Hemmingway stepped forward into the candlelight. 'Margery entertained me quite a number of times down here while you were on your honeymoon.'
It was as though the word honeymoon had rung a bell in Margery's brain. Hemmingway sensed a sudden hostility in the tensing of Margery's figure and as her eyes switched for a second to Lavina's face he felt sure that she had heard those last words of his outside the front door about lying for the sake of sparing people's feelings, and was putting a wrong interpretation on them. He tried to persuade himself that it might only be his own guilty conscience that had suggested it. but he could have sworn that Margery had guessed there had been something between him and Lavina. In a second, however, she recovered herself, smiled at him and said:
'Of course. Hemmingway was best man at your wedding. He' s an old friend of the family now; but where are Roy and Derek?'
'We're a bit worried about them,' Hemmingway confessed. It's rather a long story so perhaps we'd better keep it until the others can hear it as well, but we're hoping they'll get 3own here some time today. By-the-by, where are the others?'
'Getting up, I hope. I called them half an hour ago.'
'Why this early rising, darling?' Lavina asked. 'It's not half, past four yet.'
'It's on account of the comet,' Margery explained. 'You know that beastly red light it gives out that affects everybody so strangely? Oliver says that, even if it's cloudy today, the light will come through quite strongly almost directly after sunrise and get worse as the day goes on. Sunrise is at 4.43, and the comet will be over the horizon twelve minutes later; so it was decided that we ought all to be in the Ark before five o'clock.'
'Won't it affect anyone in the Ark, then?' Hemmingway inquired.
'It would in the ordinary way, but for the last few evenings Oliver has been experimenting with micas of various colours and he's found one which will neutralise the rays. Yesterday afternoon he and Daddy covered the port-holes of the Ark with it and they think we won't be affected if we sit in there all day.'
'I must go up and see them,' cried Lavina. 'Where's Sam?'
'He's in the nursery. They lured him in there by a trick and locked him up when he wanted to go back to London to try and find you.'
'What, they locked him up with Finkie?' Hemmingway laughed. 'Poor old Sam! You might at least have put them in
separate cells.'
'Oh, but Mr. Fink-Drummond went days ago,' Margery said quickly. 'Didn't Roy tell you?'
'He said nothing about it when he arrived at St. James's Square.'
'Well, it was the evening before he left.' Margery looked a little uncomfortable. 'You know Roy drinks rather a lot, and I think he'd been at the bottle. Anyhow, he went up to have a chat with Fink-Drummond that evening and next morning he confessed to Daddy that he'd been sorry for our unwelcome guest and let him go.'
Hemmingway shrugged. 'Well, as it was much too late f°r Finkie to have done any harm, it doesn't really matter. In any case it wouldn't have been fair to leave him a prisoner with the chance that an earthquake might bring down the house, we'd have had to free him before taking to the Ark ourselves-
Margery nodded. 'You'd better run up and let Sam out yourselves. It'll be a glorious surprise for him. I must hurry and get breakfast ready because the others'll be down in a moment.'
Up in the nursery they found Sam. He was sitting, still fully dressed, hunched up in a chair with his head between his hands, and it was clear that he had not been to bed that night.
The second he saw Lavina he sprang up and, absolutely choking with relief, seized her in his arms; then, immediately his first excitement had subsided a little, he gripped and wrung Hemmingway's hand as though he would never stop. For the last hour Lavina and Hemmingway had been dreading that meeting but, when it came, Sam carried them both away by his intense, infectious joy at seeing them again. In a moment all three of them were talking at the same time; babbling out the hopes, fears and anguish through which they had passed during the last forty odd hours. As they went downstairs Gervaise and Oliver joined them. There were more kisses, embraces, handshakes. It was almost as though Hemmingway and Lavina had returned from a war or a journey to the North Pole.
Breakfast was a hurried meal as time was flying; but, as they ate, Lavina gave a carefully expurgated account of her adventures and Hemmingway helped her out when she was questioned about Derek and Roy.
On Sam's asking about the private papers which Hemmingway was to have brought down he had to confess that, having dropped the satchel containing them behind the counter in the tea-shop at Burgh Heath when the fight started there, the ensuing earthquake had caused him to forget all about it.
The loss of the papers was such a little thing compared to Lavina's safety that Sam only laughed about it; but the fact that they had been left behind reminded Lavina that the bags she had packed were still at St. James's Square and she had little hope that if Derek did arrive he would bring them with him.
Fortunately, she had left many of her older garments at Stapleton when she had run away three years before, so, taking Sam with her, she dashed upstairs to her old room. Spreading the coverlet from the bed on the floor they hastily pulled any of her clothes that they could find out of drawers and cupboards, flung them on the coverlet and made it up into a big bundle. By the time they had done, the others were shouting to them from the hall to hurry.
Everything except last-minute articles had been loaded into the Ark already so apart from Lavina's things there was little for them to carry down to it. After a last look round the house they crossed the lawn and walked along the edge of the lake to the landing stage beside the slips from which the Ark had been launched.
It was almost daylight and the sun was on the point of rising as they settled themselves in a big, flat-bottomed punt, and Gervaise and Sam began to pole them out to the centre of the lake where the Ark floated. The summit of the huge, steel sphere stood over sixteen feet above the water, as it was ninety feet in circumference and a little less than half submerged, with the two-foot-wide landing stage, which ran round its equator just clear of the lake's placid surface.
Ten minutes were occupied in poling the heavily laden punt out to the centre of the lake. Except for a few small fleecy clouds the sky was clear and they had covered only half the distance when the sun came up over the distant tree tops. As they reached the Ark the sinister pinkish light which heralded the rising of the terror of the heavens was already colouring the sky to the east.
Quietly but quickly Gervaise opened the steel door in the curved side of the Ark and, ducking their heads, they scrambled through into its interior. Having hitched the painter of the punt to the landing-platform, in case they might need it again later, he followed them inside and closed the steel door behind him. As he did so, the others were gazing from the port-holes of the Ark in silence and awe upon what was, perhaps, the dawning of the last day of the world.
Prepare For Death
Lavina and Hemmingway had seen the Ark when it had been nearing completion but not since it had been fully equipped and, on looking round them, they marvelled at the manner in which every spare inch of space had been made use of.
Its main deck was on the same level as the landing-stage that ran round its equator and its upper part was divided into five compartments.
One half of the upper part—a quarter of the whole sphere —was fitted up as a living-room, having a maximum length along its partition wall of 30 feet and a breadth, from the dead centre of the sphere to its rim, of 15 feet; which gave a semicircular floor-space of approximately 350 square feet—roughly that of a rectangular room measuring 20 by \1\.