“If you’re quite satisfied about the genuineness of the ankle, Von Posen, I wish you would tell your Johnny here to tie it up neatly again, so that I can properly enjoy the honour of an interview with His Imperial Highness.”
Prince Waldemar came across to him, and stirred him contemptuously with the toe of his boot.
“Stand up when I approach you, you English swine. Gott strafe England!”
“Glad to see you’re aware that you won’t make much of a hand at the strafeing alone,” Rupert-George said. He dragged himself up by the help of the wall and stood propping himself against it, with his hands behind him.
Prince Waldemar looked him up and down, with a smile broadening his mouth, but an unpleasant gleam in his pale eyes.
“Now, you cursed English officer, we will at last settle accounts, you and I.”
“All right,” Rupert-George agreed without excitement.
“I learn you smashed my car about two miles from here.”
“Your shots, you know,” Cartaret interposed.
“About two miles from here, where my fools managed to lose sight of you. You were seen to drop out of the car alone, and you wished it to be thought you were alone then, eh? But I’m not a fool-headed swine of an Englishman, my friend, I assure you.”
“Really, your Imperial Highness need not tell me that,” said Cartaret politely.
“You were, and are, scouting ahead, of course; but you were going to join the girls not so far away.”
(Then it was only Rupert-George whom Von Posen had seen through the grating; Gill took that in.)
“Deny it! but I observe that you’ve gone pretty white about the gills since I had you there. Feel like sitting down, don’t you, Captain Cartaret of the British Army?”
Rupert-George took a seat upon the cask with promptitude.
“Much obliged to your Imperial Highness. A smashed ankle does make sitting more comfortable than standing.”
Waldemar just glanced at his aide-de-camp. “Show him what I mean, Fritz.”
Gill saw Captain von Posen spring upon the prisoner, and, holding him down with a hand on either shoulder, hack at his wounded ankle mercilessly, and with manifest satisfaction in the task. Cartaret caught his breath, and his good-looking face turned a patchy grey colour.
“Now perhaps you’ll understand that I mean business,” the Prince said, lighting a cigarette from the stump of the old one. “That will do, Fritz—oh, it’s no good fainting, Cartaret; you won’t get off that way, I promise you.”
“Who’s talking about fainting?” Rupert-George inquired, after a moment’s pause, during which Gillian experienced a sick wonder which side he would fall.
Von Posen hauled him roughly to his feet, and he toppled over limply against the aide-de-camp, his hands shooting out helplessly to either side, as though in an effort to stop himself.
Even from where she crouched Gillian could see the glitter of Carina’s ring; she could not be surprised that Prince Waldemar saw it too.
“Himmel! what’s that?” he cried, and, as Von Posen let the prisoner fall to the ground in a heap, the Prince bent over him, and lifted the limp hand, swollen and discoloured by the strain of so much strenuous use before the wrist had at all recovered from the wound.
The fingers were swollen too; the ring that bound Captain Cartaret to Carina of Insterburg was wedged into the flesh.
“It is a wedding ring. See the finger!” Waldemar said, savagely, at last. “Do you see that, Von Posen; it is undoubtedly a wedding ring. He has then married her; these English are the very devil!”
“Well, he is in your hands now,” hinted Fritz von Posen.
“True, but the Grand-Duchess is not; and he has married her. Thunder of Heaven, but I’ll make him pay for that presumption. Bring him round, Fritz!”
“There is no water,” grumbled Von Posen; but he brought Cartaret round by the simple expedient of burning matches under his nostrils till he stirred and groaned.
“You can listen to me lying down,” Waldemar told him, with a neatly-booted foot planted against his chest. “I don’t want you fainting again—at least not yet.”
“If it’s to be a monologue of any length, may I trouble Captain von Posen to return my brandy flask?” suggested Rupert-George.
“No, you mayn’t,” the Captain told him brutally. “Do you suppose I have forgotten that morning in August, or last night, you Englishman?”
“Well, there was something to remember, wasn’t there?” Cartaret agreed, and received a resounding smack across the face for his reward.
“That will do, Fritz; I want to talk to him,” said Waldemar. “Now, Cartaret, you’ve been pretty considerably in my way on more than one occasion, and I don’t forget any more than Von Posen here. You’ll need to be uncommonly careful unless you want a good more than you got just now. That’s not an empty threat, you know; personally I should quite enjoy seeing you wriggle.”
“It’s a matter of taste, isn’t it?” Rupert-George said, with outward politeness, but a twist of contempt in his voice.
The Prince stood right over his prisoner, looking down at him in a way that made Gill feel terribly nervous.
“What’s that on your finger?”
“Adipose tissue—do you call it that when the thing is swollen, by the way?”
“Look out, Cartaret! No, don’t touch him yet, Fritz. … What is the ring?”
“If you particularly want to know, it’s a wedding-ring,” Rupert-George informed him.
“You dare say that to me?”
“Certainly. The Grand-Duchess has done me the very great honour of becoming my wife.”
“Another item added to your bill; it’s mounting up pretty fast, I can tell you, you cursed Englishman! (A minute, Fritz!) Not that the marriage can hold water for a moment.”
“Don’t be anxious. It was naturally my care to see that everything was done in due order,” Rupert-George assured him.
“Say that again!”
“All right! I should wish you to be quite clear on the subject. Everything was done in …”
Gill only saw the Prince bend down to his victim, and did not see what happened. But she heard the sentence stop, with a horribly suggestive jerk, and there was a moment’s silence before Cartaret picked up the “due order” in a voice that had slightly changed its pitch.
“That nearly fetched a squeak out, didn’t it?” sneered the Prince, and Gillian fizzled furiously. How much longer was this horrible examination to go on? It appeared that Waldemar was under the impression that it had not yet begun.
“We’ll get to business now,” he said, “and we’ll begin by having that ring off him, Von Posen.”
“Allow me to remind your Imperial Highness that forcing the ring from one contracting party cannot in any way annul the marriage,” Cartaret observed, as Fritz von Posen seized his hand.
“I’ll have the Grand-Duchess’ off before we’re many hours older, I promise you,” Waldemar said boastfully. “Hurry with his, Fritz.”
Gillian, unable to help gazing in a sort of fascinated horror, saw Von Posen wrestle with the ring with such force as to actually drag the victim along the floor towards her, and certainly to dislocate the finger.
Cartaret caught a projecting stone in the wall beside the wood-stack to steady himself; and, with its help, got into a sitting position, when Von Posen stopped to rest, breathless and cursing.
“I don’t think you can do it with the finger that size,” he observed, in the tone of one offering impartial advice on a matter in which he has personally no concern.
“Very well, get a knife, Fritz; or stay, a pair of wire-cutters will do the trick, and we’ll have the ring off with the finger,” Waldemar said. “Send one of your fools for a pair. And you had better let your tongue move more easily than the ring has, Cartaret, or you may find your ears and nose follow your finger, and I doubt if you would find the pretty Grand-Duchess so ready to kiss you then.”
Gill felt suddenly as though she were
going to choke or scream, or else be deadly sick. She got hold of herself with infinite difficulty.
She could see Rupert-George a good deal better now, and she found herself noticing afresh how good-looking he was. His face was in profile, and she saw, dully, the fine clean moulding of his chin and the crisp way in which his close-cut brown hair grew above his ears. And Prince Waldemar was threatening to mutilate him—horribly.
“We are not in the Opera-House now, Englishman!” Waldemar had dropped from a sneer to utter savagery. “You are my prisoner and I intend you to tell me where you have hidden the Grand-Duchess, and also to swear that you will sign a paper nullifying this absurd contract. If you refuse—well, I shall lay hands on the runaway in any case, and we will see what she thinks of being tied to what the wire-cutters have left of you.”
Gill saw Cartaret’s eyes harden a little; otherwise he gave no sign of having listened.
“Do you hear? Answer!” Waldemar demanded, and Rupert-George spoke then, though still very quietly.
“Right. But it’s rather unnecessary to say ‘Go to hell!’—and that’s really all that I have to say.”
The two stolid soldiers who stood at attention between the prisoner and the door permitted themselves a slow appreciative smile.
Captain von Posen glanced at his superior for instructions. Prince Waldemar’s grin was a good deal more pronounced than Gill had seen it yet.
“That your tone? Excellent! That means I pay my debts! Fritz, send one of those fools for a pair of wire-cutters, and he had better bring a surgeon at the same time. We won’t kill you—yet,” he added, turning again to his prisoner. “It is of course well known that we never kill or ill-treat a prisoner, but it is possible that if you continue obstinate you may die—of exhaustion—on your way to the Internment Camp.”
Gill saw Von Posen cross the big room to execute the Prince’s order, but she had not much attention to spare for anyone but Captain Cartaret.
He was sitting back against the wall, his head resting against the damp stones, so close that she could almost have touched his hair by putting her hand through the stack.
She couldn’t help thinking that if Prince Waldemar hoped for some amusement from contemplating his victim he was doomed to be very much disappointed. There was no appearance of putting on indifference about Rupert-George; he was just natural.
Gill thought with admiration that she could not have done it. She might—she hoped she would—have refused to betray Carina, but she could not have answered Waldemar as Cartaret had done, or have managed to look for a minute as though she were thinking about something else, not wire-cutters.
Something must be done to save him—but what? To let Carina know his danger? Every instinct in Gillian said a decided “no” to that. She beat her brains desperately, but there was no help to be found anywhere, and all the while the precious seconds were racing by, each one bringing nearer the return of the soldiers, with the wire-cutters.
Prince Waldemar was lighting one of his everlasting cigarettes. He had thrown away the stump of the last one and stopped smoking altogether for a few moments, in the exigencies of his final conversation with Cartaret. Now he was trying to light the new one with a match which flickered in the draughts that swept the cellar.
He was forced to puff a good deal to get it to light at all; Gill watched him with a queer detached sort of attention. Puff—puff—the red light glowed for a moment … went back to a mere spark … glowed steadily again.
“It’s rather like signalling,” she thought vaguely to herself, and then a thought came tumbling anyhow into her mind that wasn’t vague at all.
The English were so near, so very near, and the village was at a salient, and if they only knew, surely they would make a rush to the rescue!
Gillian’s ideas of warfare were rather uncertain, but she did know that a S.O.S. signal is never sent out in vain, when there are Englishmen to man the lifeboat, so to speak.
S.O.S. Yes, that was the signal which a wounded soldier had taught her in the hospital at Chardille, because it was so easy: three dots, three dashes, and three dots again; and if you did it with a flash lamp, it could be seen from a long way off.
Captain von Posen hadn’t taken away Cartaret’s flash lamp when he took his silver flask. From where she crouched Gill could see it sticking out of Rupert-George’s pocket; but he was a prisoner, down in a cellar, and there was no signalling from here. But, of course, there was an upstairs to this house, and she herself was not a prisoner, and there were now—just now—no soldiers guarding the door. They might come back at any moment, and in the meantime there were Prince Waldemar and his aide-de-camp, but they were occupied with Captain Cartaret, and there was a chance, a remote chance certainly, that a person might manage to crawl round the back of the wood-stack where there was a little space between it and the wall, and skirt the wall behind them in stockinged feet, without attracting their attention for the few feet between wood-stack and door.
Gill wondered desperately whether she could do it—and then quite suddenly she knew she must, because—her ear caught a sound in the passage. She knew what it must be. Carina was coming back, and Carina would never allow Cartaret to sacrifice himself for her, and Gill had plighted her troth to Carina, and Carina needed help as she had never needed it before. Gill put a cautious hand out towards Rupert-George’s pocket, feeling all the while as though Waldemar must hear the wood crackle; but he had turned aside to grumble to Von Posen about the length of time “those cursed slugs” took about his errand.
Cartaret felt her touch, though, the moment that she grasped the torch. He did not turn his head, but he shook it decidedly. Gill didn’t stop. Carina was coming nearer, and Waldemar plainly thought his men should have been back before now. She withdrew the torch, stuffed it into the deep pocket of Tienette’s apron, took off her wet shoes, and began to crawl round the wood-stack, with the blood singing in her ears from sheer fright, and her heart in her mouth.
She seemed to herself to make a most appalling noise, and every moment she expected that Von Posen would make a pounce, and drag her out to answer for her presence.
But, wonderfully enough, they did not seem to hear, and their backs were turned towards her all the time, their eyes on Cartaret’s impassive face.
She gained the door, which the soldiers had left ajar; she was through it, and there were steps leading upwards.
Gill seemed to herself all the time to be in a sort of odd dream in which nothing could be surprising. She ran straight up, and there was nothing to bar her way, for the door which had once stood at the top of the cellar steps had been blown in. Nearly the whole front of the house had gone, too; it made her think of a rather dilapidated doll’s house, when the doors have been opened.
She ran up the steep staircase, noticing, half unconsciously, that the stair-carpet had been mended with pathetic care, and reached the landing.
It was open to the sky; roof there was none, or next to none; of partitioning walls there were even less. Only a gaunt staircase, without either balustrades or walls to flank it, stood up unsteadily against the emptiness.
Gill sped up it, feeling it shake under her feet. The sense of unreality was so strongly on her that she did not even wonder what would happen if it would not bear her weight. She reached the top, and stood beside a jagged tooth of wall, which had a little charred and blackened rosebud paper still upon it. The moon went behind a cloud, and the world was dark.
Gill stood still by that remnant of top-floor wall; a rash step might send her over into the street below. She got her finger on the knob of the torch and faced towards the English lines. Then, clinging desperately with her left hand to that crumbling fragment of wall, she felt her way a cautious two steps away from it, and stood clear. Then she pressed the knob—luckily it worked easily.
Three flashes quickly for the dots—three long for the dashes—three flashes quick once more—Gillian, standing on a tottering first floor in a German-held village, flash
ed out that desperate Save our Souls again and again.
There was a wild din below and behind her, and something whined past her ear, making her wonder for a second if she had been killed. But she stuck doggedly at her task, even when a perfect hail of bullets struck the wall beside her, making her cough and sneeze in a sudden bath of plaster, dust and mortar. She did not even think of taking what little shelter there was to take; her one idea was to go on sending out that S.O.S. signal until someone came to save Carina and Rupert-George. Her fingers had lost all feeling—her mouth was dry and her heart thumping wildly, but she never dreamt of leaving off until there was a sound of hasty steps behind her, and a strong hand caught her cold one, while a voice—an unmistakably English voice—spoke imperatively:
“Hi, signaller, come out of this!”
She was almost too stiff to move, she found then, and she could not speak for fear she should choke, until the soldier had half carried her down the shaky staircase and she stood at the head of the cellar steps once more. Then she saw that her rescuer was a grey-haired man in Colonel’s uniform. “Oh, was it in time? … Carina? … Captain Cartaret? …” she burst out, suddenly finding it possible to speak again.
“Cartaret’s all right—better than he deserves,” the Colonel assured her gruffly. “The Grand-Duchess came upon the scene just in time to save him from those devils with their wire-cutters—and, well, we turned up in the nick of time for everything else. And it took all my authority to keep him from hobbling after the plucky signaller who brought us here.”
A light dawned on Gill. “Oh, are you his C.O.? He was afraid you would be angry.”
“Angry? I should think so!” snorted the Colonel. “It’s bad enough to have charge of Royalty …”
Gill forgot manners. “What? He isn’t …”
“Prince Rupert Alexander, yes, he is, though he keeps it as quiet as he can. Come! You needn’t be more excited about it than the Grand-Duchess was,” the Colonel explained.
“He has told her?” Gill asked, breathlessly.
“Yes, when we came in, and the tables were turned on the Huns—and that infernal brute Waldemar had bolted. He suddenly went all colours, and told the Grand-Duchess he had to confess that he was the ‘suitable person,’ but Cartaret was his baptismal name, and he had always gone by it in the service, and he had wanted to know her without the fence of suitable arrangement, and so on.”
Wanted, an English Girl Page 30