CHAPTER XIII
Belinda Melnotte took to her lodging that night a heavy and troubled spirit. Sanderson's visit to the hospital had lifted not at all the burden of doubt and unhappiness that she had borne so long.
She confessed to herself—and confessed it with shame—that the appearance of the young aviator had caused her joy unspeakable. When he had clasped her hands she had been obliged to fix her gaze elsewhere that Sanderson might not see in her eyes the very expression he evidently longed to see there.
Yet, how she had dismissed and flouted him! Every word she said in spurning his half-spoken address had cut her own heart like a knife.
She loved him. She needed him particularly now in her heavy trials and ungrateful tasks at the hospital. Ah, if beside her stood just such a strong-souled, tender yet cheering presence as the aviator possessed!
Yet she cried: "Unworthy! Unworthy! Hemustbe bad! Heis!"
That other woman and her children stood beside the aviator in Belinda's vision. She could not recall his presence to her thought without bringing up, too, the wraiths of the family he must wrong in his thoughts every time he tried to address her—Belinda—with affection!
Even if he contemplated divorcing Stella, the Red Cross nurse could not think of him as her fit mate. It was against her religious training and abhorrent to her own conscience.
It became difficult for Belinda to bring into her ward a cheerful face, as had been her wont, to speak lightly to her charges, to raise—as she had heretofore—the spiritual temperature.
Desultory fighting continued; but after all there had been no great push. It was abandoned, they said, till spring. Snow and mud, rain and frost, made of all Northern France where the trenches lay an almost impassable wilderness. Nature and the elements gave the embattled armies a respite from the fray.
That is, these circumstances made all but ordinary trench fighting and air activities impossible. There were sorties and counter attacks along the sector almost daily; but the general result wasnilfor either side.
The Red Cross nurse went back to Minerva's one evening under a lowering sky that was copper colored by the rays of the setting sun all along the horizon. The landscape, Belinda thought, was the dreariest she had ever seen. Here and there stood tortured, broken trees, where shells had burst in the branches. Everywhere in the fields weremarmiteholes, or the craters made by the shells from the "Big Berthas." Many of the houses along the way had been burst asunder by the shells, and, of course, had never been repaired.
In her room under the now-thatched eaves of the stone-walled cottage Belinda delayed undressing, not because her body was not wearied, but because her brain was wide, wide awake. In the dull radiance of a smoky lamp she read over again the few letters from Aunt Roberta and from girls whom she had known in New York or at college that had reached her since she had come to the battlefields.
There was a cheerful note in all—even in Aunt Roberta's.
"Captain Dexter has called again and reports that you are very well and as pretty as ever. Ah, he is a dear man. He knows how to compliment a woman. He should be French," was the burden of Aunt Roberta's last letter.
"He calls in the morning in a taxicab and takes me to drive, if I have time to go. In the afternoon he sometimes takes tea with me. That is, if I and Margot are not housecleaning. Such a house as this is for dirt! And Margot must be watched like a hawk or she will sweep the sweepings under the furniture. If all goes well the captain sometimes takes me to dinner. The cafés and restaurants are not very gay, I must confess. It is very different now from my remembrance of Paris as it used to be. Why, it is not even as gay as New York! And these landlords here evidently never heard of hot-water supply! All I get through the rusty registers in these rooms, too, is the smell of coal gas—no heat, I vow! I know why the nobles who once lived in this hotel are here no more; they all froze to death in the cold winter of '74—and the present winter promises to be even colder. I have set up a coal stove in the parlor, as the tradesmen seem to know nothing about oil heaters. The captain says he would like to have the opportunity of putting his feet up on a base-burner (whatever that may be) and of eating a baked apple at night before he retires, as he used to do in Old Saybrook. That Old Saybrook must, in truth, be a place very charming."
There were three of Belinda's school friends in France—one married to a Frenchman and thoroughly imbued with the spirit of French patriotism; the other two working for the suffering wounded. But letters from all three were in cheerful vein. The wearied girl mentally compared their state with her own. In her diary she wrote:
"There is something lacking in my life. I have no spring left in me. It is not that I am more exhausted in body than I used sometimes to be in the hospital at home (the 'home' was crossed out and 'New York' written instead), but I miss something—I need something——"
"There is something lacking in my life. I have no spring left in me. It is not that I am more exhausted in body than I used sometimes to be in the hospital at home (the 'home' was crossed out and 'New York' written instead), but I miss something—I need something——"
A clatter against the closed shutter of her window made the girl look up. Again the rattling—was it pebbles?—startled the silence of the room. The whole house was still.
Belinda stood up, dropping her pen, one hand upon her heart. She saw her face in the little oval mirror over her dressing-table. Her lips were wreathed in a smile, her eyes were aglow. Her appearance startled the girl.
She crossed the room quite calmly as, for a third time, the pebbles clattered on the shutter. She unhooked and pushed back the swinging blind. A figure stood in the middle of the road, looking up at her.
"Belinda! Miss Melnotte!"
"Yes."
"This is Sanderson."
"I know," breathed the girl, resting both palms on the window-sill and looking down upon him. If her face had not been in the shadow! If he could have seen her luminous eyes!
"I wanted to see you again—just to speak to you," he pleaded, coming closer under the window.
"What is it? You are not going back?" she asked, but keeping her voice perfectly steady.
"No. I am going forward." He laughed with a strange tenseness in his tone. "I cannot tell you much about it. It is forbidden. 'Even the night hath ears.'"
"Oh! An air attack?" she whispered.
"In force. Several squadrons. Before daybreak. I—I wished to see you—to speak to you. If I should not return at once, you'll—you'll tell Captain Dexter to attend to my papers. He'll understand. I've fixed things for the kiddies——"
"Oh! Yes," she said. Her voice was suddenly hoarse and dry. She drew back further into the shadow.
"Good-by, Miss Melnotte—Belinda."
"Good-by, Mr. Sanderson."
He turned away rather abruptly and trudged back along the road toward the town.
She stood long at the casement—long after he was out of sight, and her thoughts were bitter. She had let him go from her without a tender word—without a whisper to console him. She fought down sternly the desire to call him back—to slip into her cape and run after him along the dark and lonely road.
He would go into the air at dawn on a mission that seemed to her mind almost sure to have a fatal ending. How often he faced death in his daily flights she did not know. But evidently Frank Sanderson considered this present venture as threatening more than usual peril, or he would not have come so far for a last glimpse of her.
A last glimpse! She thought of that moment on theBelle o' Perthwhen the nearness of death from the submarine attack was so heavy upon them. She had been kinder to him then. She had let him see for a moment that she cared.
Would he remember that weakness on her part when he mounted into the skies at dawn? Or would his last thought of her be as she was when she let him go from her window without a word of cheer?
On Sanderson's part, plodding gloomily campward, he felt as though he had been guilty of a weakness in venturing to see Belinda. He had no right to try to interest the girl in his affairs. How chaotic those affairs might be in another twenty-four hours!
He had learned that afternoon that there was to be a strong air attack over the German lines. For some reason the general in command desired the Germans harassed at this point.
The town was filled with new troops and arriving guns and supplies. The loaded, low-hung wagons ground through the streets and on toward the north. Troops of all kinds marched through—the most of them fresh, lively young fellows who hailed the aviators as they passed their camp with, "Hey, Bill!" "'Ello, Charley!" "Américain Aviateur!Hi! Hi!"
A train of giant mortars had gone up only two days before, mounted on great trucks and drawn by big motor lorries. It seemed as though all the world was in arms and was deploying past that aviation camp.
The preparations for the coming flight of at least three squadrons—perhaps more—were carried on in secret; yet a bustle all through the camps preceded it. The first business was an air reconnaissance. Every pilot wished personally to see that his machine was in the best shape possible, leaving nothing to chance, and very little to the judgment of his mechanicians.
Sanderson's aeroplane was a small Nieuport—one of those called by the Frenchappareils de chasseon account of their great speed (over one hundred miles an hour)—and had long since reached the front. The young American had been favorably marked during the winter as a cool and well-balanced pilot, with plenty of nerve and daring in reserve. His type of machine made him distinctly a fightingaviateur.
As he came back from his call upon the Red Cross nurse, foot-weary and not altogether composed in his mind, it was midnight. Before he reached the château where the members of his escadrille were quartered, he saw the bombarding unit going up—the first of this planned aerial attack on the Germans.
The machines mounted slowly, turning in great circles overhead until they reached the proper altitude—twenty-two of them. Then they vanished with their destructive bombs into the north. These bombs have propellers attached so as to retard their fall; otherwise they might sink too deeply into the earth to do much damage when they explode.
Before the bombarding squadron returned in the early morning the order came for the battleplanes to get under way. Sanderson had not had much sleep, but he was perfectly ready for the work in hand.
As the young American "jumped" his aeroplane from the ground and soared upward he saw many other machines rising—not only of his own escadrille, but of the several others brought to the sector for this attack.
His Nieuport scaled up the airways at a sharp angle—too sharp, perhaps, with the wind that was blowing. Surely the American was not careless in his management of the aeroplane—on such an occasion as this, too!
Yet his mind might not have been wholly upon the work before him. Was Belinda thinking of him at this moment? Was she kinder to him in her secret thoughts than she was openly?
She must know that an attack in force upon the German aircraft fleet would mean the destruction of many French aeroplanes and the death of their pilots.Hehad no charm against disaster!
Suddenly his Nieuport swerved, rolled sideways, and seemed about to turn over. Sanderson shut off the motor. The machine, quivering and shaking, seemed to stand still on its tail for a moment.
A stronger draft of air had struck the wings, and only the pilot's quick action in shutting off the motor had saved him from a fatal accident. The Nieuport righted itself, and Sanderson drove on after the members of his escadrille.