IN HER PLACE AGAIN
The numbing horror of it--and to have come into her life--hers!
Enveloping horror, the horror of war personified, drove Henriette out
of the ward, on with mechanical steps toward a deserted part of the
beach, where she could be alone and think before she faced Lady
Truckleford's lot.
Her gospel of life had been a gospel of beauty: a delight in her own
beauty as a source of power; a dislike of all things that were not
comely; a choice of surroundings in the fashioning of a beautiful
world, selected and detached in a charming egoism, where she was
supreme. Phil had come from afar and played a knightly part; she had
fitted him into that world. It was the end--the end of upward glances
into his eyes; of profile turned in the certainty of holding his
impelled, prolonged regard of admiration; of sauntering in woodland
paths; of rhythmic swing in step across the fields; of fair afternoons
with him posing and herself posing as she leisurely played with her
brush--of the most delectable of all her experiences.
Those finely-chiselled features which she had painted, which had been
the security of masculine strength in her fright as he carried her to
the cover of the gully, their elation when she spoke of the woman who
waited when the man went out to fight--and that monstrous fact against
a pillow in the hospital!
War had made its test in kind. All the soft, pampered years were in
reckoning for her, as the suffering years were for Helen. Her instinct
was to fly to her quiet studio in Paris, as a child flies indoors to
its mother from a storm dragon; but public opinion, personified to her
distraction by Lady Truckleford's lot, would not permit this. Her
friends knew that he was her cousin; and Lady Violet's teasing had been
the reflection of general knowledge of the situation between the two.
No one would more quickly appreciate than they in their own beautiful
world that any conventional outcome would now be impossible, yet none
readier to point the finger at heartlessness. They would expect
devoted attention to him for a certain period in his ghastly misfortune.
Had she courage? Could she bear standing by his bedside and looking at
his bandaged face? She must! Her part became clear. Her cousin and
friend had been maimed; she pitied him; suffering should go with her
grief for him in a way that would engage the sympathy of all. What
were they saying at Lady Truckleford's at this minute? Their opinion
had come to mean much to her. They knew only that she had put her
hands to her eyes and screamed and staggered out of doors. Was not
this the natural result of such a shock? And the next? It would be to
inquire about him.
Starting back to the ward, a new horror presented itself on the way.
All her life she might be known as the woman who was waiting for a man,
who returned to her a blind, deaf wreck. He would exist, haunting her
memory, invading her beautiful world with a mutilating hand. If
only--she shuddered at the thought which easily became familiar in an
era when the quick became the dead as a matter of course out where the
guns were firing. Perhaps he was already gone. She gasped and halted
as she found the possibility hastening her steps. The man for whom she
had waited, though they had not really been engaged as she kept
reminding herself, would have fallen in action and the slate would be
clean.
She was at the door of the ward and heard her voice asking a nurse how
he was.
"He's transferred to Dr. Smith. There's been an operation. I've not
heard the result," replied the nurse coldly; for a woman finds it as
easy to speak coldly to another woman who is beautiful as a man finds
it difficult.
"And my sister?" asked Henrietta.
"She went across with the stretcher."
As Henriette made a turn in the path which brought her in sight of the
Oral Surgery sign, Helen was passing under it and coming toward her.
She was pale and faint with exhaustion from the strain which had ended
with that final tax on her strength, as she put all she had into the
message of optimism which she had written on Phil's arm. So near had
she been to him, so bound up with him in thought and feeling, that
coming suddenly face to face with Henriette affected her strangely.
She had a tightening in her throat and Henriette a stifling constraint
along with her suspense. After a silence, Helen was the first to speak.
"He stood the operation well," she said.
"And he will live--live?" Henriette asked, her breath catching on the
words.
Helen remembered now how her sister had put her hands over her eyes and
screamed. Afterwards she had not thought of Henriette, only of him.
It had been too horrible for Henriette to bear. Henriette loved him
and he loved her, and her eyes to Helen's revealed her suffering in the
past two hours. Now she had come back as one in a dream, afraid to ask
how he was.
"Yes, he will live, Henriette--oh, how awful it has been for you! His
body is as good as ever. He will live and make the fight. He has
promised--such a hard fight!"
"Then he had wished to die? He was going to, you mean, and--and----"
Henriette wrenched out the words.
"Yes, and the doctor says that he would have died. It is all a matter
of will-power. But we told him that he would get his sight and hearing
back and except for some little scars will be the same as before."
"Will he?"
"He must! We must not allow him or ourselves to think anything else.
Just must--must!"
"Yes!" Henriette breathed faintly.
"Will you go in and see him?"
"I----" Henriette hesitated. "No, not to-night!" she concluded.
The two sisters walked along the path in silence, which was a gripping
silence for both. When they came to the parting of the ways to their
quarters, Helen took Henriette's hand in hers.
"There is another reason why he wants to live. You asked him to," she
said.
"I--I could not bear it--I went out. How could I? What do you mean?"
"The will was everything in the crisis, as I said. Often such
cases--well--some one had to speak to him and tell him it would all
come out right when it was so hard for him to breathe, or he would not
have tried to breathe any more. So I wrote on his arm and asked him to
live for--for the sake of those who loved him--and he could not see
that it was I--and I signed it H!"
Henriette withdrew her hand from Helen's in a spasm which shook her
frame. She opened her lips to speak, but would not trust her own
tongue and whirling brain.
"Again you took my place!" she exclaimed, at last.
"It was for you--to give him hope to inspire him for the fight!" Helen
replied, with passionate conviction.
"Yes--yes, I understand. I can't think! It's too horrible! Go on
taking my place--you can--it's easier for you! Yes, go on! It
unstrings me too much now to see him--yes, look after him, encourage
him. Go on--only don't tell any one the ruse that you are playing!"
she concluded, with a burst of emphatic coherency before she bolted
along the path, murmuring to herself: "Yes, that is it--that is the way
out!"
Over at Lady Truckleford's lot they had been thinking of little else
but Henriette. How would she take it? The lot was gathered in the
reception-room before going into dinner, and when Henriette entered all
eyes were covertly or openly upon her. Lady Violet took the lead by
springing up and kissing Henriette on the cheek.
"You poor dear!" breathed Lady Violet. "Of course we've heard, and
we've all felt for you!"
Henriette, pale in her distress, had never seemed more beautiful to
Captain Landor, who had had a bullet through the arm. Usually
Henriette cut his meat for dinner; but to-night Lady Violet was assured
of the privilege.
"I have just come from inquiring as to the result of the operation,"
said Henriette. "He is resting easily. As you know, he is really a
distant cousin of Helen's and mine and we were all fond of one another.
We had such good times together at Mervaux. It was so fine of him to
stay and fight instead of going home. Then this! You can't imagine
the shock of it!"
"Terrible!" gasped Lady Violet. "We all know what it means to you."
"And even more to Helen!" said Henriette. "Poor Helen! She was
utterly devoted to him and he to her. She has stood by so bravely,
insisting that he will get his sight and hearing back and that Bricktop
will remake him as good as new. When I think of him as I last saw him
and how Helen is suffering--it's too horrible!"
With a weary drooping of her lashes, she said that she was too tired to
think of coming down to dinner and went to her room, where, after she
had bathed her face and taken down her hair, her reflection in the
mirror in its faultless outline was a reflection of something in her
cosmos which could have no part with deformities of any kind, and her
relief was infinite over the gate that Helen had providentially opened.
She hastened to write to her mother, the letter a symbol of cutting a
chain with the past:
"... I saw it--a monstrous wound of the jaw. He is deaf, blind,
speechless. They say that he will live. I need not tell you what a
day it has been for Helen and me! When I thought of his gallant
conduct at Mervaux in refusing to leave Helen there alone, of our fun
over the portrait and the cartoons, and all that he meant to his father
and mother, the thought of what has happened to him was too horrible
for words. I am glad that when he became _epris_ I did not encourage
him. Now I see that his real fondness was for Helen. He asks for her,
wants her near him. She is a great comfort to him and her feeling for
him is deeper than either of us realised. I hope you will give up your
trip to Truckleford, travelling conditions are so abominable."
To which Madame Ribot consented, as she was no longer interested in
Peter Smithers's visit.
Helen, after she had separated from her sister on the path, had thought
little of what had passed between them. Her mind was too intensely
objective. Anything to make Phil well! It did not matter how it was
done or who did it. Upon her return to her room she gathered up her
drawing materials, which seemed to belong to her in some other
incarnation, and put them in a drawer. It was as if her life was
Phil's; his wound hers. She wrote the promised letter to Truckleford,
and then she prayed for Phil; and after she had prayed to the God
above, she clenched her fists and murmured: "Will! Must!" in the face
of all the hard little gods below who seem to get a good deal out of
the hand of the God above.