Ominous hours had come and gone; waves of gloom had surged in and
receded, but never receded far enough. It was as though the rising and
falling of some primæval storm was the background of all thought and
life and its pandemonium of sound foretold the far-off heaving of some
vast tidal wave, gathering its unearthly power as it swelled.
Coombe talking to his close friend in her few quiet hours at Eaton
Square, found a support in the very atmosphere surrounding her.
"The world at war creates a prehistoric uproar," he said. "The earth
called out of chaos to take form may have produced some such tempestuous
crash. But there is a far-off glow--"
"You believe--something--I believe too. But the prehistoric darkness and
uproar are so appalling. One loses hold." The Duchess leaned forward her
voice dropping. "What do you know that I do not?"
"The light usually breaks in the East," Coombe answered.
"It is breaking in the West to-day. It has always been there and it has
been spreading from the first. At any moment it may set the sky aflame."
For as time had gone on the world had beheld the colossal spectacle of a
huge nation in the melting pot. And, as it was as a nation the composite
result of the fusion of all the countries of the earth, the
breath-suspended lookers-on beheld it in effect, passionately
commercial, passionately generous, passionately sordid, passionately
romantic, chivalrous, cautious, limited, bounded. As American wealth and
sympathy poured in where need was most dire, bitterness became silent
through sheer discretion's sake, when for no more honest reason. As the
commercial tendency expressed itself in readiness and efficiency,
sneering condemnation had become less loud.
"It will happen. It is the result of the ideals really," Coombe said
further. "And it will come to pass at the exact psychological moment. If
they had come in at the beginning they would have faced the first full
force of the monstrous tidal wave of the colossal German belief in its
own omnipotence--and they would have faced it unawakened, unenraged by
monstrosities and half incredulous of the truth. It was not even their
fight then--and raw fighters need a flaming cause. But the tower of
agonies has built itself to its tottering height before their blazing
eyes. Now it is their fight because it is the fight of the whole world.
Others have borne the first fierce heat and burden of the day, but they
will rush in young and untouched by calamity--bounding, shouting and
singing. They will come armed with all that long-borne horrors and
maddening human fatigue most need. I repeat--it will occur at the exact
psychological moment. They will bring red-hot blood and furious
unbounded courage-- And it will be the end."
In fact Coombe waited with a tense sensation of being too tightly
strung. He had hours when he felt that something might snap. But nothing
must snap yet. He was too inextricably entangled in the arduous work
even to go to Darreuch for rest. He did not go for weeks. All was well
there however--marvellously well it seemed, even when he held in mind a
letter from Robin which had ended:--
"He has not come back. But I am not afraid. I promised him I would never
be afraid again."
In dark and tired hours he steadied himself with a singular
half-realised belief that she would not--that somehow some strange thing
would be left to her, whatsoever was taken away. It was because he felt
as if he were nearing the end of his tether. He had become
hypersensitive to noises, to the sounds in the streets, to the strain
and grief in faces he saw as he walked or drove.
* * * * *
After lying awake all one night without a moment of blank peace he came
down pale and saw that his hand shook as he held his coffee cup. It was
a livid sort of morning and when he went out for the sake of exercise he
found he was looking at each of the strained faces as if it held some
answer to an unformed question. He realised that the tenseness of both
mind and body had increased. For no reason whatever he was restrung by a
sense of waiting for something--as if something were going to happen.
He went back to Coombe House and when he crossed the threshold he
confronted the elderly unliveried man who had stood at his place for
years--and the usually unperturbed face was agitated so nearly to panic
that he stopped and addressed him.
"Has anything happened?"
"My lord--a Red Cross nurse--has brought"--he was actually quite
unsteady--too unsteady to finish, for the next moment the Red Cross
nurse was at his side--looking very whitely fresh and clean and with a
nice, serious youngish face.
"I need not prepare you for good news--even if it is a sort of shock,"
she said, watching him closely. "I have brought Captain Muir back to
you."
"You have brought--?" he exclaimed.
"He has been in one of the worst German prisons. He was left for dead on
the field and taken prisoner. We must not ask him questions. I don't
know why he is alive. He escaped, God knows how. At this time he does
not know himself. I saw him on the boat. He asked me to take charge of
him," she spoke very quickly. "He is a skeleton, poor boy. Come."
She led the way to his own private room. She went on talking short
hurried sentences, but he scarcely heard her. This, then, was what he
had been waiting for. Why had he not known? This tremendous thing was
really not so tremendous after all because it had happened in other
cases before-- Yet he had never once thought of it.
"He would not let his wife or his mother see him until he looked more
like himself," he heard the Red Cross nurse say as he entered the room.
Donal was lying stretched at full length on a sofa. He looked abnormally
long, because he was so thin that he was, as the nurse had said, a
skeleton. His face was almost a death's head, but his blue eyes looked
out of their great hollow sockets clear as tarn water, and with the
smile which Coombe would not have forgotten howsoever long life had
dragged out.
"Be very careful!" whispered the nurse.
He knew he must be careful. Only the eyes were alive. The body was a
collapsed thing. He seemed scarcely breathing, his voice was a thread.
"Robin!" Coombe caught as he bent close to him. "Robin!"
"She is well, dear boy!" How his voice shook! "I have taken care of
her."
The light leaped up into the blue for a second. The next the lids
dropped and the nurse sprang forward because he had slipped into a faint
so much like death that it might well have rent hope from a looker-on.
For the next hour, and indeed for many following, there was unflagging
work to be done. The Red Cross Nurse was a capable, swiftly moving
woman, with her resources at her finger's ends, and her quick wits about
her. Almost immediately two doctors from the staff, in charge of the
rooms upstairs were on the spot and at work with her. By what
lightning-flashed sentences she conveyed to them, without pausing for a
second, the facts it was necessary for them to know, was
incomprehensible to Coombe, who could only stand afar off and wait,
watching the dead face. Its sunken temples, cheeks and eyes, and the
sharply carven bone outline were heart gripping.
It seemed hours before one of the doctors as he bent over the couch
whispered,
"The breathing is a little better--"
It was not possible that he should be moved, but the couch was broad and
deeply upholstered and could be used temporarily as a bed. Every
resource of medical science was within reach. Nurse Jones, who had been
on her way home to take a rest, was so far ensnared by unusual interest
that she wished to be allowed to remain on duty. There were other nurses
who could be called on at any moment of either night or day. There were
doctors of indisputable skill who were also fired by the mere histrionic
features of the case. The handsome, fortunate young fellow who had been
supposed torn to fragments had by some incomprehensible luck been aided
to drag himself home--perhaps to die of pure exhaustion.
Was it really hours before Coombe saw the closed eyes weakly open? But
the smile was gone and they seemed to be looking at something not in
the room.
"They will come--in," the words dragged out scarcely to be heard.
"Jackson--said--said--they--would." The eyes dropped again and the
breathing was a mere flutter.
Nurse Jones was in fact filled with much curiosity concerning and
interest in the Marquis of Coombe. She was a clever and well trained
person, but socially a simple creature, who in an inoffensive way "loved
a lord." If her work had not absorbed her she could not have kept her
eyes from this finely conventional and rather unbending-looking man
who--keeping himself out of the way of all who were in charge of the
seemingly almost dead boy--still would not leave the room, and watched
him with a restrained passion of such feeling as it was not natural to
see in the eyes of men. Marquis or not he had gone through frightful
things in his life and this boy meant something tremendous to him. If he
couldn't be brought back--! Despite the work her swift eye darted
sideways at the Marquis.
When at length another nurse took her place and she was going out of the
room, he moved quickly towards her and spoke.
"May I ask if I may speak to you alone for a few minutes? I have no
right to keep you from your rest. I assure you I won't."
"I'll come," she answered. What she saw in the man's face was that,
because she had brought the boy, he actually clung to her. She had been
clung to many times before, but never by a man who looked quite like
this. There was _more_ than you could see.
He led her to a smaller room near by. He made her sit down, but he did
not sit himself. It was plain that he did not mean to keep her from her
bed--though he was in hard case if ever man was. His very determination
not to impose on her caused her to make up her mind to tell him all she
could, though it wasn't much.
"Captain Muir's mother believes that he is dead," he said. "It is plain
that no excitement must approach him--even another person's emotion. He
was her idol. She is in London. _Must_ I send for her--or would it be
safe to wait?"
"There have been minutes to-day when if I'd known he had a mother I
should have said she must be sent for," was her answer. "To-night I
believe--yes, I _do_--that it would be better to wait and watch. Of
course the doctors must really decide."
"Thank you. I will speak to them. But I confess I wanted to ask _you_."
How he did cling to her!
"Thank you," he said again. "I will not keep you."
He opened the door and waited for her to pass--as if she had been a
marchioness herself, she thought. In spite of his desperate eyes he
didn't forget a single thing. He so moved her that she actually turned
back.
"You don't know anything yet-- Some one you're fond of coming back from
the grave must make you half mad to know how it happened," she said. "I
don't know much myself, but I'll tell you all I was able to find out. He
was light headed when I found him trying to get on the boat. When I
spoke to him he just caught my hand and begged me to stay with him. He
wanted to get to you. He'd been wandering about, starved and hiding. If
he'd been himself he could have got help earlier. But he'd been ill
treated and had seen things that made him lose his balance. He couldn't
tell a clear story. He was too weak to talk clearly. But I asked
questions now and then and listened to every word he said when he
rambled because of his fever. Jackson was a fellow prisoner who died of
hemorrhage brought on by brutality. Often I couldn't understand him, but
he kept bringing in the name of Jackson. One thing puzzled me very much.
He said several times 'Jackson taught me to dream of Robin. I should
never have seen Robin if I hadn't known Jackson.' Now 'Robin' is a boy's
name--but he said 'her' and 'she' two or three times as if it were a
girl's."
"Robin is his wife," said Coombe. He really found the support of the
door he still held open, useful for the moment.
An odd new interest sharpened in her eyes.
"Then he's been dreaming of her." She almost jerked it out--as if in
sudden illumination almost relief. "He's been dreaming of her--! And it
may have kept him alive." She paused as if she were asking questions of
her own mind. "I wonder," dropped from her in slow speculation, "if she
has been dreaming of _him_?"
"He was not dead--he was not an angel--he was Donal!" Robin had
persisted from the first. He had not been dead. In some incredibly
hideous German prison--in the midst of inhuman horrors and the blackness
of what must have been despair--he had been alive, and had dreamed as
she had.
Nurse Jones looked at him, waiting. Even if nurses had not been,
presumably, under some such bond of honourable secrecy as constrained
the medical profession, he knew she was to be trusted. Her very look
told him.
"She did dream of him," he said. "She was slipping fast down the slope
to death and he caught her back. He saved her life and her child's. She
was going to have a child."
They were both quite silent for a few moments. The room was still. Then
the woman drew her hand with a quick odd gesture across her forehead.
"Queer things happened in the last century, but queerer ones are going
to happen in this--if people will let them. Doctors and nurses see and
think a lot they can't talk about. They're always on the spot at what
seems to be the beginning and the ending. These black times have opened
up the ways. 'Queer things,' I said," with sudden forcefulness. "They're
not queer. It's only laws we haven't known about. It's the writing on
the scroll that we couldn't read. We're just learning the alphabet."
Then after a minute more of thought, "Those two--were they particularly
fond of each other--more to each other than most young couples?"
"They loved each other the hour they first met--when they were little
children. It was an unnatural shock to them both when they were parted.
They seemed to be born mated for life."
"That was the reason," she said quite relievedly. "I can understand
that. It's as orderly as the stars." Then she added with a sudden,
strong, quite normal conviction, and her tiredness seemed to drop from
her, "He won't die--that beautiful boy," she said. "He can't. It's not
meant. They're going on, those three. He's the most splendid human thing
I ever handled--skeleton as he is. His very bones are magnificent as he
lies there. And that smile of his that's deep in the blue his eyes are
made of--it can only flicker up for a second now--but it can't go out.
He's safe, even this minute, though you mayn't believe it."
"I do believe it," Coombe said.
And he stood there believing it, when she went through the open door and
left him.