"Travelling east against a forty-mile-an-hour gale from the north-west, and with engine-trouble to top up with ... Little Willie will be seeing the angels pretty soon at this rate! Or piling himself up somewhere on the coast of Holland! Wonder who the bally idiot is?"
Saxham continued, and now he croaked as hoarsely as a raven:
"Sir Roland has little doubt that the aeroplane heard on the _Rigasamos_ was Sherbrand's 'Bird of War.' If so, there would be very little hope left, unless it had been previously arranged that a vessel belonging to--a foreign Power!--was to watch for and give help if she should require it. Now you know as much as I do. I have telephoned to both Lady Beauvayse and your mother that you return with me to Harley Street. We shall go presently. First, I want you to speak on the telephone to Lynette."
"To--Lynette!" Patrine breathed. The Doctor told her: "I have kept the worst from Lynette hitherto.... I shall do so until the ultimate hope is abandoned. My wife knows my voice so well.... You understand.... She would suspect something ..."
His voice stumbled and broke. And clinging to the arm of the big man standing quietly beside her, potent in inertia as a lump of raw iron, Patrine realised that her anguish was a drop in the ocean of his. She took his hand and said in a tone he had never before heard from her:
"Come, dear! We will go and speak to her now."
So they went across to the telegraph-cabin, raw with unshaded electric light and littered with papers. The Chief was there, looking livid and careworn, leaning one elbow on the edge of the stand that supported the Wireless, and wearing the telephone head-band with the ear-pieces, as he dictated to the pallid clerk who occupied a Windsor chair at a stained deal desk, and wrote with a spluttering pen on a depleted paper-pad. At first sight there seemed to be nothing else in the place but a low voice speaking, a Railway Key instrument, a file for telegrams and an overpowering odour of rum.
The odour of rum consolidated to Patrine's view into a stocky thickset man with a square heavy yellow face set into a tragic mask of despair. It was Macrombie, ex-Petty Officer telegraphist, whom the Royal Navy had spat forth for being D.O.D. fifteen full years before. Sacked now from his civil employment, for the old glaring, unblinkable offence.
The liquor had barely faded out in him; his breath came across the little cabin like a flaming sword, and his eyes under their beetling coal-black eyebrows looked burnt-out. He rose from the debilitated office-stool he had been sitting on, saluted Patrine stiffly and said:
"Mem, this is no place for a leddy, wi' a drucken wastrel like mysel' in it. Ay! I hae lat ower a drap too mony, I am awa' the noo wi' my weicht o' wyte. But no wi'oot a warstle have I yielded to the Enemy!" His anguish broke the flood-gates in a rumbling roar. "Like Job I hae cried oot in the nicht-watches to my Creator, speiring o' Him why He made weak men an' strong rum? He didna' gie me ony answer--and I am ganging down the Broad Road's fast as my bluidy thirrst can carry me--a disgraced and ruined man!"
"Mr. Sherbrand will give you another chance. I know he will!--I'll ask him!" came impetuously in the big warm womanly baritone.
"You're a grand woman to luik at, and the lad'll gie in--an' the haill deil's dance to begin ance mair.... Na, na, my bonny leddy!" said Macrombie, "ye can never lippen to the promises o' a drunkard. Best lat me gang my gait to muckle Hell. Ay! I'll no' be lonesome there for want o' company.... Toch! what a regiment o' Macrombies deid an' damned will answer 'Present' to auld Satan's rollcall! Guid-nicht, my leddy, an' thanks to ye a' the same."
He took his cap from a peg, and from the corner a bundle of miscellaneous possessions, rolled up in apparently a worn alpaca office-coat, and girt about with knotted string. He saluted the Chief and Saxham, and nodded to the telegraph clerk, and went out of the cabin in a plodding kind of hurry as though no grass should grow under his feet before he set them for good upon the dreadful downward Road.
His vice had played into an enemy's hands, and he would trust himself no longer. He meted out judgment to rum-soaked Macrombie, assuming for himself the prerogative of the One Judge. But he got his chance in spite of himself, when Britain's Hour came.
*CHAPTER XLI*
*SAXHAM LIES*
At Saxham's nod Patrine rang up Lynette, and the familiar voice that came back, spun out to a spider-thread of sweetness across the distance, stabbed the listener to the heart like a delicate blade of gold-wrought steel. It said, with a quiver in it:
"Of course, I am not nervous at all. And I know how much Bawne would enjoy the night-flying. But if Owen were not there, perhaps I might be--afraid that something was wrong. Owen!"
"Say that I am here," the Doctor signed, and Patrine obeyed.
"Tell my darling to speak to me," said the voice, and Patrine, dropping the microphone from suddenly useless fingers, saw Saxham take it and force his stiff white lips to speech:
"It is not possible--just at this moment. You forget----"
"Of course ... The fireworks!"
"Just so. The fireworks. Expect us in another hour. And--Patrine is here and coming back to Harley Street. To stay. Please tell Mrs. Keyse and Janey to get a room ready."
The cordial answer came:
"I will at once. Dear Pat! how glad I shall be to have her!"
"This is Patrine speaking now!"
Saxham's steady hand touched Patrine's in transferring the receiver of the telephone, and the chill of it stung like the touch of death. She could not control her trembling as she answered:
"You are always so kind to me, dear Aunt Lynette!"
"No, dear! In an hour, then? Take care of my precious," the sweet voice pleaded, "until I see you both..."
"Yes--yes!"
Saxham's hand hung up the receiver, rang off, and steadied Patrine, whose knees were melting under her weight:
"Don't ask me ... any more ... I--can't!" she begged of him brokenly. He said, and with those deep lines that showed in his hard grey face, and his light eyes staring haggardly from caves that grief had dug about them, Saxham looked older by twenty years:
"I know it was hard, but the thing had got to be done. How could I bludgeon her with the truth, whispered over a wire? Once face to face, the first glimpse of me will show her that I have lied to her. God help me!" said the Dop Doctor; "I told her I had stayed on here with Bawne to give him the treat of seeing a night-flying display."
"How--horribly clever of you!"
"So clever," Saxham answered harshly, "that I shall probably regret it to the end of my days. In the whole of my practice I have never known a well-meant deceit do any good--rather the opposite. Consequently, I preach to my patients Truth before everything--and break down and lie when my own turn comes--like the damned coward I am."
"We shall leave here now in a few minutes," went on the Doctor, glowering at his chronometer. "I sent Keyse away with the car upon a message. He will be here to take us home to Harley Street at half-past nine. You have ample time to telephone to Berkeley Square for your clothes and so on.... Lady Beauvayse's maid can pack them for you, I presume?"
"Oh, yes. She's decent in the way of doing things for me."
"Very well."
The Doctor left the telegraph-hut, and Patrine 'phoned to Berkeley Square. Then, with a sudden recollection of an appointment which must be cancelled, she gave the number that meant Margot's newly-furnished mansion, and presently heard the little bird-like voice chirping:
"Yes, this is 00, Cadogan Place. I'm Lady Norwater! ... Is that you, Pat? Yes? What cheer? ... I'm having a long, deadly domestic evening. Franky's reading an improving book aloud to me--at least he was when you rang up--'Matrimony for Beginners. A Handbook to Happiness,' it's called. But I don't believe the man who wrote it ever had a live wife."
"Probably not. Margot, pet, I can't possibly lunch with you to-morrow!"
"Don't say you back out because of the book! Fits has got it now under the sofa." Fits was Franky's lady bull-terrier. "And by the time she's done with it there won't be much left. Say you'll come!" Margot urged. "Franky's got to test a new car--so Rhona Helvellyn's coming with two or three Militant pals of hers. I'll give you lobster _Americaine_ and cold lamb in mint aspic--and strawberry mousse. There!"
"I'm frightfully sorry, my dinkie, but it simply can't be!"
"What tosh! And we're going to talk over ideas for speeches at the Monster Meeting of Women in October at the Royal Hall. And Rhona has a Grand Slam in the way of surprises--did she say anything to you about the Mansion House Banquet demonstration she's thought of for Monday night?"
"Yes, and I'm down on it--like houses!" declared Patrine. "Is Rhona really spoiling for a taste of skilly and yard-exercise? Don't you get mixed up. Think of Franky reading the paragraphs: 'POPULAR YOUNG PEERESS ON THE SUFFRAGE WAR-PATH. SOCIETY BEAUTY HECKLES THE LORD MAYOR! VISCOUNTESS NORWATER BURSTS UPON BANQUETING BISHOPS, IN THE CHARACTER OF A WOMAN WHO WANTS A VOTE!'"