The Parts Men Play Part 16

The soft chime of a clock downstairs sounded the pa.s.sing of another hour. Its murmuring echo died to a silence unbroken by any sound save that of the summer breeze playing about the eaves and towers of the house.

Minutes pa.s.sed. His thoughts blurred into the gathering shadows of sleep.

Of a sudden he was awake, his eyes staring into the dark, his whole body nervously, acutely, on the alert. He had heard a cry--of a nightjar--but so strange and eerie that it made him hold his breath.

The call was repeated. An owl answered with a creepy cry of alarm.

Selwyn muttered impatiently at the trick played upon him by his nerves, and turning over, was about to settle again to slumber, when he heard a door softly opening. Light footsteps pa.s.sed in the hall, stopping at each creaking board as though suspicious that some one might hear; then their sound was lost in the thick carpet of the stairway.

For a minute there was complete silence. He heard from below the cautious opening of the side-door leading to the lawn.

Wondering what mischief was on foot, he rose from his bed, and peering through the window, tried to penetrate the gloom. A sullen sky kept the stars imprisoned behind deep banks of clouds, and only the trees, by reason of their solid blackness, were discernible in the darkness of the night. Slipping on a dressing-gown, he stealthily left his room, and creeping downstairs, found the open door. Emerging on the lawn, he looked quickly about.

Beneath a near-by tree he saw a woman in white, and the figure of a man pleading for something. Suddenly Selwyn saw the woman take some article from around her neck and hand it to the man. The fellow took it, and seemed to be turning away, when, with a suppressed sob, she caught him in her arms, murmuring incoherent endearments through her tears.

The black scudding clouds left the sky-clear for a moment overhead--and Selwyn felt a contraction of pain in his heart.

The woman was Elise, and the man--her brother d.i.c.k.

CHAPTER X.

GATHERING SHADOWS.

I.

Breakfast at Roselawn was a studiously inconsequential meal. Places were set as usual by the servants, but the viands and the paraphernalia necessary for their preparation were placed on a separate table in the alcove by the great window overlooking the lawn. Having performed this duty, the servants did nothing more; but one could not help feeling that they were just outside the door, like a group of prompters, ready to render instantaneous a.s.sistance should the amateurs falter.

Lord Durwent made a kindly and efficient supervisor of the commissariat table, and--there was no question of it--could boil an egg with any one in the county. And the guests plying between the source of supply and the breakfast-table proper created a vagabondish camping-out air of geniality that did much to dispel the natural stiffness of the morning intercourse. As the meal had no formal opening, every one arrived at any time during the breakfast period, and though constant apologies were offered for the frequent interruptions to Lord Durwent's own meal, it could be seen that his enjoyment of buffet proprietorship was almost a professional one.

Lady Durwent's part in the function was to supervise the coffee, and ask each guest how he or she had slept, expressing regret that the night had not been cooler, warmer, calmer, or fresher, according to the polite customs of social dialogue at breakfast.

At nine-fifteen the papers used to arrive from the village, always causing a flutter of excitement. The sense of solitude at Roselawn made the outside world something so remote and apart that there was genuine curiosity to discover what the deuce it had been doing with itself during the house-party's retreat.

Lord Durwent read the _Morning Post_ as a sort of 'prairie oyster' or 'bromo-seltzer.' It settled him. There was something about that journal's editorial page and its dignified treatment of events that made Roselawn seem the embodiment of British principle. Being a man who prided himself on a catholicity of view-point, he also subscribed to the _Daily Mail_--that frivolous young thing that has as many editions as a _debutante_ has frocks, and by its super-delicate apparatus at Carmelite House can detect a popular clamour before it is louder than a kitten's miaow.

As a concession to the ladies of the household, he took, in addition, the _Daily Sketch_ and the _Daily Mirror_, those two energetic ill.u.s.trated papers, which, benefiting from the remarkable geographical fact that every place of consequence in England is exactly two hours from London, are able to offer photos of riders in Rotten How, bathers at Brighton, rowers at Oxford, and foreign monarchs walking at Windsor, the very morning after all these remarkable persons have astonished the world by riding, bathing, rowing, or walking.

But to Lord Durwent these papers and the _Daily Mail_ were but interludes. The _Morning Post_ was the real business of life, and after reading through its solid columns of type, he enjoyed the sensation of somehow having done something for his country.

II.

It was just before the arrival of the morning papers that Selwyn descended to the dining-room. Helping himself to porridge, he answered Lady Durwent's polite conventional questions.

'And _how_ did you sleep?' asked his hostess, putting into the inquiry that artistic personal touch which made it seem as if this were the first time she had asked the question, and he the first guest to whom it had been propounded.

'Lady Durwent,' he answered, smiling, 'I haven't the faintest idea.'

'Then,' said his hostess, triumphantly explaining the obvious, 'you must have slept well.'

Selwyn thought that when he answered Lady Durwent's query a quick look of relief had pa.s.sed across the face of Elise. It was for her peace of mind he had lied, as into the hours of dawn he had lain awake, trying to unravel the meaning of the nocturnal scene. He knew that her prodigal brother had been forbidden the ancestral home, but it was hardly necessary that he should lie in hiding like a negro slave dreading the hounds upon his track. And yet, as he recalled the sudden glimpse of d.i.c.k's face, Selwyn remembered that there had been a hunted look in the dark-shadowed, luminous eyes. Vaguely he felt that this new development would hinder the understanding reached by Elise and himself during the evening. If only he could go to her and offer his help or solace; or if she would come to him frankly and let him share the unhappy secret, whatever it was, it might prove a bond of comradeship instead of another element to deepen her consciousness of aloofness.

Still churning these various thoughts, he smiled his greetings to her, and affecting an easy unconcern, took his part in the fashionable agricultural conversation which marks the morning intercourse of country-living gentle-folk. If it had not been that the pigs mentioned were Lord Fitz-Guff's, and the cabbages Lady Dingworthy's--and the accents of the speakers beyond question--Selwyn could have imagined that he was sitting around Hank Myer's stove in Doanville, N.Y., listening to the gossip of the local Doanvillians on earth's produce.

'Ah,' said Lord Durwent, sighting a messenger from over the egg-timer, 'here are the papers.'

Directly afterwards the butler entered with the four morning journals, solemnly presented them to his master (with a little more dignity than a Foreign Minister displays in handing the amba.s.sador of an enemy country his pa.s.sports), then made his exit with his eyes sedately raised, to avoid noting more than was necessary of the 'behind-stage'

aspect of his domain.

'h.e.l.lo!' said Lord Durwent, perusing the _Morning Post_; 'what's this?

Austria has delivered an ultimatum to Servia.'

'What!' cried one of the ladies; 'over that unp.r.o.nounceable a.s.sa.s.sination?'

'Dear me!' said the woman who kept record of retired royalties, 'that will upset my dear friend Empress----'

But her voice was lost in the clamour, as every one, deserting breakfast, crowded about Lord Durwent, and half in jest demanded to know what the ramshackle empire had to say for itself.

In a voice that grew tremulous with anger, the host read the details, point by point, and as the seriousness of the thing broke upon the hearers, even the very lightest tongues were for the moment stilled.

With a frown the n.o.bleman looked up as he reached the end of the ultimatum, in which one nation, for its pride, demanded that another should hand over its honour, debased and shackled.

'It is infamous,' said Lord Durwent.

'I tell you what,' said a bland youth named Maynard, who was always in high spirits at breakfast, bored at lunch, 'frightfully bucked' by a cup of tea at four, and invariably sentimental after dinner; 'it would do these nasty little Balkans a lot of good to hold 'em all under water for about three minutes--what?'

'But this is more than a Balkan quarrel,' said Lord Durwent.

'Balkan quarrels always are,' said the youth amiably.

In a chorus of quick questions and answers, in which surmise and conjecture played ducks and drakes with fact, the party divided into two camps, the majority taking the stand that it was a local affair and would lead to nothing; the minority, led by a retired army captain called Fensome, reading a dark augury for the future. In the midst of all the chaffing Selwyn noticed, however, that the placidity of decorum had been dropped, and both men and women were leaning forward in the unaccustomed stimulus of their brains rallying to meet a new and powerful situation.

The men did not lose that note of easy banter which seemed the rule when women were present, but in the faces of the little group who contended that danger was ahead he could detect the stiffening of the jaw and the steadying of the eye which come to those who see events riding towards them with the threat of a prairie fire driven by a wind.

'But, good heavens!' said Selwyn, in answer to some one's prophecy that war would result, 'surely the big nations can stop it. Germany and you and America--we three won't let Austria cut Servia's throat in full daylight.'

The retired army captain turned a monocle on him. 'You have been in Germany, Mr. Selwyn?'

'Yes, just recently.'

'Did you ever hear them toasting _Der Tag_? My friend, it has arrived.--Durwent, old boy, if you will excuse me, I think I shall go to town at noon. If my old bones aren't lying, the thing which a few of us fossils have been preaching to deaf ears has come to pa.s.s, and there may be a job for a belivered old devil like me yet.'

'But,' cried Lady Durwent, whose easily roused theatrical instinct gave her the delightful sensation of presiding at a meeting of the Cabinet, 'what have we to do with Austria and Servia?'

'Hear, hear,' said the bland youth. 'Let 'em hop aboard each other if they like. I think it would be deucedly splendid for us to have another war; we're all fed up--aren't we?--with just enjoying ourselves. But I don't see how we can intrude into those blighters'