"Everything all right, Mr. Carey. The Doctor and Mr. Jones, who came last night, have gone out towards c.o.c.kthorpe. The geese are working there, and they won"t be back till dawn. There"s some supper in your room, and I"ve lit the fire."
Then I asked a question which the porter quite understood.
"And Mrs. Gaunt?"
"The old cat"s gone to bed, sir," he said in a lower voice. "I"ve just come from the Doctor"s kitchen, and Cook told me."
I pa.s.sed through the little paved lobby which led to the long corridor of cla.s.s-rooms, and hurried up the bare, wooden stairs. There was a good fire in my room and the lamp was lit upon the supper-table, where a jug of beer flanked a cold wild goose--and ordinary mortals who have not tasted that delicacy have missed a lot.
I took off my coat, went into my bedroom and washed my hands, peeped into the dormitory, where only a single lamp was burning dimly and all the boys seemed asleep, and then returned.
As I closed the door and saw my own familiar things around me, the remembrance of what had happened came over me in a great flood. I groaned aloud. Upon the walls, washed with terra-cotta, were my college groups, reminding me of Oxford and happier days. There were some silver cups upon a shelf. In a gla.s.s-fronted cupboard by the side of the fireplace were my guns. Over the mirror on the mantelpiece was a faded blue cap, and on the writing-table was a pile of filthy, dogs-eared, little exercise books, in which reluctant urchins had been scribbling attempts at Latin prose.
I bit my lip hard and sat down to supper, which did not take more than five or six minutes. Then I prepared myself for something that was yet to come.
Against the wall by the window was a bookshelf containing the few volumes I possessed and such schoolbooks as I used in my work. I took down Smith"s cla.s.sical dictionary, and Liddell and Scott"s Greek ditto, and, inserting my hand in the place this left, withdrew a pleasant little instrument which I had bought for twenty-seven-and-six--see advertis.e.m.e.nt in the _Strand Magazine_--from a scientific toy-shop in Holborn. This was known as "Our Portable House Telephone," and, not to elaborate the mystery, a little wire ran out of my window, through the ivy, and round the angle of the building to the Doctor"s block, where it found un.o.btrusive entry through another window. At this end was an instrument exactly like the one I held in my hand, but which rested in a hole made in the plaster of the wall and was concealed by that touching engraving, "The Soul"s Awakening." I had fixed up the whole thing myself some two months before, when the Doctor was away in London, Mrs. Gaunt at market in Blankington-on-Sea, and the boys engaged in a paper chase.
Doris was waiting, of course.
"Dearest, so you"ve got back--I heard the trap!"
"Yes; can you come?"
"In a minute. The connecting door to the school is locked, but I made Bill Jack lend me his key."
"Right-O!"--and I waited breathlessly for Doris.
I daresay such a proceeding as this may strike the ultra-proper with dismay. But we loved each other, there was no harm in it, and, besides, what the deuce were we to do? It was the only way we could meet at all, and even then, it only happened now and again.
The door of my sitting-room opened without a sound and Doris entered.
Doris"s hair is dark red, and, when it is down, it reaches almost to her heels. t.i.tian red, I believe, is the right name for it, though I"m sure I don"t know why. Her eyes are dark blue, like the blue on the wing of a freshly killed mallard--I am not good at this sort of thing, but she is a ripper. Directly she had closed the door, which she did noiselessly, she saw from my face what had happened. I felt a rotten tout, I can tell you, to stand there, chucked again.
"Well, here I am," I said, "returned empty, declined with thanks, His Majesty having no use for my services! Same old game, Doris dear, and if they lose the war now, they can"t blame me!" I spoke bitterly, but lightly also; yet when Doris put her arms round my neck and I held her close, when I could feel warm tears upon my cheek, I was as near breaking down as I have ever been in my life.
"Never mind, Johnny darling, never mind," she whispered, "I love you just the same--you"ve always got me--and it isn"t your fault. You"ve tried as hard as you possibly can to go."
She could only stay a quarter of an hour; it wasn"t safe longer.
Marjorie was keeping cave, for the sisters occupied the same room. I told her everything as shortly as I could, and with a sigh, we both agreed that we must make the best of it. She wanted me to go, she longed for me to go, I knew that. What patriotism there was in Morstone House School was confined to the boys and to the Doctor"s stepdaughters.
Upjelly himself seemed to take very little interest in the conflagration of the world, or, if he did, he never showed it. But I knew as well as I knew anything that Doris would rather have had me go to the Front and get a bullet through my head than that I should stay at home; which, I may remark, is the right sort of girl.
"Well," she said at length, "let us hope the Germans invade us--it will be somewhere about here, I suppose, if they do--and then you can have a smack at them with your single eight-bore, Johnny; that would be something, wouldn"t it?"
She told me the news of the school, such as it was, and then, with a final kiss, we separated and I was left alone.
The bitterness was still in my heart, a deep sort of fire at the bottom of everything which I can"t put into words--like the gentlemen in the boys" historical novels, who always begin: "I am but a plain, unlettered yeoman, and more handy with the sword than with the pen"--you know what I mean. Still, I was a man and a strong one, and an Englishman whose brother was fighting for his King. I did not know before that life could hurt so badly as it was hurting now. For nearly an hour, I suppose, I walked up and down my room, until the fire grew low and the wailing of the wind outside seemed to speak of disaster and complete the innuendo of the time.
And then, quite suddenly, I do not know what it was, my spirits began to clear. It was like a thick sea-mist on the marshes, which hangs like a dull, grey blanket for hours, with the birds calling all round, only you cannot get a shot at them. Suddenly the sun, or a puff of wind, makes the whole thing roll up like a curtain, and you see a herd of curlew or a wisp of snipe quite close to you. That is how I felt. I caught sight of my face in the gla.s.s, and I was surprised. It was positively glowing--just as if I had been made Commander-in-Chief of the R.N.F.C.
and Admiral Jellicoe had asked me to come and have a drink.
I am not used to a.n.a.lysing my feelings, which seem to me like chemicals--the more you a.n.a.lyse them, the worse they smell; so I could not account in the least for this sudden change.
Well, I was wondering at it and thinking that I had better turn in before I got the black dog on my shoulders again, when there was a tap at the door, and in shuffled little Lockhart. He had a bottle of whisky under one arm and a syphon under the other, and he looked, as usual, like a plucked spring chicken that had not been properly fed--bones sticking out everywhere.
"Thought perhaps you hadn"t any whisky," he said--and then, "Hallo!
pulled it off this time?" He was looking at my face.
I started, because there was something in his voice I had not heard before, and something in his eyes I had not seen.
"My dear chap," he went on, banging down the whisky on the table and holding out his hand. "I can"t tell you how glad I am!"
Well, this made it rather hard. Of course, I had to tell him that I had got the kick out again, but I didn"t feel the depression coming back, all the same. What I did feel, though, was a sudden liking for the odd little fellow who was my colleague. We had always got on well enough together, never had rows or anything of that sort, but he was too cynical for me as a rule. In five minutes, however, I found myself sitting on one side of the fire--which we made up--with Lockhart on the other, talking away as if we had been intimate friends for years.
By Jove, how the little fellow came out! If his body was maimed and crippled, he had a big soul, if ever a man had. I can recognise beautiful English when I hear it or read it. This man seemed inspired.
His talk of England and what we were going through and of what we still had to go through was like that wonderful pa.s.sage in Richard II which I had been trying to make my idiot boys learn for rep. He was so awfully kind and sympathetic, too. He said all that Doris had said, though in quite another way. It was like a wise man, who had known and done everything, comforting one.
When he had finished, and sat looking at the fire, I had to tell him what I felt.
"I"m awfully indebted to you, Lockhart," was what I said. "You"ve pulled me together and made a man of me again, and I can"t thank you enough.
I"m afraid we haven"t been such friends as we ought to have been"--and I held out my hand. He took it and there was a strained smile upon his wizened little face.
"Carey," he said, "don"t you be downhearted, for you are going to have your chance yet, unless I am very much mistaken."
"What do you mean?" I asked, for there was obviously something behind his words.
For answer, he did a curious thing. He slipped out of his arm-chair, hopped across the room like a sparrow, and as quietly, and opened the door, looking into the pa.s.sage. Then he closed it and came back into the middle of the room.
"In the first place, John Carey," he said, "I mean that there is something very wrong about this house."
CHAPTER III
BERNARD CAREY, LIEUTENANT-COMMANDER OF SUBMARINES
I had just finished my tub the next morning, and was about to shave, when there was a knock at my bedroom door. The school porter came in with a message--"the Doctor sends his compliments, sir, and will you give him the pleasure of your company at breakfast this morning?"
This was quite unusual on the part of my chief. He always breakfasted alone in his own house; even his daughters did not share the meal with him. Lockhart and myself breakfasted with the boys--that is to say, we sat at a table at one end of the room, while old Mrs. Gaunt, the matron, presided over the bread-and-sc.r.a.pe and the urn of wishy-washy tea which was all the boarders got, unless they provided delicacies for themselves.
About half-past eight, I went downstairs, round the rectangular wing, into the Doctor"s garden, and knocked at his front door. I was almost immediately shown into the breakfast-room, a comfortable place, with a good many books and a fine view over the marshes.
Old Upjelly was standing upon the hearthrug as I entered, and I must describe for you a very remarkable personality indeed.
The Doctor was six feet high and proportionately broad. He was not only broad from shoulder to shoulder, but thick in the chest, a big, powerful man of fifty years of age. His face was enormous, as big as a ham almost, and it was of a uniform pallor, rather like badly-cooked tripe, as I once heard Lockhart describe it. A parrot-like nose projected in the centre of this fleshy expanse; small, but very bright eyes, sunk in caverns of flesh, looked out under bushy, black brows which squirted out--there is no other word. He was clean-shaved and his mouth was large, firm and curiously watchful, if I may so express it. Upjelly could make his eyes say anything he pleased, but I have always thought that the mouth is the feature in the human face which tells more than any other. And if Upjelly"s mouth revealed anything, it was secretiveness, while there was a curious Chinese insensitiveness about it. Lockhart, who had rather a genius for description, used to say that he could conceive Doctor Upjelly locking himself up in his study and sitting down to spend a quiet and solitary afternoon torturing a cat.
He greeted me with his soft, rather guttural voice and with something meant for an expansive smile.
"Ah, here we are," he said, "and tell me at once, Mr. Carey, if you have been successful in your application."