At midnight on August 4th, Poldhu flung the news out to all ships, and Anthony Strange, on the Boulotte, took the message in the middle of the West Bay. He carried on accordingly past Weymouth, and in the morning was confronted with the wall of great breakers off St. Alban's Head. The little boat ran towards that barrier with extraordinary swiftness. Strange put her at a gap close into the shore where the waves broke lower, and with a lurch and a shudder she scooped the water in over her bows and clothed herself to her brass gunwale-top in a stinging veil of salt. Never had the Boulotte behaved better than she did that morning in the welter of the Race, and Strange, rejoicing to his very finger-tips, forgot the news which was bringing all the pleasure-boats, great and small, into the harbours of the south, forgot even that sinking of the heart which had troubled him throughout the night. But it was only in the Race that he knew any comfort. He dropped his anchor in Poole Harbour by mid-day, and fled through London to a house he owned on the Berkshire Downs.
There for a few days he found life possible. It was true there were sentries under the railway bridges, but the sun rose each day over a country ripe for the harvest, and the smoke curled from the chimneys of pleasant villages; and there was no sign of war. But soon the nights became a torture. For from midnight on, at intervals of five to ten minutes, the troop-trains roared along the Thames Valley towards Avonmouth, and the reproach of each of them ceased only with the morning. Strange leaned out of his window looking down the slopes where the corn in the moonlight was like a mist. Not a light showed in the railway carriages, but the sparks danced above the funnel of the engine, and the glare of the furnace burnished the leaves of the trees. Soldiers, soldiers, soldiers on the road to France. Then there came a morning when, not a hundred yards from his house, he saw a string of horses in the road and others being taken from the reaping-machines in a field. Strange returned to town and dined with a Mrs. Kenway, his best friend, and to her he unburdened his soul.
"I am ashamed ... don't know how to look people in the face.... I never thought to be so utterly unhappy. I am thirty and useless. I cumber the ground."
The look of surprise with which his friend turned to him hurt him like the cut of a whip. "Of course you can't help," it seemed to say. "The world is for the strong, this year and the next, and for how many more?"
Strange had to lie on his back for some hours each day, and he suffered off and on always. But that had been his lot since boyhood, and he had made light of his infirmity and grown used to it until this 4th of August. He had consoled himself with the knowledge that to the world he looked only rather delicate. He was tall, and not set apart from his fellows.
"Now," he said. "I wish that everybody knew. Yes, I wish that I showed that service was impossible. To think of us sitting here round a dinner-table--as we used to! Oh, I know what you'll think! I have the morbid sensitiveness of sick men. Perhaps you are right."
"I don't think it at all," she said, and she set herself to comfort him.
Strange went from the dinner-party to his club. There was the inevitable crowd, fighting the campaign differently, cutting up the conquered countries, or crying all was lost. Some of them had written to the papers, all were somehow swollen with importance as though the war was their private property. Strange began to take heart.
"They are not ashamed," he thought. "They speak to me as if they expected I should be here. Perhaps I am a fool."
A friend sat down by his side.
"Cross went yesterday," he said. "George Crawley was killed at Mons. Of course you have heard."
Strange had not heard, and there rose before his eyes suddenly a picture of George Crawley, the youngest colonel in the army, standing on the kerb in St. James's Street and with uplifted face blaspheming to the skies at one o'clock in the morning because of a whiskered degenerate dandy with a frilled shirt to whom he had just before been introduced. But his friend was continuing his catalogue.
"Chalmers is training at Grantham. He's with the new army. Linton has joined the Flying Corps. Every day someone slips quietly away. God knows how many of them will come back."
Strange got up and walked out of the club.
"I shall see you to-morrow," his friend cried after him.
"No, I am going back to my boat."
"For how long?"
"Till the war's over."
The resolution had been taken that instant. He loved the Boulotte better than anything else in the world. For on board of her he was altogether a man. She was fifty-five feet long over all, fourteen feet in beam, twenty-five tons by Thames measurement, and his debt to her was enormous. He had found her in a shed in the Isle of Wight, re-coppered her, given her a new boiler, fixed her up with forced draught, and taken out for himself after a year's hard work a master's certificate. He took her over to Holland, and since her bows worked like a concertina in the heavy seaway between Dover and Dieppe he strengthened them with cross-pieces. He never ceased to tinker with her, he groused at her, and complained of her, and sneered at her, and doted on her in the true sailor's fashion. For some years past life had begun for him in the spring, when he passed Portland Bill bound westward for Fowey and Falmouth and the Scillies, and had ended in the late autumn, when he pulled the Boulotte up on the mud of Wootton Creek. Now he turned to her in his distress, and made a most miserable Odyssey. He spent a month in the estuary above Salcombe, steamed across to Havre, went down through the canals to Marseilles in the autumn of 1914, and sought one of the neutral coasts of the Mediterranean. Here, where men wore buttons in their coats inscribed, "Don't speak to me of the war," he fancied that he might escape from the shame of his insufficiency. He came to a pleasant harbour, with a broad avenue of trees behind the quay, and a little ancient town behind the trees.
"I will drop my anchor here," he said, "until the war ends"; and he remained, speaking to no one but his crew, sleeping in his little cabin, and only going on shore to buy his newspapers and take his coffee. And after five weeks the miracle began to happen. He was sitting on his deck one morning reading a local newspaper. At right angles to him half a dozen steamers, moored in a line, with their sterns to the quay and their anchors out forward, were loading with fruit. He looked up from his paper, and his eyes fell upon the nearest ship, which was showing him her starboard broadside. He looked first of all carelessly, then with interest, finally he laid his paper down and walked forward. The boat had received on the lower part of her hull, up to the Plimsoll line, a brilliant fresh coat of red paint. So far, of course, there was nothing unusual, but forward, halfway between her bows and her midships, and again aft on her quarter, she had a broad perpendicular line of the same red paint standing out vividly from the black of her upper plates. Strange called to his engineer, John Shawe, and pointed to the streaks.
"What do you make of them?" he asked.
Shawe shrugged his shoulders.
"Very wasteful it do seem, sir," he said; and to a casual glance it did indeed appear as if the paint had been allowed, through some carelessness on deck, to drip down the side at those two points. Strange, however, was not satisfied. The bands of scarlet were too regular, too broad. He had himself rowed out in his dinghy past the steamer's bows.
"That will do, Harry," he said. "We can go back."
On the port bows and quarter of the steamer he had seen the same vivid streaks. Strange spoke again to John Shawe.
"Waste isn't the explanation, that's sure. You go about the town a bit, don't you? You know some of the men about the port. You might find out for me--quietly, you know--what you can about that boat"; and the phrase "quietly, you know," made all at once a different man of John Shawe. Strange at this time was really more moved by curiosity than suspicion, but he did use the phrase, and John Shawe, a big, simple, south countryman, who knew his engine and very little else, swelled at once into a being of mystery, full of brow-twisting wisdom and portentously sly.
"I understand, sir," he said in a knowing whisper. "I know my dooty. It shall be done." He put on his best brass-buttoned coat that evening, and went down the three steps of the gangway ladder with a secret air, a sleuth; but he brought back his news nevertheless.
"All those boats, sir, are chartered by a German here named Rehnke."
"But some of them are English. They are flying the red flag," cried Strange in revolt.
"It's God's truth, sir, and here's more of it. Every one of them's bound for England, consigned to English firms. One's for Manchester, two for Cardiff, one for Liverpool."
"But it's impossible. It's trading with the enemy," Strange exclaimed.
"That don't apply to the enemy in neutral countries, they say. Oh, there's a deal of dirty work going on in England. Will you come on deck?"
Strange nodded. The saloon door opened into the cockpit, and the cabin roof was the deck of the after-part of the Boulotte. They climbed by a little ladder out of the cockpit. It was twelve o'clock on a night of full moon.
"Look, sir," said Shawe.
The English boat had sailed that afternoon. The starboard side of its neighbour was now revealed. Strange looked through his glasses and he saw. Over the bows of that tramp steamer at midnight a man was suspended on a plank, and he was painting a broad, perpendicular, red streak.
Strange thought over his discovery lying on his back in the saloon. Distinguishing marks on a row of ships chartered by a German--there was just one explanation for them! Strange did not even whisper it to John Shawe, but he went ashore the next morning and called upon the British Consul.
His card was taken into a room where two men were speaking. At once the conversation stopped, and it was not resumed. There was not a whisper, nor the sound of any movement. Strange had a picture in his mind of two men with their heads together staring at his card and exchanging an unspoken question. Then the clerk appeared again.
"Mr. Taylor will see you with pleasure," he said.
As Strange entered the room a slim, elderly, indifferent gentleman, seated at a knee-hole table, gazed vaguely at him through his spectacles and offered him a chair.
"What can I do for you, Mr. Strange?" he asked, and since Strange hesitated, he turned towards his companion.
"This is Major Slingsby," said the Consul. "He will not be in your way."
Major Slingsby, a square, short, rubicund man of forty, with the face of a faun, bowed, and, without moving from his chair, seemed, nevertheless, to remove himself completely from the room.
"Not at all," said Strange. He had not an idea that he was in the presence of the two shrewdest men in those parts. To him they were just a couple of languid people whom it was his duty to arouse, and he told his story as vividly as he could.
"And what do you deduce from these mysterious signs?" asked the Consul.
Strange's answer was prompt.
"German submarines in the Mediterranean."
"Oh! And why not the Channel?" asked Mr. Taylor. "These steamers are on their way there."
To that question there was no reply. Strange rose. "I thought that I ought to tell you what I had noticed," he said stiffly.
"Thank you, yes. And I am very grateful," replied Taylor.
Major Slingsby, however, followed Strange out of the room.
"Will you lunch with me?" he asked, and the question sent the blood rushing into Strange's face. He swung between his instinct to hide his head from any man who was doing service and his craving to converse with a fellow-countryman. The craving won.
"I shall be very pleased," he stammered.
"Right. It is half-past twelve now. Shall we say one at the Café de Rome?"
As they sat against the wall by the window of the café Slingsby talked of ordinary matters, which any one of those in the chairs outside upon the pavement might overhear and be none the wiser. But he talked sagely, neither parading mysteries nor pretending disclosures. He let the mere facts of companionship and nationality work, and before luncheon was over Strange was won by them. He longed to confide, to justify himself before a fellow-citizen of his miserable inertness. Over the coffee, indeed, he would have begun, but Slingsby saw the torrent of confession coming.
"Do you often lunch here?" he said quickly. "I do whenever I happen to be in the town. Sit in this window for an hour and you will see all the town paraded before you like a show, its big men and little men, its plots and its intrigues. There, for instance," and he nodded towards a large, stout person with a blonde moustache, "is Rehnke--yes, that's your man. Take a good look at him."
Strange looked at the German hard. He looked also towards a youth who had been sitting for the last hour over a cup of coffee and a newspaper outside the window. Slingsby interpreted the look.
"He's all right. He's trying to listen, of course. Most foreigners do, whether they understand your language or not. And he doesn't--not a word of it. I have been watching him. However, we may as well go, for I would very much like you to show me your little boat."
Strange, eager and enthusiastic, jumped up from the table.
"Rather," he cried. "She's not big, of course, but she can keep the sea, especially since I strengthened her bows."
"Oh, you have done that, have you?" said Slingsby, as he paid the bill. "That's interesting."
They crossed the boulevard to the quay and went on board the Boulotte. Every inch of brass on her, from the stanchions round the deck to the engine-room telegraph, flashed, and she was varnished and white and trim like a lady fresh from her maid.
"What can you do with your forced draught?" asked Slingsby.
"Thirteen," replied Strange proudly. "With a good wind astern fourteen. Once I went out past the Needles buoy----" and off he went in a glowing account of a passage to Cherbourg at the end of a stormy September. Slingsby never once interrupted him. He followed meekly from the rudder to the bow, where he examined with some attention the famous struts and cross-pieces.
"You have got a wireless, I see," he said, looking up to the aerial, which, slackened and disconnected, dangled from the masthead.
"Yes. But it's a small affair. However, I can hear four hundred miles if the night's still. I can only send seventy."
Slingsby nodded, and the two men returned to the saloon. There, at last, over a whisky and soda. Strange was encouraged to unload his soul. The torture of the August nights on the Berkshire Downs above the Thames Valley, the intolerable sense of uselessness; the feeling that he wore a brand of shame upon his forehead for all men to see, and the poignancy of the remorse which had shrivelled him when a wounded soldier from Ypres or Le Cateau limped past him in the street; all tumbled from his lips in abrupt, half-finished sentences.
"Therefore I ran away," he said.
Slingsby sat back in his chair.
"So that's it," he said, and he laughed in a friendly fashion. "Do you know that we have all been greatly worried about you? Oh, you have caused a deuce of a fluttering I can tell you."
Strange flushed scarlet.
"I was suspected!" he cried. "Good God!" It just wanted that to complete his utter shame. He had been worse than useless; he had given trouble. He sat with his eyes fixed, in the depths of abasement. Then other words were spoken to him:
"How long will it take you to bring your boat to Marseilles?"
"You want it, then?" said Strange.
"I can use you," said Slingsby. "What's more, you are necessary."
Strange, with a buzzing head, got out his chart from a locker and spread it on the table. He took paper and a lead pencil and his compasses. He marked his course and measured it.
"Forty-seven hours' steaming and six hours to get up steam. It's four o'clock now, and the day's Tuesday. I can be at Marseilles on Thursday afternoon at four."
"I have done a good day's work," said Major Slingsby, as he rose to his feet, and he meant it. Slingsby was an intelligence officer as well as an officer of intelligence, and since he had neither boats to dispose of nor money to buy them with, Anthony Strange was a Godsend to him. "But I don't want you until to-day week. I shall want a little time to make arrangements with the French."
The Bulotte steamed round the point at three o'clock on the appointed afternoon. The pilot took her through the Naval Harbour into the small basin where the destroyers lie, and by half-past she was berthed against the quay. Strange had been for the best part of two days on his bridge, but at eleven he was knocking at a certain door without any inscription upon it in the Port office, and he was admitted to a new Major Slingsby in a khaki uniform, with red tabs on the collar, and clerks typewriting for dear life in a tiny room.
"Hallo," said Slingsby. He looked into a letter-tray on the edge of his desk and took a long envelope from it and handed it to Strange. "You might have a look at this. I'll come on board to-morrow morning. Meanwhile, if I were you I should go to bed, though I doubt if you'll get much sleep."
The reason for that doubt became more and more apparent as the evening wore on. In the first place, when Strange returned, he found workmen with drills and hammers and rivets spoiling the white foredeck of his adored Boulotte. For a moment he was inclined, like Captain Hatteras when his crew cut down his bulwarks for firewood, to stand aside and weep, but he went forward, and when he saw the work which was going on his heart exulted. Then he went back to the saloon, but as he stretched himself out upon the cushions he remembered the envelope in his pocket. It was stamped "On His Majesty's Service," and it contained the announcement that one Anthony Strange had been granted a commission as sub-lieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. After that sleep was altogether out of the question. There was the paper to be re-read at regular intervals lest its meaning should have been misunderstood. And when its meaning was at last firmly and joyfully fixed in Strange's mind there was the paper itself to be guarded and continually felt, lest it should lose itself, be stolen, or evaporate into air. Towards midnight, indeed, he did begin to doze off, but then a lighter came alongside and dumped ten tons of Welsh steam coal on board, all that he could hold, it's true, but that gave him ten days' steaming at ordinary draught. And at eight o'clock to the minute Slingsby hailed him from the quay.
"You will go back now to your old harbour," he said. "You have been a little cruise down the coast, that's all. Just look out for a sailing schooner called the Santa Maria del Pilar. She ought to turn up in seven days from now to take on board a good many barrels of carbonate of soda. I'll come by train at the same time. If she arrives before and takes her cargo on board, you can wire to me through the Consul and then--act on your own discretion."
Strange drew a long breath, and his eyes shone.
"But she won't, I think," said Slingsby. "By the way, you were at Rugby with Russell of my regiment, weren't you?"
"Yes."
"And you know Cowper, who was admiral out here?"
"Yes, he's my uncle."
"Exactly."
Strange smiled. It was clear that a good many inquiries must have been made about him over the telegraph wires during the last week.
"Well, that's all, I think," said Slingsby. "You'll push off as soon as you can, and good luck."
But there was one further ceremony before the Boulotte was ready for sea. The small crew was signed on under the Naval Discipline Act. Then she put out, rounded the point, and headed for her destination over a smooth sunlit sea, with, by the way, an extra hand on board and a fine new capstan on her foredeck. Two days later she was moored in her old position, and Strange went to bed. The excitement was over, a black depression bore him down; he was deadly tired, and his back hurt him exceedingly. What was he doing at all with work of this kind? If he had to "act on his own discretion," could he do it with any sort of profit? Such questions plagued him for two days more, whilst he lay and suffered. But then relief came. He slept soundly and without pain, and rose the next morning in a terror lest the Santa Maria del Pilar should have come and gone. He went up on to the deck and searched the harbour with his glasses. There was but one sailing boat taking in cargo, and she a brigantine named the Richard, with the Norwegian flag painted on her sides. Strange hurried to the Consul, and returned with a mind at ease. The Santa Maria del Pilar had not yet sailed in between the moles. Nor did she come until the next afternoon, by which time Slingsby was on board the Boulotte.
"There she is," said Strange in a whisper of excitement, looking seawards. She sailed in with the sunset and a fair wind, a white schooner like a great golden bird of the sea, and she was nursed by a tug into a berth on the opposite side of the harbour. Slingsby and Strange dined at the Café de Rome and came on board again at nine. The great globes of electric light on their high pillars about the quays shone down upon the still, black water of the harbour. It was very quiet. From the cockpit of the Boulotte the two men looked across to the schooner.
"I think there's a lighter alongside of her, isn't there?" said Slingsby.
Strange, whose eyesight was remarkable, answered:
"Yes, a lighter loaded with barrels."
"Some carbonate of soda," said Slingsby, with a grin. They went into the cockpit, leaving the door open.
It was a hot night, and in a café beyond the trees a band was playing the compelling music of Louise. Strange listened to it, deeply stirred. Life had so changed for him that he had risen from the depths during the last weeks. Then Slingsby raised his hand.
"Listen!"
With the distant music there mingled now the creaking of a winch. Strange extinguished the light, and both men crept out from the cockpit. The sound came from the Santa Maria del Pilar, and they could see the spar of her hoisting tackle swing out over the lighter and inboard over the ship's deck.
"She's loading," said Strange, in a low voice.
"Yes," answered Slingsby; "she's loading." And his voice purred like a contented cat.
He slept on a bed made up in the saloon that night. Strange in his tiny cabin, and at nine o'clock the next morning, as they sat at breakfast, they saw the Santa Maria del Pilar make for the sea.
"We ought to follow, oughtn't we?" said Strange anxiously.
"There's no hurry."
"But she'll do nine knots in this breeze." Strange watched her with the eye of knowledge as she leaned over ever so slightly from the wind. "She might give us the slip."
Slingsby went on eating unconcernedly.
"She will," he answered. "We are not after her, my friend. Got your chart?"
Strange fetched it from the locker and spread it out on the table.
"Do you see a small island with a lighthouse?"
"Yes."
"Four miles west-south-west of the lighthouse. Got it?"
"Yes."
"How long will it take you to get to that point?"
Strange measured his course.
"Five to five and a half hours forced draught."
"Good. Suppose we start at six this evening."
The Boulotte went away to the minute. At eight it began to grow dark, but no steaming light was hoisted on the mast, and no sidelamps betrayed her presence. In the failing light she became one with the sea but for the tiniest wisp of smoke from her chimney, and soon the night hid that. A lantern flashed for a while here and there on the forward deck in the centre of a little group, and then Slingsby came back to Strange at the wheel.
"It's all right," he whispered softly.
Nights at sea! The cool, dark tent of stars, the hiss and tinkle of waves against the boat's side, the dinghy, slung out upon the davits, progressing above the surface of the water, the lamp light from the compass striking up on the brasswork of the wheel and the face of the steersman; to nights at sea Strange owed all the spacious moments of his crippled life. But this night was a sacred thing. He was admitted to the band of the young strong men who serve, like a novice into the communion of a church; and his heart sang within his breast as he kept the Boulotte to her course. At a quarter past eleven he rang the telegraph and put the indicator to "slow." Five minutes later he stopped the engine altogether. Four miles away to the north-eastward a light brightened and faded.
"We are there," he said, and he looked out over an empty sea.
Under Slingsby's orders he steamed slowly round in a circle, ever increasing the circumference, for an hour, and then the new hand--who, by the way, was a master gunner--crept aft.
"There it is, sir."
A hundred yards from the port bow a dark mass floated on the sea. The Boulotte slid gently alongside of it. It was a raft made of barrels lashed together.
"We have seen those barrels before, my friend," said Slingsby, his nose wrinkling up in a grin of delight. Before daybreak the work was done. Fifty empty barrels floated loose; there was a layer of heavy oil over the sea and a rank smell in the air.
"Now," said Slingsby, In a whisper, "shall we have any luck, I wonder?"
He went forward. The capstan head had been removed, and in its place sat a neat little automatic gun, which could fling two hundred and seventy three-pound shells six thousand yards in a minute. For the rest of that night the Boulotte lay motionless without a light showing or a word spoken. And just as the morning came, in the very first unearthly grey of it, a wave broke--a long, placid roller which had no right to break in that smooth, deep sea. Slingsby dipped his hand into the cartridge box and made sure that the band ran free; the gunner stood with one hand on the elevating wheel, the other on the trigger; eight hundred yards away from the Boulotte there was suddenly a wild commotion of the water, and black against the misty grey a conning tower and a long, low body of steel rose into view. U-whatever-its-number was taken by surprise. The whole affair lasted a few seconds. With his third shot the gunner found the range, and then, planting his shells with precision in a level line like the perforations of a postage stamp, he ripped the submarine from amidships to its nose. Strange had a vision for a second of a couple of men trying to climb out from the conning tower, and then the nose went up in the air like the snout of some monstrous fish, and the sea gulped it down.
"One of 'em," said Slingsby. "But we won't mention it. Lucky you saw those red streaks, my friend. If a destroyer had come prowling up this coast instead of the harmless little Boulotte there wouldn't have been any raft on the sea or any submarine just here under the sea. What about breakfast?"
Strange set the boat's course for Marseilles, and the rest of that voyage was remarkable only for a clear illustration of the difference between the amateur and the professional. For whereas Strange could not for the life of him keep still during one minute, Slingsby, stretched at his ease on the saloon sofa, beguiled the time with quotations from the "Bab Ballads" and "Departmental Ditties."
Dorman Royle was the oddest hero for such an adventure. He followed the profession of a solicitor, and the business he did was like himself, responsible and a trifle heavy. No piratical dashes into the Law Courts in the hope of a great haul were encouraged in his office. Clients as regular in their morals as in their payments alone sought his trustworthy and prosaic advice. Dorman Royle, in a word, was the last man you would think ever to feel the hair lifting upon his scalp or his heart sinking down into a fathomless pit of terror. Yet to him, nevertheless, these sensations happened. It may be that he was specially chosen just because of his unflighty qualities; that, at all events, became his own conviction. Certainly those qualities stood him in good stead. This, however, is surmise. The facts are beyond all dispute.
In June, Royle called upon his friend Henry Groome, and explained that he wanted Groome's country house for the summer.
"But it's very lonely," said Groome.
"I don't mind that," replied Dorman Royle, and his face beamed with the smile at once proud and sheepish and a little fatuous which has only meant one thing since the beginning of the world.
"You are going to be married!" said Groome.
"How in the world did you guess?" asked Royle; but it must be supposed that there had been some little note of regret or jealousy in his friend's voice, for the smile died away, and he nodded his head in comprehension.
"Yes, old man. That's the way of it. It's the snapping of the old ties--not a doubt. I shall meet you from time to time at the club in the afternoon, and you will dine with us whenever you care to. But we shall not talk very intimately any more of matters which concern us. We shall be just a trifle on our guard against each other. A woman means that--yes. However, I do what I can. I borrow your house for my honeymoon."
Groome heard the speech with surprise. He had not expected to be understood with so much accuracy. He seemed to be looking at a new man--a stranger, almost certainly no longer his friend, but a man who had put friendship behind him and had reached out and grasped a treasure which had transfigured all his world.
"And whom are you going to marry?" Groome asked; and the answer surprised him still more.
"Ina Fayle."
"Ina--you don't mean----?"
"Yes, I do," said Royle, and the note of his voice was a challenge. But Groome did not take it up. Ina Fayle, of course, he knew by sight and by reputation, as who in London at that time did not? She was a young actress who had not been content to be beautiful.
"Yes, she's a worker," suddenly said Royle. "She has had to work since she was sixteen, and what she is, sheer industry has made her. Now she is going to give up all her success."
Groome wondered for a moment how in the world she could bring herself to do it. A girl of twenty-three, she had gained already so much success that she must find the world a very pleasant place. She had the joy of doing superbly the work she loved, and a reward besides, tremendous because so immediate, in the adoration of the public, in the great salary after she had been poor, and while she was young enough to enjoy every penny of it. Groome was still wondering when once more Royle broke in upon him.
"Yes. It's the sort of renunciation which is much more surprising in a girl than it would be in a man. For the art of the stage is of much the same stuff as a woman's natural life, isn't it? I mean that beauty, grace, the trick of wearing clothes, the power of swift response to another's moods, play the same large part in both. But, you see, she has character, as well as gifts--that's the explanation."
Royle looked at his watch.
"Come and see her, will you?"
"Now?"
"Yes. I promised that I would bring you round," and as he got up from his chair he added: "Oh, by the way, as to your house, I ought to have told you. Ina has a dog--a black spaniel--do you mind?"
"Not a bit," said Groome, and he put on his hat.
The two men walked northwards, Royle at once extremely shy and inordinately proud. They crossed the Marylebone Road into Regent's Park.
"That's her house," said Royle, "the one at the end of the terrace."
Ina Fayle lived with a companion; she was not quite so tall as Groome, who had only seen her upon the stage, expected her to be. He had thought to find a woman a trifle cadaverous and sallow. But she had the clear eyes and complexion of a child, and her wealth of fair, shining hair spoke of a resplendent health. She came across the room and took Groome into a window.
"You know Dorman very well, don't you? I want to show you something I have bought for him. Oh, it's nothing--but do you think he will like it?"
She was simple and direct in her manner, with more of the comrade than the woman. She showed Groome a gold cigarette-case.
"Of course it will do. But you have already made him a better wedding-gift than that," said Groome.
"I?" Her forehead puckered in a frown. "What gift?"
"A very remarkable gift of insight, which he never had before."
She coloured a little with pleasure, and her eyes and her voice softened together.
"I am very glad," she answered. "One takes a great deal. It is pleasant to give something in return."
Dorman Royle and Ina Fayle were duly married towards the end of the month, and began their life together in the house which Groome had lent them.
It stood on the top of a hill amongst bare uplands above the valley of the Thames, in a garden of roses and green lawns. But the house was new, and the trees about it small and of Groome's own planting, so that every whisper of wind became a breeze up there, and whistled about the windows. On the other hand, if the wind was still there was nowhere a place more quiet, and the slightest sound which would never have been heard in a street rang out loud with the presumption of a boast. Especially this was so at night. The roar of the great trains racing down to the west cleft the air like thunder; yet your eyes could only see far away down in the river-valley, a tiny line of bright lights winking amongst the trees. In this spot they stayed for a week, and then Ina showed her husband a telegram summoning her to the bedside of her mother.
"It's not very serious, as you see," she said. "But she wants me, and I think that for a day or two I must go."
She went the next morning. Dorman Royle was left alone, and was thoroughly bored until late on the night before Ina's return. It was, in fact, not far from twelve o'clock when Royle began to be interested. He was sitting in the library when he heard very distinctly through the open window a metallic click. The sound was unmistakable. Somewhere in the garden a gate had been opened and allowed to swing back. What he had heard was the latch catching in the socket. He was interested in his book, and for a moment paid no heed to the sound. But after a second or two he began to wonder who at this hour in that lonely garden had opened a gate. He sat up and listened but the sound was not repeated. He was inclined to think, clear and distinct though the sound had been, that he had imagined it, when his eyes fell upon Ina's black spaniel. He could no longer believe in any delusion of his senses. For the dog had heard the sound too. He had been lying curled up on the varnished boards at the edge of the room, his black, shining coat making him invisible to a careless glance. Now he was sitting up, his ears cocked and his eyes upon the window with the extraordinary intentness which dogs display.
Dorman Royle rose from his chair.
"Come," he said, in a whisper, but the spaniel did not move. He sat with his nose raised and the lip of the lower jaw trembling, and his eyes still fixed upon the window. Royle walked softly to the door of the room. It opened on to a hall paved with black and white stone which took up the middle part of the house. Upon his right a door opened on to the drive, on his left another led out to a loggia and a terrace. Royle opened this second door and called again in a whisper to the spaniel:
"Come, Duke! Seek him out!"
This time the dog obeyed, running swiftly past his legs into the open air. Royle followed. It was a bright, moonlit night, the stars hardly visible in the clear sky. Royle looked out across the broad valley to the forest-covered Chilterus, misty in the distance. Not a breath of wind was stirring; the trees stood as though they had been metal. Three brick steps led from the terrace to the tennis-lawn. On the opposite side of the tennis-lawn a small gate opened on to a paddock It was this gate which had opened and swung to. But there was no one now on the lawn or in the paddock, and no tree stood near which could shade an intruder. Royle looked at the dog. He stood upon the edge of the terrace staring out over the lawn; Royle knew him to be a good house-dog, yet now not a growl escaped him. He stood waiting to leap forward--yes, but waiting also for a friendly call from a familiar voice before he leapt forward; and as Royle realised that a strange thought came to him. He had been lonely these last days; hardly a moment had passed but he had been conscious of the absence of Ina; hardly a moment when his heart had not ached for her and called her back. What if he had succeeded? He played with the question as he stood there in the quiet moonlight upon the paved terrace. It was she who had sped across the paddock twelve hours before her time and opened the gate. She had come so eagerly that she had not troubled to close it. She had let it swing sharply to behind her. She was here now, at his side. He reached out a hand to touch her, and take hers; and suddenly he became aware that he was no longer playing with a fancy--that he believed it. She was really here, close to him. He could not see her--no. But that was his fault. There was too much dross in Dorman Royle as yet for so supreme a gift. But that would follow--follow with the greater knowledge of her which their life together would bring.
"Come, Duke," he said, and he went back into the house and sat late in the smoking-room, filled with the wonder of this new, strange life that was to be his. A month ago and now! He measured the difference of stature between the Dorman Royle of those days and the Dorman Royle of to-day, and he was sunk in humility and gratitude. But a few hours later that night his mood changed. He waked up in the dark, and, between sleep and consciousness, was aware of some regular, measured movement in the room. In a moment he became wide awake, and understood what had aroused him. The spaniel, lying on the coverlet at the foot of the bed, was thumping with his tail--just as if someone he loved was by him, fondling him. Royle sat up; the bed shook and creaked under him, but the dog paid no heed at all. He went on wagging his tail in the silence and darkness of the room. Someone must be there, and suddenly Royle cried aloud, impetuously, so that he was surprised to hear his own voice:
"Ina! Ina!" and he listened, with his arms outstretched.
But no answer came at all. It seemed that he had rashly broken a spell. For the dog became still. Royle struck a match and lighted the candle by his bed, straining his eyes to the corners of the room. But there was no one visible.
He blew out the candle and lay down again, and the darkness blotted out all the room. But he could not sleep; and--and--he was very careful not to move. It was not fear which kept him still--though fear came later---but a thrilling expectation. He was on the threshold of a new world. He had been made conscious of it already; now he was to enter it--to see. But he saw nothing. Only in a little while the spaniel's tail began once more to thump gently and regularly upon the bed. It was just as if the dog had waited for him to go to sleep before it once more resumed its invisible communion. This time he spoke to the dog.
"Duke!" he whispered, and he struck a match. The spaniel was lying upon his belly, his neck stretched out, his jaws resting upon his paws. "Duke, what is it?"
The animal raised its head and turned a little to one side. The human voice could not have said more clearly:
"What's the matter? You are interrupting us."
The match burned out between his forefinger and thumb. Royle did not light another. He laid himself down again. But the pleasant fancy born in him upon the moonlit terrace had gone altogether from his thoughts. There was something to him rather sinister in the notion of the dog waiting for him to go to sleep and then, without moving from its place--so certain it was of the neighbourhood of some unseen being to whom it gave allegiance--resuming a strange companionship. He no longer thought of Ina--Ina as the visitor. He began to wonder how the dog had come to her, who had owned it before her. He plunged into vague and uncomfortable surmises. No doubt the darkness, the silence of the night, and his own sleeplessness had their effects. He lay in a strange exaltation of spirit, which deepened slowly and gradually into fear. Yes, he was afraid now. He had a sense of danger, all the more alarming because it was reasonless. There were low breathings about his bed; now some one bent over him, now a hand lightly touched the coverlet. He, the most unimpressionable of men, rejoiced when a grey beam of light shot through a chink of the curtain and spread like a fan into the room. He turned over on his side and slept until the sun was high.
In the clear light of a July morning Royle's thoughts took on a more sober colour. None the less, he made a cautious inquiry or two that day from the gardener, and from the shops in the village. The answer in each case was the same.
"The house had no history, no traditions. It had only been built ten years back. There was nothing but a field then where the house now stood. Even the trees had been planted at the time the house was built."
Indeed, the assurance was hardly needed; for the house was new and bright as a hospital. There was hardly a dark corner anywhere, certainly nowhere a harbour for dark thoughts. Royle began to revert to his original fancy; and when that evening his wife returned, he asked her:
"Last night, just before midnight--what were you doing?"
They were together in a small library upon the first floor, a room with big windows opening upon the side of the house. The night was hot and the windows stood open, and close to one of them at a little table Ina was writing a letter. She looked up with a smile.
"Last night--just before midnight? I was asleep."
"Are you sure?"
Some note of urgency in his voice made her smile waver. It disappeared altogether as she gazed at him.
"Of course," she answered, slowly, "I am sure;" and then, after a little pause and with a slight but a noticeable hesitation, she added: "Why do you ask?"
Dorman Royle crossed over to her side and most unwisely told her:
"Because at midnight the gate into the paddock was opened and swung to without any hand to touch it. I had been thinking of you, Ina--wanting you--and I wondered."
He spoke half in jest, but there was no jesting reply. For a little while, indeed, Ina did not answer him at all. He was standing just a step behind her as she sat at the table in the window, so that he could not see her face. But her body stiffened.
"It must have been a delusion," she said, and he walked forward and sat down in a chair by the table facing her.
"If so, it was a delusion which the dog shared."
She did not change her attitude; she did not stir. From head to foot she sat as though carved in stone. Nor did her face tell him anything. It became a mask; it seemed to him that she forced all expression out of it, by some miracle of self-command. But her eyes shone more than usually big, more than usually luminous; and they held their secret too, if they had a secret to hold. Then she leaned forward and touched his sleeve.
"Tell me!" she said, and she had trouble to find her voice; and, having found it, she could not keep it steady.
"I am sorry, Ina," he said. "You are frightened. I should not have said a word."
"But you have," she replied. "Now I must know the rest."
He told her all that there was to tell. Reduced to the simple terms of narrative, the story sounded, even to him, thin and unconvincing. There was so little of fact and event, so much of suggestion and vague emotion. But his recollection was still vivid, and something of the queer terror which he had felt as he had lain in the darkness was expressed in his aspect and in the vibrations of his voice. So, at all events, he judged. For he had almost expected her to laugh at the solemnity of his manner, and yet Ina did not so much as smile. She listened without even astonishment, paying close heed to every word, now and then nodding her head in assent, but never interrupting. He was vaguely reminded of clients listening to his advice in some grave crisis of their affairs. But when he had finished she made no comment. She just sat still and rigid, gazing at him with baffling and inscrutable eyes.
Dorman Royle rose. "So it wasn't you, Ina, who returned last night?" he said.
"No," she answered, in a voice which was low, but now quite clear and steady. "I slept soundly last night--much more soundly than I usually do."
"That's strange," said Royle.
"I don't think so," Ina answered. "I think it follows. I was let alone. Yes, that's all of a piece with your story, don't you see?"
Dorman Royle sprang up, and at his abrupt movement his wife's face flashed into life and fear.
"What are you saying?" he cried, and she shrank as if she realised now what a dangerous phrase she had allowed her lips to utter.
"Nothing, nothing!" she exclaimed, and she set herself obstinately to her letter.
Royle looked at the clock.
"It's late," he said. "I'll take the dog out for a run."
He went downstairs and out at the front of the house. To-night the air was mistier, and the moon sailed through a fleece of clouds. Royle walked to a gate on the edge of the hill. It may have been a quarter of an hour before he whistled to the dog and turned back to the house. From the gate to the house was perhaps a hundred yards, and as he walked back first one, then another, of the windows of the library upon the first floor came within his view. These windows stood wide open to the night, and showed him, as in a miniature, this and that corner of the room, the bookcases, the lamps upon the tables, and the top-rails of the chair-backs, small but very clear. The one window which he could not as yet see at all was that in which his wife sat. For it was at the far end of the room and almost over the front door. Royle came within view of it at last, and stopped dead. He gazed at the window with amazement. Ina was still sitting at the writing-table in the window, but she was no longer alone. Just where he himself had stood a few minutes before, a step behind her shoulder, another man was now standing--a man with a strong, rather square, dark face, under a mane of black hair. He wore a dinner-jacket and a black tie, and he was bending forward and talking to Ina very earnestly. Ina herself sat with her hands pressed upon her face and her body huddled in her chair, not answering, but beaten down by the earnestness of the stranger's pleading. Thus they appeared within the frame of the window, both extraordinarily distinct to Royle watching outside there in the darkness. He could see the muscles working in the stranger's face and the twitching of Ina's hands, but he could hear nothing. The man was speaking in too low a voice.
Royle did not move.
"But I know the man," he was saying to himself. "I have seen him, at all events. Where? Where?" And suddenly he remembered. It was at the time of a General Election. He had arrived at King's Cross Station from Scotland late one night, and, walking along the Marylebone Road, he had been attracted by a throng of people standing about a lamp-post, and above the throng the head and shoulders of a man addressing it had been thrown into a clear light. He had stopped for a moment to listen; He had asked a question of his neighbour. Yes, the speaker was one of the candidates, and he was the man who now stood by Ina's side.
Royle tried to remember the name, but he could not. Then he began to wonder whence the stranger had come. It was a good two miles to the village. How, too, had he managed to get into the house? The servants had gone to bed an hour before Royle had come out. The hall-door stood open now. He had left it open. The man must have been waiting some such opportunity--as he had done no doubt last night. Such a passion of anger and jealousy flamed up in Royle as he had never known. He ran into the hall and shot the bolts. He hurried up the stairs and flung open the door. Ina was still sitting at the table, but she had withdrawn her hands from her face, and, but for her, the room was empty.
"Ina!" he cried, and she turned to him. Her face was quiet, her eyes steady; there was a smile upon her lips.
"Yes?"
She sat just as he had left her. Looking at her in his bewilderment, he almost came to believe that his eyes had tricked him, that thus she had sat all this while. Almost! For the violence of his cry had been unmistakable, and she did not ask for the reason of it. He was out of breath, too, his face no doubt disordered; yet she put no question; she sat and smiled--tenderly. Yes, that was the word. Dorman Royle stood in front of her. It seemed to him that his happiness was crumbling down in ruins about him.
"Ina!" he repeated, and the dog barked for admission underneath the window. The current of his thoughts was altered by the sound. His passion fell away from him. It seemed to him that he dived under ice.
"Ina!"
He sat quietly down in the chair on the other side of that table.
"You have had that dog some time?" he asked.
"Yes."
"How did you get it?"
The answer came quite steadily but slowly, and after a long silence.
"A friend gave it to me."
"Who?"
There was no longer any smile upon the girl's face. Nor, on the other hand, was there any fear. Her eyes never for a second wavered from his.
"Why do you ask?"
"I am curious," replied Royle. "Who?"
"Raymond Byatt."
The name conveyed nothing to Royle. He did not even recollect it. But he spoke as if it were quite familiar to him.
"Raymond Byatt? Didn't he stand for Parliament once in Marylebone?"
"Yes. He was defeated."
Royle rose from his chair.
"Well, I had better go down and let the dog in," he said, and he went to the door, where he turned to her again.
"But if he's a friend of yours, you should ask him down," he remarked. Ina drew herself up in her chair, her hands clinging to the arms of it.
"He killed himself a fortnight ago."
The answer turned Royle into a figure of stone. The two people stared at one another across the room in a dreadful silence; and it seemed as if, having once spoken, Ina was forced by some terrible burden of anguish to speak yet more.
"Yes," she continued in a whisper, "a week before we married."
"Did you care for him?"
Ina shook her head.
"Never."
There were words upon the tip of Royle's tongue--words of bitterness:
"It was he who came back last night. He came back for you. He was with you to-night--the moment after I left you. I saw him." But he knew they would be irrevocable words, and with an effort he held his tongue. He went downstairs and let the dog in. When he returned to the library Ina was standing up.
"I'll go to bed," she said, and her voice pleaded for silence. "I am tired. I have had a long journey;" and he let her go without a word.
He sat late himself, wondering what in the morning he should do. The house had become horrible to him. And unless Ina told him all there was to tell, how could they go on side by side anywhere? When he went upstairs Ina was in bed and asleep. He left the door wide open between her room and his and turned in himself. But he slept lightly, and at some time that night, whilst it was still dark, he was roused to wakefulness. A light was burning in his wife's room, and through the doorway he could see her. She had in her hand the glass of water which usually stood on a little table beside her bed, and she was measuring out into it from a bottle some crystals. He knew that they were chloral crystals, for, since she slept badly, she always kept them by her. He watched her shaking out the dose, and as he watched such a fear clutched at his heart as made all the other terrors of that night pale and of no account. Ina was measuring out deliberately enough chloral into that tumbler of water to kill a company. Very cautiously he drew himself up in his bed. He heard the girl stifle a sob, and as she waited for the crystals to dissolve her face took on a look of grief and despair which he had never in his life seen before. He sprang out of bed, and in an instant was at her side. With a cry Ina raised the glass to her lips, but his hand was already upon her wrist.
"Let me go!" she cried, and she struggled to free herself. But he took the glass from her, and suddenly all her self-command gave way in a passion of tears. She became a frightened child. Her hands sought him, she hid her face from him, and she would not let him go.
"Ina," he whispered, "what were you doing?"
"I was following," she said. "I had to. He stands by me, always, commanding me." And she shook like one in a fever.
"Good God!" he cried.
"Oh, I have fought," she sobbed, "but he's winning. Yes, that's the truth. Sooner or later I shall have to follow."
"Tell me everything," said Royle.
"No."
But he held her close within the comfort of his arms and wrestled for her and for himself. Gradually the story was told to him in broken sentences and with long silences between them, during which she lay in his clasp and shivered.
"He wanted me to marry him. But I wouldn't. He had a sort of power over me--the power of a bully who cares very much," she said; and a little later she gave the strangest glimpse of the man. He would hardly have believed it; but he had seen the man, and the story fitted him.
"I was in Paris for a few days--alone with my maid. I went to see a play which was to be translated for me. He was in the same hotel, quite alone as I was. It was after I had kept on refusing him. He seemed horribly lonely--that was part of his power. I never saw anyone who lived so completely in loneliness. He was shut away in it as if in some prison of glass through which you could see but not hear. It made him tragic--pitiful. I went up to him in the lounge and asked if we couldn't be just friends, since we were both there alone. You'll never imagine what he did. He stared at me without answering at all. He just walked away and went to the hotel manager. He asked him how it was that he allowed women in his hotel who came up and spoke to strangers."
"Ina--he didn't!" cried Royle.
"He did. Luckily the manager knew me. And that night, though he wouldn't speak to me in the lounge, he wrote me a terrible letter. Then, when you and I were engaged, he killed himself--just a week before we married. He tried to do it twice. He went down to an hotel at Aylesbury and sat up all night, trying to do it. But the morning came and he had failed. The servant who called him found him sitting in his bedroom at the writing-table at which he had left him the night before; and all night he had written not one word. Next day he went to another hotel on the South Coast, and all that night he waited. But in the morning--after he had been called--quite suddenly he found the courage--yes----" and Ina's voice trailed away into silence. In a little while she began again.
"Ever since he has been at my side, saying 'I did it because of you. You must follow.' There was the chloral always ready. I found myself night after night, when you were asleep, reaching out my hand obediently towards it--towards it----"
"Except last night," Royle interrupted, suddenly finding at last the explanation of some words of hers which had puzzled him, "when he came here, and you were away."
"And I slept soundly in consequence," she agreed. "Yes. But to-night--if you hadn't been here--I should have obeyed altogether."
"But I am here," said Royle, gently; and, looking up, he saw that the morning had come. He rose and pulled aside the curtains so that the clear light flooded the room.
"Ina, do something for me," he pleaded, and she understood. She took the bottle of crystals, poured them into the basin, and set the tap running.
"Stay with me," she said. "Now that I have told you, I believe that I shall sleep, and sleep without fear. When you came into the room before I was only pretending."
She nestled down, and this time she did sleep. It seemed to Royle that the victory was won.
Some months later, however, a client talking over his affairs with Royle in his private office mentioned Raymond Byatt's name. Royle leaned forward with a start.
"You knew that man?" he asked.
"Yes," replied the client with a laugh. "He forged my name for a thousand pounds--and not mine alone. He was clever with his pen. But he came to the end of his tether at last. He saved himself from penal servitude by blowing his brains out."
Royle jumped out of his chair.
"Is that true?"
"Absolutely."
And Royle sat down suddenly.
"That's the best piece of news I have ever had in my life," he cried. Now for a sure thing the victory was his. He went home that evening in the highest spirits.
"What do you think, Ina, I discovered to-day?" he blurted out. "You'll be as glad to hear as I was. Raymond Byatt didn't kill himself for you, after all. He did it to save himself from a prosecution for forgery."
There was a moment's silence, and then Ina replied:
"Indeed!" and that was all. But Dorman Royle, to his perplexity, detected a certain unexpected iciness in her voice. Somehow that new insight which Groome had discovered in him had on this evening failed him altogether.