“Poor devil!” his friend remarked sympathetically,—“best cooking, best wines in London. These Service men look after themselves all right. What are you doing here, anyhow, Granet?”
“I’m dining with my uncle,” Granet replied, quickly.
“Sir Alfred’s in there, waiting for you,” his friend told him, indicating the door,—“he has been sitting at the window watching for you, in fact. So long!”
The two men passed out and Granet was ushered into the smoking-room. Sir Alfred came back from his reverie and was greeted by his nephew cordially. The two men sat by the window for a few moments in silence.
“An aperitif?” Sir Alfred suggested. “Capital!”
They drank mixed vermouth. Sir Alfred picked up an evening paper from his side.
“Any news?” he asked.
“Nothing fresh,” Granet replied. “The whole worlds excited about this submarine affair. Looks as though we’d got the measure of those Johnnies, doesn’t it?”
“It does indeed,” Sir Alfred agreed. “Two submarines, one after the other, two of the latest class, too, destroyed within a few miles and without a word of explanation. No wonder every one’s excited about it!”
“They’re fearfully bucked at the Admiralty, I believe,” Granet remarked. “Of course, they’ll pretend that they had this new dodge or whatever it may be, up their sleeves all the time.”
Sir Alfred nodded.
“Well,” he said, “come in to dinner, young fellow. You shall entertain me with tales of your adventures whilst you compare our cuisine here with your own commissariat.”
They passed on into the strangers’ dining-room, a small but cheerful apartment opening out of the general dining-room. The head-waiter ushered them unctuously to a small table set in the far corner of the room.
“I have obeyed your wishes, Sir Alfred,” he announced, as they seated themselves. “No one else will be dining anywhere near you.”
Sir Alfred nodded.
“Knowing how modest you soldiers are in talking of your exploits,” he remarked to Granet, “I have pleaded for seclusion. Here, in the intervals of our being served with dinner, you can spin me yarns of the Front. The whole thing fascinates me. I want to hear the story of your escape.”
They seated themselves, and Sir Alfred studied the menu for a moment through his eyeglass. After the service of the soup they were alone. He leaned a little across the table.
“Ronnie,” he said, “I thought it was better to ask you here than to have you down at the city.”
Granet nodded.
“This seems all right,” he admitted, glancing around. “Well, one part of the great work is finished. I have lived for eleven days not quite sure when I wasn’t going to be stood up with my back to the light at the Tower. Now it’s over.”
“You’ve seen Pailleton?”
“Seen him, impressed him, given him the document. He has his plans all made.”
“Good! Very good!”
Sir Alfred ate soup for several moments as though it were the best soup on earth and nothing else was worth consideration. Then he laid down his spoon.
“Magnificent!” he said. “Now listen—these submarines. There was a Taube close at hand and I can tell you something which the Admiralty here are keeping dark, with their tongues in their cheeks. Both those submarines were sunk under water.”
“I guessed it,” Granet replied coolly. “I not only guessed it but I came very near the key of the whole thing.”
A waiter appeared with the next course, followed by the wine steward, carrying champagne. Sir Alfred nodded approvingly.
“Just four minutes in the ice,” he instructed, “not longer. What you tell me about the champagne country is, I must confess, a relief,” he added, turning to Granet. “It may not affect us quite so much, but personally I believe that the whole world is happier and better when champagne is cheap. It is the bottled gaiety of the nation. A nation of ginger ale drinkers would be doomed before they reached the second generation. 1900 Pommery, this, Ronnie, and I drink your health. If I may be allowed one moment’s sentiment,” he added, raising his glass, “let me say that I drink your health from the bottom of my hear, with all the admiration which a man of my age feels for you younger fellows who are fighting for us and our country.”
They drank the toast in silence. In a moment or two they were alone again.
“Go on, Ronnie,” his uncle said. “I am interested.”
“I met Conyers the other day,” Granet proceeded, “the man who commands the Scorpion. I managed to get an invitation down to Portsmouth to have lunch with him on his ship. I went down with his sister and the young lady he is engaged to marry. On deck there was a structure of some sort covered up. I tried to make inquires about it but they headed me off pretty quick. There was even a sentry standing on guard before it—wouldn’t let me even feel the shape of it. However, I hadn’t given up hope when there came a wireless—no guests to be allowed on board. Conyers had to pack us all off back to the hotel, without stopping even for lunch. From the hotel I got a telescope and I saw a pinnace with half-a-dozen workmen, and a pilot who was evidently an engineer, land on board. They seemed to be completing the adjustments of some new piece of mechanism. Then they steamed away out of sight of the land.”
“A busy life, yours, Ronnie,” Sir Alfred remarked, after a moments pause. “What about it now? I’ve had two urgent messages from Berlin this morning.”
“It’s pretty difficult,” Granet acknowledged. “The Scorpion’s out in the Channel or the North Sea. No getting at her. And I don’t believe there’s another destroyer yet fitted with this apparatus, whatever it may be.”
“They must be making them somewhere, though,” Sir Alfred remarked.
His nephew nodded.
“To think,” he muttered, “that we’ve two hundred men spread out at Tyneside, Woolwich and Portsmouth, and not one of them got on to this! A nation of spies, indeed! They’re mugs, uncle.”
“Not altogether that,” the banker replied. “We have some reports, although they don’t go far enough. I can put you on to the track of the thing. The apparatus you saw is something in the nature of an inverted telescope, with various extraordinary lenses treated by a new process. You can see forty feet down under the surface of the water for a distance of a mile, and we believe that attached to the same apparatus is an instrument which brings any moving object within the range of what they call a deep-water gun.”
“Did that come from reports?” Granet asked eagerly.
“It did,” Sir Alfred said. “Further than that, the main part of the instrument is being made under the supervision of Sir Meyville Worth, in a large workshop erected on his estate in a village near Brancaster in Norfolk.”
“I take it back,” Granet remarked.
“The plans of the instrument should be worth a hundred thousand pounds,” Sir Alfred continued calmly. “If that is impossible, the destruction of the little plant would be the next consideration.”
“Do I come in here?” Granet inquired.
“You do, Ronnie,” his uncle replied. “The name of the village where Sir Meyville Worth lives is Market Burnham, which, as I think I told you, is within a few miles of Brancaster. Geoffrey, at my instigation, has arranged a harmless little golf party to go to Brancaster the day after to-morrow. You will accompany them. In the meantime, Miss Worth, Sir Meyville Worth’s only daughter, is staying in London until Wednesday. She is lunching with your aunt at the Ritz to-morrow. I have made some other arrangements in connection with your visit to Norfolk, which will keep for the present. I see that some strangers have entered the room. Tell me exactly how you came by the wound in your foot?”
Granet turned a little around. There was a queer change in his face as he looked back at his uncle.
“Do you know the man at that corner table?” he asked.
Sir Alfred glanced across the room.
“Very slightly. I spoke to him an hour ago. He thanked me for
some ambulances. He is the chief inspector of hospitals, I think—Major Thomson, his name is.”
“Did you happen to say that I was dining with you?”
Sir Alfred reflected for a moment.
“I believe that I did mention it,” he admitted. “Why?”
Granet struggled for a moment with an idea and rejected it. He drained his glass and leaned across the table.
“He’s a dull enough person really,” he remarked, a little under his breath, “but I seem to be always running up against him. Once or twice he’s given me rather a start.”
Sir Alfred smiled. He called the wine steward and pointed to his nephew’s glass.
“The best thing in the world,” he observed drily, as he watched the wine being poured out, “for presentiments.”
CHAPTER XVII
Table of Contents
Lady Anselman stood once more in the foyer of the Ritz Hotel and counted her guests. It was a smaller party this time, and in its way a less distinguished one. There were a couple of officers, friends of Granet’s, back from the Front on leave; Lady Conyers, with Geraldine and Olive; Granet himself; and a tall, dark girl with pallid complexion and brilliant eyes, who had come with Lady Anselman and who was standing now by her side.
“I suppose you know everybody, my dear?” Lady Anselman asked her genially.
The girl shook her head a little disconsolately.
“We are so little in London, Lady Anselman,” she murmured. “You know how difficult father is, and just now he is worse than ever. In fact, if he weren’t so hard at work I don’t believe he’d have let me come even now.”
“These scientific men,” Lady Anselman declared, “are great boons to the country, but as parent I am afraid they are just a little thoughtless. Major Harrison and Colonel Grey, let me present you to my young charge—for the day only, unfortunately—Miss Worth. Now, Ronnie, if you can be persuaded to let Miss Conyers have a moment’s peace perhaps you will show us the way in to lunch.”
Granet promptly abandoned his whispered conversation with Geraldine. The little company moved in and took their places at the round table which was usually reserved for Lady Anselman on Tuesdays.
“Some people,” the latter remarked, as she seated herself, “find fault with me for going on with my luncheons this season. Even Alfred won’t come except now and then. Personally, I have very strong views about it. I think we all ought to keep on doing just the same as usual—to a certain extent, of course. There is no reason why we should bring the hotel proprietors and shopkeepers to the brink of ruin because we are all feeling more or less miserable.”
“Quite right,” her neighbour, Colonel Grey, assented. “I am sure it wouldn’t do us any good out there to feel that you were all sitting in sackcloth and ashes. Besides, think how pleasant this is to come home to,” he added, looking around the little table. “Jove! What a good-looking girl Miss Conyers is!”
Lady Anselman nodded and lowered her voice a little.
“She has just broken her engagement to Surgeon-Major Thomson. I wonder whether you know him?”
“Inspector of Field Hospitals or something, isn’t he?” the other remarked carelessly. “I came across him once at Boulogne. Rather a dull sort of fellow he seemed.”
Lady Anselman sighed.
“I am afraid Geraldine found him so,” she agreed. “Her mother is very disappointed. I can’t help thinking myself, though, that a girl with her appearance ought to do better.”
The Colonel reflected for a moment.
“Seems to me I’ve heard something about Thomson somewhere,” he said, half to himself. “By-the-bye, who is the pale girl with the wonderful eyes, to whom your nephew is making himself so agreeable?”
“That is Isabel Worth,” Lady Anselman replied. “She is the daughter of Sir Meyville Worth, the great scientist. I am afraid she has rather a dull time, poor girl. Her father lives in an out-of-the-way village of Norfolk, spends all his time trying to discover things, and forgets that he has a daughter at all. She has been in London for a few days with an aunt, but I don’t believe that the old lady is able to do much for her.”
“Ronnie seems to be making the running all right,” her neighbour observed.
“I asked him specially to look after her,” Lady Anselman confided, “and Ronnie is always such a dear at doing what he is told.”
Major Harrison leaned across the table towards them.
“Didn’t I hear you mention Thomson’s name just now?” he inquired. “I saw him the other day in Boulogne. Awful swell he was about something, too. A destroyer brought him across, and a Government motor-car was waiting at the quay to rush him up to the Front. We all thought at Boulogne that royalty was coming, at least.”
There was a slight frown on Granet’s forehead. He glanced half unconsciously towards Geraldine.
“Mysterious sort of fellow, Thomson,” Major Harrison continued, in blissful ignorance of the peculiar significance of his words. “You see him in Paris one day, you hear of him at the furthermost point of the French lines immediately afterwards, he reports at headquarters within a few hours, and you meet him slipping out of a back door of the War Office, a day or two later.”
“Inspector of Field Hospitals is a post which I think must have been created for him,” Colonel Grey remarked. “He’s an impenetrable sort of chap.”
“Was Major Thomson going or returning from France when you saw him last?” Geraldine asked, looking across the table.
“Coming back. When we left Boulogne, the destroyer which brought him over was waiting in the harbour. It passed us in mid-Channel, doing about thirty knots to our eighteen. Prince Cyril was rather sick. He was bringing dispatches but no one seemed to have thought of providing a destroyer for him.”
“After all,” Lady Anselman murmured, “there is nothing very much more important than our hospitals.”
The conversation drifted away from Thomson. Granet was making himself very agreeable indeed to Isabel Worth. There was a little more colour in her cheeks than at the commencement of luncheon, and her manner had become more animated.
“Tell me about the village where you live?” he inquired—“Market Burnham, isn’t it?”
“When we first went there,” she replied, “I thought that it was simply Paradise. That was four years ago, though, and I scarcely counted upon spending the winters there.”
“You find it lovely, then.”
She shivered a little, half closing her eyes as though to shut out some unpleasant memory.
“The house,” she explained, “is on a sort of tongue of land, with a tidal river on either side and the sea not fifty yards away from our drawing-room window. When there are high tides, we are simply cut off from the mainland altogether unless we go across on a farm cart.”
“You mustn’t draw too gloomy a picture of your home,” Lady Anselman said. “I have seen it when it was simply heavenly.”
“And I have seen it,” the girl retorted, with a note of grimness in her tone, “when it was a great deal more like the other place—stillness that seems almost to stifle you, grey mists that choke your breath and blot out everything; nothing but the gurgling of a little water, and the sighing—the most melancholy sighing you ever heard—of the wind in our ragged elms. I am talking about the autumn and winter now, you must remember.”
“It doesn’t sound attractive,” Granet admitted. “By-the-bye, which side of Norfolk are you? You are nowhere near Brancaster, I suppose?”
“We are within four miles of it,” the girl replied quickly. “You don’t ever come there, do you?”
Granet looked at her with uplifted eyebrows.
“This is really rather a coincidence!” he exclaimed. “I’ve never been to Brancaster in my life but I’ve promised one or two fellows to go down to the Dormy House there, to-morrow or the next day, and have a week’s golf. Geoff Anselman is going, for one.”
The girl was for a moment almost good-looking. Her eyes glowed, her tone was eloqu
ently appealing.
“You’ll come by and see us, won’t you?” she begged.
“If I may, I’d be delighted,” Granet promised heartily. “When are you going back?”
“To-morrow. You’re quite sure that you’ll come?”
“I shall come all right,” Granet assured her. “I’m not so keen on golf as some of the fellows, and my arm’s still a little dicky, but I’m fed up with London, and I’m not allowed even to come before the Board again for a fortnight, so I rather welcome the chance of getting right away. The links are good, I suppose?”
“Wonderful,” Miss Worth agreed eagerly, “and I think the club-house is very comfortable. There are often some quite nice men staying there. If only father weren’t so awfully peculiar, the place would be almost tolerable in the season. That reminds me,” she went on, with a little sigh, “I must warn you about father. He’s the most unsociable person that ever lived.”
“I’m not shy,” Granet laughed. “By-the-bye, pardon me, but isn’t your father the Sir Meyville Worth who invents things? I’m not quite sure what sort of things,” he added. “Perhaps you’d better post me up before I come?”
“I sha’n’t tell you a thing.” Isabel Worth declared. “Just now it’s very much better for you to know nothing whatever about him. He has what I call the inventors’ fidgets, for some reason or other. If a strange person comes near the place he simply loses his head.”
“Perhaps I sha’n’t be welcome, then?” Granet remarked disconsolately.
There was a flash in the girl’s eyes as she answered him.
“I can assure you that you will, Captain Granet,” she said. “If father chooses to behave like a bear, well, I’ll try and make up for him.”
She glanced at him impressively and Granet bowed. A few minutes later in obedience to Lady Anselman’s signal, they all made their way into the lounge, where coffee was being served. Granet made his way to Geraldine’s side but she received him a little coldly.
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