Verrinder's mind was hardly more at rest when he left her and walked to his rooms. He carried the regret of a protector of England who had bungled his task and let the wards of his suspicion break loose. The fault was not his, but he would never escape the reproach. He had no taste for taking revenge on the young woman. It would not salve his pride to visit on her pretty head the thwarted punishments due Sir Joseph and his consort in guilt. Besides, in spite of his cynicism, he had been touched by Marie Louise's sincerities. She proved them by the very contradictions of her testimony, with its history of keen intelligence alternating with curious blindness. He knew how people get themselves all tangled up in conflicting duties, how they let evils slide along, putting off till to-morrow the severing of the cords and the stepping forth with freedom from obligation. He knew that the very best people, being those who are most sensitive to grat.i.tude and to other people's pains, are incessantly let in for complications that never involve selfish or self-righteous persons.

As an executive of the law, he knew how many laws there are unwritten and implied that make obedience to the law an experiment in caddishness and ingrat.i.tude. There were reasons enough then to believe that Marie Louise had meant no harm and had not understood the evil in which she was so useful an accomplice. Even if she were guilty and her bewilderment feigned, her punishment would be untimely at this moment when the Americans who abhorred and distrusted Germany had just about persuaded the majority of their countrymen that the world would be intolerable if Germany triumphed, and that the only hope of defeating her tyranny lay in joining hands with England, France, and Italy.

The enemies of England would be only too glad to make a martyr out of Miss Webling if she were disciplined by England. She would be advertised, as a counterweight to the hideous mistake the Germans made in immortalizing with their bullets the poor little nurse, "_die_ Cavell."

Verrinder was not himself at all till he had bathed, shaved, and clothed his person in clean linen and given his inner man its tea and toast. Once this restoration was made, his tea deferred helped him to the conclusion that the one wise thing was to restore Marie Louise quietly to her own country. He went with freshened step and determined mind to a conference with the eminent men concerned. He made his own confession of failure and took more blame than he need have accepted.

Then he told his plans for Marie Louise and made the council agree with him.

Early in the afternoon he called on Miss Webling and found the house a flurry of undertakers, curious relatives, and thwarted reporters. The relatives and the reporters he satisfied with a few well-chosen lies.

Then he sent his name up to Marie Louise. The butler thrust the card-tray through the door as if he were tossing a bit of meat to some wild animal.

"I'll be down," said Marie Louise, and she primped herself like another Mary Queen of Scots receiving a call from the executioner. She was calmed by the hope that she would learn her fate, at least, and she cared little what it was, so long as it was not unknown.

Verrinder did not delay to spread his cards on the table.

"Miss Webling, I begin again with a question: If we should offer you freedom and silence, would you go back to America and tell no one of what has happened here?"

The mere hint was like flinging a door open and letting the sunlight into a dungeon. The very word "America" was itself a rush of fresh air. The long-forgotten love of country came back into her heart on a cry of hope.

"Oh, you don't mean that you might?"

"We might. In fact, we will, if you will promise--"

She could not wait for his formal conclusion. She broke in: "I'll promise anything--anything! Oh I don't want to be free just for the sake of escaping punishment! No, no. I just want a chance to--to expiate the evil I have done. I want to do some good to undo all the bad I've brought about. I won't try to shift any blame. I want to confess. It will take this awful load off my heart to tell people what a wicked fool I've been."

Verrinder checked her: "But that is just what you must not do. Unless you can a.s.sure us that you will carry this burden about with you and keep it secret at no matter what cost, then we shall have to proceed with the case--legally. We shall have to exhume Sir Joseph and Lady Webling, as it were, and drag the whole thing through the courts. We'd really rather not, but if you insist--"

"Oh, I'll promise. I'll keep the secret. Let them rest."

She was driven less by the thought of her own liberty than the terror of exposing the dead. The mere thought brought back pictures of hideous days when the grave was not refuge enough from vengeance, when bodies were dug up, gibbeted, haled by a chain along the unwashed cobblestones, quartered with a sword in the market-place and then flung back to the dark.

Verrinder may have feared that Marie Louise yielded under duress, and that when she was out of reach of the law she would forget, so he said

"Would you swear to keep this inviolate?"

"Yes!"

"Have you a Bible?"

She thought there must be one, and she searched for it among the bookshelves. But first she came across one in the German tongue. It fell open easily, as if it had been a familiar companion of Sir Joseph's. She abhorred the sight of the words that youthful Sunday-school lessons had given an unearthly sanct.i.ty as she recognized them twisted into the German paraphrase and printed in the twisted German type. But she said:

"Will this do?"

Verrinder shook his head. "I don't know that an oath on a German Bible would really count. It might be considered a mere heap of paper."

Marie Louise put it aside and brushed its dust off her fingers. She found an English Bible after a further search. Its pages had seen the light but seldom. It slipped from her hand and fell open. She knelt to pick it up with a tremor of fear.

She rose, and before she closed it glanced at the page before her.

These words caught her eye:

For thus saith the Lord G.o.d of Israel unto me. Take the winecup of this fury at my hand, and cause all the nations, to whom I send thee, to drink it. And they shall drink, and be moved, and be mad because of the sword that I will send among them.

She showed them to Verrinder. He nodded solemnly, took the book from her hand, closed it, and held it before her. She put the slim tips of her young fingers near the talon of his old thumb and echoed in a timid, silvern voice the broken phrases he spoke in a tone of bronze:

"I solemnly swear--that so long as I live--I will tell no one--what I know--of the crimes and death--of Sir Joseph and Lady Webling--unless called upon--in a court of law. This oath is made--with no mental reservations--and is binding--under all circ.u.mstances whatsoever--so help me G.o.d!"

When she had whispered the last invocation he put the book away and gripped her hand in his.

"I must remind you that releasing you is highly illegal--and perhaps immoral. Our action might be overruled and the whole case opened. But I think you are safe, especially if you get to America--the sooner the better."

"Thank you!" she said.

He laughed, somewhat pathetically.

"Good luck!"

He did not tell her that England would still be watching over her, that her name and her history were already cabled to America, that she would be shadowed to the steamer, observed aboard the boat, and picked up at the dock by the first of a long series of detectives const.i.tuting a sort of serial guardian angel.

BOOK II

IN NEW YORK

[Ill.u.s.tration: "This is the life for me. I've been a heroine and a war-worker about as long as I can."]

CHAPTER I

Leaving England quickly was not easy in those days. Pa.s.senger-steamers were few, irregular, and secret. The pa.s.sport regulations were exceedingly rigorous, and even Mr. Verrinder's influence could not speed the matter greatly.

There was the Webling estate to settle up, also. At Verrinder's suggestion Marie Louise put her affairs into the hands of counsel, and he arranged her surrender of all claims on the Webling estate. But he insisted that she should keep the twenty thousand pounds that had been given to her absolutely. He may have been influenced in this by his inability to see from what other funds he could collect his fee.

Eventually he placed her aboard a liner, and her bonds in the purser's safe; and eventually the liner stole out into the ocean, through such a gantlet of lurking demons as old superst.i.tions peopled it with.

She had not told the children good-by, but had delivered them to the Oakbys and run away. The Oakbys had received her with a coldness that startled her. They used the expression, "Under the circ.u.mstances,"

with a freezing implication that made her wonder if the secret had already trickled through to them.

On the steamer there was n.o.body she knew. At the dock no friends greeted her. She did not notice that her arrival was noted by a certain Mr. Larrey, who had been detailed to watch her and saw with some pride how pretty she was. "It'll be a pleasure to keep an eye on her," he told a luckless colleague who had a long-haired pacifist professor allotted to him. But Marie Louise's mystic squire had not counted on her stopping in New York for only a day and then setting forth on a long, hot, stupid train-ride of two days to the little town of her birth, Wakefield.

Larrey found it appalling. Marie Louise found it far smaller and shabbier than she had imagined. Yet it had grown some, too, since her time.

At least, most of the people she had known had moved away to the cities or the cemeteries, and new people had taken their place. She had not known many of the better people. Her mother had been too humble to sew for them.