Chapter XIII: In the Papers

They dined together in the big, garish restaurant of the Hotel Metropole amid the gay crowd which assembles there each week-end, no matter what weather or what season. He had asked for the right-hand corner table by the window. The _maître d’hôtel_ knew him, and he was served well. Cosmopolitan as he was, he possessed a strange and peculiar attraction for all hotel servants. He always treated them good-humoredly, and his tips were judicious without being lavish. As an old traveler, whenever he arrived at an hotel, he started tipping--not when he left, as people usually do. Hence he was regarded as a person to be well looked after. He was known from _concierge_ to _chasseur_ in a hundred hotels in Europe, just as he was known at his own club in St. James’s Street. The newspapers often referred to him as a “cosmopolitan of cosmopolitans,” or as a world-famed traveler, as indeed he was.

They laughed merrily together amid the gay chatter of the smart, holiday-making crowd, for in the Metropole at Brighton one meets each week-end all sorts of well-known people with their womenfolk, from jockeys to judges.

“How delighted I am that you are here with me, Edris,” he whispered across the little table, raising his glass and looking into her great gray eyes. She looked very dainty and charming in a black semi-evening gown, which showed to advantage the alabaster whiteness of her neck and arms. The necklace she wore consisted of a number of graduated cubes of glittering rock-crystal separated by tiny beads of jet, an ornament which suited her type of beauty to perfection.

“Are you quite sure that you are really pleased I’m here?” she asked with a tantalizing smile.

“Why, of course I am,” he said, his dark eyes fixed upon hers.

“Then if you find my company as pleasant as you say, you’ll come to Wengen, eh?”

“I can’t promise you that,” was his laughing response, though, now that he knew that her engagement with Lionel was broken, he had already secretly made up his mind to obey her wishes and go to Switzerland.

“But you’ll have to promise before I go home on Monday,” said the girl decisively.

“Well, I can’t make any promise yet,” Darville protested. “Let’s go and have coffee.”

Together they walked through the lounge to the big palm-court, which was already half-full, and for an hour sat over their coffee and liqueurs, listening to the orchestra. Then they strolled back beside the sea to Hove. The tide was coming in, and the restless waves roared over the beach as together they trod the broad promenade.

Just before eleven o’clock they reëntered the flat, where Edris found the maid awaiting her. After divesting herself of her coat and hat, she came into the sitting-room where Darville was standing with his back to the fire, a smart figure in his well-cut dinner-clothes. She seated herself cozily in the corner of the settee, took a cigarette from his case, and allowed him to light it for her.

Then he said:

“Before we went out you were talking of Lionel.”

“And you were talking of Elaine,” she added. “Why have you really parted from her? Do tell me the truth, Seton,” she said.

“I have already told you the truth,” he answered. “I did not love her, and----”

“But she loves you. Nothing will convince me to the contrary.”

The man sighed, and for some time remained silent.

Then he shook his head and said:

“No. Edris, you are quite mistaken. We have been fast friends all these years--that’s all.”

“And you really mean to say that in all that time you have never been jealous of her--I mean before she married?”

“Never. Only silly fools are jealous.”

“And if you had been in love with her, would you not have been jealous of any other man who paid her marked attention?”

“No. I have never known what jealousy is.”

“Then you have happily been spared a terrible suffering--a mental torture that drives one to madness,” the girl said, her countenance very serious. “I was jealous of Lionel, and I know, alas! what it is--a living hell. And,” she added, “I hope, Seton, you will never go through what I have done.”

“I’m not likely to,” he laughed. “Consider my age. If I were younger and in love I might perhaps run the risk of an attack of the malady.”

“A man is never too old to be jealous,” was her quiet, philosophic reply.

“Then you were jealous of Lionel! You apparently had just cause to be, eh?”

“Unfortunately, I had. I trust no man now that I have learnt my own lesson. My heart is broken,” she repeated in a hard voice of deep regret. “I shall never love again.”

He turned from her in order that she could not see his face, and pretended to get some matches from the sideboard.

“Oh, you’ll forget him, and love again one day,” he remarked cheerfully.

“No,” she said in a decisive tone, “never.”

He had long ago realized that she was a strong-willed little person, who held firm opinions about people and things, entertained very strong likes and dislikes, and was never afraid to speak her own mind before anybody. In her childhood days she had been a tomboy and the naughtiest girl in her school. She had always had her own way in everything, indulged as she had been by fond parents, and she had grown up frank in nature, independent in spirit, and entirely fearless of what people might think.

Because of this free, careless nature of hers she was defying the world and spending the week-end with a bachelor in his rooms.

Darville was struggling hard to conceal the great passion he had conceived for her. For nearly a whole year he had loved her very deeply. Yet he had successfully hidden the truth, so that she was even then entirely unsuspicious of it. The one barrier--Lionel--had been removed, he told himself, yet the other remained, still insurmountable--his age. That fact had always troubled him. A hundred times, when he looked in his mirror and saw his gray hair, tears welled in his eyes as the vision of her sweet young face arose before him and taunted him always. If Edris had come into his life when he had been thirty, engaged in the reckless task of sowing his wild oats, then how different all would have been!

He raised his head, and his eyes suddenly met hers. She saw the look of inexpressible sadness in them, and jumped to the natural conclusion that he was thinking of Elaine. Indeed, she made a remark to that effect.

“No, I’m sure I was not,” he protested. Then, in excuse, he went on: “I may often appear distracted, but it is then I am thinking of the story I am writing. Novelists must be thoughtful sometimes, you know, if their soul is in their work. No artistic effort can be accomplished without whole-hearted application and all-absorbed concentration.”

“I thought you never concentrated on anything,” she said with a merry smile. “You are always so easy-going and light-hearted. You cannot have any cares or troubles like other men.”

He smiled--rather sadly perhaps.

What would she think did she know of that terribly heavy burden of responsibility which ever rested upon his shoulders--how, thanks to his active brain, the British Cabinet were kept informed of the constant plots of the Powers of Europe against the country’s prestige and safety? What would she think of those shrewd eyes and sharp ears of his spread out through his secret agents all over the world, or of the cleverly-conceived counter-plots which he was ever directing? Elaine knew something of his secret work. She had discovered it one day by reading a document which she had found lying upon his writing-table, that big, roll-top, littered table which stood in the adjoining room. She had confessed to him that her woman’s curiosity had overcome her, whereupon he revealed one or two facts, hence more than once he had sought her opinion when he required that of a woman of quick intelligence and shrewd evasiveness. But Edris was in ignorance of his other personality. She, like all the world, regarded him as a popular novelist, and not even one of her favorite writers. She had once told him how, before they met, she had taken down one of his novels in a lending library, opened it, scanned the first page, and at once put it back again as uninteresting. She wanted a love-story, and she knew that he seldom wrote about passion.

“I have quite as many cares as everyone else,” he declared, “only I do not wear my heart on my sleeve, as some other men do,” he added meaningly. “Perhaps I have more responsibilities than some others. But I suppose we each of us think our load of worry is greater than that of our neighbor.”

“Well, you are the most light-hearted man I’ve ever met. Most men of your age are decrepit, crotchety, or faddy. You’re neither. Why, when you ski at Wengen everyone declares your vitality to be marvelous.”

Darville smiled again, yet at heart he was rather piqued at the reference to his years, for it was a very sore point with him.

He again looked at the sweet-faced, athletic girl before him. Could she ever bring herself to love a man of his years, he wondered? Dare he ever put such an outrageous question to her? He held his breath at the mere thought of it, and then decided that her presence there was only a bitter taunt which he had brought upon himself. He should have been more circumspect. In all his years he had never loved, and he felt that the situation he himself had been foolish enough to create was an entirely ludicrous one.

Till nearly midnight they sat chatting until, after she had drunk a glass of port and eaten a biscuit, she rose to go to her room.

He bent over her hand and kissed it with his innate gallantry. Then, wishing her good-night, he held open the door, and she, with a laughing “Good-night, Seton,” passed in and locked it behind her.

For another half hour he sat by the dying fire smoking and thinking, until at last he went to his own room, where, changing into an old coat, he sat down at his table, and took up the threads of his new story which he had been compelled to break off so suddenly in Corfu.

Outside, the wind had suddenly sprung up to half a gale, as it so often does in the Channel, and there came to him the beat and roar of the waves upon the beach--music always to his ears, for he loved the sea, just as did the girl he adored, who was sleeping in the guest’s room at the back, quiet and undisturbed. He had chosen that front room overlooking the sea as his own, and his workroom also, because he loved to wake in the morning and gaze upon the open space of sky and water. Though he posed as a materialist, a man-about-town, a lover of women--which he never had been--a traveler, and a popular figure in the world, with his photograph ever in the picture-papers, yet at heart he was shy, modest, and very unassuming. He hated publicity, but it had been forced upon him owing to his popularity as a writer of fiction.

The silence of the night was unbroken save for the thunder of the waves, sometimes followed by a loud swish as they swept upon the promenade. Once he paused during his writing. He thought he heard a sound in Edris’s room, and noiselessly passed into the sitting-room, where he stood listening. But all was silence, so he returned to his work, and continued until half-past two. Then he put down his pen, mixed himself a drink, and, lighting a cigarette, switched off the light and stood for a long time gazing out upon the storm-tossed waters, thinking deeply of the sleeping girl within.

He wondered, and still wondered. Dare he reveal to her the secret of his love? Through those many months his heart had been bursting with that affection which he had so carefully concealed, and even now, though the barrier of her engagement to that impossible young lover had been removed, yet there still remained that one of age--one that it was impossible to overlook, avoid, or remove.

If he summoned courage and told her the truth she would only laugh at him, he thought. No, the whole thing was a dream that could never be realized. Love had come to him too late in his life. A lump arose in his throat, and tears came to his eyes. She could never be his, alas! Never!

In the darkness he stood motionless for a long time, gazing blankly out upon the surf, which showed white and boiling in the light of the lamps on the promenade. Low sobs escaped him from time to time, until at last, with a long, heavy sigh, he drew down the blind, and, switching on the light, retired to rest in his narrow little bed.

Next morning was Sunday. When he entered the sitting-room, where breakfast was laid for two, he found Edris already sitting by the fire, reading the newspaper.

He kissed her hand, as was his wont, and greeted her merrily, asking if she had slept well.

“Quite well,” was her reply, as she lifted her dancing gray eyes to his. “But I’ve just read of a most mysterious catastrophe which happened last night under the Forth Bridge near Edinburgh. Read it,” she said, handing him the newspaper.

“The Forth Bridge!” he echoed breathlessly, as he eagerly took the paper and saw the great headlines in heavy type.

What he read was as follows:

“The Central News’ Edinburgh correspondent telegraphs that a mysterious affair took place beneath the Forth Bridge, near the center of the gigantic structure, just after midnight. Details are meager, because of the extreme reticence of the police, but as far as can be ascertained, a daring and desperate attempt has been made to mine the bridge ready for its destruction at some near date in the future, and thus bottle up our naval base at Rosyth by means of the great mass of steel of which the huge railway-bridge is constructed.

“It seems that by some secret means the authorities had learned of the enemy conspiracy, and took means to combat it. For the past three nights a motor patrol-boat has been observed in the vicinity of the bridge, but, some repairs to the base of one of the steel towers which support the bridge 360 feet above the water being in progress, no notice was taken of its presence.

“Early this morning, however, the patrol-boat was seen to be moored for a short time to the granite pier which, in the middle of the waterway, rests on the small island of Inchgarvie, and presently it left hurriedly towards Burntisland. At that moment another fast motor-boat containing five men put out from South Queensferry, and after a stern chase, was gradually overtaking it. Shots were fired repeatedly from the escaping boat, until at last they were replied to by the pursuers. A sharp fusillade ensued. Suddenly the crackle of a machine-gun mounted on the pursuing boat was heard, and the next moment, from the first boat, there was a bright red flash, and an explosion so terrific that more than twenty houses on the shore of the firth were wrecked, happily without any loss of life. The boat apparently carried some highly powerful explosive, which was detonated by a bullet, and was blown out of the water, the occupants, said to be four men and a woman, being entirely wiped out of existence. No trace of either the boat or its occupants has been found.

“Up to the present the affair is a complete mystery, save for the fact that several rubber hot-water bottles, filled with some new liquid explosive of a highly-powerful nature, were subsequently found attached to the bases of two of the supporting piers below low-water mark and connected with small electrical contrivances for detonating the whole of the explosive at the same moment.

“Through the vigilance of the authorities the gigantic bridge has been saved from destruction, though the plotters themselves have lost their lives in their desperate attempt to put the bridge in readiness for destruction at any moment.”

Seton Darville, having scanned the lines eagerly, handed the paper back to the girl.

“Isn’t it extraordinary?” she asked. “They evidently were German secret agents preparing for the next war. Don’t you think so?”

“Perhaps,” replied Darville unconcernedly. “At any rate, they have received their deserts.”