Tales of Mystery & Suspense: 25+ Thrillers in One Edition. E. Phillips Oppenheim
She was no longer the gravely minded prophetess of a great cause, the scheming woman, furious at the prospect of failure. She was suddenly wholly feminine, seductive, a coquette.
“If you were just an ordinary, stupid, stolid Englishman,” she whispered, “why did you risk your honour and your safety for my sake? Will you tell me that, dear man of steel?”
Julian leaned even closer over her. She was smiling now frankly into his face, refusing the warning of his burning eyes. Then suddenly, silently, he held her to him and kissed her, unresisting, upon the lips. She made no protest. He even fancied afterwards, when he tried to rebuild in his mind that queer, passionate interlude, that her lips had returned what his had given. It was he who released her—not she who struggled. Yet he understood. He knew that this was a tragedy.
Stenson’s voice reached them from the other side of the ridge.
“Come and show me the way across this wretched bit of marsh, Orden. I don’t like these deceptive green grasses.”
“`Pitfalls for the Politician’ or `Look before you leap’.” Julian muttered aimlessly. “Quite right to avoid that spot, sir. Just follow where I am pointing.”
Stenson made his laborious way to their side.
“This may be a short cut back to the Hall,” he exclaimed, “but except for the view of the sea and this gorgeous air, I think I should have preferred the main road! Help me up, Orden. Isn’t it somewhere near here that that little affair, happened the other night?”
“This very spot,” Julian assented. “Miss Abbeway and I were just speaking of it.”
They both glanced towards her. She was standing with her back to them, looking out seawards. She did not move even at the mention of her name.
“A dreary spot at night, I dare say,” the Prime Minister remarked, without overmuch interest. “How do we get home from here, Orden? I haven’t forgotten your warning about luncheon, and this air is giving me a most lively appetite.”
“Straight along the top of this ridge for about three quarters of a mile, sir, to the entrance of the harbour there.”
“And then?”
“I have a petrol launch,” Julian explained, “and I shall land you practically in the dining room in another ten minutes.”
“Let us proceed,” Mr. Stenson suggested briskly. “What a queer fellow Miles Furley is! Quite a friend of yours, isn’t he, Miss Abbeway?”
“I have seen a good deal of him lately,” she answered, walking on and making room for Stenson to fall into step by her side, but still keeping her face a little averted. “A man of many but confused ideas; a man, I should think, who stands an evil chance of muddling his career away.”
“We offered him a post in the Government,” Stenson ruminated.
“He had just sense enough to refuse that, I suppose,” she observed, moving slowly to the right and thereby preventing Julian from taking a place by her side. “Yet,” she went on, “I find in him the fault of so many Englishmen, the fault that prevents their becoming great statesmen, great soldiers, or even,” she added coolly, “successful lovers.”
“And what is that?” Julian demanded.
She remained silent. It was as though she had heard nothing. She caught Mr. Stenson’s arm and pointed to a huge white seagull, drifting down the wind above their heads.
“To think,” she said, “with that model, we intellectuals have waited nearly two thousand years for the aeroplane!”
CHAPTER VIII
According to plans made earlier in the day, a small shooting party left the Hall immediately after luncheon and did not return until late in the afternoon. Julian, therefore, saw nothing more of Catherine until she came into the drawing-room, a few minutes before the announcement of dinner, wearing a wonderful toilette of pale blue silk, with magnificent pearls around her neck and threaded in her Russian headdress. As is the way with all women of genius, Catherine’s complete change of toilette indicated a parallel change in her demeanour. Her interesting but somewhat subdued manner of the previous evening seemed to have vanished. At the dinner table she dominated the conversation. She displayed an intimate acquaintance with every capital of Europe and with countless personages of importance. She exchanged personal reminiscences with Lord Shervinton, who had once been attached to the Embassy at Rome, and with Mr. Hannaway Wells, who had been first secretary at Vienna. She spoke amusingly of Munich, at which place, it appeared, she had first studied art, but dilated, with all the artist’s fervour, on her travellings in Spain, on the soft yet wonderfully vivid colouring of the southern cities. She seemed to have escaped altogether from the gravity of which she had displayed traces on the previous evening. She was no longer the serious young woman with a purpose. From the chrysalis she had changed into the butterfly, the brilliant and cosmopolitan young queen of fashion, ruling easily, not with the arrogance of rank, but with the actual gifts of charm and wit. Julian himself derived little benefit from being her neighbour, for the conversation that evening, from first to last, was general. Even after she had left the room, the atmosphere which she had created seemed to linger behind her.
“I have never rightly understood Miss Abbeway,” the Bishop declared. “She is a most extraordinarily brilliant young woman.”
Lord Shervinton assented.
“To-night you have Catherine Abbeway,” he expounded, “as she might have been but for these queer, alternating crazes of hers—art and socialism. Her brain was developed a little too early, and she was unfortunately, almost in her girlhood, thrown in with a little clique of brilliant young Russians who attained a great influence over her. Most of them are in Siberia or have disappeared by now. One Anna Katinski—was brought back from Tobolsk like a royal princess on the first day of the revolution.”
“It is strange,” the Earl pronounced didactically, “that a young lady of Miss Abbeway’s birth and gifts should espouse the cause of this Labour rabble, a party already cursed with too many leaders.”
“A woman, when she takes up a cause,” Mr. Hannaway Wells observed, “always seeks either for the picturesque or for something which appeals to the emotions. So long as she doesn’t mix with them, the cause of the people has a great deal to recommend it. One can use beautiful phrases, can idealise with a certain amount of logic, and can actually achieve things.”
Julian shrugged his shoulders.
“I think we are all a little blind,” he remarked, “to the danger in which we stand through the great prosperity of Labour to-day.”
The Bishop leaned across the table.
“You have been reading Fiske this week.”
“Did I quote?” Julian asked carelessly. “I have a wretched memory. I should never dare to become a politician. I should always be passing off other people’s phrases as my own.”
“Fiske is quite right in his main contention,” Mr. Stenson interposed. “The war is rapidly creating a new class of bourgeoisie. The very differences in the earning of skilled labourers will bring trouble before long—the miner with his fifty or sixty shillings, and the munition worker with his seven or eight pounds—men drawn from the same class.”
“England,” declared the Earl, indulging in his favourite speech, “was never so contented as when wages were at their lowest.”
“Those days will never come again,” Mr. Hannaway Wells foretold grimly. “The working man has tasted blood. He has begun to understand his power. Our Ministers have been asleep for a generation. The first of these modern trades unions should have been treated like a secret society in Italy. Look at them now, and what they represent! Fancy what it will mean when they have all learnt