THE FURNACE
As Sara took her seat on board the train for Monkshaven, she was
conscious of that strange little thrill of the wanderer returned which
is the common possession of the explorer and of the school-girl at their
first sight of the old familiar scenes from which they have been exiled.
She could hardly believe that barely a year had elapsed since she had
quitted Monkshaven. So many things had happened--so many changes taken
place. Audrey had been transformed into Mrs. Herrick; Tim had been
given a commission; and Molly, the one-time butterfly, was now become
a working-bee--a member of the V.A.D. and working daily at Oldhampton
Hospital. Sara could scarcely picture such a metamorphosis!
The worst news had been that of Major Durward's death--he had been
killed in action, gallantly leading his men, in the early part of the
year. Elisabeth had written to Sara at the time--a wonderfully brave,
simple letter, facing her loss with a fortitude which Sara, remembering
her adoration for her husband and her curious antipathy to soldiering
as a profession, had not dared to anticipate. There was something rather
splendid about her quiet acceptance of it. It was Elisabeth at her
best--humanly hurt and broken, but almost heroic in her endurance now
that the blow had actually fallen. And Sara prayed that no further
sacrifice might be demanded from her--prayed that Tim might come through
safely. For herself, she mourned Geoffrey Durward as one good comrade
does another. She knew that his death would leave a big gap in the ranks
of those she counted friends.
It had been a wonderful year--that year which she had passed in
France--wonderful in its histories of tragedy and self-sacrifice, and
in its revelation both of the brutality and of the infinite fineness of
humanity. Few could have passed through such an experience and remained
unchanged, certainly no one as acutely sentient and receptive as Sara.
She felt as though she had been pitchforked into a vast melting-pot,
where the cast-iron generalizations and traditions which most people
consider their opinions grew flexible and fluid in the scorching heat
of the furnace, assimilating so much of the other ingredients in the
cauldron that they could never reassume their former unqualified and
rigid state.
And now that year of crowded life and ardent service was over, and she
was side-tracked by medical orders for an indefinite period.
“Go back to England,” her doctor had told her, “to the quietest corner
in the country you can find--and try to forget that there _is_ a war!”
This thin, eager-faced young woman, of whom every one on the hospital
staff spoke in such glowing terms, interested him enormously. He could
see that her year's work had taken out of her about double what it would
have taken out of any one less sensitively alive, and he made a shrewd
guess that something over and above the mere hard work accounted for
that curiously fine-drawn look which he had observed in her.
During a hastily snatched meal, before the advent of another batch of
casualties, he had sounded Lady Arronby on the subject. The latter shook
her head.
“I can tell you very little. I believe there was a bad love-affair
just before the war. All I know is that she was engaged and that the
engagement was broken off very suddenly.”
“Humph! And she's been living on her reserves ever since. Pack her off
to England--and do it quick.”
So October found Sara back in England once again, and as the train
steamed into Monkshaven station, and her eager gaze fell on the little
group of people on the platform, waiting to welcome her return, she felt
a sudden rush of tears to her eyes.
She winked them away, and leaned out of the window. They were all
there--big Dick Selwyn, and Molly, looking like a masquerading Venus
in her V.A.D. uniform, the Lavender Lady and Miles, and--radiant and
well-turned-out as ever--Mile's wife.
The Herrick's wedding had taken place very unobtrusively. About a month
after Sara had crossed to France, Miles and Audrey had walked quietly
into church one morning at nine o'clock and got married.
Monkshaven had been frankly disappointed. The gossips, who had so
frequently partaken of Audrey's hospitality and then discussed her
acrimoniously, had counted upon the lavish entertainment with which,
even in war-time, the wedding of a millionaire's widow might be expected
to be celebrated.
Instead of which, there had been this “hole-and-corner” sort of
marriage, as the disappointed femininity of Monkshaven chose to call
it, and, after a very brief honeymoon, Miles and Audrey had returned
and thrown themselves heart and soul into the work of organizing and
equipping a convalescent hospital for officers, of which Audrey had
undertaken to bear the entire cost.
Henceforth the mouths of Audrey's detractors were closed. She was no
longer “that shocking little widow with the dyed hair,” but a woman who
had married into a branch of one of the oldest families in the county,
and whose immense private fortune had enabled her to give substantial
help to her country in its need.
“I think it's simply splendid of you, Audrey,” declared Sara warmly, as
they were all partaking of tea at Greenacres, whither Audrey's car had
borne them from the station.
Audrey laughed.
“My dear, what else could I do with my money? I've got such a sickening
lot of it, you see! Besides”--with a bantering glance at her husband--“I
think it was only the prospect of being of some use at my hospital which
induced Miles to marry me! He's my private secretary, you know, and boss
of the commissariat department.”
Miles saluted.
“Quartermaster, at your service, miss,” he said cheerfully, adding with
a chuckle: “I saw my chance of getting a job if I married Audrey, so of
course I took it.”
He was looking amazingly well. The fact of being of some use in the
world had acted upon him like a tonic, and there was no misinterpreting
the glance of complete and happy understanding that passed between him
and his wife.
Glad as she was to see it, it served to remind Sara painfully of all
that she had missed, to stir anew the aching longing for Garth Trent,
which, though struggled against, and beaten down, and sometimes
temporarily crowded out by the thousand claims of each day's labour,
had been with her all through the long months of her absence from
Monkshaven.
It was this which had worn her so fine, not the hard physical work that
she had been doing. Always slender, and built on racing lines, there
was something almost ethereal about her now, and her sombre eyes looked
nearly double their size in her small face of which the contour was so
painfully distinct. Yet she was as vivid and alive as ever; she seemed
to diffuse, as it were, a kind of spiritual brilliance.
“She makes one think of a flame,” Audrey told her husband when they were
alone once more. “There is something so _vital_ about her, in spite of
that curiously frail look she has.”
Miles nodded.
“She's burning herself out,” he said briefly.
Audrey looked startled.
“What do you mean, Miles?”
“Good Heavens! I should think it's self-evident. She's exactly as much
in love with Trent as she was a year ago, and she's fighting against it
every hour of her life. And the strain's breaking her.”
“Can't we do something to help?” Audrey put her question with a helpless
consciousness of its futility.
Herrick's eyes kindled.
“Nothing,” he answered with quiet decision. “Every one must work out his
own salvation--if it's to be a salvation worth having.”
Herrick had delved to the root of the matter when he had declared that
Sara was exactly as much in love as she had been a year ago.
She had realized this for herself, and it had converted life into an
endless conflict between her love for Garth and her shamed sense of
his unworthiness. And now, her return to Monkshaven, to its familiar,
memory-haunted scenes, had quickened the struggle into new vitality.
With the broadened outlook born of her recent experiences, she began to
ask herself whether a man need be condemned, utterly and for ever, for
a momentary loss of nerve--even Elisabeth had admitted that it was
probably no more than that! And then, conversely, her fierce detestation
of that particular form of weakness, inculcated in her from her
childhood by Patrick Lovell, would spring up protestingly, and she would
shrink with loathing from the thought that she had given her love to a
man who had been convicted of that very thing.
Nor was the attitude he had assumed in regard to the war calculated
to placate her. She had learned from Molly that he had abstained from
taking up any form of war-work whatsoever. He appeared to be utterly
indifferent to the need of the moment, and the whole of Monkshaven
buzzed with patriotic disapprobation of his conduct. There were few
idle hands there now. A big munitions factory had been established at
Oldhampton, and its demands, added to the necessities of the hospital,
left no loophole of excuse for slackers.
Sara reflected bitterly that the sole courage of which Garth seemed
possessed was a kind of cold, moral courage--brazen-facedness, the
townspeople termed it--which enabled him to refuse doggedly to be driven
out of Monkshaven, even though the whole weight of public opinion was
dead against him.
And then the recollection of that day on Devil's Hood Island, when he
had deliberately risked his life to save her reputation, would return to
her with overwhelming force--mocking the verdict of the court-martial,
repudiating the condemnation which had made her thrust him out of her
life.
So the pendulum swung, this way and that, lacerating her heart each time
it swept forward or back. But the blind agony of her recoil, when she
had first learned the story of that tragic happening on the Indian
frontier, was passed.
Then, overmastered by the horror of the thing, she had flung violently
away from Garth, feeling herself soiled and dishonoured by the mere fact
of her love for him, too revolted to contemplate anything other than the
severance of the tie between them as swiftly as possible.
Now, with the widened sympathies and understanding which the past year
of intimacy with human nature at its strongest, and at its weakest, had
brought her, new thoughts and new possibilities were awaking within her.
The furnace--that fiercely burning furnace of life at its intensest--had
done its work.