Part 10

That night again, she sat alone in her little white room and thought and thought. She had started the day with half-formed plans of flight before her identity could be discovered. She was there voluntarily, purely as an act of grace. She could walk out, without reproach, at a moment's notice. But now--had not the situation changed? To her, as to a stranger, he had confessed his love. She had not dared probe deeper--but might not a deeper probing have brought to light something abiding and beautiful? In the war, she had accomplished her womanhood. Proudly and rightly she recognized her development. He, too, had accomplished his manhood. And his dear face would be maimed and scarred for the rest of his life. Then, with the suddenness of a tropical storm, a wave of intolerable emotion surged through her. She uttered a little cry and broke into a passion of tears. And so her love was reborn.

Professional to the tips of her cool fingers, she dressed his wounds the next morning. But she did not lure him back across the years. The present held its own happiness, tremulous in its delicacy. It was he who questioned. Whereabouts in France had she been? She replied with scraps of anecdote. There was little of war's horror and peril through which she had not passed. She explained her present position in the hospital.

"By George, you're splendid!" he cried. "I wish I could have a look at you."

"You've lost your chance for to-day," she answered gaily. For she had completed the bandaging.

After dinner, she went out and walked the streets in a day-dream, a soft light in her eyes. The moment of recognition--and it was bound soon to come--could not fail in its touch of sanctification, its touch of beauty. He and she had passed through fires of hell and had emerged purified and tempered. They were clear-eyed, clear-souled. The greatest gift of God, miraculously regiven, they could not again despise. On that dreary afternoon, Oxford Street hummed with joy.

Only a freak of chance had hitherto preserved her anonymity. A reference by matron or probationer to Sister Warrington would betray her instantly. Should she await or anticipate betrayal?

In a fluttering tumult of indecision, she returned to the hospital. The visiting-hour had begun. When she had taken off her outdoor things, she looked into the ward. Around the two beds on the right, little groups of friends were stationed. The boy, Robin McKay, in the bed nearest the door on the left, caught sight of her and summoned her.

"Sister, come and pretend to be a visitor. There's not a soul in this country who could possibly come to see me. You don't know what it is to be homesick."

She sat by his side.

"All right. Imagine I'm an elderly maiden aunt from the country."

"You?" he cried, with overseas frankness. "You're only a kid yourself."

Major Shileto overheard and laughed. She blushed and half rose.

"That's not the way to treat visitors, Mr. McKay."

The boy stretched out his hand.

"I'm awfully sorry if I was rude. Don't go."

She yielded.

"All the same," she said, "you'll have to get used to a bit of loneliness. It can't be helped. Besides, you're not the only tiger that hasn't got a Christian. There's Major Shileto. And you can read and he can't."

The voice came from the next bed.

"Don't worry about me. Talk to the boy. I'll have some one to see me to-morrow. He won't, poor old chap!"

"Have a game of chess?" said the boy.

"With pleasure."

She fetched the board and chessmen from the long table running down the center of the ward, and they set out the pieces.

"I reckon to be rather good," said he. "Perhaps I might give you something."

"I'm rather good myself," she replied. "I was taught by--" She stopped short, on the brink of pronouncing the name of the young Polish master who lived (in a very material sense) on the fringe of the Chelsea crew. "We'll start even, at any rate."

They began. She realized that the boy had not boasted, and soon she became absorbed in the game. So intent was she on the problem presented by a brilliant and unexpected move on his part that she did not notice the opening of the door and the swift passage of a fur-coated figure behind her chair. It was a cry that startled her. A cry of surprise and joy, a cry of the heart.

"Marjorie!"

She looked up and saw the fur-coated figure--that of a girl with fair hair--on her knees by the bedside, and Harry Shileto's arms were round her and his lips to hers. She stared, frozen. She heard:

"I didn't expect you till to-morrow."

"I just had time to catch the train at Inverness. I've not brought an ounce of luggage. Oh, my poor, poor, old Harry!"

It was horrible.

The boy said:

"Never mind, Sister; he's got his Christian all right. Let's get on with the game."

Mechanically obeying a professional instinct, she looked at the swimming chess-board and made a move haphazard.

"I say--that won't do!" cried the boy. "It's mate for me in two moves. Buck up!"

With a great effort, she caught the vanishing tail of her previous calculation and made a move which happened to be correct.

"That's better," he said. "I hoped you wouldn't spot it. But I couldn't let you play the ass with your knight and spoil the game. Now, this demands deep consideration."

He lingered a while over his move. She looked across. The pair at the next bed were talking in whispers. The girl was now sitting on the chair by the bedside, and her back hid the face of the man, though her head was near his.

"There!" cried the boy triumphantly.

"I beg your pardon; I didn't see it."

"Oh, I say!" His finger indicated the move.

With half her brain at work, she moved a pawn a cautious step. The boy's whole heart was in his offensive. He swooped a bishop triumphantly athwart the board.

"There's only one thing can save you for mate in five moves. I know it isn't the proper thing to be chatting over chess, but I like it. I'm chatty by nature."

"Only one course open to save me from destruction?" she murmured.

"Just one."

And she heard, from the next bed:

"Are you sure, darling, you're only saying it to break the shock gently? Are you sure your eyes are all right?"

"Perfectly certain."

"I wish I could have real proof."

Camilla stared at the blankness of her vanished dream.

"Come along, Sister; put your back into it," chuckled Robin McKay.

She held her brows tight with her hands and strove to concentrate her tortured mind on the board. Her heart was in agony of desolation. The soft murmurings she could not but overhear pierced her brain. The poignant shame of her disillusionment burned her from head to foot. Again she heard the girl's pleading voice:

"Only for a minute. It couldn't hurt."

The boy said:

"Buck up. Just one tiny brain-wave."

At the end of her tether, she cried: "The only way out! I give it up!" and swept the pieces over the board.

She rose, stood transfixed with horror and sense of outrage. Harry Shileto, propped on pillows, was unwinding the bandages from his mangled head. Devils within her clamored for hysterical outcry. But something physical happened and checked the breath that was about to utter his Christian name. The boy had gripped her arm with all his young strength in passionate remonstrance.

"Oh, dear old thing--do play the game!"

"I'm sorry," she said, and he released her.

So she passed swiftly round the boy's bed to that of the foolish patient and arrested his hand.

"Major Shileto, what on earth are you doing?"

The girl, who was very pretty, turned on her an alarmed and tearful face.

"It was my fault, Sister. Oh, can I believe him?"

"You can believe me, at any rate," she replied with asperity, swiftly readjusting the bandage. "Major Shileto's sight is unaffected. But if I had not been here and he had succeeded in taking off his dressings, God knows what would have happened. Major Shileto, I put you on your honor not to do such a silly thing again."

"All right, Sister," he said, with a little shame-faced twitch of the lips. "_Parole d'officier_."

The girl rose and drew her a step aside.

"Do forgive me, Sister. We have only been married five months--when he was last home on leave--and, you understand, don't you, what it would have meant to me if----"

"Of course I do. Anyhow, you can be perfectly reassured. But I must warn you," she whispered, and looked through narrowed eyelids into the girl's eyes; "he may be dreadfully disfigured."

The girl shrank terrified, but she cried,

"I hope I shall love him all the more for it!"

"I hope so, too," replied Camilla soberly. "I'll say good-by," she added, in a louder tone, holding out her hand.

"I'll see you again to-morrow?" the girl asked politely.

"I'm afraid not."

"What's that?" cried Shileto.

"I told you I was only here as a bird of passage. My time's up to-day. Good-by."

"I'm awfully sorry. Good-by."

They shook hands. Camilla went to Robin McKay and bent over him.

"You're quite right, my dear boy. One ought to play the game to the bitter end. It's the thing most worth doing in life. God bless you!"

The boy stared wonderingly at her as she disappeared.

"I'm glad she's not going to be here any more," said the girl.

Her husband's lips smiled.

"Why?"

"She's a most heartless, overbearing woman."

"Oh, they all seem like that when they're upset," he laughed. "And I was really playing the most outrageous fool."

She put her head close to him and whispered,

"Don't you guess why I was so madly anxious to know that you could see?"

She told him. And, from that moment, the possessor of the remembered voice faded from his memory.

Camilla went to the matron.

"I'm sorry, but I've bitten off more than I can chew. If I go on an hour longer, I'll break down. I'm due in France in a fortnight, and I must have my rest."

"I can only thank you for your self-sacrificing help," said the matron.

But, four days later, ten days before her leave had expired, Camilla appeared at the casualty clearing-station in France of which she was a Sister-in-charge.

"What the devil are you here for?" asked the amazed commanding medical officer.

"England's too full of ghosts. They scared me back to realities."

The M.O. laughed to hide his inability to understand.

"Well, if you like 'em, it's all the same to me. I'm delighted to have you. But give me the good old ghosts of blighty all the time!"

The piercing of the line at Cambrai was a surprise no less to the Germans than to the British. The great tent of the casualty clearing-station was crammed with wounded. Doctors and nurses, with tense, burning eyes and bodies aching from strain, worked and worked, and thought nothing of that which might be passing outside. No one knew that the German wave had passed over. And the German wave itself, at that part of the line, was but a set of straggling and mystified groups.

Camilla Warrington, head of the heroic host of women working in the dimly lit reek of blood and agony, had not slept for two nights and two days. The last convoy of wounded had poured in a couple of hours before. She stood by the surgeon, aiding him, the perfect machine. At last, in the terrible rota, they came to a man swathed round the middle in the rough bandages of the field dressing-station. He was unconscious. They unwound him, and revealed a sight of unimaginable horror.

"He's no good, poor chap!" said the surgeon.

"Can't you try?" she asked, and put repressing hands on the wounded man.

"Not the slightest good," said the medical officer.

No one in the great tent of agony knew that they were isolated from the British army. From the outside, it looked solitary, lighted, and secure. Two German soldiers, casual stragglers, looked in at the door of the great tent. In the kindly German way, they each threw in a bomb, and ran off laughing. Seven men were killed outright and many rewounded. And Camilla Warrington was killed.[1]

[1] The bloody and hideous incident related here is not an invention. It is true. It happened when and where I have indicated.--W.J.L.

The guards, in their memorable sweep, cleared the ground. The casualty clearing-station again came into British hands.

There is a grave in that region whose head-board states that it is consecrated "to the Heroic Memory of Camilla Warrington, one of the Great Women of the War."

And Marjorie Shileto, to her husband healed and sound, searching like a foolish woman deep into his past history:

"It's awfully decent of you, darling, to hide nothing from me and to tell me about that girl in Chelsea. But what was she like?"

"My sweetheart," said he, like a foolish man, "she wasn't worth your little finger."

THE PRINCESS'S KINGDOM

That there was once a real Prince Rabomirski is beyond question. That he was Ottilie's father may be taken for granted. But that the Princess Rabomirski had a right to bear the title many folks were scandalously prepared to deny. It is true that when the news of the Prince's death reached Monte Carlo, the Princess, who was there at the time, showed various persons on whose indiscretion she could rely a holograph letter of condolence from the Tsar, and later unfolded to the amiable muddle-headed the intricacies of a lawsuit which she was instituting for the recovery of the estates in Poland; but her detractors roundly declared the holograph letter to be a forgery and the lawsuit a fiction of her crafty brain. Princess however she continued to style herself in Cosmopolis, and Princess she was styled by all and sundry. And little Ottilie Rabomirski was called the Princess Ottilie.

Among the people who joined heart and soul with the detractors was young Vince Somerset. If there was one person whom he despised and hated more than Count Bernheim (of the Holy Roman Empire) it was the Princess Rabomirski. In his eyes she was everything that a princess, a lady, a woman, and a mother should not be. She dressed ten years younger than was seemly, she spoke English like a barmaid and French like a cocotte, she gambled her way through Europe from year's end to year's end, and after neglecting Ottilie for twenty years, she was about to marry her to Bernheim. The last was the unforgivable offence.

The young man walked up and down the Casino Terrace of Illerville-sur-Mer, and poured into a friend's ear his flaming indignation. He was nine and twenty, and though he pursued the unpoetical avocation of sub-editing the foreign telegrams on a London daily newspaper, retained some of the vehemence of undergraduate days when he had chosen the career (now abandoned) of poet, artist, dramatist, and irreconcilable politician.

"Look at them!" he cried, indicating a couple seated at a distant table beneath the awning of the café. "Did you ever see anything so horrible in your life? The maiden and the Minotaur. When I heard of the engagement to-day I wouldn't believe it until she herself told me. She doesn't know the man's abomination. He's a by-word of reproach through Europe. His name stinks like his infernal body. The live air reeks with the scent he pours upon himself. There can be no turpitude under the sun in which the wretch doesn't wallow. Do you know that he killed his first wife? Oh, I don't mean that he cut her throat. That's far too primitive for such a complex hound. There are other ways of murdering a woman, my dear Ross. You kick her body and break her heart and defile her soul. That's what he did. And he has done it to other women."

"But, my dear man," remarked Ross, elderly and cynical, "he is colossally rich."

"Rich! Do you know where he made his money? In the cesspool of European finance. He's a Jew by race, a German by parentage, an Italian by upbringing and a Greek by profession. He has bucket-shops and low-down money-lenders' cribs and rotten companies all over the Continent. Do you remember Sequasto and Co.? That was Bernheim. England's too hot to hold him. Look at him now he has taken off his hat. Do you know why he wears his greasy hair plastered over half his damned forehead? It's to hide the mark of the Beast. He's Antichrist! And when I think of that Jezebel from the Mile End Road putting Ottilie into his arms, it makes me see red. By heavens, it's touch and go that I don't slay the pair of them."

"Very likely they're not as bad as they're painted," said his friend.

"She couldn't be," Somerset retorted grimly.

Ross laughed, looked at his watch, and announced that it was time for _apéritifs_. The young man assented moodily, and they crossed the Terrace to the café tables beneath the awning. It was the dying afternoon of a sultry August day, and most of Illerville had deserted tennis courts, _tir aux pigeons_ and other distractions to listen lazily to the band in the Casino shade. The place was crowded; not a table vacant. When the waiter at last brought one from the interior of the café, he dumped it down beside the table occupied by the unspeakable Bernheim and the little Princess Ottilie. Somerset raised his hat as he took his seat. Bernheim responded with elaborate politeness, and Princess Ottilie greeted him with a faint smile. The engaged pair spoke very little to each other. Bernheim lounged back in his chair smoking a cigar and looked out to sea with a bored expression. When the girl made a casual remark he nodded rudely without turning his head. Somerset felt an irresistible desire to kick him. His external appearance was of the type that irritated the young Englishman. He was too handsome in a hard, swaggering black-mustachioed way; he exaggerated to offence the English style of easy dress; he wore a too devil-may-care Panama, a too obtrusive coloured shirt and club tie; he wore no waistcoat, and the hem of his new flannel trousers, turned up six inches, disclosed a stretch of tan-coloured silk socks clocked with gold matching elegant tan shoes. He went about with a broken-spirited poodle. He was inordinately scented. Somerset glowered at him, and let his drink remain untasted.

Presently Bernheim summoned the waiter, paid him for the tea the girl had been drinking and pushed back his chair.

"This hole is getting on my nerves," he said in French to his companion. "I am going into the _cercle_ to play écarté. Will you go to your mother whom I see over there, or will you stay here?"

"I'll stay here," said the little Princess Ottilie.

Bernheim nodded and swaggered off. Somerset bent forward.

"I must see you alone to-night--quite alone. I must have you all to myself. How can you manage it?"

Ottilie looked at him anxiously. She was fair and innocent, of a prettiness more English than foreign, and the scare in her blue eyes made them all the more appealing to the young man.

"What is the good? You can't help me. Don't you see that it is all arranged?"

"I'll undertake to disarrange it at a moment's notice," said Somerset.

"Hush!" she whispered, glancing round; "somebody will hear. Everything is gossiped about in this place."

"Well, will you meet me?" the young man persisted.

"If I can," she sighed. "If they are both playing baccarat I may slip out for a little."

"As at Spa."

She smiled and a slight flush came into her cheek.

"Yes, as at Spa. Wait for me on the _plage_ at the bottom of the Casino steps. Now I must go to my mother. She would not like to see me talking to you."

"The Princess hates me like poison. Do you know why?"

"No, and you are not going to tell me," she said demurely. "_Au revoir_."

When she had passed out of earshot, Ross touched the young man's arm.

"I'm afraid, my dear Somerset, you are playing a particularly silly fool's game."

"Have you never played it?"

"Heaven forbid!"

"It would be a precious sight better for you if you had," growled Somerset.

"I'll take another quinquina," said Ross.

"Did you see the way in which the brute treated her?" Somerset exclaimed angrily. "If it's like that before marriage, what will it be after?"

"Plenty of money, separate establishments, perfect independence and happiness for each."

Somerset rose from the table.

"There are times, my good Ross," said he, "when I absolutely hate you."

Somerset had first met the Princess Rabomirski and her daughter three years before, at Spa. They were staying at the same hotel, a very modest one which, to Somerset's mind, ill-accorded with the Princess's pretensions. Bernheim was also in attendance, but he disposed his valet, his motor-car, and himself in the luxurious Hôtel d'Orange, as befitted a man of his quality; also he was in attendance not on Ottilie, but on the Princess, who at that time was three years younger and a trifle less painted. Now, at Illerville-sur-Mer the trio were stopping at the Hotel Splendide, a sumptuous hostelry where season prices were far above Somerset's moderate means. He contented himself with the little hotel next door, and hated the Hotel Splendide and all that it contained, save Ottilie, with all his heart. But at Spa, the Princess was evidently in low water from which she did not seem to be rescued by her varying luck at the tables. Ottilie was then a child of seventeen, and Somerset was less attracted by her delicate beauty than by her extraordinary loneliness. Day after day, night after night he would come upon her sitting solitary on one of the settees in the gaming-rooms, like a forgotten fan or flower, or wandering wistfully from table to table, idly watching the revolving wheels. Sometimes she would pause behind her mother's or Bernheim's chair to watch their game; but the Princess called her a little _porte-malheur_ and would drive her away. In the mornings, or on other rare occasions, when the elder inseparables were not playing roulette, Ottilie hovered round them at a distance, as disregarded as a shadow that followed them in space of less dimensions, as it were, wherever they went. In the Casino rooms, if men spoke to her, she replied in shy monosyllables and shrank away. Somerset who had made regular acquaintance with the Princess at the hotel and taken a chivalrous pity on the girl's loneliness, she admitted first to a timid friendship, and then to a childlike intimacy. Her face would brighten and her heart beat a little faster when she saw his young, well-knit figure appear in the distance; for she knew he would come straight to her and take her from the hot room, heavy with perfumes and tobacco, on to the cool balcony, and talk of all manner of pleasant things. And Somerset found in this neglected, little sham Princess what his youth was pleased to designate a flower-like soul. Those were idyllic hours. The Princess, glad to get the embarrassing child out of the way, took no notice of the intimacy. Somerset fell in love.

It lasted out a three-years' separation, during which he did not hear from her. He had written to several addresses, but a cold Post Office returned his letters undelivered, and his only consolation was to piece together from various sources the unedifying histories of the Princess Rabomirski and the Count Bernheim of the Holy Roman Empire. He came to Illerville-sur-Mer for an August holiday. The first thing he did when shown into his hotel bedroom was to gaze out of window at the beach and the sea. The first person his eyes rested upon was the little Princess Ottilie issuing, alone as usual, from the doors of the next hotel.