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The Devil's Paw

by E. Phillips Oppenheim · English · Gutenberg #2767 · 382,159 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Devil's Paw

Author: E. Phillips Oppenheim


        
Release date: August 1, 2001 [eBook #2767]
                Most recently updated: October 11, 2016

Language: English

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THE DEVIL’S PAW

By E. Phillips Oppenheim




CHAPTER I



The two men, sole occupants of the somewhat shabby cottage parlour,
lingered over their port, not so much with the air of wine lovers,
but rather as human beings and intimates, perfectly content with
their surroundings and company. Outside, the wind was howling over the
marshes, and occasional bursts of rain came streaming against the
window panes. Inside at any rate was comfort, triumphing over varying
conditions. The cloth upon the plain deal table was of fine linen, the
decanter and glasses were beautifully cut; there were walnuts and, in
a far corner, cigars of a well-known brand and cigarettes from a famous
tobacconist. Beyond that little oasis, however, were all the evidences
of a hired abode. A hole in the closely drawn curtains was fastened
together by a safety pin. The horsehair easy-chairs bore disfiguring
antimacassars, the photographs which adorned the walls were grotesque
but typical of village ideals, the carpet was threadbare, the closed
door secured by a latch instead of the usual knob. One side of the
room was littered with golf clubs, a huge game bag and several boxes
of cartridges. Two shotguns lay upon the remains of a sofa. It scarcely
needed the costume of Miles Furley, the host, to demonstrate the fact
that this was the temporary abode of a visitor to the Blakeney marshes
in search of sport.

Furley, broad-shouldered, florid, with tanned skin and grizzled hair,
was still wearing the high sea boots and jersey of the duck shooter.
His companion, on the other hand, a tall, slim man, with high forehead,
clear eyes, stubborn jaw, and straight yet sensitive mouth, wore the
ordinary dinner clothes of civilisation. The contrast between the two
men might indeed have afforded some ground for speculation as to the
nature of their intimacy. Furley, a son of the people, had the air
of cultivating, even clinging to a certain plebeian strain, never
so apparent as when he spoke, or in his gestures. He was a Member of
Parliament for a Labour constituency, a shrewd and valuable exponent of
the gospel of the working man. What he lacked in the higher qualities
of oratory he made up in sturdy common sense. The will-o’-the-wisp
Socialism of the moment, with its many attendant “isms” and theories,
received scant favour at his hands. He represented the solid element
in British Labour politics, and it was well known that he had refused
a seat in the Cabinet in order to preserve an absolute independence. He
had a remarkable gift of taciturnity, which in a man of his class made
for strength, and it was concerning him that the Prime Minister had made
his famous epigram, that Furley was the Labour man whom he feared the
most and dreaded the least.

Julian Orden, with an exterior more promising in many respects than
that of his friend, could boast of no similar distinctions. He was
the youngest son of a particularly fatuous peer resident in the
neighbourhood, had started life as a barrister, in which profession he
had attained a moderate success, had enjoyed a brief but not inglorious
spell of soldiering, from which he had retired slightly lamed for life,
and had filled up the intervening period in the harmless occupation
of censoring. His friendship with Furley appeared on the surface too
singular to be anything else but accidental. Probably no one save the
two men themselves understood it, and they both possessed the gift of
silence.

“What’s all this peace talk mean?” Julian Orden asked, fingering the
stem of his wineglass.

“Who knows?” Furley grunted. “The newspapers must have their daily
sensation.”

“I have a theory that it is being engineered.”

“Bolo business, eh?”

Julian Orden moved in his place a little uneasily. His long, nervous
fingers played with the stick which stood always by the side of his
chair.

“You don’t believe in it, do you?” he asked quietly.

Furley looked straight ahead of him. His eyes seemed caught by the
glitter of the lamplight upon the cut-glass decanter.

“You know my opinion of war, Julian,” he said. “It’s a filthy,
intolerable heritage from generations of autocratic government. No
democracy ever wanted war. Every democracy needs and desires peace.”

“One moment,” Julian interrupted. “You must remember that a democracy
seldom possesses the imperialistic spirit, and a great empire can
scarcely survive without it.”

“Arrant nonsense!” was the vigorous reply. “A great empire, from
hemisphere to hemisphere, can be kept together a good deal better by
democratic control. Force is always the arriere pensee of the individual
and the autocrat.”

“These are generalities,” Julian declared. “I want to know your opinion
about a peace at the present moment.”

“Not having any, thanks. You’re a dilettante journalist by your own
confession, Julian, and I am not going to be drawn.”

“There is something in it, then?”

“Maybe,” was the careless admission. “You’re a visitor worth having,
Julian. ‘70 port and homegrown walnuts! A nice little addition to my
simple fare! Must you go back to-morrow?”

Julian nodded.

“We’ve another batch of visitors coming,--Stenson amongst them, by the
bye.”

Furley nodded. His eyes narrowed, and little lines appeared at their
corners.

“I can’t imagine,” he confessed. “What brings Stenson down to Maltenby.
I should have thought that your governor and he could scarcely spend ten
minutes together without quarrelling!”

“They never do spend ten minutes together alone,” Julian replied drily.
“I see to that. Then my mother, you know, has the knack of getting
interesting people together. The Bishop is coming, amongst others. And,
Furley, I wanted to ask you--do you know anything of a young woman--she
is half Russian, I believe--who calls herself Miss Catherine Abbeway?”

“Yes, I know her,” was the brief rejoinder.

“She lived in Russia for some years, it seems,” Julian continued. “Her
mother was Russian--a great writer on social subjects.”

Furley nodded.

“Miss Abbeway is rather that way herself,” he remarked. “I’ve heard her
lecture in the East End. She has got hold of the woman’s side of the
Labour question as well as any one I ever came across.”

“She is a most remarkably attractive young person,” Julian declared
pensively.

“Yes, she’s good-looking. A countess in her own right, they tell me, but
she keeps her title secret for fear of losing influence with the working
classes. She did a lot of good down Poplar way. Shouldn’t have thought
she’d have been your sort, Julian.”

“Why?”

“Too serious.”

Julian smiled--rather a peculiar, introspective smile.

“I, too, can, be serious sometimes,” he said.

His friend thrust his hands into his trousers pocket and, leaning back
in his chair, looked steadfastly at his guest.

“I believe you can, Julian,” he admitted. “Sometimes I am not quite
sure that I understand you. That’s the worst of a man with the gift for
silence.”

“You’re not a great talker yourself,” the younger man reminded his host.

“When you get me going on my own subject,” Furley remarked, “I find it
hard to stop, and you are a wonderful listener. Have you got any views
of your own? I never hear them.”

Julian drew the box of cigarettes towards him.

“Oh, yes, I’ve views of my own,” he confessed. “Some day, perhaps, you
shall know what they are.”

“A man of mystery!” his friend jeered good-naturedly.

Julian lit his cigarette and watched the smoke curl upward.

“Let’s talk about the duck,” he suggested.

The two men sat in silence for some minutes. Outside, the storm seemed
to have increased in violence. Furley rose, threw a log on to the fire
and resumed his place.

“Geese flew high,” he remarked.

“Too high for me,” Julian confessed.

“You got one more than I did.”

“Sheer luck. The outside bird dipped down to me.”

Furley filled his guest’s glass and then his own.

“What on earth have you kept your shooting kit on for?” the latter
asked, with lazy curiosity.

Furley glanced down at his incongruous attire and seemed for a moment
ill at ease.

“I’ve got to go out presently,” he announced.

Julian raised his eyebrows.

“Got to go out?” he repeated. “On a night like this? Why, my dear
fellow--”

He paused abruptly. He was a man of quick perceptions, and he realised
his host’s embarrassment. Nevertheless, there was an awkward pause in
the conversation. Furley rose to his feet and frowned. He fetched a jar
of tobacco from a shelf and filled his pouch deliberately:

“Sorry to seem mysterious, old chap,” he said. “I’ve just a bit of a job
to do. It doesn’t amount to anything, but--well, it’s the sort of affair
we don’t talk about much.”

“Well, you’re welcome to all the amusement you’ll get out of it, a night
like this.”

Furley laid down his pipe, ready-filled, and drank off his port.

“There isn’t much amusement left in the world, is there, just now?” he
remarked gravely.

“Very little indeed. It’s three years since I handled a shotgun before
to-night.”

“You’ve really chucked the censoring?”

“Last week. I’ve had a solid year at it.”

“Fed up?”

“Not exactly that. My own work accumulated so.”

“Briefs coming along, eh?”

“I’m a sort of hack journalist as well, as you reminded me just now,”
 Julian explained a little evasively.

“I wonder you stuck at the censoring so long. Isn’t it terribly
tedious?”

“Sometimes. Now and then we come across interesting things, though. For
instance, I discovered a most original cipher the other day.”

“Did it lead to anything?” Furley asked curiously.

“Not at present. I discovered it, studying a telegram from Norway.
It was addressed to a perfectly respectable firm of English timber
merchants who have an office in the city. This was the original: ‘Fir
planks too narrow by half.’ Sounds harmless enough, doesn’t it?”

“Absolutely. What’s the hidden meaning?”

“There I am still at a loss,” Julian confessed, “but treated with the
cipher it comes out as ‘Thirty-eight steeple on barn.’”

Furley stared for a moment, then he lit his pipe.

“Well, of the two,” he declared, “I should prefer the first rendering
for intelligibility.”

“So would most people,” Julian assented, smiling, “yet I am sure there
is something in it--some meaning, of course, that needs a context to
grasp it.”

“Have you interviewed the firm of timber merchants?”

“Not personally. That doesn’t come into my department. The name of the
man who manages the London office, though, is Fenn--Nicholas Fenn.”

Furley withdrew the pipe from his mouth. His eyebrows had come together
in a slight frown.

“Nicholas Fenn, the Labour M.P.?”

“That’s the fellow. You know him, of course?”

“Yes, I know him,” Furley replied thoughtfully. “He is secretary of the
Timber Trades Union and got in for one of the divisions of Hull last
year.”

“I understand that there is nothing whatever against him personally,”
 Julian continued, “although as a politician he is of course beneath
contempt. He started life as a village schoolmaster and has worked
his way up most creditably. He professed to understand the cable as it
appeared in its original form. All the same, it’s very odd that, treated
by a cipher which I got on the track of a few days previously, this same
message should work out as I told you.”

“Of course,” Furley observed, “ciphers can lead you--”

He stopped short. Julian, who had been leaning over towards the
cigarette bog, glanced around at his friend. There was a frown on
Furley’s forehead. He withdrew his pipe from between his teeth.

“What did you say you made of it?” he demanded.

“‘Thirty-eight steeple on barn.’”

“Thirty-eight! That’s queer!”

“Why is it queer?”

There was a moment’s silence. Furley glanced at the little clock upon
the mantelpiece. It was five and twenty minutes past nine.

“I don’t know whether you have ever heard, Julian,” he said, “that our
enemies on the other side of the North Sea are supposed to have divided
the whole of the eastern coast of Great Britain into small, rectangular
districts, each about a couple of miles square. One of our secret
service chaps got hold of a map some time ago.”

“No, I never heard this,” Julian acknowledged. “Well?”

“It’s only a coincidence, of course,” Furley went on, “but number
thirty-eight happens to be the two-mile block of seacoast of which this
cottage is just about the centre. It stretches to Cley on one side and
Salthouse on the other, and inland as far as Dutchman’s Common. I am not
suggesting that there is any real connection between your cable and this
fact, but that you should mention it at this particular moment--well, as
I said, it’s a coincidence.”

“Why?”

Furley had risen to his feet. He threw open the door and listened for a
moment in the passage. When he came back he was carrying some oilskins.

“Julian,” he said, “I know you are a bit of a cynic about espionage
and that sort of thing. Of course, there has been a terrible lot of
exaggeration, and heaps of fellows go gassing about secret service jobs,
all the way up the coast from here to Scotland, who haven’t the least
idea what the thing means. But there is a little bit of it done, and in
my humble way they find me an occasional job or two down here. I won’t
say that anything ever comes of our efforts--we’re rather like the
special constables of the secret service--but just occasionally we come
across something suspicious.”

“So that’s why you’re going out again to-night, is it?”

Furley nodded.

“This is my last night. I am off up to town on Monday and sha’n’t be
able to get down again this season.”

“Had any adventures?”

“Not the ghost of one. I don’t mind admitting that I’ve had a good many
wettings and a few scares on that stretch of marshland, but I’ve never
seen or heard anything yet to send in a report about. It just happens,
though, that to-night there’s a special vigilance whip out.”

“What does that mean?” Julian enquired curiously.

“Something supposed to be up,” was the dubious reply. “We’ve a very
imaginative chief, I might tell you.”

“But what sort of thing could happen?” Julian persisted. “What are you
out to prevent, anyway?”

Furley relit his pipe, thrust a flask into his pocket, and picked up a
thick stick from a corner of the room.

“Can’t tell,” he replied laconically. “There’s an idea, of course, that
communications are carried on with the enemy from somewhere down this
coast. Sorry to leave you, old fellow,” he added. “Don’t sit up. I never
fasten the door here. Remember to look after your fire upstairs, and the
whisky is on the sideboard here.”

“I shall be all right, thanks,” Julian assured his host. “No use my
offering to come with you, I suppose?”

“Not allowed,” was the brief response.

“Thank heavens!” Julian exclaimed piously, as a storm of rain blew in
through the half-open door. “Good night and good luck, old chap!”

Furley’s reply was drowned in the roar of wind. Julian secured the
door, underneath which a little stream of rain was creeping in. Then he
returned to the sitting room, threw a log upon the fire, and drew one of
the ancient easy-chairs close up to the blaze.




CHAPTER II


Julian, notwithstanding his deliberate intention of abandoning himself
to an hour’s complete repose, became, after the first few minutes of
solitude, conscious of a peculiar and increasing sense of restlessness.
With the help of a rubber-shod stick which leaned against his chair,
he rose presently to his feet and moved about the room, revealing
a lameness which had the appearance of permanency. In the small,
white-ceilinged apartment his height became more than ever noticeable,
also the squareness of his shoulders and the lean vigour of his frame.
He handled his gun for a moment and laid it down; glanced at the card
stuck in the cheap looking glass, which announced that David Grice let
lodgings and conducted shooting parties; turned with a shiver from the
contemplation of two atrocious oleographs, a church calendar pinned upon
the wall, and a battered map of the neighbourhood, back to the table at
which he had been seated. He selected a cigarette and lit it. Presently
he began to talk to himself, a habit which had grown upon him during
the latter years of a life whose secret had entailed a certain amount of
solitude.

“Perhaps,” he murmured, “I am psychic. Nevertheless, I am convinced that
something is happening, something not far away.”

He stood for a while, listening intently, the cigarette burning away
between his fingers. Then, stooping a little, he passed out into the
narrow passage and opened the door into the kitchen behind, from
which the woman who came to minister to their wants had some time ago
departed. Everything was in order here and spotlessly neat. He climbed
the narrow staircase, looked in at Furley’s room and his own, and at
the third apartment, in which had been rigged up a temporary bath. The
result was unilluminating. He turned and descended the stairs.

“Either,” he went on, with a very slight frown, “I am not psychic, or
whatever may be happening is happening out of doors.”

He raised the latch of the door, under which a little pool of water was
now standing, and leaned out. There seemed to be a curious cessation
of immediate sounds. From somewhere straight ahead of him, on the other
side of that black velvet curtain of darkness, came the dull booming of
the wind, tearing across the face of the marshes; and beyond it, beating
time in a rhythmical sullen roar, the rise and fall of the sea upon the
shingle. But near at hand, for some reason, there was almost silence.
The rain had ceased, the gale for a moment had spent itself. The strong,
salty moisture was doubly refreshing after the closeness of the small,
lamplit room. Julian lingered there for several moments.

“Nothing like fresh air,” he muttered, “for driving away fancies.”

Then he suddenly stiffened. He leaned forward into the dark, listening.
This time there was no mistake. A cry, faint and pitiful though it was,
reached his ears distinctly.

“Julian! Julian!”

“Coming, old chap,” he shouted. “Wait until I get a torch.”

He stepped quickly back into the sitting room, drew an electric torch
from the drawer of the homely little chiffonier and, regardless of
regulations, stepped once more out into the darkness, now pierced for
him by that single brilliant ray. The door opened on to a country road
filled with gleaming puddles. On the other side of the way was a strip
of grass, sloping downwards; then a broad dyke, across which hung the
remains of a footbridge. The voice came from the water, fainter now but
still eager. Julian hurried forward, fell on his knees by the side of
the dyke and, passing his hands under his friend’s shoulders, dragged
him out of the black, sluggish water.

“My God!” he exclaimed. “What happened, Miles? Did you slip?”

“The bridge gave way when I was half across,” was the muttered response.
“I think my leg’s broken. I fell in and couldn’t get clear--just managed
to raise my head out of the water and cling to the rail.”

“Hold tight,” Julian enjoined. “I’m going to drag you across the road.
It’s the best I can do.”

They reached the threshold of the sitting room.

“Sorry, old chap,” faltered Furley--and fainted.

He came to himself in front of the sitting-room fire, to find his lips
wet with brandy and his rescuer leaning over him. His first action was
to feel his leg.

“That’s all right,” Julian assured him. “It isn’t broken. I’ve been over
it carefully. If you’re quite comfortable, I’ll step down to the village
and fetch the medico. It isn’t a mile away.”

“Don’t bother about the doctor for a moment,” Furley begged. “Listen to
me. Take your torch--go out and examine that bridge. Come back and tell
me what’s wrong with it.”

“What the dickens does that matter?” Julian objected. “It’s the doctor
we want. The dyke’s flooded, and I expect the supports gave way.”

“Do as I ask,” Furley insisted. “I have a reason.”

Julian rose to his feet, walked cautiously to the edge of the dyke,
turned on his light, and looked downwards. One part of the bridge
remained; the other was caught in the weeds, a few yards down, and the
single plank which formed its foundation was sawn through, clean and
straight. He gazed at it for a moment in astonishment. Then he turned
back towards the cottage, to receive another shock. About forty yards up
the lane, drawn in close to a straggling hedge, was a small motor-car,
revealed to him by a careless swing of his torch. He turned sharply
towards it, keeping his torch as much concealed as possible. It was
empty--a small coupe of pearl-grey--a powerful two-seater, with deep,
cushioned seats and luxuriously fitted body. He flashed his torch on to
the maker’s name and returned thoughtfully to his friend.

“Miles,” he confessed, as he entered the sitting room, “there are some
things I will never make fun of again. Have you a personal enemy here?”

“Not one,” replied Furley. “The soldiers, who are all decent fellows,
the old farmer at the back, and your father and mother are the only
people with whom I have the slightest acquaintance in these parts.”

“The bridge has been deliberately sawn through,” Julian announced
gravely.

Furley nodded. He seemed prepared for the news.

“There is something doing in this section, then,” he muttered. “Julian,
will you take my job on?”

“Like a bird,” was the prompt response. “Tell me exactly what to do?”

Furley sat up, still nursing his leg.

“Put on your sea boots, and your oilskins over your clothes,” he
directed. “You will want your own stick, so take that revolver and an
electric torch. You can’t get across the remains of the bridge, but
about fifty yards down to the left, as you leave the door, the water’s
only about a foot deep. Walk through it, scramble up the other side, and
come back again along the edge of the dyke until you come to the place
where one lands from the broken bridge. Is that clear?”

“Entirely.”

“After that, you go perfectly straight along a sort of cart track until
you come to a gate. When you have passed through it, you must climb a
bank on your lefthand side and walk along the top. It’s a beastly path,
and there are dykes on either side of you.”

“Pooh!” Julian exclaimed. “You forget that I am a native of this part of
the world.”

“You come to a sort of stile at the end of about three hundred yards,”
 Furley continued. “You get over that, and the bank breaks up into two.
You keep to the left, and it leads you right down into the marsh. Turn
seaward. It will be a nasty scramble, but there will only be about
fifty yards of it. Then you get to a bit of rough ground--a bank of
grass-grown sand. Below that there is the shingle and the sea. That is
where you take up your post.”

“Can I use my torch,” Julian enquired, “and what am I to look out for?”

“Heaven knows,” replied Furley, “except that there’s a general
suggestion of communications between some person on land and some person
approaching from the sea. I don’t mind confessing that I’ve done this
job, on and off, whenever I’ve been down here, for a couple of years,
and I’ve never seen or heard a suspicious thing yet. We are never told
a word in our instructions, either, or given any advice. However, what I
should do would be to lie flat down on the top of that bank and listen.
If you hear anything peculiar, then you must use your discretion about
the torch. It’s a nasty job to make over to a pal, Julian, but I know
you’re keen on anything that looks like an adventure.”

“All over it,” was the ready reply. “What about leaving you alone,
though, Miles?”

“You put the whisky and soda where I can get at it,” Furley directed,
“and I shall be all right. I’m feeling stronger every moment. I expect
your sea boots are in the scullery. And hurry up, there’s a good fellow.
We’re twenty minutes behind time, as it is.”

Julian started on his adventure without any particular enthusiasm. He
found the crossing, returned along the side of the bank, trudged along
the cart track until he arrived at the gate, and climbed up on the dyke
without misadventure. From here he made his way more cautiously, using
his stick with his right hand, his torch, with his thumb upon the
knob, in his left. The lull in the storm seemed to be at an end. Black,
low-hanging clouds were closing in upon him. Away to the right, where
the line of marshes was unbroken, the boom of the wind grew louder. A
gust very nearly blew him down the bank. He was compelled to shelter for
a moment on its lee side, whilst a scud of snow and sleet passed like an
icy whirlwind. The roar of the sea was full in his ears now, and though
he must still have been fully two hundred yards away from it, little
ghostly specks of white spray were dashed, every now and then, into his
face. From here he made his way with great care, almost crawling, until
he came to the stile. In the marshes he was twice in salt water over his
knees, but he scrambled out until he reached the grass-grown sand bank
which Furley had indicated. Obeying orders, he lay down and listened
intently for any fainter sounds mingled with the tumult of nature. After
a few minutes, it was astonishing how his eyes found themselves able to
penetrate the darkness which at first had seemed like a black wall. Some
distance to the right he could make out the outline of a deserted barn,
once used as a coast-guard station and now only a depository for the
storing of life belts. In front of him he could trace the bank of
shingle and the line of the sea, and presently the outline of some dark
object, lying just out of reach of the breaking waves, attracted his
attention. He watched it steadily. For some time it was as motionless
as the log he presumed it to be. Then, without any warning, it hunched
itself up and drew a little farther back. There was no longer any doubt.
It was a human being, lying on its stomach with its head turned to the
sea.

Julian, who had entered upon his adventure with the supercilious
incredulity of a staunch unbeliever invited to a spiritualist’s seance,
was conscious for a moment of an absolutely new sensation. A person of
acute psychological instincts, he found himself analysing that sensation
almost as soon as it was conceived.

“There is no doubt,” he confessed under his breath, “that I am afraid!”

His heart was beating with unaccustomed vigour; he was conscious of
an acute tingling in all his senses. Then, still lying on his stomach,
almost holding his breath, he saw the thin line of light from an
electric torch steal out along the surface of the sea, obviously from
the hand of his fellow watcher. Almost at that same moment the undefined
agitation which had assailed him passed. He set his teeth and watched
that line of light. It moved slowly sideways along the surface of the
sea, as though searching for something. Julian drew himself cautiously,
inch by inch, to the extremity of the sand hummock. His brain was
working with a new clearness. An inspiration flashed in upon him during
those few seconds. He knew the geography of the place well,--the corner
of the barn, the steeple beyond, and the watcher lying in a direct line.
His cipher was explained!

Perfectly cool now, Julian thought with some regret of the revolver
which he had scorned to bring. He occupied himself, during these seconds
of watching, by considering with care what his next action was to be.
If he even set his foot upon the shingle, the watcher below would take
alarm, and if he once ran away, pursuit was hopeless. The figure, so
far as he could distinguish it, was more like that of a boy than a
man. Julian began to calculate coolly the chances of an immediate
intervention. Then things happened, and for a moment he held his breath.

The line of light had shot out once more, and this time it seemed to
reveal something, something which rose out of the water and which looked
like nothing so much as a long strip of zinc piping. The watcher at
the edge of the sea threw down his torch and gripped the end of it,
and Julian, carried away with excitement, yielded to an instant and
overpowering temptation. He flashed on his own torch and watched while
the eager figure seemed by some means to unscrew the top of the coil and
drew from it a dark, rolled-up packet. Even at that supreme moment,
the slim figure upon the beach seemed to become conscious of the
illumination of which he was the centre. He swung round,--and that was
just as far as Julian Orden got in his adventure. After a lapse of time,
during which he seemed to live in a whirl of blackness, where a thousand
men were beating at a thousand anvils, filling the world with sparks,
with the sound of every one of their blows reverberating in his ears,
he opened his eyes to find himself lying on his back, with one leg in a
pool of salt water, which was being dashed industriously into his face
by an unseen hand. By his side he was conscious of the presence of
a thick-set man in a fisherman’s costume of brown oilskins and a
southwester pulled down as though to hide his features, obviously the
man who had dealt him the blow. Then he heard a very soft, quiet voice
behind him.

“He will do now. Come.”

The man by his side grunted.

“I am going to make sure of him,” he said thickly. Again he heard that
clear voice from behind, this time a little raised. The words failed
to reach his brain, but the tone was one of cold and angry dissent,
followed by an imperative order. Then once more his senses seemed to be
leaving him. He passed into the world which seemed to consist only of
himself and a youth in fisherman’s oilskins, who was sometimes Furley,
sometimes his own sister, sometimes the figure of a person who for the
last twenty-four hours had been continually in his thoughts, who seemed
at one moment to be sympathising with him and at another to be playing
upon his face with a garden hose. Then it all faded away, and a sort of
numbness crept over him. He made a desperate struggle for consciousness.
There was something cold resting against his cheek. His fingers stole
towards it. It was the flask, drawn from his own pocket and placed there
by some unseen hand, the top already unscrewed, and the reviving odour
stealing into his nostrils. He guided it to his lips with trembling
fingers. A pleasant sense of warmth crept over him. His head fell back.

When he opened his eyes again, he first turned around for the tea by his
bedside, then stared in front of him, wondering if these things which
he saw were indeed displayed through an upraised blind. There was
the marsh--a picture of still life--winding belts of sea creeping,
serpent-like, away from him towards the land, with broad pools, in whose
bosom, here and there, were flashes of a feeble sunlight. There were
the clumps of wild lavender he had so often admired, the patches of deep
meadow green, and, beating the air with their wings as they passed, came
a flight of duck over his head. Very stiff and dazed, he staggered to
his feet. There was the village to his right, red-tiled, familiar; the
snug farmhouses, with their brown fields and belts of trees; the curve
of the white road.

And then, with a single flash of memory, it all came back to him. He
felt the top of his head, still sore; looked down at the stretch of
shingle, empty now of any reminiscences; and finally, leaning heavily
on his stick, he plodded back to the cottage, noticing, as he drew near,
the absence of the motor-car from its place of shelter. Miles Furley
was seated in his armchair, with a cup of tea in his hand and Mrs. West
fussing over him, as Julian raised the latch and dragged himself into
the sitting room. They both turned around at his entrance. Furley
dropped his teaspoon and Mrs. West raised her hands above her head and
shrieked. Julian sank into the nearest chair.

“Melodrama has come to me at last,” he murmured. “Give me some tea--a
whole teapotful, Mrs. West--and get a hot bath ready.”

He waited until their temporary housekeeper had bustled out of the room.
Then he concluded his sentence.

“I have been sandbagged,” he announced impressively, and proceeded to
relate the night’s adventure to his host.

“This,” declared Julian, about a couple of hours later, as he helped
himself for the second time to bacon and eggs, “is a wonderful tribute
to the soundness of our constitutions. Miles, it is evident that you and
I have led righteous lives.”

“Being sandbagged seems to have given you an appetite,” Furley observed.

“And a game leg seems to have done the same for you,” Julian rejoined.
“Did the doctor ask you how you did it?”

Furley nodded.

“I just said that I slipped on the marshes. One doesn’t talk of such
little adventures as you and I experienced last night.”

“By the bye, what does one do about them?” Julian enquired. “I feel a
little dazed about it all, even now living in an unreal atmosphere and
that sort of thing, you know. It seems to me that we ought to have out
the bloodhounds and search for an engaging youth and a particularly
disagreeable bully of a man, both dressed in brown oilskins and--”

“Oh, chuck it!” Furley intervened. “The intelligence department in
charge of this bit of coast doesn’t do things like that. What you want
to remember, Julian, is to keep your mouth shut. I shall have a chap
over to see me this afternoon, and I shall make a report to him.”

“All the same,” persisted Julian, “we--or rather I--was without a doubt
a witness to an act of treason. By some subtle means connected with what
seemed to be a piece of gas pipe, I have seen communication with the
enemy established.”

“You don’t know that it was the enemy at all,” Furley grunted.

“For us others,” Julian replied, “there exists the post office, the
telegraph office and the telephone. I decline to believe that any
reasonable person would put out upon the sea in weather like last
night’s for the sake of delivering a letter to any harmless inhabitant
of these regions. I will have my sensation, you see, Furley. I have
suffered--thank heavens mine is a thick skull!--and I will not be
cheated of my compensations.”

“Well, keep your mouth shut, there’s a good fellow, until after I have
made my report to the Intelligence Officer,” Furley begged. “He’ll be
here about four. You don’t mind being about?”

“Not in the least,” Julian promised. “So long as I am home for dinner,
my people will be satisfied.”

“I don’t know how you’ll amuse yourself this morning,” Furley observed,
“and I’m afraid I sha’n’t be able to get out for the flighting this
evening.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Julian begged. “Remember that I am practically
at home. It’s only three miles to the Hall from here so you mustn’t look
upon me as an ordinary guest. I am going for a tramp in a few minutes.”

“Lucky chap!” Furley declared enviously. “Sunshine like this makes one
feel as though one were on the Riviera instead of in Norfolk. Shall you
visit the scene of your adventure?”

“I may,” Julian answered thoughtfully. “The instinct of the sleuthhound
is beginning to stir in me. There is no telling how far it may lead.”

Julian started on his tramp about half an hour later. He paused first at
a bend in the road, about fifty yards down, and stepped up close to the
hedge.

“The instinct of the sleuthhound,” he said to himself, “is all very
well, but why on earth haven’t I told Furley about the car?”

He paused to consider the matter, conscious only of the fact that each
time he had opened his lips to mention it, he had felt a marked but
purposeless disinclination to do so. He consoled himself now with the
reflection that the information would be more or less valueless until
the afternoon, and he forthwith proceeded upon the investigation which
he had planned out.

The road was still muddy, and the track of the tyres, which were of
somewhat peculiar pattern, clearly visible. He followed it along the
road for a matter of a mile and a half. Then he came to a standstill
before a plain oak gate and was conscious of a distinct shock. On the
top bar of the gate was painted in white letters.

                           MALTENBY HALL

                        TRADESMEN’S ENTRANCE

and it needed only the most cursory examination to establish the fact
that the car whose track he had been following had turned in here. He
held up his hand and stopped a luggage trolley which had just turned the
bend in the avenue. The man pulled up and touched his hat.

“Where are you off to, Fellowes?” Julian enquired.

“I am going to Holt station, sir,” the man replied, “after some
luggage.”

“Are there any guests at the Hall who motored here, do you know?” Julian
asked.

“Only the young lady, sir,” the man replied, “Miss Abbeway. She came in
a little coupe Panhard.”

Julian frowned thoughtfully.

“Has she been out in it this morning?” he asked.

The man shook his head.

“She broke down in it yesterday afternoon, sir,” he answered, “about
halfway up to the Hall here.”

“Broke down?” Julian repeated. “Anything serious? Couldn’t you put it
right for her?”

“She wouldn’t let me touch it, sir,” the man explained. “She said she
had two cracked sparking plugs, and she wanted to replace them herself.
She has had some lessons, and I think she wanted a bit of practice.”

“I see. Then the car is in the avenue now?”

“About half a mile up, on the left-hand side, sir, just by the big elm.
Miss Abbeway said she was coming down this afternoon to put new plugs
in.”

“Then it’s been there all the time since yesterday afternoon?” Julian
persisted.

“The young lady wished it left there, sir. I could have put a couple
of plugs in, in five minutes, and brought her up to the house, but she
wouldn’t hear of it.”

“I see, Fellowes.”

“Any luck with the geese last night, sir?” the man asked. “I heard there
was a pack of them on Stiffkey Marshes.”

“I got one. They came badly for us,” Julian replied.

He made his way up the avenue. At exactly the spot indicated by the
chauffeur a little coupe car was standing, drawn on to the turf. He
glanced at the name of the maker and looked once more at the tracks upon
the drive. Finally, he decided that his investigations were leading him
in a most undesirable direction.

He turned back, walked across the marshes, where he found nothing to
disturb him, and lunched with Furley, whose leg was now so much better
that he was able to put it to the ground.

“What about this visitor of yours?” Julian asked, as they sat smoking
afterwards. “I must be back at the Hall in time to dine to-night, you
know. My people made rather a point of it.”

Furley nodded.

“You’ll be all right,” he replied. “As a matter of fact, he isn’t
coming.”

“Not coming?” Julian repeated. “Jove, I should have thought you’d have
had intelligence officers by the dozen down here!”

“For some reason or other,” Furley confided, “the affair has been handed
over to the military authorities. I have had a man down to see me this
morning, and he has taken full particulars. I don’t know that they’ll
even worry you at all--until later on, at any rate.”

“Jove, that seems queer!”

“Last night’s happening was queer, for that matter,” Furley continued.
“Their only chance, I suppose, of getting to the bottom of it is to lie
doggo as far as possible. It isn’t like a police affair, you see. They
don’t want witnesses and a court of justice. One man’s word and a rifle
barrel does the trick.”

Julian sighed.

“I suppose,” he observed, “that if I do my duty as a loyal subject,
I shall drop the curtain on last night. Seems a pity to have had an
adventure like that and not be able to open one’s mouth about it.”

Furley grunted.

“You don’t want to join the noble army of gas bags,” he said. “Much
better make up your mind that it was a dream.”

“There are times,” Julian confided, “when I am not quite sure that it
wasn’t.”




CHAPTER III


Julian entered the drawing-room at Maltenby Hall a few minutes before
dinner time that evening. His mother, who was alone and, for a wonder,
resting, held out her hand for him to kiss and welcomed him with
a charming smile. Notwithstanding her grey hair, she was still a
remarkably young-looking woman, with a great reputation as a hostess.

“My dear Julian,” she exclaimed, “you look like a ghost! Don’t tell me
that you had to sit up all night to shoot those wretched duck?”

Julian drew a chair to his mother’s side and seated himself with a
little air of relief.

“Never have I been more conscious of the inroads of age,” he confided.
“I can remember when, ten or fifteen years ago, I used to steal out
of the house in the darkness and bicycle down to the marsh with a
twenty-bore gun, on the chance of an odd shot.”

“And I suppose,” his mother went on, “after spending half the night
wading about in the salt water, you spent the other half talking to that
terrible Mr. Furley.”

“Quite right. We got cold and wet through in the evening; we sat
up talking till the small hours; we got cold and wet again this
morning--and here I am.”

“A converted sportsman,” his mother observed. “I wish you could convert
your friend, Mr. Furley. There’s a perfectly terrible article of his in
the National this month. I can’t understand a word of it, but it reads
like sheer anarchy.”

“So long as the world exists,” Julian remarked, “there must be
Socialists, and Furley is at least honest.”

“My dear Julian,” his mother protested, “how can a Socialist be honest!
Their attitude with regard to the war, too, is simply disgraceful. I
am sure that in any other country that man Fenn, for instance, would be
shot.”

“What about your house party?” Julian enquired, with bland irrelevance.

“All arrived. I suppose they’ll be down directly. Mr. Hannaway Wells is
here.”

“Good old Wells!” Julian murmured. “How does he look since he became a
Cabinet Minister?”

“Portentous,” Lady Maltenby replied; with a smile. “He doesn’t look
as though he would ever unbend. Then the Shervintons are here, and the
Princess Torski--your friend Miss Abbeway’s aunt.”

“The Princess Torski?” Julian repeated. “Who on earth is she?”

“She was English,” his mother explained, “a cousin of the Abbeways. She
married in Russia and is on her way now to France to meet her husband,
who is in command of a Russian battalion there. She seems quite a
pleasant person, but not in the least like her niece.”

“Miss Abbeway is still here, of course?”

“Naturally. I asked her for a week, and I think she means to stay.
We talked for an hour after tea this afternoon, and I found her most
interesting. She has been living in England for years, it seems, down in
Chelsea, studying sculpture.”

“She is a remarkably clever young woman,” Julian said thoughtfully, “but
a little incomprehensible. If the Princess Torski is her aunt, who were
her parents?”

“Her father,” the Countess replied, “was Colonel Richard Abbeway, who
seems to have been military attache at St. Petersburg, years ago. He
married a sister of the Princess Torski’s husband, and from her this
young woman inherited a title which she won’t use and a large fortune.
Colonel Abbeway was killed accidentally in the Russo-Japanese War, and
her mother died a few years ago.”

“No German blood, or anything of that sort, then?”

“My dear boy, what an idea!” his mother exclaimed reprovingly. “On
the contrary, the Torskis are one of the most aristocratic families
in Russia, and you know what the Abbeways are. The girl is excellently
bred, and I think her charming in every way. Whatever made you suggest
that she might have German blood in her?”

“No idea! Anyhow, I am glad she hasn’t. Who else?”

“The Bishop,” his mother continued, “looking very tired, poor dear!
Doctor George Lennard, from Oxford, two young soldiers from Norwich,
whom Charlie asked us to be civil to--and the great man himself.”

“Tell me about the great man? I don’t think I’ve seen him to speak to
since he became Prime Minister.”

“He declares that this is his first holiday this year. He is looking
rather tired, but he has had an hour’s shooting since he arrived, and
seemed to enjoy it. Here’s your father.”

The Earl of Maltenby, who entered a moment later, was depressingly
typical. He was as tall as his youngest son, with whom he shook
hands absently and whom he resembled in no other way. He had the
conventionally aristocratic features, thin lips and steely blue eyes. He
was apparently a little annoyed.

“Anything wrong, dear?” Lady Maltenby asked.

Her husband took up his position on the hearthrug.

“I am annoyed with Stenson,” he declared.

The Countess shook her head.

“It’s too bad of you, Henry,” she expostulated. “You’ve been trying to
talk politics with him. You know that the poor man was only longing
for forty-eight hours during which he could forget that he was Prime
Minister of England.”

“Precisely, my dear,” Lord Maltenby agreed. “I can assure you that I
have not transgressed in any way. A remark escaped me referring to the
impossibility of providing beaters, nowadays, and to the fact that out
of my seven keepers, five are fighting. I consider Mr. Stenson’s comment
was most improper, coming from one to whom the destinies of this country
are confided.”

“What did he say?” the Countess asked meekly.

“Something about wondering whether any man would be allowed to have
seven keepers after the war,” her husband replied, with an angry
light in his eyes. “If a man like Stenson is going to encourage these
socialistic ideas. I beg your pardon--the Bishop, my dear.”

The remaining guests drifted in within the next few moments,--the
Bishop, Julian’s godfather, a curious blend of the fashionable and
the devout, the anchorite and the man of the people; Lord and Lady
Shervinton, elderly connections of the nondescript variety; Mr. Hannaway
Wells, reserved yet, urbane, a wonderful type of the supreme success of
mediocrity; a couple of young soldiers, light-hearted and out for a good
time, of whom Julian took charge; an Oxford don, who had once been Lord
Maltenby’s tutor; and last of all the homely, very pleasant-looking,
middle-aged lady, Princess Torski, followed by her niece. There were a
few introductions still to be effected.

Whilst Lady Maltenby was engaged in this task, which she performed at
all times with the unfailing tact of a great hostess, Julian broke off
in his conversation with the two soldiers and looked steadfastly across
the room at Catherine Abbeway, as though anxious to revise or
complete his earlier impressions of her. She was of medium height, not
unreasonably slim, with a deliberate but noticeably graceful carriage.
Her complexion was inclined to be pale. She had large, soft brown eyes,
and hair of an unusual shade of chestnut brown, arranged with remarkably
effective simplicity. She wore a long string of green beads around her
neck, a black tulle gown without any relief of colour, but a little
daring in its cut. Her voice and laugh, as she stood talking to the
Bishop, were delightful, and neither her gestures nor her accent
betrayed the slightest trace of foreign blood. She was, without a doubt,
extraordinarily attractive, gracious almost to freedom in her manner,
and yet with that peculiar quality of aloofness only recognisable in the
elect,--a very appreciable charm. Julian found his undoubted admiration
only increased by his closer scrutiny. Nevertheless, as he watched
her, there was a slightly puzzled frown upon his forehead, a sense
of something like bewilderment mingled with those other feelings.
His mother, who had turned to speak to the object of his attentions,
beckoned him, and he crossed the room at once to their side.

“Julian is going to take you in to dinner, Miss Abbeway,” the Countess
announced, “and I hope you will be kind to him, for he’s been out all
night and a good part of the morning, too, shooting ducks and talking
nonsense with a terrible Socialist.”

Lady Maltenby passed on. Julian, leaning on his stick, looked down with
a new interest into the face which had seldom been out of his thoughts
since their first meeting, a few weeks ago.

“Tell me, Mr. Orden,” she asked, “which did you find the more
exhausting--tramping the marshes for sport, or discussing sociology with
your friend?”

“As a matter of fact,” he replied, “we didn’t tramp the marshes. We
stood still and got uncommonly wet. And I shot a goose, which made me
very happy.”

“Then it must have been the conversation,” she declared. “Is your friend
a prophet or only one of the multitude?”

“A prophet, most decidedly. He is a Mr. Miles Furley, of whom you must
have heard.”

She started a little.

“Miles Furley!” she repeated. “I had no idea that he lived in this part
of the world.”

“He has a small country house somewhere in Norfolk,” Julian told
her, “and he takes a cottage down here at odd times for the wild-fowl
shooting.”

“Will you take me to see him to-morrow?” she asked.

“With pleasure, so long as you promise not to talk socialism with him.”

“I will promise that readily, out of consideration to my escort. I
wonder how it is,” she went on, looking up at him a little thoughtfully,
“that you dislike serious subjects so much.”

“A frivolous turn of mind, I suppose,” he replied. “I certainly prefer
to talk art with you.”

“But nowadays,” she protested, “it is altogether the fashion down at
Chelsea to discard art and talk politics.”

“It’s a fashion I shouldn’t follow,” he advised. “I should stick to art,
if I were you.”

“Well, that depends upon how you define politics, of course. I don’t
mean Party politics. I mean the science of living, as a whole, not as a
unit.”

The Princess ambled up to them.

“I don’t know what your political views are, Mr. Orden,” she said, “but
you must look out for shocks if you discuss social questions with my
niece. In the old days they would never have allowed her to live in
Russia. Even now, I consider some of her doctrines the most pernicious I
ever heard.”

“Isn’t that terrible from an affectionate aunt!”

Catherine laughed, as the Princess passed on. “Tell me some more about
your adventures last night?”

She looked up into his face, and Julian was suddenly conscious from
whence had come that faint sense of mysterious trouble which had been
with him during the last few minutes. The slight quiver of her lips
brought it all back to him. Her mouth, beyond a doubt, with its half
tender, half mocking curve, was the mouth which he had seen in that
tangled dream of his, when he had lain fighting for consciousness upon
the marshes.




CHAPTER IV


Julian, absorbed for the first few minutes of dinner by the
crystallisation of this new idea which had now taken a definite place
in his brain, found his conversational powers somewhat at a discount.
Catherine very soon, however, asserted her claim upon his attention.

“Please do your duty and tell me about things,” she begged. “Remember
that I am Cinderella from Bohemia, and I scarcely know a soul here.”

“Well, there aren’t many to find out about, are there?” he replied. “Of
course you know Stenson?”

“I have been gazing at him with dilated eyes,” she confided. “Is that
not the proper thing to do? He seems to me very ordinary and very
hungry.”

“Well, then, there is the Bishop.”

“I knew him at once from his photographs. He must spend the whole of the
time when he isn’t in church visiting the photographer. However, I like
him. He is talking to my aunt quite amiably. Nothing does aunt so much
good as to sit next a bishop.”

“The Shervintons you know all about, don’t you?” he went on. “The
soldiers are just young men from the Norwich barracks, Doctor Lennard
was my father’s tutor at Oxford, and Mr. Hannaway Wells is our latest
Cabinet Minister.”

“He still has the novice’s smirk,” she remarked. “A moment ago I heard
him tell his neighbour that he preferred not to discuss the war. He
probably thinks that there is a spy under the table.”

“Well, there we are--such as we are,” Julian concluded. “There is no one
left except me.”

“Then tell me all about yourself,” she suggested. “Really, when I come
to think of it, considering the length of our conversations, you have
been remarkably reticent. You are the youngest of the family, are you
not? How many brothers are there?”

“There were four,” he told her. “Henry was killed at Ypres last year.
Guy is out there still. Richard is a Brigadier.”

“And you?”

“I am a barrister by profession, but I went out with the first Inns of
Court lot for a little amateur soldiering and lost part of my foot at
Mons. Since then I have been indulging in the unremunerative and highly
monotonous occupation of censoring.”

“Monotonous indeed, I should imagine,” she agreed. “You spend your time
reading other people’s letters, do you not, just to be sure that there
are no communications from the enemy?”

“Precisely,” he assented. “We discover ciphers and all sorts of things.”

“What brainy people you must be!”

“We are, most of us.”

“Do you do anything else?”

“Well, I’ve given up censoring for the present,” he confided. “I am
going back to my profession.”

“As a barrister?”

“Just so. I might add that I do a little hack journalism.”

“How modest!” she murmured. “I suppose you write the leading articles
for the Times!”

“For a very young lady,” Julian observed impressively, “you have
marvellous insight. How did you guess my secret?”

“I am better at guessing secrets than you are,” she retorted a little
insolently.

He was silent for some moments. The faint curve of her lips had again
given him almost a shock.

“Have you a brother?” he asked abruptly.

“No. Why?”

“Because I met some one quite lately--within the last few hours, as a
matter of fact--with a mouth exactly like yours.”

“But what a horrible thing!” she exclaimed, drawing out a little mirror
from the bag by her side and gazing into it. “How unpleasant to have any
one else going about with a mouth exactly like one’s own! No, I never
had a brother, Mr. Orden, or a sister, and, as you may have heard, I am
an enfant mechante. I live in London, I model very well, and I talk
very bad sociology. As I think I told you, I know your anarchist friend,
Miles Furley.”

“I shouldn’t call Furley an anarchist,” protested Julian.

“Well, he is a Socialist. I admit that we are rather lax in our
definitions. You see, there is just one subject, of late years, which
has brought together the Socialists and the Labour men, the Syndicalists
and the Communists, the Nationalists and the Internationalists. All
those who work for freedom are learning breadth. If they ever find a
leader, I think that this dear, smug country of yours may have to face
the greatest surprise of its existence.”

Julian looked at her curiously.

“You have ideas, Miss Abbeway.”

“So unusual in a woman!” she mocked. “Do you notice how every one is
trying to avoid the subject of the war? I give them another half-course,
don’t you? I am sure they cannot keep it up.”

“They won’t go the distance,” Julian whispered. “Listen.”

“The question to be considered,” Lord Shervinton pronounced, “is not so
much when the war will be over as what there is to stop it? That is
a point which I think we can discuss without inviting official
indiscretions.”

“If other means fail,” declared the Bishop, “Christianity will stop it.
The conscience of the world is already being stirred.”

“Our enemies,” the Earl pronounced confidently from his place at the
head of the table, “are already a broken race. They are on the point
of exhaustion. Austria is, if possible, in a worse plight. That is what
will end the war--the exhaustion of our opponents.”

“The deciding factor,” Mr. Hannaway Wells put in, with a very
non-committal air, “will probably be America. She will bring her full
strength into the struggle just at the crucial moment. She will probably
do what we farther north have as yet failed to do: she will pierce the
line and place the German armies in Flanders in peril.”

The Cabinet Minister’s views were popular. There was a little murmur of
approval, something which sounded almost like a purr of content. It
was just one more expression of that strangely discreditable yet almost
universal failing,--the over-reliance upon others. The quiet remark of
the man who suddenly saw fit to join in the discussion struck a chilling
and a disturbing note.

“There is one thing which could end the war at any moment,” Mr. Stenson
said, leaning a little forward, “and that is the will of the people.”

There was perplexity as well as discomfiture in the minds of his
hearers.

“The people?” Lord Shervinton repeated. “But surely the people speak
through the mouths of their rulers?”

“They have been content to, up to the present,” the Prime Minister
agreed, “but Europe may still see strange and dramatic events before
many years are out.”

“Do go on, please,” the Countess begged.

Mr. Stenson shook his head.

“Even as a private individual I have said more than I intended,” he
replied. “I have only one thing to say about the war in public, and that
is that we are winning, that we must win, that our national existence
depends upon winning, and that we shall go on until we do win. The
obstacles between us and victory, which may remain in our minds, are not
to be spoken of.”

There was a brief and somewhat uncomfortable pause. It was understood
that the subject was to be abandoned. Julian addressed a question to the
Bishop across the table. Lord Maltenby consulted Doctor Lennard as
to the date of the first Punic War. Mr. Stenson admired the flowers.
Catherine, who had been sitting with her eyes riveted upon the Prime
Minister, turned to her neighbour.

“Tell me about your amateur journalism, Mr. Orden?” she begged. “I have
an idea that it ought to be interesting.”

“Deadly dull, I can assure you.”

“You write about politics? Or perhaps you are an art critic? I ought to
be on my best behaviour, in case.”

“I know little about art,” he assured her. “My chief interest in
life--outside my profession, of course--lies in sociology.”

His little confession had been impulsive. She raised her eyebrows.

“You are in earnest, I believe!” she exclaimed. “Have I really found an
Englishman who is in earnest?”

“I plead guilty. It is incorrect philosophy but a distinct stimulus to
life.”

“What a pity,” she sighed, “that you are so handicapped by birth!
Sociology cannot mean anything very serious for you. Your perspective is
naturally distorted.”

“What about yourself?” he asked pertinently.

“The vanity of us women!” she murmured. “I have grown to look upon
myself as being an exception. I forget that there might be others. You
might even be one of our prophets--a Paul Fiske in disguise.”

His eyes narrowed a little as he looked at her closely. From across the
table, the Bishop broke off an interesting discussion on the subject
of his addresses to the working classes, and the Earl set down his
wineglass with an impatient gesture.

“Does no one really know,” Mr. Stenson asked, “who Paul Fiske is?”

“No one, sir,” Mr. Hannaway Wells replied. “I thought it wise, a short
time ago, to set on foot the most searching enquiries, but they were
absolutely fruitless.”

The Bishop coughed.

“I must plead guilty,” he confessed, “to having visited the offices of
The Monthly Review with the same object. I left a note for him there,
in charge of the editor, inviting him to a conference at my house. I
received no reply. His anonymity seems to be impregnable.”

“Whoever he may be,” the Earl declared, “he ought to be muzzled. He is a
traitor to his country.”

“I cannot agree with you, Lord Maltenby,” the Bishop said firmly. “The
very danger of the man’s doctrines lies in their clarity of thought,
their extraordinary proximity to the fundamental truths of life.”

“The man is, at any rate,” Doctor Lennard interposed, “the most
brilliant anonymous writer since the days of Swift and the letters of
Junius.”

Mr. Stenson for a moment hesitated. He seemed uncertain whether or no to
join in the conversation. Finally, impulse swayed him.

“Let us all be thankful,” he said, “that Paul Fiske is content with the
written word. If the democracy of England found themselves to-day with
such a leader, it is he who would be ruling the country, and not I.”

“The man is a pacifist!” the Earl protested.

“So we all are,” the Bishop declared warmly. “We are all pacifists in
the sense that we are lovers of peace. There is not one of us who does
not deplore the horrors of to-day. There is not one of us who is not
passionately seeking for the master mind which can lead us out of it.”

“There is only one way out,” the Earl insisted, “and that is to beat the
enemy.”

“It is the only obvious way,” Julian intervened, joining in the
conversation for the first time, “but meanwhile, with every tick of the
clock a fellow creature dies.”

“It is a question,” Mr. Hannaway Wells reflected, “whether the present
generation is not inclined to be mawkish with regard to human life.
History has shown us the marvellous benefits which have accrued to
the greatest nations through the lessening of population by means of
warfare.”

“History has also shown us,” Doctor Lennard observed, “that the last
resource of force is force. No brain has ever yet devised a logical
scheme for international arbitration.”

“Human nature, I am afraid, has changed extraordinarily little since the
days of the Philistines,” the Bishop confessed.

Julian turned to his companion.

“Well, they’ve all settled it amongst themselves, haven’t they?” he
murmured. “Here you may sit and listen to what may be called the modern
voice.”

“Yet there is one thing wanting,” she whispered. “What do you suppose,
if he were here at this moment, Paul Fiske would say? Do you think that
he would be content to listen to these brazen voices and accept their
verdict?”

“Without irreverence,” Julian answered, “or comparison, would Jesus
Christ?”

“With the same proviso,” she retorted, “I might reply that Jesus Christ,
from all we know of him, might reign wonderfully in the Kingdom of
Heaven, but he certainly wouldn’t be able to keep together a Cabinet in
Downing Street! Still, I am beginning to believe in your sincerity. Do
you think that Paul Fiske is sincere?”

“I believe,” Julian replied, “that he sees the truth and struggles to
express it.”

The women were leaving the table. She leaned towards him.

“Please do not be long,” she whispered. “You must admit that I have been
an admirable dinner companion. I have talked to you all the time on your
own subject. You must come and talk to me presently about art.”

Julian, with his hand on the back of his chair, watched the women pass
out of the soft halo of the electric lights into the gloomier shadows
of the high, vaulted room, Catherine a little slimmer than most of the
others, and with a strange grace of slow movement which must have come
to her from some Russian ancestor. Her last words lingered in his mind.
He was to talk to her about art! A fleeting vision of the youth in the
yellow oilskins mocked him. He remembered his morning’s tramp and the
broken-down motor-car under the trees. The significance of these things
was beginning to take shape in his mind. He resumed his seat, a little
dazed.




CHAPTER V


Maltenby was one of those old-fashioned houses where the port is served
as a lay sacrament and the call of the drawing-room is responded to
tardily. After the departure of the women, Doctor Lennard drew his chair
up to Julian’s.

“An interesting face, your dinner companion’s,” he remarked. “They tell
me that she is a very brilliant young lady.”

“She certainly has gifts,” acknowledged Julian.

“I watched her whilst she was talking to you,” the Oxford don continued.
“She is one of those rare young women whose undoubted beauty is put
into the background by their general attractiveness. Lady Maltenby was
telling me fragments of her history. It appears that she is thinking of
giving up her artistic career for some sort of sociological work.”

“It is curious,” Julian reflected, “how the cause of the people has
always appealed to gifted Russians. England, for instance, produces no
real democrats of genius. Russia seems to claim a monopoly of them.”

“There is nothing so stimulating as a sense of injustice for bringing
the best out of a man or woman,” Doctor Lennard pointed out. “Russia, of
course, for many years has been shamefully misgoverned.”

The conversation, owing to the intervention of other of the guests,
became general and platitudinal. Soon after, Mr. Stenson rose and
excused himself. His secretary; who had been at the telephone, desired a
short conference. There was a brief silence after his departure.

“Stenson,” the Oxonian observed, “is beginning to show signs of strain.”

“Why not?” Lord Shervinton pointed out. “He came into office full of the
most wonderful enthusiasm. His speeches rang through the world like a
clarion note. He converted waverers. He lit fires which still burn. But
he is a man of movement. This present stagnation is terribly irksome to
him. I heard him speak last week, and I was disappointed. He seems to
have lost his inspiration. What he needs is a stimulus of some sort,
even of disaster.”

“I wonder,” the Bishop reflected, “if he is really afraid of the
people?”

“I consider his remark concerning them most ill-advised,” Lord Maltenby
declared pompously.

“I know the people,” the Bishop continued, “and I love them. I
think, too, that they trust me. Yet I am not sure that I cannot see a
glimmering of what is at the back of Stenson’s mind. There are a good
many millions in the country who honestly believe that war is primarily
an affair of the politicians; who believe, too, that victory means a
great deal more to what they term ‘the upper classes’ than it does to
them. Yet, in every sense of the word, they are bearing an equal portion
of the fight, because, when it comes down to human life, the life of the
farm labourer’s son is of the same intrinsic value as the life of the
peer’s.”

Lord Maltenby moved a little in his chair. There was a slight frown upon
his aristocratic forehead. He disagreed entirely with the speaker, with
whom he feared, however, to cross swords. Mr. Hannaway Wells, who had
been waiting for his opportunity, took charge of the conversation. He
spoke in a reserved manner, his fingers playing with the stem of his
wineglass.

“I must confess,” he said, “that I feel the deepest interest in what
the Bishop has just said. I could not talk to you about the military
situation, even if I knew more than you do, which is not the case, but
I think it is clear that we have reached something like a temporary
impasse. There certainly seems to be no cause for alarm upon any front,
yet, not only in London, but in Paris and even Rome, there is a curious
uneasiness afoot, for which no one can account which no one can bring
home to any definite cause. In the same connection, we have confidential
information that a new spirit of hopefulness is abroad in Germany. It
has been reported to us that sober, clear-thinking men--and there are
a few of them, even in Germany--have predicted peace before a month is
out.”

“The assumption is,” Doctor Lennard interpolated, “that Germany has
something up her sleeve.”

“That is not only the assumption,” the Cabinet Minister replied, “but it
is also, I believe, the truth.”

“One could apprehend and fear a great possible danger,” Lord Shervinton
observed, “if the Labour Party in Germany were as strong as ours, or
if our own Labour Party were entirely united. The present conditions,
however, seem to me to give no cause for alarm.”

“That is where I think you are wrong,” Hannaway Wells declared. “If the
Labour Party in Germany were as strong as ours, they would be strong
enough to overthrow the Hohenzollern clique, to stamp out the militarism
against which we are at war, to lay the foundations of a great German
republic with whom we could make the sort of peace for which every
Englishman hopes. The danger, the real danger which we have to face,
would lie in an amalgamation of the Labour Party, the Socialists and the
Syndicalists in this country, and in their insisting upon treating with
the weak Labour Party in Germany.”

“I agree with the Bishop,” Julian pronounced. “The unclassified
democracy of our country may believe itself hardly treated, but
individually it is intensely patriotic. I do not believe that its
leaders would force the hand of the country towards peace, unless they
received full assurance that their confreres in Germany were able to
assume a dominant place in the government of that country--a place at
least equal to the influence of the democracy here.”

Doctor Lennard glanced at the speaker a little curiously. He had known
Julian since he was a boy but had never regarded him as anything but a
dilettante.

“You may not know it,” he said, “but you are practically expounding
the views of that extraordinary writer of whom we were speaking--Paul
Fiske.”

“I have been told,” the Bishop remarked, cracking a walnut, “that Paul
Fiske is the pseudonym of a Cabinet Minister.”

“And I,” Hannaway Wells retorted, “have been informed most credibly that
he is a Church of England clergyman.”

“The last rumour I heard,” Lord Shervinton put in, “was that he is a
grocer in a small way of business at Wigan.”

“Dear me!” Doctor Lennard remarked. “The gossips have covered enough
ground! A man at a Bohemian club of which I am a member--the Savage
Club, in fact--assured me that he was an opium drugged journalist, kept
alive by the charity of a few friends; a human wreck, who was once the
editor of an important London paper.”

“You have some slight connection with journalism, have you not, Julian?”
 the Earl asked his son condescendingly. “Have you heard no reports?”

“Many,” Julian replied, “but none which I have been disposed to credit.
I should imagine, myself, that Paul Fiske is a man who believes, having
created a public, that his written words find an added value from the
fact that he obviously desires neither reward nor recognition; just in
the same way as the really earnest democrats of twenty years ago scoffed
at the idea of a seat in Parliament, or of breaking bread in any way
with the enemy.”

“It was a fine spirit, that,” the Bishop declared. “I am not sure that
we are not all of us a little over-inclined towards compromises. The
sapping away of conscience is so easy.”

The dining-room door was thrown open, and the butler announced a
visitor.

“Colonel Henderson, your lordship.”

They all turned around in their places. The colonel, a fine,
military-looking figure of a man, shook hands with Lord Maltenby.

“My most profound apologies, sir,” he said, as he accepted a chair. “The
Countess was kind enough to say that if I were not able to get away in
time for dinner, I might come up afterwards.”

“You are sure that you have dined?”

“I had something at Mess, thank you.”

“A glass of port, then?”

The Colonel helped himself from the decanter which was passed towards
him and exchanged greetings with several of the guests to whom his host
introduced him.

“No raids or invasions, I hope, Colonel?” the latter asked.

“Nothing quite so serious as that, I am glad to say. We have had a
little excitement of another sort, though. One of my men caught a spy
this morning.”

Every one was interested. Even after three years of war, there was still
something fascinating about the word.

“Dear me!” Lord Maltenby exclaimed. “I should scarcely have considered
our out-of-the-way part of the world sufficiently important to attract
attentions of that sort.”

“It was a matter of communication,” the Colonel confided. “There was an
enemy submarine off here last night, and we have reason to believe that
a message was landed. We caught one fellow just at dawn.”

“What did you do with him?” the Bishop asked.

“We shot him an hour ago,” was the cool reply.

“Are there any others at large?” Julian enquired, leaning forward.

“One other,” the Colonel acknowledged, sipping his wine appreciatively.
“My military police here, however, are very intelligent, and I should
think it very doubtful whether he can escape.”

“Was the man who was shot a foreigner?” the Earl asked. “I trust that he
was not one of my tenants?”

“He was a stranger,” was the prompt assurance.

“And his companion?” Julian ventured.

“His companion is believed to have been quite a youth. There is a
suggestion that he escaped in a motor-car, but he is probably hiding in
the neighbourhood.”

Lord Maltenby frowned. There seemed to him something incongruous in the
fact that a deed of this sort should have been committed in his domain
without his knowledge. He rose to his feet.

“The Countess is probably relying upon some of us for bridge,” he said.
“I hope, Colonel, that you will take a hand.”

The men rose and filed slowly out of the room. The Colonel, however,
detained his host, and Julian also lingered.

“I hope, Lord Maltenby,” the former said, “that you will excuse my men,
but they tell me that they find it necessary to search your garage for a
car which has been seen in the neighbourhood.”

“Search my garage?” Lord Maltenby repeated, frowning.

“There is no doubt,” the Colonel explained, “that a car was made use
of last night by the man who is still at large, and it is very possible
that it was stolen. You will understand, I am sure, that any enquiries
which my men may feel it their duty to make are actuated entirely by
military necessity.”

“Quite so,” the Earl acceded, still a little puzzled. “You will find
my head chauffeur a most responsible man. He will, I am sure, give them
every possible information. So far as I am aware, however, there is no
strange car in the garage. Do you know of any, Julian?”

“Only Miss Abbeway’s,” his son replied. “Her little Panhard was out in
the avenue all night, waiting for her to put some plugs in. Every one
else seems to have come by train.”

The Colonel raised his eyebrows very slightly and moved slowly towards
the door.

“The matter is in the hands of my police,” he said, “but if you could
excuse me for half a moment, Lord Maltenby, I should like to speak to
your head chauffeur.”

“By all means,” the Earl replied. “I will take you round to the garage
myself.”




CHAPTER VI


Julian entered the drawing-room hurriedly a few minutes later.
He glanced around quickly, conscious of a distinct feeling of
disappointment. His mother, who was arranging a bridge table, called him
over to her side.

“You have the air, my dear boy, of missing some one,” she remarked with
a smile.

“I want particularly to speak to Miss Abbeway,” he confided.

Lady Maltenby smiled tolerantly.

“After nearly two hours of conversation at dinner! Well, I won’t keep
you in suspense. She wanted a quiet place to write some letters, so I
sent her into the boudoir.”

Julian hastened off, with a word of thanks. The boudoir was a small
room opening from the suite which had been given to the Princess and her
niece a quaint, almost circular apartment, hung with faded blue Chinese
silk and furnished with fragments of the Louis Seize period,--a rosewood
cabinet, in particular, which had come from Versailles, and which was
always associated in Julian’s mind with the faint fragrance of two
Sevres jars of dried rose leaves. The door opened almost noiselessly.

Catherine, who was seated before a small, ebony writing table, turned
her head at his entrance.

“You?” she exclaimed.

Julian listened for a moment and then closed the door. She sat watching
him, with the pen still in her fingers.

“Miss Abbeway,” he said, “have you heard any news this evening?”

The pen with which she had been tapping the table was suddenly
motionless. She turned a little farther around.

“News?” she repeated. “No! Is there any?”

“A man was caught upon the marshes this morning and shot an hour ago.
They say that he was a spy.”

She sat as though turned to stone.

“Well?”

“The military police are still hunting for his companion. They are now
searching the garage here to see if they can find a small, grey, coupe
car.”

This time she remained speechless, but all those ill-defined fears
which had gathered in his heart seemed suddenly to come to a head.
Her appearance had changed curiously during the last hour. There was
a hunted, almost a desperate gleam in her eyes, a drawn look about her
mouth as she sat looking at him.

“How do you know this?” she asked.

“The Colonel of the regiment stationed here has just arrived. He is down
in the garage now with my father.”

“Shot!” she murmured. “Most Dieu!”

“I want to help you,” he continued.

Her eyes questioned him almost fiercely.

“You are sure?”

“I am sure.”

“You know what it means?”

“I do.”

“How did you guess the truth?”

“I remembered your mouth,” he told her. “I saw your car last night, and
I traced it up the avenue this morning.”

“A mouth isn’t much to go by,” she observed, with a very wan smile.

“It happens to be your mouth,” he replied.

She rose to her feet and stood for a moment as though listening. Then
she thrust her hand down into the bosom of her gown and produced a small
roll of paper wrapped in a sheet of oilskin. He took it from her at once
and slipped it into the breast pocket of his coat.

“You understand what you are doing?” she persisted.

“Perfectly;” he replied.

She crossed the room towards the hearthrug and stood there for a moment,
leaning against the mantelpiece.

“Is there anything else I can do?” he asked.

She turned around. There was a wonderful change in her face.

“No one saw me,” she said. “I do not think that there is any one but you
who could positively identify the car. Neither my aunt nor the maid who
is with us has any idea that I left my room last night.”

“Your clothes?”

“Absolutely destroyed,” she assured him with a smile. “Some day I hope
I’ll find courage to ask you whether you thought them becoming.”

“Some day,” he retorted, a little grimly, “I am going to have a very
serious talk with you, Miss Abbeway.”

“Shall you be very stern?”

He made no response to her lighter mood. The appeal in her eyes left him
colder than ever.

“I wish to save your life,” he declared, “and I mean to do it. At the
same time, I cannot forget your crime or my complicity in it.”

“If you feel like that, then,” she said a little defiantly, “tell the
truth. I knew the risk I was running. I am not afraid, even now. You can
give me back those papers, if you like. I can assure you that the person
on whom they are found will undoubtedly be shot.”

“Then I shall certainly retain possession of them,” he decided.

“You are very chivalrous, sir,” she ventured, smiling.

“I happen to be only selfish,” Julian replied. “I even despise myself
for what I am doing. I am turning traitor myself, simply because I
could not bear the thought of what might happen to you if you were
discovered.”

“You like me, then, a little, Mr. Orden?” she asked.

“Twenty-four hours ago,” he sighed, “I had hoped to answer that question
before it was asked.”

“This is very tantalising,” she murmured. “You are going to save my
life, then, and afterwards treat me as though I were a leper?”

“I shall hope,” he said, “that you may have explanations--that I may
find--”

She held out her hand and stopped him. Once more, for a moment, her eyes
were distended, her form was tense. She was listening intently.

“There is some one coming,” she whispered--“two or three men, I think.
What fools we have been! We ought to have decided--about the car.”

Her teeth came together for a moment. It was her supreme effort at
self-control. Then she laughed almost naturally, lit a cigarette, and
seated herself upon the arm of an easy-chair.

“You are interfering shockingly with my correspondence,” she declared,
“and I am sure that they want you for bridge. Here comes Lord Maltenby
to tell you so,” she added, glancing towards the door.

Lord Maltenby was very pompous, very stiff, and yet apologetic. He
considered the whole affair in which he had become involved ridiculous.

“Miss Abbeway,” he said, “I beg to present to you Colonel Henderson. An
unfortunate occurrence took place here last night, which it has become
the duty of--er--Colonel Henderson to clear up. He wishes to ask you a
question concerning--er--a motor-car.”

Colonel Henderson frowned. He stepped a little forward with the air of
wishing to exclude the Earl from further speech.

“May I ask, Miss Abbeway,” he began, “whether the small coupe car,
standing about a hundred yards down the back avenue, is yours?”

“It is,” she assented, with a little sigh. “It won’t go.”

“It won’t go?” the Colonel repeated.

“I thought you might know something about cars,” she explained. “They
tell me that two of the sparking plugs are cracked. I am thinking of
replacing them tomorrow morning, if I can get Mr. Orden to help me.”

“How long has the car been there in its present condition, then?” the
Colonel enquired.

“Since about five o’clock yesterday afternoon,” she replied.

“You don’t think it possible that it could have been out on the road
anywhere last night, then?”

“Out on the road!” she laughed. “Why, I couldn’t get it up to the
garage! You go and look at it, Colonel, if you understand cars.
Fellowes, the chauffeur here, had a look at the plugs when I brought it
in, and you’ll find that they haven’t been touched.”

“I trust,” the Earl intervened, “that my chauffeur offered to do what
was necessary?”

“Certainly he did, Lord Maltenby,” she assured him. “I am trying hard
to be my own mechanic, though, and I have set my mind on changing those
plugs myself to-morrow morning.”

“You are your own chauffeur, then, Miss Abbeway?” her inquisitor asked.

“Absolutely.”

“You can change a wheel, perhaps?”

“Theoretically I can, but as a matter of fact I have never had to do
it.’”

“Your tyres,” Colonel Henderson continued, “are of somewhat unusual
pattern.”

“They are Russian,” she told him. “I bought them for that reason. As a
matter of fact, they are very good tyres.”

“Miss Abbeway,” the Colonel said, “I don’t know whether you are aware
that my police are in search of a spy who is reported to have escaped
from the marshes last night in a small motor-car which was left at a
certain spot in the Salthouse road. I do not believe that there are two
tyres such as yours in Norfolk. How do you account for their imprint
being clearly visible along the road to a certain spot near Salthouse?
My police have taken tracings of them this morning.”

Catherine remained perfectly speechless. A slow smile of triumph dawned
upon her accuser’s lips. Lord Maltenby’s eyebrows were upraised as
though in horror.

“Perhaps,” Julian interposed, “I can explain the tyre marks upon the
road. Miss Abbeway drove me down to Furley’s cottage, where I spent the
night, late in the afternoon. The marks were still there when I returned
this morning, because I noticed them.”

“The same marks?” the Colonel asked, frowning.

“Without a doubt the same marks,” Julian replied. “In one place, where
we skidded a little, I recognized them.”

Colonel Henderson smiled a little more naturally.

“I begin to have hopes,” he acknowledged frankly, “that I have been
drawn into another mare’s nest. Nevertheless, I am bound to ask you
this question, Miss Abbeway. Did you leave your room at all during last
night?”

“Not unless I walked in my sleep,” she answered, “but you had better
make enquiries of my aunt, and Parkins, our maid. They sleep one on
either side of me.”

“You would not object,” the Colonel continued, more cheerfully still,
“if my people thought well to have your things searched?”

“Not in the least,” Catherine replied coolly, “only if you unpack
my trunks, I beg that you will allow my maid to fold and unfold my
clothes.”

“I do not think,” Colonel Henderson said to Lord Maltenby, “that I have
any more questions to ask Miss Abbeway at present.”

“In which case we will return to the drawing-room,” the Earl suggested
a little stiffly. “Miss Abbeway, you will, I trust, accept my apologies
for our intrusion upon you. I regret that any guest of mine should have
been subjected to a suspicion so outrageous.”

Catherine laughed softly.

“Not outrageous really, dear Lord Maltenby,” she said. “I do not quite
know of what I have been suspected, but I am sure Colonel Henderson
would not have asked me these questions if it had not been his duty.”

“If you had not been a guest in this house, Miss Abbeway,” the Colonel
assured her, with some dignity, “I should have had you arrested first
and questioned afterwards.”

“You come of a race of men, Colonel Henderson, who win wars,” she
declared graciously. “You know your own mind.”

“You will be joining us presently, I hope?” Lord Maltenby enquired from
the door.

“In a very few minutes,” she promised.

The door closed behind them. Catherine waited for a moment, then she
sank a little hysterically into a chair.

“I cannot avoid a touch of melodrama, you see,” she confessed. “It goes
with my character and nationality. But seriously, now that that is over,
I do not consider myself in the slightest danger. The poor fellow who
was shot this morning belongs to a different order of people. He has
been a spy over here since the beginning of the war.”

“And what are you?” he asked bluntly.

She laughed up in his face.

“A quite attractive young woman,” she declared,--“at least I feel sure
you will think so when you know me better.”




CHAPTER VII


It was about half-past ten on the following morning when Julian, obeying
a stentorian invitation to enter, walked into Miles Furley’s sitting
room. Furley was stretched upon the couch, smoking a pipe and reading
the paper.

“Good man!” was his hearty greeting. “I hoped you’d look me up this
morning.”

Julian dragged up the other dilapidated-looking easy-chair to the log
fire and commenced to fill his pipe from the open jar.

“How’s the leg?” he enquired.

“Pretty nearly all right again,” Furley answered cheerfully. “Seems to
me I was frightened before I was hurt. What about your head?”

“No inconvenience at all,” Julian declared, stretching himself out. “I
suppose I must have a pretty tough skull.”

“Any news?”

“News enough, of a sort, if you haven’t heard it. They caught the man
who sandbagged me, and who I presume sawed your plank through, and shot
him last night.”

“The devil they did!” Furley exclaimed, taking his pipe from his mouth.
“Shot him? Who the mischief was he, then?”

“It appears,” Julian replied, “that he was a German hairdresser, who
escaped from an internment camp two years ago and has been at large ever
since, keeping in touch, somehow or other, with his friends on the other
side. He must have known the game was up as soon as he was caught. He
didn’t even attempt any defence.”

“Shot, eh?” Furley repeated, relighting his pipe. “Serves him damned
well right!”

“You think so, do you?” Julian remarked pensively.

“Who wouldn’t? I hate espionage. So does every Englishman. That’s why we
are such duffers at the game, I suppose.”

Julian watched his friend with a slight frown.

“How in thunder did you get mixed up with this affair, Furley?” he asked
quietly.

Furley’s bewilderment was too natural to be assumed. He removed his pipe
from his teeth and stared at his friend.

“What the devil are you driving at, Julian?” he demanded. “I can assure
you that I went out, the night before last, simply to make one of the
rounds which falls to my lot when I am in this part of the world and
nominated for duty. There are eleven of us between here and Sheringham,
special constables of a humble branch of the secret service, if you like
to put it so. We are a well-known institution amongst the initiated.
I’ve plodded these marshes sometimes from midnight till daybreak, and
although one’s always hearing rumours, until last night I have never
seen or heard of a single unusual incident.”

“You had no idea, then,” Julian persisted, “what it was that you were on
the look-out for the night before last? You had no idea, say, from any
source whatever, that there was going to be an attempt on the part of
the enemy to communicate with friends on this side?”

“Good God, no! Even to have known it would have been treason.”

“You admit that?”

Furley drew himself stiffly up in his chair. His mass of brown hair
seemed more unkempt than usual, his hard face sterner than ever by
reason of its disfiguring frown.

“What the hell do you mean, Julian?”

“I mean,” Julian replied, “that I have reason to suspect you, Furley,
of holding or attempting to hold secret communication with an enemy
country.”

The pipestem which he was holding snapped in Furley’s fingers. His eyes
were filled with fury.

“Damn you, Julian!” he exclaimed. “If I could stand on two legs, I’d
break your head. How dare you come here and talk such rubbish.”

“Isn’t there some truth in what I have just said?” Julian asked sternly.

“Not a word.”

Julian was silent for a moment. Furley was sitting upright upon the
sofa, his keen eyes aglint with anger.

“I am waiting for an explanation, Julian,” he announced.

“You shall have it,” was the prompt reply. “The companion of the man who
was shot, for whom the police are searching at this moment, is a guest
in my father’s house. I have had to go to the extent of lying to save
her from detection.”

“Her?” Furley gasped.

“Yes! The youth in fisherman’s oilskins, into whose hands that message
passed last night, is Miss Catherine Abbeway. The young lady has
referred me to you for some explanation as to its being in her
possession.”

Furley remained absolutely speechless for several moments. His first
expression was one of dazed bewilderment. Then the light broke in upon
him. He began to understand. When he spoke, all the vigour had left his
tone.

“You’ll have to let me think about this for a moment, Julian,” he said.

“Take your own time. I only want an explanation.”

Furley recovered himself slowly. He stretched out his hand towards the
pipe rack, filled another pipe and lit it. Then he began.

“Julian,” he said, “every word that I have spoken to you about the night
before last is the truth. There is a further confession, however, which
under the circumstances I have to make. I belong to a body of men who
are in touch with a similar association in Germany, but I have no share
in any of the practical doings--the machinery, I might call it--of our
organisation. I have known that communications have passed back and
forth, but I imagined that this was done through neutral countries. I
went out the night before last as an ordinary British citizen, to do my
duty. I had not the faintest idea that there was to be any attempt
to land a communication here, referring to the matters in which I am
interested. I should imagine that the proof, of my words lies in the
fact that efforts were made to prevent my reaching my beat, and that
you, my substitute, whom I deliberately sent to take my place, were
attacked.”

“I accept your word so far,” Julian said. “Please go on.”

“I am an Englishman and a patriot,” Furley continued, “just as much as
you are, although you are a son of the Earl of Maltenby, and you
fought in the war. You must listen to me without prejudice. There are
thoughtful men in England, patriots to the backbone, trying to grope
their way to the truth about this bloody sacrifice. There are thoughtful
men in Germany on the same tack. If, for the betterment of the world, we
should seek to come into touch with one another, I do not consider that
treason, or communicating with an enemy country in the ordinary sense of
the word.”

“I see,” Julian muttered. “What you are prepared to plead guilty to is
holding communication with members of the Labour and Socialist Party in
Germany.”

“I plead guilty to nothing,” Furley answered, with a touch of his old
fierceness. “Don’t talk like your father and his class, Julian. Get away
from it. Be yourself. Your Ministers can’t end the war. Your Government
can’t. They opened their mouth too wide at first. They made too many
commitments. Ask Stenson. He’ll tell you that I’m speaking the truth.
So it goes on, and day by day it costs the world a few hundred or a few
thousand human lives, and God knows how much of man’s labour and brains,
annihilated, wasted, blown into the air! Somehow or other the war has
got to stop, Julian. If the politicians won’t do it, the people must.”

“The people,” Julian repeated a little sadly. “Rienzi once trusted in
the people.”

“There’s a difference,” Furley protested. “Today the people are all
right, but the Rienzi isn’t here--My God!”

He broke off suddenly, pursuing another train of thought. He leaned
forward.

“Look here,” he said, “we’ll talk about the fate of that communication
later. What about Miss Abbeway?”

“Miss Abbeway,” Julian told him, “was in imminent danger last night of
arrest as a spy. Against my principles and all my convictions, I have
done my best to protect her against the consequences of her ridiculous
and inexcusable conduct. I don’t know anything about your association,
Furley, but I consider you a lot of rotters to allow a girl to take on a
job like this.”

Furley’s eyes flashed in sympathy.

“It was a cowardly action, Julian,” he agreed. “I’m hot with shame when
I think of it. But don’t, for heaven’s sake, think I had anything to
do with the affair! We have a secret service branch which arranges for
those things. It’s that skunk Fenn who’s responsible. Damn him!”

“Nicholas Fenn, the pacifist!” Julian exclaimed. “So you take vermin
like that into your councils!”

“You can’t call him too hard a name for me at this moment,” Furley
muttered.

“Nicholas Fenn,” Julian repeated, with a new light in his eyes. “Why,
the cable I censored was to him! So he’s the arch traitor!”

“Nicholas Fenn is in it;” Furley admitted, “although I deny that there’s
any treason whatever in the affair.”

“Don’t talk nonsense!” Julian replied. “What about your German
hairdresser who was shot this morning?”

“It was a mistake to make use of him,” Furley confessed. “Fenn has
deceived us all as to the method of our communications. But listen,
Julian. You’ll be able to get Miss Abbeway out of this?”

“If I don’t,” Julian replied, “I shall be in it myself, for I’ve lied
myself black in the face already.”

“You’re a man, for all the starch in you, Julian,” Furley declared. “If
anything were to happen to that girl, I’d wring Fenn’s neck.”

“I think she’s safe for the present,” Julian pronounced. “You see, she
isn’t in possession of the incriminating document. I took it from her
when she was in danger of arrest.”

“What are you going to do with it?”

“You can’t have much doubt about that,” was the composed reply. “I shall
go to town to-morrow and hand it over to the proper authorities.”

Julian rose to his feet as he spoke. Furley looked at him helplessly.

“How in heaven’s name, man,” he groaned, “shall I be able to make you
see the truth!”

A touch of the winter sunlight was upon Julian’s face which, curiously
enough, at that moment resembled his father’s in its cold, patrician
lines. The mention of Nicholas Fenn’s name seemed to have transformed
him.

“If I were you, Furley,” he advised, “for the sake of our friendship, I
wouldn’t try. There is no consideration in the world which would alter
my intentions.”

There was the sound of the lifting of the outer latch, a knock at the
door. The incoming visitors stood upon no ceremony. Mr. Stenson and
Catherine showed themselves upon the threshold.

Mr. Stenson waved aside all ceremony and at once checked Furley’s
attempt to rise to his feet.

“Pray don’t get up, Furley,” he begged, shaking hands with him. “I hope
you’ll forgive such an informal visit. I met Miss Abbeway on my way down
to the sea, and when she told me that she was coming to call on you, I
asked leave to accompany her.”

“You’re very welcome, sir,” was the cordial response. “It’s an honour
which I scarcely expected.”

Julian found chairs for every one, and Mr. Stenson, recognising
intuitively a certain state of tension, continued his good-humoured
remarks.

“Miss Abbeway and I,” he said, “have been having a most interesting
conversation, or rather argument. I find that she is entirely of your
way of thinking, Furley. You both belong to the order of what I call
puffball politicians.”

Catherine laughed heartily at the simile.

“Mr. Stenson is a glaring example,” she pointed out, “of those who do
not know their own friends. Mr. Furley and I both believe that some
time or other our views will appeal to the whole of the intellectual and
unselfish world.”

“It’s a terrible job to get people to think,” Furley observed. “They are
nearly always busy doing something else.”

“And these aristocrats!” Catherine continued, smiling at Julian. “You
spoil them so in England, you know. Eton and Oxford are simply terrible
in their narrowing effect upon your young men. It’s like putting your
raw material into a sausage machine.”

“Miss Abbeway is very severe this morning,” Stenson declared, with
unabated good humour. “She has been attacking my policy and my
principles during the whole of our walk. Bad luck about your accident,
Furley. I suppose we should have met whilst I am down here, if you
hadn’t developed too adventurous a spirit.”

Furley glanced at Julian and smiled.

“I am not so sure about that, sir,” he said. “Your host doesn’t approve
of me very much.”

“Do political prejudices exist so far from their home?” Mr. Stenson
asked.

“I am afraid my father is rather old-fashioned,” Julian confessed.

“You are all old-fashioned--and stiff with prejudice,” Furley declared.
“Even Orden,” he went on, turning to Catherine, “only tolerates me
because we ate dinners off the same board when we were both making up
our minds to be Lord High Chancellor.”

“Our friend Furley,” Julian confided, as he leaned across the table and
took a cigarette, “has no tact and many prejudices. He does write such
rubbish about the aristocracy. I remember an article of his not very
long ago, entitled ‘Out with our Peers!’ It’s all very well for a
younger son like me to take it lying down, but you could scarcely expect
my father to approve. Besides, I believe the fellow’s a renegade. I have
an idea that he was born in the narrower circles himself.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, then,” Furley grunted with satisfaction. “My
father was a boot manufacturer in a country village of Leicestershire. I
went in for the Bar because he left me pots of money, most of which, by
the bye, I seem to have dissipated.”

“Chiefly in Utopian schemes for the betterment of his betters,” Julian
observed drily.

“I certainly had an idea,” Furley confessed, “of an asylum for incapable
younger sons.”

“I call a truce,” Julian proposed. “It isn’t polite to spar before Miss
Abbeway.”

“To me,” Mr. Stenson declared, “this is a veritable temple of peace. I
arrived here literally on all fours. Miss Abbeway has proved to me quite
conclusively that as a democratic leader I have missed my vocation.”

She looked at him reproachfully. Nevertheless, his words seemed to
have brought back to her mind the thrill of their brief but stimulating
conversation. A flash of genuine earnestness transformed her face, just
as a gleam of wintry sunshine, which had found its way in through the
open window, seemed to discover threads of gold in her tightly braided
and luxuriant brown hair. Her eyes filled with an almost inspired light:

“Mr. Stenson is scarcely fair to me,” she complained. “I did not presume
to criticise his statesmanship, only there are some things here which
seem pitiful. England should be the ideal democracy of the world. Your
laws admit of it, your Government admits of it. Neither birth nor money
are indispensable to success. The way is open for the working man to
pass even to the Cabinet. And you are nothing of the sort. The cause of
the people is not in any country so shamefully and badly represented.
You have a bourgeoisie which maintains itself in almost feudal luxury
by means of the labour which it employs, and that labour is content
to squeak and open its mouth for worms, when it should have the finest
fruits of the world. And all this is for want of leadership. Up you come
you David Sands, you Phineas Crosses, you Nicholas Fenns, you Thomas
Evanses. You each think that you represent Labour, but you don’t. You
represent trade--the workers at one trade. How they laugh at you,
the men who like to keep the government of this country in their own
possession! They stretch down a hand to the one who has climbed the
highest, they pull him up into the Government, and after that Labour
is well quit of him. He has found his place with the gods. Perhaps they
will make him a ‘Sir’ and his wife a ‘Lady,’ but for him it is all over
with the Cause. And so another ten years is wasted, while another man
grows up to take his place.”

“She’s right enough,” Furley confessed gloomily. “There is something
about the atmosphere of the inner life of politics which has proved
fatal to every Labour man who has ever climbed. Paul Fiske wrote the
same thing only a few weeks ago. He thought that it was the social
atmosphere which we still preserve around our politics. We no sooner
catch a clever man, born of the people, than we dress him up like a
mummy and put him down at dinner parties and garden parties, to do
things he’s not accustomed to, and expect him to hold his own amongst
people who are not his people. There is something poisonous about it.”

“Aren’t you all rather assuming,” Stenson suggested drily, “that the
Labour Party is the only party in politics worth considering?”

“If they knew their own strength,” Catherine declared, “they would be
the predominant party. Should you like to go to the polls to-day and
fight for your seats against them?”

“Heaven forbid!” Mr. Stenson exclaimed. “But then we’ve made up our
mind to one thing--no general election during the war. Afterwards,
I shouldn’t be at all surprised if Unionists and Liberals and even
Radicals didn’t amalgamate and make one party.”

“To fight Labour,” Furley said grimly.

“To keep England great,” Mr. Stenson replied. “You must remember that so
far as any scheme or program which the Labour Party has yet disclosed,
in this country or any other, they are preeminently selfish. England has
mighty interests across the seas. A parish-council form of government
would very soon bring disaster.”

Julian glanced at the clock and rose to his feet.

“I don’t want to hurry any one,” he said, “but my father is rather a
martinet about luncheon.”

They all rose. Mr. Stenson turned to Julian.

“Will you go on with Miss Abbeway?” he begged. “I will catch up with you
on the marshes. I want to have just a word with Furley.”

Julian and his companion crossed the country road and passed through the
gate opposite on to the rude track which led down almost to the sea.

“You are very interested in English labour questions, Miss Abbeway,” he
remarked, “considering that you are only half an Englishwoman.”

“It isn’t only the English labouring classes in whom I am interested,”
 she replied impatiently. “It is the cause of the people throughout the
whole of the world which in my small way I preach.”

“Your own country,” he continued, a little diffidently, “is scarcely a
good advertisement for the cause of social reform.”

Her tone trembled with indignation as she answered him.

“My own country,” she said, “has suffered for so many centuries from
such terrible oppression that the reaction was bound, in its first
stages, to produce nothing but chaos. Automatically, all that seems to
you unreasonable, wicked even, in a way, horrible--will in the course
of time disappear. Russia will find herself. In twenty years’ time her
democracy will have solved the great problem, and Russia be the foremost
republic of the world.”

“Meanwhile,” he remarked, “she is letting us down pretty badly.”

“But you are selfish, you English!” she exclaimed. “You see one of the
greatest nations in the world going through its hour of agony, and you
think nothing but how you yourselves will be affected! Every thinking
person in Russia regrets that this thing should have come to pass at
such a time. Yet it is best for you English to look the truth in the
face. It wasn’t the Russian people who were pledged to you, with whom
you were bound in alliance. It was that accursed trick all European
politicians have of making secret treaties and secret understandings,
building up buffer States, trying to whittle away a piece of the map for
yourselves, trying all the time to be dishonest under the shadow of what
is called diplomacy. That is what brought the war about. It was never
the will of the people. It was the Hohenzollerns and the Romanoffs,
the firebrands of the French Cabinet, and your own clumsy, thick-headed
efforts to get the best of everybody and yet keep your Nonconformist
conscience. The people did not make this war, but it is the people who
are going to end it.”

They walked in silence for some minutes, he apparently pondering over
her last words, she with the cloud passing from her face as, with her
head a little thrown back and her eyes half-closed, she sniffed the
strong, salty air with an almost voluptuous expression of content. She
was perfectly dressed for the country, from her square-toed shoes,
which still seemed to maintain some distinction of shape, the perfectly
tailored coat and skirt, to the smart little felt hat with its single
quill. She walked with the free grace of an athlete, unembarrassed with
the difficulties of the way or the gusts which swept across the marshy
places, yet not even the strengthening breeze, which as they reached the
sea line became almost a gale, seemed to have power to bring even the
faintest flush of colour to her cheeks. They reached the long headland
and stood looking out at the sea before she spoke again.

“You were very kind to me last night, Mr. Orden,” she said, a little
abruptly.

“I paid a debt,” he reminded her.

“I suppose there is something in that,” she admitted. “I really believe
that that exceedingly unpleasant person with whom I was brought into
temporary association would have killed you if I had allowed it.”

“I am inclined to agree with you,” he assented. “I saw him very hazily,
but a more criminal type of countenance I never beheld.”

“So that we are quits,” she ventured.

“With a little debt on my side still to be paid.”

“Well, there is no telling what demands I may make upon our
acquaintance.”

“Acquaintance?” he protested.

“Would you like to call it friendship?”

“A very short time ago;” he said deliberately, “even friendship would
not have satisfied me.”

“And now?”

“I dislike mysteries.”

“Poor me!” she sighed. “However, you can rid yourself of the shadow of
one as soon as you like after luncheon. It would be quite safe now, I
think, for me to take back that packet.”

“Yes,” he assented slowly, “I suppose that it would.”

She looked up into his face. Something that she saw there brought her
own delicate eyebrows together in a slight frown.

“You will give it me after lunch?” she proposed.

“I think not,” was the quiet reply.

“You were only entrusted with it for a time,” she reminded him, with
ominous calm. “It belongs to me.”

“A document received in this surreptitious fashion,” he pronounced, “is
presumably a treasonable document. I have no intention of returning it
to you.”

She walked by his side for a few moments in silence. Glancing down into
her face, Julian was almost startled. There were none of the ordinary
signs of anger there, but an intense white passion, the control of which
was obviously costing her a prodigious effort. She touched his fingers
with her ungloved hand as she stepped over a stile, and he found them
icy cold. All the joy of that unexpectedly sunny morning seemed to have
passed.

“I am sorry, Miss Abbeway,” he said almost humbly, “that you take my
decision so hardly. I ask you to remember that I am just an ordinary,
typical Englishman, and that I have already lied for your sake. Will you
put yourself in my place?”

They had climbed the little ridge of grass-grown sand and stood looking
out seaward. Suddenly all the anger seemed to pass from her face. She
lifted her head, her soft brown eyes flashed into his, the little curl
of her lips seemed to transform her whole expression. She was no longer
the gravely minded prophetess of a great cause, the scheming woman,
furious at the prospect of failure. She was suddenly wholly feminine,
seductive, a coquette.

“If you were just an ordinary, stupid, stolid Englishman,” she
whispered, “why did you risk your honour and your safety for my sake?
Will you tell me that, dear man of steel?”

Julian leaned even closer over her. She was smiling now frankly into his
face, refusing the warning of his burning eyes. Then suddenly, silently,
he held her to him and kissed her, unresisting, upon the lips. She made
no protest. He even fancied afterwards, when he tried to rebuild in his
mind that queer, passionate interlude, that her lips had returned what
his had given. It was he who released her--not she who struggled. Yet he
understood. He knew that this was a tragedy.

Stenson’s voice reached them from the other side of the ridge.

“Come and show me the way across this wretched bit of marsh, Orden. I
don’t like these deceptive green grasses.”

“‘Pitfalls for the Politician’ or ‘Look before you leap’.” Julian
muttered aimlessly. “Quite right to avoid that spot, sir. Just follow
where I am pointing.”

Stenson made his laborious way to their side.

“This may be a short cut back to the Hall,” he exclaimed, “but except
for the view of the sea and this gorgeous air, I think I should have
preferred the main road! Help me up, Orden. Isn’t it somewhere near here
that that little affair happened the other night?”

“This very spot,” Julian assented. “Miss Abbeway and I were just
speaking of it.”

They both glanced towards her. She was standing with her back to them,
looking out seawards. She did not move even at the mention of her name.

“A dreary spot at night, I dare say,” the Prime Minister remarked,
without overmuch interest. “How do we get home from here, Orden? I
haven’t forgotten your warning about luncheon, and this air is giving me
a most lively appetite.”

“Straight along the top of this ridge for about three quarters of a
mile, sir, to the entrance of the harbour there.”

“And then?”

“I have a petrol launch,” Julian explained, “and I shall land you
practically in the dining room in another ten minutes.”

“Let us proceed,” Mr. Stenson suggested briskly. “What a queer fellow
Miles Furley is! Quite a friend of yours, isn’t he, Miss Abbeway?”

“I have seen a good deal of him lately,” she answered, walking on and
making room for Stenson to fall into step by her side, but still keeping
her face a little averted. “A man of many but confused ideas; a man, I
should think, who stands an evil chance of muddling his career away.”

“We offered him a post in the Government,” Stenson ruminated.

“He had just sense enough to refuse that, I suppose,” she observed,
moving slowly to the right and thereby preventing Julian from taking a
place by her side. “Yet,” she went on, “I find in him the fault of so
many Englishmen, the fault that prevents their becoming great statesmen,
great soldiers, or even,” she added coolly, “successful lovers.”

“And what is that?” Julian demanded.

She remained silent. It was as though she had heard nothing. She caught
Mr. Stenson’s arm and pointed to a huge white seagull, drifting down the
wind above their heads.

“To think,” she said, “with that model, we intellectuals have waited
nearly two thousand years for the aeroplane!”




CHAPTER VIII


According to plans made earlier in the day, a small shooting party left
the Hall immediately after luncheon and did not return until late in the
afternoon. Julian, therefore, saw nothing more of Catherine until she
came into the drawing-room, a few minutes before the announcement of
dinner, wearing a wonderful toilette of pale blue silk, with magnificent
pearls around her neck and threaded in her Russian headdress. As is the
way with all women of genius, Catherine’s complete change of toilette
indicated a parallel change in her demeanour. Her interesting but
somewhat subdued manner of the previous evening seemed to have vanished.
At the dinner table she dominated the conversation. She displayed an
intimate acquaintance with every capital of Europe and with countless
personages of importance. She exchanged personal reminiscences with Lord
Shervinton, who had once been attached to the Embassy at Rome, and with
Mr. Hannaway Wells, who had been first secretary at Vienna. She spoke
amusingly of Munich, at which place, it appeared, she had first studied
art, but dilated, with all the artist’s fervour, on her travellings
in Spain, on the soft yet wonderfully vivid colouring of the southern
cities. She seemed to have escaped altogether from the gravity of which
she had displayed traces on the previous evening. She was no longer the
serious young woman with a purpose. From the chrysalis she had changed
into the butterfly, the brilliant and cosmopolitan young queen of
fashion, ruling easily, not with the arrogance of rank, but with the
actual gifts of charm and wit. Julian himself derived little benefit
from being her neighbour, for the conversation that evening, from first
to last, was general. Even after she had left the room, the atmosphere
which she had created seemed to linger behind her.

“I have never rightly understood Miss Abbeway,” the Bishop declared.
“She is a most extraordinarily brilliant young woman.”

Lord Shervinton assented.

“To-night you have Catherine Abbeway,” he expounded, “as she might have
been but for these queer, alternating crazes of hers--art and socialism.
Her brain was developed a little too early, and she was unfortunately,
almost in her girlhood, thrown in with a little clique of brilliant
young Russians who attained a great influence over her. Most of them are
in Siberia or have disappeared by now. One Anna Katinski--was brought
back from Tobolsk like a royal princess on the first day of the
revolution.”

“It is strange,” the Earl pronounced didactically, “that a young lady of
Miss Abbeway’s birth and gifts should espouse the cause of this Labour
rabble, a party already cursed with too many leaders.”

“A woman, when she takes up a cause,” Mr. Hannaway Wells observed,
“always seeks either for the picturesque or for something which appeals
to the emotions. So long as she doesn’t mix with them, the cause of the
people has a great deal to recommend it. One can use beautiful phrases,
can idealise with a certain amount of logic, and can actually achieve
things.”

Julian shrugged his shoulders.

“I think we are all a little blind,” he remarked, “to the danger in
which we stand through the great prosperity of Labour to-day.”

The Bishop leaned across the table.

“You have been reading Fiske this week.”

“Did I quote?” Julian asked carelessly. “I have a wretched memory. I
should never dare to become a politician. I should always be passing off
other people’s phrases as my own.”

“Fiske is quite right in his main contention,” Mr. Stenson interposed.
“The war is rapidly creating a new class of bourgeoisie. The very
differences in the earning of skilled labourers will bring trouble
before long--the miner with his fifty or sixty shillings, and the
munition worker with his seven or eight pounds--men drawn from the same
class.”

“England,” declared the Earl, indulging in his favourite speech, “was
never so contented as when wages were at their lowest.”

“Those days will never come again,” Mr. Hannaway Wells foretold grimly.
“The working man has tasted blood. He has begun to understand his power.
Our Ministers have been asleep for a generation. The first of these
modern trades unions should have been treated like a secret society in
Italy. Look at them now, and what they represent! Fancy what it will
mean when they have all learnt to combine!--when Labour produces real
leaders!”

“Can any one explain the German democracy?” Lord Shervinton enquired.

“The ubiquitous Fiske was trying to last week in one of the Reviews,”
 Mr. Stenson replied. “His argument was that Germany alone, of all the
nations in the world, possessed an extra quality or an extra sense--I
forget which he called it--the sense of discipline. It’s born in
their blood. Generations of military service are responsible for it.
Discipline and combination--that might be their motto. Individual
thought has been drilled into grooves, just as all individual effort is
specialised. The Germans obey because it is their nature to obey. The
only question is whether they will stand this, the roughest test they
have ever had--whether they’ll see the thing through.”

“Personally, I think they will,” Hannaway Wells pronounced, “but if I
should be wrong--if they shouldn’t--the French Revolution would be a
picnic compared with the German one. It takes a great deal to drive a
national idea out of the German mind, but if ever they should understand
precisely and exactly how they have been duped for the glorification of
their masters--well, I should pity the junkers.”

“Do your essays in journalism,” the Bishop asked politely, “ever lead
you to touch upon Labour subjects, Julian?”

“Once or twice, in a very mild way,” was the somewhat diffident reply.

“I had an interesting talk with Furley this morning,” the Prime Minister
observed. “He tells me that they are thinking of making an appeal to
this man Paul Fiske to declare himself. They want a leader--they want
one very badly--and thank heavens they don’t know where to look for
him!”

“But surely,” Julian protested, “they don’t expect necessarily to find
a leader of men in an anonymous contributor to the Reviews? Fiske, when
they have found him, may be a septuagenarian, or a man of academic
turn of mind, who never leaves his study. ‘Paul Fiske’ may even be the
pseudonym of a woman.”

The Earl rose from his place.

“This afternoon,” he announced, “I read the latest article of this Paul
Fiske. In my opinion he is an exceedingly mischievous person, without
the slightest comprehension of the forces which really count in
government.”

The Bishop’s eyes twinkled as he left the room with his hand on his
godson’s arm.

“It would be interesting,” he whispered, “to hear this man Fiske’s
opinion of your father’s last speech in the House of Lords upon land
interests!”

It was not until the close of a particularly unsatisfactory evening of
uninspiring bridge that Julian saw anything more of Catherine. She came
in from the picture gallery, breathless, followed by four or five of the
young soldiers, to whom she had been showing the steps of a new dance,
and, turning to Julian with an impulsiveness which surprised him, laid
her fingers imperatively upon his arm.

“Take me somewhere, please, where we can sit down and talk,” she begged,
“and give me something to drink.”

He led the way into the billiard room and rang the bell.

“You have been overtiring yourself,” he said, looking down at her
curiously.

“Have I?” she answered. “I don’t think so. I used to dance all through
the night in Paris and Rome, a few years ago. These young men are so
clumsy, though--and I think that I am nervous.”

She lay back in her chair and half closed her eyes. A servant brought
in the Evian water for which she had asked and a whisky and soda for
Julian. She drank thirstily and seemed in a few moments to have overcome
her fatigue. She turned to her companion with an air of determination.

“I must speak to you about that packet, Mr. Orden,” she insisted.

“Again?”

“I cannot help it. You forget that with me it is a matter of life or
death. You must realise that you were only entrusted with it. You are a
man of honour. Give it to me.”

“I cannot.”

“What are you thinking of doing with it, then?”

“I shall take it to London with me to-morrow,” he replied, “and hand it
over to a friend of mine at the Foreign Office.”

“Would nothing that I could do or say,” she asked passionately,
“influence your decision?”

“Everything that you do or say interests and affects me,” he answered
simply, “but so far as regards this matter, my duty is clear. You have
nothing to fear from my account of how it came into my possession. It
would be impossible for me to denounce you for what I fear you are. On
the other hand, I cannot allow you the fruits of your enterprise.”

“You consider me, I suppose,” she observed after a moment’s pause, “an
enemy spy?”

“You have proved it,” he reminded her.

“Of Overman--my confederate,” she admitted, “that was true. Of me it is
not. I am an honest intermediary between the honest people of Germany
and England.”

“There can be no communication between the two countries during wartime,
except through official channels,” he declared.

Her eyes flashed. She seemed in the throes of one of those little bursts
of tempestuous passion which sometimes assailed her.

“You talk--well, as you might be supposed to talk!” she exclaimed,
breaking off with an effort. “What have official channels done to
end this war? I am not here to help either side. I represent simply
humanity. If you destroy or hand over to the Government that packet, you
will do your country an evil turn.”

He shook his head.

“I am relieved to hear all that you say,” he told her, “and I am
heartily glad to think that you do not look upon yourself as Overman’s
associate. On the other hand, you must know that any movement towards
peace, except through the authorised channels, is treason to the
country.”

“If only you were not the Honourable Julian Orden, the son of an English
peer!” she groaned. “If only you had not been to Eton and to Oxford! If
only you were a man, a man of the people, who could understand!”

“Neither my birth nor my education,” he assured her, “have affected my
present outlook upon life.”

“Pooh!” she scoffed. “You talk like a stiffened sheet of foolscap! I am
to leave here to-morrow, then, without my packet?”

“You must certainly leave--when you do leave--without that,” he
assented. “There is one thing, however, which I very sincerely hope that
you will leave behind you.”

“And that?”

“Your forgiveness.”

“My forgiveness for what?” she asked, after a moment’s pause.

“For my rashness this morning.”

Her eyes grew a little larger.

“Because you kissed me?” she observed, without flinching. “I have
nothing to forgive. In fact,” she went on, “I think that I should have
had more to forgive if you had not.”

He was puzzled and yet encouraged. She was always bewildering him by her
sudden changes from the woman of sober thoughtfulness to the woman of
feeling, the woman eager to give, eager to receive. At that moment it
seemed as though her sex possessed her to the exclusion of everything
outside. Her eyes were soft and filled with the desire of love, her lips
sweet and tremulous. She had suddenly created a new atmosphere around
her, an atmosphere of bewildering and passionate femininity.

“Won’t you tell me, please, what you mean?” he begged.

“Isn’t it clear?” she answered, very softly but with a suspicion of
scorn in her low tones. “You kissed me because I deliberately invited
it. I know that quite well. My anger--and I have been angry about it--is
with myself.”

He was a little taken aback. Her perfect naturalness was disarming, a
little confusing.

“You certainly did seem provocative,” he confessed, “but I ought to have
remembered.”

“You are very stupid,” she sighed. “I deliberately invited your embrace.
Your withholding it would simply have added to my humiliation. I am
furious with myself, simply because, although I have lived a great
part of my life with men, on equal terms with them, working with them,
playing with them, seeing more of them at all times than of my own sex,
such a thing has never happened to me before.”

“I felt that,” he said simply.

For a moment her face shone. There was a look of gratitude in her eyes.
Her impulsive grasp of his hand left his fingers tingling.

“I am glad that you understood,” she murmured. “Perhaps that will help
me just a little. For the rest, if you wish to be very kind, you will
forget.”

“If I cannot do that,” he promised, “I will at least turn the key upon
my memories.”

“Do more than that,” she begged. “Throw the key into the sea, or
whatever oblivion you choose to conjure up. Moments such as those
have no place in my life. There is one purpose there more intense than
anything else, that very purpose which by some grim irony of fate it
seems to be within your power to destroy.”

He remained silent. Ordinary expressions of regret seemed too
inadequate. Besides, the charm of the moment was passing. The other side
of her was reasserting itself.

“I suppose,” she went on, a little drearily, “that even if I told you
upon my honour, of my certain knowledge, that the due delivery of that
packet might save the lives of thousands of your countrymen, might save
hearts from breaking, homes from becoming destitute--even if I told you
all this, would it help me in my prayer?”

“Nothing could help you,” he assured her, “but your whole confidence,
and even then I fear that the result would be the same.”

“Oh, but you are very hard!” she murmured. “My confidence belongs to
others. It is not mine alone to give you.”

“You see,” he explained, “I know beforehand that you are speaking the
truth as you see it. I know beforehand that any scheme in which you are
engaged is for the benefit of our fellow creatures and not for their
harm. But alas! you make yourself the judge of these things, and there
are times when individual effort is the most dangerous thing in life.”

“If you were any one else!” she sighed.

“Why be prejudiced about me?” he protested. “Believe me, I am not a
frivolous person. I, too, think of life and its problems. You yourself
are an aristocrat. Why should not I as well as you have sympathy and
feeling for those who suffer?”

“I am a Russian,” she reminded him, “and in Russia it is different.
Besides, I am no longer an aristocrat. I am a citizeness of the world.
I have eschewed everything in life except one thing, and for that I have
worked with all my heart and strength. As for you, what have you done?
What is your record?”

“Insignificant, I fear,” he admitted. “You see, a very promising
start at the Bar was somewhat interfered with by my brief period of
soldiering.”

“At the present moment you have no definite career,” she declared. “You
have even been wasting your time censoring.”

“I am returning now to my profession.”

“Your profession!” she scoffed. “That means you will spend your time
wrangling with a number of other bewigged and narrow-minded people about
uninteresting legal technicalities which lead nowhere and which no one
cares about.”

“There is my journalism.”

“You have damned it with your own phrase ‘hack journalism’!”

“I may enter Parliament.”

“Yes, to preserve your rights,” she retorted.

“I am afraid,” he sighed, “that you haven’t a very high opinion of me.”

“It is within your power to make me look upon you as the bravest, the
kindest, the most farseeing of men,” she declared.

He shook his head.

“I decline to think that you would think any the better of me for
committing a dishonourable action for your sake.”

“Try me,” she begged, her hand resting once more upon his. “If you want
my kind feelings, my everlasting gratitude, they are yours. Give me that
packet.”

“That is impossible,” he declared uncompromisingly. “If you wish to
alter my attitude with regard to it, you must tell me exactly from whom
it comes, what it contains, and to whom it goes.”

“You ask more than is possible.. You make me almost sorry--”

“Sorry for what?”

“Sorry that I saved your life,” she said boldly. “Why should I not be?
There are many who will suffer, many who will lose their lives because
of your obstinacy.”

“If you believe that, confide in me.”

She shook her head sadly.

“If only you were different!”

“I am a human being,” he protested. “I have sympathies and heart. I
would give my life willingly to save any carnage.”

“I could never make you understand,” she murmured hopelessly. “I shall
not try. I dare not risk failure. Is this room hot, or is it my fancy?
Could we have a window open?”

“By all means.”

He crossed the room and lifted the blind from before one of the high
windows which opened seawards. In the panel of the wall, between the
window to which he addressed himself and the next one, was a tall,
gilt mirror, relic of the days, some hundreds of years ago, when
the apartment had been used as a drawing-room. Julian, by the merest
accident, for the pleasure of a stolen glance at Catherine, happened to
look in it as he leaned over towards the window fastening. For a single
moment he stood rigid. Catherine had risen to her feet and, without the
slightest evidence of any fatigue, was leaning, tense and alert, over
the tray on which his untouched whisky and soda was placed. Her hand
was outstretched. He saw a little stream of white powder fall into
the tumbler. An intense and sickening feeling of disappointment almost
brought a groan to his lips. He conquered himself with an effort,
however, opened the window a few inches, and returned to his place.
Catherine was lying back, her eyes half-closed, her arms hanging
listlessly on either side of her chair.

“Is that better?” he enquired.

“Very much,” she assured him. “Still, I think that if you do not mind,
I will go to bed. I am troubled with a very rare attack of nerves. Drink
your whisky and soda, and then will you take me into the drawing-room?”

He played with his tumbler thoughtfully. His first impulse was to
drop it. Intervention, however, was at hand. The door opened, and the
Princess entered with Lord Shervinton.

“At last!” the former exclaimed. “I have been looking for you
everywhere, child. I am sure that you are quite tired out, and I insist
upon your going to bed.”

“Finish your whisky and soda,” Catherine begged Julian, “and I will lean
on your arm as far as the staircase.”

Fate stretched out her right hand to help him. The Princess took
possession of her niece.

“I shall look after you myself,” she insisted. “Mr. Orden is wanted to
play billiards. Lord Shervinton is anxious for a game.”

“I shall be delighted,” Julian answered promptly.

He moved to the door and held it open. Catherine gave him her fingers
and a little half-doubtful smile.

“If only you were not so cruelly obstinate!” she sighed.

He found no words with which to answer her. The shock of his discovery
was still upon him.

“You’ll give me thirty in a hundred, Julian,” Lord Shervinton called
out cheerfully. “And shut that door as soon as you can, there’s a good
fellow. There’s a most confounded draught.”


CHAPTER IX


It was at some nameless hour in the early morning when Julian’s vigil
came to an end, when the handle of his door was slowly turned, and the
door itself pushed open and closed again. Julian, lying stretched upon
his bed, only half prepared for the night, with a dressing gown
wrapped around him, continued to breathe heavily, his eyes half-closed,
listening intently to the fluttering of light garments, the soft, almost
noiseless footfall of light feet. He heard her shake out his dinner
coat, try the pockets, heard the stealthy opening and closing of the
drawers in his wardrobe. Presently the footsteps drew near to his bed.
For a moment he was obliged to set his teeth. A little waft of peculiar,
unanalysable perfume, half-fascinating, half-repellent, came to him with
a sense of disturbing familiarity. She paused by his bedside. He felt
her hand steal under the pillow, which his head scarcely touched; search
the pockets of his dressing gown, search even the bed. He listened to
her soft breathing. The consciousness of her close and intimate presence
affected him in an inexplicable manner. Presently, to his intense
relief, she glided away from his immediate neighbourhood, and the moment
for which he had waited came. He heard her retreating footsteps pass
through the communicating door into his little sitting room, where he
had purposely left a light burning. He slipped softly from the bed
and followed her. She was bending over an open desk as he crossed the
threshold. He closed the door and stood with his back to it.

“Much warmer,” he said, “only, you see, it isn’t there.”

She started violently at the sound of his voice, but she did not
immediately turn around. When she did so, her demeanour was almost a
shock to him. There was no sign of nervousness or apology in her manner.
Her eyes flashed at him angrily. She wore a loose red wrap trimmed with
white fur, a dishabille unusually and provokingly attractive.

“So you were shamming sleep!” she exclaimed indignantly.

“Entirely,” he admitted.

Neither spoke for a moment. Her eyes fell upon a tumbler of whisky
and soda, which stood on a round table drawn up by the side of his
easy-chair.

“I have not come to bed thirsty,” he assured her. “I had another one
downstairs--to which I helped myself. This one I brought up to try if I
could remember sufficient of my chemistry to determine its contents. I
have been able to decide, to my great relief, that your intention
was probably to content yourself with plunging me into only temporary
slumber.”

“I wanted you out of the way whilst I searched your rooms,” she told
him coolly. “If you were not such an obstinate, pig-headed, unkind,
prejudiced person, it would not have been necessary.”

“Dear me!” he murmured. “Am I all that? Won’t you sit down?”

For a moment she looked as though she were about to strike him with
the electric torch which she was carrying. With a great effort of
self-control, however, she changed her mind and threw herself into his
easy-chair with a little gesture of recklessness. Julian seated himself
opposite to her. Although she kept her face as far as possible averted,
he realised more than ever in those few moments that she was really an
extraordinarily beautiful person. Her very attitude was full of an angry
grace. The quivering of her lips was the only sign of weakness. Her eyes
were filled with cold resentment.

“Well,” she said, “I am your prisoner. I listen.”

“You are after that packet, I suppose?”

“What sagacity!” she scoffed. “I trusted you with it, and you behaved
like a brute. You kept it. It has nothing to do with you. You have no
right to it.”

“Let us understand one another, once and for all,” he suggested. “I will
not even discuss the question of rightful or wrongful possession. I have
the packet, and I am going to keep it. You cannot cajole it out of me,
you cannot steal it from me. To-morrow I shall take it to London and
deliver it to my friend at the Foreign Office. Nothing could induce me
to change my mind.”

She seemed suddenly to be caught up in the vortex of a new emotion. All
the bitterness passed from her expression. She fell on her knees by
his side, sought his hands, and lifted her face, full of passionate
entreaty, to his. Her eyes were dimmed with tears, her voice piteous.

“Do not be so cruel, so hard,” she begged. “I swear before Heaven that
there is no treason in those papers, that they are the one necessary
link in a great, humanitarian scheme. Be generous, Mr. Orden. Julian!
Give it back to me. It is mine. I swear--”

His hands gripped her shoulders. She was conscious that he was looking
past her, and that there was horror in his eyes. The words died away on
her lips. She, too, turned her head. The door of the sitting room
had been opened from outside. Lord Maltenby was standing there in his
dressing gown, his hand stretched out behind him as though to keep some
one from following him.

“Julian,” he demanded sternly, “what is the meaning of this?”

For a moment Julian was speechless, bereft of words, or sense of
movement. Catherine still knelt there, trembling. Then Lord Maltenby was
pushed unceremoniously to one side. It was the Princess who entered.

“Catherine!” she screamed. “Catherine!”

The girl rose slowly to her feet. The Princess was leaning on the
back of a chair, dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief and sobbing
hysterically. Lord Shervinton’s voice was heard outside.

“What the devil is all this commotion?” he demanded.

He, too, crossed the threshold and remained transfixed. The Earl closed
the door firmly and stood with his back against it.

“Come,” he said, “we will have no more spectators to this disgraceful
scene. Julian, kindly remember you are not in your bachelor apartments.
You are in the house over which your mother presides. Have you any
reason to offer, or excuse to urge, why I should not ask this young
woman to leave at daybreak?”

“I have no excuse, sir,” Julian answered, “I certainly have a reason.”

“Name it?”

“Because you would be putting an affront upon the lady who has promised
to become my wife. I am quite aware that her presence in my sitting room
is unusual, but under the circumstances I do not feel called upon to
offer a general explanation. I shall say nothing beyond the fact that
a single censorious remark will be considered by me as an insult to my
affianced wife.”

The Princess abandoned her chorus of mournful sounds and dried her eyes.
Lord Waltenby was speechless.

“But why all this mystery?” the Princess asked pitifully. “It is a great
event, this. Why did you not tell me, Catherine, when you came to my
room?”

“There has been some little misunderstanding,” Julian explained. “It is
now removed. It brought us,” he added, “very near tragedy. After what I
have told you, I beg whatever may seem unusual to you in this visit with
which Catherine has honoured me will be forgotten.”

Lord Maltenby drew a little breath of relief. Fortunately, he missed
that slight note of theatricality in Julian’s demeanour which might have
left the situation still dubious.

“Very well, then, Julian,” he decided, “there is nothing more to be said
upon the matter. Miss Abbeway, you will allow me to escort you to your
room. Such further explanations as you may choose to offer us can be
very well left now until the morning.”

“You will find that the whole blame for this unconventional happening
devolves upon me,” Julian declared.

“It was entirely my fault,” Catherine murmured repentantly. “I am so
sorry to have given any one cause for distress. I do not know, even
now--”

She turned towards Julian. He leaned forward and raised her fingers to
his lips.

“Catherine,” he said, “every one is a little overwrought. Our
misunderstanding is finished. Princess, I shall try to win your
forgiveness to-morrow.”

The Princess smiled faintly.

“Catherine is so unusual,” she complained.

Julian held open the door, and they all filed away down the corridor,
from which Lord Shervinton had long since beat a hurried retreat. He
stood there until they reached the bend. Catherine, who was leaning
on his father’s arm, turned around. She waved her hand a little
irresolutely. She was too far off for him to catch her expression, but
there was something pathetic in her slow, listless walk, from which all
the eager grace of a few hours ago seemed to have departed.


It was not until they were nearing London, on the following afternoon,
that Catherine awoke from a lethargy during which she had spent the
greater portion of the journey. From her place in the corner seat of the
compartment in which they had been undisturbed since leaving Wells, she
studied her companion through half-closed eyes. Julian was reading an
article in one of the Reviews and remained entirely unconscious of her
scrutiny. His forehead was puckered, his mouth a little contemptuous. It
was obvious that he did not wholly approve of what he was reading.

Catherine, during those few hours of solitude, was conscious of a
subtle, slowly growing change in her mental attitude towards her
companion. Until the advent of those dramatic hours at Maltenby, she
had regarded him as a pleasant, even a charming acquaintance, but as
belonging to a type with which she was entirely and fundamentally out of
sympathy. The cold chivalry of his behaviour on the preceding night and
the result of her own reflections as she sat there studying him made her
inclined to doubt the complete accuracy of her first judgment. She
found something unexpectedly intellectual and forceful in his present
concentration,--in the high, pale forehead, the deep-set but alert eyes.
His long, loose frame was yet far from ungainly; his grey tweed suit and
well-worn brown shoes the careless attire of a man who has no need to
rely on his tailor for distinction. His hands, too, were strong and
capable. She found herself suddenly wishing that the man himself were
different, that he belonged to some other and more congenial type.

Julian, in course of time, laid down the Review which he had been
studying and looked out of the window.

“We shall be in London in three quarters of an hour,” he announced
politely.

She sat up and yawned, produced her vanity case, peered into the mirror,
and used her powder puff with the somewhat piquant assurance of the
foreigner. Then she closed her dressing case with a snap, pulled down
her veil, and looked across at him.

“And how,” she asked demurely, “does my fiance propose to entertain me
this evening?”

He raised his eyebrows.

“With the exception of one half-hour,” he replied unexpectedly, “I am
wholly at your service.”

“I am exacting,” she declared. “I demand that half-hour also.”

“I am afraid that I could not allow anything to interfere with one brief
call which I must pay.”

“In Downing Street?”

“Precisely!”

“You go to visit your friend at the Foreign Office?”

“Immediately I have called at my rooms.”

She looked away from him out of the window. Beneath her veil her eyes
were a little misty. She saw nothing of the trimly partitioned fields,
the rolling pastoral country. Before her vision tragedies seemed to
pass,--the blood-stained paraphernalia of the battlefield, the empty,
stricken homes, the sobbing women in black, striving to comfort their
children whilst their own hearts were breaking. When she turned away
from the window, her face was hardened. Once more she found herself
almost hating the man who was her companion. Whatever might come
afterwards, at that moment she had the sensations of a murderess.

“You may know when you sleep to-night,” she exclaimed, “that you will be
the blood-guiltiest man in the world!”

“I would not dispute the title,” he observed politely, “with your friend
the Hohenzollern.”

“He is not my friend,” she retorted, her tone vibrating with passion. “I
am a traitress in your eyes because I have received a communication from
Germany. From whom does it come, do you think? From the Court? From the
Chancellor or one of his myrmidons? Fool! It comes from those who hate
the whole military party. It comes from the Germany whose people have
been befooled and strangled throughout the war. It comes from the people
whom your politicians have sought to reach and failed.”

“The suggestion is interesting,” he remarked coldly, “but improbable.”

“Do you know,” she said, leaning a little forward and looking at him
fixedly, “if I were really your fiancee--worse! if I were really your
wife--I think that before long I should be a murderess!”

“Do you dislike me as much as all that?”

“I hate you! I think you are the most pigheaded, obstinate,
self-satisfied, ignorant creature who ever ruined a great cause.”

He accepted the lash of her words without any sign of offence,--seemed,
indeed, inclined to treat them reflectively.

“Come,” he protested, “you have wasted a lot of breath in abusing me.
Why not justify it? Tell me the story of yourself and those who are
associated with you in this secret correspondence with Germany? If you
are working for a good end, let me know of it. You blame me for judging
you, for maintaining a certain definite poise. You are not reasonable,
you know.”

“I blame you for being what you are,” she answered breathlessly. “If
you were a person who understood, who felt the great stir of humanity
outside your own little circle, who could look across your seas and
realise that nationality is accidental and that the brotherhood of man
throughout the world is the only real fact worthy of consideration--ah!
if you could realise these things, I could talk, I could explain.”

“You judge me in somewhat arbitrary fashion.”

“I judge you from your life, your prejudices, even the views which you
have expressed.”

“There are some of us,” he reminded her, “to whom reticence is a
national gift. I like what you said just now. Why should you take it for
granted that I am a narrow squireen? Why shouldn’t you believe that I,
too, may feel the horror of these days?”

“You feel it personally but not impersonally,” she cried. “You feel it
intellectually but not with your heart. You cannot see that a kindred
soul lives in the Russian peasant and the German labourer, the British
toiler and the French artificer. They are all pouring out their blood
for the sake of their dream, a politician’s dream. Freedom isn’t won by
wars. It must be won, if ever, by moral sacrifice and not with blood.”

“Then explain to me,” he begged, “exactly what you are doing? What
your reason is for being in communication with the German Government?
Remember that the dispatch I intercepted came from no private person in
Germany. It came from those in authority.”

“That again is not true,” she replied. “I would ask for permission to
explain all these things to you, if it were not so hopeless.”

“The case of your friends will probably be more hopeless still,” he
reminded her, “after to-night.”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“We shall see,” she said solemnly. “The Russian revolution surprised
no one. Perhaps an English revolution would shake even your
self-confidence.”

He made no reply. Her blood tingled, and she could have struck him for
the faint smile, almost of amusement, which for a moment parted his
lips. He was already on his feet, collecting their belongings.

“Can you help me,” he asked, “with reference to the explanations which
it will be necessary to make to your aunt and to my own people? We left
this morning, if you remember, in order that you might visit the
Russian Embassy and announce our betrothal. You are, I believe, under an
engagement to return and stay with my mother.”

“I cannot think about those things to-day,” she replied. “You may take
it that I am tired and that you had business. You know my address. May I
be favoured with yours?”

He handed her a card and scribbled a telephone number upon it. They were
in the station now, and their baggage in the hands of separate porters.
She walked slowly down the platform by his side.

“Will you allow me to say,” he ventured, “how sorry I am--for all this?”

The slight uncertainty of his speech pleased her. She looked up at him
with infinite regret. As they neared the barrier, she held out her hand.

“I, too, am more sorry than I can tell you;” she said a little
tremulously. “Whatever may come, that is how I feel myself. I am sorry.”

They separated almost upon the words. Catherine was accosted by a man
at whom Julian glanced for a moment in surprise, a man whose dress and
bearing, confident though it was, clearly indicated some other status in
life. He glanced at Julian with displeasure, a displeasure which seemed
to have something of jealousy in its composition. Then he grasped
Catherine warmly by the hand.

“Welcome back to London, Miss Abbeway! Your news?”

Her reply was inaudible. Julian quickened his pace and passed out of the
station ahead of them.




CHAPTER X


The Bishop and the Prime Minister met, one afternoon a few days later,
at the corner of Horse Guards Avenue. The latter was looking brown and
well, distinctly the better for his brief holiday. The Bishop, on the
contrary, was pale and appeared harassed. They shook hands and exchanged
for a moment the usual inanities.

“Tell me, Mr. Stenson,” the Bishop asked earnestly, “what is the meaning
of all this Press talk, about peace next month? I have heard a hint that
it was inspired.”

“You are wrong,” was the firm reply. “I have sent my private secretary
around to a few of the newspapers this morning. It just happens to be
the sensation, of the moment, and it’s fed all the time from the other
side.”

“There is nothing in it, then, really?”

“Nothing whatever. Believe me, Bishop--and there is no one feeling the
strain more than I am--the time has not yet come for peace.”

“You politicians!” the Bishop sighed. “Do you sometimes forget, I
wonder, that even the pawns you move are human?”

“I can honestly say that I, at any rate, have never forgotten it,” Mr.
Stenson answered gravely. “There isn’t a man in my Government who has
a single personal feeling in favour of, or a single benefit to gain,
by the continuance of this ghastly war. On the other hand, there is
scarcely one who does not realise that the end is not yet. We have
pledged our word, the word of the English nation, to a peace based only
upon certain contingencies. Those contingencies the enemy is not at
present prepared to accept. There is no immediate reason why he should.”

“But are you sure of that?” the Bishop ventured doubtfully. “When you
speak of Germany, you speak of William of Hohenzollern and his clan. Is
that Germany? Is theirs the voice of the people?”

“I would be happy to believe that it was not,” Mr. Stenson replied, “but
if that is the case, let them give us a sign of it.”

“That sign,” declared the Bishop, with a gleam of hopefulness in his
tone, “may come, and before long.”

The two men were on the point of parting. Mr. Stenson turned and walked
a yard or two with his companion.

“By the bye, Bishop,” he enquired, “have you heard any rumours
concerning the sudden disappearance of our young friend Julian Orden?”

The Bishop for a moment was silent. A passer-by glanced at the two men
sympathetically. Of the two, he thought, it was the man in spiritual
charge of a suffering people who showed more sign of the strain.

“I have heard rumours,” the Bishop acknowledged. “Tell me what you
know?”

“Singularly little,” Mr. Stenson replied. “He left Maltenby with Miss
Abbeway the day after their engagement, and, according to the stories
which I have heard, arranged to dine with her that night. She came
to call for him and found that he had disappeared. According to his
servant, he simply walked out in morning clothes, soon after six
o’clock, without leaving any message, and never returned. On the top
of that, though, there followed, as I expect you have heard, some very
insistent police enquiries as to Orden’s doings on the night he spent
with his friend Miles Furley. There is no doubt that a German submarine
was close to Blakeney harbour that night and that a communication of
some sort was landed.”

“It seems absurd to connect Julian with any idea of treasonable
communication with Germany,” the Bishop said slowly. “A more typical
young Englishman of his class I never met.”

“Up to a certain point I agree with you,” Mr. Stenson confessed, “but
there are some further rumours to which I cannot allude, concerning
Julian. Orden, which are, to say the least of it, surprising.”

The two men came to a standstill once more.

Stenson laid his hand upon his companion’s shoulder. “Come,” he went on,
“I know what is the matter with you, my friend. Your heart is too big.
The cry of the widow and the children lingers too long in your ears.
Remember some of your earlier sermons at the beginning of the war.
Remember how wonderfully you spoke one morning at St. Paul’s upon the
spirituality to be developed by suffering, by sacrifice. ‘The hand which
chastises also purifies.’ Wasn’t that what you said? You probably didn’t
know that I was one of your listeners, even--I myself, in those days,
scarcely looked upon the war as I do now. I remember crawling in at the
side door of the Cathedral and sitting unrecognised on a hard chair. It
was a great congregation, and I was far away in the background, but I
heard. I remember the rustle, too, the little moaning, indrawn breath of
emotion when the people rose to their feet. Take heart, Bishop. I
will remind you once more of your own words ‘These are the days of
purification.’”

The two men separated. The Bishop walked thoughtfully towards the
Strand, his hands clasped behind his back, the echo of those quoted
words of his still in his ear. As he came to the busy crossing, he
raised his head and looked around him.

“Perhaps,” he murmured, “my eyes have been closed. Perhaps there are
things to be seen.”

He called a taxicab and, giving the man some muttered directions, was
driven slowly down the Strand, looking eagerly first on one side of the
way and then on the other. It was approaching the luncheon hour and
the streets were thronged. Here seemed to be the meeting place of the
Colonial troops,--long, sinewy men, many of them, with bronzed faces
and awkward gait. They elbowed their way along, side by side with the
queerest collection of people in the world. They stopped and talked
in little knots, they entered and left the public houses, stood about
outside the restaurants. Here and there they walked arm in arm with
women. Taxicabs were turning in at the Savoy, taxicabs and private cars.
Young ladies of the stage, sometimes alone, very often escorted, were
everywhere in evidence. The life of London was flowing on in very much
the same channels. There were few, if any signs of that thing for which
he sought. The taxicab turned westwards, crossed Piccadilly Circus and
proceeded along Piccadilly, its solitary occupant still gazing into the
faces of the people with that same consuming interest. It was all
the same over again--the smiling throngs entering and leaving the
restaurants, the smug promenaders, the stream of gaily dressed women and
girls. Bond Street was even more crowded with shoppers and loiterers.
The shop windows were as full as ever, the toilettes of the women
as wonderful. Mankind, though khaki-clad, was plentiful. The narrow
thoroughfare was so crowded that his taxicab went only at a snail’s
crawl, and occasionally he heard scraps of conversation. Two pretty
girls were talking to two young men in uniform.

“What a rag last night! I didn’t get home till three!”

“Dick never got home at all. Still missing!”

“Evie and I are worn out with shopping. Everything’s twice as expensive,
but one simply can’t do without.”

“I shouldn’t do without anything, these days. One never knows how long
it may last.”

The taxicab moved on, and the Bishop’s eyes for a moment were
half-closed. The voices followed him, however. Two women, leading curled
and pampered toy dogs, were talking at the corner of the street.

“Sugar, my dear?” one was saying. “Why, I laid in nearly a
hundredweight, and I can always get what I want now. The shopkeepers
know that they have to have your custom after the war. It’s only
the people who can’t afford to buy much at a time who are really
inconvenienced.”

“Of course, it’s awfully sad about the war, and all that, but one has
to think of oneself. Harry told me last night that after paying all the
income tax he couldn’t get out of, and excess profits; he is still--”

The voices dropped to a whisper. The Bishop thrust his head out of the
window.

“Drive me to Tothill Street, Westminster,” he directed. “As quickly as
possible, please.”

The man turned up a side street and drove off. Still the Bishop watched,
only by now the hopefulness had gone from his face. He had sought for
something of which there had been no sign.

He dismissed his taxicab in front of a large and newly finished block
of buildings in the vicinity of Westminster. A lift man conducted him
to the seventh floor, and a commissionaire ushered him into an already
crowded waiting room. A youth, however, who had noticed the Bishop’s
entrance, took him in charge, and, conducting him through two other
crowded rooms, knocked reverently at the door of an apartment at the far
end of the suite. The door was opened, after a brief delay, by a
young man of unpleasant appearance, who gazed suspiciously at the
distinguished visitor through heavy spectacles.

“The Bishop wishes to see Mr. Fenn,” his guide announced.

“Show him in at once,” a voice from the middle of the room directed.
“You can go and have your lunch, Johnson.”

The Bishop found himself alone with the man whom he had come to
visit,--a moderately tall, thin figure, badly-dressed, with a drooping
moustache, bright eyes and good forehead, but peevish expression. He
stood up while he shook hands with the Bishop and motioned him to a
chair.

“First time you’ve honoured us, Bishop,” he remarked, with the air of
one straining after an equality which he was far from feeling.

“I felt an unconquerable impulse to talk with you,” the Bishop admitted.
“Tell me your news?”

“Everything progresses,” Nicholas Fenn declared confidently. “The last
eleven days have seen a social movement in this country, conducted with
absolute secrecy, equivalent in its portentous issues to the greatest
revolution of modern times. For the first time in history, Bishop, the
united voice of the people has a chance of making itself heard.”

“Mr. Fenn,” the Bishop said, “you have accomplished a wonderful work.
Now comes the moment when we must pause and think. We must be absolutely
and entirely certain that the first time that voice is heard it is heard
in a righteous cause.”

“Is there a more righteous cause in the world than the cause of peace?”
 Fenn asked sharply.

“Not if that peace be just and reasonable,” the Bishop replied, “not if
that peace can bring to an end this horrible and bloody struggle.”

“We shall see to that,” Fenn declared, with a self-satisfied air.

“You have by now, I suppose, the terms proposed by your--your kindred
body in Germany?”

Nicholas Fenn stroked his moustache. There was a frown upon his
forehead.

“I expect to have them at any moment,” he said, “but to tell you the
truth, at the present moment they are not available.”

“But I thought--”

“Just so,” the other interrupted. “The document, however, was not where
we expected to find it.”

“Surely that is a very serious complication?”

“It will mean a certain delay if we don’t succeed in getting hold of
it,” Fenn admitted. “We intend to be firm about the matter, though.”

The Bishop’s expression was troubled.

“Julian Orden,” he said, “is my godson.”

“Necessity knows neither friendship nor relationship,” Fenn pronounced
didactically. “Better ask no questions, sir. These details do not
concern you.”

“They concern my conscience,” was the grave reply. “Ours is an earnest
spiritual effort for peace, a taking away from the hands of the
politicians of a great human question which they have proved themselves
unable to handle. We should look, therefore, with peculiar care to the
means we adopt.”

Nicholas Fenn nodded. He lit a very pungent cigarette from a paper
packet by his side.

“You and I, Bishop,” he said, “are pacifists in the broadest meaning of
the word, but that does not mean that we may not sometimes have to
use force to attain our object. We have a department which alone is
concerned with the dealing of such matters. It is that department which
has undertaken the forwarding and receipt of all communications between
ourselves and our friends across the North Sea. Its operations are
entirely secret, even from the rest of the Council. It will deal with
Julian Orden. It is best for you not to interfere, or even to have
cognisance of what is going on.”

“I cannot agree,” the Bishop protested. “An act of unchristian violence
would be a flaw in the whole superstructure which we are trying to build
up.”

“Let us discuss some other subject,” Fenn proposed.

“Pardon me,” was the firm reply. “I have come here to discuss this one.”

Nicholas Fenn looked down at the table. His expression was not
altogether pleasant.

“Your position with us, sir,” he said, “although much appreciated, does
not warrant your interference in executive details.”

“Nevertheless,” the Bishop insisted, “you must please treat me
reasonably in this matter, Mr. Fenn. Remember I am not altogether
extinct as a force amongst your followers. I have three mass meetings
to address this week, and there is the sermon next Sunday at Westminster
Abbey, at which it has been agreed that I shall strike the first note
of warning. I am a helper, I believe, worth considering, and there is no
man amongst you who risks what I risk.”

“Exactly what are you asking from me?” Fenn demanded, after a moment’s
deliberation.

“I wish to know the whereabouts and condition of Julian Orden.”

“The matter is one which is being dealt with by our secret service
department,” Fenn replied, “but I see no reason why I should not give
you all reasonable information. The young man in question asked for
trouble, and to a certain extent he has found it.”

“I understand,” the Bishop reminded his companion, “that he has very
nearly, if not altogether, compromised himself in his efforts to shield
Miss Abbeway.”

“That may be so,” Fenn admitted, “but it doesn’t alter the fact that he
refuses to return to her the packet which she entrusted to his care.”

“And he is still obdurate?”

“Up to now, absolutely so. Perhaps,” Fenn added, with a slightly
malicious smile, “you would like to try what you can do with him
yourself?”

The Bishop hesitated.

“Julian Orden,” he said, “is a young man of peculiarly stubborn type,
but if I thought that my exhortations would be of any benefit, I would
not shrink from trying them, whatever it might cost me.”

“Better have a try, then,” Fenn suggested. “If we do not succeed within
the next twenty-four hours, I shall give you an order to see him. I
don’t mind confessing,” he went on confidentially, “that the need for
the production of that document is urgent, apart from the risk we run
of having our plans forestalled if it should fall into the hands of the
Government.”

“I presume that Miss Abbeway has already done her best?”

“She has worn herself out with persuasions.”

“Has he himself been told the truth?”

Fenn shook his head.

“From your own knowledge of the young man, do you think that it would
be of any use? Even Miss Abbeway is forced to admit that any one less
likely to sympathise with our aims it would be impossible to find. At
the same time, if we do arrange an interview for you, use any arguments
you can think of. To tell you the truth, our whole calculations have
been upset by not discovering the packet upon his person. He was on his
way to Downing Street when our agents intervened, and we never doubted
that he would have it with him. When will it be convenient for you to
pay your visit?”

“At any time you send for me,” the Bishop replied. “Meanwhile, Mr. Fenn,
before I leave I want to remind you once more of the original purpose of
my call upon you.”

Fenn frowned a little peevishly as he rose to usher his visitor out.

“Miss Abbeway has already extorted a foolish promise from us,” he said.
“The young man’s safety for the present is not in question.”

The Bishop, more from custom than from any appetite, walked across the
Park to the Athenaeum. Mr. Hannaway Wells accosted him in the hall.

“This is a world of rumours,” he remarked with a smile. “I have just
heard that Julian Orden, of all men in the world, has been shot as a
German spy.”

The Bishop smiled with dignity.

“You may take it from me,” he said gravely, “that the rumour is untrue.”




CHAPTER XI


Nicholas Fenn, although civilisation had laid a heavy hand upon him
during the last few years, was certainly not a man whose outward
appearance denoted any advance in either culture or taste. His morning
clothes, although he had recently abandoned the habit of dealing at a
ready-made emporium, were neither well chosen nor well worn. His evening
attire was, if possible, worse. He met Catherine that evening in
the lobby of what he believed to be a fashionable grillroom, in a
swallow-tailed coat, a badly fitting shirt with a single stud-hole, a
black tie, a collar which encircled his neck like a clerical band, and
ordinary walking boots. She repressed a little shiver as she shook
hands and tried to remember that this was not only the man whom several
millions of toilers had chosen to be their representative, but also
the duly appointed secretary of the most momentous assemblage of human
beings in the world’s history.

“I hope I am not late,” she said. “I really do not care much about
dining out, these days, but your message was so insistent.”

“One must have relaxation,” he declared. “The weight of affairs all day
long is a terrible strain. Shall we go in?”

They entered the room and stood looking aimlessly about them, Fenn
having, naturally enough, failed to realise the necessity of securing a
table. A maitre d’hotel, however, recognised Catherine and hastened to
their rescue. She conversed with the man for a few minutes in
French, while her companion listened admiringly, and finally, at his
solicitation, herself ordered the dinner.

“The news, please, Mr. Fenn?” she asked, as soon as the man had
withdrawn.

“News?” he repeated. “Oh, let’s leave it alone for a time! One gets sick
of shop.”

She raised her eyebrows a little discouragingly. She was dressed with
extraordinary simplicity, but the difference in caste between the two
supplied a problem for many curious observers.

“Why should we talk of trifles,” she demanded, “when we both have such a
great interest in the most wonderful subject in the world?”

“What is the most wonderful subject in the world?” he asked
impressively.

“Our cause, of course,” she answered firmly, “the cause of all the
peoples--Peace.”

“One labours the whole day long for that,” he grumbled. “When the hour
for rest comes, surely one may drop it for a time?”

“Do you feel like that?” she remarked indifferently. “For myself, during
these days I have but one thought. There is nothing else in my life.
And you, with all those thousands and millions of your fellow creatures
toiling, watching and waiting for a sign from you--oh, I can’t imagine
how your thoughts can ever wander from them for a moment, how you can
ever remember that self even exists! I should like to be trusted, Mr.
Fenn, as you are trusted.”

“My work,” he said complacently, “has, I hope, justified that trust.”

“Naturally,” she assented, “and yet the greatest part of it is to come.
Tell me about Mr. Orden?”

“There is no change in the fellow’s attitude. I don’t imagine there
will be until the last moment. He is just a pig-headed, insufferably
conceited Englishman, full of class prejudices to his finger tips.”

“He is nevertheless a man,” she said thoughtfully. “I heard only
yesterday that he earned considerable distinction even in his brief
soldiering.”

“No doubt,” Fenn remarked, without enthusiasm, “he has the bravery of an
animal. By the bye, the Bishop dropped in to see me this morning.”

“Really?” she asked. “What did he want?”

“Just a personal call,” was the elaborately careless reply. “He likes to
look in for a chat, now and then. He spoke about Orden, too. I persuaded
him that if we don’t succeed within the next twenty four hours, it will
be his duty to see what he can do.”

“Oh, but that was too bad!” she declared. “You know how he feels his
position, poor man. He will simply loathe having to tell Julian--Mr.
Orden, I mean that he is connected with--”

“Well, with what, Miss Abbeway?”

“With anything in the nature of a conspiracy. Of course, Mr. Orden
wouldn’t understand. How could he? I think it was cruel to bring the
Bishop into the matter at all.”

“Nothing,” Fenn pronounced, “is cruel that helps the cause. What will
you drink, Miss Abbeway? You’ll have some champagne, won’t you?”

“What a horrible idea!” she exclaimed, smiling at him nevertheless.
“Fancy a great Labour leader suggesting such a thing! No, I’ll have some
light French wine, thank you.”

Fenn passed the order on to the waiter, a little crestfallen.

“I don’t often drink anything myself,” he said, “but this seemed to me
to be something of an occasion.”

“You have some news, then?”

“Not at all. I meant dining with you.”

She raised her eyebrows.

“Oh, that?” she murmured. “That is simply a matter of routine. I thought
you had some news, or some work.”

“Isn’t it possible, Miss Abbeway,” he pleaded, “that we might have some
interests outside our work?”

“I shouldn’t think so,” she answered, with an insolence which was above
his head.

“There is no reason why we shouldn’t have,” he persisted.

“You must tell me your tastes,” she suggested. “Are you fond of grand
opera, for instance? I adore it. ‘Parsifal’--‘The Ring’?”

“I don’t know much about music,” he admitted. “My sister, who used to
live with me, plays the piano.”

“We’ll drop music, then,” she said hastily. “Books? But I remember you
once told me that you had never read anything except detective novels,
and that you didn’t care for poetry. Sports? I adore tennis and I am
rather good at golf.”

“I have never wasted a single moment of my life in games,” he declared
proudly.

She shrugged her shoulders.

“Well, you see, that leaves us rather a long way apart, outside our
work, doesn’t it?”

“Even if I were prepared to admit that, which I am not,” he replied,
“our work itself is surely enough to make up for all other things.”

“You are quite right,” she confessed. “There is nothing else worth
thinking about, worth talking about. Tell me--you had an inner Council
this afternoon--is anything decided yet about the leadership?”

He sighed a little.

“If ever there was a great cause in the world,” he said, “which stands
some chance of missing complete success through senseless and low-minded
jealousy, it is ours.”

“Mr. Fenn!” she exclaimed.

“I mean it,” he assured her. “As you know, a chairman must be elected
this week, and that chairman, of course, will hold more power in his
hand than any emperor of the past or any sovereign of the present.
That leader is going to stop the war. He is going to bring peace to the
world. It is a mighty post, Miss Abbeway.”

“It is indeed,” she agreed.

“Yet would you believe,” he went on, leaning across the table and
neglecting for a moment his dinner, “would you believe, Miss Abbeway,
that out of the twenty representatives chosen from the Trades Unions
governing the principal industries of Great Britain, there is not a
single one who does not consider himself eligible for the post.”

Catherine found herself suddenly laughing, while Fenn looked at her in
astonishment.

“I cannot help it,” she apologised. “Please forgive me. Do not think
that I am irreverent. It is not that at all. But for a moment the
absurdity of the thing overcame me. I have met some of them, you
know--Mr. Cross of Northumberland, Mr. Evans of South Wales--”

“Evans is one of the worst,” Fenn interrupted, with some excitement.
“There’s a man who has only worn a collar for the last few years of his
life, who evaded the board-school because he was a pitman’s lad, who
doesn’t even know the names of the countries of Europe, but who still
believes that he is a possible candidate. And Cross, too! Well, he
washes when he comes to London, but he sleeps in his clothes and they
look like it.”

“He is very eloquent,” Catherine observed.

“Eloquent!” Fenn exclaimed scornfully. “He may be, but who can
understand him? He speaks in broad Northumbrian. What is needed in the
leader whom they are to elect this week, Miss Abbeway, is a man of some
culture and some appearance. Remember that to him is to be confided the
greatest task ever given to man. A certain amount of personality he must
have--personality and dignity, I should say, to uphold the position.”

“There is Mr. Miles Furley,” she said thoughtfully. “He is an educated
man, is he not?”

“For that very reason unsuitable,” Fenn explained eagerly. “He
represents no great body of toilers. He is, in reality, only an honorary
member of the Council, like yourself and the Bishop, there on account of
his outside services.”

“I remember, only a few nights ago,” she reflected, “I was staying at
a country house--Lord Maltenby’s, by the bye--Mr. Orden’s father. The
Prime Minister was there and another Cabinet Minister. They spoke of the
Labour Party and its leaderless state. They had no idea, of course,
of the great Council which was already secretly formed, but they were
unanimous about the necessity for a strong leader. Two people made
the same remark, almost with apprehension: ‘If ever Paul Fiske should
materialise, the problem would be solved!’”

Fenn assented without enthusiasm.

“After all, though,” he reminded her, “a clever writer does not always
make a great speaker, nor has he always that personality and distinction
which is required in this case. He would come amongst us a stranger,
too--a stranger personally, that is to say.”

“Not in the broadest sense of the word,” Catherine objected. “Paul Fiske
is more than an ordinary literary man. His heart is in tune with what he
writes. Those are not merely eloquent words which he offers. There is
a note of something above and beyond just phrase-making--a note of
sympathetic understanding which amounts to genius.”

Her companion stroked his moustache for a moment.

“Fiske goes right to the spot,” he admitted, “but the question of the
leadership, so far as he is concerned, doesn’t come into the sphere of
practical politics. It has been suggested, Miss Abbeway, by one or two
of the more influential delegates, suggested, too, by a vast number of
letters and telegrams which have poured in upon us during the last few
days, that I should be elected to this vacant post.”

“You?” she exclaimed, a little blankly.

“Can you think of a more suitable person?” he asked, with a faint note
of truculence in his tone. “You have seen us all together. I don’t
wish to flatter myself, but as regards education, service to the cause,
familiarity with public speaking and the number of those I represent--”

“Yes, yes! I see,” she interrupted. “Taking the twenty Labour
representatives only, Mr. Fenn, I can see nothing against your
selection, but I fancied, somehow, that some one outside--the Bishop,
for instance--”

“Absolutely out of the question,” Fenn declared. “The people would lose
faith in the whole thing in a minute. The person who throws down the
gage to the Prime Minister must have the direct mandate of the people.”

They finished dinner presently. Fenn looked with admiration at the gold,
coroneted case from which Catherine helped herself to one of her tiny
cigarettes. He himself lit an American cigarette.

“I had meant, Miss Abbeway,” he confided, leaning towards her, “to
suggest a theatre to you to-night--in fact, I looked at some dress
circle seats at the Gaiety with a view to purchasing. Another matter has
cropped up, however. There is a little business for us to do.”

“Business?” Catherine repeated.

He produced a folded paper from his pocket and passed it across the
table. Catherine read it with a slight frown.

“An order entitling the bearer to search Julian Orden’s apartments!” she
exclaimed. “We don’t want to search them, do we? Besides, what authority
have we?”

“The best,” he answered, tapping with his discoloured forefinger the
signature at the foot of the strip of paper.

She examined it with a doubtful frown.

“But how did this come into your possession?” she asked.

He smiled at her in superior fashion.

“By asking for it,” he replied bluntly. “And between you and me, Miss
Abbeway, there isn’t much we might ask for that they’d care to refuse us
just now.”

“But the police have already searched Mr. Orden’s rooms,” she reminded
him.

“The police have been known to overlook things. Of course, what I am
hoping is that amongst Mr. Orden’s papers there may be some indication
as to where he has deposited our property.”

“But this has nothing to do with me,” she protested. “I do not like to
be concerned in such affairs.”

“But I particularly wish you to accompany me,” he urged. “You are the
only one who has seen the packet. It would be better, therefore, if we
conducted the search in company.”

Catherine made a little grimace, but she objected no further. She
objected very strongly, however, when Fenn tried to take her arm on
leaving the place, and she withdrew into her own corner of the taxi
immediately they had taken their seats.

“You must forgive my prejudices, Mr. Fenn,” she said--“my foreign
bringing up, perhaps--but I hate being touched.”

“Oh, come!” he remonstrated. “No need to be so stand-offish.”

He tried to hold her hand, an attempt which she skilfully frustrated.

“Really,” she insisted earnestly, “this sort of thing does not amuse me.
I avoid it even amongst my own friends.”

“Am I not a friend?” he demanded.

“So far as regards our work, you certainly are,” she admitted. “Outside
it, I do not think that we could ever have much to say to one another.”

“Why not?” he objected, a little sharply. “We’re as close together in
our work and aims as any two people could be. Perhaps,” he went on,
after a moment’s hesitation and a careful glance around, “I ought to
take you into my confidence as regards my personal position.”

“I am not inviting anything of the sort,” she observed, with faint but
wasted sarcasm.

“You know me, of course,” he went on, “only as the late manager of a
firm of timber merchants and the present elected representative of the
allied Timber and Shipbuilding Trades Unions. What you do not know”--a
queer note of triumph stealing into his tone “is that I am a wealthy
man.”

She raised her eyebrows.

“I imagined,” she remarked, “that all Labour leaders were like the
Apostles--took no thought for such things.”

“One must always keep one’s eye on the main chance; Miss Abbeway,” he
protested, “or how would things be when one came to think of marriage,
for instance?”

“Where did your money come from?” she asked bluntly.

Her question was framed simply to direct him from a repulsive subject.
His embarrassment, however, afforded her food for future thought.

“I have saved money all my life,” he confided eagerly. “An uncle left me
a little. Lately I have speculated--successfully. I don’t want to dwell
on this. I only wanted you to understand that if I chose I could cut a
very different figure--that my wife wouldn’t have to live in a suburb.”

“I really do not see,” was the cold response, “how this concerns me in
the least.”

“You, call yourself a Socialist, don’t you, Miss Abbeway?” he demanded.
“You’re not allowing the fact that you’re an aristocrat and that I am a
self-made man to weigh with you?”

“The accident of birth counts for nothing,” she replied, “you must know
that those are my principles--but it sometimes happens that birth and
environment give one tastes which it is impossible to ignore. Please do
not let us pursue this conversation any further, Mr. Fenn. We have had
a very pleasant dinner, for which I thank you--and here we are at Mr.
Orden’s flat.”

Her companion handed her out a little sulkily, and they ascended in
the lift to the fifth floor. The door was opened to them by Julian’s
servant. He recognised Catherine and greeted her respectfully. Fenn
produced his authority, which the man accepted without comment.

“No news of your master yet?” Catherine asked him.

“None at all, madam,” was the somewhat depressed admission. “I am
afraid that something must have happened to him. He was not the kind of
gentleman to go away like this and leave no word behind him.”

“Still,” she advised cheerfully, “I shouldn’t despair. More wonderful
things have happened than that your master should return home to-morrow
or the next day with a perfectly simple explanation of his absence.”

“I should be very glad to see him, madam,” the man replied, as he backed
towards the door. “If I can be of any assistance, perhaps you will
ring.”

The valet departed, closing the door behind him. Catherine looked around
the room into which they had been ushered, with a little frown. It
was essentially a man’s sitting room, but it was well and tastefully
furnished, and she was astonished at the immense number of books,
pamphlets and Reviews which crowded the walls and every available space.
The Derby desk still stood open, there was a typewriter on a special
stand, and a pile of manuscript paper.

“What on earth,” she murmured, “could Mr. Orden have wanted with a
typewriter! I thought journalism was generally done in the offices of a
newspaper--the sort of journalism that he used to undertake.”

“Nice little crib, isn’t it?” Fenn remarked, glancing around. “Cosy
little place, I call it.”

Something in the man’s expression as he advanced towards her brought all
the iciness back to her tone and manner.

“It is a pleasant apartment,” she said, “but I am not at all sure that
I like being here, and I certainly dislike our errand. It does not seem
credible that, if the police have already searched, we should find the
packet here.”

“The police don’t know what to look for,” he reminded her. “We do.”

There was apparently very little delicacy about Mr. Fenn. He drew a
chair to the desk and began to look through a pile of papers, making
running comments as he did so.

“Hm! Our friend seems to have been quite a collector of old books. I
expect second-hand booksellers found him rather a mark. Some fellow
here thanking him for a loan. And here’s a tailor’s bill. By Jove, Miss
Abbeway, just listen to this! ‘One dress suit-fourteen guineas!’ That’s
the way these fellows who don’t know any better chuck their money
about,” he added, swinging around in his chair towards her. “The clothes
I have on cost me exactly four pounds fifteen cash, and I guarantee his
were no better.”

Catherine frowned impatiently.

“We did not come here, did we, Mr. Fenn, to discuss Mr. Orden’s tailor’s
bill? I can see no object at all in going through his correspondence
in this way. What you have to search for is a packet wrapped up in thin
yellow oilskin, with ‘Number 17’ on the outside in black ink.”

“Oh, he might have slipped it in anywhere,” Fenn pointed out. “Besides,
there’s always a chance that one of his letters may give us a clue as to
where he has hidden the document. Come and sit down by the side of me,
won’t you, Miss Abbeway? Do!”

“I would rather stand, thank you,” she replied. “You seem to find your
present occupation to your taste. I should loathe it!”

“Never think of my own feelings,” Fenn said briskly, “when there’s a job
to be done. I wish you’d be a bit more friendly, though, Miss Abbeway.
Let me pull that chair up by the side of mine. I like to have you
near. You know, I’ve been a bachelor for a good many years,” he went on
impressively, “but a little homey place like this always makes me think
of things. I’ve nothing against marriage if only a man can be lucky
enough to get the right sort of girl, and although advanced thinkers
like you and me and some of the others are looking at things
differently, nowadays, I wouldn’t mind much which way it was,” he
confided, dropping his voice a little and laying his hand upon her arm,
“if you could make up your mind--”

She snatched her arm away, and this time even he could not mistake the
anger which blazed in her eyes.

“Mr. Fenn,” she exclaimed, “why is it so difficult to make you
understand? I detest such liberties as you are permitting yourself. And
for the rest, my affections are already engaged.”

“Sounds a bit old-fashioned, that,” he remarked, scowling a little. “Of
course, I don’t expect--”

“Never mind what you expect,” she interrupted, “Please go on with this
search, if you are going to make one at all. The vulgarity of the whole
thing annoys me, and I do not for a moment suppose that the packet is
here.”

“It wasn’t on Orden,” he reminded her sullenly.

“Then he must have sent it somewhere for safe keeping,” she replied. “I
had already given him cause to do so.”

“If he has, then amongst his correspondence there may be some indication
as to where he sent it,” Fenn pointed out, with unabated ill-temper. “If
you don’t like the job, and you won’t be friendly, you’d better take the
easy-chair and wait till I’m through.”

She sat down, watching him with angry eyes, uncomfortable, unhappy,
humiliated. She seemed to have dropped in a few hours from the realms of
rarefied and splendid thought to a world of petty deeds. Not one of
her companion’s actions was lost upon her. She watched him study with
ill-concealed reverence a ducal invitation, saw him read through without
hesitation a letter which she felt sure was from Julian’s mother. And
then:

The change in the man was so startling, his muttered exclamation--so
natural that its profanity never even grated. His eyes seemed to be
starting out of his head, his lips were drawn back from his teeth.
Blank, unutterable surprise held him, dumb and spellbound, as he stared
at a half-sheet of type written notepaper. She herself, amazed at his
transformed appearance, found words for the moment impossible. Then
a queer change came into his expression. His eyebrows drew closer
together, his lips turned malevolently. He pushed the paper underneath
a pile of others and turned his head towards her. Their eyes met. There
was something like fear in his.

“What is it that you have found?” she cried breathlessly.

“Nothing,” he answered, “nothing of any importance.”

She rose slowly to her feet and came towards him.

“I am your partner in this hateful enterprise,” she reminded him. “Show
me that paper which you have just concealed.”

He laid his hand on the lid of the desk, but she caught it and held it
open.

“I insist upon seeing it,” she said firmly.

He turned and faced her. There was a most unpleasant light in his eyes.

“And I say that you shall not,” he declared.

There was a brief, intense silence. Each seemed to be measuring the
other’s strength. Of the two, Catherine was the more composed. Fenn’s
face was still white and strained. His lips were twitching, his manner
nervous and jerky. He made a desperate effort to reestablish ordinary
relations.

“Look here, Miss Abbeway,” he said, “we don’t need to quarrel about
this. That paper I came across has a special interest for me personally.
I want to think about it before I say anything to a soul in the world.”

“You can consult with me,” she persisted. “Our aims are the same. We are
here for the same purpose.”

“Not altogether,” he objected. “I brought you here as my assistant.”

“Did you?”

“Well, have the truth, then!” he exclaimed. “I brought you here to be
alone with you, because I hoped that I might find you a little kinder.”

“I am afraid you have been disappointed, haven’t you?” she asked
sweetly.

“I have,” he answered, with unpleasant meaning in his tone, “but we are
not out of here yet.”

“You cannot frighten me,” she assured him. “Of course, you are a man--of
a sort--and I am a woman, but I do not fancy that you would find, if it
came to force, that you would have much of an advantage. However, we
are wandering from the point. I claim an equal right with you to see
anything which you may discover in Mr. Orden’s papers. I might, indeed,
if I chose, claim a prior right.”

“Indeed?” he answered, with an ugly scowl on his face. “Mr. Julian Orden
is by way of being a particular friend, eh?”

“As a matter of fact,” Catherine told him, “we are engaged to be
married. It isn’t a serious engagement. It was entered into by him in
a most chivalrous manner, to save me from the consequences of a very
clumsy attempt on my part to get back that packet. But there it is.
Every one down at his home believes at the present moment that we are
engaged and that I have come up to London to see our Ambassador.”

“If you are engaged,” Fenn sneered, “why hasn’t he told you more of his
secrets?”

“Secrets!” she repeated, a little scornfully. “I shouldn’t think he has
any. I should imagine his daily life could be investigated without the
least fear.”

“You’d imagine wrong, then.”

“But how interesting! You excite my curiosity. And must you continue to
hold my wrist?”

“Let me pull down the top of this desk, then.”

“No!”

“Why not?”

“I intend to examine those papers.”

With a quick movement he gained a momentary advantage and shut the desk
down. The key, however, disturbed by the jerk, fell on to the carpet,
and Catherine possessed herself of it. She sprang lightly back from him
and pressed the bell.

“D----n you, what are you going to do now?” he demanded.

“You will see,” she replied. “Don’t come any nearer, or you may find
that I can be unpleasant.”

He shrugged his shoulders and waited. She turned towards the servant who
presently appeared.

“Robert,” she said, “will you telephone for me?”

“Certainly, madam,” the man answered.

“Telephone to 1884 Westminster. Say that you are speaking for Miss
Abbeway, and ask Mr. Furley, Mr. Cross, or whoever is there, to come at
once to this address.”

“Look here, there’s no sense in that,” Fenn interrupted.

“Will you do as I ask, please, Robert?” she persisted.

The man bowed and left the room. Fenn strode sulkily back to the desk.

“Very well, then,” he conceded, “I give in. Give me the key, and I’ll
show you the letter.”

“You intend to keep your word?”

“I do,” he assured her.

She held out the key. He took it, opened the desk, searched amongst the
little pile of papers, drew out the half-sheet of notepaper, and handed
it to her.

“There you are,” he said, “although if you are really engaged to marry
Mr. Julian Orden,” he added, with disagreeable emphasis, “I am surprised
that he should have kept such a secret from you.”

She ignored him and started to read the letter, glancing first at the
address at the top. It was from the British Review, and was dated a few
days back:

My dear Orden,

I think it best to let you know, in case you haven’t seen it yourself,
that there is a reward of 100 pounds offered by some busybody for the
name of the author of the ‘Paul Fiske’ articles. Your anonymity has been
splendidly preserved up till now, but I feel compelled to warn you
that a disclosure is imminent. Take my advice and accept it with a good
grace. You have established yourself so irrevocably now that the value
of your work will not be lessened by the discovery of the fact that
you yourself do not belong to the class of whom you have written so
brilliantly.

I hope to see you in a few days.

Sincerely,

M. HALKIN.

Even after she had concluded the letter, she still stared at it.
She read again the one conclusive sentence--“Your anonymity has been
splendidly preserved up till now.” Then she suddenly broke into a laugh
which was almost hysterical.

“So this is his hack journalism!” she exclaimed. “Julian Orden--Paul
Fiske!”

“I don’t wonder you’re surprised,” Fenn observed. “Fourteen guineas for
a dress suit, and he thinks he understands the working man!”

She turned her head slowly and looked at him. There was a strange,
repressed fire in her eyes. “You are a very foolish person,” she said.
“Your parents, I suppose, were small shopkeepers, or something of the
sort, and you were brought up at a board-school and Julian Orden at
Eton and Oxford, and yet he understands, and you do not. You see, heart
counts, and sympathy, and the flair for understanding. I doubt whether
these things are really found where you come from.”

He caught up his hat. His face was very white. His tone shook with
anger.

“This is our own fault,” he exclaimed angrily, “for having ever
permitted an aristocrat to hold any place in our counsels! Before we
move a step further, we’ll purge them of such helpers as you and such
false friends as Julian Orden.”

“You very foolish person,” she repeated. “Stop, though. Why all this
mystery? Why did you try to keep that letter from me?”

“I conceived it to be for the benefit of our cause,” he said
didactically, “that the anonymity--of ‘Paul Fiske’ should be preserved.”

“Rubbish!” she scoffed. “You were afraid of him. Why, what fools we are!
We will tell him the whole truth. We will tell him of our great scheme.
We will tell him what we have been working for, these many months. The
Bishop shall tell him, and you and I, and Miles Furley, and Cross. He
shall hear all about it. He is with us! He must be with us! You shall
put him on the Council. Why, there is your great difficulty solved,”
 she went on, in growing excitement. “There is not a working man in the
country who would not rally under ‘Paul Fiske’s’ banner. There you have
your leader. It is he who shall deliver your ultimatum.”

“I’m damned if it is!” Fenn declared, suddenly throwing his hat down and
coming towards her furiously. “I’m--”

The door opened. Robert stood there.

“The message, madam,” he began--and then stopped short. She crossed the
room towards him.

“Robert,” she said, “I think I have found the way to bring your master
back to you. Will you take me downstairs, please, and fetch me a taxi?”

“Certainly, madam!”

She looked back from the threshold.

“I shall telephone to Westminster in a few minutes, Mr. Fenn,” she said.
“I hope I shall be in time to stop the others from coming. Perhaps you
had better wait here, in case they have already started.”

He made no reply. To Catherine the world had become so wonderful that
his existence scarcely counted.




CHAPTER XII


Catherine, notwithstanding her own excitement, found genuine pleasure in
the bewildered enthusiasm with which the Bishop received her astounding
news. She found him alone in the great, gloomy house which he usually
inhabited when in London, at work in a dreary library to which she was
admitted after a few minutes’ delay. Naturally, he received her tidings
at first almost with incredulity. A heartfelt joy, however, followed
upon conviction.

“I always liked Julian,” he declared. “I always believed that he had
capacity. Dear me, though,” he went on, with a whimsical little smile,
“what a blow for the Earl!”

Catherine laughed.

“Do you remember the evening we all talked about the Labour question?
Time seems to have moved so rapidly lately, but it was scarcely a week
ago.”

“I remember,” the Bishop acknowledged. “And, my dear young lady,” he
went on warmly, “now indeed I feel that I can offer you congratulations
which come from my heart.”

She turned a little away.

“Don’t,” she begged. “You would have known very soon, in any case--my
engagement to Julian Orden was only a pretence.”

“A pretence?”

“I was desperate,” she explained. “I felt I must have that packet back
at any price. I went to his rooms to try and steal it. Well, I was found
there. He invented our engagement to help me out.”

“But you went off to London together, the neat day?” the Bishop reminded
her.

“It was all part of the game,” she sighed. “What a fool he must have
thought me! However, I am glad. I am riotously, madly glad. I am glad
for the cause, I am glad for all our sakes. We have a great recruit,
Bishop, the greatest we could have. And think! When he knows the truth,
there will be no more trouble. He will hand us over the packet. We
shall know just where we stand. We shall know at once whether we dare to
strike the great blow.”

“I was down at Westminster this afternoon,” the Bishop told her. “The
whole mechanism of the Council of Labour seems to be complete. Twenty
men control industrial England. They have absolute power. They are
waiting only for the missing word. And fancy,” he went on, “to-morrow I
was to have visited Julian. I was to have used my persuasions.”

“But we must go to-night!” Catherine exclaimed. “There is no reason why
we should waste a single second.”

“I shall be only too pleased,” he assented gladly. “Where is, he?”

Catherine’s face fell.

“I haven’t the least idea,” she confessed. “Don’t you know?”

The Bishop shook his head.

“They were going to send some one with me tomorrow,” he replied, “but in
any case Fenn knows. We can get at him.”

She made a little wry face.

“I do not like Mr. Fenn,” she said slowly. “I have disagreed with him.
But that does not matter. Perhaps we had better go to the Council rooms.
We shall find some of them there, and probably Fenn. I have a taxi
waiting.”

They drove presently to Westminster. The ground floor of the great
building, which was wholly occupied now by the offices of the different
Labour men, was mostly in darkness, but on the top floor was a big room
used as a club and restaurant, and also for informal meetings. Six
or seven of the twenty-three were there, but not Fenn. Cross, a great
brawny Northumbrian, was playing a game of chess with Furley. Others
were writing letters. They all turned around at Catherine’s entrance.
She held out her hands to them.

“Great news, my friends!” she exclaimed. “Light up the committee room. I
want to talk to you.”

Those who were entitled to followed her into the room across the
passage. One or two secretaries and a visitor remained outside. Six
of them seated themselves at the long table--Phineas Cross, the
Northumbrian pitman, Miles Furley, David Sands, representative of a
million Yorkshire mill-hands, Thomas Evans, the South Wales miner.

“We got a message from you, Miss Abbeway, a little time ago,” Furley
remarked. “It was countermanded, though, just as we were ready to
start.”

“Yes!” she assented. “I am sorry. I telephoned from Julian Orden’s
rooms. It was there we made the great discovery. Listen, all of you! I
have discovered the identity of Paul Fiske.”

There was a little clamour of voices. The interest was indescribable.
Paul Fiske was their cult, their master, their undeniable prophet. It
was he who had set down in letters of fire the truths which had been
struggling for imperfect expression in these men’s minds. It was Paul
Fiske who had fired them with enthusiasm for the cause which at first
had been very much like a matter of bread and cheese to them. It was
Paul Fiske who had formed their minds, who had put the great arguments
into their brains, who had armed them from head to foot with potent
reasonings. Four very ordinary men, of varying types, sincere men, all
of plebeian extraction, all with their faults, yet all united in one
purpose, were animated by that same fire of excitement. They hung over
the table towards her. She might have been the croupier and they the
gamblers who had thrown upon the table their last stake.

“In Julian Orden’s rooms,” she said, “I found a letter from the editor
of the British Review, warning him that his anonymity could not be
preserved much longer--that before many weeks had passed the world would
know that he was Paul Fiske. Here is the letter.”

She passed it around. They studied it, one by one. They were all a
little stunned.

“Julian!” Furley exclaimed, in blank amazement. “Why, he’s been pulling
my leg for more than a year!”

“The son of an Earl!” Cross gasped.

“Never mind about that. He is a democrat and honest to the backbone,”
 Catherine declared. “The Bishop will tell you so. He has known him
all his life. Think! Julian Orden has no purpose to serve, no selfish
interest to further. He has nothing to gain, everything to lose. If he
were not sincere, if those words of his, which we all remember, did not
come from his heart, where could be the excuse, the reason, for what he
stands for? Think what it means to us!”

“He is the man, isn’t he,” Sands asked mysteriously, “whom they are
looking after down yonder?”

“I don’t know where ‘down yonder’ is,” Catherine replied, “but you have
him in your power somewhere. He left his rooms last 

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