The Great Impersonation

by E. Phillips Oppenheim

  “This is marvellously conceived,” Dominey muttered, “but what of Russia with her millions? How is it that we propose, notwithstanding her countless millions of men, to help ourselves to her richest provinces, to drive a way through the heart of her empire?”

  “This,” Seaman replied, “is where genius steps in. Russia has been ripe for a revolution any time for the last fifteen years. We have secret agents now in every city and country place and throughout the army. We shall teach Russia how to make herself a free country.”

  Dominey shivered a little with an almost involuntary repulsion. For the second time that almost satyr-like grin on Seaman’s face revolted him.

  “And what of my own work?”

  Seaman helped himself to a liqueur. He was, as a rule, a moderate man, but this was the third time he had replenished his glass since his hasty meal.

  “My brain is weary, friend,” he admitted, passing his hand over his forehead. “I have a great fatigue. The thoughts jump about. This last week has been one of fierce excitements. Everything, almost your daily life, has been planned. We shall go over it within a day or so. Meanwhile, remember this. It is our great aim to keep England out of the war.”

  “Terniloff is right, then, after all!” Dominey exclaimed.

  Seaman laughed scornfully.

  “If we want England out of the war,” he pointed out, “it is not that we desire her friendship. It is that we may crush her the more easily when Calais, Boulogne and Havre are in our hands. That will be in three months’ time. Then perhaps our attitude towards England may change a little! Now I go.”

  Dominey folded up the map with reluctance. His companion shook his head. It was curious that he, too, for the first time in his life upon the same day, addressed his host differently.

  “Baron von Ragastein,” he said, “there are six of those maps in existence. That one is for you. Lock it away and guard it as though it were your greatest treasure on earth, but when you are alone, bring it out and study it. It shall be your inspiration, it shall lighten your moments of depression, give you courage when you are in danger; it shall fill your mind with pride and wonder. It is yours.”

  Dominey folded it carefully up, crossed the room, unlocked a little safe and deposited it therein.

  “I shall guard it, according to your behest, as my greatest treasure,” he assured his departing guest, with a fervour which surprised even himself.

  Chapter XXVII

  There was something dramatic, in the most lurid sense of the word, about the brief telephone message which Dominey received, not so many hours later, from Carlton House Terrace. In a few minutes he was moving through the streets, still familiar yet already curiously changed. Men and women were going about their business as usual, but an air of stupefaction was everywhere apparent. Practically every loiterer was studying a newspaper, every chance acquaintance had stopped to confer with his fellows. War, alternately the joke and bogey of the conversationalist, stretched her grey hands over the sunlit city. Even the lightest-hearted felt a thrill of apprehension at the thought of the horrors that were to come. In a day or two all this was to be changed. People went about then counting the Russian millions; the steamroller fetish was to be evolved. The most peaceful stockbroker or shopkeeper, who had never even been to a review in his life, could make calculations of man power with a stump of pencil on the back of an old envelope, which would convince the greatest pessimist that Germany and Austria were outnumbered by at least three to one. But on this particular morning, people were too stunned for calculations. The incredible had happened. The long-discussed war—the nightmare of the nervous, the derision of the optimist—had actually materialised. The happy-go-lucky years of peace and plenty had suddenly come to an end. Black tragedy leaned over the land.

  Dominey, avoiding acquaintances as far as possible, his own mind in a curious turmoil, passed down St. James’s Street and along Pall Mall and presented himself at Carlton House Terrace. Externally, the great white building, with its rows of flower boxes, showed no signs of undue perturbation. Inside, however, the anteroom was crowded with callers, and it was only by the intervention of Terniloff’s private secretary, who was awaiting him, that Dominey was able to reach the inner sanctum where the Ambassador was busy dictating letters. He broke off immediately his visitor was announced and dismissed every one, including his secretaries. Then he locked the door.

  “Von Ragastein,” he groaned, “I am a broken man!”

  Dominey grasped his hand sympathetically. Terniloff seemed to have aged years even in the last few hours.

  “I sent for you,” he continued, “to say farewell, to say farewell and to make a confession. You were right, and I was wrong. It would have been better if I had remained and played the country farmer on my estates. I was never shrewd enough to see until now that I have been made the cat’s-paw of the very men whose policy I always condemned.”

  His visitor still remained silent. There was so little that he could say.

  “I have worked for peace,” Terniloff went on, “believing that my country wanted peace. I have worked for peace with honourable men who were just as anxious as I was to secure it. But all the time those for whom I laboured were making faces behind my back. I was nothing more nor less than their tool. I know now that nothing in this world could have hindered what is coming.”

  “Every one will at least realise,” Dominey reminded him, “that you did your best for peace.”

  “That is one reason why I sent for you,” was the agitated reply. “Not long ago I spoke of a little volume, a diary which I have been keeping of my work in this country. I promised to show it to you. You have asked me for it several times lately. I am going to show it to you now. It is written up to yesterday. It will tell you of all my efforts and how they were foiled. It is an absolutely faithful narrative of my work here and the English response to it.”

  The Prince crossed the room, unlocked one of the smaller safes, which stood against the side of the wall, withdrew a morocco-bound volume the size of a small portfolio, and returned to Dominey.

  “I beg you,” he said earnestly, “to read this with the utmost care and to await my instructions with regard to it. You can judge, no doubt,” he went on a little bitterly, “why I give it into your keeping. Even the Embassy here is not free from our own spies, and the existence of these memoirs is known. The moment I reach Germany, their fate is assured. I am a German and a patriot, although my heart is bitter against those who are bringing this blot upon our country. For that reason, these memoirs must be kept in a safe place until I see a good use for them.”

  “You mean if the governing party in Germany should change?”

  “Precisely! They would then form at once my justification, and place English diplomacy in such a light before the saner portion of my fellow countrymen that an honourable peace might be rendered possible. Study them carefully, Von Ragastein. Perhaps even your own allegiance to the Party you serve may waver for a moment as you read.”

  “I serve no Party,” Dominey said quietly, “only my Country.”

  Terniloff sighed.

  “Alas! there is no time for us to enter into one of our old arguments on the ethics of government. I must send you away, Von Ragastein. You have a terrible task before you. I am bound to wish you Godspeed. For myself I shall not raise my head again until I have left England.”

  “There is no other commission?” Dominey asked. “No other way in which I can serve you?”

  “None,” Terniloff answered sadly. “I am permitted to suffer no inconveniences. My departure is arranged for as though I were royalty. Yet believe me, my friend, every act of courtesy and generosity which I receive in these moments bites into my heart. Farewell!”

  Dominey found a taxicab in Pall Mall and drove back to Berkeley Square. He found Rosamund with a little troop of dogs, just entering the gardens, and crossed to her side.

&nb
sp; “Dear,” he asked, taking her arm, “would you mind very much coming down to Norfolk for a few days?”

  “With you?” she asked quickly.

  “Yes! I want to be in retreat for a short time. There are one or two things I must settle before I take up some fresh work.”

  “I should love it,” she declared enthusiastically. “London is getting so hot, and every one is so excited.”

  “I shall order the touring car at three o’clock,” Dominey told her. “We shall get home about nine. Parkins and your maid can go down by train. Does that suit you?”

  “Delightfully!”

  He took her arm and they paced slowly along the hot walk.

  “Rosamund dear,” he said, “the time has come which many people have been dreading. We are at war.”

  “I know,” she murmured.

  “You and I have had quite a happy time together, these last few months,” he went on, “even though there is still that black cloud between us. I have tried to treat you as kindly and tenderly as though I were really your husband and you were indeed my wife.”

  “You’re not going away?” she cried, startled. “I couldn’t bear that! No one could ever be so sweet as you have been to me.”

  “Dear,” he said, “I want you to think—of your husband—of Everard. He was a soldier once for a short time, was he not? What do you think he would have done now that this terrible war has come?”

  “He would have done what you will do,” she answered, with the slightest possible tremor in her tone. “He would have become a soldier again, he would have fought for his country.”

  “And so must I—fight for my country,” he declared. “That is why I must leave you for an hour now while I make some calls. I shall be back to luncheon. Directly afterwards we must start. I have many things to arrange first, though. Life is not going to be very easy for the next few days.”

  She held on to his arm. She seemed curiously reluctant to let him go.

  “Everard,” she said, “when we are at Dominey shall I be able to see Doctor Harrison?”

  “Of course,” he assured her.

  “There is something I want to say to him,” she confided, “something I want to ask you, too. Are you the same person, Everard, when you are in town as when you are in the country?”

  He was a little taken aback at her question—asked, too, with such almost plaintive seriousness. The very aberration it suggested seemed altogether denied by her appearance. She was wearing a dress of black and white muslin, a large black hat, Paris shoes. Her stockings, her gloves, all the trifling details of her toilette, were carefully chosen, and her clothes themselves gracefully and naturally worn. Socially, too, she had been amazingly successful. Only the week before, Caroline had come to him with a little shrug of the shoulders.

  “I have been trying to be kind to Rosamund,” she said, “and finding out instead how unnecessary it is. She is quite the most popular of the younger married women in our set. You don’t deserve such luck, Everard.”

  “You know the proverb about the old roué,” he had replied.

  His mind had wandered for a moment. He realised Rosamund’s question with a little start.

  “The same person, dear?” he repeated. “I think so. Don’t I seem so to you?”

  She shook her head.

  “I am not sure,” she answered, a little mysteriously. “You see, in the country I still remember sometimes that awful night when I so nearly lost my reason. I have never seen you look as you looked that night.”

  “You would rather not go back, perhaps?”

  “That is the strange part of it,” she replied. “There is nothing in the world I want so much to do. There’s an empty taxi, dear,” she added, as they reached the gate. “I shall go in and tell Justine about the packing.”

  Chapter XXVIII

  Within the course of the next few days, a strange rumour spread through Dominey and the district,—from the farm labourer to the farmer, from the school children to their homes, from the village post-office to the neighbouring hamlets. A gang of woodmen from a neighbouring county, with an engine and all the machinery of their craft, had started to work razing to the ground everything in the shape of tree or shrub at the north end of the Black Wood. The matter of the war was promptly forgotten. Before the second day, every man, woman and child in the place had paid an awed visit to the outskirts of the wood, had listened to the whirr of machinery, had gazed upon the great bridge of planks leading into the wood, had peered, in the hope of some strange discovery, into the tents of the men who were camping out. The men themselves were not communicative, and the first time the foreman had been known to open his mouth was when Dominey walked down to discuss progress, on the morning after his arrival.

  “It’s a dirty bit of work, sir,” he confided. “I don’t know as I ever came across a bit of woodland as was so utterly, hopelessly rotten. Why, the wood crumbles when you touch it, and the men have to be within reach of one another the whole of the time, though we’ve a matter of five hundred planks down there.”

  “Come across anything unusual yet?”

  “We ain’t come across anything that isn’t unusual so far, sir. My men are all wearing extra leggings to keep them from being bitten by them adders—as long as my arm, some on ’em. And there’s fungus there which, when you touch it, sends out a smell enough to make a strong man faint. We killed a cat the first day, as big and as fierce as a young tigress. It’s a queer job, sir.”

  “How long will it take?”

  “Matter of three weeks, sir, and when we’ve got the timber out you’ll be well advised to burn it. It’s not worth a snap of the fingers.—Begging your pardon, sir,” the man went on, “the old lady in the distance there hangs about the whole of the time. Some of my men are half scared of her.”

  Dominey swung around. On a mound a little distance away in the park, Rachael Unthank was standing. In her rusty black clothes, unrelieved by any trace of colour, with white cheeks and strange eyes, even in the morning light she was a repellent figure. Dominey strolled across to her.

  “You see, Mrs. Unthank,” he began—

  She interrupted him. Her skinny hand was stretched out towards the wood.

  “What are those men doing, Sir Everard Dominey?” she demanded. “What is your will with the wood?”

  “I am carrying out a determination I came to in the winter,” Dominey replied. “Those men are going to cut and hew their way from one end of the Black Wood to the other, until not a tree or a bush remains upright. As they cut, they burn. Afterwards, I shall have it drained. We may live to see a field of corn there, Mrs. Unthank.”

  “You will dare to do this?” she asked hoarsely.

  “Will you dare to tell me why I should not, Mrs. Unthank?”

  She relapsed into silence, and Dominey passed on. But that night, as Rosamund and he were lingering over their dessert, enjoying the strange quiet and the wonderful breeze which crept in at the open window, Parkins announced a visitor.

  “Mrs. Unthank is in the library, sir,” he announced. “She would be glad if you could spare her five minutes.”

  Rosamund shivered slightly but nodded as Dominey glanced towards her enquiringly.

  “Don’t let me see her, please,” she begged. “You must go, of course.—Everard!”

  “Yes, dear?”

  “I know what you are doing out there, although you have never said a word to me about it,” she continued, with an odd little note of passion in her tone. “Don’t let her persuade you to stop. Let them cut and burn and hew till there isn’t room for a mouse to hide. You promise?”

  “I promise,” he answered.

  Mrs. Unthank was making every effort to keep under control her fierce discomposure. She rose as Dominey entered the room and dropped an old-fashioned curtsey.

  “Well, Mrs. Unthank,” he enquired,
“what can I do for you?”

  “It’s about the wood again, sir,” she confessed. “I can’t bear it. All night long I seem to hear those axes, and the calling of the men.”

  “What is your objection, Mrs. Unthank, to the destruction of the Black Wood?” Dominey asked bluntly. “It is nothing more nor less than a noisome pest-hole. Its very presence there, after all that she has suffered, is a menace to Lady Dominey’s nerves. I am determined to sweep it from the face of the earth.”

  The forced respect was already beginning to disappear from her manner.

  “There’s evil will come to you if you do, Sir Everard,” she declared doggedly.

  “Plenty of evil has come to me from that wood as it is,” he reminded her.

  “You mean to disturb the spirit of him whose body you threw there?” she persisted.

  Dominey looked at her calmly. Some sort of evil seemed to have lit in her face. Her lips had shrunk apart, showing her yellow teeth. The fire in her narrowed eyes was the fire of hatred.

  “I am no murderer, Mrs. Unthank,” he said. “Your son stole out from the shadow of that wood, attacked me in a cowardly manner, and we fought. He was mad when he attacked me, he fought like a madman, and, notwithstanding my superior strength, I was glad to get away alive. I never touched his body. It lay where he fell. If he crept into the wood and died there, then his death was not at my door. He sought for my life as I never sought for his.”

  “You’d done him wrong,” the woman muttered.

  “That again is false. His passion for Lady Dominey was uninvited and unreciprocated. Her only feeling concerning him was one of fear; that the whole countryside knows. Your son was a lonely, a morose and an ill-living man, Mrs. Unthank. If either of us had murder in our hearts, it was he, not I. And as for you,” Dominey went on, after a moment’s pause, “I think that you have had your revenge, Mrs. Unthank. It was you who nursed my wife into insanity. It was you who fed her with the horror of your son’s so-called spirit. I think that if I had stayed away another two years, Lady Dominey would have been in a mad-house today.”