A silence fell between the two men. Presently the steward withdrew.
“I’ll be seeing after your honour’s room,” he murmured “and there’s others to tell. There’s a drop of something left, too, in the cellars, thank God!”
Jocelyn Thew listened to the retreating footsteps and then for a moment pushed open the window. There was the old roar once more, which seemed to have dwelt in his ears; the salt sting, the scream of the pebbles, the cry of a wheeling gull. There was the headland round which he had sailed his yacht, the moorland over which he had wandered with his gun, the meadow round which he had tried the wild young horses. In those few seconds of ecstatic joy, he seemed for the first time to realise all that he had suffered during his long exile.
More and more unreal seemed to grow the world in which Sir Denis Jocelyn Cathley passed that day. Time after time, the great hall in which he had played when a boy, draughty now but still moderately weather-tight, had echoed to the roars of welcome from old associates. But the climax of it all came later on, when he sat at the head of the long, black oak table, presiding over what was surely the strangest feast ever prepared and given to the strangest gathering of guests. The tablecloth of fine linen was patched and mended — here and there still in holes. Some of the dishes were of silver and others of kitchen china. There were knives and forks beautifully shaped and fashioned, mingled with the horn-handled ware of the kitchen; silver plate and common pewter side by side; priceless glass and common tumblers; fragments of beautiful china and here and there white delf, borrowed from a neighbouring farm. The fare was simple but plentiful; the only drink whisky and some ancient Marsala, in dust-covered bottles, produced by Timothy with great pride and served with his own hand. The roar which had greeted the first drinking of Sir Denis’ health had scarcely died away when Michael Dilwyn led the way to the final sensation.
“Denis, my boy,” he said, “there’s a trifle of mystery about you yet. Will you tell me then, why, when I spoke to you at the Savoy Restaurant the other night, you denied your own identity? Told me your name was Thew, or something like it, and I your father’s oldest friend, and your own, too!”
A sudden flood of recollection unlocked some of the fears in Denis Cathley’s breast.
“I have not used the name of Cathley for many years,” he said. “Was it likely that I should own to it there, in the heart of London, with a price upon my head, and half a dozen people within earshot? I came back to England at the risk of my life, on a special errand. I scarcely dared to hope that I might meet any of you. I just wanted twelve hours here—”
“Stop, lad!” Dilwyn interrupted. “What’s that about a price on your head? You’ve missed none of our letters, by any chance?”
“Letters?” Sir Denis repeated. “I have had no word from this country, not even from Timothy here, for over three years and a half.”
There was a little murmur of wonder. The truth was beginning to dawn upon them.
“It’ll be the censor, maybe,” Michael Dilwyn murmured. “Tell us, Denis Cathley, what brought you back, then? What was this special errand you spoke of?”
“Nothing I can discuss, even with you,” was the grim answer. “It was a big risk, in more ways than one, but if to-night keeps calm I’ll bring it off.”
“You’ve had no letters for three years,” Michael Dilwyn repeated. “Why, d —— n it, boy,” he exclaimed, striking the table with his fist, “maybe you don’t know, then? You haven’t heard of it?”
“Heard of what?” Sir Denis demanded.
“Your pardon!”
“My — what?”
“Your pardon,” was the hoarse reply, “signed and sealed a year ago, before the Dublin matter. Things aren’t as bad as they were! There’s a different spirit abroad. — Pass him the Madeira, Hagan. Sure, this has unnerved him!”
Sir Denis drank mechanically, drank until he felt the fire of the old wine in his veins. He set the glass down empty.
“My pardon!” he muttered.
“It’s true,” Hagan assured him. “You were one of a dozen. I wrote you with my own hand to the last address we had from you, somewhere out on the west coast of America. Dilwyn’s right enough. England has a Government at last. There are men there who want to find the truth. They know what we are and what we stand for. You can judge what I mean when I tell you that we speak as we please here, openly, and no one ventures to disturb us. Denis, they’ve begun to see the truth. Dilwyn here will tell you the same thing. He was in Downing Street only last week.”
“I was indeed — I, Michael Dilwyn, the outlaw! — and they listened to me.”
“The days are coming,” Hagan continued, “for which we’ve pawned our lands, our relatives, and some of us our liberty. Please God there isn’t one here that won’t see a free Ireland! We’ve hammered it into their dull Saxon brains. It’s been a long, drear night, but the dawn’s breaking.”
“And I am pardoned!” Sir Denis repeated wonderingly.
“Where have you been to these three years, man, that you’ve heard nothing?” Michael Dilwyn asked.
“In Mexico, Cuba, Nicaragua, Uraguay. You’re right. I’ve been out of the world. I crept out of it deliberately. When I left here, nothing seemed so hopeless as the thought that a time of justice might come. I cut myself off even from news. I have lived without a name and without a future.”
“Maybe for the best,” Hagan declared cheerfully. “Remember that it’s but twelve months ago since your pardon was signed, and you’d have done ill to have found your way back before then. — But what about this mission you spoke of?”
Sir Denis looked down the table. Of servants there was only old Timothy at the sideboard, and of those who were gathered around his board there was not one whom he could doubt.
“I will tell you about that,” he promised, leaning a little forward. “You have read of the documents and the famous stolen letter which were supposed to have been brought over to England in a certain trunk, protected by the seal of a neutral country?”
“Why, sure!” Michael Dilwyn murmured under his breath. “The box was to have been opened at Downing Street, but one heard nothing more of it.”
“The stolen letter,” Hagan remarked, “was supposed to have been indiscreet enough to have brought about the ruin of a great man in America.”
Sir Denis nodded.
“You’ve got the story all right,” he said. “Well, those papers never were in that trunk. I brought them over myself in the City of Boston. I brought them over under the nose of a Secret Service man, and although the steamer and all of us on board were searched from head to foot in the Mersey before we were permitted to land.”
“And where are they now?” Michael Dilwyn asked.
Sir Denis drew a long envelope from his pocket and laid it upon the table before him. Almost as he did so, another little sensation brought them all to their feet. They hurried to the window. From about a mile out seaward, a blue ball, followed by another, had shot up into the sky. Sir Denis watched for a moment steadily. Then he pointed to a bonfire which had been lighted on the beach.
“That,” he pointed out, “is my signal, and there is the answer. The documents you have all read about are in that envelope.”
There was a queer, protracted silence, a silence of doubt and difficulty.
“It will be a German submarine, that,” Michael Dilwyn declared. “She has come to pick up your papers, maybe?”
“That’s true,” was the quiet answer. “I was to light the fire on the beach the moment I arrived. The blue balls were to be my answer.”