"My battalion did splendidly and our debt to old Oakley is great. There is only a handful of us left and we are withdrawn, of course, from the lines. By some miracle I escaped without a hurt. Everybody has been very generous, making it up to us for our bad times. The Corps Commander came and threw bouquets in person, and we hear that D.H. himself is going out of his way to come and inspect us. I go home on leave in a fortnight and hope to come back in command of the battalion. Perhaps we may meet in London. Let me hear if that is possible."
The second letter had been sent from Rackham Park, and in it Millie Splay wrote:
"We have not heard from you for years. Will you be in England this August? We are trying to gather again our old Goodwood party. Both Dennis Brown and Harold Jupp will be home on leave. There will be no Goodwood of course, but there is a meeting at Gatwick which is easily reached from here. Do come if you can and bring your friend with you, if he is in London and has nothing better to do. We have all been reading about him in the papers, and Chichester is very proud of belonging to the same mess, and says what a wonderful thing it must be to be able to get into the papers like that, without trying to."
Hillyard could see the smile upon Lady Splay's face as she wrote that sentence. Hillyard laughed as he read it but it was less in amusement as from pleasure at the particular information which this sentence contained. Harry Luttrell had clearly won a special distinction in the hard fighting at Thiepval. There was not a word in Harry's letter to suggest it. There would not be. All his pride and joy would be engrossed by the great fact that his battalion had increased its good name.
There was a closing sentence in Millie Splay's letter which brought another smile to his lips.
"Linda Spavinsky is, alas, going as strong as ever. She was married last week, in violet, as you will remember, to the Funeral March of a Marionette and already she is in the throes of domestic unhappiness. Her husband, fleshy, of course, red in the face, and accustomed to sleep after dinner, simply won't understand her."
Here again Hillyard was able to see the smile on Millicent Splay's face, but it was a smile rather rueful and it ended, no doubt, in a sigh of annoyance. Hillyard himself was caught away to quite another scene. He was once more in the small motor-car on the top of Duncton Hill, and looked out over the Weald of Sussex to the Blackdown and Hindhead, and the slopes of Leith Hill, imagined rather than seen, in the summer haze. He saw Joan Whitworth's rapt face, and heard her eager cry.
"Look out over the Weald of Sussex, so that you can carry it away with you in your breast. Isn't it worth everything—banishment, suffering—everything? Not the people so much, but the earth itself and the jolly homes upon it!"
A passage followed which disturbed him:
"There are other things too. My magnolia is still in bud. I dread a blight before the flower opens."
It was a cry of distress—nothing less than that—uttered in some moment of intense depression. Else it would never have been allowed to escape at all.
Hillyard folded up the letter. He would be going home in any case. There were those tubes. There was B45. He had enjoyed no leave since he had left England. Yes, he would go down to Rackham Park, and take Harry Luttrell with him if he could.
Two days later the Commandant Marnier came to see him at the Ritz Hotel. They dined together in a corner of the restaurant.
"We have solved the problem of those tubes," said Marnier. "They are nothing more nor less than time-fuses."
"Time-fuses!" Hillyard repeated. "I don't understand."
"Listen!"
Marnier looked around. There was no one near enough to overhear him, if he did not raise his voice; and he was careful to speak in a whisper.
"Two things." He ticked them off upon his fingers. "First, hydrofluoric acid when brought into contact with certain forms of explosive will create a fire. Second, hydrofluoric acid will bite its way through glass. The thicker the glass, the longer the time required to set the acid free. Do you follow?"
"Yes," said Hillyard.
"Good! Make a glass tube of such thickness that it will take hydrofluoric acid four hours and a half to eat its way through. Then fill it with acid and seal it up. You have a time-fuse which will act precisely in four hours and a half."
"If it comes into contact with the necessary explosive," Hillyard added.
"Exactly. Now attend to this! Our workmen in our munition factories work three hours and a half. Then they go to their luncheon."
"Munition factories!" said Hillyard with a start.
"Yes, my friend. Munition factories. We are short of labour as you know. Our men are in the firing line. We must get labour from some other source. And there is only one source."
"The neutrals," Hillyard exclaimed.
"Yes, the neutrals, and especially the neutrals who are near to us, who can come without difficulty and without much expense. We have a good many Spanish workmen in our munition factories and three of these factories have recently been burnt down. We have the proof now, thanks to you, that those little glass tubes so carefully manufactured in Berlin to last four hours and a half and no more, set the fires going."
"Proof, you say?" Hillyard asked earnestly. "It is not probability or moral certainty? It is actual bed-rock proof?"
"Yes. For once our chemists had grasped how these tubes could be used, we knew what to look for when the workmen were searched on entering the factory. Two days ago we caught a man. He had one of these little tubes in his mouth and in the lining of his waistcoat, just a little high explosive, so little was necessary that it must escape notice unless you knew what to search for. Yes, we caught him and he, the good fellow, the good honest neutral"—it would be difficult to describe the bitterness and scorn which rang through Marnier's words, "has been kind enough to tell me how he earned his German pay as well as his French wages."
Hillyard leaned forward.
"Yes, tell me that!"
"On his way to the factory in the morning, he makes a call."
"Yes."
"The one on whom he calls fills the tube or has it just filled and gives it to the workman. The time fuse is set for four hours and a half. The workman has so arranged it that he will reach the factory half an hour after the tube is filled. He passes the searcher. At his place he takes off his waistcoat and hangs it up and in the pocket, just separated from the explosive by the lining of the waistcoat, he places, secretly, the tube. The tube has now four hours of life and the workman three and a half hours of work. When the whistle goes to knock off for luncheon, the workman leaves his waist coat still hanging up on the peg and goes out in the stream. But half an hour afterwards, half-way through the hour of luncheon, the acid reaches the explosive. There is a tiny explosion in that empty hall, not enough to make a great noise, but quite enough to start a big fire; and when the workmen return, the building is ablaze. No lives are lost, but the factory is burnt down."
Hillyard sat for a little while in thought.
"Perhaps you can tell me," he said at length. "I hear nothing from England or very little; and naturally. Are we obtaining Spanish workmen, too, for our munition factories?"
"Yes."
It was clear now why B45 was especially suitable for this work. B45 was Mario Escobar, a Spaniard himself.
"And filling the tubes! That is simple?"
"A child could do it," answered Marnier.
"Thank you," said Martin Hillyard.
The next evening he left Paris and travelling all night to Boulogne, reached London in the early afternoon of the following day. Twenty months had passed since he had set foot there.
CHAPTER XIX
Under Grey Skies Again
Hillyard landed in England athirst for grey skies. Could he have chosen the season of the year which should greet him, he would have named October. For the ceaseless bright blue of sea and heaven had set him dreaming through many a month past, of still grey mornings sweet with the smell of earth and thick hedgerows and the cluck of pheasants. But there were at all events the fields wondrously green after the brown hill-sides and rusty grass, the little rich fields in the frames of their hedges, and the brown-roofed houses and the woods splashing their emerald branches in the sunlight. Hillyard travelled up through Kent rejoicing. He reached London in the afternoon, and leaving his luggage in his flat walked down to the house in the quiet street behind the Strand whence Commodore Graham overlooked the Thames.
But even in this backwater the changes of the war were evident. The brass plates had all gone from the door post and girls ran up and down the staircases in stockings which some Allied fairies had woven on Midsummer morning out of cobwebs of dew. They were, however, as unaware as of old of any Commodore Graham. Was he quite certain that he wanted to see Commodore Graham. And why? And, after all, was there a Commodore Graham? Gracious damsels looked blandly at one another, with every apparent desire to assist this sunburnt stranger. It seemed to Hillyard that they would get for him immediately any one else in the world whom he chose to name. It was just bitterly disappointing and contrarious that the one person he wished to see was a Commodore Graham. Oh, couldn't he be reasonable and ask for somebody else?
"Very well," said Hillyard with a smile. "There was a pretty girl with grey eyes, and I'll see her."
"The description is vague," said the young lady demurely.
"She is Miss Cheyne."
"Oh!" said one.
"Oh!" said another; and
"Will you follow me, please?" said a third, who at once became business-like and brisk, and led him up the stairs. The door was still unvarnished. Miss Cheyne opened it, wearing the composed expression of attention with which she had greeted Hillyard when he had sought admission first. But her face broke up into friendliness and smiles, when she recognised him, and she drew him into the room.
"The Commodore's away for a week," she said. "He had come to the end: no sleep, nerves all jangled. He is up in Scotland shooting grouse."
Hillyard nodded. His news could wait a week very well, since it had waited already two years.
"And you?" he asked.
"Oh, I had a fortnight," replied Miss Cheyne, her eyes dancing at the recollection. It was her pleasure to sail a boat in Bosham Creek and out towards the Island. "Not a day of rain during the whole time."
"I think that I might have a month then, don't you?" said Hillyard, and Miss Cheyne opined that there would be no objection.
"But you will come back in a week," she stipulated, "won't you? The Commodore will be here on Thursday, and there are things accumulating which he must see to. So will you come on Friday?"
"Friday morning," Hillyard suggested.
Thursday was the day on which he should have travelled down to Rackham Park, but if he could finish his business on Friday morning, he would only lose one day.
"Friday morning then," said Miss Cheyne, and made a note of it.
Hillyard had thus a week in which to resume his friendships, arrange to write, at some distant time, a play, revisit his club and his tailor, and revel, as at a pageant, in the fresh beauty, the summer clothes, the white skin and clean-limbed boyishness of English girls. He went through, in a word, the first experiences of most men returned from a long sojourn in other climes; and they were ordinary enough. But the week was made notable for him by one small incident.
It was on the Monday and about five o'clock in the afternoon. He was walking from the Charing Cross Road towards Leicester Square, when, from a doorway ahead of him, a couple emerged. They did not turn his way but preceded him, so that he only saw their backs. But he had no doubt who one of the couple was. The fair hair, the tall, slim, long-limbed figure, the perverse sloppiness of dress which could not quite obscure her grace of youth, betrayed the disdainful prodigy of Rackham Park. The creator of Linda Spavinsky swam ahead of him. Had he doubted her identity, a glance at the door from which she had emerged would have dispelled the doubt. It was the entrance to a picture gallery, where, cubes and curves having served their turn and gone, the rotundists were having an innings. Everybody and everything was in rounds, palaces and gardens and ships and Westminster Bridge, and men and women were all in circles. The circle was the principle of life and art. Joan Whitworth would be drawn to the exhibition as a filing to a magnet. Undoubtedly Joan Whitworth was ahead of Hillyard and he began to hurry after her. But he checked himself after a few paces. Or rather the aspect of her companion checked him. His appearance was vaguely familiar, but that was all. It was not certainly Sir Chichester Splay, for the all-sufficient reason that the Private View had long gone by; since the very last week of the exhibition was announced in the window. Moreover, the man in front of him was younger than Sir Chichester.
The couple, however, crossed the road to the Square Garden, and Hillyard saw the man in profile. He stopped so suddenly that a man walking behind him banged heavily against his back. The man walked on and turned round after he had passed to stare at Hillyard. For Hillyard stood stock still, he was unaware that any one had run into him, in all his body his lips alone moved.
"Mario," he whispered. "Mario Escobar!"
The man who had been so far the foremost in his thoughts during the last weeks that he never thought that he could have failed to recognise him. Mario Escobar! And with Joan Whitworth. Millicent Splay's letter flashed back into his memory. The distress which he had seemed to hear loud behind the written words—was this its meaning and explanation? Joan Whitworth and Mario Escobar! Certainly Joan knew him! He was sitting next to her on the night when "The Dark Tower" was produced, sitting next to her, and talking to her. Sir Charles Hardiman had used some phrase to describe that conversation. Hillyard was strangely anxious to recapture the phrase. Escobar was talking to her with an air of intimacy a little excessive in a public place. Yes, that was the sentence.
Hillyard walked on quickly to his club.
"Is Sir Charles Hardiman here?" he asked of the hall porter.
"He is in the card-room, sir."
Martin Hillyard went up the stairs with a sense of relief. His position was becoming a little complicated. Mario Escobar was B45, and a friend of Joan Whitworth, and a friend of the Splays. There was one point upon which Martin Hillyard greatly needed information.
Hardiman, a little heavier and broader and more obese than when Hillyard had last seen him, was sitting by a bridge table overlooking the players. He never played himself, nor did he ever bet upon the game, but he took a curious pleasure in looking on, and would sit in the card-room by the hour engrossed in the fall of the cards. The sight of Hillyard, however, plucked him out of his occupation.
"So you're back!" he cried, heaving himself heavily out of his chair and shaking hands with Martin.
"For a month."
"I hear you have done very well," Sir Charles continued. "Have a whisky-and-soda."
"Thanks."
Hardiman touched the bell and led the way over to a sofa.
"Lucky man! The doctor's read the Riot Act to me! I met Luttrell in the Mall this morning, on his way back from Buckingham Palace. He had just been given his D.S.O."
Hardiman began to sit down, but the couch was low, and though he began the movement lazily, it went suddenly with a run, so that the springs of the couch jumped and twanged and his feet flew from beneath him.
"Yes, he has done splendidly," said Martin. "His battalion too. That's what he cares about."
Sir Charles needed a moment or two after he had set down to recover his equipoise. He wiped his forehead with his handkerchief.
"Luttrell told me you were both off to Rackham Park this week for Gatwick."
"That's right! But I shan't get down until Friday afternoon," said Hillyard.
The waiter put the glass of whisky-and-soda at his side, and he took a drink from it.
"Perhaps you are going too," he suggested.
Hardiman shook his head.
Hillyard was silent for a minute. Then he asked another question.
"Do you know who is going to be there beside Luttrell and myself?"
Sir Charles smiled.
"I don't know, but I fancy that you won't find him amongst the guests."
Hillyard was a little startled by the answer, but he did not betray the least sign of surprise. He pursued his questions.
"You know whom I have in my mind?"
"I drew a bow at a venture," answered Sir Charles.
"Shall I name him?" asked Hillyard.
"I will," returned Sir Charles. "Mario Escobar."
Hillyard nodded. He took another pull at his whisky-and-soda. Then he lit a cigarette and leaned forward, with his elbows upon his knees; and all the while Sir Charles Hardiman, his body in a majestic repose, contemplated him placidly. Hardiman had this great advantage in any little matter of debate; he never wished to move. Place him in a chair, and he remained, singularly immobile.
"Since you were so quick to guess at once the reason of my question," continued Hillyard, "I can draw an inference. Mario Escobar has been at Rackham Park a good deal?"
Sir Charles Hardiman's smile broadened.
"Even now you don't express your inference," he retorted. "You mean that Mario Escobar has been at Rackham Park too much." He paused whilst he drew out his cigarette-case and selected a cigarette from it. "And I agree," he added. "Mario Escobar is too picturesque a person for these primitive days."
Hillyard was not sure what Sir Charles Hardiman precisely meant. But on the other hand he was anxious to ask no direct questions concerning Escobar. He sought to enter in by another gate.
"Primitive?" he said.
"Yes. We have become rather primitive, especially the women. They have lost a deal of self-consciousness. They exact less. They give more—oh, superbly more! It's the effect of war, of course. They have jumped down off their little pinnacles. Let me put it coarsely. They are saved from rape by the fighting man, and they know it. Consequently all men benefit and not least," Sir Charles lit his cigarette, "that beast of abomination, the professional manipulator of women, the man who lives by them and on them, who cajoles them first and blackmails them afterwards, who has the little attentions, the appealing voice, in fact all the tricks of his trade ready at his fingers' ends. However, Millie Splay's awake to the danger now."
"Danger!" Hillyard sharply exclaimed.
"Quite right. It's too strong a word. I take it back," Hardiman agreed at once. But he was not in the habit of using words wildly. He had said exactly what he meant to say, and having aroused the attention which he meant to arouse, he calmly withdrew the word. "I rubbed it into Chichester's thick head that Escobar was overmuch at Rackham Park, and in the end—it percolated."
Much the same account of Escobar, with this instance of Rackham Park omitted, was given to Hillyard by Commodore Graham on the Friday morning.
"He is the kind of man whom men loathe and women like. He runs about London, gets a foot in here and there. You know what London is, even now in the midst of this war, with its inability to be surprised, and its indifference to strange things. You might walk down Regent Street dressed up as a Cherokee Indian, feathers and tomahawk and all, and how many Cockneys would take the trouble to turn round and look at you twice? It was pretty easy for Escobar to slip about unnoticed."
Commodore Graham bent his head over the case of tubes which Hillyard had brought with him.
"We'll have a look-out kept for these things. There have been none of them in England up till now."
Martin Hillyard returned to the personality of Mario Escobar.
"Did you suspect him before?" he asked.
Commodore Graham pushed the cigarettes towards Hillyard.
"Scotland Yard has kept an eye on him. That sort of adventurer is always dangerous."
He rang the bell, and on Miss Cheyne's appearance called for what information the office had concerning Mario Escobar. Miss Cheyne returned with a book in which Escobar's dossier was included.
"Here he is," said Graham, and Hillyard, moving across to the bureau, followed Graham's forefinger across the written page. He was agent for the Compania de Navigacion del Sur d'España—a German firm on the black list, headquarters at Alicante. Escobar severed his connection with the company on the outbreak of war.
Graham raised his head to comment on the action.
"That, of course, was camouflage. But it checked suspicion for a time. Suspicion was first aroused," and he resumed reading again, "by his change of lodging. He lived in a small back bedroom in a boarding-house in Clarence Street, off Westbourne Grove, and concealed his address, having his letters addressed to his club, until February, 1915, upon which date he moved into a furnished flat in Maddox Street. Nothing further, however, happened to strengthen that suspicion until, in the autumn of that year, a letter signed Mario was intercepted by the censor. It was sent to a Diego Perez, the Director of a fruit company at Murcia, for Emma Grutsner."
"You sent me a telegram about her," exclaimed Hillyard, "in November."
Commodore Graham's forefinger travelled along the written lines and stopped at the number and distinguishing sign of the telegram, sent and received.
"Yes," continued Graham. "Here's your answer. 'Emma Grutzner is the governess in a Spanish family at Torrevieja, and she goes occasionally, once a month or so, to the house of Diego Perez in Murcia.'"
"Yes, yes! I routed that out," said Hillyard. "But I hadn't an idea that Mario Escobar was concerned in it."
"That wasn't mentioned?" asked the Commodore.
"No. I already knew, you see, of B45. If just a word had been added that it was Mario who was writing to Emma Grutzner we might have identified him months ago."
"Yes," answered Graham soothingly and with a proper compunction. He was not unused to other fiery suggestions from his subordinates that if only the reasons for his telegrams and the information on which his questions were based, were sent out with the questions themselves, better results in quicker time could be obtained. Telegrams, however, were going out and coming in all day; a whole array of cipherers and decipherers lived in different rookeries in London. Commodore Graham's activities embraced the high and the narrow seas, great Capitals and little tucked-away towns and desolate stretches of coast where the trade-winds blew. No doubt full explanations would have led in many cases to more satisfactory conclusions. But fuller explanations were out of all possibility. Even with questions fined down to the last succinct syllable the cables groaned. None of the objections were raised, however, by Commodore Graham. It was his business to keep men like Hillyard who were serving him well to their own considerable cost, in a good humour. Remorse was the line, not argument.
"What a pity! I am sorry," protested the Commodore. "It's my fault! There's nothing else to be said. I am to blame about it."
Martin Hillyard began to feel some compunction that he had ever suggested a fault in the composition of the telegram. But then, it was his business not to betray any such tenderness.
"If we could have in the future a little more information from London, it would save us a good deal of time," he said stonily. "Sometimes a surname is hurled at us, and will we find him, please, and cable home all details?"
"Yes, that is very wrong," the Commodore agreed. "We will have that changed." Then a bright idea appeared to occur to him. His face lighted up. "After all, in this instance the mistake hasn't done any real harm. For we have got our friend Mario Escobar now, and without these tubes and this letter from Berlin about the use of them and José Medina's account of the conversation in the next room we shouldn't have got him. The German governess wasn't enough. He's, after all, a neutral. Besides, there was nothing definite in his letter. But now——"
"Now you can deal with him?" asked Hillyard eagerly.
"To be sure," replied the Commodore. "We have no proof here to put him on his trial. But we have reasonable ground for believing him to be in communication with our enemies for the purpose of damaging us, and that's quite enough to lock him up until the end of the war."
He reached out his hand for the telephone and asked for a number.
"I am ringing up Scotland Yard," he said to Hillyard over the top of the instrument; and immediately Hillyard heard a tiny voice speaking as if summoned from another planet.
"Hallo!" cried Graham. "Is that you, A.C.? You remember Mario Escobar? Good. I have Hillyard here from the Mediterranean with a clear case. I'll come over and see you."
Mr. "A.C.", whose real name was Adrian Carruthers, thereupon took up the conversation at the other end of the line. The lines deepened upon the Commodore's forehead as he listened. Then he turned to Hillyard, and swore softly and whole-heartedly.
"Mario Escobar has vanished."
"But I saw him myself," Hillyard exclaimed. "I saw him in London."
"When?"
"On Monday afternoon."
Graham lifted the mouthpiece to his lips again.
"Wait a bit, A.C. Hillyard saw the man in London on Monday afternoon."
Again A.C. spoke at the other end from an office in Scotland Yard. Graham put down the instrument with a bang and hung up the receiver.
"He vanished yesterday. Could he have seen you?"
Hillyard shook his head.
"I think not."
"Oh, we'll get him, of course. He can't escape from the country. And we will get him pretty soon," Graham declared. He looked out of the window on to the river. "I wonder what in the world alarmed him, since it wasn't you?" he speculated slowly.
But both Scotland Yard and Commodore Graham were out of their reckoning for once. Mario Escobar was not alarmed at all. He had packed his bag, taken the tube to his terminus, bought his ticket and gone off in a train. Only no one had noticed him go; and that was all there was to it.
CHAPTER XX
Lady Splay's Preoccupations
"It's a good race to leave alone, Miranda," said Dennis Brown. "But if you want to back something, I should put a trifle on Kinky Jane."
"Thank you, Dennis," Miranda answered absently. She was standing upon the lawn at Gatwick with her face towards the line of bookmakers upon the far side of the railings. These men were shouting at the full frenzy of their voices, in spite of the heat and the dust. The ring was crowded, and even the enclosure more than usually full.
"But you won't get any price," Harold Jupp continued, and he waved an indignant arm towards the bookmakers. "I never saw such a crowd of pinchers in my life."
"Thank you, Harold," Miranda replied politely. She was aware that he was advising her, but the nature of the advice did not reach her mind. She was staring steadily in front of her.
Dennis Brown and Harold Jupp looked at one another in alarm. They knew well that sibylline look on the face of Miranda Brown. She was awaiting the moment of inspiration. She was all wrapped up in expectation of it. At times she glanced at her race-card, whilst a thoughtful frown puckered her pretty forehead, as though the name of the winning filly might leap out in letters of gold.
Dennis shook his head dolefully. For the one thing sure and certain was that the fatal moment of inspiration would come to Miranda in time to allow her to reach the railings before the start. Suddenly a name uttered by an apoplectic gentleman in a voice breaking with fine passion reached her ears, with the odds attached to it of nine to one.
Miranda's face cleared of all its troubles.
"Oh, why didn't I think of that before?" she said in an extremity of self-reproach. She walked straight to the apoplectic gentleman, followed by the unhappy pair of scientific punters.
"Callow Girl is nine to one, isn't it?"
The apoplectic gentleman smiled winningly.
"To you, missie."
Miranda laughed.
"I'll have ten pounds on it," she said, and did not hear the gasp of her husband behind her. She made a note of the bet in her little pocket-book.
"That's ninety pounds, anyway," she said, turning to her companions. "They will just buy that simple little Callot frock with the embroidery."
Yes, racing was as easy as that to Miranda Brown. She wanted a simple little Callot frock which would cost ninety pounds, and Callow Girl was obviously marked out to win it for her.
"Then I shall be a Callot girl," she said gaily, and as neither of her companions enjoyed her witticism she stamped her small foot in vexation.
"Oh, how dull you both are!" she cried.
"Well, you see," Dennis rejoined, "we've had rather a bad day."
"So have I," returned Miranda indignantly. "Yet I keep up my spirits."
A look of blank amazement overspread the face of Dennis Brown. He gazed around as one who should say, "Did you ever see anything so amazing outside the Ark?"
Miranda corrected her remark with a laugh.
"Well, I mean I haven't won as much as I should have if I had backed winners." For she had really mastered the science of the race-course. She knew how to go racing. Her husband paid her losses and she kept her winnings.
Harold Jupp took her seriously by the arm.
"You ought to go into a home, Miranda," he advised. "You really ought. That little head was never meant for all this weighty thought."
Miranda walked across to the little stone terrace which looks down the course.
"Don't be foolish, Harold, but go and collect Colonel Luttrell if you can find him, whilst I see my filly win," she said. "Dennis has already gone to find the car and we propose to start immediately this race is over."
Miranda ascended the grass slope and saw the fillies canter down towards the starting post. From the chatter about her she gathered that the odds on Callow Girl had shortened. It was understood that a sum of money had been laid on her at the last moment. She was favourite before the flag was dropped and won by half a length. Miranda ran joyously down the slope.
"What did I tell you, Harold? Aren't I wonderful? And have you found Colonel Luttrell? You know Millie told us to look out for him?" she cried all in a breath.
Luttrell had written to Lady Splay to say that he would try to motor to Gatwick in time for the last races; and that he would look out for Jupp and Dennis Brown, whom he had already met earlier in the week at a dinner party given by Martin Hillyard.
"There's no sign of him," Harold Jupp answered.
There were two more races, but the party from Rackham Park did not wait for them. They drove over the flat country through Crawley and Horsham and came to the wooded roads between high banks where the foliage met overhead, and to the old stone bridges over quiet streams. Harold Jupp was home from Egypt, Dennis Brown from Salonika, and as the great downs, with their velvet forests, seen now over a thick hedge, now in an opening of branches like the frame of a locket, the marvel of the English countryside in summer paid them in full for their peril and endurance.
"I have a fortnight, Miranda," said Dennis, dropping a hand upon his wife's. "Think of it!"
"My dear, I have been thinking of nothing else for months," she said softly. Terrors there had been, nights and days of them, terrors there would be, but she had a fortnight now, perfect in its season, and in the meeting of old friends upon familiar ground—a miniature complete in beauty, like the glimpses of the downs seen through the openings amongst the boughs.
"Yes, a whole fortnight," she cried and laughed, and just for a second turned her head away, since just for a second the tears glistened in her eyes.
The car turned and twisted through the puzzle of the Petworth streets and mounted on to the Midhurst road. The three indefatigable race-goers found Lady Splay sitting with Martin Hillyard in the hall of Rackham Park.
"You had a good day, I hope," she said.
"It was wonderful," exclaimed Dennis Brown. "We didn't make any money except Miranda. But that didn't matter."
"All our horses were down the course," Harold Jupp explained. "They weren't running in their form at all"; and he added cheerfully: "But the war may be over before the winter, and then we'll go chasing and get it all back."
Millicent Splay rang for tea, just as Joan Whitworth came into the hall.
"You didn't see Colonel Luttrell then?" asked Lady Splay.
"No."
"He'll come down later then." She had an eye for Joan Whitworth as she spoke, but Joan was so utterly indifferent as to whether Colonel Luttrell would arrive or not that she could not stifle a sigh. She had gathered Luttrell into the party with some effort and now it seemed her effort was to be fruitless. Joan persisted in her mood of austere contempt for the foibles of the world. She was dressed in a gown of an indeterminate shade between drab and sage-green, which did its best to annul her. She had even come to sandals. There they were now sticking out beneath the abominable gown.
"She can't ruin her complexion," thought Millicent Splay. "That's one thing. But if she could, she would. Oh, I would love to smack her!"
Joan, quite unaware of Millie Splay's tingling fingers and indignant eyes, sat reading "Ferishtah's Fancies." Other girls might set their caps at the soldiers. Joan had got to be different. She had even dallied with the pacifists. Martin Hillyard had carried away so close a recollection of her on that afternoon when she had driven him through the golden sunset over Duncton Hill and of the brave words she had then spoken that he had to force himself to realise that this was indeed she.
Millicent Splay had three preoccupations that afternoon but none pressed upon her with so heavy a load of anxiety as her preoccupation concerning Joan Whitworth.
Martin crossed the room to Joan and sat upon the couch beside her.
"Didn't I see you in London, Miss Whitworth, on Monday afternoon?" he asked.
Joan met his gaze steadily.
"Did you? It was possible. I was in London on Monday. Where did you think you saw me?"
"Coming out of a picture gallery in Green Street."
Joan did not flinch, nor drop her eyes from his.
"Yes, you saw me," she replied. Then with a challenge in her voice she added distinctly, so that the words reached, as they were meant to reach, every one in that room. "I was with Mario Escobar."
The room suddenly grew still. Two years ago, Martin Hillyard reflected, Harold Jupp or Dennis would have chaffed her roundly about her conquest, and she would have retorted with good humour. Now, no one spoke, but a little sigh, a little movement of uneasiness came from Millie Splay. Joan did not take her eyes from Hillyard's face. But the blood mounted slowly over her throat and cheeks.
"Well?" she asked, and the note of challenge was a trifle more audible in her quiet voice. And since he was challenged, Hillyard answered:
"He is a German spy."
The words smote upon all in the room like a blow. Joan herself grew pale. Then she replied:
"People say that nowadays of every foreigner."
The moment of embarrassment was prolonged to a full minute—during which no one spoke. Then to the relief of every one, Sir Chichester Splay entered the hall. He had been sitting all day upon the Bench. He had to attend the Flower Show in Chichester during the next week. Really the life of a country notable was a dog's life.
"You are going to make a speech at Chichester, Sir Christopher?" Jupp inquired.
"Oh no, my boy," replied Sir Chichester. "Make a speech indeed! And in this weather! Nothing would induce me. Me for the back benches, as our cousins across the Atlantic would say."
He spoke pompously, yet with a certain gratification as though Harold Jupp had asked him to dignify the occasion with a speech.
"Have the evening papers not arrived yet?" he asked, looking with suspicious eyes on Dennis Brown.
"No, I am not sitting on them this time," said Dennis.
"And Colonel Luttrell?"
After the evening papers, Sir Chichester thought politely of his guests. Millie Splay replied with hesitation. While the others of the company were shaking off their embarrassment, she was sinking deeper into hers.
"Colonel Luttrell has not come yet. Nor—nor—the other guest who completes our party."
Her voice trailed off lamentably into a plea for kind treatment and gentleness. Here was Millie Splay's second preoccupation. As it was Sir Chichester's passion to see his name printed in the papers, so it was Millie's to gather in the personages of the moment under her roof. She had promised that this party should be just a small one of old friends with Luttrell as the only new-comer. But personages were difficult to come by at this date, since they were either deep in work or out of the country altogether. They had to be brought down by a snap shot, and very often the bird brought down turned out to be a remarkably inferior specimen of his class. Millie Splay had been tempted and had fallen; and she was not altogether easy about the quality of her bird, now on its descent to her feet.
"I didn't know any one else was coming," said Sir Chichester, who really didn't care how much Lady Splay gratified her passion, so long as he got full satisfaction for his.
"No, nor any one else," said Dennis Brown severely. "He is a stranger."
"To you," replied Millie Splay, showing fight.
Harold Jupp advanced and planted himself firmly before her.
"Do you know him yourself, Lady Splay?" he asked.
"But of course I do," the poor lady exclaimed. "How absurd of you, Harold, to ask such a question! I met him at a party when Joan and I were in London at the beginning of this week." She caught again at her fleeting courage. "So I invited him, and he's coming this afternoon. I shall send the motor to meet him in an hour from now. So there's an end of the matter."
Harold Jupp shook his head sagely.
"We must see that the plate is all locked up safely to-night."
"There! I knew it would be like this," cried Millie Splay, wringing her hands. She remembered, from a war correspondent's article, that to attack is the only successful defence. She turned on Jupp.
"I won't be bullied by you, Harold! He's a most charming person, with really nice manners," she emphasised her praise of the absent guest, "and if only you will study him whilst he is here—all of you, you will be greatly improved at the end of your visit."
Harold Jupp was quite unimpressed by Millie Splay's outburst. He remained severely in front of her, judge, prosecutor and jury all in one, and all relentlessly against her.
"And what is his name?"
Lady Splay looked down and looked up.
"Mr. Albany Todd," she said.
"I don't like it," said Harold Jupp.
"No," added Dennis Brown sadly from a corner. "We can't like it, Lady Splay."
Lady Splay turned with her most insinuating smile towards Brown.
"Oh, Dennis, do be nice and remember this isn't your house," she cried. "You can be so unpleasant if you find any one here you don't like. Mr. Albany Todd's quite a famous person."
Harold Jupp, of the inquiring mind, still stood looking down on Lady Splay without any softening of his face.
"What for?" he asked.
Lady Splay groaned in despair.
"Oh, I was sure you were going to ask that. You are so unpleasant." She put her hand to her forehead. "But I know quite well. Yes, I do." Her face suddenly cleared. "He is a conversationalist—that's it—a great conversationalist. He is the sort of man," she spoke as one repeating a lesson, "who would have been welcome at the breakfast table of Mr. Rogers."
"Rogers?" Harold Jupp asked sternly. "I don't know him."
"And probably never will, Harold, I am sorry to say," said Lady Splay triumphantly. "Mr. Rogers was in heaven many years ago." She suddenly changed her note and began to implore. "Oh, do be pleasant, you and Dennis!"
Harold Jupp's mouth began to twitch, but he composed it again, with an effort, to the stern lines befitting the occasion.
"I'll tell you what I think, Lady Splay," said he, pronouncing judgment. "Your new guest's a Plater."
The dreadful expected word was spoken. Lady Splay broke into appeals, denials, threats. "Oh, he isn't, he isn't!" She turned to her husband. "Chichester, exert your authority! He's not a Plater really. He's not right down the course. And even if he were, they've got to be polite to him."
Sir Chichester, however, was the last man who could be lured into the expression of a definite opinion.
"My dear, I never interfere in the arrangements of the house. You have your realm. I have mine. I am sure those papers are being kept in the servants' hall," and he left the room hurriedly.
"Oh, how mean men are!" cried Millie; and they all began to laugh.
Lady Splay saw a glimpse of hope in their laughter and became much more cheerful.
"As you are not racing, dear," she said to Joan, "he will be quite a pleasant companion for you."
Sir Chichester returned with the evening papers. Dennis and Miranda and Harold Jupp rose to go upstairs and change into flannels; and suddenly, a good hour before his time, Harper, the butler, announced:
"Mr. Albany Todd."
Mr. Albany Todd was a stout, consequential personage, and ovoid in appearance. Thin legs broadened out to very wide hips, and from the hips he curved in again to a bald and shiny head, which in its turn curved inwards to a high, narrow crown. Lady Splay casting a look of appeal towards her refractory young guests hurried forward to meet him.
"This is my husband." She presented him to the others. "I was going to send the motor-car to meet the seven o'clock train."
"Oh, thank you, Lady Splay," Mr. Albany Todd returned in a booming voice. "I have been staying not more than twenty miles from here, with a dear old friend, a rare and inestimable being, Lord Bilberry, and he was kind enough to send me in."
"What, old man Bilberry," cried Harold Jupp. "Isn't he balmy?"
"Balmy, sir?" Mr. Todd asked in surprise. "He takes the air every morning, if that is what you mean." He turned again to Lady Splay. "He keeps the most admirable table. You must know him, Lady Splay. I will see to it."
"Thank you," said Millie Splay humbly.
"Ah, muffins!" said Mr. Albany Todd with glistening eyes. He ate one and took another. "These are really as good as the muffins I ate at a wonderful week-end party a fortnight ago."
The chatter of the others ceased. The great conversationalist, it seemed, was off. Miranda, Dennis, Harold Jupp, Sir Chichester, even Joan looked up with expectation.
"Yes," said Lady Splay, encouraging him. She looked around at her guests. "Now you shall see," she seemed to say.
"How we laughed! What sprightly talk! The fine flavour of that party is quite incommunicable. Just dear old friends, you see, intimate, congenial friends."
Mr. Albany Todd stopped. It appeared that he needed a question to be put to him. Lady Splay dutifully put it.
"And where did this party take place, Mr. Albany Todd?"
Mr. Albany Todd smiled and dusted the crumbs from his knees.
"At the Earl of Wimborough's little place in the north. Do you know the Earl of Wimborough? No? You must, dear lady! I will see to it."
"Thank you," said Millie Splay.
Harold Jupp looked eagerly at the personage, and said, "I hope Wimborough won't go jumping this winter."
"Jumping!" cried Mr. Albany Todd turning indignantly. "I should think not indeed! Jumping! Why, he is seventy-three!"
He was utterly scandalised that any one should attribute the possibility of such wayward behaviour to the venerable Earl. In his agitation he ate another muffin. After all, if the nobleman did go jumping in the winter why should this young and horsey man presume to criticise him.
"Harold Jupp was drawing a distinction between flat racing and steeple-chasing, Mr. Albany Todd," Sir Chichester suavely explained.
"Oh, I see." Mr. Albany Todd was appeased. He turned a condescending face upon Joan Whitworth.
"And what are you reading, Miss Whitworth?"
"What ho!" interposed Harold Jupp.
Joan shot at him a withering glance.
"It wouldn't interest you." She smiled on Mr. Albany Todd. "It's Browning."
"Well, that's just where you are wrong," returned Jupp. "Browning's the only poet I can stick. There's a ripping thing of his I learnt at school."