YOU seem to have managed your little affair rather clumsily,” said Baltazar. “What’s he doing here?” she asked wildly.
“Probably catching you and Godfrey.”
“He mustn’t see Godfrey here.”
“That’s easily managed,” said Baltazar. “I’ll send him flying out of the telephone box. But what on earth could have put your husband on the track? What indiscretion have you been committing?”
“I left a letter for him telling him I wouldn’t stay any longer in his house. He’s a traitor to his country.”
Baltazar threw up his hands. “Oh, Lord! The usual idiocy. For a clever woman—well! Anyhow, I’ll head off Godfrey. When your husband spots you, use your brains. Don’t say a word to give yourself away.”
“You’ll come back?” she cried, losing her head.
“I’ll see,” said he.
He left her, and fetched a compass round the station, mingling as much as possible with the never-ceasing throng of soldiers and civilians and women and luggage, until he arrived at the row of telephone boxes. There he found Godfrey, waiting his turn and fuming at the delay.
“My boy,” said he, “here are all the elements of a first-class farce. The injured husband, Edgar Donnithorpe, has turned up. You had better make tracks as quick as you can.”
“I suppose you gave him the hint,” snarled the young man, with set teeth.
“You’re insulting your own blood to make such a damfool remark,” said Baltazar. “Go home, and stay there till I come.”
Godfrey met the infernal eyes and, for all his anger and humiliation, knew that he had accused basely.
“I apologize, sir,” said he, in his most haughty and military manner, and marched off.
Baltazar hesitated. Should he or should he not return to Lady Edna? If he had escaped the eye of Edgar Donnithorpe, it were better to leave Lady Edna, injured innocent, to tell her tale of solitary retirement to sylvan depths where she could be remote from the consequences of his political turpitude. On the other hand, if he had been observed, or if Lady Edna had avowed his presence, his abandonment of her might be idiotically interpreted. He decided to return.
He saw them at once through the moving traffic: the husband, his back towards him, gripping a handle of the truck on which the luggage was piled; the wife facing him, an ironical smile on her lips. A devilish handsome woman, thought Baltazar. The boy had taste. There she stood, slim, distinguished in her simple fawn coat and skirt and little hat to match, beneath which waved her dark brown hair, very cool, aristocratic and defiant. Baltazar came up to them.
“Ah, Donnithorpe!”
The thin, grey man wheeled round, and then Baltazar realized that he had made the wrong decision, for he was the last man the other expected to see.
“You? What are you doing here?” he shouted.
“Hush!” said Lady Edna, with a touch on his arm. “You’re not at home or in the House of Commons. You’re in a public place, and you’ll get a crowd round us in no time. Let us pretend we’re a merry party going on a holiday.”
Edgar Donnithorpe threw an anxious glance round to see if they had attracted undesired attention. But people passed them by or stood in knots near them, unheeding, intent on their own affairs.
“I ask you,” he said in a low voice, “what you are doing at this railway station with my wife?”
Baltazar, his felt hat at the back of his head and his hands thrust into his trousers’ pockets beneath the skirts of his buttoned-up, double-breasted jacket, eyed him in exasperating amusement.
“I am seeing Lady Edna off on a railway journey. Was it necessary to ask your permission?”
Lady Edna laughed mockingly. “As far as I can make out, my husband expected to find me eloping with your son Godfrey.”
Donnithorpe shifted his eyes from one to the other, looking at them evilly.
“He was with you for nearly a couple of hours to-day. I had my own very good reasons for suspicion. I went round to your house, Mr. Baltazar, and asked for your son. I saw your Chinese secretary——” He caught Baltazar’s involuntary sudden frown and angry flush. “In justice,” he continued in his thin, sneering manner, “I must absolve him from indiscretion. He knows my position in the Government, and when I informed him that it was imperative I should see your son on important political business, he told me I should find him at Waterloo station.”
“You overreached yourself,” said Baltazar with a bantering grin. “Godfrey knows no more about politics than a tom-cat. Quong Ho naturally thought you meant me. You came. Here I am, seeing your wife off. She telephoned me that she was leaving your house—going to stay with friends—wanted a man of the world’s advice on the serious step she was taking—woman-like, of course, she took the step first, and asked for advice afterwards—and I naturally put myself at her ladyship’s disposal. Don’t you think you had better let Lady Edna get on with her journey? Here’s her porter. Come with me and see her safe into her carriage.”
He was enjoying himself amazingly. Donnithorpe, baffled, tugged at his thin grey moustache. The porter came up, touching his cap.
“Time’s getting on, ma’am. I’ve reserved the two seats——”
“One seat,” said Lady Edna swiftly.
“Beg your pardon, ma’am. I thought you said the gentleman was going with you.”
“One seat. I said I was meeting a gentleman.”
The porter wheeled off the luggage. Lady Edna turned to follow, but her husband gripped her viciously by the wrist.
“Not yet.”
“drop that,” growled Baltazar.
Donnithorpe released her, plunged his hand into his breast pocket and drew out a couple of sheets of paper.
“You did say two seats. You meant to go off with him. There’s some damned trickery about it. But I’ve got the whip hand, my lady. Just look at this before you go.”
Lady Edna turned ghastly white and clutched Baltazar’s arm to steady herself from the sickening shock. In the desperate rush, after Godfrey’s departure, the scheming, the packing, the telephoning, the temporary straightening of affairs, the chase over London for the complaisant friend whose connivance was essential, the eagerness to get free of the house before her husband should return, she had forgotten the scrap of paper in her secret drawer, with its obsolete information. Now the horror flashed on her. Her husband had gone to the drawer before. Hence the article in Fordyce’s paper. Her first instinct had been right. He had gone to the drawer again. Her swaying brain wondered how he had discovered the secret of the spring. But he had found the paper which in her folly she had not destroyed—and what else besides? She heard, as in a dream, her husband saying:
“If he isn’t your lover, what about these? Here’s proof. Here’s a matter of court-martial and gaol.”
She regained her self-control with a great effort, still holding to Baltazar. “You hound!” she whispered.
Baltazar, smitten with the realization that comedy had vanished—the comedy in which he had played so debonair and masterly a part—vanished in the flash of a cinematographic film, and that something very near tragedy was staring him in the face, stretched out his hand for the papers.
“Let me see.”
But Donnithorpe smiled his thin, derisive smile. “No. They’re too precious. I’ll hold them for you to look at. Keep away.”
And there, in the airless glass-roofed railway station, on that hot summer afternoon, in the midst of the reverberating noises of trains letting off steam, of a thousand human voices, of scurrying feet, of grating luggage trunks, in the midst of a small town’s moving and lounging population, surging now, at that hour’s height of the suburban traffic with home-going streams; there, with hundreds of eyes to watch them, hundreds of ears to hear them, hundreds of successive ears of people darting bee-like around the busy bookstall not ten yards away, there three quietly talking human beings stood at grips with destiny.
“This is written on your notepaper. It is a War Office secret. It reveals the whole strategy of the High Command.”
Baltazar’s lips grew grim and his eyes bent on the little man burned like fires. In Donnithorpe’s hands the document was Godfrey’s death warrant.
Then Baltazar remembered the shock he had received in Sheepshanks’s room at Cambridge when first he saw a letter of Godfrey’s, and Godfrey’s after explanation of the identity of their handwriting.
“Don’t you see? It gives the whole thing away,” Donnithorpe continued.
“I’m quite aware of it,” said Baltazar. “I drew it up for your wife.”
“You?” exclaimed Donnithorpe in incredulous amazement, while Lady Edna caught a sharp breath and clung more fiercely to Baltazar’s arm. “Where did you get your information from?”
“I am to be Minister of the new department in a day or two,” said Baltazar, “and I’m in the inner confidence of the War Cabinet.”
“But it’s in your son’s handwriting!”
“It’s my handwriting,” said Baltazar calmly.
He drew from his pocket a sheaf of notes for a speech and handed them to Donnithorpe. “Compare, if you like.”
Donnithorpe returned them with a curious thin snarl and held out the other paper.
“Then you wrote this too?”
Baltazar glanced at it. It was the first sheet of a letter from which the other sheet had been torn. Lady Edna saw it and again swayed, half fainting with sickening humiliation. The only one of Godfrey’s letters—and only part of one—which she had kept: two pages breathing such a passionate love as she had never dreamed that a man in real life could express to woman. She had forgotten that she had left that, too, in the secret drawer. She stared haggardly into Baltazar s face. His lips twisted into a smile.
“Yes. I wrote that too,” said he.
“Then you’re a damned villain!” cried Donnithorpe.
“Very possibly,” said Baltazar.
Donnithorpe turned in his rat-like way to his wife.
“What have you to say about it?”
Suddenly recovered from her fit of terror and shame, she withdrew her grip from Baltazar’s arm and held herself up with the scornful poise of her head.
“Nothing,” she said. “You can flatter yourself now you know everything.”
He did not heed her words, but once more looked from one to the other with a thin, chuckling laugh.
“You’re a pretty pair. You, my lady. And you, Mr. Minister of Publicity. It strikes me you’ll have to postpone your elopement.”
“You’ve got elopement on the brain, my good fellow,” said Baltazar. “A Minister of Publicity doesn’t elope with a lady with nothing but what he stands up in. Where’s my luggage?”
“There,” replied Donnithorpe, pointing to the barriers to the platform. “Didn’t the porter say she had ordered two seats—one for a gentleman?”
“This is getting wearisome,” said Lady Edna. “I’ve already told you how the mistake arose.”
The solicitous porter, already rewarded with five shillings, and belonging to a race as richly endowed with human failings as any other in the world, hurried up.
“I’ve found a corner seat, ma’am. Put everything into the carriage. You’ve not much time left.”
Suddenly she became aware of the awful desolation that awaited her in the remote cottage in the New Forest with one horrible old servant woman for company. Within her feminine unreason clamoured. No, no! She revolted against the grotesque absurdity of such comfortless living burial. She would go mad, cut off from every opportunity of hearing instant developments of this nerve-racking situation. She couldn’t stick it.
“I’ve changed my mind, porter. I’m not going. Get my things out and bring them back.”
“Certainly, ma’am.”
The porter ran off. Baltazar thrust his hands again into his trousers’ pockets. His face was a grim mask.
“Why don’t you get your luggage out too?” sneered Donnithorpe.
“Don’t be a brainless fool,” said Baltazar.
The fingers in his pockets twitched, and Lady Edna caught a malevolent flash in his eyes that made her shiver. He would have liked to wring her neck. Why the devil didn’t she play the game and go to the cottage and the old woman? He read her through and through. And mingled with his contempt ran a thrill of gladness. Godfrey was well rid of her.
Donnithorpe cackled at his abjuration. He turned to Lady Edna.
“You haven’t condescended to tell me where you were going.”
“I was going, if you want to know, to stay with Sybil Manning at her little place in the New Forest.”
“Indeed?” said her husband, in his rasping voice, and a gleam of triumph sparkled in his crafty eyes. “Now it happens that I, not being quite the fool you and Mr. Baltazar have thought me, rang up Lady Manning. It was the first thing I did when I read your letter. I knew you would bolt, straight to her. I’ve often thought of bringing in a Bill in Parliament to deprive her of existence. She answered me herself. She had heard nothing of you, knew nothing of you.”
“Naturally,” she said jeeringly. “But,” she added, carrying the war into enemy’s quarters, “she knows everything about you. Everything, my friend. So will the Prime Minister.”
“I was with the Prime Minister this morning,” said Donnithorpe. “I told him all about my Saturday evening’s effort in the cause of solidarity. We parted the best of friends, and my position is secure.”
“What about Fordyce’s article this morning?”
“This morning I couldn’t conceive how the fellow had got the information. This evening or to-morrow morning”—he tapped his breast pocket—“if I am asked, I can point to a dual source of leakage.”
He folded his arms, the crafty political intriguer, thin and triumphant.
“Of us two,” said Baltazar, “it strikes me that you are the damnder scoundrel.”
“What you think is a matter of perfect indifference to me,” retorted Donnithorpe. “What does interest me is the fact that my wife was going to stay with Lady Manning in the New Forest while Lady Manning is in London, and that when I find her here with you, she decides not to go to the New Forest after all.”
Lady Edna flushed angrily. She was out-man?uvred, outclassed, beaten on all sides by the thin grey man whom she despised. She had acted like a brainless, immoral schoolgirl.
“Where do you propose to go now?” asked Donnithorpe.
She spat her venom at him. “Anywhere to get out of the sight of you. Yes, I was going alone to Sybil Manning’s cottage. I had just left her when you telephoned. I wanted to get as far away from you as I could and from the disgusting impressions of the last few days. Now the whole thing would be spoiled by this abominable insult. I shall stay with my mother to-night and go down to Moulsford to-morrow.”
“I’m glad,” replied Donnithorpe acidly, “you’re not thinking of returning to my house. I’m not going to have any plea of condonation.”
Lady Edna moved away haughtily toward the barriers.
“I see my porter. Mr. Baltazar, will you kindly put me into a taxi?”
“No, he shan’t. You shall go in my car.&rdq............