Saxham took a delicate fleecy wrap from a chair and put it about her, for she shivered in the raw chill of the unsunned morning air. Then he touched the blind, and it rolled up upon a vista of backyard and garage. The shriek of an engine and the vibrating passage of an early train through Portland Road Tube Railway came into their ears, standing together at the open window, as Dawn in her streaming crocus veil peeped shyly through the vast smoke-bank that broods upon the morning face of London, engendered by the innumerable little fires of those among her five millions who must rise and eat, and go forth to labour ere yet it is fairly day.
"Owen, tell me! What is coming? What is it I feel, here and here?"
She turned upon her husband suddenly with the question, touching her brow and heart lightly and fixing on him her widely opened eyes. The haunted look of Beatrice had come back to them. His wife's strange likeness to the Guido portrait in the Barberini Palace Gallery--the tragic face with the wistful eyes, that despite the asseverations of the learned and critical will be associated as long as its canvas hangs together with the Daughter of the Cenci--leaped up in her at this hour to startle him afresh.
"What is in the air?" she asked. "What changes are taking place about us? What great and horrible Thing is moving,--moving towards us as we stand together here?"
Saxham's powerful arm went round her protectingly. He answered:
"You shall know, my love, my comrade. In confidence--I am permitted to tell you this much. We stand upon the very brink of international War!"
She looked at him and in the golden eyes he read courage, endurance and tenderness. Love that would be changeless. Fidelity through life beyond Death to the Life that is for evermore.
"You mean that Austro-Hungary will attack Servia, and that Russia will intervene?"
"As Austria intends, no doubt," said Saxham shrugging, "prompted by her Mentor and Ally at Berlin. In him we have a personality blatantly vain, immensely egoistic, feverishly energetic, imbued to the verge of monomania with the idea of his own appointment by the Almighty--as they understand Him in Germany--to be Imperial leader of nations and arbiter of the destinies of Kings!"
He went on:
"Suppose the Great Powers of the World a row of straw bee-skeps, susceptible of being upset by a Hohenzollern kick! Will the mailed toe of Imperial Germany refrain from giving it--invading France through the lost Alsace-Lorraine provinces, the moment Austria-Hungary gets to grips with the Russian bear? Britain is France's ally, bound in Honour to support her. Now you understand what vital questions the Chancellories of the world were burning electric light and brain-power and eyesight over, the long night through, while you and I----"
She stopped him:
"You make me think!--You have told me--That man who has taken my darling is a German Flying Officer. He may have had some urgent, secret reason for quitting England at once!"
"It is more than probable that he carried dispatches of importance. But I can answer no questions on that point. I should be verging, if I did, on a betrayal of confidence."
Lynette Saxham looked at her husband earnestly, and the change wrought in her by the long night's vigil of sorrow sent a pang through the man's heart. That line of anxiety between the slender eyebrows and the bluish shadows round the golden eyes came to him, like the sorrowful sweetness of the exquisite lips, out of the past.
"Why do the Germans hate us?" she asked, and he answered wearily and sombrely:
"As the nation with which Germany runs neck and neck in military armament, national wealth and influence, Germans pay us British the compliment of dislike. German ambition, spreading rank and high, is checked in the attainment of its ends even by our geographical position. We carry in our veins too large a share of Teutonic blood, to be ingratiating or subservient to our arrogant and domineering neighbours. What hatred is bitterer than racial hatred? Where is enmity deadlier than that one finds existing between women and men of kindred blood?"
The face of David, fair and debonair, rose up before Saxham as he said it. Strange! that even while he thanked his stars for David's ancient treachery, the fact of the betrayal should rankle in the Doctor still.
"Nowhere is there hatred more terrible. Listen, Owen--there is something I want to tell you----"
Lynette shivered and drew the fleecy shawl more closely about her white bare throat, and the slender shoulders and arms that were revealed through the laces of her filmy dinner-gown:
"In the first days of the Siege of Gueldersdorp, a woman from the native stad, the wife of a Barala herd, who came to the Convent for medicine and soup for a sick _piccanin_--told the Mother that long before the Orange Free State threw in its lot with the Transvaal--long before Oom Paul and Vader Steyn ordered that all _rooinek_ soldiers sent by Groot Brittanje to South Africa should quit the country--the Barala could not sleep in their kraals at night '_for the going of the creatures_.' Not all the creatures of prey--the Eaters of Flesh--the crows and the _aasvogels_, the wild dogs and jackals, the _aard_-wolves, and hyaenas. But the hartebeest and springbok and prongbuck and rietbuck; with the little gazelles and tiny antelopes, the _dassies_ and hares, and all the shy, wild harmless things that are stalked and shot for what is called sport, by most men and some women--they passed away in multitudes each night until just before the dawn. Even the _meerkat_ and the leopard went, the baboons and snakes and the big lizards. Barala trackers followed the trails North to the Marches of the Okavango--and farther still into the Mabunda country--the woman told us--and their wise men had warned them that it was a _teeken_ of War to come."
Her wistful eyes strained towards the East, where between the crowded roofs of the vast City and the shadowy purple day-brow, showed a clear wide band of crocus-yellow, melting into exquisite hyacinth-blue.
"Perhaps I am like the antelope and the hares and the wild-bucks and the other creatures. It may be that this nameless Thing that I have felt coming nearer and nearer is War," said Lynette. Then she winced as though the net had whirled and fallen, and the trident pierced, and cried out irrepressibly: "If so--Bawne will be out there unprotected--in the midst of it! Owen!--do you hear me? How can you stand there so calmly when such a thing may be? How--oh!--how could you consent to his going?"
Saxham's square face was set like a mask in the stern effort for self-control. He was in spirit with the Navigating Lieutenant on the upper bridge of H.M.S. _Rigasamos_, hearkening to the drone of an aeroplane struggling against the thrust of a north-west gale.... He heard the double knock of a back-fire, and heard men talking about engine-trouble. Even as he brought himself back to say quietly:
"I did as you would have done in the same circumstances. If the same voice that spoke to me had virtually said to you: '_Here stands your only son, a child in years and yet a man for England! Will you let him go?_' Would you not have consented? If you deny, I shall tell you that I know my wife better than she knows herself!"
"'_A child in years--a man for England_....'" The fold between her slender eyebrows deepened and the delicate sensitive upper-lip lifted, showing the white, slightly irregular teeth. "I do not understand," she said piteously; "Was there any question of an order to be carried out?--a duty to be done?"
"There was a question to be settled," said Saxham, "involving Bawne's whole future. Here and Hereafter--and the question was this: Whether the son you have given me is worthy of his mother, or whether he has inherited any twist of brain, any degenerate and wretched weakness from the father whom your pure hand saved and led back, my guardian Saint, my heart's beloved!--from the very threshold of the gates of Hell."
"Owen! Don't speak so of yourself. I will not hear it. You had been so wronged--driven beside yourself by misfortune and betrayal. You were not responsible----" She covered the little ears with the slender hands. He took the hands down and kissed them, and held them in his own, as he went on:
"That is what I should like to believe. But--the truth is very different. There was--there is still, I suppose--a spot of weakness in me. A bubble of air in the casting--a flaw in the wrought steel." He looked like wrought steel as he spoke; "I had to be sure our boy is sound, mentally and morally as he is physically. Fit--in the fullest and highest sense of the word. Rather than have the doubt," said Saxham, "or the knowledge that confirms the doubt, I would----"
"No, no!" She tried to free her slender hands, but the Doctor's hold was as inexorable as gentle. "You must not say--that! I cannot bear----"
"Ah, my poor love, you, too, have feared lest the sins of the father might some day be visited on the son!" said Saxham with a strange mingling of pity and sorrow and exultation. "Well, now for your comfort, believe they will not be. Bawne is all yours, Lynette. Young as he is, he has learned to master Self and conquer Fear. Obedience, Duty, and Honour are welded into the metal of his character. If I had not been my boy's father, I should have envied that man--knowing what I have learned to-day. And therefore I do not grudge--I give freely----"