Chapter 21

AFTER THE ARMISTICE

The Bruxellois felt very disheartened in the closing months of 1917. The Russian revolution had brought about the collapse of Russia as an enemy of Germany; and the Germans were enabled to transport most of their troops on the Russian frontier to the west and to the Italian frontier. Italy had lost half Venetia and enormous quantities of guns in the breach of her defences at Caporetto. It seemed indeed at any moment, when the ice and snow of that dreadful winter of 1917-18 melted, as though Italy would share the fate of Rumania. Though the British army had had a grand success with their Tanks, they had, ere 1917 ended, lost nearly all the ground gained round Cambrai. Besides, the submarine menace was imperilling the British food supplies and connections with America. As to the United States: was their intervention going to be more than money loans and supplies of material? Would they really supply the fighting men, the one thing at this crisis necessary to defeat Germany?

Belgium had been divided administratively into two distinct portions, north and south of the Meuse. North of the Meuse she was to be a Dutch-speaking country either part of Germany eventually, or given to Holland to compensate her for her very benevolent neutrality towards Germany during the War. A handful of Flemish adventurers appeared at Brussels to form the Council of Flanders, and sickened the Bruxellois by their lavish praise of the German administration and servile concurrence with all German measures.

The events of the spring of 1918 accentuated the despair in the Belgian capital. When the Germans broke through the defences of the new lines which ran through Picardy and Champagne, reached the vicinity of Amiens, retook Soissons, and recrossed the Marne, it seemed as though Belgian independence had been lost; the utmost she could hope for would be the self-government of a German province.

But Vivie was not among the pessimists. She discerned a smouldering discontent among the German soldiers, even when Germany seemed near to a sweeping victory over France and Britain.

The brutality of the soldiers, their deliberate, nasty dirtiness during the first two years of the War seemed due rather to their officers' orders than to an anti-human disposition of their own. Many of the soldiers in Belgium, in Brussels, turned round--so to speak--and conceived a horror of what they had done, of what they had been told to do. Men who on the instigation of their officers--and these last, especially the Prussians, seemed fiends incarnate--had offered violence to young Belgian women, ended by offering to marry them, even showed themselves kind husbands, only too willing to become domesticated, groaning at having to leave their temporary homes and return to the terrible fighting on the Yser or in France.

There were, for example, the soldiers stationed at the Villa Beau-séjour and at the Oudekens' farm. Vivie had a growing desire to find out what had happened to her mother's property. One day, late in February, 1918, when there was a premature breath and feeling of Spring in the air, she called on her friend--as he had become--the Directeur of the Prison of Saint-Gilles, and asked him--since she herself could not deign to ask any favour or concession of the German authorities--to obtain for her a permit to proceed to Tervueren, the railway service between Brussels and that place having been reopened. She walked over--with what reminiscences the roads and paths were filled--to the Villa, and showing her pass was received, not uncivilly, by the sergeant-major in charge. Fortunately the officers had all gone, voting it very dull, with Brussels so near and yet so far. After their departure the sergeant-major and his reduced guard of men had begun to make the place more homelike. The usual German thrift had shown itself. They had reassembled the remains of Mrs. Warren's herd of cows. These had calves and were giving milk. There were once more the beginnings of a poultry yard. The rooms had been cleaned at any rate of their unspeakable filth, though the dilapidations and the ruined furniture made tears of vexation stand in Vivie's eyes. However she kept her temper and told the sergeant that it was _her_ property now; that she intended to reclaim it at the end of the War, and that if he saw to it that the place was handed back to her with no further damage, she would take care that he was duly rewarded; and as an instalment she gave him a good tip. He replied with a laugh and a shrug "That may well come about." ("Das könnte wohl geschehen.")

He had already heard of the Engländerin whom the Kommandantur was afraid to touch, and opened his heart to her; even offering to prepare her a little meal in her own _salle à manger_. With what strange sensations she sat down to it. The sergeant as he brought in the _oeufs au plat_ said the soldiers were already sick of the War. Most wanted to go back to Germany, but a few were so much in love with Belgium that they hoped they might be allowed to settle down there; especially those who spoke Platt-deutsch, to whom Flemish came so easy.

From Villa Beau-séjour, Vivien Warren passed on to the Oudekens' farm, wondering what she would see--Some fresh horror? But on the contrary, Mme. Oudekens looked years younger; indeed when Vivien first stood outside the house door, she had heard really hearty laughter coming from the orchard where the farmer's widow was pinning up clothes to dry. Yet it was here that the woman's husband had been shot and buried, as the result of a field-court's sentence.

But when she answered Vivien's questions, after plying her with innumerable enquiries, she admitted with a blush that Heinrich, the German sergeant, with whom she had first cohabited by constraint, had recently married her at the Mairie, though the Curé had refused to perform the religious service. Heinrich was now invariably kind and worked hard on the farm. He hoped by diligently supplying the officers' messes in Brussels with poultry and vegetables that he and his assistants--two corporals--might be overlooked and not sent back into the fighting ranks. As to her daughters, after a few months of promiscuity--a terrible time that Mme. Oudekens wanted to forget--they had been assigned to the two corporals as their exclusive property. They were both of them about to become mothers, and if no one interfered, as soon as this accursed War was over their men would marry them. "But," said Vivie, "suppose your husband and these corporals are married already, in Germany?" "Qu'est-ce-que ça fait?" said Mme. Oudekens. "C'est si loin." By making these little concessions she had already saved her youngest son from deportation to Germany.

The enormous demands for food in Brussels, which in 1918 had a floating population of over a million and where the Germans were turning large dogs into pemmican, had tripled the value of all productive farms so near the capital as those round Tervueren, especially now the railway service was reopened. Many of the peasants were making huge fortunes in complicity with some German soldier-partner.

In Brussels itself, soldiers often sided with the people against the odious "polizei," the intolerable German spies and police agents. Conflicts would sometimes occur in the trams and the streets when the German police endeavoured to arrest citizens for reading the _Times_ or _La Libre Belgique_, or for saying disrespectful things about the Emperor.

The tremendous rush of the German offensive onward to the Marne, Somme, and Ypres salient in March-June, 1918, was received by the shifting garrison of Brussels with little enthusiasm. Would it not tend to prolong the War? The German advance into France was spectacular, but it was paid for by an appalling death-roll. The hospitals at Brussels were filled to overflowing with wounded and dying men. The Austrians who were brought from the Italian front to replenish the depleted battalions, quarrelled openly with the Prussians, and in some cases had to be surrounded in a barrack square and shot down.

The first real check to the German Army in its second march on Paris--that which followed its crossing of the Marne near Dormans--was prophetically greeted by the Bruxellois as the turning of the tide. The Emperor had gone thither from the Hotel Impérial in order to witness and follow the culminating march on Paris. But Foch now struck with his reserves, and the head of the tortoise was nipped off. The driving back of the Germans over the Marne coincided with the Belgian National Fête of July 21. Not since 1914 had this fête been openly observed. But on this day in 1918, the German police made no protest when a huge crowd celebrated the fête day in every church and every street. Vivien herself, smiling and laughing as she had not done since Bertie's death, attended the service in Sainte-Gudule and joined in singing _La Brabançonne_ in place of _Te Deum, laudamus_. In the streets and houses of Brussels every piano, every gramophone was enrolled to play the _Marseillaise_, _Vers l'Avenir_, and _La Brabançonne_, the Belgian national anthem (uninspiring words and dreary tune). From this date onwards--July 21--the German _débacle_ proceeded, with scarcely one day's intermission, with never a German regain of lost ground.

When the Americans had retaken St. Mihiel on September 14, then did Belgians boldly predict that their King would be back in Brussels by Christmas. But their prophecies were outstripped by events. Already, in the beginning of October, the accredited German Press in Belgium was adjuring the Belgians not to be impatient, but to let them evacuate Belgium quietly. At the end of October, Minna von Stachelberg told Vivien that she and the other units of the German Red Cross had received instructions to leave and hand over their charges to the Belgian doctors and nurses. The two women took an affectionate farewell of each other, vowing they would meet again--somewhere--when the War was over. British wounded now began to cease coming into Brussels, so Vivie was free to attend to her own affairs.

Enormous quantities of German plunder were streaming out of Belgium by train, by motor, in military lorries, in carts and waggons. Nearly all this belonged to the officers, and the already-rebellious soldiers broke out in protestations. "Why should they who had done all the fighting have none of the loot?" So they won over the Belgian engine-drivers--delighted to see this quarrel between the hyenas--and held up the trains in the suburban stations north of Brussels. There were pitched battles which ended always in the soldiers' victory.

The soldiers then would hold auctions and markets of the plunder captured in the trains and lorries. They were in a hurry to get a little money to take back with them to Germany. Vivie, who had laid her plans now as to what to do after the German evacuation of Brussels, attended these auctions. She was nearly always civilly treated, because so many German soldiers had known her as a friend in hospital and told other soldiers. At one such sale she bought a serviceable motor-car for 750 francs; at another drums of petrol.

She had provided herself with funds by going to her mother's bank and reopening the question of the deposited jewels and plate. Now that the victory of the Allies seemed certain, the bank manager was more inclined to make things easy for her. He had the jewels and plate valued--roughly--at £3,000; and although he would not surrender them till the will could be proved and she could show letters of administration, he consented on behalf of the bank to make her a loan of 30,000 francs.

On November 10th, a German soldier who followed Vivien about with humble fidelity since she had cured him of a bad whitlow--and also because, as he said, it was a joy to speak English once more--for he had been a waiter at the Savoy Hotel--came to her in the Boulevard d'Anspach and said "The Red flag, lady, he fly from Kommandantur. With us I think it is Kaput." This was what Vivien had been waiting for. Asking the man to follow her, she first stopped outside a shop of military equipment, and after a brief inspection of its goods entered and purchased a short, not too flexible riding-whip, with a heavy handle. Then as the trams were densely crowded, she walked at a rapid pace--glancing round ever and again to see that her German soldier was following--up the Boulevard du Jardin Botanique and along the Rue Royale until she came to the Hotel Impérial. Here she halted for a minute to have the soldier close behind her; then gave the revolving door a turn and found herself and him in the marble hall once built for Mrs. Warren's florid taste. "Call the Manager," she said--trying not to pant--to two Belgian servants who came up, a porter and a lift man. The Manager--he who had ejected her and her mother in 1915--was fortunately a little while in appearing. He was really packing up with energy so as to depart with all the plunder he could transport before the way of escape was closed. This little delay enabled Vivien to get her breath and resume an impressive calm.

"Well: what you want?" the Manager said insolently, recollecting her.

"This first," she said, seizing him suddenly by his coat collar.

"I want--to--give--you--the--soundest--thrashing you have ever had..."

And before he could offer any effective resistance she had lashed him well with the riding _cravache_ about the shoulders, hands, back and face. He wrenched himself free and crouched ready for a counter attack. But the Belgian servants intervened and tripped him up; and the German soldier--the ex-waiter from the Savoy--said that Madame was by nature so kind that there must be some good reason for this chastisement.

"There is," she replied, now she had got her breath and was inwardly feeling ashamed at her resort to such violent methods.

"Three years ago, this creature turned my mother and myself out of this hotel with such violence that my mother died of it a few minutes afterwards. He stole our money and much of our property. I have inherited from my mother, to whom this hotel once belonged, a right over certain rooms which she used to occupy. I resume that right from to-day. I shall go to them now. As to this wretch, throw him out on to the pavement. He can afterwards send for his luggage, and what really is his he shall have."

Her orders were executed.

She then sent a message to Mme. Walcker and to the kind tea-shop woman, Mme. Trouessart, close by, explaining what she had done and why. "I shall take control of this hotel in the name of the Belgian Company that owns it, a Company in which, through my mother, I possess shares. I shall stay here till responsible persons take it over and I shall resume possession of the _appartement_ that belonged to my mother." Meantime, would Madame Trouessart engage a few stout wenches to eke out the scanty hotel staff, most of which being German had already commenced its flight back to the fatherland with all the plunder it could carry off. The soldier-ex-hotel-waiter was provisionally engaged to remain, as long as the Belgian Government allowed him, and three stalwart British soldiers, until the day before prisoners-of-war, were enlisted in her service and armed with revolvers to repel any ordinary act of brigandage.

By the end of November she had the Hotel Édouard-Sept--with the old name restored--running smoothly and ready for the new guests--British, French officers and civilians who would follow the King of the Belgians on his return to his capital. The re-established Belgian authorities soon put her into possession of the Villa Beau-séjour. The German sergeant-major here had kept faith with her, and in return for handing over everything intact, including the herd of cows, received a _douceur_ which amply rewarded him for this belated honesty before he, too, set his face towards Germany with the rest of the evacuating army. The motor-car she had bought enabled her to fetch supplies of food from farm to hotel and to perform many little services to Belgians who were returning to their old homes. Madame Trouessart, not as yet having any stock of tea with which to reopen her tea-shop to the first incoming of curious tourists, agreed to live with Miss Warren at the hotel and act as her deputy, if affairs took her away from Brussels.

It was at the Hotel Édouard-Sept, the place where she had been born, that Rossiter met her when he arrived in Brussels after the Armistice. She felt a little tremulous when his card was sent up to her, and kept him waiting quite five minutes while she saw that her hair was tidy and estimated before the glass the extent to which it had gone grey. She had let it grow of late years--the days of David Williams and Mr. Michaelis seemed very remote--and spent some time and consideration in arranging it. Her costume was workmanlike and that of an hotel manageress in the morning; yet distinctly set off her figure and suited her character of an able-bodied, intellectual woman.

* * * * *

"Vivie!"

"Michael!"

"My _dear_! You're handsomer than ever!"

"Michael! Your khaki uniform becomes you; and I'm _so_ glad you've got rid of that beard. _Now_ we can see your well-shaped chin. But still: we mustn't stand here, paying one another compliments, though this meeting is _too_ wonderful: I never thought I should see you again. Let's come to realities. I suppose the real heart-felt question at the back of your mind is: _can_ I let you have a room? I can, but not a bath-room suite; they're all taken..."

_Michael_: "Nonsense! I'm going to be put up at the Palace Hotel. Jenkins--you remember the butler of old time?--Jenkins, and my batman, a refined brigand, a polished robber, have already been there and commandeered something....

"No. I came here, firstly to find out if you were living; secondly to ask you to marry me" ... (a pause) ... "and thirdly to find out what happened to Bertie Adams. A message came through the Spanish Legation here, a year and a half ago, to the effect that he had died at Brussels from the consequences of the War. However, unless you can tell me at once this is all a mistake, we can go into his affairs later. My first question is--Oh! Bother all this cackle.... _Will_ you marry me?"

_Vivie_: "Dear, brave Bertie, whom I shall everlastingly mourn, was shot here in Brussels by the abominable Germans, as a spy, on April 8th, 1917. He was of course no more a spy than you are or I am. The poor devoted fool--I rage still, because I shall never be worth such folly, such selfless devotion--got into Belgium with false passports--American: in the hope of rescuing me. He came and enquired here--my last address in his remembrance--and came by sheer bad luck just as the Kaiser was about to arrive. They jumped to the conclusion that--"

_Rossiter_: "_Awfully, cruelly_ sad. But you can give me the details of it later on. You must have a long, long story of your own to tell which ought to be of poignant interest. But ... will you marry me? I suppose you know dear Linda died--was killed by a bomb in a German air-raid last year--October, 1917. I really felt _heart-broken_ about it, but I know now I am only doing what she would have wished. She came at last to talk about you _quite_ differently, _quite_ understanding--"

_Vivie_: "That's what all widowers say. They always declare the dead wife begged them to marry again, and even designated her successor. Poor Linda! Yes, I read an account of it in a copy of the _Times_; but I couldn't of course communicate with you to say how _truly, truly_ sorry I was. I am glad to know she spoke nicely of me. Did she really? Or have you only made it up?"

_Michael_: "_Of course_ I haven't. She really did. Do you know, she and I quite altered after the War began? She lost all her old silliness and inefficiency--or at any rate only retained enough of the old childishness to make her endearing. And I really grew to love her. I quite forgot you. Yes: I admit it....

"But somehow, after she was dead the old feeling for you came back ... and without any disloyalty to Linda. I felt in a way--I know it is an absurd thing for a man of science to say, for we have still no proof--I felt somehow as though she lived still. That's why I don't want to get rid of the Park Crescent house. Her presence seems to linger there. But I also knew--instinctively--that she would like us to come together.... She..."

_Waiter_ (knocking at door and slightly opening it): "Madame! Le Général Tompkins veut vous voir. Il ajoute qu'il n'est pas habitué à attendre. Il y a aussi M'sieur Émile Vandervelde, qui arrive instamment et qui n'a pas d'installation..."

_Rossiter_: "Damn! Let me go and settle with 'em. Tompkins! I never heard such cheek--"

_Vivien_: "Not at all. You forget I am Manageress." (To Waiter) "Entrez done! Dîtes au Général que je serai à sa disposition dans trois minutes; et montrez-lui ce que nous avons en fait de chambres. Tous les appartements avec bain sont pris. Casez M'sieur Vandervelde quelque part. Du reste, je descendrai."... (Waiter goes out) ... "Michael! It is impossible to have a sentimental conversation here, and at this hour--Eleven o'clock on a busy morning. If you want an answer to your second question, now you've seen me, meet me outside the Palm House of the Jardin Botanique, at 3 p.m. I'll get off somehow for an hour just then. Don't forget! It's close by here--along the Rue Royale. Be absolutely punctual, or else I shall think that having _seen_ me, seen how changed I am, you have altered your mind. I shall _quite_ understand; only I _may_ come back at five minutes past three and accept General Tompkins. Acquaintances ripen quickly in Brussels."

* * * * *

In the Palm House--or rather one of its many compartments; 3.5 p.m., on a beautiful afternoon in early December. The sun is sinking over outspread Brussels in a pink and yellow haze radiating from the good-humoured-looking, orange orb. There are no other visitors to the Palm House, at any rate not to this compartment, except the superintending gardener--the same that cheered the last hours of Mrs. Warren. He recognizes Vivien and salutes her gravely. Seeing that she is accompanied by a gentleman in khaki he discreetly withdraws out of hearing and tidies up a tree fern. Vivien and Michael seat themselves on two green iron chairs under the fronds and in front of grey stems.

_Vivie_: "This is a favourite place of mine for assignations. I can't think why it is so little appreciated by young Brussels. These palm houses are much more beautiful than anything at Kew; they are in the heart of Brussels, over which, as you see, you have a wonderful view. It was much more frequented when the Germans were here. With all their brutality they did not injure this unequalled collection of Tropical plants. They made the Palm House an allowance of coal and coke in winter while we poor human beings went without. I used often to come in here on a winter's day to get warm and to forget my sorrows....

"Look at that superb Raphia--_what_ fronds! And that Phoenix spinosa--and that Aralia--"

_Rossiter_: "Bother the Aralia. I haven't come here for a Botany lesson. Besides, it isn't an Aralia; it's a Gomphocarpus.... Vivie! _Will_ you marry me?"

_Vivie_: "My dear Michael: I was forty-three last October."

_Michael_: "I was _fifty-three_ last November, the day the Armistice was signed. But I feel more like thirty-three. Life in camp has quite rejuvenated me..."

_Vivie_ (continuing): ... "And my hair is cinder grey--an unfortunate transition colour. And if the gardener were not looking I should say: 'Feel my elbows ... Dreadfully bony! And my face has become..." She turns her face towards him. He sees tears trembling on the lower lashes of her grey eyes, but something has come into the features, some irradiation of love--is it the light of the sunset?--which imparts a tender youthfulness to the curvature of cheek, lips and chin. Her face, indeed, might be of any age: it held the undying beauty of a goddess, in whom knowledge has sweetened to tenderness and divinity has dissolved in a need for compassion; and the youthful assurance of a happy woman whose wish at last is won....

For a minute she looks at him without finishing her sentence. Then she sits up straighter and says explicitly: "Yes, I will."

* * * * *

The gardener managed an occasional peep at them, sitting hand in hand. He wished the idyll to last as long as the clear daylight, but the hour for closing was four o'clock--"Il n'y avait pas à nier." Either they were husband and wife, reunited, after years of war-severance; or they were mature lovers, and probably of the most respectable. In either case, the necessary hint that ecstasies must transfer themselves at sunset from the glass houses of the Jardin Botanique to the outer air was best conveyed on this occasion by a discreet gift of flowers. Accordingly he went on to where exotic lilies were blooming, picked a few blossoms, returned, came with soft padding steps up to Vivie, offered them with a bow and "Mes félicitations _sincères_, Madame." Vivie laughed and took the lilies; Rossiter of course gave him a ten-franc note. And they sauntered slowly back to the hotel.

L'ENVOI

I am reproached by such Art Critics as deign to notice my pictures with "finishing my foregrounds over much,"--filling them with superabundant detail, making the primroses more important than the snow-peaks. And by my publishers with forgetting the price of paper and the cost of printing. My jury of matrons thinks I don't know where to leave off and that I might very well close this book on the answer that Mrs. Warren's daughter gave to Sir Michael Rossiter's proposal of marriage in the Palm House at Brussels. "The reader," they say, "can very well fill in the rest of the story for himself or herself. It is hardly likely that Vivie will cry off at the last moment, or Michael reconsider the plunge into a second marriage. Why therefore waste print and paper and our eyesight in describing the marriage ceremony, the inevitable visit to Honoria, and what Vivie did with the property she inherited from her mother?"

No doubt they are all right. Yet I am distrustful of my readers' judgment and imagination. I feel both want guiding, and I doubt their knowledge of the world and goodness of heart being equal to mine, except in rare cases.

So I throw out these indications to influence the sequels they may plan to this story.

I think that Michael and Vivie were married at the British Legation in Brussels between Christmas and the New Year of 1918-1919; before that Legation was erected into an Embassy; and that the marriage officer was kind, genial Mr. Hawk when he returned to Brussels from The Hague and proceeded to get the Legation into working order. I am sure Mr. Hawk entered into the spirit of the thing and gave an informal breakfast afterwards in the Rue de Spa to which Mons. and Mme. Walcker, Mons. and Mme. Trouessart, and the Directeur of the prison of Saint-Gilles and his wife were invited. I think the head gardener of the Jardin Botanique who had charge of the Tropical houses cribbed from the collections some of the most magnificent blooms, and presented them to Vivie on the morning of her marriage; and that afterwards she laid the bouquet on her mother's newly finished tomb in the cemetery of St. Josse-ten-Noode, where, the weather being singularly mild for the time of year, the flowers lasted fresh and blooming for several days.

I am sure she and Michael then crossed the road and passed on to the building of the Tir National; entered it and stood for a moment in the verandah from which Vivie had seen Bertie Adams executed; and passed on over the tussocky grass to the graves of Bertie Adams and Edith Cavell, where they did silent homage to the dead. I believe a few days afterwards they visited the Senate where the victims of von Bissing's "Terror" had been tried, browbeaten, insulted, mocked. And the functionary who showed them over this superb national palace is certain to have included in his exposition the once splendid carpets which the German officers prior to their evacuation of the Senate--all but the legislative chamber of which was used as a barracks for rough soldiery--had sprayed and barred, streaked and splodged with printing ink. He would also have pointed out the three-hundred-year-old tapestries they had ripped from the walls and the historical portraits they had slashed, and would again have emphasized the fact that in all these senseless devastations the officers were far worse than the men.

Also I am certain that Michael and Vivie made a pilgrimage to the prison of Saint-Gilles, and stood silently in the cell where Bertie Adams and Vivie had spent those terrible days of suspense and despair between April 6 and April 8, 1917; and that when they entered that other compartment of the prison where Edith Cavell had passed her last days before her execution, they listened with sympathetic reverence to the recital by the Directeur of verses from "l'Hymne d'Édith Cavell"--as it is now called--no other than the sad old poem of human sorrow, _Abide with me_; and that they appreciated to the full the warmth of Belgian feeling which has turned the cell of Edith Cavell into a Chapelle Ardente in perpetuity.

I think they returned to England in January, 1919, so that Michael might get back quickly to his work of mending the maimed, now transferred to English hospitals; and so that Vivie--always a practical woman--should prove her mother's will, secure her heritage and have it in hand as a fund from which to promote all the happiness she could. I doubt whether she will give much of it to "causes" rather than cases and to politics in preference to persons. I think she was awfully disgusted when she was back in the England of to-day not to find Mrs. Fawcett Prime Ministress and First Lady of the Treasury, Annie Kenney at the Board of Trade and Christabel Pankhurst running the Ministry of Health. It was disheartening after the long struggle for the Woman's Vote and the equality of the sexes in opportunity to find the same old men-muddlers in charge of all public affairs and departments of state, and the only woman on the benches of the House of Commons a millionaire peeress never before identified with the struggle for the Woman's Cause.

However I think her disenchantment did not diminish the rapture at finding herself once more in the intimacy of Honoria Armstrong. Sir Petworth, when he ran over on leave from the Army of Occupation, thought her enormously improved, though he had the tact not to say so. He frankly made the _amende honorable_ for his suspicions and churlishness of the past, and himself--I think--insisted on his frank and friendly children calling her "Aunt Vivie." I am equally sure that Vivie was not long in London before she appeared at dear old Praddy's studio, beautifully gowned and looking years younger than forty-three; and I shouldn't wonder but that her presence once more in his circle will give his frame a fillip so that he may cheat Death over a few more annual outbreaks of influenza. I am convinced that he has left all his money, after providing a handsome annuity for the parlour-maid, to Vivie, knowing that in her hands, far more--and far more quickly than in those that direct princely and public charities--will his funds reach the students and the poverty-stricken artists whom he wants to benefit.

I think that after spending the first five months of 1919 in London, getting No. 1 Park Crescent tidy again and fully repaired (because Michael wished to pursue more thoroughly than ever his biological researches), Vivie and Michael went off to spend their real honeymoon in the Occupied Territory of the Rhineland, in that never-to-be forgotten June, memorable for its splendid sunshine and the beauty of its flowers and foliage. I think they did this expressly (under the guise of a visit to General Armstrong), so that Vivie and Minna von Stachelberg--now Minna Schultz--might foregather at Bonn. Minna had married again, an officer of no family but of means and of fine physique whom she had nursed in Brussels. His left arm had been shattered, but the skill of the Belgian surgeons and her devoted nursing had saved it from being amputated. She had wished however to have him examined by some great exponent of curative surgery at Bonn University, and the conjunction of the celebrated Sir Michael Rossiter--who in his discussions of anatomy with the Bonn professors forgot there had ever been a war between Britain and Germany--was most opportune.

I think however that Sir Michael said this was all humbug on Minna's part, and that all she wanted--her husband, Major Schultz, looking the picture of health--was to meet once more her well-beloved Vivie. At any rate I am sure they met in the Rhineland in a propitious month when you could be out of doors all day and all night; and that Minna said some time or other how happy she was in her second marriage, and that however heartily she disliked militarism and condemned War, soldiers made the nicest husbands. I think before she and Vivie parted to go their several ways, they determined to work for the building up of an Anglo-German reconciliation, and for the advocacy in both countries of a Man-and-Woman Government.

I think, nevertheless, that Vivie being a sound business woman and possessing a strong sense of justice on the lines of an eye for an eye, will claim at least Five Thousand pounds from the German Government for the devastations and thefts at the Villa Beau-séjour; and that having got it and having disposed of her mother's jewellery and plate for £3,500, she will present the Villa Beau-séjour property and an endowment of £8,000 to the Town of Brussels, as an educational orphanage for the children of Belgian soldiers who have died in the War, where they may receive a practical education in agriculture and poultry farming.

I fancy she gave a Thousand pounds to Pasteur Walcker's Congo Mission; and transferred to Mme. Trouessart all her shares in and rights over the Hotel Édouard-Sept.

I also picture to myself the Rossiters having a motor tour of pure pleasure and delight of the eyes in South Wales in September, 1919.

I imagine their going to Pontystrad and surprising the Vicar and Vicaress and puzzling them by purposely-diffuse stories of Vivie's cousin the late David Vavasour Williams, intended to convey the idea, without telling unnecessary fibs, that David died abroad during the War, but that Vivie in his memory and that of his dear old father intends to continue a strong personal interest in the Village Hall and its educational aims. I also picture Vivie going alone to Mrs. Evanwy's rose-entwined cottage. The old lady is now rather shaky and does not walk far from her little garden with its box bower and garden seat. I can foreshadow Vivie dispelling some of the mystery about David Williams and being embraced by the old Nannie with warm affection and the hearty assurances that she had guessed the secret from the very first but had been so drawn to the false David Williams and so sure of his honest purposes that nothing would have induced her to undeceive the old Vicar. I can even imagine the old lady ere--years hence--paralysis strikes her down--telling Vivie so much gossip about the Welsh Vavasours that Vivie becomes positively certain her mother came from that stock and that she really was first cousin to the boy she personated for the laudable purpose of showing how well a woman could practise at the Bar.

I like to think also that by the present year of grace--1920--the Rossiters will have become convinced that No. 1 Park Crescent, even with the Zoo and the Royal Botanic Gardens close by and the ornamental garden of Regent's Park in between, does not satisfy all their needs and ambitions: that they will have resolved even before this year began--to supplement it by a home in the country for week-ends, for summer visits, and finally for rest in their old age. That for this purpose they will acquire some ideal Grange or Priory, or ample farmstead near Petworth and the Armstrongs' home, over against the South Downs, and near the river Rother; that it shall be in no mere suburb of Petworth but in a stately little village with its own character and history going back to Roman times and a church with a Saxon body and a Norman chancel. And that in the ideal churchyard of this enviable church with ancient yews and 18th century tomb-stones, and old, old benches in the sunshine for the grandfathers and loafers of the village to sit on and smoke of a Sabbath morning, a place shall be found for the bones of Bertie Adams; reverently brought over from the grassy amphitheatre of the Tir National to repose in this churchyard of West Sussex which looks out over one of the finest cricket pitches in the county. If, then, there is any lien between the mouldering fragments of our bodies and the inexplicable personality which has been generated in the living brain, the former office boy of _Fraser and Warren_ will know that he is always present in the memory of Vivien Rossiter, that she has placed the few physical fragments still representing him in such a setting as would have delighted his honest, simple nature in his lifetime. He would also know that his children are now hers and her husband's; that his Nance very rightly married the excellent butler, Jenkins, with whom he had discussed many a cricket score; and that Love, after all, is stronger than Death.

THE END

End of Project Gutenberg's Mrs. Warren's Daughter, by Sir Harry Johnston