The Light Heart (45 page)

“Home?” he repeated, as though the word was unfamiliar to him.

“To England,” she explained patiently. “You don’t want me here. Nobody wants me here.” Her voice broke, and then began to rise with months of accumulated hysteria. “I don’t
belong
here, I’ve tried, God only
knows
how I’ve tried, but I can’t do it, Conny, I can’t
bear
it,
you’ve
got
to
let
me go!
”

“Control yourself, please,” he commanded, with a glance at the door.

“I can’t, I can’t go on smirking and kowtowing and eating dirt because I’m English! I’m
proud
of being English, I’d rather be English than German any day in the week—”

He took her by the arm and shook her, saying, “Be quiet, someone will hear you!”

“I don’t care, it won’t be news to them, they all hate me for being English, they all spy on me and tattle and listen at
keyholes
! Maybe they think
I’m
a spy, like Charles! They know I hate it here, hate it from morning to night, hate dressing up and being ogled by your Prussian officer friends, hate having my hand kissed and seeming to flirt and play up to them, and I
loathe
pretending to be
flattered
because your sacred Emperor has a weakness for me—”

Conrad slapped her full in the face, a blow that made the room whirl round her. She stared up at him, transfixed and quivering, while one hand crept up to the place on her jawbone where the heavy signet ring he wore had cut the skin. He let go of her arm and turned away, and she sank into a corner of the sofa with her face in both hands.

At last he spoke, and his voice was silky.

“I suppose I must say I am sorry,” he said. “But you really should not have brought the Emperor into our—private quarrel.”

There was a discreet knock on the door and the footman came in with Johnny’s card on a salver.

C
ONRAD
dismissed the servant, saying, “Ask him to wait in the green drawing-room,” and stood a moment with the card in his fingers. “And who,” he inquired then, “is Mr. John Odell Malone?”

She did not answer, seemed not to have heard.

“Rosalind. Who is this Mr. Malone, Berlin correspondent of the
New
York
Star?
”

“I don’t know,” she answered automatically, her face in her hands.

“Isn’t the
New
York
Star
that fellow Murray’s paper?”

“Murray?” Her head came up slowly.

“The fellow who married Enstone’s sister.”

“Yes—Bracken Murray—is he
here?
”

“No, but a Mr. Malone is.” He went to her, took her chin in his hand ungently and jerked her face up to meet his
suspicious
gaze. “Did you ask him to come?”

“How could I? I never even heard of him.”

“Did you ask Murray to send someone?”

“Of course not, I—I don’t know what you’re suspecting me of now, but whatever it is I didn’t do iti Maybe Phoebe asked him to come. I told you she’d wonder why she had no word from me. She probably wants to know if I’m dead!”

He dropped her chin and stood snapping the card in his fingers irritably.

“Then I suppose we shall have to see him,” he decided.

“Now? I can’t possibly.”

“You must. Or God knows what sort of tale he’ll carry back.”

“What about this?” She touched the bruised cut on her jaw bone.

“Powder over it. Put on some make-up and that pink chiffon tea-gown and come down smiling, and he won’t notice. Don’t be longer than ten minutes, please.” He walked out with the card, closing the door behind him.

When he had gone she sat a moment, wondering how she could bring herself to do as he demanded. Slowly her thoughts began to take form. Charles had escaped. And Charles was hardly more of a prisoner than herself. Charles had run for it, why shouldn’t she? She had no passport—but neither had he. She supposed there were underground routes for prisoners. Charles would know about that, if he were a secret agent as Conny said he was, but she had no way of finding out. And
Charles wasn’t a German princess. She would, have to walk across the border in her own identity, unless—unless she could find someone to help. Downstairs there was an American, perhaps sent by Bracken or Phoebe to see if she was all right. Somehow she must manage to convey to him under Conrad’s very nose that she was not all right and wanted to get away. Perhaps this Mr. Malone would help her, if he knew that. Bracken would have helped her, and this was Bracken’s man.

Ten minutes later she entered the green drawing-room, smiling and wearing the magnificent chiffon tea-gown. But the bruise on her jawbone showed. She liked Mr. Malone as soon as she saw him—his grave courtesy, his level eyes, his unflirtatious admiration, his firm handclasp. He had come to tell her, he said, that Phoebe was at Geneva with the Red Cross people and wanted her to come to Switzerland for a visit, and as letters didn’t seem to be very reliable any more she had asked him to mention it, if he was in that part of the world. And oddly enough, it had been quite convenient for him to do so. Unfortunately her husband seemed to feel, said Johnny, his eyes resting innocently on
her face, that she would not find a journey to Geneva acceptable just at the present time….

“I would love to go,” she said, concealing her agony of desire, and lifted a glance of pretty entreaty to her husband. “Don’t you think we might arrange it?” she asked.

“I am afraid it is impossible, my dear,” Conrad said flatly. “With the Emperor in the East it is necessary that my house be always at his disposal.”

“But it would be even more at his disposal if I were not here,” she smiled.

“Ah, but the Emperor likes to see a pretty hostess,” said Conrad with amiable conclusiveness. “So I’m afraid you can’t be spared from your duties here as the angel in my home. Later on, perhaps—”

“But later on, Phoebe won’t be at Geneva.”

“You know I never deny you a whim unless I have no choice,” said Conrad, and Rosalind shrugged as though resigning herself to the inevitable without too much regret.

“Let me have Phoebe’s address in Geneva, so that I can write to her and explain,” she said to Johnny, and turned away to an escritoire which held notepaper and pens.

Johnny thought fast, but he had stayed in Geneva himself and knew his way around there.

“The Hotel Beau-Rivage on the Quai des Paquis,” he said without blinking.

Rosalind wrote it slowly, bending above the escritoire with her back to them. Then she came towards him, saying, “Have I got it right, my memory is so bad,” and showed him the paper she had written on. Beneath the address he read the hasty words:
Come
back
tomorrow
at
noon.

“Yes, absolutely right,” said Johnny, and their eyes met briefly, and hers turned away.

“Tell her I am so sorry and will send her a long letter,” said Rosalind, folding the paper and tucking it inside the neck of her gown, and Johnny explained that he was going back to Berlin and wouldn’t see Phoebe again for a while.

“She particularly asked me to convey her regards to your maid Gibson,” he added.

“And I shall have to tell her that Gibson died last summer.”

“Oh. She’ll be sorry to hear that.”

“I was very sorry to lose her.” Rosalind’s face was clouded and sad. “I’d known Gibson all my life, you see. She was one of the last links with my—with the time before I was married.”

“But now you have good faithful German maids,” said Conrad with firm cheerfulness. “Gibson was all very well when you were a young bride in a strange country, perhaps a little childish and lonely. But now this is your home, and it is right that our loyal people who were born here on the land should serve you.”

“Yes, of course,” she agreed listlessly. “How is Phoebe, Mr. Malone? Is she as beautiful as ever?”

“She looks very well now,” said Johnny, and added with an eye to his effect, “She was on the Lusitania
”

The effect was forthcoming. Rosalind’s hand went to her parted lips—even Conrad stiffened with surprise.

“Then lifeboats were successfully launched,” he said, as though there had been some doubt.

“A few were, I believe, but Phoebe was not in one of them,” Johnny replied briefly. “She was picked up out of the water some hours later, injured, and half dead, and has had a long illness.”

“Here in Germany they gave the school children a holiday to celebrate the sinking of the Lusitania
”
said Rosalind, and looked him in the eyes.

“I know,” said Johnny, returning the look. “I was in Berlin, and I knew that Phoebe was on the ship. It isn’t a thing I’d care to go through again.”

“I didn’t know,” she said. “Oh, Conny, if it had meant Phoebe’s death I should never have forgiven you!”

“Isn’t that a little unreasonable, my dear?” He smiled
indulgently
. “After all, I am not a U-boat commander, but only one of the Emperor’s aides-de-camp.” He rose, and Johnny felt that the time had come for him to go. Prince Conrad made it even clearer. “It was kind of you to pay us a call, Mr. Malone,” he said formally, and offered his hand. “If ever you are in this part of the country again we shall be delighted to see you.”

Johnny had got used by now to shaking hands with people whose heads he wanted to punch and did it with good grace, and turned to Rosalind, getting another good look as he did so at that strange mark on her jawbone as though she had been struck….

“Then perhaps I should say
auf
Wiedersehen,”
he remarked, and briefly pressed the hand she held out to him, and went away.

T
HE
Emperor and his entourage arrived at Heidersdorf late that afternoon, with a whirl of motors and a great clanking and jangling of accoutrement and an array of impressive uniforms. They were to dine and sleep there, and be off early in the morning to see the war against the Russians, which was going remarkably well.

Rosalind dressed for the banquet with great care, and this time it somehow happened that the bruise on her jaw hardly showed at all. Her fingers were cold and unsteady, and her eyes had strange little sparks in them. Charles had had a try, whether or not he succeeded. She herself could not do less. She had no papers, to cross the frontier into Switzerland, where Phoebe was. But the Emperor was here in the house, she would sit next to him at dinner, and with a
laissez-passer
signed by him you could go anywhere but to heaven. And the Emperor had a weakness for her, even if she was English….

She was the only woman at the long, glittering table loaded with glass and silver and hothouse flowers, and lined with field-grey uniforms. Monocled eyes devoured her from every angle, but she devoted herself to the Emperor, who was in the best of spirits, his moustaches very upturned and militant. He had remembered her recent birthday, and he brought her a present, which he bestowed upon her publicly and with ceremony—an elaborately scrolled W in diamonds made as a brooch. Even as she accepted it with pretty surprise and
confusion
, and kissed his hand with the grateful humility of a loyal German subject, she was thinking how typical it was, how
Prussian
it was, that the initial should be his and not hers.

Every man in the room watched with his eyes on stalks as she replaced her own sapphire ornament, a present from
Conrad
, with the diamond W—every man present in his own imagination pinned the Emperor’s gift on the front of her
low-cut
gown, as her own slim fingers, fumbling a little, fastened it there. But as the meal progressed and the wine circulated, their
attention was discreetly withdrawn, and the Emperor began to pay her low-voiced compliments almost as though they were alone. He had never seen her more
intriguante,
more irresistible, he said, and what a truly fetching gown—his eyes wandered freely over her bare shoulders and down to where the diamond W rested between her small breasts. She was a woman to be greatly indulged, he remarked complacently, a woman well worth a little pampering now and then—

“Conny doesn’t think so,” she murmured, raising a limpid blue gaze to the slightly bulging regard of the All-Highest.

“Eh?—what’s this?—are you two in an argument?” It was his bluff, favourite-uncle râle now.

“Well, not—not exactly
that,
we’re always good friends, of course. But I don’t often ask him for things—I have everything a woman could possibly want to make her happy.” The long, innocent lashes swept down, and up again. “And of course I’ve already had my birthday present from him—he’s had my rooms done over very extravagantly, and I’m extremely grateful. But there
is
something I want quite badly, and he says No. It’s only because he doesn’t understand—he doesn’t think I’m clever enough to do anything on my own for Germany. But
I
think I could, if he’d let me try.”

“And what is this great thing you want to do for Germany?” the Emperor inquired, amused.

“Oh, it’s not great, it’s only a tiny thing,” she assured him modestly. “But I have an American friend, a well-known woman novelist who has great influence. She is now in
Switzerland
with the Red Cross, and she has asked me to come and visit her there, as it’s been years since we’ve seen each other. Conny says I mustn’t go because I am needed here, and I have my own Red Cross, and so on. But I think that’s very
shortsighted
of him, don’t you? Because if I write to her and say I can’t come, she will think it is for a very different reason. She will think that someone in Germany is afraid of what I might say. She will think we have something to conceal, such as that our losses are too heavy, or—”

“But they arc not!” he interrupted fiercely.

“Well, exactly, that’s what I’m saying!” her soft voice agreed at once. “But how much better if she heard that from me! How much better if a friend from Germany told her, quite simply, how well things are going here, and how
confident
we are. She would have to believe it, coming from me. She would write about it, and it would be printed in America that the wife of one of Your Majesty’s officers was quite free to come to Switzerland to see a neutral friend, even though it’s war time. They think over there that German husbands are tyrants, can you imagine that? I know very well that if I say I can’t go, she’ll be convinced that Conny is too selfish and domineering to allow it—or else that he’s afraid I might give something away that I shouldn’t. And actually it’s only because Conny thinks I’m too stupid to do my little bit where I can and see that one American, at least, knows exactly how things are in Germany. And it isn’t as though Conny would miss me, either, because if I had a passport I could go now, while he is away with you, and be home again before you return from the Front.”