That Which Hath Wings: A Novel of the Day
She breathed between stiff lips, trying to control her shuddering:
"Twice to-night I have heard him call me: '_Mother!_' and then again,
'_Mother!_' Now I feel"--she closed her eyes and opened them widely,
staring through the darkness--"that he is wanting me!--wanting you!--as
he never has before. We were always near till now--he could not realise
what parting meant!"
She fought with sobs, and the tears she could not keep back fell in the
darkness on her husband's face. His own were mingled with them.
Perhaps she knew it, as she wiped them away with a touch that was a
caress, saying:
"We must not give in! We must not fail him! To abandon hope too soon
would be to fail!"
Courage had come to her with the paling of the stars and the greying in
the East that meant the dayspring. She was full of solicitude for
Saxham's weariness, as he rose up stiffly as a knight who has watched
his armour through the long hours, kneeling on the threshold of the
Sanctuary, and knows with the waning of the flame in the lamp before the
Tabernacle that his vigil is over and done.
"You are tired--so tired! Dear Owen, go to bed now, if only for an hour
or two. There will be news of him very soon now--there _must_ be news!"
Saxham took a delicate fleecy wrap from a chair and put it about her,
for she shivered in the raw chill of the unsunned morning air. Then he
touched the blind, and it rolled up upon a vista of backyard and garage.
The shriek of an engine and the vibrating passage of an early train
through Portland Road Tube Railway came into their ears, standing
together at the open window, as Dawn in her streaming crocus veil peeped
shyly through the vast smoke-bank that broods upon the morning face of
London, engendered by the innumerable little fires of those among her
five millions who must rise and eat, and go forth to labour ere yet it
is fairly day.
"Owen, tell me! What is coming? What is it I feel, here and here?"
She turned upon her husband suddenly with the question, touching her
brow and heart lightly and fixing on him her widely opened eyes. The
haunted look of Beatrice had come back to them. His wife's strange
likeness to the Guido portrait in the Barberini Palace Gallery--the
tragic face with the wistful eyes, that despite the asseverations of the
learned and critical will be associated as long as its canvas hangs
together with the Daughter of the Cenci--leaped up in her at this hour
to startle him afresh.
"What is in the air?" she asked. "What changes are taking place about
us? What great and horrible Thing is moving,--moving towards us as we
stand together here?"
Saxham's powerful arm went round her protectingly. He answered:
"You shall know, my love, my comrade. In confidence--I am permitted to
tell you this much. We stand upon the very brink of international War!"
She looked at him and in the golden eyes he read courage, endurance and
tenderness. Love that would be changeless. Fidelity through life beyond
Death to the Life that is for evermore.
"You mean that Austro-Hungary will attack Servia, and that Russia will
intervene?"
"As Austria intends, no doubt," said Saxham shrugging, "prompted by her
Mentor and Ally at Berlin. In him we have a personality blatantly vain,
immensely egoistic, feverishly energetic, imbued to the verge of
monomania with the idea of his own appointment by the Almighty--as they
understand Him in Germany--to be Imperial leader of nations and arbiter
of the destinies of Kings!"
He went on:
"Suppose the Great Powers of the World a row of straw bee-skeps,
susceptible of being upset by a Hohenzollern kick! Will the mailed toe
of Imperial Germany refrain from giving it--invading France through the
lost Alsace-Lorraine provinces, the moment Austria-Hungary gets to grips
with the Russian bear? Britain is France's ally, bound in Honour to
support her. Now you understand what vital questions the Chancellories
of the world were burning electric light and brain-power and eyesight
over, the long night through, while you and I----"
She stopped him:
"You make me think!--You have told me--That man who has taken my darling
is a German Flying Officer. He may have had some urgent, secret reason
for quitting England at once!"
"It is more than probable that he carried dispatches of importance. But
I can answer no questions on that point. I should be verging, if I did,
on a betrayal of confidence."
Lynette Saxham looked at her husband earnestly, and the change wrought
in her by the long night's vigil of sorrow sent a pang through the man's
heart. That line of anxiety between the slender eyebrows and the bluish
shadows round the golden eyes came to him, like the sorrowful sweetness
of the exquisite lips, out of the past.
"Why do the Germans hate us?" she asked, and he answered wearily and
sombrely:
"As the nation with which Germany runs neck and neck in military
armament, national wealth and influence, Germans pay us British the
compliment of dislike. German ambition, spreading rank and high, is
checked in the attainment of its ends even by our geographical position.
We carry in our veins too large a share of Teutonic blood, to be
ingratiating or subservient to our arrogant and domineering neighbours.
What hatred is bitterer than racial hatred? Where is enmity deadlier
than that one finds existing between women and men of kindred blood?"
The face of David, fair and debonair, rose up before Saxham as he said
it. Strange! that even while he thanked his stars for David's ancient
treachery, the fact of the betrayal should rankle in the Doctor still.
"Nowhere is there hatred more terrible. Listen, Owen--there is
something I want to tell you----"
Lynette shivered and drew the fleecy shawl more closely about her white
bare throat, and the slender shoulders and arms that were revealed
through the laces of her filmy dinner-gown:
"In the first days of the Siege of Gueldersdorp, a woman from the native
stad, the wife of a Barala herd, who came to the Convent for medicine
and soup for a sick _piccanin_--told the Mother that long before the
Orange Free State threw in its lot with the Transvaal--long before Oom
Paul and Vader Steyn ordered that all _rooinek_ soldiers sent by Groot
Brittanje to South Africa should quit the country--the Barala could not
sleep in their kraals at night '_for the going of the creatures_.' Not
all the creatures of prey--the Eaters of Flesh--the crows and the
_aasvogels_, the wild dogs and jackals, the _aard_-wolves, and hyaenas.
But the hartebeest and springbok and prongbuck and rietbuck; with the
little gazelles and tiny antelopes, the _dassies_ and hares, and all the
shy, wild harmless things that are stalked and shot for what is called
sport, by most men and some women--they passed away in multitudes each
night until just before the dawn. Even the _meerkat_ and the leopard
went, the baboons and snakes and the big lizards. Barala trackers
followed the trails North to the Marches of the Okavango--and farther
still into the Mabunda country--the woman told us--and their wise men
had warned them that it was a _teeken_ of War to come."
Her wistful eyes strained towards the East, where between the crowded
roofs of the vast City and the shadowy purple day-brow, showed a clear
wide band of crocus-yellow, melting into exquisite hyacinth-blue.
"Perhaps I am like the antelope and the hares and the wild-bucks and the
other creatures. It may be that this nameless Thing that I have felt
coming nearer and nearer is War," said Lynette. Then she winced as
though the net had whirled and fallen, and the trident pierced, and
cried out irrepressibly: "If so--Bawne will be out there unprotected--in
the midst of it! Owen!--do you hear me? How can you stand there so
calmly when such a thing may be? How--oh!--how could you consent to his
going?"
Saxham's square face was set like a mask in the stern effort for
self-control. He was in spirit with the Navigating Lieutenant on the
upper bridge of H.M.S. _Rigasamos_, hearkening to the drone of an
aeroplane struggling against the thrust of a north-west gale.... He
heard the double knock of a back-fire, and heard men talking about
engine-trouble. Even as he brought himself back to say quietly:
"I did as you would have done in the same circumstances. If the same
voice that spoke to me had virtually said to you: '_Here stands your
only son, a child in years and yet a man for England! Will you let him
go?_' Would you not have consented? If you deny, I shall tell you that
I know my wife better than she knows herself!"
"'_A child in years--a man for England_....'" The fold between her
slender eyebrows deepened and the delicate sensitive upper-lip lifted,
showing the white, slightly irregular teeth. "I do not understand," she
said piteously; "Was there any question of an order to be carried
out?--a duty to be done?"
"There was a question to be settled," said Saxham, "involving Bawne's
whole future. Here and Hereafter--and the question was this: Whether
the son you have given me is worthy of his mother, or whether he has
inherited any twist of brain, any degenerate and wretched weakness from
the father whom your pure hand saved and led back, my guardian Saint, my
heart's beloved!--from the very threshold of the gates of Hell."
"Owen! Don't speak so of yourself. I will not hear it. You had been so
wronged--driven beside yourself by misfortune and betrayal. You were
not responsible----" She covered the little ears with the slender
hands. He took the hands down and kissed them, and held them in his
own, as he went on:
"That is what I should like to believe. But--the truth is very
different. There was--there is still, I suppose--a spot of weakness in
me. A bubble of air in the casting--a flaw in the wrought steel." He
looked like wrought steel as he spoke; "I had to be sure our boy is
sound, mentally and morally as he is physically. Fit--in the fullest
and highest sense of the word. Rather than have the doubt," said
Saxham, "or the knowledge that confirms the doubt, I would----"
"No, no!" She tried to free her slender hands, but the Doctor's hold
was as inexorable as gentle. "You must not say--that! I cannot
bear----"
"Ah, my poor love, you, too, have feared lest the sins of the father
might some day be visited on the son!" said Saxham with a strange
mingling of pity and sorrow and exultation. "Well, now for your
comfort, believe they will not be. Bawne is all yours, Lynette. Young
as he is, he has learned to master Self and conquer Fear. Obedience,
Duty, and Honour are welded into the metal of his character. If I had
not been my boy's father, I should have envied that man--knowing what I
have learned to-day. And therefore I do not grudge--I give freely----"
"You give--you do not grudge----" She suddenly wrenched away her hands
and said in a tone that chilled Saxham:
"Owen, do you speak like this because you believe Bawne is--dead?"
The Doctor made answer:
"I believe that if God so decree our boy will yet be given back to us.
As far as knowledge goes--except for one fact I am little wiser than
you."
"I must know what that one thing is! You will tell me now, and all!"
The sun was rushing up over East London in a gloriole of golden fire.
To her husband's thought she was like some slender Roman patrician at
the stake, as she stood up against the background of flaming splendour,
and waited to hear the worst.
*CHAPTER XLIII*
*THE PLUNDERED NEST*
If that story of the aeroplane over the North Sea in the thickening
dark, fighting East against the side-thrust of the nor'-west gale, with
the dropping revolutions and the hiccuping engine, had seemed desperate