Later, Padre, when I'd broken away from Julian, I wondered if he had
made up the whole story. The cruel trick would be impishly
characteristic! But I went straight to the concierge to ask about
Muller. He said that a man of that name had called the night before,
inquiring for me, and had talked with "the Monsieur who looked like an
Italian." This practically convinced me that Julian hadn't lied.
If only I could get direct advice from you! Do try to send me an
inspiration of what to do for the best.
My first impulse was to give Mother Beckett a faint hint of hope. But I
dared not run the risk. If Paul Herter proved to be mistaken, it would
be for her like losing her son a second time, and the dear one's
strength might not be equal to the strain. After thinking and unthinking
all night, I decided to keep silent until our two men returned from the
British front. Then, perhaps, I might tell Brian of the message from
Doctor Paul, and ask his opinion about speaking to Father Beckett. As
for myself, I resolved not to make any confession, unless it were
certain that Jim lived. And I'm not sure, Padre, whether that decision
was based on sheer, selfish cowardice, or whether I founded it partly on
the arguments I presented to myself. I said in my mind: "If it's true
that everything you did in the beginning was for Brian's good, why undo
it all at the most critical hour of his life, when perhaps there may
never be any reason to speak?" Also I said: "Why make it impossible for
yourself to give Mother Beckett the care she needs, and can hardly do
without yet? Every day counts with her now. Why not wait unless you hear
again more definitely?"
The annoying part of a specious argument is that there's always some
truth in it, and it seems like kind advice from wise friends!
Anyhow, I _did_ wait. Julian made no further appeal to me, and I felt
sure that he said nothing to Dierdre. If he had taken her into his
confidence, I should have known by her manner; because, from the
shut-up, night-flower of a girl that she was, she has rather
pathetically opened out for me into a daylight flower. All this since
she came of her own free will and told me of the scene in the chill
boarding house _salon_ at Soissons. I used to think her as secret as the
grave--and deeper. She used to make me "creep" as if a mouse ran over
_mine_, by the way her eyes watched me: still as a cat's looking into
the fire. If we had to shake hands, she used to present me with a limp
little bunch of cold fingers, which made me long to ask what the deuce
she wanted me to do with them? Now, because I'm Brian's sister, and
because I'm human enough to love her love of him, the flower-part of her
nature sheds perfume and distils honey for me: the cat-part purrs; the
girl-part warms. The creature actually deigns to like me! It could not
now conceal its anxiety for Brian and Brian's kith and kin, if it knew
what Julian knows.
I waited until our last day at Amiens, and Father Beckett, Brian, and
Sirius are back from the British front. Perhaps I forgot to tell you
that Sirius went. He wasn't on the programme, but he knew somehow that
his master was planning a separation, and refused to fall in with the
scheme. He was discovered in the motor-car when it was ready to start,
looking his best, his dear face parted in the middle with an
irresistible, ingratiating smile. When Brian tried to put him out he
flattened himself, and clung like a limpet. By Father Beckett's
intercession, he was eventually taken, trusting to luck for toleration
by the British Army. Of course he continued to smile upon all possible
arbiters of his fate; and the drama of his history, combined with the
pathos of his blind master who fought on these battlefields of Flanders,
which now he cannot see, made Brian's Sirius and Sirius's Brian _personæ
gratæ_ everywhere.
"I should have been nobody and nothing without them!" modestly insisted
the millionaire philanthropist for whom all the privileges of the trip
had been granted.
To me, with the one thought, the one word "Jim--Jim--_Jim_!" repeating
in my head it was strange, even irrelevant to hear Jim's unsuspecting
father and my blind brother discoursing of their adventures.
We all assembled in Mother Beckett's sitting room to listen to the
recital, she on a sofa, a rug over her feet, and on her transparent face
an utterly absorbed, tense expression rather like a French spaniel
trying to learn an English trick.
Father Beckett appointed Brian as spokesman, and then in his excitement
broke in every instant with: "Don't forget this! Be sure to remember
that! But so-and-so was the best!" Or he jumped up from his chair by
the sofa, and dropped his wife's hand to point out something on the
map, spread like a cloth over the whole top of a bridge-table.
It was his finger that sketched for our eyes the sharp triangle which
the road-journey had formed: Amiens to Albert: Albert to Péronne:
Péronne to Bapaume: Bapaume to Arras: Arras to Bethune, and so on to
Ypres: his finger that reminded Brian of the first forest on the road--a
forest full of working German prisoners.
At Pont-Noyelles, between Amiens and Albert, they were met by an officer
who was to be their guide for that part of the British front which they
were to visit. He was sent from headquarters, but hadn't been able to
afford time for Amiens. However, Pont-Noyelles was the most interesting
place between there and Albert. A tremendous battle was fought on that
spot in '70, between the French under famous General Faidherbe and the
Germans under Manteuffel--a _perfect_ name for a German general of these
days, if not of those! There were two monuments to commemorate the
battle--one high on a hill above the village; and the officer guide
(with the face of a boy and the grim experience of an Old Contemptible)
was well up in their history. He turned out to be a friend of friends of
Brian and knew the history of Sirius as well as that of all the
war-wasted land. He and Brian, though they'd never met, had fought near
each other it seemed, and he could describe for the blind eyes all the
changes that had come upon the Somme country since Brian's "day." The
roads which had been remade by the British over the shell-scarred and
honeycombed surface of the land; the aerodromes; the training-camps; the
tanks; the wonderful new railways for troops and ammunition: the bands
of German prisoners docilely at work.
When the great gray car stopped, throbbing, at special view-points here
and there, it was Brian who could listen for a lark's message of hope
among the billowing downs, or draw in the tea-rose scent of earth from
some brown field tilled by a woman. It was Father Beckett who saw the
horrors of desolation--desolation more hideous even than on the French
front; because, since the beginning, here had burned the hottest furnace
of war: here had fallen a black, never-ceasing rain of bombardment,
night and day, day and night, year after year.
It was the cherubic Old Contemptible who could tell each detail of
war-history, when the car reached Albert. It was Brian who knew the
ancient legend of the place, and the modern story of the spy, which,
together, double the dramatic interest of the Bending Virgin. In the
eleventh century a shepherd boy discovered, in a miraculous way, a
statue of the Virgin. There was a far-off sound of music at night, when
he was out in search of strayed sheep, and being young he forgot his
errand in curiosity to learn whence came the mysterious chanting,
accompanied by the silver notes of a flute. The boy wandered in the
direction of the delicate sounds, and to his amazement found all the
lost flock grazing round a statue which appeared to have risen from the
earth. On that spot was built the basilica of Notre-Dame de Brébières,
which became a place of pilgrimage. The Virgin of the Shepherds was
supposed to send her blessings far, far over the countryside, and her
gilded image, with the baby Christ in her arms, was a flaming beacon at
sunrise and sunset. Thus on her high tower the golden Lady stood when
the war began. Albert was pitilessly bombarded, and with a startling
accuracy which none could understand: yet the church itself, with its
temptingly high tower, remained intact. Through October, 1914, the
shining figure blazed against the sky, while houses fell in all quarters
of the town: but on November 1st, three bombs struck the church. They
were the first heavy drops of rain in a thunderstorm. The roof crashed
in: and presently the pedestal of the Virgin received a shattering blow.
This was on the very day when Albert discovered why for so long the
church had been immune. A spy had been safely signalling from the tower,
telling German gunners how and where to strike with the most damage to
the town. When all the factories which gave wealth to Albert, and the
best houses, had been methodically destroyed, the spy silently stole
away: and the Virgin of the Shepherds then bent over, face down, to
search for this black sheep of the fold. Ever since she with the sacred
Child in her arms has hung thus suspended in pity and blessing over
mountainous piles of wreckage which once composed the market-place. She
will not crash to earth, Albert believes, till the war is over. But so
loved is she in her posture of protection that the citizens propose to
keep her in it for ever to commemorate the war-history of Albert, when
Albert is rebuilt for future generations.
From there the gray car ran on almost due east to Péronne, out of the
country of Surrey-like, Chiltern-like downs, into a strange marshy
waste, where the river Somme expands into vast meres, swarming with many
fish. It looked, Father Beckett said, "Like a bit of the world when God
had just begun to create life out of chaos."
Poor Péronne! In its glorious days of feudal youth its fortress-castle
was invincible. The walls were so thick that in days before gunpowder no
assaults could hope to break through them. Down in its underground
depths was a dungeon, where trapped enemy princes lay rotting and
starving through weary years, never released save by death, unless
tortured into signing shameful treaties. The very sound of the name,
"Péronne," is an echo of history, as Brian says. Hardly a year-date in
the Middle Ages could be pricked by a pin without touching some
sensational event going on at that time at Péronne. I remember this from
my schooldays; and more clearly still from "Quentin Durward," which I
have promised to read aloud to Mother Beckett. I remember the Scottish
monks who were established at Péronne in the reign of Clovis. I remember
how Charles the Bold of Burgundy (who died outside Nancy's gates)
imprisoned wicked Louis XI in a strong tower of the château, one of the
four towers with conical roofs, like extinguishers of giant candles and
kingly reputations! I remember best of all the heroine of Péronne,
Catherine de Poix, "la belle Péronnaise," who broke with her own hand
the standard of Charles's royal flag, in the siege of 1536, threw the
bearer into the fosse, and saved the city.
When Wellington took the fortress in 1814, he did not desecrate or
despoil the place: it was left for the Germans to do that, just a
century later in the progress of civilization! My blood grew hot as I
heard from our two men the story of what the new Vandals had done. Just
for a moment I almost forgot the secret burning in my heart. The proud
pile of historic stone brought to earth at last, like a soldier-king,
felled by an axe in his old age: the statue of Catherine thrown from its
pedestal, and replaced in mockery by a foolish manikin--this as a mean
revenge for what she did to the standard-bearer, most of Charles's men
in the siege being Germans, under Henry of Nassau.
"Toujours Francs-Péronnais
Auront bon jour,
Toujours et en tout temps
Francs-Péronnais auront bon temps,"
the girls used to sing in old days as they wove the wonderful linens and
tissues of Péronne, or embroidered banners of gorgeous colours to
commemorate the saving of the Picard city by Catherine: as Brian
repeated to Father Beckett wandering through the ruins redeemed last
spring for France by the British. And though Brian's eyes could not see
the rubbish-heap where once had soared the citadel he saw through the
mystic veil of his blindness many things which others did not see.
It seems that above these marshy flats of the Somme, where the river has
wandered away from the hills and disguised itself in shining lakes,
gauzy mists always hover. Brian had seen them with bodily eyes, while he
was a soldier. Now, with the eyes of his spirit he saw them again,
gleaming with the delicate, indescribable colours which only blind eyes
can call up to lighten darkness. He saw the fleecy clouds streaming over
Péronne like a vast, transparent ghost-banner. He saw on their filmy
folds, as if traced in blue and gold and royal purple, the ever famous
scene on the walls when Catherine and her following beat back Nassau's
men from the one breach where they might have captured the town. And
this mystic banner of the spirit Germans can never capture or desecrate.
It will wave over Péronne--what was Péronne, and what will again be
Péronne--while the world goes on making history for free men.
After Péronne, Bapaume: the battered corpse of Bapaume, murdered in
flame that reddened all the skies of Picardy before the British came to
chase the Germans out!
In old times, when a place was destroyed the saying was, "Not one stone
is left upon another." But in this war, destruction means an avalanche
of stones upon each other. Bapaume as Father Beckett saw it, is a
Herculaneum unexcavated. Beneath lie buried countless precious things,
and still more precious memories; the feudal grandeur of the old château
where Philippe-Auguste married proud Isabelle de Hainaut, with splendid
ceremony as long ago as 1180: the broken glory of ancient ramparts,
where modern lovers walked till the bugles of August 2, 1914, parted
them for ever; the arcaded Town Hall, old as the domination of the
Spaniards in Picardy; the sixteenth-century church of St. Nicolas with
its quaint Byzantine Virgin of miracles: the statue of Faidherbe who
beat back the German wave from Bapaume in 1871: all, all burned and
battered, and mingled inextricably with débris of pitiful little homes,
nobles' houses, rich shops and tiny _boutiques_, so that, when Bapaume
rises from the dead, she will rise as one--even as France has risen.
Of the halting places on this pilgrimage along the British front, I
should best have liked to be with Brian and Father Beckett at Arras.
Brian and I were there together you know, Padre, on that happy-go-lucky
tramping tour of ours--not long before I met Jim. We both loved Arras,
Brian and I, and spent a week there in the most fascinating of ancient
hotels. It had been a palace; and I had a huge room, big enough for the
bedchamber of a princess (princesses should always have bedchambers,
never mere bedrooms!) with long windows draped like the walls and stiff
old furniture, in yellow satin. I was frightened when an aged servant
with the air of a pontiff ushered me in; for Brian and I were travelling
"on the cheap." But Arras, though delicious in its quaint charm, never
attracted hordes of ordinary tourists. Consequently one could have
yellow satin hangings without being beggared.
Oh, how happy we were in that hotel, and in the adorable old town! While
Brian painted in the Grande Place and the Petite Place, and sketched the
Abbey of St. Waast (who brought Christianity to that part of the world)
I wandered alone. I used to stand every evening till my neck ached,
staring up at the beautiful belfry, to watch the swallows chase each
other back and forth among the bells, whose peal was music of fairyland.
And I never tired of wandering through the arcades under the tall old
Flemish houses with their overhanging upper storeys, or peeping into the
arcades' cool shadows, from the middle of the sunlit squares.
There were some delightful shops in those arcades, where they sold
antique Flemish furniture, queer old pictures showing Arras in her
proud, treaty-making days (you know what a great place she was for
treaty-making!) and lovely faded tapestries said to be "genuinely" of
the time when no one mentioned a piece of tapestry save as an "arras."
But the shop I haunted was a cake-shop. It was called "_Au Coeur
d'Arras_," because the famous speciality of Arras was a heart-shaped
cake; but I wasn't lured there so much by the charm of _les coeurs_ as
by that of the person who sold them.
I dare say I described her to you in letters, or when I got back to
England after that trip. The most wonderful old lady who ever lived! She
didn't welcome her customers at all. She just sat and knitted. She had
an architectural sort of face, framed with a crust of snow--I mean, a
frilled cap! And if one furtively stared, she looked at one down her
nose, and made one feel cheap and small as if one had snored, or
hiccupped out aloud in a cathedral! But it seems I won her esteem by
enquiring if "_les coeurs d'Arras_" had a history. Nobody else had
ever shown enough intelligence to care! So she gave me the history of
the cakes, and of everything else in Arras; also, before we went away,
she escorted Brian and me into a marvellous cellar beneath her shop. It
went down three storeys and had fireplaces and a well! The earth under
La Grande Place was honeycombed with such _souterrains_, she said.
They'd once been quarries, in days so old as to be forgotten--quarries
of "tender stone" (what a nice expression!), and the people of Arras had
cemented and made them habitable in case of bombardment. They must have
been useful in 1914!
As for the cakes, they were invented by an abbess who was sent to Spain.
Before reluctantly departing, she gave the recipe to her successor,
saying she "left her heart in Arras." According to the legend (the old
shop-lady assured me) a girl who had never loved was certain to fall in
love within a month after first eating a Heart of Arras. Well, Padre, I
ate almost a hundred hearts, and less than a month after I met Jim!
You may believe that I asked Brian and Father Beckett a dozen questions
at once about dear Arras. But alas, alas! all the answers were sad.
The beautiful belfry? Only a phantom remaining. The Hôtel de Ville?
Smashed. La Grande Place--La Petite Place? Stone quarries above ground
as well as below, the old Flemish façades crumbled like sheets of barley
sugar. The arcades? Ruined. The charming old shops? Vanished. The seller
of Hearts? Dead. But the Hearts--_they_ still existed! The children of
Arras who have come back "since the worst was over" (that is their way
of putting it!) would not feel that life was life without the Arras
Hearts. Besides, Arras without the Hearts would be like the Altar of the
Vestal Virgins without the ever-burning lamp. So they are still baked,
and still eaten, those brave little Hearts of Arras--and Brian asked
Father Beckett to bring me a box.
They bought it of a cousin of my old woman, an ancient man who had
lurked in a cellar during the whole of the bombardment. He said that all
Arras knew, in September, 1914, how the Kaiser had vowed to march into
the town in triumph, and how, when he found the place as hard to take
"as quicksilver is to grasp," he revenged himself by destroying its
best-beloved treasures. He must have rejoiced that July day of 1915,
when Wolff's Agency was able to announce at last, that the Abbey of St.
Waast and its museum were in flames!
As the gray car bumped on to Bethune, Vimy Ridge floated blue in the far
distance, to the right of the road, and Father Beckett and Brian took
off their hats to it. Still farther away, and out of sight lay Lens, in
German possession, but practically encircled by the British. The Old
Contemptible had been there, and described the town as having scarcely a
roof left, but being an "ant heap" of Boches, who swarm in underground
shelters bristling with machine guns. Between Lens and the road stood
the celebrated Colonne de Condé, showing where the prince won his great
victory over Spain; and farther on, within gun-sound distance though out
of sight, lay Loos, on the Canal de l'Haute Deule. Who thinks nowadays
of its powerful Cistercian Abbey, that dominated the country round? Who
thinks twice, when travelling this Appian Way which Germany has given
France, of any history which began or ended before the year 1914?
Bethune they found still existing as a town. It has been bombarded often
but not utterly destroyed, and from there they ran out four miles to
Festubert, because the little that the Germans have left of the
thirteenth-century church and village, burns with an eternal flame of
interest.
Bethune itself was a famous fortress once, full of history and legend:
but isn't the whole country in its waste and ruin, like a torn historic
banner, crusted with jewels--magic jewels, which cannot be stolen by
enemy hands?
On the way to Ypres--crown and climax of the tour--the car passed
Lillers and Hazebrouck, places never to be forgotten by hearts that beat
in the battles of Flanders. Then came the frontier at Steenwoorde; and
they were actually in Belgium, passing Poperinghe to Ypres, the most
famous British battleground of the war.
When Brian was fighting, and when you were on earth, Padre, everyone
talked about the "Ypres Salient." Now, though for soldiers Ypres will
always be the "salient" since the battle of Wytschaete Ridge, the
_material_ salient has vanished. Yet the same trenches exist, in the
same gray waste which Brian used to paint in those haunting,
impressionist war sketches of his that all London talked about, after
the Regent Street exhibition that he didn't even try for leave to see!
The critics spoke of the mysterious, spiritual quality of his work,
which gave "without sentimentality" picturesqueness to the shell-holes
and mud, the shattered trees and wooden crosses, under eternally
dreaming skies.
Well, Brian tells me that going back as a blind man to the old scenes,
he had a strange, thrilling sense of _seeing_ them--seeing more clearly
than before those effects of mysterious beauty, hovering with prophecy
above the squalor of mud and blood, hovering and mingling as the faint
light of dawn mingles, at a certain hour, with the shadows of night.
People used to call his talent a "blend of vision with reality." Now,
all that is left him is "vision"--vision of the spirit. But with help--I
used to think it would be _my_ help: now I realize it will be
Dierdre's--who knows what extraordinary things my blind Brian may
accomplish? His hope is so beautiful, and so strong, that it has lit an
answering flame of hope in me.
He and I were in Ypres for a few days, just about the time I was
wondering why "Jim Wyndham" didn't keep his promise to find me again.
It was in Ypres, I remember, that I came across the box of "_Coeurs
d'Arras_" I'd brought with me. Opening it, I recalled the legend about a
girl who has never loved, falling in love within a month after first
eating an Arras Heart. It was then I said to myself, "Why, it has _come
true_! I have fallen in love with Jim Wyndham--and _he has forgotten
me_!"
Oh, Padre, how that pain comes back to me now, in the midst of the new
pain, like the "core of the brilliance within the brilliance!" Which
hurt is worse, to love a man, and believe oneself forgotten, or to love
and know one has been loved, and then become unworthy? I can't be sure.
I can't even be sure that, if I could, I would go back to being the old
self before I committed the one big sin of my life, which gave me Jim's
father and mother, and the assurance that _he had cared_. For a while,
after Mother Beckett told me about Jim's love for "The Girl," in spite
of my wickedness I glowed with a kind of happiness. I felt that, through
all the years of my life--even when I grew old--Jim would be _mine_,
young, handsome, gay, just as I had seen him on the Wonderful Day: that
I could always run away from outside things and shut the gate of the
garden on myself and Jim--that rose-garden on the border of Belgium.
Now, when I know--or almost know--that he will come back in the flesh to
despise me, and that the gate of the garden will be forever shut--why, I
shall be punished as perhaps no woman has ever been punished before.
Still--_still_ I can't be sure that I would escape, if I could, by going
back to my old self!
It is writing of Belgium, and my days there with Brian while I still
hoped to see Jim, that brings all these thoughts crowding so thickly to
my mind, they seem to drip off my pen!
But what a different Ypres Father Beckett has now seen, and Brian
_felt_, from that dear, pleasant Ypres into which we two drove in a
cart, along a cobbled causeway as straight as a tight-drawn string!
Tourists who loved the blue, and yellow, and red bath-houses on the
golden beach of Ostend, didn't worry to motor over the bumpy road,
through the Flemish plain to Ypres. The war was needed to bring its sad
fame to "Wipers!" But Brian and I interrupted our walking tour with that
cart, because we knew that the interminable causeway would take us deep
into the inner quaintness of Flanders. We adored it all: and at every
stopping-place on the twenty-mile road, I had the secret joy of
whispering; "Perhaps it is _here_ that He will suddenly appear, and meet
us!"
There was one farmhouse on the way, where I longed to have him come. I
wanted him so much that I almost _created_ him! I was listening every
moment, and through every sound, for his car. It never came. But because
I so wished the place to be a background for our meeting I can see the
two large living-rooms of the old house, with the black-beamed ceilings,
the Flemish stoves, the tall, carved sideboards and chests with armorial
bearings, the deep window-seats that were flower-stands and work-tables
combined, and the shelves of ancient pottery and gleaming, antique
brass. There was a comfortable fragrance of new-baked bread, mingling
with the spicy scent of grass-pinks, in that house: and the hostess who
gave us luncheon--a young married woman--had a mild, sweet face,
strongly resembling that of St. Geneviève of Brabant, as pictured in a
coloured lithograph on the wall.
St. Geneviève's story is surely the most romantic, the most pathetic of
any saint who ever deigned to tread on earth!--and her life and death
might serve as an allegory of Belgium's martyrdom, poor Belgium, the
little country whose patron she is. Since that day at the farmhouse on
the road to Ypres, I've thought often of the gentle face with its
forget-me-not eyes and golden hair; and of Golo the dark persecutor
who--they say now--was a _real_ person and an ancestor of the
Hohenzollerns through the first Duc de Bavière.
At Ypres, Brian painted for me a funny "imagination picture" imitating
earliest Flemish work. It showed Ypres when there was no town save a few
tiny houses and a triangular stronghold, with a turret at each corner,
built on a little island in the river Yperlee. He named the picture "The
Castle of the Three Strong Towers," and dated it in the year 900. A
thousand years have passed since then. Slowly, after much fighting (the
British fought as hard to take Ypres once, as they fight to save it
now), the town grew great and powerful, and became the capital of
Flanders. The days of the rough earthen stockades and sharp thorn-bush
defences of "Our Lady of the Enclosures" passed on to the days of
casemates and moats; and still on, to the days when the old
fortifications could be turned into ornamental walks--days of quaintly
beautiful architecture, such as Brian and I saw before the war, when we
spent hours in the Grand' Place, admiring the wonderful Cloth Hall and
the Spanish-looking Nieuwerck. The people of Ypres told us proudly that
nothing in Bruges itself, or anywhere in Flanders, could compare with
those noble buildings massed together at the west end of the Grand'
Place, each stone of which represented so much wealth of the richest
merchant kings of Europe.
And now, the work of those thousand busy years has crumbled in a few
monstrous months, like the sand-houses of children when the tide comes
in! What Father Beckett saw of Ypres after three years' bombardment, was
not much more than that shown in Brian's picture, dated 900! A blackened
wall or two and a heap of rubble where stood the _Halle des
Drapiers_--pride of Ypres since the thirteenth century--its belfry, its
statues, its carvings, its paintings, all vanished like the contours and
colours of a sunset cloud. The cathedral is a skeleton. Hardly a pointed
gable is left to tell where the quaint and prosperous houses once
grouped cosily together. Ypres the town is a mourner draped in black
with the stains of fire which killed its beauty and joy. But there is a
glory that can never be killed, a glory above mere beauty, as a living
soul is above the dead body whence it has risen. That glory is Ypres.
She is a ghost, but she is an inspiration, a name of names, a jewel
worth dying for--"worth giving a man's eyes for," Brian says!
"Has your brother told you about the man we met at the Visitors'
Château?" asked Father Beckett, when between the two men--and my
reminiscences--the story of the tour was finished with those last words
of Brian's.
"No, I haven't told her yet," Brian answered for me.
My nerves jumped. I scarcely knew what I expected to hear. "Not Doctor
Paul Herter?" I exclaimed--and was surprised to hear on my own lips the
name so constantly in my mind.
"Well, that's queer she should speak of _him_, isn't it, Brian? How did
you come to think of Herter?" Father Beckett wanted to know.
"_Was_ it he?" I insisted.
"No. But--you'd better tell her, Brian. I guess you'll have to."
"There isn't much to tell, really," Brian said. "It was only that
oculist chap Herter told you about--Dr. Henri Chrevreuil. He's been
working at the front, as you know: lately it's been the British front;
and they'd taken him in at the château for a few days' rest. We met him
there and talked of his friend--your friend, Molly--Doctor Paul."
"What did he say about your eyes?" Dierdre almost gasped. (I should not
have ventured to put the question suddenly, and before people. I should
have been too afraid of the answer. But her nickname is "_Dare!_") "He
must have said something, or Mr. Beckett wouldn't have spoken so. He
_did_ look at your eyes--didn't he? He would, for Herter's sake."
"Yes, he did look at them," Brian admitted. "He didn't say much."
"But what--_what_?"
"He said: 'Wait, and--see.'"
"And see!" Dierdre echoed.
The same thought was in all our minds. As I gazed mutely at Brian, he
gave me the most beautiful smile of his life. He must have felt that I
was looking at him, or he would not so have smiled. Let Jim hate
and--punish me when he comes back, and drive me out of Paradise!
Wherever I may go, there will be the reflection of that smile and the
thought behind it. How can I be unhappy, if Brian need only wait, to
see?