That Which Hath Wings: A Novel of the Day

before, it was ghastly now. Saxham's last hope died as he told. When he had done, Lynette said with strange, unnatural composure: "Perhaps I have loved our child too much, and that is why he is taken from me.... And yet how can a mother love by measure and by rule? Did Our Lady withhold any part of her love from her Divine Child? Did not the dearest of all earthly mothers say to me--in that waking Vision, the God-given reality of which I have never doubted--'_Be to a son of Owen's what I have been to you!_'" Her strained composure gave way. Her face quivered and the tears broke forth. She nipped her trembling lips close and shut her quivering eyelids with her fingers, but the fountains were unsealed, and she wept. Perhaps it was better so. She dried her eyes presently, and yielding to Saxham's persuasions in that she consented to go and lie down, she came into his embrace and laid her arms about his neck and kissed him with wifely tenderness, saying: "I will answer now, what you said a little while ago. You shall see under the only leaf of my heart, Owen, that has ever been folded down over a secret kept from you. When my boy was to be born, and I was weak and suffering, the doubt--the dread, that has haunted and tortured you, assailed me and made me wretched--for a little while. Then I gathered together, jealously, every noble, true and brave thing you had ever done for me or for others; every good deed of kindness, every unselfish tender thought. I asked you to take me with you to visit your poorer patients. I saw their hollow eyes brighten and heard them bless you when you turned from their bedsides to carry comfort and help elsewhere. And I wrote down these things in a book. They shine from its pages like jewels. When I die it was to be given to Bawne.... It will be if he lives to come back to us.... There is a prayer at the end that, in His goodness, God might give me in my boy a man like you!" He went with her to the door and looked after her earnestly as she passed down the corridor out of his sight. Then he locked himself in, and went back to his chair at the consulting-room table. The bright boy had stood there beside him a few short hours before. He was there now, pleading with a silent voice, coaxing with unseen looks, tugging with invisible hands. He always would be. Though Time softened the mother's anguish of loss, there would be no forgetfulness for Saxham, the grim stern man whose nature was Fidelity. Other children might yet call the Dop Doctor father, but their little fingers would never blur the imprint of the firstborn's babyish hand upon his heart. Perhaps you can see the man, wan and haggard and unshaven, trying to attend to the pressing correspondence that had accumulated since the previous noon. Even as, to the shrill crying of the Fleet bugles, a windy grey day broke over the choppy Solent, showing the huge pageant of Sea Power ready for the King. Down forty-mile avenues of floating steel fortresses one might follow Majesty, with a great muster of Naval sea-planes and aeroplanes manoeuvring somewhat wildly overhead. As Saxham sat there with Fate's trident rankling in him, those lights he had spoken of were burning behind closely-curtained windows at the Admiralty and at the Foreign Office, and at the Belgian and German Embassies. In Berlin and Vienna, in Brussels and Paris and St. Petersburg--later to cast off its Teutonic name in loathing and be Petrograd--similar phenomena might have been observed. "Austria was going to take some step," as Prince Lichnowsky had nervously stated to Britain's Foreign Secretary, adding that he regarded the situation as very uncomfortable. And the German Foreign Secretary ingenuously confided to the British Charge d'Affaires in Berlin that it was the intention of Austria-Hungary to offer Serbia a pill which she could not swallow, in the Note demanding the removal of all officers and functionaries guilty of propaganda against the Dual Monarchy, presented by Baron Giesel at Belgrade, on the 24th of July. The ultimatum was to be accepted or rejected within forty-eight hours, a sweeping proviso, in which one recognises the Hohenzollern touch. The world trembled on the brink of Armageddon. Men even then were doubtful as to the issue. It might yet, some said, be Peace. But if Man, who arrives at conclusions by intellectual processes, was unsure, not so things that are guided merely by Instinct. Like the wise creatures of Natal and the Transvaal and Bechuanaland in 1900, these knew quite well that War was in the air. It is on record that in these days preceding the Great Calamity, huge droves of wild pig, great herds of deer and small bands of the rarer elk, with bears, hares, martens, and foxes, evacuated the forests of Bavaria and South Germany for the mountain fastnesses of Switzerland. Immense flights of birds not usually migratory, partridges, pheasants, grouse, plover, wild-doves and water-fowl went South with the animals. Under cover of night the colossal game-preserves of East Prussia emptied into Poland--their furred and feathered peoples passing into the labyrinthine swamps of the Russian Dnieper and Dniester--spreading the news, sending the alarm before them: "_Man is coming, and with him War!_" Man was coming. That strange trembling of the earth had warned its creatures, even before the tramp, tramp, tramp of millions of marching feet, the rumbling that betokened the slow but sure approach of Titanic death-engines, told Fine Ears to seek safety in flight, before the cataclysm of human flesh and iron and steel, and chemicals a thousand times more deadly, rolled down to overwhelm, and destroy. Hence through those July nights the sound of rushing wings above, and stealthy pads, and trotting hoofs, and heavy bodies crashing through sedge and brake and underbrush, hardly for a moment ceased. Puffs of sweet wild breath, and musky odours from hidden lairs; tufts of hair upon the thorns, and crowded spoor upon the dust of the forest-paths or the mud of the river-banks, told of their going, to those who were skilled to read such signs. But the same mysterious instinct that urged them to flight, bade the eagle and vulture that prey upon carrion, the raven and owl and crow, the wolf and lynx be on the alert, for the table of Earth would shortly be spread for them as never before in the whole History of War. And their hoarse croaking and hooting and baying and barking answered: War, War, War! *CHAPTER XLIV* *PATRINE REMEMBERS* Patrine knelt beside the bed in her charming chintz-draped, white-enamelled room at Harley Street, and clumsily thanked God for having taken away von Herrnung. She petitioned that darling Bawne might be quickly found and brought back, and that if he were not, Lynette might not die. And she wound up with 'Our Father,' rather imperfectly remembered, and got into bed wondering whether Sherbrand would be pleased if he could know her not quite as irreligious as she had boasted--and lay revelling drowsily in the comfort of cool lavender-scented linen, until she fell asleep. She had not tasted sleep for nights: age-long nights of broad staring wakefulness. Now Somnos, the gentle brother of Thanatos, took her and lapped her divinely round. She felt herself drifting away on a wide-flowing tide of deep sweet restfulness. Then it was as though an electric light were suddenly switched on in the dark galleries of her brain. Insomnia, the malevolent hag-witch, jests thus merrily with her victims, suffering them to taste sleep, and then whisking the cup away. Like many other practical jests, this ends in breakdown and brain-fever, or drives its victims to the chemist for sleepy drugs, and to the madhouse subsequently. In the middle of the dazzling cocoon-shaped patch of brightness thus created, Patrine recognized the outlines of an ornamental fountain that occupied the centre of the vestibule leading to the supper-room of the Upas Club. Executed in the New Art style of sculpture, of white and black, and tawny marble, it was shaded by tall palms with gilded leaves. On low pedestals rising from the rim of the shallow oval basin of the fountain were three nude life-sized shapes delicately tinted, with gilt hair, carmined lips, darkened eyebrows, vague round eyes of pale blue. They had the flattened breasts and narrow hips of masculine adolescence with women's faces and shoulders, arms and thighs. One held a finger hushingly on its lip; another was putting on a black vizard through which its pale eyes peeped slyly, the third was smiling over the rim of a golden drinking-cup. The Three were sharing a pleasant secret between them--or so it had seemed that night to Patrine. After complying with certain formalities, and paying a heavy fee for admission, Patrine with her friend had passed through to a wonderfully decorated supper-room with a big grill at the end, where white-capped cooks were busy with savoury things. Wind and strings filled the room with great waves of music. Liveried attendants were serving champagne in crystal jugs to men and women seated supping at the daintily-appointed tables. The hot eyes and lividly-pale or purple-flushed faces of many of the revellers, already told their tale of excess. The champagne at a guinea a jug, a speciality of the Upas, had seemed excellent to Patrine. She was out for enjoyment, and fizz made you feel top-hole. They had supped--was it lobster Americaine or grilled oysters that had preceded the other things?--when there came a change in the music. The unseen orchestra sighing and thrilling forth the amorous phrases of _Samson et Dalila_, leaped all at once into another familiar theme. To wit, the dance of the Jaguars in the Jungle, with its wail, clang, clash and growl as of strange, discordant, exotic instruments. "Drums covered with serpent-skin, gombos of elephant-tusk, human skull-rattles and all the paraphernalia of Voodoo," to quote Lady Beauvayse. Couples rose, and began passing out through a wide curtained exit at the farther end of the supper-room. The music grew madder. Patrine, laughing, took von Herrnung's offered arm. "Now," he told her, "you are going to see something that is very _chic_! We shall dance in the Hall of the Hundred Pillars!" "How frightfully ripping!" said Patrine. Thus they joined the mob of people--a singularly quiet mob,--and passed through the heavy, curtained entrance. The much-talked-of Hall was merely a big circular ballroom, lighted by groups of electric lilies, set about with pillars of tinted glass, slanting from a dado of black marble, ending at a broad frieze of black beneath the ceiling-dome. Theatrical and tawdry, gaudy and glittering, the scheme of decoration reminded Patrine of the inside of a solitaire marble. The walls of fierce bright orange were striped in curving oblique and transverse lines of black-and-silver, the silver dome was decorated with similarly curving lines of orange-and-black. To the strange barbaric music of the dance from Sao Paulo men and women were gyrating and posturing, gliding and pausing, as other men and women had done at the Milles Plaisirs. Presently Patrine and her friend were revolving like the others, in the Valse with the hesitations and the Tango steps in it. You had only to know Tango and the thing came easily--or you imagined it did, after so much champagne. Reflected in the wall and ceiling-mirrors the girl had seen herself, twisting and twirling amidst the mob of dancers, with her head thrown back, and her long eyes blazing, and her wide red mouth laughing wantonly, before the black-and-orange-and-silver walls, the silver-and-black-and-orange dome