That Which Hath Wings: A Novel of the Day
that you long for me and love me?" His light brows were drawn into a
heavy line over his stern grey eyes. "Aren't you and I going to be
married? Is it possible that you'd draw back--_now_?"
"Because your wife should be a pure woman, and I am not, it is possible.
Don't move! Don't come nearer! If you do I'll never have the courage
to tell--what must be told!"
And he had sat still, as a figure in carved khaki-coloured stone with
his knees apart and his knotted hands hanging between them, and his
eyes, curiously hard and pale against the strong red sunburn of his
face, fixed immovably upon her mouth. When she ended there had been a
great silence; and she had looked up at the azure dome lidding their
green nest, wondering why the burning, perfumed breeze had suddenly
turned cold. His voice recalled her:
"Why have you told me this?"
"To be honest." She hugged her knees. "To give you a chance for
freedom before you were handicapped with me for life, poor boy!"
"And how do you suppose it makes me feel?" He breathed roughly, and
gritted his teeth, wringing his hands in one another so strongly that
the knuckles started death-white against the reddened skin. She heard
herself saying lamely:
"I knew you'd be horribly sick about it and hate me!"
"I don't hate you. But I want to kill _him_! He took you to that
damnable place and--" He bit his lip and swallowed. "How long was that
before I met you at Hendon? Three days--and our day of meeting--the
meeting I thanked God for!--was July 18th. This is October--the
14th--to be particular. You must know what I'm driving at. Is
there--any danger----"
She said in a level voice, looking at him steadily:
"I have deserved it--but I think God is going to be kinder to me than
to--punish me in that way." Her eyes flickered and fell from his. "It
was because--I was so awfully afraid at first that I made up my mind to
marry you. And now--and now you know the very worst of me."
"Hardly the worst." He drew breath roughly, and the cloud upon his
forehead lightened a little. "We'd have been man and wife before I flew
for France--if you'd let me have my way. Why didn't you?"
"I--Oh!--It seemed so mean.... A kind of child-stealing. You were so
unsuspecting, and so generous, and so _clean_!" She bit her lips, and
the tears welled over her underlids.... "You shamed me into being
straight with you. I'd loved you from the beginning. But it was as
though my love had left off crawling and grown a pair of wings."
"Answer me straight." He turned so as to face her. "Did you ever love
that German?"
"To my shame be it spoken--never for an instant! After that night at
the Upas I hated him unspeakably. Only when I thought he was dead, I
began to let up a little on the hate."
He looked at his hands and unknotted them and knotted them, and said
suddenly:
"You may be interested to know that he is not dead, but very much the
other thing. He is scouting and spotting for von Kluck's gunners on
their south and west Fronts, and sometimes bombing positions he has
skried out--and doing it all superbly, damn him! He has been degraded
to the rank of a Supernumerary Flying officer for some breach of duty
that got to the Kaiser. And he has evidently made his mind up to make
good in this War. They pick him for all the dangerous missions. He
seems unkillable--and we've tried our hardest. And wherever he
goes--until now I've kept this from you--he takes--the Saxhams' son!"
"Bawne! ..."
She shaped the name dumbly, with lips that were pale as poplar leaves.
"God forgive me!" her conscience whispered. "How little I have thought
of Bawne!"
"Yes. I mean Bawne!"
So odd was the contrast between the speaker's grim, set face and the
bald simplicity of his language, that her white lips twitched with a
crazy desire to laugh, as he added:
"I've been keen for a long time on coming across the man who pinched my
hawk-hoverer and kidnapped my friend's son--and putting the fear of God
into him with an automatic revolver, or a Maxim.... But now that I
know--this!"--the deadly contempt in the voice is inconveyable--"a clean
death hardly meets his case. Good cartridges seem wasted in killing
that fellow. One wants to set one's heel down--hard on him--and
scrunch!"
He had sat silent, staring before him yet a moment longer. Then he
gathered himself together and got up from the grass, glanced at his
wrist-watch and said, holding out his hand to assist her in rising:
"Well, let's be going. It's half-past three. They'll expect us to tea
at the cottage. By the way, you haven't told me. Did you send on your
bag from the station when you came?"
She shuddered violently, and leaped up without touching the offered
hand. The west was all dappled with tiny pearly cloudlets, their
shadows were lengthening momentarily, the salt smell of the sea was on
the breeze that came in languid puffs. But the wine of joy that had
brimmed their green bowl had been emptied out by her own hand, and the
draught now held to her flinching mouth was bitterer than hemlock and
blacker than Styx. That change in his face and voice--
"What do you suppose? I brought no bag. I am going home by the next
train." She glanced at a little jewelled wrist-watch he had given her
and back at the mask-like face, that said:
"You mean we part here, for good! Is that it?"
"For good--or bad. My poor boy----"
He put her "poor boy" from him with a gesture of the hand. He asked in
a flat, toneless voice:
"Am I a blackguard like von Herrnung? You came down here to marry me.
What will be said afterwards--if----"
"I'm past caring what people think or say!" she flashed at him angrily.
"I've told you that I will not marry you!--that I'm not fit to be your
wife. Oh! if you suppose it didn't hurt----"
A rush of tears drowned out his altered visage. She turned away,
fighting for composure, summoning all her woman's pride to help her at
her need. That swaying grace, that alluring physical perfection--had
never appealed to Sherbrand's senses so irresistibly....
"Patrine!"
She heard his eager footsteps following her. She was snatched into his
masterful embrace, assailed by his stormy kisses, wooed by his
passionate words of love beyond her power to resist. The flood in the
veins of both was rising, the force of the warm rushing torrent was
bearing them away, she cared not whither, so that she might keep those
arms about her still.
"Patrine! My woman of women--do you think I'd let you go from me? Not
I! I'll have you for my wife whether you will or no! We'll forget--all
that! We'll be happy in spite of it. Won't we?"
"No!" she gasped out.
"We will, I tell you!" He laughed out with ringing triumph and bent his
head, seeking her evasive mouth with his own. Hard pressed she had
panted:
"Don't ask me to marry you! I'd never, never do it! Unless you were
poor and sick and a nobody--and wanted a woman to nurse and work for
you.... Then--the wag of a finger or the wind of a word would bring me
to you. But--I swear it before God!--I won't marry you as you are!"
"You will!"
"I've sworn I won't. But--" She had whispered it in a kiss of fire--"I
will give you--what that other man took!"
And Sherbrand had uttered a hoarse sound like a sob, and unwound her
arms from about his neck, and said, holding her hands close in his and
looking sternly in her swimming eyes:
"I'm no saint, God knows!--but I'm a better man than to take what you
offer. Halloa! That's Davis. What's up now?"
A distant whistle had made him prick his ears. He whistled back and ran
lightly up to the brink of the grassy punch-bowl in time to meet the
little black-avised Welshman--hero of the Paris episode in connection
with the girl with the goo-goo eyes. Davis had handed him a paper-pad.
Sherbrand had read it, scrawled a reply on the blank side to be
dispatched by the Station's Wireless, and hurried back to Patrine.
"We--couldn't have been married to-morrow anyway. The man who undertook
to replace me while I went on leave has been killed doing reconnaissance
on our new Front in North-West France. I'm recalled."
"Recalled?"
He nodded. The British Force had been deftly transferred from its
position on the Aisne to a base at St. Omer, you will remember, thus
blocking the Calais Gate. The New Offensive was taking shape.
Sherbrand had continued:
"So--if you're to catch the three-fifty from Fearnchurch to Charing
Cross--we'll have to run!"
And as the screech of a distant engine had sounded from the direction of
Fearnchurch Station, he had caught up the veiled hat and thrust it upon
Patrine, grabbed her thin rain-coat and vanity bag and sunshade, and
hurried her back to the flinty railway-station by the way she had come.
And with the banging of the carriage-door, her woman's heart had broken.
She had felt it bleeding drip, drip, drip! as Sherbrand's tall bare head
and grave sad eyes had receded out of sight.
And the train had been delayed at the next station, waiting for the
passage of a troop-train crammed with eager faced young men of
Kitchener's Army, concrete answers to the famous Call to Arms and the
First Five Questions--nearly half an hour. So that rounding the curve
beyond the last signal-cabin for the clanking journey through the short
tunnel, Patrine had seen, some miles to seaward of the glittering white
prow of the North Foreland, a biplane with its wings reddened by the
sunset, flying south-east.
"Oh! good-bye, Alan!" she had whispered, knowing that she would never
see her Bird of War again. He had been caught and dragged back into the
fiery whirl of the cyclone without the hope that nerves and supports and
brings adventurers back. Sorrowful and stern, baulked of his heart's
desire, grimly bent on meeting von Herrnung, and wreaking retribution
for a horrible wrong, upon the red head of the Kaiser's Flying Man.
*CHAPTER LXVI*
*MORE KULTUR*
The boy's slight figure seemed to shrink upon itself as the stony eyes
looked at him, and the teeth showed under the red moustache, not tightly
curled now, but stiffened and pointing to the eyes. Von Herrnung set a
foot upon the broken wall and leaped into the baker's parlour,
staggering slightly as he alighted amongst the rubbish on the broken
floor. He had been drinking, but not to excess, for the
restaurant-cellars having been thoroughly gutted by his countrymen, the
wreckage of the bar behind which Madame had sat, busy with her
embroidery, had yielded barely a half-tumbler of Cognac and a single
bottle of Champagne.
Having drunk enough to spur memory and not to lull his snarling
grievances to slumber, he had come forth to blunt the tooth of his
bitter hatred on the boy. For, since that queer tickling, pleasurable
sensation experienced in his first tantalization of Bawne's hunger,
every new weal marked upon the wincing body, every fresh bruise
inflicted on the shuddering soul of Her Dearest, imparted to von
Herrnung a ferocious pleasure in comparison with which mere vicious
indulgence palled.
"So, there you are, little English pig-dog," he said in German, as the
blue eyes met his own and fell away before them and the colour sank out
of the young face. "Get you back to the _Market-platz_ there and wait
for me. I have some business with your friend."
He stretched out a long arm, picked up the boy by the slack of his
garments, and with a turn of the wrist dropped him into the street. His
ears were pricked for the cry that should follow the slight scrambling
fall of the light body on the rubbish. It failed to come, and he
frowned. Presently-- Meanwhile here was game of a larger kind. He