The Zeppelin's Passenger
for their country. What do you care? You will sit there smoking your
pipe and catching dabs!”
“Do you know you are almost offensive, Philippa?” her husband said
quietly.
“I want to be,” she retorted. “I should like you to feel that I am. In
any case, this will probably be the last conversation I shall hold with
you on the subject.”
“Well, thank God for that, anyway!” he observed, strolling to the
chimneypiece and selecting a pipe from a rack. “I think you've said
about enough.”
“I haven't finished,” she told him ominously.
“Then for heaven's sake get on with it and let's have it over,” he
begged.
“Oh, you're impossible!” Philippa exclaimed bitterly. “Listen. I give
you one chance more. Tell me the truth? Is there anything in your
health of which I do not know? Is there any possible explanation of your
extraordinary behaviour which, for some reason or other, you have kept
to yourself? Give me your whole confidence.”
Sir Henry, for a moment, was serious enough. He stood looking down at
her a little wistfully.
“My dear,” he told her, “I have nothing to say except this. You are my
very precious wife. I have loved you and trusted you since the day of
our marriage. I am content to go on loving and trusting you, even though
things should come under my notice which I do not understand. Can't you
accept me the same way?”
Philippa, momentarily uneasy, was nevertheless rebellious.
“Accept you the same way? How can I! There is nothing in my life to
compare in any way with the tragedy of your--”
She paused, as though unwilling to finish the sentence. He waited
patiently, however, for her to proceed.
“Of my what?”
Philippa compromised.
“Lethargy,” she pronounced triumphantly.
“An excellent word,” he murmured.
“It is too mild a one, but you are my husband,” she remarked.
“That reminds me,” he said quietly. “You are my wife.”
“I know it,” she admitted, “but I am also a woman, and there are limits
to my endurance. If you can give me no explanation of your behaviour,
Henry, if you really have no intention of changing it, then there is
only one course left open for me.”
“That sounds rather alarming--what is it?” he demanded.
Philippa lifted her head a little. This was the pronouncement towards
which she had been leading.
“From to-day,” she declared, “I cease to be your wife.”
His fingers paused in the manipulation of the tobacco with which he was
filling his pipe. He turned and looked at her.
“You what?”
“I cease to be your wife.”
“How do you manage that?” he asked.
“Don't jest,” she begged. “It hurts me so. What I mean is surely plain
enough. I will continue to live under your roof if you wish it, or I
am perfectly willing to go back to Wood Norton. I will continue to bear
your name because I must, but the other ties between us are finished.”
“You don't mean this, Philippa,” he said gravely.
“But I do mean it,” she insisted. “I mean every word I have spoken. So
far as I am concerned, Henry, this is your last chance.”
There was a knock at the door. Mills entered with a note upon a salver.
Sir Henry took it up, glanced questioningly at his wife, and tore open
the envelope.
“There will be no answer, Mills,” he said.
The man withdrew. Sir Henry read the few lines thoughtfully:--
Police-station, Dreymarsh
SIR,
According to enquiries made I find that Mr. Hamar Lessingham
arrived at the Hotel this evening in time for dinner. His
luggage arrived by rail yesterday. It is presumed that he came
by motor-car, but there is no car in the garage, nor any mention
of one. His room was taken for him by Miss Fairclough, ringing
up for Lady Cranston about seven o'clock.
Respectfully yours,
JOHN HAYLOCK.
“Is your note of interest?” Philippa enquired.
“In a sense, yes,” he replied, thrusting it into his waistcoat pocket.
“I presume we can consider our late subject of conversation finished
with?”
“I have nothing more to say,” she pronounced.
“Very well, then,” her husband agreed, “let us select another topic.
This time, supposing I choose?”
“You are welcome.”
“Let us converse, then, about Mr. Hamar Lessingham.”
Philippa had taken up her work. Her fingers ceased their labours, but
she did not look up.
“About Mr. Hamar Lessingham,” she repeated. “Rather a limited subject, I
am afraid.”
“I am not so sure,” he said thoughtfully. “For instance, who is he?”
“I have no idea,” she replied. “Does it matter? He was at college with
Richard, and he has been a visitor at Wood Norton. That is all that
we know. Surely it is sufficient for us to offer him any reasonable
hospitality?”
“I am not disputing it,” Sir Henry assured her. “On the face of it, it
seems perfectly reasonable that you should be civil to him. On the other
hand, there are one or two rather curious points about his coming here
just now.”
“Really?” Philippa murmured indifferently, bending a little lower over
her work.
“In the first place,” her husband continued, “how did he arrive here?”
“For all I know,” she replied, “he may have walked.”
“A little unlikely. Still, he didn't come from London by either of the
evening trains, and it seems that you didn't take his rooms for him
until about seven o'clock, before which time he hadn't been to the
hotel. So, you see, one is driven to wonder how the mischief he did get
here.”
“I took his rooms?” Philippa repeated, with a sudden little catch at her
heart.
“Some one from here rang up, didn't they?” Sir Henry went on carelessly.
“I gathered that we were introducing him at the hotel.”
“Where did you hear that?” she demanded.
He shrugged his shoulders, but avoided answering the question.
“I have no doubt,” he continued, “that the whole subject of Mr. Hamar
Lessingham is scarcely worth discussing. Yet he does seem to have
arrived here under a little halo of coincidence.”
“I am afraid I have scarcely appreciated that,” Philippa remarked; “in
fact, his coming here has seemed to me the most ordinary thing in the
world. After all, although one scarcely remembers that since the war,
this is a health resort, and the man has been ill.”
“Quite right,” Sir Henry agreed. “You are not going to bed, dear?”
Philippa had folded up her work. She stood for a moment upon the
hearth-rug. The little hardness which had tightened her mouth had
disappeared, her eyes had softened.
“May I say just one word more,” she begged, “about our previous--our
only serious subject of conversation? I have tried my best since we were
married, Henry, to make you happy.”
“You know quite well,” he assured her, “that you have succeeded.”
“Grant me one favour, then,” she pleaded. “Give up your fishing
expedition to-morrow, go back to London by the first train and let me
write to Lord Rayton. I am sure he would do something for you.”
“Of course he'd do something!” Her husband groaned. “I should get a
censorship in Ireland, or a post as instructor at Portsmouth.”
“Wouldn't you rather take either of those than nothing?” she asked,
“than go on living the life you are living now?”
“To be perfectly frank with you, Philippa, I wouldn't,” he declared
bluntly. “What on earth use should I be in a land appointment? Why, no
one could read my writing, and my nautical science is entirely out of
date. Why a cadet at Osborne could floor me in no time.”
“You refuse to let me write, then?” she persisted.
“Absolutely.”
“You intend to go on that fishing expedition with Jimmy Dumble
to-morrow?”
“Wouldn't miss it for anything,” he confessed.
Philippa was suddenly white with anger.
“Henry, I've finished,” she declared, holding out her hand to keep
him away from her. “I've finished with you entirely. I would rather be
married to an enemy who was fighting honourably for his country than to
you. What I have said, I mean. Don't come near me. Don't try to touch
me.”
She swept past him on her way to the door.
“Not even a good-night kiss?” he asked, stooping down.
She looked him in the eyes.
“I am not a child,” she said scornfully.
He closed the door after her. For a moment he remained as though
undecided whether to follow or not. His face had softened with her
absence. Finally, however, he turned away with a little shrug of
the shoulders, threw himself into his easy-chair and began to smoke
furiously.
The telephone bell disturbed his reflection. He rose at once and took up
the receiver.
“Yes, this is 19, Dreymarsh. Trunk call? All right, I am here.”
He waited until another voice came to him faintly.
“Cranston?”
“Speaking.”
“That's right. The message is Odino Berry, you understand? O-d-i-n-o
b-e-r-r-y.”
“I've got it,” Sir Henry replied. “Good night!” He hung up the receiver,
crossed the room to his desk, unlocked one of the drawers, and produced
a black memorandum book, secured with a brass lock. He drew a key from
his watch chain, opened the book, and ran his fingers down the O's.
“Odino,” he muttered to himself. “Here it is: 'We have trustworthy
information from Berlin.' Now Berry.” He turned back. “'You are being
watched by an enemy secret service agent.'”
He relocked the cipher book and replaced it in the desk. Then he
strolled over to his easy-chair and helped himself to a whisky and soda
from the tray which Mills had just arranged upon the sideboard.
“We have trustworthy information from Berlin,” he repeated to himself,
“that you are being watched by an enemy secret service agent.”
CHAPTER VIII
“Tell me, Mr. Lessingham,” Philippa insisted, “exactly what are you
thinking of? You looked so dark and mysterious from the ridge below that
I've climbed up on purpose to ask you.”
Lessingham held out his hand to steady her. They were standing on
a sharp spur of the cliffs, the north wind blowing in their faces,
thrashing into little flecks of white foam the sea below, on which the
twilight was already resting. For a moment or two neither of them could
speak.
“I was thinking of my country,” he confessed. “I was looking through the
shadows there, right across the North Sea.”
“To Germany?”
He shook his head.
“Further away--to Sweden.”
“I forgot,” she murmured. “You looked as though you were posing for a
statue of some one in exile,” she observed. “Come, let us go a little
lower down--unless you want to stay here and be blown to pieces.”
“I was on my way back to the hotel,” he answered quickly, as he followed
her lead, “but to tell you the truth I was feeling a little lonely.”
“That,” she declared, “is your own fault. I asked you to come to
Mainsail Haul whenever you felt inclined.”
“As I have felt inclined ever since the evening I arrived,” he remarked
with a smile, “you might, perhaps, by this time have had a little too
much of me.”
“On the contrary,” she told him, “I quite expected you yesterday
afternoon, to tell me how you like the place and what you have been
doing. So you were thinking about--over there?” she added, moving her
head seawards.
“Over there absorbs a great deal of one's thoughts,” he confessed, “and
the rest of them have been playing me queer tricks.”
“Well, I should like to hear about the first half,” she insisted.
“Do you know,” he replied, “there are times when even now this war seems
to me like an unreal thing, like something I have been reading about,
some wild imagining of Shelley or one of the unrestrainable poets. I
can't believe that millions of the flower of Germany's manhood and
yours have perished helplessly, hopelessly, cruelly. And France--poor
decimated France!”
“Well, Germany started the war, you know,” she reminded him.
“Did she?” he answered. “I sometimes wonder. Even now I fancy, if the