The Spy in Black

If anyone had been watching the bay that August night (which, fortunately for us, there was not), they would have seen up till an hour after midnight as lonely and peaceful a scene as if it had been some inlet in Greenland. The war might have been waging on another planet. The segment of a waning moon was just rising, but the sky was covered with clouds, except right overhead where a bevy of stars twinkled, and it was a dim though not a dark night. The sea was as flat and calm as you can ever get on an Atlantic coast⁠—a glassy surface, but always a gentle regular bursting of foam upon the beach. In a semicircle the shore rose black, towering at either horn (and especially on the south) into high dark cliffs.

I suppose a bird or two may have been crying then as they were a little later, but there was not a light nor a sign of anything human being within a hundred miles. If one of the Vikings who used to live in those islands had revisited that particular glimpse of the moon, he could never have guessed that his old haunts had altered a tittle. But if he had waited a while he would have rubbed his eyes and wondered. Right between the headlands he would have seen it dimly:⁠—a great thing that was not a fish rising out of the calm water, and then very stealthily creeping in and in towards the southern shore.

“Ruinous” these farm buildings certainly were; but “uninhabited”⁠—obviously not quite! I rose stealthily and crossed to the door, and just as I reached it the door of the other house began to open. I stepped back and peered round the corner for quite a minute before anything more happened. My neighbour, whoever he was, seemed unconscionably slow in his movements.

And then a very old, bent, and withered woman appeared, with a grey shawl about her head. As she looked slowly round her, first to one side and then to the other, I cautiously drew back; but even as I did so I knew it was too late. A wisp of smoke had given us both away. This time it was a trail from my cigarette which I could see quite plainly drifting through the open door.

I heard her steps coming towards me, and then her shadow filled the doorway. There was nothing for it but taking the bull by the horns.

“Good morning!” I said genially.

She did not start. She did not speak. She just stared at me out of as unpleasant-looking a pair of old eyes as I have ever looked into. I suspected at once why the old crone lived here by herself; she did not look as if she would be popular among her neighbours.

“I think it is going to be a fine day,” I continued breezily.

She simply continued to stare; and if ever I saw suspicion in human eyes, I saw it in hers.

“What do you think yourself?” I inquired with a smile. “I have no doubt you are more weatherwise than I.”

They bent round the corner of the bay and passed the little row of houses, pressed close beneath the high grassy bank, and rumbled on to the pier. The sentries and the naval guard eyed the passengers with professional suspicion as they gathered in a cue to show their passports, and then gradually straggled towards the mail boat. But there was one passenger who was particularly eyed; though if all the glances toward her were prompted by suspicion, it was well concealed. She was a girl of anything from twenty-two to twenty-five, lithe, dressed to a miracle, dark-haired, and more than merely pretty. Her dark eyebrows nearly meeting, her bright and singularly intelligent eyes, her firm mouth and resolute chin, the mixture of thoughtfulness in her expression and decision in her movements, were not the usual ingredients of prettiness. Yet her features were so fine and her complexion so clear, and there was so much charm as well as thought in her expression, that the whole effect of her was delightful. Undoubtedly she was beautiful.

She was clearly travelling alone, and evidently a stranger to those parts. No one on the pier or steamer touched a hat or greeted her, and from her quick looks of interest it was plain that everything was fresh to her. The string of passengers was blocked for a moment on the narrow deck, and just where she paused stood a tall man who had come aboard a minute or two before. He took his eyes discreetly off her face, and they fell upon her bag. There on the label he could plainly read, “Miss Eileen Holland.” Then she passed on, and the tall man kept looking after her.

The house of Breck was a mansion of tolerable antiquity as mansions went in the islands, and several curious stories had already had time to encrust it, like lichen on an aged wall. But none of them were stranger than the quite up-to-date and literally true story of the vanishing governess.

Richard Craigie, Esq., of Breck, the popular, and more or less respected, laird of the mansion and estate, was a stout grey-bearded gentleman, with a twinkling blue eye, and one of the easiest-going dispositions probably in Europe. His wife, the respected, and more or less popular, mistress of the mansion, was lean and short, and very energetic. Their sons were employed at present like everybody else’s sons, and do not concern this narrative. But their two daughters, aged fifteen and fourteen, were at home, and do concern it materially.

It was only towards the end of July that Mrs. Craigie thought of having a governess for the two girls during the summer holidays. With a letter in her hand, she bustled into Mr. Craigie’s smoking-room, and announced that her friend Mrs. Armitage, in Kensington, knew a lady who knew a charming and well-educated girl⁠—

“And who does she know?” interrupted her husband.

“Nobody,” said Mrs. Craigie. “She is the girl.”

“Oh!” said the laird. “Now I thought that she would surely know another girl who knows a woman, who knows a man⁠—”

“Richard!” said his wife. “Kindly listen to me!”

It had been her fate to marry a confirmed domestic humourist, but she bore her burden stoically.

“Damn it, Mr. Wilson,” exclaimed my friend with surprising energy, “everyone in the country seems to be on government business nowadays⁠—except myself! And I’ve got to pay their salaries! We’re asked in the catechism what’s our business in this weary world, and damn it, I can answer that conundrum now! It’s just to pay government officials their wages, and build a dozen or two new Dreadnoughts, and send six million peaceable men into the army, and fill a pile of shells with trinitrol-globule-paralysis, or whatever they call the stuff, and all this on the rental of an estate which was just keeping me comfortably in tobacco before this infernal murdering business began! Do you know what I’d do with that Kaiser if I caught him?”

I looked as interested as possible, and begged for information.

“I’d give him my wife and my income, and see how he liked the mess he’s landed me in!”