Part 16

"No words have yet been made to express what you are to me--Dearest of all women!--and have been always, since the blessed hour when I saw you first!"

She was not a woman from whom to exact caresses. You waited the moment when she was pleased to give. Now she swayed nearer and her bosom brushed his--and the world went dim as they exchanged a kiss....

Last time they had met she had worn a Regulation tunic and short uniform skirt of blue serge, thick high Service boots and a plain blue felt hat with an enamelled Red Cross badge, and had been no less beautiful in his eyes. Now her tall lithe shapeliness was in silken raiment, like the beautiful arched feet in their buckled shoes. The rigorous plainness of her mourning dress added to her beauty, with its pure strong outlines and rich creamy skin. Her high-bred simplicity was the dominant note of her--or was it her generosity, her sympathy, or her piety? ...

A man had once said to Yaill in the early stages of the friendship that had changed so quickly into passionate love:

"She would be enchanting if she were not so holy!"

And Yaill had answered, with his grave eyes following her:

"Holiness is the bloom upon the nectarine."

Well, it was true. She was all the more attractive for the piety that graced her beauty, the devotion that exhaled from her, unconsciously as the fragrance from the rose.... Like Yaill's dead mother, she had no use for a man who was not religious. She had a standard and expected her beloveds to live up to it. And Yaill had done so, according to his lights.

She leaned closer, and her long, beautiful arm curved across his tunic, and her fond hand stroked the ribbons on his breast. Lingering over them, enumerating with silently moving lips the list of her man's distinctions, from the orange-centred blue and red of the Queen's medal of the South African War of 1899-1901, to the red ribbon of the Victoria Cross; the rainbow of the Star of Mons: the blue-edged red of the D.S.O. the white-mauve-white of the Military Cross; and the green, red-lined ribbon of Belgium's Croix de Guerre--with the sweet colour coming and going in her cheeks, and her dark lashes lowered over the shining cairngorm eyes. His sick heart ached anew, she was so wifely; and so womanly in her insistence on her point. For she went on urging:

"Then, I may tell Father Inghame that you will serve Mass on my father's last day in the old home, and in his place? ... He would yield the privilege to no one--unless it were my brother Julian--so gladly as to you. Say that I may say 'Yes!'"

Yaill's deep voice answered, slowly and heavily:

"He was a good man. No better ever lived, I am quite certain. And under most conceivable circumstances--to me his wish would be law. But I cannot take his place beside the altar or even attend at Mass."

He felt her start. She asked him quickly:

"There is some reason--"

"There is of course a reason!" He stirred a smouldering log with the toe of his high boot.

"Your health?" Her voice had the sharpened edge of anxiety, and her bosom rose and fell with her quickened breath. His starved eyes dwelt on the modelling of her wide brows, the black lashes of the sweet eyelids that dropped under his scrutiny, the setting of her head on the throat's white column, the superb width of her shoulders, the arch of her deep chest....

"Your health.... There is more to hear than I have been told--is there not? Don't keep--anything back from me, Edward. Nothing is so terrible to bear as suspense."

"There is nothing.... Have you ever known me keep anything back from you, my dearest?" he asked, in wonder at his own hypocrisy. For he knew that to have answered, "I have lost the Faith" would be to her an overwhelming blow. "Now tell me of Julian. You wrote to me that"--the speaker hesitated, mentally groping, "that he had applied to his Superior General and got leave to volunteer for service as a Chaplain with the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force."

"That was in last December. But the permission was delayed, as I wrote you later, and he sailed for Lemnos with the 29th Division a year ago this February. We heard from him next from Gallipoli,--such brave, cheerful letters. But since August 21st.... Oh, Edward!" She caught her breath sharply and paled and reddened. "Since the 21st not a line--not a single line!"

Yaill's forehead knitted in the effort to remember. Thin, thin ice here. He must go warily....

She went on:

"We know from the despatches published in the newspapers and from letters written to us by friends of Julian's, that he went forward with his brigade when the 29th Division fought through the scrub-fire to the top of Scimitar Hill.... When the terrible Turkish shrapnel swept them back down the hillside Julian stayed with the wounded--giving First Aid and comforting the dying. A brother Religious of St. Gerard who was with the Eleventh Division, visited us here afterwards and told us; 'Father Forbis was splendid!' ... 'One of the Church's many heroes!' he called him. But he could enlighten us no more than the people at the War Office.... And it broke my heart to look at Father--as the weeks went by and by without bringing any news.... He bore it in silence, but he has suffered dreadfully. I have heard him over and over, walking up and down at night in his bedroom. And by day one could see him hanging on the hope of a wire from Whitehall. Oh, Edward!--the wire that never will come, perhaps! That last day I saw Father alive, when he rode out with his Adjutant to put the last polish on the Fourth and Fifth Squadron of his Yeomanry at Cauldstanes Muirlees Racecourse--he looked so beautiful that my heart swelled big for pride in him,--and so sorrowful that I had to run away to cry. And he waved to me and rode up the brae without looking back to wave again, and--"

Here Katharine broke down and sobbed, and Yaill caressed his love and soothed her, setting fresh tears running in the channels that had long been dry. She had wept bitterly when Mark had been killed at Mons, though when the Tweedburgh Regiment had been wiped out near Loos, and Yaill had suffered in the blowing-in of the advanced telephone-communication dug-out, the news had reached her on the morning of an attack by German aircraft on the Clearing Hospital, and there had been not a single moment to spend in selfish grief. This last blow, coming as it had, had left her numbed to the centre of her being. Until this moment she had not cried at all ...

Yaill said, when she grew calm at last, lifting his strong brown hand to his lips, and drying with a kiss a shining drop that had fallen on it:

"We must hope for the best for Julian. He may be a prisoner with the Turks, or wounded,"--he spoke hoarsely--"or suffering after some such fashion as--makes it impossible to communicate with--those whom he loves."

"My dear," she said, knowing that his own case rose in mind, "my poor, poor dear!" And the wretched man grew sick at heart and shuddered. The mothering note in her voice called to him across the years of an engagement senselessly prolonged, that he might have heard it cooing to their children, or whispering love-words through many, many wasted nights. And the more hopelessly he yearned to her, the more he shrank from the solicitude in her sweet eyes. He had seen those eyes flame with generous anger, and sparkling with mirth, and dewy with tenderness. Now they were full of sorrow mingled with love for him. He tried to imagine how they would look her scorn....

For when she knew all the truth, she must despise him. That was the thing that made his heart a hell. The knowledge that no one could possibly believe in the innocence of the fellow who had done this hideous, brutal, beastly thing.

"Shell-shock, no doubt!" He heard the voices saying it, and saw the shake of sympathetic heads. "Shell-shock! ... How quite frightfully sad!" And through the eyeholes of the masks of sympathy, pity, commiseration--he saw the wriggle of the little snake of Doubt.

Were the truth known to the world, no one could ever believe it. He would lie, therefore, until it came to light. He would have the joy of these last hours spent beside Katharine, to remember when she banished him for ever from her side.

To Katharine, whose sore heart was eased by that burst of weeping, the joy of Edward restored shone through her sorrow as the sun through a snow-fog or a mountain mist. By and by, when Yaill settled into a well-known arm-chair, she hesitated but another instant before sinking with one swift, supple movement, down upon the hearthrug at her lover's side. He refused to smoke; she knew out of respect for the presence of Death in that bereaved, masterless house. She whispered, leaning her forehead against his shoulder, surrendering her hand to the warm, strong, masculine clasp:

"By and by we will go in together and see him. Shall we not, dearest? He would wish it!"

Yaill muttered, looking at the engagement-ring of Indian turquoises that he had placed years back on the fair womanly hand within his own:

"Certainly. If it will not be--too hard for you!"

"Too hard! O no, dear Edward!" The hearth-blaze lightened on her broad forehead as she raised it. "The hardness will be when he is there no longer, to talk to and to look at and to pray for.... To pray to, as well, being with the Holy Souls. It is wonderful to think now; '_He is with my mother!_'"

"And Mark, and your little sister Rosamond."

"And Julian, perhaps. He knows now, whether Julian was killed or taken prisoner.... Turks are cruel to their captives, are they not?"

"Sometimes...."

The muscle in Yaill's thin cheek twitched. He moved restlessly:

"Sometimes.... But do not dwell on these possibilities, or torture yourself with useless conjectures. Even in the shadow of the bereavement that has fallen upon this dear home, we are together.... Together, Katharine!"

She turned and kissed the fine dark khaki cloth of his sleeve, lingeringly echoing:

"'Together.' Doesn't it seem--rather too good to be real? After all that has been--the cruel years of parting, the shock of calamity; the rush and roar of events, the ugly things of War, the horror of dreadful news--the suspense of waiting--for letters from you--letters that never came--"

"I could not--did not--" he stammered miserably and broke off.

Her strong, fine hand closed upon his reassuringly.

"My own love, did I ever for a moment, lose faith in you? Did I ever cease to write, though I never heard? ..."

He groaned in spirit, remembering his discovery of those letters.... Square envelopes containing two or three sheets of ribbed linen note-paper, covered with Katharine's clear free script.... The pocket of an old writing-case of his was stuffed with them--they had crammed that damned Japanese workbox to the lid!

Again she breathed:

"Though I never heard from you I kept on writing. Each letter like a cry from my heart to yours."

Words burst from him:

"As God hears me, I never got one of those letters!"

She drew a troubled breath and said wonderingly, with sweet, perplexed eyes seeking light from his:

"Not at the time they were written, dear, possibly. But your nurse did read them to you, Edward?--as soon as you could bear it, that is."

"Did she?"

"She was very kind. I was very grateful to her."

"Was she? ... Were you? ..."

The sweat stood in beads upon his brow and temples, and his strained knuckles showed white through the sunburnt skin.

"Kind, I mean, in writing to break the cruel truth to me, that you--Edward!--let us forget about this!"

"It will be best," he said in a low constrained tone, not looking at her. "But tell me first what truth she broke to you?"

"The truth--" He felt her warm mouth upon his hand, "that your mind was quite a blank with regard to me. That was the news that came in her first letter from the Convalescent Camp at B---- Base. I have not kept the letter--I could not!--but the date I shall remember always. October 28th, 1915."

It had been true then. The effort to remember; to conjure up figures, faces, associations, places, out of the Great Blank that had followed the shell-burst--had been attended by blinding headache, spasms of sickness and nights of insomnia. Katharine went on:

"I wrote to her--Nurse Burtonshaw--at the Camp,--and thanked her, and said that I would go on writing to you exactly the same. My work involved some risk. If I had been killed, you would have learned from those letters that I never once forgot you, Edward, dear! So I asked your nurse to put them by in some safe keeping-place, and when God in His Mercy should restore my darling's memory, to give them to him, with his Katharine's love. For I never doubted that you would recover, Edward. If I had, for one moment--how could I have gone on working? I must have given up hope! I must--"

The break in her dear voice supplied the missing end to the sentence:

"I must have broken down and died!"

XIII

When a man's own organs, senses, wits conspire against him, in league with an enamoured woman who plays traitress, what earthly chance has the man?

Yaill stared into the glowing rose-red heart of the fire, conjuring up for the thousandth time that part played by one brown puppet of a myriad of puppets similarly attired, in War's dread drama; cheek by jowl, night in and day out--with the grim tragi-comedian Death; whose paces, poses and antics, grown commonplace by dint of familiarity--at length ceased to cause a shudder, or provoke a passing jest....

The War.... A waking nightmare of cold, heat, thirst and hunger; exertion, anxiety, responsibility, fatigue; sleeplessness and NOISE, NOISE, in a ceaseless, maddening crescendo, until that flaming white-hot moment when the German 5.9 H.E. shell blew in the Advanced Telephone Communication dug-out. When consciousness of these things abruptly ceased for Yaill.

So it came to pass that stark-naked as when he was born into this world, save for a platinum disc-chain on his wrist, bearing his name, religion, rank and regiment, and a small gold Crucifix slung by a blackened cord about his neck, Number 40, Shell Shock Ward 8, General Casualty Hospital 70, on the Lines of Communication, came into being. Later on, when the Great Blank had given place to a drab-hued mental twilight, wherein men, women and children; animals, trees and houses could dimly be conjectured or unemotionally discerned; and a little later yet, when one began again to realise oneself a living puppet, playing a dull, dull part in a dreary production called Life,--with some character dimly sensed as missing from the cast, whose presence would have made a world of difference!--Number 80, Convalescent Officers' Camp, B---- Base, began to take what other nurses called a "good deal of notice" of Nurse Lucy Burtonshaw.

You are to conceive of Nurse Burtonshaw as anything but a purposeful Delilah. The piously-reared daughter of one Burton, a respectable West of England dairy-farmer,--calling herself "Burtonshaw" for reasons of her own, while serving in concert with thousands of other admirable young British women, enrolled for Service at Home and Overseas under the auspices of the Red Cross,--how shall she be held blameworthy because there beat under her Navy blue lustre overall, and white bibbed apron with its badge of red twill Turkey, a woman's heart, susceptible to Love....

Does any woman wonder? Does any man ask Why? Nurse Lucy Burtonshaw had washed Number 80; combed him, fed him, dressed him,--and put him to bed again. Administered general massage and tonics, and superintended the ministrations of the orderly-barber, unwearying, for months on end. She had soothed him,--waking from brief daylight sleeps in panics bred of hideous, nerve-shattering visions,--reproductions of such sights,--burned in upon the brain and reproduced by the subconscious memory, as made the nights grim ordeals of dread. She had alternately scolded and encouraged her patient, gaining strength mentally and physically under her unselfish, able care, until she had established herself as the hub of his universe. The sky and sea, the flowers and trees, and that fresh West Country face with its blunt features and well-opened grey-blue eyes, were the only books the patient ever cared to read in. The printed lines, the written sheets, were torture to Yaill's dazed brain and astigmatic vision. So the Commandant's private secretary attended to his business letters, and the correspondence of his friends was dealt with by Nurse....

Upon her arm at first, by her side later, he took his first walks in the Convalescent Camp grounds. When later still, he was taken for drives in the company of other shell-shocked officers, it was Nurse Burtonshaw who persuaded him not to rebel against this order of the C.M.O.... Nurse, who waited for the return of the big, crowded car and unpacked him, smiling, at the gates of Canvas Park Row, the double avenue of roomy tents pitched on the green, tree-clumped slopes rising North of the Base Port, behind the big square stone house where the Staff officers and quarters were,--and the huge, shapeless, plank-built zinc-roofed bulk of the Hospital.

"There now, you're back again and no bones broken. And whether you liked it or not, the air has done you good," she would say cheerfully, unwinding his muffler, knitted by herself in her scant spare time. For all Yaill's personal, immediate baggage had been destroyed by a Boche bomb-raid upon Battalion Staff Headquarters, and as Number 80 never wrote letters, such lacking necessaries had been replaced by Red Cross gifts.

Subsequently, when some battered portmanteaux were received from Regimental H.Q. in France,--but of that later in the chapter.... You are to see Nurse taking off the muffler, over which her patient stared down at her with grey, brooding, mournful eyes. Those eyes followed her about, burning holes in her grey print. If she had established herself as the hub of Number 80's universe, she was none the less the adoring slave of him whom--in private and at his entreaty she called "Teddy."

For Lord help this bedevilled man! he who in all his thirty-five years of life had been "Edward" to all who loved him, holding pet names in abhorrence,--had invited Nurse Burtonshaw to address him by this fond diminutive. "My mother used to call me 'Teddy,'" he would say, with his sad eyes brimming: "and though she has married again--" the poor widowed lady being dead and buried years previously--"and I am nothing to her now, I somehow like to hear it."

So Nurse called him "Teddy," scrupulously selecting moments when they were quite alone and out of earshot. Then Teddy, who was a Border laird of ancient lineage, as well as a Squire in Cumberland, with a solid rent-roll of four thousand a year, some thriving home-farms and a park of many acres, confided to Nurse that he was a poor man--without a rap beyond his pay. But if Lucy had no fear of poverty, shared with a poor broken wretch who loved her--one to whom the love of woman had been a sealed book until he saw her face....

"You're getting too stuck on that Colonel man of yours, Burtonshaw!" expostulated a friend some hours later on, when the day-nurses went off duty. "Because when it comes to kissing Good-night--and I couldn't help but hear!--the partition between the O.C. wards being merely canvas! Of course you can trust me not to talk, though I hope you won't again!--a warm handshake as between friends being properer, and not against the Regulations--which I will say I never knew you go against before. Now own up. Am I right, or wrong?"

"I did, I'll own it.... I do truly feel for Number 80," admitted Nurse Burtonshaw. "He's alone in the world and quite poor, though three hundred and seventy pounds a year, which is his pay--not counting War allowances,--seems like riches to little me."

"Bless me!" cried the friend, "then you've actually clicked! ... He's asked you to marry him? ..."

Nurse Burtonshaw demanded, with rather a defiant flare lighting up her well-opened grey-blue eyes, and with a decided deepening of the steady bloom on her broad, blunt-featured West of England face, nunlike in the setting of flowing white linen hiding the rich red-gold hair that was her one undeniable beauty:

"Do you think I'd let him kiss me--a girl brought up like I've been--unless he'd behaved himself honourable? Not one of my friends can say a word--"

"But what will _his_ friends say about you?" asked the other nurse acutely, "when they hear how you've fixed things? To marry a Regular Army toff, who not so long ago was queer in his head, and had to be mothered and seen to and fed as if he'd been a blinking baby--"

Nurse Burtonshaw asserted:

"He's well, and going to get his discharge next week. They say his cure's my doing. And he's got no friends. He's told me so, over and over again!"

"That makes it better for you. And I'm not saying that you won't turn out a happy pair, not for a minute! Don't lots of patients marry their nurses and live happy ever after? And, whenever I've read your teacup, Fate has seemed to point that way. But as to his having no friends--that won't half wash!"

"And why won't it?"

"Just because your Teddy's a Society Toff, poor or not poor! Belongs to a crack Scotch regiment.... Gets lots of letters in lovely envelopes with the names of topping County places on some of 'em--and coronetted crests and monograms...."

"The smart folks who wrote those letters don't count. Hasn't he told me? 'Not one of them,' he says,--'matters to me a straw.'"

"He may have said so, but are you _sure_? I'm asking out of friendship. Wasn't there a woman--isn't there a woman who writes as if he mattered to her more than several stacks of straw? Oh, Luce! ..."

Nurse Burtonshaw stood her ground obstinately:

"I've questioned him over and over.... 'I may have liked her, since she says I did,' he says.... 'But all the same, she's less than nought to me.... What did you say her name was?' he asks in that simple way of his." ...

"And did you tell him?"

"What does that matter to you?"

"It'll matter to you one of these days, as sure as I'm certificated! And you told me she'd begged you to keep the letters until he was able to read them without hurting his head. You haven't given them to him! ... Straight--are you going to? Infirmary-trained we both may be, and not Hospital--but I hope we know what's due to the professions to say nothing of the Red Cross! When will you give him those letters?"

Behind Nurse Burtonshaw's blue-grey eyes a red flame kindled. She retorted, confronting her interlocutor:

"When he asks me to! Haven't I told you?"

"Not much, you haven't. And about your first venture--with the Didlick boy--poor thing! Killed at Mons and buried no one knows where--are you going to tell him about that?"

"I--am--NOT! ... Is that plain enough? ... Now let me get to bed!"