Part 16

"My dear," she said, knowing that his own case rose in mind, "my poor, poor dear!" And the wretched man grew sick at heart and shuddered. The mothering note in her voice called to him across the years of an engagement senselessly prolonged, that he might have heard it cooing to their children, or whispering love-words through many, many wasted nights. And the more hopelessly he yearned to her, the more he shrank from the solicitude in her sweet eyes. He had seen those eyes flame with generous anger, and sparkling with mirth, and dewy with tenderness. Now they were full of sorrow mingled with love for him. He tried to imagine how they would look her scorn....

For when she knew all the truth, she must despise him. That was the thing that made his heart a hell. The knowledge that no one could possibly believe in the innocence of the fellow who had done this hideous, brutal, beastly thing.

"Shell-shock, no doubt!" He heard the voices saying it, and saw the shake of sympathetic heads. "Shell-shock! ... How quite frightfully sad!" And through the eyeholes of the masks of sympathy, pity, commiseration--he saw the wriggle of the little snake of Doubt.

Were the truth known to the world, no one could ever believe it. He would lie, therefore, until it came to light. He would have the joy of these last hours spent beside Katharine, to remember when she banished him for ever from her side.

To Katharine, whose sore heart was eased by that burst of weeping, the joy of Edward restored shone through her sorrow as the sun through a snow-fog or a mountain mist. By and by, when Yaill settled into a well-known arm-chair, she hesitated but another instant before sinking with one swift, supple movement, down upon the hearthrug at her lover's side. He refused to smoke; she knew out of respect for the presence of Death in that bereaved, masterless house. She whispered, leaning her forehead against his shoulder, surrendering her hand to the warm, strong, masculine clasp:

"By and by we will go in together and see him. Shall we not, dearest? He would wish it!"

Yaill muttered, looking at the engagement-ring of Indian turquoises that he had placed years back on the fair womanly hand within his own:

"Certainly. If it will not be--too hard for you!"

"Too hard! O no, dear Edward!" The hearth-blaze lightened on her broad forehead as she raised it. "The hardness will be when he is there no longer, to talk to and to look at and to pray for.... To pray to, as well, being with the Holy Souls. It is wonderful to think now; '_He is with my mother!_'"

"And Mark, and your little sister Rosamond."

"And Julian, perhaps. He knows now, whether Julian was killed or taken prisoner.... Turks are cruel to their captives, are they not?"

"Sometimes...."

The muscle in Yaill's thin cheek twitched. He moved restlessly:

"Sometimes.... But do not dwell on these possibilities, or torture yourself with useless conjectures. Even in the shadow of the bereavement that has fallen upon this dear home, we are together.... Together, Katharine!"

She turned and kissed the fine dark khaki cloth of his sleeve, lingeringly echoing:

"'Together.' Doesn't it seem--rather too good to be real? After all that has been--the cruel years of parting, the shock of calamity; the rush and roar of events, the ugly things of War, the horror of dreadful news--the suspense of waiting--for letters from you--letters that never came--"

"I could not--did not--" he stammered miserably and broke off.

Her strong, fine hand closed upon his reassuringly.

"My own love, did I ever for a moment, lose faith in you? Did I ever cease to write, though I never heard? ..."

He groaned in spirit, remembering his discovery of those letters.... Square envelopes containing two or three sheets of ribbed linen note-paper, covered with Katharine's clear free script.... The pocket of an old writing-case of his was stuffed with them--they had crammed that damned Japanese workbox to the lid!

Again she breathed:

"Though I never heard from you I kept on writing. Each letter like a cry from my heart to yours."

Words burst from him:

"As God hears me, I never got one of those letters!"

She drew a troubled breath and said wonderingly, with sweet, perplexed eyes seeking light from his:

"Not at the time they were written, dear, possibly. But your nurse did read them to you, Edward?--as soon as you could bear it, that is."

"Did she?"

"She was very kind. I was very grateful to her."

"Was she? ... Were you? ..."

The sweat stood in beads upon his brow and temples, and his strained knuckles showed white through the sunburnt skin.

"Kind, I mean, in writing to break the cruel truth to me, that you--Edward!--let us forget about this!"

"It will be best," he said in a low constrained tone, not looking at her. "But tell me first what truth she broke to you?"

"The truth--" He felt her warm mouth upon his hand, "that your mind was quite a blank with regard to me. That was the news that came in her first letter from the Convalescent Camp at B---- Base. I have not kept the letter--I could not!--but the date I shall remember always. October 28th, 1915."

It had been true then. The effort to remember; to conjure up figures, faces, associations, places, out of the Great Blank that had followed the shell-burst--had been attended by blinding headache, spasms of sickness and nights of insomnia. Katharine went on:

"I wrote to her--Nurse Burtonshaw--at the Camp,--and thanked her, and said that I would go on writing to you exactly the same. My work involved some risk. If I had been killed, you would have learned from those letters that I never once forgot you, Edward, dear! So I asked your nurse to put them by in some safe keeping-place, and when God in His Mercy should restore my darling's memory, to give them to him, with his Katharine's love. For I never doubted that you would recover, Edward. If I had, for one moment--how could I have gone on working? I must have given up hope! I must--"

The break in her dear voice supplied the missing end to the sentence:

"I must have broken down and died!"

XIII

When a man's own organs, senses, wits conspire against him, in league with an enamoured woman who plays traitress, what earthly chance has the man?

Yaill stared into the glowing rose-red heart of the fire, conjuring up for the thousandth time that part played by one brown puppet of a myriad of puppets similarly attired, in War's dread drama; cheek by jowl, night in and day out--with the grim tragi-comedian Death; whose paces, poses and antics, grown commonplace by dint of familiarity--at length ceased to cause a shudder, or provoke a passing jest....

The War.... A waking nightmare of cold, heat, thirst and hunger; exertion, anxiety, responsibility, fatigue; sleeplessness and NOISE, NOISE, in a ceaseless, maddening crescendo, until that flaming white-hot moment when the German 5.9 H.E. shell blew in the Advanced Telephone Communication dug-out. When consciousness of these things abruptly ceased for Yaill.

So it came to pass that stark-naked as when he was born into this world, save for a platinum disc-chain on his wrist, bearing his name, religion, rank and regiment, and a small gold Crucifix slung by a blackened cord about his neck, Number 40, Shell Shock Ward 8, General Casualty Hospital 70, on the Lines of Communication, came into being. Later on, when the Great Blank had given place to a drab-hued mental twilight, wherein men, women and children; animals, trees and houses could dimly be conjectured or unemotionally discerned; and a little later yet, when one began again to realise oneself a living puppet, playing a dull, dull part in a dreary production called Life,--with some character dimly sensed as missing from the cast, whose presence would have made a world of difference!--Number 80, Convalescent Officers' Camp, B---- Base, began to take what other nurses called a "good deal of notice" of Nurse Lucy Burtonshaw.

You are to conceive of Nurse Burtonshaw as anything but a purposeful Delilah. The piously-reared daughter of one Burton, a respectable West of England dairy-farmer,--calling herself "Burtonshaw" for reasons of her own, while serving in concert with thousands of other admirable young British women, enrolled for Service at Home and Overseas under the auspices of the Red Cross,--how shall she be held blameworthy because there beat under her Navy blue lustre overall, and white bibbed apron with its badge of red twill Turkey, a woman's heart, susceptible to Love....

Does any woman wonder? Does any man ask Why? Nurse Lucy Burtonshaw had washed Number 80; combed him, fed him, dressed him,--and put him to bed again. Administered general massage and tonics, and superintended the ministrations of the orderly-barber, unwearying, for months on end. She had soothed him,--waking from brief daylight sleeps in panics bred of hideous, nerve-shattering visions,--reproductions of such sights,--burned in upon the brain and reproduced by the subconscious memory, as made the nights grim ordeals of dread. She had alternately scolded and encouraged her patient, gaining strength mentally and physically under her unselfish, able care, until she had established herself as the hub of his universe. The sky and sea, the flowers and trees, and that fresh West Country face with its blunt features and well-opened grey-blue eyes, were the only books the patient ever cared to read in. The printed lines, the written sheets, were torture to Yaill's dazed brain and astigmatic vision. So the Commandant's private secretary attended to his business letters, and the correspondence of his friends was dealt with by Nurse....

Upon her arm at first, by her side later, he took his first walks in the Convalescent Camp grounds. When later still, he was taken for drives in the company of other shell-shocked officers, it was Nurse Burtonshaw who persuaded him not to rebel against this order of the C.M.O.... Nurse, who waited for the return of the big, crowded car and unpacked him, smiling, at the gates of Canvas Park Row, the double avenue of roomy tents pitched on the green, tree-clumped slopes rising North of the Base Port, behind the big square stone house where the Staff officers and quarters were,--and the huge, shapeless, plank-built zinc-roofed bulk of the Hospital.

"There now, you're back again and no bones broken. And whether you liked it or not, the air has done you good," she would say cheerfully, unwinding his muffler, knitted by herself in her scant spare time. For all Yaill's personal, immediate baggage had been destroyed by a Boche bomb-raid upon Battalion Staff Headquarters, and as Number 80 never wrote letters, such lacking necessaries had been replaced by Red Cross gifts.

Subsequently, when some battered portmanteaux were received from Regimental H.Q. in France,--but of that later in the chapter.... You are to see Nurse taking off the muffler, over which her patient stared down at her with grey, brooding, mournful eyes. Those eyes followed her about, burning holes in her grey print. If she had established herself as the hub of Number 80's universe, she was none the less the adoring slave of him whom--in private and at his entreaty she called "Teddy."

For Lord help this bedevilled man! he who in all his thirty-five years of life had been "Edward" to all who loved him, holding pet names in abhorrence,--had invited Nurse Burtonshaw to address him by this fond diminutive. "My mother used to call me 'Teddy,'" he would say, with his sad eyes brimming: "and though she has married again--" the poor widowed lady being dead and buried years previously--"and I am nothing to her now, I somehow like to hear it."

So Nurse called him "Teddy," scrupulously selecting moments when they were quite alone and out of earshot. Then Teddy, who was a Border laird of ancient lineage, as well as a Squire in Cumberland, with a solid rent-roll of four thousand a year, some thriving home-farms and a park of many acres, confided to Nurse that he was a poor man--without a rap beyond his pay. But if Lucy had no fear of poverty, shared with a poor broken wretch who loved her--one to whom the love of woman had been a sealed book until he saw her face....

"You're getting too stuck on that Colonel man of yours, Burtonshaw!" expostulated a friend some hours later on, when the day-nurses went off duty. "Because when it comes to kissing Good-night--and I couldn't help but hear!--the partition between the O.C. wards being merely canvas! Of course you can trust me not to talk, though I hope you won't again!--a warm handshake as between friends being properer, and not against the Regulations--which I will say I never knew you go against before. Now own up. Am I right, or wrong?"

"I did, I'll own it.... I do truly feel for Number 80," admitted Nurse Burtonshaw. "He's alone in the world and quite poor, though three hundred and seventy pounds a year, which is his pay--not counting War allowances,--seems like riches to little me."

"Bless me!" cried the friend, "then you've actually clicked! ... He's asked you to marry him? ..."

Nurse Burtonshaw demanded, with rather a defiant flare lighting up her well-opened grey-blue eyes, and with a decided deepening of the steady bloom on her broad, blunt-featured West of England face, nunlike in the setting of flowing white linen hiding the rich red-gold hair that was her one undeniable beauty:

"Do you think I'd let him kiss me--a girl brought up like I've been--unless he'd behaved himself honourable? Not one of my friends can say a word--"

"But what will _his_ friends say about you?" asked the other nurse acutely, "when they hear how you've fixed things? To marry a Regular Army toff, who not so long ago was queer in his head, and had to be mothered and seen to and fed as if he'd been a blinking baby--"

Nurse Burtonshaw asserted:

"He's well, and going to get his discharge next week. They say his cure's my doing. And he's got no friends. He's told me so, over and over again!"

"That makes it better for you. And I'm not saying that you won't turn out a happy pair, not for a minute! Don't lots of patients marry their nurses and live happy ever after? And, whenever I've read your teacup, Fate has seemed to point that way. But as to his having no friends--that won't half wash!"

"And why won't it?"

"Just because your Teddy's a Society Toff, poor or not poor! Belongs to a crack Scotch regiment.... Gets lots of letters in lovely envelopes with the names of topping County places on some of 'em--and coronetted crests and monograms...."

"The smart folks who wrote those letters don't count. Hasn't he told me? 'Not one of them,' he says,--'matters to me a straw.'"

"He may have said so, but are you _sure_? I'm asking out of friendship. Wasn't there a woman--isn't there a woman who writes as if he mattered to her more than several stacks of straw? Oh, Luce! ..."

Nurse Burtonshaw stood her ground obstinately:

"I've questioned him over and over.... 'I may have liked her, since she says I did,' he says.... 'But all the same, she's less than nought to me.... What did you say her name was?' he asks in that simple way of his." ...

"And did you tell him?"

"What does that matter to you?"

"It'll matter to you one of these days, as sure as I'm certificated! And you told me she'd begged you to keep the letters until he was able to read them without hurting his head. You haven't given them to him! ... Straight--are you going to? Infirmary-trained we both may be, and not Hospital--but I hope we know what's due to the professions to say nothing of the Red Cross! When will you give him those letters?"

Behind Nurse Burtonshaw's blue-grey eyes a red flame kindled. She retorted, confronting her interlocutor:

"When he asks me to! Haven't I told you?"

"Not much, you haven't. And about your first venture--with the Didlick boy--poor thing! Killed at Mons and buried no one knows where--are you going to tell him about that?"

"I--am--NOT! ... Is that plain enough? ... Now let me get to bed!"

When Katharine should learn that those letters, written from her post of service at the Receiving Hospital in France, and later from a London Nursing Home,--and later still from Kerr's Arbour,--had never been delivered to Nurse Burtonshaw's patient, would she believe--Yaill wondered dismally, or doubt like all the rest of the world, the man who had married the nurse?

XIV

He had told the girl, according to her, that though the letters on his disc proclaimed him Catholic, he was just as much a Protestant as anything.... And a Church of England clergyman--not the Chaplain attached to the Convalescent Camp--but the pastor of a Protestant church in the town had been consulted, and under his advice the Special license had been procured:

Yaill had written to his Brigadier and Divisional Commander.... As for Nurse Burtonshaw, she had already applied to the Principal Commandant of the Women's Detachments and the Matron-in-Chief at the Front for her discharge. And obtained it--on account of her health,--she had always been anæmic,--and of late headache and indigestion born of chocolate-creams and cigarettes, of which Nurse consumed quantities when off duty, had troubled her a good deal.

"And besides, duck," she told her pal, "if it comes to choosing between Teddy and my profession, my first duty is to Teddy. I do really think it was Providence prevented me signing on for the Duration of the War!"

And so they had been married only a week ago. O God!--O God!--why had nothing happened to prevent the affair? Why hadn't the officiating Church of England clergyman had a fit or a belated attack of scruples? Why out of all the flotillas of aircraft scouring the charted skies on War's endless business, had not one (preferably a bomb-carrier) crashed on the roof of the church?

They had had breakfast at the Conronne--where Brass Hats and Red Tabs did congregate and foregather. In the private room above the restaurant, looking across the short side of the gardens across the Ouai Clemenceau. The hotel was crowded with British khaki and French grey puppets playing the talky interludes that enliven the grimmest tragedy of War.

Nurse Burtonshaw had looked her best in her off-duty dress of pale blue alpaca, with bishop sleeves, and black Red Cross buttons, a white lawn collar and cuffs to match--a black patent leather belt with a sprig of artificial white heather tucked in it, and a white straw hat with the regulation Service ribbon crowning her wonderful red-gold hair. Her Teddy's engagement-ring, chosen by herself, set with three smallish rubies--did duty as keeper to the plain gold ring he had placed--not quite an hour before--on her large, capable left hand....

The popping of corks, the clinking of glasses, and the polyglot roar of male voices from the restaurant below, discussing the one burning topic of the day in every civilised tongue used on earth saving one, came to them as they ate their omelette and sole _matelotte_ at the round table in the big bay window--looking across the Quai upon the outer Port--crammed to the jaws of the long channel between the light-housed jetties--with Allied steamers of all imaginable grades, types and sizes: from Leviathan troopers, converted Cunarders and P. and O. boats disgorging endless streams of men, horses, lorries, guns and munitions; and Hospital ships ceaselessly swallowing processions of walking wounded and stretcher-cases--poured out from the long khaki-coloured Red Cross trains drawn up at the platforms--to T.B.D.'s, British and French mine-sweepers, submarines, American or Eastern oil-tankers, seaplane-carriers, Wireless Service boats and Canadian or Argentine cattle-ships. With a myriad others brought from the world's airts to serve this single end of War.

Lucy Burtonshaw, now Lucy Yaill,--while eating her _déjeuner_ with an unspoiled appetite, saw with relief her newly wedded husband unmoved by this stirring spectacle; long unfamiliar to one laid-by for months in the placid backwater of the Convalescent Camp. His sad grey eyes swept the wonderful panorama without seeming to take it in. Presently they came back to her; and she smiled into them affectionately, as she laid down her fork, and spared her rather large hand, with its brand new wedding-ring under the ruby keeper, to give his a protecting, reassuring squeeze....

"Ducks!" she cooed. (Lucy could coo.) "Sure all this hasn't given you a cooker of a headache?"

He did not seem to hear. He was looking at the sprig of imitation white heather. She followed the direction of his gaze, and took it from her belt.

"That what you're looking at? ... My bit of white heather! ... Pidge"--Pidge being the Hospital nickname of Nurse Pringle, the pal of some pages back--"Pidge gave it me 'For luck' when we said good-bye to each other this morning. 'Not the real thing, but as near as I could get for two frongs!' she said. Want it, Ducks?"

She put in his hand Pidge's parting gift--a caricature of Nature with its gummed green-and-white paper leaves and bells, and trumpery glass dewdrops--and he stared at it as though it held the secrets of the Past and of the Future both....

Perhaps it did for Ducks. For something wakened in him. Some atrophied nerve vibrated, it may be: some long-numbed brain-cell quickened into life....

Who knows what change took place? ... At any rate, the sight and touch of the little shrub with the white-belled flower that grows amongst the purple ling of Northern moors and mountains, made Teddy's slowly-beating heart perform a curious demivolt. Remembrance began to waken from her hazy trance, or dream, or lethargy.... Somewhere, some time, Some One had given him a bit of white heather.... Some One, some time, somewhere--and the gift had meant the world! The round world floating in her ocean of air, and all the planets swinging in their orbits.... A woman utterly, unspeakably beloved by Nurse Burtonshaw's Teddy ... the woman, whose love had been sweet as the honeycomb of the Singer of the Canticles--fragrant as myrrh and ambergris and frankincense; the utter bliss of the body--the soul's bread and wine....

"_How beautiful are thy steps, O King's daughter! ... How beautiful art Thou, and how comely my dearest, in delights ... Thy stature like unto a palm-tree ... thy throat like the best wine ... Put me as a seal upon thy heart, as a seal upon thy arm: for love is strong as death: ... if a man should give all the substance of his house for love he shall despise it as nothing..._"

"What are you mumbling, Teddy dear? Sounds like a bit out of the Bible."

He lifted his dropped head and said, regarding his wife austerely.

"It is as a matter of fact, something from the Canticle of Canticles. I once got the eight of them by heart, when I was a boy."

"Oh--well! ... Don't mutter, but I thought it came out of the Bible...."

"It does, as I said.... What are you doing?" For Lucy was twisting and tilting her coffee-cup, and peering into it curiously at each new tilt or twist.

"Laying my cup--trying to read my fortune. Though you can't do it with coffee-grounds as well as with tea-leaves, and even with them I'm not a patch on Pidge. Who's Pidge, did you ask? ... Why, Nurse Pidge, my best pal, who gave me the bit o' white heather.... How you do stare--as though you'd never seen me before!"

She trembled with alarm as she reached over to pat her Teddy's cheek. Had not Nurse Pidge, that seeress of things to come _per_ medium of "Best Household Black" or "Liphook's Luscious Tea-Tips" prophesied truly that Nurse Burtonshaw would reap the whirlwind over those letters in the Japanese box....