CHAPTER XXXII
A VIGIL IN THE NIGHT
Although Lennard had always recognised the possibility of such acatastrophe as that which John Castellan threatened, and had even takensuch precautions as he could to prevent it, still this direct menace,coming straight from the man himself, brought the danger home to him ina peculiarly personal way.
The look which had passed between them as they were swimming their racein Clifden Bay had just as much meaning for him as for the man who nownot openly professed himself his rival, but who threatened to proceed tothe last extremities in order to gain possession of the girl they bothloved. It was impossible for him not to believe that the man who hadbeen capable of such cold-blooded atrocities as he had perpetrated atPortsmouth, London and other places, would hesitate for a moment incarrying out such a threat, and if he did--No, the alternative was quitetoo horrible to think of yet.
One thing, however, was absolutely certain. Although no word of love hadpassed between Auriole and himself since the night when he had shown herthe comet and described the possible doom of the world to her, she hadin a hundred ways made it plain to him that she was perfectly well awarethat he loved her and that she did not resent it--and he knew quiteenough of human nature to be well aware that when a woman allows herselfto be loved by a man with whom she is in daily and hourly contact, sheis already half won; and from this it followed, according to his exactmathematical reasoning, that, whatever the consequences, her reply toJohn Castellan's letter would be in the negative, and equally, ofcourse, so would her father's be.
"I wonder what the Kaiser's Admiral of the Air would think if he knewhow matters really stand," he said to himself as he read the letterthrough for a second time. "Quite certain of doing what he threatens, ishe? I'm not. Still, after all, I suppose I mustn't blame him too much,for wasn't I in just the same mind myself once--to save the world if shewould make it heaven for me, to--well--turn it into the other place ifshe wouldn't. But she very soon cured me of that madness.
"I wonder if she could cure this scoundrel if she condescended to try,which I am pretty certain she would not. I wonder what she'll look likewhen she reads this letter. I've never seen her angry yet, but I knowshe would look magnificent. Well, I shall do nothing till Mr Parmentergets back. Still, it's a pity that I've got to gravitate between hereand Bolton for the next seven weeks. If I wasn't, I'd ask him for one ofthose airships and I'd hunt John Castellan through all the oceans of airtill I ran him down and smashed him and his ship too!"
At this moment the butler came to him and informed him that his dinnerwas ready and to ask him what wine he would drink.
"Thank you, Simmons," he replied. "A pint of that excellent Burgundy ofyours, please. By the way, have the papers come yet?"
"Just arrived, sir," said Mr Simmons, making the simple announcementwith all the dignity due to the butler to a millionaire.
He went at once into the dining-room and opened the second edition ofthe _Times_, which was sent every day to Settle by train and thence bymotor-car to Whernside House.
Of course he turned first to the "Latest Intelligence" column. It washeaded, as he half expected it to be, "The Great Turning Movement: TheEnemy in Possession of Aldershot and advancing on Reading."
The account itself was one of those admirable combinations of brevityand impartiality for which the leading journal of the world has alwaysbeen distinguished. What Lennard read ran as follows:
"Four months have now passed since the invading forces of the Allies,after destroying the fortifications of Portsmouth and Dover by meansnever yet employed in warfare, set foot on English soil. There have beenfour months of almost incessant fighting, of heroic defence anddearly-bought victory, but, although it is not too much to say in soberlanguage that the defending troops, regulars, militia, yeomanry andvolunteers, have accomplished what have seemed to be something likemiracles of valour and devotion, the tide of conquest has neverthelessflowed steadily towards London.
"Considering the unanimous devotion with which the citizens of thiscountry, English, Scotch, Irish and Welsh, have taken up arms for thedefence of their Motherland, there can be no doubt but that, if the warhad been fought under ordinary conditions, the tide of invasion would bythis time have been rolled back to our coasts in spite of the admittedsuperiority of the invaders in the technical operations of warfare, andtheir enormous advantage in numbers to begin with. But the Britishforces have had to fight under conditions which have never before beenknown in warfare. Their enemies have not been only those of the land andsea: they have had to fight foes capable of raining destruction uponthem from the air as well, and it may well be believed that the leadersof the invading hosts would be the first to admit that without thisenormous advantage not even the progress that they have so far madewould have been possible.
"The glories of Albuera and Waterloo, of Inkermann and Balaklava, haveover and over again been eclipsed by the whole-souled devotion of theBritish soldiery, fighting, as no doubt every man of them believes, withtheir backs to the wall, not for ultimate victory perhaps but for thepreservation of those splendid traditions which have been maintaineduntarnished for over a thousand years. It is no exaggeration to say thatof all the wars in the history of mankind this has been the deadliestand the bloodiest. Never, perhaps, has so tremendous an attack beendelivered, and never has such an attack been met by so determined aresistance. Still, having due regard to the information at our disposal,it would be vain to deny that, tremendous as the cost must have been,the victory so far lies with the invaders.
"After a battle which has lasted almost continuously for a fortnight; astruggle in which battalion after battalion has fought itself to astandstill and the last limits of human endurance have been reached, thefact remains that the enemy have occupied the whole line of the NorthDowns, Aldershot has ceased to be a British military camp, and is nowoccupied by the legions of Germany, France and Austria.
"Russia, in spite of the disastrous defeat of the united German andRussian expedition against Sheerness, Tilbury and Woolwich, is nowpreparing a force for an attack on Harwich which, if it is not defeatedby the same means as that upon the Thames was defeated by, will havewhat we may frankly call the deplorable effect of diverting a largeproportion of the defenders of London from the south to the north, andthis, unless some other force, at present unheard of, is brought intoplay in aid of the defenders, can only result in the closing of theattack round London--and after that must come the deluge.
"That this is part of a general plan of operations appears to be quiteclear from the desperate efforts which the French, German and Austriantroops are making to turn the position of General French at Reading, tooutflank the British left which is resting on the hills beyondFaversham, and, having thus got astride the Thames, occupy thesemicircle of the Chiltern Hills and so place the whole Thames valleyeast of Reading at their mercy.
"In consequence of the ease with which the enemy's airships havedestroyed both telegraphic and railway communication, no definitedetails are at present to hand. It is only known that since the attackon Aldershot the fighting has not only been on a colossal scale, butalso of the most sanguinary description, with the advantage slowly butsurely turning in favour of the invaders. Such news as reaches us comesentirely by despatch rider and aerogram. We greatly regret to learn,through the former source, that yesterday evening Lord Westerham, thelast of the six special Service officers attached to General French'sstaff, was either killed or captured in a gallant attempt to carrydespatches containing an accurate account of the situation up to datefrom Reading to Windsor, whence it was to be transmitted by theunderground telephone cable to His Majesty at Buckingham Palace."
"That reads pretty bad," said Lennard, when Mr Simmons had left theroom, "especially Westerham being killed or taken prisoner; I don't likethat at all. I wish we'd been able to collar His Majesty of Germany onthat trip to Canterbury as Lord Kitchener suggested, and put him onboard the _Ithuriel_. He'd have made a very excellent hostage in a caselik
e this. I must say that, altogether, affairs do not look verypromising, and we've still two months all but a day or two. Well, if MrParmenter doesn't get across with his aerial fleet pretty soon, I shallcertainly take steps to convince him and his Allies, who are fightingfor a few islands when the whole world is in peril, that my ultimatumwas anything but the joke he seemed to take it for."
He finished his wine, drank a cup of coffee and smoked a meditativecigar in the library, and then went up to the observatory.
It was a lovely night from his point of view; clear, cool and almostcloudless. The young moon was just rising to the eastward, and as helooked up at that portion of the south-western sky from which theCelestial Invader was approaching he could almost persuade himself thathe saw a dim ghostly shape of the Spectre from Space.
But when he got to the telescope the Spectre was no longer there. Thefield of the great reflector was blank, save for the few far-awaystar-mists, and here and there a dimly-distant star, already familiar tohim through many nights of watching.
What had happened? Had some catastrophe occurred in the outer realms ofSpace in which some other world had been involved in fiery ruin, or hadthe comet been dragged away from its orbit by the attraction of one ofthose dead suns, those derelicts of Creation which, dark and silent,drift for age after age through the trackless ocean of Immensity?
There was no cooler-headed man alive than Gilbert Lennard when it cameto a matter of his own profession and yet the world did not hold a morefrightened man than he was when he went to re-adjust the machinery whichregulated the movement of the great telescope, and so began his searchfor the lost comet all over again. One thing only was certain--that theslightest swerve from its course might make the comet harmless and sendit flying through Space millions of miles away from the earth, or bringthe threatening catastrophe nearer by an unknown number of days andhours. And that was the problem, here, alone, and in the silence of thenight, he had to solve. The great gun at Bolton and the other atPittsburg might by this time be useless, or, worse still, they might notbe ready in time.
It was curious that, even face to face with such a terrific crisis, hehad enough human vanity left to shape a half regret that hiscalculations would almost certainly be falsified.
That, however, was only the sensation of a moment. He ran rapidly overhis previous calculations, did about fifteen minutes very hardthinking, and in thirty more he had found the comet. There it was: a fewdegrees more to the northward, and more inclined to the plane of theearth's orbit; brighter, and therefore nearer; and now the question was,by how much?
Confronted with this problem, the man and the lover disappeared, andonly the mathematician and the calculating machine remained. He made hisnotes and went to his desk. The next three hours passed without anyconsciousness of existence save the slow ticking of the astronomicalclock which governed the mechanism of the telescope. The rest was merelyfigures and formulae, which might amount to the death-sentence of thehuman race or to an indefinite reprieve.
When he got up from his desk he had learnt that the time in which itmight be possible to save humanity from a still impending fate had beenshortened by twelve days, and that the contact of the comet with theearth's atmosphere would take place precisely at twelve o'clock,midnight, on the thirtieth of April.
Then he went back to the telescope and picked up the comet again. Justas he had got its ominous shape into the centre of the field a score ofother shapes drifted swiftly across it, infinitely vaster--huge wingedforms, apparently heading straight for the end of the telescope, andonly two or three yards away.
His nerves were not perhaps as steady as they would have been withoutthe shock which he had already received, and he shrank back from theeye-piece as though to avoid a coming blow. Then he got up from hischair and laughed.
"What an ass I am! That's Mr Parmenter's fleet; but what monsters theydo look through a telescope like this!"