And as the screech of a distant engine had sounded from the direction of Fearnchurch Station, he had caught up the veiled hat and thrust it upon Patrine, grabbed her thin rain-coat and vanity bag and sunshade, and hurried her back to the flinty railway-station by the way she had come. And with the banging of the carriage-door, her woman's heart had broken. She had felt it bleeding drip, drip, drip! as Sherbrand's tall bare head and grave sad eyes had receded out of sight.
And the train had been delayed at the next station, waiting for the passage of a troop-train crammed with eager faced young men of Kitchener's Army, concrete answers to the famous Call to Arms and the First Five Questions—nearly half an hour. So that rounding the curve beyond the last signal-cabin for the clanking journey through the short tunnel, Patrine had seen, some miles to seaward of the glittering white prow of the North Foreland, a biplane with its wings reddened by the sunset, flying south-east.
"Oh! good-bye, Alan!" she had whispered, knowing that she would never see her Bird of War again. He had been caught and dragged back into the fiery whirl of the cyclone without the hope that nerves and supports and brings adventurers back. Sorrowful and stern, baulked of his heart's desire, grimly bent on meeting von Herrnung, and wreaking retribution for a horrible wrong, upon the red head of the Kaiser's Flying Man.
CHAPTER LXVI
MORE KULTUR
The boy's slight figure seemed to shrink upon itself as the stony eyes looked at him, and the teeth showed under the red moustache, not tightly curled now, but stiffened and pointing to the eyes. Von Herrnung set a foot upon the broken wall and leaped into the baker's parlour, staggering slightly as he alighted amongst the rubbish on the broken floor. He had been drinking, but not to excess, for the restaurant-cellars having been thoroughly gutted by his countrymen, the wreckage of the bar behind which Madame had sat, busy with her embroidery, had yielded barely a half-tumbler of Cognac and a single bottle of Champagne.
Having drunk enough to spur memory and not to lull his snarling grievances to slumber, he had come forth to blunt the tooth of his bitter hatred on the boy. For, since that queer tickling, pleasurable sensation experienced in his first tantalization of Bawne's hunger, every new weal marked upon the wincing body, every fresh bruise inflicted on the shuddering soul of Her Dearest, imparted to von Herrnung a ferocious pleasure in comparison with which mere vicious indulgence palled.
"So, there you are, little English pig-dog," he said in German, as the blue eyes met his own and fell away before them and the colour sank out of the young face. "Get you back to the Market-platz there and wait for me. I have some business with your friend."
He stretched out a long arm, picked up the boy by the slack of his garments, and with a turn of the wrist dropped him into the street. His ears were pricked for the cry that should follow the slight scrambling fall of the light body on the rubbish. It failed to come, and he frowned. Presently— Meanwhile here was game of a larger kind. He looked down from his superb height upon the bloodstained figure in the stretcher. Its eyes were closed, and the haggard face beneath the grime and bristles had the yellowish-white of old wax. He spoke to it harshly, in his English, and the brownish lids split apart and the gaunt sick eyes glimmered up at him. But no reply came from the livid lips. He rapped his foot sharply on the floor, repeating:
"I suppose you know you are my prisoner, sir?" and a strange spasm of mingled amusement and irony twitched the muscles of the haggard mask. The faded negatives of eyes regarded him with the ghost of a smile in them. The dissolving voice said in tones no louder than a sigh: