“Do you know you are almost offensive, Philippa?” her husband said quietly.
“I want to be,” she retorted. “I should like you to feel that I am. In any case, this will probably be the last conversation I shall hold with you on the subject.”
“Well, thank God for that, anyway!” he observed, strolling to the chimneypiece and selecting a pipe from a rack. “I think you’ve said about enough.”
“I haven’t finished,” she told him ominously.
“Then for heaven’s sake get on with it and let’s have it over,” he begged.
“Oh, you’re impossible!” Philippa exclaimed bitterly. “Listen. I give you one chance more. Tell me the truth? Is there anything in your health of which I do not know? Is there any possible explanation of your extraordinary behaviour which, for some reason or other, you have kept to yourself? Give me your whole confidence.”
Sir Henry, for a moment, was serious enough. He stood looking down at her a little wistfully.
“My dear,” he told her, “I have nothing to say except this. You are my very precious wife. I have loved you and trusted you since the day of our marriage. I am content to go on loving and trusting you, even though things should come under my notice which I do not understand. Can’t you accept me the same way?”
Philippa, momentarily uneasy, was nevertheless rebellious.
“Accept you the same way? How can I! There is nothing in my life to compare in any way with the tragedy of your—”
She paused, as though unwilling to finish the sentence. He waited patiently, however, for her to proceed.
“Of my what?”
Philippa compromised.
“Lethargy,” she pronounced triumphantly.
“An excellent word,” he murmured.
“It is too mild a one, but you are my husband,” she remarked.
“That reminds me,” he said quietly. “You are my wife.”
“I know it,” she admitted, “but I am also a woman, and there are limits to my endurance. If you can give me no explanation of your behaviour, Henry, if you really have no intention of changing it, then there is only one course left open for me.”
“That sounds rather alarming—what is it?” he demanded.
Philippa lifted her head a little. This was the pronouncement towards which she had been leading.
“From to-day,” she declared, “I cease to be your wife.”
His fingers paused in the manipulation of the tobacco with which he was filling his pipe. He turned and looked at her.
“You what?”
“I cease to be your wife.”
“How do you manage that?” he asked.
“Don’t jest,” she begged. “It hurts me so. What I mean is surely plain enough. I will continue to live under your roof if you wish it, or I am perfectly willing to go back to Wood Norton. I will continue to bear your name because I must, but the other ties between us are finished.”
“You don’t mean this, Philippa,” he said gravely.
“But I do mean it,” she insisted. “I mean every word I have spoken. So far as I am concerned, Henry, this is your last chance.”
There was a knock at the door. Mills entered with a note upon a salver. Sir Henry took it up, glanced questioningly at his wife, and tore open the envelope.
“There will be no answer, Mills,” he said.
The man withdrew. Sir Henry read the few lines thoughtfully:—
Police-station, Dreymarsh
SIR,
According to enquiries made I find that Mr. Hamar Lessingham arrived at the Hotel this evening in time for dinner. His luggage arrived by rail yesterday. It is presumed that he came by motor-car, but there is no car in the garage, nor any mention of one. His room was taken for him by Miss Fairclough, ringing up for Lady Cranston about seven o’clock.
Respectfully yours,
JOHN HAYLOCK.
“Is your note of interest?” Philippa enquired.
“In a sense, yes,” he replied, thrusting it into his waistcoat pocket. “I presume we can consider our late subject of conversation finished with?”
“I have nothing more to say,” she pronounced.
“Very well, then,” her husband agreed, “let us select another topic. This time, supposing I choose?”
“You are welcome.”
“Let us converse, then, about Mr. Hamar Lessingham.”
Philippa had taken up her work. Her fingers ceased their labours, but she did not look up.
“About Mr. Hamar Lessingham,” she repeated. “Rather a limited subject, I am afraid.”
“I am not so sure,” he said thoughtfully. “For instance, who is he?”
“I have no idea,” she replied. “Does it matter? He was at college with Richard, and he has been a visitor at Wood Norton. That is all that we know. Surely it is sufficient for us to offer him any reasonable hospitality?”
“I am not disputing it,” Sir Henry assured her. “On the face of it, it seems perfectly reasonable that you should be civil to him. On the other hand, there are one or two rather curious points about his coming here just now.”
“Really?” Philippa murmured indifferently, bending a little lower over her work.
“In the first place,” her husband continued, “how did he arrive here?”
“For all I know,” she replied, “he may have walked.”
“A little unlikely. Still, he didn’t come from London by either of the evening trains, and it seems that you didn’t take his rooms for him until about seven o’clock, before which time he hadn’t been to the hotel. So, you see, one is driven to wonder how the mischief he did get here.”
“I took his rooms?” Philippa repeated, with a sudden little catch at her heart.
“Some one from here rang up, didn’t they?” Sir Henry went on carelessly. “I gathered that we were introducing him at the hotel.”
“Where did you hear that?” she demanded.
He shrugged his shoulders, but avoided answering the question.
“I have no doubt,” he continued, “that the whole subject of Mr. Hamar Lessingham is scarcely worth discussing. Yet he does seem to have arrived here under a little halo of coincidence.”
“I am afraid I have scarcely appreciated that,” Philippa remarked; “in fact, his coming here has seemed to me the most ordinary thing in the world. After all, although one scarcely remembers that since the war, this is a health resort, and the man has been ill.”
“Quite right,” Sir Henry agreed. “You are not going to bed, dear?”
Philippa had folded up her work. She stood for a moment upon the hearth-rug. The little hardness which had tightened her mouth had disappeared, her eyes had softened.
“May I say just one word more,” she begged, “about our previous—our only serious subject of conversation? I have tried my best since we were married, Henry, to make you happy.”
“You know quite well,” he assured her, “that you have succeeded.”
“Grant me one favour, then,” she pleaded. “Give up your fishing expedition to-morrow, go back to London by the first train and let me write to Lord Rayton. I am sure he would do something for you.”
“Of course he’d do something!” Her husband groaned. “I should get a censorship in Ireland, or a post as instructor at Portsmouth.”
“Wouldn’t you rather take either of those than nothing?” she asked, “than go on living the life you are living now?”
“To be perfectly frank with you, Philippa, I wouldn’t,” he declared bluntly. “What on earth use should I be in a land appointment? Why, no one could read my writing, and my nautical science is entirely out of date. Why a cadet at Osborne could floor me in no time.”
“You refuse to let me write, then?” she persisted.
“Absolutely.”
“You intend to go on that fishing expedition with Jimmy Dumble to-morrow?”
“Wouldn’t miss it for anything,” he confessed.
Philippa was suddenly white with ang
er.
“Henry, I’ve finished,” she declared, holding out her hand to keep him away from her. “I’ve finished with you entirely. I would rather be married to an enemy who was fighting honourably for his country than to you. What I have said, I mean. Don’t come near me. Don’t try to touch me.”
She swept past him on her way to the door.
“Not even a good-night kiss?” he asked, stooping down.
She looked him in the eyes.
“I am not a child,” she said scornfully.
He closed the door after her. For a moment he remained as though undecided whether to follow or not. His face had softened with her absence. Finally, however, he turned away with a little shrug of the shoulders, threw himself into his easy-chair and began to smoke furiously.
The telephone bell disturbed his reflection. He rose at once and took up the receiver.
“Yes, this is 19, Dreymarsh. Trunk call? All right, I am here.”
He waited until another voice came to him faintly.
“Cranston?”
“Speaking.”
“That’s right. The message is Odino Berry, you understand? O-d-i-n-o b-e-r-r-y.”
“I’ve got it,” Sir Henry replied. “Good night!” He hung up the receiver, crossed the room to his desk, unlocked one of the drawers, and produced a black memorandum book, secured with a brass lock. He drew a key from his watch chain, opened the book, and ran his fingers down the O’s.
“Odino,” he muttered to himself. “Here it is: ‘We have trustworthy information from Berlin.’ Now Berry.” He turned back. “‘You are being watched by an enemy secret service agent.’”
He relocked the cipher book and replaced it in the desk. Then he strolled over to his easy-chair and helped himself to a whisky and soda from the tray which Mills had just arranged upon the sideboard.
“We have trustworthy information from Berlin,” he repeated to himself, “that you are being watched by an enemy secret service agent.”
CHAPTER VIII
Table of Contents
“Tell me, Mr. Lessingham,” Philippa insisted, “exactly what are you thinking of? You looked so dark and mysterious from the ridge below that I’ve climbed up on purpose to ask you.”
Lessingham held out his hand to steady her. They were standing on a sharp spur of the cliffs, the north wind blowing in their faces, thrashing into little flecks of white foam the sea below, on which the twilight was already resting. For a moment or two neither of them could speak.
“I was thinking of my country,” he confessed. “I was looking through the shadows there, right across the North Sea.”
“To Germany?”
He shook his head.
“Further away—to Sweden.”
“I forgot,” she murmured. “You looked as though you were posing for a statue of some one in exile,” she observed. “Come, let us go a little lower down—unless you want to stay here and be blown to pieces.”
“I was on my way back to the hotel,” he answered quickly, as he followed her lead, “but to tell you the truth I was feeling a little lonely.”
“That,” she declared, “is your own fault. I asked you to come to Mainsail Haul whenever you felt inclined.”
“As I have felt inclined ever since the evening I arrived,” he remarked with a smile, “you might, perhaps, by this time have had a little too much of me.”
“On the contrary,” she told him, “I quite expected you yesterday afternoon, to tell me how you like the place and what you have been doing. So you were thinking about—over there?” she added, moving her head seawards.
“Over there absorbs a great deal of one’s thoughts,” he confessed, “and the rest of them have been playing me queer tricks.”
“Well, I should like to hear about the first half,” she insisted.
“Do you know,” he replied, “there are times when even now this war seems to me like an unreal thing, like something I have been reading about, some wild imagining of Shelley or one of the unrestrainable poets. I can’t believe that millions of the flower of Germany’s manhood and yours have perished helplessly, hopelessly, cruelly. And France—poor decimated France!”
“Well, Germany started the war, you know,” she reminded him.
“Did she?” he answered. “I sometimes wonder. Even now I fancy, if the official papers of every one of the nations lay side by side, with their own case stated from their own point of view, even you might feel a little confused about that. Still, I am going to be very honest with you. I think myself that Germany wanted war.”
“There you are, then,” she declared triumphantly. “The whole thing is her responsibility.”
“I do not quite go so far as that,” he protested. “You see, the world is governed by great natural laws. As a snowball grows larger with rolling, so it takes up more room. As a child grows out of its infant clothes, it needs the vestments of a youth and then a man. And so with Germany. She grew and grew until the country could not hold her children, until her banks could not contain her money, until she stretched her arms out on every side and felt herself stifled. Germany came late into the world and found it parcelled out, but had she not a right to her place? She made herself great. She needed space.”
“Well,” Philippa observed, “you couldn’t suppose that other nations were going to give up what they had, just because she wanted their possessions, could you?”
“Perhaps not,” he admitted. “And yet, you see, the immutable law comes in here. The stronger must possess—not only the stronger by arms, mind, but by intellect, by learning, by proficiency in science, by utilitarianism. The really cruel part, the part I was thinking of then, as I looked out across the sea, is that this crude and miserable resort to arms should be necessary.”
“If only Germans themselves were as broad-minded and reasonable as you,” Philippa sighed, “one feels that there might be some hope for the future!”
“I am not alone,” he assured her, “but, you see, all over Germany there is spread like a spider’s web the lay religion of the citizen—devotion to the Government, blind obedience to the Kaiser. Independent thought has made Germany great in science, in political economy, in economics. But independent thought is never turned towards her political destinies. Those are shaped for her. For good or for evil her children have learnt obedience.”
They were descending the hillside now. At their feet lay the little town, black and silent.
“You have helped me to understand a little,” Philippa said. “You put things so gently and yet so clearly. Now tell me, will you not, how it is that you, who are a Swede by birth, are bearing arms for Germany?”
“That is very simple,” he confessed. “My mother was a German, and when she died she bequeathed to me large estates in Bavaria, and a very considerable fortune. These I could never have inherited unless I had chosen to do my military service in Germany. My family is an impoverished one, and I have brothers and sisters dependent upon me. Under the circumstances, hesitation on my part was impossible.”
“But when the war came?” she queried.
He looked at her in surprise.
“What was there left for me then?” he demanded. “Naturally I heard nothing but the voice of those whom I had sworn to obey. I was in that mad rush through Belgium. I was wounded at Maubeuge, or else I should have followed hard on the heels of that wonderful retreat of yours. As it was, I lay for many months in hospital. I joined again—shall I confess it?—almost unwillingly. The bloodthirstiness of it all sickened me. I fought at Ypres, but I think that it was something of the courage of despair, of black misery. I was wounded again and decorated. I suppose I shall never be fit for the front again. I tried to turn to account some of my knowledge of England and English life. Then they sent me here.”
“Here, of all places in the world!” Philippa repeated wonderingly. “Just look at us! We have a single line of railway, a perfectly straightforward system of roads, the ordinary number of soldiers being trained, no mysteries,
no industries—nothing. What terrible scheme are you at work upon, Mr. Lessingham?”
He smiled.
“Between you and me,” he confided, “I am not at all sure that I am not here on a fool’s errand—at least I thought so when I arrived.”
She glanced up at him.
“And why not now?”
He made no answer, but their eyes met and Philippa looked hurriedly away. There was a moment’s queer, strained silence. Before them loomed up the outline of Mainsail Haul.
“You will come in and have some tea, won’t you?” she invited.
“If I may. Believe me,” he added, “it has only been a certain diffidence that has kept me away so long.”
She made no reply, and they entered the house together. They found Helen and Nora, with three or four young men from the Depot, having tea in the drawing-room. Lessingham slipped very easily into the pleasant little circle. If a trifle subdued, his quiet manners, and a sense of humour which every now and then displayed itself, were most attractive.
“Wish you’d come and dine with us and meet our colonel, sir,” Harrison asked him. “He was at Magdalen a few years after Major Felstead, and I am sure you’d find plenty to talk about.”
“I am quite sure that we should,” Lessingham replied. “May I come, perhaps, towards the end of next week? I am making most strenuous efforts to lead an absolutely quiet life here.”
“Whenever you like, sir. We sha’n’t be able to show you anything very wild in the way of dissipation. Vintage port and a decent cigar are the only changes we can make for guests.”
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