Part 18
"There isn't so much wrong--and I'm going to drop a postcard to Abrahams in the Support trenches, to tell him so and cheer his heart. The queer thing about it is--that the moment I saw Abrahams--(whose real name is Hazel)--I felt I knew the man! ... Somewhere, his huge hooked beak and great shoulders have risen up before me. Somehow--this can't be love at first sight, Edward!" Ah, wicked Katharine!--"because my heart is so hopelessly lost to you!--somehow his very ordinary--rather Cockney voice wasn't quite the voice of a stranger. Oddly I felt that I could trust the man!--had trusted him--somewhere, in many a tight place! ... Newspaper has come in.... Must stop here.... Finish this idiotic epistle to-night when I get a chance--"
This bore a date in September, 1915.
"MY PRECIOUS DEAR,
"I've had your last letter. So you're lonely wanting your Katharine! My dear, don't be! I AM with you, though not bodily--yet in heart and soul. Please God--"
There was a break. The handwriting of the rest was shaky and irregular, showing what storms of mingled emotions had swept through the writer.
"This was begun the day before yesterday. I left off to read the News of the War. Read--Oh! my dearest--with what mingled joy and anguish, the story of the combined assault on Loos. My love, my love!--what awful loss! How you must grieve for your glorious regiment! Thanks to Our Lord and His dear Mother! you are alive!--you are alive! The report that you were missing was contradicted in a later bulletin. I've been crying until I'm hideous, for sorrow and joy and pride in you, my Edward! And, for gratitude that you're alive--and longing to be with you.... How I should love to pitch duty to the wide and rush away to nurse You! Wouldn't I? WOULDN'T I?--if it were only playing the game. But I must,--MUST stop here and do my job for the Red Cross. My own Edward--these silly X's are all meant for kisses.... The blots are where I've cried! ... Oh! how I've cried--how I would love to cry all over the shoulder of your dear khaki jacket. With love and such unutterable pride in my dear lover--Your own for this world and the next, please Heaven! Katharine."
The third bore a date in October, 1916, and the address of a Distributing Hospital on a Base in France.
"MY DEAREST DEAR,
"I've been desperately wretched, writing and WRITING and never getting a scrap from you. Now comes a letter written by your nurse. She tells me that your dear eyes can't stand print or handwriting, and that even being read to is dreadful agony. Edward, how selfish I have been--and how stupid, with all my experience of the results of shell-shock--not to realise the extent and nature of my dear one's suffering! Now I beg and command you never to dream of writing until you are fit to! I have asked your kind nurse not even to read you my letters, until you are able to hear them without distress or pain. To think that loving lines from me should cause you suffering, Edward! And yet I understand, my own! how such a condition may exist. For the moment I leave off. They are beating the gong and some signal rockets have just warned us--"
* * * * * * *
Four hours later....
"An attack by German bomb-carrying Taubes on the Hospital, in spite of air-scouts and L----s barrage of anti-aircraft guns. There is a British Army Corps H.Q. close by. I try to think they wanted that--and not really to bomb the Hospital with all those poor, poor bandaged men helpless in their beds.
It was terrific. They got us with H.E. every time--and the Hospital looks like a squashed bandbox. But, you see, in spite of the Boche's worst, your loving Kathy stays alive. Casualties only three, thank God! A convalescent Tommy killed, an R.A.M.C. orderly badly wounded; and a V.A.D. ambulance-driving woman somehow got an internal injury--helping to carry some of the worst cases out of the blazing wards down into the cellars of the Commandant's house--luckily close by.
Be prepared to find my next letter written from London, for I'm going to be invalided back to Blighty. Address, '_Hospital of SS. Stanislaus and Theresa, Copse End Road, St. John's Wood. Care of the Matron._' Don't worry the least bit! ... I'm tophole, though no good for driving. It will be a rest, really, for me. And by and by, if God is good--" crossed out--"He is, has He not saved you, Edward?--I shall come rushing over to B---- and carry you home. Home to Scotland. Oh, my dear, what it would be to have you to myself at Kerr's Arbour! All the memories of our happy days langsyne are waiting for us, Edward,--under the blessed old roof-beams, and on the moors and in the fir-wood--(miles of bluebells, you remember, in May--growing under the black-green trees)--and where wee Rushet winds away between the green braesides, to tumble into Teviot. I've still got some of the primroses we gathered there one April. Oh! the good times, before the dreadful War. Let us both look forward steadily, and hope, and pray, Edward,--that they may come again. If this is a dismal letter, forgive:
Your Katharine."
Another written a fortnight later, from London.
"HOSPITAL OF SS. STANISLAUS AND TERESA, COPSE END ROAD, ST. JOHN'S WOOD, N. W.
"My DEAREST MAN,
"The operation--quite a small affair, happily over, and your Kathy pronounced to be well upon the mend. I get the best of care at this dear place, where matron and Sisters spoil me. Everybody in town is overwhelmingly kind, and if I set down all the messages of affection and goodwill that I am charged with for you, and repeated all the admiring speeches that have been made to me about my sweetheart--I should need half-a-dozen sheets of letter-paper to write to you instead of one.
"Are you able to read for yourself a little, dearest, or do you still depend on the kind offices of your nurse? If the answer is 'Yes' to my question, she has of course given you my letters. I have her assurance that she will do this on the very earliest opportunity. For I should not like her to read them to you, you know, Edward! For one thing, my epistolary style is open to criticism--and for another--what I set down for your dear eyes was and will always be meant for no other's. Ah, but you understand!
"This is a dull scribble. But I'll do better next time. Too tired to write another. God bless you, darling!
K. F.
"If only you could write! ... I'm hungering for a line so. But not--not a scratch--if it's bad for you, my own!
"K."
There were many letters, and Yaill read them all, haphazard at first, and then in regular sequence, down to the very last....
"KERR'S ARBOUR, TWEEDBURGH, N.B.
"_January 20th._
"Look here, Edward, can't you write, my darling? Your nurse sends me news of your wonderful improvement, for which I thank God, with all my heart and soul! But if you are so much better that you can read without pain and endure being read to, why not a scrap of a line to me? ... It seems to me that I have some right, forgive me for reminding you, to have news of you from your own hand, my dearest one.... Oh! to have to beg the bread of one's heart.... I was proud once--men used to say so. Now I am only your very lonely, horribly unhappy KATHARINE."
* * * * * * *
And yet until a door had clicked open in Yaill's brain, that handwriting had meant nothing. He asked his Maker in the depths of his wrung soul, why that Open Sesame of the bit of white heather--why the leather baggage-trunk with its guarded secret,--why the letter with its cry of wounded passion had come to the man who loved Katharine, too late?
"_It seems to me that I have some right...._" Proud, delicate-minded Katharine. What suffering must have wrung that sad reproach from her, that cry of a wounded soul....
"_Oh! to have to beg the bread of one's heart.... I way proud once--men used to say so. Now I am only your very lonely, horribly unhappy Katharine._"
Lonely.... Unhappy, his joy, his treasure, his worshipped one.... Well, Yaill would go to her now, though Hell's gulf yawned between. He had had this in his mind when he passed up the cliff-road, breathing the unheeded spices of the sea and the pine-trees, with the warm morning sunshine full upon his back....
Now, sitting high upon the cliffs with the booming of the Channel waters in his ears and the mourning cry of the hovering gulls about him, he faced a dim crimson sun, going to bed in blankets of grey fog. The letters lay scattered on the grass between his feet. He gathered them up and buttoned them away safely in his pockets. Then he got up and went back to his wife at the Tor View Hotel.
He would say he had been called away on business. She must stay there--the woman who bore his name, until he had seen his lawyers.... He would provide for her generously. Things would be arranged, he told himself as he hurried down the cliff-road in the clammy, blanketing fog....
The excuses were not received as easily as he had anticipated. He had left a sulky, tearful girl alone the whole day. And he came back to a resentful, jealous woman....
He shuddered, remembering how he had bowed his head to meet the storm of reproach.
Well, well! Forget,--now one was here under the dear roof of Kerr's Arbour, by the warm side of the beloved--the perfect, the ideal mate. He looked at her as she sat there by his side with her proud head bent, and the dark fringes of her dreaming eyes lowered upon the soft blush that graced her cheeks,--Love's exquisite carnation flag, always displayed for Edward.
She was happy, poor, faithful soul, with just a little tang of guilt spoiling the happiness. Mark had been killed at Mons, and Julian had been gulped down by the insatiable War-monster; and Death had taken their father and hers, but her man of men was left. How could she help, by his dear side, being a little happy? She turned and gave him look for look, and his strength began to ebb away.
Yaill's determination to play the game fairly was weakening. The barriers were breaking down. His tense muscles twitched, his blood ran liquid fire. In another moment he would have snatched her to him, stifled her surprise with furious kisses--assailed her virgin ears with frantic pleadings--but that a bell clanged at the hallward end of the corridor. Whishaw's asthmatic cough sounded outside,--he knocked and came in.
The old man's lean figure, with its stooping, rook-like gait, was invested with new, dignified solemnity, his well-worn blacks, even the wide-flanged Gladstone collar that framed his frosty-apple chops, and the rusty-black silk neckerchief knotted under his chin, the short end sticking out at a perennial right-angle, while the other flowed over his starchless shirt-front, to lose itself in the hollows of his baggy waistcoat,--were as vestments of one readied for some sacerdotal rite. He carried a three-branched silver candlestick of antique form, with lighted wax-tapers, and a Missal bound in faded crimson leather was tucked under his other arm....
"Ye'll be for the nicht-prayers noo, Miss Forbis? The Father has gane ben the chap_ell_, sae I juist bode to ring the bell."
"We are coming now, Whishaw."
Katharine rose, took a folded black lace veil from the corner of the mantelshelf, shook out its scrolled and patterned length--with firelight flashing through the dark transparency, draped it with one swift upward movement, over her noble head--and held out a hand to Yaill. He cursed the intruder mentally as he got up and the warm fingers met his own--because those wild words surging to his lips had been so baulked of utterance. But he took the Missal Whishaw offered him, and led his love out and down the long corridor--following the lean, black figure with its upheld light over the flagged pavement, whose uneven stones could be felt through thickness of matting and worn Turkey carpeting.
Whishaw held open the Chapel door, Katharine passed in and Yaill followed mechanically; conscious as might be a man in a dream, of the mingled perfume of incense and flowers, of the hollow square of benches in the little nave, framing the long coffin on its black-draped trestles, with the tall brown wax tapers in their man-high wooden candlesticks burning at the head, and the sides, and the feet....
Still as in a dream he bent his knee as Katharine sank down before the Presence in the Tabernacle, and rose up from her genuflection to take his hand again. He felt her lead him up the narrow aisle ... heard her say to that strange, familiar face, young-old, wax-white, framed in the shining oaken wood against the background of the narrow pillow:
"Dear Father, Edward has come."
And he knew as he looked on the still face of the old man, guardian even in Death of his House's honour--that those traitorous words that had been upon his tongue would never be spoken now.
XVI
Katharine said to him next morning as they sat together at breakfast:
"I am glad to hear of a good night's sleep. I fancied that you would rest better in your old bedroom, dear."
Yaill said, rejoicing in the clear sparkle of her eyes, the fresh, sweet tinting of her cheeks, the gloss upon her springy hair, and the dozen other charming signs that proved her an early-morning woman:
"You knew that I should prefer my langsyne nest of old-fashioned rosebud-chintz to any other. When I went inside and shut the door, all the old memories came crowding round me. The great carved four-post bed, the big blaze in the bowed Queen Anne grate, the General's arm-chair opposite mine--"
"Where he always sat, dear love! to smoke that last good-night-cigar, that seemed to have no end." She blinked back a tear resolutely and Yaill said, feeling in the side-pocket of his Field Service jacket:
"Here is something I found last night on the chintz-room chimney-piece." He displayed a blackened briar-root pipe with the initials E.A.Y. engraved on its tarnished silver mounting. "The first birthday-present I ever had from you. And in the camphor-wood William and Mary press"--
"Your dear, shabby old shooting-suit. Lying there ever since August, 1914."
Men know so little even of the women they love. He never dreamed of the kisses and tears, the wild words whispered, the secrets told to that belted Norfolk-jacket of rough tweed, smelling of cigars and heather. Breakfast over, he filled the briar-root and went to smoke it on the terrace, while after conference with the housekeeper, and a brief visit to Mrs. Bell, who breakfasted in her bedroom, Katharine tied on a vast apron of blue and white checked cotton, covered her head with her black lace veil, and went to renew the Altar flowers, replace the burnt-out brown-wax tapers--and sweep and dust the Sanctuary.
Her doubly-sacred duties done, and the prayer that followed ended, her heart flew back to Edward, and she went whither it tugged. He was pacing, bareheaded, on the gravel of the lavender-walk below the flagstoned terrace that ran before the drawing-room windows. His pipe was gripped askew between his teeth,--his hands were driven deep into his breeches-pockets. The frozen lavender-bushes were not greyer or dourer than his face....
"_You dear! ... You dear! ... Come here! ..._"
She imitated the blackbird's challenging Spring call, a quaintly pretty gift of hers; and he looked up and took his pipe out of his mouth, and his wintry face was gone--and it was Spring. He smiled and beckoned, and she hoisted her carnation flag,--unlatched the French window and was stepping out to join him,--when Whishaw's voice said behind her:
"Miss Forbis, mem, there is a gentleman--"
"A gentleman, Whishaw! But, of course, you mean Mr. Keller."
"I'm no!" Whishaw retorted. "I'm no' meaning the lawyer-body!"
"But I can receive no visitor! At a time like this..."
Miss Forbis' dismay rang in her tones. Her dark brows straightened. Her mouth hardened a little as she turned to confront her servitor:
"I'm no' saying stric'ly a veesitor," Whishaw amended: "A caller I'se ca' the body--gin need's be ca' him onything." As Whishaw showed a card upon a Benares silversalver, his red-rimmed old eyes blinked, and his frosty-apple visage assumed an expression of scandalised dismay. "I'm sair loth to bring my mistress sic' a message, an' the General's corp lying in the chap_ell_--an' the Funeral on Monday,--and yoursel' an' the Colonel set mourning by a maisterless hairth! But the big, black lad in khaki that rode oot on Alec Govan's motor-cycle frae Cauldstanes the morn's morn, is deid set on winnin' an answer from ye.... He says--an' Gude kens!--for a' his medal an' his wound-stripes, the man may be lying!--that ye're prepared to see him, an' hear what he has to say!" He added: "An' I'm boun' to testify, gin he's nae respeckitable the dougs are deceivit; for Bran an' Laddie an' Dawtie are fell freendly wi' the man."
Yaill had approached the drawing-room window, by the steps leading up to the terrace from the lavender-walk. He had heard, and his heart contracted in a spasm of fierce suspicion, and his brows drew down over narrowed, glittering eyes. He watched the face of Katharine as she pondered over the card of the intruder. It at first occurred to him that the stranger had ridden over from Whingates with a note from Lady Wastwood, telling all. He had no sooner dismissed the idea than another took the place of it. That woman, whom he had left at Coombe Bay, had somehow discovered his destination. From her--and from no other--this urgent stranger came....
"You will not think of seeing the fellow, Katharine? ... Under the circumstances you might very well decline." ...
His voice, sounding strange in his own ears, brought Katharine's head round, and called her absorbed eyes back to his beloved face. She said, as Whishaw clacked his tongue noisily against his palate, and fidgeted from one gouty foot to another:
"The name upon this card was familiar to my father. He told me some weeks before his death, that he looked forward with great interest to the coming of a Mr. Hazel--I suppose the Mr. John Benn Hazel of the firm of Dannahill, Lee-Levyson and Hazel, Insurance Brokers, of Cornhill--London--whose name is on this card.... I know it was his intention to offer Mr. Hazel hospitality. His family--I am told they are Jews of Palestine--has been for more years than I dare to estimate--closely associated with our own.... He has a right--should he wish to exercise it--to attend my father's funeral. Should he even ask to see him--I should not venture to refuse."
Whishaw said, straightening his stooping back to soldierly erectness, and holding the Benares tray against the seam of his trouser-leg:
"Vera' gude, Miss Forbis, mem. Will I bring Mr. Hazel here to ye, or show him in the morning parlour? 'My business wi' the leddy,' says he, 'is maist private, ye ken.'"
Katharine's order to show the visitor into the morning parlour was forestalled by Yaill's saying:
"Receive Mr. Hazel here. While you talk to him I shall smoke another pipe in the garden, if I may?" ...
He hardly gave back the smile that accompanied Katharine's assent. She untied her blue apron and laid aside her veil. Yaill touched her hand swiftly with his lips, and went out again into the frosty morning sunshine, as Whishaw quitted the drawing-room, clacking softly yet....
The door re-opened, showing his black, rook-like shape, bald brow, sharp, little red-rimmed blue eyes, and withered-apple-visage, plimmed into an expression of sour disapproval, behind the vast khaki shoulders of a huge man who stooped low upon the room's threshold, saluting its mistress with almost Oriental reverence....
If the accompanying words had been: "Hail to you, O lady!" instead of "I'm glad to have the pleasure--" as John Hazel bent his gaunt shoulders and lowered his square black head before the tall, womanly shape that towered against its sunlit background of terrace and garden, woodlands and snow-tipped hills, Miss Forbis would hardly have been surprised. For his long right arm had shot out and downwards, sweeping back with the fingers incurved, to touch breast and lips and forehead. As he rose up to his great height of six feet four inches, and some invisible, resistless hand--with the weight of many centuries behind it--ceased to press down his head--the glamour of his Eastern salutation fell from him like a discarded robe....
Katharine saw a big, raw-boned, brown-skinned man, of powerfully Semitic type, probably a year or two over thirty; too gaunt to be coarse, and too frankly middle-class in tone and manner to be mistaken for a gentleman. And somewhere--somewhere--she had met the man before....
To John as Whishaw closed the drawing-room door and its owner moved forward with graceful, gracious greeting, the first sight of Katharine brought its disappointing shock. For it was not the woman he had unreasonably expected. Taller--he had only seen the Ideal seated, remember! Older, with great, sad eyes, rust-coloured as the withered leaves, surrounded with brownish circles. The rich carnations that had bloomed in the other woman's cheeks, under the peaked blue cloth storm-cap of Foreign Service, were missing. It was not she, but a woman who was like her! Extremely like her,--John conceded that. But older, paler, graver and more self-contained; without the gay good-fellowship, the heartening smile--the buoyancy--the atmosphere of youth....
And yet, as he stood by the chair to which she had pointed, waiting impassively until she should have chosen and taken her own seat, he knew that he stood in the presence of his very liege lady, whom by virtue of an ancient oath one John Hazel was bound to serve, honour, reverence, defend and obey....
He said to himself that he was glad the real Katharine Forbis was older than _that other_. More dignified, more reserved, and all that sort of thing. He was saying it again when the tall shape of a man in khaki passed the open window on his left hand,--there were four of these opening like doors on a level with the terrace--and a red spark kindled in John's gaunt black eyes,--because he knew the man again. He would deal with him presently. Meanwhile--he looked back at Miss Forbis, and roughly caught his breath. Who had deemed her less than young, with such eyes of gold and bramble-dew, and such roses blooming in her cheeks, as her wide, beautiful mouth curved in a happy smile. And that she WAS the Woman of the muddy road that had led in April, 1915, to the Fighting Line east of Ypres--there could be no doubt....
"Then it _is_ you!"--broke from him.... "I give you my word that hundreds of times since that day on the Menin road, I've said to myself I'd know you again anywhere--even if they'd shown me your skin on a gate! But--up to this minute I've not been sure. Now I'm certain!"
In the same breath she found him again:
"Private John Hazel, No. 000, X. Platoon, F. Company, 4th Battalion, 448th City of London (Fenchurch Street) Fusiliers! .... Well, I sent the postcard to tell you about your friend.... Wallis--you see I remember his name--shot in the shoulder with shrapnel. He wasn't very badly hurt. What!--you never got my message?"
John grinned, showing his mouthful of big, white teeth.
"No such gay luck! Fritz handed me a Blighty one that same afternoon, and I went down to the dressing-station dug-outs by the Meat-Tray Express--the Wheeled Stretcher Line, I mean!--and then back to the Base by the Gingerbread Chuff. Sucking your toffee.... My word! that was some toffee. I kept the wrapper a long time--till the nurses said it was germy, and pitched it in the fire."
Her heart warmed to the familiar soldier-slang. She gave back his smile frankly.