Part 18

She dropped her head like a sulky child, and mounted the wide stairs slowly. Yaill stood at the stairfoot watching, while the blue alpaca was in sight. She did not return. He followed, and knocked at the door of their bedroom. She cried "Come in" and he went in, to find her with a tear-stained, sulky, mulish face, standing at the bedside.... The Japanese workbox--a tawdry thing of imitation lacquer--was lying on the counterpane. She gulped to him that she had mislaid the key that opened the stupid thing. He responded:

"Break open the box. I will buy you--others!"

"My hands aren't strong enough!"

She feigned that those broad, strong dairywoman's hands that had put up many a twelve-pound frail of muslin-enwrapped pats for the market,--that had held down delirious men upon their Hospital beds--were too feeble to break the flimsy lock of Japanese manufacture. He accepted her explanation with unmoved countenance.

"Then be good enough to allow me!"

The letters were in his hands. But even as they poured forth from their camphor-scented prison, so from his wife's swollen, trembling mouth poured a stream of wordy defence. He could hear the voice pleading now with its broad, soft Somerset accent....

"How was I to be sure she told the truth? ... And didn't she ask me--and didn't you too--to put by the letters? ... Haven't I said to you over and over, when you swore how much you loved me. '_Tell me, Teddy, on your oath! Are you sure you're not engaged?_'--And you always swore you weren't, and that till you met me you'd never known what it meant to love any woman! Am I to be blamed--called wicked and treacherous--because I believed you? Oh, Ted!"

He had ground his heel into the carpet beneath his feet, and set his teeth to keep back the curses he longed to shriek at her. That plump, fresh-coloured, well-proportioned, deadly-commonplace young woman would never know what murderous frenzy boiled in her Teddy's blood, and tautened his muscles then. But he crushed down the ugly, murderous impulse and said to her with elaborate gentleness:

"I do not blame you.... I have not reproached you with--anything. And--I have spoiled your box, and you were fond of it. You shall have one ten times as good as soon as they can send it from Liberty's."

So, with the promise of a new box instead of the smashed one, he carried away his letters, and went up on the moors where he might be alone to read.... And the larks were singing in the pale harebell skies of late January.... And the spicy smell of the larches, the raw-red trunks of the pines, and the rasp of the wintry ling underfoot reminded him of Scotland. And the rust-brown of the frost-nipped bracken was the shade of Katharine's hair. And the colour of the little streams, running crystal-bright over dead drowned leaves and red-brown Devon sandstone had the very, very colour of those beloved eyes.... Stars that would never now look down upon the slumber of their child....

To Wyers of Harley Street, Lieutenant-Colonel (T) R.A.M.C., Consulting Surgeon attached to the Staff of the Base Hospital in connection with the Convalescent Camp at B---- the Chief Medical Officer, was at that moment saying--Wyers having just returned by 'plane from a professional visit to the Front:

"You know Yaill left us for Blighty on Tuesday morning? I'm wondering whether it wouldn't have been better to have kept him on here a bit? Or have sent him to that Hydro at Les Bonnes Eaux."

"Instead--" Wyers flicked off the ash of his inevitable Trichinopoli, and deftly picked up a little sheaf of papers clipped together from the big leather-topped writing-table in the C.M.O.'s official room. He reversed the chart, to glance with cool professional interest at the history-sheet behind it, and turned back to the doctor's card with the inky scrawl beneath the heading:

"Discharged.... Convalescent" ... and the date of three days back.

"Instead of striking him off the sheet with leave to get married! I don't see why not, for my part. He's as well as ever he will be, unless--you know my theory! And marriage may help him. Should, certainly--supposing him to have got hold of a woman of the right sort."

"Ah, but has he? Query,--is she?" The Chief Medical Officer, deftly packing fragrant Navy Cut into a well-burned briar-root, looked up from his deft thumb-work, under an anxiously-puckered brow. "You're not aware that he's married the chart-nurse of No. 8. Hut Ward C.O.C. That little Burtonshaw--you remember Burtonshaw? Blonde and blue-eyed, faintly frisky, but a model of provincial propriety for all of that. And a good nurse--to do her justice!--now discharged invalided, after two years' Foreign Service with her unit of the Red Cross."

"H'm!" The nod of Wyers conveyed his knowledge of Nurse Burtonshaw. "There's only one thing to say for a match of that kind. It may turn out successfully. One hopes of course it will. But for a man of that stamp--ultra refined, highly-bred, and used--going by what one has heard--" whatever Wyers had heard, he retained with Sphinx-like taciturnity,--"to a very different type of woman,--Happiness will not depend on his ultimate return to the normal,--do you follow? But on his stopping exactly where he is. For the Miracle wouldn't benefit him--under the present circumstances. Better for him that the Angel should never trouble the pool!"

Thus Oppenshaw Wyers, who may or may not have heard the name of Katharine Forbis. But the Miracle had happened, Yaill had returned to the normal.... And the thin chance of happiness in an unequal union with the poor thing he had married--lay shattered into fragments at his unlucky feet.

Sitting on a crumbling ledge of the grey-pink cliffs of Devon, he read his love's letters--that had come so much too late. Such fond womanly letters--and gallant and courageous, written from her Receiving Hospital in France, and from the Base--and from a London Nursing Home and from Kerr's Arbour.

Here was one dated from the Receiving Hospital in Belgium in the previous April. It shall be quoted here:

"MY MAN OF ALL MEN....

"To-day I met a Tommy (one of a great many) on the frightfully muddy road that leads from Our Shop to the fighting-line. We were bringing down wounded--(Canadians chiefly). This long-legged, gaunt, black-a-vised man was going up with the Relief. A Jew unmistakably--going by his leading feature--and in evident trouble about a chum who had got crumped. So your Kathy, wangling a spare seat from under an orderly--undertook to convey Private Abrahams' chum back to Hospital...."

Added some hours later:

"There isn't so much wrong--and I'm going to drop a postcard to Abrahams in the Support trenches, to tell him so and cheer his heart. The queer thing about it is--that the moment I saw Abrahams--(whose real name is Hazel)--I felt I knew the man! ... Somewhere, his huge hooked beak and great shoulders have risen up before me. Somehow--this can't be love at first sight, Edward!" Ah, wicked Katharine!--"because my heart is so hopelessly lost to you!--somehow his very ordinary--rather Cockney voice wasn't quite the voice of a stranger. Oddly I felt that I could trust the man!--had trusted him--somewhere, in many a tight place! ... Newspaper has come in.... Must stop here.... Finish this idiotic epistle to-night when I get a chance--"

This bore a date in September, 1915.

"MY PRECIOUS DEAR,

"I've had your last letter. So you're lonely wanting your Katharine! My dear, don't be! I AM with you, though not bodily--yet in heart and soul. Please God--"

There was a break. The handwriting of the rest was shaky and irregular, showing what storms of mingled emotions had swept through the writer.

"This was begun the day before yesterday. I left off to read the News of the War. Read--Oh! my dearest--with what mingled joy and anguish, the story of the combined assault on Loos. My love, my love!--what awful loss! How you must grieve for your glorious regiment! Thanks to Our Lord and His dear Mother! you are alive!--you are alive! The report that you were missing was contradicted in a later bulletin. I've been crying until I'm hideous, for sorrow and joy and pride in you, my Edward! And, for gratitude that you're alive--and longing to be with you.... How I should love to pitch duty to the wide and rush away to nurse You! Wouldn't I? WOULDN'T I?--if it were only playing the game. But I must,--MUST stop here and do my job for the Red Cross. My own Edward--these silly X's are all meant for kisses.... The blots are where I've cried! ... Oh! how I've cried--how I would love to cry all over the shoulder of your dear khaki jacket. With love and such unutterable pride in my dear lover--Your own for this world and the next, please Heaven! Katharine."

The third bore a date in October, 1916, and the address of a Distributing Hospital on a Base in France.

"MY DEAREST DEAR,

"I've been desperately wretched, writing and WRITING and never getting a scrap from you. Now comes a letter written by your nurse. She tells me that your dear eyes can't stand print or handwriting, and that even being read to is dreadful agony. Edward, how selfish I have been--and how stupid, with all my experience of the results of shell-shock--not to realise the extent and nature of my dear one's suffering! Now I beg and command you never to dream of writing until you are fit to! I have asked your kind nurse not even to read you my letters, until you are able to hear them without distress or pain. To think that loving lines from me should cause you suffering, Edward! And yet I understand, my own! how such a condition may exist. For the moment I leave off. They are beating the gong and some signal rockets have just warned us--"

* * * * * * *

Four hours later....

"An attack by German bomb-carrying Taubes on the Hospital, in spite of air-scouts and L----s barrage of anti-aircraft guns. There is a British Army Corps H.Q. close by. I try to think they wanted that--and not really to bomb the Hospital with all those poor, poor bandaged men helpless in their beds.

It was terrific. They got us with H.E. every time--and the Hospital looks like a squashed bandbox. But, you see, in spite of the Boche's worst, your loving Kathy stays alive. Casualties only three, thank God! A convalescent Tommy killed, an R.A.M.C. orderly badly wounded; and a V.A.D. ambulance-driving woman somehow got an internal injury--helping to carry some of the worst cases out of the blazing wards down into the cellars of the Commandant's house--luckily close by.

Be prepared to find my next letter written from London, for I'm going to be invalided back to Blighty. Address, '_Hospital of SS. Stanislaus and Theresa, Copse End Road, St. John's Wood. Care of the Matron._' Don't worry the least bit! ... I'm tophole, though no good for driving. It will be a rest, really, for me. And by and by, if God is good--" crossed out--"He is, has He not saved you, Edward?--I shall come rushing over to B---- and carry you home. Home to Scotland. Oh, my dear, what it would be to have you to myself at Kerr's Arbour! All the memories of our happy days langsyne are waiting for us, Edward,--under the blessed old roof-beams, and on the moors and in the fir-wood--(miles of bluebells, you remember, in May--growing under the black-green trees)--and where wee Rushet winds away between the green braesides, to tumble into Teviot. I've still got some of the primroses we gathered there one April. Oh! the good times, before the dreadful War. Let us both look forward steadily, and hope, and pray, Edward,--that they may come again. If this is a dismal letter, forgive:

Your Katharine."

Another written a fortnight later, from London.

"HOSPITAL OF SS. STANISLAUS AND TERESA, COPSE END ROAD, ST. JOHN'S WOOD, N. W.

"My DEAREST MAN,

"The operation--quite a small affair, happily over, and your Kathy pronounced to be well upon the mend. I get the best of care at this dear place, where matron and Sisters spoil me. Everybody in town is overwhelmingly kind, and if I set down all the messages of affection and goodwill that I am charged with for you, and repeated all the admiring speeches that have been made to me about my sweetheart--I should need half-a-dozen sheets of letter-paper to write to you instead of one.

"Are you able to read for yourself a little, dearest, or do you still depend on the kind offices of your nurse? If the answer is 'Yes' to my question, she has of course given you my letters. I have her assurance that she will do this on the very earliest opportunity. For I should not like her to read them to you, you know, Edward! For one thing, my epistolary style is open to criticism--and for another--what I set down for your dear eyes was and will always be meant for no other's. Ah, but you understand!

"This is a dull scribble. But I'll do better next time. Too tired to write another. God bless you, darling!

K. F.

"If only you could write! ... I'm hungering for a line so. But not--not a scratch--if it's bad for you, my own!

"K."

There were many letters, and Yaill read them all, haphazard at first, and then in regular sequence, down to the very last....

"KERR'S ARBOUR, TWEEDBURGH, N.B.

"_January 20th._

"Look here, Edward, can't you write, my darling? Your nurse sends me news of your wonderful improvement, for which I thank God, with all my heart and soul! But if you are so much better that you can read without pain and endure being read to, why not a scrap of a line to me? ... It seems to me that I have some right, forgive me for reminding you, to have news of you from your own hand, my dearest one.... Oh! to have to beg the bread of one's heart.... I was proud once--men used to say so. Now I am only your very lonely, horribly unhappy KATHARINE."

* * * * * * *

And yet until a door had clicked open in Yaill's brain, that handwriting had meant nothing. He asked his Maker in the depths of his wrung soul, why that Open Sesame of the bit of white heather--why the leather baggage-trunk with its guarded secret,--why the letter with its cry of wounded passion had come to the man who loved Katharine, too late?

"_It seems to me that I have some right...._" Proud, delicate-minded Katharine. What suffering must have wrung that sad reproach from her, that cry of a wounded soul....

"_Oh! to have to beg the bread of one's heart.... I way proud once--men used to say so. Now I am only your very lonely, horribly unhappy Katharine._"

Lonely.... Unhappy, his joy, his treasure, his worshipped one.... Well, Yaill would go to her now, though Hell's gulf yawned between. He had had this in his mind when he passed up the cliff-road, breathing the unheeded spices of the sea and the pine-trees, with the warm morning sunshine full upon his back....

Now, sitting high upon the cliffs with the booming of the Channel waters in his ears and the mourning cry of the hovering gulls about him, he faced a dim crimson sun, going to bed in blankets of grey fog. The letters lay scattered on the grass between his feet. He gathered them up and buttoned them away safely in his pockets. Then he got up and went back to his wife at the Tor View Hotel.

He would say he had been called away on business. She must stay there--the woman who bore his name, until he had seen his lawyers.... He would provide for her generously. Things would be arranged, he told himself as he hurried down the cliff-road in the clammy, blanketing fog....

The excuses were not received as easily as he had anticipated. He had left a sulky, tearful girl alone the whole day. And he came back to a resentful, jealous woman....

He shuddered, remembering how he had bowed his head to meet the storm of reproach.

Well, well! Forget,--now one was here under the dear roof of Kerr's Arbour, by the warm side of the beloved--the perfect, the ideal mate. He looked at her as she sat there by his side with her proud head bent, and the dark fringes of her dreaming eyes lowered upon the soft blush that graced her cheeks,--Love's exquisite carnation flag, always displayed for Edward.

She was happy, poor, faithful soul, with just a little tang of guilt spoiling the happiness. Mark had been killed at Mons, and Julian had been gulped down by the insatiable War-monster; and Death had taken their father and hers, but her man of men was left. How could she help, by his dear side, being a little happy? She turned and gave him look for look, and his strength began to ebb away.

Yaill's determination to play the game fairly was weakening. The barriers were breaking down. His tense muscles twitched, his blood ran liquid fire. In another moment he would have snatched her to him, stifled her surprise with furious kisses--assailed her virgin ears with frantic pleadings--but that a bell clanged at the hallward end of the corridor. Whishaw's asthmatic cough sounded outside,--he knocked and came in.

The old man's lean figure, with its stooping, rook-like gait, was invested with new, dignified solemnity, his well-worn blacks, even the wide-flanged Gladstone collar that framed his frosty-apple chops, and the rusty-black silk neckerchief knotted under his chin, the short end sticking out at a perennial right-angle, while the other flowed over his starchless shirt-front, to lose itself in the hollows of his baggy waistcoat,--were as vestments of one readied for some sacerdotal rite. He carried a three-branched silver candlestick of antique form, with lighted wax-tapers, and a Missal bound in faded crimson leather was tucked under his other arm....

"Ye'll be for the nicht-prayers noo, Miss Forbis? The Father has gane ben the chap_ell_, sae I juist bode to ring the bell."

"We are coming now, Whishaw."

Katharine rose, took a folded black lace veil from the corner of the mantelshelf, shook out its scrolled and patterned length--with firelight flashing through the dark transparency, draped it with one swift upward movement, over her noble head--and held out a hand to Yaill. He cursed the intruder mentally as he got up and the warm fingers met his own--because those wild words surging to his lips had been so baulked of utterance. But he took the Missal Whishaw offered him, and led his love out and down the long corridor--following the lean, black figure with its upheld light over the flagged pavement, whose uneven stones could be felt through thickness of matting and worn Turkey carpeting.

Whishaw held open the Chapel door, Katharine passed in and Yaill followed mechanically; conscious as might be a man in a dream, of the mingled perfume of incense and flowers, of the hollow square of benches in the little nave, framing the long coffin on its black-draped trestles, with the tall brown wax tapers in their man-high wooden candlesticks burning at the head, and the sides, and the feet....

Still as in a dream he bent his knee as Katharine sank down before the Presence in the Tabernacle, and rose up from her genuflection to take his hand again. He felt her lead him up the narrow aisle ... heard her say to that strange, familiar face, young-old, wax-white, framed in the shining oaken wood against the background of the narrow pillow:

"Dear Father, Edward has come."

And he knew as he looked on the still face of the old man, guardian even in Death of his House's honour--that those traitorous words that had been upon his tongue would never be spoken now.

XVI

Katharine said to him next morning as they sat together at breakfast:

"I am glad to hear of a good night's sleep. I fancied that you would rest better in your old bedroom, dear."

Yaill said, rejoicing in the clear sparkle of her eyes, the fresh, sweet tinting of her cheeks, the gloss upon her springy hair, and the dozen other charming signs that proved her an early-morning woman:

"You knew that I should prefer my langsyne nest of old-fashioned rosebud-chintz to any other. When I went inside and shut the door, all the old memories came crowding round me. The great carved four-post bed, the big blaze in the bowed Queen Anne grate, the General's arm-chair opposite mine--"

"Where he always sat, dear love! to smoke that last good-night-cigar, that seemed to have no end." She blinked back a tear resolutely and Yaill said, feeling in the side-pocket of his Field Service jacket:

"Here is something I found last night on the chintz-room chimney-piece." He displayed a blackened briar-root pipe with the initials E.A.Y. engraved on its tarnished silver mounting. "The first birthday-present I ever had from you. And in the camphor-wood William and Mary press"--

"Your dear, shabby old shooting-suit. Lying there ever since August, 1914."

Men know so little even of the women they love. He never dreamed of the kisses and tears, the wild words whispered, the secrets told to that belted Norfolk-jacket of rough tweed, smelling of cigars and heather. Breakfast over, he filled the briar-root and went to smoke it on the terrace, while after conference with the housekeeper, and a brief visit to Mrs. Bell, who breakfasted in her bedroom, Katharine tied on a vast apron of blue and white checked cotton, covered her head with her black lace veil, and went to renew the Altar flowers, replace the burnt-out brown-wax tapers--and sweep and dust the Sanctuary.

Her doubly-sacred duties done, and the prayer that followed ended, her heart flew back to Edward, and she went whither it tugged. He was pacing, bareheaded, on the gravel of the lavender-walk below the flagstoned terrace that ran before the drawing-room windows. His pipe was gripped askew between his teeth,--his hands were driven deep into his breeches-pockets. The frozen lavender-bushes were not greyer or dourer than his face....

"_You dear! ... You dear! ... Come here! ..._"

She imitated the blackbird's challenging Spring call, a quaintly pretty gift of hers; and he looked up and took his pipe out of his mouth, and his wintry face was gone--and it was Spring. He smiled and beckoned, and she hoisted her carnation flag,--unlatched the French window and was stepping out to join him,--when Whishaw's voice said behind her:

"Miss Forbis, mem, there is a gentleman--"

"A gentleman, Whishaw! But, of course, you mean Mr. Keller."

"I'm no!" Whishaw retorted. "I'm no' meaning the lawyer-body!"

"But I can receive no visitor! At a time like this..."

Miss Forbis' dismay rang in her tones. Her dark brows straightened. Her mouth hardened a little as she turned to confront her servitor: