CHAPTER XVII
AWAY FROM THE WARPATH
When Lennard entered the little drawing-room in the house in WestbourneTerrace, where Norah Castellan and her aunt were staying, he had decidedto do something which, without his knowing it, probably made a veryconsiderable difference in his own fortunes and those of two or threeother people.
During his brief but exciting experiences on board the _Ithuriel_, hehad formed a real friendship for both Erskine and Castellan, and he hadcome to the conclusion that Denis's sister and aunt would be very muchsafer in the remote seclusion of Whernside than in a city which mightwithin the next few days share the fate of Portsmouth and Gosport. Hewas instantly confirmed in this resolution when Mrs O'Connor and herniece came into the room. Never had he seen a more perfect specimen ofthe Irishwoman, who is a lady by Nature's own patent of nobility, thanMrs O'Connor, and, with of course one exception, never had he seen sucha beautiful girl as Norah Castellan.
He was friends with them in half an hour, and inside an hour he hadaccepted their invitation to dine and sleep at the house and help themto get ready for their unexpected journey to the North the next morning.
He went back to the Grand and got his portmanteau and Gladstone bag andreturned to Westbourne Terrace in time for afternoon tea. Meanwhile, hehad bought the early copies of all the evening papers and read up thecondition of things in London, which, in the light of his experiences atPortsmouth, did not appear to him to be in any way promising. He gaveNorah and her aunt a full, true and particular account of the assault onPortsmouth, the doings of the _Ithuriel_, the great Fleet action, andthe brilliant _ruse de guerre_ which Admiral Beresford had used tocapture the First French Army Corps that had landed in England--andlanded as prisoners.
The news in the afternoon papers, coupled with what he already knew ofthe tactics of the enemy, impressed Lennard so gravely that he succeededin persuading Mrs O'Connor and Norah to leave London by the midnightsleeping-car train from St Pancras for Whernside, since no one knew atwhat time during the night John Castellan or his lieutenants might notorder an indiscriminate bombardment of London from the air. He was alsovery anxious, for reasons of his own, to get back to his work at theobservatory and make his preparations for the carrying out of anundertaking compared with which the war, terrible as it was and wouldbe, could only be considered as the squabblings of children or lunatics.
His task was not one of aggression or conquest, but of salvation, andthe enemy he was going to fight was an invader not of states orcountries, but of a whole world, and unless the assault of this invaderfrom the outer wilderness of Space were repelled, the result would notbe merely the destruction of ships and fortresses, or the killing of afew hundreds or thousands of men on the battlefield; it would meannothing less than a holocaust which would involve the whole human race,and the simultaneous annihilation of all that the genius of man had solaboriously accumulated during the slow, uncounted ages of his progressfrom the brute to the man.
They left the train at Settle at six o'clock the next morning, and wereat once taken charge of by the station-master, who had had hisinstructions by telephone from the Parmenter mansion on the slopes ofGreat Whernside. He conducted them at once to the Midland Hotel, wherethey found a suite of apartments, luxuriously furnished, with firesblazing in the grates, and everything looking very cosy under the softglow of the shaded electric lights. Baths were ready and breakfast wouldbe on the table at seven. At eight, Mr Parmenter, who practically ownedthis suite of rooms, would drive over with Miss Parmenter in a couple ofmotor-cars and take the party to the house.
"Sure, then," said Mrs O'Connor, when the arrangements had beenexplained to her, "it must be very comfortable to have all the money tobuy just what you want, and make everything as easy as all this, andit's yourself, Mr Lennard, we have to thank for making us the guests ofa millionaire, when neither Norah nor myself have so much as seen one.Is he a very great man, this Mr Parmenter? It seems to me to besomething like going to dine with a duke."
"My dear Mrs O'Connor," laughed Lennard, "I can assure you that you willfind this master of millions one of Nature's own gentlemen. Although hecan make men rich or poor by a stroke of his pen, and, with a few otherslike him, wield such power as was never in the hands of kings, youwouldn't know him from a plain English country gentleman if it wasn'tfor his American accent, and there's not very much of that."
"And his daughter, Miss Auriole, what's she like?" said Norah. "Abeauty, of course."
Lennard flushed somewhat suspiciously, and a keen glance of Norah'sIrish eyes read the meaning of that flush in an instant.
"Miss Parmenter is considered to be very beautiful," he replied, "and Imust confess that I share the general opinion."
"I thought so," said Norah, with a little nod that had a great deal ofmeaning in it. "Now, I suppose we'd better go and change, or we'll belate for breakfast. I certainly don't want the beautiful Miss Parmenterto see me in this state for the first time."
"My dear Miss Castellan, I can assure you that you have not thefaintest reason to fear any comparison that might be made," laughedLennard as he left the room and went to have his tub.
Punctually at eight a double "Toot-toot" sounded from the street infront of the main entrance to the hotel. Norah ran to the window and sawtwo splendidly-appointed Napier cars--although, of course, she didn'tknow a Napier from a Darracq. Something in female shape with peaked capand goggles, gauntleted and covered from head to foot in a heavy furcoat, got out of the first car, and another shape, rather shorter butalmost similarly clad, got out of the second. Five minutes later therewas a knock at the door of the breakfast-room. It opened, and Norah sawwhat the cap and the goggles and the great fur coat had hidden. Duringthe next few seconds, two of the most beautiful girls in the twohemispheres looked at each other, as only girls and women can look. ThenAuriole put out both her hands and said, quite simply:
"You are Norah Castellan. I hope we shall be good friends. If we're not,I'm afraid it will be my fault."
Norah took her hands and said:
"I think it would more likely be mine, after what Mr Lennard has beentelling us of yourself and your father."
At this moment Lennard saved the situation as far as he was concerned bymaking the other introductions, and Mrs O'Connor took the hand whichwielded the terrible power of millions and experienced a curious sort ofsurprise at finding that it was just like other hands, and that theowner of it was bending over hers with one of those gestures of simplecourtesy which are the infallible mark of the American gentleman. In afew minutes they were all as much at home together as though they hadknown each other for weeks. Then came the preparation of Norah and heraunt for the motor ride, and then the ride itself.
The sun had risen clearly, and there was a decided nip of frost in thekeen Northern air. The roads were hard and clean, and thetwenty-five-mile run over them, winding through the valleys and climbingthe ridges with the heather-clad, rock-crowned hills on all sides, nowsliding down a slope or shooting along a level, or taking a rise in whatseemed a flying leap, was by far the most wonderful experience thatNorah and her aunt had ever had.
Auriole drove the first car, and had Norah sitting beside her on thefront seat. Her aunt and the mechanician were sitting in the tonneaubehind. Mr Parmenter drove the second car with Lennard beside him. Histonneau was filled with luggage.
At the end of the eighteenth mile the cars, going at a quite illegalspeed, jumped a ridge between two heather-clad moors, which in SouthAfrica would have been called a nek, and dived down along a white roadleading into a broad forest track, sunlit now, but bordered on eitherside by the twilight of towering pines and firs through which thesunlight filtered only in little flakes, which lay upon the last year'sleaves and cones, somewhat as an electric light might have fallen on amonkish manuscript of the thirteenth century.
Then came two more miles on hard, well-kept roads, so perfectly gradedthat the upward slope was hardly perceptible.
"We're on our own grou
nd now and I guess I'll let her out," said MissAuriole. "Don't be frightened, Norah. These things look big and strong,but it's quite wonderful what they'll do when there's a bit of humansense running them. See that your goggles are right and twist your veilin a bit tighter, I'm going to give you a new sensation."
She waved her hand to her father in the car behind and put on the fourthspeed lever, and said: "Hold tight now."
Norah nodded, for she could hardly breathe as it was. Then the pines andfirs on either side of the broad drive melted into a green-grey blur.The road under them was like a rapidly unwinding ribbon. The hilltopswhich showed above the trees rose up now to the right hand and now tothe left, as the car swung round the curves. Every now and then Norahlooked at the girl beside her, controlling the distance-devouringmonster with one hand on a little wheel, her left foot on a pedal andher right hand ready to work the levers if necessary.
The two miles of the drive from the gates to the front door of WhernsideHouse, a long, low-lying two-storeyed, granite-built house, which wasabout as good a combination of outward solidity and indoor comfort asyou could find in the British Islands, was covered in two and a halfminutes, and the car pulled up, as Norah thought, almost at full speedand stopped dead in front of the steps leading up from the broad road tothe steps leading up to the terrace which ran along the whole southwardfront of Whernside House.
"I reckon, Miss Castellan--"
"If you say Miss Castellan, I shall get back to Settle by the firstconveyance that I can hire."
"Now, that's just nice of you, Norah. What I was going to say, if Ihadn't made that mistake, was, that this would be about the first timethat you had covered two miles along a road at fifty miles an hour, andthat's what you've just done. Pretty quick, isn't it? Oh, there's LordWesterham on the terrace! Come for lunch, I suppose. He's a very greatman here, you know. Lord-Lieutenant of the West Riding of Yorkshire,fought through the Boer War, got made a Colonel by some miracle when hewas only about twenty-eight, went to Lhassa, and now he's something likeCommander-in-Chief of the Yeomanry and Volunteers round here--andwithout anything of that sort, he's just about the best sort of man youwant to meet. Come along, I'll introduce you."
The two cars stopped at the steps leading up to the terrace, a man inkhaki, with a stretch of a dozen ribbons across the left side of histunic, came bareheaded down the steps and opened the side door ofAuriole's motor-car. Auriole pushed her goggles up and held out hergauntleted hand, and said:
"What! Lord Westerham! Well now, this is nice of you. Come to lunch, ofcourse. And how's the recruiting going on?"
Then without waiting for a reply, she went on: "Norah, dear, this isLord Westerham, Lord-Lieutenant of this part of the County of York,Colonel commanding the West Riding Yeomanry and lots of other thingsthat I don't understand."
Norah pushed her goggles up and tilted her hat back. Auriole saw a flashof recognition pass like lightning between their eyes. She noticed thatNorah's cheeks were a little bit brighter than even the speed of the carcould account for. She saw, too, that there was a flush under the tan ofLord Westerham's face, and to her these were signs of great comfort.
"I don't know how this particular miracle has been arranged," said LordWesterham, as he gave his hand to Norah and took her out of the car,"but a re-introduction is, if you will allow me to say so, MissParmenter, rather superfluous. I have known Miss Castellan for quite twoyears, at least, I had the pleasure of meeting her in Connemara, and wehave fished and shot and sailed together until we became almostfriends."
Auriole's eyes, observant at all times, had been working hard during thelast two or three minutes, and in those few minutes she had learned agreat deal. Arthur Lennard, who also had his eyes wide open, had learntin his own slow, masculine way about as much, and perhaps a little more.He and Lord Westerham had been school-fellows and college chums and goodfriends for years, but of late a shadow had come between them, and it'shardly necessary to say that it was the shadow of a woman. He knewperfectly well by this time that Lord Westerham was, in the opinion ofMr Parmenter, the husband-designate, one might say, of Auriole. Young ashe was, he already had a distinguished record as a soldier and anadministrator, but he was also heir to one of the oldest Marquisates inEngland with a very probable reversion to a dukedom.
This was what he had been thinking of that night in the observatory whenhe told Auriole of the fate that was approaching the world. No one knewbetter than he how brilliant a figure she would make in Society as theMarchioness of Westerham, granted always that the Anglo-Saxon would donow as he had ever done, fling the invader back upon his own shores orinto the sea which he had crossed: but that swift flash of recognitionseen as his car came up behind Auriole's, and the slight but mostsignificant change which had come over the features of both of them ashe handed her out of the car, had instantly banished the shadow and madehim a happier man than he had been for a good many months past.
Still he was one of those hard-headed, practical men who rightlyconsider that the very worst enemy either to friendship between man andman, or love between man and woman, is an unexplained misunderstanding,and so in that moment he decided to "have it out" with his lordship onthe first possible opportunity.