His face was dangerous for a moment. They had not yet reached the promontory which sheltered them from Dreymarsh.
“Perhaps,” he muttered, leaning malignly towards her, “I could make myself even more obnoxious.”
“Quite possibly,” she replied, “only I want to tell you this. If you come a single inch nearer to me, one of them shall shoot you.”
“Your friend or your husband, eh?” he scoffed.
She waved him on.
“I think,” she told him, “that either of them would be quite capable of ridding the world of a coward like you.”
“A coward?” he repeated.
“Precisely! Isn’t it a coward’s part to terrorise a woman?”
“I don’t want to terrorise you,” he said sulkily.
“Well, you must admit that you haven’t shown any particular desire to make yourself agreeable,” she pointed out.
He turned suddenly upon her.
“I am a fool, I know,” he declared bitterly. “I’m an awkward, nervous, miserable fool, my own worst enemy as they say of me in the Mess, turning the people against me I want to have like me, stumbling into every blunder a fool can. I’m the sort of man women make sport of, and you’ve done it for them cruelly, perfectly.”
“Captain Griffiths!” she protested. “When have I ever been anything but kind and courteous to you?”
“It isn’t your kindness I want, nor your courtesy! There’s a curse upon my tongue,” he went on desperately. “I’m not like other men. I don’t know how to say what I feel. I can’t put it into words. Every one misunderstands me. You, too! Here I rode up to you this afternoon and my heart was beating for joy, and in five minutes I had made an enemy of you. Damn that fellow Lessingham! It is all his fault!”
Without the slightest warning he brought down his hunting crop upon his horse’s flanks. The mare gave one great plunge, and he was off, riding at a furious gallop. Philippa watched him with immense relief, In the far distance she could see two little specks growing larger and larger. She hurried on towards them.
“Whatever did you do to Captain Griffiths, Mummy?” Nora demanded. “Why he passed us without looking down, galloping like a madman, and his face looked—well, what did it look like, Helen?”
Helen was gazing uneasily along the sands.
“Like a man riding for his enemy,” she declared.
CHAPTER XXVII
Table of Contents
Philippa and Helen looked at one another a little dolefully across the luncheon table.
“I supposes one misses the child,” Helen said.
“I feel too depressed for words,” Philippa admitted.
“A few days ago,” Helen reminded her companion, “we were getting all the excitement that was good for any one.”
“And a little more,” Philippa agreed. “I don’t know why things seem so flat now. We really ought to be glad that nothing terrible has happened.”
“What with Henry and Mr. Lessingham both away,” Helen continued, “and Captain Griffiths not coming near the place, we really have reverted to the normal, haven’t we? I wonder—if Mr. Lessingham has gone back.”
“I do not think so,” Philippa murmured.
Helen frowned slightly.
“Personally,” she said, with some emphasis, “I hope that he has.”
“If we are considering the personal point of view only,” Philippa retorted, “I hope that he has not.”
Helen looked her disapproval.
“I should have thought that you had had enough playing with fire,” she observed.
“One never has until one has burned one’s fingers,” Philippa sighed. “I know perfectly well what is the matter with you,” she continued severely. “You are fretting because curried chicken is Dick’s favourite dish.”
“I am not such a baby,” Helen protested. “All the same, it does make one think. I wonder—”
“I know exactly what you were going to say,” Philippa interrupted. “You were going to say that you wondered whether Mr. Lessingham would keep his promise.”
“Whether he would be able to,” Helen corrected. “It does seem so impossible, doesn’t it?”
“So does Mr. Lessingham himself,” Philippa reminded her. “It isn’t exactly a usual thing, is it, to have a perfectly charming and well-bred young man step out of a Zeppelin into your drawing-room.”
“You really believe, then,” Helen asked eagerly, “that he will be able to keep his promise?”
Philippa nodded confidently.
“Do you know,” she said, “I believe that Mr. Lessingham, by some means or another, would keep any promise he ever made. I am expecting to see Dick at any moment now, so you can get on with your lunch, dear, and not sit looking at the curry with tears in your eyes.”
“It isn’t the curry so much as the chutney,” Helen protested faintly. “He never would touch any other sort.”
“Well, I shouldn’t be surprised if he were here to finish the bottle,” Philippa declared. “I have a feeling this morning that something is going to happen.”
“How long has Nora gone away for?” Helen enquired, after a moment’s pause.
“A fortnight or three weeks,” Philippa answered. “Her grandmother wired that she would be glad to have her until Christmas.”
“Just why,” Helen asked seriously, “have you sent her away?”
Philippa toyed with her curry, and glanced around as though she regretted Mills’ absence from the room.
“I thought it best,” she said quietly. “You see, I am not quite sure what the immediate future of this menage is going to be.”
Helen leaned across the table and laid her hand upon her friend’s.
“Dear,” she sighed, “it worries me so to hear you talk like that.”
“Why?”
“Because you know perfectly well, although you profess to ignore it, that at the bottom of your heart there is no one else but Henry. It isn’t fair, you know.”
“To whom isn’t it fair?” Philippa demanded.
“To Mr. Lessingham.”
Philippa was thoughtful for a few moments.
“Perhaps,” she admitted, “that is a point of view which I have not sufficiently considered.”
Helen pressed home her advantage.
“I don’t think you realise, Philippa,” she said, “how madly in love with you the man is. In a perfectly ingenuous way, too. No one could help seeing it.”
“Then where does the unfairness come in?” Philippa asked. “It is within my power to give him all that he wants.”
“But you wouldn’t do it, Philippa. You know that you wouldn’t!” Helen objected. “You may play with the idea in your mind, but that’s just as far as you’d ever get.”
Philippa looked her friend steadily in the face. “I disagree with you, Helen,” she said. Helen set down the glass which she had been in the act of raising to her lips. It was her first really serious intimation of the tragedy which hovered over her future sister-in-law’s life. Somehow or other, Philippa had seemed, even to her, so far removed from that strenuous world of over-drugged, over-excited feminine decadence, to whom the changing of a husband or a lover is merely an incident in the day’s excitements. Philippa, with her frail and almost flowerlike beauty, her love of the wholesome ways of life, and her strong affections, represented other things. Now, for the first time, Helen was really afraid, afraid for her friend.
“But you couldn’t ever—you wouldn’t leave Henry!”
Philippa seemed to find nothing monstrous in the idea.
“That is just what I am seriously thinking of doing,” she confided.
Helen affected to laugh, but her mirth was obviously forced. Their conversation ceased perforce with the return of Mills into the room.
Then the wonderful thing happened. The windows of the dining room faced the drive to the house and both women could clearly see a motor car turn in at the gate and stop at the front door. It was obviously a hired car, as t
he driver was not in livery, but the tall, mulled-up figure in unfamiliar clothes who occupied the front seat was for the moment a mystery to them. Only Helen seemed to have some wonderful premonition of the truth, a premonition which she was afraid to admit even to herself. Her hand began to shake. Philippa looked at her in amazement.
“You look as though you had seen a ghost, Helen!” she exclaimed. “Who on earth can it be, coming at this time of the day?”
Helen was speechless, and Philippa divined at once the cause of her agitation. She sprang to her feet.
“Helen, you don’t imagine—” she gasped. “Listen!”
There was a voice in the hail—a familiar voice, though strained a little and hoarse; Mills’ decorous greetings, agitated but fervent. And then—Major Richard Felstead!
“Dick!” Helen screamed, as she threw herself into his arms. “Oh, Dick! Dick!”
It was an incoherent, breathless moment. Somehow or other, Philippa found herself sharing her brother’s embrace. Then the fire of questions and answers was presently interrupted by Mills, triumphantly bearing in a fresh dish of curry.
“What will the Major take to drink, your ladyship?” he asked.
Felstead laughed a little chokingly.
“Upon my word, there’s something wonderfully sound about Mills!” he said. “It’s a ghoulish thing to ask for in the middle of the day, isn’t it, Philippa, but can I have some champagne?”
“You can have the whole cellarful,” Philippa assured him joyously. “Be sure you bring the best, Mills.”
“The Perrier Jonet 1904, your ladyship,” was the murmured reply.
Mills’ disappearance was very brief, and in a very few moments they found themselves seated once more at the table. They sat one on either side of him, watching his glass and his plate. By degrees their questions and his answers became more intelligible.
“When did you get here?” they wanted to know.
“I arrived in Harwich about daylight this morning,” he told them; “came across from Holland. I hired a car and drove straight here.”
“When did you know you were coming home?” Helen asked.
“Only two days ago,” he replied. “I never was so surprised in my life. Even now I can’t realise my good luck. I can’t see what I’ve done. The last two months, in fact, seem to me to have been a dream. Jove!” he went on, as he drank his wine, “I never thought I should be such a pig as to care so much for eating and drinking!”
“And think what weeks of it you have before you?” Helen explained, clapping her hands. “Philippa and I will have a new interest in life—to make you fat.”
He laughed.
“It won’t be very difficult,” he promised them. “I had several months of semi-starvation before the miracle happened. It was all just the chance of having had a pal up at Magdalen who’s been serving in the German Army—Bertram Maderstrom was his name. You remember him, Philippa? He was a Swede in those days.”
“What a dear he must have been to have remembered and to have been so faithful!” Philippa observed, looking away for a moment.
“He’s a real good sort,” Felstead declared enthusiastically, “although Heaven knows why he’s turned German! He worked like a slave for me. I dare say he didn’t find it so difficult to get me better quarters and a servant, and decent food, but when they told me that I was free—well, it nearly knocked me silly.”
“The dear fellow!” Philippa murmured pensively.
“Do you remember him, either of you?” Felstead continued. “Rather good-looking he was, and a little shy, but quite a sportsman.”
“I—seem to remember,” Philippa admitted.
“The name sounds familiar,” Helen echoed. “Do have some more chutney, Dick.”
“Thanks! What a pig I am making of myself!” he observed cheerfully. “You girls will think I can’t talk about any one but Maderstrom, but the whole business beats me so completely. Of course, we were great pals, in a way, but I never thought that I was the apple of his eye, or anything of that sort. How he got the influence, too, I can’t imagine. And oh! I knew there was something else I was going to ask you girls,” Felstead went on. “Have you ever had a letter, or rather a letter each, uncensored? Just a line or two? I think I mentioned Maderstrom which I should not have been allowed to do in the ordinary prison letters.”
Felstead was helping himself to cheese, and he saw nothing of the quick glance which passed between the two women.
“Yes, we had them, Dick,” Philippa told him. “It was one afternoon—it doesn’t seem so very long ago. And oh, how thankful we were!”
Felstead nodded.
“He got them across all right, then. Tell me, did they come through Holland? What was the postmark?”
“The postmark,” Philippa repeated, a little doubtfully. “You heard what Dick asked, Helen? The postmark?”
“I don’t think there was one,” Helen replied, glancing anxiously at Philippa.
Felstead set down his glass.
“No postmark? You mean no foreign postmark, I suppose? They were posted in England, eh?”
Philippa shook her head.
“They came to us, Dick,” she said, “by hand.”
Felstead was, without a doubt, astonished. He turned round in his chair towards Philippa.
“By hand?” he repeated. “Do you mean to say that they were actually brought here by hand?”
Perhaps something in his manner warned them. Philippa laughed as she bent over his chair.
“We will tell you how they came, presently,” she declared, “but not until you have finished your lunch, drunk the last drop of that champagne, and had at least two glasses of the port that Mills has been decanting so carefully. After that we will see. Just now I have only one feeling, and I know that Helen has it, too. Nothing else matters except that we have you home again.”
Felstead patted his sister on the cheek, drew her face down to his and kissed her.
“It’s so wonderful to be at home!” he exclaimed apologetically. “But I must warn you that I am the rabidest person alive. I went out to the war with a certain amount of respect for the Germans. I have come back loathing them like vermin. I spent—but I won’t go on.”
Mills made his appearance with the decanter of port.
“I beg your ladyship’s pardon,” he said, as he filled Felstead’s glass, “but Mr. Lessingham has arrived and is in the library, waiting to see you.”
CHAPTER XXVIII
Table of Contents
To Major Richard Felstead, Mills’ announcement was without significance. For the first time he became conscious, however, of something which seemed almost like a secret understanding between his sister and his fiancée.
“Tell Mr. Lessingham I shall be with him in a minute or two, if he will kindly wait,” Philippa instructed.
“Who is Mr. Lessingham?” Richard enquired, as soon as the door had closed behind Mills. “Seems a queer time to call.”
Helen glanced at Philippa, whose lips framed a decided negative.
“Mr. Lessingham is a gentleman staying in the neighbourhood,” the latter replied. “You will probably make his acquaintance before long. Incidentally, he saved Henry’s life the other night.”
“Sounds exciting,” Richard observed. “What form of destruction was Henry courting?”
“There was a trawler shipwrecked in the storm,” Philippa explained. “You can see it from all the front windows. Henry was on board, returning from one of his fishing excursions. They were trying to find Dumble’s anchorage and were driven in on to that low ridge of rock. A rope broke, or something, they had no more rockets, and Mr. Lessingham swam out with the line.”
“Sounds like a plucky chap,” Richard admitted.
Philippa rose to her feet regretfully.
“I expect he has come to wish us good-by,” she said. “I’ll leave you with Helen, Dick. Don’t let her overfeed you. And you know where the cigars are, Helen. Take Dick into the gun room afterward
s. You’ll have it all to yourselves and there is a fire there.”
Philippa entered the library in a state of agitation for which she was glad to have some reasonable excuse. She held out both her hands to Lessingham.
“Dick is back—just arrived!” she exclaimed. “I can’t tell you how happy we are, and how grateful!”
Lessingham raised her fingers to his lips.
“I am glad,” he said simply. “Do you mean that he is in the house here, now?”
“He is in the dining room with Helen.”
Lessingham for a moment was thoughtful.
“Don’t you think,” he suggested, “that it would be better to keep us apart?”
“I was wondering,” she confessed.
“Have you told him about my bringing the letters?”
She shook her head.
“We nearly did. Then I stopped—I wasn’t sure.”
“You were wise,” he said.
“Are you wise?” she asked him quickly.
“In coming back here?”
She nodded.
“Captain Griffiths knows everything,” she reminded him. “He is simply furious because your arrest was interfered with. I really believe that he is dangerous.”
Lessingham was unmoved.
“I had to come back,” he said simply.
“Why did you go away so suddenly?”
“Well, I had to do that, too,” he replied, “only the governing causes were very different. We will speak, if you do not mind, only of the cause which has brought me back. That I believe you know already.”
Philippa was curiously afraid. She looked towards the door as though with some vague hope of escape. She realised that the necessity for decision had arrived.
“Philippa,” he went on, “do you see what this is?”
He handed her two folded slips of paper. She started. At the top of one she recognised a small photograph of herself.
“What are they?” she asked. “What does it mean?”
“They are passports for America,” he told her.
“For—for me?” she faltered.
“For you and me.”
They slipped from her fingers. He picked them up from the carpet. Her face was hidden for a moment in her hands.
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