The Popular Magazine/Volume 51/Number 4/Lights Out
Lights Out
By L. H. Robbins
Author of “The Merlin-Ames Torpedo,” Etc.
(A Complete Novel)
CHAPTER I.
The Raid.
By a no less distinguished philosopher than Mr. Herbert Wembley, the heart of the world has been located at Charing Cross, London. Geographically Mr. Wembley may be correct; sentimentally, too, so far as the English-speaking peoples of the earth are concerned. Where the Strand pours its human tides into Trafalgar Square to meet the streams from Whitehall and Pall Mall and busy Oxford Street, there most of North America and Australasia and much of modern Asia and Africa took its start; there the peace-loving civilization that has made many a far land sweet and kindly and good to live in had its beginning.
In one sense, however, Mr. Wembley is wrong. Through the tempestuous years since 1914 the heart of the world has lain not at Charing Cross, but some hundreds of miles northward from that historic spot. Since then to this day, unless the Great War shall have come to an end before these words are printed, the vital point of the world, the heart of the British Empire, the hope and salvation of Christendom has been a gray, little, fog-wreathed, steel-netted harbor on the east coast of Scotland, where the British Grand Fleet watches the Germans.
The English-speaking world might do without any of its members but that; without brave Canada, without the loyal Anzac nation, without India or Egypt or South Africa, without the United States of America, tremendous though the service every one of them contributes to the common cause. But it cannot do, it cannot live without the fleet that saved the seas from the Hun; that held the Hun impotent in his canals and behind his mine fields until a stunned and staggering world could gear itself and gather itself to challenge the outrageous peril. There, in that landlocked bay whose name few men know, beats the heart of the world to-day.
There was no Eagle Hut in the Strand in the spring of the year 1915. There were no American bluejackets perched on the wall in Trafalgar Square, ogling the London throngs. There were no American destroyers prowling catlike in the Channel, waiting to pounce on the kaiser's sea rats; no American regiments hiking along the lanes of Kent, hardening up for the great adventure beyond Dover Strait.
If Tom Thurston, American, had been able to look forward three years and see the Eagle Hut, the bluejacket, the destroyers and the route marchers he would have been a happier man. In his newspaper-reporter days he had guessed right many a time in advance of the event. But on this Monday night in April as he strolled hotelward from a Leicester Square revue, he despaired of ever beholding the glorious sight that has come to pass—the sight of America in arms beside her sister democracies, fighting for the freedom of mankind.
In the play that night a joke had recurred often, growing better with each repetition. Said the leading actor to his foil:
“Lend me five pun, U. S. A.”
“What do you mean—U. S. A.?”
“Until Something 'Appens,” the leading man replied, and waited for the audience to laugh; which the audience did, not hilariously, not derisively, but with that consciously superior air of rectitude that is so maddening to the butt of the joke. In one of the scenes the leading man impersonated an opulent Yankee and employed much American slang, and the audience laughed at that, too, even when the humorist mispronounced the honorable word “gazabo” by stressing the first syllable.
The English in those days were acutely aware that their nation had seized her opportunity to shine through all future ages as the great champion of history, while America had hung back, debating whether or not her turn had come to enter the lists. In the hotels Tom Thurston met with sly words and half-hidden smiles that told him what the British nation thought of him and his fellow countrymen. It would have done him no good, nor would it have convinced them, to tell them that thinking Americans already saw their duty clear and prayed for the day when the rest of America should come to see it.
The revue that night had included some living cartoons. There was Tenniel's “Dropping the Pilot,” in which Bismarck descends from the helm of the German ship of state while the youthful kaiser lolls sneering over the rail. There was the most famous picture Punch has produced in this war—Albert, King of the Belgians, looking upon his ruined and burning land, the lustful kaiser leering up at him. “You see, you have lost all,” says the kaiser. “But not my soul!” says the king. And there had been a song, sung by chorus girls dressed as newsboys, ending in the shouted refrain, “Are we down-hearted? No!”—a song that would echo in the trenches of Picardy and Flanders until the end of the war.
Some of the placards which the chorus-girl newsboys wore got a laugh. “U-8 Visits Davy Jones!” “Krupp Making One-hundred-inch Guns Out of Doorknobs!” “Submarine in the Serpentine!” “Wilhelm Shaven!” “Sahara Remains Neutral!” But behind, the effort at gayety and the resolve not to be downhearted there was no mirth, no light-heartedness. Tom Thurston's blood moved more quickly and a lump rose in his throat as he sensed the strain and the anxiety; for the war was his war and his people's war. If his people could only be as near to it as he was, if they could feel the world peril as he felt it in the quiver of sudden dread that shook Britain in those awakenings days—if they could go with him to the courtyard of the war office and gaze upon the staring eyes, the trembling lips around the bulletin board as the death lists were posted! There would be no jokes about “Until Something 'Appens” then.
He halted in the darkness near the Nelson monument. The base of the shaft was a billboard now. “England Expects Every Man to Do His Duty.” “Your King and Your Country Call You.” Skyward from the roof of the Admiralty Building shot a great shaft of light and searched the clouds a moment, then winked out. Around the square moved an endless procession of taxi cabs, their lights dimmed. The brightest thing in sight in the darkened city was a little oval spot of radiance on the pavement, a spot not more than a foot wide, in the middle of which a toy rooster danced to the pulling of an invisible thread.
“Tuppence, sir, only tuppence!”
There was an anxious whine in the voice of the sidewalk vender who operated the dancing bird, as if the war had already begun to cut in on his business. Thurston glanced at the bull's-eye lantern that supplied the light for the fellow's midnight trade, and with a shudder of pity he walked on. Crossing to Northumberland Avenue, he entered an outwardly dark office building and mounted the stairs to the second floor. In the London bureau of the Chicago Sun a slender chap with grave, clear eyes looked up from a desk where he wrote.
“Hello, Tom. Have a chair while I finish this cable.”
Thurston sat down, picked up a file of American newspapers and glanced at the headlines. Ted Price, London man for the Sun, went on writing. Thurston had been in England less than a month, but Price was an old-timer on the ground; he could remember the day when Eugene Field walked in at the door by which Thurston had just entered. Soon he gathered up his cablegram and paged and read it, striking out a word here and there.
“Bad business across the Channel, Tom.”
“Nothing to fight with, you mean?”
“Nothing but shrapnel. What good is shrapnel against an enemy underground? The Huns used some kind of gas to-day; they break all the rules of warfare. A Moorish division saw the cloud coming; they thought it was an evil spirit and they haven't stopped running yet. There's a gap four miles wide for the Canadians to hold till help comes, and God only knows how they'll do it. The Germans may be in Calais to-morrow night.”
“I sat in the House of Commons this afternoon,” said Thurston. “While the Canadians were holding the line in France, the British statesmen wrangled for three mortal hours over the question whether or not to forbid the sale of liquor in the Parliament restaurant. Gosh!”
Price smiled. “When you have been here as long as I have you will understand the British better. I met Sir Arthur Purdoy to-day. Mostly he talked motor cars. Last week at Ypres his son was blinded by a shell—blinded for life. You'll find more Spartan courage around London these days than they ever had in Sparta.”
His cablegram finished, Price donned hat and overcoat, and the two men went out into the dark street, crossed the square to the telegraph office and filed the dispatch. Out in the street again, they strolled up the Strand toward the Adelphi. As they passed Charing Cross Station the sound of an explosion brought them to a standstill.
“A backfire, maybe,” Thurston suggested.
“Backfire, nothing!” said Price. “It's the anti-aircraft guns. Listen.”
From Westminster came the boom of a fieldpiece. Other cannon echoed from the direction of the City. On the Embankment close by a gun spoke louder than the rest. Police whistles shrilled everywhere.
“The Zeps are here again,” said Price, scanning the sky. “This is the third time in a month.”
Back to the square the two friends hastened for a better view of the heavens. In front of Morley's they watched the play of the searchlights on the clouds. Frightened men and women ran past them, scurrying for shelter.
“Look!”
A pencil of light, upward streaming from a near-by roof, pierced through a break in the overhanging mist and touched something crystal white, lost its object, then found it again and remained fixed upon it. Other searchlights picked it out; cannon from all directions barked and thundered, and little bursts of flame from their shells showed far beneath the white thing in the sky.
Now with a sudden jar the pavement quivered; an instant later came the roar of a heavier detonation than any before.
“She has dropped a bomb,” cried Price. “There goes another. Lord help the poor devils under her.”
The gunners had the range now, for the shells burst higher up toward the glassy thing in the sky, and still it floated safe out of reach. A veil of mist stole between it and the watchers; still blindly through the cloud the cannoneers hurled their storm of iron, and still, from somewhere toward Paddington, came the earth shocks as the Zeppelin loosed its thunderbolts. Price clenched his fists as he watched. Thurston swore like an infidel. A man standing near them turned when Tom had finished.
“Thank you,” he said.
Price lowered his eyes from the sky to glance at the man who had spoken.
“Hello!” said he. “It's Sir Arthur Purdoy. Sir Arthur, Mr. Thurston.”
Tom shook hands with a bearded gentleman who wore an opera hat on his head and carried a walking stick under his arm. He had no time to size up Sir Arthur further, for a sudden silence had at that moment fallen over the city, the cause whereof was visible in the sky.
The cloud veil had passed, and the white thing showed clearer than before in the rays of the searchlights. It was moving now toward the east and moving rapidly. But swift as it swam through the sky, a tiny white object above and behind followed faster. From far away overhead came the faint chatter of a rapid-fire gun, and all the while the Zeppelin drove toward the North Sea and the tiny white birdlike speck pursued.
“He's gaining,” said Sir Arthur. “He surely is. He's on the fellow's tail.”
“There goes his red light,” cried Price. “Look!”
The little air plane was now almost hidden from their sight above the shapely shell of the giant dirigible; beneath its little white wings a red light gleamed. Breathless the watchers gazed and saw the Zeppelin burst into sudden, wild, leaping flame that filled half the heaven and shed a sickly glare on things below. For ten seconds angry tongues of fire lapped at the clouds, then darkness came, save where a shower of sparkling embers dropped with gathering velocity toward the earth; save, too, where the red light of the little conqueror still burned above the point of battle. Downward floated a dull gush of sound like that made when a gas jet is lighted.
“That's one sky pirate that won't wear the Iron Cross on his manly chest,” Price declared. “Here's a taxi. Hop in and let's go view the remains.”
“May I invite myself along?” asked Sir Arthur.
“You're already invited, sir,” said Price.
Up Charing Cross Road they went in a procession of taxis on the same errand bent. They passed the theater where Thurston's American pride had suffered that night; the entrance was dark now, though no darker than when he had found his way through it at nine o'clock. Where Tottenham Court Road joins Euston a policeman waved them to the left; and at Portland Road another officer pointed to the right.
“The Huns must have fallen in the park,” said Price, as their cab swung into the tree-lined way that leads to Primrose Hill. His surmise proved correct. A score of cars had stopped at the edge of a lawn not far from the Zoölogical Gardens, and policemen were shouting futile commands at the crowd of sight-seers which had already gathered. In the darkness was little for sight-seers to see except a huge tangle of metal, smoking and evil smelling, that lay in the midst of what had lately been a field of daffodils.
“Did any of them live?” Price asked a policeman.
“Live!” snorted the bobby. “Bless your 'eart, no. Burned to a crisp they was before ever they struck ground.”
It was two o'clock in the morning when Thurston bade good-by to his companions at the entrance to his hotel in the Strand and mounted the stairs to his room. Sitting down at his desk, after drawing his curtains tightly closed as directed by the card on the wall, he shivered as a man with the ague. It was not so much the April chill of the room as the nausea he had felt since the moment when the burst of flaming hydrogen filled the midnight sky.
“What a story to write!” he told himself. The expectation of witnessing just such a thing as he had seen that night had brought him across the Atlantic—that and the hope of being torpedoed by a submarine. But now, in the presence of the expected event, his mind stalled.
“I'll wait till daylight,” he thought. “By then there will be more to tell.” He had just put his pencil down when a sound came through the wall that he faced—the sound of a woman's sobbing.
He listened and again he heard it; he tried to catch another voice than the woman's, but all that he heard was the woman's, “Oh! oh! oh!” repeated endlessly. He stepped to the door opening into the hall, but stayed his hand at the knob. If the woman's moaning had been a call for help—but it was not that; it was the cry of secret anguish and a breaking heart.
He went to bed. As long as he remained awake he could hear the sound from the next room.
CHAPTER II.
The Princess.
Curiosity and the quest for copy had brought Tom Thurston to London. In the Zeppelin raids which Germany had begun against England and in the submarine warfare which she had but a few weeks before announced, he had seen fresh and lively material. To be bombed from the sky and to be torpedoed from the ocean depths were experiences novel to mankind then.
Scouting through the city one day in search of an American typewriter office where he might rent a machine that he understood, he came to a shop in Cornhill; in the outer room some girl stenographers waited for work and he listened to one of them talking with the manager. She was a trim, proud, anxious little figure of young womanhood.
“You shouldn't be downhearted, you know,” the manager told her. “The lad is bound to get well, now he's back in England.”
“If you could see him, sir,” she answered; “if you could see his face with the bandages off you would almost wish, for his sake, that he didn't have to get well.”
Bravely as she held up her head, her lip quivered and her eyes grew moist. She spoke again, and now her eyes flashed.
“I must find a new place, sir. Where you sent me the first of the year, they keep me working till nine or ten at night. It wasn't agreed; it isn't fair. Besides, sir, a girl can't work such long hours and keep her health. And it isn't right for a girl to be out so late in London now, with the streets so dark. My people at home talk about me and make it very hard. They don't seem to understand that I must earn the living where I can. But that isn't the main thing, sir. There is a man, and he—I shouldn't stay there, sir.”
“No, indeed, you shouldn't,” sympathized the manager. “But the way times are just now” He glanced at the line of waiting girls and rubbed his knuckles helplessly.
On that same day Thurston stood in front of the Horse Guards in Whitehall, where the gorgeous cavalrymen with drawn sabers startle the passers-by. A band came playing through the arches leading a company of raw recruits. One of the new soldiers, an undersized, hollow-chested wisp of a man, turned to wave his hand to a little group of people on the sidewalk near Thurston, and the little group waved back to the man in line. The party was made up of a boy of ten, a little girl of seven, and a woman thin of form, plain of face, and poorly dressed, who carried a pink-cheeked baby in her arms.
“Good-by,” called the fellow in the ranks; his face was drawn and wistful, unlike the stolid young British faces around him.
“Good-by, good-by,” answered the mother and the older children. The baby had nothing to say, its mouth being busy with a celluloid pacifier; but the woman clasped its chubby arm and waved the little hand.
The man turned away, unable to look any longer.
“Is that your big brother?” Thurston asked the boy.
“Naw; it's me father.”
The woman's eyes swam with tears; she looked lost, helpless; still she held up her head.
“Is your daddy going away to the war?”
“Yes,” the woman answered, with a break in her voice.
“Here, kids,” said Tom, fatuously, “here's some pennies for you. There's a candy shop around where you live, isn't there?” He had no idea what earthly good pennies could be to the children at a time like that; still the boy and the girl took theirs without hesitation.
“What do you say?” asked the mother.
“Thanks,” said the boy.
“'Ank you,” said the girl.
The baby refused its penny, so the mother took the coin as trustee. Then she turned to gaze after the little column of rookies tramping away behind their noisy band.
Such were the scenes Thurston saw all about him; fathers and mothers waiting anxious-eyed at the war office for news; young fellows in civilian clothes drilling after office hours in the quadrangle of Somerset House, on the Temple lawns, in the courtyard of the Prudential buildings in Holborn; sober-faced regiments in khaki going away to decimation, stepping to the stirring music of that once hopeful tune, “God Save Our Noble Czar;” and long lists of names in the shop windows, the fore runners of our service flags.
To many of us in America in those days the war was a sporting event, a spectacle, and Thurston had gone to view it as such. But the young woman at the typewriter office, the little family group at the Horse Guards, and, above all, the women marching beside their men in the streets, these and countless other sights that assailed him at every turning opened his eyes to the grim, bare truth that murder and outrage were loose in the world, and that a chivalrous people who spoke his own tongue were fighting for life.
In a week Thurston's frivolous mood evaporated, and the Zeppelin raid of that April night sobered him completely. When he awoke in the morning it was with the new and persistent idea in his head that he had something better to do in life than to write graphic tales of submarine catastrophes and air attacks.
“I'll not hang fire Until Something 'Appens; darned if I will,” he told his reflection in the shaving mirror. “I'm going to get into this thing somewhere and somehow now!”
With that worthy resolution uppermost in his mind he stepped out into the corridor to fortify his determination with an English breakfast. The door of the room next to his stood open and a slavey came out, bringing with her a broom, a dustpan, and an atmosphere of rare flowers and Turkish cigarettes.
“So sorry, sir,” she simpered, making way for him to pass.
A glance within the room showed him a boudoir trunk, three or four pretty gowns draped carelessly over the backs of chairs, and a dresser covered with toilet things of silver and ivory. Thinking of the woman's sobbing he had heard in the night, he descended to the breakfast room.
The hour was late, and few of the tables in that stately refectory were occupied. In a window overlooking the Obelisk on the Embankment sat a portly Englishman, a copy of the Times propped up before his eyes, reading of the Zeppelin raid and growing purpler in the face with every new paragraph. Near Thurston a pair of youngsters in the uniform of army officers stopped an earnest conversation to glance at him, and thereafter they spoke in lowered tones. It was not the first time that Tom had been mistrusted in London. For writing down on a scrap of paper one day a quaintly worded appeal to prayer posted at St. Paul's he had been shadowed by three indignant Englishmen all the way to his hotel.
To be relieved of the suspicion plainly held by the young officers that he was an eavesdropper, he changed his seat to a table out of earshot of them, and so came in view of the only other patron of the breakfast room. This person was a girl, or, more properly, a young woman; for there is a difference. A girl would scarcely do up her bright yellow hair in the elaborate coiffure which this young woman affected. A girl would hardly appear at public breakfast in the almost regal morning robe which this young woman wore. Nor would a girl smoke a cigarette over her coffee, inhaling the fumes deeply and with evident satisfaction to her nerves, as did this young woman before Tom's eyes,
Thurston's knocking about the world had been mostly on its western side. Many a time since he had made this hotel his home he had caught himself staring at the women smokers who ornamented the halls and the lounging rooms. Young and old, the female of the European species seemed to think nothing at all of burning tobacco in public view; it appeared to be the accepted custom. Yet he noted that the women, when they smoked, made more of a business of the operation than men do. A man, when he smokes, thinks about something else than his smoking, but the women at the Salisbury smoked and thought about what they did. So with the yellow-haired young woman whom he watched this morning.
She sat facing him, three tables away; she had sunk a little too low in her chair for propriety, and her feet were crossed; her air was one of sensitive, if not sensuous, enjoyment. Once, as she held her cigarette daintily in her fingers and puffed an arrow of smoke at its glowing tip, he thought he caught her in the act of regarding him sharply through the smoke cloud. But when he looked closer to make sure, he saw that her gaze rested upon the two British officers behind him.
Suddenly she came out of her languor with a shake of her pretty shoulders and rose to her feet, crushing the remaining inch of her cigarette into her coffee cup.
“I wonder what country she's the queen of?” thought Thurston, and was justified in his speculation. From her proud young attitude and her consciously elegant carriage as she moved toward the door, she was a princess, at least.
At the door she paused to look back, and the head waiter hastened across the floor to her side. Thurston saw them exchange perhaps ten words. Then the man bowed with deference and the princess passed on out of the room. Tom had now only the head waiter to watch, and it struck him as worthy of thought that the man should have bowed so obsequiously to the princess in one moment and have turned away in the next moment with so obvious a sneer as his face now wore.
“Queer tribe, these European servants,” thought Tom. “Humble as rabbits to your face, yet all the while holding their private opinion of you. I wonder what that fellow knows on the princess. Maybe she's stranded here, chased out of her own country by the Huns, and can't pay her hotel bill.” With that romantic theory his curiosity was satisfied.
The head waiter approached a serving table near by and muttered something in French to the omnibus, who, replying in the same language, delved in a pocket of his jacket and drew forth a bit of paper, which he handed to his chief.
“All the English waiters,” thought Tom, “are waiting on table in America, so the English have to import waiters from the Continent.”
His omelet consumed, and his coffee, he sauntered back to his room for his overcoat and an American cigar. In the corridor he came upon the princess with the yellow hair, outside the door of the room next to his. He bowed and stepped aside, when, to his surprise, she spoke to him.
“Could you help me?” she asked. Her voice was soft and appealing, with the slightest trace of huskiness—the cigarette smoking, possibly. “My window—the maid left it open and it seems to be fast. I've rung for the porter, but the servants in this hotel” She smiled to Tom out of tender eyes; blue eyes; she was very pretty in her helplessness, and Tom gallantly hastened to oblige her. The open window needed only his goodly weight to bring it down.
“Thank you so much,” breathed the princess.
“Don't mention it, ma'am,” said Tom, backing out.
He was in his own room before it occurred to him that this comely young woman was the person whose sobbing he had heard in the night. Instead of setting forth into London to look for a place where he might break into the war, as had been his firm intention, he went downstairs to the reading room to think about the princess with the yellow hair and to ponder the question whether she might not need some greater service from him than the closing of a reluctant window.
“The poor thing is in trouble, that's a cinch,” he* ruminated, over his cigar. “Women don't cry at two o'clock in the morning for the fun of the thing. Then there was the sneer on the head waiter's face after he talked with her at the breakfast-room door; and the servants won't answer her bell when she rings.”
But the reading room that morning was a poor place for a man to think, for a party of Americans around the fireplace discussed the latest Zeppelin raid noisily and damned the President of the United States and his administration for dealing so courteously with the outrageous German government. At last the abuse grew so bitter that Tom could not resist the impulse to lift up his voice.
“Gentlemen,” said he, “I guess you're not Democrats.”
“You're dead right we're not!” exploded a stout man with a glittering diamond in bis necktie. “You're dead right we're not!”
“Well, neither am I,” said Tom, “and I'm for America's getting into the war as much as you are. But the majority of people over there are against it yet, so what's the sense in jumping on the president? If Woodrow tried to drag the United States into war just now, the people would impeach him—or the Senate would, or whatever it is that impeaches presidents. Let's be fair about this thing.”
Said the stout man with the diamond scarfpin, “One of these days the Germans will sink a liner with a lot of Americans on board. What then?”
“Then,” Tom answered, “the American people will give the president the backing they won't give him now. You don't see this matter as clear as you might. The American people won't be bullied or coaxed or fooled into going to war, and I guess the president knows the temper of America as well as anybody. When they learn that they ought to, then they will jump in good and hard. Meanwhile, you might blame somebody besides the president, just for variety. What's the matter with blaming the mayor of Omaha?”
“You talk like a Bryanite,” said the owner of the stick pin.
“He talks like an American,” spoke up a man who had previously kept silent. “He knows what he's talking about, and I'm going to buy him a drink. Come along, young man.”
Tom declined to drink so early in the day; which fact, declared his defender in the argument, proved his sound sense; and Thurston walked out into the Strand feeling quite as good as if he had taken a morning nip.
To the London office of the Chicago Sun he went seeking his friend Price; and Price, looking up from his desk phone, slammed the receiver on the hook.
“I was about to call you at the Salisbury,” said the newspaper man. “Do you still feel the way you said you felt last night—about mixing up in things over here?”
“I certainly do,” answered Thurston. “Show me an opening. I'll do anything but fly.”
“Good,” said Price. “Hop aboard a bus and run up to see Sir Arthur Purdoy. Victoria Street—Canadian High Commission. You'll see the sign. Sir Arthur has a job for you.”
CHAPTER III.
The Light.
Sir Arthur Purdoy, plump, polished, polite and political, was a typical product of the English system of breeding that creates gentlemen. He was a man of honor. One knew it the moment one laid eyes on him. He knew it himself—and there is no harm in the sort of self-consciousness that holds a man true to form and tradition, true to his party and his king and true to his ideal of manliness. Sir Arthur was of the scrupulous kind that will spend four minutes in writing a letter to a man and four hours in making sure that he has called the man by his correct title.
Tom Thurston, looking into his worldly-wise and honest smile, recalled what Price had told him of Sir Arthur's son blinded for the rest of life by a German shell, and wondered that the nobleman could go on smiling. It took grit for many a London man to smile in those days of peril and confusion—and to wear a primrose in his lapel, as Sir Arthur did this morning.
“Mr. Thurston, I thank you for coming so promptly. Mr. Price tells me”—he nodded toward the telephone—“that you are still of a mind to become a Briton for the time being and help us wind up the watch on the Rhine.”
“Show me where to begin,” Tom replied, liking the man better with every second. In the darkness of their midnight meeting he had had little chance to form an opinion of him.
“I am rather busy, as you may know,” Sir Arthur continued, “so I shall turn you over at once to a friend of mine, Mr. Herbert Wembley”
“Not the Herbert Wembley?” cried Tom.
“None other. The author of 'The World Awake' is waiting for you in the next room. If you will step this way”
He opened a door, and Tom shook hands next moment with a round-headed round bodied little man who might, from his dress and general appearance, have been almost anybody on earth except the leading scientific novelist and the most widely discussed English writer of the age. Mr. Wembley's mustache needed training, his cravat needed tightening in his soft flannel collar, his hair needed brushing. He looked as if he had played golf vigorously for twenty-four hours; but in Tom's eyes he was quite as desirable to gaze upon as King George himself.
“Talk it out between you,” said Sir Arthur, and withdrew to his own office.
“Do you walk?” asked Mr. Wambley abruptly.
“I do,” said Tom.
“Come,” said Mr. Wembley.
They struck through Buckingham Gate to St. James Park and sat down on a bench facing the swan pond, whereupon an elderly person wearing a brass badge on his coat came up and taxed them tuppence. All the way Mr. Wembley had said nothing, though Tom's eager ears had stood wide open. Still, merely to walk through the streets side by side with Herbert Wembley was something. How the younger crowd at the Players, back home in Gramercy Park, would have stared and envied 1 The older Players had no great respect for Mr. Wembley's novels—yet.
For a minute they sat silent. Then
“You are an American?” Mr. Wembley asked.
It gave Tom the chance he wanted to uncork his enthusiastic admiration for Mr. Wembley's works.
“Yes, sir,” he said; “and I have read every line you have ever printed, from that first yarn about the people in the moon to your last thing, 'The World Awake.' Perhaps I seem a bit impetuous in telling you this, but I have to get it off my chest.”
“What do you think of the last novel?” asked the famous author.
“Best thing ever written,” said Tom. “But you'll do better. I know you will, because I declare every book you write the best book ever, and a year thereafter you make me eat my words by bringing out a better book still.”
Mr. Wembley, whose face was ruddy by nature, flushed redder still with pleasure. He was almost childlike about it; simple and childlike he was in all things, which fact may have explained his power as an interpreter of life.
“There's a point I'd like to have you clear up for me,” said Thurston. “The girl who runs through 'Yarrow Hedges' and winds up so badly—wasn't she a drug fiend?”
Mr. Wembley considered for a moment. “I don't like to talk scandal about the ladies in my books or out of them,” he replied. “But such a thing as you suggest has been known to happen.”
“I'm glad to hear you say so,” Tom declared. “It relieves my mind; because if she wasn't given to dope, there's no accounting for the things you made her do in that laboratory on the moors.”
Mr. Wembley smiled, appreciating the humor in his young companion's seriousness.
“Do you happen to know a man in London named Krug?” he asked.
“Krug? I haven't the pleasure of knowing him.”
“He passes as an American and seems to be wealthy,” said Mr. Wembley. “Now, Mr. Thurston, you have shown so friendly an interest in my scientific fiction, let me tell you a story that may turn out to be history.”
He bent forward, picked up a dead leaf from the park path and fixed his eyes upon it.
“I live, as you probably do not know, in the suburb of Kew.”
“Where the Gardens are?” asked Tom.
“Where the Gardens are. That is why I live there. It is extraordinary how much of my time I spend in the Gardens when I ought to be at home in my garret at my writing. I have a standing-in with the gatekeepers. Isn't that what you Americans call it?”
“A stand-in, you mean; a drag,” said Tom, glad that there was one point of knowledge upon which he could enlighten this master of literature.
“Stand-in—stand-in—I shall remember that. Thank you. I have a stand-in with the gatekeepers, as I say, and I am thereby enabled to frequent the Gardens at hours when the public is not welcomed. There's nothing irregular about it, please understand. Before I became a novelist I was a scientist, and my connection with half of the royal scientific societies of the kingdom would give me the run of the Gardens, anyway. But I like to prowl, I enjoy the thrill that goes with mysterious and proscribed adventure, and I find this in my stolen walks among the groves of Kew Gardens after dark. It is a fine mental tonic.”
“I know it is,” said Tom. “I once stole a watermelon and I have felt toned up ever since. The tonic the farmer administered was common salt, applied subcutaneously, with a shotgun.”
The novelist ignored the irrelevant comment. “Last night I strolled homeward across the wide lawn below the orchid house, from a ramble along the river bank. Often, returning home across that lawn in other years, I have noted the glow of light that fills the sky to the eastward above the heart of London. You know, of course, how a city will advertise itself on the sky at night.”
“Yes.”
“This year London has done no night advertising. On ordinary nights the sky above town has been as dark as the sky above Epping Forest.”
“Because of the Zeppelins?”
“Precisely. The lights-out regulation has worked well. When it was published, I doubted that any good would come of it. The necessary lights, such as those of the thousands of taxicabs and busses in the streets, were bound, I thought, to produce enough illumination overhead to serve the Germans as a guiding mark; but in this conjecture I was happily disappointed. The city was hard at first for them to find, and most of them dropped their bombs over the hop fields of Kent and the vineyards of Essex so that on returning to their sweet land of slavery they might escape punishment for bringing back their ammunition unspent. They worked dreadful destruction among rural pigsties and chicken runs in those days.”
Thurston listened intently, for there was corking copy in the little author's account of his nocturnal excursions in Kew Gardens—like Charles Dickens' midnight rambles in the London streets—and in his unique explanation of the bombing of nonbelligerent pigs and chickens.
“I speak of the ordinary nights,” Mr. Wembley continued, “but there have been extraordinary nights when from the darkness of the Gardens at Kew I have seen such a radiance in the London sky as makes me think of the pillar of fire by night that went before the Israelites in the wilderness. To a person looking toward London from a distance, especially from a glade whose woodsy border forms a screen against any rays of surface light, this apparition in the heavens is clearly defined and has the suggestion of being a signal light—a light fixed somehow in the sky to guide enemy air craft.”
“Is it a shaft of light?” asked Tom, thinking of the searchlights he had seen playing on the clouds.
“It is not,” Mr. Wembley answered. “It reminds me of certain manifestations of aurora borealis that I have observed at the North Cape and in Iceland. I should describe it as a spot of luminescence, a glare in a setting of darkness, formless as a nebula and seeming to have no connection whatever with the earth. On three of what I term the extraordinary nights I have seen the spot in the sky and have watched it for an hour at a time. Its second appearance was at the last full moon, and it was still plain to see, even in the moonlight. Always it appears at the same point in the heavens, as well as I can tell; and always on those nights the Zeppelins have raided London.”
“You saw it last night, sir?”
“For a little while. It was very bright, and it was higher than the clouds which afterward shut off my view of it. I did not need to look at the newspaper this morning to know that London had been bombed again.”
“What was the condition of the sky on the other nights when you saw the light?”
“Clear.”
“That makes it more mysterious.”
“I get your drift, Mr. Thurston. You think that if there had been no object—a fleck of cloud, for instance—for the light to shine upon there would have been nothing for me to see. You are thinking that light itself is invisible, and that all we see when we say we see light is the object upon which the light falls.”
“I haven't read your books ten years for nothing,” Tom laughed.
“What you have thought occurred also to me, on the first night, or, rather, the next day, when I read of the murder of women and children by the German airmen. I reasoned that there is always sufficient vapor and smoke in the London atmosphere to show a stream of light cast upward, but in that case it would be easy to trace the stream of light downward to its source, whereas, in this case, as I have told you, there is total darkness below the spot. There is no pencil of rays, as there would have to be if a searchlight were employed.”
“In one of your books—I forget which one,” said Thurston, “you describe an experiment in which certain invisible rays, ultra-violet rays, are brought together in such a way as to produce on the eye the impression of white light. You cite the experiment to prove that light is not a form of energy, as is commonly supposed, but an emanation of matter; that light, in other words, is matter flying off into space. I remember, now, it was in your radium book that you told us these things.”
“So it was,” said Mr. Wembley. “Your mind runs ahead of my story and helps me to take a short cut to my conclusion, which is this: That the spot of illumination in the London sky on the nights of the Zeppelin raids is produced in some such way as I described in my radium book, by the crossing in air of two or more streams of invisible rays directed upward by powerful lenses and reflectors from points on the earth's surface in the London vicinity. Now let's build up our hypothesis. Let's assume that the spot of light is five miles above the earth.”
“How can you assume that?” Tom demanded. “It may be three miles, or ten.”
“Not according to my triangulation. If the light is a signal for the Zeppelins it will naturally be fixed as nearly as possible above the heart of London, will it not?”
“Yes.”
“That is Charing Cross. Well, from Kew Gardens to Charing Cross the distance is six miles, and the spot in the sky, when viewed from Kew, appears about forty degrees above the horizon. Do you follow me?”
“I think I do,” said Tom. “If the spot were six miles above Charing Cross, and Charing Cross is six miles from Kew, then the light would be half a quadrant above the horizon, or forty-five degrees.”
“That's it. Let us now assume something else; let's assume that the angle at which the streams of invisible light come together is a right angle, as it would need to be in order to insure the maximum of luminosity. You can then readily calculate, can't you, that the sending points are ten miles apart?”
Before Thurston could assent to that self-evident proposition he had to take pencil and draw a diagram. “I guess you're right,” he said at last.
“Then you must see,” cried Mr. Wembley, triumphantly, “that if my two assumptions are correct as to the elevation of the light and the angle of the streams of rays, the sending points will be found somewhere along the circumference of a circle whose center is Charing Cross and whose radius is five miles. That circumference touches Barnes Common, Chiswick Park, Wormwood Scrubbs and Dollis Hill on the west, Golder's Green, Muswell Hill and Wanstead Flats on the north, Hackney Marsh and Greenwich on the east, and Tooting on the south—a path some thirty-five miles in length along which we have to hunt for the secret power plants from which the local friends of Germany light the Zeppelins on their way to town. It seems a hopeless undertaking, you think?”
Tom's face reflected his doubt. “If we only had a clew,” said he, “something to give us a start.”
“That we have,” said Mr. Wembley, and threw away the dead leaf, having looked at it steadily through all their talk. “A year ago I met a man at one of my clubs—the Flyfishers, I think, or perhaps the Eccentric. He was a wealthy American of the name of Krug. On a number of occasions he went out of his way to be agreeable to me. He professed to have dabbled in science, and his knowledge of recent advances in radiology and catoptrics was indeed more than superficial, as I discerned from a little conversation with him.”
“What's catoptrics?” demanded Thurston.
“The science of the reflection of light,” patiently Mr. Wembley explained. “He brought up one day the subject you have mentioned this morning—the experiment set forth in my radium book, which is perhaps the most convincing experiment yet devised to demonstrate that light is matter. I now recall that he showed a rather persistent interest in the details of the apparatus used, so that I gave him a card to Professor Smythe, at Kensington Institute; but Smythe tells me the card has never been presented. Soon after the card episode I ceased to run across the man Krug, and I have not seen him since, except one night last week when I went to attend the annual dinner of the Royal Botanical Society at the Salisbury.”
“The Salisbury?” Thurston exclaimed. “That's my hotel.”
“So Sir Arthur tells me,” said Mr. Wembley. “That is one reason why I am asking you to help me. I stopped at the hotel desk that night to inquire my way to the banquet hall, and discovered Mr. Krug beside me, waiting for the clerk to hand him his mail. Pleased to see him again, for he had been almost as complimentary, in our brief acquaintance, as you have been this morning, I greeted him. But he looked me in the eyes and denied that he knew me. 'You have made a mistake, I think,' he said; but he lied. It was Krug, beyond a doubt, for I saw that name on the uppermost of the letters the clerk gave him.”
“You think he is staying at the Salisbury, then?”
“He got his mail there. His box number was 340.”
“What does he look like?”
“He is a large man with a stomach; over-prosperous in appearance, noisy and self-assertive in his talk, and fond of jewelry. I once admired a ring that he wore, and he assured me he had a change of rings for every day in the week. And now,” said Mr. Wembley, “we come to the objective of all our rambling. I feel that Mr. Krug ought to be investigated. This morning I expressed that opinion to Sir Arthur Purdoy, and Sir Arthur laughed at me. Like all Britons of the official class, he lacks imagination. He's a grand good fellow, but he has let his vision be circumscribed by the miscroscopic pettiness of British party politics. A year ago I told him that the British nation would be fighting not only for the life of Belgium, but for its own life as well before the end of the summer, and he called me a wild ass. If you were an Englishman you would have read his speech in the House of Commons last April, one year ago, in which he described the advocates of a larger naval program as little better than profiteers. Well, the war has come, as I predicted, and still his eyes aren't open. Failing to interest him this morning, I declared it my intention to conduct an investigation of my own; and when I mentioned Krug as an American stopping at the Salisbury, Sir Arthur thought at once of you and of some declaration or other you made to him last night; and he sent for you, and here we are.”
“I'm proud to be with you in this business,” said Tom. “But you don't know a lot about me, do you?”
“I know that Sir Arthur's friend, Mr. Price, vouches for you, and that Sir Arthur vouches for Price, so what more do I need to know?”
“Secret-service work is a little out of my line,” said Thurston; “but if you think I can help you, I'm your man. You want Krug shadowed, I suppose. Is that about all?”
“That's about all. Living there in the hotel, you can easily find out what there is to learn about the man; and if there seems to be any basis for my suspicions, we can then take them to the police—a course at which I hesitate now, for, you see, I know the English police as well as I know Sir Arthur Purdoy.”
“There's one question,” said Tom. “If the mysterious spot in the sky has been as distinct as you say, then it must have been observed by other people than you.”
“So it has been,” said Mr. Wembley. “A day or two after the first manifestation occurred, a letter was printed in the London Mail from a person who signs himself 'H. Hatfield' and gives his address as Number 25, Hermitage Road, Finsbury. In his letter in the newspaper Mr. Hatfield describes the phenomenon that I saw. Here is the clipping for you to read at your leisure. You will note that the sky spot, as he viewed it from Finsbury, appeared in the south-southwest. This fact has helped me in locating it over Charing Cross, since Finsbury is in the northern part of London and a little to the east of the Charing Cross meredian.”
“Are you and Mr. Hatfield the only persons who have seen the light?”
“We are, so far as I know,” answered Mr. Wembley, rising. “It may pay you to go to see him. Now I shall leave you to your own devices. Being an American, you are resourceful. I'm sure.”
“And you, sir, being an Englishman, are a jollier,” Tom laughed, detecting a twinkle in Mr. Wembley's eyes and remembering the “Until Something 'Appens” joke.
“I hope,” said the other, in conclusion, “that you will have interesting things to report to-morrow evening at Fabian Villa, Kew Lane, where I shall expect you to take tea with me.”
CHAPTER IV.
Mr. Brompton.
On the upper deck of a motor bus Thurston rode into the maze of North London unto the Finsbury district. This was a different London from the London of parks, palaces and clubs, of stately bridges and historic monuments. Here the house-building speculators had done their worst, covering league after league with monotonous rows of brick dwellings for the sheltering of millions of the capital's toilers. Here almost every street was like almost any other street within a mile. But Hermitage Road, where Tom descended, had two features to distinguish it from its neighbors. Its houses were detached one from another, and before each house was a little high-walled garden, the walls built of brick and surmounted with broken bottles set in mortar.
Such a wall had Number 25, and upon the wall beside the gate was a sign of painted tin that read:
H. HATFIELD,
MANTUA MAKER.
Giving the gate bell a pull, Thurston waited until, through the lattice that formed the upper half of the gate, he saw the house door open and a tall and angular woman descend the steps.
“Well, sir?” said she, opening the gate.
“Is Mr. Hatfield at home?” Tom asked.
“There is no Mr. Hatfield,” the woman answered, sharply.
“I'm sorry, ma'am,” said Tom, sympathetically. “I didn't know”
“Oh, there's no occasion for condolences,” the woman interrupted. “Mr. Hatfield hasn't died. There never was a Mr. Hatfield—not in this house, anyhow. If you are looking for a person named H. Hatfield, I am that person.”
“I see,” said Tom. “I've thought all along that you were a man. Allow me to beg your pardon.”
“Pardon's granted,” said the woman. “What is your business, please?”
On the bus trip north through Camdentown Thurston had read the Mail clipping which Mr. Wembley had given him. It was addressed to the editors and ran as follows:
Sirs: Last night, about eleven o'clock, while I was crossing Finsbury Park, my attention was attracted to a remarkable spectacle in the heavens, which at first I took to be a display of northern lights, despite the paradoxical fact that the auroral exhibition was in the SOUTH!!!
In the direction of Westminster from where I stood, and high in air above darkened London, appeared what I can perhaps best describe as a rosy glow, a kind of floating veil of light, much brighter than a comet's tail, yet suggesting that phenomenon, inasmuch as the stars were visible through it.
It could not have been the reflection of earth lights on a passing cloud, for the cloud did not pass, and, besides, the night was quite clear.
To-day, as I read in the Mail of the visit of the Prussian aviators, I incline to suspect that the resourceful enemy has found a way. to set at naught our vaunted lights-out regulation. I beg to suggest that, if this is the case, it demonstrates the utter helplessness of a government conducted by mere men. Let the women of England have a voice in public affairs and see if the Germans will prevail over us in our very midst as they now so impudently do. The female of the species is more deadly than the male.Yours, H. Hatfield.
25 Hermitage Road, Finsbury.
Challenged by Miss Hatfield, Thurston stated his errand briefly. He had come to inquire whether the writer of the letter in the newspaper could give him further information regarding the apparition in the sky. Miss Hatfield could not. She was interested much less in sky glows for Germans than in votes for women. It was rather as a suffragist than as an Englishwoman that she had written the letter. Was Mr. Thurston a suffragist?
“In the United States, where I come from,” Tom replied, “many of the women vote.”
Then Miss H. Hatfield softened. Bidding the stranger enter, she sat down with him on the house steps and talked to him of the rights of women until a half hour had passed.
“But about the light in the sky,” she said, at last, “I can tell you no more than I wrote in the Mail. I was returning home from a business meeting of our Finsbury Suffrage executive committee when I saw the queer sight. I watched it for ten minutes or more, then I came on home.”
“Do you know of any one else who saw the light?”
“There were two men who stood near me in the park,” she answered. “I remember hearing them laugh together, and I thought at first they were laughing at me. Perhaps that is why I didn't watch longer.”
“You don't know who they are, do you?”
“Indeed I do. They live at Number 20, just opposite. But I shouldn't go there if I were you.”
“Why not?”
“It is not for me to slander my neighbors and go to prison,” Miss Hatfield replied. “But there are stories. There's bound to be talk when people keep themselves behind locked doors and refuse to speak to the other people in the street when they meet thm. And when people have explosions in their house in the dead of night and fill the air with dreadful smells when honest folk are asleep, I'm sure it's only human nature for tongues to wag.”
“I'm sure of that, too,” Tom agreed. “Tell me the name of the family at Number 20.”
“The old gentleman's name is Brompton. I call him a gentleman because he does seem, indeed, to be a very nice old creature. The names of the other people I don't know.”
“Was Mr. Brompton one of the men who watched the light with you in the park?”
“Yes, he and a younger man.”
“In spite of your friendly warning,” said Tom, “I think I'll go across the street and pay a call at Number 20.”
“Please yourself, of course,” said Miss Hatfield. “But don't tell them you came from me.”
Like all the other residences in Hermitage Road, Number 20 had a lattice gate. Through the gate Thurston could see the house. It was of red brick, three stories in height, well kept and respectable in look. The grass along the path that led to the door was neatly clipped, and an apple tree in bloom canopied the yard and dropped its pink-and-white petals upon a trim young woman who sat on a rustic bench. Her hand held a pencil, her lap supported a notebook, and her eyes rested upon an elderly man in a rustic chair before her.
Thurston, with his hand on the bell pull at the side of the gate, stared through the lattice and stared again, for the girl before his eyes was certainly the stenographer whom he had seen and heard in the typewriter office in Cornhill. He recalled her words to the manager on that occasion: “If you could see him, sir; if you could see his face with the bandages off, you would almost wish, for his sake, that he didn't have to get well.” He remembered, too, the fear in her voice when she told of something wrong, something degrading in the place where she was employed. “There is a man, and he—I shouldn't stay there, sir.” Not much of an accusation, but enough for a person of Tom's imagination.
More than once since that day in Cornhill he had thought of the girl and her brave battle for bread. He remembered how proud yet helpless she looked as she said, “It isn't right for a girl to be out so late in London now, with the streets so dark. My people at home talk about me and make it very hard.” Now he found her under a blossoming apple tree, serving a respectable looking, benevolent-looking elderly gentleman as a secretary.
As he looked at her, the girl raised her eyes and, seeing the stranger at the gate, spoke a word to the elderly gentleman, who rose and came toward Tom, limping somewhat and aiding his movements with a heavy cane. The man was tall in stature and spare of limb, his face was smooth-shaven and scholarly, and a shaggy mane of iron-gray hair enhanced the distinction of his appearance. Tom felt sure that this was the “very nice old creature” described to him by Miss Hatfield.
“Well, sir?” asked the old gentleman through the lattice.
“Are you Mr. Brompton?”
“I am.”
“My name is Thurston. I understand that you witnessed a strange light in the sky one night about a month ago, and I have called to see whether you will talk to me about it.”
Mr. Brompton squinted through the lattice and studied Tom's face shrewdly.
“How do you happen to know, young man, that I saw the light in the sky?”
“One of your neighbors saw you looking at it.”
“In that case, I suppose I shall have to plead guilty,” said the old gentleman good-naturedly. He opened the gate with a heavy key. “Won't you step inside?”
Tom followed him to the apple tree. The stenographer rose and stood awaiting instructions from her employer.
“You may go into the house and work on our last chapter, my dear,” Mr. Brompton told her. Tom's eyes remained upon her until the house door shut her from his sight. She was the prettiest girl he had seen in England, not excepting the princess of the Salisbury breakfast room. When he saw her first at the typewriter agency in Cornhill he thought her the prettiest, and the interval of two weeks had verified his opinion. Most of the girls in the streets of London did not dress attractively, and they wore oversize shoes. This girl had eyes and cheeks, and an air and a way of carrying herself; and there was the neatness of a new pin about her, from the tight coil of dark hair at the back of her head to the shining tips of her properly small boots.
Noting the young man's undisguised interest, Mr. Brompton explained.
“That is my secretary, Miss Ashby. She is almost a daughter to me. If you care to know, I am a retired bookseller, and I am spending a year on the downhill side of my life in the pleasant occupation of writing my autobiography. I shall call it 'The Memoirs of a Bookman.' Very few persons will care to read it, I know; but it gives me a mild sort of happiness to talk my life over again to Miss Ashby for an hour or two a day, since I thus renew the friendships I have enjoyed with some of the great people of the earth. In these April days we do our work out here; it is warmer than indoors.”
“How long,” Thurston asked, “have you and Miss Ashby been at work on your memoirs?”
“How long? Let me see. This is April. We began on New Year's Day.”
So this was the employer of whom the girl had spoken the words that had sunk into Tom's heart. “There is a man, and he—I shouldn't stay there, sir.” Tom began to dislike Mr. Brompton exceedingly, but the object of his growing animosity chattered on about himself with so agreeable a flow of talk and such an air of bookish cultivation that Tom's mistrust soon went to sleep.
“Perhaps you know my bookstall in High Holborn, sir? I still own it, though I seldom go near the place any more.” He tapped his left foot gently with his cane.
“Rheumatism?”
“Gout. Plain, old-fashioned gout, such as all the earls used to have in the novels, before our literature became so confoundedly full of golf and hockey and motoring. Gout, sir. It keeps me close at home. You are an American, aren't you? I thought so. In my day I had many Americans among my customers; the Gaits, the Drexmores, the Perquins—I've supplied libraries to all of them.”
“Do you happen to know a wealthy American named Krug?”
“Krug? The name seems familiar. I believe I once knew such a man. Is he a shy little chap with poor eyesight?”
“Not the same,” said Tom, and changed the subject. “You know most of the English writers, no doubt?”
“Know them all, sir, know them all, but the old-timers best. Meredith, Huxley, Darwin, Tennyson, all were friends of mine. Robert Louis Stevenson used to drop in at my shop.”
“You knew R. L. S.?”
“Indeed I did. In the years when he and his father weren't on speaking terms I gave him shelter many a cold day. He showed me his 'Suicide Club' in manuscript, poor chap, and I advised him where to place it.”
“Do you know Mr. Herbert Wembley?”
“The scientific novelist? Only by sight,” Mr. Brompton replied. “Mr. Wembley is too modern for a man in my trade. Much too modern. In fact, he is so far ahead of the times that I wonder he interests anybody. No one ever calls for his books at my shop. But you did not come here to talk of books and authors, did you?”
“No,” said Tom; “I came to talk about lights in the sky. The reason I mention Mr. Wembley is that he has seen the lights and has asked me to help him investigate them.”
“Mr. Wembley has seen them?”
“On three occasions.”
“Well, well! Now he will have some new insanity to write about, won't he? May I ask what Mr. Wembley thinks of the lights?”
“He thinks they are signals for the Zeppelin raiders.”
Mr. Brompton leaned back in his rustic chair and laughed.
“The theory is not so ludicrous,” said Tom, nettled at Mr. Brompton's scorn of the noted English author, “when you stop to think that on each of the three nights when the light has appeared in the sky, London has been bombed. How do you explain that?”
“Coincidence, purely,” said Mr. Brompton. “Hot-heads in England like Mr. Wembley are too quick in accepting the German notion that the Germans are supermen. The Germans are nothing of the sort; they are common human folk like the rest of us. To produce a signal light in the sky for the Zeppelins—I mean by that, such a peculiar light as I saw—would be a supernatural act. It can't be done by them or by anybody else.”
“What was there peculiar about the light that you saw?”
The old gentleman shot a quick scowl at his questioner. Perhaps his gouty foot had given him a twinge of pain.
“Well,” said he, “there was no visible connection between the light and the earth. I suppose that's what I mean. It was merely a glow up there, like a nebula. But don't ask me to talk science,” he added, turning his scowl into a smile. “I'm only a book lover and a sentimentalist, you know.”
“You think such a light can't be produced by human power,” said Thurston. “But it can.”
“I wish you would tell me how.”
“You would know how if you had followed Mr. Wembley's stories,” said Tom. “Some years ago, before the war crowded radium out of the newspapers and the magazines, Mr. Wembley published a novel in which he described a laboratory experiment in the ultra-violet rays of the spectrum. He tells me that the experiment, if engineered on a large scale, could produce the sky illumination that you and he have seen.”
“This is interesting, indeed,” said Mr. Brompton. “You don't suppose that Mr. Wembley himself may be throwing those lights on the sky, do you?”
“Certainly not; but I can tell you this, that he was sought out, a year ago, by a certain wealthy foreigner, a dabbler in science, and questioned about the experiment, the necessary apparatus, and so on; more than that, the man is still in London, and he now behaves unaccountably toward Mr. Wembley and pretends not to know him. So, you see, Mr. Wembley's theory may not be so ridiculous, after all.”
“Apparently not,” responded Mr. Brompton, opening his eyes wide. “May I ask you the foreigner's name?”
“His name is not important,” Tom replied. “I have told you this much merely to convince you that you ought to have Mr. Wembley on your bookshelves.”
Mr. Brompton admitted cheerfully that his education might have been neglected, and promised to order Mr. Wembley's rarium book at once.
“Suppose I should see the light again,” said he, as Tom rose to go. “Where can I get in touch with you?”
Thurston opened his pocketbook, found one of his cards and scribbled, “Hotel Salisbury, Strand,” under the name.
A pleasant fellow, after all, was Mr. Brompton, although Tom would have liked to interview the pretty secretary before accepting that estimate of the man as final. Through the lattice gate he looked back at the house, scanning every window from basement up to eaves; but the only face he saw was the forbidding visage of a slatternly woman, possibly a servant, on the second floor.
Thinking of the pretty stenographer, Tom boarded the wrong bus in Green Lanes and discovered the fact an hour later.
“Where the deuce does this jitney run to?” he asked the conductor.
“This wot? Padd'n'ton Station. Where do you want to go? Charing Cross, is it? 'Op hoff when I tells you and take a Number 'Leven.”
He was a friendly conductor, so Tom was emboldened to remark to him upon the large number of crippled soldiers in the streets.
“Yes, the poor blighters!” said the fare man. “They picked the hinfantry, they did. Me for the hartillery. 'Cos why? 'Cos when you get it you get it quick, and hall hover but a letter 'ome saying wot a fine chap you were. I'll be a 'listed man to-morrer night, sir.”
“Good for you,” said Tom.
“Bad for me, you mean. But wot helse you goin' to do when they tells you there'll be a lady in your job to-morrer?”
At the proper point Tom hopped off and found himself in front of a nice old church in Marylebone. A little crowd of people hung about the church and another crowd loitered beside the park wall opposite. A policeman in the street had his hands full in keeping the crowd off the church steps.
“What's going on inside?” Thurston asked. “A wedding?”
“A wedding!” There are no words in the English language to express the policeman's honest scorn. “'E arsks is it a wedding!”
“Well, then, what? Spill it to me so I can enjoy the fun along with the rest of the audience.”
“It's the bloody Zeppeleen pirates, them that came to town last night,” the officer explained, perceiving that the stranger was in earnest. “They're a-givin' of 'em a decent Christian funeral service. Hi suppose the blessed little choir boys is a-singin' the German 'ymn of 'ate hover their blarsted remains now, hout o' politeness. My Gord!”
The bluecoat was too full of righteous disgust for further utterance. Respect for the dead, in his not very humble opinion, could be carried entirely too far. Chuck the bloody 'Uns in a sewer, that's wot 'e'd 'a' done with 'em.
Thurston mingled with the onlookers and watched the proceedings. From the interior of the church came the music of an organ and the sound of a voice singing. It was not the German hymn of hate that was sung; it was Barnby's sweetest, saddest anthem, “For all the Saints Who From Their Labors Rest.” Through the eight plaintive, beautiful stanzas, with their “Alleluia” refrain, Thurston listened spellbound.
“The golden evening brightens in the west;
Soon, soon to faithful warriors comes their rest;
Sweet is the calm of Paradise the blest.
Alleluia! Alleluia!”
If there was unconscious humor in the singing of that song on such an occasion, Tom was in no mood to perceive it. His mind was filled with awe of a nation that could show such solemn and sincere respect to the charred bodies of its murderous enemies.
The music ceased. The crowd around the steps stirred a little, and out from the portal came a procession of black coffins carefully borne on the shoulders of pallbearers. In silence the crowd watched the hearses drive away.
But Tom had no eyes for hearses or crowd just then. His eyes were fixed upon a richly dressed young woman with yellow hair who had followed the caskets out of the church. It was the princess of the Salisbury, and she wore below her throat a cluster of bright blue cornflowers.
She passed him without seeing him. Indeed, she walked as if seeing nothing—as if she had been asleep.
Long after her taxicab had disappeared, Tom stood staring.
CHAPTER V.
Mr. Krug.
To enter the Hotel Salisbury the visitor passes from the Strand through an archway into a quiet courtyard, at the farther end of which are the hotel offices. On Thurston's return from Finsbury he discovered that the courtyard wore a sunnier look than when he had left in the morning, the cause of this new effect being tall spikes of bright yellow flowers in a score of window boxes which a florist had installed in his absence.
“The flowers in the window boxes outside,” he said to the clerk at the desk; “can you tell me what they are?”
The clerk could not, but he would find out for the gentleman. He tapped a bell, spoke in French to a messenger, the messenger went in search of the manager, and word came back that the yellow blooms in the courtyard were genesta.
“Planta genesta—Plantagenet,” thought Tom. “Wasn't that the national flower of England once upon a time? You'd think an English hotel clerk would know it.” He turned to the man behind the desk. “Speaking of flowers, do you happen to know the national flower of Germany?”
“Cornflower,” instantly replied the clerk.
He reminded Thurston of some one—the head waiter in the breakfast room, perhaps. Both men were stout, swarthy of complexion, unctuous of skin and manner, and both had the kind of eyes that can see everything or nothing, at their owner's convenience.
The clerk hung obsequiously near; his manner invited further requests for information, though his eyes were mildly impudent. Perhaps the inquisitive American would like to know something about the botany of the Fiji Islands.
“Is there a guest here named Krug?”
“Krug? Let me see.” The clerk turned to his roster and ran a fat forefinger down the list. “Krug? Yes, sir.” He put his hand into pigeonhole 340 in the key rack. “Mr. Krug is about the place now. Would you like him paged?”
“Don't bother,” Tom answered. “What does he look like?”
The clerk hesitated, and in that moment an interruption walked up to the desk in the person of a dowager who wished to complain of the gas grate in her bathroom. Abandoning the clerk to his fate, Tom sauntered through the parlors looking for a stout and prosperous American with a noisy voice and a passion for jewelry; looking also for the yellow-haired princess who had worn cornflowers at the funeral of the Zeppelin pirates.
Numbers of women were taking tea with army officers in one of the parlors, and two or three solitary women were dreaming over their cigarettes, but the princess was not among them. The reading room was deserted; there Thurston sat down near a window through which he could look out upon the muddy little Thames beyond.
A barge worked its way up the river with the tide, steered by a man with a sweep oar. Watching its leisurely progress, Tom failed to see a little pantomime in the door way behind him. Just outside the portières stood two men. One of them was the desk clerk, and he pointed toward Tom. The other was the man who had damned the President of the United States so heartily before the fireplace in that room earlier in the day. He answered Mr. Herbert Wembley's description of Mr. Krug in every detail, except that at the moment he had throttled his obstreperous voice down to a husky whisper.
“When did he ask you about me?”
“Five minutes ago.”
“Who the devil is he?”
“His name is Thurston. He arrived from America last month.”
“If he asks about me again, point me out to him. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
The whispering pair withdrew from the doorway, the barge drifted upstream out of sight, and Tom still sat at the window, planning his next move in the assignment Mr. Wembley had given him. The best way to learn about Mr. Krug, the American way, was the direct way. He would scrape an acquaintance with the unsuspecting Mr. Krug at the first opportunity. It would not take ten minutes to discover whether or not Mr. Krug was what he advertised himself to be.
He rose and resumed his search. Passing the hotel desk, he heard his own name spoken.
“Mr. Thurston,” said the clerk, “you were asking for Mr. Krug. He is the gentleman looking at the Blue Book at the table yonder.”
Tom saw the man he sought, recognizing him at once as his opponent in the reading-room debate of the morning. Mr. Krug looked up in surprise upon being addressed.
“Sure I remember you,” he growled. “You're the young devil who goes around London whitewashing the Wilson administration. If you want to borrow money, apply at the American embassy, Grosvenor Gardens.”
Tom swallowed the insult with a good-natured grin. Mr. Krug grinned, himself, and his bluff manner moderated.
“What you doing in London?”
“Looking for stories.”
“You find plenty of stuff, don't you?”
“Plenty. There's copy everywhere—reams of it. You're here on business, I suppose?”
“No, damn it, I'm not. I wish I was. I belong to the idle rich, and loafing don't agree with me. If I was back home in America I'd be making munitions; but Mrs. Krug and the girls won't live anywhere but here.”
“It isn't a particularly safe place to keep a family, is it? There was the Zeppelin raid last night, for instance. You saw the windup of that, I presume?”
“I had no such luck,” Mr. Krug answered. “I was home in Richmond, asleep in my bed. The first I heard of it was when I turned out early this morning to putter around my flower garden. The hired man told me about it, and I hustled into town to see what there was left to see. But the damned newspapers don't even tell where the bombs struck. Who's your banker?”
“Brown-Shipley.”
“I'll look you up,” Mr. Krug declared, in his abrupt though not ill-natured way. “If you're all right I'll have the girls invite you out to the house. We have to be careful about the people we take in. Lots of American crooks here, you know. Play tennis?”
Again Tom's sense of humor was equal to the strain. “Yes, I play tennis,” he said.
“Good,” said Mr. Krug. “You'll hear from me in a day or two.”
He resumed his study of the Blue Book in his hand, but Tom was not to be dismissed without putting in one further question.
“Are you acquainted with Mr. Herbert Wembley, the author?”
The Blue Book fell face down on the table. Mr. Krug recovered it with an impatient clutch.
“To my regret, I am,” he answered. “I say that because I believe the man's a lunatic. I have to cut him when I meet him.”
“What's wrong with him, if I may ask?”
“Bughouse. Plain nut! Anarchist and all that. Wants to turn everything upside down and make the world over. Do you know him?”
“I've met him.”
“Then watch your step.”
So saying, Mr. Krug returned so pointedly to looking up society names in the book that Tom had nothing to do but to withdraw as gracefully as he could.
A forceful person Mr. Krug seemed to be, and accustomed to having his own way in the world. He lived in a house in Richmond; he had no business to keep him in London, and he disliked Mr. Herbert Wembley. Thus Tom checked up the information he had gained.
The princess remained invisible to Thurston that evening, though he looked for her at dinner and afterward. But she occupied his thoughts as he sat down in his bedroom late at night to try again to write an account of the Zeppelin raid as he had seen it.
About midnight his curiosity, which was quite as human as it was professional, was suddenly keyed up to high tension by new sounds that came through the wall. There were men in the princess' room—two of them. He could hear the bass grumble of their voices, punctuated now and then with the soprano tones of the princess. It got on his nerves at last; it increased the mystery surrounding the princess; furthermore, the princess was too frail and dainty a doll of a thing to be visited by gruff-voiced men at midnight.
Tom slipped his overcoat on, went out into the Strand and walked east as far as the Law Courts and back again to relieve his feelings. As he turned in under the archway a tall man passed him, walking vigorously away from the hotel and swinging a heavy cane. Tom whirled about and followed the man down the Strand to Charing Cross. There the man waited for a bus, and Tom drew near enough to see that his surmise in the dim light of the courtyard had been correct, for the man was Mr. Brompton of Finsbury.
“Queer,” thought Tom, “how soon the old chap has gotten well from the gout. He's a regular Eddie Weston to-night.”
At the hotel desk another surprise awaited him, for the night clerk hailed him as he passed.
“A letter just came for you, sir.”
Tom looked at the writing on the envelope. Unfamiliar writing it was, and in a woman's hand. There was neither stamp nor postmark, and it was addressed to “Thomas T. Thurston, Esquire, Hotel Salisbury, Strand.”
In his room Tom opened the letter and read:
Sir: I wish to warn you that it is quite unsafe for you to have any dealings with Mr. Brompton. Please do not visit Hermitage Road again, and please, if you value this warning, say nothing to any one about it. Sincere.
To Thos. T. Thurston, Esq.,
Hotel Salisbury, The Strand.
“Why the dickens,” thought Tom, “should Brompton warn me against himself?”
That the retired bookseller had delivered the letter in person was as clear to Tom as daylight. Hadn't he seen the man hastily leaving the hotel? Hadn't the clerk reported that the letter had just arrived? There was a stronger bit of circumstantial evidence still. On arriving at the hotel Thurston had registered as “Thomas Thurston,” neglecting to set down the initial letter of his middle name. No one in London except Mr. Brompton knew that he had a middle initial in his name, for the calling card which he had handed to Brompton in Finsbury was the only card he had taken out of his pocketbook since reaching England. This letter was addressed, both outside and inside, to “Thomas T. Thurston.”
It was a clear enough case except for the fact that the handwriting of the letter was certainly not a man's. Mr. Brompton employed a girl for a secretary; but would he be likely to dictate to a secretary such a letter as this?
Tom stepped to the phone on his bedroom wall.
“This is Thurston—Room 83. You handed me a letter a minute ago. What sort of a person brought it in?”
“A small boy brought it, sir,” the clerk replied.
Long after the last taxicabs had ceased their “pip-pipping” in the streets outside, Thurston's mind was busy trying to fit together the pieces of this picture puzzle in real life that had been thrust into his hands that day; Mr. Wembley's account of the lights in the sky; Mr. Brompton, under the apple tree, dictating his memoirs to the pretty stenographer who was afraid of her employer; the glimpse he had had of the princess at Marylebone; the sounds in her room last night and this; the sight of Mr. Brompton enjoying the use of both of his feet; and, last of all, the anonymous note delivered at the hotel by the small boy.
There were no more sounds of talking in the princess' room. But it was not of the princess that Tom thought; it was of a trim young woman secretary with apple petals in her dark hair. Certainly the note of warning had been written by a woman, and by one who felt friendly toward him.
He might have gone to sleep in a flattered and contented frame of mind if he had not suddenly recollected Miss H. Hatfield, mantua maker and suffragist. Perhaps, after all, the note had come from her. It took him half an hour of painful thinking to remind himself that Miss Hatfield knew neither his middle initial nor his address.
CHAPTER VI.
The Knight.
There are always two ways of looking at an event; and the event in which Thurston and the princess figured as the chief characters on the following morning must be considered from two points of view in order to be understood.
Considered from Tom's point of view, it happened thus. Having risen, he dressed and shaved with unusual care, for he was to take tea that day with Mr. Herbert Wembley, the greatest exponent of the new school of English authorship. Descending in the elevator, he passed through the hotel parlors, treading luxuriously on the soft, rich carpets. Before a mirror on the stairs leading down to the breakfast room he paused to inspect his tie; then he continued downward. At the foot of the staircase he heard the half-repressed scream of a woman in distress, and, stepping hastily forward, he came upon a sight that caused him to grow instantly hot under the collar.
Outside the breakfast-room door stood the yellow-haired young woman he had come to call the princess. That it was she who had screamed appeared probable, for the only other woman in sight was the hat-check girl behind her counter, who did not look to be of the screaming kind; indeed, she now regarded the scene before her with a smile of scornful amusement. But the princess was not amused. She was angry and storming, and the head waiter, the object of her wrath, bowed smirking and insolent before the words that assailed him from her lips.
“You coward! You brute!” cried the princess, and clutched at the shelves of the hatstand for support. The waiter shot a question at her in French, to which she replied, “No! no! no! It's a lie. Oh, dear! I” She put a hand over her eyes as if to shut out a hateful sight. At the same moment her other hand loosened its grip on the hatstand and she certainly would have fallen if Thurston had not caught her in his arms. They were muscular arms and held their burden lightly as he turned upon the grinning waiter.
“What's all this?” he demanded.
“Ask mademoiselle,” answered the waiter, and walked away shrugging his stout shoulders.
Tom appealed to the hat-check girl. “What's the matter?”
“I know nussing,” the young woman replied. “I see nussing. Perhaps mademoiselle vill tell you.” So maliciously she leered that Tom turned away from her in disgust.
“Mademoiselle,” he called to the drooping creature in his arms. “Mademoiselle, come, wake up! Tell me what's wrong. Has that confounded waiter insulted you? Say the word and I'll mop him up.”
Slowly the princess opened her eyes.
“Oh!” Swiftly she freed herself from his quite respectful embrace. “Oh! Thank you, sir, but—but it's all right now. I shouldn't have cried out.”
“Listen, miss,” said Tom. “You didn't have any dinner last night, did you? I know that, because I watched for you and you didn't show up. Honest, now, aren't you hungry?”
Slowly she bowed her head, and Tom thought she blushed.
“Come along,” said he. “You don't know me, but let's have breakfast together, anyhow. I'm as lonesome here in London as a Quaker in Germany, and I'll be tickled half to death if you will let me sit across a table from you and look at you. A cup of coffee, now, and a Spanish omelet—what do you say?”
“Sir,” she replied, looking him in the eyes, “I cannot refuse your offer. I believe you are a gentleman.”
“Try me,” said Tom. She took his arm.
For the young man the half hour that followed was a bright one. When viewed at close range across the tablecloth the princess came up to his first impression of her—even exceeded it. Her skin made him think of peaches and cream. Her eyes were soft and full of light, shyly hidden from his sight at times, banteringly bold at others. She handled her knife and fork with the skill of a society woman. All in all, Tom felt not a little proud of himself and glad to be gazed at by the other breakfasters. It is to any man's credit to take breakfast with a charming young woman. As for any sign of unrefinement in her, he might as well have looked for a flaw in Queen Mary's favorite crown jewel.
The head waiter had disappeared, for which Tom was thankful. The other servants behaved as attentively as if he and his companion had just come over from Pittsburgh. To add to his sense of satisfaction was the fact that the princess ate heartily, accepting a second helping of the omelet without demur. His guess that she had gone without food the evening before was close to the truth.
So Tom and the early bird breakfasted together innocently and happily, the observed of all the breakfasters. Among others who observed them was the stout and bejeweled Mr. Krug, who seemed to have broken his fast previously that morning, for he merely entered the room, looked around until his eyes rested upon Tom and mademoiselle, and withdrew, his place in the doorway being taken a moment thereafter by a brisk little man in a rusty mackintosh, who spotted Tom and Tom's lady friend at once and remained near the door, never removing his eyes from them.
In great contentment Tom signed the check for the breakfasts and escorted the princess out of the room, past the little man in the rusty mackintosh and up the stairs to the first parlor, where they sat down tête-à-tête in a conversation chair, with an ash tray on a stand convenient to the young woman's hand.
“Now,” spoke Tom, “if I have satisfied you that I am a nice young man, let me help you further. You're in trouble, aren't you?”
“Yes,” she answered, dropping a burned match in the tray and feeling at her belt for her handkerchief.
“I hoped and expected to keep this,” said Tom, holding up a bit of lace and linen, “but if you need it, here it is.”
“Thank you,” she said, and applied the recaptured kerchief to her eyes.
“You are in trouble,” he said again.
“Very deep trouble,” she answered. “But how can I ask you to help me? What right have I?”
“You have the right of any woman,” Tom answered. “As for your asking me to help you, it's the other way around; I'm asking you to let me help you.”
“You are as gallant as a knight,” she told him, smiling once more. “I shall not ask for your help, but I shall tell you my story and ask for your advice. There can be nothing indecorous in that, can there?”
“Certainly not. Please go to it—I mean, begin.”
She sat silent for a minute. At the top of the breakfast-room stairs stood the stout Mr. Krug, talking with the brisk little man in the rusty mackintosh. They both were looking into the parlor. Tom, whose back was toward them, did not see them, nor did the princess, who had begun her story.
“It will not be a complete story,” said the princess, after a preliminary pull at her cigarette, which had been made in the Far East and was very fragrant. “It will be merely an outline, a sketch. I shall not have time for more, because every minute I spend with you increases your danger.”
“My danger!”
“You will understand in a moment what I mean. To begin, sir, my father's name would be familiar to your ears if I should breathe it to you. But discretion requires me to speak of him at this time simply as 'the count.' For you know, sir, you are a stranger to me—yet.”
“Yet!” thought Tom.
“In all Europe, sir, no man was held in greater respect than my father, the count. Trusted by his king, loved by his people, a man of probity, justice and kindness, a man whose life was devoted to the great-hearted service of our happy, hopeful little nation—such was my father until the dreadful day in August of last year when the Prussian government sought to lure us into a plot against our neighbors and, failing in that base effort, swept across our frontiers in overwhelming hordes to, crush our land under the iron heel of war.”
“Then you are a Belgian,” said Tom, his sympathy shining from his eyes. “I've thought so, all along. But here in England you are among friends, child.”
“Ah, these English! They are so good to my people. They have opened their doors to half a million of us. But, as I shall make clear to you in a moment, there are reasons of state which bar me from sharing that hospitality so generously given. You have heard, no doubt, of a certain volume of state papers which my government, in its flight to Havre, left behind at the bookbinder's in Brussels. It was in that forgotten volume, if you remember, that the Germans believed, or pretended to believe, they had discovered a conspiracy on the part of Great Britain, France and Belgium to at tack Germany. With what ingenuity they twisted the meaning of those discovered documents to fool and inflame their own people you are doubtless familiar; and you know that it is only necessary to supply the omissions in the German translations in order to prove that the papers were totally academic and harmless.”
“I have read something to that effect,” Tom admitted.
“There existed a similar set of papers,” mademoiselle continued, “involving certain projected commercial agreements between England and Belgium, and these papers were quite as susceptible of misrepresentation as the Brussels documents. My father, the count, was their appointed custodian, for they were considered too delicate to be intrusted to the archives of the Belgian government, where they would certainly have fallen under the eye of the German secret agents. The secret agents of Germany—they were everywhere in our country in those days of false peace and security, and they are here in London, here in this hotel, even now. For they know, sir”—here the princess paused to cast a cautious glance around the parlor “they know, sir, that I have the papers in my possession. Here in this friendly hotel in a friendly land my life is in danger as long as I guard the secret treaties for whose safe-keeping my father pledged his honor.”
“Why don't you put 'em in the hotel safe?” asked Tom, with American practicality.
She laughed cynically. “And play directly into the hands of the Germans? I tell you, sir, they are everywhere, those people. They are behind the desk, out there in front. They are downstairs in the dining room. They watch my every move. Twice they have searched my luggage. They know somehow that I carry the papers with me wherever I go.”
Tom glanced at a gay-colored knitting bag in her lap and saw her fingers close tight upon the silken cords.
“Pardon me for putting in a side remark,” said he, “but for a Continental person you speak mighty good English.”
“I was educated in England,” she replied, with quiet dignity.
“Oh! I beg your pardon again. But you must have friends in England, then. Can't you go to them?”
“And subject them to the same peril of life that hangs over me? Would that be honorable?”
“Tell me how these documents happen to be in your charge.”
“My father, the count, was at Brussels when the blow fell. The papers were hidden at our château near Waremme. He could not forsake the king. I volunteered to go for them; it was thought that I might steal safely through the invaded district without suspicion. Alas! my father and his friends at court relied upon a thing that exists only in fantasy—they believed in German chivalry.
“At Tirlemont I was detained, my chauffeur was arrested, my motor car was taken away from me. I sought to hire the farmers to drive me the remaining miles of my journey, but every cart was busy hauling the poor fugitives and their belongings out of the country. I went forward on foot. I slept at night in a hayfield. I reached our estate. The place was deserted, the servants had fled; there was not even a horse that I might have ridden back to Brussels. That day the last fortress at Liege capitulated under the pounding of those awful German guns. The tide of invasion swept forward, and next morning I looked from my window upon a regiment of gray-clad troops marching toward the capital.”
“Didn't they bother you in your château?” Tom asked.
“I hid in the wine cellar and they overlooked me,” said the princess.
“Queer about that,” thought Tom, but he withheld his opinion. The young woman lit a second cigarette and continued.
“Our château must have been out of the principal line of march, for there were no Germans in sight on the second morning. I made my way to the nearest hamlet, and there I found a man with a span of oxen, who was preparing to start with his family for the Dutch frontier. I gained permission to join his party. I dressed in some of the clothing of his daughter. Under tarpaulins we lay cowering in the bottom of the wagon, expecting at every mile to be dragged out of hiding to Heaven knows what dreadful fate. But the soldiers left behind to garrison the villages were of the Landsturm; they had wives and daughters of their own in Germany. Many times they stopped us, then suffered us to pass unharmed. On a rainy night we crossed into Holland, whence, after many days, I found passage to England. Now, sir, you know my story.”
Tom thought it over. It was a pretty good story, but it had loose ends.
“Is your father still with the King of the Belgians?”
“He is.”
“Then what's the matter with running over to Calais and delivering the papers into his hands?”
“The matter is, for one thing, that I should certainly be murdered on the way. At least, the papers would be stolen.”
“Not if I went with you,” Tom declared. “But if that won't do, why not turn the papers over to the British foreign office, in Downing Street? According to what you say, the British government is an interested party in the secret treaties. That's what I should do if I were you. I'd like to see any German spy try to steal them from Sir Edward Grey.”
“You do not understand, sir,” said the princess. “This is a matter of personal honor. My father promised his government to be personally responsible for the papers. He has delegated the responsibility to me. How then can I let them go out of my hands? Alas! I am only a woman. Whom can I trust?”
She looked at him so appealingly that his heart jumped. He was flattered and knew it, and let himself enjoy the sensation against his better judgment. The princess was a very magneto of attractiveness this morning.
“What about the head waiter?” Tom asked. “What has he got on you—that is to say, is he one of the Germans?”
“He a German?” she laughed. “No, indeed; he is a Swiss. They all are Swiss in England.”
“But does he know who you are?”
“He knows. He has told me so. It is he who has threatened me, speaking for others higher up than he. Through fear he hopes to break down my will. Yesterday he offered me promises in the name of the government at Berlin—promises of future favors to my father; for you must see, sir, these papers will enable the Germans to make out a very black case against England in the eyes of the neutral nations. To gain time I pretended to consider his proposal. This morning I told him I would not bargain with him, whereupon he became enraged and assailed me with the dire threats which you must have overheard.”
“Unfortunately, I can't take French, though I can send it,” said Tom. “That's what the beggar was doing, eh?—threatening you?”
Her forlorn look was answer enough. So hopeless, so despairing she seemed, he put aside his last doubts of her veracity. It wasn't manly, anyway, to mistrust the word of a woman.
“We have talked too long,” she said, rising. “I have no right to jeopardize your life along with mine.”
“Forget it,” said Tom. “You don't think a bunch of sneaking foreigners can get my goat, do you?” He stood beside her looking at her downcast face. “Will it relieve your mind if I take care of that bag for you?”
“Would you—just for to-day? I have reason to believe that this is the day when something may happen to me. I am leaving town to seek a new refuge—a quiet place somewhere in the country. I shall be followed, watched; there may be foul play if”
He took the silken bag from her not unwilling hand, rolled it into a tight wad and stuffed it under his coat.
“When you want it back, say the word.”
“To-morrow morning,” she replied. “To-morrow morning—at breakfast.”
“But listen, princess. If you're going out of town to-day to look for country board, won't you need somebody along to kind of kill anybody that molests you?”
“Thank you, sir. But please don't follow me. Please trust to me and do as I bid. Good-by, Sir Knight.”
She moved lightly across the soft, rich carpets. At the door she looked back, flashed him a sad little smile, and was gone.
CHAPTER VII.
The Man in the Mackintosh.
In his room Thurston took the knitting bag from under his coat and looked at the silky thing with amusement. His good sense warned him that mademoiselle's story was about as air-tight as a last year's bargain-sale tire. That she had quarreled with the head waiter, perhaps been insulted by the man, and that she was in difficulties of some sort Tom could readily believe. But a frail young Belgian, the daughter of a count, possessing papers valuable to the British government, would scarcely want for protection in England.
Nevertheless, it had pleased the pleasing young woman to intrust the bag to his care, and he would take care of it for her to satisfy her whim. For a while he debated whether or not he would be playing the game to open the drawstrings and look inside. His chivalry advised against such a proceeding, but his American horse sense warned him that any trustee has the right to know the nature of his trust. Strange women have a way, he knew, of turning out to be spies, diamond thieves and dangerous enemies of society generally.
He opened the bag. As the acting attorney for the fair defendant in the case he retained the privilege, in protection to himself, of learning the truth. As her attorney he could afterward keep his mouth shut concerning what the truth might be.
The bag contained a leather wallet, fastened with a strap and a buckle. He unfastened the wallet and spread it open. Within was a bulky sheaf of foolscap paper, the pages held together with brass clips. He unfolded the document. It was typewritten. At the top of the first page he read:
OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY OF STATE FOR WAR.
CONFIDENTIAL REPORT TO THE CABINET
On the Progress of Training in Certain of the Volunteer Army Camps.
Thurston stared at the paper in his hands as horrified as if it had suddenly transformed itself into a rattlesnake.
“My Lord!” he gasped.
He made his room door in one jump and the princess' door in another. With angry knuckles he rapped on the panel. There was no answer. Back in his own room, he stuck the confidential war-office report in his coat pocket, picked up a folded newspaper from his desk, stuffed it into the wallet, returned the wallet to the knitting bag, drew the strings tight, then looked around for a place to hide the beautiful bag until he should have had time to consult his friend Ted Price as to the deadly contents it had lately held. His suit case under the bed had a good lock. In the suit case he kept his passport, his letters of introduction to prominent Englishmen—which he had forborne to present after discovering how busy most prominent Englishmen were in those days—and such manuscript as he had found time to write since his arrival in London. In the suit case he locked the bag. Then he went out into the Strand and down the hill toward Trafalgar Square and the London office of the Chicago Sun.
Price was not at his desk. The office girl did not expect him that day. He had talked of going to Birmingham with Mr. Lloyd George to attend a mass meeting of munitions workers. Tom drifted back to the hotel and roamed the parlors, looking for the princess; but the princess had vanished from public view, nor was she in her room when he went thither again to knock at her door.
Having nothing better to do until he could see Price or the princess, he inquired at the hotel desk for Mr. Krug. The clerk was of the opinion that Mr. Krug had not come into the hotel that morning. Yes, Mr. Krug kept a room at the hotel and received mail there, though he had a villa in the country where he spent most of his time. The information disappointed Tom, for he had meant to pump the American millionaire for the real reason why that gentleman disliked Mr. Herbert Wembley. Failing to interview Mr. Krug, Tom could employ his time profitably, however, in walking the London streets and gathering local color. In a strange town everything is copy.
He turned eastward in the Strand, waited for a break in the traffic at the head of Waterloo Bridge, and paused to look in at the quadrangle of Somerset House. A band of Scottish bagpipers went noisily past, followed by the usual squad of recruits marching away to some station whence they would be sent to the training camps. Clean-cut, good-hearted youngsters those boys were who rallied at their country's call, in the early days of the war, to make up the greatest volunteer army the world has ever seen. Thousands of them, with the making of officers in them, were to die as privates before their country should awaken to the imperative need for conscription. It was the cream of the young generation, the bravest and best, that went first to the graves in Flanders fields.
A young fellow walked just in front of Thurston as the little procession went past, and he halted so suddenly that Tom bumped against him.
“Beg your pardon,” said the American.
But the young Englishman was oblivious to the apology. He flung away his cigarette, muttered to Tom, “It's got to be done,” and stepped off the sidewalk into the street, falling in at the rear of the marching line.
Out of the roar of the street into the quiet of the Temple Thurston went. Here, amid the green lawns, with the river glimmering beyond in the sunlight, there was no breath of war, although squads of law clerks would drill on the grass later in the day. Here stood the ancient buildings as they stood when Doctor Johnson made his dictionary. A postman hurried along the walk, and Tom hailed him.
“Can you tell me the entry where Charles Lamb used to live?”
The postman stopped to think. “Charles Lamb, sir? I don't recollect the party, but I'll inquire for you.”
A brisk little man in a rusty mackintosh had halted beside them.
“I'll show the gentleman,” he told the postman. “I know the way.”
“Much obliged,” said Tom to the stranger, as the postman proceeded on his route.
“Don't mention it,” the stranger responded. “I'll walk with you. It's only a step.”
Tom sized the man up. Said he: “You're not a native, I'll bet.”
“Me? Not much. I'm an American.”
“I thought so,” said Tom. “You speak the English language according to Hoyle.”
“These gazabos in London don't know their own tongue, that's a fact,” said the stranger; at which Tom shot a second look at him, for, like the comedian at the Alhambra, the man in the rusty mackintosh had placed the accent of the honorable word “gazabo” on the first syllable.
The stranger, it seemed, bore the honest name of Googan and lived, when at home, in Seattle. A year previously he had started on a trip around the world; he had traveled as far as India when the war broke, and he had continued westward leisurely as far as London, where he had lingered many weeks. He was a man of wide experience, a whimsical talker and a pleasant companion. Together the two Americans roamed the worn pavements of the Temple for half an hour.
They stood at last beside the grave of Oliver Goldsmith. Some one that morning had placed a yellow jonquil on the stone. “War or no war, old England goes right along in the same old rut,” Mr. Googan observed. “Yesterday I sat in the Law Courts and listened to seventeen lawyers chew the rag over a right of way granted seven hundred years ago. Have you looked in at the Law Courts?”
Tom had not, and was glad to accept the stranger's offer of guidance, the stranger insisting that he had nothing more important to do that day. Back across the Strand they went, mounted a dark flight of stairs to a gallery and listened in the respectful manner expected of them to a dispute between two bewigged and begowned barristers over a runaway horse that had jumped a hedge and landed in a greenhouse. The British constitution was mentioned a vast number of times; it seemed that the damage done to the greenhouse was as nothing to the harm that was threatened to the British constitution by one side or the other in the controversy, or perhaps by both of them.
“The man on the bench,” whispered Mr. Googan in Tom's ear, “is Rufus Isaacs, Earl Reading, the Lord Chief Justice.” Tom looked more closely at the urbane gentleman who was one day to become ambassador extraordinary to the United States.
Outside the gallery door a little old watchman threatened to perish of a broken heart if the strangers left the Law Courts without seeing Justice Darling.
“He is most witty at times, gentlemen; it's extraordinary the witty things the justice can think up to say. You'd better let me slip you in; there's two vacancies.”
So the Americans sat in another gallery and gazed upon the witty Justice Darling. It was noon before they came out into the street.
“Have lunch with me, won't you?” asked Thurston.
Mr. Googan pleaded an engagement in Russell Square. “But listen,” said he. “Have you ever done the House of Lords?”
Tom never had.
“I've got two passes for this afternoon. They're as hard to get as tickets to a leg show in little old New York. This-afternoon Lord Benbold is to make his speech in defense of himself for his old-time friendship with the kaiser. Would you like to go?”
Tom would be glad. So it was arranged that they should meet at the Lords' entrance to the Houses of Parliament in Westminster that afternoon at two o'clock sharp.
At two o'clock sharp Tom loitered near the appointed place, waiting for the brisk little man in the rusty mackintosh. But no such person appeared among the many pedestrians that passed in and out. Until three o'clock he waited; still no Mr. Googan. The policeman at the door began to eye the loiterer with unveiled suspicion. Tom offered him a shilling and explained.
“I've been waiting here an hour for a little man in a mackintosh; his name is Googan. If you see him will you tell him I couldn't wait any longer? He will probably ask you if I've been here. My name is Thurston.”
The policeman accepted the shilling and the commission. Tom crossed the street to the Abbey, looked a while at the names of Dickens and Thackeray and Ben Jonson in the Poets' Corner, admired the Longfellow bust as a dutiful American should, then went out into Princes Street and boarded a west bound motor bus.
Coming to Hyde Park Corner, where, in April, the old women sit on the sidewalk selling primroses, he continued along the southern edge of the park. Amid the green lawns the tulips and hyacinths bloomed brightly; beside them walked many women in black—for England at that early stage of the war had not given up outward signs of mourning. Upon a playing field in Kensington Gardens a troop of boy scouts went manfully through military evolutions.
“Getting ready for the slaughter,” thought Tom.
Toward the southwest, mile after mile, the bus rumbled along through streets lovely and unlovely, and across the Thames at Putney Bridge into a region of lanes and hedges, of parks, little and big, of neat shops and pretty suburban homes, of cricket fields and tennis courts with people in white flannels playing thereon. Here was quiet and greenery; here fruit trees in blossom overhung the walls, and small boys flew kites on the commons, and all was so peaceful and so pleasant that Tom resented the conductor's, “Richmond, sir. Far as we go.”
In a shop in the Richmond high street Tom did something that he had planned to do a number of days past. He bought a cane. Not to carry a cane in London, he had discovered, was to be conspicuous. For a quarter—that is to say, a shilling—he purchased a handsome stick of bamboo with a curved handle that would hang sportily on his arm. The shopkeeper apologized for the price. “They used to be ninepence, sir, but on account of the war, and shipping the way it is, we've had to advance the price on this lot. When these are gone, Heaven knows when we shall be able to get more.”
“Forget it,” said Tom. “In America that cane would cost me four dollars.”
Swinging his new toy, he strolled forth to look Richmond over. It was here, he remembered, that Mr. Krug professed to be at home. At a chemist's shop he consulted a local directory, but the author of the book had overlooked anybody of the name of Krug. He questioned a policeman, who informed him by way of reply that Richmond was quite a large place if a person didn't know a person's house number.
In a half hour's ramble Thurston saw many villas that might have suited the expensive taste of Mr. Krug. After picking out several of them as the probable residence of the American millionaire, he decided at last upon a stately little mansion that boasted a park all of its own. Of red stone it was with a roof of red tiles. Outside chimneys told of cozy fireplaces within. There was a red brick garage at the rear, and near it a tennis court. Mr. Krug had mentioned that his daughters played tennis. There were neatly barbered evergreens in the yard and early flowers in profusion in a garden at the side. Mr. Krug had spoken of his flower garden. Borders of white and lacy stuff—sweet alysseum, he thought—guided the scrubbed-brick walk from the gate to the door and prevented it from straying around over the very inviting lawn.
The windows of the villa gleamed brightly in the light of the declining sun, and it may have been these that suggested Mr. Krug to Tom's mind, for Krug himself, with his diamond scarfpin, was no mean gleamer. More likely, however, it was the snug little astronomical plant that capped the house. Of the color of the sky, the observatory lifted its hemispherical shape above the chimney tops and bespoke for the occupant of the house a passion for stargazing. If Mr. Krug were interested in cat—what was that unusual word Mr. Herbert Wembley had uttered so glibly? Catoptrics; that was it!—if Mr. Krug were interested in catoptrics, this villa might very well be his hangout.
At this point in Thurston's cogitations a large brunet dog came baying around a corner of the house and made toward him across the lawn. An Uncle Tom's Cabin kind of dog it was, and its barking brought other dogs of similar breed to clamor at the stranger over the wall. Thurston hastened away as if he had been a small boy caught looking at a neighbor's pear tree in September. Anyway, he had not come to Richmond with the intention of spying upon Mr. Krug; he had another errand, and of this errand the setting sun reminded him.
“Kew Gardens?” said a nursemaid of whom he asked the way. “Foller the tram line, mister.”
Following the tram line, Tom came, after a ten-minute walk, to an open gate in a high stone wall, through which he passed into a sweet-scented and wonderful little forest; a prim, trim, demure little forest. Never had he seen so many handsome trees; never so many trees whose names he did not know. As he sauntered along the winding paths he found himself quoting from Alfred Noyes:
“Come down to Kew in lilac time,
It isn't far from London”
and wondering what the rest of the lines were. No lilac plumes greeted his eyes, for he had arrived too early in the year; but Kew Gardens were worthy of a poem, even without the lilacs. Other persons than Tom were there that day enjoying the beauty of the place. There were girls in pairs who giggled as Tom swung past; he thought it might have been his cane, though it was only his American hat. There were young couples walking arm in arm, most of the young men in khaki. On the river were people in boats, and under the wonderful trees were picnic supper parties.
Supper! Perhaps at this very moment Mr. Wembley awaited Tom—and the tea growing stronger every second. Reluctantly Thurston left the Gardens, found Mr. Wembley's house in Kew Lane, and found Mr. Wembley on his knees before a fireplace, vigorously punching the smoldering coals with a poker.
That was a memorable evening for Thurston. With Mr. Wembley he took tea and muffins and marmalade. Afterward, in Mr. Wembley's study where the greatest novels in the world were produced, he puffed one churchwarden pipe and listened while Mr. Wembley puffed another and talked. Such talk it was as few American young men ever hear; which is well for their peace of mind. Tom considered himself a radical, a progressive, an advanced thinker on every subject under the sun. But the little English author had him feeling fifty years out of date in ten minutes.
There were more things in the English air than were dreamed of in Tom's American philosophy. He learned, for instance, that the American republic is only a nice, respectable, benevolent oligarchy. He learned that what he called democracy was only an infant in arms alongside the lusty democratic idea of working-class England. He learned that the greatest of English revolutions was going forward peaceably under his eyes.
“We shall come to true democracy through the war, if we are not destroyed,” said Mr. Wembley. “Then it will be your turn. When British labor has given its sweat and its blood to save the Citizen idea from the Slave idea—for that is all that this war is about—then this will be a new and a different England. Our toilers know what is at stake and they are willing to pay the price. But the fruits of the victory are to be theirs; don't forget that.”
“Rabid,” thought Tom, and remembered that Mr. Krug had called Mr. Wembley an anarchist. But before many years he was to recall Mr. Wembley's talk as inspired prophecy.
About ten o'clock they worked around to the spot in the sky. Thurston reported his interview with Mr. Krug, omitting to mention the particular words Mr. Krug had used in discussing Mr. Wembley. He related also his conversations in Finsbury with Miss Hatfield and Mr. Brompton and his glimpse of the lame bookseller in the Strand at midnight when that gentleman seemed to have been miraculously cured of his lameness; and he showed Mr. Wembley the anonymous note warning him against further traffic with Brompton.
For reasons entirely sentimental he restrained his impulse to show Mr. Wembley the war-office report which the princess had intrusted to his care. He might consult Price about it, as one attorney will consult another in a difficult matter. But he had known Mr. Wembley only two days; and, anyway, the war-office report was another story and had nothing to do with Mr. Wembley's lights in the sky.
Mr. Wembley puzzled over the note of warning long enough for Tom to read the titles of all the books on one shelf of the Wembley bookcase.
“Are you certain it was Brompton you saw leaving the hotel?”
“Absolutely certain.”
“You don't know what he was doing there, or who it was that he went to see?”
“I asked the night clerk. He couldn't remember the man I described.”
“Was Mr. Krug in the hotel that night?”
“I don't know.”
“Who do you suppose sent you the note?”
“There are four persons who know that I called on Brompton,” Tom replied. “One of them is you. The second is Brompton himself. The third is Miss Hatfield, the suffragette; when I called at her house she advised me against going to Brompton, you remember. The fourth person who knows is Mr. Brompton's secretary.”
“You haven't told me much about that secretary,” said Mr. Wembley gravely. “She's a scraggly old thing, I presume?”
“Like fun she is,” Tom retorted. “She's the prettiest girl in London. I ran across her once before. It was in a typewriter agency where she was trying to locate a new job.”
“Why not hunt her up and find out whether it was she who wrote the note? The writing is plainly a woman's.”
“I don't know where she lives,” said Tom, “and I can't very well go up to Hermitage Road to ask her.”
“Won't the agency have her address?”
“I hadn't thought of that. I'll go there to inquire to-morrow.”
“Meanwhile,” said Mr. Wembley, “we might take a walk in the dark. It is time for the Germans to light their beacon.”
But a prowl across the dewy lawns of Kew Gardens revealed no light in the sky.
Back to town went Tom and made at once for his hotel, his room and his bed. Before turning out the light he looked at his suit case. The lock was fast. He sat still a minute to listen, but no sound came through the wall from the adjoining room.
CHAPTER VIII.
Scotland Yard.
When Thurston passed through the hall next morning he saw a porter's truck near mademoiselle's door, which stood open. Within the room a porter was tying up the boudoir trunk with rope while the chambermaid stood by bossing the job, as women ever do.
Tom stopped. “What's up?” he asked the slavey. “Lady leaving town?”
“'Aven't you 'eard, sir? Mamselle has been took up by the police for a 'orrid German spy. So sorry, sir.”
“Arrested, you mean?”
“Yes, sir. Last night it 'appened. So sorry, sir. She was very liberal, sir.”
So the princess was an agent of the kaiser! It was no news to Tom. The yellow-haired young woman was no more the daughter of a Belgian count than he was. He thought now that he understood her purpose in pouring her tearful story into his sympathetic ears. She had known that her arrest was near. Probably she had been warned or threatened by the head waiter in the distressing scene at the breakfast-room door.
He knew another thing, too. He knew that he had willingly and cheerfully played the fool at the lady's suggestion. The knowledge made him angry. He was not to be tangled up. He had other things to do in London than to face a British judge and jury to answer for the crimes of a Prussian adventuress. Having arrived at this conviction and at the breakfast room simultaneously, he faced about and returned to his bedroom. There he locked himself in against interruption, drew the suit case from beneath the bed and unlocked it.
A tap sounded at his door.
“Who's there?”
“Open, please.”
He thrust the suit case back under the bed and unlocked the door. Outside stood Mr. Googan in his rusty mackintosh.
“Oh, it's you. Good morning,” said Tom.
Mr. Googan made no response but beckoned down the hall, whereupon two sturdy male persons appeared and followed Mr. Googan into the room, closing the door behind them.
“What the devil?” Tom demanded.
“We want you to answer some questions,” Mr. Googan spoke. He perched himself on the edge of the writing desk and looked his briskest.
“Shoot,” said Tom, seating himself on the bed. The sturdy male persons remained standing, one at the door, the other at the window.
“How long,” asked Mr. Googan, “have you known the woman who occupied the next room?”
“Twenty-four hours and some minutes,” Tom replied.
“You've never traveled with her in Italy, I suppose?”
“I've never been in Italy.”
“Nor ever passed her off as your sister at the Astorbilt Hotel in New York?”
“I tell you I've known the lady only since breakfast yesterday.”
“There is a suit case under your bed. Open it, please.”
Tom obeyed the command. The silken knitting bag lay disclosed.
“That bag belongs to the woman, I think?”
“How the deuce did you know it was here? But I guess I can answer that question myself. While I was waiting like a boob at the House of Lords for you yesterday, you were playing the sneak here in my room.”
Mr. Googan acknowledged the compliment with a bow and looked proud of himself. “Open the bag,” said he.
Tom loosened the cords, groped in the depths of the bag and drew forth the leather wallet.
“Go ahead,” Googan ordered. Tom removed the strap, opened the wallet and brought out a thumbed and ragged copy of the London Times, three or four days old.
“That's a queer-looking newspaper, Mr. Thurston.”
“Why so?”
“Look at the writing,” commanded Mr. Googan. “I'd like to know what is meant, there under your thumb, where it says, 'Aircraft gun, Temple Pier, talk to soldier with musket,' and up at the top of the page where you'll find written, 'Westminster Abbey like some other churches, full of dead ones.' Open the paper to the second page and I'll show you something else. There it is—'Beans and pork.' Now will you tell me, Mr. Thurston, why a sane person would cover a newspaper with that kind of nonsense unless he was writing cipher messages to be sent out of the country?”
“This is my newspaper and my writing,” said Tom. “As I told you yesterday, I am an American looking for story material in London. These notes all represent things I've heard, incidents I've seen or opinions I have formed. 'Beans and Pork,' for example, is simply a note of the fact that English restaurants never say 'Pork and beans,' as we do in America. Over here it's always 'Beans and pork.' The Westminster Abbey item is a scurrilous thought that came to me one day when I looked at the tombs of the kings. The reference to the anti-aircraft gun at Temple Pier is a reminder of a talk I had with a guard on duty there.”
“And what,” said Mr. Googan, “is your explanation of the words 'Cheddar cheese' on the next page?”
“That is a funny name they have in this country for American cheese,” said Tom.
Mr. Googan laughed disdainfully. “You are a very clever dodger, Mr. Thurston, but I shall have to ask you to go with us to Scotland Yard. If you go peaceably it will save you trouble.”
“Will you let me summon a friend of mine first?”
“No objection to that, is there, Mr. Hitt?” asked Googan of the sturdy male person who guarded the door. Both Mr. Hitt and his colleague at the window shook their heads. Tom stepped to the phone on the wall and called the London bureau of the Chicago Sun.
“Is Mr. Price there? When will he be in? This is Thomas Thurston talking. When Price comes in, ask him to hustle to Scotland Yard at once. Tell him it's urgent, please. Thank you.”
In a taxicab the three British secret-service operatives and their captive bowled through Whitehall and stopped at a door way in a blind alley, where a policeman stood guard. Tom was gently hustled out of the car, up the steps, down a dingy hall and into a gaslit room. There, pacing the floor, was Ted Price.
“Hello,” sang out the newspaper man. “What have you been up to?”
“How did you get here so soon after I phoned?” Tom answered.
“I've waited here an hour for you.”
“Waited for me?”
“Yes. My friend Googan took longer than he expected.” Price nodded toward the little man in the mackintosh, who was engaged at the moment in a whispered conversation with an erect old gentleman at a desk in the other end of the room.
“Who is Googan, anyhow?”
“The slickest detective in Scotland Yard. You know why he has brought you here?”
“I presume I do,” said Tom. “Let's sit down while I tell you about it.”
Mr. Googan still being busy at the desk, Thurston and Price sat down, and Tom confessed his innocent adventure of the previous morning with the count's daughter. The newspaper man smiled with the cynical satisfaction that all men take in the foolishness of their fellows.
“I'm afraid you've let yourself in for a bad time,” said Price. “The woman you call the princess has been under observation a long while, but the police have been unable to get anything on her until yesterday, when she was seen slipping that knitting bag to you. You know what was in the bag, of course?”
Thurston drew the war-office report from his pocket and flashed the heading of the first page before Price's eyes.
“This is what was in the bag originally.”
“This?”
“Yes. The moment I discovered what it was, I rushed out to look for you, but you had gone to Birmingham.”
“Then,” said the astonished Price, “what the devil was it that Googan found in the bag?”
“Nothing but an old newspaper with some notes of mine on it.”
“Notes of yours?” Then Price understood and would have howled with laughter if Googan had not happened to look their way. “Googan thinks,” he whispered, “that he is on the trail of a system of communication between German spies here and headquarters in Berlin. He thinks that the newspaper was given to you by the woman, and that the writing on it was in a new code. He made copies of the writing and sat up all night trying to interpret it.”
“How do you know all this?”
“I am on the inside with these chaps. They have known me for years; I help them now and then. Among your papers yesterday they found a note from me, and they came to me with it. I tried all evening to reach you by telephone at your hotel. I went there myself just before midnight and asked the fellow at the desk to have you call me when you came in. Didn't you get my message?”
“Not a word of it.”
“I've done about all I can for you,” said Price. “I have shown them your honorable record in 'Who's Who in America' and referred them to the American ambassador. But these people have a bull-headed way of looking at a thing, and you can't deny that you let the woman make an accomplice of you. Maybe you can convince them that you were just a romantic sucker, but I doubt it. At any rate, you'd better turn this very interesting document over to the chief, yonder, explain to him how you got hold of it, what you intended to do with it and why you substituted the newspaper for it in the bag. Why did you do that last thing, by the way?”
“I don't know,” Tom answered. “I suppose I wanted the wallet to feel fat in case the princess should ask me to return the bag before I had had a chance to talk to you. The newspaper was the first thing handy.”
“Gallant youth, to wish to spare the afflicted lady's feelings! But Googan is crooking his finger. Come on.”
Tom approached the desk and faced the keen eyes of the erect old gentleman, who said:
“You still insist, do you, Mr. Thurston, that you and the young woman who occupied the room next to yours at the Salisbury have known each other no longer than a day?”
“I certainly do,” said Tom.
“We have information that you have traveled together on the Continent and in the States.”
“Whoever says that is a liar,” Tom declared. “Where did you get that dope, anyway?”
“That what, sir?”
“That dope—that information.”
“In the proper time you shall know where we got that—that dope,” said the old gentleman, making a wry face as he spoke the word. “Meanwhile, we shall have to detain you. The charge is that of having in your possession a newspaper covered with writings of a secret and mysterious nature, which may contain information detrimental to the welfare of the realm and valuable to the enemy.”
“Chief,” spoke up Ted Price; “I wish you would give Thurston a chance to explain about that newspaper. It won't take him long, and it's a beautiful story.”
“This is not a court,” the old gentleman replied. “Besides, we are well aware of the manner in which he gained possession of the paper in question. But if Mr. Thurston has any statement to offer, we shall be glad to listen.”
“Go to it, Tom,” Price advised.
“Gentlemen,” said he to the men around the desk, “I want time to think this thing over before I do any talking, so I guess you may lock me up.”
Price stared at him. Mr. Googan and his associates listened unmoved.
“Of course, Ted,” he told Price, “if you have a stand-in with the British government and can bring any pressure to bear that will help me out of the mess, I have no objection to going free. But what I told you over there in the corner is strictly under your hat. Get me?”
“I get you, you blamed fool,” said Price, and stood by while Mr. Googan led his charge away to the place where Scotland Yard keeps its living treasures. At the door Tom turned back.
“Come and see me before night, Ted,” he said. “I'll have something to ask you to do for me by then.”
Mystified, Price rid himself of a gentleman's oath.
“I'm sorry not to let your friend go, Mr. Price,” said the old gentleman at the desk. “I would do a great deal for you, but this is no matter for sentiment. We have been too easy-going with these people and we have paid for our lenity in enormous fire losses, in the destruction of battleships and ammunition plants and in worse mischief still. The orders are for a strong hand henceforth. All aliens, including Americans, must be registered at police headquarters after this week, and the wholesale internment of enemy aliens is in sight. This case is so plain and flagrant, there is nothing for us to do but to keep your friend in confinement until the whole conspiracy is cleared up. I trust he may be able to prove his innocence.”
“You won't mind helping me to help him prove it, will you?”
“Assuredly not.”
“Then arrange to let me see the woman in the case. Maybe I can talk something out of her.”
The old gentleman smiled skeptically, but penned a note and handed it to a messenger, who disappeared through the door by which Tom had left, returning in a minute or two with a guard in uniform whose large right hand clasped the slim left arm of Tom's princess.
Her yellow hair showed the absence of boudoir facilities in the cell where she had spent the night. Her eyes were hard and sharp and furtive, and darted restlessly from Price to the old gentleman and back again to Price. Silent and defiant she stood before the desk.
“This gentleman wishes to speak with you,” said the chief of the detective bureau. “While you talk, the guard and I will retire to the next room. We shall return in five minutes.”
Price, when he and the princess were alone, said, “Sit down, miss.” But the young woman asked, almost savagely:
“Have you a cigarette?”
He had a cigarette and he gave it to her out of his silver case. He had a match also. In half a minute her tension went from her and her eyes grew soft. With a lazy little smoke-wreathed smile to him she asked:
“Well?”
“You put up a job on a friend of mine yesterday,” said Price. “You gave him your knitting bag to take care of, and he took such good care of it that he is now in jail.”
“Yes?” she queried, on the defensive and admitting nothing.
“You know, perhaps, that the bag contained a copy of a document in the war office—spy stuff of the worst soft. He may hang for it.”
“Why do you tell me this?” she asked. “Are you another beastly detective?”
“I am not a detective, nor yet a lawyer,” he answered. “I tell you this because my friend had a chance to clear himself by repeating to the chief that wild yarn that you told him yesterday, and he refused to take it. Out of some fool notion of chivalry, I suppose, he kept his mouth shut. He thought yesterday that you were in serious trouble, and I guess he still thinks that by keeping mum he can protect you.”
“You speak of a wild yarn. What wild yarn?”
“The one you spun to him about being the daughter of a Belgian count. He told it to me in confidence.”
“Only to you?”
“Only to me. He knows that you lied to him, yet he sticks up for you. Now, then, isn't it up to you to play square with a man like that? . You seem to be in for it, anyway, for it's evident they've got the goods on you. How does it help you any to pull a fellow down with you whose only sin is that he is sorry for you?”
“They have the goods on me? What do you mean?”
“That's American slang. It means that they have you dead to rights. They've got your number.”
“I understand the slang,” she retorted, “but I don't know what you mean when you intimate that they have evidence against me. Evidence of what?”
“Evidence of spying on the British military. Don't be thick.”
“Why should I be suspected of that?”
“Because you gave Thurston a copy of a secret report of the government. Here it is.” He showed her the document which Thurston had left in his hands. “You know about it, don't you?”
“Is that why I have been arrested? Thank you for the news.”
She sat for half a minute thinking. Price tried to guess what was in her mind, but he was unprepared for her next question.
“You mention a knitting bag. What do you know about it?”
“It was found in Thurston's suit case when the detectives searched his room yesterday. They identified it as yours, and your arrest followed.”
“Silly!” she cried. “It wasn't my bag. It was one that I picked up in the hotel parlors late the evening before, intending to turn it in at the desk.”
“But you gave it to Thurston with this paper in it, didn't you? Possibly the detectives had their eyes on you at the time you handed it over to him.”
“There was not a soul in sight of us. I took no chances. There was only one person besides your friend who had ever seen that bag in my possession. There was just one person”
Suddenly she turned to face him. Her eyes were wild again with the fear that Thurston had read in them.
“I am going to trust you as I trusted your friend yesterday. I am going to tell you a story, but this will be a true story. Will you listen and—and believe me?.”
“I'll do my best,” Price told her, and glanced at his watch. “You have two minutes.”
Still facing him, sitting proud and straight, her eyes flashing, she began her narrative.
CHAPTER IX.
The Higher Command.
“My father's name,” said the yellow-haired young woman, fixing her flashing eyes upon Price's face, “my father's name would be familiar to your ears if I should mention it to you. But discretion compels me to speak of him at this time merely as 'the duke.' For, you know, sir, you are a stranger to me—yet.”
“Yet!” thought the newspaper man, as his friend Thurston had thought on hearing the princess speak in almost the same words a day before.
“In all Europe, sir, no man was held in greater veneration than my father, the duke. Trusted by his kaiser, loved by his peasants, a man of uprightness, justice and generosity, whose life, though he belonged to the idle class, was devoted to the service of humanity, my father was a happy man up to the summer day last year when the King of Prussia issued the command that plunged our gentle land and the peaceful lands of our neighbors into the fiery furnace of war.”
“You are of South Germany, then?” Price commented.
“I am,” she answered. “My people did not desire war. They are distinguished for their serenity; they love the quiet pursuits of tilling the soil, tending their herds and their vineyards, weaving the woolens that carry the fame of our little duchy to the ends of the earth. What happiness, what benefit of any sort could war add to their contented life?”
“But think of the gold' candlesticks out of the churches, and all the rest of the loot,” said Price.
“Don't interrupt me, please,” said the young woman, tapping the floor with her foot.
“Beg pardon,” said her auditor.
“We all had foreseen the calamity toward which the powerful few at the helm of state had hurried the German empire through many reckless years. In the Reichstag our representatives had protested and pleaded without effect. They had no power; their only right was the right to talk, and they might be thankful for that empty privilege. In the Bundesrath, where you in England believe the real power of the empire reposes, my father the duke lifted his voice in solemn warning, and many a gentle-hearted provincial ruler joined with him in appeal to Potsdam to avert the needless catastrophe. But in the fateful and fatal decision my father and his colleagues were not consulted. There is a power in Germany above even the Bundesrath; there is a private council that overrules the Bundesrath as the Bundesrath overrules the Reichstag. When that council spoke the word there was nothing for the empire to do but to obey, even to destruction, for so tightly is the political and economic fabric of my country knitted into one piece. All this you must know without my telling you, for you are a man of intelligence, as I can readily see.”
“Thank you,” said Price. “You have one minute more.”
“When, at the declaration of war, our farm boys and our weavers marched away to take their place in the human avalanche that swept across northern France, my father was not in his accustomed place at their head. He had loved soldiering and mimic warfare as a game, as a spectacle and as a means of discipline. But now shame and sorrow over the arrogant and unwarranted act of the arbitrary powers at Potsdam, coupled with his grief over the death of the duchess, my sweet mother, which had occurred only at few weeks previously, prostrated him upon his bed; so that it was my uncle, General von”
Here she checked her words a moment. “But I must not name him. Enough to say that it was my uncle who commanded our reluctant divisions in my father's stead, while my father lay on his couch in our summer castle on the Rhine, a broken man.
“Broken? Nay, I must not call him that. No man is broken whose love for humanity, whose faith in fairness and whose courage in speech impel him to make the sacrifices my poor father made in his valiant efforts to bring our misguided nation to its sanity. For no sooner had I nursed him back to a semblance of his former strength than he would be off to Berlin. Deep were my misgivings as I drove him to the railway station in my little Cassel twin six and saw him enter the train. As well as he I knew the bloodthirsty temper of the Prussian overlords in those days when our columns rolled resistlessly through Maubeuge and Mons and Charleroi toward Paris. I knew that my father, noble though he was in lineage as well as in heart, laid his head on the block when he sought to oppose the will of our war-mad government. Nor was I taken by surprise when, after he had been gone three days, a telegram came to me from Berlin, saying simply: 'Copenhagen, Hotel Elsinore, immediately.'
“Surmising what had happened, I departed from our castle quietly, taking with me only such of my personal belongings as I could pack into a boudoir trunk. Without a farewell word to my servants or to my dear friends among the neighboring peasantry, I crossed Germany, traveling as a common passenger and delayed for hours at a time by troop trains rushing toward Aachen and the Belgian border. At the Danish frontier I should have been turned back by the military authorities if I had not proclaimed myself the daughter of a German duke and asserted my divine right to do what I pleased. With apologies the officials suffered me to continue my journey; but as I was to learn afterward, their politeness was from the teeth out. Before I had been established a single hour in the hotel at Copenhagen I became aware that I was under surveillance.
“When I dined I was watched. When I walked in the park I was followed. When I returned at night I could hear the sound of a gimlet in the ceiling overhead. After a day or two I began to expect the sight of a certain man at every turning, and I was not often disappointed in my expectation. This, man was somewhat past middle age, large, well fed and active. He mingled freely among the guests at the hotel, of whom there were many. He ingratiated himself with the Americans who had fled from Germany at the opening of hostilities and now waited at the Danish capital for ships to carry them home. I heard him talking loudly, in as excellent English as I myself use, to any one who would listen to him; but always when I was near, his eyes were upon me, and usually he arranged that he and I should not be far apart. I may add that he exhibited at all times a feminine fondness for wearing costly jewelry.”
At this point in the story of mademoiselle the door opened and the chief of the detective bureau entered.
“Time's up,” he announced.
“Give us two minutes more, please,” said Price.
The duke's daughter frowned prettily. “If I am to finish in two minutes,” she said, “I shall have to omit many of the most vital and convincing details.”
“I know your feelings,” said the newspaper man. “I don't like to be hurried in a story, myself. Perhaps the chief will make it five minutes.”
The old gentleman bowed his acquiescence and again withdrew, whereupon the princess resumed her history, speaking rapidly.
“A week passed; a week of worry and loneliness, in which I heard not a word from the duke, my father. That some dreadful fate had overtaken him I feared, for I knew his temerity in plain speaking, I know how resolute he was in upholding a principle, and I knew the ruthlessness of the Prussians, even toward their own kind. At the end of a fortnight I made up my mind in desperation to return to Germany, there to seek out my father and remain at his side through whatever peril or disgrace he might have incurred from daring to obstruct the will of the war lords.
“Through this period of waiting I had read the war reports with such interest as you can well imagine. From Germany the news was all of victories in apparently end less succession. From London the Danish newspapers heard little; but early in September the British dispatches announced the defeat of the German, armies at the Marne and the Ourcq and their retreat to the Aisne—a defeat and a retreat to which the carelessness or the foolhardiness of my father's brother, the general, had directly contributed.”
“Then,” said Price, “you are a niece of General von Kluck?”
“That, sir, is for you to judge; I say nothing on the point. I am obliged to tell you of the failure of the general in the field so that you can see that his brother, my father, was placed in a position even more precarious than before. Would not the German higher command connect the general's blunder with my father's pacifistic errand in Berlin? Would not duke and general together be accused of a treasonable conspiracy to thwart the war aims of their imperial masters, to discourage the people at home and bring about a collapse of the German offensive? In a day or two came word, again by way of London, that the general had been removed from his command; and then, indeed, I trembled for my father.
“I had made up my mind,” continued the story-teller, “to return to Germany, when a visiting card was brought to my door—the card of a Miss Eliza Billings, accompanied by a request from Miss Billings for an interview. Miss Billings was an American, a school-teacher, and she had just made her way out of Germany after many vexatious delays; she would reach America a month late for her work. In the waiting room of the station at Berlin my father had singled her out as a person whom he could trust with an oral message. He had asked her to seek me in Denmark and bid me flee to England at the first opportunity, there to place myself under the protection of his lifelong friend, Lord Benbold.”
Price pricked up his ears at this, for Lord Benbold, though he had suffered partial eclipse since the previous summer by reason of his well-known intimacy with the mighty of Germany, was still one of the most brilliant and powerful political figures in Britain. His speech in defense of himself in the House of Lords the day before had been read this morning by millions of friends and enemies, and Price had cabled half a column of it to America.
“I thanked Miss Eliza Billings, whom I have not heard from since,” the princess resumed, “and a week thereafter I landed at Hull, proceeded to London, drove in a taxicab to the beautiful home of Lord Benbold, in Park Lane, and mounted the steps. At the moment when I put out my hand to the bell I saw a cab roll up at the curb behind mine. From the window of the second cab a face looked out at me. It was the face of the man who had followed me in Copenhagen.
“For an instant the day turned black before my eyes. How I regained my composure I know not, but regain it I did, worn out though I was by the anxiety of my flight and the fears I felt for my unhappy father. My own taxi still waited at the curb. Descending the steps without pulling the bell, I commanded the chauffeur to take me to the Hotel Salisbury, and I drove away from the home of the man who might have been my benefactor. Through the pane I looked back and saw the second taxicab following close behind.
“In the five minutes of that ride through Piccadilly I tried to reason out what had happened to me, and my conclusions amounted to this: That Miss Eliza Billings had not come from my father, at all, but had been an emissary of the burly, boisterous and jeweled man in the cab that pursued mine, and that the man in the cab was an agent of the merciless German higher command and an enemy of my father's. You may ask why this man should have sent me to England. Do you not perceive that my flight to this country and my presence in the household of Lord Benbold could be used by the war party in Germany as further evidence to prove my father a traitor? In that first moment I saw the trick as clearly as I see it now.
“Through the entire month of October I remained in my room at the hotel, ill from nervousness, daring not to appeal to Lord Benbold, my sole acquaintance in London, lest in so doing I should injure my father. Weekly I settled my bill until I had less than ten pounds left in my purse. At the hotel office I was known as Mademoiselle de Reuter of Denmark, and as 'mademoiselle' I was known to the servants who tended my room and brought in my meals. From these menials I received scant respect; from one in particular, a waiter, I had sly leers and words that verged on insolence.
“One day this waiter said to me, 'I have news from Germany that mademoiselle would like to hear.' Taken off my guard, I must have shown my eagerness to listen, for the waiter grinned in malicious glee as he went out at the door. Next day he came again. 'Mademoiselle does not ask me for the news from Germany,' he sneered. 'Speak,' I commanded him, and he obeyed. My father's estates, he told me, had been confiscated by the empire and presented to the crown prince as a reward to that honorable young gentleman for holding the line as well as he did before Verdur and serving as a hinge upon which the German front could turn safely in its retreat from the Marne. 'How do you know who I am?' I demanded. 'If mademoiselle would know,' the waiter replied, 'let me bring to her room a friend of hers who will explain all.'
“In my terror I resolved to face the worst, to know the truth of my situation at once. I gave the word the waiter desired. That day I had the first of many interviews with the German government agent who had followed me through Denmark to England. Stout and serious and deferential, always recognizing my station in life, he talked with me for an hour. His liking for jewelry, it seemed, was an affectation, a pretended weakness which he employed for psychological purposes, as also his boisterous manner in public. At heart the man is as deep as a well and as subtle as a cobra, and those who hear him blustering around the Salisbury to-day little know him as he is. I may tell you that the name he uses is Krug.”
“That fellow?” cried Price. “I know him. He poses as an American, doesn't he?”
“He does.” The princess smiled. “I knew I should capture your interest before I had finished,” said she. “If you know Herr Krug, you will be better able to visualize what follows. Regretfully, in our first interview, he told me the news which I had guessed yet had dreaded to hear, that my father was held a secret political prisoner in a fortress near Berlin, his life at the mercy of the insensate Prussian arbiters of German destiny. That I had come to England under instructions from my father to get in communication with a powerful British stateman had been reported to the military authorities at home. There remained one chance for me to save my father, one loophole through which he might yet escape.
“Sir,” cried the yellow-haired young woman, turning her tear-filled eyes upon her now wholly sympathetic auditor, “when my father's life was at stake, could I refuse to help him, even if in so doing I became a spy?”
“Of course you couldn't,” said Price. “Krug had you right where he wanted you. But I still fail to see why you and he waylaid poor Thurston. What had that boy done to you that you should have framed up this job on him?”
“That is a question I cannot answer. If I shall speak one truthful word to you in all our talk, it is this, that I know as little as you why Herr Krug desired to put your friend out of the way. I know merely this, that I obeyed his orders in the matter. I arranged with the head waiter to create a scene at the hotel, which Mr. Thurston should have to witness. Having enlisted Mr. Thurston's sympathy, I led him to offer to take charge of a set of papers which Krug had bidden me to place in the young man's possession. The nature of the papers I do not know, nor do I remember what fantastic tale I told Mr. Thurston to win his pity; I believe I may have pretended to be the daughter of a Belgian count. But those points are immaterial. The thing that matters is that in luring the young man into a trap for Krug I played into another net which Krug had spread for me.”
Here, the princess rose to her feet; her pretty fists were clenched, her eyes gleamed angrily.
“It was the knitting bag,” she cried. “I had picked it up in the hotel parlors late in the evening before and taken it to my room. There Krug saw it at midnight, when he came to give me my orders. He admired the bag. 'Have you bought something pretty for yourself?' he asked—he always took a fatherly tone with me. I told him it was not mine; it was one I had found that evening. 'The very thing for our purpose,' said he. 'Put the papers in it and give it to the young man, and some other woman will be suspected.'
“While I watched for Mr. Thurston next morning I concealed it beneath the folds of my gown. When I gave it to Mr. Thurston he immediately hid it under his coat. No one saw the bag in my possession except Mr. Thurston, Krug and myself, and I will swear that no one saw me hand it to the young man. You say that I was arrested because the bag was recognized as mine?”
“Yes.”
“Has Mr. Thurston said that the bag was mine?”
“Yes, but not until this morning,” Price answered, catching the drift of her thoughts. “But I heard about the bag last night.”
“From that unspeakable detective?”
“If you mean Googan, yes.”
“That was before the police had found Mr. Thurston?”
“Yes.”
“Then,” cried the princess, “Mr. Googan's information that the bag was mine must have come from Herr Krug. There can be no other explanation, for he was the only one who knew. He has played a double game. He has exploited my love for my father and used me as a tool, and now he throws me away. It is Krug and no one else who is responsible for my being in this wretched place.”
“Why should Krug want to get you in trouble?”
“There are many possible reasons. Perhaps I know too much about him. Perhaps the police are on his track and he thinks to escape them by sacrificing me. Perhaps I have outlived my usefulness to him and he takes this means of putting me where I can do him no harm. Perhaps my father's enemies at Berlin have brought my arrest about, working through Krug, in order to discredit my father with Lord Benbold and any other friends my father may have in England—you can readily see how little influence a German pacifist would have in this country when it is known that his daughter is a spy. Whatever the reason, Krug is to blame for what has happened to me. Oh! if I had him here!”
Price thought it was a very good thing for Mr. Krug that Mr. Krug was not among those present.
“You have told me all this, I suppose,” he said, “because you want Krug laid by the heels. You will have to give me further particulars about him. What are some of his crimes?”
“In Berlin,” she replied, “there is a book. It contains hundreds of names—names of prominent English people. It is called 'The English Vice Directory,' and the people whose names are in that book do the bidding of our higher command. They dare not disobey.”
“Blackmail, eh?”
As she nodded her head, the door opened and the chief of the bureau entered, followed by the guard, who beckoned to mademoiselle.
“Where does Krug figure in the scheme?” Price asked her.
“He is the resident ruler of that part of the English ruling class that is rulable from Berlin,” the princess replied. “To-morrow I may tell you more.”
The grateful newspaper man thrust his cigarette case and his match box into her hand, and she gave him in return a wonderful smile as she went away toward her cell.
CHAPTER X.
Hermitage Road.
It required the combined efforts of Ted Price, Mr. Herbert Wembley, Sir Arthur Purdoy and the American ambassador to secure Thurston's release from detention at Scotland Yard, and those efforts, powerful as they were, might have failed if Price had not gone over Googan's head and pledged himself as a hostage to a Ministerial Personage higher than any one at the Yard.
At the end of the day Tom walked out into Whitehall a free man, with his wits sharpened, from hard thinking in his solitary confinement. Price and Mr. Wembley took him to supper at the Carlton. The story the yellow-haired young woman had told Price held first place in their talk.
“Did you repeat her story to the police?” Thurston asked Price.
“I did not. I have too much respect for my reputation among them. I went higher, to a man who has imagination. You want to say nice things about Lloyd George, my boy, in the stuff you write to America.”
“I will,” said Tom, suspecting how his deliverance had been effected. “Meanwhile, there is something bigger than blackmail in the wind that blows from Berlin.”
Then, guided by the reasoning he had done in Scotland Yard that day, and aided now and then by hints from Mr. Wembley, he related to the newspaper man the incident of the lights in the sky and the episodes of the day of his visit to Finsbury.
“It's a whale of a story,” Price exclaimed, when the recital was ended. “Here is the dope as I see it. Krug is the chief conspirator. Brompton and the yellow-haired girl are his accomplices. Miss Hatfield's letter in the Mail was an accident to their plans, for it led you to Brompton's door. But, Thomas, my boy, you had an accident, too. You told Brompton more than you had the right to tell him. You told him that you and Mr. Wembley had made a start in solving the mystery, didn't you?”
“Yes, but I didn't mention Krug by name.”
“Are you sure of that?” Mr. Wembley asked.
“Come to think, I believe I did,” Tom confessed. “It was early in our talk, before we got around to the light in the sky. We were discussing wealthy American book buyers.”
“All the same, you see, you let Brompton know that we had a man named Krug in mind.”
“I guess he did,” said Price. “Thurston is the easiest mark in town—taking care of knitting bags and all that. But what happened as a result? Brompton went to the Salisbury late that night to warn Krug. It was their voices, Tom, that you heard in the yellow kid's room at midnight. A little later you saw Brompton leave the hotel. Next day the yellow kid put up a job on you that made you look like a German spy to Googan, who had been tipped off, probably by Krug, as to what to expect. The whole sinful affair is as clear as this pale and beautiful soup, which I will now absorb. For your precious sake to-day I went without lunch.”
But Thurston was not satisfied with the clearness of the affair. Why had the princess wept so heartbrokenly in her room on the night of the Zeppelin raid?
“Perhaps she was frightened,” Price suggested. “Perhaps she was homesick for her summer castle on the Rhine. Or, if her sympathies are against the war, as she pretends, maybe she felt sorry for the murdered Britishers.”
“Then will you tell me why she wore cornflowers at the funeral of the Zeppelin people next day?”
“She's a German, isn't she? It is quite possible, you know, that her to-day's story is true; she may be the daughter of a German duke, as she says. I'll ask Sir Arthur to ask Lord Benbold about her.”
“The important thing for us to do,” said Mr. Wembley, “is to reconnoiter Krug. You know the police quite well, don't you, Mr. Price?”
“Yes; but I'm afraid we shall have to do without help from that quarter. I had a little talk with Googan about Krug this afternoon, and Googan laughed at me. Krug, it seems, has been of use to Scotland Yard. I have reason to believe that it was he who turned in the tip that led to the hanging of the three German photographers in the Tower last month.”
“I remember the case,” said Mr. Wembley, with a smile. “The Times stated gravely that the court proceedings were held in camera.”
“Googan is impervious to suggestions,” Price continued. “I tried hard to instill a little suspicion into his mind, but it was no use. Evidently, he doesn't know yet that a favorite trick of big German secret agents the world over is to sacrifice the poor devils under them when they think it may strengthen their own position. Googan is incorruptible; I'll bet my last dollar on that; but he is hopeless just now, so far as Krug is concerned, and the more we give him our confidence, the less likely we shall be to land Krug.”
“Then we shall have to take the law into our own hands,” Mr. Wembley declared.
“That is what my friend higher up advises,” said Price. “He knows nothing about this sky-lighting business, of course.”
“What have you done with the war-office report I gave you this morning?” Thurston asked.
“Here it is,” Price replied, drawing the document from his pocket. “It turns out to be six months old and of no particular value to the enemy or any one else. Keep it as a souvenir of the occasion.”
Before the three amateur detectives parted, it was agreed that Mr. Wembley should give up his rambles in Kew Gardens for a while and begin to ramble in Richmond, where Mr. Krug claimed residence; that Price should hold a second talk with the girl at Scotland Yard as soon as possible, and that Tom should attempt a little gumshoe work on Mr. Krug's trail when the chance offered, and employ some of his remaining time in securing, at the typewriter exchange in Cornhill, the home address of the pretty stenographer who took down Mr. Brompton's memoirs.
Then Tom recalled the complaint he had heard the girl make to the agency manager. “Where you sent me the first of the year, they keep me working till nine or ten at night. It wasn't agreed, and it isn't fair. And it isn't right for a girl to be out so late in London now, with the streets so dark.” On the chance that this might be one of the nights when Mr. Brompton kept his secretary late, Tom crossed the square to the nearest underground station and took train toward the northern side of London. In the car behind his rode Mr. Googan, in his rusty mackintosh. Somewhere in the journey Tom changed from one tube to an other, climbing flights of stairs, descending other flights and following painted arrows through queerly twisting corridors that might have been made by some gigantic and eccentric mole; and always, if he had listened, he would have heard the footfalls of Mr. Googan, the human ferret, coming along behind him through the runways.
When he emerged at last from the subterranean world he stood in a dark street near the southern end of Finsbury Park. Half a mile farther, at the upper end of the park, was Hermitage Road, where Mr. Brompton dictated his memoirs of a bookselling life. Thither Tom walked and stood at last before the lattice gate. Through the gate came the fragrance of apple blossoms.
The basement and first floor of the house were dark, but a light showed through a chink in the curtain of a window in the second story, and a shadow moved across the curtain. Unwilling to pull the bell and equally unwilling to leave the neighborhood while a chance remained that Mr. Brompton's secretary was within the house, Thurston crossed the street to a convenient seat under the high stone wall of “H. Hatfield's” abode and settled down to wait. It was ten o'clock when he sat down, and when he looked at his watch again it was half past the hour.
Strangely, now that he believed himself to be near the girl whose story in the typewriter agency had touched his heart, he found his thoughts wandering to the yellow haired princess in Scotland Yard. She was a queer one. That she had been concerned in enemy plots and so deserved what had happened to her he doubted not, yet he was sorry for her. No girl except one in dire trouble could have given him that beseeching look of fear that he remembered on her face the last time he had seen her. As plain as words it said to him: “Help me! I cannot tell you the terror that hangs over me. But help me!”
His meditations were interrupted. From the Brompton house came the sudden sound of the slamming of a door and quick footfalls on the walk that led to the gate. Then he heard a safety lock thrown back and a man's voice call peremptorily into the darkness of the walled garden:
“Grace! Come back!”
Listen as hard as he could, Tom could hear no answer to the command. What he heard was a heavy tread descending the steps of the house, and a muttered call of: “Grace, where are you?”
A minute of silence followed. Then a girl's voice cried: “Help!”
Thurston crossed the narrow street at a jump and thrust his face close to the lattice. In the garden shadows were sounds of a scuffle and a half-smothered curse. Then Tom saw a girl run toward him, followed by the bulkier form of a man. Her hands clasped and shook the lattice; she was breathing hard, and her face was turned over her shoulder toward the man who pursued.
“Stand back or I'll shoot!” Tom shouted.
On an impulse he had thrust his new bamboo cane through the gate and aimed it at the man's heart. The man halted, stood still for an instant, then did an unaccountable thing. He whirled about, ran precipitately toward the house, mounted the steps at a single bound, plunged inside and slammed, locked and bolted the door behind him. Tom had seen many a New Jersey commuter run for a train, but he had never seen a human being run as this man ran.
Said the girl, still clinging to the gate: “I can't open it. He has the key. Can you manage”
“Sure I can,” Tom replied. He twisted the shilling cane in the lattice until it snapped in two. But some of the slats of the lattice snapped with it, and his hands finished the work, leaving a gap in the upper half of the gate wide enough for a girl to climb through if she were agile. Such a girl was this one; her lithe young arms needed no assistance from Thurston, and in a moment she stood beside him in the street.
Somewhere along the way a window was raised, and a voice called in the night: “What's wrong down there? Police! police!” Other windows flew up, and the demand for constabulary protection was vociferous and general.
“Come away,” the girl whispered. Her manner was so insistent that Tom yielded. Side by side they hastened toward the park.
“You are Mr. Thurston, the man who called upon Mr. Brompton one day this week,” she said. “How do you happen to be here to-night? They said you were in jail.”
“The news of my arrest has traveled fast.”
“We heard it at noon to-day. Won't you please hurry?”
“Take my arm,” said Tom; and when she had done so, simply and without hesitation, he knew that she was trembling.
“You are very foolish to come back to Finsbury again,” said the girl, “especially after”
“After the anonymous warning you sent me?”
“Yes.”
Tom's heart performed the caper known as leaping for joy.
“Will you tell me why you wrote me the note?”
“I overheard something said about you. You were taken for a government man, a detective. I found your card and address on Mr. Brompton's desk.”
“Why should Mr. Brompton be afraid of a detective?”
“Oh, it wasn't Mr. Brompton. There are others in that house, sir; he has only the first floor. There is something unlawful and very desperate going on upstairs.”
“But it was Mr. Brompton who ran into the yard after you just now.”
“Yes.”
They had come to the cricket ground at the northern end of the park. The girl halted before a bench. “I shall have to rest a minute,” she said, and sank down with a sigh.
“You are chilled,” said Tom. “You forgot your wraps when you ran away.” He slipped his overcoat off and placed it around her shoulders. “I'll lend you my hat, too, if you'll wear it.”
“I'm used to going bareheaded, thank you,” she replied, and lifted her hands to arrange her hair.
“Brompton was rough with you,” said Tom.
“He didn't mean to be, I'm sure. It was dark where he found me, and I was a bit frantic.”
“When you are ready to tell me what happened, I'm ready to listen,” Thurston hinted. “But take your time.”
She settled herself in the folds of his overcoat and began to talk without further urging. Not far away, in the shelter of a hawthorn thicket, Mr. Googan watched the pair on the bench; but after watching a while without being able to hear what was said, he tiptoed back across the park lawn toward Hermitage Road.
If he had lingered among the thorns five minutes longer he would have beheld odd behavior on the part of the young man and the young woman. He would have seen the young man spring to his feet and point southward across the cricket field toward a glow of soft and mellow light that burned in the midnight sky, and he would have had no difficulty in hearing the young man's exclamation.
“Look there, Miss Ashby! Look!”
“What do you see?” the girl asked, standing beside him.
“It has gone. But wait a minute.”
Silently they watched the southern sky. Again the glow of light flared clear and bright.
“What is it?” she demanded.
“The Zeppelin light!”
“Do you think—does that light mean an air raid on London to-night?”
“It doesn't mean anything else. Lucky for us we're out here on the edge of town.”
“I shall have to go at once,” the girl declared.
“Why? Out here you're safe.”
“But my brother—I must go to him.”
There was no use in arguing with a girl like that.
“I'll see you home, if I may,” said Thurston.
Guided by the glow in the sky they hastened to the lower end of the park. The boy on duty at the ticket window in the underground station offered them advice.
“Better stay where you are, sir. They say the Zeppeleens are back again. They say they've bombed St. Paul's.”
At every station of the underground the crowd on the platform was dense. At Kings Cross and Farringdon Street and Aldersgate hundreds of people packed the narrow foot-ways, the men cursing, the women weeping, the little children yawning sleepily. Terror showed in the faces of the older folk; the little ones were spared from understanding the barbarous hatred that sought their lives. Through the crowd at Moorgate the girl and Tom worked their way, no one in the frightened throng noting that the young woman wore the young man's overcoat, nor that the young man carried in his hand the splintered stump of a bamboo cane.
Coming out into the open air in the midst of the old city, they heard the booming of distant guns and the pop of bursting shells, but in the maze of winding streets they could see little of the sky. Where he was Tom had no idea until they swung round a corner into sight of the dim spires of the Guildhall. Hurrying on, they came to a church and a little graveyard; through the bars of the iron fence stole the breath of spring flowers, sweetening the night air, speaking of happy times when the air of London was not fouled and poisoned for defenseless folk by sky-roving murderers.
At a corner of the churchyard the girl halted and, taking off the overcoat, hung it across Thurston's arm.
“Thank you for all your kindness,” she said. “Good night.”
He would have protested, but she held up a forbidding hand.
“I live only a step from here,” she said. “Won't you say good night?”
“Not until I know how I am to find you again.”
She laughed a merry little laugh. “Good-by,” said she, gave him her hand and swung away. Considering himself in honor bound not to follow her, he stood listening until he heard her footsteps no longer. Then he set to work energetically to get his bearings.
He looked at the old church until he thought he could remember every shadow of it; this must have been one of the churches that made Christopher Wren famous. As he walked along he noted every turning he made in the crazy old streets of that ancient part of London so that he might find his way back to the churchyard again. Quiet streets and deserted were these at night, though noisy enough in daytime, he knew, with the traffic of the British empire flowing through them.
After he had wandered half an hour it occurred to him that he should long before have come to the Guildhall. At last he inquired his way of a besotted person who seemed to be spending the night in holding up a lightless lamp-post.
“Gord's sake, man!” the person ejaculated. “You're two bloody miles from the Guildhall. This 'ere is Shoreditch. Hi say!”
The Zeppelins had gone homeward across the North Sea for another cargo of their shameful freight; the anti-aircraft guns had long ceased barking and the early dawn of England had lighted the streets a full hour before Thurston got down from a hansom cab in front of Morley's, where his friend Ted Price kept a bedroom for such nights as this had been.
Price had gone to sleep after a hard night's work and didn't want to wake up. So Thurston stretched out on the lounge, with a rug for cover. When he awoke, the sun was high in the sky and Price had gone.
CHAPTER XI.
Googan's Counterfeiters.
At breakfast in a coffeehouse in St. Martin's Lane Thurston read a newspaper account of the air raid. The Zeppelins had won a staggering military victory, it seemed, having plumped a bomb through the roof of a home for superannuated nurses, in Southwark. It had been a great night for the frightful Hun.
Around the corner from the coffeehouse Tom came upon evidence of the fright the Hun had instilled in the heart of the British nation. From the tail of an empty furniture van a terror-stricken British veteran in a glittering gold-lace uniform of other days harangued a crowd apoplectically, and at the end of his speech a hundred terrorized young Britons marched away to enlist. Throughout London similar scenes by the score were acted that day, and the British volunteer army was swelled by thousands of recruits as a result of the German government's midnight advertising.
Ted Price was at his desk when Thurston reached the office where the Chicago Sun gathered its British news, and beside the desk sat the brisk Mr. Googan of Scotland Yard, in his rusty mackintosh.
“Listen to this, Tom,” hailed Price. “You're a detective and don't know it. Hear what Googan has to report.”
Mr. Googan's face wore a smile of self-satisfaction. Said he:
“I happened to be in the Finsbury Park district late last night. Have you ever heard of Hermitage Road?”
“Hermitage Road? I was there last night, myself.”
“Ah! Then you don't deny it.”
“Why should I?”
“Will you tell me what your business was in that remote part of London?”
“Certainly I'll tell you. I'm interested in a young woman out there.”
“So interested in her that you smash garden gates for her and let her wear your overcoat, I observed.”
Tom controlled his dudgeon and waited to hear what more the grinning Googan would say. He had now three good and valid reasons for disliking Mr. Googan. First, Mr. Googan had sent him on a wild-goose chase to the House of Lords. Second, Mr. Googan had let himself be used as a cat's-paw for the crafty Herr Krug; for how else than through Krug had Googan obtained the evidence on which he had locked up the princess and Tom? Third, Mr. Googan had, by his present admission, followed Tom to Hermitage Road, had watched him break through the lattice gate and had spied on him in Finsbury Park. Thurston's opinion of his friend Price's friend Googan was not flattering.
“Can you tell me,” asked the detective, “where I can find the young woman?”
“I cannot.”
“That's too bad, because she is needed as a witness. I presume you don't know, Mr. Thurston, that the house from which the young woman fled is a counterfeiters' nest?”
“I suspected as much from what she told me in the park last night, while she wore my overcoat and while you played Hawkshaw in the background. She will testify for you, if you can find her.”
“Fortunately,” continued Mr. Googan, “we have a clear case without her testimony; one of the clearest cases in my experience. If you had remained in Hermitage Road a little longer, Mr. Thurston, you would have seen a neat bit of police work.”
“You pulled the joint, then?”
“We did. By front and rear we entered the house and captured the entire outfit; stamping tools, dies, engraving implements, molds, metal, electric furnaces, everything.”
“Everything except the counterfeiters,” Price added.
“But they had been there at work only a few minutes before we arrived,” said Googan. “Their electric furnace was still hot. They had one of the best plants I have ever seen.”
“The young woman was no party to the counterfeiting,” Tom declared. “She was secretary to the old gentleman who occupied the first floor of the house. He wasn't in the gang; he lived alone, with a servant to look after him.”
“Then why did he skip out with the others?” Googan demanded. “Why didn't we find him when we broke in?”
“That's beyond me,” Tom answered. “I'm simply telling you what has been told to me. Brompton lived downstairs and rented the upper floors to his nephew, a research chemist, and it was the nephew who manufactured the bogus money. Miss Ashby discovered more than a month ago that things upstairs weren't straight, and she tried to quit her job with Brompton; but she couldn't find other work. I know that to be a fact. She had to keep on with Brompton, because she has two maiden aunts who look to her for support, and she has a brother who has just come home from the hospital after having had his jaw blown off by a German explosive bullet.”
“If she knew things were wrong, why didn't she report them to the authorities?”
“She needed the money Brompton paid her. Furthermore, she did not discover until yesterday just what was going on above-stairs. Brompton kept her late at her writing on certain nights, perhaps as a blind in case of a police investigation. The thing that spilled the beans last night was the nephew's conduct toward Miss Ashby. He has been fresh at every chance. Last night, when Brompton was out of his study for a minute, the cad insulted her and frightened her so that she ran out into the garden. It was Brompton who followed her out and tried to coax her indoors again. The rest you know.”
“A likely story,” said Mr, Googan. “A very likely story. You swallow it, do you?”
“Of course I do,” Tom exploded. Mr. Googan's conceit was irritating.
“You know all this, yet you don't know where the young woman lives. Where did you leave her last night?”
“Somewhere near the Guildhall. She wouldn't let me go all the way home with her. I'm afraid her aunts are a bit cattish.”
Mr. Googan's grin spelled incredulity. “I may want to see you again about her,” he said, rising to depart.
“Any time at all,” said Tom. “By the way, is there any reason why Price and I shouldn't go out to Finsbury this afternoon and look the house over?”
Mr. Googan could think of no reason; and not without a little pride he scribbled a note to the local authorities in charge of the premises at Number 20, Hermitage Road. “They will honor that,” said he.
“Talk about a bull in a china shop!” exclaimed Thurston, when the detective had gone. “That man is on the edge of the biggest piece of service a fellow in his business could render to his country, yet all he sees is a counterfeiting plant. Perhaps they did make bogus money in Brompton's house; but that was a part of their larger game; that was their nifty little way of throwing the police off the trail of the main thing they did there, which was to shoot a light on the sky for the Zeppelins. They studied to please Googan and his kind, and they succeeded.”
Unfortunately for Thurston's effort to make himself clear, the useful word “camouflage” had not at that time been adopted out of France.
“I want to see that electric furnace Googan talks about,” Tom went on, “and I want Mr. Wembley to see it. Can you spare a couple of hours?”
“I can spare a couple of weeks on a thing like this,” said Price. “You want Wembley to go along, do you?”
Tom nodded, and Price reached for the telephone. Mr. Wembley was not at home in Kew that day. Price tried the Eccentric Club and there found the foremost scientific novelist of the times.
“But I'm in the middle of a checker game,” Mr. Wembley protested.
“This is a better game than checkers,” said Price.
At Piccadilly Circus the two Americans picked up the checker player, and the underground bore the three to Finsbury. The police officer at the broken gate admitted them, after reading Googan's note.
The interior of the house remained in much the same state as when the police had found it, except that the counterfeiting outfit on the top floor had been removed. This floor had lately been remodeled, as the marks of torn-out partitions gave evidence. Its front windows looked down through the boughs of the apple tree into the garden and the street beyond. The windows at the rear showed a property wall connecting through a gate with a common. An escape from the house in that direction would have been easy to arrange.
Around the room were workbenches equipped with tools enough for a small factory. But it was at a skylight in the ceiling that Mr. Wembley gazed. Having inspected the skylight from the front of the room and from the rear of the room, and still unsatisfied with the result of his inspection, he laid hands on a table that stood in his way and attempted to shove it aside. But the table budged not an inch, for it was bolted solidly to the floor; so Mr. Wembley clambered upon it, despite his plumpness, and gazed at the skylight again.
“What do you see?” Price asked. But Thurston, pointing toward Mr. Wembley's polished boots, cried, “Look here!”
Across the table top under Mr. Wembley's feet ran a series of straight lines cut into the smooth surface with a sharp instrument, the lines converging at a point on the edge of the table nearest the rear of the room.
Said Price: “It looks like a sundial.”
“It has been laid out by compass,” declared Mr. Wembley, stooping to look. “Here's the meridian, deeper marked than the rest. Now note the third line to the west of the north-and-south line. See that notch at the end of it? I wish I had a map of London.”
“Here you are, sir,” said Tom, who had pulled out a drawer under the table.
Mr. Wembley hopped to the floor and spread out upon the table the cloth map of the metropolis which Tom had unearthed. His hands shook with excitement as he arranged the map so that the longitude lines paralleled the deepest groove in the table top. “Hold it there,” he commanded. Then, with pencil and ruler from the nearest workbench he traced a right line across the map from Hermitage Road, on the upper edge, through Charing Cross and beyond to the lower edge. The pencil line came out in the groove that was distinguished by the notch at the end.
Next, he squatted down beside the table and looked up at its under side. Beneath the edges all around were marks where the teeth of clamps had bitten into the wood. Mr. Wembley rose beaming.
“Here's where they set their radioscope,” he announced. “The notched line helped them to aim it. The skylight up forward there” He seized a cord fastened at the side wall and gave it a pull. The window in the ceiling rolled noiselessly back.
Price and Thurston were convinced. From this room, from this table the Zeppelins had been guided in finding London in the dark. Further search of the workroom lent weight to Mr. Wembley's conclusion. In a corner overlooked by the police they found a spectrum chart. On the rear wall was a cut-off and a switchboard where an electric-light wire from the cables in Green Lanes entered the house. Bits of electrical apparatus cluttered the benches and the floor. The police, having discovered the electric furnace, had stopped there.
So the three went back to town, Price to his newspaper work, Mr. Wembley to his promising lead, and Thurston to spend the evening wandering in the labyrinth of the city with a paper bundle under his arm, looking for a churchyard with the perfume of spring flowers about it. The paper bundle contained the black straw sailor hat and the black cloth jacket that Grace Ashby had left behind in Mr. Brompton's study on the night of her flight from Hermitage Road.
Near midnight Tom drifted disconsolately in at Price's office door, the bundle still under his arm. The mystery of the lights in the sky bothered him less than the thought of the dark-haired girl whom he had befriended.
Price had another blow for him.
“I called at Scotland Yard,” said the newspaper man, “and sent in word to the yellow kid that I had come for the rest of her story. She sent back word that she would hang herself before she would see me again.”
“Temperamental as ever,” Tom observed, and went on thinking of the dark-haired English girl who supported herself, her invalid brother and her maiden aunts on less money, perhaps, than the princess, in her hotel days, spent for cigarettes.
CHAPTER XII.
Lord Benbold.
The clerk at the Salisbury raised his eyebrows in astonishment as Thurston stopped at the desk that night for his room key.
“We thought” he began.
“I know you did,” said Tom. “You thought I had been locked up. But here I am, you see.”
“Yes, sir. So sorry, sir. All a mistake, I presume?”
“All a mistake, but no harm done. Good night.”
Tom's return to his hotel was an idea of Mr. Wembley's. That man of parts figured the situation thus:
“If Krug brought about your arrest, as we suspect, then it is to be supposed that he knows you have been released from custody. If you go back to the hotel he will have you where he can watch you, or where he can set other people to watch you, and this will cause him to feel easy in his mind. If you stay out of his sight he may worry and take alarm. The enemy a man fears is the invisible enemy.”
So Thurston slept that night in his own bed, luxuriated next morning in a bath in his own tub and a shave before his own mirror, and brazenly took his morning coffee in the public breakfast room, under the eyes of any “Swiss” waiters who may have been interested in his reappearance. Throughout the meal he kept watch for the princess' enemy, the head waiter, but that unctuous person remained out of his sight.
After breakfast a Strand bus bore him eastward through Fleet Street, up Ludgate Hill and past St. Paul's to the Bank, whence he continued on foot down Cornhill to the American typewriter exchange.
A young woman sat at the manager's desk. The manager had enlisted, she said, and the office was now in her charge.
“I am looking for a stenographer who sometimes comes in here,” Tom explained, rather painfully. “Ashby is the name—Miss Grace Ashby. Can you give me her address?”
The young woman opened a book and searched the pages. Miss Ashby's address, she said, was Hermitage Road, Finsbury; Number Twenty.
“That's where she used to work,” said Tom. “It is her home address I need to know.”
But the agency register book contained no further information about Miss Ashby.
Forth into the noisy city went Thurston with no better clew to the whereabouts of Mr. Brompton's secretary than that she dwelt in the neighborhood of one of Sir Christopher Wren's fifty-seven varieties of churches. Through the remainder of the morning he wandered at random, following street after street in the heart of the commercial district, coming out at towers, monuments, railway stations, bridges and public office buildings that had no business to be where they were. On his ramble he found a dozen ancient churches; in one of their yards was a bit of the original London Wall, nicely preserved with a fresh coat of white wash and looked down upon by loft buildings where beads and spangles, soap, shoe laces and tinner's supplies were manufactured or sold. Spring flowers bloomed in most of the churchyards, but none of the yards was the one where he had parted with Miss Ashby on the night of the latest air raid.
He came to Friday Street and noted that Messrs. Hines, Stroud & Co., bedding manufacturers, seemed to be thriving in spite of the fact that the number over their door was 13. He must have roved in a sort of circle, for presently he found himself looking at a low and rakish building that seemed familiar. Of the six-foot policeman who guarded the entrance he inquired what the building was. The policeman looked him up and down scornfully.
“Don't you know wot plyce this is? My hye!” As if anybody on earth shouldn't have recognized the Bank of England.
Many things caught Thurston's American interest. A merchant in Fenchurch Street displayed a picture in his window, in which the kaiser was shown as waiting on table, the legend underneath reading: “Taking orders—Soon! But we are taking orders now.” A bakeshop owner announced: “No Germans employed in my establishment.” There were enlistment placards everywhere: “Men Physically Fit Who Do Nothing For Their Country—How Beneath Contempt!” “Germany Versus England. Sign at Once for the Grand International Final. Every Man Counts.” And citizens were warned of the danger from shells and bullets that might be used in repelling airship attacks.
Coming to London Bridge and walking out upon it to get his bearings afresh, Tom discovered from a sign posted on the wall that the small boys of London had been throwing stones off the bridge, to the indignation of boatmen passing underneath, so that it had become necessary for the police to warn the small boys that the London calaboose yawned for them. Among a thousand other immaterial things that he noted was the fact that the sparrow of the London streets resembles in every way the sparrow of Washington Square, New York.
Toward noon he arrived in front of the Guildhall in time to witness the departure of the Lord Mayor from a meeting of the London aldermen. Footmen in buff livery walked before the Lord Mayor. Next came a man in pink silk who carried in his arms a thing that looked to Tom like a gold fire plug, though it was only the official mace. Besides the mace bearer went the sword bearer with a gold-sheathed broadsword on his shoulder. Like Solomon in all his glory came the Lord Mayor himself; a pleasant-looking gentleman in a gold cocked hat, a powdered wig and a flowing gown of brilliant red, the skirts of which swept the pavement. He leaned on the arms of two aldermen, one in blue robes and one in orange, and behind came the rest of the city council in vestments of thrilling hues.
Into the state carriage climbed the Lord Mayor and his attendants. It was a bright blue carriage with golden spokes; it had four great golden lamps, one at each corner; and there was a platform behind for the footmen and a gold-embroidered sofa out in front for the coachman. The footmen sprang up behind, the coachman's whip popped over the backs of the four prancing horses, and away the gorgeous equipage went, clatter and jingle and gleam, toward the Mansion House, the gold mace sticking out at one window and the gold sword out opposite.
It all was entertaining enough, but it brought Tom Thurston and Miss Ashby no closer together. He gave up his profitless efforts at last and turned westward, resolving to place an advertisement in every newspaper in London and to inquire at the war office for the address of a British soldier named Ashby who had lately been invalided home.
In High Holborn he halted before a shop window and feasted his eyes on a first edition of the “Pickwick Papers” in their original paper backs, standing almost a yard wide on their shelf and tied round with a cord. The price, he noted, was five pounds. He glanced at the sign above the door for the dealer's name and address. The sign read:
ISAAC BROMPTON.
OLD BOOKS BOUGHT AND SOLD.
At the tinkle of the shop bell a clerk came forward; he was old and dusty and dismal, to match the interior of the bookstall. Yes, he would put the “Pickwick Papers” away for the stranger if the stranger would leave a deposit of one pound. No, he was not the owner of the shop; the owner was an invalid. Rheumatism. If the stranger was interested in first editions he must have heard of Mr. Brompton, who numbered many of the quality among his patrons, as well as many wealthy foreigners. Tom wanted to inquire if Mr. Brompton's wealthy foreign patrons included any Germans; but the clerk was so plainly guileless and gave up the Finsbury address of Mr. Brompton so readily that Thurston withheld the question.
Going out, Tom collided with Mr. Googan.
“Hello, there,” said he. But Mr. Googan frowned at him and went on into the shop.
In Ted Price's office at Charing Cross Sir Arthur Purdoy sat waiting for Price to come in, and with him sat a portly gentleman whose face was exceedingly red. As Thurston entered Sir Arthur rose.
“Lord Benbold,” said he to the red-faced gentleman, “let me make you acquainted with Mr. Thurston, the American we spoke of a moment ago. We called to see Mr. Price,” he explained to Tom, “but you will do as well.”
“You are the man who was arrested at the Salisbury?” asked the British peer.
“Yes, sir.”
“Sir Arthur tells me there is a young woman in the case, and that she pretends to know me.”
“There is such a young woman, sir. She is locked up at Scotland Yard.”
“And a good place for her. She claims to be the daughter of a German duke, I believe?”
“She does. According to her story, her father, the duke, is a lifelong friend of yours, and is now imprisoned in Germany for trying to stop the war.”
“Bosh!” Lord Benbold exploded. “Twaddle and fiddlesticks! I have known many prominent men in Germany, it's true. I've entertained them here and been entertained by them in Germany, and I've learned to speak their infernal language as well as I speak my own. But as for my knowing a German pacifist duke, that's plain nonsense. I have gone carefully over the list of my acquaintances in Germany, and I find that not one of the dukes on the list is a peacemaker. They all are in the field murdering honest Englishmen. The girl's story is therefore a falsehood. Why she dragged my name into it I can only surmise. It is possible that her mention of me is part of the general German plan to create mistrust in the minds of the British public and thus lower our morale. Many stories that have been circulated about me in this country had their origin in Germany, as internal evidence will show. Again, this girl's story may be prompted by the spite of the German government toward me for my having failed to stop England from entering the war. In their scheme of things, my function, as I now see and freely admit, was to quiet British indignation when the German war plans against Belgium should be disclosed. Think of it, Purdoy!”
There could be no doubt of Lord Benbold's sincerity in the mind of any one who heard him. The trouble was that there were so few people in England who could hear him.
This was the closest that Thurston had ever come to the deeps of international diplomacy, outside of the novels. He hoped Lord Benbold would say more, and Lord Benbold did.
“I was a personal friend of Prince Lichnowsky during his ambassadorship here, and the two of us worked together like Christian gentlemen to keep harmony between Germany and England. What is more, the prince was as honest in his desire for peace between the two nations as I was. But he was only a figurehead. Underneath him, and without his knowledge, things went on that he didn't see. Dark things were done behind his back. Those devils across the North Sea kept two systems of agents here, one set for show and another for business; and some of the underground outfit still remain among us, although the prince has gone home to face the disgrace of failing to prevent a war which his superiors at Potsdam and Vienna deliberately planned and precipitated. Some day,” cried the big Englishman, removing his silk hat and mopping the sweat from his ruddy brow, “some day the prince will tell what he now must know of the dirty work that was done here under his nominal ambassadorship. Then, I hope, the people who slander me because of my German friendships will see the truth. They will know that no one worked harder than I did to keep the German dragon chained. But this is personal, and I apologize for saying so much.”
Afterward Thurston learned much from Price of Lord Benbold's career and was able to sympathize with that statesman, whom the German secret government tricked for its own overreaching ends and left broken and discredited among his own people.
“The point of the whole matter,” spoke Sir Arthur Purdoy, “is that powerful German agencies are still at work in London, the leader of which may be the man Krug against whom the young woman is so bitter. She was probably a tool in his hands, of whom he had begun to be afraid. Mr. Price tells me her anger against Krug could scarcely have been feigned. If she could be induced to drop this fiction of hers about her pacifist father and tell us the truth, we might get somewhere. But Mr. Price assures me that she refuses to add a word to what she has told him. I presume her fear of Krug has gotten the better of her.”
“It is up to us to find Krug,” said Thurston. “I am lying in wait for him at the hotel, but he hasn't been around there in two days. His key box at the desk is full of letters. Mr. Wembley is making inquiries in Richmond, where Krug told me he made his home.”
“Then bet on it,” spoke Lord Benbold, “that he lives in Limehouse, or Finchley Road, or some other part remote from Richmond. Do you know, Purdoy, I fancy I've met the fellow. There was a German chap who used to be rude to the prince—a sub-consul or a commercial agent he was. I came upon them together one day in Lichnowsky's apartments; the fellow was bullying and the prince decidedly embarrassed. I wish I might have a look at Krug.”
“I wish you might,” replied Sir Arthur, and there the conversation ended.
After vainly seeking Mr. Wembley by telephone that evening, Thurston went to the Duke of York's Theater to rest both his mind and his feet. It was a Barrie night; there was a sad little curtain raiser in which an English boy spent his last evening at home before starting for the war. Tenderly the mother implored father and son, each privately in turn, to forget their British reserve and show their affection for each other before it should be too late. In turn father and son screwed up their courage for the ordeal. The mother bade them good night and withdrew, leaving man and boy alone together for perhaps the last time in life.
Awkwardly each made concessions, little by little putting aside the assumed indifference that had characterized their relations with each other. Each admitted that he had always thought the other a little bit of all right. The father hemmed and hawed and at last blurted out the truth that it made him proud to hear the son tell a funny story in company, and the son confessed that he had bragged of his father to the fellows at school.
The mother returned to show her soldier boy to bed.
“Good night—father,” said the boy, with a painful effort.
“Night,” growled the man.
There was a pause; then the boy mustered all his resolution, laid his hand for a second on the man's shoulder and said:
“Dear father!”
The man sat silent, motionless. But when he had heard the door close behind him he took the boy's photograph from the table and pressed it to his lips.
That was all. But Tom thought of Sir Arthur Purdoy, with the smile on his face and the primrose in his lapel—and his son at home blinded for life.
CHAPTER XIII.
The Refugees.
After centuries of experimenting with behavior of all sorts, the human race has summed up its experience in two excellent maxims, namely, “Be good and you will be happy,” and “Honesty is the best policy.” To these may be added a third, which will maintain that “The churchgoing habit never does a man any harm.” If Tom Thurston had not gone to church on the morning following his visit to the theater, his adventure of the Zeppelin lights might have ended in nothing.
Upon returning to the hotel from the play he had found this note from Sir Arthur Purdoy awaiting him:
My Dear Thurston: Since my interest in certain matters is not known at the Salisbury, I have taken the liberty of inquiring there concerning our friend. I am informed that he has departed for America. You may be able to obtain verification of this. Truly yours,
A. Purdoy.
With Mr. Krug out of the country and Mr. Brompton hiding from the police, the mission Tom had undertaken for Mr. Wembley seemed to have run itself into a blind alley, leaving Tom free to pick up his own work again or to look about for something more useful to do than chasing midnight rainbows.
Like a good Christian he went to church to make a fresh and proper beginning, and as any other American might have done he chose the historic Abbey at Westminster for his devotions.
He found the Abbey packed to the outer doors with the Queen's Westminster Volunteer Infantry and their friends; the regiment was to depart for France before night to face the German dragon at Ypres. From the corner into which he worked his way, facing the memorials to Warren Hastings and Richard Cobden, he could hear a tenor voice far off in the shadowy church preaching earnestly on “Our Christian Duty as a Nation.” The sermon came to an end, and the congregation, led by the organ and the regiment band, sang “Onward, Christian Soldiers”—sang the hymn all the way through six verses; and the deep-vaulted roof echoed again with the shout of the final chorus. They worshiped no brazen State, those people; they worshiped God. It was His battle as well as theirs they went forth to fight.
Thurston forgot his American neutrality and sang as hard as anybody, assuring himself that a man does not have a chance to sing a hymn like that in a church like that on an occasion like that every Sunday. A pause, then the drums sounded, the band and the organ chimed in, and the venerable shrine rang tremendously with the anthem, “God Save the King.” Tom could not join very well in that, but he sang American words to the same good tune much to the astonishment of an elderly Briton who stood beside him. One verse, then the organ softened down to humbler strains, the music died away, and the congregation, kneeling, received the benediction. “The peace of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ be with you now and forever more.” Peace!—and only a few minutes' walk from the Abbey, in a window in Cockspur Street, Tom had seen that morning a badge displayed as a curiosity—a badge enameled in the colors of three “Christian” nations and one heathen nation, bearing across its face the legend: “Gott Strafe Englandl”
A motion-picture camera perched on the top of a taxicab caught the Queen's Volunteers as they marched out of the Abbey. Watching the operator, Tom heard a pleading voice at his side. Looking down, he saw a thin little woman who held a coin box toward him. “For the Belgians, please, sir,” she said. He dropped a shilling into the box. Then, as the woman moved away through the crowd, he followed her with a question. But the woman's only English words were those he had heard. “For the Belgians, please, sir.”
To a policeman Tom put his question, and the policeman had to consult a brother officer before he could answer: “You'd better try Alexandra Palace, sir. They had 'em there the last I heard.”
To the northern edge of London Tom journeyed over the route he had taken to Finsbury. At the end of the last tram line he asked the conductor: “This is Alexandra Palace, is it?”
“Yes, sir; that's it, up top of the hill.”
“That is where the Belgian refugees are?”
“Ho!” replied the conductor. “There ain't none of 'em here no more. They've all been took away. The gov'ment's cleared 'em out to mike room for the bloody German pris'ners o' war. They send the poor Belgians to stay anywheres and they put the blarsted Germans in an 'andsome palace.”
But the old keeper of the palace lodge had a different version of the removal of the Belgians. Through the chained and padlocked gate he explained:
“You see, sir, the big palace yonder on the hill is a landmark for miles around. If we fill it with German prisoners, then the Zeppeleens won't drop no bombs on it. If it's Belgians you'd like to see, you want to go to Earl's Court.”
Earl's Court lay on the opposite side of London, miles away, but the underground from Finsbury Park carried Thurston quickly across town, compelling him, however, to pay dearly for the service by reminding him of a dark-haired, anxious-eyed English girl who had worn his overcoat down that same railway line two nights before.
Outside the gates at Earl's Court numbers of Belgians, sad-looking folk, waited hopelessly around for something that seemed in no immediate likelihood of turning up. Among them were Belgian children, their little faces bright as their yellow curls, though the garments in which their little bodies were clad could scarcely be called clothing.
In ordinary times Earl's Court is one of the Coney Islands of London. At the time of Thurston's visit it was a shelter for homeless Belgians driven from their own land by the German invasion. On every side Tom saw the carousels, the dance halls, the theaters, the slides and chutes and mystic mazes that had once provided amusement for holiday makers. But the crowds of simple folk who filled the court that day were not merry. The children laughed, indeed, when Tom produced a double handful of candies that a slot machine outside the gate had yielded up to him in exchange for a pocketful of coppers; and hundreds of little boys and girls played happily in the great halls and the sunny open spaces, as if their homes had not been heaps of shell-shattered stone.
But the older folk, the men uprooted from their own soil and flung upon the charity of a strange land, the women who sat dreaming in the noisy confusion of that grotesque house of refuge, dreaming of their tulip gardens, of their own hearthstones, of their menfolk left behind in King Albert's hunted little army—they did not laugh. Tom saw the lost, lorn, homesick look on their faces; he saw the gay background of the pleasure park and wondered if tragedy had ever chosen a more incongruous stage setting.
The Englishman who served as his guide led him through vast halls and showed him there mile after mile, it seemed, of iron cots, each bed neatly made up with an army blanket for a coverlet.
“In the dormitories it is necessary to separate families,” he explained. “But the mothers and their children sleep side by side, and in the night the mothers are permitted to push their beds close up to the children's.”
They looked in at what had once been a merry-go-round. Women and girls were busy over laundry tubs and ironing boards. “Notice that one,” said the guide, indicating a sturdy woman of perhaps thirty years; her eyes were red from weeping, and there were still tears in them. “I am glad she has found something to do. She is washing baby clothes for a mother of three, just for kindness. Yesterday she was quite out of her head with grief; she had just heard from France that her husband had been killed. But that is not all. Her only child, a boy of six, was taken to the hospital last week ill with scarlet fever, and the red post card from the doctors came to her yesterday. You can guess what that means.”
A cinematograph hall had been turned into a Catholic chapel. Over the door a little white cross held up its message of hope.
“And now,” said the guide, with his first smile, “now I'll introduce you to the lion show.”
He led the way to a building where once the king of beasts had done tricks for the pleasure of the London populace. Entering, Tom looked upon rows of cradles, each one containing a sleeping or a sleepy baby. Nurses in white moved about the room. Following one of these with his eyes to a table where milk bottles were being washed, Tom suddenly left his guide to gape after him and rushed across the nursery as if one of the now departed lions had been behind him.
The guide saw him halt before the young woman in white and speak to her, and he saw the young woman drop the bottle in her hand and turn to the stranger with a smile of surprise and gladness. In a minute Tom came back, bringing the young woman with him, both of them blushing handsomely.
“Mr. Powell,” said he, “Miss Ashby, here, is a friend of mine, and if it's all the same to you, I think I'll stay here a while and save the rest of the sights till later.”
It was all right with Mr. Powell, especially when Tom followed up his declaration by thrusting a gold sovereign into the Englishman's hand—“to buy something for the Belgian kiddies.” Not until sundown did Thurston hunt up Mr. Powell to thank him for his guidance and bid him good-by.
In the underground train back to town he told himself that it had been luck that had led him to Earl's Court, where Miss Ashby had found new work. But it had not been luck, at all. It had been his churchgoing habit, as must be clear to any one who reads this tale. For if Thurston had not gone to the Abbey that morning he would not have been approached for a contribution for the Belgians; and if he had not been so approached, he might not have remembered that he wished to have a look at the refugees, and the delightful meeting in the day nursery at Earl's Court would never have happened. It was a beaming young man who rushed up the stairs in Northumberland Avenue and burst in at Ted Price's door.
“I've found her!” he cried.
“Found who?” growled the grammatical newspaper man, who was unhappy at the moment because there are no Sunday holidays for London correspondents.
“Miss Ashby—Mr. Brompton's secretary. She is at Earl's Court, helping among the refugees. I asked her if she didn't have sadness enough in her life without going to work in a house of trouble like that. She said she guessed people in trouble ought to be the best kind of people to take care of other people in trouble. She's a brick, Ted. But that isn't all. She knows where Brompton is.”
“She does?”
“Yes; he's lying up somewhere in the Whitechapel District, in a lodging house, broken-hearted over the mess his vile young nephew has got him into.”
“How does she know that?”
“He has called on her. He knows, it seems, where she lives; which is more than I know. He wants her to go on writing his memoirs for him. He offers to go with his old servant to some out-of-the-way place in the country where his rascally nephew can't find him, and to let Grace take one of her maiden aunts along as chaperon. Miss Ashby says there's no doubt of his being in earnest about those reminiscences of his.”
“Evidently it's a move to get her out of the way,” said Price. “The gang may think she knows more about them than she does, and they don't want to take a chance.”
“That's what I told her,” said Tom. “But when I went further and told her Brompton's real business, she vowed she would take up his offer and go with him if I gave the word. She doesn't love the Huns, you know, after what they did to her brother.”
“This looks interesting,” Price declared. “If she goes away with Brompton, we can easily arrange to stick around near enough to protect her in case of any danger. And it may be—have you seen the stories in the papers to-day about the lights in the sky?”
He fetched a Sunday newspaper from the file rack and pointed out to Tom a leading article, in which the director of the Greenwich astronomical observatory and other scientists discussed the mysterious presence of a rosy light in the heavens above London on the night of every Zeppelin raid.
“So the authorities have known about the lights all along,” said Thurston, after a hasty glance down the column.
“That's how it looks. They've kept mum about it, in typical British fashion, until the thing began to be talked about openly. To-day they admit that such lights have appeared, but they have no good explanation, you see. The chap at Kensington Institute says, for instance, that it may be the Zeps themselves that produce the light, projecting it before them as they come”
The telephone bell rang, and Price reached for the instrument. “Are you there? Yes. Good evening, Mr. Wembley. Here he is now. Want to talk with him?” Price handed the phone to Tom.
Mr. Wembley had news. He had spent the day rambling in Richmond, inquiring about a wealthy American named Krug. He found no one in Richmond who knew of such a man, but he found a gardener whose wife's sister had come home out of a job two days before, her employer and his family having. closed their house and started for America.
Being interviewed, the gardner's wife's sister agreed that her former employer and his family might be Americans, for they spoke a foreign tongue. Bread in their house was always “brot” and butter was “booter,” and when her little nephew had visited her one day he had been chased off the place by the American, her master, who spoke of the child as “dass ferdamp kint,” or words to that effect. Yes, from their language the gardener's wife's sister was sure they were Americans. Her brother-in-law would take Mr. Wembley and show him the house.
“The house,” said Mr. Wembley, over the phone, “is a villa in a little park all of its own.”
“Is it built of red stone?” asked Tom, “with a red-tiled roof and outside chimneys and a red brick garage?”
“Yes, it is. How do you know?”
“There's evergreens in the yard, and a flower garden at the side, and a dome for a telescope on the roof. Am I right?”
“You are,” said Mr. Wembley. “The man was a crank on double stars; and he owned so much jewelry that he had to have an iron safe to keep it in; and his name was Burlington. Extraordinary, eh, what?”
“When did he leave?” Tom asked.
“Friday night, in time to reach Liverpool before sailing time Saturday. I'm afraid our game's up.”
“Never think it,” Thurston replied, and told Mr. Wembley then the news he had gathered at Earl's Court, Mr. Wembley exclaiming “Extraordinary!” an extraordinary number of times.
“Can you come out to Kew to-night?” the world's greatest living author asked, at the end of the tale.
“I'm sorry, but I can't,” Tom answered.
“Then I'll run into town to see you.”
“All right—only make it late, because I have a date at nine o'clock to see a young woman home across London.” It wasn't safe for a girl to be out so late in London, with the street so dark.
Wisely, Mr. Wembley decided that morning would be a better time to call upon Mr. Thurston.
It was near midnight when Tom turned out of the Strand into the courtyard of his hotel. His feelings were the pleasantest of all in his life. Miss Ashby, freed from her duties at Earl's Court until the following day, permitted him to walk with her past the corner of the flower-scented churchyard and quite to her door, and her maiden aunts had invited him into supper.
Prim little old ladies they were. Miss Jane quoted Ruskin to the visitor to demonstrate that she was no ordinary person, and Miss Matilda regretted that he had chosen a poor time to visit England. They still warmed their souls before the burned-out fires of a departed era and were bewildered by the swift new age about them. They had made their home for years with Grace's father, their brother, who, Miss Jane said, had held a very important office at the London docks until the time of his death, three years before. Since then the burden of earning an income for the household had been borne by Grace and William—and William had gone to war at the first call and had come home grievously wounded.
“We still have a brother living,” said Miss Matilda. “He ran away to the States when he was eighteen. He now lives in Connecticut.” She pronounced it “Connect-icut.”
“He is in the cycle business,” added Miss Jane. “Coming from America, you may know him. His name is Henry.”
“Henry Ashby?” said Tom. “No, I'm afraid I'm not acquainted with him.” Noting that the spinsters looked disappointed, he hastened to explain that he had never gone in for cycling.
Well satisfied with his day's adventures, Tom returned to his hotel. In the shadows of the archway a hand fell upon his arm, and he drew back with fists ready.
“Mr. Thurston, sir.”
It was the head waiter of the breakfast room.
“That's my name. What do you want?”
“The young lady, sir, that you took breakfast with—Mademoiselle de Reuter; can you give me any news of her?”
“Why should you want news of her?”
“She is my sister, sir. I have the right to ask.”
“Your sister!”
“It is the truth, sir. They arrested her last Wednesday afternoon. I have had no word from her since. If you could help me”
The man's tone was anxious, his attitude cringing; he rubbed his hands nervously as he awaited Thurston's answer. Tom recalled the waiter's behavior toward the princess in the breakfast room and the part the man had played in the framed-up scene that had led both the princess and Tom to jail.
“I think you are a confounded liar,” said Thurston, with righteous contempt. “But if you want information about the girl, inquire at Scotland Yard.”
“So sorry, sir; thank you, sir,” the man replied, humbly, and Tom left him standing in the archway shadow. Halfway up the stairs to his room he kicked himself to think he had not asked the man about Krug. Quickly he returned to the courtyard, but the waiter had vanished.
CHAPTER XIV.
Scotland.
The month of May is as chilly indoors in Scotland as the month of April in England, especially when the person whose chilliness is concerned happens to be accustomed to American sunshine and American steam heat. William Dean Howells has described the English sitting-room stove as possessing the capacity of a quart pot and the heating power of a glowworm. Thomas Thurston would have liked to hear Mr. Howells' opinion of the fireplace in the sitting room of the Temperance Hotel in the little town of Drumkenny, on the Scottish East Coast.
It was raining, as frequently happens in Scotland. The sun had not shone for three days, and the coals in the fireplace had done their best to make up for the lack of solar Warmth. But it was a poor best, and all that saved Tom from shaking his joints loose was the society of Angus MacPherson.
Angus was the innkeeper. Rather, he was the husband of the innkeeper, for Mrs. MacPherson wore the trousers in that establishment. Mrs. Mac frowned upon the intimacy that had sprung up between her husband and the only guest her hotel contained, hence the visits Angus paid to the sitting room were more or less surreptitious. Always he watched the door, and whenever his wife's step sounded outside he became suddenly busy dusting the furniture, tending the fire, or polishing the brass candlesticks that ornamented the mantel.
This afternoon, however, he wore a more comfortable air than usual as he sat with Thurston before the fire, for Mrs. MacPherson had gone away for the afternoon to attend the monthly meeting of the local temperance society. Temperance was the ruling passion in that good woman's house.
“I wonder,” said Tom, “if there is a copy of Bobbie Burns' poems around?”
“Dinna ca' him Bobbie,” replied Angus MacPherson. “That gi'es ye awa' for an Amurrican. Ca' him Robbie.”
“Robbie Burns, then,” said Tom. “How is it there's no book of his poems in this hotel? I supposed he was in everybody's library in Scotland.”
“Na, na,” replied Angus, his eyes twinkling behind his tobacco smoke. “Ye'll no find Robbie Burns' poems in this hoose. Dinna ye hear that Robbie was a rovin', rantin' rake and a dretful yin wi' the drink? But what poem of his wad ye like to hear? Because I ken the maist o' them by heart.”
Thurston laughed, denying that he had any particular song of the Ayrshire bard's in mind, though that was an untruth; for some verses about a “bonny wee thing” had run in his head since the day, now a week gone by, when he had arrived at this out-of-the-way village in Scotland twenty-four hours behind Grace Ashby, Miss Jane Ashby and Mr. Isaac Brompton. Whenever Tom thought of Grace he tried to recall the words of Burns' gentlest of love lyrics; from which minor circumstance we may judge the state of Tom's heart.
Angus MacPherson, reveling in his afternoon of personal liberty, proved his familiarity with the Scottish poet by reciting “Tom O'Shanter” from beginning to end, dwelling upon the “cutty sark” lines with relish. The rain beat upon the window-panes, and Tom, looking through them at the white-walled village street, wondered what the end of his adventure would be. Like Tam O'Shanter at the auld kirk at Alloway, he had looked in upon a scene which it was not his business to witness. Forgetting his errand in England, he had accepted a wild, vague commission from Mr. Herbert Wembley, whom some folk described as a lunatic. He had listened to the siren words of a yellow-haired and soulful eyed stranger and landed in jail for that lapse from wisdom, and he had fallen in love with a plucky English girl who
Who was at that moment crossing the street to the door of the Temperance Hotel, or else his eyes needed treatment at the oculist's!
He bolted from the sitting room, to the amazement of Angus, who had just begun “The Cotter's Saturday Night,” and he flung open the street door, to the astonishment of the young woman in the rain outside. Her cheeks were pink from her walk of a mile in a Scottish downpour. A strand of dark hair blew across her lips, and there were raindrops on it. Quickly Tom relieved her of her dripping umbrella, helped her off with her raincoat and drew her in before the fire, where Angus got suddenly upon his feet, hiding his pipe behind his back.
“I'll gae tosh masel up,” said Angus, and immediately made himself scarce.
“I didn't suppose you would come out on a day like this,” said Tom, when he had pulled two chairs close together before the fireplace.
“I waited for you at the stationer's as usual,” said Miss Ashby.
“Then consider me as groveling at your feet. Has anything happened?”
“You know the books Mr. Brompton has expected from London?”
“Yes.”
“They came last night, in a large box, and he unpacked them to-day. But they aren't books, at all.”
“What are they?”
“Electric batteries—cells and cells and cells of them.”
“How do you know?”
“He let me see them. He intends to use them for his rheumatism. He has carried them upstairs into the room that was once the minister's study. Mr. Brompton calls it his sanctum, and no one enters there except himself. My aunt and I have a bedroom on the first floor, overlooking the garden. His old servant sleeps downstairs near us. We never go into his room upstairs, even to make his bed. It is the only thing he is strict about.”
“How do the memoirs go?”
“We began chapter thirteen to-day; it is to be about Cecil Rhodes and the orders he used to give Mr. Brompton for old books on horse-racing. Really, you know, Mr. Brompton is so absorbed in his work and so interesting in his talk, I feel certain we have made a dreadful mistake about him. Still, those batteries—I thought you had better know.”
“It's important that I should,” said Tom, gravely. “What about the nephew? Any sign of him yet?”
“Not a sign. Now, sir, I've delivered my message and I must go back to the manse.”
She rose as she spoke, but a tap came at the door and Angus entered with a tray upon which were tea things, a pot of tea, seven kinds of oatmeal biscuits and a jar of marmalade. He had toshed himself up by donning his Sunday coat.
“We may as weel mak' a pairty o' 't,” said he. “The guid wife will be clackin' temperance an hour yet.”
“What lovely old cups and saucers!” cried Grace, admiringly.
“'Tis our best cheeny,” Angus confided. “She wad be gey sweirt we'd be usin' it. But wha will tell her?”
So they made a party of it, and Miss Ashby spread marmalade on the seven varieties of oatmeal cakes for Tom to eat, which he did to oblige her, though disclaiming that he was a horse. As for Angus, he spread his own marmalade and enjoyed himself hugely, poor man!
The dark of a rainy evening had fallen on the village street, on cots and byres and gardens, on the churchyard with its little white stone kirk, and on the rolling moors beyond, when Tom surrendered the umbrella to Miss Ashby and bade her good-by. Under a kirkyard tree whose leaves were too young to afford protection from the rain he watched her swing away along the path that led to the manse which Mr. Brompton had leased. A few paces up the path she turned.
“I forgot to tell you,” said she, “that I think I shall have to go back to London.”
“Why?”
“Because Mr. Brompton has taken a great fancy to Aunt Jane, and I'm afraid the feeling is mutual. If Mr. Brompton should turn out to be the villain we suspect, it would break her heart.”
“It's rough on auntie, I know,” said Tom. “But you aren't serious about going back, are you?”
She laughed at him. “I thought you Americans had so keen a sense of humor,” she said, teasingly, and left him.
The manse toward which she went was of a little better quality than the rest of the houses in Drumkenny. There for many years the minister of the kirk had lived until he had finished his earthly service. For a year the manse had stood vacant owing to the inability of the elders and the congregation to unite upon a new minister. There was a schism in the kirk, it seemed, and no likelihood of healing it so long as the determined Mrs. Angus MacPherson remained alive to lead her faction of the flock against the faction represented by the ruling elders. Foreseeing a long war between Mrs. Angus and the session, the canny trustees had conceived the economical plan of letting the manse to a tenant pending the outcome of the hostilities, and the thrifty congregation, even including Mrs. MacPherson, had concurred in the plan. It was the only point on which the people of Drumkenny had been unanimous in a year.
A sixpenny advertisement in a London paper had brought an immediate response from a gentleman of literary inclinations, who desired a retreat in which he might compose his memoirs, and Mr. Brompton, masquerading as “James Treadwell, Esquire,” had arrived duly and installed himself, as we have seen.
“Natur' aborrs a vaccoom,” said Angus, in explaining these matters to Thurston. “'Tis an ill wind that blaws naebody guid.”
Through the rain Thurston plodded down the village street to the railway station, where he filed three telegrams, all to London. It was time for the evening train from the south, so he lingered to behold its arrival. From down the line came the tinny pipe of the locomotive, and presently the train stood in the station, the guards in their rubber coats running along its length and opening doors. Four passengers alighted. One of them was the adroit Mr. Googan of Scotland Yard, in his rusty mackintosh and now needing that garment for the first time Tom had seen him wearing it. With him were the two sturdy male persons who had invaded Thurston's room at the Salisbury on the day of his arrest. In watching the three, Tom failed to observe the fourth passenger. This person was a man plump of form and swarthy of complexion, who forbore to thrust himself upon public notice at the station, but made his way quickly across a siding and a vacant lot and disappeared toward the village.
Googan and his pair drew the station master into a corner and held mysterious talk with him, after which the station master went inside and returned with a shipping book, at which the three looked with close interest. Then, satchels in hand, they walked up the rainy street and entered the door of the Temperance Hotel.
What business had brought Googan to Scotland? Thurston could readily guess. He recalled how Googan's meddling had played the mischief with his and Mr. Wembley's plans all along the way. It was Googan who had caused Tom's arrest. It was Googan who had raided the house in Finsbury and scattered its nervous occupants to the four winds. Without a doubt it was Googan's stroke that had frightened Mr. Krug out of Richmond, out of London and perhaps out of Great Britain. Now Googan had come to meddle once more.
“You have some new guests,” Tom remarked to Angus MacPherson late that night. “Why didn't they show up for supper?”
“Whist!” replied the landlord, his fingers on his lips. “'Tis no for me to be talkin' aboot them; but 'tis detectives, they are, frae Scotian' Yard. Aye, 'tis so. And wad ye believe it, there's a counterfeiter here in the toon and they've come for to spy on him.”
“They told you all that, did they?”
“Aye.”
“Did they tell you his name?
“Na, but they spiered aboot the new tenant up at the manse.”
“You don't think he could be a counterfeiter, do you? Why, man, he's an author.”
“It micht be,” said Angus sagely.
Thurston, in his bedroom up the narrow stairs, doused the glim, raised his window and looked out into the night. The rain had ceased, though the drip still fell from the eaves. Opposite him the white houses straggled away along a wynd to the fields beyond. Above the fields a round, bare hill lifted its bulk against the horizon, and behind the hill a shaft of light flashed upward, lost itself in a bank of cloud, wavered a moment, then vanished.
Tom had essayed to mount that hill in the daytime and had been stopped halfway to the top by armed guards. But he knew what view lay behind the hill. All Britain knew, though few people cared to speak of it above a whisper. Beyond the hill was the fateful inlet from the sea, not three miles across at its widest, made by nature through millions of years for the purpose one day of becoming the heart of the world.
There, curtained by sea fogs from the North Sea, and screened from view on the landward side by bleak, heathery hills, lay the Grand Fleet of Britain at anchor behind its nets of steel, watching, ever watching, holding the Hun in his own harbors, keeping the seas free for the free peoples of the earth.
Free? On that very night in May when Tom looked forth at the searchlight of a battleship sweeping the clouds, frail boats filled with trembling women,, shuddering children and grimly silent men crept into other harbors on a not far distant coast; and behind them in the dark waters drifted the dead bodies of a thousand free people like them, murdered that the Hun might call the seas his own.
The seas had not been free for the Lusitania that day, nor would it be free in the years to come for many another fair ship of the free nations. Still, through the dark years would the Grand Fleet keep its vigil, and still would the seas be free again, when the Teuton should have spent his blood and his treasure in his vain ambition to set the seal of Slavery upon a world of Citizens.
CHAPTER XV.
The Midnight Motorist.
Mr. Googan of Scotland Yard wasted no time. Before bedtime he had visited the Drumkenny police office and held a long conference with the sergeant in charge, and before breakfast next morning he was out in the bright sunlight of the rain-washed street taking his bearings. At breakfast he came face to face with Thurston.
“Well, well!” he exclaimed. “You here, too, eh?”
He stared at the young man with a look, that was not flattering.
“What brings you north?” Tom asked.
“The London and Northwestern,” replied Mr. Googan, pointedly, whereat the two sturdy male persons, his companions, burst into oatmeal-porridgey laughter and had to wipe their mouths.
After the meal the trio went into secret session upstairs. It had been clear to Tom from their looks that his presence in Drumkenny gave them concern. He was not surprised, therefore, when the stouter of the under-detectives entered the sitting room and engaged him in talk.
“You flit about quite a bit, sir,” said the stout man.
“Yes,” Tom answered, “I'm quite a flitter.”
Through the window he saw Googan and the other satellite set forth up the street toward the manse. Also he saw a round-bodied, swarthy-faced man saunter out of a grogshop across the way in the company of a soldier in kilts.
“I say!” cried the stout detective, as Tom sprang from his chair to gaze through the window at the grogshop pair. “What's the excitement?”
“A soldier in a saloon,” Tom answered. “I didn't know it was permitted.”
But it was at the soldier's companion that he stared, for the man who had come out of the beer shop with the Highlander was the head waiter of the Hotel Salisbury, London.
“I'm going out,” said Thurston. “So long.”
“I'll keep you company if you don't mind,” said the detective.
The head waiter had followed Googan and the second detective up the street toward the kirk. Tom turned his steps in the same direction; there was no use in pretending that his interest lay in any other. In the manse Mr. Brompton had a large boxful of storage batteries—cells and cells and cells of them—for what purpose Tom could well imagine. In the manse Grace Ashby watched Mr. Brompton's moves for Tom and Mr. Wembley. Toward the manse Mr. Googan had done with the intention probably of taking Mr. Brompton into custody for the common or garden crime of manufacturing spurious money. His interference at this time would break up the ferreting out of the gigantic conspiracy which Mr. Wembley had discerned, and would possibly permit the escape of a greater criminal than Mr. Brompton. For Tom, since leaving London, had received this letter:
H. W.
That Brompton and Krug were separated at the present moment by a very few miles Tom believed; and now that Googan threatened to spoil the game as he had spoiled it in Finsbury, Tom found himself taking sides against lawful police authority and wishing that something large and heavy might fall upon Mr. Googan. The evening train that day, he felt certain, would bring Mr. Wembley to Scotland to help him in watching the manse. But he told himself candidly that the chance of Mr. Brompton's remaining at the manse until evening was slight, unless Googan could be headed off.
Saying nothing to each other, Tom and the stout detective came to the kirk. Beyond it, across a little field, they saw the manse, partly screened behind yew hedges. Beyond the manse was a pasture where a red cow grazed, and at the farther side of the pasture a wood, green with the first touch of spring. Back of all was the round, bare hill that looked down from its hidden side upon the harbor where the dreadnoughts of Britain lay at anchor.
On the stone wall inclosing the kirkyard Tom sat down. Uncertain what move to make next, the detective loitered near, spelling out the epitaphs on the lichen-spotted gravestones. His time belonged to Thurston that morning.
The manse appeared to be unconscious of the conflict of action that centered around its white walls. Tom could see Mr. Brompton's old servant in the yard at the rear, engaged in hanging out some linen to dry. His fancy pictured a peaceful literary scene within the house—Mr. Brompton in an old armchair dictating the recollections of a busy life; Grace seated near, her pretty head bent over her notebook; Aunt Jane knitting not far away, listening to the entertaining words of the retired bookseller and, perhaps, casting a melting though quite maidenly look in Mr. Brompton's direction. But what had become of Googan and the second detective? Where was the London waiter who had followed them up the road?
Beyond the manse, beyond the pasture and the woods, high up on the side of the big hill where the armed sentries lurked to stop curious wanderers, Tom saw a group of moving figures. A mile away they were, and hard to make out. There must have been a half dozen of them, at least. They passed over the brow of the hill and out of sight. Still no sign of Googan.
Tom had made up his mind as to the course he should pursue in case Googan approached the manse. He would intercept him, tell him everything and offer himself as a hostage, should Googan suspect him of being in league with Brompton; and he would resign all the credit for the exposure of the greater plot to Googan if that brisk person would consent to delay action for a single day.
But no Googan appeared, though Tom watched for an hour. The manse door opened and Grace came out to stretch her arms in enjoyment of the sunny morning. Tom saw her stroll down the walk toward the stile at the road; saw her stoop to the ground behind the hedge and, rising again, hold a flower to her face. From her manner it was clear that nothing untoward was going on within the house and that Mr. Googan was not there. Soon Grace went indoors and the manse resumed its former look.
But out of the wood and across the red cow's pasture came a figure that Thurston knew at once. The stout detective had sat down behind the wall to sharpen his pocketknife on a convenient headstone. Unobserved by him, the head waiter of the Hotel Salisbury, London, passed the manse, the kirkyard and the kirk and disappeared toward the village.
Tom, yawning, slipped down from the wall. “I'll mosey back down the hill,” said he. “Going my way?”
The detective decided that his knife was sharp enough. In silence they retraced their steps; and when Tom sat down in the sitting room of the Temperance Hotel to read “The Demon Rum,” the detective settled himself comfortably near him and opened “Ten Nights in a Barroom.” Thus they remained until the bustling Mrs. MacPherson commanded them to come to dinner.
At dinner the detective displayed uneasiness. A step sounded at the door and he looked up quickly, but it was only Angus MacPherson that he saw. Angus held in his hand a copy of an Edinburgh newspaper that had arrived on the noon train.
“Wull ye listen to this!” he cried. “They've sunk the Lusitania! A thousand puir folk drowndit by a skulkin' submarine! Bairns and a'l”
Dinner forgotten, the detective seized the newspaper and ran through its brief account of the German crime, while Tom read the story over his shoulder. In the street outside, little groups of villagers gathered around lucky owners of newspaper copies and, having read all that was told, went back to their shopkeeping and their weaving, shaking their heads and muttering: “What a peety!”
Tom was bothered no more by his shadow that day, the shadow having gone up the hill alone, and into the woods beyond the manse, thence returning to the headquarters of the local constabulary with questions and becoming more worried with each passing hour. At four o'clock Thurston entered the village stationer's shop and looked over the scanty stock of magazines until Grace Ashby came in.
“You've heard the news—about the Lusitania?” she greeted him.
“Yes; I've heard.”
“A woman driving past our house stopped at the stile and told me. I ran in and told Mr. Brompton, and he laughed aloud!” The girl shuddered. “I don't see how I can stay under the same roof with him another night—or let Aunt Jane stay.”
“What did he say about the news?”
“He said; 'It is the beginning of the end.' Those were his words. Actually, he gloated. I must tell you, too, that he has been busy in his room up the stairs ever since breakfast. He did no dictating to-day.”
“You must stay one more night,” said Tom. “I expect Mr. Wembley on the evening train, provided he received my telegram in time to leave London at midnight last night. You're not afraid, are you?”
“Not for myself,” she replied. “But for others. Have I told you that Mr. Brompton had a visitor late last night?”
“No. Who?”
“A man. That's all I know. I heard them talking at the door long after midnight.”
Tom thought of the London waiter.
“A few minutes after the man had gone away I heard the whir of a motor engine not far away. There are still prints of big tires in the road in front of the church, if you care to look.”
“To-night at ten o'clock,” said Tom, “I'll be at the kirk with Mr. Wembley, if he has arrived. Will you meet us there in case there's anything more to report?”
“I will,” Miss Ashby promised.
In a shed behind the Temperance Hotel Angus MacPherson was putting a new splint seat in a century-old chair when Tom found him.
“Mac, there aren't many motor cars in this metropolis, are there?”
“Weel,” the innkeeper's husband replied, “I heard a big yin gae by in the nicht. When the simmer comes thur'll be dizzens o' they.”
“But there's none in the town now?”
“Aye, there's Gavin Haggart, the fishman's. 'Tis a wee contraption frae Amurrica wi' a smell to 't like finnan haddie cookit in benzine. But 'tis only the folk by the roadside has to smell it; 'tis ne'er Gavin—he aye rins so fast. When Gavin gaes by ye'll see folk sneezin' an' chokin' and the tears comin' oot their een like they had a cauld in the heid.”
“Where can I find this Mr. Haggart?”
“Doon till his shope by the police barracks. Jist folly yer nose and ye'll no miss it.”
At the fish market alongside the local police headquarters Gavin Haggart consented to take the stranger for a ride in consideration of a half crown; but the ride must be over by sundown, for he had an engagement at that time to drive the little Haggarts “to the big toon sax mile awa' to see thae shiftin' pictur's.”
In the seat of the trusty American delivery car which Mr. Haggart used in his business of supplying the surrounding region with fish, they drove up the hill to the church. There Tom descended to the ground and examined the tire prints reported by Grace. Big prints they were, and the tread had left an easily recognizable pattern in the soft earth.
“Which way was that car headed, do you suppose?” he asked his chauffeur.
“Yon way,” Haggart replied, pointing back toward the village.
Down the hill, through the village, across the railway tracks and out upon the moors they rattled. Coming to a fork, they halted so that Tom might study the roadway again.
“Here they are,” he called from a little distance up the right-hand road, and again the expedition got under way. Thrice more they stopped to pick up the trail, and went on over heathery hills and down into snug little valleys until, twelve miles from home, they came to a rusty iron gate that barred farther going in that direction.
Beyond the gate lay a park, unkempt in look and seemingly left neglected for years. Haggart explained about it. Had the American ever heard of Lord Benbold? He was one of the great men of the kingdom, and this place had once been his favorite country seat. Its acres were past counting; its brooks contained enough trout and salmon to feed all the town of Aberdeen.
“How far does it stretch from this gate?” Tom asked.
“Miles and miles,” said Haggart. “A' the way to the sea.”
“The place looks run down. Doesn't the owner come here any more?”
No, Lord Benbold had not visited the estate since his son Harry was killed there. The son was a naturalist. He had gone over the cliffs at the end of a rope to collect birds' eggs and been dashed to death on the beach a hundred feet below. No one witnessed the accident except a foreigner, a professor of a sort, who was out with the boy that day. Some people said the rope was cut, but more likely it had chafed in two on a bit of rock.
“And the place has stood idle ever since?”
“Ever since,” said Haggart. “That was three year ago. Noo, if ye please, I must gae back till the weans.”
A mile along the road homeward he brought the little car to a stop and pointed away through a gap in the hills to a spot of blue in the south.
“Do ye see what's yon?”
“I see water.”
“There's mair than water,” Gavin declared, in an awed whisper. “Yon's a sight the kaiser was gie his ane guid arm for to see. Yon's the Grand Fleet lyin' in wait for him.”
The flivver went forward again and the view was gone.
“When we started out,” said Thurston, “we were south of the Grand Fleet. Now we are north of it. Have we come around in a half circle to get here?”
“Aye.”
The evening train had arrived at Drumkenny before the flivver reëntered the village street. At the door of the Temperance Hotel stood Mr. Herbert Wembley, and with him Ted Price and Sir Arthur Purdoy.
CHAPTER XVI.
The Last Signal.
At ten o'clock at night the manse, viewed from the kirkyard, was dark, but from the point where Thurston watched, just outside the yew hedge, a light showed behind the window shades in the upper room that Grace had described to him as Mr. Brompton's sanctum.
A window on the first floor was open; he could tell this because a white curtain swung softly to and fro in the night wind. By and by something else appeared in the open window; something that swung one foot, then another over the ledge and lowered itself quietly to the ground. In a moment Grace reached the stile, then entered the road. She gave a little gasp as he rose beside her.
They said nothing as they walked to the kirk, but Tom put out his hand and she took it. In the shadow of the wall four manly figures stood up to be introduced, the fourth and last being the stout detective who had played Siamese Twins with Tom that morning. This person's presence in company with Mr. Wembley, Mr. Price and Sir Arthur needs this explanation, that, having utterly lost track of his chief for twelve mortal hours, the man had also lost his nerve and thrown himself upon the good will of the other Londoners at the Temperance Hotel.
“But I'm not Mr. Googan's keeper,” Tom reminded him. “If Googan wants to lose himself in the wilds of Scotland, is it any of my business?”
“Something's 'appened to him, sir,” the detective insisted. “You saw him, and Hi saw him a-going up the road after breakfast, and he ain't been seen 'ide nor 'air of since. Hi think he's been made away with; it looks like foul play, and, that being the case, it's your dewty as a loyal subject of 'is majesty to 'elp me find him.” Quite in a panic was Mr. Googan's satellite.
“Not being a subject of his majesty,” Tom replied, “I can't see that my duty lies in the direction you suggest. But if you care to come along with us and keep your mouth shut, maybe you'll learn something.”
The others consenting, the forlorn detective went along. His name was Hitt.
“Well, Miss Ashby,” said Mr. Wembley, “what's the old chap up to to-night?”
“He is working in his room,” Grace replied. “He has had his door locked quite all day. For the last half hour there has been a strange buzzing sound up there—I can't describe it—a sound as if a thousand bees were swarming in the room, and now and then a crackling and snapping sound, too, as if something were burning. My aunt suspects nothing; she has gone to sleep; but I am frightened enough for the two of us. After what he said about the Lusitania I am sure he is insane.”
Mr. Wembley turned a pocket flash upon the face of his watch. “Ten-fifteen,” he said. “Ten-thirty is the time, if this is to be one of their nights.” He rested the flash on a partly folded map and said, “Let us stand where we can see the northern sky.”
In a ghostly procession they moved around the kirk, Mr. Hitt stumbling over a tombstone and muffling an oath as he limped on. At the rear the graveyard ended at a stone wall, with an open field beyond, stretching toward the hill of the armed sentinels. The sky was faintly overcast, though here and there the stars shone through.
“This will do nicely,” said Mr. Wembley; and they waited beside the wall, watching the sky in the north. Tom's heart thrilled when a timid hand slipped itself under his arm; and he experienced the odd sensation of having known this English girl all his life. Under the sky that night he doubted no more that an intelligent fate had brought them together than that Mrs. MacPherson would serve oatmeal porridge for breakfast in the morning.
“There it is!” Mr. Wembley and Sir Arthur exclaimed together.
The others gazed with staring eyes at a spot of light high in air and far away to the north. A second it glowed, then vanished, then reappeared a little higher and much brighter—a ruddy opalescence like a cloud of fire, that wavered and pulsated, expanded, contracted, dimmed and brightened until it stood out clear and steady above the harbor where the Grand Fleet watched the sea doors of Germany.
“It casts a shadow!” Mr. Wembley pointed to the ground behind the watchers, and they saw the outlines of their figures upon the graveyard turf. Startled, they turned to look again at the weird new thing in the sky, too deeply awed to remember the business at hand. It was Sir Arthur who spoke at last.
“This mustn't go on,” he said. “We have wasted too much time already.”
Through the kirkyard they picked their way to the road. In the dim glow of the uncanny ball of light still burning in its place in the sky they approached the manse. Tom, who had left Miss Ashby on the steps of the kirk under instructions to remain there, jumped as he heard her light footsteps at his side.
“I can't desert Aunt Jane,” she said, and he let her remain close to the yew hedge. On the ground below her bedroom window he paused to listen, then lifted himself easily over the sill and into the room. Somewhere in the dark he heard the gentle snoring of Aunt Jane. Feeling his way along the wall to the door that opened into the inner hall, he turned the key without noise and stepped through into darkness. His hand found a stair round, then the newel post.
There was matting on the stairs, and his feet made no sound, although it would have meant little if they had; for down from the upper floor came the persistent humming that Grace had described as like the swarming of bees. Mingled with it was a sputtering sound that reminded Tom of an X-ray machine he had once heard in operation.
He reached the top of the flight safely. A faint line of light showed him Brompton's door. Drawing a deep breath, he stretched out his hand and tapped sharply on the panel.
There was a quick shuffling inside, then a gruff, “Who's there? I told you I didn't want to be disturbed.”
“You didn't tell me,” Tom shouted. “Open up or I'll smash down the door!”
Dead silence followed, then a rush, a scrambling and clawing, and silence again. Suddenly from outside came shouts, the crunch of running feet on gravel walks, the sound of some one stumbling, and a pistol shot that ended all the hubbub as a period stops a sentence.
For half a minute Tom strained his ears to listen, then heard a voice far in the distance, crying:
“This way! This way! ”
He found the doorknob and turned it, but the door held fast. He placed his shoulder against a panel; the hallway was narrow and his foot found a wall to brace against. With a splintering of wood the door gave way and Tom plunged into the room.
On the mantel three oil lamps lighted the place. Before the north window stood a table upon which rested an instrument that looked like a stereopticon. The instrument was so set that its telescopelike nose pointed upward and outward. But a window shade of opaque material hung the full length of the window, shutting in the lamplight from the outer world. Tom thrust the shade, aside and saw that the window was open.
It was an old-fashioned shade that worked —when it pleased—with a cord. In his impatience Tom tore it down from its roller—and before him in the sky hung the Zeppelin light, blazing away at its brightest.
Swiftly he examined the instrument on the table. From the end farthest from the window came the buzzing sound that he had heard outside. To this end heavy wires were attached. Following these by touch in the shadows of the floor, he came to a second table laden with a nest of storage batteries—cells and cells and cells of them, as Grace had said.
With a lamp in his hand he descended the stairs and opened the front door. The yard was still, but voices sounded from the direction of the kirk. Through the dark he ran toward them and arrived breathless in time to hear the equally breathless Mr. Wembley exclaim:
“Mr. Hitt, that was a good job. You've earned our thanks.”
“That's all right, guvner,” Mr. Hitt replied. He stood over the prostrate figure of Mr. Brompton. That person, though prostrate and bound hand and foot with knotted handkerchiefs, was far from inaudible. Of the rights of Englishmen he raved, and of the vengeance that should descend upon lunatics who violated the privacy of an Englishman's home.
Leaving Mr. Hitt to guard the prisoner, the rest of the party went back to the manse and gathered found the sizzling instrument on the table in Mr. Brompton's sanctum. Mr. Wembley fairly danced with satisfaction. “This thing, gentlemen, is a magnified duplicate of the apparatus I described to the inquisitive Krug at the Flyfisher's Club less than a year ago.”
“But the window shade was down,” said Thurston.
“What's a window shade to an invisible ray?” asked Mr. Wembley.
“Shouldn't we disconnect the thing and stop the light up there?” queried Sir Arthur. “If past experience is any guide to us, the Zeppelins are making for the light this very minute, and the fleet is at their mercy.”
Tom seized the wires that ran back to the battery, but Mr. Wembley cried:
“Wait! This is only half of the necessary machinery. Somewhere in the vicinity is another outfit like this. One is no good without the other.”
“Then shut this one off,” Sir Arthur insisted.
“Wait,” said Mr. Wembley again, stepping to the back of the table. “Stand at the window, some of you, and watch.”
Resting on four iron supports clamped to the table top, the business portion of the apparatus revolved on a ball-and-socket joint.
“Watch the sky and tell me what happens,” Wembley commanded.
He shifted the instrument a few degrees to the right.
“The light has gone,” Price reported, from the window. “There it is again,” he added, as Mr. Wembley brought the machine back to its original position.
“Can you see it now?” The little author had pointed the nose of the machine to the left.
“No.”
“Now?”
“Yes.”
“Sir Arthur,” said Mr. Wembley, “take the best observation you can of the position of the light. Use your cane; rest the ferrule on the window sill and aim the stick so that it points directly at the light.”
Sir Arthur had to lie down on the floor to perform this part of the experiment.
“Got it? Good. Here's a pencil. Make a mark on the floor where the handle of your cane rests. Now, you folk at the window, tell me what happens.”
He elevated the breech of the machine, thus throwing the telescope end lower, until it pointed almost down to the horizon.
“The light has gone, sir,” said Price.
“Watch closely, just above the sky line,” Wembley directed, at the same time turning the instrument slowly from east to west.
“There!” Price sang out. “There it is again, just above the big hill in front of us, only much fainter than it was.”
“That is because the two streams of rays no longer meet at right angles,” Mr. Wembley explained. “But you can see it, can you?”
He went to the window himself to look.
“Yes, gentlemen, there it is. Now, Sir Arthur, put your cane in action again and mark the new direction.”
Once more the nobleman rested the point of his walking stick on the window ledge and took the position of the light, making a new pencil mark on the matting.
“That's all, gentlemen,” said Wembley. “We may disconnect the wires now and let the Zeppelins do their worst.”
He sat down on the floor beside the marks that Sir Arthur had made. With pencil and paper he plotted the angle of difference between the two lines of sight which Sir Arthur had defined. Next he produced a pocket compass and his folded map. It was a large-scale topographical map of the region for twenty miles around the village of Drumkenny—such a map as German spies risk their lives to steal from the government archives.
Quietly and laboriously he made his calculations. Then, using Sir Arthur's cane for a ruler, he drew a pencil line across the map from the point where the manse was indicated, out across the moors, across the big, round hill with its closely printed isometric altitude lines, across the nameless little inlet which was the true heart of the world, continuing to the north shore of the harbor until the pencil mark cut a headland five miles beyond the harbor mouth and passed out to sea.
“Somewhere along that line, gentlemen,” said Mr. Wembley, “we shall find the other half of this very interesting experiment.”
Thurston, on his hands and knees, studied the map. With his eyes he traced the roads he had followed in Gavin Haggart's flivver that afternoon, around the inner end of the harbor, over the hills and down the valleys, until the last of the roads ended at a spot colored in green. It was this green patch on the map that the pencil mark crossed before it ended at the sea; and this green patch represented the private estate of Lord Benbold.
He rose, caught Sir Arthur's eye and stepped out of the room, the nobleman following.
“I think I can tell you where the other half of this business is,” said Tom. “I drove around to the north shore of the harbor to-day, following the tracks of a big motor car that stopped near this house last night. I traced the car to the gates of Lord Benbold's big summer place over there. You are a friend of Lord Benbold's. I think you ought to know of what I discovered, before I tell the others.”
“Go ahead and tell them,” cried Sir Arthur. “I wouldn't stop you if it were the estate of the king himself!”
At this moment a faint and quavering female voice called from the floor below.
“Grace! Where are you? What is the matter?”
“Nothing's the matter, auntie, dear,” Miss Ashby hastened to reply, over the banister.
“All right,” said Aunt Jane. “I thought I heard a noise.”
CHAPTER XVII.
At Benbold Castle.
Gavin Haggart's flivver stood in its shed behind the fish shop, its radiator still hot after its run homeward from the market town, six miles away, and his five wee Haggarts had just gone to sleep in their two beds to dream of the “shiftin' pictur's” they had seen that night. Haggart himself had partly undressed and wore only his red flannel undershirt and his trousers when he opened the door in answer to Thurston's hasty knock.
“A' richt, if it's in the name o' the king,” said he, when explanations had been made to him.
Through the darkness the flivver jolted over the roads it had traveled in the afternoon. Sir Arthur Purdoy, by reason of his social station, sat beside the driver, while Mr. Wembley, Ted Price, Thurston and Mr. Hitt sat on the fishy floor of the car and held on as best they could. Mr. Brompton had been left behind in the safe deposit of the police barracks, Mr. Hitt charging him with manufacturing bogus money.
It was past one o'clock when the expedition halted at the iron gates of the Benbold estate. There the adventurers left their chauffeur to await their return. Climbing the wall, they proceeded on foot, following the carriage road that wound through park woods and across sheep downs for two miles or more, until they came to the foot of the ascent that ended at the brow of the headland. From this point they could see, at the top of the hill, the twelfth-century castle which Lord Benbold's riches had transformed into a modern country palace. Lightless it stood against the sky.
Now Mr. Wembley called a council of war. Mr. Hitt, flushed with his success in felling the fugitive Brompton in the kirkyard, voted for advancing upon Benbold Castle, ringing the doorbell and demanding the surrender of the occupants forthwith. Sir Arthur's voice was for discretion.
“There are not enough of us to surround the house properly,” said he. “Let us wait and watch. It will be dawn in another hour.”
The others agreed that since the perilous light in the sky had vanished there was no need of haste; and they settled down on the damp turf of the roadside to shiver in the chill night air and wait for daybreak.
For a long time they sat silent. Then said Mr. Wembley, “There ought to be an owl to hoot at us. This adventure is quite irregular without an owl.”
“I think, Wembley,” said Sir Arthur, “that you are owl enough, yourself. I'll leave it to the others.”
The others admitted that Mr. Wembley's sagacity in tracing the second stream of invisible rays to its approximate source placed him in the bird-of-wisdom class beyond a doubt.
“Hoot, mon!” Mr. Wembley responded to their flattery.
They fell silent again until Price, who was nearest the great house on the hill, said, “Listen. What's that?”
They listened and looked. Something moved across the park lawn and down the hill toward them.
“A bloomin' sheep,” said Mr. Hitt; but at once the blooming sheep lifted its nose in air and let loose a savage and bloodcurdling howl, and bounded down the hill with long, wild leaps, waking the woods with angry barking. Ten yards away from the party the hound halted, bristling and growling and baying.
“Here, doggie; nice doggie,” Price called softly. “Come along, old fellow.”
At this invitation the old fellow came along two jumps nearer with such ferocity that Price fell back upon his reserves in disorder. From the house other hounds now rushed, filling the night with alarm. Charging down the hill, they formed a yowling, snapping ring around the intruders. At a window of the house a light gleamed, then disappeared.
“It's all up, gentlemen,” said Sir Arthur, with decision, and advanced upon the nearest hound with his cane clubbed, ready to strike. Close behind him Mr. Hitt's automatic spat fire, and one of the dogs curled up in a heap while another ran limping and yelping up the hill. Again the pistol cracked, and Price's “nice doggie,” in the act of springing at Price's throat, turned over in air and fell dead on its back.
“Spread out and close up around the house. Keep to cover,” Mr. Wembley shouted.
With Thurston on the left of the line, Mr. Hitt on the right and Price, Mr. Wembley and Sir Arthur acting as the center, they raced up the hill to the edge of the house lawn. There they halted, and Tom found himself lying flat behind an evergreen, before him the house, beside him, not three paces away, the brink of the headland upon which some chieftain of another century had built his castle.
Down through the faint first light of dawn Thurston looked and saw the foam of breakers a hundred feet below; the throb and the rush of them came up to him through the ominous quiet that had fallen on the castle and the vicinity. Peering down the dizzy height once more, he saw a light beyond the line of the surf—a light that winked as rapidly as a man can close and open his eyes—three winks, then two, then five, just as the signal light on the bridge of Tom's liner had winked to the pilot boat at the Mersey bar six weeks before.
“Wembley,” he called. “Come here if you can.”
In a moment Mr. Wembley knelt beside him, gazing at the flashes from the dark sea below the cliff.
“A submarine,” he said. Then he looked toward the house, but its side nearest the water was invisible to them from where they watched.
The flashes ceased. There was no sound save the beating of the waves at the foot of the headland. Five minutes passed, and with every minute the early dawn of the north made their surroundings clearer.
Suddenly Mr. Wembley put out his hand and touched Tom's sleeve. Something was stirring behind the house on the side facing the sea. They heard a door hinge creak, a floor board rattle, then the spiteful bark of a gun and the sound of heavy feet running. A yell of fear and agony rang up to them from the cliff below and set the sea birds to screaming far up and down the shore.
Silence again, the sea birds wheeling back to their roosts, the sky brightening in the east, the gaunt old castle standing out distinct at last in every line.
“This w'y, gentlemen!”
The honest voice of Mr. Hitt was calling.
“This w'y, gentlemen. Hi think Hi winged the bloody hinseck as 'e went over the top. 'E'll never go over the top no more, 'e won't!”
Cautiously the besiegers rallied round the detective. He stood at the edge of a little grassplot behind the house, looking down a staircase of iron that descended over the face of the cliff.
“'E was makin' 'is lucky down the ladder when Hi popped 'im. 'E went down faster than wot 'e expected.”
“Hitt,” said Price, “that's the second hit you've made to-night.”
Tom swept his eyes over the sea. The signal light had gone, and with it whatever vessel had sent the flashes landward.
“Our submarine seems to have ducked,” Mr. Wembley chuckled.
“But there!”
Thurston pointed toward a dark shape that soared eastward through the air miles to the north of them, making swiftly for a fog bank on the horizon.
“A Zep!” cried Price.
“And hydroplanes after it!” Sir Arthur added. “Three of them!”
Straight for the fog bank the air monster sailed and was swallowed up in the mist, the sea planes hotly pursuing as kingbirds chase a hawk.
The great rooms of the castle were void of life. The furniture, sheathed in its winter ticking, stared at the searchers as they passed. To the south wing of the house Mr. Wembley went, and there, in a room that had once been the nursery for Lord Benbold's children, he found the thing he sought—the duplicate of the apparatus in Brompton's sanctum at the manse.
From the instrument a set of insulated wires ran out through a window to the lawn beneath. Under the window, close to the house wall, stood a big closed motor car. Its rear wheels had been jacked up and seated on a pair of stout blocks; the tire of one of the drive wheels had been removed, and a leather belt passed around the denuded rim ran the shaft wheel of a bright new electric generator that was bolted to the side of an oak at the corner of the house.
“That handy power plant,” said Mr. Wembley, “is one idea that Krug did not borrow from me.”
At the foot of the iron staircase over the cliff they found the body of Mr. Krug of the Hotel Salisbury, alias Mr. Burlington of Richmond. In his pockets were papers that have since been of interest to the British government. His body was badly crumpled, but a large and glittering diamond pin in his cravat remained unmarred. This bit of jewelry is to-day in Thurston's possession, awaiting an owner to claim it.
They reascended the iron ladder and stood looking down upon the little harbor to the south where hundreds of war vessels lay safe at anchor. Sir Arthur drew Tom aside.
“This will kill poor Benbold,” said he. “I would stake my life that he knows nothing of this shameful misuse of his property.”
“I've been thinking,” said Tom. “It isn't natural for a place like this to be left without caretakers. There must be some of Lord Benbold's people around.”
They set off down a road that soon passed out of sight of the castle and led them to the stables of the estate.
“There's a door open,” said Tom.
They looked in upon a room filled with dust-covered carriages, wagons and pony carts.
“Hello in here!” Tom shouted. Listening for an answer, they heard a faint cry from a distant end of the barns. Thurston called again, and this time they, heard the cry distinctly. “Help!” it said.
In a stall, covered with straw, lay an old man whose gray hair was matted with blood. They had him out in the air in a minute, and Thurston brought water from a near-by well. Presently the old man was able to sit up and talk, although he trembled as with the palsy.
“He tried to murder me,” he said, his teeth chattering. “He told me he came from Lord Benbold to buy the furniture. I said to him, 'Aren't you the furriner professor that was with poor young Sir Harry when he fell over the cliff to his death?' With that he up and hit me over the head with a big wrench he had in his hand. How I came in the stable under the straw I don't know.”
“You take care of the place for Benbold, do you?” Sir Arthur asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“What day did the man come?”
“What day? It was a Wednesday, sir.”
“And he tried to kill you that day?”
“Yes, sir, as soon as he got out of the big car that brought him. It was full of dogs, sir.”
“And this is Sunday!” said Tom. “You must have lain near dead half a week.”
“I've been calling for ever so long, sir. You can see I can't move the right side of me.”
“How did the fellow get through the lodge gate?” asked Sir Arthur. “It's locked.”
“I don't know, sir. He must have had a key.”
In the late Mr. Krug's handsome motor car, its missing tire replaced on the rim and Sir Arthur at the wheel, the adventurers returned to the lodge gate. An examination of the lock showed that it had been pried apart and cleverly put together again, not so well reassembled, however, but that it fell in pieces in Mr. Wembley's hand.
Gavin Haggart and his flivver had gone home, lacking any great amount of patience to spend on night-roving folk who might turn out to be burglars. But Mr. Krug's car accommodated them all nicely, including the wounded old caretaker.
At the Temperance Hotel Mrs. MacPherson awaited them with frowns of displeasure; she did not approve of guests who stayed out all Saturday night and showed up late for their Sunday oatmeal. But when she saw the injured man they had brought with them, and satisfied herself that he had not come to his injuries through dallying with the demon rum, her scowl dissolved into a look of pity and she sent Angus to put the kettle on the hob.
Angus was in no haste to obey. “Let me tell the gentlemen the news,” he pleaded, but his wife shooed him away with a wave of her arm.
“He's a' excitit,” she explained. “The military arrestit twa German spies yesterday in the glen behind the manse.”
“Hitt,” said Tom, “that's what became of Googan.”
“Breakfast is waitin',” said Mrs. MacPherson, “and gettin' cauld.”
“Breakfast!” cried Mr. Wembley. “I could eat one of those dogs back there—raw!”
Sir Arthur, Mr. Wembley and Price were similarly minded. But Tom went on up the hill to the manse, and was rewarded for his thoughtfulness of Miss Ashby and Aunt Jane by being invited to sit down to a meal of ham and eggs and honest coffee served charmingly by a dark-haired English girl, who smiled at him across the table in the pleasantest manner in the world.
CHAPTER XVIII.
More Light Than Shadow.
“So you're back in London, are you? What brings you south? The London and Northwestern, I suppose?”
Tom Thurston grinned as he jollied Mr. Googan of Scotland Yard, who, in his rusty mackintosh, had just entered Price's office at Charing Cross. Price grinned, too.
“Have your little joke,” Mr. Googan retorted with dignity. “But I noticed you weren't very happy to be locked up as a German spy, yourself, and I think you might be a little more sympathetic. You turned the tables on me rather neatly, Mr. Thurston, I must say.”
“I? What did I have to do with your arrest?”
“Then I wish you'd tell me how else it happened,” said Mr. Googan, incredulously. “Nobody but you would have wanted to play me such a trick.”
“Perhaps,” said Tom, “you remember arresting a young woman at the Hotel Salisbury on the night before you arrested me.”
“Yes.”
“Perhaps you don't know that the young woman has a brother, and that the brother was not a hundred yards behind you on the morning in Drumkenny when you went up the hill to arrest Brompton.”
Mr. Googan let his mouth hang open.
“Was this brother a dark-skinned, waiterish-looking chap?”
“He was.”
“Well, blow my eyes!” Googan exclaimed. “I went up the hill that morning with my man Giles, but not to make an arrest, as you think. I went to reconnoiter. At the little church a man overtook us—the same chap you mention. He asked us if we weren't the detectives from London. He said the local sergeant of constabulary had sent him to guide us to a place where the stranger at the manse had been seen burying something in the earth, presumably a hoard of counterfeit coins.
“I asked him why the sergeant hadn't told me this the night before. He replied the sergeant had only heard of it that morning. We went with him farther up the road and crossed a pasture into a wood. At the mouth of a little glen that ran back into the hills we came to a path where we had to walk single file, because the fir boughs were quite close there and wet from the rain. I went ahead, Giles came next, the other chap last. He said we should go cautiously there, and we obeyed like bally idiots.
“The glen led upward toward the high, round-topped hill that you may have seen from the village. We didn't know what was beyond the hill, no more than anything. All of a sudden we found ourselves surrounded by a couple of dozen of naked-legged soldiers who commanded us to surrender, which we did, they being armed with bayonets. I looked around for the dark-faced chap to see if they'd got him too, but he wasn't there.
“Well, gentlemen, they led us over the big hill to a little stone cow byre which they'd turned into a jail, and they clapped us in and gave us pretzels to eat and kept us there for two mortal days, while they wired to London to find out if we were what we said we were. When they let us go at last, my man Hitt had nabbed Brompton and left me holding the sack. Are you sure you didn't know about any of this before it happened?”
“On my word of honor, I didn't,” said Tom. “I knew merely that the dark-faced chap followed you up the hill and came back down alone. Tell me this; when did you have your talk about Brompton with the local sergeant?”
“The night before, at the Drumkenny police office.”
“Could any one have overheard you?”
“By gravy!” Googan cried. “There was a window open directly behind the desk. I remember now, because the smell of dead fish came in there dreadfully from the fish market next door.”
“A man outside the window could have overheard what you and the sergeant said?”
“It's quite likely.”
“I'll tell you something else,” said Thurston. “Early the next morning the man who afterward followed you up the hill had a talk with a soldier in kilts; and before they had their talk the soldier came to the hotel door and took a good, long look at you while you sat at breakfast. More than that, the moment you disappeared up the hill, with the dark-faced man after you, the soldier jumped on a bicycle and beat it down the road the other way as fast as he could go. Putting two and two together, I should say that the dark-skinned man informed the military authorities that you were a German spy and steered you into a trap that had been prepared for you at his suggestion.”
Quite humbly Mr. Googan bowed his head.
“It's a painful subject, gentlemen,” said he. “Let's talk about the young woman.”
“Do you mean the yellow kid?” asked Price. “What's new about her?”
“She sent for me to-day,” said Googan, “and made a signed and sworn confession. It seems there's been a conspiracy of a sort to light up the sky at night for the Zeppeleens so they can find London easy, and she got wind of it. There's an American in London named Krug. I've known him quite well; in fact, he has helped me in a number of spy cases. He had a knack of overhearing things—it was really quite extraordinary. It was from him that I got the tip-off about you, Mr. Thurston, and about the girl in the case. Perhaps I was a bit hasty in that matter, and if so I wish to apologize. It never does a man any harm to own up, sir, if he has been in the wrong, and I'll admit that those pencil notes of yours on that newspaper may have been less important than they seemed to me at the time.”
“The apology is accepted,” said Tom.
“And very generous of you, sir,” said Googan. “Well, it now appears that this man Krug was the head of the sky-lighting plot, and when his young lady friend, Miss de Reuter, learned what he was up to, she threatened to inform on him. That is why he framed up a rascally trick on her and put me up to arrest her. The reason she hasn't confessed before is that she is afraid to death of Krug; she knew she was safer in jail than out. It is a strange case, but quite clear.”
“I'm sure of that,” said Tom. “What was the basis of the friendship between the girl and Krug.”
“It is a remarkable story,” Googan replied. “Her mother, it appears, died in Denmark last winter, and Krug and his family, who happened to be visiting her father at Copenhagen, offered to take her traveling for a time to help her forget her grief. But when they reached London a young British nobleman who had been paying attentions to the elder Miss Krug fell head over heels in love with Miss de Reuter and she with him, which broke up the friendship between the family and her, although Krug stood by her. That explains, you see, why she was living at the hotel when she might have stopped with the Krugs at the mansion they had leased in Richmond. You should have seen the tears in her eyes when she told me that part.”
“Why didn't she return to her father in Denmark?” Price queried..
“I asked her that question. She answered that she was as deep in love with the young nobleman as he with her, and that Krug asked her as a personal favor to stay on in London and keep the young man away from Richmond, on account of not wanting his daughters to marry titles and come to a sad end, the way so many American heiresses do. So, for her own sake as well as Krug's, she stayed; and one day she opened a letter by mistake and found out about Krug's real business in England. At the first chance she accused him of it, with the result which you know. It's a straight story, gentlemen, as straight as any I've ever heard, and I've promised to help the young woman as a return to her for telling the truth fair and square.”
“Bully for you!” said Tom, and Price expressed the same sentiment by shaking the detective's hand warmly. But when Googan had gone away to look for Krug, whose dead body was bobbing about in the North Sea among the German floating mines and the corpses of honest British fishermen, Thurston said:
“Googan will get the princess her freedom, for he's a persistent chap. But I'm still up in the air on two points. Why did the girl sob and moan in her room the night the Zeppelin fell in Regents Park? And why did she wear cornflowers at the funeral of the German airmen in Marylebone next day?”
“Whatever happened,” said Prince, finally, “we shall never know the truth of it from Mademoiselle de Reuter—and that's a cinch!”
In the vestry room of a stately old church in the heart of the City, a church built by the illustrious Sir Christopher Wren, a quiet wedding occurred one day in June, and the breath of the flowers in the ancient church yard came in through the windows to add their sweetness to the occasion.
Those present, besides the bride and bridegroom, were a tall young fellow in army khaki, his face swathed in bandages; a pair of prim maiden aunts who wept steadily throughout the ceremony; Mr. Herbert Wembley, who gave the bride away, and Ted Price, who served as best man. Sir Arthur Purdoy was unavoidably detained; he had to answer questions in Parliament that day; but he sent as his gift to the bride an Oriental rug that would have cost at least a thousand dollars in America, though the London price was probably not one-fourth of that amount. The wedding guests admired the rug afterward in the best room of the bride's home, before the young couple set forth on their honeymoon trip.
The wedding journey consisted of nothing more than a tram-car ride down the suburban lanes of the south of London to Crystal Palace and homeward again in the evening; for the Belgian babies at Earl's Court could not spare their dark-haired nurse very long, and a new job of government work awaited Thurston on the morrow at the Canadian high commissioner's office.
Homeward bound, they left the car at Lambeth and walked out upon Westminster Bridge at sunset, the tide swirling out among the piers, and London, with its towers and spires and palaces and bridges, stretching away in its beautiful imperial crescent from Vauxhall to St. Paul's.
“It was here, you know,” said Grace, “perhaps at this very parapet where we are leaning, that Wordsworth wrote, 'Earth has not anything to show more fair.' You remember the sonnet?”
“But Wordsworth had never seen my wife,” said Tom; and Mrs. Thomas Thurston let him see, in the depths of her dark eyes, that her heart was happy.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1930.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1947, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 77 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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