glad, on that ever-crowded platform: and one morning, on a day they
did not soon forget, Sheila made a find on her own account that
concerned them all more nearly than they knew.
It was a brilliant morning. Scarcely a cloud in the sky or a ripple
on the sea; and they reached the station early to find a train had
arrived before daylight. Stretcher cases had been left undisturbed;
but those who could walk were strolling or limping up and down in the
sun. Others, more seriously damaged, lay about in groups on the
ground or propped against bales of goods; great gaunt Highlanders,
Gunners and Guardsmen, Indians and Canadians--their coats, boots, and
puttees caked with the mud of Flanders; heads and limbs swathed in
bandages bright with blood; rough jokes on their lips; a ready gleam
of laughter in their tired eyes. And the sun beat down upon them
all; and the last of the flies gave them no peace.
It was a sight to contract the heart in pity and to lift it in pride
of common human manhood that could so smilingly suffer and endure.
There must have been seven hundred of them, all told. To dress their
wounds and remove them would be an arduous day's work; and only by
very special efforts could they be fed. Red Cross and V.A.D. ladies
hurried to and fro with food and hot drinks and words of welcome,
hardly less acceptable.
Keith went off, at once, to help with the stretchers; and for a space
the three were separated. Helen promptly attached herself to a
Highlander whose face was obliterated in bandages, save for his mouth
and one eye: and very soon Sheila came hurrying up to them, two spots
of colour in her pale cheeks.
"Mums, _who_ d'you think I've found?--No, not Mark," she added
quickly. "It's my very 'poor thing,' Mr. Seldon, of all people on
earth. I knew he'd taken up motor cycling keenly; but I didn't dream
he'd volunteer for despatch riding. Just shows you can never label
people off-hand. It seems he had furlough due and wanted to be
useful; so he's been running to and fro, in this awful fighting, and
had his right leg smashed for a reward. When your Kiltie's had his
breakfast, do come and be introduced."
The Kiltie's one eye beamed at the familiar allusion from so engaging
a morsel of girlhood; and he nearly choked himself in a gallant
effort to empty his steaming cup of coffee at a gulp. But Sheila
noticed nothing. She was engrossed in her regenerate "poor thing":
rather more so than Lady Forsyth quite approved.
She, herself, found him not unattractive; dark as a gypsy, with
thoughtful eyes that followed Sheila wherever she moved.
"That _you_ should have found me! The most amazing luck!" he kept
repeating, at intervals, apparently taking it for granted that Lady
Forsyth understood the situation.
And, indeed, Helen caught herself wondering was it out of pure
consideration for him that the girl chiefly confined her
ministrations to men in his neighbourhood? She even came back to ask
for details of the culminating adventure that had possibly cost him a
leg.
"There's just a shred of hope they may save it," he added
philosophically. "And I'm hanging on to that. Anyway it's not
likely now, I'd be quarrelling with my fate! I told you I was coming
over. Didn't you get my letter?"
"No. It'll probably follow me here. Now--I mustn't stay talking.
Shall I ask Mr. Macnair to get you for our car?"
"Do; angel of mercy!"
Snatches, in this vein, Helen overheard as she came and went upon her
own errands and her swift brain sprang half-way to meet possible
developments not entirely to her liking. Still--she was sorry for
the man and glad when Keith secured him as a passenger.
They left him finally at the hospital where Mona was beginning to
earn distinction; and Sheila promised to look him up later. Then
back they rattled again to that eternally familiar Gare.
This time they lighted on Maurice Lenox--not wounded, but shivering
with fever, his nerves all ajar from sleeplessness and shell fire.
The hope that he might give them news of Mark was soon extinguished.
Maurice had run across him earlier in the day, and had since heard
great things of his capacity and courage; but where the regiment was
at present he had not the ghost of an idea.
Maurice himself was a rather damaged edition of the lively clever boy
they had known at Inveraig. He declared that the horrors of war
"made in Germany" exceeded the wildest cinematographs in his brain.
He had only been "forward" three times for training purposes; but
every time "the luck" had been against him. He thanked his stars he
had got out of it alive; and had not the remotest desire to go back.
After her talk with him, Helen wilted visibly; and by the end of
their strenuous morning she looked so white and strained that Keith
prescribed an afternoon of complete rest. The station work was too
urgent for Sheila and himself to cry off altogether; but they would
come back early and cheer her loneliness.
Helen accepted her fate the more readily because, from the moment of
waking, her spirit had been shadowed by a too-familiar sensation.
Some large event was hovering near. For this reason she felt
reluctant to leave the Hotel; and when the waiter brought in her
tea-tray with two envelopes on it, she did not even need to look at
the writing. Her instincts--as Mark had once said--were infallible.
The second letter was from his Colonel; but that could wait.
Page on close written page she scanned, while absently sipping her
tea; till her heart brimmed over afresh with love and pride; and
gratitude that, in spite of all, she had him still. She could not
help contrasting the tone of his letter with the talk of Maurice that
morning. No insistence, here, on horrors, or on hell fire; no easy
optimism, either, as regards the gigantic task in hand.
"Every day makes it clearer," he wrote, "that we've a thundering hard
job before us and that our line round here is dangerously thin.
Officers and men are about equally exhausted by the long strain and
insufficient reliefs; and enemy movements all suggest that they're
cheerfully reckoning to extinguish us in time for Christmas in Town.
Bless their innocent hearts! They've yet to reckon with Tommy's
talent for hanging on with his back teeth, even when a good few of
them have been extracted!
"Mums, he's simply a human miracle; and we're all head over ears in
pride of him, though we don't let on to any great extent. We've had
a welcome breather in billets the last three days. But there are big
doings on; and I expect we'll soon go forward again. Look out for a
field PC and be of good heart till you get one. 'Who dies if England
lives?' That's the only sane way to look at it.
"Just had three ripping letters from you and Sheila and Bel. It does
a man's heart good, in the midst of all this, to get such delicious
whiffs of home. You sound a shade anxious. But fretting's waste of
strength, little Mums, and your Highland laddie's going strong. The
C.O.'s a mighty man of valour. Talks of making me Adjutant when
Collins takes up his staff job; all for love of you, I'll swear!
And--talking of love, I've one word for your very private ear. If
old Keith should suddenly startle you by an offer of marriage, don't
say 'No' if you can help it. Mind, I'm not sure if he will. But
I've reason to suppose he may. What matter, after all, the
difference in years--you that, at fifty, can still behave like a
child of ten!"
Helen read and re-read those amazing words in a very mixed frame of
mind. An offer of marriage--! Mark's imagination was running away
with him. More than once of late she had wondered if Keith cared for
Sheila. But herself--! Impossible. Undeniably it warmed her heart,
true lover of love that she was: yet Keith was right. She could
still, at times, feel that Other so near her, in spirit, as to make
the idea of a second husband seem little short of sacrilege.
Dropping Mark's letter in her lap, she covered her face.
"Richard--Richard!" she whispered, and yielded herself to the vague
yet intimate sense of his presence, that gradually enfolded her and
as gradually faded, leaving her doubly alone.
By way of banishing ghosts she opened the Colonel's letter and read,
with uplifted heart, his sincere and soldierly praise of her son whom
he hoped very soon to secure for his Adjutant. The first moment it
was possible, he added, Mark should have a few days' leave. No man
in the battalion had earned a better right to it. Moreover, in the
recent fighting, he had shown such conspicuous gallantry that his
name was to be sent up for a decoration.
Such news made royal atonement for anxiety; and she was still reading
when there came a knock at the door.
"Entrez!" she said casually, supposing the man had come for her
tea-things. Then she found that he was holding a salver towards her;
and on the salver lay a telegram.
At sight of it all the wheels of her being stopped dead. Everything
seemed slipping away from her. Mechanically, she took the envelope
and rose to her feet.
The waiter, too often a messenger of sorrow, vanished swiftly: and
Helen Forsyth stood alone reading, with dazed iteration, the bald
announcement that the War Office regretted to report her son
Lieutenant Sir Mark Stuart Forsyth "Wounded and Missing, believed
killed."
Her immobility was the measure of her anguish; and the shock was the
greater coming at a moment when his voice had almost sounded in her
ears.
Still mechanically, she picked up that precious letter and, for the
first time, looked at the date. It was a week old.
Life without Mark----!
She pressed a hand across her tearless eyes: and while she stood so,
the door opened again. She started violently. A crazy hope of
reprieve flashed through her brain. But it was only Keith.
The paper she held and the look in her eyes enlightened him: and
before he could master his voice, she had recovered hers.
"Keith--it's _come_!" she cried holding out the telegram. "God help
us!"
A sudden faintness overwhelmed her, and she put both hands to her
head. Keith saw her sway just perceptibly; and without an instant's
hesitation he put an arm round her shoulders.
"Helen--my dear," was all he could say, as she leaned limply against
him, shaken with sharp, tearless sobs.
Once, in despair at the sheer impotence of speech, he laid his hand
on her head; a moment--no more. Then very gently he led her to the
sofa, and she lay there, her rebel spirit broken by this last and
cruelest blow.
He picked up the telegram; re-read it, and put it on the mantelpiece.
Its work was not yet done. The news would hit Sheila hard. And Miss
Alison. Had Helen thought of that?
She was thinking of it now.
"Keith," she sat upright, her eyes tearless still. "I've just
remembered--poor Bel! Shall we wire or write?"
"A letter would be more merciful," he said.
"Very well. I don't know how to write it. But I'll try." She sat
silent, gazing at a photograph of Mark in uniform. Then: "Keith--he
_is alive_. I am sure of it," she said slowly in a voice of
impressive quietness and conviction. "While I was lying there
something--Someone told me. If he were not, he would have come to
me, as Derek came. With all three of them, I had the warning. So,
unless he does come, I shall cling to my conviction."
"Yes:--cling to it," he said. "You've always seen true. Meantime,
I'll take the car to the Front and not cease from searching, till I
find him or some trace of him. You two must go home at once."
"_Home_--?" She shivered.
"Have faith--and patience," he said gently. "Throw all your energy
into some sort of work less painful than the work here."
"But Sheila will hate leaving it. Her whole heart is given to the
wounded."
"A very large part of it is given to you. And now--you are one of
them; one of the wounded in spirit, whose names appear in no casualty
lists."
At last, to his relief, he saw tears in her eyes. She brushed them
away and rose to her feet.
"I must try and write to Bel. And oh--there were letters from him
and the Colonel. You must read them----"
Suddenly she remembered--and went hot all over at thought of how he
had held her while she was immersed in grief. Dexterously
abstracting Mark's last sheet, she handed him the rest and went back
to the escritoire.
For a while Keith sat watching her, love and pain and pity contending
in his heart. Then he opened the letters. It was the first time she
had given him one of Mark's to read.
Hers to Bel scarcely filled a sheet. But it took a long time to
write; and before it was finished, Sheila came in, visibly refreshed
by an hour's talk with Mona and Seldon, who was not to lose his leg.
Hearing her step, Lady Forsyth put down her pen and covered her face.
Keith, feeling like an executioner, again took up the telegram that
was propped against a vase; and involuntarily Sheila put up a hand as
if he had struck her.
"So soon?" she breathed, looking beyond him at Helen's bowed head.
"Not the worst--yet," Keith answered handing her the paper.
She took in the contents at a glance; and for a long minute she stood
gazing at it; lifeless as a statue; white to the lips, their first
tremor resolutely stilled.
Presently she came back, as it were, from a long way off. "We can
still hope--and pray," she said just above her breath.
Then, turning from him, she hurried over to Helen; and Keith went
out, leaving them together----
Next morning there were hasty preparations to catch the midday boat.
Keith's idea had been to cross with them and see them safe on English
ground: but in the end there was no resisting Helen's urgent plea
that he would not waste so many precious hours on them.
She promised him a telegram from Dover, and another from Wynchcombe
Friars. Then, Helen-like, when it came to the actual pang of
parting, she impulsively clutched his arm.
"Oh--_take care_ of yourself," she said with smothered intensity.
"Both of you gone: and we alone--waiting----"
"For the fulfilment of your conviction," he reminded her. "Be sure
_I_ shall not rest till I have found him."
"Do you suppose I doubt that?" she asked, a new tenderness in her
eyes.
But even to him she could not speak her inmost fear--"What if Mark
were wounded and in German hands?"
CHAPTER VII
"Your hearts are lifted up; your hearts
That have foreknown the utter price;
Your hearts burn upward, as a flame
Of splendour and of sacrifice,"
_To Women_--LAWRENCE BINYON.
Wynchcombe Friars again--with the spirit of Mark haunting them in
every room and at every turn of the grounds. Most intolerable were
the little intimate things that conjured up his presence, the very
tone of his voice: and--to crown all, there was Bobs. His ecstatic
greeting, the sobbing squeals of joy that Mark so loved to hear; his
rush beyond them, obviously in search of his master; shook the
foundations of their fortitude. Not until now did Helen discover how
much virtue had gone out of her: and the reaction, while it lasted,
was a nightmare of which she afterwards felt heartily ashamed.
Sheila, thankful to be alone with her at such a time, quietly took
the reins of government into her small, capable hands. On the day
after their arrival she put Lady Forsyth to bed and practically kept
her there for a week, soothing and stimulating, with massage, the
nerves of her head and her spirit.
She had the peculiar love of the born healer for all things hurt or
unhappy; and the reserve force in her, detected by Keith, had kept
the poise of her spirit unshaken through all. But the hovering
shadow of a smile no longer haunted her lips. She had learnt, by
aspiration rather than petition, to draw freely upon the one
unlimited Source of Strength; and young as she was, the older woman
grew to rely upon her utterly during those days when the light within
her was darkness.
Mercifully they found no strangers in the house; and Sir Richard's
sisters promptly discovered plausible excuses for going home. Helen
was evidently in good hands; and in no mood for any other company.
So for a while they two had their shrine of sacred memories to
themselves; and Lady Forsyth who had supposed she knew her Sheila
through and through, began to feel as if she had never really known
her--till now. Such still, strong natures are slow studies always.
In the ordinary way of life, they seldom sparkle or allure. It needs
the high demand to call forth the hidden elements that make them the
salt of the earth. And now, in response to that high demand, the
true Sheila shone out like a star in darkness.
Alone with her and the healing influences of home, Helen's courage
revived apace; and with it her natural tendency to merge the personal
in the larger view.
All over England, all over Europe, suspense or suffering, in some
form, had become a paramount law of life. It was the price of
patriotism. Men paid it with their blood and their mutilated bodies:
women with their tears and mutilated lives. One in suffering, they
had the more need, all of them, to be one in courage. And Mark
himself had willed to give everything, without reserve, without
regret. Bitter repining on her part were simple disloyalty to him:
and there remained the saving mercy that her sorrow was tinged with
hope.
There came a morning when she felt able to speak of these things to
Sheila; even to tell her in detail of that talk in her turret-room;
and their tacit, mutual resolve not to fail him in this last and
hardest test of loyalty linked them closer than ever----
So far no word from Bel; and Lady Forsyth felt anxious, a little.
Deep and real fellow-feeling had wakened her first genuine impulse of
affection towards the girl. She had written almost as to a daughter.
And on this very morning of her talk with Sheila, Bel's answer
came:--heart-broken, purged of affectation, yet emphasising, in every
line, her complete divergence of feeling and point of view.
"You will wonder, dear, why I haven't written sooner, but I'm an
arrant coward inside, and I simply couldn't face putting the cold
truth on paper. Your sweet letter, written while the shock was fresh
upon you, was a heroic thing. One sees where Mark got his courage.
If he'd only had a little less of it--he might be with us still. You
will disapprove of that 'If.' But I'm too utterly crushed to invent
correct sentiments. I can only put my own down anyhow, even if
they're all wrong. Sweet of you to tell me of your private
conviction. I hope to Heaven it may be true: but I have no
sustaining faith to keep me going. Myself, I had a horrid feeling,
that last night, that it was--the end. It's dear of you to say I can
come when I like. But just now, having to work keeps one from
collapse and I am sure you two are happier together. Later
on--perhaps. Harry is an angel to me. But I'm not pleasant company
these days. Nothing interests me now and I hate this abominable war
worse than ever. If you hear any news, please wire. I got a letter
from him--after yours. And it smashed me up. That's partly why I
didn't write. Love to you and Sheila
from your desperately unhappy,
BEL."
Lady Forsyth handed the letter to Sheila. It was blotted at the end,
where tears had dropped.
"Poor child! She cares more than I gave her credit for.--I wonder,"
she added, half to herself, "what he would think of that letter?"
Sheila bit her lip and was silent, and they fell to discussing Lady
Forsyth's latest scheme--country Cottage Homes for Children Orphaned
by the War.
That morning proved a turning-point in their new, shadowed life. On
all sides there was work crying out to be done. They had no right
any longer to shut themselves up with their sorrow.
"If we believe he will come back, we must live up to our faith," Lady
Forsyth said simply: and they did so, to the best of their power.
Keith wrote every few days, just to keep in touch with them and
report his movements. There was nothing else to report--as yet.
Among countless notes of sympathy and hope, and of admiration for
Mark was none more uplifting to the mother's heart than the sincere
and simple tribute of Colonel Munro.
"To the Regiment and to me personally," he wrote, "the loss is so
great that although the worst is reported, we cannot give up hope.
Neither will you, I feel sure, for many weeks to come. Forsyth's
presence among us was an inspiration. It is not often in these
dead-level days that one meets with a man who seems a natural-born
king. Without exaggeration, that was how we felt about him.
Unfortunately, those of his company who were with him last are also
missing; but I feel convinced we shall hear of them all yet. I have
named and described the men to Mr. Macnair, who writes that he is
instituting a search on his own account. Good luck to him: and to
you--the very best that heart can wish. Yours ever,
R. MUNRO."
Sheila shared that letter, and every other, even as she shared the
difficult task of answering them all. In this respect, at least, she
was grateful to Bel who had tacitly relinquished the sad, high
privilege that was hers by right.
The cottage scheme involved much correspondence and occasional
journeys to London: and it was then that they began to realise more
acutely the contrast between the "War drama" as visualised by an
island people, and the stern, yet stimulating actuality, just across
the Channel.
There, even at the Base, the atmosphere was electrical with the
spirit of the Front, with the enthusiasm and passion of a great
imaginative race, for whom invasion was no "bogey" but a bloody and
devastating fact. Here, the great unseen thing was frankly a
sensation fitfully discerned through the fog of censored despatches;
analysed, with bewildering brilliance, by literary strategists; and
distorted by visionaries, who extolled "the war against War," and
feverishly planned a new heaven on earth.
Happily for them, the real issues hung upon the vigil and the valour
of a negligible minority who were only concerned to beat the Germans,
and to make good, with their lives, the State's miscalculations and
delays.
But the very advantages of the islander are a part of his many
disabilities. Not only did realisation come slowly to England: but
it came too often in the wrong guise. In London, the newspaper craze
became a form of dram-drinking. Everything that could be said about
the great obsession was repeated over and over, in every conceivable
tone of voice: till a bewildered public began to wonder whether
politicians believed in their high-sounding generalities or
journalists in their inspired leaders.
Though social life had practically ceased, the pavements of the City
were still thronged with men of military age, quite convinced, by the
tone of certain journals, that their services were not urgently
needed elsewhere; that the War would probably be over by Christmas;
certainly by Easter. And, after all, were they not doing good work,
necessary work, on the spot?
Lady Forsyth herself had reason to feel grateful, often, for the
steadying effect of contact with the real thing--even the fringe of
it: and her native sensibility to atmosphere made her feel, more
keenly than most, the clash of contrast between the often unwholesome
ferment of London and the immovable phlegm of the countryside.
Coming home, tired in body and spirit, after a long day's work in
Town, she would be beset by distracting doubts as to how this great
and casual country of hers would emerge from the searching test of
war.
It was then that Sheila, quick to read her mood, would slip behind
her, unloose her hair, and with skilful finger-tips, magically pluck
out weariness and doubts alike, till Lady Forsyth would catch at her
hands and kiss them.
"Sheila, that's not mere massage. You seem to reach one's very soul."
And the girl stood smiling down upon her like a young goddess radiant
with conscious power.
"That's because I'm loving you hard all the time," she said. "It's a
heavenly gift. I used to feel--such a dumb thing. Now I can give it
all out through my fingers, I feel free. And--Dearest," she added
gravely, "you mustn't get disheartened because London, on the
surface, seems unspeakable. The unspeakables are always on the
surface. Underneath, there are hundreds of real workers and silent
sufferers, doing and bearing things without trumpets or banners. And
aren't our sailors and soldiers miracles to praise God for? Surely
such leaven as that must end in leavening the whole lump----"
"You're a miracle to praise God for," Lady Forsyth began; but her lip
trembled and she was silent.
Then Sheila, in her protecting mother-fashion, drew the older woman's
head close to her breast. "Nearly three weeks now," she whispered.
"We _must_ hear something soon."
Lady Forsyth shivered; but Sheila went resolutely on: "London wears
you out, Mums, body and soul. Let's give it up for a little.
There's plenty of work on the spot. It will hearten up Mark's people
to see more of you. They must be anxious too, in their own way."
They were: and it was the very reflection of her own anxiety, the
hovering question on every face, that at first made this paramount
duty a very real ordeal. But it was Mark's work; and his mother
found it by no means devoid of compensation. It drew them all closer
together; it threw fresh light on Mark's individual fashion of
upholding the aristocratic ideal among a free people; and it steadily
strengthened her own conviction that there, where human nature is
still untainted by industrialism, lies the true hope of England's
future. She was sustained, also, by a private resolve that when Mark
returned he should find, within the boundaries of his own kingdom, a
right spirit towards the War.
Very soon she discovered an ally of equal enthusiasm and wider
experience--Dr. Warburton, Headmaster of High Rough School. He had
lost no time in getting to the Front, as Chaplain of the Forces,
leaving High Rough in charge of Rex Maitland, to that gentleman's
undisguised satisfaction. Already the fatal word "indispensable" had
become a mark of distinction more coveted in some quarters than a
decoration. Warburton, at home for the moment, on business connected
with the school, spent most of his spare time trying to instil the
spirit of the trenches into cottages and country shops, where
impassioned leaders were dismissed as "hot air" and despatches full
of foreign names were only half understood.
As an old friend of the family, he had been among the first admitted
to see Helen, on her return from abroad: and the day after her talk
with Sheila, he turned up at tea-time in the private hope that he
might glean news of Mark.
His leonine head with its shock of grizzled hair, hawk's eyes under
shaggy brows, and a Homeric laugh, gave a general impression of
bigness, belied by his mere inches: but the man's inner stature
corresponded unmistakably with the laugh and the lion's head.
Within a week, now, he would be back in France. "And high time,
too," he added, thoughtfully sipping his tea. "I'll miss coming
here. Otherwise--" he shot out his great moustache--"It's healthier
at the Front in spite of the shells. The real spirit of England is
in the trenches and on the sea."
As he spoke the door opened and a parlour-maid brought in the
afternoon post.
"Ah--Keith," Lady Forsyth murmured, seizing a thin unstamped envelope
and letting the rest fall into her lap.
Warburton rose, as if to put down his cup, and strolled across to the
window. Presently a small sound of relief reached him and he turned
quickly about. "Found him, have they?"
"Not yet," Helen answered with a brave smile. "But the Sergeant, who
was wounded trying to help him, has made his way back to the Regiment
after hair-breadth adventures. They're sending him home at once,
Keith says. He has my address. He will write. Then I can go and
see him." She spoke in short swift sentences, holding emotion in
leash. Sheila had risen and was standing near the fire, ostensibly
warming her hands. "He and another soldier managed to drag Mark to a
farm. He was hit in the head. Unconscious. They could do no more.
The Germans began shelling the place: and there they had to leave him
with kind French people. They weren't even sure--if he was alive.
That's all--so far." She tried to smile. "It doesn't lift the fog
much, does it? But still, just to see this man who was with him----"
"Yes--yes," Warburton's regard held more of admiration than of pity.
"Let me go with you--if the call comes in time," he added, and rather
abruptly took his leave.
That night Lady Forsyth wrote to Bel. "Come to me for the week-end,
dear," she added, "if you feel you can now, and would care to hear in
detail what little I may have to tell. With any luck I ought to see
Sergeant Macgregor before Saturday."
And in a very few days the summons came. It was from Aldershot; and
Sheila decided to go with them. While they interviewed Macgregor she
would love to make a round of the wards. For, in secret, she missed
her "poor things" and the work at Boulogne.
It was hard not to hope for impossibilities; but the Sergeant's
rather disjointed tale served neither to justify Helen's obstinate
conviction, nor to dispel her secret fears. He was a red-headed man,
square and sturdy, just able to hobble. His nerves were obviously
shaken by all he had been through; and his emotion in speaking of
that particular day made it the harder to restrain her own. Of the
nature of Mark's wound he could tell her nothing except that there
was blood all over his head and that they had bandaged it roughly--he
and a British Tommy, who contributed his own mud-stained puttee, worn
for weeks.
The mother winced at that. "Did he know you?" she asked quickly
hoping he had not seen.
"Ah canna rightly tell, ma leddy," was the unsatisfactory reply. "Ah
kneeled in the mud and ah said: 'Ye ken verra weel who I am, sir?'
An' he smiled crooked-like an' pit up his hand to stroke me cheek
like a bairn. An' there came a sound in his thrapple. But niver a
word. The Lord shield him from the hands o' they Jairman blayguards."
But Helen knew, now, that the tide of war had rolled over the village
where they had left her son: and for the moment hope and courage were
dead within her.
Warburton left for France next day, having promised to look up Keith:
and Bel arrived with Harry to stay over Sunday. Lady Forsyth had
smiled, not without understanding, at her request that Harry might
"come too." Even in her sorrow Bel was still a victim to fear of
being bored: and Harry's masculine attitude of worship and service
was more of an asset than she knew.
Lady Forsyth discovered many fresh points in common with Harry; but
the change in Bel, obvious to both, troubled her beyond measure. Not
merely was her smiling serenity subdued by grief: but it seemed
overlaid with a fine film of hardness from which things painful or
emotional glanced off like arrows from a surface of steel. She would
neither look at the papers, nor talk of the war. This fact alone
made conversation difficult; but for Helen this stumbling-block was
as nothing to its inner significance. The strain and pain of war,
that was steadily softening and enlarging Sheila, appeared to be
having the opposite effect on Bel. Deliberately she turned her eyes
away from beholding the world's anguish and heroism: deliberately she
hardened her heart against its effect upon herself; so that she
seemed in danger of losing even the surface softness that had been no
small part of her charm.
Plainly, her love for Mark, however sincere, had no alchemic power to
transmute the dross in her to gold. Would his return, such as he was
now, dissolve that film of hardness? Or was the girl laying up
further tragedy for herself and others?
Alone with Lady Forsyth, Bel was gentle and affectionate, yet
completely aloof. She listened to Macgregor's story with set lips
and a fine line between her brows. Though the mother's voice shook
and tears threatened, Bel's eyes were dry.
"And after that--you can _still_ manage to hope?" was all she said.
"Dear, it is not so much hope with me, as--belief," Lady Forsyth
answered gently, and Bel's sigh had a faint note of exasperation.
"You are amazing," she said. "And--so like him." Then with a swift
dramatic gesture, she rose and seemed to fling away her mantle of
composure. "Oh, this brutal, senseless war!" she cried, her eyes
still hard, her low voice tense with feeling. "A man like
that--splendid, strong, gifted--smashed up like a bit of matchboard.
And what earthly use has it been to any one--his sacrifice or our
pain?"
The older woman listened to that strange outburst with something very
like relief. It proved that Bel was not hard all through and it
cried aloud the very thoughts that had visited her own heart in the
small hours when all the wheels run low.
"Bel--Bel!" she remonstrated gently, "that is _the_ question one dare
not ask. It's hard not to. No one knows that better than I do. But
the answer is, if Mark, and others of his quality, had taken that
point of view, where would England be now?"
"Oh England!" She dismissed her country with a faint shrug. "Mark
would be here with us, safe and whole. That's all I know--or care."
Her voice still had its low bitterness; but it shook a little now and
going over to the window she sat awhile looking out upon the wood and
the terrace where she had walked with him in that other life, gone
beyond recall.
Vaguely she heard the door open. Then a low sound from Lady Forsyth
made her look round sharply. Helen had risen--her lips were set and
pale.
Bel glanced at the open letter she held out to her. It was a formal
intimation, garnished with formal regret, that Lieutenant Sir Mark
Forsyth, formerly reported missing, in November, was now officially
reported killed. The scanty information received in the past three
weeks gave no grounds for supposing otherwise.
"Of course this was bound to come," Helen said mechanically.
But Bel pushed aside the paper and covered her face.
Helen stood silent a moment; then she found courage to repeat her own
conviction.
"Dear, they may report what they please. Mark _is_ alive. I know
it."
Bel simply shook her head.
"You don't believe me?"
"No."
"But--you won't go into mourning. Bel, you mustn't."
"No--no. I detest mourning."
The muffled voice broke suddenly. Lady Forsyth put an arm round the
girl's shoulders and Bel leaned against her sobbing like a child.
Then, with a shivering sigh, she released herself and hurried out of
the room.
Lady Forsyth picked up that hateful slip of paper and dropped it into
the fire. Mark was alive:--nothing could shake her belief in that.
But he was wounded--and in German hands. Her inmost fear had come
true.
BOOK III
VIA CRUCIS
CHAPTER I
"Love is swift of foot,
Love's a man of war,
And can hit and can shoot
From far."
GEORGE HERBERT.
It was on the first of December that Sir Mark Forsyth was officially
reported killed; and it was upon an evening of early November, on a
battle-scarred road of Northern France, that a certain waggon-load of
dead and wounded men jolted leisurely towards a certain village
lately recaptured by the Prussians. The open body of the cart was
spacious and full of straw that had once been tolerably clean, but
was now defiled with mud and blood. It held six men--two French,
three British, and one German. Two of them were obviously dead,
three were as obviously alive and in cruel pain. The sixth, who wore
a kilt and a blood-stained puttee wound about his head, lay on his
back, motionless, wide-eyed, watching a bank of grey cloud dissolve
into shredded wisps of gold. Presently the sun broke through and
smiled upon the aftermath of battle as upon the sheaves of some
peaceful harvest garnered with thanks and praise.
In this unceremonious fashion was Mark removed from the farm where
Macgregor had been forced to leave him--dead, to all appearance, or
at the point of death.
Of how he came to be there, in such woeful company, he knew nothing.
His brain seemed blurred and curiously inert. He felt no pain, only
a horrid faintness; utter exhaustion from loss of blood. He would
have given the world for a sip of brandy. Where was his flask? he
wondered vaguely, but felt too weak to stir a finger.
Above him, beside the driver, sat a little French doctor, talking and
gesticulating vehemently. He might be of use, Mark reflected with
feeble impatience, if one could only attract his attention.
Summoning all his ebbing strength, he tried to shout. The sole
result was a horrid choking sensation and an abortive noise in his
throat.
He grew suddenly alarmed. What did it mean? And where were they
going? Had he, possibly, been taken prisoner in spite of himself?
There was none to enlighten him, even could he have spoken; and the
torment of uncertainty remained. The fact that he suffered no
physical pain was a minor item to be thankful for. Not altogether a
minor item, perhaps, judging from sounds emitted by the German at the
far end of the cart. Between groans and broken curses he was calling
impartially on God and his mother.
The last galvanised Mark's brain into momentary life. What of his
own mother--and Bel? Would they believe him killed? How long was it
since his clock of time had stopped dead? Would it ever be set going
again? And--what of the fight?
More questions--nothing but questions--unanswered and unanswerable.
They buzzed about him like hornets; and to be rid of them he fell
back on memory. He recalled a world that rained shells and
shrapnel--a violent, friendly and increasingly muddy world, in which
Allies and enemies were wildly intermingled, till it was cleft from
end to end by long and opposing lines of trenches, with a No Man's
Land of varying width between. In the No Man's Land things had
happened: things that left a scar on the memory--things a man could
not talk about and, most unhappily, could not forget. In those early
days reliefs were few and infrequent; and Mark looked back on trench
life as an endless age of strain--nerve and body and imaginative
brain racked to the limit of endurance, and under all a dogged
resolve that there should be no limit of endurance but the arbitrary
limit of death.
Too vividly he remembered those last days, when grey-green battalions
had been hurled against them, wave on wave, till his Highlanders, who
stood like rocks in a storm, had been forced to retire by an urgent
order from those who alone knew when wisdom demanded sacrifice of
ground rather than of men. Stubbornly, foot by foot, they had fallen
back from their hard-won position. Then--consternation ... and
confusion. The battalion on their right seemed to have melted away.
But the enemy allowed them no breathing space for dismay. They were
in dire peril: and Mark lost not a moment in rallying his men for a
final desperate stand.... Suddenly, in the midst of it, when the
struggle was fiercest, the earth had seemed to collapse under him.
He recalled a horrid sensation of falling backwards, headlong--into
nothingness.
At that point his memory broke off short. The rest was a meaningless
jumble of sights and sensations like a troubled dream.
He was lying in a turnip-field. Something had happened to his head.
Blood was flowing freely, but he felt no pain. In vain he tried to
move. Weakness flowed over him. Living and conscious, he lay there
among the dead, listening to the roar of battle that rolled steadily
farther away; fearful exceedingly lest they should bury or burn him;
or, finding him alive, should take him prisoner while this
ignominious helplessness hung like lead upon his limbs.
At times he could hear voices and men passing. But very soon
darkness fell again; and out of the darkness came a vision of
Macgregor's face. He remembered trying to speak, and the feel of the
man's rough cheek when he patted it in sign of recognition. To his
intense relief, he had felt them trying to move him. What had come
of it? Where were they now?
The questions were at him afresh and the haunting thought of his
mother. Once more he summoned all his strength in an effort to reach
her mentally. He had succeeded in doing so on more than one
occasion. But now, the attempt was lunacy. It simply exhausted his
last remnant of strength, and once more he slipped back into the
outer dark....
By some miracle, his resolute spirit hung on to the thread of life
that remained; and when next it struggled up from the bottomless pit,
the cart and the jolting and the smell of blood had vanished like all
the other dreams. He was lying on a bed. He could feel the blanket
against his chin. The air he breathed was faintly impregnated with
antiseptics and the scent of clean straw.
As his brain cleared, he heard women's voices murmuring rhythmically
in a foreign tongue. Too weak and weary to stir, he lay awhile
steeped in contentment, till that rhythmical murmur resolved itself
into Latin prayers. French nuns, good souls, must be praying by his
bed.
Next moment, the chill trickle of water on his face made him start
and open his eyes. One of the nuns was bending over him.
"Our Lady be praised," she said softly. "The spirit has returned.
Monsieur will drink this, and strength will also return."
She held a cup to his lips; warm milk dashed with brandy--pure
nectar! It seemed to set life stirring in his veins, even as the
woman's face set some vague memory stirring in his mind. The breadth
of brow and cheek-bones, the mouth, with its resolute softness and
the deep dent above the chin, struck a note of dim familiarity; but
he felt far too lazy and comfortable to search for a clue.
The barn-like room in which he found himself was no hospital, but a
rough makeshift. There were but half a dozen beds like his own. The
remaining sufferers lay on straw pallets; and the little French
doctor, whose profile he recognised, appeared to be in charge. That
fact, and the presence of nuns made him hopeful of being in the right
hands. If only he could ask! But the curse of dumbness was on him
still; and a fear that it might be permanent chilled the flow of
returning life.
The other nuns had risen and moved away. She whom they called
Sœur Colette stood smiling down on him.
"Ça va bien," she said. "Monsieur comprend?"
He made a sign of assent, then with his left hand and eyebrow, tried
to convey the question he could not ask. Her face lit up.
"Le bon Dieu soit bénit. Monsieur desires a little conversation. As
much as one can, I will relate."
Serene and smiling, she sat beside him on a low stool. It was purely
refreshing to hear a woman's voice again.
"M. le docteur," she told him, "a saint of God with a rough tongue,
gathered up many dead and wounded from the terrible battle, more than
a week ago, and brought them here to the Red Cross Hospital, then in
the hands of my people. Now--Mary Mother, pity us!--it is once more
taken by the Prussians. The hospital is seized for themselves, and
M. le docteur is graciously permitted to use this ruined farm.
Those, alas, who recover become prisoners of war. Monsieur himself
on arriving was as one dead; and, next evening, we of the Sisterhood
must pray for the souls of the departed. But I, who came to kneel
near Monsieur, said: 'This, surely, is not death.' While others
summoned M. le docteur, myself I found, by the mercy of God, one
pulse, so small, so feeble, there in the neck of Monsieur. Imaginez!"
Mark smiled his crooked smile and lifted his eyebrows. He found it
hard to believe in her fairy tale. But, if it were true, this woman,
with the beautiful familiar face, had evidently been his good angel.
She was explaining to him now the nature of his wound, and how
splinters of bone pressing on the brain made him powerless to speak
or move. These the little doctor had partially lifted. But the
complete operation was a delicate one; and he would prefer to wait
awhile, in hopes that the tide of battle should roll eastward again.
"It might be well for Monsieur, then, to seem as one dead," Sœur
Colette explained, with a flicker of humour in her great dark eyes.
"They would not think him worth the trouble to remove; and in Paris
all is possible."
Mark had need of the utmost consolation he could extract from that
thought. For, as strength returned, impatience returned also, and
his imprisoned spirit girded at the hampering hulk of a body over
which it had lost command--for how long?
Questions again! He grew to hate them heartily. Wherever he turned
for relief, there one or more would spring up to confound him; and at
moments of supreme exasperation, his brain seemed alive with notes of
interrogation, seeking answers and finding none. More than once he
vowed mentally that if he regained the power of speech, he would
never again ask a question while he lived.
And he suffered more than exasperation during those interminable
November days. The very inactivity of his body seemed to induce a
restless activity of mind. Fleeting inspirations mocked him:
wonderful, impossible ideas for bas-reliefs and great symbolic
figures. Strange moods swept through him and strange unreasoning
fears. There were visions also--and dreams: visions of things he
would have given years of life to forget; dreams from which he awoke
in a cold sweat, so shaken that he would lie staring at the darkness,
positively afraid to close his eyes.
Very often the dreams were nightmare distortions of realities. These
had a horrid knack of recurring at intervals; and the one most
dreaded by Mark concerned a minor incident of No Man's Land that had
been permanently photographed on his brain.
Always it began at the same point: dusk, illumined fitfully by
searchlights and bursting shells; the silhouetted figure of a Sapper
subaltern walking coolly into the open with his coil of wire; then
the scream of a bursting shell--and there, where the boy had stood,
was a mound of earth and debris at a crater's rim.
Later on, the moon revealed something that moved fitfully near the
edge of the mound. It was the leg of that Sapper subaltern--buried
alive. Under heavy and persistent enemy fire, any attempt at rescue
would have been madness; and Mark, digging and carrying all that
night, had prayed that a second shell might put the boy out of his
misery. But in the morning the leg still moved, and continued to
move at intervals all day; till Mark, fresh to such horrors, could
endure it no more.
That night, when the firing slackened a little, another figure, armed
with a spade, had crept over the parapet and walked coolly out into
the open.
And again, just as it reached the mound, a shell screamed and the
earth yawned--and when Mark recovered consciousness, he was lying on
his face a good many yards nearer his own trenches, himself half
buried in the debris of that other mound, which was now no more. He
thanked God the boy was dead; but the memory of that twenty-four
hours had haunted him for weeks; and now with pitiless persistence it
haunted his dreams.
The fact that he could neither speak nor shake off mental obsessions
by a rousing walk, aggravated their tyranny over him; and there were
times when it crazed him, almost, to lie there, like a felled tree,
powerless even to ask how he could let his dear ones know he was
alive.
One morning, in such a mood, he tried to convey by gesture this
question that so troubled him; and, to his delight, Sœur Colette
understood almost at once. No, Monsieur could neither send nor
receive letters until the good day when "les poilus" or "les Tommies"
came to their rescue. And Monsieur had lost his talisman.
Mark's left hand went quickly to his throat. It was true. The
precious silver disc and silver chain were gone. He glanced at his
wrist. No leather-coated watch--his mother's gift. Filled with
sudden, acute dismay, he went through the dumb show of feeling in
coat-pockets.
Again Sœur Colette understood and shook her head. There was
nothing in Monsieur's coat--nothing at all. Monsieur le docteur
could discover neither his name nor his regiment. In proof of her
statement, she brought him the coat. It was rifled very completely.
His flask, his gold pencil--Sheila's present--his letter-case and
letters--all gone. The very buttons and badges had been neatly
removed; a finishing touch that suggested the gentle German.
And Mark lay there realising that, unless and until he recovered his
speech, he was lost, absolutely--even his identity gone.
He was not merely a log, but a nameless log. He chafed at the
ignominy of it, as a man in sore straits will chafe at a trifle, yet
endure the worst with fortitude.
Suddenly, with vast relief, he remembered his brogues. If only he
could tell Sœur Colette to look inside them!
But the attempt produced such wild and ludicrous misunderstandings
that the little nun grew embarrassed and Mark gave it up in despair.
Perhaps his brogues had also been stolen by the Germans. After all,
his precious name was no earthly use to him at present, and the
future was a blank.
In this monotonous fashion the first weeks of November ebbed away.
On the whole they were left in peace, except for periodical
incursions of a rough-mannered German officer with aggressive
moustaches, a high narrow forehead, and unmistakable Prussian eyes.
It was his joke, when in a humorous mood, to bid the fierce little
doctor hurry up with his contributions for the nearest prison camp in
the Fatherland. More than once he infuriated Mark by alluding to him
as "that English swine." But it was the thinly-veiled insolence of
the man's manner to Sœur Colette that made him long most
vehemently for command of his hands and tongue. Happily for himself,
and for those who loved him, he could do no more than glare and
clench a hidden fist.
On one occasion it chanced that Captain Adler encountered the flame
of impotent wrath in his eyes, and the sight appeared to tickle his
Teutonic sense of humour. With deliberate relish and a sneering
smile he looked Mark over from head to foot, then turned to the
doctor who stood near, inwardly nervous, outwardly fiercer than ever.
"Doubtless the hoch wohlgeboren a without-fear-or-reproach knight
is," he remarked, with a contemptuous jerk of his thumb. "But never
again will he for the fair-and-distressed lady of his admiration one
blow of revenge strike."
Mark could only set his teeth. Sœur Colette, who knew a little
German, bent very low over the young Frenchman she was feeding; and
the Prussian, chuckling audibly, swung out of the barn.
That afternoon there came a lull in the unceasing rain and wind. The
sky cleared and the sun shone out with a divine effulgence upon all
the ruin and tragedy wrought by man.
Since Mark's arrival there had been only one such golden interval.
It had lasted several days, and he had succeeded in conveying his
great wish to be out in the open. So to-day the little doctor and
his orderly carried him, bed and all, into the homely garden.
There, storm-draggled chrysanthemums made patches of colour. Stray
leaves of Virginia creeper flamed on the walls; and the farmhouse
itself gaped roofless to the indifferent heavens. A dovecot,
battered and empty of doves, leaned drunkenly against the barn that
was their hospital. The poplars behind it, etched delicately upon
the blue, had been stripped, in this terrible autumn, of branches as
well as leaves; and the fields beyond were pock-marked by shell fire.
Yet peasant women still patiently tended the wounded earth and its
products.
Some way off, on rising ground, stood the feudal chateau--what
remained of it: headless turrets, gables shattered and distorted;
windows, like empty eye-sockets, mere gaping holes. And the garden,
beneath, sloping downward to the river, was a chaos of trampled
shrubberies and twisted iron.
Mark, in his utter loneliness, cut off from letters and activity and
the companionable gift of speech, could, at least, thank God for the
"silver streak" and the grey battleships that preserved his own most
sacred treasures from a like fate. But thought of those treasures so
tormented him and roused such a buzzing swarm of questions, that he
refrained--as far as possible--from futile excursions into the future
or the past; and he began to grow impatient for the advent of Sœur
Colette with his chocolate.
He accepted, without after-thought, the fact that it was always she
who attended him and entertained him; nor was he disposed to quarrel
with the arrangement. He had discovered by this time why she created
about him an atmosphere of home and of assurance that all was well.
Dreaming one night of Sheila, he had waked in the morning to find
Sœur Colette standing by his bed; and the haunting sense of
familiarity was a puzzle no longer.
For a moment Mark had fancied he must still be dreaming. Then the
nun spoke and the illusion vanished. But the charm remained; a charm
that carried him back to early days before Bel's disturbing witchery
had changed the complexion of life. In his isolation and bitter
uncertainty, he surrendered himself, instinctively, to this blessed
illusion of home. It was his one real solace throughout those grey,
interminable weeks.
What their one-sided talks and increasing friendliness might mean to
Sœur Colette he neither knew, nor sought to know. As a nun, he
deemed her sacred, a being set apart. He was apt to forget--as the
insolent Adler never forgot--that a nun is nevertheless a woman. But
to-day, as the minutes lagged past and she did not appear, there
stirred in him an emotion other than mere impatience--an emotion
belonging to that virile world where a man could walk and talk and
fight and hold a woman in his arms.
He checked himself sharply. That would never do. It was almost as
if, through this unknown Frenchwoman, the spirit of Sheila were
drawing him back to his old allegiance that, in those July days
before the deluge, had been on the verge--he knew it now--of
blossoming into a strong and deep love. And she--? Had she,
possibly, begun to care? But that also, would never do. He had
chosen; or, to be more accurate, Bel had chosen and he had succumbed.
He surveyed his great prostrate figure almost with disgust. Would
Bel, as revealed in her recent letters, have any use for a lover who
could neither pay her compliments nor take her in his arms? Strange
how, in these few weeks, she seemed to have slipped away from him.
Even her face eluded his memory. It was the face and form of his
virile little mother that was most constantly with him in these days.
Now, deliberately, he called up a vision of an earlier Bel--unknown,
irresistible, ardently desired--sitting on a rock beside the burn
awaiting his avowal, while he fondly believed her dreaming her own
dreams. This time memory played him no tricks; and the very
vividness of the scene intensified his dawning perception of a
change, gradual, indefinable, that had crept into their relation
since war wrenched them apart. Her first letters, he remembered, had
bothered him; and he had found the same lack, the same touch of
artificiality in those that had followed him to France. His very
hunger for them had only increased the vague disappointment they so
often produced. He recalled a remark of hers: "Separations are
rather uncanny things." Curiously true--in her own case. While she
was with him, it seemed, she approximated instinctively to the woman
he would have her be. Without him, she became simply the product of
her unsatisfactory antecedents.
Well, he had lost her letters with the rest of his kit; and on the
whole he was not sorry....
Just as impatience revived afresh, Sœur Colette and the chocolate
appeared at last.
Sight of her recalled the morning's incident and she saw the
recollection in his eyes.
"Monsieur must not so concern himself on my account," she said, after
apologies for the delay. "If Monsieur could know what one has seen,
what one has passed through unharmed, since they drove us from our
convent! I have no fear. I am shielded by Our Lady!"
For a few seconds Mark looked hard at her. Then, to her amazement,
he blurted out two words, the first he had uttered for a month.
"Tell me," he said. His voice sounded strange; but he had produced
the right words, and he saw his own exultation repeated in her eyes.
"Ah, Monsieur!" she cried. "It will come at last--the miracle. We
have prayed without ceasing. And now--one must obey Monsieur's first
command! But it is a story too terrible for altogether telling,
Monsieur understands?"
Monsieur understood very well; but he had a great wish to know more
of this sainted woman, who smiled with Sheila's smile and spoke with
her voice. So in the quiet of that golden afternoon she told
him--sitting on the doctor's camp-stool--of the town in Northern
France that was her home, and of the bombardment that was the
beginning of sorrows; when people lived in their cellars under the
shadow of a greater fear than the fear of death. For after the
shells came the Uhlans, demanding money and wine and women; above all
wine and more wine, drowning their manhood so that no form of
brutality came amiss.
With the same unimpassioned detachment, she told him of her own
Sisterhood that, in pity, had stayed to help the wounded, and of "la
petite Pauline." A novice, beautiful and spirited, she had resented
the coarse gallantry of certain German soldiers. Her contempt had
roused the devil in them. Embraces not willingly given, must be
taken by force.
"And she--poor innocent--she died in my arms, crazed with terror and
torment. And they laughed ... those devils!" She was silent a
moment, looking out over the disfigured landscape. "Monsieur, there
are things that even the good God Himself can surely never forgive."
Rising abruptly, she left him--haunted, enraged, half wishing he had
not asked for her tale. Yet these were the very abominations that,
if ever he reached home again, must be remembered, verified, and
mercilessly avenged. She was right, that small fearless woman: there
were things that God Himself could not forgive.
From that day there came a slight change in Mark's happy relation
with Sœur Colette. Her likeness to Sheila worried him now, almost
as much as it had charmed him before. The sense of having
unconsciously slipped away from Bel set him idealising her afresh;
regilding her halo, till she became again almost the Bel of that July
afternoon in the glen, before the shock of her repudiation had
temporarily shaken his faith and love.
Sœur Colette, dimly aware of some jar in their communion, suffered
her own private shock of awakening. While all went smoothly, she had
suspected nothing. Now she knew--and shame overwhelmed her. While
her lips had prayed daily for the victorious return of French or
British soldiers, her heart, dedicated to the Mother of God, had been
secretly dreading the end of this, the one idyll of her saintly life.
And because she shrank from confession of that most human lapse, she
devised for herself certain penances that failed signally to still
the strange new disturbance within.
At last, on a day, the dull thunder she had prayed for reverberated
along the horizon. By slow degrees it rolled nearer, steadily
nearer, till Mark could distinguish the familiar note of bursting
shells. Then it was that he began to ask himself--would the Germans
think him worth taking along with them as a prisoner of war?
He hoped they might not even be given time to save their own skins.
CHAPTER II
"So hard it seems that one must bleed
Because another needs will bite!
All round we find cold nature slight
The feelings of the totter-knee'd."
MEREDITH.
Lady Forsyth sat in her bedroom window-seat, looking out over the
terrace to the restless pine woods tossed and tumbled by the wind.
Masses of grey cloud sagged low above the trees. Here and there
patches of fragile blue showed fitfully. Then the sun took courage
and flashed a pale smile from between two scurrying clouds.
Gradually the sky cleared. The wet flags of the terrace gleamed like
polished steel. Drenched and dismal trees stood suddenly
transfigured. Every leaf and twig flaunted a diamond.
"How Mark would love it!" was the mother's instinctive thought: and
closing her eyes a moment she lifted her face to the sun's caress.
The clear light revealed lines that had not been there in August.
She had passed through deep waters, this bereaved woman, who refused
to own herself bereaved: and in some ways the past week had seemed
the longest, the hardest of all. While Bel mourned her lover as
dead, she, who refused to mourn her son, had been subjected to
requests for photographs and details for obituary notices. She had
been threatened with a fresh epidemic of condolences; and, finally,
in self-defence, had sent a brief notice to the _Times_, and _Morning
Post_, announcing that Sir Mark Forsyth's family had not yet given up
hope. Let them denounce her for a fool if they chose! The flame
within still burned on; tremulous, unquenchable.
When she looked down again, two figures had appeared on the terrace:
Sheila and Mr. Seldon, moving very slowly, deep in talk. The man was
tall and thin, with a small, aristocratic head. He could not yet
walk without crutches; but, by a miracle of surgery, the leg had been
saved. He seemed a homeless creature: parents dead; married sister
in India; and Sheila had begged that he might spend part of his
convalescence at Wynchcombe Friars.
She was quite frankly interested in his new development. Whether
that interest went deeper, Lady Forsyth found it hard to tell; the
more so, that she felt doubtful how far Sheila had ever let herself
go in respect of Mark. That she loved him was certain, and natural
enough; but the extent and nature of that love was her own most
hidden secret, kept under lock and key.
Lady Forsyth herself had hoped honestly, for Sheila's sake, that the
girl's heart was not given irrevocably to Mark. Yet here she was,
with her native inconsistency, resenting the least sign that it might
have strayed elsewhere. She had the grace to remind herself that
Sheila--by temperament and by her own shy confession--was made for
marriage, for motherhood. But--it must not be Seldon. On that point
Helen was unwavering: though, in spite of drawbacks, she liked the
man. She found him clever, interesting, and annoyingly
self-conscious. Sheila, it seemed, had complete faith in his
remarkable transmutation. Helen privately doubted whether it would
outlast the stimulus of the war. She even suspected him of playing
up to the girl's new view of him in the hope that so he might win her
after all.
Well, Sheila was strong enough and wise enough to work out her own
salvation; but there were moments when Helen was half tempted to wish
that Mr. Seldon had stuck to his desert station and his whisky.
By now the fugitive gleam had brought two more figures into the
garden: Ralph Melrose, with his left arm in a sling, and Mona's young
step-brother, Eldred Laurence: an infant of twenty who had been
through everything from Mons to Ypres. He limped badly and wore a
bandage over one eye. Both boys, Helen perceived, had brought back
from their great ordeal an engaging modesty and cheerfulness; a truer
perspective of things in general. And they were not rare phenomena.
They were average specimens of their kind; standing proofs of the
hard paradox that "the senseless, devilish, bestial thing" called War
had, even in a few months, done more to lift and enlarge the
characters of those who waged it, in a right spirit, than a decade of
material prosperity and peace.
These three convalescents, and one other, represented Helen's
household of the moment. That other was the Rev. George Wilton,
Wynchmere's new curate. In an impulse of kindliness--since
regretted--Helen had succumbed to the importunity of Mrs. Clutterbuck
on his behalf. With a battalion temporarily billeted on the little
town, there were simply no "rooms" to be had; none, at least, that
suited the Rev. Wilton's fastidious taste. The one Hotel was
over-crowded with officers. Three subalterns had invaded the
Vicarage and Mrs. Clutterbuck was in a quiver of anxiety over the
possible effect upon her two plain daughters of khaki and frivolous
conversation for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. If "dear Lady
Forsyth" would take pity on Mr. Wilton, it would be an "act of
Christian kindness," and who knew but she might find herself
entertaining an angel unawares!
She had entertained the angel for a week, now, and was only aware of
having stumbled on a specimen of sanctified snobbery, who annoyed her
to exasperation. Though she numbered among her friends more than one
Scottish Minister, the average English curate had a knack of setting
all her bristles on end: and Mr. Wilton was the average curate--with
aggravations.
"He is what Americans would call a 'bromide,'" she had written to
Keith shortly after his arrival. "He discovers the obvious with
enthusiasm. He asks me for the toast or the salt as apologetically
as if he were asking for a five pound note; and he says '_Eg_-zactly'
to every word I utter--almost before it's out! When I'm in a really
wicked mood, I contradict myself wildly just to test his mental and
moral agility! I'm convinced I shall catch him out one day, backing
up compulsion, or the right of churchmen to defend their country.
And he's dead against both. By which you may see that I'm badly
needing the two of you to keep me in order...."
By this time it was four o'clock. The strollers had gone in for tea:
and as Helen rose to join them, the "angel unawares" came flapping
down the path through the rose-garden, a neatly folded mackintosh and
an unrolled umbrella hanging over his left arm.
There had been a partial movement of troops. He had been out to "try
his luck": and in that one respect, at least, she was his fervent
well-wisher.
She found them all in the drawing-room and Sheila making tea.
"Couldn't wait for you, Mums," she apologised. "The kettle was
having a fit!"
The two subalterns rose at her entrance. But it was Wilton who
secured her favourite chair and pushed it a couple of inches nearer
the table.
"I hope you didn't have your long wet walk in vain?" she said; and he
turned an eloquent eye upon her as he sank back among his cushions.
"I think not. But even if I had, I cannot pretend I should have
suffered serious disappointment." His gaze wandered appreciatively
round the firelit room. "It has been such a pleasure--such a
privilege... Muffins? Sandwiches?"
He proffered them with eager empressement; and proceeded to recount,
in minutest detail, the happy chance by which he believed he had at
last secured the good cooking, the south aspect and the unlimited
supply of hot water indispensable to his well-being.
Lady Forsyth, it must be admitted, listened with only one ear. The
other was attentively following a discussion between Ralph and
Laurence as to the best means of making a sheltered, complacent
people "sit up and begin to take notice of the scrap across the
water."
Laurence was for compulsion; Ralph for a vigorous revival of his
Majesty's Opposition; and Helen was a keen advocate of both.
Skilfully and politely, she slipped away from the vexed question of
curtains and pictures to the more congenial occupation of
reconstructing the Government, and "rounding up" the slackers who
were obviously "waiting to be fetched."
"Nothing short of _that_," she concluded in her emphatic fashion,
"will disturb their casual conviction that England can beat Germany
with one hand tied behind her back."
It was a subject on which she was apt to wax hot, even a trifle
caustic; but never, since Wilton's arrival, had she spoken with such
vehemence as she felt suddenly moved to do by sheer irritation at his
womanish fiddle-faddling. For a while he listened in mute amazement,
with the bird-like tilt of his head and eyes riveted on her face.
Then, as she paused to empty her cup, he leaned a little towards her.
"But _dear_ Lady Forsyth," he asked in his slowest, silkiest tones,
"how, precisely, would you define that somewhat loose term of
disparagement--a slacker?"
"A self-regarding, spiritual sluggard," she answered him with a
straight look. "Is that precise enough? The 'slacker'--so far as I
understand the breed--would rather _not_ see England share the fate
of Belgium; but would very _much_ rather not risk his life or limbs,
to avert the calamity. At best, he is afflicted with a disease
called 'humanitarianism,' that would have men save their skins at the
cost of everything that makes their skins worth saving. At worst, he
simply shirks his obvious duty for the sake of his own peace and
comfort."
"Hear, hear!" from the three convalescents and from Wilton a faint
gasp of dismay.
"_Eg_-zactly," he murmured automatically, fingering his remnant of
cake. "But that sounds ... _just_ a little sweeping; not to say
severe."
With a sigh of impatience, Lady Forsyth rose and went over to the
fire. Her cheeks were flushed; but her hands and feet were cold.
"Certain sorts of people _require_ a dash of severity," she remarked
to the room at large. "Browning was right. There are some souls
'terror must burn the truth into'... A good many in these islands,
high and low."
Wilton nervously cleared his throat. "Ah--Browning," he struck in,
evading the issue. "A stimulating writer. Rather too rough and
obscure for my taste."
"That's not the point." She dismissed his taste impatiently.
Interruption annoyed her when she was well under way. "The point is
terror burning the truth into people, who have a positive genius for
shutting their eyes to it--if it's likely to make them uncomfortable.
One wonders, will even these unmasked Germans convince our
intellectuals that evil in all its forms is a deadly reality, to be
fought and conquered; not a sort of moral indigestion to be cured
with sugar-coated tabloids! Between science and civilisation, we've
exploded hell and chloroformed the devil. And if we're properly
advanced, we can't even commit sin. We are merely the victims of
environment or inherited tendencies. Nothing like the polysyllable
steam-roller for flattening out awkward facts! Take the case of the
slacker. What does his argument amount to in Saxon English? 'I
don't see the force of risking my life for my country.' But deck it
out in polysyllables, and you can conjure it into quite a lofty
sentiment. You try, Mr. Wilton, in your next sermon----"
"Hullo, here comes Sheila's scarlet spider." Ralph's voice from the
window-seat broke the thread of her monologue and saved the slightly
staggered curate from further discomfiture. "A wire for one of us!"
Lady Forsyth started. "Keith!" was her instant thought. "Ralph,
dear, run and get it," she said. "Hester's out."
An odd silence fell till he reappeared. "For you," he said, "and the
imp's waiting."
With a sudden leap of conviction, she tore it open and read: "Sir
Mark Forsyth is alive and wounded but safe. I have letter from
France. Posting to-night."
It was signed by Mark's bootmaker at Winchester. But, at the moment,
her brain took in nothing beyond the incredible fact. Mark was
there--across the Channel. She could go to him....
"Any answer?" Ralph asked.
She shook her head. Then, suddenly, she looked up, with a strange,
uncertain smile. "Mark is alive--safe!" she said, an uncontrollable
note of triumph in her low voice.
She saw Sheila rise; heard disjointed sounds from the four men: then
a rush of tears blinded her, and she hurried out of the room.
It was some time before Sheila joined her. She, who had shared all,
knew that the mother's first ecstasy of reprieve was a matter between
her own soul and God. And Sheila herself found it hard to speak
calmly of this great news. The blaze of it made one realise what a
shadowy thing hope had been at best.
She found Lady Forsyth sitting over her fire drowned fathoms deep in
the wonder of it all. Undried tears gleamed on her cheeks and the
precious telegram lay unheeded on the floor.
Sheila knelt down by her and they clung together in silence. Then,
casually, Sheila picked up the telegram. "I want--to see it
written," she murmured with a sudden stab of recollection. "But--why
Jevons?"
"That's the mystery. Why should he get a letter about my boy? And
what's wrong with Mark that he didn't write himself? Oh my dear,
what marvels of perversity we are! Here have I kept myself going for
weeks by the firm belief that we must get him back: and now it's
come, I'm a shivering sceptic. I have almost to pinch myself to make
sure it's not a dream."
But Sheila standing by her was reading the telegram over and over.
"It's no dream," she said. "It's--a miracle. I suppose we can't
wire to Mr. Macnair or Colonel Munro till you get that letter.
But--there's Bel."
"Yes--there's Bel." A pause. "I hope the shock of joy will unfreeze
her. She'd better come here, if she can. Get me a form, darling,
and see if the men are happy. I'd like to sit here peacefully till
dinner--and think about my boy."
Sheila dropped a kiss on her hair and vanished: not for long.
"Quite happy, are they? _All_ of them?" Lady Forsyth asked when the
wire had been despatched. "I'm pricked with faint compunction over
the curate man. He roused the devil in me with his hot bath and his
art curtains. But I didn't mean to hit quite so hard...."
Sheila's eyes twinkled. "I'm afraid we all loved it! And you
needn't be pricked with compunction, Dearest. I found him on the
drawing-room sofa, quite audibly asleep, with his mouth open!"
"There are _some_ souls...!" Helen confided to the blazing logs.
That evening was the liveliest that the convalescents had experienced
at Wynchcombe Friars. After dinner Lady Forsyth played to them for
the first time. Music was the one adequate outlet for her pent-up
emotion. She chose only triumphal themes and she played them
triumphantly. Let her audience understand if they chose.
Seldon, ensconced in an armchair by the fire, listened with rapt
attention, his neat profile cut like a cameo on the oak panelling
beyond. Sheila sat near him on the wide fender-stool, absorbed in
her own thoughts.
Suddenly when the music was loudest he leaned towards her over the
arm of his chair.
"Miss Melrose," he said in a low voice. "Do tell me, who is--Bel?
Is she a connection? What's her other name?"
Sheila started and looked round.
"Alison," she said, "Bel Alison. She's engaged--to Sir Mark. Why?
D'you know her?"
"I seem to remember the name," he answered evasively. "A tall,
striking-looking girl?"
"Yes." His manner pricked Sheila's curiosity; but she did not repeat
her question.
"Coming to-morrow, is she?"
"Yes," Sheila said again; and this time a wild possibility darted
through her brain.
Seldon, frowning and biting his lip, still scrutinised the fire.
"Sounds like a girl--I met one summer," he remarked casually. "Odd
if it is the same.--And she's to be mistress of all this? She's in
luck. Sir Mark, I take it, is a very fine fellow?"
"A very fine fellow," the girl answered; and for a few minutes Seldon
seemed to ponder her statement. Then, with an odd jerk of his head,
he abruptly changed the subject.
"A treat to hear playing like that. What with gramaphones and
things, people won't be bothered nowadays. And she's got such a
ripping touch."
"She's inspired to-night," Sheila said, glancing towards the slender
upright figure in the dull blue teagown, shot through with gold,
woven for her by Mark's people and designed by Mark himself.
Seldon, it was evident, would say no more about Bel. That in itself
lent colour to the wild possibility that Sheila hoped, for Mark's
sake, was too wild to be true. The bare chance of it so troubled her
that long after she had soothed Lady Forsyth into a deep sleep, she
lay wide-eyed, in her own little room, wondering and dreading and
piecing things together; wishing fervently that Seldon had held his
tongue.
Well, to-morrow she would see them together; and Bel, ignorant of Mr.
Seldon's anonymous confidences, would almost certainly give herself
away.
CHAPTER III
"She gave no vine of Love to rear,
Love's wine drank not; yet bent her ear
To themes of Love no less."
MEREDITH.
Next morning, in spite of her vigil, Sheila appeared earlier than
usual in Lady Forsyth's room, to share tea and letters--especially
letters. And there failed not the envelope with the Winchester
postmark.
The bootmaker--respectfully amazed and delighted--begged to enclose a
letter in French whose contents he had learnt from a Belgian refugee.
It was written in Sœur Colette's fine clear hand; and beneath her
modest signature a circle of sealing-wax bore the Forsyth crest.
At sight of it the mother's tears started. "Oh, I'm an idiot. Read
it to me, darling," she said handing the letter to Sheila. And
Sheila read in a low steady voice, the plain tale, simple yet
astonishing, of Mark's threefold reprieve from death: of the mystery
that surrounded him till Sœur Colette--who attributed every detail
to the goodness of God and the Holy Virgin--discovered his name and
regiment written inside his brogues; of the victorious French Army
that returned at last, scattering and annihilating "les Boches" so
that there was scant time for collecting sick prisoners or indeed for
anything but a hurried retreat upon stronger positions.
"But already," continued the writer, "M. le docteur had of his wisdom
made them to suppose that Monsieur was without hope of recovery. May
the good God forgive him that deception so well-intended. Possessing
no other address, I venture to report these matters to M. le
cordonnier, trusting that they may yet arrive to the relations of
Monsieur Sir Forsyth who is of a courage and patience unsurpassed.
Having power to move his left hand he has pressed with his own ring
the wax one has spilt upon this page for a message to Madame his
mother. If one should come soon and take him to Paris, M. le docteur
has great hope that in time he will walk and speak as before."
Thus Sœur Colette, in her saintly simplicity; and neither of the
women, who read and read again the letter she had written, with tears
and prayers, caught a glimpse of the idyll that had saddened and
glorified her life. They had far too much, on their own account, to
think of, to give thanks for, and to do.
"Oh, if I could only pack up and start this instant!" was the cry of
Helen's impatient spirit. "And he, lying paralysed, all these
weeks--my poor darling!"
The first obvious move was a telegram to Keith, care of Colonel
Munro, whom he kept informed of his movements: more telegrams to
relations and friends; and--a letter to Mark. Life was suddenly real
again; purposeful, genuinely worth living.
Soon after breakfast came a wire from Bel. "Thanks for splendid
news. Arriving Westover 4.15."
"I'll take the car out and meet her," Sheila announced with decision.
Something in her tone made Lady Forsyth look up from the letter she
was writing. "Very sweet of you, my lamb," she said: but Sheila knew
that sweetness had nothing whatever to do with it. "Crown your
virtue by giving his Reverence a lift into Wynchmere as you go
through. We shall scarcely escape tears at parting! The fleshpots
and the title and the joy of casually airing it can be trusted to
eclipse all my egregious remarks."
It seemed she was not far wrong. After lunch Wilton hovered about
like a tame rook, murmuring plaintive platitudes, lamenting his
inability to put into adequate words ... and so on and so forth. But
at the last, spurred by inexorable sounds without, he found, in one
breath, the adequate word and the courage to speak it.
"_Dear_ Lady Forsyth," he murmured bowing over her hand. "It has
been such a privilege. Quite a liberal education. So hard to tear
oneself away! At lunch I was wishing--forgive the audacity--that I
had the luck to be your son. Then I need never go away."
"My son?" She started and changed colour: at that moment it was the
last audacity she felt disposed to forgive. "If you were my son, Mr.
Wilton, you'd have to go a good deal farther than Wynchmere. I
should send you straight out to France--where you ought to be now."
The startled curate drew back as if from a blow. "But my cloth--my
sacred calling----"
She gave him a direct look. "It may surprise you," she said. "But I
have looked carefully through the ordering of priests and the
Thirty-nine Articles and I can find there no admonition whatever that
churchmen shall abstain from bearing arms in defence of their
country. And look at the French priests. Hundreds of them in the
ranks; lifting the Church, by their manliness and courage, to a
position it has not occupied since the Revolution. I know several
clergymen, Scottish and English, with the colours. And I am quite
_sure_ their sacred calling has suffered no stain because they have
bayoneted a few Germans and quitted themselves like men. They will
preach sermons worth hearing, those brave fellows ... if they win
through. It's men, real men, that we need if the Church is to regain
her lost hold on us all."
"_Eg_-zactly," he agreed inadvertently, to her huge delight.
"Well then--why not go out and qualify----?"
"Impossible, dear lady, impossible." He reddened distressfully
lifting one long hand as if to ward off the devil in person.
"Others--I would not presume to judge. Every man is ultimately
responsible to the Inner Light. And _my_ conscience would never
permit----"
"That settles it," she interposed briskly, without a touch of
flippancy. "We can't start a full-dress debate on the doorstep; Miss
Melrose has a train to meet. I hope the hot water and the cooking
and the curtains will leave nothing to be desired. I mean it," she
added with her kindest smile, and handed him over to Sheila, who had
found some difficulty in dispensing with the services of Ralph.
Wilton was abnormally silent all the way to Wynchmere; and Sheila was
absorbed in her driving and her own thoughts. At intervals the
pensive curate glanced at her under his eyelids; appraised her
charming profile--a shade too resolute for his taste--and her capable
handling of the machine. Yet his thoughts were practical rather than
sentimental. Thanks to a natural genius for gleaning personal items,
he already knew that Sheila Melrose possessed advantages which
distinctly enhanced her charming profile. In the common phrase of
parish gossips there was "plenty of money going" at Westover Court.
Mrs. Melrose, he learnt, was a Burlton, daughter of a great steel
magnate in the North; married, by some queer freak of fate, to George
Melrose, the distinguished antiquarian. Melrose, himself,--shy and
clever, drowned fathoms deep in his researches--appeared to spend
most of his time in Egypt, where Sheila had stayed with him on her
way from India. Not even the War, nor a very real affection for his
youngest daughter, had power to lure him back to the uncongenial
atmosphere of the old home he had once so loved that, in order to
save it, he had married money. Then, too late, a lucky speculation
had considerably increased his own private means; and, as Westover
Court had become a stronghold of the entire Burlton family, he had
found it expedient to spend a good deal of his time elsewhere.
Wynchmere had duly given the new curate its garbled history of the
Melrose _ménage_; but for Wilton the chief point of interest lay in
the assurance that all three daughters would be well dowered; and
this one was an open favourite at Wynchcombe Friars. Decidedly, if
it came to business, the youngest Miss Melrose would do very well.
The glow of this secret decision made his limp handshake at parting a
degree less limp than usual: but Sheila wore thick driving gloves and
was visibly in a hurry to be gone.
At Westover station she annexed Bel--radiant, friendly, and eager for
further news.
"Sheila--is it stark true?" she asked as they spun along between bare
hedges. "Have you got the mysterious letter? Who wrote it? Please
tell everything."
And Sheila told--keeping her eyes on the wheel.
At the word "paralysis" Bel started.
"Oh, how horrible! So disfiguring.--I suppose Lady Forsyth will go
out to him. And she believed it all the time. Isn't she a wonder?
_I_ can't, even now. Not till I see him and feel him----"
There flashed a vivid memory of her first drive along this familiar
road, when Mark had sat beside her in the August sunlight: and she
fell silent, thinking her own thoughts.
Sheila had just braced herself to a casual mention of Seldon, when
Bel spoke again.
"Any wounded at Wynchcombe Friars just now?"
"Yes, three of them. Ralph--almost well. Mona's brother, Mr.
Laurence. Such a delightful boy; and Mr. Seldon, an Indian civilian.
Came over as a despatch-rider----"
"Seldon? From India?" It was enough. Sheila knew now that the wild
possibility was true. "A thin dark man, is he? Clever and rather
good-looking?"
"Yes. Have you been in India?"
Sheila looked round now, curious to see if Bel were the least put out
by the reappearance of a lover she had cruelly hurt and deceived. On
the contrary she seemed interested and rather amused. "No. I met
him on leave in Cornwall, some years ago. Odd he should turn up
again here!"
"Not so very," Sheila said with her small smile. "You see, he's a
friend of mine. I met him in India and we've corresponded ever
since. Then he came over to France: and I found him one day among
the wounded at Boulogne."
"Oh, _you_ know him too!" Bel's amusement increased visibly. "D'you
like him? I thought him rather a poor specimen."
"The war has brought out all the best in him," Sheila remarked.
Every moment she grew angrier with Bel; angrier, and more resolute to
get at the truth--in good time. For months she had been sitting down
severely on her own deep-seated jealousy and pain; and this final
proof of Bel's utter unworthiness, coming at such a moment, seemed to
shake the foundations of things.
Some women, it appeared, were privileged to go about the world sowing
pain and reaping adulation: and Sheila, whose creed was acceptance,
was still young enough to be badly tripped up, on occasion, by the
bewildering injustices of life. It was her private opinion that Bel
deserved to be hurt, and probably never would be. Not that she
consciously sat in judgment. There was nothing of the prig in her
composition. But, because her heart was the biggest thing about her,
she held peculiarly sacred the hearts of men, that, for Bel and her
kind, are so many counters on the gaming-tables of life. Small,
contained creature though she was, sins of passion or emotion were
the sins she could most readily understand and condone. It was Bel's
smiling, unassailable selfishness that alienated and enraged her.
And Mark, with his fiery sensitive spirit, at the mercy of such an
one for life! The thought of it was almost more than she could bear.
For Bel, herself, Sheila was simply a rather sweet person who did not
count in the least. Nothing counted much, at the moment, except Mark
and his unbelievable resurrection. Yet she had no intention of going
out with Lady Forsyth. That was not her way. Certain of his coming,
she could wait. Meantime her resurgent spirit, hungry for enjoyment,
saw possibilities in the Seldon coincidence that might serve to pass
the time.
She turned smilingly to the suppressed volcano at her side.
"I say, Sheila, does Mr. Seldon know I'm coming? Does he know ...
I'm engaged to Mark?"
"Yes. We spoke of it last night."
"Did he say anything about meeting me before?"
"He seemed to remember the name," Sheila answered casually. It was
the truth, if not the whole truth; and she could not resist the
chance of administering a flick to Bel's omnivorous vanity. The
flick told. It also goaded Bel into further revelations than she had
intended.
"I fancy he'll remember more than my name when we meet," she
remarked, looking out over the sodden December landscape. "Not so
very long ago I was accused of having spoilt his life and broken his
heart: a tougher organism than sentimental people care to admit!"
Sheila betrayed no surprise. She would not condescend to feign
ignorance. "You could hardly expect him to parade a broken heart in
the circumstances," was all she said.
Bel laughed. "Well hit! What a practical person you are. I merely
thought he might have told you, as you correspond and are evidently
great friends."
Sheila did not answer. She was skilfully manipulating a sharp turn
into the town. Bel watched her in frank admiration.
"How awfully well you drive! Who taught you?"
"Mr. Macnair."
"Oh! _I_ always feel that man being horribly critical underneath.
But you're evidently privileged! Is _he_--another great friend?"
"Yes."
"Mark, too! You've quite a talent in that line."
Sheila felt the light scratch under the velvet tone, and turned her
clear eyes full on Bel.
"You mean--they don't fall in love with me? Well, sometimes
friendship is the higher compliment."
"Sour grapes!" reflected Bel. Aloud she said sweetly: "It's a
compliment no man has ever paid me yet. And I can do very well with
... the other thing. Even if it results in only seeming to remember
my name!"
That was all for the moment. But it set Sheila thoroughly on edge;
nor were matters improved by Bel's behaviour throughout the evening.
Seldon she greeted without a shadow of embarrassment; asked after
mutual acquaintances in Cornwall; smilingly held his gaze a moment;
then, as it were, consigned him to Sheila, who missed no item of the
by-play between them.
Later on, though ostensibly devoting herself to Lady Forsyth and
young Laurence, Bel never for a moment allowed Seldon to be unaware
of her. It was a situation that appealed to all the actress in her;
and the whole performance was a piece of finished coquetry, perfect
of its kind.
As for Seldon, he clung to Sheila with nervous tenacity, as a man
might cling to a talisman against witchcraft; but his eyes and ears
and the back of his mind were intent on Bel. He talked in spasms and
his self-consciousness was more pronounced than ever. Painfully he
recalled the Seldon of Indian days: and before the evening was over
Sheila had arrived at wondering could he, with open eyes, revert to
the girl who had used him so ill? Were his love and friendship for
herself such mere card-houses that they could tumble to earth at a
flicker of Bel's long eyelashes, a careless word from her lips?
The bare supposition was unflattering to say the least. More; it was
a shock to her young, ardent faith in human nature. She had seen
this man rise--in a measure through love of her--above his lesser
self. She had been proud of him and for him. Though he could marry
neither of them, he was hers in a very special sense; and Bel had no
right to him whatever. But the heart, like the tongue, can no man
tame; and Seldon's whole manner to Sheila that evening conveyed the
mute attestation: "I am yours. Yet, if she beckons, I follow in
spite of myself."
It was not a heroic confession. It angered Sheila, even while it
moved her to pity. She hated the whole distracting affair: and felt
thankful that Lady Forsyth was incapable of perceiving anything but
the one supreme fact: thankful, even, that she would soon be gone.
Next day came a telegram from Keith bidding her get a passport to
Boulogne whither he would bring Mark--Authority permitting--in the
Forsyth-Macnair ambulance car. And for the time being, all lesser
matters were in abeyance.
Bel decided not to go; and Lady Forsyth was too relieved to press the
point. Sheila did most of the packing and dropped a few secret,
rebellious tears into Mark's valise. It hurt her bitterly that she
could not go too and complete the old happy quartet that had seemed
linked indissolubly till Bel stepped into the picture and upset
everything. She had a knack of unsettling things whenever she
appeared; and that without seeming to lift a finger. In a minor way,
she was doing it again; doing it admirably; while Sheila anointed
Mark's familiar ties and shirts with her tears.
Quite incidentally it occurred to Lady Forsyth that five young people
could not, without scandalising the proprieties, be left entirely to
themselves.
"It's ridiculous nonsense," she declared with a touch of impatience.
"And everyone's far too busy to be bothered. Bel, how about your
Harry? Not married, of course, but still----"
Bel smiled. "The more the safer, I suppose? It's quite a pretty
problem in arithmetic: how many women, unmarried, equal one woman,
married? Harry could come to-morrow, I think, for a few days."
"Good. And Mrs. Laurence might manage the week end. Wire at once,
dear, will you? Say I leave this afternoon. I can't put off going
for any Propriety-bogey in creation."
So that afternoon she set out on her glad errand, armed with letters
and messages of welcome to him who, for five weeks, had been counted
dead by all except two brave women in England and the two men who
sought him in France.
Harry wired that she would come next day, and throughout that
evening, Propriety--even in the person of Mrs. Clutterbuck--could
have found nothing to cavil at in the behaviour of the five young
people left temporarily unshepherded at Wynchcombe Friars.
Only Sheila became increasingly aware of the effect wrought upon
Seldon by Bel's discreetly veiled coquetry. Beneath his restlessness
and his half-defiant flippancy, she discerned the man's inner
flutterings that affected her like the sight of a live butterfly
impaled by a pin. She herself was quieter than usual; but under the
still surface her anger was rising steadily; and before dinner was
over, she knew that she could not sleep to-night, till she had spoken
her mind to Bel.
CHAPTER IV
"It is the worst of crimes to feel life so cheap, and make it so
expensive for other people."--MARY A. HAMILTON.
Punctually at ten she made a move; and as she bid Seldon good night
his eyes clung to her face with a pathetic mixture of apology and
appeal. It needed only that look to stiffen her resolve; though the
last thing she wanted at the moment was a quarrel with Bel. She
hoped it might not amount to that; but she felt half afraid of her
own inner tumult as she knocked lightly at Bel's door.
She found the girl already half undressed, sitting before her glass
in a cream-coloured wrapper, her pale hair falling to her waist. Her
face so framed, looked engagingly young. She was smiling frankly at
her own image; and an aftermath of the same smile served as greeting
to her unexpected visitor.
"Come for a talk? How nice of you!"
She indicated a chair near the fire; and Sheila, glad of the warmth,
set one silver-shod foot on the fender. But she remained standing--a
slim grey figure with a knot of turquoise blue at her waist and a
blue fillet threaded through the dark cloud of her hair.
So, for the first time, they seriously confronted one another, these
two----
"I'm not so sure," said Sheila slowly, "that you'll think it nice of
me when you hear what I have to say."
Bel's eyes expressed polite enquiry.
"Nothing very formidable, I hope? And, for Heaven's sake, don't be
tragic. I've had enough tragedy, all these weeks, to last me a
lifetime."
"So have ... most of us," Sheila put in quietly. "And there's no
question of tragedy, for any one, if you'll only leave poor Mr.
Seldon alone."
"Oh, that's all, is it? Hands off your property, in fact?"
"Nothing of the sort." Sheila's temper flared up, do what she would.
"Hands off a man who has suffered _more_ than enough on your account
already. I think if you realised how much----"
"Suffered--has he? And poured it all into your sympathetic ears? I
rather suspected he was gone on you."
"Well, then--why can't you let him be? Isn't one splendid lover
enough for you?"
"To possess--certainly," Bel answered with her invincible
good-humour. "That man Seldon's a mere invertebrate. But he's
clever, in his own way; and he amuses me. If you don't want him for
yourself, why in the world d'you bother about him?"
"Simply because he's a human being and he's made a plucky fight
against things, and--he's my friend."
"Why not mine too?"
"Friendship is not one of your gifts, Bel. The only kindness you can
do him is--what I said: let him alone. He mayn't be worth very much.
But he is worth something ... now. Even you'd admit that if you'd
seen him as I did, last autumn: a wretched cynical man with no heart
in his work. Drinking too, from sheer loneliness and ill-health.
And so obviously needing a woman in his life that it was hard to
refuse him. In the end--that I mightn't think too badly of him--he
told me about that summer in Cornwall. And ... to think it should
have been you!"
Something in her tone drew Bel's eyes to her face.
"Well, what harm? I didn't commit murder. I refused him--as you
did. That's all."
"It's _not_ all," Sheila flashed out. "Bel--don't prevaricate. He
... he told me everything."
Bel started and a faintly hostile gleam showed in her eyes. Then,
very deliberately, she combed back a lock that had fallen half over
her face.
"May I ask--what 'everything' amounted to?"
Sheila moistened her lips. "Well ... the way you simply made use of
him to secure that other man ... the married one. Mr. Seldon heard
afterwards that you--went away with him. That he didn't believe,
except when he felt bitter enough to believe anything. Bel--_is_ it
true? Any of it? I _must_ know."
She spoke with unguarded urgency; and Bel turned clear hard eyes upon
her. The hostile gleam was no longer faint.
"Why must you know what is entirely my own affair? In order to tell
Lady Forsyth, or Mark, and make trouble between us, after all I've
just been through? Model of virtue though you are, I believe you'd
give your beautiful violet eyes to put Mark out of love with me. But
you never will. Men don't easily leave off loving me. Mr. Seldon's
a case in point. I understand one side of them. And I understand it
thoroughly. Mark's a bit straight-laced about some things. But he's
tremendously a man. And he'll love _me_--worthless me--to the end of
the chapter, whatever I may have done, or do!"
Sheila--amazed, disgusted and angrier than ever--had listened so far
without interruption, simply because she could not trust herself to
speak. At that moment she hated Bel, as she had never hated any
fellow-being; and her white Northern anger would rather have vented
itself in blows than words. But, by this time, she had herself in
hand.
"_I_ tell Mark?" she said, on a note of concentrated scorn, ignoring
the implication of her motive. "It's for you to tell him--whatever
there is to tell."
Bel let out a breath of relief. "Then he'll remain in blessed
ignorance. Men don't bore us with a recital of their pre-nuptial
peccadilloes. They've too much sense. So why the dickens should we
inflict ours on them? I'm a modern woman, Sheila. You're not: for
all you're the younger. And Mark himself isn't quite modern enough
for my taste. It's my only quarrel with him."
She had quite recovered her complacence now. Tilting her head, she
swept the brush through her long fine hair: and Sheila stood watching
her a moment, fascinated unwillingly.
Then with a small sigh she sat down.
"I rather think," she said slowly, "that, if this war goes on long
enough, it is you up-to-date people who will end in being
out-of-date. But Bel--" she hesitated. Fuller knowledge would serve
no purpose save to increase her own secret misery. Yet, perversely,
she still wanted to know. "Are you admitting that what Mr. Seldon
heard was true?"
"Just true enough to be a spiteful lie," Bel answered enigmatically,
discarding her brush and resting her bare arms on the table. "What
are you getting at, you determined little person?"
"The truth--if I can. I don't want to be unjust to you."
"Very scrupulous!"
Bel paused a moment, smiling at her own image ... considering....
She was not given to verbal indiscretions, but she had her reckless
impulses: and with Sheila she instinctively knew herself safe; knew
that the truth demanded of her by this gentle, inexorable girl would
hurt the more because--for very love of Mark and his mother--Sheila
could be trusted to keep silence. Hidden knowledge of that kind
rankles and pricks, as Bel had learnt from experience; and her own
galling sense of Sheila's finer loyalty and courage made the impulse
to hurt and startle her irresistible.
"Well," she said at length, turning from the glass, just as Sheila
had given up hope of hearing more, "as you evidently won't play the
sneak, I don't mind admitting that I had every intention of going off
with that other man to Australia. I was at a loose end: in the mood
for any escape from humdrum England and sufficiently in love to be
tempted. It was Harry, with her awkward genius for rescue-work, who
upset the apple-cart. So my 'going off' with him amounted to no more
than a week end together at the Lizard----"
"Bel!"
"Don't look so scarified, my dear innocent! Heaps of the smartest
girls do that sort of thing;--or rather did, in happier days than
these. And properly modern-minded men condoned it. If you're for
giving women freedom you can't tie them by the leg to the
conventional moralities; and I wasn't going to take such a big risk
without due consideration. So he found rooms in a wee cottage at the
Lizard and we went there--as temporary brother and sister--to do the
considering. He behaved beautifully; and, in the end, we decided to
take the plunge. Harry happened to be in Cornwall just then,
tackling a troublesome 'case'. So I arranged to go to her and join
him in London when he wired. But somehow, she suspicioned what was
up: and as she believes in the emancipation of woman, I thought she'd
take it reasonably. However--she didn't; and there was the devil to
pay. I stood out against her; but she got at him and worked him up
over his precious children. So the great adventure fizzled out. And
Harry, having rescued me, has stuck to me ever since. I suppose some
of the fools at Bude heard we'd been to the Lizard and invented the
rest. There! That's the extent of my villainy. The whole thing's
dead and gone, and you must admit I'd be a prize fool to tell Mark.
He'd worry needlessly; and distrust me. Also needlessly. If any man
can hold a woman, it's Mark. Of course you think I'm not fit to
black his boots. I'm not. I've told him so. But it's me he wants,
my dear,--good or bad. Look here, though; not a word of all this to
your 'Mums.' She'd never forgive me."
"No. Never." Sheila's cheeks were flushed and her lips set. "I'm
not sure that ... Mark would either. I simply can't understand...."
"Didn't suppose you would." Bel smiled sweetly. "You're too
limited. That's the trouble with you good people----"
"Mark's not limited," Sheila broke out with sudden passion. "No more
is Mums. Oh--and to think I told her, without knowing it ... the
very day you two were out in the yacht----"
"That day? Really, this approaches the dramatic! But never you give
her the key to your story. Promise!"
Sheila sighed. "I'm not likely to--for her sake; though it isn't
easy keeping anything from Mums. We're so close to each other all
through."
"Well, you must manage it somehow," Bel said with decision. "And I
expect you have your reserves even from her. Have you ever, I
wonder, let her realise that you're dead in love--with Mark?"
"How _dare_ you!" Sheila broke in low and fiercely, "when I've tried
to do you justice--to be friends----"
She checked herself, rose, and turned her back on Bel, grasping the
mantelpiece with her small fine hands.
The girl surveyed her in genuine surprise.
"I'm sorry," she said good-naturedly. "One would think I'd accused
you of stealing! It's no sin!"
Sheila swung round in an access of sheer impatience. "This time it's
_you_ who don't understand! If that sort of thing's not sacred to
you, it is to me----"
Bel faintly raised her brows. "No," she said, "I don't understand
people who mix up falling in love with religion. To me, it's simply
the most thrilling amusement on earth. Still, I'm sorry----"
"You're not," Sheila retorted, unappeased. "And I'd like you better
if you said so, honestly. _I'm_ sorry I ever came in here at all.
Good night."
She moved to the door; but softly and swiftly as a cat Bel sped after
her and took her by the shoulder.
"Sheila, my dear, don't be a high-flown little fool," she said in her
seductive voice that was seldom wasted on a woman.
"Oh, let me alone, I'm tired," Sheila murmured, and shook off the
detaining hand, only to find it slipped through her arm.
"Come and make it up. Then I'll let you go," Bel cooed invitingly.
It was detestable; but Sheila was genuinely tired and too disgusted
for further argument. Unresisting, and unresponsive, she allowed
herself to be drawn back to the fire and gently pulled down into the
chair.
"You're such a lovesome morsel of dignity and reserve," Bel went on,
kneeling beside her and warming her hands. "It's quite an
achievement to have drawn you out a little. I can't let you shut up
again with a click. Besides, we must be friends _now_!"
Sheila, who was hardly attending, did not grasp the import of that
last remark.
"I'm not altogether depraved, you know."
"I never said you were."
"But you thought so."
Sheila merely shook her head. She had no further desire to discuss
Bel or her very mixed attributes; but, for Bel, there was no more
congenial subject on earth.
"You _did_ think so," she insisted, with untroubled conviction. "But
I do try to be decent, up to my lights. Can't help it--can I?--if
mine are candles and yours are stars? And I admit this beastly war
has demoralized me badly. Your Mums talks of it as a 'refiner's
fire'; but ... I don't know. That sort of thing doesn't agree with
everyone. It may exalt the good; but ... I rather think it makes the
bad worse."
Sheila nodded. "It finds us all out. It's burning away the husks of
life and forcing us to be our real selves.--_My_ real self, at this
moment," she added lightly, "is a mere log of weariness. I must go
now."
"Very well--go. Good night, dear."
Bel put up her face for a kiss; but Sheila was on her feet again.
"_Will_ you leave Mr. Seldon alone?" she said returning to her
original attack.
"I'll try--just to please you! But you can't blame _me_ if the man's
a mere weather-cock."
"I do blame you--all along the line," Sheila answered with quiet
obstinacy; and at last effected her escape.
But for all her weariness, sleep was long in coming. Though her lids
were heavy, her brain was wide awake and haunted distractingly by
visions of Bel; her smiling self-complacence, her graceful, studied
poses, her serene assurance--cruelly emphasised--that no revelation
of her intrinsic worthlessness would affect her dominion over Mark.
Was that true, Sheila wondered, feeling of a sudden very ignorant and
limited--as Bel had said? Would it make no difference even if he
knew all? Was a man's love so entirely a mixture of infatuation and
passion that the soul of a woman counted for next to nothing?
Personally, Sheila did not believe it; but she was too young, too
untravelled in the heart's byways, to feel secure in that belief.
She only saw Mark, her god among men, lured and held by this
elf-maiden of a girl; fair without, hollow within. Mr. Seldon,
too--in spite of all he had suffered, in spite of genuine love for
herself--seemed powerless to hold his own against Bel. And was it
only Bel? Was it only Mark and Seldon? Or, was their private tangle
simply part of the cruel, primitive essence of things? Sheila lying
there in the dark, pictured hundreds of Bels dragging down hundreds
of Marks and Seldons; and her protective, mother-tenderness for the
masculine half of creation, raged impotently against it all. One
heard so much, in these outspoken days, about men ruining women. Was
there not fully as much to be said about women ruining men? Between
sleep and waking her mind dwelt long on this side of a question that
touched her so nearly. The mixed emotions of the last few days and
the need to keep them hidden, had put a severe strain on her. And
closer contact with Bel seemed to have rubbed the bloom off life; to
have shaken her faith in the nature of things----
Her heart, in its loneliness, yearned for the dear comrade-woman;
mother, sister, and friend in one; who could light up even the dark
places of life with the fire of her brave enthusiasm. Soon they
would all be together, they three: while she, who was intrinsically
one with them, remained out in the cold; and must so remain--as Bel
had smilingly assured her--to the end of the chapter.
CHAPTER V
"And the land shall leave me or take, and the Woman shall
take me or leave me....
But Life shall hold me alive, and Death shall never deceive me,
As long as I walk in England, in the lanes that let me pass."
CHESTERTON.
It was accomplished. The faith and courage of Helen Forsyth had
reaped their due reward; and they three were together at last. But
not yet under one roof. The instant Mark emerged from supposed
extinction, Authority claimed him; and Helen rebelled a little,
inevitably against cast-iron regulations that withheld her from
taking immediate possession of her own.
Meanwhile she was thankful, on reaching the hospital, to find him in
a small room with two other empty beds. Ignoring the chair that had
been set for her, she knelt beside him, her face radiating a silent
benediction.
Prostrate, paralysed, his reddish hair almost hidden by the cap-like
bandage, he lay there smiling his queer, crooked smile and his lashes
were wet with tears. When one or two of them escaped and ran down
his cheek, she wiped them away with her handkerchief and leaning over
him kissed his eyelids.
He frowned as if vexed at his own weakness, but she shook her head.
"We needn't think shame of them," she said, for her own were falling.
"It's natural. Just the blessed reaction. Don't you remember your
favourite bit of Blake? '"Damn" braces, "bless" relaxes.'"
He smiled and pressed the hand he was clinging to in a fashion that
recalled nursery days when some nightmare had so shaken him that he
must hold her to make sure she was really there. And to-day in this
first, incredible hour of reunion, both felt unashamedly the childish
need of that same reassurance.
As his hand clung to hers, so her eyes clung to his face; and she saw
now that he was making a desperate effort to speak.
"No, no. Bad for you, beloved," she said. "I understand."
But he would not be baulked of achievement; so strong was the current
of new life in his veins. And the words came at last; though, till
they were out, he could not be sure whether sense or nonsense would
emerge.
"M-Mother--Mums--Home!"
He brought them out, one by one; the last with triumphant emphasis
and a stronger grip on her hand.
"Yes--home the first possible minute," she assured him. "A Nursing
Home first, I'm afraid, for some time. We've been wondering if we
could put off the operation till we get across, as it's been delayed
so long already. The doctor here will see your head to-night and
decide. Of course half our best men are on the spot. But it might
keep us here weeks; and it's England you want, isn't it,
darling,--and Bel?"
He nodded, then suddenly releasing her hand, he put his left arm
round her drawing her down to him....
He was still holding her thus when the inexorable knock sounded on
the door.
That night it was decided that no harm would arise from a few days'
delay: and Authority made arrangements accordingly; thrusting its
ruthless arm once again between Helen and her son.
For Mark, the mere exigencies of travelling emphasised his own
vexatious helplessness, so that he understood, for the first time,
something of the monkish attitude towards the body as a despised and
hampering burden, rather than the beautiful disciplined servant of
the spirit: but he was cheered beyond measure, by the sight and smell
of the sea and the faint salt of it on his lips. For the sea spelt
England: and England--Bel; haloed and idealised, by this time, beyond
the height of mortal woman. While he lay on deck, delighting in
wind-driven clouds and wind-tossed waters, memories crowded thick
upon him....
He hated losing sight of Keith and his mother even for a few hours:
but his spirits rose steadily as the steamer, mysteriously
safe-guarded, nosed her way toward the cliffs of Home. It was still
something of a wonder simply to be back again in the world of men; to
see papers, as a matter of course, and to know more or less what was
happening in that complex maze of trenches that now cleft France from
the Vosges to the sea and changed the whole character of the War.
Wounded officers, who had heard his story, came up to congratulate
him and stayed to tell their own experiences. It was good to hear
them, though conversation was a distractingly one-sided affair: good
to see, at last, the white cliffs of Kent, lit by a frail ray of
winter sunshine; to glide up alongside the familiar quay with its
cheering crowd, and to hear the rough speech of his own people. It
was better still to watch Keith pushing his way through them all,
with a new uprightness and a squarer set of his shoulders, though the
weeks of anxious search had left their mark on his rugged face. And
there, at his elbow, was "Mums" looking out eagerly for her "boy."
His glimpse of them was brief but reassuring. Then it was: "See you
again in London": and for all he longed to speed straight to
Wynchcombe Friars, the spell of the great grey city, throned upon its
grey river, under a shifting pall of fog, penetrated, as never
before, to the deep places of his imagination and his heart.
The squalor of her back alleys was shrouded in darkness. Her great
thoroughfares were dimmed and emptier than of old. As they drove
away from the station, ragged flakes of snow and sleet were falling,
and sharp against a blurred background loomed the stately splendour
of the Abbey, the Houses, and Big Ben. For him that shadowy mass of
architecture possessed something of the sublimity and the aloofness
of a great mountain range: and to-night, above all, it was a vision
to lift the heart of one mere Englishman in thankfulness and
praise....
His destination was a Nursing Home for Officers in Park Lane--a
paradise of ordered comfort and spotlessness and peace, where the hum
of London's unresting voice sounded scarcely louder than the breaking
of waves upon a stony shore. Here his mother reappeared to bid him
welcome and good night. She had found rooms, she told him, in a
hotel close by: and--yes, Bel was downstairs waiting for permission
to come up.
A quarter of an hour--no longer, the Nurse decreed. And presently
she came--a vision supremely satisfying to the eye. Her simple,
costly-looking coat and skirt were only a few shades darker than her
hair. On the brim of her beaver hat rested one yellow velvet flower;
and she wore her amber beads over a yellow blouse. Every detail had
been carefully thought out; and the result, as she swiftly perceived,
was very much to his taste.
But this new Mark, who in a few short months had plumbed the heights
and depths of human experience, craved more from the woman he had
been sedulously glorifying than perfect finish of colour and form.
And he could neither utter that craving nor appraise her with the
sugar-plum compliments she loved. He could only hold out his left
hand and smile his crooked smile.
An attempt to speak her name produced only such a strange, unnatural
sound that she winced, ever so slightly, and the blood mounted to his
face.
Pricked with genuine pity and remorse she swept to him and caught his
hand in both her own.
"Darling--darling, don't try," she said in her cooing voice of
tenderness. "All in good time. You're a wonder and a miracle to be
here at all."