The Zeppelin's Passenger by E. Phillips Oppenheim (romantic novels to read txt) 📕
"As Commandant of the place," Captain Griffiths replied, "I naturally had to have the Common searched. With the exception of the observation car, however, I think that I am betraying no confidences in telling you that we discovered nothing of interest."
"Do you suppose that the Zeppelin was in difficulties, as she was flying so low?" Helen enquired.
"It is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis," the Commandant assented. "Two patrol boats were sent out early this morning, in search of her. An old man whom I saw at Waburne declares that she passed like a long, black cloud, just over his head, and that he was almost deafened by the noise of the engines. Personally, I cannot believe that they wou
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The door facing them was opened.
“Captain Griffiths,” Mills announced.
Through the open door they caught a vision of two other soldiers and Inspector Fisher. Griffiths came into the room alone, however, and waited until the door was closed before he spoke. He carried himself as awkwardly as ever, but his long, lean face seemed to have taken to itself a new expression. He had the air of a man indulging in some strange pleasure.
“Lady Cranston,” he said, “I am very sorry to intrude, but my visit here is official.”
“What is it?” she asked hoarsely.
“I have received confirmatory evidence in the matter of which I spoke to you this afternoon,” he went on. “I am sorry to disturb you at such an hour, but it is my duty to arrest this man on a charge of espionage.”
Lessingham to all appearance remained unmoved.
“A most objectionable word,” he remarked.
“A most villainous profession,” Captain Griffiths retorted. “Thank heaven that in this country we are learning the art of dealing with its disciples.”
“This is all a hideous mistake,” Philippa declared feverishly. “I assure you that Mr. Lessingham has visited my father’s house, that he was well-known to me years ago.”
“As the Baron Maderstrom! What arguments he has used, Lady Cranston, to induce you to accept him here under his new identity, I do not know, but the facts are very clear.”
“He seems quite convinced, doesn’t he?” Lessingham remarked, turning to Philippa. “And as I gather that a portion of the British Army, assisted by the local constabulary, is waiting for me outside, perhaps I had better humour him.”
“It would be as well, sir,” Captain Griffiths assented grimly. “I am glad to find you in the humour for jesting.”
Lessingham turned once more to Philippa. This time his tone was more serious.
“Lady Cranston,” he begged, “won’t you please leave us?”
“No!” she answered hysterically. “I know why you want me to, and I won’t go! You have done no harm, and nothing shall happen to you. I will not leave the room, and you shall not - “
His gesture of appeal coincided with the sob in her throat. She broke down in her speech, and Captain Griffiths moved a step nearer.
“If you have any weapon in your possession, sir,” he said, “you had better hand it over to me.”
“Well, do you know,” Lessingham replied, “I scarcely see the necessity. One thing I will promise you,” he added, with a sudden flash in his eyes, “a single step nearer - a single step, mind - and you shall have as much of my weapon as will keep you quiet for the rest of your life. Remember that so long as you are reasonable I do not threaten you. Help me to persuade Lady Cranston to leave us.”
Captain Griffiths was out of his depths. He was not a coward, but he=20had no hankering after death, and there was death in Lessingham’s threat and in the flash of his eyes. While he hesitated, there was a knock upon the door. Mills came silently in. He carried a telegram upon a salver.
“For you, sir,” he announced, addressing Captain Griffiths. “An orderly has just brought it down.”
Griffiths looked at the pink envelope and frowned. He tore it open, however, without a word. As he read, his long, upper teeth closed in upon his lip. So he stood there until two little drops of blood appeared.
Then he turned to Mills.
“There is no answer,” he said.
The man bowed and left the room. He walked slowly and he looked back from the doorway. It was scarcely possible for even so perfectly trained a servant to escape from the atmosphere of tragedy.
“Something tells me,” Lessingham remarked coolly, as soon as the door was closed, “that that message concerns me.”
The Commandant made no immediate reply. He straightened out the telegram and read it once more under the lamplight, as though to be sure there was no possible mistake. Then he folded it up and placed it in his waistcoat pocket.
“The notion of your arrest, sir,” he said to Lessingham harshly, “is apparently distasteful to some one at headquarters who has not digested my information. I am withdrawing my men for the present.”
“You’re not going to arrest him?” Philippa cried.
“I am not,” Captain Griffiths answered. “But,” he added, turning to Lessingham, “this is only a respite. I have more evidence behind all that I have offered. You are Baron Bertram Maderstrom, a German spy, living here in a prohibited area under a false name. That I know, and that I shall prove to those who have interfered with me in the execution of my duty. This is not the end.”
He left the room without even a word or a salute to Philippa. Lessingham looked after him for a moment, thoughtfully. Then he shrugged his shoulders.
“I am quite sure that I do not like Captain Griffiths,” he declared. “There is no breeding about the fellow.”
Philippa, even for some moments after the departure of Captain Griffiths and his myrmidons, remained in a sort of nerveless trance. The crisis, with its bewildering denouement, had affected her curiously. Lessingham rose presently to his feet.
“I wonder,” he asked, “if I could have a whisky and soda?”
She stamped her foot at him in a little fit of hysterical passion.
“You’re not natural!” she cried. “Whisky and soda!”
“Well, I don’t know,” he protested mildly, helping himself from the table in the background. “I rather thought I was being particularly British. When in doubt, take a drink. That is Richard all the world over, you know.”
She broke into a little mirthless laugh.
“I shall begin to think that you are a poseur!” she exclaimed.
He crossed the room towards her.
“Perhaps I am, dear,” he confessed. “I want you just to sit up and lose that unnatural look. I am not really full of cheap bravado, but I am a philosopher. Something has happened to postpone - the end. Good luck to it, I say!”
He raised his tumbler to his lips and set it down empty. Philippa rose to her feet and walked restlessly to the window and back.
“I’ll try and be reasonable too,” she promised, resuming her seat. “I was right, you see. Captain Griffiths has discovered everything. Can you tell me what possible reason any one in London could have had for interference?”
“I seem to have got a friend up there without knowing it, don’t I?” he observed.
“This is aging me terribly,” Philippa declared, throwing herself back into her seat. “All my life I have hated mysteries. Here I am face to face with two absolutely insoluble ones. Captain Griffiths has assured me that there is here in Dreymarsh something of sufficient importance to account for the presence of a foreign spy. You have confirmed it. I have been torturing my brain about that for the last twenty-four hours. Now there happens something more inexplicable still. You are arrested, and you are not arrested. Your identity is known, and Captain Griffiths is forbidden to do his duty.”
“It seems puzzling, does it not?” Lessingham agreed. “I shouldn’t worry about the first, but this last little episode takes some explaining.”
“If anything further happens this evening, I think I shall go mad,” Philippa sighed.
“And something is going to happen,” Lessingham declared, rising to his feet. “Did you hear that?”
Above even the roar of the wind they heard the brazen report of a gun from almost underneath the window. The room was suddenly lightened by a single vivid flash.
“A mortar!” Lessingham exclaimed. “And that was a rocket, unless I’m mistaken.”
“The signal for the lifeboat!” Philippa announced. “I wonder if we can see anything.”
She hastened towards the window, but paused at the abrupt opening of the door. Nora burst in, followed more sedately by Helen.
“Mummy, there’s a wreck!” the former cried in excitement. “I heard something an hour ago, and I got up, and I’ve been sitting by the window, watching. I saw the lifeboat go out, and they’re signalling now for the other one.”
“It’s quite true, Philippa,” Helen declared. “We’re going to try and fight our way down to the beach.”
“I’ll go, too, ” Lessingham decided. “Perhaps I may be of use.”
“We’ll all go,” Philippa agreed. “Wait while I get my things on. What is it, Mills?” she added, as the door opened and the latter presented himself.
“There is a trawler on the rocks just off the breakwater, your ladyship,” he announced. “They have just sent up from the beach to know if we can take some of the crew in. They are landing them as well as they can on the line.”
“Of course we can,” was the prompt reply. “Tell them to send as many as they want to. We will find room for them, somehow. I’ll go upstairs and see about the fires. You’ll all come back?” she added, turning around.
“We will all come back,” Lessingham promised.
They fought their way down to the beach. At first the storm completely deafened all sound. The lanterns, waved here and there by unseen hands, seemed part of some ghostly tableau, of which the only background was the raging of the storm. Then suddenly, with a startling hiss, another rocket clove its way through the darkness. They had an instantaneous but brilliant view of all that was happening, - saw the trawler lying on its side, apparently only a few yards from the shore, saw the line stretched to the beach, on which, even at that moment, a man was being drawn ashore, licked by the spray, his strained face and wind-tossed hair clearly visible. Then all was darkness again more complete than ever. They struggled down on to the shingle, where the little cluster of fishermen were hard at work with the line. Almost the first person they ran across was Jimmy Dumble. He was standing on the edge of the breakwater with a great lantern in his hand, superintending the line, and, as they drew near, Lessingham, who was a little in advance, could hear his voice above the storm. He was shouting towards the wreck, his hand to his mouth.
“Send the master over next, you lubbers, or we’ll cut the line. Do you hear?”
There was no reply or, if there was, it was drowned in the wind. Lessingham gripped the fisherman by the arm.
“Whom do you mean by ‘master’?” he demanded. Dumble scarcely glanced at his interlocutor.
“Why, Sir Henry Cranston, to be sure,” was the agitated answer. “These lubbers of sea hands are all coming off first, and the line won’t stand for more than another one or two,” he added, dropping his voice.
Then the thrill of those few minutes’ excitement unrolled itself into a great drama before Lessingham’s eyes. Sir Henry was on that ship as near as any man might wish to be to death.
“‘Ere’s the next,” Jimmy muttered, as they turned the windlass vigorously. “Gosh, ‘e’s a heavy one, too!”
Then came a cry which sounded like a moan and above it the shrill fearful yell of a man who feels himself dropping out of the world’s hearing. Lessingham raised the lantern which stood on the beach by Jimmy’s side. The line had broken. The body of its suspended traveller had disappeared! And just then, strangely enough, for the first time for over an hour, the heavens opened in one great sheet of lightning, and they could see the figure of one man left on the ship, clinging desperately to the rigging.
“Tie the line around me,” Jimmy shouted. “Let her go. Get the other end on the windlass.”
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