Part 22

Three o'clock sounded from the clock upon the mantelshelf, a Tudor toy in enamel openwork, whose tiny chime had rung for many a lover's meeting--and hastened many a lover's parting--but never heralded one more tragic than was coming now. He raised his head from its sweet rest on her beloved shoulder, and slowly loosed the yearning arms that had girdled her supple waist. Now,--now let the revelation come--the sooner the better. But how to bring it about? ...

Unwitting Katharine assisted here, by telling him how that morning Dawtie, the General's old pointer-bitch, had been found dead and already stiffened at her post outside the chapel door. Yaill said, scarce knowing what he uttered:

"You will be even--lonelier--without her. You must let me find you another dog to fill her empty place."

"Edward?"

Her sweet eyes lifted to his face. She saw him changed--changing. Deep lines graven on the broad brow that had smoothed under her kisses. Folds of bitterness from either wing of the large sensitive nostrils to the corners of the lips.

"Dear Edward, Dawtie was very old, and very seldom with me. And there are Bran and Laddie--if I should need the companionship of dogs. But soon now, very soon--there is nothing to prevent it"--She looked calmly in his face as he knelt on the rug beside her, stiffly upright, not touching her, both hands gripping the arm of her chair--"in a very few weeks--we shall be married, shall we not?"

He did not speak, and her eyes wavered from his, and a blush burned over her whole fair body: for was it not the man's part to speak such words as these? She said again: "Shall we not?" ... There was a terrible pause.... The clock chimed the quarter-hour....

"Shall we not, Edward, loving as we do--after these cruel years of delay?" ...

Unable to credit her own vision, she saw creeping into his grey eyes--was it reluctance, distaste or dismay? ... A shock went through her.... Rushing sounds filled her ears and through them she heard her own voice crying to him:

"Edward! ... For God's sake, don't look at me so! Something is wrong.... My dearest, tell me!" ...

Her arms went out to draw him close, and came back empty. He had drawn back, avoiding them, and risen to his feet. A quiver passed over his thin brown face, such as in windless weather will ripple the sleeping surface of some quiet forest pool. And the question came from her that she had never dreamed of asking:

"Is it that you do not love me--in the marriage sense--any more? Am I nothing but a friend? ... Answer.... I command you--answer!"

Yaill's face was drawn and grey. He said,--keeping stiff control upon the muscles of his lips:

"You are the one woman I worship.... I have never known another whose person so charms me, whose nature so appeals to me,--whose mind is so clear and full,--whose sympathy is so warm, so sweet, whose soul so answers to mine--"

"Edward!" ...

All reassured, she breathed the name in a tone of exquisite tenderness. He made her a sign that he had not done, and went slowly on:

"I have desired--desire you now as man desires the woman he worships. When our marriage was postponed by the death of your mother--when the Regiment was ordered to India and you could not leave your father--when this thrice-accursed War burst on the world in a blizzard of fire and steel, and I had to leave you almost at the church-door--God is my witness that I suffered! Far more than I could tell you, Katharine!"

"Love of my heart, I know it! ..."

He signed to her again for silence:

"Do not interrupt me! All this is hard to say.... But though my heart often cried out to you in those mad years of filthy fighting--living, eating and sleeping--did we ever sleep?--in the company of the Dead--while the world one had known and lived in--the world of pretty women--decent clothes, pleasant week-ends, jolly shooting-parties, sport, play, good hunters and easily-running cars--seemed--except in short flashes of intervals--to have been dead for cycles of ages--I was buoyed up by my hopes of you, my thoughts of you--your letters and our short rare blessed meetings. Glimpses of Paradise to a soul in Purgatory! You will believe that, will you not, Katharine?" ...

One tear glittered on his hard cheek. Oh! to have dried it with her kisses, and whispered comfort to her dearest, wrought to this desperate mood by some unknown cause.... But she sat still as he had bidden, soothed by his words of tenderness, yet with a little shivering premonition beginning to quicken at the roots of her heart:

"Then came the Great Disaster.... Oh! why didn't I marry you, when I got back to England--"

"My love," she said, "my precious dear!--I asked you to, you know!"

He made a despairing gesture of assenting:

"And I would not accept the gift you offered in your generosity--dear love, sweet woman!--best friend an unlucky devil ever had or could have! ..."

"Why?"

That "Why?" came like a moan from her. He answered sadly:

"Because I wanted to go away alone somewhere. To look my new self in the face, or to recapture the lost me. Thousands of men have felt the same--feel like that even at this moment--coming back with raw nerves and jumbled brains out of the hell of War."

"Then God help the women who love them!" said Katharine Forbis.

"They will suffer," said Edward Yaill, "until they have learned to understand the men. As you, pearl of women!--understood me, and pitied me. Can I ever forget that!"

"Stop!" She held up her hand in warning. "Do not praise me. For I believed your heart had changed to me. For a long time I believed it, and suffered horribly.... And then thank God, I found out one day that it was not so." ...

"When I came Home to tell you I had got back the Regiment.... There was just time--we could have made the time--to have got married then.... What stepped in? ... Fate! Was it Fate, Katharine? ..."

She knew their chance of happiness had been baulked again as ever by the inconquerable vacillation of this brave man she loved. But unshaken in her loyalty, she looked back at Edward, repeating with unfaltering lips:

"Just Fate--I suppose. Let us leave it at that and look forward to the Future. And the years we may have to spend together if it be God's Will."

Her voice blurred with held-back tears;

"But--don't keep me waiting any longer, dear Edward! I never have--never could have dreamed the possibility of changing towards you.... But if I get more lonely--if I get much more lonely than I am now--"

Was it possible that cry of tortured womanhood could have come from Katharine? Must she, his proud one, stoop, and stoop to plead? With clasped hands and yearning eyes of pain entreating--

"O Edward! don't keep me waiting long! Think of the years--"

He said with forced deliberation:

"We may even yet have years to spend together--if you have courage to forgive a grievous wrong!"

"What do you mean? ... How have you wronged? ... Have you not told me--"

Her voice had the sharpness of the stab he had dealt her, as she rose up out of her fireside chair.

"I will tell you what I mean--what I meant to have spared you, had not the man who came here yesterday with the documents from Palestine--had not that man threatened to tell you if I did not."

"To tell me what? Let me hear it now! You look ill, Edward!"

"To tell you that I am married!" said Edward Yaill....

As she stood before him, straight and tall, he saw the life go out of her. For an instant he looked on a dead, bloodless thing. Then the banished blood rushed back from about her heart. Her lips and eyes retained the look of life, but the face was a stranger's, and not Katharine's. Nor was it Katharine's voice that said:

"To tell me that you are married? ... Who is she?"

He hardly recognised his own voice saying:

"She is a nurse.... She was attached to the Convalescent Camp at B---- Base."

"Ah! ... And her name?" ...

"Lucy Burtonshaw."

"Ah! ..."

The interjection dropped from her pale lips like an icicle. But her breeding wrapped her in an impregnable mantle of dignity. His sense of her new remoteness was desolating as she asked him:

"And why are you here with me and not with Lucy Burtonshaw? I beg her pardon!--I should have said, Mrs. Edward Yaill. Can you explain?"

"I can explain absolutely. Whether you would believe me--that is another thing!"

"Let--let me think! ..." She put her hand to her forehead, pushing back her hair with a gesture of bewilderment. All her world lay in ruins round her, since those few sentences had fallen from his lips....

Rejected.... Betrayed.... Cast off.... She, Katharine Forbis, so great, so beloved, so beautiful,--the desired of many honourable, brave, high-born, handsome and wealthy men. Edward Yaill had never been told how many aspirants had sought her,--how many brilliant offers she had steadfastly set aside. Choosing for years to walk in maiden loneliness--keeping her priceless treasure of splendid womanhood stored up,--hoarded away to this unutterable end....

She moaned, and put her hand to her heart an instant when he said she would not believe if he explained himself. Nothing cut deeper or more cruelly than that. She said with the calmness of a mortally-wounded gentlewoman:

"I have not deserved that you should so judge me.... Say what you think is to be said for you.... This person--this lady who is now your wife--is the nurse--unless I am mistaken?--to whom I entrusted my letters to keep in charge for you?"

"The same. And she betrayed the trust.... She kept your letters. It was only on Thursday morning they first reached my hands." Always chary of gesture, he stretched them out to her, and drew them back and clenched--and let them fall again. "But for the accident of my getting the last letter you wrote me, upon the morning I was discharged from the Convalescent Camp--I might never have known--never remembered--" His voice broke. He turned away and leaned upon the mantelshelf, and bowed his shamed head over his folded arms.

"Edward! ..."

Her hand went out and lightly touched his shoulder. He thrilled at the tone in which she spoke his name:

"Edward, tell everything, and I will listen! ..."

He said in a choked voice, averting his face from her that she might not see the tears that brimmed and fell:

"God bless you for your mercy to me, Katharine! ... But the story is so wild and so incredible--I dare not hope for your entire belief.... You have believed in my devoted love for you.... I have lived, all these years, for you alone.... Yet last Thursday, when I awakened from that strange illusion--in the room at that Coombe Bay hotel"--Katharine shuddered--"I was married," he made a despairing gesture,--"married to a poor, weak, commonplace girl."

"She is your wife.... You are bound to remember it...."

He said:

"I have done so far more than she deserves.... I have written to my solicitors--have provided for her generously.... Do not think me capable of leaving her to poverty.... But I cannot--will not share my life with her! ..."

"Loneliness can be worse to bear than poverty. And--once again--remember--she is your wife!"

"She is welcome to what good may be got from that position! She has schemed for it--"

"Be just to her.... You have owned to me that you told her you were poor. Why? ..."

"Heaven knows why--or Hell! I have no answer.... But she had only to ask--to make inquiries--to be enlightened on the subject of my money!"

Chivalrous Katharine flashed out in defence of her enemy.

"Do you suppose the surgeons at the Camp would have told her? Or that your medical report would have supplied such details? Or do you think Burke's '_Landed Gentry_' is a work of reference accessible to nurses? ..."

He broke out with whirling words--frantic asseverations. He would get a divorce.... A suit for Nullity could be obtained under the circumstances--once the circumstances should be made clear. Another touch of contempt frosted her tone as she said to him:

"The marriage is legal. And though you seem to have forgotten your religion--when you speak of divorce to me, I must ask you to remember that I am a Catholic woman, Colonel Yaill!"

"Forgive me! ..."

He sat down haggard and exhausted.... She, too, resumed her seat, for her strength was failing fast.... And so they sat in a sorrowful-grim travesty of the old happy comradeship. She looked so sorrow-stricken and yet so sweet as she sat there in her mourning for her lost one,--that the heart of Yaill was more than ever tortured by the fierce agony of hopeless love.

"Think!--" he said to her desperately, "for I cannot.... Is there no way of escape from this horrible pitfall into which I have tumbled with open eyes? Think! ... Or cannot you think of anything, Katharine? ..."

She said to him gently:

"Wait.... I will think, and tell you presently.... Only wait and be patient a little, my poor dear!"

For she could not withhold her compassion and forgiveness from this man with the furrowed face of anguish, and the haunted, desperate eyes. No longer her hero, her ideal of perfect manliness and honour,--but a mere man, to be loved and pitied, and made excuses for. Or--her sick heart knew a ray of Hope.... In her white cheeks dawned a tinge of colour.... Was he one of the innumerable, blameless martyrs made by the accursed War?

XXII

She could bear to live if Edward proved a martyr and not a traitor. Oh! let him be the other woman's husband if it must be--as long as Katharine knew him guiltless. She bent her brow and set her rare mental powers of clear thought, reasonable argument and logical deduction, to trace a mean between a biassed partisanship and common justice.... One had known such strange, abnormal things result from shellshock.... And Edward loved her.... Oh! most entirely loved her.... It would be possible to live on, empty of joy, bare of all happiness--if Edward were a martyr.... God send it might prove so....

She gripped the arms of her chair and shut her eyes, striving to reconstruct the situation, assembling all the evidence upon his side; trying to live through all those twilit months the life of the man with the jangled nerves, and the numbed and blunted brain.... Just, generous, noble-minded Katharine, incapable of pettiness, great in her desolation.... She opened her eyes, to encounter the sorrowful stare of his--and began to speak, calmly, almost cheerfully--drawing him on insensibly to talk to her of _that day_....

That day in September of the previous year, when in those trenches south of Loos the First Battalion of the "Tweedburghs" had been wiped out, almost to a man, for the second time in the War.

"Why should you want to hear that story again--and now?" he pleaded: "My God, don't ask me to tell it now! ..."

But she asked it with her steady eyes upon him; and he obeyed her with knitted brows and twitching lips and cold sweat upon his face:

"The Germans had started shelling our front-line parapet at 5.30 that morning.... At a rough calculation they pounded us with eleven hundred guns.... Half the battalion were in the front line, and half in supports. And we had been given instructions to hold those trenches at any cost...."

He licked his dry lips and threw her a dog-like glance of entreaty. But she waited inexorably and he went on:

"We had taken them by assault and we weren't willing to lose them. Our guns gave back Hell for leather, but we kept getting Super-Hell. News kept coming through to us at Battalion Headquarters, of casualties, fresh casualties.... Always killed--hardly ever wounded! ... My God--my God! ... And at last I and my Adjutant--Cameron-Bain--were left at Headquarters with a few orderlies, cooks and bottle-washers. We'd sent up practically every man through the barrage to help 'em carry on.... And all my officers were killed except two. Jameson and Kinray-Heptown, the officers in charge of the Advanced Line Wireless and Telephone Communications. Don't ask to hear the rest. What good can it do? ..."

"It is my right," she answered him, "to hear this story from you.... And I am waiting...."

So he went on:

"There came a minute when Cameron-Bain and I stared at each other blankly across a pit of horror. We found the Advanced Line Communications getting queer and dribbling into incoherency.... Then they stopped.... And we knew that the worst had happened--though we waited, hoping against hope that Kinray-Heptown would speak again. Then we tossed up a penny to decide which of us-- This hurts! ... Must I carry through with it to the end? ..."

Her great maternal heart wept tears of blood for him. But yes.... For his sake she compelled him to carry through....

"I called 'Tails' and won, though Bain swore I hadn't.... Then we shook hands and I went up through the German barrage. Trains of stretcher-bearers and wounded--our stretcher-bearers and our wounded--lay dead upon that horrible road.... And I got to Supports--and found them evacuated, except for the Dead--there were plenty of dead men! Gas was being sent over from our Advanced trench by somebody--the wind being in our favour--if nothing else was! But the German guns kept on sending over High Explosive--5.9 shell--and shrapnel: and the fire of their machine-guns--they were enfilading us from two angles--came at us like a solid wall of lead! ..."

He wetted his parched lips and rubbed his forehead. And still she waited for him to tell the rest.

"I got to the Advanced trenches.... Hardly even challenged! The few men left alive there looked at me as if I'd been a ghost. But they carried on, and I pushed through to the T. & W. dug-out, to find it had been blown in by a High Velocity Shell. Kinray-Heptown, our T.C.O., lay dead--sprawling over the table, his blood and brains and so on--all mixed up horribly with the _débris_. And his assistant--Jameson--was in the same case. But the Wireless and telephone installations were in working-trim,--so I took them both over--receiving and transmitting messages in Morse Code from the connected Advanced Posts through Cameron-Bain to Brigade Headquarters, until one by one they left off talking, and I took off the head-band and put down the receiver--"

He might have but now come in out of the rain, his haggard face so streamed with wet....

"Because I knew they were all dead and that I was alone.... Then a blaze of hot yellow light filled the place--and the table reared on its hind-legs--and Kinray-Heptown--dead as stone and covered with blood, and with his skull--you know!--I've told you!--Heptown stood bolt upright a second--and then went for me!"

He laughed, the loud, unnaturally harsh laugh that had startled Katharine on the night of his arrival....

"High Explosive plays queer tricks. Another 5.9 shell had landed in the dug-out--and I was pinned down with Heptown on top of me--and the heavy case of the Wireless outfit on top of him--and the corrugated zinc, and sandbags, and earth of the roof on top of all! And I lay there with his awful face crushed down on mine, and remembered," he laughed again harshly, "what a silly kind of ass he used to be.... Always running after new women and howling for sympathy--because he was such a poor devil, without a rap beyond his pay--and hadn't a living relative in the world...."

"Edward! O Edward! my poor love! ..."

He did not hear her voice of throbbing tenderness. He was passing through that unspeakable ordeal again:

"A dismal man. They called him 'Gummidge' in the Regiment, and the nickname fitted the beggar to a 'T.' How I crawled out from under him ... can't imagine for the life of me! Probably my tin hat saved me from smothering.... They say I'd not a rag on when they found me--yellow as a guinea from melinite and smeared with blood--not mine, but Heptown's! Poor devil!--not a rap beyond his pay--not a living soul belonging to him in the world! ..."

He shuddered, and knitted his hands together closely, and so sat rigid--battling with some invisible power that strove with him for mastery of will....

"Edward! ..."

She was kneeling by his chair,--her arms wrapped round about him, her cheek to his,--the swell and heave of her bosom close to his--her warmth and sweetness his--all his once more....

"All is quite clear to me now. You have not wronged me! You are blameless--my man of men! Listen, dear Edward! In some way strange to us, clear to neurologists--when you lay buried alive, pinned down helpless by the body of that poor dead officer, the horror of those dreadful minutes--or hours--stamped his personality--branded it, I might better say--upon your memory so that you could not forget it if you would! The story you told to that poor girl afterwards--your conviction that you were poor, unloved and friendless--all came from that--were part of the strange obsession. Dear, in my eyes you are quite blameless. Forgive me, Edward, if"--he felt the sob she bravely kept back--"in the first agony of hearing what you have told me--I let myself feel resentful towards you!"

"Katharine!"

He drew a great breath of relief, and his load was lightened. She believed.... Oh, wonder of wonders, she believed.... He faltered:

"Then you do not hate and despise me? ..."

Her swift kiss touched his hands. He heard her saying:

"On the contrary, I admire, I love, I worship you!--my hero, my martyr--my King--my man of men! ..."

"KATHARINE!"

In the rapture of that declaration Yaill would have embraced her; clasped her close to his starving heart and covered her with caresses. But she freed herself from him gently and with decision, though he pleaded humbly for a single kiss.

"Dear, when we say Good-bye, then I will kiss you. It is my right, I shall not waive my claim. We were husband and wife in soul if not in actuality--we are parted--not through any mutual change of feeling, but by an act of the inscrutable Will of God. You have a wife--it is for us to remember it!--and so I ask you to go away from here--"

"'Go!' ... Leave you now? ..."

His face grew hard and obstinate.

"Why should I leave you? Do we not love each other? Have we not, as you say yourself, been one in heart for all these years! ... We have done no wrong, so why should we suffer? And, if I leave you, where am I to go? Not back to that woman? ..."

A spasm contracted her white face to a pinched mask of jealousy. He hardly knew the voice that came through the clenched teeth and stiffened lips:

"Why not? She _is_ your wife!"

"My wife through a vulgar deceit. Don't say you hold her guiltless?"

"Almost, if she believed you!" she forced herself to say.

"And this is your love!" he snarled at her, stung to injustice.

She answered--and the voice was once more Katharine's:

"This is my love! ..."

He wheeled to the fireplace and stood in thought, resting his elbow on the mantelshelf. When he looked back at her it was to say:

"And if I obey you now and leave you, what are your plans? What do you intend to do?"

She told him: