The Yellow Dove/Chapter 16
CHAPTER XVI
THE GENERAL PLAYS TO WIN
WHEN General von Stromberg went out of the room Doris turned toward Cyril, her happiness in her eyes where he could read it if he wished. But instead of coming to her he made a warning gesture and then walked slowly around the room, peering out of the windows and listening at the doors until satisfied that they were unobserved. Then he beckoned her to a spot out of the line of vision of the door into the adjoining room. She obeyed it wonderingly while he caught her in his arms and kissed her passionately.
“Thank God,” he whispered, “you understood.”
“Oh, Cyril,” she gasped, “if anything had happened to you”
“We must be careful,” he went on, whispering hastily. “My success hangs by a hair. Tonight—the thing that I came for will be within my reach. I must have it.”
“There will be danger?”
“I hope not. But you must not trust his promises to send you away. You must get away from here tonight before eleven. I will help you. Before then I must see you alone. It is not safe to talk here.”
He pressed her hand hurriedly and moved slowly across the room close to the wall and door, which he examined as he passed.
“But, Cyril”
A warning finger stopped her.
“There is no use in your trying to persuade me, old girl,” he said, his voice raised to a tone which seemed louder than necessary. “I am only doing my duty as I see it. But whatever happens I can at least remember that you told the truth.”
What did he mean? She couldn’t understand. She followed him with her gaze. The fingers of one hand were tracing the flowers of the wallpaper upon one side of the room, and as she looked he glanced out of the window and then got quickly upon a chair and peered into an aperture in the cornice.
“I am not sorry for Rizzio,” he said again, dusting off the chair and replacing it. “He only gets what he deserved. What did he do to you? How did he find you?”
A glance at his face showed her that he expected her to reply.
“I was lost on the moor,” she faltered. “I followed you to Rudha Mor and saw you leave in the Yellow Dove. When I turned to go back, a cloth was thrown over my head. They chloroformed me”
He muttered an imprecation. “And on the yacht”
“I—I had nothing to complain of. He did everything he could for my comfort.”
She watched him again moving around the room. At the chimney he paused and, reaching swiftly upward, lifted the clock and then put it into its place again, the expression in his face still strained and anxious.
“I am not sorry for him,” he said again. Suddenly he came to her saying in such a low whisper that she could hardly hear him,
“I’m not satisfied. There’s something dangerous in von Stromberg’s sudden kindness. Act, Doris. We are overheard.” And then in louder tones, “If anything had happened to you”
She glanced around her timidly, her initiative suddenly at a loss.
“N-nothing happened to me,” she repeated bewildered.
“I would have made another death for him—a man’s death at least.”
“It is terrible,” she managed to say, “and I will have been the cause of it.”
He came closer and took her by the hand, speaking distinctly.
“And do you regret that it is Rizzio instead of me?”
“No, no,” she stammered. Her accents of horror were genuine, but it seemed more horrible that she should be making a farce of her genuine emotions. Yet Cyril’s eyes impelled her. “It is terrible. I can’t believe”
“General von Stromberg is not a man to make idle threats. I am glad that I am not in Rizzio’s shoes.”
She saw him pause, his mouth open, gazing upward at the lithograph of Emperor William. To Doris the picture merely typified power, ambition, intolerance of any ideals but those of military glory. But it was not at the portrait that Cyril was looking. He was examining the frame, which was swung a little to one side, revealing a patch of unfaded wallpaper. He looked down into the fireplace thoughtfully and while the girl wondered what he was going to do next, he whirled suddenly and moved quickly toward the door into the hall, which he opened swiftly straight into the face of Captain Wentz, who managed to step back only in time to avoid it.
But the officer was equal to the occasion.
“I was seeking General von Stromberg,” he said coolly.
“He isn’t here,” Doris heard Cyril say quietly. And then, “I wanted a glass of water. Fräulein Mather is feeling ill.”
“Ah! I will have it brought at once.” As he disappeared in the passage to the kitchen, Cyril closed the door and came in three strides to the fireplace, reached up and raised the picture from the wall, peering under it, and touched the surface of the wallpaper with the tips of his fingers. Then with great care he put the picture back in its place and bent over Doris close to her ear, whispering: “They suspect. Everything we have said has been overheard. A microphone! I knew it was here somewhere.”
The pallor of her face when the man from the kitchen brought the water was almost convincing proof of the truth of Hammersley’s statement. She did look ill, for terror of the situation that confronted them had driven the blood back to her heart. A moment ago the room had seemed so friendly, and now every object in it was a menace. And above the mantel the Emperor of Germany with his upturned mustaches glared down at her austerely, eloquent of the relentless forces that held them in their thrall. Behind her she heard Cyril whispering with the man who had brought the water and realized that it was the tall soldier with the lame leg who had brought her toast and eggs upstairs.
“Danke sehr, Lindberg,” Cyril said aloud. “She is tired from the journey.”
“Perhaps, Herr Hammersley, a little fresh air will help. A stroll in the kitchen garden.”
Doris got up in sudden relief as she understood.
“Yes,” she said. “Perhaps I will feel better in the air.”
Cyril led the way to the door and together they went out. They heard sounds of heavy footsteps in the hallway above but did not pause, making their way along the path which led around the house. Cyril did not turn toward her, but she heard him speaking.
“They will call us back. Do not be frightened. If von Stromberg questions again, answer to the best of your ability. I will find a means of reaching your room tonight. In the meanwhile keep up your courage.”
She did not reply for she heard steps behind her, and turning, found Captain Wentz, who bowed, taking off his cap.
“General von Stromberg requests me to ask,” he said in very good English, “if Miss Mather will not give him the pleasure of joining him in a cup of chocolate.”
“He is very kind,” she said slowly with a glance at Cyril. “Of course—I shall be very glad.”
The officer replaced his cap and, turning to Hammersley, spoke in German.
“His Excellenz also requests that Herr Hammersley will remain within call.”
Hammersley bowed.
“Tell his Excellenz with my compliments that with his permission I will smoke my pipe here in the kitchen garden.”
Doris followed the officer into the room they had just left and von Stromberg joined her almost immediately.
“Ach, gnädiges Fräulein,” he said with his blandest manner, “you will forgive me for calling you back from your contemplation of the beauties of this lovely afternoon, but there are certain questions, merely trifling ones, which have to do with the fate of Herr Rizzio which I neglected to ask you. You will not begrudge an old man the privilege of a few words over a cup of chocolate?”
She smiled at him bravely, as a woman can do, even in a last extremity, and told him that she was flattered by this mark of his condescension.
A wave of the hand and Wentz disappeared, while Lindberg, the lame man, entered with the chocolate. The General had the tray put upon the table before her and asked her to serve it, standing erect and watching her with open admiration. Doris was frightened, for she had already seen the power that this old man possessed. But with an effort she found her composure and made up her mind that if she was alarmed von Stromberg at least should not be aware of it. The safest defense against such a man was audacity.
“You were feeling ill,” he said, suavely sympathetic. “The long morning in the train and the strain of your ordeal. It is but natural. A little cup of chocolate and a biscuit should revive you wonderfully. Nicht wahr?” His English, though excellent, had a slight German accent and his tone the quality of a lullaby.
“It is very good,” said Doris. “I have often heard it said that nowhere in the world is chocolate so excellent as in Germany.”
“I trust that you may find it so. There are many things beside chocolate that are excellent in Germany, Fräulein Mather.”
“I am sure that must be true,” she said politely, touching the cup to her lips.
“Then why do you dislike us so much?” he asked with a smile.
“It is not your people that I dislike so much, General von Stromberg. Many of the most charming people I have ever known have been Germans. It is not what you are, but what you want to be, that I dislike; not your habits or your tastes, but your intolerance of any civilization which happens to differ from yours.”
She paused, a little frightened at her temerity, but von Stromberg still smiled.
“Go on,” he chuckled, “you speak very prettily.”
“I am an American, General von Stromberg, from the United States, where people are accustomed to speak what they feel, without fear of lèse majesté. If the President of the United States did something that I didn’t like I would write him a letter.”
“And would he answer it?” he purred.
“If he had time, yes. If anyone wrote such a letter to your Emperor, he would be boiled in oil.”
Von Stromberg roared with delight. “Boiled in oil!” he repeated.
“Yes—or perhaps some more exquisite cruelty that your ingenious people have devised,” she said coolly. “To prosaic minds like mine, Excellenz, you Germans are the wonders of the age. You are both godlike and Saturnian; a nation of military fanatics, a nation of silly sentimentalists; a nation trained to scientific brutality, which shares the sorrows of the dying rose. Which is it that you want us to think you, the god or the satyr?”
“We know that we are the god,” he said, showing his teeth, “but we want you to think us the satyr.”
“You have succeeded, Excellenz,” she replied calmly. “It is very pleasant to be sitting here drinking chocolate with a Geheimrath—a councilor of the Empire—but you’ll pardon me if I say that the peculiarly social pleasure of the occasion is somewhat marred by the fact that if the whim happened to strike you you could have me strung up by the thumbs.”
“You think that I am cruel? Ach, no, Fräulein. You are mistaken,” in his blandest tones. “I have a daughter in East Prussia of just your age. For that reason I would like to have you think of me a little as the sentimentalist rather than as the—the brute—as you have been pleased to suggest. I am not cruel and I shall prove it to you.”
“In America, Excellenz, we do not make war upon women.”
“Nor do I make war upon you,” he put in quickly. “I did not bring you to Germany, Fräulein. Herr Rizzio acted upon his own responsibility. Even yet, if he is an English agent, I cannot understand his purpose in bringing such an incriminating document.”
He smiled as he spoke, but she felt the question and its threat. For a moment the directness of his attack bewildered her and so she sipped her chocolate to gain a moment of time.
“General von Stromberg,” she said at last, as the idea came to her, “I am told that you have one of the keenest intellects in the Empire of Germany. I feel much like a child before you, who should see matters much more clearly than I. There were two reasons why he brought me, one of which bears upon our personal relations, the other upon his relation to England. I knew that he possessed your confidence, otherwise he would not have been in possession of a document which empowered Mr. Hammersley to give up the secret message of Captain Byfield. I knew too much. If I had told my friends in England what I knew, his utility to England would have been gone.”
“Why? It seems to me that having my confidence would have made his utility to England the greater.”
“He would have been suspected of double dealing, would he not?”
“As a friend of England you would have let him be suspected?” he asked quietly. “Given evidence against a man whom you knew to be acting in England’s interests?”
“There were other—other—interests,” she faltered, “more important to me than England’s—Mr. Hammersley’s. You have a daughter, Excellenz. Perhaps you would try to think of me as you would think of her in a similar situation. When I read those papers at Ashwater Park I knew that the man to whom I was promised and of whom I had always thought as an Englishman was acting as a secret agent—a spy of Germany. He was pursued by agents of the English War Office. I knew that if his connection with Germany were discovered he would be shot. I was frightened. I did not know what to do. John Rizzio followed me to Scotland and tried to get the papers. I refused to give them to him. And then when—when Mr. Hammersley came I burned them. There was nothing left for me to do—for England—for him. If there were no papers there could be no evidence against him.”
She paused to get her breath, aware that her companion was listening intently, and fearfully afraid that she was saying too much.
“And then—?” he asked.
“And then,” she went on more slowly, “I found the other papers. When I wouldn’t give them to him, Mr. Hammersley took them away from me. We quarreled, Excellenz, and I gave him up.”
“And after that—”
“After that came Mr. Rizzio’s note asking me to go to Ben-a-Chielt and see the meeting between Cyr—between Mr. Hammersley and your messenger in the last hope that I could make Mr. Hammersley give up his plans to deliver the message to you. As you know I failed. It was there—after that—that Mr. Rizzio, who had overheard our conversation, tried to kill Mr. Hammersley, knowing that he had resolved to deliver the message.” She got up and paced the floor. “Oh, it is so clear, what Rizzio was, that I wonder that it should be necessary for me to tell it to you.”
“Yes, I see. And the other—the personal reasons you mentioned.”
She hesitated. “It is difficult to speak of them—but I will tell you. Mr. Rizzio has forfeited all right to my loyalty. He offered to marry me. I refused him. He told me he would never give me up. In Scotland he threatened Cyril—Mr. Hammersley’s life. I know now what he meant.”
“Yes, but in his letter to you he does not threaten. He urges that he is doing what he can to save Hammersley!”
“I did not believe him. I was right. Events have proved it. He would have been glad to see Mr. Hammersley out of the way.” She covered her face with her hands and sank into her chair again. “Oh,” she whispered, “it is horrible—horrible. And it is I who must be the instrument of justice.”
Von Stromberg waited for a moment, tapping one finger of his left hand very slowly upon the back of his right.
“Try to compose yourself, liebes Fräulein,” he urged calmly, and, as she looked up at him: “You say he wanted to be rid of Herr Hammersley. Can you tell me then, why his men did not shoot him when they had him prisoner at Ashwater Park gates?”
“I do not know. Perhaps they would have done so if he hadn’t escaped.”
Von Stromberg paused again, and then, gently:
“You love Herr Hammersley a great deal, Fräulein?”
She bent her gaze upon him appealingly.
“Would I now be here, Excellenz?” she asked.
Von Stromberg bent his head and then got up and slowly paced the length of the room. When he returned there was another note in his voice. It was still quiet but the legato note had gone, and it was ice-cold.
“You do well to tell your story through the medium of sentiment which you well understand, rather than through the medium of logic, which you do not understand, which no woman understands.”
At his change of tone she glanced up. He was leering at her unpleasantly.
“I do not know what you mean,” she murmured.
“You are very clever, Fräulein, but your story has a great many holes in it—little holes which might grow into big ones, if one were disposed to enlarge them. There are several things which are not at all clear to me. Of course it must be as apparent to you as it is to me that if Herr Rizzio was an English agent, by remaining in England he had nothing to fear from you or anyone else. His object, too, in bringing you 
"The truth, and he becomes an honorable prisoner of war. Silence, and he is shot tomorrow. Speak."
He tapped his long forefinger upon his breast significantly and leaned forward ominously across the table. He dominated, hypnotized her. She closed her eyes, trembling violently.
“Do you mean that you do not believe? His letter, Excellenz—surely you believe that to be genuine?”
“Bait, Fräulein—that is all. Excellent bait. You swallowed it. Herr Hammersley very cleverly prepared himself against surprise. Only the fortunate accident of your losing yourself upon the moor saved Herr Rizzio from failure.”
“Oh, you are all wrong. You are willfully making me suffer. I have told the truth.”
Von Stromberg straightened and drew from his pocket a military telegraph form which he smoothed out gently with his long, bony fingers.
“Unfortunately for Herr Hammersley I have just received a message from another agent in London—in whom I have implicit faith. You read German a little. Would you care to see it?”
He laid it upon the table before her eyes and she looked, her eyes distended with terror of she knew now what.
Hammersley caused arrest of Byfield. Has informed on Rizzio and myself. Am in hiding in Kent. Will reach Germany by usual methods.
Doris sat immovable, petrified with horror. Von Stromberg’s voice crackled harshly at her ear. “Well? And what have you to say?”
“It is a lie!” she managed to stammer. “He lies—lies, I tell you!”
“Ach! If I could believe you! Why should he lie? Unlike the case of Rizzio, Herr Hammersley has not robbed Herr Maxwell of a bride.”
“There is a mistake”
“I fear not.”
“But why should Mr. Hammersley have come? He would have been safe in England”
“He himself says to the contrary”
She was breaking fast and he sought further to involve her.
“He did not have to come. Why should he have come?” she asked wildly, rising to her feet and laying her hands upon his arm. “Answer me that, Excellenz.”
For reply he turned away from her abruptly and walked the length of the room to an end window, where he stood for a moment looking out.
“Come, Fräulein, and I will show you something.”
She approached him blindly and followed his gaze around the corner of the building. Upon a tree stump in the kitchen garden, looking out across the fields toward the wooded hills sat Hammersley, calmly smoking.
“Half of his blood is English, half Prussian, Fräulein, but it is the English in him that dominates. Is there anything that is Prussian about him? Tell me. From the crown of his head to the sole of his foot—his pipe, his bent shoulders, his careless air—he is English, all English. He knows that at this moment I am weighing his fate in the balance and yet he smokes his short wooden pipe. If he has Prussian blood it is a pity, for Germany needs all the Prussian blood that flows red in the veins of men.” He paused and then abruptly, “But the Prussian blood must be sacrificed with the English”
She fell back from him, deathly white, groping for a chair to support her.
“You mean” she whispered.
“That I can take no chances. He will be shot tomorrow.”
“O God! He is loyal to Germany. I swear it.” Her utterance was choked. Her breath came with difficulty. The room darkened suddenly and she seemed about to swoon. She dropped to her knees beside the armchair, clinging to it, trying to speak, but no words would come. She was aware of his hawk-like face bending over her as though in the act of striking its prey and she heard his voice at her ear.
“There is one chance to save him.”
She reached his hand and clung to it.
“A chance—what—”
“Tell me the truth,” he said sternly.
“I—I have told you the truth. He is innocent.”
He loosened her fingers and stood away.
“Quatsch!” he muttered, leaning forward. “The truth, girl!”
“I—I”
She fell against the chair and clung to it for support.
“The truth, and he becomes an honorable prisoner of war. Silence, and he is shot tomorrow. Speak.”
“He is” The words choked her. “He is”
“Bah!” he growled, moving toward the table. “You have already convicted him!”
She struggled to her feet and followed him. He was about to touch the bell when she caught his arm.
“Wait!” she whispered. “What guarantee have I that he will not be injured?”
He shrugged and laughed. “I need give no guarantee now, Fräulein. This is not a court of law! I am the judge of what constitutes proof. You have testified.”
He shook her off and sounded the bell, which was immediately answered by Udo von Winden.
“You will conduct Fräulein Mather to her room upstairs. Lock the door and bring me the key. Then tell Herr Hammersley that I am waiting to see him.”