'Thanks. I'll come with pleasure.'
A they stood up to leave; Lovelace glanced at the pale ascetic face of the young American again. 'I wonder,' he said suddenly, 'if there is really anything except pacifist bluff behind this Millers of God business. D'you think the police will stand any chance of tracing the man who gave you that message?'
Christopher Penn's beautifully chiseled mouth carved into a faint smile. 'Not the least,' he said firmly. `I don't mind telling you now that whatever description I give will be completely mythical, and that the Millers of God are in deadly earnest. I am one of their, myself, you see.'
'I had an idea that might be the case,' murmured Sir Anthony I.ovelace.
2
Murder?
As Penn and Lovelace left the warmth and security of he Union Club, the outer world seemed doubly grim by contrast.
Manhattan Island was still in the grip of winter. spring might be on the way, but the towering blocks of steel and concrete flung their pinnacles towards a grey and lowering sky. An icy wind bent the tree tops in ,Central Park and howled down the man made canyons, pausing the down town crowd to draw their wraps more closely round them as they hurried homewards from their offices.
During the forty mile drive the two men hardly spoke. Penn, at the wheel of his long low car, was intent on the swift moving traffic as it hurtled towards them, while Lovelace, naturally a rather silent man, was busy with his own thoughts.
The car swung right after passing through Bayshore and turned in through a pair of tall gates with a lodge on one side. The drive wound through ancient trees, and ended in a wide sweep before a long, low, rambling louse. Lovelace saw just enough of its front, as the headlights swept the porch and balconies, to realise that it was old, creeper covered and mellowed by time. actually it was the original home of Christopher's branch of the Penn family, and except that its big stables were now garages and the house had all the additional comforts that modern science could supply, it was little altered from what it had been when Abraham Lincoln was a boy.
As a servant came out to take over the car, the deafening roar of an aeroplane engine sounded overhead,
'That chap's flying pretty low,' remarked Lovelace.
`It's not a chap; it's Valerie, I expect. Her people are our nearest neighbours. Have been for generations. She's my fiancé, you know.'
Lovelace looked at the young American with some surprise as they passed into the house. He could well understand any girl falling for such a handsome fellow. Women would be certain to find his black eyes beneath their curling lashes 'romantic,' and his unusual pallor 'interesting.' Yet he did not strike the Englishman as a woman's man at all. It was difficult to imagine him making love. He seemed such a spiritual type almost as though he lived in a world apart.
'Hardly flying weather, particularly for a girl,' Lovelace added after a moment.
'Oh, Valerie's all right.' The reply was casual. 'She can fly as well as most men, or better, and anyhow, she'll have landed and be safe at home by now, Come along in.'
He led the way into a square, book lined room and pushed a couple of arm chairs up to an old fashioned open hearth, upon which a bright fire was burning. 'You'll excuse me for a moment while I give some orders, won't you? There are the drinks and cigarettes. Help yourself. I shan't be long.'
`Thanks.' Lovelace poured himself a drink and sat down, thrusting his feet forward to the blaze, but a moment later he drew them sharply up again and leaned forward to peer at a solitary photograph which occupied a prominent position on the mantelpiece.
It was that of a girl, and he judged her to be about twenty five. The style of hairdressing showed that it was quite a recent portrait, but it was difficult to guess if her hair were golden or brown. The eyes were large, but rather pale in the photograph, which gave them an almost magnetic look and made Lovelace suspect that they were grey. They were set under dead straight brows, giving the young face a look of tremendous personality and determination. It would have been almost forbidding had it not been for the mobile mouth and for an enormous, but somehow quite incongruous dimple under the curve of the left cheek.
Certain in his own mind that he knew the original of the portrait, he stood up to examine it more closely, but he searched his memory in vain for a clue. He was still gazing at it when his host returned.
`Sorry,' Lovelace apologised. `You must think me an ill mannered fellow staring at your friend.'
`Oh, no. That's Valerie, the girl we were talking about just now.'
'Yes, I think I guessed that; but the strange thing is I'm sure I've met her, and for the life of me I can't think where.'
Penn laughed. `That's easily explained: she's Valerie Lorne, the flying ace, and she holds all sorts of records. You must have seen photographs of her in the Press a hundred times.'
`Of course, how stupid of me!' Lovelace shrugged. Yet although he had never seen the famous air woman in the flesh he was certain now that her hair was not fair, but chestnut, and that those compelling eyes were grey. He could not account for the queer impression that he had been face to face with her on some occasion.
Half an hour later the two men sat down to dinner the mahogany was of an earlier period than the house, and the chairs were of the broad seated comfortable a memory of more spacious days when people liked ample elbow room and men sat long over their wine. The Georgian silver was no purchase from an auction room, but had come to the family straight from its maker in the hold of a sailing ship, when steam transport was still undreamt of.
An elderly butler and one footman waited on them; they served elderly meal that was good but unpretentious. Christopher Penn drank only water, but Lovelace found the Burgundy, which was served with the duck, excellent and chambre to a nicety. The port, too, was a pre prohibition vintage, which had lain undisturbed, steadily approaching maturity, during the years that the Volstead Act had been in force. Yet there was not the least suggestion of glitter and display in the quiet room, and Lovelace felt that he might have been enjoying a pleasant dinner with one of his less well off friends at home, rather than with a young man who controlled enormous vested interests and was several times a millionaire.
During the latter part of the meal the two discovered a mutual interest in fishing, and talked of flies, tackle, and of the red letter days on which they had made their best catches.
The heat, the dust, the rains of Abyssinia all had faded from the Englishman's mind, and he was thinking of the brown trout which frequented a pool he knew on the Findhorn, when he realised with a little shock that, unobserved by him, the servants had left the room, and that his host was speaking.
`I want to talk to you seriously, Lovelace, about the real possibilities of stopping war.'
`Yes; this society, the Millers of God, eh? I'd be most interested to hear more of that, if you care to tell me. It was taking a bit of a risk though, wasn't it? To admit you're a member, seeing that I'm, well a comparative stranger.'
Penn shook his dark head. `I don't think so. You see, I've rather a gift for sizing people up, and I felt I could trust you all along. When you said that about chucking the easy life to go out and make things just a shade less terrible for the innocent who suffer in every war, I was certain that, even if you didn't approve our methods, you wouldn't give me away in a thousand years.'
`That's so, of course. Has your society been operating for long?'
'It started at Oxford just after the Great War. Quite a lot of men went up there to take their degrees. Who should have gone up years before. Many of them were broken and bitter. You know how it was; they'd been through it all and come out three parts wrecked, in mind and body. There were others, too, who hadn't seen the fighting but spent the war years at their public schools. Half starved, poor devils, and deprived of all the natural fun which goes with boyhood. They had listened on Sundays, week after week, to all those long lists read out in chapel;` fathers, jolly uncles, chaps who had been in the eleven or fifteen a few terms before ', cousins and friends; one by one posted as dead, casualties, or missing.'