Away From The Warpath

: The World Peril Of 1910

When Lennard entered the little drawing-room in the house in Westbourne

Terrace, where Norah Castellan and her aunt were staying, he had decided

to do something which, without his knowing it, probably made a very

considerable difference in his own fortunes and those of two or three

other people.



During his brief but exciting experiences on board the Ithuriel, he

had formed a real friendship for both Erski
e and Castellan, and he had

come to the conclusion that Denis's sister and aunt would be very much

safer in the remote seclusion of Whernside than in a city which might

within the next few days share the fate of Portsmouth and Gosport. He

was instantly confirmed in this resolution when Mrs O'Connor and her

niece came into the room. Never had he seen a more perfect specimen of

the Irishwoman, who is a lady by Nature's own patent of nobility, than

Mrs O'Connor, and, with of course one exception, never had he seen such

a beautiful girl as Norah Castellan.



He was friends with them in half an hour, and inside an hour he had

accepted their invitation to dine and sleep at the house and help them

to get ready for their unexpected journey to the North the next morning.



He went back to the Grand and got his portmanteau and Gladstone bag and

returned to Westbourne Terrace in time for afternoon tea. Meanwhile, he

had bought the early copies of all the evening papers and read up the

condition of things in London, which, in the light of his experiences at

Portsmouth, did not appear to him to be in any way promising. He gave

Norah and her aunt a full, true and particular account of the assault on

Portsmouth, the doings of the Ithuriel, the great Fleet action, and

the brilliant ruse de guerre which Admiral Beresford had used to

capture the First French Army Corps that had landed in England--and

landed as prisoners.



The news in the afternoon papers, coupled with what he already knew of

the tactics of the enemy, impressed Lennard so gravely that he succeeded

in persuading Mrs O'Connor and Norah to leave London by the midnight

sleeping-car train from St Pancras for Whernside, since no one knew at

what time during the night John Castellan or his lieutenants might not

order an indiscriminate bombardment of London from the air. He was also

very anxious, for reasons of his own, to get back to his work at the

observatory and make his preparations for the carrying out of an

undertaking compared with which the war, terrible as it was and would

be, could only be considered as the squabblings of children or lunatics.



His task was not one of aggression or conquest, but of salvation, and

the enemy he was going to fight was an invader not of states or

countries, but of a whole world, and unless the assault of this invader

from the outer wilderness of Space were repelled, the result would not

be merely the destruction of ships and fortresses, or the killing of a

few hundreds or thousands of men on the battlefield; it would mean

nothing less than a holocaust which would involve the whole human race,

and the simultaneous annihilation of all that the genius of man had so

laboriously accumulated during the slow, uncounted ages of his progress

from the brute to the man.



They left the train at Settle at six o'clock the next morning, and were

at once taken charge of by the station-master, who had had his

instructions by telephone from the Parmenter mansion on the slopes of

Great Whernside. He conducted them at once to the Midland Hotel, where

they found a suite of apartments, luxuriously furnished, with fires

blazing in the grates, and everything looking very cosy under the soft

glow of the shaded electric lights. Baths were ready and breakfast would

be on the table at seven. At eight, Mr Parmenter, who practically owned

this suite of rooms, would drive over with Miss Parmenter in a couple of

motor-cars and take the party to the house.



"Sure, then," said Mrs O'Connor, when the arrangements had been

explained to her, "it must be very comfortable to have all the money to

buy just what you want, and make everything as easy as all this, and

it's yourself, Mr Lennard, we have to thank for making us the guests of

a millionaire, when neither Norah nor myself have so much as seen one.

Is he a very great man, this Mr Parmenter? It seems to me to be

something like going to dine with a duke."



"My dear Mrs O'Connor," laughed Lennard, "I can assure you that you will

find this master of millions one of Nature's own gentlemen. Although he

can make men rich or poor by a stroke of his pen, and, with a few others

like him, wield such power as was never in the hands of kings, you

wouldn't know him from a plain English country gentleman if it wasn't

for his American accent, and there's not very much of that."



"And his daughter, Miss Auriole, what's she like?" said Norah. "A

beauty, of course."



Lennard flushed somewhat suspiciously, and a keen glance of Norah's

Irish eyes read the meaning of that flush in an instant.



"Miss Parmenter is considered to be very beautiful," he replied, "and I

must confess that I share the general opinion."



"I thought so," said Norah, with a little nod that had a great deal of

meaning in it. "Now, I suppose we'd better go and change, or we'll be

late for breakfast. I certainly don't want the beautiful Miss Parmenter

to see me in this state for the first time."



"My dear Miss Castellan, I can assure you that you have not the

faintest reason to fear any comparison that might be made," laughed

Lennard as he left the room and went to have his tub.



Punctually at eight a double "Toot-toot" sounded from the street in

front of the main entrance to the hotel. Norah ran to the window and saw

two splendidly-appointed Napier cars--although, of course, she didn't

know a Napier from a Darracq. Something in female shape with peaked cap

and goggles, gauntleted and covered from head to foot in a heavy fur

coat, got out of the first car, and another shape, rather shorter but

almost similarly clad, got out of the second. Five minutes later there

was a knock at the door of the breakfast-room. It opened, and Norah saw

what the cap and the goggles and the great fur coat had hidden. During

the next few seconds, two of the most beautiful girls in the two

hemispheres looked at each other, as only girls and women can look. Then

Auriole put out both her hands and said, quite simply:



"You are Norah Castellan. I hope we shall be good friends. If we're not,

I'm afraid it will be my fault."



Norah took her hands and said:



"I think it would more likely be mine, after what Mr Lennard has been

telling us of yourself and your father."



At this moment Lennard saved the situation as far as he was concerned by

making the other introductions, and Mrs O'Connor took the hand which

wielded the terrible power of millions and experienced a curious sort of

surprise at finding that it was just like other hands, and that the

owner of it was bending over hers with one of those gestures of simple

courtesy which are the infallible mark of the American gentleman. In a

few minutes they were all as much at home together as though they had

known each other for weeks. Then came the preparation of Norah and her

aunt for the motor ride, and then the ride itself.



The sun had risen clearly, and there was a decided nip of frost in the

keen Northern air. The roads were hard and clean, and the

twenty-five-mile run over them, winding through the valleys and climbing

the ridges with the heather-clad, rock-crowned hills on all sides, now

sliding down a slope or shooting along a level, or taking a rise in what

seemed a flying leap, was by far the most wonderful experience that

Norah and her aunt had ever had.



Auriole drove the first car, and had Norah sitting beside her on the

front seat. Her aunt and the mechanician were sitting in the tonneau

behind. Mr Parmenter drove the second car with Lennard beside him. His

tonneau was filled with luggage.



At the end of the eighteenth mile the cars, going at a quite illegal

speed, jumped a ridge between two heather-clad moors, which in South

Africa would have been called a nek, and dived down along a white road

leading into a broad forest track, sunlit now, but bordered on either

side by the twilight of towering pines and firs through which the

sunlight filtered only in little flakes, which lay upon the last year's

leaves and cones, somewhat as an electric light might have fallen on a

monkish manuscript of the thirteenth century.



Then came two more miles on hard, well-kept roads, so perfectly graded

that the upward slope was hardly perceptible.



"We're on our own ground now and I guess I'll let her out," said Miss

Auriole. "Don't be frightened, Norah. These things look big and strong,

but it's quite wonderful what they'll do when there's a bit of human

sense running them. See that your goggles are right and twist your veil

in a bit tighter, I'm going to give you a new sensation."



She waved her hand to her father in the car behind and put on the fourth

speed lever, and said: "Hold tight now."



Norah nodded, for she could hardly breathe as it was. Then the pines and

firs on either side of the broad drive melted into a green-grey blur.

The road under them was like a rapidly unwinding ribbon. The hilltops

which showed above the trees rose up now to the right hand and now to

the left, as the car swung round the curves. Every now and then Norah

looked at the girl beside her, controlling the distance-devouring

monster with one hand on a little wheel, her left foot on a pedal and

her right hand ready to work the levers if necessary.



The two miles of the drive from the gates to the front door of Whernside

House, a long, low-lying two-storeyed, granite-built house, which was

about as good a combination of outward solidity and indoor comfort as

you could find in the British Islands, was covered in two and a half

minutes, and the car pulled up, as Norah thought, almost at full speed

and stopped dead in front of the steps leading up from the broad road to

the steps leading up to the terrace which ran along the whole southward

front of Whernside House.



"I reckon, Miss Castellan--"



"If you say Miss Castellan, I shall get back to Settle by the first

conveyance that I can hire."



"Now, that's just nice of you, Norah. What I was going to say, if I

hadn't made that mistake, was, that this would be about the first time

that you had covered two miles along a road at fifty miles an hour, and

that's what you've just done. Pretty quick, isn't it? Oh, there's Lord

Westerham on the terrace! Come for lunch, I suppose. He's a very great

man here, you know. Lord-Lieutenant of the West Riding of Yorkshire,

fought through the Boer War, got made a Colonel by some miracle when he

was only about twenty-eight, went to Lhassa, and now he's something like

Commander-in-Chief of the Yeomanry and Volunteers round here--and

without anything of that sort, he's just about the best sort of man you

want to meet. Come along, I'll introduce you."



The two cars stopped at the steps leading up to the terrace, a man in

khaki, with a stretch of a dozen ribbons across the left side of his

tunic, came bareheaded down the steps and opened the side door of

Auriole's motor-car. Auriole pushed her goggles up and held out her

gauntleted hand, and said:



"What! Lord Westerham! Well now, this is nice of you. Come to lunch, of

course. And how's the recruiting going on?"



Then without waiting for a reply, she went on: "Norah, dear, this is

Lord Westerham, Lord-Lieutenant of this part of the County of York,

Colonel commanding the West Riding Yeomanry and lots of other things

that I don't understand."



Norah pushed her goggles up and tilted her hat back. Auriole saw a flash

of recognition pass like lightning between their eyes. She noticed that

Norah's cheeks were a little bit brighter than even the speed of the car

could account for. She saw, too, that there was a flush under the tan of

Lord Westerham's face, and to her these were signs of great comfort.



"I don't know how this particular miracle has been arranged," said Lord

Westerham, as he gave his hand to Norah and took her out of the car,

"but a re-introduction is, if you will allow me to say so, Miss

Parmenter, rather superfluous. I have known Miss Castellan for quite two

years, at least, I had the pleasure of meeting her in Connemara, and we

have fished and shot and sailed together until we became almost

friends."



Auriole's eyes, observant at all times, had been working hard during the

last two or three minutes, and in those few minutes she had learned a

great deal. Arthur Lennard, who also had his eyes wide open, had learnt

in his own slow, masculine way about as much, and perhaps a little more.

He and Lord Westerham had been school-fellows and college chums and good

friends for years, but of late a shadow had come between them, and it's

hardly necessary to say that it was the shadow of a woman. He knew

perfectly well by this time that Lord Westerham was, in the opinion of

Mr Parmenter, the husband-designate, one might say, of Auriole. Young as

he was, he already had a distinguished record as a soldier and an

administrator, but he was also heir to one of the oldest Marquisates in

England with a very probable reversion to a dukedom.



This was what he had been thinking of that night in the observatory when

he told Auriole of the fate that was approaching the world. No one knew

better than he how brilliant a figure she would make in Society as the

Marchioness of Westerham, granted always that the Anglo-Saxon would do

now as he had ever done, fling the invader back upon his own shores or

into the sea which he had crossed: but that swift flash of recognition

seen as his car came up behind Auriole's, and the slight but most

significant change which had come over the features of both of them as

he handed her out of the car, had instantly banished the shadow and made

him a happier man than he had been for a good many months past.



Still he was one of those hard-headed, practical men who rightly

consider that the very worst enemy either to friendship between man and

man, or love between man and woman, is an unexplained misunderstanding,

and so in that moment he decided to "have it out" with his lordship on

the first possible opportunity.



More

;