The Zeppelin's Passenger - E. Phillips Oppenheim (best way to read ebooks TXT) 📗
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“Women don’t understand these things, Philippa - ” Richard began.
“Thank heavens we understand them better than you men!” Philippa interrupted fiercely. “You have but one idea-to strike - the narrow idea of men that breeds warfare. I tell you that if ever universal peace comes, if ever the nations are taught the horror of this lust for blood, this criminal outrage against civilisation, it is the women who will become the teachers, because amongst your instincts the brutish ones of force are the first to leap to the surface at the slightest provocation. We women see further, we know more. I swear to you, Richard, that if you interfere I will never forgive you as long as I live!”
Richard stared at his sister in amazement. There seemed to be some new spirit born within her. Throughout all their days he had never known her so much in earnest, so passionately insistent. He looked from her to the man whom she sought to protect, and who answered, unasked, the thoughts that were in his mind.
“Whatever harm I may have been able to do,” Lessingham announced, “is finished. I leave this place tonight, probably for ever. As for the Commandant,” he went on with a faint smile, “he is already upon my track. There is nothing you can tell him about me which he does not know. It is just a matter of hours, the toss of a coin, whether I get away or not.”
“They’ve found you out, then?” Richard exclaimed.
“Only a miracle saved me from arrest a week ago,” Lessingham acknowledged. “Your Commandant here is at the present moment in London for the sole purpose of denouncing me.”
“And yet you remain here, paying afternoon calls?” Richard observed incredulously. “I’m hanged if I can see through this!”
“You see,” Lessingham explained gently. “I am a fatalist!”
It was Helen who finally led her lover from the room. He looked back from the door.
“Maderstrom,” he said, “you know quite well how personally I feel towards you. I am grateful for what you have done for me, even though I am beginning to understand your motives. But as regards the other things we are both soldiers. I am going to talk to Helen for a time. I want to understand a little more than I do at present.”
Lessingham nodded.
“Let me help you,” he begged. “Here is the issue in plain words. All that I did for you at Wittenberg, I should have done in any case for the sake of our friendship. Your freedom would probably never have been granted to me but for my mission, although even that I might have tried to arrange. I brought your letters here, and I traded them with your sister and Miss Fairclough for the shelter of their hospitality and their guarantees. Now you know just where friendship ended and the other things began. Do what you believe to be your duty.”
Richard followed Helen out, closing the door after him. Lessingham looked down into Philippa’s face.
“You are more wonderful even than I thought,” he continued softly. “You say so little and you live so near the truth. It is those of us who feel as you do - who understand - to whom this war is so terrible.”
“I want to ask you one question before I send you away,” she told him. “This journey to America?”
“It is a mission on behalf of Germany,” he explained, “but it is, after all, an open one. I have friends - highly placed friends - in my own country, who in their hearts feel as I do about the war. It is through=20them that I am able to turn my back upon Europe. I have done my share of fighting,” he went on sadly, “and the horror of it will never quite leave me. I think that no one has ever charged me with shirking my duty, and yet the sheer, black ugliness of this ghastly struggle, its criminal inutility, have got into my blood so that I think I would rather pass out of the world in some simple way than find myself back again in that debauch of blood. Is this cowardice, Philippa?”
She looked at him with shining eyes.
“There isn’t any one in the world,” she said, “who could call you a coward. Whatever I may decide, whatever I may feel towards you, that at least I know.”
He kissed her fingers.
“At ten o’clock,” he began -
“But listen,” she interrupted. “Apart from anything which Dick might do, you are in terrible danger here, all the more if you really have accomplished something. Why not go now, at this moment? Why wait? These few hours may make all the difference.”
He smiled.
“They may, indeed, make all the difference to my life,” he answered. “That is for you.”
He followed Mills, who had obeyed her summons, out of the room. Philippa moved to the window and watched him until he had disappeared. Then very slowly she left the room, walked up the stairs, made her way to her own little suite of apartments, and locked the door.
It was a happy, if a trifle hysterical little dinner party that evening at Mainsail Haul. Philippa was at times unusually silent, but Helen had expanded in the joy of her great happiness. Richard, shaved and with his hair cut, attired once more in the garb of civilisation, seemed a different person. Even in these few hours the lines about his mouth seemed less pronounced. They talked freely of Maderstrom.
“A regular ‘Vanity Fair’ problem,” Richard declared, balancing his wine glass between his fingers, “a problem, too, which I can’t say I have solved altogether yet. The only thing is that if he is really going tonight, I don’t see why I shouldn’t let the matter drift out of my mind.”
“It is so much better,” Helen agreed. “Try as hard as ever I can, I cannot picture his doing any harm to anybody. And as for any information he may have gained here, well, I think that we can safely let him take it back to Germany.”
“He was always,” Richard continued reminiscently, “a sort of cross between a dreamer, an idealist, and a sportsman. There was never anything of the practical man of affairs about him. He was scrupulously honourable, and almost a purist in his outlook upon life. I have met a great many Germans,” Richard went on, “and I’ve killed a few, thank God! - but he is about as unlike the ordinary type as any one I ever met. The only pity is that he ever served his time with them.”
Philippa had been listening attentively. She was more than ever silent after her brother’s little appreciation of his friend. Richard glanced at her good-humouredly.
“You haven’t killed the fatted calf for me in the shape of clothes, Philippa,” he observed. “One would think that you were going on a journey.”
She glanced down at her high-necked gown and avoided Helen’s anxious eyes.
“I may go for a walk,” she said, “and leave you two young people to talk secrets. I am rather fond of the garden these moonlight nights.”
“When is Henry coming back?” her brother enquired.
Philippa’s manner was quiet but ominous.
“I have no idea,” she confessed. “He comes and goes as the whim seizes him, and I very seldom know where he is. One week it is whiting and another codling. Lately he seems to have shown some partiality for London life.”
Richard’s eyes were wide open now.
“You mean to say that he is still not doing anything?”
“Nothing whatever.”
“But what excuse does he give - or rather I should say reason?” Richard persisted.
“He says that he is too old for a ship, and he won’t work in an office,” Philippa replied. “That is what he says. His point of view is so impossible that I can not even discuss it with him.”
“It’s the rummest go I ever came across,” Richard remarked reminiscently. “I should have said that old Henry would have been up and at ‘em at the Admiralty before the first gun was fired.”
“On the contrary,” Philippa rejoined, “he took advantage of the war to hire a Scotch moor at half-price, about a week after hostilities had commenced.”
“It’s a rum go,” Richard repeated. “I can’t fancy Henry as a skulker. Forgive me, Philippa,” he added.
“You are entirely forgiven,” she assured him drily.
“He comes of such a fine fighting stock,” Richard mused. “I suppose his health is all right?”
“His health,” Philippa declared, “is marvellous. I should think he is one of the strongest men I know.”
Her brother patted her hand.
“You’ve been making rather a trouble of it, old girl,” he said affectionately. “It’s no good doing that, you know. You wait and let me have a talk with Henry.”
“I think,” she replied, “that nearly everything possible has already been said to him.”
“Perhaps you’ve put his back up a bit,” Richard suggested, “and he may really be on the lookout for something all the time.”
“It has been a long search!” Philippa retorted, with quiet sarcasm. “Let us talk about something else.”
They gossiped for a time over acquaintances and relations, made their plans for the week - Richard must report at the War Office at once.
Philippa grew more and more silent as the meal drew to a close. It was at Helen’s initiative that they left Richard alone for a moment over his port. She kept her arm through her friend’s as they crossed the hall into the drawing-room, and closed the door behind them. Philippa stood upon the hearth rug. Already her mouth had come together in a straight line. 11cr eyes met Helen’s defiantly.
“I know exactly what you are going to say, Helen,” she began, “and I warn you that it will be of no use.”
Helen drew up a small chair and seated herself before the fire.
“Are you going away with Mr. Lessingham, Philippa?” she asked.
“I am,” was the calm response. “I made up my mind this afternoon. We are leaving tonight.”
Helen stretched out one foot to the blaze.
“Motoring?” she enquired.
“Naturally,” Philippa replied. “You know there are no trains leaving here tonight.”
“You’ll have a cold ride,” Helen remarked. “I should take your heavy fur coat.”
Philippa stared at her companion.
“You don’t seem much upset, Helen!”
“I think,” Helen. declared, looking up, “that nothing that has ever happened to me in my life has made me more unhappy, but I can see that you have reasoned it all out, and there is not a single argument I could use which you haven’t already discounted. It is your life, Philippa, not mine.”
“Since you are so philosophical,” Philippa observed, “let me ask you - should you do what I am going to do, if you were in my place?”
“I should not,” was the firm reply.
Philippa laughed heartily.
“Oh, I know what you are going to say!” Helen continued quickly. “You’ll tell me, won’t you, that I am not temperamental. I think in your heart you rather despise my absolute fidelity to Richard. You would call it cowlike, or something of that sort. There is a difference between us, Philippa, and that is why I am afraid to argue with you.”
“What should you do,” Philippa demanded, “if Richard failed you in some great thing?”
“I might suffer,” Helen confessed, “but my love would be there all the same. Perhaps for that reason I should suffer the more, but I should never be able to see with those who judged him hardly.”
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