"You haven't been here much this summer, sir," remarked the good woman.

"In Idsworth they think you've quite deserted us--Mr. Barnes was only saying so last week. They're all so glad to see you down here, sir."

"That's very good of them, Mrs. Deacon," he laughed. "I, too, only wish I could spend more time here. I love the country, and I'm never so happy as when wandering in Idsworth woods."

And then he asked her to tell him the village gossip while she waited at his table.

After luncheon he put on a rough suit and, taking his stout holly stick, went for a ramble through the great woods he loved so well, where the trees were tinted by autumn and the pheasants were strong upon the wing.

He found Findlay, one of the keepers, and walked with him for an hour as far as the Roman camp, where alone he sat down upon a felled tree and, with his gaze fixed across the distant hills towards the sea, pondered deeply. He loved his modest country cottage, and he loved those quiet, homely Dorsetshire folk around him. Yet such a wanderer was he that only a few months each year--the months he wrote those wonderful romances of his--could he spend in that old-fashioned cottage which he had rendered the very acme of cosiness and comfort.

At half-past four the rickety station fly called for him, and later he left by the express which took him to Waterloo and his club in time for dinner.

And so once again he changed his ident.i.ty from John Maltwood, busy man of business, to Walter Fetherston, novelist and traveller.

The seriousness of what was in progress was now plain to him. He had long been filled with strong suspicions, and these suspicions had been confirmed both by Enid's statements and his own observations; therefore he was already alert and watchful.

At ten o'clock he went to his gloomy chambers for an hour, and then strolled forth to the Vauxhall Bridge Road, and remained vigilant outside the doctor's house until nearly two.

He noted those who came and went--two men who called before midnight, and were evidently foreigners. They came separately, remained about half an hour, and then Weirmarsh himself let them out, shaking hands with them effusively.

Suddenly a taxicab drove up, and from it Sir Hugh, in black overcoat and opera hat, stepped out and was at once admitted, the taxi driving off.

Walter, as he paced up and down the pavement outside, would have given much to know what was transpiring within.

Had he been able to glance inside that shabby little back room he would have witnessed a strange scene--Sir Hugh, the gallant old soldier, crushed and humiliated by the man who practised medicine, and who called himself Weirmarsh.

"I had only just come in from the theatre when you telephoned me," Sir Hugh said sharply on entering. "I am sorry I could make no appointment to-day, but I was at the War Office all the morning, lunched at the Carlton, and was afterwards quite full up."

"There was no immediate hurry, Sir Hugh," responded the doctor with a pleasant smile. "I quite understand that your many social engagements prevented you from seeing me. I should have been round at noon, only I was called out to an urgent case. Therefore no apology is needed--by either of us." Then, after a pause, he looked sharply at the man seated before him and asked: "I presume you have reconsidered your decision, General, and will carry out my request?"

"No, I have not decided to do that," was the old fellow's firm answer.

"It's too dangerous an exploit--far too dangerous. Besides, it means ruin."

"My dear sir," remarked the doctor, "you are viewing the matter in quite a wrong light. There will be no suspicion providing you exercise due caution."

"And what would be the use of that, pray, when my secret will not be mine alone? It is already known to half a dozen other persons--your friends--any of whom might give me away."

"It will not be known until afterwards--when you are safe. Therefore, there will be absolutely no risk," the doctor a.s.sured him.

The other, however, was no fool, and was still unconvinced. He knew well that to carry out the request made by Weirmarsh involved considerable risk.

The doctor spoke quietly, but very firmly. In his demands he was always inexorable. He had already hinted at the disaster which might fall upon Sir Hugh if he refused to obey. Weirmarsh was, the general knew from bitter experience, not a man to be trifled with.

Completely and irrevocably he was in this man's hands. During the past twenty-four hours the grave old fellow, who had faced death a hundred times, had pa.s.sed through a crisis of agony and despair. He hated himself, and would even have welcomed death, would have courted it at his own hands, had not these jeers of the doctor's rung in his ears. And, after all, he had decided that suicide was only a coward's death. The man who takes his own life to avoid exposure is always despised by his friends.

So he had lived, and had come down there in response to the doctor's request over the telephone, resolved to face the music, if for the last time.

He sat in the shabby old arm-chair and firmly refused to carry out the doctor's suggestion. But Weirmarsh, with his innate cunning, presented to him a picture of exposure and degradation which held him horrified.

"I should have thought, Sir Hugh, that in face of what must inevitably result you would not risk exposure," he said. "Of course, it lies with you entirely," he added with an unconcerned air.

"I'm thinking of my family," the old officer said slowly.

"Of the disgrace if the truth were known, eh?"

"No; of the suspicion, nay, ruin and imprisonment, that would fall upon another person," replied Sir Hugh.

"No suspicion can be aroused if you are careful, I repeat," exclaimed Weirmarsh impatiently. "Not a breath of suspicion has ever fallen upon you up to the present, has it? No, because you have exercised foresight and have followed to the letter the plans I made. I ask you, when you have followed my advice have you ever gone wrong--have you ever taken one false step?"

"Never--since the first," replied the old soldier in a hard, bitter tone.

"Then I urge you to continue to follow the advice I give you, namely, to agree to the terms."

"And who will be aware of the matter?"

"Only myself," was Weirmarsh's reply. "And I think that you may trust a secret with me?"

The old man made no reply, and the crafty doctor wondered whether by silence he very reluctantly gave his consent.

CHAPTER VIII

PAUL LE PONTOIS

THERE is in the far north-west of France a broad, white highway which runs from Chalons, crosses the green Meuse valley, mounts the steep, high, tree-fringed lands of the Cotes Lorraines, and goes almost straight as an arrow across what was, before the war, the German frontier at Mars-la-Tour into quaint old Metz, that town with ancient streets, musical chimes, and sad monument to Frenchmen who fell in the disastrous never-to-be-forgotten war of '70.

This road has ever been one of the most strongly guarded highways in the world, for, between the Moselle, at Metz, and the Meuse, the country is a flat plain smiling under cultivation, with vines and cornfields everywhere, and comfortable little homesteads of the peasantry. This was once the great battlefield whereon Gravelotte was fought long ago, and where the Prussians swept back the French like chaff before the wind, and where France, later on, defeated the Crown Prince's army. The peasants, in ploughing, daily turn up a rusty bayonet, a rotting gun-stock, a skull, a thigh-bone, or some other hideous relic of those black days; while the old men in their blouses sit of nights smoking and telling thrilling stories of the ferocity of that helmeted enemy from yonder across the winding Moselle. In recent days it has been again devastated by the great world war, as its gaunt ruins mutely tell.

That road, with its long line of poplars, after crossing the ante-war French border, runs straight for twenty kilometres towards the abrupt range of high hills which form the natural frontier of France, and then, at Haudiomont, enters a narrow pa.s.s, over twelve kilometres long, before it reaches the broad valley of the Meuse. This pa.s.s was, before 1914, one of the four princ.i.p.al gateways into France from Germany. The others are all within a short distance, fifteen kilometres or so--at Commercy, which is an important sous-prefecture, at Apremont, and at Eix. All have ever been strongly guarded, but that at Haudiomont was most impregnable of them all.

Before 1914 great forts in which were mounted the most modern and the most destructive artillery ever devised by man, commanded the whole country far beyond the Moselle into Germany. Every hill-top bristled with them, smaller batteries were in every coign of vantage, while those narrow mountain pa.s.ses could also be closed at any moment by being blown up when the signal was given against the Hun invaders.

On the German side were many fortresses, but none was so strong as these, for the efforts of the French Ministry of War had, ever since the fall of Napoleon III., been directed towards rendering the Cotes Lorraines impa.s.sable.

As one stands upon the road outside the tiny hamlet of Harville--a quaint but half-destroyed little place consisting of one long street of ruined whitewashed houses--and looks towards the hills eastward, low concrete walls can be seen, half hidden, but speaking mutely of the withering storm of sh.e.l.l that had, in 1914, burst from them and swept the land.

Much can be seen of that chain of damaged fortresses, and the details of most of them are now known. Of those great ugly fortifications at Moulainville--the Belrupt Fort, which overlooks the Meuse; the Daumaumont, commanding the road from Conflans to Azannes; the Paroches, which stands directly over the highway from the Moselle at Moussin--we have heard valiant stories, how the brave French defended them against the armies of the Crown Prince.

It was not upon these, however, that the French Army relied when, in August, 1914, the clash of war resounded along that pleasant fertile valley, where the sun seems ever to shine and the crops never fail.

Hidden away from the sight of pa.s.sers-by upon the roads, protected from sight by lines of sentries night and day, and unapproachable, save by those immediately connected with them, were the secret defences, huge forts with long-range ordnance, which rose, fired, and disappeared again, offering no mark for the enemy. Constructed in strictest secrecy, there were a dozen of such fortresses, the true details of which the Huns vainly endeavoured to learn while they were war-plotting. Many a spy of the Kaiser had tried to pry there and had been arrested and sentenced to a long term of imprisonment.

Those defences, placed at intervals along the chain of hills right from Apremont away to Bezonvaux, had been the greatest secret which France possessed.

Within three kilometres of the mouth of the pa.s.s at Haudiomont, at a short distance from the road and at the edge of a wood, stood the ancient Chateau de Lerouville, a small picturesque place of the days of Louis XIV., with pretty lawns and old-world gardens--a chateau only in the sense of being a country house and the residence of Paul Le Pontois, once a captain in the French Army, but now retired.

Shut off from the road by a high old wall, with great iron gates, it was approached by a wide carriage-drive through a well-kept flower-garden to a long _terra.s.se_ which ran the whole length of the house, and whereon, in summer, it was the habit of the family to take their meals.