and, as she stooped to kiss him, captured her with his arm. For the
moment he asked nothing on earth but the sense of her living
presence, the soft surrender of her lips. Ecstasy flowed through
him: short-lived, but fiery sweet----
Loosening his hold, he pulled at her hat. She sat back on the low
chair facing him, removed the hat, and considered it with critical
approval.
"Bought for the occasion!" she explained. "Rather a gem, isn't it?"
He nodded, smiling, and fingering her beads; and she, suddenly
slipping on to her knees, hid her face against him.
Comforted exceedingly, he caressed her hair, and found courage for a
fresh effort to speak. This time he succeeded.
"Beautiful--my Bel," he said slowly.
She lifted her face and smiled at him: flushed but dry-eyed.
"Yes--your Bel. And you're going to shake off this horror as soon as
possible; so that we can stick to our original date in spite of the
war and its abominations. There--I _must_ go. I hear Nurse coming."
She picked up the precious hat and stood before the over-mantel
pinning it on. Then she sighed.
"Oh, _won't_ I be thankful when to-morrow's well over. Sleep sound,
darling, and I'll hope to see you in the morning."
She kissed him again and vanished with a parting wave of the hand.
And he lay a long while brooding on the day's events: his body too
tired and his brain too full of impressions for coherent thought....
Next morning, before the operation, he had a brief glimpse of her.
Then his mother came, with Sheila--graver, paler, and, in some
indefinable fashion, lovelier than he seemed to remember her. But of
late her image had been kept well in the background of his brain: and
it smote him now the more poignantly as if in revenge.
His hand closed firmly on hers and kept it imprisoned, while she
stood there smiling at him through tears. Yesterday's failure made
him shy of attempting her name. His gaze travelled from her face to
his mother's and back again: and at last he spoke.
"All my thanks--for Mums," he said and with an abrupt movement
pressed her fingers to his lips.
Then he released them and her pale face glowed.
"Mark, don't thank me," she murmured. "It was simply ... we were
everything to each other, and it helped us to pull through. Some day
when she's not there, I'll tell you just how splendid she was. And I
want to hear about the Nun who wrote that letter. She must be a
jewel. When all this is well over, we'll have a real long talk!"
And Mark, more than ever enamoured of her musical voice, felt
ridiculously elated at the prospect.
Even this unsatisfactory lop-sided talk was over too soon: the
eminent surgeon had arrived; and they must surrender him to the
saving mercy of chloroform and the knife. Is the whole enlightened
race of man ever anything but ungrateful to these grim agents of
salvation--at least until the beloved is safe out of the toils?
Lady Forsyth's heart failed her badly as she stooped to kiss her son.
But seeing the tense set of his lips, she spoke more bravely than she
felt.
"We've no reason at all to feel nervous, darling," she said low in
his ear. "I have Dr. Norton's word for it. He says your condition's
excellent and it ought to be quite plain sailing. Keith is
downstairs; and we won't leave till everything is well over. God
keep you safe--till I see you again."
CHAPTER VI
"... No longer can I cast
A glory round about this head of gold.
Glory she wears, but springing from the mould;
Not like the consecration of the past."
MEREDITH.
Dr. Norton proved no false prophet.
Ten days later a very much revived Mark lay propped up in bed, while
his mother sat by him, reading aloud, with emphatic relish, an
outspoken article from the _National Review_.
The loyal, universal confidence accorded, in August, to a Government
mainly responsible for the failure to save Belgium, was already on
the wane. The political leopard, it appeared, could not change his
spots even to preserve the British Empire from ruin. Increasingly
the note of criticism replaced the note of confidence: and to none
did the change seem more ominous than to Helen Forsyth and her son.
But for Mark, at the moment, no larger anxieties could cloud the joy
of regaining his grip on life; of watching his mother's expressive
face as she snapped the thread of a sentence to acclaim here or
denounce there; till he longed for command of speech to lure her into
one of their arguments that, for her, were at once an exasperation
and a delight.
Words came more readily now; but still at times, they played him
ludicrous and disconcerting tricks, that were not always matter for
mirth. Bel--whose sense of humour was an uncertain quantity--too
often winced at them; and then they covered him with confusion or
pricked him to momentary irritation with her. They would pass, he
assured her, as the brain reasserted its full control. The fact that
it had proved to be slightly torn would retard things a little; but
already he began to move his right hand; and in time recovery would
be complete. They must have patience: that was all.
She proclaimed herself a miracle of patience; but there were days
when he suspected her of being faintly bored; when her cheerfully
persistent injunction to "hurry up and get well" had, to his
sensitive ear, an almost metallic ring. Work and the war and the
strain of real suffering had wrought inner changes of which he became
gradually aware. The fine film of hardness, that dismayed Lady
Forsyth, had not been altogether dissolved even by those first
wonderful days of reunion; and now when she spoke of painful things,
it was fatally apparent to Mark.
He was, in fact, beginning to perceive the woman beneath the glamour;
yet the glamour remained, in spite of disillusion. Only when he
looked into the future, or was tired and alone, the old distracting
doubts assailed him. For purposes of love-making she was inimitable.
To that end, she was born. For the larger purposes of wifehood,
motherhood, companionship:--well, he had chosen her and he must take
his chance----
And all the while, he tried not to be aware that he was watching for
one face, waiting for the "real long talk" she had promised him.
Others came with increasing frequency; but she never reappeared.
What was wrong? The uncertainty grew distracting; but he felt
reluctant to speak of her, these days; and when at last, he achieved
a casual question to his mother, nervousness made it one of his
failures.
"Where is--become--Colette?" was the conundrum that emerged.
"I wrote to her, dear," Lady Forsyth answered, pleased at his
remembering. "But I haven't heard yet."
He frowned impatiently. "D-damn it! I mean--Sheila?"
Then he learnt that her mother had claimed her for work at Westover
Court, where a number of half convalescent nervous cases were in need
of massage and Mrs. Melrose was short of skilled hands.
"Sheila is quite wonderful at it," Lady Forsyth added. "A genuine
gift. More magnetism than massage, I verily believe."
Mark smiled at her enthusiasm, but asked no more questions. His
belated discovery must not be suffered to get out of hand....
So far, he had been a very saint for patience. But as vigour
increased, irritability increased also. In certain moods, the
monotony, the dependence, the rubber-tyred routine of the hospital
existence irked him to exasperation; and if he were alone with Keith
he would let off steam, in an outburst of wholesome profanity.
He did his best not to upset the women; but when a rare fine day
flung panels of sunshine across the carpet and a frolic wind set the
blind-tassels tap-tapping on the windows he felt like a caged thing.
No garden here, as in France, where at least he could commune with
trees and sky: and it was no garden he wanted now. It was the road
or the heather underfoot; the wilds of Hampshire, the rolling hills
of his native Argyll; the sea-salt and heather-fragrant air that, for
him, was like no other air on earth. He wanted simply to walk and
walk, world without end; only Bobs for company; Bobs, who most
certainly was not forgetting his master, though he was accepting with
true canine philosophy the homage paid him by the house of Russell.
One night he dreamed of a kingly tramp among the hills and glens
beyond Inveraig: Keith walked beside him, while Bobs put the fear of
God into rabbits, visible and invisible.
So vivid was the dream that he awoke with the dog's bark and Keith's
voice sounding in his ears--woke to find he could scarcely shift
himself in bed without help. The contrast jarred so painfully that
he cursed that delusive dream and decided to ask a few straight
questions when Dr. Norton came, if his unruly member would permit.
They had subjected him to a thorough overhauling the day before: but
of information not a crumb could he extract from them, beyond vague
encouragement and counsels of patience. And this morning he fared
very little better at Dr. Norton's hands.
Norton was a lean tall man, with a humorous grey-green eye and, on
occasion, a slightly caustic tongue. He had taken a great liking to
this virile, sensitive patient of his; who could thoroughly enjoy a
joke at his own expense. But, for all that, even Mark's direct
demand for enlightenment failed to entice him from the cautious
reserve of his kind.
"My dear Sir Mark," he said, a gleam of sympathy in his grave eye,
"it's hardly fair to fling leading questions at men whose reputation
might not be worth an hour's purchase if they took to scattering
inaccurate prophecies among their patients! The damage to your brain
was slight considering what it might have been. With that
well-seasoned puttee for a first aid bandage, it's a miracle you
didn't die of septic meningitis within a week. The main thing to
guard against now is nerve trouble: if you let yourself get worried
or uncontrolled. With luck we shall have you out of bed in a week.
But it may be more like a month before we can let you out of this."
"Oh--_damn_!" The "good old word of sin" seldom failed him at
command.
"Quite so," Norton remarked in his even voice. "It's beastly having
to lie up when you don't feel ill. At the same time----"
"Yes, of course--all those other chaps," Mark broke in, feeling
suddenly very much ashamed of himself. "Lucky enough getting
away--intact. I won't worry. I'll--what's it they say out
there--carry on!"
But for some reason--whether because of his dream or because of Dr.
Norton's guarded statement, that morning marked a point from which
his hopefulness flagged; and the atmosphere about him seemed to
suffer some indefinable change that gave Norton's injunction not to
worry a slightly satirical tang.
He became too keenly conscious of sympathy in the air; and the more
tactfully it was implied, the worse it jarred. His kind, attentive
Nurse seemed suddenly kinder, more attentive. His mother's lively
humour sounded, at times, a trifle strained. More than once he
caught his mother gazing at him with a yearning wistfulness that he
had either not noticed or not encountered before. She managed to
laugh it off; but it haunted him afterwards.
Worse than all, he detected a fine shade of difference in Bel: at
times a hint of constraint in her manner that he tried to dismiss as
pure fantasy; at times, a passion of affection, very rare with her.
There was less of mere lovers' talk between them now: and in the
intervals, a paucity of common interests was revealed. Very often
she would read to him; and her visits were growing less regular.
Some days she did not come at all; but sent a hurried affectionate
note of excuses, lean diet for a man who needed companionship as
never before.
And Sheila, except for an occasional letter, appeared to have
deserted him utterly.
He put up with this state of things for a week: during which time his
arm and speech made good progress towards recovery. Then, suddenly,
his patience gave out and he decided to tackle Keith, the only one
whose bearing had suffered no perceptible change.
Keith had been away for a few days at Montrose; but he was due in
Town that morning: and he came straight from the station to Park Lane.
He looked noticeably tired and worn: but Mark, just then, was
fiercely intent on his own determination to be rid of half truths.
"You--you damned lucky devil!" he broke out, holding on to Keith's
hand and searching his eyes hungrily for knowledge withheld.
"Scotland--mountains--the sea! And I lie here--cursing. How much
taller--" the word eluded him and gesture failed--"Oh, _you_ know ...
yard measure--longer? They won't tell me. Those infernal doctors.
I'm--no coward. Let's have the damage straight. My legs ... rotten,
useless. Don't improve."
Keith shook his head, pain unconcealed in his eyes. Then he sat down
by the bed and faced the ordeal thrust upon him.
"The chances are--they won't--improve," he said slowly. "That's the
damage, Mark. Your spine."
Mark set his teeth and was silent. The breath of tragedy had clean
blown out the rushlight of impatience. Keith hoped that Helen would
never see him look as he looked then.
"I gather they didn't mend matters ... dragging you to that farm,"
Keith went on in his low, contained voice. "Not their fault, poor
fellows. Very bad ground, Macgregor said; and they were wounded and
under fire. But the result is--a lesion----"
"Lesion," Mark repeated frowning with the effort of thought.
"Medical stuff. In plain English ... I'm done for ... physically.
That it?"
Keith was silent a moment. "That's ... about it: so far as they can
tell at present. But there's just a possibility of gradual
improvement. A very slow business. And, at best, Dr. Norton fears
recovery would only be partial----"
"Thanks very much."
The quiet courtesy of his tone pierced Keith to the heart. He would
infinitely sooner have heard Mark swear. The swearing was bound to
come, soon or late, and it would be a relief for both.
At present, he merely closed his eyes and lay silent a long, long
while, facing naked and unlovely facts with his vivid,
forward-looking artist's brain....
Some fool had once said: "_Never_ is a long word"; but no word ever
coined was interminable enough to suggest the unnumbered army of days
that threatened him--that was the literal effect--between seven and
twenty and the merciful end of all. Try as he would, he could not
believe in it--yet.
And the others--they had known it a week or more. It must have been
hell for them; and it explained everything. Most startlingly, it
explained--Bel. If she had seemed, on occasion, to weary of an
invalid lover, what manner of use would she have for a husband
chained to a wheeled chair? Had he any shadow of right to hold
her--now?
Unable to endure the torment of thought, he opened his eyes. Keith
still sat there, one elbow on the bed; his hand across his forehead
shutting out the vision of Mark's face.
"Keith, old man," he said, and Keith looked up with a start. "Don't
you worry. I can--stick it. Others, worse off--eh? Half a
life--half a loaf--" He struggled to complete the connection; and
failing, tried to smile. "Mother?" he asked sharply and Keith drew
in his lips.
"No thought of herself. Only you!"
Then came the word he hardly dared speak. "Bel? She knows too?"
"Yes. She knows."
Another long pause: but he forced himself to go on.
"Keith--can I? Ought I--? Must I lose _every_ thing?"
The words came out in a sudden rush.
"That depends--" Keith answered with slow emphasis--"on her.
Naturally--she is free, if she chooses. But she has every right to
refuse freedom; to wait ... on the chance.... Picture your mother in
such a case."
Mark pictured her; and knew very well that no lover of hers, so
placed, would have need to fear the double loss. But Bel--? How
imperfectly he knew her, how utterly unsure he was of her even now.
"Why did they keep it from me?" he asked irrelevantly.
"They were afraid for your head, till the three weeks were up."
"Weeks?--what are weeks?" Mark murmured. "Look here--they must leave
me alone a bit. Tell them. An hour or two. I'll ring."
"Very well. I will come again, this afternoon."
Keith held out his hand and their mutual grasp supplied all racial
disabilities.
They left him alone the greater part of that morning; alone with the
news that had come down on him like a guillotine snapping his life in
two. It struck him, in his first access of bitterness, that the
guillotine would have been the more merciful fate----
But the one practical problem of the moment was Bel. It amazed and
hurt him to realise how little he could foretell her line of action
in this cruel dilemma. Almost, he could see her rising,
dramatically, superbly, to the heroic plane. The difficulty was to
see her keeping it up. Throughout all her past "phases" he detected
that same incapacity running like a fatal thread. Though it pleased
her to pose as a rebel, her instinctive skill lay, rather, in
graceful evasion of circumstances that threatened to prove too strong
for her. Would she regard a crippled husband as a circumstance that
called for graceful evasion? That question she alone could answer.
And how--and when was he to ask it?
He could not yet write; and, like all strong natures, he inclined to
the spoken word if anything unpleasant must be done; but he still
felt quite unfit for the strain of a scene that might end
disastrously. He would of a certainty be tripped up by egregious
verbal lapses, that, at such a moment, would be intolerable.
If she came, however, he must see her and take his chance.
She did not come; and the uncertainty, following on the shock of
knowledge, was none too good for his nerves. Dr. Norton advised a
sleeping draught that afternoon and another at night.
These gave him brief and merciful respite from the torment of
thought: but morning brought fresh realisation, fresh perplexity. It
also brought a letter from Bel.
He scarcely dared open it. Did she know that he knew? And was she
too great a coward to face his pain?
Her short note answered neither question.
"Darling Man," she wrote, "this is to tell you that Harry and I must
run down to Folkestone for three or four days on account of her work.
A big meeting, for one thing; and she wants me to speak. I'm rather
keen about it. Not so sure I haven't found my real vocation at last.
I looked in yesterday evening to say good-bye: but Nurse said you
were asleep and not on any account to be disturbed. So the kisses
must be stored up for a few days. Forgive this hurried scrawl. I'll
write again from Folkestone. Always your so loving Bel."
He read that "hurried scrawl" several times over without arriving at
any clear conclusion, except the obvious one that matters must stand
over till her return; unless he could bring himself to write through
his mother, an expedient that did not commend itself, except as a
last resort.
CHAPTER VII
"God's own gifts
Have a devil for the weak.
Yea the very force that lifts
Finds the vessel's secret leak."
MEREDITH.
Bel's maiden speech at Folkestone proved an unqualified success. Her
sweet, well-modulated voice, hardly suitable for platform purposes,
carried well enough in Mrs. Langton's double drawing-room where some
sixty ardent feminists and pacifists, of both sexes, were gathered
together mainly for the glorification of woman--as martyr in chief of
man's recurrent lust for slaughter, and as the normal promoter of
peace between nations, whose eyes were blinded with blood and wrath.
Characteristically, she had concealed from Mark the real nature of
the meeting and the subject-matter of her own speech. This last, as
may be supposed, emanated from Harry, though declaimed and decorated
by Bel. The Utopian vision of universal peace had caught hold of her
imagination. The fact that the world's harmony spelt comfort and
material prosperity made a direct appeal to her practical brain: and
now the shadow of her own private tragedy seemed more than ever to
justify her leaning towards those who denounced as criminal the
ruthless indefinite prolongation of war.
"Woman and War";--the antithesis lent itself to a rhetorical opening,
a study in contrasts: and Bel made the most of it. War destroys
life; woman creates and beautifies it. War is brutality and
coarseness _in excelsis_; woman is all tenderness and grace. War
stands for hate; woman for love. War degrades; woman lifts and
inspires. The scope for contrast was infinite if not always exact.
It would quite spoil the effect to admit that there were scores of
women who had neither the will nor the power to lift and inspire:
scores, like herself, for whom love was war, as fierce and unsparing
as any conflict on earth. Her concern was not with awkward
realities, but with the success of her speech; and from these lofty
opening flourishes, she swung downward to more practical
considerations. She reminded them that the patriotic spirit in which
the women of England had worked and endured, through these first
bewildering and terrible months of war, must assuredly win for them
the all-round equality, economic and political, out of which they had
been cheated for so long....
There spoke the soul of Harry through the voice of Bel, vitiating
fine service rendered by a perpetual eye on the ballot-box of the
future. But, for the moment, even the obsession of years paled
before her consuming admiration of Bel in a new rôle. Her address
had been reserved as the finishing touch to a great occasion, the
inauguration of a movement that promised far-reaching results. For
three quarters of an hour she held her audience--their eyes no less
than their brains; and the culminating burst of applause was fully as
much a tribute to the speaker as to the speech: of which fact Bel was
radiantly aware.
A select company of the audience remained for tea and talk. Fads and
theories flourished. Compliments rained. And Bel was never happier
than in the limelight of uncritical praise. Between Harry's open
adoration and the joy of achievement, she was swept for the time
being, right away from the perplexities and tragic issues of her
lover's return.
It needed only the unexpected appearance of Rex Maitland, and his
discreet adulation, to complete her enjoyment. But his polite
enquiries about Mark elicited brief and evasive answers. She had not
yet found courage to tell any one the truth, only excepting Harry,
whose honest sympathy for the man in no way affected her inevitable
opinion as regards Bel.
Maitland was among the still further selected few whom Mrs. Langton
entertained at dinner: and Bel--in an apricot-yellow gown and her
leopard-skin cloak was admittedly the heroine of the evening. The
whole affair was an experience after her own heart; marred only by
that hovering shadow of tragedy that waited to engulf her when
solitude and darkness left her at its mercy.
Alone at last in her bedroom, it engulfed her very thoroughly,
blotting out her tinsel triumphs, thrusting her in upon herself,
demanding decisions.
For nearly two weeks she had deliberately evaded the issue. Now the
time for evasion was over.
Mark must already know his fate: and for the last few days she had
been half hoping, half fearing that he would write, through his
mother, offering to release her from their engagement. Not a word
had come; and to-morrow....
Mechanically discarding her robe of triumpn, she slipped on a padded
dressing-gown and sank into a comfortable chair by the fire to
confront the situation. No comfort there; look whichever way she
would, it was all cruel and horrible: fresh proof that the Fates were
in league against her, as always. In her case, pity for the broken
or imperfect creatures of earth was not akin to love, but to
repulsion. It was one of the chief horrors of this horrible war that
it would fill the world with hundreds of maimed and disfigured men;
perpetual reminders of an event which all sane people must surely
crave to forget.
And now--Mark would be one of them: Mark, her strong, splendid lover!
To marry him would be to live with a perpetual reminder of the thing
she abhorred: to spend her days either uncompanioned or tied to his
chair. No seasons in Town: no social triumphs. She could not see
Mark submitting to an invalid existence in London. He would cling
more obstinately than ever to Wynchcombe Friars. So would the very
position and affluence she craved be robbed of its chief attraction.
She had enough imagination to foresee it all far too clearly; and the
more she looked at the prospect the less she liked it. The hope of
gradual improvement held out by Dr. Norton, was too distant, too
uncertain to mitigate the tragic actuality that lay like a stone upon
her heart. For the great man had told her plainly that if, in six
months, there was no change of condition, the case would be hopeless.
He considered improvement possible; but was too cautious to say more,
or to, prophecy how far it might ultimately go. And vague
possibilities were not enough for Bel. Suppose she did wait six
months and then...?
With a shiver of misery she leaned forward, covering her face; and
tears, that came so rarely, fell from between her fingers. Too well
she knew that the compound of passion and sentiment which she called
"love," would never stand the strain; and, genuinely though she
sorrowed for Mark, she was many degrees more sorry for herself. The
root of her own tragedy lay in the fact that now--for the first time
in her varied dealings with men--her heart was seriously involved;
and its promptings did not agree with the promptings of her brain.
Hitherto it had been an underling; obedient to the dictates of
self-interest, more becomingly designated common-sense. It had
played no leading part in her swift, dramatic conquest of Mark; in
the keen pleasure, known only to her kind, of luring him from a girl
lovelier and worthier than herself, and with hardly a grain of
coquetry in her composition. Lady Forsyth's obvious disapproval had
been but one stimulus the more: and, her head having guided her into
a delectable harbour, she had felt, at last, sufficiently secure to
let her heart have its way--with disastrous result.
For, in her own fashion, she loved Mark now, more deeply and
genuinely than she would have believed possible that day at Inveraig,
when she had rejoiced mainly in the capture of a strong man, against
his mother's wish and probably against his own cooler judgment. Her
triumph had been complete. She had done more than capture him; she
had held him; and now--no denying it--he very certainly held her.
In his case, absence, and the letters that revealed unsuspected
heights and depths in him, had served to strengthen that hold; while
her own letters were having the opposite effect on him. Nor had Mark
been mistaken in thinking that she might rise, momentarily to the
heroic plane. For a few exalted days she had seen herself in the
grand rôle; and had almost believed in her power to carry it through.
But Nemesis pursued her: the Nemesis of her own nature. Invariably
her high impulses had been short-lived; rootless things, like seeds
dropped on stony ground: and this one had proved no exception to the
rule.
Hovering to-night at the cross-roads, vowed to a decision before she
slept, Bel discovered to her cost that this, the one great choice of
her life, was decided already by the hundreds of minor, careless
decisions that had gone before. Since she had never yet, in small
matters, chosen the path of hardness or unselfishness, so she could
not choose it now. The Greeks, as usual, were in the right of it:
character is fate.
For years, unconsciously, and with keen enjoyment, Bel Alison had
been building up her own tragedy. Now it turned and overwhelmed her.
But she did not long indulge in the futility of tears. Very soon her
practical mind was at work again devising pleas that would throw a
becoming light on her quite justifiable, if unheroic, refusal to face
marriage with a husband who must either hamper her at every turn, or
be a cipher in her life. The main points in her eyes were to do the
thing gracefully, to preserve at least a semblance of being in the
right, and, if possible, to avoid witnessing the pain she could not
choose but inflict. For that reason, his silence troubled her. It
implied either that he meant to do the thing personally or--not to do
it at all. In which case, she would be driven to take the
initiative. That unpleasant possibility swung her back to her
original lament. It was all cruel and horrible: no escape any where
from pain for herself or him. She felt helpless, like a squirrel in
a revolving cage.
At least she must see him to-morrow and chance the result.
"Better write and be done with it, Mavourneen," was Harry's counsel
next day, when Bel suggested a train that would allow time to "look
up Mark." "It's a bitter business for the poor fellow losing
everything at a stroke; and I can't believe he's the man to try and
hold you in spite of all. But if he gets making love to you--well!
there's no knowing what might happen. And there's only one end to
the business that's fair on you. Short and sharp's the kindest way
of it, Bel. It'll only be worse for the both of you if you let
things drag on. Cruel hard enough as it is."
Bel admitted the hardship--and the risk: but she insisted on the
earlier train; and wired to Mark her probable time of arrival at the
Home. Marriage or no marriage, she wanted simply to feel his arms
round her, his lips on hers again.
At first sight of him, her heart contracted so sharply that she had
need of Harry's warning and vehement conviction to fortify her own
resolve. They had dressed him and moved him into an arm-chair by the
fire. A fur rug covered his legs. The bandage had given place to a
velvet football cap that hid the shaven patch on his head.
Altogether, he looked more normal than she had seen him yet. But the
change that smote her was in his face; the look of his eyes as if
some inner light had gone out.
Those first few days of awful realisation as regards himself and
bewildering uncertainty as regards Bel had told upon him visibly.
The strong outline of his chin and jaw seemed sharper. When he was
not talking or smiling the strained expression of his lips was
pitiful to see. And his greeting, for the moment, unnerved her
utterly.
"Bel,--at last!" he cried, a queer ring in his voice, and held out
his hand.
She came to him swiftly and half flung herself on him kneeling beside
his chair. Very seldom in her life had she felt tongue-tied: but
just then speech seemed the last impossibility. And when she closed
her eyes the feel of his rough Norfolk coat against her cheek carried
her sharply back to days of cool, assured conquest at Inveraig. If
_only_ she had known!----
Very sorely she began to wish that she had followed Harry's advice.
For, though head governed heart, she was, like most egoists, a
sentimentalist at the core. Evenly balanced on the knife-edge
between pain and pleasure, she leaned against her lover, expecting,
yet half dreading the word that he, poor man, was doing his utmost to
speak.
So far he had said nothing to any one of the facts wrung from Keith a
few days ago. With his mother there had been no need. Neither could
have borne it: and their understanding was complete. The mute
sympathy of his Nurse no longer jarred: and his few recent visitors
had continued to maintain a tactful silence. Detailed talk on the
subject would hurt like salt on an open wound. It would also involve
the inevitable scene, so distressful to his shaken nerves; and still,
at critical moments, there lurked the dread of making ludicrous
mistakes.
But the main stumbling-block was Bel herself. Her flight to
Folkestone--he did not believe in the importance of that meeting--had
convinced him that retreat was simply a prelude to graceful
acceptance of her freedom. Yet here she was, incalculable as ever,
making passionate love to him: her lips mutely attesting, "I am
yours, in spite of all!"
Every minute of silence, every fresh kiss, made things harder for
Mark. The mere glamour of her most strangely out-lasted his own
clearer vision. After four of the worst days he had ever lived
through, it was undeniably refreshing, if only because it made no
demands on the higher centres of his brain and soul. But it
engendered neither true emotion nor response. It was a pure anodyne;
and as such he frankly recognised it.
Conversely, Bel's emotion had so genuine a ring that it set him
wondering had he after all, misjudged her? Were there hidden deeps
in her that this sharp test might reach and bring to light? In that
case it were hard to put her aside in the hour of his own greatest
need for the best that woman can give; harder still to resist her in
an appealing vein.
He was mentally unstrung--and he knew it. Not otherwise could her
mere genius for love-making override his deep and real conviction
that in freedom from her spell lay his sole chance of salvation.
That very conviction made resistance seem unchivalrous; and he felt
utterly unfit for the emotional strain of a dramatic scene, such as
she would instinctively make out of a noble resolve to devote herself
to a crippled husband. By one of life's ironic twists their
positions appeared to be reversed.
It was not in him to conceive that she was merely indulging herself
to the full because this must be the end; because, with the innate
perversity of her kind she had never loved him better than now, when
her will was set to give him up.
Mark himself, with the deeper, ingrained perversity of human nature,
felt a sudden distaste for this exuberance of sentiment, which
thwarted his fixed intent and seemed tacitly to rebuke the secret
defection of his heart. He began to think the thing would have to be
written after all. In any case he needed time to readjust his mind
in view of her possible refusal to be set free.
To-morrow--perhaps. Any idea of speaking to-day was "off." ...
She released him at last, and sat back in his mother's low chair; her
ringed hand resting close to his arm.
"Well, fire away," he said in his natural manner. "I want to
know--all that--" a gesture filled the gap. "Is the latest thing in
... vocations going to be a thundering success?"
She smiled at the recollection.
"It started well anyway. Compliments were flying."
"What subject?"
"Harry's pet subject, of course! Chiefly glorification of ourselves.
But we women _do_ get the kicks in war time and precious few of the
ha'pence!" Though she spoke lightly, a shade of bitterness crept
into her tone. "What harm if we make little tinsel crowns for
ourselves just to keep up our spirits!"
Then, sheering away as from the edge of a precipice she entertained
him with thumb-nail sketches of Mrs. Langton and her friends and with
a judicious selection of their flying compliments to herself. The
longer she stayed, the harder it became to get up and leave him--for
the last time. She felt convinced now, that he would not speak; and
she did not mean to see him again.
At last, somehow, she was on her feet, saying she must go; and when
she stooped to kiss him, he looked searchingly into her eyes.
"Badly bored--are you?--by your invalid lover?" he asked, probing her
on impulse; but she managed to laugh it off.
"Boring people is not one of his talents!" she said lightly, and
leaned her head against him.
"To-morrow?" he said in her ear. And she, humanly
inconsistent--could not bear that her last word to him should be a
lie. So, for answer, she kissed him lingeringly, and made haste to
be gone.
On the threshold she turned, for a last look. But sudden tears
blinded her; and, with a flutter of her hand she left him.
Arrived at the flat, she found supper ready and Harry impatient, more
from anxiety than anything else. Even now she did not feel quite
secure about Bel. No one ever did. It was perhaps half the secret
of her power.
"Well?" she asked abruptly. Bel shook her head.
"He never said a word."
Crouching on the hearth-rug she drew off her gloves and held her
chilled hands to the blaze.
Harry's eyes scrutinised her fire-lit face. "Perhaps he doesn't mean
to."
"Oh--I don't know. But--I _can't_ go on----"
"Of course you can't. It's horribly unfair on you. You must write
yourself, Mavourneen. Do it to-night; and get it over."
Bel shivered. "I suppose--I must. But it seems so ungracious coming
from me. And ... it's not only him. It's the whole thing----"
Her voice broke suddenly and she sank on to the floor, sobbing
passionately, her face hidden in the empty arm-chair.
Quick as thought Harry was beside her, removing her hat, clinging to
her, murmuring endearments; to all of which Bel submitted without
response.
"You're tired, my precious, and the strain of it all has upset your
nerves. It won't feel half so bad once you've got it over. You
shall have this room to yourself after supper and I'll post it the
minute it's written. Cheer up and eat something before it all gets
cold. Your poor old Harry will be ever so good to you----"
Bel raised her head suddenly and shook off the clinging hands. "Oh,
let me alone! You're not a bit sorry really. You only want me for
yourself. But I'm bound to marry--I _must_ marry. You know that.
Yet you always try to prevent me. If you hadn't made such an unholy
fuss about Geoffrey, we might have been quite happy together now in
Australia. He was a good fellow anyway; and I would have been
spared--_all this_. Now I've tasted the best and I'll have to
swallow the second best, with my eyes open and my heart locked up.
It's evidently not safe, even to fall in love with one's affianced
husband. God knows I've had enough of tragedy----"
With a superbly dramatic gesture she swept to her feet and left the
discomfited Harry kneeling ignominiously by an empty chair.
But if Harry's devotion was deep, her temper was short. "And
sometimes I think I've had enough of you, Bel," she flung out,
scrambling ungainly from her knees. "I, that have loved you and
slaved for you--goodness knows why. For all your sweetness, you're
selfish, heartless, ungrateful----"
She broke off, for Bel had vanished into her room and locked the door.
In her own time, she reappeared--dignified, unapproachable and
polite. But before their half-cold meal was over, dignity had
thawed; Harry's temper had evaporated and Bel had talked herself into
the belief that her latest evasion was mainly prompted by
consideration for Mark. Since she could not rise to his level, it
were kinder to leave him than to drag him down. It was a singularly
sustaining belief and it made her ungracious letter much easier to
write.
Harry, as good as her word, took a bundle of pamphlets to read by the
kitchen fire, leaving her alone.
After a little preliminary pacing and framing of sentences, Bel sat
down to her task, steeled outwardly and composed. Harry was right.
Once the thing was done, past undoing, the worst wrench would be over.
"My darling Mark," she began in her firm, clear hand. "I can write
that truthfully, in spite of what I am going to say. It's not lack
of love that forces me to do this hateful thing. It's lack of
something much bigger, which you possess and I most certainly don't.
I knew, the minute I saw your face, that they had told you. It's the
cruelest, bitterest blow that could have fallen on a man like you.
To say I'm sorry would be simply a travesty of what I feel about it.
And you'll understand now what sort of a purgatory _I've_ been going
through this last two weeks. Let that be my excuse--if you admit any.
"Mark--I didn't properly love you at Inveraig, but I do now. And
yet--I _can't_ marry you. No use pretending. I couldn't go through
the pain and strain of it even for the finest man I've ever known.
"I told you, when first this Inferno began, that you were too big for
a mere Bel; that in spite of it I couldn't let you go. Now,
_because_ of it, I must. This war has shrivelled up all I ever
possessed in the way of a soul. But it seems to have made you stand
out bigger than before. I believe that even this fiendish stroke of
Fate will only crush you for a time. You'll override it. You and
your astonishing mother. Perhaps even wring some good out of it.
That would simply drive me to the other extreme. People ought _not_
to accept and glorify horrors like this. It's all wrong. Simply
encourages Kings and politicians to wallow in wholesale murder for
their own ends.
"But this is heresy to you; so no more. If you hate reading this
letter, please believe I've hated writing it. I thought you might
speak this afternoon. But I expect it was too hard for you, poor
boy. And it's really kinder on my part to do it this way, even
though it _seems_ to put me in an ungracious position. If I saw you
again, I might give way after all, in spite of myself. But it
_wouldn't last_. A worse tragedy for you. At least I'm sparing you
that. And I'm not returning your ring. I feel sure you would like
me to keep it with your letters, as a remembrance of the one real
phase in my rather artificial life.
"Will you miss me tremendously, I wonder? But it's no use thinking
of that now. It's all cruel and horrible for both of us.
"If you ever hear of me marrying, you'll know it is simply a business
arrangement--and no doubt you'll be very sorry for the man. Enough
of this. Good-bye. Your unworthy but not unloving Bel."
There--it was done, even to the straight thick line under her
signature with a loop at one end. She forced herself to read it
through, with a critical detachment, and decided that it could not
well be improved upon. Even the ungraceful thing, she had managed to
do gracefully. There was a gleam of comfort in that. She felt half
tempted to show it to Harry; but refrained. Harry was allowed to run
out with it, however, though her cough was troublesome and a fine
cold rain was falling.
Alone again, Bel sat down by the fire and tried not to be aware of a
chill emptiness at her heart....
It was a sharp pang, this parting: the sharpest she had yet known.
But she could and would live it down. Her invincible common-sense
assured her that, after all, there were other men in the world,
moneyed and titled; that a woman between thirty and thirty-five was
at the zenith of her charm. But something else told her that men of
Mark's quality do not grow on bramble bushes. Though he could not
lift her to his level, he had raised her standard, if only for a
time. The sort of husband who might have done very well six months
ago would, now, not do at all. More and more she saw herself as the
chief sufferer in this double calamity. Mark had his own fineness to
uphold him. He had a beautiful home, devoted friends, a mother who
worshipped him, Mr. Macnair, Sheila----
Though Bel put Sheila last, the thought of her had come first: and in
the private corner of her heart she was glad that her loss could not
be Sheila's gain. Though Mark might hesitate to set her free, she
could not see him proposing marriage to another woman. It was her
one crumb of consolation.
At the sound of the latch-key in the lock she rose and went hurriedly
to her own room. Harry's jealous devotion seemed to her suddenly a
thing intolerable----
CHAPTER VIII
"There never was to God such worship sent
By any angel in the heavenly ways
As this, that Life has uttered for God's praise:--
This girlhood--as the service of Life said
In the beauty and the manners of this maid."
L. ABERCROMBIE.
But Mark Forsyth had still a long black road to travel before he
could arrive at mastering calamity, or even at recognising the very
real ameliorations which Bel had enumerated for her own justification.
During those first staggering days, realisation bit into him like a
corrosive acid, that he had lost, at a stroke, all the manlier side
of life; all free, independent movement, and the right to hold his
promised wife, even if she willed. More and more he doubted this
last, in spite of recent proof that her love had been growing deeper
precisely as his own had begun to wane. That was during her absence
at Folkestone, which, in the circumstances, looked like a prelude to
rejection.
And all the while, locked in the depths of his being, lay the hidden
knowledge that he had jettisoned the real woman for the sake of the
tinsel sham and had discovered the truth too late. He knew now why
his feeling for Sheila had been so curiously unaffected by his
passing passion for Bel. It belonged to the depths; and there it had
lain hidden, like a jewel in a mine. Once he was blind. Now he saw.
War and its vicissitudes had effectually burnt away the husks and
left the real man--battered, enlightened, enlarged....
His sole ray of light, since the blow fell, had been one of Sheila's
rare letters, written directly she heard that he knew the truth.
Short and simple as it was, Mark found in every line of it the
inexpressible fragrance of her spirit, the sure delicate touch of the
healer on his hidden wound. It had given him a passing uplift, a
glimpse of what life might be when the fog had cleared. At present,
it seemed to be choking the life out of him, converting all his
strength to weakness, his blood to gall.
Sheila wrote that she was still very much tied with work at Westover.
Mr. Nacnair had been angelic about coming down and giving her
first-hand news; but the moment it was possible, she would fly up to
London for a glimpse of them both.
And on the morning after Bel's return--just as Mark was beginning to
wonder at her non-appearance--the door opened to admit Lady Forsyth
and Sheila, in squirrel furs, with a bunch of violets in her coat.
"Sheila!" he exclaimed, startled, yet frankly overjoyed. "Lord--it's
like--seeing you suddenly--like a breath of Hampshire in this
confounded London. I'd pretty well given you up."
"I've been trying to come for nearly a week.--True." She nodded,
beaming on him and unfastening her violets while she talked. "It
seemed hopeless. Then suddenly, to-day, I saw a free space ahead.
There was no time to cry, 'Look out!' So I just flew off and nipped
into a kind train. And these"--she held out her violets--"are for
you. I wanted to bring a sheaf of Father's special chrysanthemums.
But I'd have lost the train."
"I prefer these," he said, and under pretence of sniffing them he
touched them with his lips. "Fasten them--will you? I'm no better
than an overgrown infant."
She shook her head at the faint note of bitterness. "A very capable
infant! And your precious right hand's ever so much better. There!
They look lovely."
For answer, he merely glanced from the flowers to her face. Lady
Forsyth, standing near the window? watched the little scene with a
yearning ache at her heart. Now she came forward and patted Mark's
shoulder.
"You shall have her to yourself," she said, "for a real long talk.
I'll do dragon downstairs and keep Londoners at bay!"
"That's good."
Mark's tone was gravely content. Reaching out, he drew a low chair
nearer to the fire and to himself. "Sit--Mouse," he said, as his
mother moved away. "Take off your coat. Look as if--you'd come to
stay."
She obeyed, more gladly than he knew, and, sitting down by him, drew
a khaki sock out of her bag. "You must excuse," she said smiling.
"We're as bad as the French Revolution, these days! I'm more or less
responsible for Ralph's men. They feel the cold cruelly, poor dears!
And I don't get overmuch time now. Mums looks rather strained and
tired, doesn't she?"
Mark nodded. "It's been cruel hard on her--this business. But she's
come through it all ... 'm what's the confounded word?--a heroine.
Has she said much to you?"
"Not much. She knows I understand. We came very close together ...
before."
Mark leaned forward.
"You know, you promised you'd tell me ... all that. And then--you
never came!"
"Dear, I couldn't," she said very low to the heel of her sock.
He watched her a while in silence; approving the clear, delicate
outline of her profile, the soft-toned blue of her blouse, and the
old lace collar he had given her two years ago. He knew now how
impermissibly he had been craving to see her....
"Well, as you _have_ turned up, at last," he said, abruptly breaking
the silence, "tell ... all about it now. I'm dead sick of myself."
And she told...
For nearly an hour they were left in peace. Not since that long-ago
talk on the terrace, when she had surprised him by denouncing Bel,
had they talked so intimately or at such length; and for Mark it was
the most satisfying hour he had known since his return. Both of
them, unsuspected by each other, clung rather desperately to "Mums"
as the one topic on which they could safely draw near together. Then
Sheila wanted to hear about Sœur Colette. This was not easy
matter for Mark, but he achieved it, after a fashion. He was
describing his own abortive attempt to thank the devoted little nun
at parting, when there came a knock at the door.
It was the maid with two letters for Mark. With a start--half
relief, half vexation--he recognised Bel's writing.
"May I?" he asked.
And Sheila, rising casually, went over to the window that looked
across the Park. This quiet hour together had been so rare and
perfect a gift from the blue that she could hardly endure to watch
him read a love-letter from Bel. That the girl could dream of
leaving him in his helplessness never so much as entered her head.
A smothered curse startled her and she turned sharply.
"Mark!" she cried, an irrepressible ring of tenderness in her tone;
but he scarcely heard her.
The Mark of five minutes earlier--her Mark--had vanished. The man
she confronted was of Bel's making. He had tossed his letter on to
his elbow-table. He sat looking straight before him, his face set
and stern.
"Oh--_what_ is it?" she asked, rooted to the spot by a feeling that
she ought not to be there. No one ought to see him suffering so.
But Mark, dashed from his haven of content by a great wave of anger
and disgust, was past troubling about any human presence.
"She ... has no further use for me.--That's all," he said, as if he
were speaking into vacancy. "And yesterday I was fool eno' ... Quite
a ... masterly composition!"
Could Bel have heard that last she would have felt punished indeed.
But it was Sheila who heard it--Sheila who stood grasping the
window-sill, swept by a tempest of anger scarcely less than his own.
"Oh--she's a coward--a coward!" The words flashed out involuntarily;
and he seemed suddenly to be aware of her.
"You tender-hearted Mouse," he said, in a changed voice. "You ...
don't understand, eh? But ... it's natural enough. Inevitable. No
one ... but Mums could be expected ... to have any use for me--now."
To that tragic remark Sheila could find no answer. Besides, she was
fighting back her tears and wondering desperately, ought she perhaps,
to speak of what she knew? Would it give him the smallest
consolation? Was it fair to kick even Bel when she was down--Bel,
who had taken her all? Fair, or not, the thing was not in Sheila's
nature. She was human enough to wish that Mark could know--now. But
she was not the one to tell him.
"Thank God--for Mums," she said softly, after a long pause; and he
bowed his head in heartfelt acquiescence.
The strained hardness had gone from his face. But the irony of the
whole situation was piercing his heart. Sheila--who would have been
staunch through thick and thin--here alone with him, almost within
arm's length, yet irrevocably, eternally out of reach; lost to him
through his own blind folly. If ever mortal man endured the torment
of Tantalus it was Mark Forsyth in that hour of bewildered anger and
pain.
Sheila, believing him heart-broken, remained near the window, seeking
some inadequate word of comfort, and finding none. Instinct told her
that, for the moment, silence was best. Probably he was not even
aware of her: while she, startled out of her stoic self-repression,
had never been so intimately, so poignantly aware of him.
Unconsciously he had clenched his left hand until the knuckles stood
out sharp and white. He sat staring into the fire with a fixed
unseeing look. At intervals his eyebrows twitched nervously; and
sudden fear seized her lest this blow had fallen on him before he was
fit for the strain.
"Mark," she said at last, very gently, and came closer to him now.
"It simply ... bewilders me; and it has come at such a cruel moment.
But you mustn't let--things upset you too much. Would you rather be
alone?"
To her surprise he flung out his hand and grasped her wrist.
"No--no. Don't _you_ leave me!"
Was it fancy,--or was there an under-note of fear in his tone? The
mere possibility pierced her heart.
"Sit down--please," he said abruptly, and released her. "You've come
all this way and I've been simply----"
He checked himself, and was thankful that she would suppose he had
forgotten a word. "I've been--looking forward to it for so long.
I'll be rotten company. But do stay...."
He let out a great sigh and she sat by him as before; but the spell
of their happy intercourse was broken. Bel had come upon the scene,
and, as usual, had spoilt everything.
"I think," she said, "you ought to lie back and rest a little. Would
you prefer ... shall I read?"
"Do. I'd love it."
"What have you got here? ... Roman Rolland?"
"Yes: a new one--the '_Michel Ange_.' It's splendid."
He indicated the page; but first she must arrange his chair and
cushions at a restful slope. Leaning back he gazed up at her. For a
mere instant his eyes lingered in hers, that had the clear depth and
quiet of a mountain lake.
"Clever Mouse!" he said, in a voice of lazy content. "And look here,
not a word to Mums. She'd rage. We'll have our afternoon in peace;
and I'll tell her to-night. Go ahead."
Pocketing Bel's letter, he closed his eyes; and Sheila, between the
sentences, could scrutinise his face. Cheek-bones and jaw and the
fine strong curve of the eye-bone still stood out too sharply; and
she noted with a pang the strained corners of his mouth. Beneath his
surface composure she detected unmistakable signs of jarred
nerves--signs she was learning to know too well--and a great longing
came over her to soothe him with the touch of her skilled fingers
over his forehead and head. But the very intensity of her feeling
made her shrink from an offer that would otherwise have been a mere
matter of course.
Meantime she must give her attention to Michael Angelo----
And it was so that Lady Forsyth found them when she came to carry
Sheila off for lunch.
After his prescribed rest, they returned and had their afternoon in
peace. Though Mark's natural cheerfulness was still shadowed by his
calamity, Sheila--seeing what she had seen--marvelled at the
controlled ease of his manner. And few could estimate better the
manifold difficulties of self-control.
The moment of parting put an almost equal strain on both.
"Come again soon, Mouse," he said, with a brave show of lightness
that wrung her heart. "It's done me good--a breath of country air."
She promised to come, when stress of work allowed, and she frankly
returned the pressure of his hand.
Then--she was gone: and for Mark it was as if the sun had fallen out
of the sky. Alone--with the haunting sense of her presence, the
empty chair, and that letter in his pocket, a chill conviction crept
through him that life--real life--was over and done with--that he had
reached the dead end of everything.
His mother, when she reappeared, found him lying listless and
unoccupied, staring into space. As she came to the fire and drew off
her gloves, he glanced up at her without a word of greeting: a glance
that would normally have hurt her. But, in those days, thought and
feeling were altogether concentrated on him.
"Darling," she said, in a voice that tried not to sound over-anxious,
"you look horribly done up. It was lovely, wasn't it? But I'm
afraid it's all been a little too much for you."
His answer, spoken in a vehement undertone, jarred all through her.
"You're right. The whole cursed situation is just a little too much
for me." Then, seeing the startled pain in her eyes, he handed her
Bel's envelope, adding more gently: "I'm not going off my head. That
came this morning."
She read it slowly, with very mixed feelings, and Mark's eyes never
left her face. The breeze of her thoughts rippled over it like wind
over a pool. But she did not "rage" as he had anticipated. She was
at once too thankful and too profoundly angered by the girl's
invincible coolness and selfishness to find relief in mere explosives.
"Well?" he asked, seeing that she had reached the end.
"_Well!_" she echoed, with eloquent brevity. Then, after a pause:
"No wonder that took the virtue out of Sheila's visit. It's Bel
through and through. I can make no severer comment. And, after all,
one detects a touch of poetic justice. She did it ... before to hurt
you deliberately for her own ends. Now she's compelled to do it,
being what she is. Of course----"
"Mother, be _quiet_!" Mark's eyebrows twitched and he raised a
commanding hand. "She's in the right of it. But yesterday ... she
never gave me a chance.... Not likely I should dream of holding her
to... Oh Lord!" He clenched his hand and closed his eyes, as if to
shut out the intolerable truth. But the enemy was within.
And his mother stood there watching him. Every nerve in her quivered
with his pain as well as her own; and two great tears rolled unheeded
down her cheeks.
Suddenly Mark opened his eyes; and at sight of her mute controlled
misery, his heart smote him.
"_Mother_ ... I'm a graceless beast," he said slowly. "Thank
God--there's _you_----"
"Yes--there's me--always!" With a sharp sob she fell on her knees
beside him and pressed her lips upon his hand.
CHAPTER IX
"Suffer not woman in her tenderness to sit near him in the darkness.
Banish the frailties of hope, wither the relenting of love, scorch
the fountain of tears...."--DE QUINCEY.
Next morning they could speak of it all more calmly. Mark had slept
little and had done some unpleasantly lucid thinking in the small
hours.
"Now--it must be business to-day," he said, when his mother appeared
after breakfast, to read or to write for him according to his mood.
"And first, we must answer _this_."
He brought his hand down sharply on Bel's letter.
"Need you?" she asked.
"Yes--I need. I've ... one or two things to say. My left-hand
scrawl's not legible yet; so--you must write them for me. She won't
like that."
It was the first time Helen Forsyth had heard a vindictive note in
her son's voice.
"No," she said quietly; and, opening his despatch-case, she laid out
her materials, while he sat worrying his moustache.
When she was ready, he dictated in a low, impersonal tone the "one or
two things" that he had thought out in the small hours.
"Bel, I have your letter. Of course you are free. I had no other
intention. I meant to tell you on Thursday, but ... I was a weak
fool----"
"Mark!" his mother remonstrated; and he frowned sharply.
"I was a weak fool," he repeated with emphasis. "Written it?"
"Yes."
"As it's hard on you losing everything, I am instructing my
solicitors to pay you the £5000 I told you about. Money is always
useful."
At that, his mother laid down her pen.
"My dear boy, it's out of the question. Walker will think you've
gone mad."
"Walker may think what he pleases. He will get his instructions
before he knows the engagement is off."
The set of Mark's face warned her that she was knocking her head
against a wall; but she could not give in without further protest.
"Darling, do be reasonable," she pleaded. "It's not fair----"
"Not fair--on whom?" he blazed round at her. "I'm not despoiling
Wynchcombe Friars. And it isn't as if ... there was any
chance--Marriage is out of the question. And ... it's a bit hard on
Bel. After all, she's lost her husband through the war. I'm simply
treating her as if she was my widow. And it may save some other
luckless chap from ... the 'business arrangement' she proposes to
ratify at the altar. Anyway, Mother, the money's mine, and I don't
feel fit to argue the point. If you won't write what I want, I must
do it through Keith--that's all."
She bit her lip to keep back the futile retort. He was plainly not
himself this morning. Dr. Norton had warned her of possible nerve
complications. Opposition was useless; probably harmful. And what
did a little money matter after all?
"Of course I'll write what you want, Mark," she said quietly. "But
... wouldn't three thousand be enough?"
"Oh, all right, three thousand," he agreed listlessly, to her
complete surprise. All the fire seemed to have gone out of him.
"Let's get it over. Have you written everything? Thanks. Give it
here."
He read it through, while his mother watched him with troubled eyes,
then slowly, laboriously he scrawled with his left hand: "Good-bye.
Mark Stuart Forsyth."
"There--that's done," he said, pushing the paper across the table.
"Write instructions to Walker in my name, will you? I feel fagged
out. This cursed lying up saps all one's energy."
Though her heart yearned over him, she answered nothing. He needed
no cheap word of sympathy from her. They were one in suffering; and
he knew it. All she could do for him was to be untiring in his
service.
While she went on with her writing, he lay silent and inert, not even
troubling to fill his pipe--an achievement that had delighted him a
few days ago.
Mechanically Helen's pen travelled over the paper; but she scarcely
knew what she wrote, so harassed was her brain with perplexity and
foreboding. She had hoped much from Sheila's visit, but Bel had
stepped in and spoilt the effect. Just when the first realisation of
his fate was blackening everything, she must needs rub salt into his
wound by dwelling on the pain and strain which she could not endure.
And Mark responded by heaping coals of fire on her head. It was
maddening of him; but at the moment every minor consideration was
dwarfed by the discouraging state of his nerves. His alterations
between listlessness and irritability alarmed her. Mercifully, Dr.
Norton was coming to-morrow; and she hoped Keith would arrive soon.
At the first, far-off sound of his footstep she laid down her pen.
"I'll be back in a minute, darling," she said, and hurried away.
In the midst of all her anxiety and sorrow, it was a very real
blessing to have Keith back again; and, as regards Mark, her reliance
on him was absolute. To her, their relation seemed a singularly
perfect thing. She had almost forgotten--in her concentration on
Mark--that he was supposed to be in love with her.
"What's wrong now?" he asked: she was so obviously thankful to see
him.
"Oh, everything. Come in here a minute."
She led him into the empty ante-room where visitors waited; and there
told him, in a few trenchant phrases, the tale of Bel's defection, of
Sheila's visit, and of Mark's change for the worse.
"I suspect he didn't sleep much last night, and I'm afraid I ...
rather ... get on his nerves," she concluded, with a pitiful quiver
of her lip. "Something fresh is hurting him terribly--something
bigger, I think, than the loss of Bel. Keith ... I'm afraid ... for
his precious brain."
"Don't get thinking that, Helen." Keith's eyes were gentler than his
tone. "How about another drive? The first was a success. We'll ask
Nurse."
"Yes, do." Her face cleared. "But I think--unless he asks for me--I
won't come. He can feel my anxiety--just as I feel his pain. And it
worries him."
"Well--perhaps you're right. You mothers are the standing miracles
of creation."
She shook her head; but his quietly spoken tribute cheered and
comforted her, as he had meant that it should.
"Nurse" approved the suggestion of a drive, and Mark assented without
enthusiasm. He also accepted without comment the fact that his
mother was not coming; and she, from the window, watched them go in a
mood of bewildered misery that came very near despair. Could she
have broken down the wall of Mark's reserve and probed the depths of
his hidden pain, even her fine courage might altogether have given
way. But mercifully man "goes upon his long business like a blind
child...."
To-day's drive was quite conspicuously not a success. The first one
had come at a happy moment. But Mark was slipping steadily down into
the dark places of the soul where happy moments are not, where he
would have to fight with beasts--quite as real and terrible as the
beasts at Ephesus--before he could win again to daylight and sanity
and acceptance.
To-day, though the sun shone fitfully and the sky showed frail
patches of blue, his soul was unresponsive, utterly, to the still
small voice of hope. To-day the mere sight of whole men and women,
walking, riding free to come and go, to feel the good earth under
their feet, stirred him suddenly to such a fury of rebellion that he
felt as if his brain would burst.
Bombs! That was what he wanted. Bombs to hurl right and left into
that complacent crowd, that talked "war" and "atrocities" and "the
Christmas truce," and knew nothing about it all--nothing whatever.
Why were there no bombs? It was scandalous mismanagement----
By some queer freak, the taxi had become a trench and the complacent
Londoners were Germans--swarms of them. One couldn't imagine Germans
otherwise than in swarms. And there was only one way to prevent
these swarms from overrunning the earth:--shells and guns, unlimited
shells and guns. When the deuce would Home Authorities even begin to
wake up...?
At this point the Germans vanished; the trench was a taxi again, and
Mark glanced furtively at Keith as if to see whether he had noticed
the transformation. But Keith had merely seen the outer Mark sunk in
an unnatural apathy that seemed to confirm his own worst forebodings;
and now, in response to that questioning glance, he smiled his
tranquil, rather tired smile.
"A nice change getting out into the open, eh, old man?" he said. "In
a few months' time you may be handling your own car."
"Think so?" A flicker of interest sounded in Mark's tone.
"Quite possible, I should say. When that day comes we'll go round
recruiting again--you and I."
Then, having caught Mark's attention, he dilated a little upon that
vexed question, and ventured a pious hope that some day,
something--perhaps Zeppelin bombs in Downing Street--would convince a
Government, presumably anxious for victory, that, in war, time spelt
not merely money but infinitely precious human lives.
Mark gave the matter his polite consideration, though it seemed to
him curiously remote. Keith was doing his best. They all were; but
none of them had a glimmering idea of the Sheila complication, or of
what the whole thing meant--for him. Just as well, perhaps.
He felt half ashamed, now, of the sudden rage that had possessed him;
and that brief vivid delusion had startled him not a little. He must
"hang on to things" firmly or it might recur.
He hung on, accordingly, till the drive ended and they carried him up
to his room, haunted now by Sheila's presence. His mother was out;
and Keith, as luck would have it, began to talk of Sheila and to sing
her praises, till Mark could endure it no more. His brows twitched
and he hung on to things with desperate tenacity. But it was
useless. Keith, in the kindness of his heart, was jabbing nails into
him: driving them home----
For a time Mark bore it in semi-silence: then, to Keith's
consternation, he suddenly and very completely let himself go....
For close on half an hour he cursed everything and everyone, more
especially the devoted Macgregor, whose superfluous zeal had saved
him from extinction. He raged against his dependence on others,
against the broken life ahead of him, with a terrible fluency and
command of language that Keith had not heard from him since full
power of speech returned.
To interrupt or reason with him were worse than useless: moreover,
Macnair knew that, for a man of Mark's passionate nature, some such
explosion was inevitable, and he devoutly hoped it might bring
relief. Much of it, both in manner and matter, was so foreign to the
true Mark, that Keith found it all unendurably painful. Yet he
endured; and at intervals said what he could, which was little
enough; first, because he was a tongue-tied Scot; second, because
Mark was in no condition just then for comfort of any kind.
Slowly the storm died down to disconnected mutterings of apology and
self-disgust; and the sound of his mother's footstep without silenced
him altogether.
"Oh Lord! Here's Mums," he murmured, and Keith did not fail to
notice the worried look in his eyes. "Don't go, old man. And for
God's sake--don't give me away."
"_Is_ it likely?" Keith asked, with a reproachful look. "She has
more than enough to bear."
Words and tone had their intended effect. When his mother appeared,
Mark achieved a smile.
She came to him and kissed his forehead.
"Had a nice drive?"
"Oh, a damned delectable drive!" he answered with a short laugh.
"Beastly unfair on Keith, dosing him with an hour of my society."
"You shut up," Keith commanded sternly; and Helen, seeing that
something had gone wrong, made haste to change the subject.
Keith took her out to lunch and had a good deal to say about the
political situation. Then, the day being Saturday, he insisted on a
Symphony Concert. He further insisted on ringing up Sir John
Forsyth--who happened to be in town--and asking him to look in on
Mark for tea. Helen never liked him better than in these occasional
autocratic moods. Too often nowadays the one thing she prayed to be
delivered from was a decision, no matter how trifling; and at such
times the masculine note of command was restful beyond belief.
So she went with him to the Queen's Hall; and Beethoven's music
flowed like a river of healing over the bruised places of her heart;
and when they returned to Park Lane, Sir John began insisting also.
This, though she never guessed it, was equally Keith's doing.
Laura, he said, had given him strict injunctions to bring Helen back
for dinner. "Quite quiet," the Admiral assured her, seeing
hesitation on her face. "Only ourselves and the Desmonds. He's up
on some recruiting business. Age cannot wither him. Wonderful
fellow!"
"But--Mark," Helen murmured, glancing at her son, who seemed lost in
his own reflections.
"I'll spend the evening with him," Keith struck in. "Nothing I
should enjoy better."
Mark, who was listening fitfully, greeted that statement with a
grimace and a faint, very faint, twinkle in his eye. The eclipse of
his humour was, to those who loved him, a bitter thing; and, in
Keith's opinion, a bad sign.
It was certainly not in evidence that evening. The afternoon's
explosion seemed to have flung him to the other extreme. He smoked
pipe after pipe without volunteering a word; and Keith, watching him
unobserved, grew more anxious than ever. Towards the end, after a
long silence, he suddenly leaned forward and gave Keith a straight
look.
"I've got it!" he said, with decision.
"Got what, old chap?" Keith asked, feeling seriously alarmed.
"A priceless sentence of Robert Louis'--rather apt for the occasion,"
Mark answered; and Keith broke into a low laugh of relief. "It's
been wandering in my head, bits of it. Couldn't piece them together.
Now it's come straight. 'When we have fallen through storey after
storey of our vanity and aspiration, and sit rueful among the ruins,
it is then that we begin to measure the stature of our friends.'
Struck me I'd been ... measuring yours to-day. Understand?"
"I do understand." Keith was too deeply moved to say more.
"Not quite so crazy, am I, as I sounded this afternoon," Mark went
on, with a pathetic pride in his own achievement.
"Not a bit of it! If you can quote R.L.S. verbatim, you'll do all
right, in time."
"Yes--in time." Mark let out his breath and leaned back against his
cushions. "Meanwhile I--'sit rueful among the ruins.' And you must
make allowances, you ... people."
At that, Keith rose abruptly; it was time to be gone.
"My dear fellow," he said, and laid a hand on Mark's shoulder, "we're
ready to make all the allowances on earth. Only--" a pause--"as far
as you can ... be merciful to your mother."
Mark sighed. "Mums? Yes--that's the difficulty. Women are the
deuce."
"A few of them," Keith remarked with quiet emphasis, "are about all
the visible guarantee we have that--there's a God in heaven!"
Then he took his leave, feeling a shade less anxious, but determined
to be on the spot next morning and to see Dr. Norton when he came.
"Sleep sound, old chap," was his parting injunction; but the brief
snatches of sleep that came to Mark in the early hours of the night
were robbed of all healing influence by dreams--hideous dreams, such
as he had not suffered from since his earlier days in the Red Cross
barn. Vividly he saw again that mound of earth, in the moonlight,
and the leg that would not be still; and again, in imagination, he
crept out into the open, caring nothing for risks if only he could
quiet that leg or release its owner.
Up to this point, the dream was always the same. It varied only in
its culmination. And to-night there sprang from behind the mound a
colossal German with nails like talons and eyes like live coals. But
when Mark would have sprung at him he found himself paralysed; while
the Thing under the mound whimpered for help, and the Creature--a
very Apollyon--loomed nearer every moment....
Miraculously, he shook off that nightmare rigidity. He was locked in
a suffocating death-grapple. The Creature's breath scorched his
face; and, with a start, he awoke, shivering, beads of cold sweat
upon his forehead.
"My God!" he breathed, between horror and relief, and promptly
switched on the light. It was just after one o'clock; but sleep and
the desire of sleep were gone from him.
To quiet his mind and cleanse it of fear he tried reading a few pages
of _Michel Ange_. It was useless. His eyes followed the words but,
although he understood them, they made no connected impression on his
brain.
With a sigh he gave it up, switched off the light and lay there,
open-eyed, hour after hour, watching two panels of moonlight shift
slowly across the carpet, climb the wall, lessen and vanish as the
moon swung westward. Outside, the companionable hum of traffic grew
fainter; ceased altogether; and left him at the mercy of his
increasingly bitter thoughts.
Too clearly he foresaw the peculiar trials of his hampered,
restricted life; devoid of freedom, devoid of movement, save such as
he could accomplish in a wheeled chair, or a motor--perhaps. To a
man of independent spirit and immense physical vigour, the prospect
was intolerable; and the glimmer of hope on the horizon was too dim
to pierce the fog that shrouded his spirit. Better a shattered limb,
that could have been replaced, than this hulk of useless bone and
sinew. Even now he could not grasp the fact that in all probability,
he would never stand squarely on his feet again----
And that was only a part of the tragedy: the rest was entirely of his
own making, which did not mend matters--rather the reverse.
In the silence, one reiterate sentence kept hammering at his brain:
"All along, I have been a fool--worse than a fool. All along, Mums
has been right."
Forcing himself to travel backward through the years, he saw, now,
how obviously it had been Sheila from the very beginning; so
obviously, that he had taken things almost too much for granted. She
and Mums were his life. He had asked nothing better; and having them
constantly with him, he had scarcely given a thought to marriage. On
the whole, he had preferred his freedom. Marriage could wait.
It was her sudden departure from his horizon and her charming
letters--she was fairly communicative on paper--that had set him
thinking seriously of her, dreaming of her, longing to see her again.
That year of her absence had seemed a rather blank year.
Then--she had come back....
He remembered very well that moment of meeting; the stir in his
veins; the new touch of shyness between them, and the light in his
mother's eyes. He understood it all now. She had been watching her
dearest dream come true.
Soon after that he had found himself wondering--did Sheila, by any
chance, care? Or was it chiefly Mums? And was he no more to her
than Ralph?
At that point--with a suddenness, a swiftness of which he now felt
half ashamed--Bel happened to him. There is no other word for it.
She came, smiled, conquered; and for a time he was translated; no
longer master of his destiny and very hardly master of himself.
Living again through those plays, he began to suspect that from the
first her effect on him had been conscious, deliberate. There was no
true simplicity in her. Yet with what engaging charm she could
affect simplicity, the better to secure her hold on him.
Since his return, since he had been able to see her as she was, he
had perceived that she represented, in subtle gracious guise, an
appeal which, in its more obvious forms, he had successfully
withstood. For this, for the glamour, the unsatisfying charm of the
mere courtesan--so he labelled her in his bitterness--he had flung
aside a real woman; one of the few, as Keith had said, who are a
visible guarantee of God. He had dropped the substance to catch at a
shadow: and now, too late, the horrors and splendours of war, the
shining faith and saintliness of one small French nun, had renewed a
right spirit within him and opened his eyes to the truth.
It was the cruelest knowledge of his life. Even the crippling of his
manhood seemed a small thing beside that other loss for which he
alone was to blame.
Strange how vivid was the feel of her in absence! How near she had
drawn to him in France! And Bel, not seen, eluded him utterly.
Proof--he knew it now--that she was but the fair semblance of
reality; while Sheila, like the King's daughter, was "all glorious
within." Six months ago, she might have been his for the asking.
And she would have stood by him, stood by him to the end----
Towards morning, he slept heavily for an hour; and woke with a dead
weight on heart and brain: a weight, beyond his power to shift, that
seemed steadily pressing him down, down into the depths----
In this state Dr. Norton found him; and, after some fifteen minutes
of very lop-sided talk, he said decisively: "Sir Mark, I've come to
the conclusion we can't keep you here your full time. The sooner we
get you out of Town the better."
"Home?" Mark asked, a glimmer of hope in his voice.
"I'm afraid--not yet. But a move in that direction. 'Mavins,' in
Surrey; a beautiful old place. Perhaps you know it?"
Mark nodded.
"Sir Howard Meredith has given it over to convalescents like
yourself, who need mental as well as physical healing. I'll ring
them up. Move you to-day, if possible. You'll go quite comfortably
by motor ambulance."
"Thanks."
The veil of indifference had fallen again. "Anything's
preferable--to this."
"Cheer up, then, and give yourself a chance," Norton commanded
briskly; but he walked down the passage with an anxious line between
his brows.
He found Macnair and Lady Forsyth in the sitting-room, and wasted no
words in vain preliminaries.
"My patient's all to pieces," he announced bluntly. "Nerves in a
rotten state. What have you been doing to him these two days?"
Helen briefly explained the situation and Bel's latest move.
As the doctor listened, anxiety gave place to anger.
"Good Lord! As if he hadn't enough against him! I've distrusted
that young lady and her silky manners from the start. Seen too many
of her kind, in hospitals, smoking cigarettes with wounded officers,
under the impression that they are doing their 'bit' for their
country. He's well rid of her; but this is a critical moment for any
fresh upset."
He proceeded to unfold his plan; and to them he explained more fully
that "Mavins" was more a home for nerve-shattered officers. There
Sir Mark would be in the best possible hands; noted specialists,
professors of psychology; and there was no reason to suppose that he
might not pull round completely, in time.
"We'll move him to-day if we can," Norton concluded, addressing Lady
Forsyth. "His best chance just now is to get right away from
everything and everyone associated with this business;
especially--from you!"
She managed to smile. "Oh, I know, I'm the fatal one----"
"Because he cares for you most," Norton reminded her in a gentler
tone. Then he went off to make the necessary arrangements.
After a good deal of telephoning, matters were settled. Mark would
leave in the early afternoon. Dr. Norton, meanwhile, had discovered
that Macnair was a personal friend of Professor Langton, the great
psychologist. On the strength of this he proposed that Keith should
go down with Mark and stay a few days till he felt settled in his new
surroundings.
Mark, himself, took no visible interest in it all. He seemed to have
slipped hopelessly out of reach.
After lunch his mother came in for a few minutes to say good-bye; and
there on his table lay an open note in Bel's handwriting. For a
moment it startled her: then she remembered his quixotic gift.
"May I?" she asked, and he nodded.
Bel's acknowledgment was brief and, as usual, effective.
"Coals of fire on my head. How exactly like you! And--what can one
say, except that my utter unworthiness is the measure of my
gratitude.--BEL."
"Posing to the last!" was Lady Forsyth's enraged reflection. "That's
the best place for it," she said aloud; and tearing it across, she
flung it in the fire.
Mark, leaning back against his cushions watched it burn.
Helen was watching his face. It showed no glimmer of feeling. Then,
anxiety and curiosity so pricked her that she ventured a question.
"Darling," she said, a hand on his shoulder, "I'm puzzled. Is this
fresh trouble--altogether Bel?"
"N--no. Not the way you mean. Still--she's responsible----"
His brows twitched. He seemed to force the words out, frowning at
the fire.
Then, unexpectedly, he looked up at her, a strange, wild light in his
eyes. "Mums, it's--oh God! ... It's _everything_!"
To that heart-piercing cry there could be only one answer. Stooping
over him, she kissed him, holding him close; and he, with sudden
fervour, returned her kiss, clutching her hand as if he could not
bear to let it go.
So they parted, with never a word; and her question remained
unanswered;--the puzzle still unsolved.
Keith went with him, as arranged. Sheila was presumably chained to
Westover; and Helen, with heart and hope near breaking-point, was
left utterly alone.
BOOK IV
VIA LUCIS
CHAPTER I
"So shall he read elder truths, grand truths, fearful truths. And so
shall our mission be accomplished, that from God we had--to plague
his heart till we had unfolded the capacities of his spirit."--OUR
LADY OF SORROWS.
Mavins, like Wynchcombe Friars, was set upon a ridge; but the house
was comparatively modern and here was no falling and rising sea of
pine-tops splashed in dark foam against the sky. Lawns and
shrubberies ended in a low brick wall matted with arabis and
aubretia. And beyond the wall lay Surrey, and again more Surrey,
merging into Sussex: gentle undulations, interlacing ridges and, in
the clear weather, the sweeping line of the Downs, mistily blue along
the horizon. When the wind was in the south, Sir Howard Meredith
would call upon his visitors to note the whiff of sea-salt in the
air: and those who were sufficiently imaginative would scent that
phantom whiff with enthusiasm.
But there was, now, no host at Mavins, though there were many guests.
For Sir Howard had entirely devoted his beautiful place to those
that--excepting prisoners--were perhaps the saddest aftermath of war
as conceived and waged by modern Germany: men broken in nerve and
spirit; strong men, shaken by dreams and delusions, who dreaded the
night and cried out in their sleep; men, who sat alone and wept,
quietly, hopelessly, because their manhood was gone from them, and
with it, their power of self-control. One there was, a mere boy of
two and twenty, crazed permanently, the doctors feared, because he
had seen a lad of his own platoon crucified with indignity by German
soldiers; and--he could not forget. That was the secret torment of
so many who came out of the trenches seemingly unscathed:--they could
not forget. Mark knew. It had been the chief of his own troubles in
that backwater in France.
Yet now, for a time, under the deadening influence of nervous
depression, he lived and moved among these tragic fellow-sufferers
almost as though they were not. The first few weeks of isolation
from all he loved, drifted by like a timeless, colourless dream. He
seldom opened a paper or troubled to read his letters. He wrote
none, and hardly a trace remained of his keen interest in the war.
He learnt with blank indifference, that the Russian "steam-roller"
was rolling to some purpose through Galicia, that the first Zeppelins
had arrived in England and dropped bombs on the east coast. Even the
more personal news of Ralph's gallant death in action scarcely seemed
to reach him.
It was the crazed boy and his story that gave him the first sharp
twinge of pain--herald of returning life.
He heard it from Honor Lenox, Maurice's elder sister. She was at
Mavins that winter, doing V.A.D. work, to which she had devoted
herself unremittingly since the outbreak of war. As hospital
orderly, she had been through the siege of Antwerp and the retreat
upon Ostend. She had ministered to stunned and starving refugees,
had earned conspicuous distinction in advance ambulance work, and had
lately been decorated by the King. A brief collapse, following on
those strenuous months in Flanders, obliged her for the moment, to be
content with lighter work at home: and Mark, on arrival, had been
practically given into her charge.
She was a tall, plain girl, strikingly plain: with her father's
rough-cut features and clear northern eyes. The two were already
acquainted: and Mark, in his present mood, found refreshment in her
bluntness and dry humour and strong, unbeautiful face. The normal
Mark did not suffer plain women gladly. But at the moment it was
Honor's chief asset that she was neither fair, fascinating nor
conspicuously a woman. The revulsion--as Keith had prophesied--was
complete.
There was virtue also in her sane, soldierly attitude towards the
war. She neither denounced it as "devilish and senseless," nor
harped morbidly on horrors. She had seen both sides of the shield.
She knew--as he knew--that from the pains of hell spring the
splendours of sacrifice and devotion: that the true peace which
passes understanding is not the prerogative of the shirker and the
pacifist; that in the trenches and even in the shambles of a modern
battlefield, "Death rages but he does not reign." There you have,
perhaps, the main distinction between those who have been in the
firing line and those who have not: between the soldiers who have
resisted unto blood, and the ineffectives--willing and
unwilling--obsessed by casualty lists, atrocities and shattered men.
That spirit Mark chiefly associated with Bel: and he was the more
thankful to find no trace of it in the daughter of Sir Eldred Lenox.
Not that she soothed him with fairy tales. On the contrary, she
recounted, purposely and in plain terms, many of her worst
experiences; probing him with stiletto pricks of pain sharper than
his own; if so be that she might stab his spirit broad awake.
It was his unnatural indifference to Ralph's death that had prompted
her to tell him in full the pitiful tale of that crazed subaltern: a
brilliant Oxford scholar, whose brain had been unhinged not by the
normal rigours of war but by the abnormal cruelty of scientifically
dehumanised German soldiers. The telling of it pained her horribly;
and the hearing of it hurt Mark as nothing had hurt him yet since
that night when the sword of realisation pierced his soul.
Manlike, pain vented itself in anger. Why the dickens did she talk
about such beastliness? he demanded irritably: and she knew she had
touched a vulnerable spot.
"I don't--as a rule," she said without apology. "But, now and then,
something goads me to remind myself and others that this isn't an
ordinary war. It's a crusade against organised powers of evil. It
makes vengeance almost a sacred duty. And we've got to realise
things like that--however much we shrink from them--in order to crush
out, absolutely, the spirit that makes them possible."
There was no fervour, no touch of the didactic in her quiet, rather
flat voice. It spoke, with deep conviction, the very thoughts that
had burned in his own brain after hearing the story of "la petite
Pauline"; and for the first time the real Mark looked with real
interest at Maurice's sister.
"That's so," he agreed gruffly. "Not much use though for the poor
crocked-up devils who can't help any more."
She looked back at him in her direct, masculine fashion. A smile
hovered in her eyes. "There are crocks _and_ crocks!" she said.
"And there are other ways besides fighting. Think them over. You'll
find it as good as a tonic."
He did think them over: and it was as good as a tonic. He reverted
more than once to the subject of young Carmichael. Was there no
hope? A shadow of hope, Honor told him. His mother--who came at
intervals--was heart-broken.
That last bit of information took effect, as intended. Mark began to
talk of his own mother. He also began to think about Ralph and
Sheila. He wondered.... He wanted to know....
By slow degrees, light was breaking through the fog that shrouded his
spirit. Then came Sheila's letter about Ralph, that let in quite a
painful flood of sensation.
"I wonder, have they told you," she wrote, "that my Ralph has had the
honour of dying for his country? It was an honour he coveted with
all his heart; and they say he came by it splendidly. I promised him
long ago that, if this happened, I would not grieve nor wear
mourning. But, oh Mark (if you are really waking up again), you will
know, better than any one but Mums, how blank everything feels some
days when pride seems no prop at all and there is simply the
emptiness--the longing----.
"He was the one bit of home that seemed really to belong. I know to
the outside world he seemed just a very ordinary subaltern
overburdened with brains. But I'm sure England need think no shame
of her very ordinary subalterns judging from their record in war.
'To sacrifice she prompts her best,
She reaps them as the sower reaps.'
That's Meredith, isn't it? It has the sound of him. Mother has
really been wonderful in refusing to let our private sorrow interfere
with her work. She says we are all dedicated--with an extra big D.
You know her way. But it is not all talk. She's proved that these
last few weeks. Dear Mark, forgive if my letter makes you sad. It's
only to you two I can say a little of what I feel--on the bad days.
In between, I can go quietly on and be grateful for my gift, such as
it is, and pray that you may soon be home again to cheer the brave
Mums in her great loneliness! I go to her whenever I can. Mr.
Macnair is ambulance driver in France again. I do wish he would come
back. And oh--a fresh trouble. My dear Mona is very ill with
typhoid at Boulogne. I long to go to her. But I'm badly wanted
here. Isn't your right arm well enough yet to manage a letter? Mums
tells me she hasn't heard. Half a dozen lines, the merest scrawl
even, would cheer her ever so. Do try. Yours always, Sheila."
That letter gave him a sudden blessed sense of enlargement; as if a
window had been opened in his brain. It also pricked his awakening
conscience: and he did try, with very fair success.
Surely and steadily his right hand regained its cunning: and even the
tentative return of power feelingly persuaded him that this skilled
servant of his brain, was worth all the rest of his body put
together. After all, he had willed to risk everything; to give
everything. He had recognised that the price of patriotism might be
a very long price: but he had never dreamed of paying it in this form.
He tried to express some of these thoughts in a long outpouring to
that brave lonely mother he had treated so ill. He also attempted a
letter to Sheila: but the only thing he really wanted to tell her was
the one thing that must never be told.
Having written the words: "My dear Sheila," he sat there, pen in
hand, cursing the fate that forbade him to add, "I love you--I love
you--I love you." Simply that. The sheer relief of it!
Suppose he did--what would her answer be?
Oh--coward and fool! Apart from every other disability how could he
account for Bel?
In the end he wrote to her at some length of Ralph and Mona and Mums.
It frightened him afterwards to realise how near he had come to the
cliff's edge.
Sheila's mention of Mona set him thinking of Maurice. Queer that
Miss Lenox had never mentioned him. Next time they were alone
together he spoke of Mona's illness and asked after her brother.
Honor's face clouded a little.
"My poor Maurice," she said, "was not made for great days or terrible
events. He has had a bitter bad time. It has broken him to pieces.
And Father, who is always rather down on him, takes it very hard.
There are the Desmond boys winning decorations--and his own eldest
son----"
"How about his eldest daughter?" Mark asked smiling.
"Oh--she's a faint consolation! But not quite the same thing.
Dick's doing good work in the Flying Corps, which is much more to the
point."
"But Maurice--where is he, poor chap? There's good stuff in him if
he isn't a fighter. I'd like to hear more."
So she told him more; glad of his increasing concern for others;
though it went hard with her to speak freely of anything so near her
heart. Maurice, it seemed, had returned to the Front after a
fortnight in the hospital where Mona worked and a week at home.
"In love with her--is he?" Mark asked.
"Yes. Very much so. That made a fresh jar with Father. He's
devoted to Colonel and Mrs. Laurence. But he could not bear the idea
of Dr. Videlle's daughter marrying his son; though he wouldn't have
Mrs. Laurence know that for the world. It was a most awkward tangle.
Father objected and Maurice insisted; and it quite spoilt the poor
boy's crumb of leave. Then he had an awful spell in the trenches.
His letters to me--" she paused to steady her lips. "I think--he was
thankful when he got hit. But it's his right hand--badly damaged----"
"Oh Lord! D'you mean--he may lose it?"
"I'm not sure. They still hope to save it--partially. He's back at
Boulogne. The same hospital. His poor nerves worse than ever.
Mother's out there too."
"And Mona?"
Honor was silent a moment; then she said in a quiet, toneless voice:
"Mona ... is dead. I only heard yesterday!"
"Good God!" Mark's voice was hushed also. He wanted to say more.
Miss Lenox was evidently upset. But before he found the adequate
word, she was speaking again in the same level tone.
"It is sometimes difficult, in these days, to go on believing that
God is good. Maurice knew--she cared. He spoke to her a few days
before she fell ill. It gave him such a lift. And now--he's half
crazed, Mother says. They talk of sending him here. I hope they
will. Professor Langton is working marvels."
They did send him to Mavins, with the remains of his right hand in a
sling. The bulk of it had been saved. Only the little finger and
half the forefinger were gone: so that eventually, with practice, he
would draw and paint again. But at present no word of comfort could
reach his half-distracted brain. All day long he talked wildly and
rapidly of Mona; and at night he could not sleep for dreams. A
troublesome case; not an obstinate one, the friendly Professor of
Psychology told Honor; but it was not advisable at present to let him
see much of his sister or his friend.
Meanwhile the girl devoted herself to Sir Mark, and found no small
comfort in his gradual progress toward a saner, happier mood of mind.
Keith--definitely back from France--came to see him oftener now, and
they talked of Sheila. To Mark the mere sound of her name was like
the music of running water in a barren land. It struck him that
Keith seemed to be a good deal at Westover Court; and he fell to
wondering about "Mums." Because he, Mark, had not been knocked out,
did the queer fellow mean to keep silence for ever?
It also struck him as strange that his mother had never been to see
him. At last he asked for her; and she came, straightway, on the
wings of the first available express. Resolutely she had held to her
hard resolve not to go near him till he needed her; and now she had
her reward. He said little, but his hand clutched hers; and his
eyes, that had a gleam of the old light in them, followed her
wherever she moved.
"Come again soon," he said at parting; and she came again soon....
So February slipped by; and light increased without and within. Far
away, in the Mediterranean, by way of prelude to the splendid and
terrible Gallipoli adventure, British warships were lobbing shells
into the forts along the Narrows: and cheerful prophets predicted the
fall of Constantinople within a month. And still, across the
Channel, the interminable underground war dragged on. And still a
sanguine Government did its casual best to defeat the frankly
malignant German with the maximum of polite consideration; to which
end, Ministers temporised, fatally, over conscription and enemy
aliens and high explosives and other awkward trifles that involved
the removal of kid gloves. And the voice of criticism and
division--hushed in the inaugural days of 1914--was once more heard
in the land.
And still, week after week, War--that is no respecter of
Governments--exacted its inexorable toll of the young and the
incomparably brave; and the fearful also: and from Germany came the
cry of the prisoners--starved, tortured, yet unbroken--"How long, O
Lord, how long!"
Each dawn brought some new shock of grief to hundreds of hearts;
brought also its golden grain of healing to those already stricken----
At Mavins, as the days grew longer and milder, healing came gradually
both to Maurice and Mark.
Maurice's mercurial nature had responded more rapidly to both
atmosphere and treatment than the doctors had dared to hope. He
talked less and slept more. The strange, unseeing stare went out of
his eyes; and there came a day when Langton--who looked favourably on
Miss Lenox--declared that it rested with her to complete his cure.
Events justified him; and Mark found a new interest not untinged with
envy, in watching the two together. The very qualities that made for
discord between Maurice and his father, seemed to link the brother
and sister in a bond closer than common. It set Mark thinking of
Ailsa and wondering--would he eventually arrive at accepting Sheila
in that relation, the only one now possible between them.
Increasingly he longed to see her. But she did not come and he would
not ask.
In this fashion February drew to an end and Dr. Norton came down to
inspect his former patient. In his old guarded manner, he expressed
himself satisfied with Mark's general condition; and confirmed the
opinion of his colleague at Mavins that improvement, slight yet
unmistakable, had already begun. But how far it might ultimately go,
not a doctor among them would venture to prophesy yet. Mark's
nerves, at all events, were obviously on the mend. For a time, they
told him, he must "go softly" and keep clear of worry or strain. The
more normal his life and surroundings, the better his chance of
complete mental readjustment; and there was talk of going home before
long.
That, unquestionably, was a move in the right direction: and yet--he
felt half afraid. Coward selfishness whispered that, in this
peaceful backwater, "things" were easier to bear. Manhood urged that
he had been long enough on the shelf. It was high time to rouse
himself and give his country such service as he could; to conquer a
certain morbid dread of facing his own world--in a wheeled chair.
He did some hard and wholesome thinking on the subject while Maurice,
in the transition stage, claimed the chief part of Honor's attention;
and he discovered that here was the secret of his faint reluctance to
go home, though well he knew that his mother was counting the days to
his return.
He made that unheroic discovery on the last day of February, a day of
fugitive, appealing beauty.
With the help of the despised wheeled chair--that gave him a small
measure of freedom--he had established himself in his special corner
of the grounds, at the far end of the long low wall looking southward
across Surrey and Sussex to the sea. The February sun was warm as
April. Close to him loomed a wide-spreading yew, centuries old. In
the shadow of its blackness snowdrops gleamed; and on its uppermost
branch sat a thrush, pouring out a torrent of song. Almost, in
response to that brave music, Mark could feel the earth stirring in
her sleep, even as his own benumbed spirit was stirring within him
after the darkest winter he had ever known. A light breeze blew from
the south. Stately masses of cloud drifted across the heavens; the
Downs--grey-blue, against a toneless horizon--seemed astonishingly
near....
Mark, brooding on them, recalled Meredith's phrase: "The Downs have
swiftness." They set a man longing for a winged horse or for the
Seven-League boots. At first he had hardly been able to bear the
sight of them. He was learning to bear it now; even as he was
learning to accept cheerfully, almost gratefully, quite a number of
things that in the beginning had seemed unendurable. He was
discovering, at first hand, the amazing adaptability of the human
organism and the native resilience of his own spirit. There were
black moods still, when the curses came. But these were increasingly
offset by moods of high-hearted resolve to fling into his art all the
energy and passion of his stultified life: moods far truer to his
essential self; likelier therefore to endure.
And on this February day of drifting cloud and snowdrops and a
jubilant thrush, the more normal Mark held the field.
For an hour and a half, to his great satisfaction, he had been left
alone with his sketch-book and Meredith's _Nature Poems_--a
favourite, illustrated edition--and his own resurgent thoughts. He
knew now, definitely, that his time at Mavins was nearing an end.
Dr. Carstairs had spoken yesterday of a week or ten days. That fact
alone served to stiffen his manlier resolves.
And there was also another fact; quite unlooked-for, decidedly
stimulating. Miss Lenox had discovered it in the _Times_ that
morning under the heading of "Army Honours." It notified the award
of the Distinguished Service Order to Lieut. Sir Mark Stuart Forsyth:
and, from the bone-dry record appended, Mark made the surprising
discovery that on two occasions he had "exhibited conspicuous
coolness and courage." Once, by his intrepid leading, he had carried
a full trench against overwhelming odds: an unpleasant business, he
remembered it very well. Another time during a retreat, when one
flank of the battalion had been left in the air, he had, it seemed,
held on tenaciously to a critical position and saved the regiment
from annihilation. That must have been on the terrible last day of
his recollection, when he had himself been annihilated for his pains.
Baldly set down, it struck him as very ordinary average behaviour in
the circumstances. Quite likely poor old Maurice had been just as
sporting now and then. Only no one happened to notice. It was all a
matter of luck and partiality. A war that rained shells, rained
decorations--naturally enough. It was very gratifying all the same,
to have "stopped one": to possess a lasting memento of his own brief
strenuous flash of effort.
And what did it amount to after all? For sixty days--whether in
billets or trenches, or in the stress of actual fighting--he had
lived at the full stretch of his being. He had quailed and suffered
and exulted. He had seen with his eyes that, in nature and in human
nature, beauty shines out undimmed, though all the devils of hell are
leagued for its extinction. He had proved, in his own body and soul,
that "in war man values the power which it affords to life of rising
above life."
And now--this!
He glanced ruefully at the fur rug over his knees. Well, it was just
a question whether those sixty days were not worth a lifetime of
limitation. But--the loss of Sheila! There was the rub....
With a deliberate wrench he shifted his thoughts back to their
starting-point--those three proud letters after his name. He must
write to the Colonel--and to "Mums." No doubt she had been secretly
watching that list for weeks! And now there would be no holding her.
A wonder she had not wired already. She would need repressing badly;
or goodness knew what manner of fool she would make of him. He had
been a beast to her all these weeks. He would atone for it when he
got home. Then days seemed suddenly an intolerable time to wait.
Impatience stirred in him: the best possible sign. He shook himself
mentally--he had been mooning long enough;--and picked up his book
again.
It was open at "The Thrush in February." Nothing like Meredith for
tuning up the strings of a man's spirit: and this particular poem
vibrates with the morning quality of his genius; his sane loyalty to
Earth--Mother and Slayer in one.
He read on, now, from the point at which his personal affairs had
intruded on the poet's thought.
"She, judged of shrinking nerves, appears,
A Mother whom no cry can melt;--
A slayer, yea, as when she pressed
Her savage to the slaughter-heaps.
To sacrifice she prompts her best;
She reaps them as the sower reaps.
But read her thought; to speed the race--
And stars rush forth of blackest night...."
Again Mark paused, pondering those vigorous lines that might well
have been written in this year of turmoil; of evil, self-exposed and
rampant, that it may be the more squarely smitten. "To speed the
race," at no matter what cost of individual life, individual pain:
there you have the hard paradox of Nature, underlying every form of
human activity; but focused, intensified, and poignantly realised
when "God holds his assizes and hurls the nations on one another."
If a cog in the machinery is broken, what matter? There are scores
of others available. It has given its mite of service toward the
progress of the whole. But this particular cog was not altogether
useless even now; for the which compensation God be praised.
To that mountain-top of philosophy Mark had clambered painfully
enough: and to-day he caught an echo of it, clear and heartening, in
the song of the poet and the song of the thrush----
At this point he became aware of approaching footsteps and voices.
The thrush became aware of them also and took flight.
They drew nearer; and their owners came into view: Keith, Mums,
Sheila,--all three of them, with Maurice and his sister. Now he knew
why there had been no telegram. Just like her. He might have
guessed.
Closing his book, he waved a welcome and his mother hurried forward.
"A surprise visit of congratulation, darling," she explained
superfluously. "Well done!"
And she kissed him, unashamedly, before them all. There were moments
when the Irish streak in her carried the day. There were also
moments when even a son could not find it in his heart to be
repressive.
Mark had enough ado to repress himself, when Sheila stood before him,
her soft, cool hand in his; and Keith demanded gravely what the
dickens he meant by giving his family such a shock: and Maurice, the
born talker, looked on enviously and said nothing.
The happy event, the sunshine and the smell of spring in the air went
to their heads like wine. It was as if some tension within had
snapped. They talked nonsense once again with zeal and fluency; and
Mark himself was as foolish as any of them. It was a vast relief,
after those endless grey weeks when humour--the star of life--had
dwindled to a farthing dip in the outer dark. Now it sparkled again,
clear as ever: and Mark found it very good....
Then, quite casually, in the middle of it all, Keith slipped in his
own surprise contribution, that had been kept a profound secret
during its incubation. It consisted of a small motor car, specially
designed, light and easy to handle, in which--Mark with Keith's
help--could drive about his beloved country, and regain a measure of
the independent movement so dear to his heart. Keith himself was
responsible for the thought, but the car was to be a combined gift
from all three; the outward and visible sign of their joy in his
return.
Mark--too overwhelmed for mere thanks--could only evince the
liveliest interest in the "little beauty" and her manifold
perfections. From car talk they drifted naturally to ambulance
driving and an exchange of experiences between Honor and Keith. Even
Maurice revived considerably under Lady Forsyth's sympathetic
handling.
And through it all, Mark's inner self was chiefly aware of Sheila's
voice, too seldom heard, and Sheila's eyes--their twilight colour
intensified by the grey-violet hat and gown that she wore in place of
conventional mourning.
She sat on the low wall, a little apart from the group round his
chair; her sweet, serious face shadowed by the double loss of brother
and friend. The shadow lifted a little at sight of Mark's
sketch-book. With a glance at him for permission, she opened it and
went through it slowly, lingering a long while over each page.
He wanted her to himself so urgently that he wished the others at
Jericho. Now and again he contrived an exchange of glances. Then he
would hold her gaze a minute and reluctantly let her go. He had no
business whatever to do this: and he knew it. But to-day he felt
like a schoolboy out of bounds. He refused to look beyond the
sunshine into the waiting dark.
Honor Lenox, he found, had planned a semi-secluded tea-party in a
corner of the wide verandah,--the real Indian article; added by Sir
Howard, who declared he would as soon live without shaving-soap as
without a verandah. And Mark enjoyed it all consumedly, though not
five minutes' talk did he get with Sheila alone. Suddenly and
surprisingly, life had righted itself in defiance of tragic
limitations. The good minute would pass; but the fact that it had
come at all was of hopeful augury. And while it lasted, Mark could
forget everything except that he had not lost his art; and that
Sheila, however unattainable, was part of the vital fabric of his
life.
"Will you still be at home when I come?" he asked her at parting; and
she shook her head.
"'Fraid not. I go back on Friday, when 'Mums' goes to Lady John.
But I'm to get leave for a visit soon, she says----"
"_I_ say--" he corrected, under his breath; and again there passed
between them that flash of understanding; a direct contact of spirit
with spirit, never achieved in all his passionate courtship of Bel.
Oh, that he could banish her from his memory as though she had never
been!
But Bel would not let herself be so easily forgotten. Though
disenchantment was complete, she could still reassert herself, at
inopportune moments, to tarnish a love so different in quality that
there was need of some other name to call it by.
These thoughts visited him much later on that same evening, as he sat
beside his fire reviewing the events of a day that marked a definite
step towards the recovery of his spiritual balance; of a normal, if
tempered, thankfulness for all that still remained to him of joy in
life.
Lately Maurice had taken to looking in at this time for a talk; and
he very soon appeared, with the inevitable cigarette and a rather
doleful countenance.
For a while he sat smoking moodily, staring at the fire. Then, to
Mark's surprise, he said in a constrained voice: "I suppose Honor
told you--about Mona."
"Yes." Mark did his best to convey his own dumb depth of
fellow-feeling in that one word. Maurice let out a great sigh.
"She--cared. She'd have married me, Father or no. Seeing Miss
Melrose brought it all back again. She ... Mona ... understood.
_She_ didn't think me a hopeless rotter because I've been a bit
broken up by this cursed, inhuman war."
That tone towards the world's greatest crusade against machine-made
tyranny and brutality jarred Mark always. And it savoured too much
of Bel.
"Not a bit of use cursing the war, old chap," he said kindly.
"Nearer the mark to curse the apostles of cheapness for cheapness'
sake, who thwarted Joe Chamberlain, killed our economic independence,
and delivered the Empire into the tentacles of the German octopus.
But it's all done now; and we've just got to put our backs into it
and pull things through. You've done your level best, Maurice, and
no one thinks you a hopeless rotter. _I_ don't. Your sister
doesn't. Your mother----?"
Maurice frowned. "I'm hanged if I know what Mother thinks. She's
awfully fond of me. But she's not the soft kind. And she hugely
admires the genuine man of action; which accounts for my splendid but
rather formidable father. _He_ thinks me the out and outest rotter
that ever stepped. If it wasn't for Honor, God knows where I'd be at
this moment. And, as for going home--I believe a week of it would
simply smash me up again.'
"'M. I know what you mean. Why not come along to my place when
you're quit of this? We've both got to make a fresh start somehow;
and I've still to complete your conversion to Beauty and the
Classics!"
"D'you _mean_ that?" Maurice asked in genuine delight.
"Rather. It would give me a spurt. And your sister could come for
weekends. She's a rare good sort."