, on a note that the surf took up and carried out to sea, cried, "Gavan!" On whose initiative neither knew, they were clinging together. They cared as little for sea water as did the rocks. The two stood there like one—as if through all the moons to come they would bide as steadfast in their rapture as the rocks in foam.
When she drew her face away from his, and they looked at each other, it was with the knowledge that the wash of a greater sea than this they stood beside had flung them, companion castaways, on the shore of a new world.
She had thrown back her head. The scarf fell down over her shoulder to her feet, a tiny cascade to join the whiteness of sea water. All veils had been stripped off for that moment of uttermost joy, before the man cried sharply, "Julian!" and his arms fell down to his sides.
"Julian!" the girl echoed, aghast. She stumbled back a step. He didn't try to save her. She fell against the rock. Her hand, that tried to break the fall, was wrenched at the wrist. She hardly knew it at the time.
"Come, let us go back." He was leading her through swirling foam.
"How can we go back?" she whispered. But she followed him. They found the others waiting for them by the pier.
CHAPTER XI
It was not such dirty weather as McClintock the boatman had prophesied. Though the night was dark and the sky mantled in heavy cloud, the rain was hardly more than a Scotch mist. That is to say, it was no rain at all in the terms of the North. On the mainland the temperature was mild to mugginess. But once away and under full sail, a decent little breeze carried the boat smartly over the long rollers.
Napier had taken his place at the tiller. Half-way to the objective, which had not yet been named, he added to the sense of the importance of the expedition by proposing to double McClintock's fee as some compensation for doing without his pipe for an hour or two after landing.
Napier anticipated a tussle over this point. McClintock's grunt might mean anything from pig-headed refusal to whole-hearted agreement.
"Naturally," Napier went on, with an air of being a deal more easy than he felt, "when I wanted to overhaul Gull Island, I thought of the man who took Julian and me there when we were boys."
"Gairrmans!" remarked McClintock, careful to abstain from the rising inflection.
"What! Have you seen something?"
"Na, na; but I have na lookit." He took the pipe out of his mouth and knocked the ashes into the sea. "They'll be verra gude at smellin' oot." It was so he indorsed Napier's generalship, and accepted service.
The only notice taken of the observation seemed to hint at a further acuteness for McClintock to reckon with. "I'll tell you the plan in two words," Napier said, "and then we'd best not be talking for the next couple of hours." When he'd landed Napier, McClintock was to lie low in his boat, just offshore, for about an hour and a half, unless one of two things happened. If McClintock should see a light on the rocks at the top of the gorge, he might, if he liked, come and see what was up, but if he should hear a pistol-shot, whatever length of time he'd been left alone, he was to wait half an hour longer. If, by then, Napier had neither appeared nor shown a light, McClintock was to get along back to Kirklamont and raise the hue and cry—an extremity, he was to understand, which Napier particularly desired to avoid. And that was why he was going by himself, going with extreme caution, just to establish the fact that there was no reason why they shouldn't come back by daylight safely enough and go over the old ground together. For a last word, Napier remarked that he hadn't forgotten McClintock had taught him and Julian more than fishing and sailing, and here was a pistol he'd best keep handy.
The old man slipped the weapon into the pocket of his reefer as casually as though it had been another pipe. But he remarked that he was more at home in these days with a knife, whether for oysters "or whatever." There was no doubt that McClintock was not only enlisted, but interested at last.
He brought his boat softly up on the spit of sand left by the tide, sole landing-place of this nature on all the little rock-bound coast. The only sounds abroad were the shrill keep, keep, of the sea-pie, and a swish of wings out of the cliff.
Without a word being exchanged, Napier went over the side, through a shallow ripple to the little beach, so narrow as to be hardly more than a window of gravel at the foot of the cliff. In a sense this was an advantage once he was piloted safely to the sand spit. He remembered he had only to hug the cliff till he came to that place—scene of many a wreck, where the cliff fell sharply in a chaos of boulders tumbling out to sea. By bearing inland, Napier would cross at its narrowest the neck of what he used to think looked like the wreckage of a pier. Quite suddenly he would come into a gentler region, a gradual acclivity that led through willow and heather and bracken up to the apex of the height which, midmost of the island, commanded all points of the compass. If there was an installation, it would be there masked from the mainland, among the rocks at the top of the gorge. And if the installation was there, Napier would find it, provided somebody did not first find him.
The night was warm for September, but till he landed, the wet breeze had struck cold. Here, on the island, summer seemed to linger. The air was still full of the sun-quickened scent of pines. The sweetness of thyme was stronger than the faint bitter of bracken. But these things reached Napier vaguely. Those admirable servants, his eyes, were well used by now to this half-darkness; but they could do little for him in comparison with the two other allies, his hearing and the quickened power of the humblest faculty of all. As he felt his way with foot and shoulder, the new significance in contact seemed to extend from living flesh and nerve to the rattan stick he carried. The soft alternate strokes, now right, now left advised him of the gorse clumps, of a solitary stone-pine, or an occasional rock half submerged in coarse grass and heather. Every few yards he stopped to listen. Yet he got over the ground with a quickness that brought him a jolt of surprise when, the ascent grown suddenly steeper and less verdured, he found himself near the top of the hangar. He had reached the place where the bony shoulders of the island rose naked above her mantle of green and heather-purple.
Though he could see virtually nothing of the wide prospect daylight opened out from this point, he was too well aware of the prodigies of vision possible to trained eyes for him to risk showing any faintest shadow moving on the sky-line. Before he came to the top he was making his progress bent nearly double; crouching to listen, and then creeping along on hands and knees.
The comparatively uniform surfaces of the mother-rock showed no sign yet of dropping down to chaos. But Napier knew where he was. The tinkle of water told him. In two minutes he was craning over the lip of the gorge, staring into the murk beneath him.
A mere gulf of shadow.
No man in his senses would venture farther on a night like this, unless he had in his memory one of those indelible maps that only youth knows the secret of engraving. It was such a map that Napier turned back to as he lay there in the dark, getting not only the detail, but the order, clear again in his head.
The remembered call of the water came up insistent. Almost Napier could imagine that he made it out, that nook, a few yards below, which had always been the boys' first stopping-place. In the driest summer a thread of pure fresh water trickled out of a fissure in the granite down there among the ferns. In spring the trickle would swell to a torrent. It would go boiling over the worn boulders till it plunged down that last lap in noise and foam into the tiny lake, the small rock basin of steel-blue water, smiling in the sunshine of memory, but even in that light set warningly about with nearly perpendicular walls on three sides. On this southern arc, more terribly furnished still, with rocks of sharper tooth, calved later from the mother in labor of heat and frost.
After quenching their thirst, the boys' next stopping-place would be Table Rock, a third of the way to the bottom. There they would lie stretched out to the sun and eat their sandwiches. Then they would crawl to the far edge and peer over for that dizzy view of the great boss, the outcrop of granite eighteen to twenty feet below them on the left. By virtue of place or special constitution, it had possessed a power to resist the forces of disintegration. It treated the very torrent cavalierly, for it butted the torrent aside with that Giant's Head, and then bent leisurely over to look at itself in the lake.
There were days when the jutting forehead, with its crown of heather and veil of creepers interlaced, was seen more clearly mirrored in the water than when looked straight down upon from Table Rock or from the opposite cliff across the lake. Neither point of view gave one the smallest inkling of what was under the veil, behind the brow of granite.
Napier sniffed the wet air for smoldering wood. No whiff, no sound.
What the devil had been in Greta's mind? The cause of her panic, whatever it was, no longer inhabited here. Napier would feel his way down as quickly as due caution would permit, and in less than forty minutes he'd be back in the boat with McClintock.
All he had to do was to steer clear of Table Rock and follow the watercourse till it bore away to the left. Any one who knew his ground and kept to the right could easily enough let himself down to that comfortable ledge under the Giant's Head. Sometimes you found bilberries there. Anyway, you found the niche that sheltered you from rain. And then you went on to the discovery that took your breath.
In the old days you waited for McClintock with beating hearts, even if there were two of you. Gavan eight and Julian seven, would follow behind the old sou'wester to the end of the curving gallery, where a drop of some four feet landed you in the irregular-shaped stone chamber where the smugglers long ago had hid the contraband. How did they get it round the Giant's Head? you asked, remembering the narrow way. They didn't get it round. They lowered it over the top. McClintock could show you the grooves worn in the granite. Good days, those!
Wet and a little chilled, but without misgiving, Napier let himself down among the rocks. He began the descent with a swing of the rattan to take his immediate bearings. Before he brought the stick full circle, he dropped the hand that held it. What was this against the side of his knee? He bent down and found his face a few inches from a steel cable, screwed taut, and straining aslant skyward. His eye followed the outline of the twisted strand till it met a slender rod planted discreetly among the rocks. Planted so discreetly that it was completely masked from observation on three points of the compass and would not easily be detected on the fourth. Napier could not make out the wire connecting the farther one of the antennæ onto this one above his head; but he knew that it was there. He knew that he had set his knee against one of the guys of a wireless. He moved only a couple of inches away from that significant companionship and stood quite still.
Was this installation a pre-war dodge, abandoned now? And if not abandoned—
He found himself making his way down with his right hand in his pistol-pocket. Gull Island was another place with that wand of magic set up among the rocks.
He started as violently as if a gun had gone off. Only the vicious snapping of a dry twig under foot; but, Lord, the racket! His caution redoubled.
With horror he remembered that old pastime—rolling the rocks down. How they bounded and crashed! Across the years he heard again the reverberant thunder of that long falling. What if he should displace one of these.... He drew his foot back, trembling from head to heel at the slight rocking of a boulder. Could he venture down in this darkness?
Wasn't, after all, the darkness an indispensable part of his plan? He stood and listened. Behind the sound of falling water there was nothing, not even a bird's note. The stillness was piercing. Under its penetrant impact he shrank inwardly.
What was that?
Something had sprung out of the shadow. Lord! Nothing but an infernal rabbit; and the damned fool had dislodged a few little stones.
Napier sat crouching in the gorge a good four or five minutes after the last of that pop-popping died. He had pulled off his cap and thrust it into his pocket. He wiped his forehead. Whew! nothing but a damned rabbit!
He listened an instant, and then went on down in the murk and the fine rain. Suddenly he stood still again. There wasn't a sound his ear could verify. But he held his breath, while horror moved like a wind in his hair.
He wasn't alone.
How he knew, he couldn't have told. He plunged his hand into his revolver pocket, braced himself, and waited. Waited while the seconds passed. Waited till that first strong impression weakened, till he had silently called himself a few unpleasant names, and had drawn out of his pocket the cap he told himself his addled pate needed more than the protection of firearms. He went on in the act of settling the cap firmly on his head. He had heard nothing, seen nothing, when a blow on the back all but felled him. He saved himself from falling flat only by plunging a few paces down the gorge. He managed to recover, and wheeled about, his hand at his pocket. Before he could get at his pistol, that hand and the other arm were seized in a powerful grip. His hobnailed boot did him the instant service of bringing his assailant down on one knee. But Napier was dragged along with him in those arms of iron. It flashed over Napier that the aim of this dumb enemy was not so much to kill as to disarm him.
It was a battle for a pistol. The conviction grew in Napier's mind that he would already be lying dead there among the rocks but for the man's strange caution. He didn't want that pistol to go off; and so they wrestled in a nightmare of blind silence. Now one, and now the other, regained his footing and then lost it; and now they both went rolling down together till the rocks stopped them. And still no word was spoken.
Twice Napier had his fingers almost on the trigger, and twice his hand was wrenched away. The last time a thick voice whispered, "Drop it! Don't you know you're a dead man if you make a sound?" The voice of Bloom, Sir William's chauffeur! He had got Napier down again; the full weight of the assailant's body was on Napier's head; his left arm pinned under him. In that strangling darkness Napier told himself the end had come. He was dead already. Why was he resisting? He knew why, when he felt Bloom's teeth on his right forearm. He felt the pistol go from his bruised side. He heard the drop among the scant herbage of the rocks.
It was over. Resistance had been battered out of him. He was quite sure of that. Why didn't Bloom let him alone? Why was the fellow dragging him down?
It suddenly occurred to him that they couldn't be far from Table Rock. Bloom was going to throw him over!
He had loosed his hold on Napier's shoulder. Breathing heavily, he had come round and straddled across his victim's body. He fastened his hands in Napier's torn collar, pulled him up into a sitting posture, and dashed his head against a boulder. Not quite squarely, for Bloom's foot had slipped on the wet moss. He braced himself and took fresh hold. In that second the impotence passed out of Napier's body. His sinews hardened as he locked his maimed arms round the man. Before Bloom could recover from the disadvantage of his stooping posture, Napier, in a spasm of dying energy, had rolled with the chauffeur in his arms toward the edge of Table Rock. More angry than frightened by the suddenness of Napier's recovery, Bloom was striking wild.
"He doesn't know where he is!" Napier said to himself with exultation. In a very convulsion of insane strength he gripped the panting body of the German and flung it out over the edge of Table Rock.
He hung there listening.
But the blood flowed into his ears as well as into his eyes. No sound reached him. He tried to crawl back toward the stream. On the way unconsciousness, like an angel out of heaven, came down and covered him.
In spite of the tribute to McClintock's being able to do what he was told, the old man had no mind to go home at the end of the time stipulated without knowing something of what was keeping Mr. Gavan. And so, some three quarters of an hour after that body had shot out into the void, the fisherman, picking his way cannily down the gorge, slipped on something soft. His questing hands felt blood, new spilt. A match, lit in his sou'wester and instantly smothered, showed him enough. He drew back behind a rock and waited there several minutes, listening. When he got back to Napier, he had the sou'wester half full of water. He sprinkled it over Napier's face. He poured whiskey down his throat. Aye, that was better. Napier was presently able to say that a man who attacked him had been thrown over Table Rock. The question was, could McClintock get Napier back to the boat?
Oh, aye, McClintock could do that same. But Mr. Gavan had best bide there a little longer; and here was the whiskey-flask to keep him company.
Napier sent a whisper of remonstrance after him as the foolhardy old man went down the gorge. Too well Napier knew where McClintock would be going. And he hadn't warned him! Poor old McClintock! Napier lay there a few minutes, and then crawled to the water. He bathed his head and drank some more whiskey. He tried to stand but couldn't manage that, and went on hands and knees. He had no clear idea what he was doing. But McClintock was fumbling his way down there without a notion of the risk he ran.
Presently Napier found he could stand, after a fashion. So he staggered on till the stream turned to the left, and Napier, to the right, was making his way round the Giant's Head down to the ledge beneath.
"McClintock!" he whispered, and steadied himself against the rock wall to listen. McClintock must have gone in! Napier had no consciousness of making any decision. He merely found himself feeling the way along an inward-curving gallery when the pitch blackness in front of him opened on a wedge of light, fierce, intolerable. As suddenly, the light was gone.
If he had been quite clear in his head, Napier declared afterward, he would have prudently retraced his steps.
As it was, a sense of blind compulsion was on him. For in that dazzling instant he'd had a glimpse of McClintock. Poor old McClintock, whom Napier had inveigled into this trap; McClintock, his heavy shoulder, his sou'wester, and a bristle of beard stamped for an instant on that blinding, impossible light. Streaks of it still leaked through the blackness. Napier's outstretched hand came almost at once against something soft, yielding. A double-felted curtain. He grasped it and stared through, to find himself standing at the top of a carpeted incline, looking down into a luxurious room, flooded with high-power, electric light. In the glare McClintock, with a knife in his hand, stood not ten feet from a man in shirt-sleeves seated at a table. The back of the seated figure was turned partly away from the entrance; his head bent; a green shade over his eyes. He was taking down a message. A metal band over his crown, ear-caps set close to his head, held him oblivious to all sound save that which the mysterious forces of nature were ticking into his ears.
Not McClintock's wary approach, but Napier's less cautious movement of the felted curtain, or some cooler air current penetrating the overheated chamber, was responsible for that slight turn of the harnessed head. It was Carl Pforzheim! His cry died on his lips as he tore off the shade. But he couldn't in that lightning instant wrench himself free of the apparatus, for the cord had become wound round his neck. He presented a sickening impression of one struggling in a man-trap, showing, as a wild animal might, a flash of bared teeth as he strained out across the table and seized a revolver. The shot went wild. For he had turned to face the descent of McClintock's knife. Pforzheim fell sidewise against the pink wall of petrol tins, still hung up by his apparat, and dribbling scarlet over the pink.
They spent the night with the dead body.
There were two good beds, but only one was slept in. McClintock mounted guard. In the morning he went out and found the body of Sir William's chauffeur. He buried him with Pforzheim.
The den was stocked with supplies, wine, cigars, food, books, cards. There were very few papers, but they were worth coming for.
CHAPTER XII
Antwerp, in flames from incendiary bombs, had fallen to the Germans, and hot fighting was in progress between Arras and Albert and from Laon to Rheims when Napier, not yet recovered from his shooting accident, returned from Scotland in October.
At his chambers in St. James' he was told that an urgent message had come for him from Lamborough. Would he please say nothing about it to Sir William, who must not be alarmed, but very particularly would he please ring up Lady McIntyre the moment he got back.
Before he opened a letter, or even took off his hat, he was listening to the agitated voice at the other end of the wire. It begged him to get a car and motor out instantly to Lamborough. "Without telling anybody, anybody at all," that he was coming.
"I hope nothing has happened to Sir William."
Sir William was all right, and he wasn't to know.
"Bad news from the front, is it?" he said with that already familiar turn of thought to the unintermitting tragedy across the Channel.
"No, no. Jim was all right. Colin and Neil, too." The distracted voice assured him, nevertheless, Mr. Gavan was urgently, cruelly needed at Lamborough.
"Tell me if anybody is hurt," he said with sudden horror upon him.
"N—not yet," came back the astonishing answer.
Everything depended upon his getting there in time.
All the way he tortured himself with pictures of Nan in some fearful trouble. By whom else at Lamborough could he, Gavan Napier, be "cruelly needed"?
He remembered Julian's speech about her that day of her arrival. "Did you ever see such faith in any pair of eyes? It's pathetic, a person like that. Think of the knocks she'll get."
He cursed the slowness of the car that was going fifty miles an hour.
"Nan! Nan! I'm coming!"
For the hundredth time he lived over those minutes among the rocks; that lightning stroke in the blood; the astonishment of the two victims; the shame; the silent, shared, effort at retrieval. Hardly two sentences had been exchanged between them afterward. Yet there had been no conscious abstention from the luxury of speech. A bewilderment possessed them, an aching too anguished not to be dumb.
He had gone away early the next morning without seeing her again. He had not written.
There was no sign of Nan or of any one else, as Napier drove up to the house toward four o'clock that afternoon. The quickening of his pulses on the way to the drawing-room seemed to say, "She is here." But the room was empty. All the house was strangely still, in that brief interval before word came down. Would Mr. Napier come up to Lady McIntyre's sitting room?
"Oh, Mr. Gavan!" As though she were the last survivor of some huge disaster, a woeful, haggard little lady came forward to greet him. "I thought you'd never get here. It has been the most dreadful time." She dropped among her sofa cushions, speechless for a moment. "Even up there in Scotland," tacitly she reproached him, "you've heard, I suppose, of the length this spy mania has gone. Everybody with a foreign name is suspected. Any one who protests, even the most trusted official—openly insulted—"
"Oh, really, Lady McIntyre,"—he tried to enfold the poor little lady in his own reassurance. "I haven't heard anything to suggest—"
"Then you've forgotten how we lost our dear good Bloom. That was bad enough. But what has worried William a great deal more are the questions, though they are asked only in private—'as yet only in private,' William says,"—Lady McIntyre clasped her thin hands—"questions about Greta. William has been splendid, so has Julian. We have all tried to make it—" The delicate face crumpled suddenly. It seemed to shrivel as the picture of a face might at the touch of fire. The touch of trouble—consolidator of the strong, disintegrator of the weak—had found out Lady McIntyre in her safe and sheltered place in the world. She turned away the quivering little visage and went on: "There have been letters. Odious anonymous letters,"—she brought her eyes back to Napier again, the eyes of a hurt child—"about Greta! Poor William had been getting horrid letters for a fortnight. He never said a word about them till the wretches began to write to me. And the neighbors—no, you can't think what we've been through!" The relief of tears eased the strain.
"The Scotland Yard people—I've only known that since Sunday week—they'd already been to William. With absolutely nothing that could be called proof. 'Suspicious circumstances'—'a girl going out to meet her lover under the rose.' She told William she was going to marry him—Ernst; yes. I liked Carl best—such nice teeth. But anyway—William—they little knew, those Scotland Yard people."
From confused fragments of overcolored speech, Napier gathered that the growing epidemic of fear and detestation had only stiffened his chief's determination to protect the stranger within his gate.
"You wouldn't have called William a patient man, now, would you? Well, you ought to have heard how he explained, argued, said all the right things. You might as well suspect my daughter of being the wrong sort of person to live under my roof. The lady in question is one of us. I vouch for Miss von Schwarzenberg."
Even the child—even Meggy—came to know that people looked askance at her for having Greta at her side!
Even Meggy! Napier was ready to swear that "the child" was, after Miss Greta herself, by far the best-informed person in the house. She was, anyway, according to her mother, the most indignant. Meggy had made common cause with Nan Ellis and Mr. Grant in ridiculing and condemning the popular superstition that every German must needs be an enemy of England. Napier heard how those three had redoubled their watchful friendship, a self-constituted bodyguard to keep Miss Greta safe from any breath of discourtesy, from so much as a glance of unworthy suspicion.
A momentary comfort derived from the thought of these champions suddenly failed Lady McIntyre. The smoothness of her face was broken again, as, again on the brink of tears, she remembered the villain of the piece. "The local inspector—that creature who made Greta go to Newton Hackett without any tea—he came again. Simply wouldn't go till William had seen him. I haven't often known William so angry. I am afraid he was rude to the man. It never does to be rude to these people. I've tried being kind to him. I,"—the tear-faded eyes lifted with a look of conscious virtue—"I gave him all William's best cigars. And still he hasn't given us a moment's peace. Of course William flatly refused to send Greta away. 'Not all the inspectors in England—'" \lady McIntyre stiffened her slight back a moment with borrowed resolution. Only for a moment. The next saw her wavering forward with: "Then two men came down from London to see me! Oh, Mr. Gavan,"—she writhed her locked fingers—"they won't go!"
"Won't go?"
She shook her ear-rings, speechless a moment. Then in a whisper: "At the inn, since yesterday. What do you think of that?"
All that Napier thought was Nan! Nan! How much does she know? And how is she taking it?
"They must have found out I'd gone to give Boris and Ivan a run on the sands. Greta and the rest were up on the sea-wall. They never dreamed that those two dreadful young men, standing there as if they were friends, pretending to admire the boarhounds, were secret service people, sent down by the Intelligence Department. And what they were really saying—at least the one who does the talking! I was thinking only last night while Julia was brushing my hair—things often come to me like that—I suddenly remembered that I couldn't—not if I was to be hanged for it—I couldn't remember a syllable the fat young man had uttered. It's my belief he's a deaf mute. Well, the other one said, if something wasn't done at once, if I didn't use my great influence with my husband to have the German lady sent out of England, there would be a scandal. Everybody would say we had harbored a suspect after we'd been warned. And when he saw I wasn't going to do what he wanted, what do you think he called Greta? A spy, who handed on official information to the enemies of the country! Things have got out that they blame poor Greta for. Oh, isn't it an awful penalty to pay for her loyalty in sticking to us as she's done through thick and thin!
"Well, these secret service men—one very worrying thing about them: I don't know how to treat such people; they seem to be quite superior to their disgusting work—well, they pretend that for her sake, for Greta's, I ought—Heavens above! here they are again!" Lady McIntyre collapsed against her cushions, breathing heavily and staring fascinated at the door opposite the one by which Napier had come in. Napier, too, could hear them now—those footsteps.
The knock on the door must have been expected and couldn't have been more discreet, yet at the sound Lady McIntyre lost her head. Instead of saying, "Come in!" she remarked in a smothered undertone, "I told McAndrews to bring them up the back stairs."
The door opened. "Mr. Singleton, Mr. Grindley, m'lady."
Two young men came in. Well groomed, wearing well-creased trousers, holding their hats and walking sticks. Singleton, taller, a year or two the older, was a well-set-up person, with dark mustache, and frank, hazel eyes. "Where have I seen the fellow?" Napier asked himself, reading recognition in the guarded smile. They both greeted the lady.
"Isn't, after all!" Lady McIntyre jerked out in a confidential aside to Napier, upon the supposed deaf-mute's audible salutation. Neither was Mr. Grindley so very fat either, merely inclined to stoutness. Fair, slow, slightly bored; his prominent, gray-green eyes seemed gently to seek vacuity. Whether dullard or dreamer, this was certainly the last person you would pick out of a crowd for the errand on which he had come. This plump young man looked at ease, for the reason that he didn't care, or had forgotten where he was; the other one seemed to be at ease because he had never, in any place, been anything else. During the pause, which Lady McIntyre found agitating, Mr. Singleton stood there a step in advance of his companion, the hands that held his hat, with gloves tucked in the brim, crossed on the knob of his walking stick. And suddenly Napier remembered. This frank-looking young man with the long chin had been sent down from Oxford in Napier's first year. He had done what he could to shield the culprit, though they had never been friends.
Napier was the first to move, after McAndrews had shut the door behind him. It was not mere restlessness on Napier's part, nor detestation of the business these fellows had come about. He felt he must go and look out into the front hall. If Nan were to come in suddenly—
There was no one. Napier leaned against the wall, standing where, through the door ajar, he could command the stairs.
"We heard,"—Singleton in his cheerful, cultivated tones was saying to Lady McIntyre—"we heard the gentleman you were waiting for had arrived."
"Yes, but I—I haven't yet had time to explain." That poor head, which Lady McIntyre had jerked to Singleton, she jerked now to Napier. "They want me," she told him, "to search Greta's things. What do you think of that?" As Napier didn't at once say what he thought of it, Lady McIntyre flung out, "While she's away!"
Instead of denouncing such a demand, Napier asked, "Where is she?"
"Oh, they've gone off to see some old church, or something, on the coast."
"You don't know where?"
She shook her head. "How can I remember all the places they go to? A fresh one every day."
"Has—a—" Napier caught his tongue back from articulating "Nan." "They've all gone?"
"Yes; and they may be back any moment."
Napier seemed to read in the easy confidence in Mr. Singleton's eyes that he personally did not look for the immediate return of the party. But it occurred to Napier that "the party" meant, to the secret service men, only Greta von Schwarzenberg. It seemed quite possible to Napier's own fears that, by some perverse stroke, Nan Ellis might return alone. She might even at the last moment—Fate did play these tricks—have fallen out of the party. In one of the rooms overhead she might be meditating descent. How else could he account for that all-pervading sense of her presence which filled the house? And he was the only one who knew how much, how infinitely, worse it would be if Nan were to come in and find them—He glanced sharply through the crack of the door.
"I have been explaining,"—Mr. Singleton seemed to invite Mr. Napier's coöperation—"since Lady McIntyre is so sure the view held by the Intelligence Department is mistaken, that it's a kindness to the young lady to embrace this opportunity to clear the matter up."
"Imagine the shabbiness of such conduct!" Lady McIntyre appealed to the figure listening by the door. "I am to take advantage of her absence to rummage among her—"
"No, no," Mr. Singleton protested. "You take advantage of the one and only chance of proving her innocent without hurting her feelings. It can either be done quietly without the least scandal, or be done with a publicity much less considerate. I should say, if the lady were a friend of mine—"
"Yes, I've heard your view," said Lady McIntyre, with nervous asperity. "It is Mr. Napier's I have waited for. Can you,"—she stood up wavering, miserable—"can you see me giving permission to a strange man and his confederate"—she jerked a glance toward the silent, absent-minded individual at Singleton's side—"to break open Miss von Schwarzenberg's trunk and—"
Mr. Singleton, wholly unperturbed, assured Lady McIntyre there need be no breaking open. He had, as she said, "most fortunately, a—"—Mr. Singleton smiled pleasantly—"an assistant who was in his way a genius at avoidance of breakage or any sort of violence."
The fastidiousness with which he repudiated "any sort of violence" plainly gave Lady McIntyre pause. Even in the thick of a thousand agitations it was noticeable how great a part was played in the persuading of the lady by the voice and manner of the agent, particularly by the voice. Its natural timbre, its accent, its curve and fall, all connoted the moral decencies, as well as the external fitness and refinements, of good breeding. If you suspected this man of baseness, you simply gave away your own unworthy thoughts. The reticent dignity with which he uttered the phrase, "for the sake of the safety of the country," that of itself seemed to range him on the side of defenders in the field.
Helplessly, Lady McIntyre waited upon the guidance she had sent for.
"Have you had official warning of this visit?" Napier asked her.
"No."
"There are reasons," Mr. Singleton reminded him, "as you must see, why a warning would defeat the purpose of the visit."
"You have a warrant for this search?"
He had. He produced it. An order under the Official Secrets' Act. "If a mistake has been made, Mr. Grindley and I," he said, as he returned the document to his inside pocket, "can assure ourselves of the fact and be out of the house in half an hour. Unless Lady McIntyre should, unhappily, be too long in making up her mind,"—he glanced at the clock on the mantel-piece—"neither the German lady nor any one outside this room and the Intelligence Department will ever know of the investigation. Isn't that better than the alternative?—having it conducted in public?"
The bribe was great, yet great was poor Lady McIntyre's misgiving. Men of another class would have stood no chance of overcoming her scruples. Oh, the Intelligence Department was not so blundering as some would have us believe, since upon a presumably very minor case it could expend this patience and finesse.
Lady McIntyre fluttered to the guarded door. "I couldn't let them do it with no one here." She clung an instant to Napier's arm.
He and Singleton glanced up and down corridor and stair, as the three men followed Lady McIntyre's lead into a room at the end of a passage.
The first thing noticeable about the little room was its air of distinction, bred only in part by the taste shown in the choice of certain articles of furniture, culled, Napier was sure, from other parts of the house during that week Miss Greta had spent alone here. Not her knowledge of values in Möbeln alone, but something less obvious, in the serene, uncrowded aspect, in the exquisite orderliness, lent the little room its special air.
Singleton walked straight to the window. It commanded the approach to the house and looked upon the sea. It wasn't till a moment later that Napier verified this fact. On the dressing table, which stood out two feet or so in front of the window, his eyes had found a faded photograph. It showed a girl in her teens at another window. Two long plaits fell over the sill as the eager figure leaned out to greet, with all that joy and affection, the woman whom Napier was here to convict of felony and to cover with disgrace. No need of the signature under the sill to say the girl was "Miss Greta's ever loving Nan."
That first cursory glance about the room had seemed both to please and intrigue Singleton. His face wore the look of intentness, of subdued satisfaction, with which your sportsman addresses himself to a game he knows he's good at.
"He likes ferreting things out! He likes it!" Napier said to himself, as Singleton swung back with one of his easy movements and turned the key in the door.
"What will Greta think when she tries it and finds it locked, and me in here!" Lady McIntyre bemoaned to Napier.
"Oh, but she won't," answered Singleton. He nodded toward the window. "You'll see her coming." He laid down hat, stick, and gloves on the small table by the bed, and picked up a book lying there. He read aloud the title, "Pilgerfahrt by Gerhard," for Grindley's benefit, apparently, for he looked at that person interrogatively. "With Nan's love," he added, as though that might fetch Grindley.
But Grindley seemed to have neither literary nor sentimental curiosity. By the tall gilt screen set against the angle of the opposite wall Grindley halted, as if he had forgotten why he was there and felt unequal to the mental effort of recalling. You'd say he no more realized that the leaves of the screen were turned back so as almost to meet the angle described by the wall, than that the panels were composed of exquisite engravings after Fragonard, set in old gilt. Even when he moved a pace or two, you would say that he was speculating whereabouts in a room so scantily, albeit so charmingly, furnished as to boast only a single chair, should he find a place whereon to lay hat and stick, and the small despatch-case of the same color as the brown clothes he wore. Whether for that reason, or because of the inconspicuous way in which it was carried, Napier had not noticed the case till Grindley set it down against the skirting of the wall, along with hat and stick.
For those first moments, glued to the window, Lady McIntyre alternately watched the avenue leading to the house and watched the two strange men. She made no effort to disguise her perturbation at not having two pairs of eyes, the better to keep her poor little watch upon "dear Greta's things." "You don't, I suppose, expect to find anything contraband on her dressing-table," she said, as Singleton paused to run his eye over the glittering array. "You may know that's all right when I tell you Sir William and I gave her the toilet set last Christmas."
Singleton stooped to the faded photograph, an act as offensive in Napier's eyes as the next was in Lady McIntyre's—his attempt to open the little, inlaid bureau.
"That is her writing-table," said the lady, with dignity. "Of course it's locked. An engaged girl always locks her—"
"Yes; this, Grindley," Singleton said. And Grindley, moving like a soft brown shadow, was there with some bits of iron hanging keywise on a ring. Some of these slender "persuaders" were notched and some were hooked. There were also one or two pieces of wire.
Lady McIntyre identified these objects instantly in a horrified whisper as, "Burglar's tools!"
"Or that, first?" Singleton interrupted, with a nod at the screen.
"Yes, it's her box behind there," Lady McIntyre said, and clasped her hands. "But if you break that—a most queer lock—you can never mend it. And she'll know what we've—"
Mr. Grindley gave a slow head-shake. "American wardrobe trunk," he said, as though he had been tall enough to see over the close-set screen, and took no interest in what it hid. He inserted a steel object in the lock of the writing-table, and opened a flap as easily as if he'd had the key; more easily than if Lady McIntyre had had it.
"Her private letters!" she murmured with horror. "Love letters!"
Far more offensive, Napier was sure, than if Grindley had fallen upon the neat packets and loose papers with greedy curiosity, was the bored cursoriness, as it looked, of the inspection. Perhaps the other man was really going to read them through when he had—heavens above! What was he doing in Greta's cupboard?
"Disgraceful!" said Lady McIntyre under her breath. Singleton was passing his hands along the row of skirts neatly hung at the side. The investigating fingers reached those other garments suspended at a greater height. From supports, hooked upon a bar set overhead, depended afternoon and evening gowns—the pink cotton, the black and gold, the lemon-colored—all of familiar aspect, and yet in this collapsed state odd-looking, defenseless, taken at disadvantage. Napier with some difficulty recognized the apple-green silk, all its sauciness gone, as dejected now as a deflated balloon. And this stranger's hand upon them!
"Disgusting familiarity, I call it. He'll be feeling in her pockets next," Lady McIntyre whispered tremulously. "I don't know how I can bear to be here."
Napier himself was too aware of a Peeping-Tom unseemliness in looking in upon these privacies to stand there watching. He turned again to the glittering dressing table and the treasure it enshrined. What wouldn't he give to be able to slip that photograph in his pocket? Nan looked at him out of her window with unsullied trust.
Napier glanced nervously out of the other, the window behind the dressing-table. While he had been watching Singleton and looking at the pictured face, Nan might easily have come into the house; for Lady McIntyre, too, had clean forgotten that side of her sentinelship.
Napier turned round, so palpably listening, that even Lady McIntyre in the midst of her agitations saw what must be in his mind.
"Yes, any moment they'll be in upon us!" She fled again to the window.
"Grindley, here!" Singleton called from the cupboard.
But Grindley had found something, at last, which, though it seemed not to interest him, had proved itself worthy to be abstracted. Not one of the love letters, as Lady McIntyre plainly feared. It was nothing more exciting than Greta's French dictionary. Grindley came away from the littered bureau, holding the flat volume open in his hand, and turning the leaves at random.
Singleton joined him. "What have you got there?"
"La Motte's Dictionary."
"Is that all?" Singleton dismissed it.
Not so Grindley. He stooped, and laid the book on the floor beside his brown case.
Singleton was obviously disappointed. He glanced back at the open writing-table. "Nothing else?" he said.
"Only this," Grindley took a ball-nibbed pen out of the tray.
Singleton examined it carefully, "Yes." He, too, appeared to think the pen worthy of all care. He opened Grindley's nearly empty attaché case and laid the pen on top of a piece of brown paper, which covered something at the bottom. "And the ink?" He seemed to wait for it.
Grindley was understood to say, "Not yet." Lady McIntyre pointed out the twin pots on the silver tray engraved G. v. S. from N. E. Christmas 1913. "This is the ink," she said. Nobody seemed to hear. Grindley had gone to the dressing-table, leaving behind him open drawers and Greta's papers in confusion.
Lady McIntyre followed. "I must trouble you," she said, with dignity, "to put the writing-table as you found it."
"It isn't necessary," murmured the outrageous Grindley.
"But that is monstrous! You promised—at least, the other one—" She looked round. The other one, lost to view, was pursuing his nefarious course in the hanging cupboard.
"You heard him, Mr. Napier?" She spoke with tremulous bitterness.
"If I let them investigate quietly, no one need ever know."
"Yes, if we found we were mistaken,"—Singleton stuck his head out of the cupboard to say. "But, you see, we find we are not mistaken." He disappeared amongst folds of apple-green silk and lemon chiffon.
"Not mistaken!" cried Lady McIntyre.
"What have you discovered?" Napier called to Singleton.
It was Grindley, ludicrously inadequate, who answered, "The pen."
Lady McIntyre ran to the open attaché case and took it out. Grindley, at the dressing table, fingering Greta's toilet set, kept a vacant eye on Lady McIntyre.
"What could be more innocent than a perfectly new pen? Look, Mr. Napier. It's never been used, not even once!" She thrust the pen into Napier's hand.
"Look at the point," advised Grindley.
"Well, look at it. Perfectly clean. If it matters," Lady McIntyre said, "that pen has never touched ink. And how can you write with a pen if you don't write with ink?"
"We might—ask the lady," suggested Grindley, who was actually opening and unscrewing Greta's silver toilet things, holding bottles up to the light, smelling at corks and stoppers. He slipped out of its silver shell a small bottle of thick blue glass. He uncorked it and applied it gingerly to his nose.
"This is it," he said.
Lady McIntyre, with the dive of a dragon-fly, was at his side. "You think because that's labelled 'Poison,' there's something suspicious about her having it. It just shows! That bottle is part of the manicure set. Read what it says above the label," she commanded.
"Pour les ongles," the obliging young man pronounced with impeccable accent. "Yes." And he took the bottle over to the attaché case.
Lady McIntyre made a motion to arrest, to retrieve. As Napier laid a hand on her arm, trembling, she stood still.
"We must let them go through with it," he said.
She looked at him. With an effort Napier could only partly gage. Lady McIntyre recovered herself. "Go through with it? Of—of course. How else,"—she flicked her ear-rings with her drawing-room air—"how else could we convince them?"
Singleton, with some display of muscle, had dragged out from behind the pendent draperies a square, canvas box.
"Ah, that,"—Lady McIntyre went forward, maintaining valiantly the recovered, drawing-room manner—"that is her hat-box. What they can want with her hat-box!" She tried to smile at Napier.
"Heavy for hats," remarked Singleton, in a tone of subdued pleasure. The box was furnished not only with the usual leather handle on the top, but with one on each side. To the top handle the label was still tied. It bore across the upper end the printed legend,
From Sir William McIntyre,
Kirklamont.
and underneath the familiar hand had set:
Von Schwarzenberg.
Below, in plain large capitals that caught the eye,
BOOTS
"Oh, that's why it's heavier than hats." Lady McIntyre held the label so all could see.
"It's heavy for boots," remarked Singleton. Grindley had sunk down on his haunches.
"This is it," he said.
"How do you know?" Napier asked.
"The lock," answered Grindley, picking over his hooks and twisted wires. He worked for some moments in his customary silence. Singleton strolled about, opening books.
"From Nan. From Nan. She might almost as well have had a stamp made."
Back to the lock-picking figure Napier's eyes came, from praying pardon of the girl with the plaits leaning out of the window. "Shame!" the girl cried.
"A case for cold chisel?" Singleton inquired, looking up from the libretto of Rosenkavalier. No answer from Grindley, but he put out his hand and felt under the corrugated paper in the attaché case. The hand came out with a chisel and a hammer.
"No! no!" cried Lady McIntyre on a note of firmness new to Napier's ears. "You said 'no forcing open.'"
"Unless we knew we were justified," amended Singleton. "We know now."
"You can't know."
"We have found enough to explain."
"Enough to explain what?"
"Why we are here. And why she shouldn't be."
Lady McIntyre turned, quivering, to Napier. "You know, don't you."
"I'm afraid,"—Napier interrupted—"what I know wouldn't help Miss Greta."
"What do you mean!"—her voice was hysterical. "Oh, everybody's mad!"
As the hammer was raised, Lady McIntyre flung out her hand toward the top of the chisel. Grindley, his shoulder against the box, pushed it a trifle to the left, and down fell the hammer in a resounding stroke. The lady wrung ineffectual fingers, as though they had succeeded in taking the blow aimed at Greta's lock. "Never, never shall I forgive myself! If she were to come in while we are at this horrible business—"
"She won't." But as it now struck Napier, Singleton hadn't once glanced out of the window.
Blow upon blow, till the lock fell to the floor. Grindley raised the lid. He said nothing, uttered no sound, but he smiled for the first and only time. A sheet of dull silvery metal had met his eye—the top of an inner box.
Lady McIntyre sat down in the solitary chair, as though her legs had suddenly given way.
By its two steel handles, which had fitted neatly into felt-lined sockets in the cane-and-canvas top, Grindley and Singleton lifted out the metal box. They laid it on its front. With those short, vicious hammer-strokes that seemed to shake the house, Grindley cut the hinges through. He and Singleton set the box upright and forced back the top.
CHAPTER XIII
After the first moment of stupefaction, Lady McIntyre's, "Oh—a—is that all?" resolutely proclaimed there was nothing out of the way in a governess having a box half full of ... books chiefly, weren't they?
The first thing Grindley took out was a roll of tracing-paper. He undid it. He smoothed it flat. He turned it over. He held it up to the light.
"Nothing! Not a thing!" breathed the lady.
Three pairs of eyes had fallen simultaneously on a letter which had been underneath the roll of paper—a letter unaddressed, in a sealed envelope. Grindley opened it. Singleton leaned over to read it, too. All that Napier could see was that the communication appeared to be in German script, not written compactly, as the national instinct for economy seems to inculcate. The lines were wide apart. Grindley's thick finger, traversing the blank space, seemed to emphasize this fact.
"Nothing there," said Singleton, dipping his hand in the box again.
"Nothing that jumps to the eye." Grindley laid letter and envelope on the floor by the tracing-paper. Out of a shallow cardboard box, full of numbered films, Singleton had briskly helped himself to one after another. He held each in turn up to the light—held the first two so that Grindley could see them.
"To keep such things! It's the kind of extraordinarily rash things they do." A look of understanding passed between the two secret-service men.
"They?" inquired Lady McIntyre, and as no one answered, "Rash?" She turned her helpless eyes on Napier. "What a world to live in, when to take a little picnic snap-shots is 'rash'!"
"You have a dark room? She develops her own photographs?"
Lady McIntyre swung her ear-rings.
While Singleton was running rapidly through the picture series, Grindley took out a book—a leather-covered book, with a lock.
"A diary, that is, just like mine," said Lady McIntyre. "Her diary had a lock, too," she said. But the fact did not save this one from desecration. Off came the lock at the edge of the chisel, and Grindley was bending his head over pages of exquisite writing. That it was German, seemed in no wise to disconcert Grindley. "Plain sailing," was his comment as he handed the book over to Singleton, who, with a kind of affectionate regret, put down the two films he had been studying side by side. "Very instructive, seen seriatim," he remarked, as he swept them toward the case, and took the diary.
Whether it was a fellow feeling for this private chronicle with the lock like hers, yet so ineffectual, certainly the sight of Greta's diary being passed from one strange hand to another made a sudden breach in Lady McIntyre's hard-won self-control.
"How you can!" She leaned forward to cast the three words into the dull face again over Greta's box. Grindley's hand was about to close upon a little gray silk bag which had fallen out of an envelope. Lady McIntyre was before him.
"I'll see what that is!" she said.
Napier winced in anticipation of the undignified struggle to which Lady McIntyre's action had laid her open.
But not at all. Grindley's good manners suffered him to make only the most civil protest.
"I wouldn't, really. Please, take care!"
Too late. Lady McIntyre had untied the drawstring and opened the innocent-looking, feminine thing, only to draw back, choking. Then she sneezed loudly. She sneezed without intermission, as she held the bag out at arm's length.
"Wha-atchew! What-atchew—is it? Chew!"
Grindley, handling the bag with caution, returned it to the thick waxed envelope and added that to his collection. Singleton had looked up an instant from his reading, sympathy in his attitude, a gleam of entertainment in his eye at recognition of this new object lesson in the unadvisability of a lady's poking her nose where a secret-service man warns her not to.
Napier stood anxiously over Lady McIntyre during the final paroxysm.
"What was that stuff?" he demanded of the oblivious Grindley.
"Usually snuff and cayenne," Singleton answered for him. "Harmless, unless it's flung into the eyes."
"Flung in!" gasped Lady McIntyre, receiving, as it were, full in the face her first staggering suspicion.
"If you get only a whiff, the thing to do is to gargle and bathe the eyes," Singleton advised politely, and fell upon his book again, like some intrigued reader of romance.
Lady McIntyre declined to go away to bathe and gargle. She sat wiping her streaming eyes and letting loose an occasional sneeze.
There still remained in the boot box, as Napier had seen, two modest-sized receptacles to be examined. One was of nickel or silver; the other, a trifle larger, appeared, as Grindley lifted it out, to be an ordinary japanned cash-box, with the key sticking in the lock.
"Achew! chew! chew!" said Lady McIntyre, trying to clear her watery vision, the better to verify the fact that the box was full of English gold—most of it done up in amateur rouleaux of twenty pounds each, sealed at each end.
Surprising, but not criminal, Lady McIntyre's inflamed face seemed to say. "Maybe," she wedged the words in between a couple of less violent sneezes; already she was steadying herself after the shock of knowing that gray bag of devilment in Greta's possession—"maybe she is custodian—others'—savings—some refugee."
Grindley had tumbled the rouleaux and the loose gold into his handkerchief. He knotted it and threw it into his case.
"I shall tell her!" Lady McIntyre's still streaming eyes arraigned him. "She shall know you've got it."
"Of course," said Grindley.
"And now for the jewel case." Reluctantly Singleton closed the diary.
But it wasn't a jewel case. No close observer needed Singleton's, "This is what you were looking for," to recognize Grindley's satisfaction at discovering a spirit lamp and alcohol flask fitted neatly into the box.
"It's to heat curling-tongs," said Lady McIntyre in her rasped and clouded voice. "That's all it is. Nothing in this world but the arrangement to heat her tongs. Every woman—"
"Miss von Schwarzenberg doesn't curl her hair with tongs," said the astonishing Grindley, a man you wouldn't have expected to know if a woman's hair were green and dressed in pot-hooks.
"How do you know she doesn't use tongs?" Napier could not forbear asking. Grindley, working with the lamp, made no reply.
"Do we understand you to say she does curl her hair with tongs?" Singleton inquired politely of Lady McIntyre. It was clear to the pair that part of Singleton's affair was to transact his business with as little friction as possible, to establish coöperation in the most unlikely quarters. "You can't say she uses tongs," he said persuasively.
"I certainly cannot say she doesn't. Neither can you." Lady McIntyre stuck to her point as if she knew what hung upon it.
Grindley had unscrewed the wick cap. If she didn't use tongs, certainly she had used the lamp; the wick was charred. He lifted out the receiver and shook it. "Nearly full," he said.
Singleton was rapidly going through the few things left in the bottom of the safe. Several leather jewel cases. They revealed a truly astonishing store—chiefly diamonds.
"She can have these back at once," Singleton said, setting the cases down by Lady McIntyre's feet.
Grindley still hung over the alcohol lamp. He had found narrow metal bands folded down at the sides of the box. They were supports, as he proved by setting them upright, and in relation to yet others, with which they formed an overhead platform above that wired bed, which was so much more extensive than was necessary to supply the flame for the heating of tongs. But Grindley seemed to find no flaw in the arrangement. He made libation of alcohol, and felt for a match. As the wavering blue flame played along the wire mattress under the tester-like frame, Grindley put out a hand for the tracing-paper.
The conviction flashed across Napier's mind, bringing with it a twinge of acute distaste: Grindley's enjoying himself. Not that the vacant eyes achieved vision, nor the blunt features keenness. But Grindley was given up to a pleasureable absorption; an intentness that should not—considering his task—and yet somehow did insist on seeming less of the intellect than of the sensory nerves. It was the same look you will see on the face of the heavy feeder. A slight congestion; a gloss, as of a faint perspiration. Napier was sure that, apart from Grindley's professional stake in the issue of the hour, he was living through highly compensatory moments, as he watched the heat bringing out marks in the tracing paper. Very slowly the faint lines blackened.... Grindley showed no impatience; nothing but that gloating, with its suggestion of sensual abandonment. During those moments of waiting, Napier struggled against the injustice of his impression. What, after all, were they looking on at? Wasn't Grindley's satisfaction the same in its lesser degree as that Champollion felt when he forced the Rosetta Stone to yield the key to Egyptian hieroglyphics? Champollion used his wits to serve the ends of learning. Grindley was using his to serve his country. Why, then, did one feel a horrible kind of guilty excitement rather than honorable pride, as the heat of Grindley's lamp brought out clean and clear an outline drawing to scale of a new system of fortification on the northern coast?
Napier could hardly repress an explosion of consternation at the sight. But the only audible sound, except a crackling of the tracing-paper, as Grindley held it up, was Lady McIntyre's bewildered, "What do you call that?"
Grindley had thrown it down for Singleton to deal with, and now the unaddressed letter was being laid on the grille. Here for some reason the invisible ink answered less reluctantly to the warmth of the blue flames' invitation. Between the wide-apart lines appeared like magic the second letter. Again that stillness, a kind of drunkenness of pleasure on Grindley's part; again Singleton's quick reaction to success; again, the instant the lamp had done the work, its abandonment by Grindley. He looked at his watch. "I suppose we mustn't go without—" He moved toward the screen.
Lady McIntyre had made no effort to read a syllable of the new writing. She sat intensely quiet, while Singleton folded the letter and blew out the lamp. All her exclamatory speech, all her fluttering motions, were as stilled as death would one day leave them. It was like the rest one takes after a prodigious journey. The distance traversed since the hat-box had been wrenched open was made as clear as though the last object in the box had been yet another lamp shedding an intenser ray. Singleton had brought out something rolled in a scarf of Roman silk. The two objects inside were a small box of cartridges and a revolver. It was then that Lady McIntyre, rising and steadying herself by the chair, showed how far she had come in these last moments. "At all events, you can't say you've found any bombs!"
"No! oh, no!" If anything could minimize the implications of tragedy evoked by the sight of a revolver among the personal possessions of a lady in England, it would be the even pleasantness of Mr. Singleton's voice. "Nothing of that sort."
Singleton was busy putting away a medley of things into the attaché case, while Grindley was churning up the contents of the drawers in the American wardrobe trunk with the energy that seemed so nearly passive and was so uncannily effectual. The great trunk held no papers and only the lesser trinkets. But the store of purple and fine linen! Lace and lawn, and cobweb silk, dribbled from half-open drawers. Brocade and cloth, chiffon and velvet, swung out to view on adjustable supports. And all that brave show the unappreciative Grindley dismissed with a single word, "Nothing," and back he went to La Motte's Dictionary.
Singleton picked up the jewels that had come out of the hat-box and held the cases out to Lady McIntyre.
She seemed, as she stood there steadying herself by the chair back, to have gone momentarily blind. Singleton suggested she should take care of the jewels.
"No; oh, no!" she shrank back, and then the poor soul broke into weeping. "Under William's roof!"
Singleton slipped the jewels into the brown suit-case and led the way to the door. Grindley stood with La Motte open in the hollow of his arm. Now and then he made a note on a piece of paper, laid on the open page.
They waited for Lady McIntyre to master her tears.
"What are you meaning to do?" she demanded.
Singleton didn't hesitate an instant. The lady would be shown every consideration. Out of respect to Sir William.
"I suppose," said Lady McIntyre, with unexpected shrewdness, "it's his duty to tell me that." She turned from Napier to the man who stood there with that awful "body of conviction" in the brown suit-case.
"It will be terrible to have her here—terrible. But all the same you shall not take her to London to-night."
"I am afraid those are our instructions," Singleton answered deferentially.
"Instructions!" she echoed. "Sir William issues the instructions here. You cannot take her away till he comes home. Mr. Napier,"—she clutched at his arm—"will you ring up Sir William?"
On the other side of the threshold Grindley paused an instant and looked into the room again. Reluctantly he shut La Motte, and went back for his hat and stick.
"Oh, come away and shut the door!" wailed Lady McIntyre, casting a look of horror about the raided room. A few paces down the hall she loosed her hold on Napier and walked in front of the three men. Even before she got to her own room, she put out her hand like a blind person feeling for the door. She seemed to fall against it. It opened and hid the little figure from their sight.
Napier followed guiltily behind the brown case, glancing in at open doors, listening over the banister.
Nan! His heart suddenly stood still. There was the cap of Mercury on the chest in an angle of the lower hall.
"What is it?" asked the observant Singleton.
"She has—they have come back!" said Napier.
"Oh, no." He went on with the same light, swinging gait.
If Singleton was not, certainly the noiseless brown presence at Napier's side could not fail to be aware of the afternoon letters on a table in the hall below. The uppermost in one pile bore the American stamp. That would be addressed Miss Anne Ellis.
An undefined dread which had lurked in the dark of Napier's mind, masking itself as dislike of the man Singleton, betrayed more than a hint of its presence in an anxious speculation as to whether these men, licensed to break all laws of human dealing, ought to be left alone a moment in company with letters and telegrams, and God knew what, down there on the hall table.
"We'll go into Sir William's room and telephone him," Napier suggested.
Singleton looked at his watch.
"He's due here in about a quarter of an hour. Meanwhile, we'd better take these in out of the wet."
Napier could have sworn Singleton was studying the top letter on Miss Ellis's pile. The only ones he touched were Greta's. All the same, Napier had to put pressure on himself to avoid picking up Nan's letters and secreting them in his own pocket. He seriously considered the possibility of going out and heading off her return. He fixed an inimical eye on Grindley—Grindley, wandering about taking his bearings, La Motte still open on his arm. Now he was at the door, looking out—not for Sir William at all, as it seemed to Napier's mounting uneasiness. He was standing there looking out for Miss von Schwarzenberg's "ever loving" friend. Her "confederate," he might be capable of thinking.
Napier struggled with a vivid prevision of Nan coming back to find that ambiguous figure—Grindley—at the door. And when she knew what he stood there for, wouldn't she by every look and motion proclaim her share in the Schwarzenberg's fate?
Napier returned hastily to the man at the table.
"You have," Napier suggested, "some idea, perhaps, when Miss von Schwarzenberg is likely to be here?"
In the instant of Singleton's pause to enter a note in that little book of his, footsteps sounded on the gravel. Steps so quick and light, whose could they be but—Napier stood braced to meet the misery of this "coming back." To see her for the first time after that fleeting rapture among the rocks—to see her like this! He turned his head. Grindley put out a slow hand. "I'll take it," he said to a telegraph boy who stood there.
God!—the relief!
"You were saying, oh, yes, When." Singleton pocketed his note-book. "If nothing is altered, she'll be back with the others in an hour or so. Say, a little after six."
"From Sir William McIntyre's point of view mightn't it be better to—a—detach Miss von Schwarzenberg from the rest of the party? To get some of what can't fail to be—a very disagreeable business over without—a—"
Singleton eyed him.
"Not a bad suggestion." He pulled out a time-table. "What do you say, Grindley, to doing without another night in that beast of an inn?"
Grindley was at his elbow, holding the orange-brown envelope, superscription uppermost. "Schwarzenberg," all three read. Singleton dropped his time-table and laid hold of the envelope.
"No, you'd tear it." Grindley's thick soft thumb was already gently inserted under the flap. He persuaded it. He put the envelope in his side pocket and opened the paper slip. As the two secret-service men closed together to read the message, Napier made a movement for which he derided himself, an instinctive drawing out of range, as though the telegram were the private property of these men.
Singleton dropped his end of the paper with an impatient, "Just exactly as interesting as usual." He gathered Miss Greta's letters in a pile and opened the brown case to receive them. The case was now so full that, in order to include the dictionary abandoned for the moment by Grindley, Singleton opened the fat volume in the middle, and spatchcocked it face down on the journal and the jewel boxes. Even so, the case refused to shut. Singleton turned La Motte out.
"What's the good of it!"
"M'm." The sound Grindley made reminded one of a child mouthing a sweet. But his vacant eyes never left the telegram.
"You haven't told me,"—with difficulty Napier controlled his impatience—"I gather"—he went on—"that you know where to lay your hand on Miss von Schwarzenberg?"
"Tea telephoned for by Mr. Grant, Golden Lion, Newton Hackett," Singleton answered, still readjusting the contents of the case.
"Shall I see if I can get her on the telephone?"
Singleton hesitated. Over his shoulder he looked round at Napier with the faintest possible trace of a smile.
"Just as you like."
"Yes, it's I, Gavan Napier. Speaking from Lamborough."
She was surprised, greatly, you'd say pleasantly, surprised. Had Napier not stopped her, she would have been welcoming, in spite of the fact conveyed by that subtle inflection which tells the experienced ear that the speaker at the other end of the wire is not alone.
"Don't use names," Napier warned. "Could you get away from your party and return here at once?"
"What's happened?" the voice came sharply back.
"You might say Lady McIntyre wants you. She isn't ill. And she would specially like the party not to be broken up. The motor can go back for the others. One moment! Could you—use your influence to prevent anybody coming with you? Any one at all?"
After a second's pause the voice came pleasantly:
"The others have begun tea already. Famished. But I don't mind waiting to have mine with ... perhaps with you! Good-by, dear—"
Napier nearly dropped the receiver.
"—dear Lady McIntyre."
Before he rang off, he stepped back as far as the cord on the receiver allowed him to go. To the very threshold of the telephone room. He had suddenly remembered Nan's letters. Had they dared—?
He could see the two quite plainly, Grindley with a glass at his eye, studying the telegram, with Greta's dictionary between them. The message was in French, then. A sharp pricking of curiosity brought Napier back into the hall.
Grindley folded Miss Greta's telegram, returned it to its envelope, and stuck down the flap. Then he laid it, address uppermost, in the empty space between Lady McIntyre's letters and those of Miss Ellis, picked up the brown case, and passed Singleton, with a murmured, "Back in time."
"Perishing for a pipe," was his companion's comment to Napier, as the stout figure turned off among the shrubberies. "Great person, Grindley!"
Singleton took a letter off Miss Ellis's pile.
"How much is she—the American—in this, should you say?"
"You're too good at your job," retorted Napier, "to imagine she's within a thousand miles of being 'in it.'"
"Oh, you think that?"
His look drew a sudden stricture round Napier's heart.
CHAPTER XIV
Singleton stood there in the middle of the hall, facing the open door, and still, as though he had the smallest right to touch anything of hers, he held Miss Anne Ellis's letter in his hand.
"Something must have happened to Sir William," he said.
"Puncture," suggested Napier, all his energies concentrated for the moment on suppressing every outward sign of concern about the fate of the letter. He had forced his eyes away from it. Yet, wherever he looked, he was more aware of that white square in Singleton's hands than of anything else in the hall.
But Napier had pulled himself together with a strong hand. He mustn't lose an instant; he shied away from formulating even in secret the idea of which Singleton's mind must be disabused. He got only as far as to ask himself, with a ghastly inner sinking, just what danger was there—could there conceivably be—of Nan's being inadvertently caught in the net he, Gavan Napier, had helped to spread? Nan! He leaned hard against the table. Of course—he told himself—of course, they'd find nothing, nothing in the world to implicate Nan. But the shock, the wound! How she'd loathe this England! He sat down heavily.
Singleton came sauntering back, the long chin in one hand, the overbrilliant eyes on Napier. To make an enemy of this man, in the present universal instability of equilibrium, wouldn't it be a stupid as well as dangerous mistake?
"Smoke?" suggested Napier. He felt for his cigar case.
Singleton didn't mind if he did. As he sat down on the other side of the table, he dropped Miss Ellis's letter on the pile.
Oh, but the letter looked well on the table! It suddenly occurred to Napier, lightly slapping his pockets—what had he done with those cigars?—there was something not only attractive about Singleton, but downright likeable.
"It must be a curious life, yours," he said.
"Well, you know how it is yourself."
"I know?" It was one thing to leave off hating him, quite another to ally Gavan Napier with the underground work of the world of spies.
"Nous pêchons aujourd'hui des plus gros poissons, surtout à,"—he dropped out as lightly as a smoke-ring the final words, "Gull Island."
Napier, leaning forward to take back the burning match, very nearly fell off his chair.
"What do you know about—"
"Oh, Gull Island is one of our secret-service pets," Singleton went on, still in French—though it seemed the height of improbability that, had he spoken in English, any unseen listener could have distinguished words falling in the voice you would say was low by nature rather than by caution. "Jolly little place, Gull Island. I was there last month."
"Comment!" Napier said, accepting the medium chosen by his interlocutor. "You mean before I—"
"Oh, yes, two weeks before you reported. You didn't, so far as I remember,"—he seemed to indicate a flaw or even a suspicious circumstance—"you didn't connect this woman with it."
"What woman?"
"Oh, then there is more than one?"
"Oh, see here,"—Napier's patience, perhaps even his self-control, was wearing thin—"what's the use of going on like this? You know there's only one suspicious person hereabouts. What you couldn't know is that I wrote from Scotland a full and complete statement."
"Who to?"
"To Sir William!"
"That was before you were warned?"
"Warned?"
"To keep the Gull Island business to yourself."
Before Napier could bring out his slightly annoyed defense, Singleton went on: "I wouldn't have dreamed of broaching the matter, if I hadn't just got my instructions to meet you in London for the express purpose of telling you that the importance of Gull Island isn't a thing of the past." He waited while Napier digested the news in a wondering silence.
"In your report to headquarters you didn't, I gather, mention the lady," Singleton persisted.
"Why should I? So far as she was concerned I had only my unsupported suspicions to go on. I thought it only fair to Sir William to leave the initiative there to him."
"I see. It was perhaps the more convenient thing to do."
"It wasn't at all convenient," Napier assured him with asperity. "I got into such particularly hot water over my case against the lady that I don't at this moment know whether I am still private secretary to Sir William McIntyre or not."
"Why is that?"
"She persuaded him that I was, to put it mildly, salving my wounded feelings. Oh, she's—" Napier jumped up, and went to the door.
"Yes, she is," Singleton's voice sounded an amused agreement.
"What is she?" Napier demanded, turning round. "Does anybody know?"
"Well, what do you think we're for?"
Napier stood there, an embodied interrogation. How closely did it touch Nan Ellis, the knowledge this man had?
"We've kept an eye on her for some time. She has been unconsciously—" Singleton flicked his cigar-ash—"of considerable use to us. Oh, she's well known. Devils for Pforzheim and Engleberg."
"Engleberg? Who is Engleberg?"
"The older one, who called himself Carl Pforzheim. A slim pair, those two!"
"He got away?"
Singleton smiled. "One got away—Carl. Ernst is—extremely safe."
The thought of Lady McIntyre came to Napier, along with the horror of the picture Singleton had evoked; intimates of Kirklamont, donors of Boris and Ivan; Mr. Ernst, in prison waiting for the firing squad; Mr. Carl showing his "nice teeth" in a rictus of terror before turning to take McClintock's knife in his throat.
"There's no call to make a mystery of this little Schwarzenberg affair," Singleton was saying. "The woman is better known in Brussels. Better known still in Cincinnati, Ohio." Singleton smiled. "She has a great reputation in a certain suburb of that semi-German city. The good people of New Bonn are proud of her. She has come on so."
"Come on?"
"Oh, she began to 'come on' from the moment she arrived, twenty years ago, at the age of twelve."
"You don't mean she's thirty-two?"
"Thirty-three, to be exact. She came from a suburb of Berlin with an older sister, to help in the patriarchal family of the Cincinnati uncle and aunt."
"The millionaire uncle?"
Singleton's nod of pleasant indulgence accompanied the more exact information.
"He'd laid by money enough to start a little beer garden. The older sister soon went out to service. This one insisted on going to school. But she helped in the beer garden between whiles. Made a friend of one of the habitués, a fiddler in the local band. She sang for the beer garden customers, and they threw her dimes. At fourteen she got an engagement at the little German theater. She sent home the passage money for a brother. Instead of putting him to a trade, she put him to school. This girl of fifteen. The next year she sent for another brother. Même jeu. Oh, she's been very decent to her family. But the voice of great souls appears always to have been Miss Schwarz's undoing. Her voice was unformed. She forced it. Broke it. At eighteen an end to hopes of great operatic career. A year or so later she went on the stage. Played in German a couple of seasons. Graduated into English. Then there's a goodish interval which we haven't yet filled. Nearly six years, I make it. When she next comes to the surface, she had fallen in with Pforzheim at Washington, and was falling out with him in Paris. The Brussels' Secret Service had employed him on that Duc de Berry case. She did the work. Pforzheim, as usual, got the credit, and naturally most of the cash. She needs an awful lot to keep her going—this woman. They quarreled over the amount. She washed her hands of the job and of him, and back she goes to America. Out of the glare and excitement of Paris and a partnership in Pforzheim's plottings, to—what do you suppose? To teach music, of all things! In San Francisco, of all places! In a private family!" Singleton laughed. "These Ellises!" He nodded at Miss Anne's letters. "Again and again we've traced Greta Schwarz doing this and that for the International Bureau, being successful and well paid, and suddenly chucking the whole thing and going back to respectability and dullness. An inversion of the desire of the moth for the flame. The desire of the butterfly to labor, to store honey and esteem!"
Napier brought him back to the point. "Now that you've landed Pforzheim, any more use for her?"
"None on earth."
"But if in this case she's been only Pforzheim's tool, is the evidence enough—?"
Singleton nodded.
"Her neck's in the noose. You don't believe her neck's in the noose?"
The smile was ugly. It gave a certain sportsman's pleasure to Napier's reply.
"She's a very clever person—is Miss von Schwarzenberg."
"Well, my experience with all these people," returned Singleton, easily, "is that the cleverest do the rashest things. Who takes care of Pforzheim's tracery of fortifications? Pforzheim? Not he. This woman, with twice his wits. And what do you think of her setting down in that idiotic diary full reports of conversations among officials? Some at dinner, some overheard. And do you think Number Eighteen—that is Pforzheim—do you think he was going to run the risk of having code messages traced to him? Not a bit of it. The compromising messages come to her."
"How do you know?"
Singleton dropped his long fingers on the orange envelope and played a brief tattoo.
"We stopped another of the same sort, signed in her name, this morning at the local post-office."
"And you could read it?"
"Anybody could read it. Order on an Amsterdam broker to buy Tarapaca nitrates."
"And what did that tell you?"
"Absolutely nothing. We've tapped messages of the same sort before."
"Then you are no forrader."
"We weren't when we got here this afternoon." Although the conversation had been carried on in low-voiced French, Singleton leaned over the table and dropped out the next sentence in a tone that barely escaped the suspicion-stirring whisper, "Grindley found a French dictionary in her writing-table."
"What good did that do you?"
"All the good in the world." Singleton's face shone with the good it did him. "You see," he went on, in that careless-sounding undertone, "the hitch was we couldn't hit on the code. That's why we've been giving her rope."
"And now?"
"Now—?" In a flash of pantomime Singleton with one hand suggested the knotting round the throat. His quick fingers carried the invisible cord above his head. He dangled the phantom felon in the air. "And the beauty of it is, she's done it herself."
"I wonder," said Napier.
"You wouldn't if you knew Grindley!" Singleton smiled comfortably as he lay back in the high carved chair. "Frightfully intelligent boy, Grindley. You see,"—suddenly he bent over the table again—"it's like this. They send about a devilish lot of their information in the form of brokers' orders. I dare say, if you've noticed, she'll pretend to read the 'Financial Times.'"
He waited only a second for the verification Napier withheld. But the familiar picture sprang up at call: Miss Greta half coquettish, half girlishly—appealing, "I must see what's happened to my poor little earnings." Sir William amused, pleasantly malicious, "As if you'd know, even if they told you! You'd far better ask me."
"Thank you immensely, but women oughtn't to be so dreadfully dependent. I'd like to make myself understand. Perhaps in time—"
And Sir William's laughter: "When rivers run uphill and kittens cry to-whitt, to-whoo!"
Singleton had taken out a note-book and scribbled two or three lines.
"She'll telegraph something like that." He held the book open on the table under Napier's eyes. "She wouldn't care a button if the post-office people gave that up or whose hands it fell into."
Certainly in Napier's hands it would have made Miss Greta no trouble.
"You might call it stupid," was his comment.
"Exactly. Nobody could be expected to see danger to the state in an order to buy Nepaul rice or Sumatra cigars. It's all right and runs on greased rails, till Grindley comes along. He turns over that La Motte of hers, till he notices some minute pencil-marks on one of the green advertisement pages at the back. The marks were so small that no eyes but Grindley's would have noticed them at all. And even Grindley couldn't read them without a magnifying glass." Singleton leaned over suddenly till he could command the avenue, stretching, sun-flecked, empty to the gates.
"Do you always hear the motor before it gets to the plantation?"
"Always."
"Well, the kind of thing that came out under the glass was: 'Market dull—Ascertain R—activity.' R," interpreted Singleton, "meaning Hosyth, of course. 'Prices falling—Leaving Southampton. Advise purchase—Report to Seventy-Six.'
"Seventy-six is the number of the German agent at Amsterdam. We've learned a good deal since we discovered that is where seventy-six hangs out. This message, for instance,"—he nodded at the one between them on the table—"says, 'Advise immediate purchase Erie at 22-1/4—3/4 and steel 129-5/8, market rising.' It's clear, according to the La Motte code, that something's got to be reported instantly to the German secret service agent at Amsterdam. The question is what? Even if we intercepted the message, we shouldn't be any the wiser. Or, rather, we shouldn't have been, if Grindley hadn't gone juggling with the numbers of the stock quotations till it occurred to him, after trying the thing twenty other ways." He stopped.
"Yes," Napier threw in. "I've been wondering why you tell me all this."
His smile was slightly abstracted.
"It's all right, I thought I heard a motor," said Singleton. He met Napier's eyes. "It's my business to know men, and before it was my business I knew you." That was the sole reference made to the Oxford episode. "Grindley's got an idea," Singleton went on and his face reflected the brilliance of it, "that the consonants in the occasional short-code words interpolated into some of the messages—words like Tubu, and so on—stand for the class of ship the submarines are to look out for. Tubu equals Torpedo boat. Kreuzer, Kleinkreuzer, Zerstorer, and so on, are indicated, we think now, in the same way."
Napier made no pretense at sharing Singleton's delight in these speculations.
"All this information," he exclaimed, "going back and forth with absolute impunity!"
"Until to-day," Singleton breathed out from full lungs. "Great day this for the service!"
But Napier sat appalled. No ship to leave our harbors, but its character and course might be known to the enemy lying in wait! He began to believe things he'd scoffed at. It was true, then, the Germans had coded in their secret-service ciphers every naval base, every ammunition center, every camp, every war-vessel of the British fleet. He said as much, with raging in his heart.
"And while ship after ship, crew after crew, goes down, what is our secret service doing!"
One member of it was blowing smoke-rings. Not till the supply of smoke gave out, did Singleton fall back on words:
"You hear very little about the English secret service, and you hear a lot about the German. That, to begin with, is an advantage, greater than you can appreciate. I don't propose to subtract from it. But there's no law against my talking about the German system. Their greatest technical flaw is that they lose themselves in a wilderness of detail. Their men will know all about the trajectory and penetration of the fourteen-inch gun, and they'll understand so little the men who make the guns that our quarrels among ourselves, our industrial unrest, is taken to mean that we're ready to consent to 'a German peace.' They'll report reams—we've seen 'em, got 'em docketed in our drawers—reams about the ordnance factories of the Argyle works. But as for the new projectile we're turning out a few hundred yards away, they'll have no more idea of that—till it goes whistling and roaring through their compact formations—than they have that the money they're still secretly supplying to Pforzheim comes straight to our Intelligence Department. All the same, where the Germans fail isn't in brains. Trouble with the ruck of 'em is, they go from the extreme of sentimentality at one end, to the extreme of brutality at the other. Pforzheim! A sort of modern Werther, with a capacity for cruelty that would turn a South Sea cannibal sick. This woman, too. Risk her own life and lose Pforzheim his, colossal business in hand, and goes on like the heroine of a shilling shocker. Can't resist collecting all the silly 'properties.' Simply dotes on the paraphernalia, pistol, and what not. One of the unwritten rules of the service: 'Make no memoranda. Carry no documents; only by rare exception carry arms.' She goes putting down compromising details, in a letter, for the amateurish pleasure of airing her 'inside knowledge' of the British Cabinet, and making use of invisible ink. No self-respecting British spy would be caught dead with most of the truck she'd collected in that box."
Napier had the very soundest conviction that, however poorly Singleton thought, or pretended to think, of Miss Greta's qualifications, he had set a guard of some sort at every possible avenue of escape. The woman was already as much a prisoner as any badger in the bottom of a bag. "If she's a specimen of the amateur," Napier said, "Heaven save us from the professional!"
Singleton laughed. "Heaven would need to look lively. I'd hate to be the custodian of damaging secrets with a fellow like Grindley about. You'll see." He struck his fist on the table. "A hundred pound sterling to a German pfennig, Grindley'll come back with that message from the Dutch agent neatly decoded. Oh, Grindley's immense!" Singleton rolled one long leg over the other, luxuriating in Grindley's immensity. "We aren't supposed to know each other—Grindley and I. But who wouldn't know Grindley! As a matter of fact, I introduced him to the chief, and the chief luckily isn't a stickler for the continental rules in this business. We English humanize it. What's the result? We totally mystify the rule-ridden Hun, and we've got the most efficient secret service in the world."
"Have we?" Napier started involuntarily at the sound of the motor turning off the high road and running now through the plantation with a muffled hum. "Here comes the—amateur!"
No acumen was required to read the fact that, in Napier's opinion, Singleton underestimated the noxious power of the amateur agent.
"I don't deny,"—the secret-service man stood up, but he dropped his voice to a lower register, as though the invisible comer were already at the door—"I'm not for a moment denying that this woman can do a certain amount of harm. She's got to be suppressed. But think of what she might do! She's had every opportunity, and she'll always fall short."
"Not ruthless enough?"
"Oh, she can be as ruthless as you please,"—Singleton for some reason had crossed the hall. He stood leaning against the wall near the billiard-room. "She could put a bullet in you nicely, after she'd blinded you with cayenne. But,"—Singleton shook his head—"she hasn't the right standards."
"Oh, standards?" echoed Napier. It seemed a queer word.
"At heart," said Singleton, "she has longings, as I read per record—ineradicable longings—for, what do you think? Respectability!" He smiled and then shook his fine head. "To be any good as a spy you must be either aristocrat—a perfectly satisfying law unto yourself, or you must be canaille. This woman—she's bourgeoise to the core, and a Romantic to boot. There doesn't exist a more fatal combination. I tell you,"—he stood erect—"Greta Schwarz is done for. Kaput!"
"She doesn't look it." Napier, leaning over, had caught sight of the car.
Gliding round the drive, the handsome occupant visibly luxuriating in the comfort and elegance of Lady McIntyre's limousine, Greta von Schwarzenberg lay back against the dove-colored cushions, with only her heightened color to show her the least stirred by the unexpected summons. Or was the color there, like a couple of flags, hung out in honor of Napier's return?
"Ecoutez!" Singleton's head appeared an instant out of the drawing-room door. "There's just one thing missing in that box of tricks upstairs—pinch of white powder. You must look out for that if we don't want a corpse on our hands."
"I must look out? See here—"
Singleton's head vanished.
CHAPTER XV
Greta smiled at him.
"What has happened?" another would have demanded, on sight of Napier's face; not Miss Greta. She paused on the step of the motor, calmly giving the chauffeur directions about going back for the others. "Nice to see you home again." She held out her hand to Napier.
He led the way into the hall.
"You look rather disturbed," she commented drily.
Disturbed, indeed! Who wouldn't at finding such a business shifted on his shoulders? "We expected Sir William before this,"—Napier's hesitation was only outward. Inwardly he was cursing with extreme fluency. "The train service is horribly disorganized."
"Everything is disorganized," responded Miss Greta, drawing off her glove. She caught sight of her telegram. The heavy, white fingers paused in the act of opening it. A change, quick, subtle, came over her face. "Some one has been tampering with this!" She spoke in a sudden, harsh voice, Napier had never heard before. He was conscious that guilt was printed large on his countenance.
"Yes, it's been tampered with." He in his turn spoke loud enough for the words to reach Singleton.
"Hush!" said Miss Greta, to his astonishment. "Come—" she led the way across the hall, toward the drawing-room.
"I must wait here, for Sir William," said Napier, lamely.
Miss Greta stood looking at him an instant, then she took the telegram out of the envelope and glanced at it. After a moment's reflection she folded it up, replaced it in the envelope, folded the envelope small, and thrust it in her belt.
"You'd better tell me," she said in an undertone, "what has been going on." As Napier hesitated, her growing uneasiness got the better of her. "I'll ask Lady McIntyre." She went quickly toward the staircase.
"No, no, come back." He waited till she turned. "There's been some one—some one was sent down from London to—look into things."
Wide and innocent, the china-blue eyes were on him. "To look into what things?"
"Yours."
"Mine? What on earth for?" She smiled, divided, it would seem, between diversion and stark bewilderment.
For a second, Napier forgot the man in the next room. "I'm afraid it's all up, Miss Greta." He had never called her "Miss Greta" before, never spoken so gently.
She came over to the table. "And why," she asked in a level voice, "do you think that, Mr. Gavan?" She had never used his Christian name before.
"They've found—what they were looking for."
"And what were they? Not"—she drew herself up suddenly—"not that that matters," she said with a towering contempt. "The thing that does matter isn't that in these terrible times all foreigners are suspect. The thing that matters is that Lady McIntyre and you—you should allow strange people to—" Her quivering lips could form no more for the moment. She pressed her handkerchief to her mouth. "Were you present when they—"
He nodded.
"How you could!" From a great height she dropped contempt on him. And she had scorn to spare for the men of the secret service. "They must be easily satisfied! What do they think they have found in my poor solitary trunk?"
It was perhaps better to go through with the odious business and get it over. "They found your journal."
"What of that?"
"Transcripts of conversations at official dinners—"
"What of that? Always I set down what interesting people say. Every diarist has done that since diaries began. Nan does it. Your friend, Julian Grant, does it. I've done it since I was twelve."
An effect of poise about her, a delicate effrontery in her tone, steeled Napier to ask: "And have you also, since you were twelve, made a practice of photographing fortifications?"
"Fortifications! Oh, this is the very lunacy of suspicion!"
"There was also a tracing of the most important of our new coast defenses."
"Tracing? What is tracing?" As Napier did not answer, she went on, "I have never seen such a thing."
"No, you wouldn't see it, not till you had heated the paper."
"You mean,"—she gasped—"something in what they call invisible ink? Who has put that among my papers?" The pink in her face had not so much faded as deepened to a sickly bluish magenta, like the discoloration of certain roses before the petals fall. Napier looked away. She stood there, pouring her cautious, low-voiced scorn on some secret enemy. It wasn't the first time in history this kind of villainy had been practised on an innocent person, a person whom somebody—who was it?—(she clutched his arm)—whom somebody wanted to get into trouble, to get out of the way. The congested face looked swollen and patchy. Minute bubbles of saliva frothed at one corner of the mouth. Suddenly she faced about and made a rush for the stairs. But Napier, at her flying heels, caught her half-way up. He seized her by the shoulder, and he did it roughly, anticipating a struggle.
Instantly she was still. She dropped her cheek against his ungentle fingers. "Oh, Gavan, save me!"
