They walked in silence for some minutes, he apparently pondering over her last words, she with the cloud passing from her face as, with her head a little thrown back and her eyes half-closed, she sniffed the strong, salty air with an almost voluptuous expression of content. She was perfectly dressed for the country, from her square-toed shoes, which still seemed to maintain some distinction of shape, the perfectly tailored coat and skirt, to the smart little felt hat with its single quill. She walked with the free grace of an athlete, unembarrassed with the difficulties of the way or the gusts which swept across the marshy places, yet not even the strengthening breeze, which as they reached the sea line became almost a gale, seemed to have power to bring even the faintest flush of colour to her cheeks. They reached the long headland and stood looking out at the sea before she spoke again.
“You were very kind to me last night, Mr. Orden,” she said, a little abruptly.
“I paid a debt,” he reminded her.
“I suppose there is something in that,” she admitted. “I really believe that that exceedingly unpleasant person with whom I was brought into temporary association would have killed you if I had allowed it.”
“I am inclined to agree with you,” he assented. “I saw him very hazily, but a more criminal type of countenance I never beheld.”
“So that we are quits,” she ventured.
“With a little debt on my side still to be paid.”
“Well, there is no telling what demands I may make upon our acquaintance.”
“Acquaintance?” he protested.
“Would you like to call it friendship?”
“A very short time ago;” he said deliberately, “even friendship would not have satisfied me.”
“And now?”
“I dislike mysteries.”
“Poor me!” she sighed. “However, you can rid yourself of the shadow of one as soon as you like after luncheon. It would be quite safe now, I think, for me to take back that packet.”
“Yes,” he assented slowly, “I suppose that it would.”
She looked up into his face. Something that she saw there brought her own delicate eyebrows together in a slight frown.
“You will give it me after lunch?” she proposed.
“I think not,” was the quiet reply.
“You were only entrusted with it for a time,” she reminded him, with ominous calm. “It belongs to me.”
“A document received in this surreptitious fashion,” he pronounced, “is presumably a treasonable document. I have no intention of returning it to you.”
She walked by his side for a few moments in silence. Glancing down into her face, Julian was almost startled. There were none of the ordinary signs of anger there, but an intense white passion, the control of which was obviously costing her a prodigious effort. She touched his fingers with her ungloved hand as she stepped over a stile, and he found them icy cold. All the joy of that unexpectedly sunny morning seemed to have passed.
“I am sorry, Miss Abbeway,” he said almost humbly, “that you take my decision so hardly. I ask you to remember that I am just an ordinary, typical Englishman, and that I have already lied for your sake. Will you put yourself in my place?”
They had climbed the little ridge of grass-grown sand and stood looking out seaward. Suddenly all the anger seemed to pass from her face. She lifted her head, her soft brown eyes flashed into his, the little curl of her lips seemed to transform her whole expression. She was no longer the gravely minded prophetess of a great cause, the scheming woman, furious at the prospect of failure. She was suddenly wholly feminine, seductive, a coquette.
“If you were just an ordinary, stupid, stolid Englishman,” she whispered, “why did you risk your honour and your safety for my sake? Will you tell me that, dear man of steel?”
Julian leaned even closer over her. She was smiling now frankly into his face, refusing the warning of his burning eyes. Then suddenly, silently, he held her to him and kissed her, unresisting, upon the lips. She made no protest. He even fancied afterwards, when he tried to rebuild in his mind that queer, passionate interlude, that her lips had returned what his had given. It was he who released her—not she who struggled. Yet he understood. He knew that this was a tragedy.
Stenson’s voice reached them from the other side of the ridge.
“Come and show me the way across this wretched bit of marsh, Orden. I don’t like these deceptive green grasses.”
“`Pitfalls for the Politician’ or `Look before you leap’.” Julian muttered aimlessly. “Quite right to avoid that spot, sir. Just follow where I am pointing.”
Stenson made his laborious way to their side.
“This may be a short cut back to the Hall,” he exclaimed, “but except for the view of the sea and this gorgeous air, I think I should have preferred the main road! Help me up, Orden. Isn’t it somewhere near here that that little affair, happened the other night?”
“This very spot,” Julian assented. “Miss Abbeway and I were just speaking of it.”
They both glanced towards her. She was standing with her back to them, looking out seawards. She did not move even at the mention of her name.
“A dreary spot at night, I dare say,” the Prime Minister remarked, without overmuch interest. “How do we get home from here, Orden? I haven’t forgotten your warning about luncheon, and this air is giving me a most lively appetite.”
“Straight along the top of this ridge for about three quarters of a mile, sir, to the entrance of the harbour there.”
“And then?”
“I have a petrol launch,” Julian explained, “and I shall land you practically in the dining room in another ten minutes.”
“Let us proceed,” Mr. Stenson suggested briskly. “What a queer fellow Miles Furley is! Quite a friend of yours, isn’t he, Miss Abbeway?”
“I have seen a good deal of him lately,” she answered, walking on and making room for Stenson to fall into step by her side, but still keeping her face a little averted. “A man of many but confused ideas; a man, I should think, who stands an evil chance of muddling his career away.”
“We offered him a post in the Government,” Stenson ruminated.
“He had just sense enough to refuse that, I suppose,” she observed, moving slowly to the right and thereby preventing Julian from taking a place by her side. “Yet,” she went on, “I find in him the fault of so many Englishmen, the fault that prevents their becoming great statesmen, great soldiers, or even,” she added coolly, “successful lovers.”
“And what is that?” Julian demanded.
She remained silent. It was as though she had heard nothing. She caught Mr. Stenson’s arm and pointed to a huge white seagull, drifting down the wind above their heads.
“To think,” she said, “with that model, we intellectuals have waited nearly two thousand years for the aeroplane!”
CHAPTER VIII
Table of Contents
According to plans made earlier in the day, a small shooting party left the Hall immediately after luncheon and did not return until late in the afternoon. Julian, therefore, saw nothing more of Catherine until she came into the drawing-room, a few minutes before the announcement of dinner, wearing a wonderful toilette of pale blue silk, with magnificent pearls around her neck and threaded in her Russian headdress. As is the way with all women of genius, Catherine’s complete change of toilette indicated a parallel change in her demeanour. Her interesting but somewhat subdued manner of the previous evening seemed to have vanished. At the dinner table she dominated the conversation. She displayed an intimate acquaintance with every capital of Europe and with countless personages of importance. She exchanged personal reminiscences with Lord Shervinton, who had once been attached to the Embassy at Rome, and with Mr. Hannaway Wells, who had been first secretary at Vienna. She spoke amusingly of Munich, at which place, it appeared, she had first studied art, but dilated, with all the artist’s fervour, on her travellings in Spain, on the soft yet wonderfully
vivid colouring of the southern cities. She seemed to have escaped altogether from the gravity of which she had displayed traces on the previous evening. She was no longer the serious young woman with a purpose. From the chrysalis she had changed into the butterfly, the brilliant and cosmopolitan young queen of fashion, ruling easily, not with the arrogance of rank, but with the actual gifts of charm and wit. Julian himself derived little benefit from being her neighbour, for the conversation that evening, from first to last, was general. Even after she had left the room, the atmosphere which she had created seemed to linger behind her.
“I have never rightly understood Miss Abbeway,” the Bishop declared. “She is a most extraordinarily brilliant young woman.”
Lord Shervinton assented.
“To-night you have Catherine Abbeway,” he expounded, “as she might have been but for these queer, alternating crazes of hers—art and socialism. Her brain was developed a little too early, and she was unfortunately, almost in her girlhood, thrown in with a little clique of brilliant young Russians who attained a great influence over her. Most of them are in Siberia or have disappeared by now. One Anna Katinski—was brought back from Tobolsk like a royal princess on the first day of the revolution.”
“It is strange,” the Earl pronounced didactically, “that a young lady of Miss Abbeway’s birth and gifts should espouse the cause of this Labour rabble, a party already cursed with too many leaders.”
“A woman, when she takes up a cause,” Mr. Hannaway Wells observed, “always seeks either for the picturesque or for something which appeals to the emotions. So long as she doesn’t mix with them, the cause of the people has a great deal to recommend it. One can use beautiful phrases, can idealise with a certain amount of logic, and can actually achieve things.”
Julian shrugged his shoulders.
“I think we are all a little blind,” he remarked, “to the danger in which we stand through the great prosperity of Labour to-day.”
The Bishop leaned across the table.
“You have been reading Fiske this week.”
“Did I quote?” Julian asked carelessly. “I have a wretched memory. I should never dare to become a politician. I should always be passing off other people’s phrases as my own.”
“Fiske is quite right in his main contention,” Mr. Stenson interposed. “The war is rapidly creating a new class of bourgeoisie. The very differences in the earning of skilled labourers will bring trouble before long—the miner with his fifty or sixty shillings, and the munition worker with his seven or eight pounds—men drawn from the same class.”
“England,” declared the Earl, indulging in his favourite speech, “was never so contented as when wages were at their lowest.”
“Those days will never come again,” Mr. Hannaway Wells foretold grimly. “The working man has tasted blood. He has begun to understand his power. Our Ministers have been asleep for a generation. The first of these modern trades unions should have been treated like a secret society in Italy. Look at them now, and what they represent! Fancy what it will mean when they have all learnt to combine!—when Labour produces real leaders!”
“Can any one explain the German democracy?” Lord Shervinton enquired.
“The ubiquitous Fiske was trying to last week in one of the Reviews,” Mr. Stenson replied. “His argument was that Germany alone, of all the nations in the world, possessed an extra quality or an extra sense—I forget which he called it—the sense of discipline. It’s born in their blood. Generations of military service are responsible for it. Discipline and combination—that might be their motto. Individual thought has been drilled into grooves, just as all individual effort is specialised. The Germans obey because it is their nature to obey. The only question is whether they will stand this, the roughest test they have ever had—whether they’ll see the thing through.”
“Personally, I think they will,” Hannaway Wells pronounced, “but if I should be wrong—if they shouldn’t—the French Revolution would be a picnic compared with the German one. It takes a great deal to drive a national idea out of the German mind, but if ever they should understand precisely and exactly how they have been duped for the glorification of their masters—well, I should pity the junkers.”
“Do your essays in journalism,” the Bishop asked politely, “ever lead you to touch upon Labour subjects, Julian?”
“Once or twice, in a very mild way,” was the somewhat diffident reply.
“I had an interesting talk with Furley this morning,” the Prime Minister observed. “He tells me that they are thinking of making an appeal to this man Paul Fiske to declare himself. They want a leader—they want one very badly—and thank heavens they don’t know where to look for him!”
“But surely,” Julian protested, “they don’t expect necessarily to find a leader of men in an anonymous contributor to the Reviews? Fiske, when they have found him, may be a septuagenarian, or a man of academic turn of mind, who never leaves his study. ‘Paul Fiske’ may even be the pseudonym of a woman.”
The Earl rose from his place.
“This afternoon,” he announced, “I read the latest article of this Paul Fiske. In my opinion he is an exceedingly mischievous person, without the slightest comprehension of the forces which really count in government.”
The Bishop’s eyes twinkled as he left the room with his hand on his godson’s arm.
“It would be interesting,” he whispered, “to hear this man Fiske’s opinion of your father’s last speech in the House of Lords upon land interests!”
It was not until the close of a particularly unsatisfactory evening of uninspiring bridge that Julian saw anything more of Catherine. She came in from the picture gallery, breathless, followed by four or five of the young soldiers, to whom she had been showing the steps of a new dance, and, turning to Julian with an impulsiveness which surprised him, laid her fingers imperatively upon his arm.
“Take me somewhere, please, where we can sit down and talk,” she begged, “and give me something to drink.”
He led the way into the billiard room and rang the bell.
“You have been overtiring yourself,” he said, looking down at her curiously.
“Have I?” she answered. “I don’t think so. I used to dance all through the night in Paris and Rome, a few years ago. These young men are so clumsy, though—and I think that I am nervous.”
She lay back in her chair and half closed her eyes. A servant brought in the Evian water for which she had asked and a whisky and soda for Julian. She drank thirstily and seemed in a few moments to have overcome her fatigue. She turned to her companion with an air of determination.
“I must speak to you about that packet, Mr. Orden,” she insisted.
“Again?”
“I cannot help it. You forget that with me it is a matter of life or death. You must realise that you were only entrusted with it. You are a man of honour. Give it to me.”
“I cannot.”
“What are you thinking of doing with it, then?”
“I shall take it to London with me to-morrow,” he replied, “and hand it over to a friend of mine at the Foreign Office.”
“Would nothing that I could do or say,” she asked passionately, “influence your decision?”
“Everything that you do or say interests and affects me,” he answered simply, “but so far as regards this matter, my duty is clear. You have nothing to fear from my account of how it came into my possession. It would be impossible for me to denounce you for what I fear you are. On the other hand, I cannot allow you the fruits of your enterprise.”
“You consider me, I suppose,” she observed after a moment’s pause, “an enemy spy?”
“You have proved it,” he reminded her.
“Of Overman—my confederate,” she admitted, “that was true. Of me it is not. I am an honest intermediary between the honest people of Germany and England.”
“There can be no communication between the two countries during wartime, except thr
ough official channels,” he declared.
Her eyes flashed. She seemed in the throes of one of those little bursts of tempestuous passion which sometimes assailed her.
“You talk—well, as you might be supposed to talk!” she exclaimed, breaking off with an effort. “What have official channels done to end this war? I am not here to help either side. I represent simply humanity. If you destroy or hand over to the Government that packet, you will do your country an evil turn.”
He shook his head.
“I am relieved to hear all that you say,” he told her, “and I am heartily glad to think that you do not look upon yourself as Overman’s associate. On the other hand, you must know that any movement towards peace, except through the authorised channels, is treason to the country.”
“If only you were not the Honourable Julian Orden, the son of an English peer!” she groaned. “If only you had not been to Eton and to Oxford! If only you were a man, a man of the people, who could understand!”
“Neither my birth nor my education,” he assured her, “have affected my present outlook upon life.”
“Pooh!” she scoffed. “You talk like a stiffened sheet of foolscap! I am to leave here to-morrow, then, without my packet?”
“You must certainly leave—when you do leave—without that,” he assented. “There is one thing, however, which I very sincerely hope that you will leave behind you.”
“And that?”
“Your forgiveness.”
“My forgiveness for what?” she asked, after a moment’s pause.
“For my rashness this morning.”
Her eyes grew a little larger.
“Because you kissed me?” she observed, without flinching. “I have nothing to forgive. In fact,” she went on, “I think that I should have had more to forgive if you had not.”
He was puzzled and yet encouraged. She was always bewildering him by her sudden changes from the woman of sober thoughtfulness to the woman of feeling, the woman eager to give, eager to receive. At that moment it seemed as though her sex possessed her to the exclusion of everything outside. Her eyes were soft and filled with the desire of love, her lips sweet and tremulous. She had suddenly created a new atmosphere around her, an atmosphere of bewildering and passionate femininity.
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