Knight Without Armour

“Yes. We seemed to be going somewhere all the time—just one place after another—and at night we slept out in the open and used hot stones for water-bottles.” She laughed. “Isn’t it curious the way everything gets mixed up in dreams?”

The chance to tell her was again full on him, yet once again he forbore. He was still wrestling with memories of those old and epic days. He said, abruptly: “Are you happy in America? What do you do there? Tell me the kind of life you have.”

She looked amused. “I rather thought mother had told you everything you ever wanted to hear about our home life. As a matter of fact, we really do have a good time and get on splendidly together. We play a little bridge and tennis (though we’re both very bad), and we just have money enough to travel now and again and go to theatres and have friends to stay with us. I shall have to earn my own living, of course, for which I’m rather glad—I think it’s a mistake to do nothing but idle about and wait to be married by somebody.”

“Don’t you wish you’d been born rich, or high up in the world—a princess, say?”

“I wouldn’t mind if I’d been born rich, though I don’t suppose it would have made me any happier. And as for being a princess, when I feel romantic I sometimes try to kid myself that I am one—after all, nobody knows who I really am, do they?”

“I suppose not.”

“Though I daresay I wouldn’t really like it if I were. It must be very tiresome having to be important all the time. It would stop me from doing things like this, wouldn’t it?”

“Like this?”

“Yes. Scrambling up a mountain with you.”

He laughed—a sudden almost boyish laugh that startled the mountain silences. “Yes, you’re right. You’re happier as you are, no doubt.”

“I know I am. Oh, it has been such fun, travelling all over Europe ever since nearly a year ago, and the strange thing is, it all somehow seems to have been leading up to this. I mean this—here—now—just this.” She looked at him quickly and then stared far across the distance to the furthest horizon. “I like these mountains ever so much better than the Swiss ones, don’t you? I suppose it’s heresy to say so, but the Alps rather remind me of wedding-cake.”

And all the time and all the way down as they descended he was thinking of something else—of gilded salons and baroque antechambers, of consulates and embassies and chancelleries, of faded uniforms and tarnished orders, of intrigues and plottings and counter-plottings, of Paris cafés where Russian émigrés passed their days on a treadmill of futile anticipation, of Riviera hotels where the very waiters were princes and expected extra tips for so being, of dark and secret assassinations, of frontiers stiff with bayonets, of men in Moscow council-rooms ruthless, logical, and aware. That madly spinning world lay so close, and it was in his power to thrust her into the very vortex of it.

That night he took out of a sealed envelope certain curiously-marked papers. They were twelve years old; time and a fumigating oven had considerably faded them. He looked them through and then replaced them in the envelope. It was late, past midnight; the sailors had returned to their ship; even the Roones had gone to bed, and the lamps in the corridor were all out. He groped his way downstairs and found the drawing-room. There were the remains of a fire just faintly red in the grate; he knelt on the hearth-rug and fanned the embers till they glowed into flame. Then he placed the envelope on the top and watched it burn with all its contents. He waited till the last inch was turned to ashes and he could break and scatter them with the poker. Then he went back to his room and to bed.

But he did not sleep too well. If one problem had been settled, another remained; if he had not traced her in order to tell her who she was, why had he traced her at all? What need was there to stay at Roone’s any longer? And so, bewitching and insidious, came again the memory of the past; she was a shadow, an echo, reminding him that he was still young, and that the Harley Street man might have made a mistake. And the idea came to him that he might tell her some day, not about her own identity, which did not matter, but about himself and Daly.