The Zeppelin's Passenger - E. Phillips Oppenheim (best way to read ebooks TXT) 📗
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“Ah, don’t mock me!” he begged. “What I am saying to you comes from my heart.”
Philippa laughed at him quietly. There was just a little break in her voice, however.
“Don’t he absurd!”
“There is nothing absurd about it,” he replied, with a note of sadness in his tone. “I felt it from the moment we met. I struggled against it, but I have felt it growing day by day. I came here with my mind filled with different purposes. I had no thought of amusing myself, no thought of seeking here the happiness which up till now I seem to have missed. I came as a servant because I was sent, a mechanical being. You have changed everything. For you I feel what I have never felt for any woman before. I place before you my career, my freedom, my honour.”
Philippa sighed very softly.
“Do you mind ringing the bell?” she begged.
“The bell?” he repeated. “What for?”
“I want Helen to hear you,” she confided, with a wonderful little smile.
“Philippa, don’t mock me,” he pleaded. “If this is only amusement to you, tell me so and let me go away. It is the first time in my life that a woman has come between me and my work. I am no longer master of myself. I am obsessed with you. I want nothing else in life but your love.”
There was an almost startling change in Philippa’s face. The banter which had served her with so much effect, which she had relied upon as her defensive weapon, was suddenly useless. Lessingham had created an atmosphere around him, an atmosphere of sincerity.
“Are you in earnest?” she faltered.
“God knows I am!” he insisted.
“You - you care for me?”
“So much,” he answered passionately, “that for your sake I would sacrifice my honour, my country, my life.”
“But I’ve only known you for such a short time,” Philippa protested, “and you’re an enemy.”
“I discard my birth. I renounce my adopted country,” he declared fiercely. “You have swept my life clear of every scrap of ambition and patriotism. You have filled it with one thing only - a great, consuming love.”
“Have you forgotten my husband?”
“Do you think that if he had been a different sort of man I should have dared to speak? Ask yourself how you can continue to live with him? You can call him which you will. Both are equally disgraceful. Your heart knows the truth. He is either a coward or a philanderer.”
Philippa’s cheeks were suddenly white. Her eyes flashed. His words had stung her to the quick.
“A coward?” she repeated furiously. “You dare to call Henry that?”
Lessingham rose abruptly to his feet. He moved restlessly about the room. His fists were clenched, his tone thick with passion.
“I do!” he pronounced. “Philippa, look at this matter without prejudice. Do you believe that there is a single man of any country, of your husband’s age and rank, who would be content to trawl the seas for fish whilst his country’s blood is being drained dry? Who would weigh a codling,” he added, pointing scornfully to the scales, “whilst the funeral march of heroes is beating throughout the world? The thing is insensate, impossible!”
Philippa’s head drooped. Her hands were nervously intertwined.
“Don’t!” she pleaded, “I have suffered so much.”
“Forgive me,” he begged, with a sudden change of voice. “If I am mistaken in your husband - and there is always the chance - I am sorry. I will confess that I myself had a different opinion of him, but I can only judge from what I have seen and from that there is no one in the world who would not agree with me that your husband is unworthy of you.”
“Oh, please stop!” Philippa cried. “Stop at once!”
Lessingham came back to his place by her side. His voice was still shaking, but it had grown very soft.
“Philippa, forgive me,” he repeated. “If you only knew how it hurts to see you like this! Yet I must speak. There is just once in every man’s lifetime when he must tell the truth. That time has come with me - I love you.”
“So does my husband,” she murmured.
“I will only remind you, then, that he shows it in strange fashion,” Lessingham continued. “He sets your wishes at defiance. He who should be an example in a small place like this, is only an object of contempt in the neighbourhood. Even I, who have only lived here for so short a time, have caught the burden of what people say.”
Philippa wiped her eyes.
“Please, do you mind,” she begged, “not saying anything more about Henry. You are only reminding me of things which I try all the time to forget.”
“Believe me,” Lessingham answered wistfully, “I am only too content to ignore him, to forget that he exists, to remember only that you are the woman who has changed my life.”
Philippa looked at him in something like dismay, rather like a child who has started an engine which she has no idea how to stop.
“But you must not - you must not talk to me like this!”
His hand closed upon hers. It lay in his grasp, unyielding, cold, yet passive.
“Why not?” he whispered. “I have the one unalterable right, and I am willing to pay the great price.”
“Right?” she faltered.
“The right of loving you - the right of loving you better than any woman in the world.”
There was a queer silence, only partly due, as she was instantly aware, to the emotion of the moment. A door behind them had opened. Philippa’s quicker senses had recognised her husband’s footsteps. Lessingham rose deliberately to his feet. In his heart he welcomed the interruption. This might, perhaps, be the decisive moment. Sir Henry was strolling towards them. His manner and his tone, however, were alike good-natured.
“I was to order you into the billiard room, Mr. Lessingham,” he announced. “Sinclair has been sent for - a night route march, or some such horror - and they want you to make a four.”
Lessingham hesitated. He had a passionate inclination to face the situation, to tell this man the truth. Sir Henry’s courteous indifference, however, was like a harrier. He recognised the inevitable.
“I am afraid I am rather out of practice,” he said, “but I shall be delighted to do my best.”
Sir Henry was obviously not in the best of tempers. For a mild-mannered and easy-going man, his expression was scarcely normal.
“That fellow was making love to you,” he said bluntly, as soon as the door was closed behind Lessingham.
Philippa looked up at her husband with an air of pleasant candour.
“He was doing it very nicely, too,” she admitted.
“You mean to say that you let him?”
“I listened to what he had to say,” she confessed. “It didn’t occur to you, I suppose,” her husband remarked, with somewhat strained sarcasm, “that you were another man’s wife?”
“I am doing my best to forget that fact,” Philippa reminded him.
“I see! And he is to help you?”
“Possibly.”
Sir Henry’s irritation was fast merging into anger.
“I shall turn the fellow out of the house,” he declared.
Philippa shrugged her shoulders.
“Why don’t you?”
He seated himself on the couch by his wife’s side. “Look here, Philippa, don’t let’s wrangle,” he begged. “I’m afraid you’ll have to make up your mind to see a good deal less of your friend Lessingham, anyway.”
Philippa’s brows were knitted. She was conscious of a vague uneasiness.
“Really? And why?”
“For one thing,” her husband explained, “because I don’t intend to have him hanging about my house during my absence.”
“The best way to prevent that would be not to go away,” Philippa suggested.
“Well, in all probability,” he announced guardedly, “I am not going away again - at least not just yet.”
Philippa’s manner suddenly changed. She laid down her work. Her hand rested lightly upon her husband’s shoulder.
“You mean that you are going to give up those horrible fishing excursions of yours?”
“For the present I am,” he assured her.
“And are you going to do something - some work, I mean?” she asked breathlessly.
“For the immediate present I am going to stay at home and look after you,” he replied.
Philippa’s face fell. Her manner became notably colder.
“You are very wise,” she declared. “Mr. Lessingham is a most fascinating person. We are all half in love with him - even Helen.”
“The fellow must have a way with him,” Sir Henry conceded grudgingly. “As a rule the people here are not over-keen on strangers, unless they have immediate connections in the neighbourhood. Even Griffiths, who since they made him Commandant, is a man of many suspicions, seems inclined to accept him.”
“Captain Griffiths dined here the other night,” Philippa remarked, “and I noticed that he and Mr. Lessingham seemed to get on very well.”
“The fellow’s all right in his way, no doubt,” Sir Henry began.
“Of course he is,” Philippa interrupted. “Helen likes him quite as much as I do.”
“Does he make love to Helen, too?” Sir Henry ventured.
“Don’t talk nonsense!” Philippa retorted. “He isn’t that sort of a man at all. If he has made love to me, he has done so because I have encouraged him, and if I have encouraged him, it is your fault.”
Sir Henry, with an impatient exclamation, rose from his place and took a cigarette from an open box.
“Quite time I stayed at home, I can see. All the same, the fellow’s rather a puzzle. I can’t help wondering how he succeeded in making such an easy conquest of a lady who has scarcely been notorious for her flirtations, and a young woman who is madly in love with another man. He hasn’t - “
“Hasn’t what?”
“He hasn’t,” Sir Henry continued, blowing out the match which he had been holding to his cigarette and throwing it away, “been in the position of being able to render you or Helen any service, has he?”
“I don’t understand you,” Philippa replied, a little uneasily.
“There’s nothing to understand,” Sir Henry went on. “I was simply trying to find some explanation for his veni, vidi, vici.”
“I don’t think you need go any further than the fact,” Philippa observed, “that he is well-bred, charming and companionable.”
“Incidentally,” Sir Henry queried, “do you happen to have come across any one here who ever heard of him before?”
“I don’t remember any one,” Philippa replied. “He was at college with Richard, you know.”
Sir Henry nodded.
“Of course, that’s a wonderful introduction to you and Helen,” he admitted. “And by-the-by, that reminds me,” he went on, “I never saw such a change in two women in my life, as in you and Helen. A few weeks ago you were fretting yourselves to death about Dick. Now you don’t seem to mention him, you both of you look as though you hadn’t a care in the world, and yet you say you haven’t heard from him. Upon my word, this is getting to be a house of mysteries!”
“The only mystery in it that I can see, is you, Henry,” she declared.
“Me?” he protested. “I’m one of the simplest-minded fellows alive. What is there mysterious about me?”
“Your ignominious life,” was the cold reply.
“Jove, I got it that time!” he groaned, - “got it in the neck! But didn’t I tell you just now that I was turning over a new leaf?”
“Then prove it,” Philippa pleaded. “Let me write to Rayton and beg him to use his influence to get you something to do. I am sure you would be happier, and I can’t tell
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