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The Box with Broken Seals (Strange Case of Mr. Jocelyn Thew), a novel by E. Phillips Oppenheim |
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Chapter 22 |
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_ CHAPTER XXII The dinner of the red roses, as though in emulation of its rival entertainment, seemed on its way to complete success. Jocelyn Thew, from whose manner there seemed to have departed much of the austerity of the previous evening, had never been a more brilliant companion. He, who spoke so seldom of his own doings, told story after story of his wanderings in distant countries, until even Katharine lost her fears of the situation and abandoned herself to the enjoyment of the moment. His tone was kindlier and his manner more natural. He spoke with regret of Richard Beverley's departure in a couple of days, and only once did he hint at anything in the least disturbing. "Wonderful feat, that of you flying men," he remarked, "dropping ten thousand copies of Wilson's speech over the German lines. I am not sure that it isn't rather a dangerous precedent, though." "Why dangerous?" Katharine enquired. "Because," he answered coolly, "it might suggest a possible means of communication with Germany to a person, say, like myself." "But you are not a flying man," Katharine reminded him. He smiled. "It would not be necessary," he observed, "for me to be my own messenger." There was a brief and rather a blank silence. The shadow of a new fear had arisen in Katharine's heart. The brother and sister exchanged quick glances. "I believe I am right," their host went on, a few minutes later, "in presuming that you have told Richard here the details of our little adventure upon the _City of Boston_?" "I have told him everything," Katharine acknowledged. "You don't mind that, do you? I felt that I had to." "You were quite right," Jocelyn Thew assented. "There is no reason for you to keep anything secret from Richard." The young man was conscious of a sudden recrudescence of anger, the flaming up again of his first resentment. "The whole thing was a rotten business, Thew," he declared. "I should never have resented your making use of me in any way you wished, but to make a tool of Katharine--" "My dear fellow," Jocelyn Thew interrupted, smoothly but with a dangerous glitter in his eyes, "please don't go on. I have an idea that you were going to say something offensive. Better not. Your sister came to no real harm. She never ran any real risk." "It depends upon the way you look at these things," the young man replied gloomily. "Katharine tells me that she is watched at her hotel day and night, and that she has come under the suspicion of the Government for being concerned in this affair." "That really isn't of much account," the other assured him. "You yourself," he went on, "came very nearly under suspicion once for something infinitely more serious." It was a chill note in the warmth of their festivities. Katharine glanced reproachfully at her host, and he seemed to realise at once his lapse. "Forgive me, both of you," he begged. "I fear that I am a little irritable to-night. This constant espionage gets on one's nerves. Look at them all around us,--Crawshay in the corner, trying his best to get something incriminating out of Nora Sharey; Brightman smoking a cigar out there, with his eyes wandering all the time through the glass screen towards this table; and the young man who seemed to haunt your hotel, Miss Beverley--Henshaw I believe his name is--you see him dining there with his back turned ostentatiously towards us and a little pocket mirror by his side. There are three pairs of eyes that scarcely ever leave us. I don't know whether they expect me to produce my spoils from my pocket and lay them upon the table, or whether one of them is a student of the lip language and hopes to learn the secrets of our conversation. Bah! They are very stupid, this professional potpourri of secret-service agents and detectives. Can't you hear them, how they will whisper in the lobby after we have left? 'Jocelyn Thew is entertaining a young Flying Corps man on leave from the front, the brother of Miss Beverley, who has already helped him. What does that mean?' Then they will put their fingers to their noses and you, too, will probably be watched, Dick. They will congratulate themselves upon possessing the subtlety of the Devil. They will see through my scheme. They will say--'This young man is to drop the documents behind the German lines!' Don't be alarmed, Richard, if you find a secret service man in your bedroom when you get home to-night." Katharine laughed almost joyously. "Then you're not going to ask Dick to do anything of that sort?" she demanded, her tone indicating an immense relief. He smiled. "I am not going to ask your brother to do anything which is so palpably obvious," he replied. "His help I am certainly going to engage, but in a manner which is very unlikely to bring trouble upon him. I promise you that." She suddenly leaned across the table. The cloud had passed from her features, the dull weight from her heart. Her eyes were more eloquent even than her tremulous lips. "Mr. Thew," she said, "do you know that I have always had one conviction about you, and that is that all these strange adventures in which you have taken part--some of them, as you yourself have acknowledged, more creditable than others--you have entered into chiefly from that spirit of adventure, just the spirit in which Dick here," she added with a little shiver, "made his mistake. Why can't you satisfy that part of your nature as Dick is doing? This war, upon which we Americans looked so coldly at first, has become almost a holy war, a twentieth-century crusade. Why don't you join one of these irregular forces and fight?" Then they both witnessed what they had never before seen in Jocelyn Thew. They saw his eyes blaze with a sudden concentrated fury. They saw his lips part and something that was almost a snarl transform and disfigure his mouth. "Fight for England?" he exclaimed bitterly. "I would sooner cut off my right hand!" His words left them at first speechless. He, too, after his little outburst seemed shaken, lacking in his usual _sangfroid_. It was Katharine who first recovered herself. "But you are English?" she protested wonderingly. "Am I?" he replied. "Will you forgive me if I beg you to change the subject?" The subject was effectually changed for them by the advent of some of Richard Beverley's brothers in arms. It was some time before they passed on. Then a little note almost of tragedy concluded the feast. A tall and elderly man, gaunt, with sunken cheeks, silver-white hair, complexion curiously waxen, and big, dark eyes, left the table where he had been sitting with a few Americans and came over towards them. His advance was measured, almost abnormally slow. His manner would have been melodramatic but for its intense earnestness. He stood at their table for a few seconds before speaking, his eyes fixed upon Jocelyn Thew's in a curious, almost unnatural stare. "You will forgive me," he said. "I must be speaking to Sir Denis Cathley?" Neither of the two young people, who were filled with wonder at the strange appearance of the newcomer, noticed Jocelyn Thew's sudden grip of the tablecloth, the tightening of his frame, the ominous contraction of his eyebrows as for a moment he sat there speechless. Then he was himself again. He shook his head courteously. "I am afraid," he replied, "that you must be making some mistake. My name is Jocelyn Thew." "And mine," the stranger announced, "is Michael Dilwyn. Is that name known to you?" "Perfectly well," Jocelyn Thew acknowledged. "I was present at the production of your last play in New York. I have since read with much regret," he went on courteously, "of the losses you have sustained." The old man's wonderful eyes flashed for a moment. "They are losses I am proud to endure, sir," he said. "But I did not come to speak of myself. I came to speak to Sir Denis Cathley." Jocelyn Thew shook his head. "It is a likeness which deceives you," he declared. "A likeness!" the other repeated. "Nine weeks ago I stood in a ruined mansion--so dilapidated, in fact, that one corner of it is open to the skies. I listened to the roar of the Atlantic as I heard it in the same place fifty years ago. A herdsman and his wife, perhaps a girl or two, live somewhere in the back quarters. The only apartment in any sort of preservation is the one sometimes called the picture gallery and sometimes the banqueting hall. You should visit this ruined mansion, sir. You should visit it before you give me the lie when I call you Sir Denis Cathley." Jocelyn Thew's hand for a moment shielded part of his face, as though he found the electric light a little strong. From behind the shelter of his palm his eyes met the eyes of his visitor. The latter suddenly turned and bowed to Katharine. "You will forgive an old man," he begged courteously, "who has seen much trouble lately, for his ill manners. Perhaps your friend here, your friend whose name is not Sir Denis Cathley, can explain to you why I felt some emotion at the sight of so wonderful a likeness." He bowed, murmured some broken words in reply to Katharine's kindly little speech, and moved away. Jocelyn Thew's eyes watched him with a curious softness. "Yes," he acknowledged, "I can tell you why, if he really saw a likeness in me to the person he spoke of, it might remind him of strange things. You know him by name, of course--Michael Dilwyn?" "He wrote the wonderful Sinn Fein play, 'The New Green,' didn't he?" Katharine asked eagerly. "I heard you mention it to him. My aunt and I were there at the first night." "He wrote that and some more wonderful poetry. He has spent more than half his life working for the cause of Ireland. He was the father and patriarch of the last rising. One of his sons was shot at Dublin." "And who is Sir Denis Cathley?" "The Cathleys are another so-called revolutionary family," Jocelyn Thew explained. "The late Sir Denis, the father of the man whom he supposed me to be, was Michael Dilwyn's closest friend. They, too, have paid a heavy price for their patriotism or their rebellious instincts, whichever way you choose to look at the matter." "I think," Katharine declared, "that Mr. Dilwyn is the most picturesque-looking man I ever saw. I don't believe that even now he is altogether convinced as to your identity." "He has probably reached an age," was the cool reply, "when his memory begins to suffer.--Ah! I see our friend Crawshay is taking counsel with Henshaw. They are looking in this direction. Richard, my young friend, you are in a bad way. Suspicion is beginning to fasten upon you. Believe me, one of my parasites will be on your track to-night. I can almost convince myself as to their present subject of conversation. They are preening themselves upon having seen through my subtle scheme. I am very sure they are asking themselves--'When is the transfer of documents to take place?'" "It may all seem very humorous to you," the young man remarked, a little sullenly, "but it leaves a sort of nasty flavour in one's mouth, all the same. If they were to suspect me of trying to drop documents over the German lines except under instructions, it would mean a court-martial, even though they were unable to prove anything, and a firing party in five minutes if they were." "Take heart, my young friend," Jocelyn Thew advised him, "and do not refuse the Courvoisier brandy which our saintly friend with the chain is proffering. If it is not indeed a relic of the Napoleonic era, it is at least drinkable. And listen--this may help you to drink it with zest--I am not going to ask you to drop any documents over the German lines." The thankfulness in Katharine's face was reflected in her brother's. "Thank God for that!" he exclaimed, helping himself liberally to the brandy. "You know I'd find it hard to refuse you anything, Thew, but there are limits. Besides, you are never really out of sight there. We go out in squadrons, and from the height we fly at nothing I could drop would be very likely to reach its destination." Jocelyn Thew smiled coldly. "My dear Richard," he said, "I am not going to make you an unwilling partner in any foolhardy scheme such as you are thinking of, because that is just the Obvious thing that our friends who take so much interest in us would expect and prepare for. All the same, there is just a trifling commission which I will ask you to undertake for me, and which I will explain to you later. When do you leave?" "Ten o'clock train from Charing Cross on Monday night," the young man replied. "I have to fly on Tuesday morning." "Then if it pleases you we will all dine here that night," Jocelyn Thew suggested, "and I will take you on to the Alhambra for an hour. Doctor Gant and I were there our first night in town, and we found the performance excellent. You will honour me, Miss Beverley?" "I shall be delighted," she answered, "but I am not at all sure that you will be able to get seats at the Alhambra." "Why not?" he asked. "There is a great benefit performance there on Monday night," she told him. "The house is closed now for rehearsals. All the stalls have gone already, and the boxes are to be sold by auction at the Theatrical Fete." Jocelyn Thew was for a moment grave. "I am very glad that you told me this," he said, "but I think that I can nevertheless promise you the stage box for Monday night. I have a call on it. We must all meet once more. It is just possible that I may have a pleasant surprise for both of you." "Do give us an idea what it is," she begged. He shook his head. Somehow, since the coming of Michael Dilwyn, a tired look had crept into his eyes. He seemed to have lost all his old vivacity. He had paid the bill some time before and they strolled together now into the lounge. Katharine was carrying half a dozen of the roses, which the waiter had pressed into her hand. "To-night," she said, looking up into his face and dropping her voice a little, "I am feeling so much happier--happier than I have felt for a long time. Why do you keep us both, Mr. Thew, in such a state of uneasiness? You give us so little of your real confidence, so little of your real self. Sometimes it seems as though you deliberately try to make yourself out a harder, crueller person than you really are. Why do you do that?" For a moment she fancied that the impossible had happened, that she had penetrated the armour of that steadfast and studied indifference. "We are all just a little the fools of circumstance," he sighed. "A will to succeed sometimes, if it is strong enough, crushes out things we would like to keep alive." She thrust one of the blossoms which she was carrying through his buttonhole. "I know you will hate that," she whispered, "but you can take it out the moment you have gotten rid of us. Dick and I are going on now, you know, to the Esholt House dance. Shall I thank you for your dinner?" "Or I you for your company?" he murmured, bowing over her fingers. They took their leave, and Jocelyn Thew, almost as though against his will, walked back into the foyer, after a few minutes of hesitation, and sat there twirling the rose between his fingers, with his eyes fixed upon the interior of the restaurant. He had the air of one waiting. _ |
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