CHAPTER XVI

Mr. William Hayter, in the solitude of his chambers at the Milan Court,

was a very altered personage. He extended no welcoming salutation to his

midnight visitor but simply motioned him to a chair.

“Well,” he began, “is your task finished that you are in London?”

“My task,” Lessingham replied, “might just as well never have been

entered upon. The man you sent me to watch is nothing but an ordinary

sport-loving Englishman.”

“Really! You have lived as his neighbour for nearly a month, and that is

your impression of him?”

“It is,” Lessingham assented. “He has been away sea-fishing, half the

time, but I have searched his house thoroughly.”

“Searched his papers, eh?”

“Every one I could find, and hated the job. There are a good many charts

of the coast, but they are all for the use of the fishermen.”

“Wonderful!” Hayter scoffed. “My young friend, you may yet find

distinction in some other walk of life. Our secret service, I fancy,

will very soon be able to dispense with your energies.”

“And I with your secret service,” Lessingham agreed heartily. “I dare

say there may be some branches of it in which existence is tolerable.

That, however, does not apply to the task upon which I have been

engaged.”

“You have been completely duped,” Hayter told him calmly, “and the

information you have sent us is valueless. Sir Henry Cranston, instead

of being the type of man whom you have described, is one of the greatest

experts upon coast defense and mine-laying, in the English Admiralty.”

Lessingham laughed shortly.

“That,” he declared, “is perfectly absurd.”

“It is,” Hayter repeated, with emphasis, “the precise truth. Sir Henry

Cranton's fishing excursions are myths. He is simply transferred from

his fishing boat on to one of a little fleet of so-called mine sweepers,

from which he conducts his operations. Nearly every one of the most

important towns on the east coast are protected by minefields of his

design.”

Lessingham was dumbfounded. His companion's manner was singularly

convincing.

“But how could Sir Henry or any one else keep this a secret?” he

protested. “Even his wife is scarcely on speaking terms with him because

she believes him to be an idler, and the whole neighbourhood gossips

over his slackness.”

“The whole neighbourhood is easily fooled,” Hayter retorted. “There are

one or two who know, however.”

“There are one or two,” Lessingham observed grimly, “who are beginning

to suspect me.”

“That is a pity,” Hayter admitted, “because it will be necessary for you

to return to Dreymarsh at once.”

“Return to Dreymarsh at once? But Cranston is away. There is nothing for

me to do there in his absence.”

“He will be back on Wednesday or Thursday night,” was the confident

reply. “He will bring with him the plan of his latest defenses of a town

on the east coast, which our cruiser squadron purpose to bombard. We

must have that chart.”

Lessingham listened in mute distress.

“Could you possibly get me relieved?” he begged. “The fact is--”

“We could not, and we will not,” Hayter interrupted fiercely. “Unless

you wish me to denounce you at home as a renegade and a coward, you will

go through with the work which has been allotted to you. Your earlier

mistakes will be forgiven if that chart is in my hands by Friday.”

“But how do you know that he will have it?” Lessingham protested.

“Supposing you are right and he is really responsible for the minefields

you speak of, I should think the last thing he would do would be to

bring the chart back to Dreymarsh.”

“As a matter of fact, that is precisely what he will do,” Hayter assured

his listener. “He is bringing it back for the inspection of one of the

commissioners for the east coast defense, who is to meet him at his

house. And I wish to warn you, too, Maderstrom, that you will have very

little time. For some reason or other, Cranston is dissatisfied with the

secrecy under which he has been compelled to work, and has applied

to the Admiralty for recognition of his position. Immediately this is

given, I gather that his house will be inaccessible to you.”

Lessingham sat, his arms folded, his eyes fixed upon the fire. His

thoughts were in a turmoil, yet one thing was hatefully clear. Cranston

was not the unworthy slacker he had believed him to be. Philippa's whole

point of view might well be changed by this discovery--especially now

that Cranston had made up his mind to assert himself for his wife's

sake. There was an icy fear in his heart.

“You understand,” Hayter persisted coldly, “what it is you have to do?”

“Perfectly. I shall return by the afternoon train,” was the despairing

reply.

“If you succeed,” Hayter continued, “I shall see that you get the usual

acknowledgment, but I will, if you wish it, ask for your transfer to

another branch of the service. I am not questioning your patriotism or

your honour, Maderstrom, but you are not the man for this work.”

“You are right,” Lessingham said. “I am not.”

“It is not my affair,” Hayter proceeded, “to enquire too closely into

the means used by our agents in carrying out our designs. That I find

you in London in company with the wife of the man whom you are appointed

to watch, may be a fact capable of the most complete and satisfactory

explanation. I ask no questions. I only remind you that your country,

even though it be only your adopted country, demands from you, as from

all others in her service, unswerving loyalty, a loyalty uninfluenced by

the claims of personal sentiment, duty, or honour. Have I said enough?”

“You have said as much as it is wise for you to say,” Lessingham

replied, his voice trembling with suppressed passion.

“That is all, then,” the other concluded. “You know where to send

or bring the chart when you have it? If you bring it yourself, it

is possible that something which you may regard as a reward, will be

offered to you.”

Lessingham rose a little wearily to his feet. His farewell to Hayter was

cold and lifeless.

He left the hotel and started on his homeward way, struggling with a

sense of intolerable depression. The streets through which he passed

were sombre and unlit.

A Zeppelin warning, a few hours before, had driven the people to their

homes. There was not a chink of light to be seen anywhere. An intense

and gloomy stillness seemed to brood over the deserted thoroughfares.

Nightbirds on their way home flitted by like shadows. Policemen lurked

in the shadows of the houses. The few vehicles left crawled about with

insufficient lights. Even the warning horns of the taxicab men sounded

furtive and repressed. Lessingham, as he marched stolidly along, felt

curiously in sympathy with his environment. Hayter's news brought him

face to face with that inner problem which had so suddenly become the

dominant factor in his life. For the first time he knew what love was.

He felt the wonder of it, the far-reaching possibilities, the strange

idealism called so unexpectedly into being. He recognized the vagaries

of Philippa's disposition, and yet, during the last few days, he had

convinced himself that she was beginning to care. Her strained relations

with her husband had been, without a doubt, her first incentive towards

the acceptance of his proffered devotion. Now he told himself with eager

hopefulness that some portion of it, however minute, must be for his own

sake. The relations between husband and wife, he reminded himself, must,

at any rate, have been strained during the last few months, or Cranston

would never have been able to keep his secret. In his gloomy passage

through this land of ill omens, however, he shivered a little as he

thought of the other possibility--tortured himself with imagining what

might happen during her revulsion of feeling, if Philippa discovered the

truth. A sense of something greater than he had yet known in life seemed

to lift him into some lofty state of aloofness, from which he could

look down and despise himself, the poor, tired plodder wearing the heavy

chains of duty. There was a life so much more wonderful, just the other

side of the clouds, a very short distance away, a life of alluring and

passionate happiness. Should he ever find the courage, he wondered, to

escape from the treadmill and go in search of it? Duty, for the last two

years, had taken him by the hand and led him along a pathway of shame.

He had never been a hypocrite about the war. He was one of those who had

acknowledged from the first that Germany had set forth, with the sword

in her hand, on a war of conquest. His own inherited martial spirit had

vaguely approved; he, too, in those earlier days, had felt the sunlight

upon his rapier. Later had come the enlightenment, the turbulent waves

of doubt, the nightmare of a nation's awakening conscience, mirrored in

his own soul. It was in a depression shared, perhaps, in a lesser

degree by millions of those whose ranks he had joined, that he felt this

passionate craving for escape into a world which took count of other

things.