Chapter Sixteen.
Dawn.
When in the early morning I drove into Downing Street and entered the office of the chief of the night staff, I was informed that the Marquess of Malvern was in town; therefore I drove on to Belgrave Square.
The Prime Minister’s house was a large, old-fashioned, substantial-looking mansion, devoid of any outward show or embellishment, and with very little attempt at ornamentation in the interior. Everything was solid and good, but long out of date. The gimcrack painted deal abominations, miscalled art-furniture, had not been invented in the day when the town house of the great family had been renovated in honour of the marriage of the fourth Marquess, the present Prime Minister’s grandfather, and very little had been altered by the two generations who had succeeded him. The time-mellowed stability of the place was one of its greatest charms. The footman led me upstairs through the great reception-room which every foreign diplomatist in London knows so well, where the furniture was at present hidden beneath holland shrouds, and down a long corridor, till we found the valet, who, in obedience to the strict orders of his master, went and awakened him. The Marquess, attentive to the affairs of State by night as well as by day, was always awakened on the arrival of a crossed despatch from any of Britain’s representatives at the Foreign Courts.
“His lordship will see you in his dressing-room in a few moments, sir,” the valet said when he returned, as he ushered me into a small room close at hand.
I had sat there before on previous occasions when I had been the bearer of secret reports from my Chief. I had only to wait a few moments, and the great statesman—a tall, thin, grave-faced gentleman, wrapped in his dressing-gown, opened the door and stood before me.
“Good-morning, Mr Ingram!” he exclaimed affably; for to all the staff of the Foreign Office, from ambassador down to the lower-grade clerk, the Marquess was equally courteous, and often gave a word of encouraging approval from his own lips. Many times had he been heard to say, “Each of us work for our country’s good. There must be neither jealousy nor pride among us.” The esprit de corps in the Foreign Office is well known.
I bowed, apologised for disturbing him at that early hour—it was half-past five—and handed him the despatch.
“You’ve been travelling while I’ve been sleeping,” laughed the director of England’s foreign policy, taking the envelope and examining the seals to assure himself they were intact. Then he scrawled his signature upon the receipt which I handed him, tore open the envelope, and glanced at the cipher.
“Have you any idea of the contents of this?” he inquired.
“No, it is secret. Lord Barmouth wrote it himself.”
“Then kindly come this way;” and he led me down a long corridor to a large room at the end—his library. From the safe he took his decipher-book, and after a few minutes had transcribed the despatch into plain English.
I saw from his face that what he read was somewhat displeasing, and also that he was considerably surprised by the news it contained. He re-read the lines he had written, twisting his watch-guard nervously within his thin white fingers. Then he said:
“It seems, Ingram, that you have some extremely difficult diplomacy in Paris just now—extremely difficult and often annoying?”
“Yes,” I said, “there are several problems of late that have required great tact and finesse. But we at the Embassy have the utmost confidence in our Chief.”
“Lord Barmouth is a man of whom England may justly be proud. Would that there were many more like him in our service!” said the Prime Minister. “Kindly ask him to keep me posted constantly regarding the progress of the matter he has just reported. It is serious, and may necessitate some drastic change of policy. It is for that reason that I wish to be kept informed.”
“Do you require me to return to my post to-day?”
“Certainly not,” he replied quickly. “Now you are in England you may remain a couple of days or so, if you wish. I am well aware how all of you long for a day or two at home.”
I thanked his lordship; and then, after a short and pleasant chat upon the political situation in Paris and the mystery regarding Ceuta, I went out, mounted into my cab, and drove down to the St. James’ Club, where I made myself tidy, and breakfasted.
When I had finished my second cup of tea and glanced through the morning paper, eight o’clock was striking. I rose, went to the window, and looked out upon Piccadilly, bright and brilliant in the morning sun. With hands in my pockets I stood debating whether I should act upon a suggestion that had been constantly in my mind ever since leaving Paris. Should I take Edith by surprise, and go down to visit her?
The fact that the Marquess had given me leave so readily showed that the outlook had become clearer, notwithstanding the fact that my Chief had transmitted, for the eye of the Foreign Minister only, the secret despatch of which I had been the bearer.
At that early hour there was no one in the club, yet as I wandered through those well-remembered rooms my mind became filled with pleasant recollections of merry hours spent there in the days before my duty compelled me to become an exile abroad. I thought of Yolande, and tried to decide whether or no I really loved her. A vision of her face arose before my eyes, but with a strenuous effort I succeeded in shutting it out. All was of the past. Besides, had not Kaye proved her to be a secret agent, or, to put it plainly, a spy? Daily, hourly, I had struggled with my conscience. In the performance of what was plainly my duty I had visited her, and had nearly fallen into the trap she had so cunningly baited, for she no doubt intended, after all, to become my wife; and in this she was acting, I felt confident, in concert with that man who was my bitterest enemy—the man who now called himself Rodolphe Wolf. No, I had treated Edith unfairly, and therefore resolved to run down to Norfolk and visit her. With that object, an hour later I left London for Great Ryburgh, the small village where she delighted to live reposeful days in company with her maiden aunt, Miss Henrietta Foskett. In due course I arrived by the express at Fakenham, drove in a fly to the quiet little village, and descended before the large, low, roomy old house with mullioned windows and tall chimneys, which lay back from the village street behind a garden filled with those old-world, sweet-smelling flowers so much beloved by our grandmothers.
I walked up the garden-path, knocked, and was admitted by the neat maid, Ann, who for fifteen years had been in Miss Foskett’s service.
It has always seemed to me that except by their immediate heirs, maiden aunts are often nearly forgotten among a bustling younger generation always striving and toiling. They are left to dust their own china and sharply to superintend the morals and manners of their general servant, save when the holiday-times of the year come round, when their country houses are more apt to recur to their relatives’ minds; their periodical letters, in the delicate pointed Italian hand, essential in the days of their youth as the hall-mark of gentility, are then more eagerly replied to, for Aunt Jane’s or Aunt Maria’s proffered hospitality will generally furnish an economical change of air.
Edith’s case was not an unusual one. Her father, a wealthy landowner in Northumberland, had died in her youth, while five years ago, just before she left college at St. Leonard’s, her mother, who was constantly ailing, also succumbed. She was left entirely alone; but she had succeeded to a handsome income, derived from property in the city of Newcastle. Her Aunt Henrietta, her mother’s only surviving sister, had constituted herself her guardian. Miss Foskett had been able through stress and change to cling to the old house—the old place, once so full, from which so many had gone out to return no more.
I knew that interior well. There was a haunting sense of pathos in those old rooms, and the ancient furniture was arranged in unyielding precision.
When Ann ushered me into the musty-smelling drawing-room, I glanced round and shuddered. Aunt Henrietta’s rules were the household rules of her mother before her, and she severely reprobated the domestic slackness and craving for mere comfort and luxury of the present generation. Her lace curtains, carefully dressed, were hung up, and fires banished from all her fireplaces, on the first of May. Untimely frost and snow had no power to move the prim old wool-work screen, glazed and framed, that hid the steel bars of the grate; the simpering ladies, in their faded blue and scarlet dresses, looked unsympathetically at the light carpet, the white curtains, the anti-macassared armchairs, the round table with books, miniatures, and a flowering plant, whatever the state of the thermometer.
Through the windows a pleasant vista was presented across a well-kept lawn with broad pasture-lands beyond, and the spire of Testerton church rising in the distance behind the belt of trees. While I sat there awaiting Edith, who was no doubt amazed at the announcement of my presence, and was now rearranging her hair, as women will, I glanced up at the feeble watercolours and chalk drawings traced by the hand of “dear Aunt Fanny, who had a wonderful talent for drawing.” It occurred to me that Fanny’s great-nieces, with perhaps less artistic excuse, now studied at the Slade, copied at the National Gallery, and lived in flats with some feminine friend on tea and pickles. Such girls give lunches and teas to stray bachelors, and own a latchkey. But such doings could hardly be thought of among Fanny’s muddled trees and impossible sunsets, with Fanny’s pictured eyes smiling sweetly, if a trifle inanely, from behind her bunches of fair, hanging curls, at grandmother’s mild face and folded hands on the opposite wall.
Notwithstanding the inartistic character of the place, there was everywhere a tranquillity and an old-world charm. Through the open window came the scent of the flowers, the hum of insects in the noonday sun, and the call of the birds. How different was the life there from my own turbulent existence in the glare and glitter of the gayest circle in Paris! I sighed, and longed for quiet and rest at home in dear old rural England.
Suddenly the door opened, and Aunt Henrietta, a prim, shrunken, thin-faced old lady in stiff black silk, and wearing a cap of cream lace, came forward to greet me.
“Why, you have taken us entirely by surprise, Mr Ingram!” she said in her high-pitched voice. “When Ann told me that it was you, I would scarcely believe her. We thought you were in Paris.”
“I had to come to London on business, so I thought I would run down to see how you all are,” I answered. “I hope my visit is not inconvenient?”
“Oh no,” answered the old lady. “I’ve told Edith, and she will be down in a moment. She’s been worrying for the past week because she has received no letter from you.”
“Well, I’ve come personally, Miss Foskett,” I laughed. “I hope my presence will partly make up for my failure as a correspondent.”
Her grey, wizened face puckered into a smile. I knew that she had not altogether approved of Edith becoming engaged to me. But her niece was of age, mistress of her fortune, and, I shrewdly suspected, contributed handsomely towards the expenses of that small, prim household.
Although Aunt Hetty was of a somewhat trenchant type, and shook her head over the wilful vagaries of a world that had outgrown her philosophy of life, yet she still preserved a motherly instinct of patient love for all mankind. She was, in common with most maiden aunts, a great church-goer and firm supporter of the parish clergy of Great Ryburgh; but in parochial matters I believe she was more dreaded than loved for the uncompromising force of her doctrine and demeanour. She was severe on the faults and failings of her inferiors, and apt to discriminate in her almsgiving. Frequent curtseys and a little adroit flattery from “the poor” were a surer road to her purse than morose merit, however great.
The old lady straightened out an antimacassar that chanced to be a trifle awry, then, spreading out her skirts slowly, seated herself, and began to relate to me gossip concerning people whom I knew in the neighbourhood—the squire, the doctor, the parson, and other local worthies, all of whom, taken together, made up her quiet little world.
At last the door opened again, and next instant, as I sprang up, I became conscious of a fair vision in a simple white gown standing before me. The touch of her soft, tiny hand, the love-glance of those beautiful eyes, the glad smile of welcome, the music of that voice, came upon me as a sudden revelation. Her perfect type of English loveliness became disclosed to me for the first time. She was absolutely incomparable, although never before that moment had I realised the truth. But in that instant I became aware that she held me irrevocably beneath her spell.
I took her hand, and our eyes met. My gaze wavered beneath hers, and what words I uttered in response to her greeting I cannot tell. All that I knew was that I was unworthy of her love.