The Zeppelin's Passenger
“Perhaps you are right,” he admitted. “As you can tell by finding me
here this afternoon, I am a great walker. I arrived--on foot.”
“I see,” Griffiths reflected. “The other question which we usually ask
is, where was your last stopping place?”
“Stopping place?” Lessingham murmured.
“Yes, where did you sleep the night before you came here?” Griffiths
persisted.
Lessingham shook his head as though oppressed by some distasteful
memory.
“But I did not sleep at all,” he complained. “It was one of the worst
nights which I have ever spent in my life.”
Captain Griffiths gathered up his reins.
“Well,” he said with clumsy sarcasm, “I am much obliged to you, Mr.
Lessingham, for the straight-forward way in which you have answered my
questions. I won't bother you any more just at present. Shall I see you
to-morrow night at Mainsail Haul?”
“Lady Cranston has asked me to dine,” was the somewhat reserved reply.
His inquisitor nodded and cantered away. Lessingham looked after him
until he had disappeared, then he turned his face towards Dreymarsh and
walked steadily into the lowering afternoon. Twilight was falling as
he reached Mainsail Haul, where he found Philippa entertaining some
callers, to whom she promptly introduced him. Lessingham gathered,
almost in the first few minutes, that his presence in Dreymarsh was
becoming a subject of comment.
“My husband has played bridge with you at the club, I think,” a lady
by whose side he found himself observed. “You perhaps didn't hear my
name--Mrs. Johnson?”
“I congratulate you upon your husband,” Lessingham replied. “I remember
him perfectly well because he kept his temper when I revoked.”
“Dear me!” she exclaimed. “He must have taken a fancy to you, then. As a
rule, they rather complain about him at bridge.”
“I formed the impression,” Lessingham continued, “that he was rather a
better player than the majority of the performers there.”
Mrs. Johnson, who was a dark and somewhat forbidding-looking lady,
smiled.
“He thinks so, at any rate,” she conceded. “Didn't he tell me that you
were invalided home from the front?”
Lessingham shook his head.
“I am quite sure that it was not mentioned,” he said. “We walked home
together as far as the hotel one evening, but we spoke only of the golf
and some shooting in the neighbourhood.”
Philippa, who had been maneuvering to attract Lessingham's attention,
suddenly dropped the cake basket which she was passing. There was a
little commotion. Lessingham went down on his hands and knees to help
collect the fragments, and she found an opportunity to whisper in his
ear.
“Be careful. That woman is a cat. Stay and talk to me. Please don't
bother, Mr. Lessingham. Won't you ring the bell instead?” she continued,
raising her voice.
Lessingham did as he was asked, and affected not to notice Mrs.
Johnson's inviting smile as he returned. Philippa made room for him by
her side.
“Helen and I were talking this afternoon, Mr. Lessingham,” she said, “of
the days when you and Dick were both in the Magdalen Eleven and both
had just a chance of being chosen for the Varsity. You never played, did
you?”
He shook his head.
“No such luck. In any case, Richard would have been in well before me. I
always maintained that he was the first of our googlie bowlers.”
“So you were at Magdalen with Major Felstead?” another caller remarked
in mild wonder.
“Mr. Lessingham and my brother were great friends,” Philippa explained.
“Mr. Lessingham used to come down to shoot in Cheshire.”
Lady Cranston's guests were all conscious of a little indefinable
disappointment. The gossip concerning this stranger's appearance in
Dreymarsh was practically strangled. Mrs. Johnson, however, fired a
parting shot as she rose to go.
“You were not in the same regiment as Major Felstead, were you, Mr.
Lessingham?” she asked. “No,” he answered calmly.
Philippa was busy with her adieux. Mrs. Johnson remained indomitable.
“What was your regiment, Mr. Lessingham?” she persisted. “You must
forgive my seeming inquisitive, but I am so interested in military
affairs.”
Lessingham bowed courteously.
“I do not remember alluding to my soldiering at all,” he said coolly,
“but as a matter of fact I am in the Guards.”
Mrs. Johnson accepted Philippa's hand and the inevitable. Her good-by to
Lessingham was most affable. She walked up the road with the vicar.
“I think, Vicar,” she said severely, “that for a small place, Dreymarsh
is becoming one of the worst centres of gossip I ever knew. Every one
has been saying all sorts of unkind things about that charming Mr.
Lessingham, and there you are--Major Felstead's friend and a Guardsman!
Somehow or other, I felt that he belonged to one of the crack regiments.
I shall certainly ask him to dinner one night next week.”
The vicar nodded benignly. He had the utmost respect for Mrs. Johnson's
cook, and his own standard of social desirability, to which the object
of their discussion had attained.
“I should be happy to meet Mr. Lessingham at any time,” he pronounced,
with ample condescension. “I noticed him in church last Sunday morning.”
CHAPTER XX
“My dear man, whatever shall I do with you!” Philippa exclaimed
pathetically, as the door closed upon the last of her callers. “The
Guards, indeed!”
Lessingham smiled as he resumed his place by her side.
“Well,” he said, “I told the dear lady the truth. You will find my
name well up in the list of the thirty-first battalion of the Prussian
Guards.”
She threw herself back in her chair and laughed. “How amusing it would
be if it weren't all so terrible! You really are a perfect political
Raffles. Do you know that this afternoon you have absolutely
reestablished yourself? Mr. Johnson will probably call on you
to-morrow--they may even ask you to dine--the vicar will write and ask
for a subscription, and Dolly Fenwick will invite you to play golf with
her.”
“Do not turn my head,” he begged.
“All the same,” Philippa continued, more gravely, “I shall never have
a moment's peace whilst you are in the place. I was thinking about you
last night. I don't believe I have ever realised before how terrible it
would be if you really were discovered. What would they do to you?”
“Whatever they might do,” he replied, a little wearily, “I must obey
orders. My orders are to remain here, but even if I were told that I
might go, I should find it hard.”
“Do you mean that?” she asked.
“I think you know,” he answered.
“You men are so strange,” she went on, after a moment's pause. “You give
us so little time to know you, you show us so little of yourselves and
you expect so much.”
“We offer everything,” he reminded her.
“I want to avoid platitudes,” she said thoughtfully, “but is love quite
the same thing for a man as for a woman?”
“Sometimes it is more,” was the prompt reply. “Sometimes love, for a
woman, means only shelter; often, for a man, love means the blending of
all knowledge, of all beauty, all ambition, of all that he has learned
from books and from life. Sometimes a man can see no further and needs
to look no further.”
Philippa suddenly felt that she was in danger. There was something in
her heart of which she had never before been conscious, some music, some
strange turn of sentiment in Lessingham's voice or the words themselves.
It was madness, she told herself breathlessly. She was in love with
her husband, if any one. She could not have lost all feeling for him so
soon. She clasped her hands tightly. Lessingham seemed conscious of his
advantage, and leaned towards her.
“If I were not offering you my whole life,” he pleaded, “believe me, I
would not open my lips. If I were thinking of episodes, I would throw
myself into the sea before I asked you to give me even your fingers. But
you, and you alone, could fill the place in my life which I have always
prayed might be filled, not for a year or even a decade of years, but
for eternity.”
“Oh, but you forget!” she faltered.
“I remember so much,” he replied, “that I know it is hard for you to
speak. There are bonds which you have made sacred, and your
fingers shrink from tearing them asunder. If it were not for this,
Philippa--hear the speech of a renegade--my mandate should be torn in
pieces. My instructions should flutter into the waste-paper basket,
To-morrow should see us on our way to a new country and a new life. But
you must be very sure indeed.”
“Is it because of me that you are staying here?” she asked.
“Upon my honour, no,” he assured her. “I must stay here a little longer,
whatever it may mean for me. And so I am content to remain what I am to
you at this minute. I ask from you only that you remain just what you
are. But when the moment of my freedom comes, when my task here is
finished and I turn to go, then I must come to you.”
She rose suddenly to her feet, crossed the floor, and threw open the
window. The breeze swept through the room, flapping the curtains,
blowing about loose articles into a strange confusion. She stood there
for several moments, as though in search of some respite from the
emotional atmosphere upon which she had turned her back. When she
finally closed the window, her hair was in little strands about her
face. Her eyes were soft and her lips quivering.
“You make me feel,” she said, taking his hand for a moment and looking
at him almost piteously, “you make me feel everything except one thing.”
“Except one thing?” he repeated.
“Can't you understand?” she continued, stretching out her hand with a
quick, impulsive little movement. “I am here in Henry's house, his wife,
the mistress of his household. All the years we've been married I have
never thought of another man. I have never indulged in even the idlest
flirtation. And now suddenly my life seems upside down. I feel as
though, if Henry stood before me now, I would strike him on the cheek. I
feel sore all over, and ashamed, but I don't know whether I have ceased
to love him. I can't tell. Nothing seems to help me. I close my eyes
and I try to think of that new world and that new life, and I know that
there is nothing repulsive in it. I feel all the joy and the strength of
being with you. And then there is Henry in the background. He seems to
have had so much of my love.”
He saw the tears gathering in her eyes, and he smiled at her
encouragingly.
“Remember that at this moment I am asking you for nothing,” he said.
“Just think these things out. It isn't really a matter for sorrow,” he
continued. “Love must always mean happiness--for the one who is loved.”
She leaned back in the corner of the sofa to which he had led her,
her eyes dry now but still very soft and sweet. He sat by her side,
fingering some of the things in her work basket. Once she held out her
hand and seemed to find comfort in his clasp. He raised her fingers to
his lips without any protest from her. She looked at him with a little
smile.
“You know, I'm not at all an Ibsen heroine,” she declared. “I can't see
my way like those wonderful emancipated women.”
“Yet,” he said thoughtfully, “the way to the simple things is so clear.”
Confidences were at an end for a time, broken up by the entrance of Nora
and Helen, and some young men from the Depot, who had looked in for a
game of billiards. Lessingham rose to leave as soon as the latter had
returned to their game. His tone and manner now were completely changed.
He seemed ill at ease and unhappy.
“I am going to have a day's fishing to-morrow,” he told Philippa, “but
I must admit that I have very little faith in this man Oates. They all
tell me that your husband has any number of charts of the coast. Do you
think I could borrow one?”
“Why, of course,” she replied, “if we can find it.”