That Which Hath Wings: A Novel of the Day
because we eat too much rich food, walk too little, automobile too much,
and want some useful work or other to occupy our minds! He is coming
here to lunch with me--he was quite touchingly anxious to be invited!"
Her beautiful eyes widened as the swing-doors thudded behind three
entering masculine figures, "Why, here he is with Lord Norwater, and
your boy, Trixie! All three in khaki! What a day we are having!"
She added, as her handsome middle-aged Colonel made his spurred way
through the ever-thickening crush to her:
"I am enlightened! So _this_ was your surprise!"
"Not half as big as mine when I found they were willing to take me.
'Fit as a fiddle,' according to the M. O. Gad!"--he went on, as his wife
made room for him on the settle by her side--"as willingly as though he
had been somebody else's husband," Lady Wathe said subsequently--"It's
to my golf I owe it--these A.M.S. sawbones finding me in the pink! And
instead of a back-seat, what do you think they've given me? Command of
the Third Reserve Battalion of the blessed old Regiment, the Loyal North
Linkshires, _vice_ Crowe-Pinckney, kicked out by a gouty toe! ... How's
that for an oldster of fifty-five, ... Eh, what?" His chuckle was that
of a Fourth Form athlete picked to supply a gap in the School Eleven.
And Cynthia's beautiful eyes, as she slipped her hand into the
Colonel's, looked at him as the boy's mother's might have looked upon
her son.
Lady Wastwood's Pierrot smile might have played upon the reunited couple
mockingly, but that the unexpected apparition of her boy Wastwood in
single-starred khaki, adorned with the badge of a crack Hussar Regiment,
girt with the Sam Browne and narrow officer's shoulder-strap, and clad
as to the legs in spurred brown butcher-boots--dimmed her bright green
eyes and brought a choke into her throat. Wastwood the son was so like
Wastwood the father--killed at Magersfontein in 1900,--whom Trixie, for
no reason apparently, had romantically adored. A burly young man, pink
as a baby, with thick fair hair growing down within two inches of his
eyebrows, small, fierce blue eyes, and a huge roaring voice, softened
down now to a tender bellow as he answered a pale girl's eager question
with:
"Well, I can't say exactly when we're going to the Front, but I hope to
Christmas it'll be soon!"
Wastwood's engagement to the girl had been announced only the week
previously in the Society Columns of the leading dailies. Now, while
Wastwood's younger brother Jerry anguished in the throes of a final
Exam, at Sandhurst, the said Jerry being set upon getting a Commission
in time to go to the Front with one of the First Divisions--his elder
sat on a Club sofa and made love to the girl Jerry was subsequently to
marry. For not only Wastwood's title, but his vacant Commission as a
Lieutenant in the Dapple Greys and his sweetheart went to his junior
after Mons.
There was a lot of family and regimental re-shuffling and re-dealing,
you will remember, after Mons.
The leaven of the Great Awakening was working in the souls of these
worldly-minded, ultra-modern men and women, even as the crowd in the
rooms grew denser, as the buzz of talk became almost solid, and khaki
mingled with the brilliant toilettes. Hardly a man but wore dead-leaf
brown. Wives were entertaining their husbands, mothers were lunching
their sons, that day, at the multitudinous little tables in the great
and lesser dining-rooms,--there was a revival of old code-words, an
interchange of almost forgotten pet-names, a resurrection of ancient
jokes, when the atmosphere seemed dangerously charged with emotion. How
many Last Sacraments of renewed love were eaten and drunk by husbands
and wives who, estranged for years, were to be reunited by the War, and
parted by the War until the Day when Wars shall be no more.
That a tall young man in grey tweed with a crape armlet should sit
opposite Patrine that day at Margot's special table was one of the
thousand miracles already wrought.
Sherbrand had shelved all recollection of that June adventure in the
Bois de Boulogne, when a flushed young husband in immaculate top-hat and
frock-coat had thanked an angry young man in waterproof overalls and
gabardine for not chopping his wife into kedgeree.
Could one be angry any more when this little human dragon-fly was what
Patrine called "a frightful pal" of hers. Thank Heaven! Patrine had
known nothing of the cousinship when she had answered Sherbrand's plain
question, "Will you marry me?" with an assent:
"_Sooner than not!_"
"Then--it is settled?"
"Yes, you poor dear! If you think me worth having!"
_Worth having_! Sherbrand's glorious Patrine. Whom to be near was
heaven on earth. Whom to obey was a lover's luxury, even when she had
issued the mandate:
"Now, you must come to the Club and lunch with me, and meet my friends.
Do be decent to them!"
Perhaps you can see Sherbrand bowing rather stiffly to Margot and
accepting with the briefest hesitation the smallest of offered hands.
"I thought it must be the same!--I was certain there couldn't be two
Flying Sherbrands. Pat!--Mr. Sherbrand can't deny the relationship,
though he disapproves of Franky and me most fearfully. You'll have to
teach him," went on the coaxing little voice, "that we're lots and lots
nicer than he thinks us! For we've got to be friends," said Kittums,
"if you and my dear Pat are going to be married! No time like the
present! Can't we begin now?"
What a vivid little face it was, though there were tired marks like
faint bruises under the great dark eyes, and the rose-flush in the
cheeks was less bright than it had seemed in June. He released the tiny
jewelled fingers, and found himself presented to the husband.
"Frightfully glad to meet you--more reasons than one!"
Franky, slim, sleek-headed, and dapper in unblemished Regulation
tea-leaf, held out his hand, saying as he looked the other squarely in
the eyes:
"If I had known your Home address, I should like to have dropped a line
to you, when I--when I saw the newspaper yesterday."
"My mother lives at Bournemouth. My father had been an invalid for
years. I go down to-day by the afternoon train."
"Ah! Please remember me to my--Aunt Jeannette."
From what dusty shelf of memories had Franky reached down the name of
his uncle's unknown wife? But it sounded pleasantly to Mrs. Sherbrand's
son. The cloud upon his forehead cleared away, and his cold sea-blue
eyes began to thaw into kindness:
"I'd like a word with you in private. Do you mind comin' out of this
clackshop into the vest*i*bulee?" Franky went on, quoting his favourite
Jimmy Greggson, and with a word to Margot and a glance on Sherbrand's
part at Patrine, the two men passed through the swing-doors. Here
Franky wheeled, and said with effort:
"This is a bit subsequent! but--if there's time available and the date
of my uncle's funeral doesn't happen to be fixed, I should like to
say--" He grew furiously red and began to stammer: "My father ...
myself ... Dash! how brutally I bungle! But my uncle has a right to--to
lie in the family vault with his ancestors. It's at Whins--the Church
is in the Castle grounds. I can guarantee that my father--every
facility--sympathy--proper respect--" He broke down. Sherbrand
answered, now the cooler of the two:
"You are very kind, Lord Norwater. My mother has already received a
telegram from Lord Mitchelborough conveying a message to the same
effect."
"I engineered that!" thought Franky complacently. But he was fish-dumb.
Sherbrand went on:
"She would thank you, as I do, gratefully. But my father--would have
preferred to be buried where he died!"
"Good egg! And now there's another thing to get off my chest," said
Franky. "You know you stand in for the Viscounty when I succeed my
father, or if I get knocked out in this scrap--supposing I should kick
without heirs! That being so, suppose you bury the hatchet and lunch
with us? Wouldn't in Paris--perhaps you will now? The War seems to rub
up old saws like new somehow. That copy-book tag about Blood bein'
thicker than water! that's one of the ones I mean. In case my wife got
left--do you tumble?"--the ambiguous term was quite expressive--"I'd
like to think that you were--would be kind to her!"
"I should certainly--in that case--try to do what I could." A certain
physical and mental resemblance showed between these two long-legged,
lightly-built, clean-made Sherbrands, standing together talking of grave
matters, with candour and simplicity and British avoidance of sentiment
and excess of words.
"But,"--Sherbrand found himself yielding to an impulse of confidence in
the owner of the brown eyes that were some inches below his own, "this
War is my chance! I'm a certified pilot-aviator and constructor and
engineer. Perhaps there'll be a chink in the Royal Flying Corps for
me--and many another fellow like me--before long--I hope, not very long!
For my father's sake as much as for my own, I'm bound to make good--you
understand?"
The brown eyes understood. His kindred blood warmed to the look in
them.
"He knew--my father knew that he had failed in life through his own
fault. He did not resent his brother's attitude. He bore the
consequences more or less patiently, and when he died he left the
cleansing of his name to me. Not that he was as badly to blame as
people thought. He was born without sufficient of the quality
called--objectivity. It's the power that keeps a man slogging, slogging
in one groove without getting mechanical or stupid, as long as he attain
his ends or can serve his country by keeping on. It's
_indispensable_!"--he emphasised the word, his strong blue-grey eyes
full on Franky's--"as indispensable as lymph in your inner ear-tubes.
Without it you can't keep a level balance--whether you stand, or walk,
or fly!"
"Miss Saxham--knows, I suppose?"
A flush crept up through Sherbrand's tanning:
"I have told her. It wasn't pleasant. But she--likes me enough to
overlook it. She--seems to think I should never fail in that way! I
hope to God I never shall!" The old boyish terror of inherited weakness
cropped up in the tone of the man grown. "It would be horrible to
suspect the bacillus of slackness lurking in my blood! If there is--the
sooner I get scrapped, the better for her and for me!"
"Well, you've chosen the--kind of career that is going to use up a good
many men pretty quickly." Franky was warming more and more to this big
blond, candid cousin. "Not that I think there's much of the slacker
about you. Few chaps more fit and nervy--that is, going by looks, you
know! But if the Kaiser's Flying Men can shoot on the wing as well as
they brag they can"--his brown eyes were watchful for a change in the
other's face--"then----"
"Then I tumble out of my sky, a dead bird!" said Sherbrand, squaring his
broad shoulders, "and someone luckier fills my place!"
"Thumbs up! Ten to one you'd come down with a broken wing or so."
There was something that touched Franky's latent quality of imagination
in the fellow's queer way of saying "my sky." "This cousin of mine is a
handsome fellow," he said to himself, "and a plucky one. And--by the
Great Brass Hat!--now I come to think of it--the livin' image of old Sir
Roger Sherbrand--his and my great-grandfather--goin' by the portrait in
the gallery at Whins."
"So you're firm on joinin' the Flying Corps..." he went on, feeling for
the moustache which had been reduced to Regulation toothbrush size.
"Good egg You! Wish you all the sporting chances----"
"And better luck," said Sherbrand drily, "with Bird of War No. II. than
I had with No. I.!"
"You're building a new 'plane?" The brown eyes were alight with
interest.