*chapter Vi*
*SHERBRAND*
The frantic honking of the pneumatic horn was lost in the crashing collision of earth and metal. Franky, pallid and damp with apprehension, reassured himself by a rapid glance that Margot was safe and sound. The aeroplane had ceased buzzing and hovering, headed southwards, and floated on, trailing her shadow, leaving the traces of her passage in a smear of brown earth indicating a vicious slash made by the right-side foot-rest of a motor-cycle in the greensward, conserved and sacred to the French Republic—the upset machine to which the foot-rest appertained, and an angry young man in dusty overalls, sitting in the middle of the raked-up avenue.
“You’ve had a spill! …” Franky heard himself saying.
“Yes… I have had a spill—thanks to that young lady!”
The dusty young man’s tone was frankly savage; he regarded the brilliant little figure in the distance with a scowl of resentment as he gathered himself up from the gravel, and dabbed at a jagged, oozing cut on his prominent chin with a handkerchief of Isabella hue. “The brake-handle did that,” he curtly explained, more for his own benefit than apologetic Franky’s. But he looked full in the flushed and dewy countenance of Margot’s lord as he added:
“If I’d killed her, a French jury would have found that she deserved it!—running like a corncrake across the avenue when I was scorching up at top speed! …”
“I know,” Franky stammered. “I—I see how it all happened. You had to steer slap into the bank—to save my—my wife’s life. How can I apologise? … You see, she was crazy about the aeroplane… She’d been warned to keep well out of the way—you know what women are! …”
“Oh, as to that! …” The dusty young man, moving with a perceptible limp, went to the prone motor-cycle, stood it up on its bent stand with one twist of his big-boned wrist, and began to examine into its injuries. “Not much wrong,” he said to himself, and straightened his back, and in the act of throwing a leg over the saddle, felt Franky’s restraining grip upon his arm.
“You don’t go until my wife has thanked you!” Franky’s upper-lip was Rhadamanthine. “Margot!” he called, in a tone of authority such as he had never previously heard from his own mouth; “Come here at once, please! I want to speak to you!”
The fluttering little figure waved a hand to him. The gay little voice called back:
“Yes… Oh!—but look at them! … Can they be going? Why, I believe they are! …”
The canvas strips had been rolled up by a mechanician of the Service Aeronautique, and stowed away behind the big grey telegraph-car, in the recesses of which the telescopic steel mast and aerials of the wireless had been snugly tucked away. The mechanics in kepis and overalls had stowed themselves away inside the camion; the wireless operator, a kepi having replaced his headband, was acting as chauffeur. And, occupying the front seat beside a junior officer, who piloted a second, smaller car, Raymond, Capitaine-Commandant pilot of the—th escadrille of France’s Service Aeronautique gave the signal for departure with an upward wave of his hand. Then, with some sharp, staccato trills of a whistle and the double honk of a pneumatic horn, the car of the commandant turned and sped down the avenue, followed by the tractor-waggon; and both were lost to view.
“But—they’re gone! … And—and the aeroplane…” Margot gasped out the words in amazed discomfiture, sending her eyes after a dwindling shape beating down the sky to the southward, and straining her ears to catch the last of the tractor’s whirring song.
“Nearly at Issy, I should calculate—travelling at eighty miles an hour. Impossible now to catch up with her in time to see her do the last stunt. Can choose my own pace for going, anyhow,” said the motor-cyclist ruefully. “Nothing left to do but take the Bird over and fly her back to the Drancy hangar.”
He tried to laugh, but his wrung face gave the lie to the plucky pretence of indifference. He went on, still doggedly mopping away at his bleeding chin:
“I was lucky in getting a hearing on this side of the Channel. The bigwigs at Whitehall simply referred me to the Superintendent of the Royal Aircraft Factory at Frayborough, and as I’d tried him twice already, I knew what he’d got to say. The Commander of the Central School of Military Aviation was a brick—I’ll say that for him. He sent a French flying officer to look me up at Hendon, who got me in touch with the Inventions Bureau of their Service Aeronautique… Well! the big test’s over by this time. I shall know my fate in a week or two—or possibly in a year?”
“Oh! You don’t mean—“
The horrified cry broke from Margot. Franky yelled:
“By the Great Brass Hat! … You’re the inventor! The whole thing was your show!”
“Yes, I’m the inventor,” the tanned young man in the dusty overalls answered rather contemptuously: “What did you take me for? … A French medical student having a joy-ride, or a commis voyageur?”
“Can’t say. Never thought! … Fact is—my wife had frightened me horribly. When your machine bore down on her—posted right in the middle of the gravel—I was scared stiff—give you my honour!—you might have sunk a brace of Dreadnoughts in the palms of my hands!”
Franky made this absurd statement with so sincere an air, and clinched it so effectually by displaying a lovely silk-cambric handkerchief in a state of soppy limpness, that the abrased inventor nearly laughed.
But his thick, silvery, fair eyebrows settled into a straight line across his tanned forehead. He said with a directness that seemed to belong to his lean, keen, hatchet-faced type:
“Once more, I am glad that no harm has happened to the lady. The delay caused by the—mishap can hardly have prejudiced my success. For all I know, the test of my hoverer may have favourably impressed the judges. If it has done otherwise I have no right to blame man, dog, or devil, for a failure that may be my own.”
He lifted his goggled cap to Margot with a good air, pulled it down, and was in the act of lowering the visor, when Margot’s voice arrested the big-boned hand. That voice Franky knew could be wonderfully coaxing. It pleaded now, soft as the sigh of a Mediterranean breeze:
“Whether the test is successful or isn’t, will you promise that we shall hear from you? …”
“Good egg!” joined in Franky. “Do let us know! … We’re stopping at the Spitz, Place Vendome.” He warmed and grew expansive in the light of Margot’s smile of approval. “Drop in on us there,” he urged, “as soon as you’ve found out. Come and dine with us in any case… No!—we’re engaged to-night, but come and lunch at two sharp to-morrow, and tell us all about your hoverer over a bottle of Bubbly. Suite 10, Second Floor. Name of Norwater. Stick this away to remind you,” he ended, tendering his card.
“You’re awfully good. But at the same time I hardly—“
The voice broke off. A glance at the proffered pasteboard had dyed the inventor flaming scarlet from the collar of his dusty gabardine to the edges of his goggled cap. He dropped the card quietly upon the gravel, and said, looking Franky straight between the eyes:
“Even if I were able to accept I’d have to decline your invitation. My name’s Sherbrand—I’m your Uncle Alan’s son.” He settled himself in the saddle and finished before he pulled up the starting-lever. “Understand—I’d no idea who you were until I saw the name on your card. It has been a queer encounter—I can’t say a pleasant one. Let me end it by saying ‘Good-day!’ …”
Franky’s new-found cousin touched the goggled cap and pulled up the starting-lever. With the customary bang and snort, the motor-bicycle leaped away. Margot had uttered a little gasp at the moment of revelation. Now she turned great eyes of dismay on Franky, and withdrew them quickly. For Franky’s eyes had become circular and poppy, his mouth tried to shape itself into a whistle, but his expression was merely vacuous. He continued to explode with “Great Snipe!” at intervals, as he and Margot made their way back to more populous avenues, chartered a fortuitously passing taxi, and were driven back via the Porte Dauphine to Spitz’s gorgeous caravanserai in the Place Vendome, when Margot vanished into her own bower, sending her French maid to intimate to Milord that Miladi would take tea alone in that apartment, and did not intend to dine.
Thus Franky, relieved from duty, presently found himself, in company with a cigar, strolling bachelor-fashion through the streets of Paris. No very clear recollection stayed with him of how he spent the afternoon. At one time he found himself with his features glued against the plate-glass window of a celebrated establishment dedicated to the culture and restoration of feminine beauty, contemplating divers gilt wigs on stands—porcelain pots of marvellous unguents, warranted to eliminate wrinkles; sachets of mystic herbs to be immersed in baths; creams guaranteed to impart to the most exhausted skin the velvety freshness of infancy.
Later he strayed into a sunny, green-turfed public garden, full of white statues, sparkling fountains, and municipal seats whereon Burgundian, Dalmatian, and Alsatian wet-nurses dandled or rocked or nourished their infant charges, and bonnes or governesses presided over the gambols of older babies, who played with belled Pierrots, or toy automobiles, or inflated balls of gorgeous hues.
There is nothing profoundly moving in the sight of a stout, beribboned wet-nurse suckling her employer’s infant. But into the company of these important hirelings came quite unconsciously a young working-woman in a shabby brown merino skirt and a blouse of white Swiss. Her shining black hair was uncovered to the sunshine. On one arm she carried a bouncing baby, on the other a basket containing cabbages and onions, and a flask of cheap red wine, which receptacle its owner, having taken the other end of the seat Franky occupied, set down between herself and the young man. She was a healthy, plump young woman with too pronounced a moustache for beauty. But when, having methodically turned the baby upside down to rearrange some detail of its scanty dress, she reversed it and bared her breast to the eager mouth, a strange thrill went through Franky. A dimness came before his vision, and it was as though those dimpled hands plucked at his heart. He suffered a sudden revulsion strange in a young man so modern, up-to-date, and beautifully tailored. He knew that he longed for a son most desperately. And the devil of it was—Margot did not.