The Zeppelin Destroyer/Chapter XIV

by William Le Queux

 

CHAPTER XIV

FALSE OR TRUE?

One bright crisp afternoon in mid-December, Roseye, wrapped warmly in her furs, sat beside me in the car as we sped through Leatherhead on our way out to Burford Bridge, where we had decided to have tea.

In the grey wintry light the landscape had become gloomy and depressing. Yet my love chatted merrily as we sped along.

Since that well-remembered evening at my rooms when she had made her sudden reappearance on my threshold from nowhere, the days had been very dark and terribly anxious ones.

After her refusal to tell me anything, I had taken her home, where her sudden arrival had been as a thunderbolt to her parents. But alas! her overstrained brain had then given way, and for three weeks she had remained in bed under the care of Sir Charles Needham, one of the greatest mental specialists in Harley Street.

Thanks to his skill, she had slowly recovered—very slowly it seemed to me.

A dozen times I had chatted with Sir Charles, and he had admitted to me that the case was not only most unusual, but almost unique. He could not obtain from her any lucid account of what had occurred after she had left home on that fatal morning. She had contradicted herself so many times.

Any reference to inventions, to electricity, to trains, to Zeppelins, or to women, sent her into fierce paroxysms of anger. Her attitude was most mysterious. In fact her adventures during the time she had been missing were enveloped in a dark cloud of mystery which, even Barton himself, was unable to penetrate.

Captain Pollock, of course, had been informed and had repeated his red-taped suspicions. But, having no reliable or actual evidence upon which to base his assertions, Barton seemed inclined to disregard them.

I noticed this, putting it down to the usual disagreement which exists in officialdom the world over. No one official has ever been known to be in actual accord with another in another Department. That's why the clock of State creaks on so rustily in every civilized community.

Arrived at that motoring rendezvous, the Burford Bridge Hotel, we took a stroll in its picturesque grounds on the slope of Box Hill, leafless and deserted on that December afternoon.

Having walked some distance along the gravelled paths, we sat together upon a seat, when her sudden silence caused me to ponder. Since we had been walking she had scarcely uttered a word, and had appeared utterly absorbed.

At last she exclaimed:

'I shall be so very glad when they let me fly again, Claude. I feel ever so much better now—quite my old self again.'

'I'm delighted to hear that,' was my reply. 'But you must wait another week or two before you take out your machine. Your man is overhauling it thoroughly. When I was at Hendon yesterday I saw that he had taken down the engine.'

'Yes. I'm most anxious to help you, dear, with your great invention. How is it getting on?'

'Famously,' I replied. 'Teddy and I have been working hard for the last four days, and have made progress in both lightening the weight of the outfit, and increasing its power. I've ordered a big new dynamo to be constructed on such lines that it can be placed on my machine with a second engine. This engine will either run the dynamo, or the propeller.'

'Of course, I quite see,' she exclaimed. 'You must have a second engine for night-flying. How long will it be, do you think, before you can make a trial flight?' she asked anxiously.

'Early in January I hope, darling.'

'And you will let me come with you—won't you? Now promise me. Do,' she urged, placing her gloved hand upon my arm, and looking earnestly into my face.

'Yes. I promise,' I answered laughing. 'Teddy will, no doubt, be very anxious to come, but you shall make the first flight, darling. It is your privilege.'

'May I come out to Gunnersbury and help you?' she asked. 'I'm quite all right again, I assure you.'

'When Sir Charles gives his consent, then you may come,' I replied.

'I'll ask him to-morrow,' she cried gladly. 'I'm so horribly tired of leading an idle life at home. Lionel lunched with us yesterday, and took me out to a matinée. It was quite jolly to have such a change. We had tea at the Piccadilly afterwards.'

'Lionel!' I exclaimed in surprise.

'Yes. Why? Are you jealous you dear old thing?'

I drew a deep breath, and she evidently noticed my displeasure.

'Jealous!' I cried with affected nonchalance. 'Why should I be?'

'Well—I ought, of course, to have told you before,' she answered. 'But he's such a good friend of ours, you know.’

Good friend. All the suspicions I held regarding him flashed across my mind. Why had he pretended to be an invalid on that day I had sat at his bedside, and yet afterwards had dined at Hatchett's? Why was he ever inquisitive regarding our secret experiments, and why did he appear to possess such unusual knowledge of coming events?

'Yes,' I remarked after a pause. 'He is, no doubt, a good friend.'

I saw that I could learn more by disarming suspicion than by appearing ungenerous.

'You don't mind me going to a matinée with him, do you, Claude?' she asked frankly. 'Of course, if it has annoyed you, I won't go again. But mother said she thought a theatre would be a pleasant relaxation for me, now that we can't go out at night on account of the darkened streets and the bad winter weather.'

'The darkened streets seem to make no difference to pleasure-going,' I said bitterly, and purposely disregarding her first question. 'Though we are at war—though thousands upon thousands of our poor brave fellows have been killed or maimed in the defence of their homes and their loved ones, yet the London public are still the same. Nothing seems to disturb them. Bond Street, with all its fripperies, is still in full swing: the drapers everywhere are paying big dividends—money is being squandered in luxuries by those who have never previously known such things; jewellers are flourishing, and extravagance runs riot through the land. Men and women go nightly to revues and join in rollicking choruses, even while the death-rattle sounds in the throats of Britain's bravest sons. Ah! Roseye,' I said. 'It is all too awful. What I fear is that we are riding gaily for a fall.'

'No,' she said. 'I agree in a sense with all you say. But we are not riding for a fall, so long as we have brave men ready to sacrifice their lives in Britain's cause. You, Claude, are one of those,' she added, looking straight into my face with an open, frank expression—that love-look which can never be feigned, either by man or by woman.

In that second I realized that at least my suspicion that she had any secret affection for Lionel Eastwell was groundless.

Yet I was, nevertheless, annoyed that he should still mislead her parents by expressions of friendship. True, when I came to examine and to analyse my doubts, I could discover no real and actual foundation for them. Perhaps it was an intuition that possessed me—a strange half-formed belief that Eastwell, though such a cheerful companion, such a real good fellow, and so popular with all the flying-boys, was not exactly of the truly patriotic type which he represented himself to be.

For that reason alone I inwardly objected to Roseye associating with him, yet as he was such a warmly welcomed friend of the family, it was extremely difficult for me to move in any antagonistic spirit.

Within myself I had a fierce and desperate struggle, yet long ago I had realized that if I intended to win I must not show the slightest sign of anger or of suspicion.

So, as we sat there together—gazing across the sloping lawn, so melancholy in that falling December twilight, yet so picturesque and gay on those summer evenings as I had often known it—I crushed down the apprehension that had arisen within me, and laughed gaily with my dainty well-beloved.

Still the facts—the mysterious inexplicable facts—remained. Was it possible that my love desired again to assist in the completion of our experiments in order to know the result of them—and perhaps to betray them?

No. I could not—even in my inward anger at the knowledge that she had spent the previous afternoon with the man I suspected—bring myself to believe that she was really acting in contradiction to the interests of the country.

Somebody has truly said that love is blind. Well, I loved Roseye. And my blindness had been a very pleasant and delightful affliction up to that tragic day of her disappearance.

Through those weeks when her mind had remained unbalanced and unhinged, she had never once made any statement nor had she ever inadvertently admitted anything which might reveal the truth as to where she had been, or the identity of the person whom she held in greatest terror—that Woman with the Leopard's Eyes.

With all the cunning I possessed I had sought to glean from her some fact, any fact however vague, concerning those weeks when she had been missing, but beyond what I have written in these pages, I could gather no single incident.

I was but an ordinary man—one whose father had risen in the medical profession to grasp one of its plums. From being a ne'er-do-well and idler, I had taken up aviation and, after much perseverance, had learned to fly. I suppose I was gifted with ordinary intelligence, and that intelligence had shown me that, now we were at war, the enemy had placed upon the whole country that secret Hand, eager and clutching, to effect and secure our undoing. Its finger-prints, indelible and unmistakable, remained wherever one sought them.

That Hand had been upon me when I had crashed to earth with a wooden bolt in my machine in place of one of steel.

But whether the Hand had really been placed upon Roseye was a problem which utterly defied solution.

That she had suffered had been vividly apparent, yet her absolute and fixed refusal to say anything, to admit anything, or to make any charge against anyone, was, in itself, an astounding feature of what was an extremely curious situation.

I remained that afternoon at Burford Bridge just as dumbfounded and mystified as I had been at that moment when Theed had opened the door of my sitting-room and she had returned from what, in her own words, had been a living tomb.

Why a living tomb? Who had prepared the trap—if trap there had been? Who was the unknown woman, the very mention of whom terrified her—the Woman with the Leopard's Eyes?

Though we sat there and laughed together—for I had affected, I hope successfully, an utter disregard of any suspicion or jealousy of Eastwell—I gazed upon her, and I saw that she had grown nervous and anxious.

Why?

It seemed to me that, with her woman's innate cleverness and cunning—which by the way is never outmatched by that of the mere man—she was reading my own innermost thoughts. She knew my suspicions, and her intention, at all hazards, was to conceal from me some bitter and perhaps disgraceful truth.

This thought aroused within me a relentless hatred of the fellow Eastwell. Nevertheless, once again when I came to examine the actual facts, I could discover really nothing tangible—nothing which ought to lead me, with any degree of right or justice, to an adverse decision.

I had revealed much to Inspector Barton before Roseye's disappearance. I had told him of my suspicions of Eastwell, but I suppose he had—as natural to an investigator of crime—regarded those suspicions as the natural outcome of a man's jealousy. But they were not, because I had never been jealous of the man—not until we sat there on the lawn before the hotel, and she had told me how she had spent an afternoon at the theatre in his company.

As a matter of fact jealousy had never entered my head. Previously I had always regarded Eastwell as quite a good fellow, full of the true stamina of a patriot. He had been, I knew, full of schemes for the future of aviation in England ever since he had taken his first flap at the aerodrome. Once, indeed, he had serious thoughts, in the pre-war days, of putting up as Parliamentary candidate for a Yorkshire borough. But the matter fell through because the Opposition, on their part, ran a man whose chances were assured—an Anglo-Indian colonel who had passed through every local distinction, from being a member of the local Board of Guardians to becoming a D. L. Against such odds Eastwell could not fight. In the great game of politics it has ever been that the local man who spends his money with the local butcher, baker and candlestick-maker, is usually returned with a thumping majority.

The man from afar, the man with a mission, the man who knows his job and will dare to raise his voice in the House to declaim his country's shortcomings, will usually be jeered at as a 'carpet-bagger' and hopelessly outpaced and outvoted.

I knew this. I had seen it long ago.

As I sat there at Roseye's side I fell to wondering—wondering whether she had actually played an open, straightforward game.

Or was she deceiving me!

Which?