Chapter 10

Again a pause, and again came the low-voiced affirmative. Margaret lowered the glasses and returned them to the case slung across her shoulder. "I thought I was doing right. . . . But I was wrong." The night had not been without its lesson. "He's out there." She nodded towards the North Sea, and as she spoke the blunt bows of a hospital ship crept round a distant headland, making towards them. Silence tell between them again.

Margaret broke it. "Betty," she said, "if the time ever comes for you to choose between the love of the man you love and--and anything else in the wide world, don't be misled by other claims . . . by what may seem to be higher claims. Loving and being loved are the highest responsibilities that life holds."

Betty turned her head and stared. "But," she said, "if you think duty doesn't give you the right to----"

"Love gives you all the right a woman wants," replied Margaret, still in the same low, sad tone. "If it's only the right to cry. . . . If you forego love, you forego even that." She gathered the reins and turned her horse. "Now we must get back to bath and dress. There's a lot of work ahead of us."

Neither spoke again as they rode back across the downs. In the filmy blue overhead a lark sang rapturously, pouring out its soul in gladness.

* * * * *

Margaret was in the hall when the first of the long line of stretcher-bearers arrived. As each stretcher was brought in, a surgeon made a brief examination of the wounded man, and he passed through one or other of the wide doorways opening out on either side of the hall. There was a subdued murmur of voices as every moment brought a fresh arrival. Two blue-jackets, who came up the steps carrying a hooded stretcher, stood looking about them as if for orders. The surgeons were all occupied, but, catching sight of Margaret in uniform, with the broad red cross on her breast, the blue-jackets crossed the hall towards her and laid the stretcher at her feet, as if they had brought their burden all this way for her alone.

"Second door on the left," said Margaret. "Wait--is it a bad case?"

"Too late, I'm afraid, Sister," said the stalwart at the head of the stretcher. "'E's died on the way up."

"'Emmerage, Sister," supplemented the other, anxious to display his familiarity with the technicalities of her profession. "'E wouldn't take 'is turn to be attended to aboard of us--we was in a Destroyer, an' picked 'im up 'angin' on to a spar. Would 'ave the doctor fix up a German prisoner wot was bleedin' to death. Said 'e wasn't in no particular 'urry, speakin' for 'isself. An' 'im a-bleedin' to death, too. As fine a gentleman as ever stepped."

The other nodded, warming, sailor-like, to the hero-worship of an officer. "That's right, Sister. 'E give 'is life for one of them Germans, you might say."

"Is he dead?" asked Margaret in her clear, incisive tones.

"Yes, Sister." The speaker knelt down and turned back the hood, uncovering the face and shoulders of the motionless figure on the stretcher.

For a moment a feeling of giddiness seized Margaret. A great blackness seemed to close round her, shutting out the busy scene, the voices of the bearers, and the shuffle of their feet across the tiled hall. With a supreme effort she mastered herself, and somehow knew she had been waiting for this moment, expecting it. . . .

The man who had been kneeling rose to his feet, and the two stood before her as if awaiting orders. Outside the entrance a motor ambulance arrived and drew up with throbbing engine.

"The mortuary----" she began. "No--bring him here . . . out of all this." She walked across the hall and opened the door of the small room on the left of the entrance. The scent of roses greeted them: it was the room from which she had fetched her glasses early in the morning.

The two men deposited the stretcher on the floor and came out, glancing at her white face as they passed. "Shall we carry on, Sister?"

"What? . . . Oh, yes, please."

They saluted awkwardly, and left her standing irresolute, as if dazed, in the midst of all the bustle and traffic of suffering.

He had come back to her. Torps, who in life had never broken his word, was also faithful to it in death.

2

The journey across the lawn to one of the seats in the shelter of the clipped hedge of evergreens was accomplished at length.

The Indiarubber Man lowered himself with a little grimace into the seat, and laid the crutches down beside him. One leg, encased in splints and bandages, was stiffly outstretched on a stool in front of him; his uniform cap--a very disreputable one, with a tarnished badge--was perched on top of the bandages that still swathed his head.

"Phew!" he said; "thank you. That was a bit of a Marathon, wasn't it?" He measured the distance across the lawn with a humorous eye.

"It was very good for a first attempt," said Betty, considering him professionally. "Is that leg comfortable?"

"Quite, thank you." He leaned back and closed his eyes with a luxurious sigh. "'Pon my word, this is what I call cutting it pretty fat. Fancy my lolling here in the sun, and you . . . and you----" he opened his eyes, regarding her as she stood before him in her trim, nurse's uniform. "It's quite like a play, isn't it, where everything comes right in the end? Miss Betty----"

"You mustn't call me that," said Betty primly. "I told you before. You must say 'Nurse.'"

"Can't I say 'Nurse Betty'?"

"My name is Elizabeth. If you wanted to distinguish me from other nurses you might conceivably say 'Nurse Elizabeth.' But even that's not necessary, as I'm the only nurse here at the moment."

The Indiarubber Man looked cautiously round the sunlit enclosure. "True. So you are----"

"And it's time for your beef-tea," added Betty severely, marching off in the direction of the distant wing.

Her patient watched her slim form retreating and vanish down a green alley. "You dear," he said, "you dear!" He meditated awhile. "It's a rum world," he soliloquised. "Torps has gone. The Young Doc.'s gone. The Pay's gone."

He mused awhile. "But we gave 'em an almighty hammering. And here am I, alive and kicking again. And there's Betty. . . . It's a rum world." He bent forward and gathered a daisy growing in the border beside his seat. With his bleached, rather unsteady, fingers, he began picking the petals from it one by one.

"She does, she doesn't. She does, she doesn't. She doesn't," repeated the Indiarubber Man in a woeful voice.

A thrush hopped across the lawn, and paused to regard him with one bright eye. Apparently reassured, it deftly secured and swallowed a worm.

The Indiarubber Man laughed. "Doesn't anybody love you either?" he said.

Betty reappeared in the distance carrying a tray in her hands. The thrush, as if realising that two is company and three none, flew away.

Betty handed a cup to the invalid. "There's a piece of toast too--you must soak it in the beef-tea, and here is a little bell. If you want anything, or you aren't comfortable, you can ring it."

"I see." The Indiarubber Man gravely accepted all three gifts and laid them on the seat beside him. "Thank you awfully. But you aren't going away, are you?"

"Of course I am," said Betty. "I'm very busy. You _must_ remember that this is a hospital, that you're a patient and I'm a nurse." She moved off sedately.

"Miss Betty!" called the Indiarubber Man. "I mean 'Nurse.'" Betty turned and retraced her footsteps. "Wouldn't it be awful if I was suddenly taken very ill indeed--if I came over all of a tremble, and tried to ring the toast and soaked the bell in my beef-tea?"

"From what I've seen of you during the last six weeks," replied Betty the Hospital Nurse, "such a thing wouldn't surprise me a little bit." She left him to his graceless self.

For a while after she had gone the Indiarubber Man tried to read a book. Tiring of that, he lit a pipe and smoked it without enthusiasm. Tobacco tasted oddly flavourless and unfamiliar. Then he remembered his beef-tea and drank it obediently, soaking the toast as he had been bidden. Remained the bell. For a long time he sat staring at it.

"Much better get it over," he said aloud. "One way or the other."

Cautiously he looked round. No one was in sight; the windows at the back of the hospital that overlooked this secluded lawn had been the windows of class-rooms, and were of frosted glass. With the aid of his crutches he got up unsteadily, and then, maintaining a precarious balance with one crutch, he thrust the other one under the seat leverwise, and with an effort tipped it over backwards on to the flowerbed.

This accomplished, the Indiarubber Man looked round again to convince himself that the manoeuvre was unobserved. Reassured on this point, he lowered himself down gingerly over the seat until he was lying on his back with his legs in the air and his head in a clump of marigolds. In this attitude he seized the bell and rang it furiously, feebly waving his uninjured leg the while.

The moments passed. From his prostrate position behind the seat he was unable to obtain a view of the lawn, and stopped ringing the bell to listen. He heard a faint cry in the distance, and then the flutter of skirts. The next instant Betty was bending over him, white and breathless.

"Oh!" she cried, "how _did_ it happen? Did the seat tip over backwards--are you hurt?" and kneeling beside him raised his unhallowed head. The Indiarubber Man closed his eyes.

"You told me to ring if I wasn't comfortable, and I wasn't a bit. I hate the smell of marigolds too. No--please don't move; I'm very comfortable now." Betty looked wildly in the direction of the house for help.

"I heard the bell," she said in a queer, breathless little voice, "and I just came out to look . . . and then I ran. I ought to have called someone. Ring the bell--I can't move you by myself. We must have assistance. How _did_ this happen?"

The Indiarubber Man opened his eyes. "The seat tipped over backwards."

"But _how_?"

"It--it just tipped--as it were."

"Will you promise to lie still for one minute while I run for help--are you in pain?"

"No. As a matter of fact, I wanted to ask you a question."

"What?" asked Betty, reaching for the bell with her disengaged hand.

"Betty, will you marry me?"

The Indiarubber Man's bandaged head was deposited once more among the marigolds. Betty rose to her feet, astonishment and indignation joining forces to overcome laughter within her. The resultant of all three was something suspiciously like tears.

"_What_? Oh, I do believe--I don't believe it was an accident at all----"

"Will you, Betty?" queried the Indiarubber Man from the depths of the marigolds.

Voices sounded beyond the yews. A white-coated orderly appeared in the distance, stood a moment in astonishment, and came running across the grass towards them.

"Quick! There's someone coming. I swear I won't be budged till you answer."

The orderly arrived panting. "What's up, miss, an accident?"

"Oh," gasped Betty. "Yes!"

The Indiarubber Man suffered himself to be moved.