That Which Hath Wings: A Novel of the Day
strawberry-fields and red and white clover. Yet she had not noticed it
until now. Her mood had changed. She had put away the thing she most
hated to remember. She felt almost like the Patrine of two days ago.
"Miss Saxham!"
It was von Herrnung's voice speaking behind her, and with a shock of
loathing horror she remembered all. She turned to see his tall figure
approaching. The first impression was that he was ill; the next, that
he was furiously angry. His florid complexion had bleached to an ugly,
greenish pallor, even the blue of his eyes had faded to a curious lilac
hue. He carried in his gloved left hand, and with evident care, a flat
strapped wallet of brown leather, fastened with two Bramah locks and a
lock-strap. He said to Patrine in a jarring voice of resentment and
impatience:
"I have been looking for you. Could one not leave you for a minute but
you must go off by yourself? _Sapperlot_! Whom has one here? Where did
you pick up the boy?"
Her heart swelled as Bawne looked up at her in astonishment, then
transferred his stare to von Herrnung, puckering his brows in
disapproval of the rude, strange man. She answered as calmly as was
possible:
"This is my cousin, Bawne Saxham, Count von Herrnung."
"Why did you leave me?" von Herrnung grumbled as Bawne stiffly saluted,
and she told him:
"Because I saw you occupied in conversation with your German friends."
"Women are incomprehensible creatures! ... How do you know that they
were German? At any rate, whether they were or not, they have gone away
now! You find me annoyed. It is because they are--what shall I call
it?--perhaps a little exigent. Now I will have a smoke. I suppose you
do not mind?"
He had not freed his hand from the brown leather satchel to remove his
hat when he had mopped his perspiring forehead, with a big cambric
handkerchief scented with the _tres persistent_ perfume that always
clung about his clothes. Nor did he relinquish it to help himself to a
cigar, but opened the gold case containing the weeds with the hand that
drew it from his pocket, extracted a cigar with his teeth, and returned
the case to his pocket; then produced a matchbox, opened it in the same
way, picked out a match, shut the box, and struck the match upon it,
saying to Bawne, as he blew out the first mouthful of smoke: "What do
you think of that, my fine fellow? Should I not make a famous
one-handed man?" But Bawne's suffrages remained unwon, although the
dexterity of the thing had secretly pleased him. He remained doggedly
silent, scowling with his reddish-fair brows, thrusting out his chin.
"Should I not? Tell me!" von Herrnung persisted. "Or is it that British
boys are cowards and afraid to answer when they are spoken to?"
"I am not afraid--of anything or anybody!"
Bawne reddened and looked the taunting big man between the eyes,
squarely. The look added--_And least of all of anybody like you_! He
went on:
"But I think it takes more than--that kind of being clever--to make a
famous man."
"_Nicht so schlimm!_" Von Herrnung nodded. "But all the same these
little tricks are worth knowing. You might be bound with ropes to a
post, or tree, or waggon by the enemy, and if he happened to have left
your matches on you--and you could get one hand free--there is no knot
man could tie that I could not wriggle myself out of!--you might burn
the rope and get away! I did that once when I was a gunner-boy of
seventeen in South Africa----"
Von Herrnung stopped short. Bawne asked simply, and with the same
straight look between the eyes:
"Did you fight with the Boers against us in the War?"
Von Herrnung did not seem to have heard. He had caught the drift of a
sentence spoken by Sherbrand, who was answering to a question of the
Chief Scout.
"Oh yes! I live here--have quarters over Mrs. Dunlett's restaurant--you
could communicate with me practically at any time. We've the 'phone and
a private telegraph-office, and the wireless--under the usual licence
from the Postmaster-General."
He pointed towards the well-known tall posts with the short
cross-pieces, china insulators and lines of thick wire, standing beside
the telegraph-cabin, over the roof of which straddled the wireless
installation's tall, latticed steel mast.
"We find it useful for business as well as instructional purposes," he
went on. "Macrombie--the man in charge--is a one-time Royal Navy Petty
Officer Telegraphist and a first-class operator." Sherbrand's mouth
twisted a little at the corners as he added: "About twenty-four days out
of thirty, let us say!"
The quick rejoinder came:
"Then he's D.O.D. two working days in the month, not counting Sundays.
I've met plenty of Macrombies in my time. This doesn't happen to be the
monthly pay-day, by any chance, or one of the other close days in its
neighbourhood?"
"No, no! He's as right as rain and as sober as a seal," said Sherbrand.
"And--this tall fellow with red hair must be the man who has written to
me upon business. I shall have to go to him."
They exchanged a left-handed grip, mutually smiling.
"Good old habits stick," said the Chief, and Sherbrand answered:
"Fortunately, they do. Let me say again how much and how gratefully I
have to thank you for the teaching that has helped me to find myself!"
His clear light glance reverted to Saxham. "The Doctor too, for giving
me this chance of meeting you. Please tell him the story if you think
it would interest him. I hope with all my heart, sir, that you will
soon come here again!"
"I had already taken the permission for granted," the Chief said, as
Sherbrand saluted and went forward to meet "the fellow with red hair."
"There is big business in that gyroscopic stabiliser of his," he added
to Saxham, "and our friends at the French War Ministry have tumbled to
it as one might naturally expect. So much the worse for our bungling
bigwigs at Whitehall, who've let a good thing slip, for the millionth
time, out of their claws. But taking for granted the value of the
patent, and recognising the likelihood of the French bid stimulating
Teutonic competition----"
The gentle, modulated voice broke off. Von Herrnung had stepped out
upon the green and was striding towards the lightly-moving, less
stiffly-carried figure of Sherbrand, the approximation of the two
somehow suggesting a salute of gladiators previous to the fight. Now
the big, grey-clad German was arrested in the middle of his stride by
the sudden kling-a-ling of a motor-gong, a sharp crystal vibration that
stiffened him to attention, and pricked his ears for a repetition of the
sound.
It did not immediately come. He raised the left hand that held the
leather satchel, and swung it from front to rear, so that it was for a
moment clear of the outline of his body, as who should signal: "_I have
it safe!_" Quick, watchful eyes noted this. Took in also the ornate
bulk of the dark blue F.I.A.T. touring-car, as with the characteristic,
noiseless smoothness of its make, it glided between the ranks of parked
and waiting automobiles, and stopped in the open, perhaps some forty
yards away.
A fat yellow hand, with a twinkling solitaire upon it, waved. A brown
hand, with a massive gold curb-chain watch-bracelet on the wrist of it,
beckoned imperiously. Something had been forgotten, something was still
to say. Von Herrnung wheeled, and went back in his traces as obediently
as the pointer that has been called to heel. He did not uncover,
perhaps he had been told not to. He saluted, and stood stiffly,
listening to a harsh German voice that yapped at him. All his arrogance
and swagger seemed to have been juggled out of him by the gestures of
the brown hand with the flashing wrist-bracelet, emerging from the white
cuff with jewelled sleeve-links and the snowy sleeve with its broad
bands of glittering golden braid.
"_S'th!_"
The slight sound pulled Saxham's head round. He had not been looking at
the occupants of the blue F.I.A.T. His eyes were intent on the tall
white figure of the woman standing beside his boy. Her black lace
sunshade was closed. She held the tall-sticked thing at arm's-length,
leaning upon it, and the westering light smote a myriad of
multi-coloured sparkles out of the tinsel spangles of the hat with the
single black cock's plume. The queer headgear crowning her barbaric
hair, and her full white oval face with its wide, low, arched black
brows and long eyes, made her seem strange, alluring, as some
tall-stemmed, exotic flower, sprung at the incantation of an Oriental
conjuror, from a green stretch of English turf.
In the same instant von Herrnung touched his hat, stepped back from the
blue car, wheeled and walked away toward the waiting figure of
Sherbrand, the sallow man in the Homburg hat gave an order, the
chauffeur touched the electric starter, and the F.I.A.T. turned and
smoothly bowled away. But in the instant of its turning, the bearded
man in the white naval uniform rose in his place, and obtruding half his
short, bulky body across the lean person of his sallow neighbour,
scrutinised the face and figure of Patrine Saxham with a cool,
appraising deliberateness that tortured the wincing flesh it enveloped
like the cut of a carriage-whip.
They were full, bright, and rather handsome grey-blue eyes shadowed by
the white cap-peak, and they had the indefinable expression of authority
and power. Their glance said--and the face with the perfectly-trimmed
beard and the upturned moustache wore a curious smile that bore out the
glance's meaning:
"So! That's the woman!" And a surge of scalding shame and bitter
resentment rose in the heart of Patrine Saxham and filled it to the
brim.
She could not have explained why she felt certain that her shameful
secret was known to the man with the powerful eyes, the cast of whose
face with its pointed beard faintly reminded one of the King and the
Tsar.
Patrine had always abominated cheap sentiment. She had once laughed
until she cried at a revival of an old four-decker drama, whose hero,
waking to the knowledge of a committed, irrevocable deed cried in
throaty, stagy tones of anguish upon God to put back the dreadful clock
of Time and give him yesterday.
Now she perceived the deep, vital interest of the common-place human
story. If asking Him on whom that other sinner cried would wipe from
Time's register a span of hours between twelve P.M. and three o'clock in
the morning--blot one deed from the Roll of things that done, are beyond
Humanity's undoing--Patrine told herself that it would be worth while to
wear sackcloth, live on boiled field-peas, drink brook-water, and
pray--until her knees were worn to the bone.
She caught Saxham's piercing glance across the intervening strip of
greensward. He turned away his eyes, and a shudder went through her
frame. Had he suspected--could anyone have found out and told him? The
Doctor's head was bent now as the General talked to him. It seemed to
her that a muscle in his lean cheek twitched, a characteristic sign with
him of excitement, or emotion. She wondered what the General had said
to Uncle Owen to make him look like that.
As a fact, the quiet voice was saying in Saxham's ear: "And prepare
against a surprise, Doctor--for though your nerves are tough as
aluminium bronze, a few million gallons of water have rolled under the
Thames bridges since you and I held Council of War.... As I mentioned
before, the interest taken by the French Government in Sherbrand's
gyroscopic hoverer may well have stimulated the interest of our Teuton
neighbours. But it doesn't explain the presence on Fanshaw's Flying
Ground of Lieutenant-General Count Helmuth von Moltke, Chief of the
German Great General Staff, and--Grand Admiral Prince Henry of Prussia,