CHAPTER XXXI.
HIATUS
I find that my memory holds no proper record of the hour that elapsed between this time and our return to Nanette. There were certain unavoidable formalities to be gone through; but within ten minutes of the arrest of Zara, I was on the telephone to my rooms. My man answered; and his replies, whilst reticent, were reassuring.
“Mr. Milton has been removed to hospital, sir. A very narrow escape, I understand. It will be a long job, but he is in no danger. Yes, sir, the lady is”--pause--“still here.”
“Why?” I asked uneasily, and glanced at O’Shea, who was standing at my elbow throughout this conversation.
“They--didn’t like to move her, sir. I ’phoned to Sir Frank Leslie, in Harley Street, sir, by request. He is here.”
“But where is--the lady?”
“Sorry, sir, but she is--in your room. Her mother is with her, sir.”
“Is she dangerously ill?”
“I don’t really know, sir. Both the medical men are with her now.”
As I replaced the receiver, I stared at O’Shea. He had moved away from me and was pacing restlessly up and down the bleakly furnished room in New Scotland Yard from which we had been speaking.
“You understand?” I said. “She is--rather badly hurt.”
“I understand.” He nodded grimly. “She saved my life, Decies, perhaps at the price of her own. I can’t bear to think of it.”
He turned abruptly and stared out of the window at a vista of empty Embankment below, lighted by many twinkling lamps.
“I have been a self-reliant man all my life, Decies; it may be aggressively so. Perhaps this is poetic justice. Since the moment that I set foot in Madeira, up to this very hour, she has done my work for me, step by step. You admit it, Decies? You admit it?”
“I do,” said I. “It’s true, but no discredit to you.”
He shook his head and resumed the restless pacing. I saw him groping for his monocle, which he had left at his rooms prior to setting out for the raid on the S Group, and I saw him snap his fingers irritably as he realized how enslaved he was to this habit.
“I have placed independence above every other virtue in man,” he went on. “I have fought for it and suffered for it. I suppose she has been sent to teach me that independence and loneliness are inseparable. Do you know,” he turned and looked fully into my eyes, with an expression almost of humility, “I don’t think I could bear that lonely path any longer, Decies. And if--” he paused and squared his jaw for a moment--“and if I have to follow it, there won’t be very much left.”
“Shut up!” I said. “You are talking nonsense. If you elect to be lonely in future, the choice is yours.”
“Unless…” he smiled wryly.
“Don’t think of that!” I replied. “She is young and full of stamina. Besides, she wants to live.”
“And I want her to live,” he added softly. “Yet, even now, I can’t believe it--and I can’t quite condone it.”
“Condone what?” I demanded.
“The acceptance, by a man of my age, world-worn, a little disappointed, more than a little cynical, of such a sacrifice, from a girl with all the world to choose from. I can find no justification.”
“I see,” I murmured. “And can you find any for leaving her, now that you know? Because you can’t shut your eyes to the fact that this is not a schoolgirl’s infatuation, but the real thing. Can you condone that?”
My voice was not quite steady.
“She was ready to die for you, O’Shea,” I said. “It would break her heart to lose you. Damn it!” I pulled out my cigarette case, “I am talking like your sentimental aunt.”
O’Shea smiled, this time more happily, and grasped my shoulder in characteristic fashion.
“I believe we are both behaving rather idiotically,” he admitted. “Let’s hope for the best.”
“I don’t believe you would recognize it if it came to you,” I returned.
He shrugged his shoulders and we went up to a room on the floor above, where some sort of superior official was waiting. Throughout the interview that followed O’Shea became again the steely-eyed, square-jawed soldier whom I knew so well; the traditional O’Shea, whose name had been a tonic to many a man during those black days when the shadow of Prussia lay over Europe.