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: