“Have you anything more to say to me?” the man stammered. “I feel faint.”
His persecutor threw open the door.
“Nothing! Get into your car and drive home. Keep out of sight and hearing for a time. You are no particular ornament nor any use to any country, but remember that everything you have done, you have done when the country of your birth was in trouble and the country of your adoption was at peace. The situation is altered. The country of which you are a naturalised citizen is now at war. You had better remember it, and decide for yourself where your duty lies.”
They listened to his heavy footsteps as he descended the stairs. Then the girl turned to her companion.
“Mr. Thew,” she began, “you are not a German or an Austrian, yet you are doing their work, risking your life every day. Is it for money?”
“No,” he replied, “in a general way it is not for money.”
“What is it, then?” she asked curiously.
He stood looking out across the roofs and at the distant skyscrapers. She watched him without speaking. She knew very well that his eyes saw nothing of the landscape. He was looking back into some world of his own fancy, back, perhaps, into the shadows of his own life, concerning which no word that she or any one else in the city had ever heard had passed his lips.
.
CHAPTER IV
The two men — Crawshay and Sam Hobson — still a little breathless, stood at the end of the dock, gazing out towards the river. Around them was a slowly dispersing crowd of sightseers, friends and relations of the passengers on board the great American liner, ploughing her way down the river amidst the shrieks and hoots of her attendant tugs. Out on the horizon, beyond the Statue of Liberty, two long, grey, sinister shapes were waiting. Hobson glanced at them gloomily.
“Guess those are our destroyers going to take the City of Boston some of the way across,” he observed. “To think, with all this fuss about, that she must go and start an hour before her time!”
“It’s filthy luck,” the Englishman muttered.
The crowd grew thinner and thinner, yet the two men made no movement towards departure. It seemed to Crawshay impossible that after all they had gone through they should have failed. The journey in the fast motor car, after a breakdown of the Chicago Limited, rushing through the night like some live monster, tearing now through a plain of level lights, as they passed through some great city, vomiting fire and flame into the black darkness of the country places. It was like the ride of madmen, and more than once they had both hung on to their seats in something which was almost terror. “How are we going?” Crawshay had asked perpetually.
“Still that infernal half-hour,” was the continual reply. “We are doing seventy, but we don’t seem to be able to work it down.”
A powerful automobile had taken them through the streets of New York, and lay now a wreck in one of the streets a mile from the dock. They had finished the journey in a taxicab, and the finish had been this — half an hour late! Yet they lingered, with their eyes fixed upon the disappearing ship.
“I guess there’s nothing more we can do,” Hobson said at last grudgingly. “We can lay it up for them on the other side, and we can talk to her all the way to Liverpool on the wireless, but if there is any scoop to be made the others’ll get it — not us.”
“If only we could have got on board!” Crawshay muttered. “It’s no use thinking of a tug, I suppose?”
The American shook his head.
“She’s too far out,” he replied gloomily. “There’s nothing to be hired that could catch her.”
Crawshay’s hand had suddenly stolen to his chin. There was a queer light in his eyes. He clutched at his companion’s arm.
“You’re wrong, Hobson,” he exclaimed. “There is! Come right along with me. We can talk as we go.”
“Are you crazy?” the American demanded.
“Not quite,” the other answered. “Hurry up, man.”
“Where to?” “To New Jersey. I’ve got Government orders, endorsed by your own Secretary of War. It’s a hundred to one they won’t listen to me, but we’ve got to try it.”
He was already dragging his companion down the wooden way. His whole expression had changed. His face was alight with the joy of an idea. Already Hobson, upon whom the germ of that idea had dawned, began to be infected with his enthusiasm.
“It’s a gorgeous stunt,” he acknowledged, as he followed his companion into a taxicab. “If we bring it off, it’s going to knock the movies silly.”
Katharine, weary at last of waving her hand to the indistinct blur of faces upon the dock, picked up the great clusters of roses which late arrivals had thrust into her arms at the last moment, and descended to her stateroom upon the saloon deck. She spent only a few minutes looking at the arrangement of her things, and then knocked at the door of the stateroom exactly opposite. A thick-browed, heavy-looking man, sombrely and professionally dressed, opened the door.
“Are you wanting me, Doctor Gant?” she asked.
The doctor shook his head.
“The patient is asleep,” he announced in a whisper.
Katharine stepped inside and stood looking down upon the pale, almost ghastly face of the man stretched at full length upon the bed.
“Why, I remember him perfectly,” she exclaimed. “He was in Number Three Ward for some time. Surely he was a clerk at one of the drygoods stores down-town?”
The doctor nodded.
“Very likely.”
“I remember the case,” Katharine continued,— “appendicitis, followed by pneumonia, and complicated by angina pectoris.”
“You have it precisely.”
Katharine’s eyes were full of perplexity.
“But the man is in very poor circumstances,” she remarked. “How on earth can he afford a trip like this? He was on the free list at the hospital.”
The doctor frowned.
“That is not my business,” he said. “My fees are paid, and the steamer tickets appear to be in order. He probably has wealthy friends.”
Katharine looked down once more at the sleeping man. His face was insignificant, his expression peevish, his features without the animation of any high purpose.
“I really cannot understand,” she murmured, “how he became a friend — a friend—”
“A friend of whom?” the doctor enquired.
Katharine reflected and shook her head.
“Perhaps I was indiscreet,” she confessed. “I dare say you know as much about him as I do. At what time would you like me to come and help you change the bandages?”
“I shall change them alone,” the doctor replied.
“I prefer to.”
Katharine glanced up in surprise.
“Surely you are not in earnest?” she asked. “What else am I here for? I suppose you realise that I am fully qualified?”
The doctor unbent a little.
“I am perfectly well aware of that. Miss Beverley,” he said, “and it may be that there are times when I shall be glad of your help, and in any case,” he went on, “I shall have to ask you to take a share in the night watching. But the surgical part of the case has been a great responsibility, and I couldn’t afford to have the slightest thing in the world happen to one of my bandages.”