Yaill's deep voice answered, slowly and heavily:
"He was a good man. No better ever lived, I am quite certain. And under most conceivable circumstances—to me his wish would be law. But I cannot take his place beside the altar or even attend at Mass."
He felt her start. She asked him quickly:
"There is some reason—"
"There is of course a reason!" He stirred a smouldering log with the toe of his high boot.
"Your health?" Her voice had the sharpened edge of anxiety, and her bosom rose and fell with her quickened breath. His starved eyes dwelt on the modelling of her wide brows, the black lashes of the sweet eyelids that dropped under his scrutiny, the setting of her head on the throat's white column, the superb width of her shoulders, the arch of her deep chest....
"Your health.... There is more to hear than I have been told—is there not? Don't keep—anything back from me, Edward. Nothing is so terrible to bear as suspense."
"There is nothing.... Have you ever known me keep anything back from you, my dearest?" he asked, in wonder at his own hypocrisy. For he knew that to have answered, "I have lost the Faith" would be to her an overwhelming blow. "Now tell me of Julian. You wrote to me that"—the speaker hesitated, mentally groping, "that he had applied to his Superior General and got leave to volunteer for service as a Chaplain with the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force."
"That was in last December. But the permission was delayed, as I wrote you later, and he sailed for Lemnos with the 29th Division a year ago this February. We heard from him next from Gallipoli,—such brave, cheerful letters. But since August 21st.... Oh, Edward!" She caught her breath sharply and paled and reddened. "Since the 21st not a line—not a single line!"
Yaill's forehead knitted in the effort to remember. Thin, thin ice here. He must go warily....
She went on:
"We know from the despatches published in the newspapers and from letters written to us by friends of Julian's, that he went forward with his brigade when the 29th Division fought through the scrub-fire to the top of Scimitar Hill.... When the terrible Turkish shrapnel swept them back down the hillside Julian stayed with the wounded—giving First Aid and comforting the dying. A brother Religious of St. Gerard who was with the Eleventh Division, visited us here afterwards and told us; 'Father Forbis was splendid!' ... 'One of the Church's many heroes!' he called him. But he could enlighten us no more than the people at the War Office.... And it broke my heart to look at Father—as the weeks went by and by without bringing any news.... He bore it in silence, but he has suffered dreadfully. I have heard him over and over, walking up and down at night in his bedroom. And by day one could see him hanging on the hope of a wire from Whitehall. Oh, Edward!—the wire that never will come, perhaps! That last day I saw Father alive, when he rode out with his Adjutant to put the last polish on the Fourth and Fifth Squadron of his Yeomanry at Cauldstanes Muirlees Racecourse—he looked so beautiful that my heart swelled big for pride in him,—and so sorrowful that I had to run away to cry. And he waved to me and rode up the brae without looking back to wave again, and—"
Here Katharine broke down and sobbed, and Yaill caressed his love and soothed her, setting fresh tears running in the channels that had long been dry. She had wept bitterly when Mark had been killed at Mons, though when the Tweedburgh Regiment had been wiped out near Loos, and Yaill had suffered in the blowing-in of the advanced telephone-communication dug-out, the news had reached her on the morning of an attack by German aircraft on the Clearing Hospital, and there had been not a single moment to spend in selfish grief. This last blow, coming as it had, had left her numbed to the centre of her being. Until this moment she had not cried at all ...
Yaill said, when she grew calm at last, lifting his strong brown hand to his lips, and drying with a kiss a shining drop that had fallen on it:
"We must hope for the best for Julian. He may be a prisoner with the Turks, or wounded,"—he spoke hoarsely—"or suffering after some such fashion as—makes it impossible to communicate with—those whom he loves."
"My dear," she said, knowing that his own case rose in mind, "my poor, poor dear!" And the wretched man grew sick at heart and shuddered. The mothering note in her voice called to him across the years of an engagement senselessly prolonged, that he might have heard it cooing to their children, or whispering love-words through many, many wasted nights. And the more hopelessly he yearned to her, the more he shrank from the solicitude in her sweet eyes. He had seen those eyes flame with generous anger, and sparkling with mirth, and dewy with tenderness. Now they were full of sorrow mingled with love for him. He tried to imagine how they would look her scorn....
For when she knew all the truth, she must despise him. That was the thing that made his heart a hell. The knowledge that no one could possibly believe in the innocence of the fellow who had done this hideous, brutal, beastly thing.
"Shell-shock, no doubt!" He heard the voices saying it, and saw the shake of sympathetic heads. "Shell-shock! ... How quite frightfully sad!" And through the eyeholes of the masks of sympathy, pity, commiseration—he saw the wriggle of the little snake of Doubt.
Were the truth known to the world, no one could ever believe it. He would lie, therefore, until it came to light. He would have the joy of these last hours spent beside Katharine, to remember when she banished him for ever from her side.
To Katharine, whose sore heart was eased by that burst of weeping, the joy of Edward restored shone through her sorrow as the sun through a snow-fog or a mountain mist. By and by, when Yaill settled into a well-known arm-chair, she hesitated but another instant before sinking with one swift, supple movement, down upon the hearthrug at her lover's side. He refused to smoke; she knew out of respect for the presence of Death in that bereaved, masterless house. She whispered, leaning her forehead against his shoulder, surrendering her hand to the warm, strong, masculine clasp:
"By and by we will go in together and see him. Shall we not, dearest? He would wish it!"
Yaill muttered, looking at the engagement-ring of Indian turquoises that he had placed years back on the fair womanly hand within his own:
"Certainly. If it will not be—too hard for you!"
"Too hard! O no, dear Edward!" The hearth-blaze lightened on her broad forehead as she raised it. "The hardness will be when he is there no longer, to talk to and to look at and to pray for.... To pray to, as well, being with the Holy Souls. It is wonderful to think now; 'He is with my mother!'"
"And Mark, and your little sister Rosamond."
"And Julian, perhaps. He knows now, whether Julian was killed or taken prisoner.... Turks are cruel to their captives, are they not?"
"Sometimes...."
The muscle in Yaill's thin cheek twitched. He moved restlessly:
"Sometimes.... But do not dwell on these possibilities, or torture yourself with useless conjectures. Even in the shadow of the bereavement that has fallen upon this dear home, we are together.... Together, Katharine!"
She turned and kissed the fine dark khaki cloth of his sleeve, lingeringly echoing:
"'Together.' Doesn't it seem—rather too good to be real? After all that has been—the cruel years of parting, the shock of calamity; the rush and roar of events, the ugly things of War, the horror of dreadful news—the suspense of waiting—for letters from you—letters that never came—"
"I could not—did not—" he stammered miserably and broke off.
Her strong, fine hand closed upon his reassuringly.
"My own love, did I ever for a moment, lose faith in you? Did I ever cease to write, though I never heard? ..."
He groaned in spirit, remembering his discovery of those letters.... Square envelopes containing two or three sheets of ribbed linen note-paper, covered with Katharine's clear free script.... The pocket of an old writing-case of his was stuffed with them—they had crammed that damned Japanese workbox to the lid!
Again she breathed:
"Though I never heard from you I kept on writing. Each letter like a cry from my heart to yours."
Words burst from him:
"As God hears me, I never got one of those letters!"
She drew a troubled breath and said wonderingly, with sweet, perplexed eyes seeking light from his:
"Not at the time they were written, dear, possibly. But your nurse did read them to you, Edward?—as soon as you could bear it, that is."
"Did she?"
"She was very kind. I was very grateful to her."
"Was she? ... Were you? ..."
The sweat stood in beads upon his brow and temples, and his strained knuckles showed white through the sunburnt skin.
"Kind, I mean, in writing to break the cruel truth to me, that you—Edward!—let us forget about this!"
"It will be best," he said in a low constrained tone, not looking at her. "But tell me first what truth she broke to you?"
"The truth—" He felt her warm mouth upon his hand, "that your mind was quite a blank with regard to me. That was the news that came in her first letter from the Convalescent Camp at B—— Base. I have not kept the letter—I could not!—but the date I shall remember always. October 28th, 1915."
It had been true then. The effort to remember; to conjure up figures, faces, associations, places, out of the Great Blank that had followed the shell-burst—had been attended by blinding headache, spasms of sickness and nights of insomnia. Katharine went on:
"I wrote to her—Nurse Burtonshaw—at the Camp,—and thanked her, and said that I would go on writing to you exactly the same. My work involved some risk. If I had been killed, you would have learned from those letters that I never once forgot you, Edward, dear! So I asked your nurse to put them by in some safe keeping-place, and when God in His Mercy should restore my darling's memory, to give them to him, with his Katharine's love. For I never doubted that you would recover, Edward. If I had, for one moment—how could I have gone on working? I must have given up hope! I must—"
The break in her dear voice supplied the missing end to the sentence:
"I must have broken down and died!"
XIII
When a man's own organs, senses, wits conspire against him, in league with an enamoured woman who plays traitress, what earthly chance has the man?
Yaill stared into the glowing rose-red heart of the fire, conjuring up for the thousandth time that part played by one brown puppet of a myriad of puppets similarly attired, in War's dread drama; cheek by jowl, night in and day out—with the grim tragi-comedian Death; whose paces, poses and antics, grown commonplace by dint of familiarity—at length ceased to cause a shudder, or provoke a passing jest....
The War.... A waking nightmare of cold, heat, thirst and hunger; exertion, anxiety, responsibility, fatigue; sleeplessness and NOISE, NOISE, in a ceaseless, maddening crescendo, until that flaming white-hot moment when the German 5.9 H.E. shell blew in the Advanced Telephone Communication dug-out. When consciousness of these things abruptly ceased for Yaill.
So it came to pass that stark-naked as when he was born into this world, save for a platinum disc-chain on his wrist, bearing his name, religion, rank and regiment, and a small gold Crucifix slung by a blackened cord about his neck, Number 40, Shell Shock Ward 8, General Casualty Hospital 70, on the Lines of Communication, came into being. Later on, when the Great Blank had given place to a drab-hued mental twilight, wherein men, women and children; animals, trees and houses could dimly be conjectured or unemotionally discerned; and a little later yet, when one began again to realise oneself a living puppet, playing a dull, dull part in a dreary production called Life,—with some character dimly sensed as missing from the cast, whose presence would have made a world of difference!—Number 80, Convalescent Officers' Camp, B—— Base, began to take what other nurses called a "good deal of notice" of Nurse Lucy Burtonshaw.
You are to conceive of Nurse Burtonshaw as anything but a purposeful Delilah. The piously-reared daughter of one Burton, a respectable West of England dairy-farmer,—calling herself "Burtonshaw" for reasons of her own, while serving in concert with thousands of other admirable young British women, enrolled for Service at Home and Overseas under the auspices of the Red Cross,—how shall she be held blameworthy because there beat under her Navy blue lustre overall, and white bibbed apron with its badge of red twill Turkey, a woman's heart, susceptible to Love....
Does any woman wonder? Does any man ask Why? Nurse Lucy Burtonshaw had washed Number 80; combed him, fed him, dressed him,—and put him to bed again. Administered general massage and tonics, and superintended the ministrations of the orderly-barber, unwearying, for months on end. She had soothed him,—waking from brief daylight sleeps in panics bred of hideous, nerve-shattering visions,—reproductions of such sights,—burned in upon the brain and reproduced by the subconscious memory, as made the nights grim ordeals of dread. She had alternately scolded and encouraged her patient, gaining strength mentally and physically under her unselfish, able care, until she had established herself as the hub of his universe. The sky and sea, the flowers and trees, and that fresh West Country face with its blunt features and well-opened grey-blue eyes, were the only books the patient ever cared to read in. The printed lines, the written sheets, were torture to Yaill's dazed brain and astigmatic vision. So the Commandant's private secretary attended to his business letters, and the correspondence of his friends was dealt with by Nurse....
Upon her arm at first, by her side later, he took his first walks in the Convalescent Camp grounds. When later still, he was taken for drives in the company of other shell-shocked officers, it was Nurse Burtonshaw who persuaded him not to rebel against this order of the C.M.O.... Nurse, who waited for the return of the big, crowded car and unpacked him, smiling, at the gates of Canvas Park Row, the double avenue of roomy tents pitched on the green, tree-clumped slopes rising North of the Base Port, behind the big square stone house where the Staff officers and quarters were,—and the huge, shapeless, plank-built zinc-roofed bulk of the Hospital.
"There now, you're back again and no bones broken. And whether you liked it or not, the air has done you good," she would say cheerfully, unwinding his muffler, knitted by herself in her scant spare time. For all Yaill's personal, immediate baggage had been destroyed by a Boche bomb-raid upon Battalion Staff Headquarters, and as Number 80 never wrote letters, such lacking necessaries had been replaced by Red Cross gifts.
Subsequently, when some battered portmanteaux were received from Regimental H.Q. in France,—but of that later in the chapter.... You are to see Nurse taking off the muffler, over which her patient stared down at her with grey, brooding, mournful eyes. Those eyes followed her about, burning holes in her grey print. If she had established herself as the hub of Number 80's universe, she was none the less the adoring slave of him whom—in private and at his entreaty she called "Teddy."
For Lord help this bedevilled man! he who in all his thirty-five years of life had been "Edward" to all who loved him, holding pet names in abhorrence,—had invited Nurse Burtonshaw to address him by this fond diminutive. "My mother used to call me 'Teddy,'" he would say, with his sad eyes brimming: "and though she has married again—" the poor widowed lady being dead and buried years previously—"and I am nothing to her now, I somehow like to hear it."
So Nurse called him "Teddy," scrupulously selecting moments when they were quite alone and out of earshot. Then Teddy, who was a Border laird of ancient lineage, as well as a Squire in Cumberland, with a solid rent-roll of four thousand a year, some thriving home-farms and a park of many acres, confided to Nurse that he was a poor man—without a rap beyond his pay. But if Lucy had no fear of poverty, shared with a poor broken wretch who loved her—one to whom the love of woman had been a sealed book until he saw her face....
"You're getting too stuck on that Colonel man of yours, Burtonshaw!" expostulated a friend some hours later on, when the day-nurses went off duty. "Because when it comes to kissing Good-night—and I couldn't help but hear!—the partition between the O.C. wards being merely canvas! Of course you can trust me not to talk, though I hope you won't again!—a warm handshake as between friends being properer, and not against the Regulations—which I will say I never knew you go against before. Now own up. Am I right, or wrong?"
"I did, I'll own it.... I do truly feel for Number 80," admitted Nurse Burtonshaw. "He's alone in the world and quite poor, though three hundred and seventy pounds a year, which is his pay—not counting War allowances,—seems like riches to little me."
"Bless me!" cried the friend, "then you've actually clicked! ... He's asked you to marry him? ..."
Nurse Burtonshaw demanded, with rather a defiant flare lighting up her well-opened grey-blue eyes, and with a decided deepening of the steady bloom on her broad, blunt-featured West of England face, nunlike in the setting of flowing white linen hiding the rich red-gold hair that was her one undeniable beauty:
"Do you think I'd let him kiss me—a girl brought up like I've been—unless he'd behaved himself honourable? Not one of my friends can say a word—"
"But what will his friends say about you?" asked the other nurse acutely, "when they hear how you've fixed things? To marry a Regular Army toff, who not so long ago was queer in his head, and had to be mothered and seen to and fed as if he'd been a blinking baby—"
Nurse Burtonshaw asserted:
"He's well, and going to get his discharge next week. They say his cure's my doing. And he's got no friends. He's told me so, over and over again!"
"That makes it better for you. And I'm not saying that you won't turn out a happy pair, not for a minute! Don't lots of patients marry their nurses and live happy ever after? And, whenever I've read your teacup, Fate has seemed to point that way. But as to his having no friends—that won't half wash!"
"And why won't it?"
"Just because your Teddy's a Society Toff, poor or not poor! Belongs to a crack Scotch regiment.... Gets lots of letters in lovely envelopes with the names of topping County places on some of 'em—and coronetted crests and monograms...."
"The smart folks who wrote those letters don't count. Hasn't he told me? 'Not one of them,' he says,—'matters to me a straw.'"
"He may have said so, but are you sure? I'm asking out of friendship. Wasn't there a woman—isn't there a woman who writes as if he mattered to her more than several stacks of straw? Oh, Luce! ..."
Nurse Burtonshaw stood her ground obstinately:
"I've questioned him over and over.... 'I may have liked her, since she says I did,' he says.... 'But all the same, she's less than nought to me.... What did you say her name was?' he asks in that simple way of his." ...
"And did you tell him?"
"What does that matter to you?"
"It'll matter to you one of these days, as sure as I'm certificated! And you told me she'd begged you to keep the letters until he was able to read them without hurting his head. You haven't given them to him! ... Straight—are you going to? Infirmary-trained we both may be, and not Hospital—but I hope we know what's due to the professions to say nothing of the Red Cross! When will you give him those letters?"
Behind Nurse Burtonshaw's blue-grey eyes a red flame kindled. She retorted, confronting her interlocutor:
"When he asks me to! Haven't I told you?"
"Not much, you haven't. And about your first venture—with the Didlick boy—poor thing! Killed at Mons and buried no one knows where—are you going to tell him about that?"
"I—am—NOT! ... Is that plain enough? ... Now let me get to bed!"
When Katharine should learn that those letters, written from her post of service at the Receiving Hospital in France, and later from a London Nursing Home,—and later still from Kerr's Arbour,—had never been delivered to Nurse Burtonshaw's patient, would she believe—Yaill wondered dismally, or doubt like all the rest of the world, the man who had married the nurse?
XIV
He had told the girl, according to her, that though the letters on his disc proclaimed him Catholic, he was just as much a Protestant as anything.... And a Church of England clergyman—not the Chaplain attached to the Convalescent Camp—but the pastor of a Protestant church in the town had been consulted, and under his advice the Special license had been procured:
Yaill had written to his Brigadier and Divisional Commander.... As for Nurse Burtonshaw, she had already applied to the Principal Commandant of the Women's Detachments and the Matron-in-Chief at the Front for her discharge. And obtained it—on account of her health,—she had always been anæmic,—and of late headache and indigestion born of chocolate-creams and cigarettes, of which Nurse consumed quantities when off duty, had troubled her a good deal.
"And besides, duck," she told her pal, "if it comes to choosing between Teddy and my profession, my first duty is to Teddy. I do really think it was Providence prevented me signing on for the Duration of the War!"
And so they had been married only a week ago. O God!—O God!—why had nothing happened to prevent the affair? Why hadn't the officiating Church of England clergyman had a fit or a belated attack of scruples? Why out of all the flotillas of aircraft scouring the charted skies on War's endless business, had not one (preferably a bomb-carrier) crashed on the roof of the church?
They had had breakfast at the Conronne—where Brass Hats and Red Tabs did congregate and foregather. In the private room above the restaurant, looking across the short side of the gardens across the Ouai Clemenceau. The hotel was crowded with British khaki and French grey puppets playing the talky interludes that enliven the grimmest tragedy of War.
Nurse Burtonshaw had looked her best in her off-duty dress of pale blue alpaca, with bishop sleeves, and black Red Cross buttons, a white lawn collar and cuffs to match—a black patent leather belt with a sprig of artificial white heather tucked in it, and a white straw hat with the regulation Service ribbon crowning her wonderful red-gold hair. Her Teddy's engagement-ring, chosen by herself, set with three smallish rubies—did duty as keeper to the plain gold ring he had placed—not quite an hour before—on her large, capable left hand....
The popping of corks, the clinking of glasses, and the polyglot roar of male voices from the restaurant below, discussing the one burning topic of the day in every civilised tongue used on earth saving one, came to them as they ate their omelette and sole matelotte at the round table in the big bay window—looking across the Quai upon the outer Port—crammed to the jaws of the long channel between the light-housed jetties—with Allied steamers of all imaginable grades, types and sizes: from Leviathan troopers, converted Cunarders and P. and O. boats disgorging endless streams of men, horses, lorries, guns and munitions; and Hospital ships ceaselessly swallowing processions of walking wounded and stretcher-cases—poured out from the long khaki-coloured Red Cross trains drawn up at the platforms—to T.B.D.'s, British and French mine-sweepers, submarines, American or Eastern oil-tankers, seaplane-carriers, Wireless Service boats and Canadian or Argentine cattle-ships. With a myriad others brought from the world's airts to serve this single end of War.
Lucy Burtonshaw, now Lucy Yaill,—while eating her déjeuner with an unspoiled appetite, saw with relief her newly wedded husband unmoved by this stirring spectacle; long unfamiliar to one laid-by for months in the placid backwater of the Convalescent Camp. His sad grey eyes swept the wonderful panorama without seeming to take it in. Presently they came back to her; and she smiled into them affectionately, as she laid down her fork, and spared her rather large hand, with its brand new wedding-ring under the ruby keeper, to give his a protecting, reassuring squeeze....
"Ducks!" she cooed. (Lucy could coo.) "Sure all this hasn't given you a cooker of a headache?"
He did not seem to hear. He was looking at the sprig of imitation white heather. She followed the direction of his gaze, and took it from her belt.
"That what you're looking at? ... My bit of white heather! ... Pidge"—Pidge being the Hospital nickname of Nurse Pringle, the pal of some pages back—"Pidge gave it me 'For luck' when we said good-bye to each other this morning. 'Not the real thing, but as near as I could get for two frongs!' she said. Want it, Ducks?"
She put in his hand Pidge's parting gift—a caricature of Nature with its gummed green-and-white paper leaves and bells, and trumpery glass dewdrops—and he stared at it as though it held the secrets of the Past and of the Future both....
Perhaps it did for Ducks. For something wakened in him. Some atrophied nerve vibrated, it may be: some long-numbed brain-cell quickened into life....
Who knows what change took place? ... At any rate, the sight and touch of the little shrub with the white-belled flower that grows amongst the purple ling of Northern moors and mountains, made Teddy's slowly-beating heart perform a curious demivolt. Remembrance began to waken from her hazy trance, or dream, or lethargy.... Somewhere, some time, Some One had given him a bit of white heather.... Some One, some time, somewhere—and the gift had meant the world! The round world floating in her ocean of air, and all the planets swinging in their orbits.... A woman utterly, unspeakably beloved by Nurse Burtonshaw's Teddy ... the woman, whose love had been sweet as the honeycomb of the Singer of the Canticles—fragrant as myrrh and ambergris and frankincense; the utter bliss of the body—the soul's bread and wine....
"How beautiful are thy steps, O King's daughter! ...
How beautiful art Thou, and how comely my dearest, in delights ...
Thy stature like unto a palm-tree ... thy throat like the
best wine ...
Put me as a seal upon thy heart, as a seal upon thy arm:
for love is strong as death: ... if a man should give
all the substance of his house for love he shall despise
it as nothing..."
"What are you mumbling, Teddy dear? Sounds like a bit out of the Bible."
He lifted his dropped head and said, regarding his wife austerely.
"It is as a matter of fact, something from the Canticle of Canticles. I once got the eight of them by heart, when I was a boy."
"Oh—well! ... Don't mutter, but I thought it came out of the Bible...."
"It does, as I said.... What are you doing?" For Lucy was twisting and tilting her coffee-cup, and peering into it curiously at each new tilt or twist.
"Laying my cup—trying to read my fortune. Though you can't do it with coffee-grounds as well as with tea-leaves, and even with them I'm not a patch on Pidge. Who's Pidge, did you ask? ... Why, Nurse Pidge, my best pal, who gave me the bit o' white heather.... How you do stare—as though you'd never seen me before!"
She trembled with alarm as she reached over to pat her Teddy's cheek. Had not Nurse Pidge, that seeress of things to come per medium of "Best Household Black" or "Liphook's Luscious Tea-Tips" prophesied truly that Nurse Burtonshaw would reap the whirlwind over those letters in the Japanese box....
She shivered as though a chilly draught had pierced her blue alpaca. Nurse Pidge had not let the topic sleep. She had reverted to it often in that odd argot,—(compound of homely, commonplace, modern English; up-to-date scientific terms; Public School, Clubland and Army slang),—which comes so trippingly from the tongue of the trained nurse of To-Day.
Pidge had quoted her idol Wyers, Oppenshaw Wyers, F.R.C.S., of Harley Street, Lieutenant Colonel R.A.M.C. (T.), Consulting Surgeon attached to the Staff of the Base Hospital of which the Convalescent Camp was an offshoot.
Who has not heard of Wyers, coarse, gross and tubby in his khaki, who showed the tenderness of an angel and the insight of a demigod in his dealings with shell-shocked men—victims of War's dire curse, hysteria—whose limbs and members, flaccidly limp, or strangely twisted and distorted, refused to obey the bidding of their owners' brains. Who, seized by epilepsy, would fall down foaming, or weep and sob like heart-wrung women; or stumble in their gait and speech like the infant members of a Kindergarten; or sit, staring vacantly, lost in a grey dream of infinite bewilderment—as Teddy used to sit—as Teddy was sitting now.....
"Helpless and hopeless, beyond the aid of Science, dead to the voice or touch of old, sweet love, seemingly unhelped by prayer. Until—just as the stopped watch begins to tick on the removal of some globule of oil, or speck of dust that clogged the mechanism—the paralysed nerve thrills once more into life, the unlocated lesion heals, the infinitesimal blood-clot dissipates, and the man rises up, sane, freed from bonds, healed of his infirmity."
Thus Wyers, as many other men no less great have said before and will say after him, honestly trying to deal with the problem that to the end of all Time will baffle the human race: "And how or why that change takes place cannot even be conjectured by any of us wiseacres.... Call it a Miracle if you will,—it's as good a word as any other. But until that Miracle takes place—and the Angel troubles the pool—Medicine and Surgery must twiddle their thumbs."
Were the waters moving now? Edward Yaill's new-made wife asked herself, timorously watching him. When he had spoken in that new, masterful tone—looked at her with that new glance, so cold and keen and observant, a little shiver had run through her underneath her blue alpaca. The Miracle, she knew in her soul, would spell for her Disaster. Secretly she must have wished that the Angel would never trouble the pool....
The best laid plans will gang agley. Nurse Burtonshaw, formally relieved of her duties by ukase from the Chief Matron on the Front in France, had quitted the Convalescent Camp on the previous afternoon. Two or three letters had been brought in on Number 80's breakfast-tray that morning.... A bill from a Bond Street tailor, a communication from Cox's Bank, London, and a square envelope of thick ribbed linen note with the Cauldstanes postmark, addressed in a clear, firm handwriting—a letter that would, one conjectures—but for the interposition of Destiny,—have joined its fellows in that Pandora casket, the Japanese Box.
Teddy, always indifferent where correspondence was concerned, had not had time to read the letters, hurrying to tie the Knot that takes so much undoing. He had thrust his mail hastily into a breast-pocket of his Service jacket—it would well keep till by and by. Now he fished the letters out and laid them on the clean coarse napery of the breakfast-table, with another envelope containing two official leaflets badly printed on thin yellowish paper, duly stamped and viséd by Military Authority, and having names and personal details filled in with red ink. Ensuring to Lieutenant-Colonel Edward Angus Sholto Yaill, etc., etc., late C.O. Tweedburgh Regiment of Infantry, Discharged from the Convalescent Hospital Camp B—— Base, and Proceeding Home on (indefinite) Leave—as to Lucy Alice Burtonshaw T.N. of such and such a Nursing Detachment. Invalided Home from Service in France under the British Red Cross—transit at the expense of the British Government, per steamer and rail to Folkestone, London and Coombe Bay, Devonshire. The passes arrested Yaill's eye. He did not open the letters. He thrust them back in his pocket; and said with a glance at the new, cheap silver wrist-watch that had been the wedding-gift of his bride:
"We have just time to catch the boat without hurrying you, I think, dear!"
And so they had gone out by the Couronne's side-entrance to the debilitated fiacre that waited on the cobblestones in the cold bright forenoon, and for the moment the guilty fears that throbbed under the blue alpaca were lulled to treacherous rest....
Old friends—these chiefly warriors going back on Blighty leave—came up to Colonel Yaill upon the Folkestone boat, with hearty greetings and crushing hand-grips. Service and Club acquaintances saluted and spoke. People were frightfully glad to see Yaill looking so beany, and generally tophole.... Every one was expecting soon to hear of his going back to the Front.... Meanwhile a rest—well-earned, by the Living Tinker!—discreetly combined with recreation, would soon set him on his legs. Country-house Bridge, and pillow-ragging, or London jazz and champagne-parties only good for lieutenants.... A bit of huntin' and a pleasant house-party just the thing, etc., what? ... Shooting and fishing had generally gone to the dogs, all the junior keepers having been called up—but there were woodcock and snipe and hares—that place of yours in Cumberland must be stiff with 'em! and up North—the Gala Water—or at a pinch—(the speaker twinkled knowingly)—the Rushet where it ran through the Kerr's Arbour property,—might supply a decent fish or two....
So, as the Folkestone steamer pushed through the crowded War-traffic of the English Channel waters, chaperoned by the dim grey shape of a T.B. destroyer,—watched from the air by a pilot seaplane,—the desultory chatter ran on.... With a reference or so to the War news of the month-end; the German aircraft-raid on the Kentish coast, the Arabs of the Senussi dispersed in West Egypt, the impending declaration of War by Albania on Austria: winding up with a proposed adjournment to the bar for drinks; though Government-controlled Scotch, thirty-five under proof—and Government-brewed malt-liquor—cursed rotten swipes—eh, what? ...
The speaker pulled himself up with a surprised glance at the fresh-coloured young woman in the white straw hat and the pale blue alpaca gown peeping from underneath a starred Regulation cloak, who had laid her rather large ungloved hand on the arm of the fellow-officer addressed, saying:
"No! ... It wouldn't be good for you! ... Please not, Teddy!"
"Beg pardon, Nurse! ... I thought my friend alone. Didn't seem to realise you'd got him on a lead. Quite right to give me the tip. Colonel, the invitation's off! ... Unless you'll pledge me in something soft; lemon-squash or ginger-beer!—pretty rotten, I expect!—or tea, or coffee. Perhaps Nurse'll join?" He thought as he screwed his eyeglasses tighter: "What glorious hair! ... My favourite colour.... Yaill strikes me as rather a lucky kind of chap!" ...
"No, thank you!" Lucy drew herself up and looked at her husband.
With that possessive hand upon his arm, Yaill hesitated the fraction of an instant, then took the header:
"'No thanks!' for both Mrs. Yaill and myself.... We breakfasted rather late, didn't we, Lucy? ... Let me introduce Major Scales-Packard, my wife...."
"Awfully delighted!"
The eyeglass of Scales-Packard, who knew Katharine Forbis,—leaped out of its orbit as his eyebrows shot up under the peak of his cap. He grew red,—stammered something congratulatory, saluted and speedily vanished. And Lucy breathed more freely. Dimly she sensed that she had stepped across the frontiers of a new, and possibly hostile country. That man, Teddy's friend, had looked at her—when Teddy had introduced him,—as though she had been guilty of child-stealing....
Had she? ... The question probed to the quick, so that she paled and shivered; and found relief in the solicitude her convalescent displayed: permitting Teddy in his new role of guardian and protector, to envelop her in plaids and waterproofs, to find her a seat upon the smutty leeward side of the grimy after-deck saloon-cabin—and supply her with Captain's biscuits and tea, both of War's villainous brand. Her mental qualms would have been justified had she overheard Scales-Packard confiding to numerous acquaintances on board:
"See that tall, good-lookin' man with a blue Hospital brassard? ... That's Yaill, late C.O. of the Tweedburgh Regiment! Gassed and shell-shocked last September somewhere north of Loos.... Married his nurse at the Base C.O.C. and comin' home—poor silly blighter!—to break it to the finest woman God ever made—who's waited for him years and years."
XV
There had been—Yaill remembered, staring into the red-gold heart of the fire, where sapphire and violet and emerald flames played over the burning turfs and hissing oaken billets, making as they devoured them a little purring sound;—there had been a little hitch over baggage when they got to Folkestone. Two heavy strapped cowhide trunks, recovered from Regimental Headquarters; now found to be lacking some necessary red or blue chalk lettering,—were nearly being shipped back to the Base. Battered, mildewed, smeared with whitewash, they presented a deplorable appearance on the truck with Teddy's brand new Gladstone, (War manufacture, of American cloth masquerading as leather) and Lucy's green canvas-covered box.
The keys of the trunks had long been lost,—necessitating an explanation with the Representative of Customs. But Yaill had needed nothing that those leather trunks might contain during the three days they had spent in London, on the third floor of a vast caravanserai of a hotel, looking on the myriad-voiced Strand. But he had sent for a locksmith on the second day, and had fresh keys fitted. And on the morning subsequent to the arrival of the bride and bridegroom at the Tor View Hotel, Coombe Bay, he had gone into the dressing-room adjacent to their nuptial chamber, fresh from his bath, rumpled as to the hair,—and opened one of the battered receptacles in search of a khaki tie. Quite haphazard, and as chance would have it—on the top—between a mouldy Field Service mess-frock, and some khaki shirts with burnt holes in them made by red-hot shell-splinters—he had found a silver-mounted leather photograph-frame, much tarnished, and gone white in spots....
The frame held a portrait of large panel-size, and at the back was a strut to stand it up by. He lifted the frame and set it up against the lid of the open trunk, on the top of the mouldy clothes, and Ah!—what a warm, rich, fragrant gale of memories blew through the man's sick brain and desolate heart as those dear eyes of Katharine's looked candid love into his own! Something like a cry escaped him—he choked it back fiercely....
"Did you call me, Teddy?" asked his wife from the next room, where she sat in a blue Japanese kimono, brushing her wonderful red-gold hair before a modest display of nickel-silver-backed brushes and toilet-bottles. For through the partly-closed door of the dressing-room, or so it seemed to Lucy, she had heard a woman's name.... And to Lucy's Nonconformist mind, the woman a man cries out for must be his lawful married helpmeet; and if she isn't, then the wife has got a (legal, mind you!) right to know the reason why.... "Did you want me, dear?" she reiterated,—and saw reflected in the toilette-glass behind her blue kimono-covered shoulders and round fresh country face—from which the bloom had faded suddenly,—the half-open door of the dressing-room close softly, and heard the key turn in the lock upon the other side....
The chambermaid came through with Yaill's shaving-water, and said that the bath was ready for the lady; and Lucy went at once. Purposely prolonging her matutinal ablutions, so that Teddy had dressed and gone down to the coffee-room by the time she returned, much more composed in mind....
When she came down the wide shallow staircase with its artificial palms in mock-bronze vessels, and British-made Turkey carpet,—he was waiting for her there.... The manager, an alleged Swiss, had given them a table in the window, and—sensing the honeymooners with the infallible instinct of his tribe—enclosed it with lincrusta screens—and placed by each cover a sprig of white heather of the artificial kind. It is strange how Fate and Destiny, twin-balances of the scales in which poor human lives are weighed, will be tipped one way or the other by gewgaws such as this....
Within the glass of the photo-frame, against the knee of the tall, erect, womanly-gracious figure, was a withered sprig of the real white heather, plucked on the moors above Kerr's Arbour, and placed there by Katharine.... Against the raging heart of Yaill lay Katharine's latest letter.... He had found it on the dressing-glass with the notification from Cox's Bank, and the Bond Street tailor's bill.
He knew that letter word for word. He saw the short, poignant sentences in the beloved handwriting written on the walls of the coffee-room, across the imitation-tapestry paper; on the white tablecloth and serviettes; on the alleged Swiss manager's badly-starched shirt-front, and smug dingy-pale face.
He refused ham and eggs; broke War-bread toast, and drank down cup after cup of doubtful coffee, unseen by Lucy, who was fluttered by the observant lorgnette of a large lady, breakfasting with one obese elderly gentleman in the silver-grey of the Local Coast Defence Corps—and two tanned young men in khaki with shabby Sam Browne belts and sword-straps, sufficiently like the large lady, to be, as in fact they were, her sons....
Now the large important lady—upon the shoulder-straps of whose blue serge jacket glittered the four-pointed gold star of a Commandant above the numeral of the Detachment—the honoured title of the Red Cross Society and the name of her County—happened to be Lady Ridgely, Commandant of a Convalescent Hospital for Private Soldiers, a large white mansion standing in neatly-kept grounds, above the Tor View Hotel, on the same side of the Torcliff Road.... For certain reasons of her own Lady Ridgely had taken to breakfasting at the Tor View Hotel; and being a rigid martinet re the observance of Regulations, the sight of Lucy's pale-blue alpaca Foreign Service Off Duty dress had very much shocked her,—worn in combination with an officer so manifestly an invalid: "For even without his Hospital brassard, which he must have forgotten to take off—the man looked simply ghastly, my dear!"
Thus Lady Ridgely afterwards, per telephone, (the receiver being held by her sister-in-law, the Deputy-Assistant Director-General of the L.L.W.S.L. at the London Headquarters)—and a cousin, as Fate would have it, of the protagonist. Of whom Lady Ridgely took no note at first, being wholly absorbed in the blue alpaca—and not unconscious of the fact that its wearer was embarrassed by the rigid glare of her lorgnetted eye.
When at length she lowered the instrument, it was to signal the Coffee-Room Manager, alleged Swiss, who hurried to her side....
"Kindly tell me the names of those two persons breakfasting at the table in the window. The invalid officer and the pale blue nurse," commanded Lady Ridgely. And the alleged Swiss Manager of the Coffee-Room, relieved—for very private reasons, to find another than himself the object of Lady Ridgely's lorgnette—bounded away to consult the Visitor's Book in the vestibule-office—returned with the information, was thanked, and gratefully effaced himself. Subsequently interned under the Defence Of The Realm Act, upon conviction of communication by flashlight with certain undersea activities in the Channel—we are to see his pasty German face no more.
The dreary meal came to an end. When his wife rose, Yaill went with her to the staircase-foot and said in a quiet, level tone:
"You were so—kind as to put some letters of mine away in a box for me.... Might I ask you to be so good as to let me have them now?"
She tried, poor goose!—a mingling of self-assertion and coquetry:
"Give 'em you now? ... I like that tone of yours.... Now that we're married and one flesh ... I'm not at all so sure I shall!"
He looked her full in the eyes and said to her quietly:
"You will go upstairs to our—to your room,—and bring them to me here!"
"Will I? ... Oh! well,—I suppose I must, since you're so set on it."
She dropped her head like a sulky child, and mounted the wide stairs slowly. Yaill stood at the stairfoot watching, while the blue alpaca was in sight. She did not return. He followed, and knocked at the door of their bedroom. She cried "Come in" and he went in, to find her with a tear-stained, sulky, mulish face, standing at the bedside.... The Japanese workbox—a tawdry thing of imitation lacquer—was lying on the counterpane. She gulped to him that she had mislaid the key that opened the stupid thing. He responded:
"Break open the box. I will buy you—others!"
"My hands aren't strong enough!"
She feigned that those broad, strong dairywoman's hands that had put up many a twelve-pound frail of muslin-enwrapped pats for the market,—that had held down delirious men upon their Hospital beds—were too feeble to break the flimsy lock of Japanese manufacture. He accepted her explanation with unmoved countenance.
"Then be good enough to allow me!"
The letters were in his hands. But even as they poured forth from their camphor-scented prison, so from his wife's swollen, trembling mouth poured a stream of wordy defence. He could hear the voice pleading now with its broad, soft Somerset accent....
"How was I to be sure she told the truth? ... And didn't she ask me—and didn't you too—to put by the letters? ... Haven't I said to you over and over, when you swore how much you loved me. 'Tell me, Teddy, on your oath! Are you sure you're not engaged?'—And you always swore you weren't, and that till you met me you'd never known what it meant to love any woman! Am I to be blamed—called wicked and treacherous—because I believed you? Oh, Ted!"
He had ground his heel into the carpet beneath his feet, and set his teeth to keep back the curses he longed to shriek at her. That plump, fresh-coloured, well-proportioned, deadly-commonplace young woman would never know what murderous frenzy boiled in her Teddy's blood, and tautened his muscles then. But he crushed down the ugly, murderous impulse and said to her with elaborate gentleness:
"I do not blame you.... I have not reproached you with—anything. And—I have spoiled your box, and you were fond of it. You shall have one ten times as good as soon as they can send it from Liberty's."
So, with the promise of a new box instead of the smashed one, he carried away his letters, and went up on the moors where he might be alone to read.... And the larks were singing in the pale harebell skies of late January.... And the spicy smell of the larches, the raw-red trunks of the pines, and the rasp of the wintry ling underfoot reminded him of Scotland. And the rust-brown of the frost-nipped bracken was the shade of Katharine's hair. And the colour of the little streams, running crystal-bright over dead drowned leaves and red-brown Devon sandstone had the very, very colour of those beloved eyes.... Stars that would never now look down upon the slumber of their child....
To Wyers of Harley Street, Lieutenant-Colonel (T) R.A.M.C., Consulting Surgeon attached to the Staff of the Base Hospital in connection with the Convalescent Camp at B—— the Chief Medical Officer, was at that moment saying—Wyers having just returned by 'plane from a professional visit to the Front:
"You know Yaill left us for Blighty on Tuesday morning? I'm wondering whether it wouldn't have been better to have kept him on here a bit? Or have sent him to that Hydro at Les Bonnes Eaux."
"Instead—" Wyers flicked off the ash of his inevitable Trichinopoli, and deftly picked up a little sheaf of papers clipped together from the big leather-topped writing-table in the C.M.O.'s official room. He reversed the chart, to glance with cool professional interest at the history-sheet behind it, and turned back to the doctor's card with the inky scrawl beneath the heading:
"Discharged.... Convalescent" ... and the date of three days back.
"Instead of striking him off the sheet with leave to get married! I don't see why not, for my part. He's as well as ever he will be, unless—you know my theory! And marriage may help him. Should, certainly—supposing him to have got hold of a woman of the right sort."
"Ah, but has he? Query,—is she?" The Chief Medical Officer, deftly packing fragrant Navy Cut into a well-burned briar-root, looked up from his deft thumb-work, under an anxiously-puckered brow. "You're not aware that he's married the chart-nurse of No. 8. Hut Ward C.O.C. That little Burtonshaw—you remember Burtonshaw? Blonde and blue-eyed, faintly frisky, but a model of provincial propriety for all of that. And a good nurse—to do her justice!—now discharged invalided, after two years' Foreign Service with her unit of the Red Cross."
"H'm!" The nod of Wyers conveyed his knowledge of Nurse Burtonshaw. "There's only one thing to say for a match of that kind. It may turn out successfully. One hopes of course it will. But for a man of that stamp—ultra refined, highly-bred, and used—going by what one has heard—" whatever Wyers had heard, he retained with Sphinx-like taciturnity,—"to a very different type of woman,—Happiness will not depend on his ultimate return to the normal,—do you follow? But on his stopping exactly where he is. For the Miracle wouldn't benefit him—under the present circumstances. Better for him that the Angel should never trouble the pool!"
Thus Oppenshaw Wyers, who may or may not have heard the name of Katharine Forbis. But the Miracle had happened, Yaill had returned to the normal.... And the thin chance of happiness in an unequal union with the poor thing he had married—lay shattered into fragments at his unlucky feet.
Sitting on a crumbling ledge of the grey-pink cliffs of Devon, he read his love's letters—that had come so much too late. Such fond womanly letters—and gallant and courageous, written from her Receiving Hospital in France, and from the Base—and from a London Nursing Home and from Kerr's Arbour.
Here was one dated from the Receiving Hospital in Belgium in the previous April. It shall be quoted here:
"MY MAN OF ALL MEN....
"To-day I met a Tommy (one of a great many) on the frightfully muddy road that leads from Our Shop to the fighting-line. We were bringing down wounded—(Canadians chiefly). This long-legged, gaunt, black-a-vised man was going up with the Relief. A Jew unmistakably—going by his leading feature—and in evident trouble about a chum who had got crumped. So your Kathy, wangling a spare seat from under an orderly—undertook to convey Private Abrahams' chum back to Hospital...."
Added some hours later:
"There isn't so much wrong—and I'm going to drop a postcard to Abrahams in the Support trenches, to tell him so and cheer his heart. The queer thing about it is—that the moment I saw Abrahams—(whose real name is Hazel)—I felt I knew the man! ... Somewhere, his huge hooked beak and great shoulders have risen up before me. Somehow—this can't be love at first sight, Edward!" Ah, wicked Katharine!—"because my heart is so hopelessly lost to you!—somehow his very ordinary—rather Cockney voice wasn't quite the voice of a stranger. Oddly I felt that I could trust the man!—had trusted him—somewhere, in many a tight place! ... Newspaper has come in.... Must stop here.... Finish this idiotic epistle to-night when I get a chance—"
This bore a date in September, 1915.
"MY PRECIOUS DEAR,
"I've had your last letter. So you're lonely wanting your Katharine! My dear, don't be! I AM with you, though not bodily—yet in heart and soul. Please God—"
There was a break. The handwriting of the rest was shaky and irregular, showing what storms of mingled emotions had swept through the writer.
"This was begun the day before yesterday. I left off to read the News of the War. Read—Oh! my dearest—with what mingled joy and anguish, the story of the combined assault on Loos. My love, my love!—what awful loss! How you must grieve for your glorious regiment! Thanks to Our Lord and His dear Mother! you are alive!—you are alive! The report that you were missing was contradicted in a later bulletin. I've been crying until I'm hideous, for sorrow and joy and pride in you, my Edward! And, for gratitude that you're alive—and longing to be with you.... How I should love to pitch duty to the wide and rush away to nurse You! Wouldn't I? WOULDN'T I?—if it were only playing the game. But I must,—MUST stop here and do my job for the Red Cross. My own Edward—these silly X's are all meant for kisses.... The blots are where I've cried! ... Oh! how I've cried—how I would love to cry all over the shoulder of your dear khaki jacket. With love and such unutterable pride in my dear lover—Your own for this world and the next, please Heaven! Katharine."
The third bore a date in October, 1916, and the address of a Distributing Hospital on a Base in France.
"MY DEAREST DEAR,
"I've been desperately wretched, writing and WRITING and never getting a scrap from you. Now comes a letter written by your nurse. She tells me that your dear eyes can't stand print or handwriting, and that even being read to is dreadful agony. Edward, how selfish I have been—and how stupid, with all my experience of the results of shell-shock—not to realise the extent and nature of my dear one's suffering! Now I beg and command you never to dream of writing until you are fit to! I have asked your kind nurse not even to read you my letters, until you are able to hear them without distress or pain. To think that loving lines from me should cause you suffering, Edward! And yet I understand, my own! how such a condition may exist. For the moment I leave off. They are beating the gong and some signal rockets have just warned us—"
* * * * * * *
Four hours later....
"An attack by German bomb-carrying Taubes on the Hospital, in spite of air-scouts and L——s barrage of anti-aircraft guns. There is a British Army Corps H.Q. close by. I try to think they wanted that—and not really to bomb the Hospital with all those poor, poor bandaged men helpless in their beds.
It was terrific. They got us with H.E. every time—and the Hospital looks like a squashed bandbox. But, you see, in spite of the Boche's worst, your loving Kathy stays alive. Casualties only three, thank God! A convalescent Tommy killed, an R.A.M.C. orderly badly wounded; and a V.A.D. ambulance-driving woman somehow got an internal injury—helping to carry some of the worst cases out of the blazing wards down into the cellars of the Commandant's house—luckily close by.
Be prepared to find my next letter written from London, for I'm going to be invalided back to Blighty. Address, 'Hospital of SS. Stanislaus and Theresa, Copse End Road, St. John's Wood. Care of the Matron.' Don't worry the least bit! ... I'm tophole, though no good for driving. It will be a rest, really, for me. And by and by, if God is good—" crossed out—"He is, has He not saved you, Edward?—I shall come rushing over to B—— and carry you home. Home to Scotland. Oh, my dear, what it would be to have you to myself at Kerr's Arbour! All the memories of our happy days langsyne are waiting for us, Edward,—under the blessed old roof-beams, and on the moors and in the fir-wood—(miles of bluebells, you remember, in May—growing under the black-green trees)—and where wee Rushet winds away between the green braesides, to tumble into Teviot. I've still got some of the primroses we gathered there one April. Oh! the good times, before the dreadful War. Let us both look forward steadily, and hope, and pray, Edward,—that they may come again. If this is a dismal letter, forgive:
Your Katharine."
Another written a fortnight later, from London.
"HOSPITAL OF SS. STANISLAUS AND TERESA,
COPSE END ROAD,
ST. JOHN'S WOOD, N. W.
"My DEAREST MAN,
"The operation—quite a small affair, happily over, and your Kathy pronounced to be well upon the mend. I get the best of care at this dear place, where matron and Sisters spoil me. Everybody in town is overwhelmingly kind, and if I set down all the messages of affection and goodwill that I am charged with for you, and repeated all the admiring speeches that have been made to me about my sweetheart—I should need half-a-dozen sheets of letter-paper to write to you instead of one.
"Are you able to read for yourself a little, dearest, or do you still depend on the kind offices of your nurse? If the answer is 'Yes' to my question, she has of course given you my letters. I have her assurance that she will do this on the very earliest opportunity. For I should not like her to read them to you, you know, Edward! For one thing, my epistolary style is open to criticism—and for another—what I set down for your dear eyes was and will always be meant for no other's. Ah, but you understand!
"This is a dull scribble. But I'll do better next time. Too tired to write another. God bless you, darling!
K. F.
"If only you could write! ... I'm hungering for a line so. But not—not a scratch—if it's bad for you, my own!
"K."
There were many letters, and Yaill read them all, haphazard at first, and then in regular sequence, down to the very last....
"KERR'S ARBOUR, TWEEDBURGH, N.B.
"January 20th.
"Look here, Edward, can't you write, my darling? Your nurse sends me news of your wonderful improvement, for which I thank God, with all my heart and soul! But if you are so much better that you can read without pain and endure being read to, why not a scrap of a line to me? ... It seems to me that I have some right, forgive me for reminding you, to have news of you from your own hand, my dearest one.... Oh! to have to beg the bread of one's heart.... I was proud once—men used to say so. Now I am only your very lonely, horribly unhappy KATHARINE."
* * * * * * *
And yet until a door had clicked open in Yaill's brain, that handwriting had meant nothing. He asked his Maker in the depths of his wrung soul, why that Open Sesame of the bit of white heather—why the leather baggage-trunk with its guarded secret,—why the letter with its cry of wounded passion had come to the man who loved Katharine, too late?
"It seems to me that I have some right...." Proud, delicate-minded Katharine. What suffering must have wrung that sad reproach from her, that cry of a wounded soul....
"Oh! to have to beg the bread of one's heart.... I way proud once—men used to say so. Now I am only your very lonely, horribly unhappy Katharine."
Lonely.... Unhappy, his joy, his treasure, his worshipped one.... Well, Yaill would go to her now, though Hell's gulf yawned between. He had had this in his mind when he passed up the cliff-road, breathing the unheeded spices of the sea and the pine-trees, with the warm morning sunshine full upon his back....
Now, sitting high upon the cliffs with the booming of the Channel waters in his ears and the mourning cry of the hovering gulls about him, he faced a dim crimson sun, going to bed in blankets of grey fog. The letters lay scattered on the grass between his feet. He gathered them up and buttoned them away safely in his pockets. Then he got up and went back to his wife at the Tor View Hotel.
He would say he had been called away on business. She must stay there—the woman who bore his name, until he had seen his lawyers.... He would provide for her generously. Things would be arranged, he told himself as he hurried down the cliff-road in the clammy, blanketing fog....
The excuses were not received as easily as he had anticipated. He had left a sulky, tearful girl alone the whole day. And he came back to a resentful, jealous woman....
He shuddered, remembering how he had bowed his head to meet the storm of reproach.
Well, well! Forget,—now one was here under the dear roof of Kerr's Arbour, by the warm side of the beloved—the perfect, the ideal mate. He looked at her as she sat there by his side with her proud head bent, and the dark fringes of her dreaming eyes lowered upon the soft blush that graced her cheeks,—Love's exquisite carnation flag, always displayed for Edward.
She was happy, poor, faithful soul, with just a little tang of guilt spoiling the happiness. Mark had been killed at Mons, and Julian had been gulped down by the insatiable War-monster; and Death had taken their father and hers, but her man of men was left. How could she help, by his dear side, being a little happy? She turned and gave him look for look, and his strength began to ebb away.
Yaill's determination to play the game fairly was weakening. The barriers were breaking down. His tense muscles twitched, his blood ran liquid fire. In another moment he would have snatched her to him, stifled her surprise with furious kisses—assailed her virgin ears with frantic pleadings—but that a bell clanged at the hallward end of the corridor. Whishaw's asthmatic cough sounded outside,—he knocked and came in.
The old man's lean figure, with its stooping, rook-like gait, was invested with new, dignified solemnity, his well-worn blacks, even the wide-flanged Gladstone collar that framed his frosty-apple chops, and the rusty-black silk neckerchief knotted under his chin, the short end sticking out at a perennial right-angle, while the other flowed over his starchless shirt-front, to lose itself in the hollows of his baggy waistcoat,—were as vestments of one readied for some sacerdotal rite. He carried a three-branched silver candlestick of antique form, with lighted wax-tapers, and a Missal bound in faded crimson leather was tucked under his other arm....
"Ye'll be for the nicht-prayers noo, Miss Forbis? The Father has gane ben the chapell, sae I juist bode to ring the bell."
"We are coming now, Whishaw."
Katharine rose, took a folded black lace veil from the corner of the mantelshelf, shook out its scrolled and patterned length—with firelight flashing through the dark transparency, draped it with one swift upward movement, over her noble head—and held out a hand to Yaill. He cursed the intruder mentally as he got up and the warm fingers met his own—because those wild words surging to his lips had been so baulked of utterance. But he took the Missal Whishaw offered him, and led his love out and down the long corridor—following the lean, black figure with its upheld light over the flagged pavement, whose uneven stones could be felt through thickness of matting and worn Turkey carpeting.
Whishaw held open the Chapel door, Katharine passed in and Yaill followed mechanically; conscious as might be a man in a dream, of the mingled perfume of incense and flowers, of the hollow square of benches in the little nave, framing the long coffin on its black-draped trestles, with the tall brown wax tapers in their man-high wooden candlesticks burning at the head, and the sides, and the feet....
Still as in a dream he bent his knee as Katharine sank down before the Presence in the Tabernacle, and rose up from her genuflection to take his hand again. He felt her lead him up the narrow aisle ... heard her say to that strange, familiar face, young-old, wax-white, framed in the shining oaken wood against the background of the narrow pillow:
"Dear Father, Edward has come."
And he knew as he looked on the still face of the old man, guardian even in Death of his House's honour—that those traitorous words that had been upon his tongue would never be spoken now.