The Yellow Dove

Cyril paused for a long moment, tapping the document lightly with his finger and then taking a pencil from his pocket bent over and upon the nearest rock wrote something. Then he slipped the letter into its envelope and handed it to the other, who put it into his pocket, saluted again and with a hurried farewell turned down the path and was gone.

That was all. The interview had not lasted more than five minutes, but Doris knew by the look she had seen on Cyril’s face that danger threatened. The letter had contained a command, a command from a German officer of high rank to Cyril Hammersley—a spy receiving his orders from the government he served. If he had gone back to the Lodge at this moment she would have let him go past her without a word, for the bitterness came back into her heart and engulfed all purpose. She sat in her place of concealment, peering out at him, fascinated. He moved nearer and then stood, his feet braced on the rocks, gazing down the path by which his midnight visitor had disappeared. How long he stood there motionless she could not know, but as the moments passed and he did not move, she rose from her cranny, her trembling nerves seeking an outlet in motion or speech. Why didn’t he move?

At last her overtaxed nerves could no longer endure and she came out of the shadow and spoke his name. Still he made no motion, and she realized that her lips had made no sound. But her foot touched a small stone, which fell among the rocks, and she saw him wheel around and face her quickly, something glittering in his hand, while his voice rang sharply.

“Stand where you are!”

He took a few threatening steps toward her, his look studying her small bulk.

“It’s I, Cyril,” she said faintly, “Doris.”

“You!” He glanced to right and left, putting the thing in his pocket and faced her, incredulous. “What are you doing here, Doris?”

“I came to—to see you again–”

His eyes were still searching the darkness around them.

“Who told you to come here?”

“No one,” she lied. “I followed you.”

“Who saw you come? You heard?”

“Yes–” slowly. “O Cyril—I can’t let you go from me like this–”

She put her face to her hands and felt his arms enfold her. She trembled, but in this weakness a new kind of strength came to her. “I want you to come with me away—away from all this—for me—for England. It’s my last appeal—you must not refuse it. I—I want you so, Cyril, as it used to be.”

She felt his lips gently touch her brow and heard his whisper,

“God bless you!”

She clung to him desperately, to his caress, the one sure symbol of his purity–

“I love you, Cyril,” she murmured, “I can’t help it. I’ve tried not to. But you couldn’t kiss me like this, reverently, if you did not love me well enough to forget everything else. Say you do, dear.”

“I love you,” he whispered again. “But you must not stay here. You must–”

“Doesn’t it mean something to you that I came,” she went on breathlessly, “that I could forget—what happened—that the love that was in my heart for you was greater than my hatred of what you are? I came so that you could know it by the difficulty, the danger that I ran. I don’t care what others may think of me. The only thing that matters is to have you again. You don’t know what it cost me to come. I am not the kind to be held so lightly, Cyril. I have forgotten my pride, even my sense of what is fitting for a girl to do, in the hope that you will listen to me.”

“Yes,” he murmured, “but not now, Doris. You must go back.”

“Not yet–” she protested.

“I—I have much to do–” he said.

“That messenger—O Cyril—you mustn’t. Come back with me—tonight—now–”

“I can’t,” he muttered. “It—it is important for me to stay here–”

She loosened his arms and stood away from him, peering down into the cove where clouds of black smoke were belching from the funnels of the black vessel. The water of the cove was churning in its wake and its prow was turning toward the harbor mouth.

Suddenly she saw Cyril start and peer around him in the darkness.

“Who sent you here?” she heard his voice in a strangled whisper at her ear.

“No one,” she denied again, “I followed you.”

“That isn’t possible, Doris,” he said quickly. “I have reasons for knowing. You were here before I came. Rizzio told you– He knew what was to happen—he was the only one who could have known.”

“Why?” Her curiosity sent all subterfuge flying. She could see his pale face in the moonlight.

“Because it was Rizzio who sent this messenger to meet me.”

“Rizzio!” The mystery was deepening. “I can’t understand.”

He hesitated a long moment before replying, as though weighing something in his mind.

“I’ll tell you this much,” he said at last. “You’ve a right to know. Rizzio told you that he was an agent of the English Government. It’s my word against his. You can believe me or not if you like. Rizzio is a spy of Germany!”

“Impossible! John Rizzio–” she whispered aghast.

He laughed.

“The pot callin’ the kettle black—what? It’s the truth.”

“But Rizzio! What object would he have in betraying England? A man of his position!”

“That’s the kind of men England’s enemies want,” put in Cyril dryly.

“But he has no need of money. Not money. Impossible!”

“No, not money. There are other things that John Rizzio values more than money.”

“What?”

He caught her by the arm impressively to make his meaning clear. “You don’t know the passion of collectors. They would sell their souls for the things they want. The things that seem impossible are the things they want the most.”

“But I don’t understand.”

“After the war Rizzio is to be permitted to ‘buy’ Rubens’s ‘Descent from the Cross’ from the German Government.”

“Oh!” she gasped in horror. A new idea of the terrible possibilities of duplicity was borne to her. But she couldn’t believe.

“How do you know this?” she asked.

He laughed.

“It’s one of the things I stopped in London to find out.”

“Then you–”

“I am a German spy.”

“I don’t believe you,” she cried proudly. There was a note of joy in her voice, a momentary note which seemed to trail off into one of terror. “Cyril!” she whispered. “Rizzio! He wrote me to come here.”

“I knew it.”

“But he said he–” she hesitated. “Why did he want me to come? There must have been some other reasons besides wanting me to see—he’s here, Cyril—somewhere–”

Hammersley started and turned, his hand in his pocket, and Doris followed his look. Three men had risen from among the rocks toward the Tower.

“Don’t move, Hammersley,” said Rizzio’s voice. “You’re in danger, Doris.”

But the girl was clinging to Cyril’s arm. “No, no,” she was crying. Several shots rang out as Cyril threw her aside, dashing forward. One of the men seemed to stumble among the rocks and fall heavily. The other came in toward Cyril, his arm raised, but another shot from behind the rocks made him pause, twist half around, his hand to his shoulder as Cyril caught him a blow which sent him reeling to the edge of the cliff, over which he hung for a moment, peering downwards in horror, and then disappeared from view.

“Well done, Stryker,” she heard Cyril cry. “The other—this way. Don’t let him get off.”

And Stryker disappeared after Rizzio.

CHAPTER X
THE YELLOW DOVE

In a daze Doris saw Cyril bend over the prostrate figure and then come toward her.

“Dead?” she whispered in horror.

But he didn’t seem to hear her. He caught her by the arm and forcibly led her inland.

“Dead!” she whispered again. “It might have been you.”

“Or you,” she heard him say sharply.

“Me?”

“Yes. But it’s my fault. I should have guessed.”

“John Rizzio would kill me. Oh, it’s unbelievable!”

“You know too much.” He gave a short laugh. “Far too much for your own good—or mine.” He caught her suddenly by both arms and made her look straight into his eyes. “Doris, you’ve seen nothing, you’ve heard nothing tonight. Do you understand?”

His grasp on her arms hurt her but she bore it without a murmur.

“Yes,” she said.

“You swear it?”

“Yes,” faintly, “I do.”

“I’ve got to go away from Ben-a-Chielt tonight. I can’t tell you why. You’ve got to go straight to Kilmorack House now. You rode over. Take the short cut by Horsham Hill. It’s not so well known. I would go with you but I haven’t a moment to spare. Don’t trust anyone—not even the maids at the house. Go back to London tomorrow with Jack Sandys and don’t let him leave you until you’re safe at Ashwater Park. Where’s your horse?”

She told him and followed blindly.

“Where are you going, Cyril?” she pleaded.

“It doesn’t matter.”

He found the horse and untied the bridle.

“Tell me, Cyril. I’ve earned the right to know.”

“Something has happened,” he said quietly, “which has put all my plans in danger–”

“And you?”

“Yes. The thing I’ve been trying to do may fail. It hangs or falls by this issue.”

“But what—what?”

“You can’t know that,” he said quickly. “Don’t ask me anything more. I can’t answer. But trust in me if you can. Trust in me, Doris, and if you love me—silence!”

He gave her a lift into the saddle and kissed her hand. Then he looked around him and gave a parting injunction.

“Now cut sharp off to the right in the darkness until you strike the old sheep trail. You can see it quite plainly in the heather. Follow it to the head of the ridge, then take the road to Horsham Hill. Good-by and God bless you.”

A sob rose in her throat and she could only wave a hand in reply. And so she left him standing there alone gazing after her with bared head in the darkness. The strain on her nerves had told on her and she sat her side-saddle listlessly holding on by the pommel, and peering into the darkness before her, with eyes that saw nothing but pictures of death. She could not forget the wounded man grasping at space as he tottered on the rim of the rocks. Cyril had killed a man. War! She had thought war a more glorious thing. This seemed very like murder. She blessed God for Stryker who had come so opportunely. Rizzio had tried to kill Cyril. In horror she had seen him raise his pistol and aim, but at her cry he had missed his shot and with the disabling of his confederates he had fled.

Rizzio was a German spy. Then since they were enemies of course Cyril was loyal—playing a part to deceive the enemy—learning its secrets that England might profit by them. The message! What was the message that the German naval officer had brought which had so disturbed Cyril? What was this mysterious duty of Cyril’s which meant so much to his cause, the success or failure of which hung by a thread? She tried to think what Cyril could do in England and after a time the thing began to come to her. Cyril was acting for England. He had succeeded, in the guise of a German secret agent, in finding the traitor in the War Office, and it was Cyril who had caused the arrest of Captain Byfield. Rizzio, too, was a German spy who for some reason or other had been sent—O God—that was it. The Germans suspected Cyril and had used John Rizzio to put him to the test—had set a thief to catch a thief. Cyril had found that the message was a dangerous one—and had refused to give it up to Rizzio. That seemed to explain everything—Cyril’s willingness to have her burn the papers, Rizzio’s anxiety to save them, that he might send them to his employers. The second packet of papers? A false message, prepared for a purpose which Cyril was to fulfill. The German naval officer! His message—what was it? Imagination refused to aid her. She could not understand. He brought a command—a test of Cyril’s loyalty to Germany perhaps? Was that it? And if so, what? A test which meant victory or defeat—that was what Cyril’s last words had meant. Victory or defeat—life or death. It was a desperate game that he was playing. And what was he going to do tonight that made it necessary for him to leave her to ride to Kilmorack House alone?

Bewildered and weary with excitement and much thinking, she gave it up, and as in a daze set her mind to the task of finding the way to Horsham Hill. She rode on inland searching for the old sheep trail as Cyril had described it to her, but as the minutes went by and she did not find it she began to think that she must have passed it in the darkness. She had ridden at a walk for hours it seemed, keeping as she thought in a direction which would surely lead her to a road toward the Hill, but she realized now that she was lost on the moor and that it might be morning before she would find her way to Betty Heathcote’s. She stopped her horse and peered in every direction. Nothing but the undulations of the moor, hill and dale, a dead tree outlined against the sky, masses of rock uncouth in form, bushes which whispered in the wind, the babble of a tarn somewhere behind her, though she had not remembered passing it. There were no lights in any direction, none even from the heavens, for the stars had gone out. After a long while she wondered vaguely what time it was. She had no watch, but it seemed that a paleness like that which precedes the dawn had spread along the sky—though it hardly seemed possible it could be so late as that. Three—four o’clock she thought it might be—perhaps later. The one thing that now seemed to persist in her mind was the hope that Wilson had obeyed orders and kept Lady Heathcote in ignorance of her absence.

She was startled by her horse which, without moving, had stretched his neck and whinnied loudly. He, too, had realized the aimlessness of their wanderings and wanted the warm stalls at the Kilmorack stables. Doris tried to think what was best to do. All sense of direction was gone and she was beyond even the sound of the sea. At last she decided to try a slight eminence and see if she could make out the bulk of Ben-a-Chielt, but a mist had fallen, and when she reached the height she was no wiser than before. Fortunately, it was not cold, and if she did not fall from the saddle in utter weariness, daylight would show her a way. She got down from her horse and, fastening him to a bush, walked to and fro to keep awake, waiting for the day, for at sunrise she could make her way toward the east until she reached the coast, after which by following the cliffs to the right she would reach the Lodge, and from there the way to Kilmorack House.

She had grown accustomed to the silences and now and then paused in her pacing to stop and listen. She thought she heard a sound different from the others—behind her it seemed, a subdued murmur, which, as she listened, grew in intensity until she clearly made it out to be the quick reverberations of a motor, running with its cut-out open. It was coming fast, and in a moment a long fan of light shot across the sky from below the brow of a distant hill and then fell suddenly to earth, where it picked out the shapes of trees and bushes along what appeared to be its road. The motor was not traveling toward her, but at an angle which would make it pass near her, but quickly as she mounted and rode toward it she was unable even to come within earshot before the machine had passed and was lost to sight in the distance. It had not gone by so rapidly that Doris had not been able to make out on a rise of ground against the sky the profile of a roadster and the shapes of two men. Cyril and Stryker! There could be no doubt of it, for the body of Cyril’s car was familiar to her and the chances of any other machine being abroad in this locality at this hour were remote indeed. Where were they going? In which direction? Toward Saltham Rocks or northward? She did not know, but decided to take the chance and follow. She reached the road without difficulty—a trail it appeared to be with well-defined wheel tracks and the marks of hoofs. She pressed her horse onward in the wake of the speeding machine, not to overtake it, but to reach a destination of some sort which would be better than the utter loneliness of the desolate moor, the silence and inaction of which made her a prey to unhappy thoughts. Her horse was willing, and as the going was good broke into a brisk trot which for a while kept the glow of the swinging searchlight of the machine in sight. But presently that, too, disappeared and all was as before. And glancing above she understood. To her right a pale streak of light was showing along the horizon, and above her between patches of dark clouds she caught a faint reflection of violet light. It was the beginning of the dawn.

Dawn on her right—that meant the east. She was riding north, then. North—and to what destination? She had ridden this road with Cyril, but never to its end, which as she knew was among the unhospitable crags of Rudha Mor, a wild spot unfrequented by any except Cyril’s gamekeepers. What was Cyril’s errand in the night to such a place when everything that had happened would seem to indicate the necessity for his immediate return to London? The same kind of curiosity that had made her open the package of cigarette papers against Cyril’s wishes, stimulated her to follow this quest to its end. She forgot that she had had no sleep all night, and little the night before. Of physical weariness now she seemed to have none, and in the growing light she urged her tired horse forward into a hard gallop which covered the miles swiftly. She came to the cliffs and saw the sea, passed inland again. The going was rougher here, less turf and more rocks and whins, while to her left the hills were split by crags which protruded in fantastic shapes, like heads of prisoned monsters of the underworld which had forced their way up through the crust of the earth to the light of day. It was curious. The trail was well worn here as it had been before, and there were signs of much hauling. What was going on at Rudha Mor? The place could not be far distant, for she saw that the road wound up the rocks and fell away rapidly into a deep gorge, the further side of which she could see, dimly colored with the opalescent tint of the East. This she thought must be nearly the end of her ride. She did not know what was in store for her and was doubtful as to her wisdom, but she was eaten with curiosity, and dismounted, led her horse slowly to the lip of the gorge and peered over. What she saw made her gasp. She drew quickly back, tethered her horse to a bush and came forward again. Near by, under a shed built on the brink of the cliff, was Cyril’s roadster, but of Cyril and Stryker she saw no sign. Beneath her feet the cliffs fell away rapidly by easy steps, down which she marked a well-worn footpath. The bottom of the gorge was of rock and sand shelving gradually toward the sea and fairly in its middle, built strongly of rough lumber, she saw a shed with wide doors which even now were open—a large hangar from which as she looked several figures wheeled forth a huge aëroplane—to a platform of planks which extended for a long way toward the sea. From a distance it was difficult to judge its measurements, but by comparison with the heights of the men Doris knew that she had never seen a machine so large. As the east grew lighter she could see Cyril plainly. He came out of the hangar dressed in leather, gave some orders which made the other figures hurry and a series of deafening explosions from the engine as they “tuned it up,” gave Doris a sense of immediate departure. For a while she watched, fascinated, her interest in the size of this huge toy and its possibilities making a separate mind-picture which superseded all those that had gone before. But as the light grew stronger and she made out the color of the wide yellow planes, she started up with a cry which would have been heard by the men below her had it not been for the racket that the engine was making. “A huge machine with yellow wings,” she remembered Jack Sandys’ description, “a thousand horsepower at least.” The Yellow Dove—this was the Yellow Dove and the man of mystery, its driver, was—Cyril.

Spellbound and trembling with excitement, she watched Cyril climb up into one of the seats. Cyril was going to fly to the Germans, she knew it now, to obey the commands which had been brought last night by the German officer, commands to come to Germany and explain his failure to deliver his secret message to Rizzio. They suspected him and yet he was going to face them. It was desperate, foolhardy, insane. He would never come back. Not victory, but death—that was what it meant. She ran out to the very edge of the rocks, shrieking his name, but the sounds were lost in the fearful din of the motor below. The explosions echoed and reëchoed in the gorge which seemed to quiver with the volume of sound. Not a head from below was turned up to look at her and she had a sense of her own unimportance in the immensity of Cyril’s viewpoint. She saw the yellow machine start slowly down the incline, gathering momentum as it ran until it left the runway and rose magnificently, its engine roaring steadily, clearing the surf and rocks and heading straight into the growing day.

O God! That she should have suspected him of anything base and dishonorable—a man who could face death as he was doing, as he had been doing for months. Cyril—the Yellow Dove. There could be no doubt of it, for she had seen with her own eyes. She understood now many things that had been a mystery before; why he could not speak to her; the reasons for his occasional absences, for his air of indifference, for his coolness in the face of adverse criticism. She understood about John Rizzio and the reasons why Cyril had wanted her to take such precautions in getting safely back to Ashwater Park, precautions which she had disregarded. But what mattered about her when Cyril every day, every hour for months had taken chances against death, the most ignominious death of all!

Her heart was big with pride in him and she followed the Yellow Dove with her gaze, now rising high and diminishing rapidly in the mist, her soul in her moist eyes and on her lips which were whispering words that she hoped could follow him into the distance. Her Cyril, still hers, and England’s—the Honorable Cyril whom the world had come to know as the Yellow Dove.

She stood in the shelter of the rocks, for she knew now in which way her duty to Cyril lay, and waited until the aëroplane was but a speck against the sky, when she turned with a sigh which was almost a gasp of weariness and walked slowly toward her horse. The ride before her was long, but by good riding she might still reach Kilmorack House before Lady Betty’s guests were up. Otherwise her reputation was gone. She knew that, for she could make no explanation of any kind. On that she was–

Quick footsteps behind her—her arms caught from behind—a glimpse of a strange face and then something white over her head—a pungent odor and—unconsciousness.