Part 45

"It might serve as a reliquary--at need, my child," said Monseigneur, examining the platinum setting. He gave one swift glance at the unsuspicious Aumonier and another at the innocent nun. He peered again narrowly at the empty hiding-place, to the shallow sides of which a few atoms of glittering grey dust were adhering. He lifted the ring to his nose and sniffed, tapped the little box on his thumb-nail, and touched his tongue to one of the glittering grey specks. Then he hastily spat in his handkerchief, and thunder-clouds sat on the furrowed forehead over the great hooked beak.

"Listen!"

The nun started and grew paler still. She hurried to the glazed doors opening on the garden and threw them wide apart. As the chill outer air rushed in, sporting with the scant white locks of M. l'Aumonier, fluttering the purple lappets at the throat of Monseigneur, and tugging as with invisible hands at the Sister's thin black veil, approaching footsteps crunched over the sloppy gravel of the cloister walk.

The small stout figure of the Sister-Keeper of the mortuary headed the small, solemn procession. She held up her habit out of the slush, and carried as well as a mammoth iron doorkey, a small bunch of spring flowers.

A stretcher-squad of the French Red Cross followed the Sister of the mortuary. In life the man they bore must have been a magnificent specimen of humanity. In death the length of his rigid form appeared phenomenal. The black velvet pall, over which had been draped the black-red-white German War Ensign, was far too short to cover the stiff blanket-swathed feet. That they projected beyond the stretcher-end with an effect of arrogance and obstinacy, was the thought that occurred to one of the three people gathered in a little group upon the threshold of the cloister-doors.

"Monseigneur.... My Father! ..." Sister Catherine was speaking in suppressed but eager accents. "It is Number Twenty. They are taking him to the mortuary. The Sister-Keeper promised to carry flowers as a sign that all was well. You understand, do you not? The surgeons have decided--thanks be to God!--that the poor man did not poison himself!"

She dropped to her knees and began to say a decade of her Rosary, the wooden beads running between her fingers like brown water as she prayed. The priests made the Sign of the Cross silently as the body was borne past. When the last feather of the Black Eagle had vanished, and the crunching of footsteps on sloppy gravel had thinned away in distance, the nun rose.

"You feel happier now, my sister, do you not?" Monseigneur asked kindly.

"Much happier, Monseigneur," she said, "for now I may pray for him!"

Monseigneur, who had retained the ring, shut the hiding-place with a decided click, snapped into its slot the end of the bar that held the magpie pearl in place, and said as he restored the bauble to the nun:

"Who knows but that some ray of Divine Grace may yet shine upon that darkened soul! Do as the owner begged of you, and pray for him by all means!"

"That I will!" she said fervently. "And you also, will you not pray for him? the poor, proud Pagan who believed no resurrection possible--unless one were to exist again as a vapour or a tree. Alas! I fear I have sinned much in yielding to the feeling he inspired in me!"

She added, meeting the keen glance of Monseigneur's vivid eyes:

"The feeling of repugnance. Of horror, Monseigneur! Here comes the Bavarian to finish the inscription. Well, my good Kuehler, you have got some more ceruse?"

The glass-doors had been darkened by the shape of a one-legged man on crutches, a black-haired, swarthy fellow dressed in the maroon flannel uniform distinctive of the Hospital. A little pot with a brush in it dangled from one of his big fingers. He glanced up under his heavy brows, with a muttered word as he passed the Sister, and returned the greeting of Monseigneur with a clumsy attempt at a salute.

"You are better? You are getting on?" said Monseigneur to him in German.

"Better, _mein Vater_, and getting on."

"That is well! And you have only a little bit to do, and then your work is done?"

"Done, _mein Vater!_" echoed the one-legged man.

He went to the head-board where it was near the door leading to the chapel, leaned his crutches against the wall, and began cautiously and painfully to let himself down. Monseigneur and the Aumonier hurried to his assistance, saw him safely squatted upon his folded sack, took leave of the Sister, who knelt to receive the blessing of the hand that wore the amethyst ring,--and vanished through the farther door at the urgent summons of a bell.

The Sister turned again to her big ledger. A list of articles appertaining to the deceased would have to be checked and verified. Two pairs of binoculars--surely the one bearing the name and address of an officer in a British Guards regiment ought to be sent to the Allies' Headquarters at St. O--. Two purses, one full of English sovereigns, a stout roll of French bank-notes in a pigskin case, and so forth. When next she looked round, the Bavarian was wiping his brushes. The finished inscription now stood:

"HIER RUHT IM GOTT EIN DEUTSCHER FLIEGENDE OFFIZIER _T. v. H._ 30 YAHRE ALT."

"You are sorry for him, are you not, my good Kuehler?" the nun asked mildly as the Bavarian scrambled to his solitary foot, and stood supporting himself against the wall.

"Sorry, my Sister?" He spoke in thick Teutonic French, and looked at her under his lowering black brows as he reached his crutches out of the corner and tucked them under his arms. "Why should I be sorry? He's dead--and so an end of him. _Total kaput_ for another officer!" He saluted the Sister and stumped out.

*CHAPTER LXXII*

*LOVE THAT HAS WINGS*

Under a blue sky--the forget-me-not blue of April--tiny blizzards--mere dust of snow--alternated with slashes of sleet. The road running east from Pophereele was villainous; bad _pave_ in the centre, and on either side morasses of mud from which rose at irregular intervals, scraggy poplars hacked by shell-fire and barked by the impact of innumerable iron-shod wheels.

An almost continuous line of transports bumped over the abominable _pave_. Staff cars with British Brass Hats and red French _kepis_ gold-braided, motor-guns and caissons, motor-lorries, motor-ambulances, motor-cyclists, pedestrians--chiefly Belgian peasants in tall peaked caps and long blue blouses, caked to the knees in sticky mire. Odd detachments of French Artillery, a squadron of Chasseurs in the new uniform of sallow blue--a half-battalion of magnificent, singing Canadians, loaded on the dark green motor-buses that used to run from Holloway to Westminster Bridge.

Where French police were posted at cross-roads and a working-party of British Engineers were mending the highway--filling up shell-pits, and the cunningly-concealed emplacements where a battery of French 75's had been in action a few months before, and the shrapnel-riddled houses of a small village yet harboured a few wizened Flemish peasants, was the point whence you first caught sight of the towers of the ancient capital of Western Flanders, rising above a bank of grey mist, sucked from the thawing earth by the warmth of the April sun.

An historic city of gabled houses, a city on a river long lost and vaulted over--a city as famous through its industries of cloth-weaving, and the exquisite manufacture of cob-webby lace of Valenciennes, as precious to students of Art and Literature by reason of its stirring history, and the wonders it enshrined. A matchless city, the glory of Flandre Occident, with its Cloth Hall of the marvellous Early Gothic facades, its Renaissance _Nieuwerk_ and ancient _Stedehuus_, its glorious cathedral on the north opposite the Halles, with the unfinished tower by Marten Untenhove, and the triumphal arch in the West porch by Urban Taillebert.

Since October, 1914, when a British Brigade with two battalions of another B.B., had successfully withstood the desperate attacks of the flower of the Prussian Imperial Guard, the beautiful old city had suffered bombardment, furious, purposeful, desultory, or intermittent, from the enemy's 11.2-in. long range Krupps. That First Battle--fought upon a line extending from a few miles north-east of the city--had been succeeded after the partial lull of winter, by a second, a stubborn and sanguinary renewal of the struggle, rendered hideous by the use of the Boche's trump-card, flaming oil-jets and asphyxiating gas.

Now the pride of Flandre Occident stood as it stands to-day, like the heart of a martyr calcined but unconsumed in the cold ashes of the pyre. Its sad and stately dignity was marvellously beautiful, under the blue April sky, with its lashes of wintry sleet. Its gardens were dressed in green spring livery, the grass was peeping between the cobble-stones, the scorched and broken chestnut-trees that had shaded the promenades on the site of its ancient ramparts were thrusting out their pinky-brown finger-like buds. And above the shell-pitted waste of uncut brass now representing the Plaine d'Amour,--where the reviews used to take place and the Kermesses, and athletic Club competitions--where the aerodrome is cut by the line of the canal that receives the waters of the subterranean river--a lark was singing joyfully as it climbed its airy spiral, and a blind man was standing by the twisted ruins of a British aeroplane drinking in the music that rained from the sky.

In the battered Rue d'Elverdinghe, behind a block of the ruined prison, the car that had brought Sherbrand waited. A grey car with the Red Cross and a miniature replica of Old Glory on the bonnet. The Belgian chauffeur smoked cigarettes and read the _Independence Belge_ industriously; the American V.A.D. orderly smoked also, surveying the wreckage at the end of the wide thoroughfare, between whose gaunt and roofless walls was revealed a vista of the Grand Place,--where the west facade of the Cathedral reared, a calcined skeleton above the ruined Halles,--and the Belfry whose massiveness defied the genii of destruction for a few weeks to come. Yet he kept his eye on his charge, solicitously. No creature is so utterly unaided by the senses, so pathetically defenceless as a recently blind man.

Drives were part of the treatment prescribed for Sherbrand by the American surgeon of the Hospital at Pophereele. The chauffeur and the attendant were instructed to humour him, and his humour craved solitude and the sense of space. This excursion to the plain lying north-west of the stricken city where Death and Ruin were Burgomaster and Bishop was not the first by several. The few remaining inhabitants--the pale women who made lace in the shelter of broken doorways, the feeble old folks from the almshouses, who peered from their cellar-refuges at the crunch and grind of armoured wheels upon the bricks and timbers heaped upon the littered thoroughfares--dully wondered at these visits of the blind Englishman.

They had seen many strange things of late, the red-eyed, meagre, ague-bitten old people, since that day in early October when fifteen thousand Kaisermen, chanting the German War Song, had defiled for six mortal hours through the streets of their ancient town.

"There are a great many of you gentlemen," some of the old folks had ventured to say.

"That may be so," they had been told, "but we have millions waiting to follow. We are sure to win; the French are cowards, and the English stupid fools. As for you--you are now all Belgo-Germans, our Kaiser has said so! When we leave here we are going to Calais, Paris next, and then London--it's nothing at all to get to London in our magnificent Zeppelins!"

Then suddenly the Germans had gone away--and with them trains of waggons crammed with booty. A week later, amidst the vivas of the people, twenty-one thousand British had poured into the town. They had rolled down the streets like a tawny river singing lustily:

"Here we are--here we are--here we are again! Hallo! Hallo! Hallo! HALLO!"

And the crowd had been quick to catch up the chorus, responding:

"Eeeweea--eeweea--eeweea--eggain! Allo! Allo! Allo! ALLO!"

And the British Headquarters had established itself in its spider-web of Intelligence at the house of the Burgomaster, and the very next day a Boche aviator had tried to drop a bomb on it, and had been winged by a clever shot from an anti-aircraft gun, and brought crashing down on the Plaine d'Amour. And there had been rejoicings on the part of the young people who were thoughtless. But the wise old folks had known quite well that many more Taubes would come.

What an autumn it had been, dear Lord! thought the trembling old people. The first Sunday in August, with its decorations, processions, hymns, and litanies, all in honour of Our Lady of Thuyn, had been turned into a demonstration of penitents. The Kermesse had been prohibited with the other festivities. No use baking honey-cakes and marzipan. Nobody would have bought them. The Yprais were too busy listening to the distant firing of terribly great guns. All the window-panes rattled and shivered, and the earth vibrated without ceasing. Each morning brought dreadful news, contradicted every afternoon, and confirmed at night. Towns bombarded, townsmen shot, hung, or burned, children and women--even nuns--violated and murdered. Villages wiped out--these were the stories that found their way into the deafest ears. Crowds of refugees evacuated from these towns and villages presently began to throng in. Soon the streets were full from wall to wall. Spies moved everywhere, and no lights dared be shown at night-time. Bread grew scarce, the dreadful sound of the guns drew nearer. Wounded, Allies and Germans also, were brought in, in thousands, by the ambulance-cars. The hospitals and hotels and convents were full--all the schools--and many of the private houses. Terrible rumours gained ground of a great battle about to be fought in the neighbourhood of the town.

Peering from garret-windows by day or night, one could see great banks of black smoke towering on the north, east, and west horizons, pierced by broad licking tongues of cherry-coloured flame. Taubes and Allied aircraft fought battles in the heavens. Bombs were dropped upon public buildings. Death had begun to be common in the streets when the first Krupp shells fell and exploded in the moat behind the Abbey Church of St. Jacques. Ten minutes later--upon the doomed city fell the direst fury of the German hate.

It had been as though hell had opened, as under that hail of iron and fire the troops and transports of the Allies, and the long processions of townspeople afoot and in carts and carriages had rolled out of the town. Even the dogs had left, following their owners. Like the cats--who clung to their familiar surroundings, and had to be removed by force, if they were to be taken--the old folks resisted the sturdy hands that tugged at them. "Leave us! ..." they quavered. "We are so old! ... We can never bear the journey! ... We should only die upon the roads if we were to go!"

Many did go, and many died, and of those who stayed behind them, Steel, Iron, and Fire claimed a heavy toll. But in the Northern quarter, some yet dwelt in cellar-basements, feeding on mouldy flour, and frozen potatoes. Sleeping on sacks of straw, covered with rugs or blankets, warming their lean, shivery bodies at braziers, choking behind masks taken from slain men through deadly gas-attacks,--creeping up between bombardments for a breath of purer air. Venturing forth to kneel upon the littered pavements of roofless churches, and pray to Our Lord before His vacant tabernacles and shattered Crucifixes--for an end to the dreadful War.

And no answer came, it seemed, for all their praying. They had grown used to the dampness underground. Their eyes were now accustomed to the gloom, as their ears to the stunning crashes of the bombardments--and the perpetual whirr and buzz and whine of the aircraft in the sky. So natural had become to them the abomination of desolation that they actually resented the occasional visits of the Red Cross car from Pophereele.

"Behold him again," they grumbled, "the tall, blind Englishman. What does he seek here? Hardly to view our ruins that he has no eyes to see! And now in another big grey car arrive a French priest and a woman, asking, wherever they meet a soul to ask, if the blind Englishman is here? The priest is a Monseigneur--Old Ottilie swears to the ring and the purple collar. The woman is English, it appears. Perhaps she is the blind man's wife?"

The car moved on where the roadway was not broken by trenches, crawling painfully over litter and wreck. In the shadow of the ruined prison, while yet the sun was high, they halted. Their chauffeur nodded to his Belgian compatriot, the Red Cross orderly, interrogated by Monseigneur, pointed to the tall brown figure standing on the grass beside the twisted wreckage of a British aeroplane.

"I will wait here for you, Mademoiselle," said Monseigneur, getting out and assisting his fellow-traveller. She was very tall and of supple figure, and wore a long blue coat with the Red Cross shield-badge, and a felt hat banded with the V.A.D. ribbon, pulled down over luxuriant masses of hair--hair that had been cloudy-black as storm-wrack and had been bleached to the hue of wintry beech-leaves, and now had darkened to the brown of peat-earth, deepening in colour every day.

She gave Monseigneur her hand, thanking him, and suddenly he thought her beautiful, although the tall young woman had not previously appealed to the sense of beauty in Monseigneur. Her long eyes under their widely arching brows were stars, her mouth was smiling. When she moved away over the snow-patched grass, she seemed to tread on air....

Throughout the drive Patrine had been torn with horrible misgivings. "What shall I say or do," she had wondered. "How shall I bear it if the look upon his face should tell me, when Alan first hears my voice--that I was wrong to come?" But the chilly fit had passed with the first glimpse of Sherbrand. The rich, warm flood rising in her veins had swept her doubts away.

Here on this shell-pitted expanse of turf you felt the War-pulse beating. French 75's were putting over a furious barrage from the south. North of the City of the Salient the British guns were slogging, and through the chain-fire of the enemy's 77 mm.'s, his 11.2-in. howitzers bellowed at short intervals, and sent in 600-pound shells.

The smoke of a train rose north-west in the direction of Thourout Junction. That the train was a German train, carrying troops and guns and munitions for War purposes, did not at once occur to Patrine. All was well. Not a doubt remained. She was near her Flying Man again after months of separation. Here at last was food for her hungry eyes and drink for her thirsting soul.

"He has grown thin, poor dear!" she thought, seeing how the war-stained khaki hung in folds on his tall figure. The broad shoulders stooped. The chest had sunken, and he leaned upon a heavy walking-stick. The beloved face was turned away, the line of the cheek was careworn. She choked upon a sob and stopped short, fighting her emotion down.

The song of the soaring lark broke off. The bird dived to earth and hid itself amongst the frosty grasses as the snoring whirr of aircraft came out of the distance high in the sky to the west. Now the shape of a big biplane gleamed pinky-white as a seagull, beating up against the thrust of the snow-tanged easterly breeze.

Nearer and nearer flew the 'plane. Now one could see it distinctly. A French machine by its blue-white-red rings, and a Caudron by its great square tail. A silver-grey monoplane scurried in its wake, a Weiss by the backward curve of its wing-tips. The whirr of its tractor and the blatter of its machine-gun wakened the echoes sleeping among the leprous white ruins of the city. The Caudron wheeled and circled beautifully, and the trac-trac of its mitraille answered the machine-gun, and spent bullets began to patter on the Plaine far below.

Suddenly the Frenchman banked and began to climb. The Weiss, its aluminium sheathing glittering in the sunshine, climbed too, so rapidly that the enemy's purpose was foiled. Then, at a great height they circled round each other, and the crack and flare of explosive revolver-bullets began to mingle with the blatter and trac-trac, and little blobs of something that blazed and sputtered wickedly began to drop with the bullets that tumbled out of the skies. It was the prettiest sight. It suggested the amorous dallying of two big butterflies, the squabble of a pair of hawking swallows, and yet the issues were Life and Death. Suddenly the Weiss took to flight. A second Caudron had showed upon the distance and the Kaiser's flier was not taking any more on. Waiting for his countryman to come abreast, the Frenchman hovered like a kite-hawk. And at the familiar buzz of the horizontal screws a visible thrill went through Sherbrand. He took off the smoked glasses that he wore, and turned his blind eyes upwards towards the sound, and on his haggard face was stamped the anguish of his despair.

"My poor boy!" nearly broke from Patrine, and hot tears scalded her eyelids. He started, though she had uttered no word, and brought down those unseeing eyes. His nostrils expanded as he inhaled the air. His thick fair brows contracted. The first Caudron, exchanging signals with the second, had ceased hovering and floated onwards, but Sherbrand's thoughts had been brought down out of his sky.

"What is it? ... Why?" said the intent and frowning look. He snuffed the air again and pondered still, and suddenly Patrine comprehended. Some waft of perfume from her hair or clothes had reached the sense made keener by his blindness, evoked some once-loved image, roused some memory of her.

She crouched low, and looked up at the lean, lined visage yearningly. Dear heart! how changed he was to-day from her young Mercury of the Milles Plaisirs. And yet this altered face of his, marred by the broad, new-healed scar that traversed the left cheek and temple, and the cloudy look of suffering in the prominent grey-blue eyes, was dearer than ever to Patrine.

How bravely the ribbon of the Croix de Guerre and the purple, green, and silver of the Belgian Order showed against the war-stained khaki. What woman living would not glory in such a lover, welcome the sacred charge, rejoice to be his guide and minister! ... "Oh, my blind eagle, to sit mateless in the darkness shall not be your fate, God being good to me!" Some words like these were on the lips of Patrine.

But the words were unspoken. He was turning those cloudy, troubled eyes towards his unseen sky again as though trying to project the vision of his soul through the depths of aerial distance. Then he desisted as though wearied by the effort. His stern face softened to dreamy tenderness. His lips moved. Very quietly, but with infinite wistfulness, he uttered her own name:

"Patrine! Patrine!"

He was thinking of her--he was dreaming of her--he was still her lover. She knew a joyful shock, a checking of the pulses.... Then her blood whirled on its crimson circle as though arteries and veins were brimmed with wine. Her bosom heaved, her eyes were misty jewels, and out of the wonderful silence about them came to her the low, sweet soughing of her long-lost Wind of Joy.

She moved to Sherbrand, kissed him full upon the mouth, and called him: "Alan!" And a great cry broke from him--a cry of wonder, triumph, and joy. As his arms swept out to enfold her she knew that she had conquered. She had not been deceived in reading love between the formal lines.