The Mystery of the Green Ray - William le Queux (ebook reader .txt) 📗

fellow. Not a cab’net meeting, y’know,” he murmured drowsily. And by way of compromise I pulled the primitive draught curtain between the two boats, and as I sat up to do so I noticed with a start that Dennis wore a worried look I had never seen before. I lay back, got my pipe going, and waited for him to speak.

“I wonder,” he said presently, through the clouds of smoke that hung imprisoned beneath our shallow roof—“I wonder if there would have been any war if the Germans smoked Jamavana?”

“What’s worrying you, Den?” I asked, ignoring his question.

“Worrying me? Why, nothing. I’ve got nothing to worry about. What about you, though? I don’t want to butt in on your private affairs, but you’ve a lot more to be worried about than I have.”

“I? Oh, nonsense, Dennis,” I protested.

“None of that with me, Ron. You know what I mean. There’s no point in either of us concealing things. This war is going to make a big difference to you and Myra McLeod. Now, tell me all about it. What do you mean to do, and everything?”

“There isn’t much to tell you. You know all about it. We’re not engaged. Old General McLeod objects to our engagement on account of my position. Of course, he’s quite right. He’s very nice about it, and he’s always kindness itself to me. You know, of course, that he and my father were brother officers? Myra and I have been chums since she was four. We love each other, and she would be content to wait, but, in the meantime—well, you know my position. I can only describe it in the well-worn phrases, ‘briefless barrister’ and ‘impecunious junior.’ There’s a great deal of truth in the weak old joke, Dennis, about the many that are called and the few that are briefed. Of course the General is right. He says that I ought to leave Myra absolutely alone, and neither write to her nor see her, and give her a chance to meet someone else, and all that—someone who could keep her among her own set. But I tried that once for three months; I didn’t answer her letters, or write to her, and I worried myself to death very nearly about it. But at the end of the three months she came up to town to see what it was all about. Gad, how glad I was to see her!”

“I bet you were,” said Dennis, sympathetically. “But what d’you mean by telling me you’d got nothing to worry about? Now that you’re just getting things going nicely, and look like doing really well, along comes this wretched war, and you join the army, and such practice as you have goes to the devil. It’s rotten luck, Ronnie, rotten luck.”

“It is a bit,” I admitted with a sigh. My little bit of hard-earned success had meant a lot to me.

“Still,” said Dennis, “you’ve got a thundering lot to be thankful for too. To begin with, she’ll wait for you, and then, if necessary, marry on twopence-halfpenny a year, and make you comfortable on it too. As far as her father is concerned, she’s very devoted to him, and would never do anything to annoy him if she could possibly help it, as I easily spotted the night we dined with them at the Carlton. But she’s made up her mind to be Mrs. Ronald Ewart sooner or later; that I will swear!”

“I’m very glad to hear you say so,” I answered, “but the thing that worries me, of course, is the question as to whether I have any right to let this go on. If war is declared——”

“Which it will be,” said Dennis.

“Well, then, my practice goes to the devil, as you say. How long after the war is it going to be before I could marry one of Myra’s maids, let alone Myra? And, supposing, of course, that I use the return half of my ticket, so to speak, and come back safe and sound, my own prospects will be infinitely worse than they were before the war. The law, after all, is a luxury, and no one will have a great deal of money for luxuries by the time we have finished with it and wiped Germany off the map. Besides, if there’s no money about, there’s nothing to go to law over. So there you are, or, rather, there I am.”

“What do you intend to do, then?” my friend asked.

“I shall go up to Scotland to-morrow night—well, of course, it’s to-night, I should say—and see her—and—and——”

“Yes—well, and——”

“Oh, and tell her that it must be all—all over. I shall say that the war will make all the difference, that I must join the army, and that she must consider herself free to marry someone else, and that, as in any case I might never come back, I think it’s the best thing for us both that she should consider herself free, and—er—and—and consider herself free,” I ended weakly.

“Just like that?” asked Dennis, with a twinkle in his eye.

“I shall try and put it fairly formally to her,” I said, “because, of course, I must appear to be sincere about it. I must try and think out some way of making her imagine I want it broken off for reasons of my own.”

Dennis laughed softly.

“You delicious, egotistical idiot,” he said. “You don’t really imagine that you could persuade anyone you met for the first time even that you’re not in love. By all means do what you think is right, Ron. I wouldn’t dissuade you for the world. Tell her that she is free. Tell her why you are setting her free, and I’ll be willing to wager my little all that you two ridiculous young people will find yourselves tied tighter together than ever. By all means do your best to be a good little boy, Ronald, and do what you conceive to be your duty.”

“You needn’t pull my leg about it,” I said, though somewhat half-heartedly.

“I’m not pulling your leg, as you put it,” Dennie answered, in a more serious tone. “If ever I saw honesty and truth and love and loyalty looking out of a girl’s eyes, that girl is Myra McLeod.”

“Thank you for that, Den,” I answered simply. There was little sentiment between us. Thank heaven, there was something more.

“And so you see, you lucky dog, you’ll go out to the front, and come back loaded with honours and blushes, and marry the girl of your dreams, and live happy ever after.” And Dennis sighed.

“Why the sigh?” I asked. “Oh, come now,” I added, suddenly remembering. “Fair exchange, you know. You haven’t told me what was worrying you.”

“My dear old fellow, don’t be ridiculous, there’s nothing worrying me.”

I pressed him to no purpose. He refused to admit that he had a care in the world, and so we fell to talking of matters connected with the routine of army life, how long we should be before we got to the front, the sport we four should have in our rest time behind the trenches, our determination to stick together at all costs, etc. Suddenly Dennis sat bolt upright.

“Gad!” he cried savagely, “if you beggars weren’t going, I could stick it. But you three leaving me behind, it’s——”

“Leaving you behind?” I echoed in astonishment. “But why, old man? Aren’t you coming too?”

“I hope so,” said Dennis bitterly; “I hope so with all my heart, and I shall have a jolly good shot at it. But I know what it will be, worse luck.”

“But why, Dennis?” I asked again. “I don’t understand.”

“Of course you don’t,” he replied, “but you’ve got your own troubles, and there’s no point in worrying about me, in any case.”

I begged him to tell me; I pleaded our old friendship, and the fact that I had taken him into my confidence in the various vicissitudes of my own love affair. It struck me at the time that it was I who should have been indebted to him for his patient sympathy and help; and here he was, poor old fellow, with a real, live trouble of his own, refusing to bother me with it.

“So you’ve just got to own up, old man,” I finished.

“Oh, it’s really nothing,” said Dennis miserably. “I’m a crock, that’s all. A useless hulk of unnecessary lumber.”

“How, my dear chap?” I asked incredulously. Here was Dennis Burnham, who had put up a record for the mile in our school days, and lifted the public school’s middle-weight pot, a champion swimmer, a massive young man of six-foot-two in his socks, calling himself a crock.

“You remember that summer we did the cruise from Southampton to Stranraer?”

“Heavens! yes,” I exclaimed, “and we capsized the cutter in the Solway, and you were laid up in a farmhouse at Whithorn with rheumatic fever. Am I ever likely to forget it?”

“I’m not, anyway,” said Dennis, ruefully. “That rheumatic fever left me with a weak heart. I strained it rowing up at Oxford, you remember, and that fever business put the last touches on it for all practical purposes.”

“Are you sure, old man?” I asked. It seemed impossible that a great big chap like Dennis, the picture of health, should have anything seriously wrong with him.

“I’m dead sure, Ron; I wish I weren’t. Not that it matters much, of course; but just now, when one has a chance to do something decent for one’s Motherland and justify one’s existence, it hits a bit hard.”

“Is it serious?” I asked—“really serious?”

“Sufficient to bar me from joining you chaps, though I’ll see if I can sneak past the doctor. You remember about three weeks ago we were to have played a foursome out at Hendon, and I didn’t turn up? I said afterwards that I had been called out of town, and had quite forgotten to wire.”

“Which was extremely unlike you,” I interposed; “but go on.”

“Well, as a matter of fact, I was on my way. I was a bit late, and when I got outside Golders Green Tube Station I ran for a ’bus. The rest of the day I spent in the Cottage Hospital. No, I didn’t faint. The valve struck, and I simply lay on the pavement a crumpled mass of semi-conscious humanity till they carted me off on the ambulance. It’s the fourth time it’s happened.”

“Of course you had good advice?” I asked anxiously.

“Heavens! yes,” he exclaimed; “any amount of the best. And they all say the same thing—rest, be careful, no sudden excitement, no strain, and I may live for ever—a creaking door.”

“My dear old Den,” I said, for I was deeply touched. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Plenty of worries of your own, old man,” he answered, more cheerfully; “and, besides, it would have spoiled everything. You fellows would have been nursing me behind my back, to use an Irishism, and trying to prevent my noticing it. You know as well as I do that if you had known I should have been a skeleton at the feast.”

“You must promise me two things,” I said presently. “One is that you won’t try to join the army; there is sure to be a rush of recruits in the next few days, and the doctors will be flurried, and may skip through their work roughshod. The other is that you will take care of yourself, run no risks, and do nothing rash while we are away.”

The first he refused. He said he must do what he could to get through, if only to satisfy his conscience; but he made me the second promise, and solemnly gave me his word that he would do nothing that would put him in any danger. Then at last, at his suggestion, we turned in; he insisted that I had an