That Which Hath Wings: A Novel of the Day
"I think it better to tell you and Lynette that Alan Sherbrand and I
have said ta-ta!" She tried to smile. "I'm back on your hands like a
bad penny!" Her eyes seemed all black between their narrowed lids.
They were quite alone, no servant within hearing, and the dining-room
door was shut. Came the Doctor's low-toned question:
"Has any--third person made mischief between you two?"
"No, nobody has blabbed to him about anything. But--he's wise enough
now, as regards this child. Particularly wide-O!" The black,
glittering eyes looked dry and hard as enamel. Her teeth again showed
in that mirthless grin. "I don't suppose he has the ghost of an illusion
left.... Women--most women would say I was a howling fool to make a
clean breast of it. I never meant to--I can swear!--when first we got
engaged. I used to call his goodness stodgy. I think I despised him
for it in certain moods of mine. You've never realised the kind of
beast I can be. But more and more, I got to respect him! And
suddenly--I knew that if I married him under false colours--letting him
believe me to be what I amn't--even though he never found me
out--I'd--never have been able to shake hands with myself again!"
She moved to the stairs, the sleeve of her coat brushing the Doctor's
great shoulder.
"Don't you suppose God had it all his own way," she said in that odd,
strangled voice that wasn't like Patrine's. "There were minutes when the
World, and the Flesh, and the Devil were jolly well to the fore. Alan
would marry me to-morrow if I used the power I _could_ use. But I
won't! I won't! It'd not be playing the decent, straight game. So I let
him call me heartless, and piffle like that, and then the game seemed
hardly worth playing. I'd have thrown up my cards--only the Recall
came. And we said good-bye, and I saw him fly away like a great white
bird, over the water. And I'm so strong--so horribly strong--that I
stood it and didn't die.... Even if Alan's killed at the Front I shan't
die.... _Ah-h!_ ... You mustn't touch me!" Her hands plucked
themselves violently from Saxham's that would have enfolded them. "I
could stand anything better than pity. Being pitied would kill
me--though I'm so awfully strong!"
"Then trust us not to pity you--only to love you. That I look upon you
as a daughter is no secret to you, I think?"
"No, dear!" She stroked his sleeve, not lifting her pitifully reddened
eyelids, and then he felt her start. "Uncle Owen!" Her hand clenched
upon his arm, and her tear-blurred eyes sought his. "I must tell
you.... He had news to give me to-day--of Bawne!"
"Nothing worse, thank God!--than what I know already," Saxham commented
when she had told. He stood in silence a moment, mastering himself, and
the electric hall-light showed in his harsh square visage the ravages
that grief had wrought.
"How you have suffered! If only I could do something to comfort you!"
she muttered. "And Lynette. Do you know--there are days"--a sob caught
her breath--"when I daren't even look at Lynette."
"It is so with me!" His voice was deep and quiet and sorrowful. "Old
Webster probed deep with his Elizabethan goose-quill, when he wrote of
the
"Greyfe that wastyth a faire woman
Even as wax doth waste yn flame."
Pray for us both, my dear, and believe that you are a comfort to us."
She said with a laugh that was half a sob: "I might have made a hole in
the water at Seasheere, or jumped out of the train on the way back, I
daresay, but for the thought of you both. Or, if it wasn't that stopped
me, my joss was on the job."
"I had rather say your Guardian Angel."
"Do you think any self-respecting Guardian Angel could possibly bother
about a regular bad egg like me?"
"Mine did--when my wife married me and I was a peculiarly bad egg."
"You, you dear!" She suddenly caught him round the neck and hugged him
strenuously. "Do you think I don't know--haven't always known how my
father and mother treated you!"
"Time heals wounds of that kind," said Saxham, as they turned together
from the foot of the staircase, and, still keeping a protecting arm
about David's daughter, he reached his hat and stick from the
hall-stand, "though you may doubt the statement now."
"I can't. I'd only have to look at mother to----"
"To remember that she is your mother!"
His tone was final in its closure of the subject. But in his heart he
thanked frail Mildred once again for her ancient treachery, as he went
out to the waiting car, and sped through London's murky streets to the
North-West suburb where stands the Hospital.
Patrine went upstairs, holding by the balusters and feeling chilly and
old. In the prettily furnished sitting-room, communicating with her
chintzy bedroom, were her letters, and a deep cardboard box stood upon a
table. It had been sent on to Harley Street from the Club, and bore the
address of a Regent Street florist, whose showy establishment boasted a
German name.
The fragrance of roses with a musky after-tang in their sweetness
permeated the atmosphere. There were no roses amongst the flowers on
the chimney-shelf and cabinets. It occurred to Patrine that there must
be roses in the box.
Her head was throbbing and her eyes smarted. She threw off her hat and
coat, pitched them down upon the chintzy sofa, switched off the electric
lights, let up the blinds, pulled a chair close to the open window, and
sat down, resting her folded arms on the clean, dustless sill.
Sitting there, staring out into the semi-obscurity of Harley Street,
with the late cabs and motors sliding past and the distant roar of
Oxford Street in her ears, she asked herself:
"Have I behaved like an honourable woman or--a blithering idiot? That's
what I want to know?"
She waited. Not one pat on the back was vouchsafed by an approving
Conscience. The indicator of the dial slowly travelled in the direction
of the blitherer. Patrine shut her hot, dry eyes, and began to conjure
up the day that had gone over. Its sweetness was rendered infinitely
sweeter, its bitterness a hundredfold more poignant by the knowledge
that it was the last, the very last.
If she lived to be old, old, old, she knew she would never live to
forget Seasheere. The smell of the hot thyme and sun-baked grasses of
the cliffs, the rhythmic _frrsh!_ of the salt waves upon its shingle,
the shrill piping of its gulls, and pale blue of its skies would never
fade, never cease, never be silent, never alter.... For on Seasheere
cliffs her Wind of Joy had blown for the last time.
*CHAPTER LXIII*
*BAWNE FINDS A FRIEND*
The machine that could hover like Sherbrand's "Bird of War" had come
down in the Market Place. A big grey two-seater monoplane, with the
rounded cleft bird-tail and wings of the German Taube type. You could
see a number on its side and three big black Maltese crosses, and the
profile heads of pilot and passenger showing up in strong relief against
the blackened ruins of the Town Hall.
A bomb hung in its wire cage-holder on the visible side of the fuselage.
It struck Franky that the airman must be profoundly sure of himself, or
culpably reckless to have come down before getting rid of the thing. A
swivel-mounting like a barless capital A supported a machine-gun above
the radius of the tractor, and well within reach of the pilot's hand.
The pilot got down. He was tall and big, with a red moustache; a man
whose natural height and bulk were so augmented by the padded helmet
topped with the now-raised goggles, the pneumatic jacket girt in by a
broad band of webbing, supporting a brace of large revolvers, and the
heavy bandolier he carried, that the figure of his companion, scrambling
after him, seemed that of a mere dwarf.
The man who saw, _per_ medium of the rakishly-angled looking-glass yet
hanging on the wall of the wrecked parlour, conceived a horror of the
Troll-like creature in its big helmet, and the full-sized oilskins that
hung in folds about its diminutive body, the skirts reaching nearly to
the ground. When the two passed beyond the mirror's area of reflection,
the doubt whether they might not have discovered his whereabouts and be
stealthily creeping up from the rear to attack him, made him shudder,
and brought the perspiration starting in the hollows of his sunken
temples and cheeks.
Minutes passed. He waited with his eyes upon the mirror. Someone was
approaching from the direction of the Market Place, keeping well under
the broken walls of the houses fringing the narrow _trottoir_. Where an
avalanche of tiles and brickwork had fallen, he must perforce skirt the
obstacle, and thus for an instant be reflected in the glass. Meanwhile
the sound of nearing footsteps--sometimes muffled in thick dust, or
clicking over cobblestones, or tripping and stumbling among bricks and
rubble--grew more distinct. The red-moustached giant could not walk so
lightly. It must be the Troll--could be no one but the Troll! The
suspense of waiting had tensed into unbearable agony when the sound of a
voice crying broke out in the deathly silence of the place.
"Oh, oh!" Like a woman or a child's uncontrolled wailing. "Oh--the
poor men! Oh, the poor women and the li-ittle ch-ildren! Oh!" and _da
capo_, working up to a crescendo of agony, and dying away in
heartbreaking sobs. It was so strange--not that there should be weeping
in these razed and ravaged streets, but that the voice that wept should
be a voice of England--that it begot in the helpless man who heard
doubts of his own sanity, and a reckless desire to dissipate such
doubts. He heard himself call out: "Who is crying there?"
And a treble voice piped back, and stumbling over the moraine of
_debris_ tongueing from the avalanche of broken tiles and masonry,
came--not the Troll-dwarf in his huge disguising helmet and outsized
pneumatic jacket--but an urchin of twelve or thirteen--in the familiar
dress of a Boy Scout--minus the smasher hat and staff.
"Me for the gay old life!" meditated Franky. "Thought I was getting
groggy in the upper works--and now I know it! A British Boy Scout in
his little khaki shirt, with a row of gadgets on his left sleeve, and
ribbon tags to his little garters, all on his little lone in the middle
of this--Gehenna!" He spoke to the fever that galloped through his
veins in the tone of a patron presiding at the test-display of a Cinema
Film Company: "Pretty good, but you can do better. Roll along with a
troop of blue-eyed Girl Guides, old Touch-and-Go!"
The Scout's figure vanished out of the glass. There was a sound of
scratching and scrambling. The broken floor jarred to the impact of a
light body, and a boyish treble called:
"Is--is anybody here? Anybody--English?"
The voice quavered on the last word. Franky knew that this was
delirium. He grinned under his four-days' beard, and the grime and soot
and plaster that masked him, and answered in a series of Bantu clicks,
so leather-dry was his tongue:
"Me as per descrip: to fol: Young British sossifer of good fam: irrepro:
ref: and tophole edu: badly dam: by Hun shell! Greatly in need of the
com: of a ref: Chris: ho: Mus: in the eve: and intell: conver: greatly
appre:" He shut his stiff eyelids and opened them again, but the
imaginary Scout had not gone.
"You're dreadfully--hurt. Couldn't I do--something?" the treble voice
piped. Its owner was now squatting on his heels in the shade of
Franky's penthouse of planks. The knuckles he rested on the floor were
cracked and grimy, and his deeply-freckled, fair-complexioncd face was
lined, and anxious and thin. His blue eyes were swollen with crying,
though his sensitive lips wore a wistful, crooked smile. "You _are_