Literature · Romance

That Which Hath Wings 1

That Which Hath Wings (part 1)

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*THAT WHICH HATH WINGS*

A NOVEL OF THE DAY

RICHARD DEHAN

AUTHOR OF "THE DOP DOCTOR," "BETWEEN TWO THIEVES," ETC.

"For a bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall tell the matter."--ECCLESIAS. x., 20.

S. B. GUNDY TORONTO

The Knickerbocker Press, New York

THESE LEAVES IN DEAR REMEMBRANCE FOR YOUR GRAVE ACROSS THE SEA.

SIDMOUTH, DEVON, January, 1918.

*CONTENTS*

CHAPTER

I.--PRESENTS TWO YOUNG PEOPLE II.--DAME NATURE INTERVENES III.--FAIR ROSAMOND'S CHOICE IV.--RAYMOND OF THE S. AE. F. V.--THE BIRD OF WAR VI.--SHERBRAND VII.--THE CONSOLATRIX VIII.--MONSEIGNEUR IX.--SIR THOMAS ENTERTAINS X.--A SUPERMAN XI.--PATRINE SAXHAM XII.--THE GATHERING OF THE STORM XIII.--THE SUPERMAN XIV.--A PARIS DANCE-GARDEN XV.--THE BITE IN THE KISS XVI.--THE WIND OF JOY XVII.--INTRODUCES AN OLD FRIEND XVIII.--SAXHAM PAYS XIX.--BAWNE XX.--THE MODERN HIPPOCRATES XXI.--MARGOT LOOKS IN XXII.--MARGOT IS SQUARE XXIII.--A MODERN CLUB XXIV.--DISILLUSION

XXV.--THREE MEN IN A CAR XXVI.--A PAIR OF PALS XXVII.--SIR ROLAND TELLS A STORY XXVIII.--THE GOD FROM THE MACHINE XXIX.--A SECRET MISSION XXX.--THE REAPING XXXI.--VON HERRNUNG BAITS THE HOOK XXXII.--ADVENTURE IN THE AIR XXXIII.--BAWNE LEARNS THE TRUTH XXXIV.--THE BROWN SATCHEL XXXV.--NUMBER EIGHTEEN XXXVI.--HUE AND CRY XXXVII.--PATRINE CONFESSES XXXVIII.--THE REBOUND XXXIX.--A NIGHT IN JULY XL.--MACROMBIE IS SACKED XLI.--SAXHAM LIES XLII.--SAXHAM BREAKS THE NEWS XLIII.--THE PLUNDERED NEST XLIV.--PATRINE REMEMBERS XLV.--FLOTSAM FROM THE NORTH SEA XLVI.--AT NORDEICH WIRELESS XLVII.--THE MAN OF "THE DAY" XLVIII.--PATRINE IS ENGAGED

XLIX.--THE WAR CLOUD BREAKS L.--THE EVE OF ARMAGEDDON LI.--THE INWARD VOICE LII.--KHAKI LIII.--FRANKY GOES TO THE FRONT LIV.--OFFICIAL RETICENCE LV.--NEWS OF BAWNE LVI.--LA BRABANCONNE LVII.--THE BELGIAN WIFE LVIII.--SHERBRAND BUYS THE LICENCE LIX.--THE WOE-WAVE BREAKS LX.--KULTUR!

LXI.--LYNETTE DREAMS LXII.--WOUNDED FROM THE FRONT LXIII.--BAWNE FINDS A FRIEND LXIV.--AT SEASHEERE LXV.--GOOD-BYE, DEAR LOVE, GOOD-BYE! LXVI.--MORE KULTUR LXVII.--THE QUESTION LXVIII.--THE DEVIL-EGG LXIX.--A MENACE; AND GOOD NEWS LXX.--A LOVER'S JOURNEY LXXI.--LIVING AND DEAD LXXII.--LOVE THAT HAS WINGS

*That Which Hath Wings*

*CHAPTER I*

*PRESENTS TWO YOUNG PEOPLE*

In January, 1914, Francis Athelstan Sherbrand, Viscount Norwater, only son of that fine old warrior, General the Right Honourable Roger Sherbrand, V.C., K.C.B., first Earl of Mitchelborough, married Margot Mountjohn, otherwise known as "Kittums," and found that she was wonderfully innocent--for a girl who knew so much.

It was a genuine love-match, Franky being a comparatively poor Guardsman, with only two thousand a year in addition to his pay as a Second Lieutenant in the Royal Bearskins Plain, and Margot a mere Cinderella in comparison with heiresses of the American canned-provision and cereal kind.

It had seemed to Franky, standing with patent-leathered feet at the Rubicon dividing bachelorhood from Benedictism, that all his wooing had been done at Margot's Club. True, he had actually proposed to Margot at the Royal Naval and Military Tournament of the previous June, and Margot, hysterical with sheer ecstasy, as the horses gravely played at push-ball, had pinched his arm and gasped out:

"Yes, but don't take my mind off the game just now; these dear beasts are so heavenly! ..."

And theatres, film-picture-shows and variety halls, race-meetings, receptions, balls and kettledrums, polo and croquet-clubs, had fostered the courtship of Franky and Margot; but all their love-making had been carried out to the accompanying hum of conversation and the tinkle of crystal and silver-plate in the dining-room of the "Ladies' Social," where Margot had her favourite table in the glass-screened corner by the fire-place; or in the circular smoking-room with the Persian divan and green-glass dome, that Margot had given the Club on her nineteenth birthday; or in the boudoir belonging to the suite she had decorated for herself on the condition that no other member got the rooms if Margot wanted them, which Margot nearly always did....

There was a big, rambling, ancient red-brick Hall, stone-faced in the Early Jacobean manner, standing with its rare old gardens and glass-houses, lawns and shrubberies, about it, within sight and sound of the Channel, amidst pine and beech-woods carpeted with bilberry-bushes, heathery moors, and coverts neck-high in July with the Osmunda regalis fern. The Hall belonged to Margot, though you never found her there except for a week or two in September and three days at Christmas-tide. The first fortnight with the birds was well enough, but those three days at Christmas marked the limit. Of human endurance Margot meant, possibly. She never vouchsafed to explain.

She also possessed a house in town, but just as her deceased father's spinster sister lived at the Hall in Devonshire, so did her dead mother's brother Derek, with his collection of European moths and butterflies and other Lepidoptera, inhabit the fine old mansion in Hanover Square. Devonshire at Christmas marked the limit of dulness, but Hanover Square all the London season through beat the band for sheer ghastly boredom.... Not that there were any flies on little old London.... Paris and Ostend were ripping places, and you could put in a clinking good time at Monte Carlo.... Margot had tried New York and liked it, except for the place itself, which made you think of illustrations to weird Dunsany legends in which towering temples climb up unendingly upon each other into black star-speckled skies. But the Club and London, with Unlimited Bridge and Tango, constituted Margot's idea of earthly happiness. She never had dreamed of marrying anybody--until Franky had arrived on the scene.

Perhaps you can see Franky, with the wholesome tan of the Autumn Manoeuvres yet upon him. Twenty-seven, well-made and muscular, if with somewhat sloping shoulders and legs of the type that look better in Bedford cords and puttees, or leathers and hunting-tops, than in tweed knickers and woollen stockings, or Court knee-breeches and silks. Observe his well-shaped feet and slight strong hands with pointed fingers, like those of his ancestors, painted by Vandyke; his brown eyes--distinctly good if not glowing with the fire of intellect, his forehead too steep and narrow; his moustache of the regulation tooth-brush kind, adorning the upper-lip that will not shut down firmly over his white, rather prominent, front teeth. Cap the small rounded skull of him with bright brown hair, brushed and anointed to astonishing sleekness, dress him in the full uniform of a Second Lieutenant in the Bearskins Plain, and you have Franky on his wedding-day.

Photographs of the happy couple published in the Daily Wire, the Weekly Silhouette, the Lady's Dictatorial, and the Photographic Smile, hardly do the bridegroom justice. In that without the busby his features are fixed in a painful grin, while in the other there are no features at all. But Margot--Margot in a hobble-skirt of satin and chiffon, with a tulle turban-veil, starred with orange-flowers in pearls and diamonds, and a long serpent-tail train of silver brocade, hung from her shoulders by ropes of pearls, was "almost too swee," to quote Margot's Club friends. Search had been made, amongst the said friends, many of whom were married, for a pair of five-year-old pages to carry the bride's train; but there being, for some reason, a dearth of babies among Margot's wedded intimates, the idea had to be given up.

The wedding was quite the prettiest function of the season. The eight bridesmaids walked in moss-green crepe de Chine veiled with silver-spotted chiffon. On their heads were skull-caps of silver tissue, each having a thirty-inch-high aigrette supported by a thin bandeau of gold, set with crystals and olivines, the gift of the bride.... Their stockings were of white lace openwork, the left knee of each being clasped by the bridegroom's souvenir, a garter of gold, crystal, and olivines. Silver slippers with four-inch heels completed the ravishing effect.

O Perfect Love! was sung before the Bishop's Address, and the ceremony concluded with The Voice that Breathed and Stainer's Sevenfold Amen. The bridal-party passed down the nave to the strains of the Wedding Chorus from Lohengrin. And there was a reception at the Werkeley Square house of one of the dearest of Margot's innumerable dearest friends, and the happy pair left in their beautiful brand-new Winston-Beeston touring car en route for the old red-brick Hall in Devonshire. Decidedly the honeymoon might have been termed ideal--and four subsequent months of married life proved tolerably cloudless--until Fate sent a stinging hailstorm to strip the roses from the bridal bower.

An unexpected, appalling, inevitable discovery was made in Paris in the Grande Semaine, at the end of the loveliest of June seasons. It utterly ruined--for two people--the Day of the Grand Prix, that marks the climax of the Big Week, when the Parisian coaching-world tools its four-in-hands to Longchamps Racecourse, and the smartest, richest, and gayest people, mustered from every capital of Europe, parade under the chestnut-trees that shade the sunny paddock, to display or criticise the creations of the greatest couturiers.

Margot had put on an astonishing gown for the occasion.... You will recall that the summer dress designs of 1914 were astonishing; the autumn modes promised to be even more so, according to Babin, Touchet, and the Brothers Paillot. Skirts--already as short and as narrow as possible--were to be even narrower; the Alpha and Omega of perfection would be represented by the Amphora Silhouette. And Margot, revolving before her cheval-glass in a sheath of jonquil-coloured silk lisse, embroidered with blue-and-green beetle-wings, found--to her horror and consternation----

Shall one phrase it that Dame Nature, intent upon her essential, unfashionable business of reproduction, was at variance with Madame Fashion re the Amphora Silhouette? The slender shape was not yet spoilt, but long before the autumn came, no art would mask the wealthy curves of its maternity.

*CHAPTER II*

*DAME NATURE INTERVENES*

"I can't bear it!--I won't bear it!" Margot reiterated. With her tumbled hair, swollen eyes, pink uptilted nose, and the little mouth and chin that quivered with each sobbing breath intaken, she looked absurdly babyish for her twenty years, as she vowed that wild horses shouldn't drag her to Longchamps, and railed against the injustice of Fate.

"None of my married friends have had such rotten luck!" she asserted. She stamped upon the velvety carpet and flashed at Franky a glance of imperious appeal. "Not Tota Stannus, or Cynthia Charterhouse, or Joan Delabrand, or anybody! Then, why me? That's what I want to know? After all the mascots I've worn and carried about with me.... Gojo and Jollikins and the jade tree-frog, and the rest! ... Every single one given me by a different woman who'd been married for years and never had a baby! This very day I'll smash the whole lot!"

"By the Great Brass Hat! ..."

Franky exploded before he could stop himself, and laughed until the tears coursed down. So "Gojo," the black velvet kitten, and "Jollikins," the fat, leering, naked thing that sat and squinted over its pot-belly at its own huge, shapeless feet, and all the array of gadgets and netsukis crowding Margot's toilette-table and secretaire, down to "Pat-Pat," the bog-oak pig, and "Ti-Ti," the jade tree-frog, were so many insurances against the Menace of Maternity. By Jove! women were regular children.... And Margot ... Nothing but a baby, this poor little Margot--going, in spite of Jollikins and Gojo, to have a baby of her own.

"What is one to believe? Whom is one to trust in? ..."

"'Trust in.' ... My best child, you don't mean that you believed those women when they told you that such twopenny gadgets could work charms of--that or any other kind?"

"Indeed, indeed they do! Tota Stannus was perfectly serious when she came to my boudoir one night at the Club, about a week before our--the wedding.... She said--I can hear her now; 'Well, old child, you're to be married on Wednesday, and of course you know the ropes well enough not to want any tips from me.... Still----'"

"That wasn't overwhelmingly flattering," Franky commented, "from a married woman twice your age. What else did she say?"

"She said I must be aware," went on Margot, "that a woman who wanted to keep her friends and her figure, simply couldn't afford to have kids."

"And you----"

Franky no longer battled with the grin that would have infuriated Margot. Something had wiped it from his face.

"I said she was frightfully kind, but that I was quite well-posted--everything was O.K., and she needn't alarm herself.... And she said, 'Oh! if you've arranged things with Franky, jolly sensible of him! Too often a man who is open and liberal-minded before marriage develops gerontocracie afterwards, don't you know? ...' And I told her that you were the very reverse of narrow-minded--and she kissed me and wished me happiness, and went away. And the maid knocked later on to say Mrs. Stannus sent her apologies for having forgotten to leave her little gift. And the little gift was, Jollikins. And my special pals joined in to stand me a farewell dinner, and they drowned my enamel Club badge in a bowl of Maraschino punch, and fished it up and gave me this diamond and enamel one, mounted as a tie-brooch, instead. And every married woman brought me a mascot.... I had Gojo from Joan Delabrand, and Ti-Ti from Cynthia Charterhouse, and the jade tree-frog from Patrine Saxham, and the carved African bean from Rhona Helvellyn, and----"

Franky objected:

"Neither Patrine Saxham nor Rhona Helvellyn happen to be married women!"

"Perhaps not; but Patrine is an Advanced Thinker, and Rhona Helvellyn is a Militant Suffragist."

Franky commented:

"As for Suffragists, that Club of yours is stiff with 'em. Gassing about their Cause.... I loathe the noisy crowd!"

"Then you loathe me! I share their convictions!" Margot proclaimed. "I hold the faith that Woman's Day will dawn with the passing of the Bill that gives us the Vote...."

"My best child, you wouldn't know what to do with the Vote if you had it."

Margot retorted:

"I cannot expect my husband to treat me as a reasonable being while the State classes his wife with infants and imbeciles."

It will be seen that a very pretty squabble was on the point of developing. Fortunately, at this juncture a valet of the chambers knocked at the door to say that a waiter from the restaurant begged to know whether Milord and Miladi would take lunch a la carte, or prefer something special in their own apartments?

"Tell him no!" wailed Miladi, to the unconcealed consternation of Milord, who had a healthy appetite.

"Must keep up your pecker--never say die!" Franky, stimulated by the pangs of hunger, developed an unsuspected talent for diplomacy. "Look here! We must talk over things quietly and calmly. I'll order a taxi, and we'll chuff to that jolly little restaurant in the Bois de Boulogne--where you can grub in the open air under a rose-pergola--and order something special and odd----"

Since Eve's day, this lure has never failed to catch a woman. Margot began to dry her eyes. Then she asked Franky to ring.

"Three times, please.... That's for Pauline; I want another handkerchief."

"Have two or three while you're about it," advised Franky, obeying, returning, and perching on the arm of the settee. "And bathe your eyes a bit, have a swab-over of the pinky cream-stuff, and a dab of powder." He brushed some pale mealy traces from his right-arm sleeve and coat-lapel, ending, "And put on your swankiest hat and come along to Nadier's."

"Could we get anything to eat at Nadier's that we couldn't get here--or in London, at the Tarlton or the Rocroy? ..."

"Stacks of things! For instance--Canard a la presse.... They squeeze the juice out of the duck, you twig, with a silver kind of squozzer, and cook it on a chafing-dish under your nose. Look here! ..." Franky, now desperate, produced his watch. "All the cushiest little tables will be taken if you don't look sharp."

"Not on the day of the Grand Prix!"

Franky retorted, spurred to maddest invention by the pangs of hunger:

"My best child, there are about a hundred thousand wealthy Americans in Paris who don't care a red cent about racing, while with most of 'em--to eat canard a la presse at Nadier's in the Bois de Boulogne in the June season--is a--kind of religious rite!"

So Margot disappeared to dab her eyes and apply the prescribed touches of perfumed cream and powder, and duly reappeared, crowned with the most marvellous hat that ever promenaded the ateliers of the Maison Blin on the head of a milliner's mannequin.

You are to imagine the tiny thing and her Franky seated--not in one of the smart automobiles that wait for hire outside Spitz's, but in a little red taxi, borne along with the broad double stream of traffic of every description that ceaselessly roared east and west under the now withering red-and-white blossoms of the chestnut-trees of the Avenue of the Champs Elysees, inhaling the stimulating breezes--flavoured with hot dust and petrol, Seine stink, sewer-gas, coffee, patchouli, fruit, Regie tobacco and roses--of Paris in the end of June.

All the world and his wife might be at Longchamps, but here were people enough and to spare. Luxurious people in costly automobiles or carriages drawn by shiny high-steppers. People in little public taxis, men and women on motor-bicycles and the human-power kind. People of all stamps and classes, clustered like bees outside the big, smelly, top-heavy auto-buses, soon to vanish from the Paris avenues and boulevards, with the red and yellow and green-flagged taxis, to play their part in the transport and nourishment of the Army of France. People of all ranks and classes on foot, though as of old the midinette with her big cardboard bandbax, the military cadet, or the student of Art or Medicine, the seminarist and the shaggy-haired and bearded man with the deadly complexion, the slouch hat, the aged paletot and the soiled and ragged crimson necktie that distinguish the milder breed of Anarchist, made up the crowd upon the sidewalks, liberally peppered with the sight-seeing stranger of British, American, or Teuton nationality--the brilliantly-complexioned, gaily-plumaged, loudly-perfumed lady of the pavements; the gendarme and the National Guard, and--with Marie or Jeannette proudly hanging on his elbow--Rosalie in her black-leather scabbard dangling by his side, his crimson kepi tilted rakishly--the blue-coated, red-trousered French infantryman, the poilu whom we have learned to love.

The Bois was not seething with fashionable life as it would be towards the sunset hour. The dandy Clubmen, the smart ladies, had gone to Longchamps with the four-in-hands. Polo was going on near the Pont de Suresnes, the band of a regiment of Cuirassiers was playing in the Jardin d'Acclimatation, and Hungarian zithers and violins discoursed sweet music on a little gilded platform at the axial point of Nadier's open-air restaurant--which is shaped like a half-wheel, with pergolas of shower-roses and Crimson Ramblers radiating from the gilded band-stand to the outer circle of little white tables at which one can lunch or dine in fine weather under a light screen of leaves and blossoms, beneath which the green canvas awnings can be drawn when it comes on to rain.

The tables were crowded with French people taking late dejeuner, and English, Germans, and German-Americans having lunch. The gravelled courtyard before the terrace was packed with showy automobiles.

If canard a la presse did not grace the meal supplied to Franky and Margot on Nadier's terrace, the potage printaniere and ecrevisses and a blanquette d'agneau were exquisitely cooked and served. Asparagus and a salad of endive followed, and by the time they had emptied a bottle of Chateau Yquem and the omelette soufflee had given place to Peches Melba, Margot had smiled several times and laughed once.

She was so dainty and sweet, so brilliant a little human humming-bird, that the laughing, chattering, feasting crowd of smartly or extravagantly dressed people gathered about the other trellis-screened tables under Nadier's rose-pergola sent many a curious or admiring glance her way. And Franky was very proud of his young wife, and theirs had been undeniably a love-match; yet in spite of the good dishes and the excellent Chateau Yquem, little shivers of chilly premonition rippled over him from time to time. He had got to speak out--definitely decline, in the interests of Posterity, to permit interference on the part of Margot's Club circle in his private domestic affairs.... How to do it effectively yet inoffensively was a problem that strained his brain-capacity. Yet--again in the interests of Posterity--Franky had never previously interested himself in Posterity--the thing had to be done. He refused Roquefort, buttered a tiny biscuit absently, put it down undecidedly, and as the waiter whisked his plate away--conjured crystal bowls of tepid rose-water and other essentials from space, and vanished in search of dessert--he spoke, assuming for the first time in his five months' experience of connubial life the toga of marital authority.

"I think, do you know, Kittums"--Kittums was Margot's pet name--"that it will be best to face the music!"

"Connu!" Margot shrugged a little, widely opening her splendid brown eyes, "But what music?"

"The"--Franky took the plunge--"the cradle-music, if you will have it!"

Margot's gasp of dismay, and the indignant fire of a stare that was quenched in brine, awakened Franky to the fact of his having failed in tactics. The return of the waiter with a pyramid of superb strawberries and a musk-melon on cracked ice alone stemmed the outburst of the pent-up flood of reproach. Entrenched behind the melon, Franky waited. The waiter again effaced himself, and Margot said from behind another handkerchief:

"Oh, how could you! ... I never dreamed that I should live to hear you speak to me in that way."

Over the melon, whose rough green quartered rind had delicate white raised traceries all over it, suggesting outline maps of countries in Fairyland, Franky curiously regarded his wife. He said:

"Why are you and all your friends so funky of--what's only a natural phe--what do you call it? ... What do men and women marry for, if it isn't to have--children? ... Perhaps you'll answer me?"

"What do people marry for?" Margot regarded him indignantly over the neglected pyramid of luscious, tempting strawberries, "To--to be happy together--to have a clinking time!" Her voice shook. "And this is to be a gorgeous season. Balls--balls! right on from now to the end of July--then from the autumn all through winter. Period Costume Balls, reviving the modes, music, and manners of Ancient Civilisations--Carthagenian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Gothic--got up and arranged by the Committees of the Cercle Moderne, here in Paris, and in London by the New Style Club.... Tony Guisseguignol and Paul Peigault and their set are busy designing the dresses and decorations--nothing like them will ever have been seen! And--Peigault says--Tango and the Maxixe are to be chucked to the little cabbages. A new dance is coming from Sao Paulo that will simply wipe them out.... And now--just when I was looking forward--when everything was to have been so splendid----"

The shaking voice choked upon a note of anguish. Franky had picked up the melon, quite unconsciously, and was balancing it. At this juncture he gripped the green globe with both hands, and said, summoning all his courage to meet the agonised appeal of Margot's tear-drenched eyes:

"Look here. This is--strict Bridge.... Do you loathe 'em--the kiddies--so horribly that the idea of having any is hateful to you? Or is it--not only the--the veto it puts on larking and kickabout and--the temporary disfigurement--you're afraid of--but the--the--the inevitable pain?" He glanced round cautiously and looked back again at his wife, saying in a low voice: "Nobody's listening.... Tell me frankly...." He waited an instant, and then said in an urgent whisper. "Answer me! ... For God's sake, tell the frozen truth, Margot!"

*CHAPTER III*

*FAIR ROSAMOND'S CHOICE*

The terrace under Nadier's roses--dotted with little tables covered with napery, silver, crystal, and china, surrounded with laughing, chattering feasters--the terrace was no longer a scene out of a comedy of the lighter side of Parisian life.... Tragedy, pale and awe-inspiring in her ink-black mantle and purple chiton, had stepped across the gravel in her gold-buckled leather buskins, to offer to the girlish bride--a piece of human porcelain, prinked in the height of the fashion, and lovely--with her wild-rose cheeks and little uptilted nose, her floss-silk hair and wide, dark, lustrous deer-eyes--Fair Rosamond's choice, the dagger or the bowl....

"Yes--yes.... It is the ugliness of the thing! ..." The little mouth was pulled awry as though it had sipped of verjuice. The tiny hands knotted themselves convulsively, and the colour fled in terror from her face. "The grotesque ugliness.... And the"--the last two words came as though a pang had wrung them from the pale lips--"the pain--the awful pain! And besides--my mother died when I was born!" Margot's voice was a fluttering, appealing whisper; her great eyes were dilated and wild with terror. "Perhaps that is why I am so deadly afraid"--she caught her breath--"but there are heaps, heaps, heaps of married women who fear--that--equally! And they arrange to escape it--I don't know how! ... For I knew--nothing--when I married you! ..." She lifted her great eyes to Franky's, and he realised that it had been so, actually. "I've been ashamed ever to confess that I was--ignorant about these things! ... I've talked a language--amongst other women--that I didn't understand! ..."

There are moments when even the shallow-brained become clairvoyant. Franky's love for her made him see clear. He looked back down the vista of Margot's twenty years of existence, and saw her the motherless daughter of a self-absorbed, cultivated, Art-loving valetudinarian, who habitually spent the chillier part of each year in ranging from French to Italian health-resorts, occupying the spring with Art in Paris--returning to London for June and July, generally spending August and September in Devonshire--to take flight Southwards before the migrating swallows, at the first chill breath of October frosts.

Margot had been educated at home, down in Devonshire, by a series of certificated female tutors. The spinster aunt, the younger sister of her father, extended to her niece for a liberal remuneration a nominal protection and an indifferent care.... And Mr. Mountjohn had died when the girl was sixteen, leaving her unconditionally heiress to his considerable fortune, and the aunt had let Margot have her head in every imaginable way. She had allowed her to take up her residence at the "Ladies' Social" Club three years subsequently, on the sole condition that a responsible chaperon accompanied Margot to Society functions. Hence, Mrs. Ponsonby Rewes, the irreproachable widow of a late King's Messenger, was evoked from Kensington Tower Mansions upon these occasions--by telephone--to vanish when no longer wanted, in the discreetest and most obliging way.

"Poor little Margot! .... Poor little woman!..." Franky could see how it all had happened by the wild light of the great deer-eyes, so like those in the portrait of the girl's dead mother--half Irish, half Greek by birth.

While Franky reflected, the tables had been emptying. People were hurrying away to hear the band of the Jardin d'Acclimatation or to fulfil other engagements of a seasonable kind. Some remained to smoke and gossip over liqueurs and coffee. The light blue wreaths of cigar and cigarette smoke curled up towards the awning overhead. Franky mechanically produced his own case and lighted up. And Margot, stretching a slender arm across the table, was saying:

"Give me one!--I've forgotten mine! ..."

"Ought you? ... Is it wise? ..." Franky was on the point of asking, but his good Angel must have clapped a hand before his mouth. He silently gave Margot a thick, masculine Sobranie and supplied a light; and as their young faces neared and the red spark glowed, and the first smoke-wreath rose between the approximating tubes of delicate tobacco-filled paper, his wife whispered as their eyes met:

"You're hurt! But now you know--you're sorry for me, aren't you?" It was a dragging, plaintive undertone, not at all like Margot's voice.

"Frightfully! All the more because"--Franky drew so hard at his cigarette that it burned one-sidedly--"I can't help being thundering--glad!"

"I--see! ..."

She breathed out the words with a thin stream of fragrant Turkish vapour crawling over her scarlet under-lip, it seemed to Franky, like a pale blue worm. And he bit through his Sobranie and threw it on his dessert-plate, saying desperately:

"Not yet. Will you listen quietly to what I've got to say?"

She nodded. Franky launched himself upon the tide of revelation. Nearly everybody who had been eating when he had come into Nadier's with Margot had got up and gone away. And the Cuirassiers band was playing the love-music from Samson et Dalila on the terrace of the Jardin d'Acclimatation, as melodiously as only a French military band can play.

"It's got to do with the Peerage. Only a Second Afghan War-Earldom dating from 1879--tacked on to the Viscounty they gave my great-grandfather after Badajos--but worth having in its way, or the Dad wouldn't have accepted it. And, naturally enough--I want a boy to take the Viscounty when I succeed my father, and have the Earldom when I've absquatulated, just as the kiddy'll want one when his own time comes."

Margot was burning a strawberry-leaf on her plate with her cigarette-end. She asked, impressing another little yellow scorched circle on the surface of rough green:

"Would it matter so very much if there wasn't any boy?"

Franky jumped and turned red to the white, unsunned circle left by the field-cap on the summit of his high forehead.

"It would matter--lots! For my Uncle Sherbrand, a younger brother of my father's, would come in for the Viscounty when I succeeded the dear old Dad. And my Uncle Sherbrand is a blackguard! Got cashiered in 1900, when he was an Artillery officer in a gun-testing billet at Wanwich. Kicked out of the Army--in War-time, mind you!--for not backing up his C.O. And the brute has got a son, too, an apprentice in an engine-shop, if he isn't actually a chauffeur. Probably the young fellow's respectable, and of course it ain't the pup's fault he's got such a sire. But my Dad would turn in his grave at the idea of being succeeded by the brother who disgraced him--and as for his grandfather--the jolly old cock 'ud bally well get up and dance, I should say.... So, you see, I can't--sympathise with you as you want me to do in this, darling! I want you to buck up and be cheerful, and face the music like a brick.... As for what you've told me--about your mother----" In spite of himself, Franky gulped, and little shiny beads of sweat stood upon his cheeks and temples. "That sort of thing doesn't run in families, like rheumatism"--he was getting idiotic--"or Roman noses! Be plucky--and everything will turn out all right. Can't possibly go wrong if we call in Saxham ... Saxham of 000, Harley Street--man my sister Trix simply swears by. Brought her boy Ronald into the world thirteen years ago, and successfully operated on him for appendicitis only the other day! ..."

Margot looked at Franky attentively and bent her head slightly. Had she understood? She must have.... Had she tacitly agreed? Of course....

*CHAPTER IV*

*RAYMOND OF THE S. AE. F.*

The Masculine Will had conquered. You had only to be firm with women--bless their hearts! and they caved directly.... Couldn't hold out.... Not built that way.... Franky's sternly-clamped upper-lip relaxed. He beamed as he proposed a noonday stroll in the Bois. In the direction of the bigger Lake, by one of the narrower avenues, or if Margot preferred a look-in at the Polo Club, another avenue, intersecting the Allee de Longchamps and skirting the enclosure of the Gun Club, would take them there in a jiffy, via Bagatelle.

Margot assented to the latter proposition, and, with a little flutter of the lips Franky accepted as a smile, reached for her egret stole, a filmy feathery thing she had removed on entering Nadier's, and drew on her long mousquetaire gloves and pulled down her veil of sunset chiffon, half shaded red, merging into jonquil yellow matching the shade of her marvellous gown. And Franky paid the bill in plump English sovereigns (invariably exchanged as good for louis of twenty francs by the suave and smiling waiter) and tipped the said waiter extravagantly, and took his hat from the second waiter (who invariably starts up by the side of the first when you are going) and tipped him, and got his stick from the third waiter (who came forward with this, and the en tout cas of Madame--a lovely thing in the latest dome-shape, of black net over jonquil colour, with a flounce, and an ivory stick, upon the top of which sat a green monkey in olivines, eating a ruby fruit), and lighted another cigarette, and returned the elaborate bow of the manager with a nod of the cheerful patronising order as he followed Margot through the Rambler-wreathed archway leading by a flight of shallow steps from Nadier's terrace to the wide carriage-sweep that links the broad Allee de Longchamps with the narrower Route de Madrid. And the towering plume of her astonishing hat brought down a shower of red rose-petals as she passed out before him--and Franky, with some of these on his top-hat-brim and others nestling in the front of his waistcoat, was irresistibly reminded of their wedding-day.

Unconsciously, Franky and Margot quitted the broader, more frequented avenue, crowded with people in carriages, people in automobiles, people on motor-bicycles and bicyclettes, and followed narrower pathways, stretching between green lawns adorned with shrubberies and clumps of stately forest trees, and chiefly patronised by sweethearting couples, nursemaids in charge of children, children in domineering but affectionate charge of white-haired ladies, while venerable gentlemen dozed on rustic benches over the columns of Figaro or Paris Midi.

When even these figures became rare, it was borne in upon Franky that he and Margot were not upon a path that led to the Grounds of the Polo Club. Reluctantly, he admitted himself lost.

"Does it matter? ..." Margot's voice was weary. "If you're absolutely set on it, we could ask one of those men in cocked hats and waxed moustaches and red-and-yellow shoulder-cords to give us the straight tip. But I don't feel the least bit keen about the Polo Club any more than the Lakes. These alleys are quiet, and the grass is nice and green. I vote we go on."

"Madame cannot pass this way. It is not open for strangers."

A Republican Guard, a good-looking sous-officier, had spoken, comprehending the tone rather than the English words.

"Why not?" Margot's eyes suddenly brightened. She eagerly sniffed the air of the forbidden avenue. The corporal, indicating with his white-gloved hand other Republican Guards posted at equal distances down the prohibited alley, and at its intersection with another some two hundred yards distant, brought his eyes back to Margot to answer:

"Madame, for the reason that certain military operations are taking place here to-day."

"But my husband is an English officer--" Margot was beginning, when Franky, reddening to his hat-brim, exhorted her to be quiet, and the Republican Guard, civilly saluting, stepped upon the grass and moved away.

"All the same, you are an English officer," Margot persisted, "and what use is the Entente if that doesn't count?"

"Best child, don't be a giddy goose!" Franky implored her. "You don't suppose the Authorities care a bad tomato for an English Loot--what they'd cotton to would have to be a British Brass Hat of the very biggest kind. Look there!--more to your left, little battums!" He indicated yet other Republican cocked hats strung at equal distances down the length of a neighbouring alley, precisely outlining the farther border of the sandwich-shaped halfacre of greensward by which their particular avenue ran. "And there!" His professional eye had noted a big, grey-painted military motor-lorry, numbered, and lettered "S. Ae. F." Behind the driver's seat towered the slender T-shaped steel mast of a Field wireless, whose spidery aerials, pegged to the turf, were in charge of men in kepis and blue overalls, while a non-commissioned officer, wearing the telephone head-band of the operator, leaned on the elbow-rest of the tripod supporting the apparatus, his finger on the buzzer-key. Near him his clerk squatted, pencil and pad in readiness, while at a respectful distance from two oblong patches of white in the middle of the green plat of turf, several active upright figures in dark uniforms stood conversing, or walking to and fro.

"Officiers Aviateurs, telegraphists and mechanics of the French Service Aeronautique"--you are listening to Franky--"tremendously well-organised compared with our little footling Flying Corps, tinkered fourteen months ago out of the old Air Battalion of the R. E. These chaps are Engineers--goin' by the dark red double stripes on their overalls and their dark blue kepis. Some of their machines'll be out for practice. Despatch-droppin' or bombs. Here's a man with brass on his hat, coming our way.... Takes me for a German soger-orficer I shouldn't wonder!--lots of 'em get their clothes cut in Bond Street. But though you can hide Allemand legs in English trousers"--Franky was recovering his customary cheeriness--"and some of 'em do it uncommon cleverly--you can't deodorise an accent that hails from Berlin."

The officer approaching--a youthful, upright figure walking quickly, with the short, springy steps of a man much in the saddle--proved to be grey-haired and grey-moustached. The double-winged badge of his Service was embroidered in gold upon the right sleeve of his tunic, and upon the collar, a single wing in this case, ending in a star. He carried binoculars suspended from his neck by a rolled-leather thong, and a revolver in a black-leather case was attached to the belt about his middle. There was thick white dust upon the legs and uppers of his high polished black boots, which the grass had scoured from the toes and soles. His bright blue-grey eyes ran over Franky as the slight soldierly salute was exchanged. He said, speaking in excellent English:

"If Monsieur, the English officer, will obligingly mention his name, rank, and regiment, it might be possible to allow him to continue his promenade with Madame, the invention we are testing being the patent of his countryman, and already familiar to the Authorities at the British War Office."

Thus coerced, Franky produced his card, Margot dimpled into smiles, the polite officer saluted again, introduced himself as Raymond, Capitaine-Commandant pilot of the --th escadrille, wheeled and walked away. But he returned to say, this time directly addressing Margot:

"Should Madame la Vicomtesse desire to witness the test of her countryman's--apparatus, there can be no objection to her doing so. But that Madame should keep clear of the vicinity of the"--he pointed to the two oblong strips of white canvas adorning the middle of the expanse of green,--"the signal, intended for the guidance of the aviator, is of absolute necessity, Madame must understand!"

"There won't be any...?" Margot was beginning, nervously.

"Mais non, Madame. Pas d'explosion," the officer assured her, and stiffened to attention facing eastwards, and scanning the sky with eyes that blinked in the dazzling glare of early noon. For the droning whirr of a plane just then reached them, drowning the sign of the hot south breeze that rustled in the tops of the acacias and oaks, ilexes and poplars, that rose about the arena of open ground....

*CHAPTER V*

*THE BIRD OF WAR*

"The avion comes from Drancy." The speaker looked back at Margot as he focussed his binoculars. "It is not one of our Army machines, but a British monoplane built by your countryman and fitted with the invention whose usefulness we are here to test." He continued: "Should the officier-pilote in charge of the--apparatus--and who for the time being represents an enemy--succeed in poising"--he hesitated a bare instant--"for a stipulated number of moments over the target--those two lengths of white canvas approximating on the grass represent the target--he scores a bull's-eye."

He blinked a little, and before Franky's mental vision rose the aggregation of Government buildings near the Carrefour des Cascades, marked "Magazins et depots" on Baedeker's maps.

"He scores a bull's eye," resumed the speaker. "He has already paid one visit of the requisite duration to an address near the Porte d'Aubervilliers." Franky had a mental vision of the array of big, bloated gasometers pertaining to the Strasbourg Railway Yards. "He has made a similar call at a point indicated between the station of the Batignolles and the station of the Avenue de Clichy"--the well-preserved teeth of the officer showed under the grey moustache as he smiled, and Franky had another vision of the huge Gare aux Marchandises tucked in the angle between the Railway of the Geinture and the Western Railway lines, as the speaker went on suavely "and the target succeeding this will be the last. It is situated on the Champ de Manoeuvres at Issy. The wireless-telegraph operator of my escadrille informs me that two bull's eyes have already been registered--which for your countryman's invention presages well."

Franky, with British plumpness, queried:

"And the invention? Some new bomb-dropping device--planned to get rid of the way the engine always puts on 'em? If the English inventor-fellow has done that, his goods are worth buying, I should say!"

Raymond, Capitaine-Commandant, answered as the droning song from the sky grew louder:

"Of certainty, Monsieur, if his invention prove worth buying, my Government will undoubtedly purchase what has already been unavailingly offered to yours. It is our custom to examine and test, closely and exhaustively, new things that are offered. But what would you? We seek the best for France."

"He isn't flying his aeroplane himself, is he? Or working his own invention, whatever it may be?"

"But no, Madame! One of our* Officiers-Aviateurs* is acting as pilot, a skilled mechanic of our Service occupies the observer's place. Despite the Entente Cordiale--the happy relations prevailing between my country and England--it would hardly be convenable or discreet to permit even an Englishman"--the tone of graceful, subtle irony cannot be conveyed by pen or type--"even an Englishman to fly over Paris, or any other fortified city of France. But see! In the sky to the north-east--above that silvery puff of vapour--arrives now the avion built and christened by your countryman."

Margot asked, narrowing her beautiful eyes as she searched out the darkish speck upon the hot blue background:

"The plane, you mean. What does he call it?"

Raymond answered without removing his eyes from his binoculars:

"Madame, he calls it 'The Bird of War.'"

The tuff-tuff of a motor-cycle sounded faintly in the distance, as the resonant vibrating noise of the aeroplane came more triumphantly out of the hot blue sky. Save for a scintillating white reflection to the north that might have been the crystal dome of the great big Palm House in the Jardin d'Acclimatation, and that unavoidable, useful ugliness, the gilded lantern of the Tour Eiffel, thrusting up into the middle distance over the delicately-rounded masses of new foliage upon the right-hand looking east, the glory and shame and magnificence and squalor of the Queen City of Cities might have lain a hundred leagues away, so ringed-in by delicate austere brown of serried tree-trunks, rising above rich clumps of blossoming lilac, syringa, yellow azalea, and pink, mauve, and snowy rhododendron, was the spacious green arena wherein Franky and Margot were destined to play their part.

Now, followed by the wide-winged shadow that the sun of high noon threw almost directly beneath her, darkening drifting cloud, and open city spaces, passing over breasting tree-tops and wide stretches of municipal greensward, the Bird of War drew nearer and more near.... And glancing up as the portentous flying shadow suddenly blotted out the sunlight, Franky realised that the two-seater monoplane was hovering, and buzzing as she hovered, like a Brobdingnagian combination of kite-hawk, dragon-fly, and bumblebee.

He pulled out a pair of vest-pocket field-glasses and scanned her as she hung there, gleaming in the sunlight, at a height of perhaps five hundred feet above the white cloths on the grass. He could make out the Union Jack on her underwings, the huge black raking capitals of her name BIRD OF WAR painted on the side of the tapering canvas-covered fuselage, the diamond-shaped tail swaying between the pendant flaps of the huge triangular elevators, clearly as though these features had been filmed upon the screen. In a curious misty circle, spinning under the fuselage, he suspected lay the secret of her kite-like poise and hover, and behind his immaculate waistcoat he was sensible of a thrill.

If the English inventor had not solved the baffling Problem of Stability, he had come uncommonly near it, by the Great Brass Hat! And the dud-heads at Whitehall had shown the door to him and his invention. "Good Christmas!--how like 'em!" reflected Franky, lowering the glasses to chuckle, and looking round for Margot.

There she was, some twenty yards distant, planted right in the middle of the avenue, lost to the wide in rapt contemplation of the hovering aeroplane.

"Kitts!" he called, but she did not hear, or disdained to pay attention. He tried to call again, but his mouth dried up and his feet seemed rooted to the ground. For, swinging round the turf-banked corner of the avenue at its junction with another, charging at a terrific pace down upon the little brilliant creature, came a whity-brown figure on a motorcycle, the frantic honking of its horn and the racket of its engine's open throttle mingling deafeningly with the tractor's roar.

*CHAPTER VI*

*SHERBRAND*

The frantic honking of the pneumatic horn was lost in the crashing collision of earth and metal. Franky, pallid and damp with apprehension, reassured himself by a rapid glance that Margot was safe and sound. The aeroplane had ceased buzzing and hovering, headed southwards, and floated on, trailing her shadow, leaving the traces of her passage in a smear of brown earth indicating a vicious slash made by the right-side foot-rest of a motor-cycle in the greensward, conserved and sacred to the French Republic--the upset machine to which the foot-rest appertained, and an angry young man in dusty overalls, sitting in the middle of the raked-up avenue.

"You've had a spill! ..." Franky heard himself saying.

"Yes.... I have had a spill--thanks to that young lady!"

The dusty young man's tone was frankly savage; he regarded the brilliant little figure in the distance with a scowl of resentment as he gathered himself up from the gravel, and dabbed at a jagged, oozing cut on his prominent chin with a handkerchief of Isabella hue. "The brake-handle did that," he curtly explained, more for his own benefit than apologetic Franky's. But he looked full in the flushed and dewy countenance of Margot's lord as he added:

"If I'd killed her, a French jury would have found that she deserved it!--running like a corncrake across the avenue when I was scorching up at top speed! ..."

"I know," Franky stammered. "I--I see how it all happened. You had to steer slap into the bank--to save my--my wife's life. How can I apologise? ... You see, she was crazy about the aeroplane.... She'd been warned to keep well out of the way--you know what women are! ..."

"Oh, as to that! ..." The dusty young man, moving with a perceptible limp, went to the prone motor-cycle, stood it up on its bent stand with one twist of his big-boned wrist, and began to examine into its injuries. "Not much wrong," he said to himself, and straightened his back, and in the act of throwing a leg over the saddle, felt Franky's restraining grip upon his arm.

"You don't go until my wife has thanked you!" Franky's upper-lip was Rhadamanthine. "Margot!" he called, in a tone of authority such as he had never previously heard from his own mouth; "Come here at once, please! I want to speak to you!"

The fluttering little figure waved a hand to him. The gay little voice called back:

"Yes.... Oh!--but look at them! ... Can they be going? Why, I believe they are! ..."

The canvas strips had been rolled up by a mechanician of the Service Aeronautique, and stowed away behind the big grey telegraph-car, in the recesses of which the telescopic steel mast and aerials of the wireless had been snugly tucked away. The mechanics in kepis and overalls had stowed themselves away inside the camion; the wireless operator, a kepi having replaced his headband, was acting as chauffeur. And, occupying the front seat beside a junior officer, who piloted a second, smaller car, Raymond, Capitaine-Commandant pilot of the --th escadrille of France's Service Aeronautique gave the signal for departure with an upward wave of his hand. Then, with some sharp, staccato trills of a whistle and the double honk of a pneumatic horn, the car of the commandant turned and sped down the avenue, followed by the tractor-waggon; and both were lost to view.

"But--they're gone! ... And--and the aeroplane...." Margot gasped out the words in amazed discomfiture, sending her eyes after a dwindling shape beating down the sky to the southward, and straining her ears to catch the last of the tractor's whirring song.

"Nearly at Issy, I should calculate--travelling at eighty miles an hour. Impossible now to catch up with her in time to see her do the last stunt. Can choose my own pace for going, anyhow," said the motor-cyclist ruefully. "Nothing left to do but take the Bird over and fly her back to the Drancy hangar."

He tried to laugh, but his wrung face gave the lie to the plucky pretence of indifference. He went on, still doggedly mopping away at his bleeding chin:

"I was lucky in getting a hearing on this side of the Channel. The bigwigs at Whitehall simply referred me to the Superintendent of the Royal Aircraft Factory at Frayborough, and as I'd tried him twice already, I knew what he'd got to say. The Commander of the Central School of Military Aviation was a brick--I'll say that for him. He sent a French flying officer to look me up at Hendon, who got me in touch with the Inventions Bureau of their Service Aeronautique.... Well! the big test's over by this time. I shall know my fate in a week or two--or possibly in a year?"

"Oh! You don't mean----"

The horrified cry broke from Margot. Franky yelled:

"By the Great Brass Hat! ... You're the inventor! The whole thing was your show!"

"Yes, I'm the inventor," the tanned young man in the dusty overalls answered rather contemptuously: "What did you take me for? ... A French medical student having a joy-ride, or a commis voyageur?"

"Can't say. Never thought! ... Fact is--my wife had frightened me horribly. When your machine bore down on her--posted right in the middle of the gravel--I was scared stiff--give you my honour!--you might have sunk a brace of Dreadnoughts in the palms of my hands!"

Franky made this absurd statement with so sincere an air, and clinched it so effectually by displaying a lovely silk-cambric handkerchief in a state of soppy limpness, that the abrased inventor nearly laughed.

But his thick, silvery, fair eyebrows settled into a straight line across his tanned forehead. He said with a directness that seemed to belong to his lean, keen, hatchet-faced type:

"Once more, I am glad that no harm has happened to the lady. The delay caused by the--mishap can hardly have prejudiced my success. For all I know, the test of my hoverer may have favourably impressed the judges. If it has done otherwise I have no right to blame man, dog, or devil, for a failure that may be my own."

He lifted his goggled cap to Margot with a good air, pulled it down, and was in the act of lowering the visor, when Margot's voice arrested the big-boned hand. That voice Franky knew could be wonderfully coaxing. It pleaded now, soft as the sigh of a Mediterranean breeze:

"Whether the test is successful or isn't, will you promise that we shall hear from you? ..."

"Good egg!" joined in Franky. "Do let us know! ... We're stopping at the Spitz, Place Vendome." He warmed and grew expansive in the light of Margot's smile of approval. "Drop in on us there," he urged, "as soon as you've found out. Come and dine with us in any case.... No!--we're engaged to-night, but come and lunch at two sharp to-morrow, and tell us all about your hoverer over a bottle of Bubbly. Suite 10, Second Floor. Name of Norwater. Stick this away to remind you," he ended, tendering his card.

"You're awfully good. But at the same time I hardly----"

The voice broke off. A glance at the proffered pasteboard had dyed the inventor flaming scarlet from the collar of his dusty gabardine to the edges of his goggled cap. He dropped the card quietly upon the gravel, and said, looking Franky straight between the eyes:

"Even if I were able to accept I'd have to decline your invitation. My name's Sherbrand--I'm your Uncle Alan's son." He settled himself in the saddle and finished before he pulled up the starting-lever. "Understand--I'd no idea who you were until I saw the name on your card. It has been a queer encounter--I can't say a pleasant one. Let me end it by saying 'Good-day!' ..."

Franky's new-found cousin touched the goggled cap and pulled up the starting-lever. With the customary bang and snort, the motor-bicycle leaped away. Margot had uttered a little gasp at the moment of revelation. Now she turned great eyes of dismay on Franky, and withdrew them quickly. For Franky's eyes had become circular and poppy, his mouth tried to shape itself into a whistle, but his expression was merely vacuous. He continued to explode with "Great Snipe!" at intervals, as he and Margot made their way back to more populous avenues, chartered a fortuitously passing taxi, and were driven back via the Porte Dauphine to Spitz's gorgeous caravanserai in the Place Vendome, when Margot vanished into her own bower, sending her French maid to intimate to Milord that Miladi would take tea alone in that apartment, and did not intend to dine.

Thus Franky, relieved from duty, presently found himself, in company with a cigar, strolling bachelor-fashion through the streets of Paris. No very clear recollection stayed with him of how he spent the afternoon. At one time he found himself with his features glued against the plate-glass window of a celebrated establishment dedicated to the culture and restoration of feminine beauty, contemplating divers gilt wigs on stands--porcelain pots of marvellous unguents, warranted to eliminate wrinkles; sachets of mystic herbs to be immersed in baths; creams guaranteed to impart to the most exhausted skin the velvety freshness of infancy.

Later he strayed into a sunny, green-turfed public garden, full of white statues, sparkling fountains, and municipal seats whereon Burgundian, Dalmatian, and Alsatian wet-nurses dandled or rocked or nourished their infant charges, and bonnes or governesses presided over the gambols of older babies, who played with belled Pierrots, or toy automobiles, or inflated balls of gorgeous hues.

There is nothing profoundly moving in the sight of a stout, beribboned wet-nurse suckling her employer's infant. But into the company of these important hirelings came quite unconsciously a young working-woman in a shabby brown merino skirt and a blouse of white Swiss. Her shining black hair was uncovered to the sunshine. On one arm she carried a bouncing baby, on the other a basket containing cabbages and onions, and a flask of cheap red wine, which receptacle its owner, having taken the other end of the seat Franky occupied, set down between herself and the young man. She was a healthy, plump young woman with too pronounced a moustache for beauty. But when, having methodically turned the baby upside down to rearrange some detail of its scanty dress, she reversed it and bared her breast to the eager mouth, a strange thrill went through Franky. A dimness came before his vision, and it was as though those dimpled hands plucked at his heart. He suffered a sudden revulsion strange in a young man so modern, up-to-date, and beautifully tailored. He knew that he longed for a son most desperately. And the devil of it was--Margot did not.

*CHAPTER VII*

*THE CONSOLATRIX*

Thus, Franky got up and moved away, driven by the stinging cloud of thoughts that pursued and battened on him, and presently found himself following a stream of people up a flight of marble steps, and under an imposing portico that ended in a turnstile and a National Collection of Paintings and Sculptures.

Wandering through a maze of long skylighted galleries where the master-works of Modern Art are conserved and cherished, he was to encounter the thought that haunted him in a myriad of images, wrought by the chisel, the brush, the burin, and the graving-tool in marble or bronze, upon canvas or panel, in ivory, or silver, or enamel, or gold.

A sculptured Hagar mourning by the side of her dying Ishmael caught his eye as he entered the first gallery. Farther on, Eve after the Fall lifted the infant Cain to receive the kiss of Adam, homing to his shack of green branches at the end of the labouring day. And a shag-thighed, curly-horned Pan romped with a litter of sturdy bear-cubs, and medallions and panels of childhood were everywhere.

It was the same in the galleries devoted to painting. A Breton christening-party, depicted with the roughness that hides consummate mastery of technique, trudged along a snowy coast-road towards a little chapel near the seashore. The young mother in her winged starched cap and bodice of black velvet, yet pale from the ordeal of anguish, walked between her smiling gossips, carrying her new-born infant, chrysalis-like in its linen swaddlings, to be made into a good Christian by M. le Cure. And seated on a broken throne of red granite beneath the towering propylaeum of a ruined Egyptian temple, whose colonnades of lotus columns, and walls painted with processions of hierophants offering incense to bird or beast-headed deities, and bewigged dancers and musicians ministering to the pleasures of long-eyed kings, receded down long perspectives into distance, a Woman, young and slender and draped in a long blue cloak over a white robe, gazed downwards at a naked Child sleeping upon her knees. And about the downy temples of the Child shone a slender ring of mystic brightness, and another, more faint, haloed the chastely beautiful head of the Mother bending above.

Another canvas, austere and gorgeous, with the marvellous blues and emeralds and rich deep crimsons of old Byzantine ornament in relief against a background of dull tawny gold, showed the same maternal figure, far older and in darker draperies, seated upon a chair of wrought ivory upon a dais, looking outward and upward with deep eyes of unfathomable tenderness and sorrow, and pale hands lifted in supplication to that Heaven whither Her Son ascended after His Victory over Death. Across the knees of the Consolatrix Afflictorum a mourning mother lay prone and tearless. And at the feet of the Virgin, outstretched amidst the scattered petals of some fallen roses, you saw the nude, beautiful body of a male child of some three years old.

Spotted a mistake or have an idea?