Elizabeth's Campaign Part 33

Elizabeth turned away. The touch of scorn in her bearing was not lost on Pamela.

'And if I refuse to stay on, without saying or doing anything--to put myself right--you threaten to run away?'

'I do--I mean it,' said Pamela firmly. She had not only hardened again under the sting of that contempt she detected in Elizabeth, but there was rising up in her a sudden and rapturous vision of London:--Arthur at the War Office--herself on open ground--no longer interfered with and over-shadowed. He would come to see her--take her out, perhaps, sometimes to an exhibition, or for a walk. The suggestion of going to Margaret had been made on the spur of the moment without after-thought. She was now wedded to it, divining in it a hundred possibilities.

At the same moment she became more cautious, and more ashamed of herself. It would be better to apologize. But before she could speak Elizabeth said:

'Does Desmond agree with what you have been saying?'

Pamela staring at her adversary was a little frightened. She rushed into a falsehood.

'Desmond knows nothing about it! I don't want him dragged in.'

Elizabeth's eyes, with their bitter, wounded look; seemed to search the girl's inmost mind. Then she moved away.

'We had better go to bed. We shall both want to think it over.

Good-night.'

And from the darkness of the hall, where fire and lamp were dying, Pamela half spell-bound, watched the tall figure of Elizabeth slowly mounting the broad staircase at the further end, the candle-light flickering on her bright hair, and on a bunch of snowdrops in her breast.

Then, for an hour, while the house sank into silence, Pamela sat crouched and s.h.i.+vering by the only log left in the grate. 'A little while ago,' she was thinking miserably, 'I had good feelings and ideas--I never hated anybody. I never told lies. I suppose--I shall get worse and worse.'

And when she had gone wearily to bed, it was to cry herself to sleep.

The following morning, an urgent telegram from her younger sister recalled Elizabeth Bremerton to London, where her mother's invalid condition had suddenly taken a disastrous turn for the worse.

CHAPTER XII

'Hullo, Aubrey! what brings you here?' And with the words Arthur Chicksands, just emerging from the War Office, stopped to greet a brother officer, who was just entering it.

'Nothing much. I shan't be long. Can you wait a bit?'

'Right you are. I've got to leave a note at the Ministry of Munitions, but I'll be back in a few minutes.'

Arthur Chicksands went his way to Whitehall Gardens, while Major Mannering disappeared into the inner regions of that vast building where dwell the men on whom hang the fortunes of an Empire. Arthur walking fast up Whitehall was very little aware of the scene about him. His mind was occupied with the details of the interview in which he had just been engaged. His promotion had lately been rapid, and his work of extraordinary interest. He had been travelling a great deal, backwards and forwards between London and Versailles, charged with several special enquiries in which he had shown both steadiness and _flair_. Things were known to him that he could not share even with a friend so old and 'safe' as Aubrey Mannering. The grip of the coming crisis was upon him, and he seemed 'to carry the world in his breast'

'Next year--next February--where shall we all be?' The question was automatically suggested to him by the sight of the green buds of the lilac trees In front of Whitehall Terrace.

'Oh, my dear Susan!--do look at those trees!'

Chicksands, startled from his own meditations, looked up to see two old ladies gazing with an eager interest at a couple of plane trees, which had just shed a profusion of bark and stood white and almost naked in the grey London air. They were dear old ladies from some distant country-side, with bonnets and fronts, and reticules, as though they had just walked out of _Cranford_, and after gazing with close attention at the plane trees near them they turned and looked at all the other plane trees in Whitehall, which presented an equally plucked and peeled appearance.

Then the one addressed as Susan laughed out--a happy, chuckling laugh.

'Oh, I see! My dear Ellen, how clever people are now! They're _camouflaged_--that's what it is--can't you see?--all the way down, because of the raids!'

The admiring fervour of the voice was too much for Chicksands. He hurried past them, head down, and ran up the steps of the Ministry of Munitions. From that point of vantage he turned, shaken with amus.e.m.e.nt, to see the pair advancing slowly towards Westminster, their old-fas.h.i.+oned skirts floating round them, still pointing eagerly at the barkless trees. Had they come from some piny region where the plane is not? Anyway the tension of the day was less.

He repeated the tale to Aubrey Mannering a few minutes later, when they had turned together into Birdcage Walk. But Aubrey scarcely gave it the ghost of a smile. As to his old friend's enquiries about his own work and plans, he answered them quite readily, but shortly, without any expansion; with the manner, indeed, of one for whom talk about himself had no sort of attraction. And as they pa.s.sed along the front of the barracks, where a few men were drilling, Chicksands, struck by his companion's silence, turned a sudden look upon him. Mannering's eyes were absently and yet intently fixed on the small squads of drilling men. And it was sharply borne in on Chicksands that he was walking beside the mere image or phantom of a man, a man whose mind was far away--'voyaging through strange seas of thought alone.' Mannering's eyes were wide open; but they made the weird impression on the spectator of a double seeing--of some object of vision beyond and behind the actual scene of the barracks and the recruits, and that an object producing terror or pain.

Chicksands made a remark and it was not answered.

It was not the first time that Arthur had observed this trance-like state in the man who was to be his brother-in-law, and had been his 'chum' from childhood. Others had noticed it, and he had reason to think that Beryl was often distressed by it. He had never himself seen any signs of strangeness or depression in Aubrey before the Easter of 1915, when they met in Paris, for the first time after the battle of Neuve Chapelle, in which Mannering had lost his dearest friend, one Freddy Vivian, of the Worcesters. During the winter they had met fairly often in the neighbourhood of Ypres, and Aubrey was then the same eager, impulsive fellow that Chicksands had known at Eton and Cambridge, bubbling over with the exploits of his battalion, and adored by his own men. In April, in a raid near Festubert, Mannering was badly wounded. But the change in him was already evident when they were in Paris together. Chicksands could only suppose it represented the mental and nervous depression caused by Vivian's death, and would pa.s.s away. On the contrary, it had proved to be something permanent.

Yet it had never interfered with his efficiency as a soldier, nor his record for a dare-devil courage. There were many tales current of his exploits on the Somme, in which again and again he had singed the beard of Death, with an absolute recklessness of his own personal life, combined with the most anxious care for that of his men. Since the battle of Messines he had been the head of a remarkable Officers' School at Aldershot, mainly organized by himself. But now, it seemed, he was moving heaven and earth to get back to France and the front. Chicksands did not think he would achieve it. He was invaluable where he was, and his superiors, to Mannering's indignation, were inclined to regard him as a man who was physically fit rather for home service than the front.

When they reached the Buckingham Palace end of the Walk, Mannering paused.

'Where are you lunching?'

'At Brooks', with my father.'

'Oh, then I'll walk there with you.'

They struck across the park, and talk fell on a recent small set-back which had happened to a regiment with which they were both well acquainted.

Chicksands shrugged his shoulders.

'I've heard some details at the War Office. Just ten minutes' rot!

The Colonel stopped it with his revolver. Most of them splendid fellows. Two young subs gave way under a terrific sh.e.l.ling and their men with them. And in ten minutes they were all rus.h.i.+ng forward again, straight through the barrage--and the two lieutenants were killed.'

'My G.o.d!--lucky fellows!' cried Mannering, under his breath, with a pa.s.sion and suddenness that struck astonishment into his companion.

'Well, yes,' said Arthur, 'in a sense--but--nothing would have happened to them. They had wiped it out.'

Mannering shook his head. Then with a great and evident effort he changed the conversation.

'You know Pamela's in town?'

'Yes, with Margaret Strang. I'm going to dine there to-night. How's the new agent getting on?'

Aubrey smiled.

'Which?--the man--or the lady?'

'Miss Bremerton, of course. I got a most interesting letter from her a fortnight ago. Do you know that she herself has discovered nearly a thousand ash in the Squire's woods, after that old idiot Hull had told her she wouldn't find half-a-dozen? A thousand ash is not to be sneezed at in these days! I happen to know that the Air Board wrote the Squire a very civil letter.'

'"All along of Eliza!"' mused Mannering. 'She's been away from Mannering just lately. Her invalid mother became very seriously ill about three weeks ago, and she had to go home for a time. My father, of course, has been fussing and fuming to get her back.'

'Poor Squire! But how could Pamela be spared too?'

Mannering hesitated.

'Well, the fact is she and my father seem to have had a good old-fas.h.i.+oned row. She tried to fill Miss Bremerton's place, and of course it didn't answer. She's too young, and my father too exacting. Then when it broke down, and he took things out of her hands again, comparing her, of course, enormously to her disadvantage with Miss Bremerton, Pamela lost her temper and said foolish things of Miss Bremerton. Whereupon fury on my father's part--and sudden departure on Pamela's. She actually bicycled off to the railway station, sent a telegram for her things, and came up to Margaret. Alice Gaddesden is looking after father. But of course he and she don't get on a bit.'