"Toujours Francs-PéronnaisAuront bon jour,Toujours et en tout tempsFrancs-Péronnais auront bon temps,"the girls used to sing in old days as they wove the wonderful linens and tissues of Péronne, or embroidered banners of gorgeous colours to commemorate the saving of the Picard city by Catherine: as Brian repeated to Father Beckett wandering through the ruins redeemed last spring for France by the British. And though Brian's eyes could not see the rubbish-heap where once had soared the citadel he saw through the mystic veil of his blindness many things which others did not see.It seems that above these marshy flats of the Somme, where the river has wandered away from the hills and disguised itself in shining lakes, gauzy mists always hover. Brian had seen them with bodily eyes, while he was a soldier. Now, with the eyes of his spirit he saw them again, gleaming with the delicate, indescribable colours which only blind eyes can call up to lighten darkness. He saw the fleecy clouds streaming over Péronne like a vast, transparent ghost-banner. He saw on their filmyfolds, as if traced in blue and gold and royal purple, the ever famous scene on the walls when Catherine and her following beat back Nassau's men from the one breach where they might have captured the town. And this mystic banner of the spirit Germans can never capture or desecrate. It will wave over Péronne—what was Péronne, and what will again be Péronne—while the world goes on making history for free men.After Péronne, Bapaume: the battered corpse of Bapaume, murdered in flame that reddened all the skies of Picardy before the British came to chase the Germans out!In old times, when a place was destroyed the saying was, "Not one stone is left upon another." But in this war, destruction means an avalanche of stones upon each other. Bapaume as Father Beckett saw it, is a Herculaneum unexcavated. Beneath lie buried countless precious things, and still more precious memories; the feudal grandeur of the old château where Philippe-Auguste married proud Isabelle de Hainaut, with splendid ceremony as long ago as 1180: the broken glory of ancient ramparts, where modern lovers walked till the bugles of August 2, 1914, parted them for ever; the arcaded Town Hall, old as the domination of the Spaniards in Picardy; the sixteenth-century church of St. Nicolas with its quaint Byzantine Virgin of miracles: the statue of Faidherbe who beat back the German wave from Bapaume in 1871: all, all burned and battered, and mingled inextricably with débris of pitiful little homes, nobles' houses, rich shops and tinyboutiques, so that, when Bapaume rises from the dead, she will rise as one—even as France has risen.Of the halting places on this pilgrimage along the British front, I should best have liked to be with Brian and Father Beckett at Arras. Brian and I were there together you know, Padre, on that happy-go-lucky tramping tour of ours—not long before I met Jim. We both loved Arras, Brian and I, and spent a week there in the most fascinating of ancient hotels. It had been a palace; and I had a huge room, big enough for the bedchamber of a princess (princesses should always have bedchambers, never mere bedrooms!) with long windows draped like the walls and stiff old furniture, in yellow satin. I was frightened when an aged servant with the air of a pontiff ushered me in; for Brian and I were travelling "on the cheap." But Arras, though delicious in its quaint charm, never attracted hordes of ordinary tourists. Consequently one could have yellow satin hangings without being beggared.Oh, how happy we were in that hotel, and in the adorable old town! While Brian painted in the Grande Place and the Petite Place, and sketched the Abbey of St. Waast (who brought Christianity to that part of the world) I wandered alone. I used to stand every evening till my neck ached, staring up at the beautiful belfry, to watch the swallows chase each other back and forth among the bells, whose peal was music of fairyland. And I never tired of wandering through the arcades under the tall old Flemish houses with their overhanging upper storeys, or peeping into the arcades' cool shadows, from the middle of the sunlit squares.There were some delightful shops in those arcades, where they sold antique Flemish furniture, queer old pictures showing Arras in her proud, treaty-making days (you knowwhat a great place she was for treaty-making!) and lovely faded tapestries said to be "genuinely" of the time when no one mentioned a piece of tapestry save as an "arras." But the shop I haunted was a cake-shop. It was called "Au Cœur d'Arras," because the famous speciality of Arras was a heart-shaped cake; but I wasn't lured there so much by the charm ofles cœursas by that of the person who sold them.I dare say I described her to you in letters, or when I got back to England after that trip. The most wonderful old lady who ever lived! She didn't welcome her customers at all. She just sat and knitted. She had an architectural sort of face, framed with a crust of snow—I mean, a frilled cap! And if one furtively stared, she looked at one down her nose, and made one feel cheap and small as if one had snored, or hiccupped out aloud in a cathedral! But it seems I won her esteem by enquiring if "les cœurs d'Arras" had a history. Nobody else had ever shown enough intelligence to care! So she gave me the history of the cakes, and of everything else in Arras; also, before we went away, she escorted Brian and me into a marvellous cellar beneath her shop. It went down three storeys and had fireplaces and a well! The earth under La Grande Place was honeycombed with suchsouterrains, she said. They'd once been quarries, in days so old as to be forgotten—quarries of "tender stone" (what a nice expression!), and the people of Arras had cemented and made them habitable in case of bombardment. They must have been useful in 1914!As for the cakes, they were invented by an abbess who was sent to Spain. Before reluctantly departing, shegave the recipe to her successor, saying she "left her heart in Arras." According to the legend (the old shop-lady assured me) a girl who had never loved was certain to fall in love within a month after first eating a Heart of Arras. Well, Padre, I ate almost a hundred hearts, and less than a month after I met Jim!You may believe that I asked Brian and Father Beckett a dozen questions at once about dear Arras. But alas, alas! all the answers were sad.The beautiful belfry? Only a phantom remaining. The Hôtel de Ville? Smashed. La Grande Place—La Petite Place? Stone quarries above ground as well as below, the old Flemish façades crumbled like sheets of barley sugar. The arcades? Ruined. The charming old shops? Vanished. The seller of Hearts? Dead. But the Hearts—theystill existed! The children of Arras who have come back "since the worst was over" (that is their way of putting it!) would not feel that life was life without the Arras Hearts. Besides, Arras without the Hearts would be like the Altar of the Vestal Virgins without the ever-burning lamp. So they are still baked, and still eaten, those brave little Hearts of Arras—and Brian asked Father Beckett to bring me a box.They bought it of a cousin of my old woman, an ancient man who had lurked in a cellar during the whole of the bombardment. He said that all Arras knew, in September, 1914, how the Kaiser had vowed to march into the town in triumph, and how, when he found the place as hard to take "as quicksilver is to grasp," he revenged himself by destroying its best-beloved treasures. He must have rejoiced that July day of 1915, when Wolff's Agency wasable to announce at last, that the Abbey of St. Waast and its museum were in flames!As the gray car bumped on to Bethune, Vimy Ridge floated blue in the far distance, to the right of the road, and Father Beckett and Brian took off their hats to it. Still farther away, and out of sight lay Lens, in German possession, but practically encircled by the British. The Old Contemptible had been there, and described the town as having scarcely a roof left, but being an "ant heap" of Boches, who swarm in underground shelters bristling with machine guns. Between Lens and the road stood the celebrated Colonne de Condé, showing where the prince won his great victory over Spain; and farther on, within gun-sound distance though out of sight, lay Loos, on the Canal de l'Haute Deule. Who thinks nowadays of its powerful Cistercian Abbey, that dominated the country round? Who thinks twice, when travelling this Appian Way which Germany has given France, of any history which began or ended before the year 1914?Bethune they found still existing as a town. It has been bombarded often but not utterly destroyed, and from there they ran out four miles to Festubert, because the little that the Germans have left of the thirteenth-century church and village, burns with an eternal flame of interest.Bethune itself was a famous fortress once, full of history and legend: but isn't the whole country in its waste and ruin, like a torn historic banner, crusted with jewels—magic jewels, which cannot be stolen by enemy hands?On the way to Ypres—crown and climax of the tour—the car passed Lillers and Hazebrouck, places never to be forgotten by hearts that beat in the battles of Flanders.Then came the frontier at Steenwoorde; and they were actually in Belgium, passing Poperinghe to Ypres, the most famous British battleground of the war.When Brian was fighting, and when you were on earth, Padre, everyone talked about the "Ypres Salient." Now, though for soldiers Ypres will always be the "salient" since the battle of Wytschaete Ridge, thematerialsalient has vanished. Yet the same trenches exist, in the same gray waste which Brian used to paint in those haunting, impressionist war sketches of his that all London talked about, after the Regent Street exhibition that he didn't even try for leave to see! The critics spoke of the mysterious, spiritual quality of his work, which gave "without sentimentality" picturesqueness to the shell-holes and mud, the shattered trees and wooden crosses, under eternally dreaming skies.Well, Brian tells me that going back as a blind man to the old scenes, he had a strange, thrilling sense ofseeingthem—seeing more clearly than before those effects of mysterious beauty, hovering with prophecy above the squalor of mud and blood, hovering and mingling as the faint light of dawn mingles, at a certain hour, with the shadows of night. People used to call his talent a "blend of vision with reality." Now, all that is left him is "vision"—vision of the spirit. But with help—I used to think it would bemyhelp: now I realize it will be Dierdre's—who knows what extraordinary things my blind Brian may accomplish? His hope is so beautiful, and so strong, that it has lit an answering flame of hope in me.He and I were in Ypres for a few days, just about the time I was wondering why "Jim Wyndham" didn't keephis promise to find me again. It was in Ypres, I remember, that I came across the box of "Cœurs d'Arras" I'd brought with me. Opening it, I recalled the legend about a girl who has never loved, falling in love within a month after first eating an Arras Heart. It was then I said to myself, "Why, it hascome true! I have fallen in love with Jim Wyndham—andhe has forgotten me!"Oh, Padre, how that pain comes back to me now, in the midst of the new pain, like the "core of the brilliance within the brilliance!" Which hurt is worse, to love a man, and believe oneself forgotten, or to love and know one has been loved, and then become unworthy? I can't be sure. I can't even be sure that, if I could, I would go back to being the old self before I committed the one big sin of my life, which gave me Jim's father and mother, and the assurance thathe had cared. For a while, after Mother Beckett told me about Jim's love for "The Girl," in spite of my wickedness I glowed with a kind of happiness. I felt that, through all the years of my life—even when I grew old—Jim would bemine, young, handsome, gay, just as I had seen him on the Wonderful Day: that I could always run away from outside things and shut the gate of the garden on myself and Jim—that rose-garden on the border of Belgium. Now, when I know—or almost know—that he will come back in the flesh to despise me, and that the gate of the garden will be forever shut—why, I shall be punished as perhaps no woman has ever been punished before. Still—stillI can't be sure that I would escape, if I could, by going back to my old self!It is writing of Belgium, and my days there with Brianwhile I still hoped to see Jim, that brings all these thoughts crowding so thickly to my mind, they seem to drip off my pen!But what a different Ypres Father Beckett has now seen, and Brianfelt, from that dear, pleasant Ypres into which we two drove in a cart, along a cobbled causeway as straight as a tight-drawn string! Tourists who loved the blue, and yellow, and red bath-houses on the golden beach of Ostend, didn't worry to motor over the bumpy road, through the Flemish plain to Ypres. The war was needed to bring its sad fame to "Wipers!" But Brian and I interrupted our walking tour with that cart, because we knew that the interminable causeway would take us deep into the inner quaintness of Flanders. We adored it all: and at every stopping-place on the twenty-mile road, I had the secret joy of whispering; "Perhaps it isherethat He will suddenly appear, and meet us!"There was one farmhouse on the way, where I longed to have him come. I wanted him so much that I almostcreatedhim! I was listening every moment, and through every sound, for his car. It never came. But because I so wished the place to be a background for our meeting I can see the two large living-rooms of the old house, with the black-beamed ceilings, the Flemish stoves, the tall, carved sideboards and chests with armorial bearings, the deep window-seats that were flower-stands and work-tables combined, and the shelves of ancient pottery and gleaming, antique brass. There was a comfortable fragrance of new-baked bread, mingling with the spicy scent of grass-pinks, in that house: and the hostess who gave us luncheon—a young married woman—had a mild,sweet face, strongly resembling that of St. Geneviève of Brabant, as pictured in a coloured lithograph on the wall.St. Geneviève's story is surely the most romantic, the most pathetic of any saint who ever deigned to tread on earth!—and her life and death might serve as an allegory of Belgium's martyrdom, poor Belgium, the little country whose patron she is. Since that day at the farmhouse on the road to Ypres, I've thought often of the gentle face with its forget-me-not eyes and golden hair; and of Golo the dark persecutor who—they say now—was arealperson and an ancestor of the Hohenzollerns through the first Duc de Bavière.At Ypres, Brian painted for me a funny "imagination picture" imitating earliest Flemish work. It showed Ypres when there was no town save a few tiny houses and a triangular stronghold, with a turret at each corner, built on a little island in the river Yperlee. He named the picture "The Castle of the Three Strong Towers," and dated it in the year 900. A thousand years have passed since then. Slowly, after much fighting (the British fought as hard to take Ypres once, as they fight to save it now), the town grew great and powerful, and became the capital of Flanders. The days of the rough earthen stockades and sharp thorn-bush defences of "Our Lady of the Enclosures" passed on to the days of casemates and moats; and still on, to the days when the old fortifications could be turned into ornamental walks—days of quaintly beautiful architecture, such as Brian and I saw before the war, when we spent hours in the Grand' Place, admiring the wonderful Cloth Hall and the Spanish-looking Nieuwerck.The people of Ypres told us proudly that nothing in Bruges itself, or anywhere in Flanders, could compare with those noble buildings massed together at the west end of the Grand' Place, each stone of which represented so much wealth of the richest merchant kings of Europe.And now, the work of those thousand busy years has crumbled in a few monstrous months, like the sand-houses of children when the tide comes in! What Father Beckett saw of Ypres after three years' bombardment, was not much more than that shown in Brian's picture, dated 900! A blackened wall or two and a heap of rubble where stood theHalle des Drapiers—pride of Ypres since the thirteenth century—its belfry, its statues, its carvings, its paintings, all vanished like the contours and colours of a sunset cloud. The cathedral is a skeleton. Hardly a pointed gable is left to tell where the quaint and prosperous houses once grouped cosily together. Ypres the town is a mourner draped in black with the stains of fire which killed its beauty and joy. But there is a glory that can never be killed, a glory above mere beauty, as a living soul is above the dead body whence it has risen. That glory is Ypres. She is a ghost, but she is an inspiration, a name of names, a jewel worth dying for—"worth giving a man's eyes for," Brian says!"Has your brother told you about the man we met at the Visitors' Château?" asked Father Beckett, when between the two men—and my reminiscences—the story of the tour was finished with those last words of Brian's."No, I haven't told her yet," Brian answered for me.My nerves jumped. I scarcely knew what I expected tohear. "Not Doctor Paul Herter?" I exclaimed—and was surprised to hear on my own lips the name so constantly in my mind."Well, that's queer she should speak ofhim, isn't it, Brian? How did you come to think of Herter?" Father Beckett wanted to know."Wasit he?" I insisted."No. But—you'd better tell her, Brian. I guess you'll have to.""There isn't much to tell, really," Brian said. "It was only that oculist chap Herter told you about—Dr. Henri Chrevreuil. He's been working at the front, as you know: lately it's been the British front; and they'd taken him in at the château for a few days' rest. We met him there and talked of his friend—your friend, Molly—Doctor Paul.""What did he say about your eyes?" Dierdre almost gasped. (I should not have ventured to put the question suddenly, and before people. I should have been too afraid of the answer. But her nickname is "Dare!") "He must have said something, or Mr. Beckett wouldn't have spoken so. Hedidlook at your eyes—didn't he? He would, for Herter's sake.""Yes, he did look at them," Brian admitted. "He didn't say much.""But what—what?""He said: 'Wait, and—see.'""And see!" Dierdre echoed.The same thought was in all our minds. As I gazed mutely at Brian, he gave me the most beautiful smile of his life. He must have felt that I was looking at him, or hewould not so have smiled. Let Jim hate and—punish me when he comes back, and drive me out of Paradise! Wherever I may go, there will be the reflection of that smile and the thought behind it. How can I be unhappy, if Brian need only wait, to see?CHAPTER XXXPadre, my mind is like a thermometer exposed every minute to a different temperature, but always high or low—never normal.To tell, or not to tell, Father Beckett what the man I didn't see said about Jim—or rather, what Julian O'Farrell said that he said! This has been the constant question; but the thermometer invariably flies up or down, far from the answer-point.When our men came back to Amiens, I almost hoped that Puck would do his worst—carry out his threat and "give me away" to Father Beckett. In that case I should at least have been relieved from responsibility. But Puck didn't. In my heart I had known all along that he would not.If I could have felt for a whole minute at a time that it would be fair to wake hopes which mightn't be fulfilled, out would have burst the secret. But whenever I'd screwed up my courage to speak, Something would remind me: "Herter sent word that there might be a message from Switzerland. Better wait till it comes, for he wasn't sure of his facts. He may have been misled." Or, when I'd decidednotto speak, another Something would say: "Jim is alive. Youknowhe is alive! Herter is helping him to escape. Don't let these dear old people suffer a minute longer than they need."But—well—so far I have waited. A week has passed since I wrote at Amiens. We have arrived at Jim's château—the little, quaint, old Château d'Andelle, with thick stone walls, black-beamed ceilings, and amusing towers, set in the midst of an enchanted forest of Normandy. No wonder he fell in love with the place before the war, and wanted to live there! It must have seemed an impossible dream at the time, for the owners (the château has been in the same family for generations) had money in those days, and wouldn't have let their home to strangers. The war has made all the difference. They couldn't afford to keep up the place, and were eager to let. Beckett money is a boon to them, so everyone is satisfied. The agents in Paris secured two or three extra servants to help the old pair left in the house as caretakers; and there is a jewel of a maid for Mother Beckett—a Belgian refugette. I shall give her some training as a nurse, and by and by I shall be able to fade away in peace. Already I'm beginning to prepare my dear lady's mind for a parting. I talk of my hospital work, and drop hints that I'm only on leave—that Brian's hopes and Father Beckett's splendid new-born plan for him, will permit me to take up duty again soon.The plan developed on the trip: but I'm sure the first inspiration came from Mother Beckett. While she was ill, she did nothing but lie and think of things to do for other people. And she was determined to make it possible for Brian to have a love story of his own, provided he wanted one. It only needed Father Beckett's practical brain and unlimited purse to turn her vague suggestion into a full-grown plan. A whole block of buildings onthe outskirts of Paris, let as apartment houses, is to be bought by Mr. Beckett, for the use of blinded soldiers. Already his agents have got the refusal of the property for him; and with a few changes such as knocking down inner walls and putting in doors where doors don't exist, the houses will become one big mansion, to accommodate five or six hundred men. Each will have his own bedroom or cubicle. There'll be a gymnasium, with a Swedish instructor, and every trade or profession in which a blind man could possibly engage will be taught by experts. There will be a big dining hall with a musicians' gallery, and a theatre. The library will be supplied with quantities of books for the blind. There'll be a garden where the men will be taught to grow flowers and vegetables. They will have a resident doctor, and two superintendents. One of these two will himself be a blind man taught by his own experience how to teach others. Of course, Padre, you know that this blind teacher is already chosen, and that the whole scheme centers round him!In a way Brian realizes that, if it were not for him, it would never have been thought of. In a way. But—it ishisway. He doesn't torture himself, as I probably should in his place, by thinking: "All these immense sums of money being spent as an excuse to provide for me in life! Ought I to let it be done? Ought I to accept?"Brian's way is not that. He says: "Now I understand why I lost my eyesight, and it's worth it a thousand times. This wonderful chance is to be given me to help others, as I never could have helped if I hadn't been blind. If sight comes back, I shall know what it is to be blind, and I can give counsel and courage to others. I am glad, glad tobe blind. It's a privilege and a mission. Even if I never see again, except with my spirit's eyes, I shall still be glad!"He doesn't worry at all because carrying out the plan will cost Father Beckett one or more of his millions. What is money for, except to be spent? What pleasure is like spending to do good? He finds it quite natural that Father Beckett wants to do this thing; and though he's immensely grateful, he takes it blithely for granted that the benefactor should be happy and proud.Travelling back from Ypres to Amiens they seem to have settled all the details between them, though they told us their adventures before even mentioning the Plan. Brian is to be guide, philosopher, and friend to the inmates and students of the James Wyndham Beckett College for the Blind. Also he is to give lectures on art and various other subjects. If he can learn to paint his blind impressions (as he believes he can, with Dierdre's promised help) he will be able to teach other blind artists to follow his example. And he is to have a salary for his services—not the big one Father Beckett wished: Brian wouldn't hear of that—but enough to live on. And Dierdre and Julian are offered official positions and salaries too. It's suggested that they should take a flat near by the College, within easy walking distance. Dierdre is to entertain the blind men with recitations, and teach the art of reciting to those who wish to learn. Julian is to sing and play for the men in the house-theatre, once or twice a week, as he can spare time from his work with De Letzski. Also he will give one lesson a week in singing and voice production.Both the O'Farrells are to be well paid (no trouble inpersuading Julian to accept generous proposals for himself and his sister; for him the labourer is indeed worthy of his hire): and with American dash and money the scheme is expected to be in working order by next June. It's now well into November. But after seeing how other schemes have worked, and how this Château d'Andelle business has been rushed through, I have the most sublime faith in Beckett miracles.They are astonishing, these Becketts! Father, the simplest, kindest man, with the air of liking his fireside better than any adventure: Mother, a slip of a creature—"a flower in a vase to be kept by her menfolk on a high shelf," as I told myself when I first saw her. Yet what adventures they have had, and what they have accomplished since the day Brian proposed this pilgrimage, two months ago! Not a town on our route that, after the war won't have cause to bless them and the son in whose name their good works have been done—cause to bless Beckett kindness, Beckett money for generations in the future! Yet now they have added this most ambitious plan of all to the list, and I know it will be carried out to perfection.You see now, Padre, from what I've told you, how easy it is being made for me to slip out of this circle. Brian, beaming with happiness, and on the point of opening his heart to Dierdre's almost worshipping love: Mother Beckett slowly getting back a measure of frail, flower-like health, in this lovely place which she calls Jim's: Father Beckett more at ease about her, and intensely interested in his scheme: the small, neat Belgian refugette likely to prove at least a ministering mouse if not a ministering angel: above all, hope if not certainty that Jim will oneday return—not only in spirit but in body—to his château and his family. If I am needed anywhere on earth, it isn't here, but down in the south at my poor Hôpital des Épidémies. Would it be cowardly in me to fly, as soon as I've persuaded the Becketts to spare me, and throw the responsibility I haven't dared decide to take, upon my brave, blind Brian?Ah, I don't mean telling him about myself and my sins. I shouldn't have the courage for that, I fear! I mean, shall I tell him about Doctor Paul's message—orsupposedmessage? It has just occurred to me that I might do this, and let Brian decide whether Father Beckett ought to know, even if no further news comes through Switzerland. You see, if I were gone, and Jim came, I could trust the new Dierdre to do her best for me with Brian. He could never respect me, never love me in the old way—but he might forgive, because of Dierdre herself—and because of the great Plan. Hasn't my wickedness given them both to him?Writing all this to you has done me good, Padre. I see more clearly ahead. I shall decide before morning what to do. I feel Ishallthis time! And I think it a good idea to speak to Brian. He will agree, though he doesn't know my secret need to escape, that it's right for me to take up hospital work again. But, Padre, I can't go—Iwon'tgo—until I've helped Mother Beckett arrange Jim's treasures in the room to be called his "den." She has been living for that, striving to grow strong enough for that. And I—oh, Padre!—I want to be the one to unpack his things and to touch each one with my hands. I want to leave something of myself in that room where, if he's dead,his spirit will surely come: where, if he lives, his body will come. If I leave behind me thoughts of love, won't they linger between those walls like the scent of roses in a vase? Mayn't those thoughts influence Jim Beckett not to detest me as I deserve?CHAPTER XXXIFive days later.I did talk to Brian, Padre, and he said, better wait and give the letter from Switzerland a fair chance to arrive, before telling Father Beckett about Doctor Paul's messenger at Amiens.Now I have had a letter, but not from Switzerland. I shall fold it up between the pages of this book of my confessions. I believe you will read it, Padre.It came to-day. It explains itself. The envelope, postmarked Paris, was addressed to me in typewriting. If Mother Beckett had not had a slight relapse from working too hard in the den, I might perhaps have been gone before the letter came. Then it would have had to be forwarded. It's better that I stayed. You will see why. But—oh, Padre, Padre!THE LETTER"Miss O'Malley,"Once I met a lady whose name, as I understood it, was not unlike yours now, given me by Doctor Paul Herter. I cannot think that you and she are one. That lady, I'd swear, would be incapable of—let me say, placing herself in a false position."Though you will not recognize my handwriting, I've said enough for you to guess that James Wyndham Beckett is your correspondent. I have had the address typed because, for my parents' sake and to spare them distress, it seems that you and Imust reach some understanding before I venture to let them know that I'm alive."If you are worthy to be called 'friend' by such a man as Paul Herter, you will wish to atone for certain conduct, by carrying out the request I make now. I must trust you to do so. But first let me relieve my mind of any fear for yourself. I have not contradicted the story you told Herter about our engagement. What I shall say to my parents when I meet them, as I hope soon to do, depends upon circumstances. Till you and I have had a private conversation, you will oblige me by letting things remain as they are. I have strong reasons for this wish. One of them—the only one I need explain now, is that it will seem natural to them I should write to my fiancée—a young, strong girl able to bear the shock of a great surprise—asking her to break the news gently and tactfully to my father and mother. I do ask you to do this. How to do it I must leave to you. But when you've told my parents that I'm alive, that I've escaped, that I'm in Paris with Herter, that as soon as my official business of reporting myself is finished, I'll get leave, you may put into their hands the following pages of this letter. They will not think it strange that the girl I am engaged to should keep the first part for her own eyes. Thus, without your being compromised, they will learn my adventures without having to wait until I come. But there's just room enough left on this first sheet to reiterate that, when Herter found me, and gave me the somewhat disconcerting news of my engagement to his friend, a Miss O'Malley travelling with my parents, I—simply listened. Rather than excite his suspicions I did not even yield to curiosity, and try to draw out a description. I could not be sure then that I should ever see you, or my people, for escape was difficult and there were more chances against than for my getting out of Germany alive. Now, in all human certainty I shall arrive at the Château d'Andelle (I got the addressat the bank), and you owe it to me to remain on the spot till we can thrash out our affair together. I will begin on anewsheet the story of the last few months since my capture. You must forgive me if it bores you. In reality it is for my parents, when you have prepared their minds, and I don't think it will bore them...."We came a bad cropper. I was thrown clear of the machine, but knew nothing until I waked up, feeling like a bag of broken bones. It was night, and I saw a huge fountain of red flame and a lot of dark figures like silhouettes moving between it and me. That brought me out of my stupor. I knew my plane must have taken fire as it crashed down, and I was pretty sure the silhouettes were Germans. I looked around for my observer, and called to him in a low voice, hoping the Bosch wouldn't hear, over the noise of the fire. Nobody answered. Later I found out that the poor chap had been caught under the car. I pray he died before the flames reached him!"As I got my wits back, I planned to try and hide myself under some bushes I could see not far off, till the coast was clear; but I couldn't move. I seemed to be thoroughly smashed up, and began to think it was the end of thingsici-basfor me. After a while I must have fainted. By and by I had a dream of jolting along through a blazing desert, on the back of a lame camel. It was rather fierce, that jolting! It shook me out of my faint, and when I opened my eyes it was to find myself on a stretcher carried by fellows in German gray. They took me to a field hospital, and I guessed by the look of things that it was close to the first lines. It made me sick to think how near I must be to our own front—yet so far!"Well, I won't be long-winded about what happened next. I can go into details when we meet. It turned out that I had a leg, an arm, and some ribs smashed. The Bosch surgeon wasn't half bad, as Bosches go, but he was a bit brusque. Iheard him say right out to the anæsthetist, it seemed a pity to waste good ether on me, as there wasn't one chance in five to save my life. Still, I'd be an experiment! Before I went off under the stuff I told them who I was, for I'd heard they were sometimes fairly decent to enemy aviators, and I hoped to get a message through to my people. I was feeling as stupid as an owl, but I did think I saw a change come over the men's faces when they heard my name. Later, putting two and two together, I concluded that Germany was just the kind of business nation to know all about the dear old Governor. I might have realized that, out of sheer spite against the United States for bursting into the war, they'd enjoy letting a man of James Beckett Senior's importance go on believing his son was dead. I bet they put my name over the grave of my poor, burned pal, Hank Lee! It would be the thoroughgoing sort of thing they do, when they make up their minds to create an impression."I didn't die, though! Spite for spite, I got well. But it took some time. One of my lungs had been damaged a bit by a broken rib, and the doctors prescribed an open-air cure, after I'd begun to crawl again. I was put with a lot of T. B.'s, if you know what that means, in a camp hospital. Not far off was a huge 'camouflaged' aerodrome and a village of hangars. I heard that flying men were being trained there. I used to think I'd give my head to get to the place, but I never hoped to do it—till Herter came."Now I will tell you how he came—which I can freely do, as we are both safe in Paris, having come from somewhere near Compiègne. One of the first things Herter said about you was that you must have guessed where he was going, and more or less for what purpose. For that purpose he was the ideal man: a Lorrainer of Germanized Lorraine; German his native tongue—(though he hates it)—and clever as Machiavelli. He "escaped" from France into Germany, told a tale about killinga French sentry and creeping across No Man's Land at night, in order to get to the German lines. It was a big risk, but Herter is as brave and resourceful a man as I ever met. He got the Bosches to believe that he was badly ill in Paris when the war broke out and couldn't slip away, otherwise he'd have sprung to do his loyal duty to the Fatherland. He persuaded them that his lot being cast in France for the time, he'd resolved to serve Germany by spying, until he could somehow bolt across the frontier. He spun a specious tale about pretending to the French to have French sympathies, and winning the confidence of high-up men, by serving as a surgeon on several fronts. To prove his German patriotism he had notes to show, realistically made on thin silk paper, and hidden inside the lining of his coat."Herter's mission in Boschland isn't my business or yours; but I'm allowed to say that it was concerned with aeroplanes. There was something he had to find out, and hehasfound it out, or he wouldn't be back on this side of the lines. Because he hoped to be among German flying-men, he hinted to you that he might be able to do you some service. It occurred to him that he might learn where my grave was and let you know. Nothing further was in his thoughts then—or until he happened to draw out a piece of unexpected information in a roundabout way."His trick of getting across to the flying-men was smart, like all his tricks. The valuable (?) notes he'd brought into Germany mostly concerned new French and American inventions in that line. That was his 'speciality.' And when he had handed the notes over with explanations, he continued his programme by asking for a job as surgeon in a field hospital. (You see, he hoped to get back to France before the worthlessness of his notes was discovered.) When he'd proved his qualifications, he got his job like a shot. They were only too glad of his services. Pretending to have been in American training-camps, it was easy to bring up my name in a casual way. Laughing that rather sinister laugh of his, which you will remember, Herter told a couple of flying chaps he had promised a girl to find Jim Beckett's grave. One of the fellows laughed too, and made a remark which set Herter thinking. Later, he was able to refer to the subject again, and learned enough to suspect that there was something fishy about the Bosch announcement of my death and burial. He tells me that, at this point, he was able to send you a verbal message by a consumptive prisoner about to be repatriated. Whether you got that message or not who knows?"His idea was to send another (in a way he won't explain even to me) when he'd picked up further news. But as things turned out, there was no time. Besides, it wasn't necessary. It looked hopeful that we might be our own carrier pigeons, or else—cease to exist."What happened was that Herter heard I was alive and in a hospital not far behind the lines. Just at this time he had got hold of the very secret he'd come to seek. The sooner he could make a dash for home the better: but if possible, he wished to take me with him. He had the impression that to do so would please his friend Miss O'Malley! How it was to be worked he didn't see until an odd sort of American bombing machine fell, between an aerodrome it had attempted to destroy, and Herter's hospital. They knew it was American, only because of its two occupants, both killed. The machine was considerably smashed up, but experts found traces of something amazingly novel, which they couldn't understand. Herter was called to the scene, because he had pretended to be up in the latest American flying 'stunts.' The minute he saw the wreckage an inspiration jumped into his head."He confessed himself puzzled by the mysterious details, thought them important, and said: 'It seems to me thisresembles the engine and wings of the James Beckett invention I heard so much about. But I didn't know it was far enough ahead yet to be in use. A pity the inventor was killed. He might have come in handy."Well, they put those words in their pipes and smoked them—knowing, of course, that I was very much alive and almost within a stone's throw."I had always pretended not to understand German: thought ignorance of the language might serve my plans some day or other. The chap they sent to fetch me dropped a few words to a doctor in my hearing. And so, though I wasn't told where I was being taken or why I was to go, I'd about caught on to the fact that I was supposed to have invented the plans for a new bombing biplane. That made me wonder if a friend was at work under the rose: and I was ready for anything when I got to the scene of the smash."Fortunately, none of the Bosches on the spot could speak English fluently, and I appeared more of a fool at French than German. Herter—entirely trusted by his German pals—was told off to talk English with me; and a flash of his eye said,herewas the friend! It was only a flash, and I couldn't be sure, but it put me on thequi vive. I noticed that in asking me the question he was told to ask, he emphasized certain words which needed no emphasis, and spoke them slowly, with a look that made me determine to fix each one in my mind. This I did, and putting them together when I got the chance, I made out, 'I want to get you home. Say you invented this model, and could put the thing in working trim.'"That was a big order! If I said it and could keep my word, would it be a patriotic job to present the enemy with a perfectly good machine, of a new make, in the place of a wreck they didn't understand? This was my first thought. But the second reminded me of a sentence I'd constructed with some ofthe emphasized words; 'I want to get you home.' How did he expect to get me home—if not by air?"With that I caught a glimpse of the plan, as one sometimes catches sight of the earth through a break in massed clouds when flying. If the man meant to help me, I would help him. If he turned out a fraud, the Germans shouldn't profit by his treachery I'd stop that game at the last moment, if I died for it!"You will know nothing about the new and curious bombing biplane of super-speed invented by Leroy Harman of Galbraith, Texas. But Father knows as much as any one not an expert in aeronautics can know. When the Government wouldn't believe in Harman, Father financed him by my advice. I left home for France before the trial machine that was to convince officialdom had come into being; and I didn't even know whether it had made good. But the minute I saw what lay on the ground, surrounded by a ring of Germans, I said to myself; 'Good old Leroy!'"I'd seen so much of his plans that they remained printed on my brain, and I could—if I would—set that biplane on its wings again almost as easily as if Ihadinvented it."Odd that the Bosches and I both trusted Herter, seeing he must be false to one side or other! But he's that sort of man. And I always take a tip from my own instinct before listening to my reason. Maybe that's why I didn't do badly in my brief career as a flier. Anyhow, I played up to Herter; and I got the job of superintending the reconstruction of poor Harman's damaged machine. It was a lovely job for a prisoner, though they watched me as a German cat would watch an Allied mouse. Herter was nearly always on the spot, however, for he'd made himself responsible for me. Also, he'd offered to pump me about what was best in the air world on my side of the water: how many aeroplanes of different sorts America could turn out insix months, etc. We contrived a cypher on diagrams I made. It was a clever one, but the credit was Herter's."The Bosches were waiting impatiently for my work to be done, in order to try out the machine, and if satisfactory, spawn a brood of their own on the same model. I was equally impatient. I hoped to fly off with the biplane before they had time to copy it!"A wounded Ace of theirs, Anton Hupfer, was for ever hanging round. He was to take up the 'plane when it was ready. But Herter industriously chummed with him, and not for nothing. To Herter was due the 'discovery' of the inventor; and as he boasted experience in flying, he asked the privilege of being Hupfer's companion on the trial trip."The success of this trip would depend even more on the machine's worth as a bomber than on her speed and climbing qualities. It was, therefore, to be undertaken at night, with a full complement of real bombs to drop upon headquarters at Compiègne. Herter had suggested this. Daylight wouldn't have suited for a start."An hour before the appointed time he dashed in upon Hupfer to confide that a sudden suspicion concerning me was troubling him. He had noticed a queer expression on my face as I gave the engine a last look over! If I had done some obscure damage to this so new type of machine, the mechanics might not detect its nature. Herter didn't wish to harm me, if his suspicion was unfounded, he explained, but he proposed a drastic proof of my good faith. I was to be hauled out of bed, and hurried without warning to look at the biplane in her hangar. The mechanics were to be sent outside, there to wait for a signal to open the doors: this to avoid gossip if I was honest after all. Hupfer was to spring it on me that he'd decided to take me up instead of Herter. My face was to be watched as this news was flung at me. If I showed the slightest trace of uneasiness, itwould be a sign that I had played a trick and feared to fall its victim. In that case the 'third degree' was to be applied until I owned up, and could be haled away for punishment."There was just time to carry out this programme, and Hupfer fell for it. Herter had put me wise beforehand, and I knew what to expect. His real plan was to stand behind Hupfer, the Bosch Ace, and bash him on the head with a spanner, while his (Hupfer's) whole attention was fixed on me. We would then undress the fellow. I would take his clothes, and we'd put him into mine. Hupfer's body (stunned, not dead, we hoped) we would lay behind a pile of petrol tins. I acting as pilot, would trust to my disguise and the darkness of night not to be spotted when the two mechanics threw open the hangar doors."Everything happened as we'd arranged, without a hitch—again, all credit to Herter! When we'd hidden the limp Ace, trussed up in my prison rig, Herter yelled to the waiting men, in a good imitation of Hupfer's voice. We ran smoothly out of the hangar, and were given a fine send off. How soon the Bosches found out how they'd been spoofed, I don't know. It couldn't have been long though, as my prison guard was in attendance. The great thing was, we went up in grand style. Otherwise—but we needn't now think of the 'otherwise'!"Our next danger lay in taking the wrong direction, getting farther back in Boschland instead of over the frontier. I kept my wits, fortunately, so that turned out all right. Still, there remained the chance of being shot down by the French, and blown with our own bombs into kingdom come. But, by good luck it was a clear night. No excuse for getting lost! And when I was sure we were well over the French lines, I planed down to alight in a field."The alert was out for us, of course, and a fierce barrage put up, but I flew high till I was ready for a dive. We'd hardly landed, when thepoilusswarmed like bees, but that was what we wanted. You must imagine the scene that followed, till I can tell you by word of mouth!"I shall have made my report, and have been given leave to start for a visit to my family by to-morrow I hope."Yours till the end,"JIM.""Yours till the end!" Rather a smart, cynical way of winding up those "exhibition pages" was it not, Padre? The secret translation of that signature is: "Yours, you brute, till I can get rid of you with least damage to my parents' susceptibilities!"I shall obey, and wait for the interview. It's like waiting to be shot at dawn!CHAPTER XXXIII persuaded Brian to tell Father Beckett. I wasn't worthy. But the dear old man came straight to me, transfigured, to make me go with him to his wife, even before he had finished reading the letter."You must come," he said—and when Father Beckett says "must," in a certain tone, one does. It's then that the resemblance, more in expression than feature, between him and his son shines out like a light. "It will save mother the trouble of asking for you," he went on, dragging me joyously with him, his arm round my waist. "She'd do that, first thing, sure! Why, do you suppose we forget Jim's as much to you as to us? Haven't you shown us that, every day since we met?"What answer could I give? I gave none.Mother Beckett had been lying down for the afternoon nap which by my orders she takes every day. She'd just waked, and was sitting up on the lounge, when her husband softly opened the door to peep in. The only light was firelight, leaping in an open grate."Come in, come in!" she greeted us in her silver tinkle of a voice. "Oh, you didn't disturb me. I was awake. I thought I'd ring for tea. But I didn't after all. I'd had such a beautiful dream, I hated to come out of it.""I bet it was a dream about Jim!" said Father Beckett. He drew me into the room, and the little lady pulled medown beside her on the wide, cushiony lounge. Her husband's special arm-chair was close by, but he didn't subside into it as usual at this cosy hour of the afternoon. Instead, he knelt stiffly down on one knee, and took the tiny, ringed hand held out to him. "You wouldn't think a dream beautiful, unless Jim was in it!""Yes I would, ifyouwere in it, dear," she reproached him. "Or Molly. But Jim was in this dream. I saw him as plainly as I see you both. He walked in at the door, the way he used to do at home, saying: 'Hello, Mother, I've been looking for you everywhere!' You know, Father how you and Jimmy used to feel injured if you called me and I couldn't be found in a minute. In this dream though, we didn't seem to be back home. I wasn't sure where we were: only—I was sure——" She stopped, with a catch in her voice. But Father Beckett took up the sentence where she let it drop. "Sure of Jim?""Yes. He was so real!""Well then, Mother darling, I guess the dream ought not to have been back home, but here, in this very house. For here's where Jim will come.""Oh, I do feel that!" she agreed, trying to "camouflage" a tear with a smile. "Jim's with me all the time.""Not yet," said Father Beckett, with a stolid gentleness. "Not yet. Not the real Jim. But he'll come.""You mean, when Molly and I've finished putting out all his treasures in the den, just as he'd like to see them?""He might come before you get the den ready. He might come—any day now—even to-morrow." The gnarled brown hand smoothed the small, shrivelled white one with nervous strokes and passes."Father!" she sat up suddenly, straight and rigid among her cushions. "You've heard—you're trying to break something to me. Tell me right out. Jim's alive!"She snatched her hand free, and bending forward, flung both arms round the old man's neck before he could answer. I sprang up to give them room. I thought they had forgotten me. But no. Out came Father Beckett's big hand to snatch my dress."This child got the news—a letter," he explained. "The boy was afraid of the shock for us. He thought she——""A shock of joy—why,thatgives life—not death!" sobbed and laughed Mother Beckett. "But it was right to let Molly know first. She's more to him than we are now. Oh, Father—Father—our Jim's alive—alive! I think in my soul I knew it all the time. I never felt he was gone. He must have sent me thoughts. Dear ones, I want to pray. I want to thank God—now, this instant, before I hear more—before I read the letter. We three together—on our knees!"Padre, when I was on my knees, with the thin little arm of Jim's mother thrilling my shoulder, my face hidden in the cushions, I could only say: "God, forgive!" and echo the thanksgiving of those two loving hearts. I didn't pray not to be punished. I almost want to be punished—since Brian is safe, and my punishment can't spoil his future.The patriotic Becketts have given up the big gray car, now they've settled down at the Château d'Andelle: and our one-legged soldier-chauffeur has departed, to conducta military motor. For the moment there's only the O'Farrell Red Cross taxi, not yet gone about its legitimate business; so it was Julian who took Father Beckett to the far-off railway station, to meet Jim Beckett the next day but one—Julian—of all people on earth!Father Beckett begged me to be of the party, and Mother Beckett—too frail still for so long and cold a drive—piled up her persuasions. But I was firm. I didn't like going to meet trains, I said. It was prosaic. I was allowed to stop at home, therefore, with my dear little lady: the last time, I told myself, that she would ever love and "mother" me. Once Jim and I had settled our affairs in that "interview" I was ordered to wait for, I should be the black sheep, turned out of the fold.There was just one reason why I'd have liked to be in the car to bring Jim back from the station. Knowing Julian-Puck, I was convinced that despite Father Beckett's presence he'd contrive a chance to thrust some entering wedge of mischief into Jim Beckett's head. Not that it was needed! If he'd read the first pages of Jim's letter—the secret pages—he would have known that. But the night the great news came to the château, he whispered into my ear: "You seem to be taking things easy. Sure you won't change your mind and bolt with me?—or do you count on your invincible charm, "über alles"?I didn't even answer. I merely looked. Perhaps he took it for a defiant look, though Heaven knows it wasn't. I was past defiance. In any case, such as the look was, it shut him up. And after that the brooding storm behind his eyes made me wonder (when I'd time to think of it) whatcouphe was meditating. There would never be achance like the chance at the station before Jim had met me. Julian was sharp enough, dramatic enough to see that. I pictured him somehow corralling Jim for an instant, while Father Beckett carried on a conversation of signs with a worriedporteuse. Julian would be able to do in an instant as much damage to a character as most men could do in an hour!A little added disgust for me on Jim's part, however, what could it matter? I tried to argue. When a thing is already black, can it be painted blacker?Still, I was foolish enough to wish that our good old one-legged soldier might have stayed to bring Jim home.Mother Beckett would have compelled me to be with her at the open door to meet "our darling boy," but that I could not bear. It would be as trying for him as for me, and I had to spare him the ordeal at any price."Don't make me do that," I begged, with real tears in my voice. "I—I've set my heart on seeing Jim for the first time alone. He wants it too—I know he does."She gazed at me for some long seconds, with the clear blue eyes which seemed—though only seemed!—to read my soul. In reality she saw quite another soul than mine. The darling crystallizes to radiant beauty all souls of those she loves, as objects are crystallized by frost, or by sparkling salt in a salt mine."Well, you must have a good and loving reason, I'm sure. And probably your love has taught you to know better than I can, what Jim would want you to do," she said. "It shall be just as you wish, dear. Only you must grant one little favour in return to please me. You are to waitfor Jim in theden. When his Father and I have hugged and kissed him a few times, and made certain he's not one of my dreams, we'll lead him up to that door, and leave him outside. It shall be my hand that shuts the door when he's gone in. And I shan't tell him one word about the den. It shall be a surprise. But he won't notice a thing until—until you and he have been together for a while, I guess—not even the hobby-horse! He'll see nothing except you, Molly—you!"I implored—I argued—in vain. The making of the den had been her inspiration. It was monstrous that I should have to greet her son there. The pleasure of the den-surprise would be for ever spoilt for Jim. But I couldn't explain that to his mother. I had to yield at last, tongue-tied and miserable beyond words.I haven't described the den to you, Padre. I will do it now, in the pause, the hush, before the storm.It's a quaint room, with a little round tower in each of the two front corners. One of these Mother Beckett has turned into a refuge for broken-down toys, all Jim's early favourites, which he'd never let her throw away: the famous spotted hobby-horse starred in the centre of the stage: oh, but a noble, red-nostrilled beast, whose eternal prance has something of the endless dignity of the Laocoön! The second tower is a miniature library, whose shelves are crowded with the pet books of Jim's boyhood—queer books, some of them, for a child to choose: "Byron," "Letters of Pliny," Plutarch's "Lives," Gibbon's "Rome," "Morte d'Arthur," Maeterlinck's "Life of the Bee," Kingsland's "Scientific Idealism," with several quite learned volumes of astronomy and geology, side by sidewith Gulliver and all kinds of travel and story-books which we have most of us adored. It was I who had the task of sorting and arranging this motley collection, and I can hardly tell you, Padre, how I loved doing it!The room isn't large, so the ten or twelve pictures on the walls are not lost in a desert of bare spaces. These pictures, the toys, the books, tennis-rackets, golf-clubs and two lovely old Persian prayer-rugs are all of Jim's treasures brought to France. He must have been a boy of individual, independent nature, for it seems he disliked the idea of killing things for pleasure, and was never a hunter or even a fisherman. Consequently, there are no monster fish under glass, or rare birds or butterflies, or stuffed animals. He must have loved wild creatures though, for five of the beloved pictures are masterly oil-paintings by well-known artists, of lions and tigers and stags,chez eux, happy and at home, not being hunted, or standing agonized at bay. Oh, getting this den in order has taught me more about the real Jim than a girl can learn about a man in ordinary acquaintance in a year! But then I had a wonderful foundation to begin building upon: that day in the rose-arbour—the red-rose day of my life.Well, when the car was expected back from the station, bringing Jim home to his mother, I went by her command to the den. Even that was better than having to meet him in the presence of those two dear souls who trusted and loved me only second to him. And yet everything in the den which had meant something in Jim's life, seemed to cry out at me, as I shut the door and stood alone with them—and my pounding heart—to wait.I didn't know how to make the time pass. I was toorestless to sit down. I wouldn't let myself look out of the window to see the car come along the drive. I dared not walk up and down like the caged thing I was, lest the floor should creak, for the tower-room—the den—is over the entrance-hall. I felt like a hunted animal—I, the one creature to whom Jim Beckett deliberately meant to be cruel! I, in this room which was a tribute to his kindness of heart, his faithfulness, his loyalty! But why should it not be so? I had no right to call upon these qualities of his.The horn of the little Red Cross taxi! It must be turning in at the gate. How well I knew its gay, conceited tootle! An eighth of a mile, and the car would reach the house. Even the poor worn-out taxi couldn't be five minutes doing that!...If I ran to the window between the towers I could see! No, I wouldn't; Icouldn't. I should scream—or faint—or do something else idiotic, if I saw Jim Beckett getting out of the car, and his mother flying to meet him. I had never felt like this in my whole life—not in any suspense, not in any danger.Instinctively I walked as far from the window as I could. I sought sanctuary under Brian's cathedral picture—the picture that had introduced me to Jim. Yes, sanctuary I sought, for in that room my brother's work was my one excuse to intrude!By this time the car must have arrived. The front door must have flown open in welcome. Now Mother Beckett must be crying tears of joy in the arms of her son, Father Beckett gazing at the blessed sight, speechless with ecstasy!What should I be doing at this moment, if I had yielded to their wish and stopped downstairs with them? Just how far would Jim have gone in keeping up the tragic farce? Would he have kissed me? Would he——?The vision was so blazing bright that I covered my eyes to shut it out. Not that I hated it. Oh no, I loved it too well!So, for a while, I stood, my hands pressed over my eyes, my ears strained to catch distant sounds—yet wishing not to hear. Suddenly, close by, there came the click of a latch. My hands dropped like broken clock weights. I opened my eyes. Jim Beckett was in the room, and the door was shut.
"Toujours Francs-PéronnaisAuront bon jour,Toujours et en tout tempsFrancs-Péronnais auront bon temps,"
"Toujours Francs-PéronnaisAuront bon jour,Toujours et en tout tempsFrancs-Péronnais auront bon temps,"
the girls used to sing in old days as they wove the wonderful linens and tissues of Péronne, or embroidered banners of gorgeous colours to commemorate the saving of the Picard city by Catherine: as Brian repeated to Father Beckett wandering through the ruins redeemed last spring for France by the British. And though Brian's eyes could not see the rubbish-heap where once had soared the citadel he saw through the mystic veil of his blindness many things which others did not see.
It seems that above these marshy flats of the Somme, where the river has wandered away from the hills and disguised itself in shining lakes, gauzy mists always hover. Brian had seen them with bodily eyes, while he was a soldier. Now, with the eyes of his spirit he saw them again, gleaming with the delicate, indescribable colours which only blind eyes can call up to lighten darkness. He saw the fleecy clouds streaming over Péronne like a vast, transparent ghost-banner. He saw on their filmyfolds, as if traced in blue and gold and royal purple, the ever famous scene on the walls when Catherine and her following beat back Nassau's men from the one breach where they might have captured the town. And this mystic banner of the spirit Germans can never capture or desecrate. It will wave over Péronne—what was Péronne, and what will again be Péronne—while the world goes on making history for free men.
After Péronne, Bapaume: the battered corpse of Bapaume, murdered in flame that reddened all the skies of Picardy before the British came to chase the Germans out!
In old times, when a place was destroyed the saying was, "Not one stone is left upon another." But in this war, destruction means an avalanche of stones upon each other. Bapaume as Father Beckett saw it, is a Herculaneum unexcavated. Beneath lie buried countless precious things, and still more precious memories; the feudal grandeur of the old château where Philippe-Auguste married proud Isabelle de Hainaut, with splendid ceremony as long ago as 1180: the broken glory of ancient ramparts, where modern lovers walked till the bugles of August 2, 1914, parted them for ever; the arcaded Town Hall, old as the domination of the Spaniards in Picardy; the sixteenth-century church of St. Nicolas with its quaint Byzantine Virgin of miracles: the statue of Faidherbe who beat back the German wave from Bapaume in 1871: all, all burned and battered, and mingled inextricably with débris of pitiful little homes, nobles' houses, rich shops and tinyboutiques, so that, when Bapaume rises from the dead, she will rise as one—even as France has risen.
Of the halting places on this pilgrimage along the British front, I should best have liked to be with Brian and Father Beckett at Arras. Brian and I were there together you know, Padre, on that happy-go-lucky tramping tour of ours—not long before I met Jim. We both loved Arras, Brian and I, and spent a week there in the most fascinating of ancient hotels. It had been a palace; and I had a huge room, big enough for the bedchamber of a princess (princesses should always have bedchambers, never mere bedrooms!) with long windows draped like the walls and stiff old furniture, in yellow satin. I was frightened when an aged servant with the air of a pontiff ushered me in; for Brian and I were travelling "on the cheap." But Arras, though delicious in its quaint charm, never attracted hordes of ordinary tourists. Consequently one could have yellow satin hangings without being beggared.
Oh, how happy we were in that hotel, and in the adorable old town! While Brian painted in the Grande Place and the Petite Place, and sketched the Abbey of St. Waast (who brought Christianity to that part of the world) I wandered alone. I used to stand every evening till my neck ached, staring up at the beautiful belfry, to watch the swallows chase each other back and forth among the bells, whose peal was music of fairyland. And I never tired of wandering through the arcades under the tall old Flemish houses with their overhanging upper storeys, or peeping into the arcades' cool shadows, from the middle of the sunlit squares.
There were some delightful shops in those arcades, where they sold antique Flemish furniture, queer old pictures showing Arras in her proud, treaty-making days (you knowwhat a great place she was for treaty-making!) and lovely faded tapestries said to be "genuinely" of the time when no one mentioned a piece of tapestry save as an "arras." But the shop I haunted was a cake-shop. It was called "Au Cœur d'Arras," because the famous speciality of Arras was a heart-shaped cake; but I wasn't lured there so much by the charm ofles cœursas by that of the person who sold them.
I dare say I described her to you in letters, or when I got back to England after that trip. The most wonderful old lady who ever lived! She didn't welcome her customers at all. She just sat and knitted. She had an architectural sort of face, framed with a crust of snow—I mean, a frilled cap! And if one furtively stared, she looked at one down her nose, and made one feel cheap and small as if one had snored, or hiccupped out aloud in a cathedral! But it seems I won her esteem by enquiring if "les cœurs d'Arras" had a history. Nobody else had ever shown enough intelligence to care! So she gave me the history of the cakes, and of everything else in Arras; also, before we went away, she escorted Brian and me into a marvellous cellar beneath her shop. It went down three storeys and had fireplaces and a well! The earth under La Grande Place was honeycombed with suchsouterrains, she said. They'd once been quarries, in days so old as to be forgotten—quarries of "tender stone" (what a nice expression!), and the people of Arras had cemented and made them habitable in case of bombardment. They must have been useful in 1914!
As for the cakes, they were invented by an abbess who was sent to Spain. Before reluctantly departing, shegave the recipe to her successor, saying she "left her heart in Arras." According to the legend (the old shop-lady assured me) a girl who had never loved was certain to fall in love within a month after first eating a Heart of Arras. Well, Padre, I ate almost a hundred hearts, and less than a month after I met Jim!
You may believe that I asked Brian and Father Beckett a dozen questions at once about dear Arras. But alas, alas! all the answers were sad.
The beautiful belfry? Only a phantom remaining. The Hôtel de Ville? Smashed. La Grande Place—La Petite Place? Stone quarries above ground as well as below, the old Flemish façades crumbled like sheets of barley sugar. The arcades? Ruined. The charming old shops? Vanished. The seller of Hearts? Dead. But the Hearts—theystill existed! The children of Arras who have come back "since the worst was over" (that is their way of putting it!) would not feel that life was life without the Arras Hearts. Besides, Arras without the Hearts would be like the Altar of the Vestal Virgins without the ever-burning lamp. So they are still baked, and still eaten, those brave little Hearts of Arras—and Brian asked Father Beckett to bring me a box.
They bought it of a cousin of my old woman, an ancient man who had lurked in a cellar during the whole of the bombardment. He said that all Arras knew, in September, 1914, how the Kaiser had vowed to march into the town in triumph, and how, when he found the place as hard to take "as quicksilver is to grasp," he revenged himself by destroying its best-beloved treasures. He must have rejoiced that July day of 1915, when Wolff's Agency wasable to announce at last, that the Abbey of St. Waast and its museum were in flames!
As the gray car bumped on to Bethune, Vimy Ridge floated blue in the far distance, to the right of the road, and Father Beckett and Brian took off their hats to it. Still farther away, and out of sight lay Lens, in German possession, but practically encircled by the British. The Old Contemptible had been there, and described the town as having scarcely a roof left, but being an "ant heap" of Boches, who swarm in underground shelters bristling with machine guns. Between Lens and the road stood the celebrated Colonne de Condé, showing where the prince won his great victory over Spain; and farther on, within gun-sound distance though out of sight, lay Loos, on the Canal de l'Haute Deule. Who thinks nowadays of its powerful Cistercian Abbey, that dominated the country round? Who thinks twice, when travelling this Appian Way which Germany has given France, of any history which began or ended before the year 1914?
Bethune they found still existing as a town. It has been bombarded often but not utterly destroyed, and from there they ran out four miles to Festubert, because the little that the Germans have left of the thirteenth-century church and village, burns with an eternal flame of interest.
Bethune itself was a famous fortress once, full of history and legend: but isn't the whole country in its waste and ruin, like a torn historic banner, crusted with jewels—magic jewels, which cannot be stolen by enemy hands?
On the way to Ypres—crown and climax of the tour—the car passed Lillers and Hazebrouck, places never to be forgotten by hearts that beat in the battles of Flanders.Then came the frontier at Steenwoorde; and they were actually in Belgium, passing Poperinghe to Ypres, the most famous British battleground of the war.
When Brian was fighting, and when you were on earth, Padre, everyone talked about the "Ypres Salient." Now, though for soldiers Ypres will always be the "salient" since the battle of Wytschaete Ridge, thematerialsalient has vanished. Yet the same trenches exist, in the same gray waste which Brian used to paint in those haunting, impressionist war sketches of his that all London talked about, after the Regent Street exhibition that he didn't even try for leave to see! The critics spoke of the mysterious, spiritual quality of his work, which gave "without sentimentality" picturesqueness to the shell-holes and mud, the shattered trees and wooden crosses, under eternally dreaming skies.
Well, Brian tells me that going back as a blind man to the old scenes, he had a strange, thrilling sense ofseeingthem—seeing more clearly than before those effects of mysterious beauty, hovering with prophecy above the squalor of mud and blood, hovering and mingling as the faint light of dawn mingles, at a certain hour, with the shadows of night. People used to call his talent a "blend of vision with reality." Now, all that is left him is "vision"—vision of the spirit. But with help—I used to think it would bemyhelp: now I realize it will be Dierdre's—who knows what extraordinary things my blind Brian may accomplish? His hope is so beautiful, and so strong, that it has lit an answering flame of hope in me.
He and I were in Ypres for a few days, just about the time I was wondering why "Jim Wyndham" didn't keephis promise to find me again. It was in Ypres, I remember, that I came across the box of "Cœurs d'Arras" I'd brought with me. Opening it, I recalled the legend about a girl who has never loved, falling in love within a month after first eating an Arras Heart. It was then I said to myself, "Why, it hascome true! I have fallen in love with Jim Wyndham—andhe has forgotten me!"
Oh, Padre, how that pain comes back to me now, in the midst of the new pain, like the "core of the brilliance within the brilliance!" Which hurt is worse, to love a man, and believe oneself forgotten, or to love and know one has been loved, and then become unworthy? I can't be sure. I can't even be sure that, if I could, I would go back to being the old self before I committed the one big sin of my life, which gave me Jim's father and mother, and the assurance thathe had cared. For a while, after Mother Beckett told me about Jim's love for "The Girl," in spite of my wickedness I glowed with a kind of happiness. I felt that, through all the years of my life—even when I grew old—Jim would bemine, young, handsome, gay, just as I had seen him on the Wonderful Day: that I could always run away from outside things and shut the gate of the garden on myself and Jim—that rose-garden on the border of Belgium. Now, when I know—or almost know—that he will come back in the flesh to despise me, and that the gate of the garden will be forever shut—why, I shall be punished as perhaps no woman has ever been punished before. Still—stillI can't be sure that I would escape, if I could, by going back to my old self!
It is writing of Belgium, and my days there with Brianwhile I still hoped to see Jim, that brings all these thoughts crowding so thickly to my mind, they seem to drip off my pen!
But what a different Ypres Father Beckett has now seen, and Brianfelt, from that dear, pleasant Ypres into which we two drove in a cart, along a cobbled causeway as straight as a tight-drawn string! Tourists who loved the blue, and yellow, and red bath-houses on the golden beach of Ostend, didn't worry to motor over the bumpy road, through the Flemish plain to Ypres. The war was needed to bring its sad fame to "Wipers!" But Brian and I interrupted our walking tour with that cart, because we knew that the interminable causeway would take us deep into the inner quaintness of Flanders. We adored it all: and at every stopping-place on the twenty-mile road, I had the secret joy of whispering; "Perhaps it isherethat He will suddenly appear, and meet us!"
There was one farmhouse on the way, where I longed to have him come. I wanted him so much that I almostcreatedhim! I was listening every moment, and through every sound, for his car. It never came. But because I so wished the place to be a background for our meeting I can see the two large living-rooms of the old house, with the black-beamed ceilings, the Flemish stoves, the tall, carved sideboards and chests with armorial bearings, the deep window-seats that were flower-stands and work-tables combined, and the shelves of ancient pottery and gleaming, antique brass. There was a comfortable fragrance of new-baked bread, mingling with the spicy scent of grass-pinks, in that house: and the hostess who gave us luncheon—a young married woman—had a mild,sweet face, strongly resembling that of St. Geneviève of Brabant, as pictured in a coloured lithograph on the wall.
St. Geneviève's story is surely the most romantic, the most pathetic of any saint who ever deigned to tread on earth!—and her life and death might serve as an allegory of Belgium's martyrdom, poor Belgium, the little country whose patron she is. Since that day at the farmhouse on the road to Ypres, I've thought often of the gentle face with its forget-me-not eyes and golden hair; and of Golo the dark persecutor who—they say now—was arealperson and an ancestor of the Hohenzollerns through the first Duc de Bavière.
At Ypres, Brian painted for me a funny "imagination picture" imitating earliest Flemish work. It showed Ypres when there was no town save a few tiny houses and a triangular stronghold, with a turret at each corner, built on a little island in the river Yperlee. He named the picture "The Castle of the Three Strong Towers," and dated it in the year 900. A thousand years have passed since then. Slowly, after much fighting (the British fought as hard to take Ypres once, as they fight to save it now), the town grew great and powerful, and became the capital of Flanders. The days of the rough earthen stockades and sharp thorn-bush defences of "Our Lady of the Enclosures" passed on to the days of casemates and moats; and still on, to the days when the old fortifications could be turned into ornamental walks—days of quaintly beautiful architecture, such as Brian and I saw before the war, when we spent hours in the Grand' Place, admiring the wonderful Cloth Hall and the Spanish-looking Nieuwerck.The people of Ypres told us proudly that nothing in Bruges itself, or anywhere in Flanders, could compare with those noble buildings massed together at the west end of the Grand' Place, each stone of which represented so much wealth of the richest merchant kings of Europe.
And now, the work of those thousand busy years has crumbled in a few monstrous months, like the sand-houses of children when the tide comes in! What Father Beckett saw of Ypres after three years' bombardment, was not much more than that shown in Brian's picture, dated 900! A blackened wall or two and a heap of rubble where stood theHalle des Drapiers—pride of Ypres since the thirteenth century—its belfry, its statues, its carvings, its paintings, all vanished like the contours and colours of a sunset cloud. The cathedral is a skeleton. Hardly a pointed gable is left to tell where the quaint and prosperous houses once grouped cosily together. Ypres the town is a mourner draped in black with the stains of fire which killed its beauty and joy. But there is a glory that can never be killed, a glory above mere beauty, as a living soul is above the dead body whence it has risen. That glory is Ypres. She is a ghost, but she is an inspiration, a name of names, a jewel worth dying for—"worth giving a man's eyes for," Brian says!
"Has your brother told you about the man we met at the Visitors' Château?" asked Father Beckett, when between the two men—and my reminiscences—the story of the tour was finished with those last words of Brian's.
"No, I haven't told her yet," Brian answered for me.
My nerves jumped. I scarcely knew what I expected tohear. "Not Doctor Paul Herter?" I exclaimed—and was surprised to hear on my own lips the name so constantly in my mind.
"Well, that's queer she should speak ofhim, isn't it, Brian? How did you come to think of Herter?" Father Beckett wanted to know.
"Wasit he?" I insisted.
"No. But—you'd better tell her, Brian. I guess you'll have to."
"There isn't much to tell, really," Brian said. "It was only that oculist chap Herter told you about—Dr. Henri Chrevreuil. He's been working at the front, as you know: lately it's been the British front; and they'd taken him in at the château for a few days' rest. We met him there and talked of his friend—your friend, Molly—Doctor Paul."
"What did he say about your eyes?" Dierdre almost gasped. (I should not have ventured to put the question suddenly, and before people. I should have been too afraid of the answer. But her nickname is "Dare!") "He must have said something, or Mr. Beckett wouldn't have spoken so. Hedidlook at your eyes—didn't he? He would, for Herter's sake."
"Yes, he did look at them," Brian admitted. "He didn't say much."
"But what—what?"
"He said: 'Wait, and—see.'"
"And see!" Dierdre echoed.
The same thought was in all our minds. As I gazed mutely at Brian, he gave me the most beautiful smile of his life. He must have felt that I was looking at him, or hewould not so have smiled. Let Jim hate and—punish me when he comes back, and drive me out of Paradise! Wherever I may go, there will be the reflection of that smile and the thought behind it. How can I be unhappy, if Brian need only wait, to see?
Padre, my mind is like a thermometer exposed every minute to a different temperature, but always high or low—never normal.
To tell, or not to tell, Father Beckett what the man I didn't see said about Jim—or rather, what Julian O'Farrell said that he said! This has been the constant question; but the thermometer invariably flies up or down, far from the answer-point.
When our men came back to Amiens, I almost hoped that Puck would do his worst—carry out his threat and "give me away" to Father Beckett. In that case I should at least have been relieved from responsibility. But Puck didn't. In my heart I had known all along that he would not.
If I could have felt for a whole minute at a time that it would be fair to wake hopes which mightn't be fulfilled, out would have burst the secret. But whenever I'd screwed up my courage to speak, Something would remind me: "Herter sent word that there might be a message from Switzerland. Better wait till it comes, for he wasn't sure of his facts. He may have been misled." Or, when I'd decidednotto speak, another Something would say: "Jim is alive. Youknowhe is alive! Herter is helping him to escape. Don't let these dear old people suffer a minute longer than they need."
But—well—so far I have waited. A week has passed since I wrote at Amiens. We have arrived at Jim's château—the little, quaint, old Château d'Andelle, with thick stone walls, black-beamed ceilings, and amusing towers, set in the midst of an enchanted forest of Normandy. No wonder he fell in love with the place before the war, and wanted to live there! It must have seemed an impossible dream at the time, for the owners (the château has been in the same family for generations) had money in those days, and wouldn't have let their home to strangers. The war has made all the difference. They couldn't afford to keep up the place, and were eager to let. Beckett money is a boon to them, so everyone is satisfied. The agents in Paris secured two or three extra servants to help the old pair left in the house as caretakers; and there is a jewel of a maid for Mother Beckett—a Belgian refugette. I shall give her some training as a nurse, and by and by I shall be able to fade away in peace. Already I'm beginning to prepare my dear lady's mind for a parting. I talk of my hospital work, and drop hints that I'm only on leave—that Brian's hopes and Father Beckett's splendid new-born plan for him, will permit me to take up duty again soon.
The plan developed on the trip: but I'm sure the first inspiration came from Mother Beckett. While she was ill, she did nothing but lie and think of things to do for other people. And she was determined to make it possible for Brian to have a love story of his own, provided he wanted one. It only needed Father Beckett's practical brain and unlimited purse to turn her vague suggestion into a full-grown plan. A whole block of buildings onthe outskirts of Paris, let as apartment houses, is to be bought by Mr. Beckett, for the use of blinded soldiers. Already his agents have got the refusal of the property for him; and with a few changes such as knocking down inner walls and putting in doors where doors don't exist, the houses will become one big mansion, to accommodate five or six hundred men. Each will have his own bedroom or cubicle. There'll be a gymnasium, with a Swedish instructor, and every trade or profession in which a blind man could possibly engage will be taught by experts. There will be a big dining hall with a musicians' gallery, and a theatre. The library will be supplied with quantities of books for the blind. There'll be a garden where the men will be taught to grow flowers and vegetables. They will have a resident doctor, and two superintendents. One of these two will himself be a blind man taught by his own experience how to teach others. Of course, Padre, you know that this blind teacher is already chosen, and that the whole scheme centers round him!
In a way Brian realizes that, if it were not for him, it would never have been thought of. In a way. But—it ishisway. He doesn't torture himself, as I probably should in his place, by thinking: "All these immense sums of money being spent as an excuse to provide for me in life! Ought I to let it be done? Ought I to accept?"
Brian's way is not that. He says: "Now I understand why I lost my eyesight, and it's worth it a thousand times. This wonderful chance is to be given me to help others, as I never could have helped if I hadn't been blind. If sight comes back, I shall know what it is to be blind, and I can give counsel and courage to others. I am glad, glad tobe blind. It's a privilege and a mission. Even if I never see again, except with my spirit's eyes, I shall still be glad!"
He doesn't worry at all because carrying out the plan will cost Father Beckett one or more of his millions. What is money for, except to be spent? What pleasure is like spending to do good? He finds it quite natural that Father Beckett wants to do this thing; and though he's immensely grateful, he takes it blithely for granted that the benefactor should be happy and proud.
Travelling back from Ypres to Amiens they seem to have settled all the details between them, though they told us their adventures before even mentioning the Plan. Brian is to be guide, philosopher, and friend to the inmates and students of the James Wyndham Beckett College for the Blind. Also he is to give lectures on art and various other subjects. If he can learn to paint his blind impressions (as he believes he can, with Dierdre's promised help) he will be able to teach other blind artists to follow his example. And he is to have a salary for his services—not the big one Father Beckett wished: Brian wouldn't hear of that—but enough to live on. And Dierdre and Julian are offered official positions and salaries too. It's suggested that they should take a flat near by the College, within easy walking distance. Dierdre is to entertain the blind men with recitations, and teach the art of reciting to those who wish to learn. Julian is to sing and play for the men in the house-theatre, once or twice a week, as he can spare time from his work with De Letzski. Also he will give one lesson a week in singing and voice production.
Both the O'Farrells are to be well paid (no trouble inpersuading Julian to accept generous proposals for himself and his sister; for him the labourer is indeed worthy of his hire): and with American dash and money the scheme is expected to be in working order by next June. It's now well into November. But after seeing how other schemes have worked, and how this Château d'Andelle business has been rushed through, I have the most sublime faith in Beckett miracles.
They are astonishing, these Becketts! Father, the simplest, kindest man, with the air of liking his fireside better than any adventure: Mother, a slip of a creature—"a flower in a vase to be kept by her menfolk on a high shelf," as I told myself when I first saw her. Yet what adventures they have had, and what they have accomplished since the day Brian proposed this pilgrimage, two months ago! Not a town on our route that, after the war won't have cause to bless them and the son in whose name their good works have been done—cause to bless Beckett kindness, Beckett money for generations in the future! Yet now they have added this most ambitious plan of all to the list, and I know it will be carried out to perfection.
You see now, Padre, from what I've told you, how easy it is being made for me to slip out of this circle. Brian, beaming with happiness, and on the point of opening his heart to Dierdre's almost worshipping love: Mother Beckett slowly getting back a measure of frail, flower-like health, in this lovely place which she calls Jim's: Father Beckett more at ease about her, and intensely interested in his scheme: the small, neat Belgian refugette likely to prove at least a ministering mouse if not a ministering angel: above all, hope if not certainty that Jim will oneday return—not only in spirit but in body—to his château and his family. If I am needed anywhere on earth, it isn't here, but down in the south at my poor Hôpital des Épidémies. Would it be cowardly in me to fly, as soon as I've persuaded the Becketts to spare me, and throw the responsibility I haven't dared decide to take, upon my brave, blind Brian?
Ah, I don't mean telling him about myself and my sins. I shouldn't have the courage for that, I fear! I mean, shall I tell him about Doctor Paul's message—orsupposedmessage? It has just occurred to me that I might do this, and let Brian decide whether Father Beckett ought to know, even if no further news comes through Switzerland. You see, if I were gone, and Jim came, I could trust the new Dierdre to do her best for me with Brian. He could never respect me, never love me in the old way—but he might forgive, because of Dierdre herself—and because of the great Plan. Hasn't my wickedness given them both to him?
Writing all this to you has done me good, Padre. I see more clearly ahead. I shall decide before morning what to do. I feel Ishallthis time! And I think it a good idea to speak to Brian. He will agree, though he doesn't know my secret need to escape, that it's right for me to take up hospital work again. But, Padre, I can't go—Iwon'tgo—until I've helped Mother Beckett arrange Jim's treasures in the room to be called his "den." She has been living for that, striving to grow strong enough for that. And I—oh, Padre!—I want to be the one to unpack his things and to touch each one with my hands. I want to leave something of myself in that room where, if he's dead,his spirit will surely come: where, if he lives, his body will come. If I leave behind me thoughts of love, won't they linger between those walls like the scent of roses in a vase? Mayn't those thoughts influence Jim Beckett not to detest me as I deserve?
Five days later.
I did talk to Brian, Padre, and he said, better wait and give the letter from Switzerland a fair chance to arrive, before telling Father Beckett about Doctor Paul's messenger at Amiens.
Now I have had a letter, but not from Switzerland. I shall fold it up between the pages of this book of my confessions. I believe you will read it, Padre.
It came to-day. It explains itself. The envelope, postmarked Paris, was addressed to me in typewriting. If Mother Beckett had not had a slight relapse from working too hard in the den, I might perhaps have been gone before the letter came. Then it would have had to be forwarded. It's better that I stayed. You will see why. But—oh, Padre, Padre!
THE LETTER"Miss O'Malley,"Once I met a lady whose name, as I understood it, was not unlike yours now, given me by Doctor Paul Herter. I cannot think that you and she are one. That lady, I'd swear, would be incapable of—let me say, placing herself in a false position."Though you will not recognize my handwriting, I've said enough for you to guess that James Wyndham Beckett is your correspondent. I have had the address typed because, for my parents' sake and to spare them distress, it seems that you and Imust reach some understanding before I venture to let them know that I'm alive."If you are worthy to be called 'friend' by such a man as Paul Herter, you will wish to atone for certain conduct, by carrying out the request I make now. I must trust you to do so. But first let me relieve my mind of any fear for yourself. I have not contradicted the story you told Herter about our engagement. What I shall say to my parents when I meet them, as I hope soon to do, depends upon circumstances. Till you and I have had a private conversation, you will oblige me by letting things remain as they are. I have strong reasons for this wish. One of them—the only one I need explain now, is that it will seem natural to them I should write to my fiancée—a young, strong girl able to bear the shock of a great surprise—asking her to break the news gently and tactfully to my father and mother. I do ask you to do this. How to do it I must leave to you. But when you've told my parents that I'm alive, that I've escaped, that I'm in Paris with Herter, that as soon as my official business of reporting myself is finished, I'll get leave, you may put into their hands the following pages of this letter. They will not think it strange that the girl I am engaged to should keep the first part for her own eyes. Thus, without your being compromised, they will learn my adventures without having to wait until I come. But there's just room enough left on this first sheet to reiterate that, when Herter found me, and gave me the somewhat disconcerting news of my engagement to his friend, a Miss O'Malley travelling with my parents, I—simply listened. Rather than excite his suspicions I did not even yield to curiosity, and try to draw out a description. I could not be sure then that I should ever see you, or my people, for escape was difficult and there were more chances against than for my getting out of Germany alive. Now, in all human certainty I shall arrive at the Château d'Andelle (I got the addressat the bank), and you owe it to me to remain on the spot till we can thrash out our affair together. I will begin on anewsheet the story of the last few months since my capture. You must forgive me if it bores you. In reality it is for my parents, when you have prepared their minds, and I don't think it will bore them...."We came a bad cropper. I was thrown clear of the machine, but knew nothing until I waked up, feeling like a bag of broken bones. It was night, and I saw a huge fountain of red flame and a lot of dark figures like silhouettes moving between it and me. That brought me out of my stupor. I knew my plane must have taken fire as it crashed down, and I was pretty sure the silhouettes were Germans. I looked around for my observer, and called to him in a low voice, hoping the Bosch wouldn't hear, over the noise of the fire. Nobody answered. Later I found out that the poor chap had been caught under the car. I pray he died before the flames reached him!"As I got my wits back, I planned to try and hide myself under some bushes I could see not far off, till the coast was clear; but I couldn't move. I seemed to be thoroughly smashed up, and began to think it was the end of thingsici-basfor me. After a while I must have fainted. By and by I had a dream of jolting along through a blazing desert, on the back of a lame camel. It was rather fierce, that jolting! It shook me out of my faint, and when I opened my eyes it was to find myself on a stretcher carried by fellows in German gray. They took me to a field hospital, and I guessed by the look of things that it was close to the first lines. It made me sick to think how near I must be to our own front—yet so far!"Well, I won't be long-winded about what happened next. I can go into details when we meet. It turned out that I had a leg, an arm, and some ribs smashed. The Bosch surgeon wasn't half bad, as Bosches go, but he was a bit brusque. Iheard him say right out to the anæsthetist, it seemed a pity to waste good ether on me, as there wasn't one chance in five to save my life. Still, I'd be an experiment! Before I went off under the stuff I told them who I was, for I'd heard they were sometimes fairly decent to enemy aviators, and I hoped to get a message through to my people. I was feeling as stupid as an owl, but I did think I saw a change come over the men's faces when they heard my name. Later, putting two and two together, I concluded that Germany was just the kind of business nation to know all about the dear old Governor. I might have realized that, out of sheer spite against the United States for bursting into the war, they'd enjoy letting a man of James Beckett Senior's importance go on believing his son was dead. I bet they put my name over the grave of my poor, burned pal, Hank Lee! It would be the thoroughgoing sort of thing they do, when they make up their minds to create an impression."I didn't die, though! Spite for spite, I got well. But it took some time. One of my lungs had been damaged a bit by a broken rib, and the doctors prescribed an open-air cure, after I'd begun to crawl again. I was put with a lot of T. B.'s, if you know what that means, in a camp hospital. Not far off was a huge 'camouflaged' aerodrome and a village of hangars. I heard that flying men were being trained there. I used to think I'd give my head to get to the place, but I never hoped to do it—till Herter came."Now I will tell you how he came—which I can freely do, as we are both safe in Paris, having come from somewhere near Compiègne. One of the first things Herter said about you was that you must have guessed where he was going, and more or less for what purpose. For that purpose he was the ideal man: a Lorrainer of Germanized Lorraine; German his native tongue—(though he hates it)—and clever as Machiavelli. He "escaped" from France into Germany, told a tale about killinga French sentry and creeping across No Man's Land at night, in order to get to the German lines. It was a big risk, but Herter is as brave and resourceful a man as I ever met. He got the Bosches to believe that he was badly ill in Paris when the war broke out and couldn't slip away, otherwise he'd have sprung to do his loyal duty to the Fatherland. He persuaded them that his lot being cast in France for the time, he'd resolved to serve Germany by spying, until he could somehow bolt across the frontier. He spun a specious tale about pretending to the French to have French sympathies, and winning the confidence of high-up men, by serving as a surgeon on several fronts. To prove his German patriotism he had notes to show, realistically made on thin silk paper, and hidden inside the lining of his coat."Herter's mission in Boschland isn't my business or yours; but I'm allowed to say that it was concerned with aeroplanes. There was something he had to find out, and hehasfound it out, or he wouldn't be back on this side of the lines. Because he hoped to be among German flying-men, he hinted to you that he might be able to do you some service. It occurred to him that he might learn where my grave was and let you know. Nothing further was in his thoughts then—or until he happened to draw out a piece of unexpected information in a roundabout way."His trick of getting across to the flying-men was smart, like all his tricks. The valuable (?) notes he'd brought into Germany mostly concerned new French and American inventions in that line. That was his 'speciality.' And when he had handed the notes over with explanations, he continued his programme by asking for a job as surgeon in a field hospital. (You see, he hoped to get back to France before the worthlessness of his notes was discovered.) When he'd proved his qualifications, he got his job like a shot. They were only too glad of his services. Pretending to have been in American training-camps, it was easy to bring up my name in a casual way. Laughing that rather sinister laugh of his, which you will remember, Herter told a couple of flying chaps he had promised a girl to find Jim Beckett's grave. One of the fellows laughed too, and made a remark which set Herter thinking. Later, he was able to refer to the subject again, and learned enough to suspect that there was something fishy about the Bosch announcement of my death and burial. He tells me that, at this point, he was able to send you a verbal message by a consumptive prisoner about to be repatriated. Whether you got that message or not who knows?"His idea was to send another (in a way he won't explain even to me) when he'd picked up further news. But as things turned out, there was no time. Besides, it wasn't necessary. It looked hopeful that we might be our own carrier pigeons, or else—cease to exist."What happened was that Herter heard I was alive and in a hospital not far behind the lines. Just at this time he had got hold of the very secret he'd come to seek. The sooner he could make a dash for home the better: but if possible, he wished to take me with him. He had the impression that to do so would please his friend Miss O'Malley! How it was to be worked he didn't see until an odd sort of American bombing machine fell, between an aerodrome it had attempted to destroy, and Herter's hospital. They knew it was American, only because of its two occupants, both killed. The machine was considerably smashed up, but experts found traces of something amazingly novel, which they couldn't understand. Herter was called to the scene, because he had pretended to be up in the latest American flying 'stunts.' The minute he saw the wreckage an inspiration jumped into his head."He confessed himself puzzled by the mysterious details, thought them important, and said: 'It seems to me thisresembles the engine and wings of the James Beckett invention I heard so much about. But I didn't know it was far enough ahead yet to be in use. A pity the inventor was killed. He might have come in handy."Well, they put those words in their pipes and smoked them—knowing, of course, that I was very much alive and almost within a stone's throw."I had always pretended not to understand German: thought ignorance of the language might serve my plans some day or other. The chap they sent to fetch me dropped a few words to a doctor in my hearing. And so, though I wasn't told where I was being taken or why I was to go, I'd about caught on to the fact that I was supposed to have invented the plans for a new bombing biplane. That made me wonder if a friend was at work under the rose: and I was ready for anything when I got to the scene of the smash."Fortunately, none of the Bosches on the spot could speak English fluently, and I appeared more of a fool at French than German. Herter—entirely trusted by his German pals—was told off to talk English with me; and a flash of his eye said,herewas the friend! It was only a flash, and I couldn't be sure, but it put me on thequi vive. I noticed that in asking me the question he was told to ask, he emphasized certain words which needed no emphasis, and spoke them slowly, with a look that made me determine to fix each one in my mind. This I did, and putting them together when I got the chance, I made out, 'I want to get you home. Say you invented this model, and could put the thing in working trim.'"That was a big order! If I said it and could keep my word, would it be a patriotic job to present the enemy with a perfectly good machine, of a new make, in the place of a wreck they didn't understand? This was my first thought. But the second reminded me of a sentence I'd constructed with some ofthe emphasized words; 'I want to get you home.' How did he expect to get me home—if not by air?"With that I caught a glimpse of the plan, as one sometimes catches sight of the earth through a break in massed clouds when flying. If the man meant to help me, I would help him. If he turned out a fraud, the Germans shouldn't profit by his treachery I'd stop that game at the last moment, if I died for it!"You will know nothing about the new and curious bombing biplane of super-speed invented by Leroy Harman of Galbraith, Texas. But Father knows as much as any one not an expert in aeronautics can know. When the Government wouldn't believe in Harman, Father financed him by my advice. I left home for France before the trial machine that was to convince officialdom had come into being; and I didn't even know whether it had made good. But the minute I saw what lay on the ground, surrounded by a ring of Germans, I said to myself; 'Good old Leroy!'"I'd seen so much of his plans that they remained printed on my brain, and I could—if I would—set that biplane on its wings again almost as easily as if Ihadinvented it."Odd that the Bosches and I both trusted Herter, seeing he must be false to one side or other! But he's that sort of man. And I always take a tip from my own instinct before listening to my reason. Maybe that's why I didn't do badly in my brief career as a flier. Anyhow, I played up to Herter; and I got the job of superintending the reconstruction of poor Harman's damaged machine. It was a lovely job for a prisoner, though they watched me as a German cat would watch an Allied mouse. Herter was nearly always on the spot, however, for he'd made himself responsible for me. Also, he'd offered to pump me about what was best in the air world on my side of the water: how many aeroplanes of different sorts America could turn out insix months, etc. We contrived a cypher on diagrams I made. It was a clever one, but the credit was Herter's."The Bosches were waiting impatiently for my work to be done, in order to try out the machine, and if satisfactory, spawn a brood of their own on the same model. I was equally impatient. I hoped to fly off with the biplane before they had time to copy it!"A wounded Ace of theirs, Anton Hupfer, was for ever hanging round. He was to take up the 'plane when it was ready. But Herter industriously chummed with him, and not for nothing. To Herter was due the 'discovery' of the inventor; and as he boasted experience in flying, he asked the privilege of being Hupfer's companion on the trial trip."The success of this trip would depend even more on the machine's worth as a bomber than on her speed and climbing qualities. It was, therefore, to be undertaken at night, with a full complement of real bombs to drop upon headquarters at Compiègne. Herter had suggested this. Daylight wouldn't have suited for a start."An hour before the appointed time he dashed in upon Hupfer to confide that a sudden suspicion concerning me was troubling him. He had noticed a queer expression on my face as I gave the engine a last look over! If I had done some obscure damage to this so new type of machine, the mechanics might not detect its nature. Herter didn't wish to harm me, if his suspicion was unfounded, he explained, but he proposed a drastic proof of my good faith. I was to be hauled out of bed, and hurried without warning to look at the biplane in her hangar. The mechanics were to be sent outside, there to wait for a signal to open the doors: this to avoid gossip if I was honest after all. Hupfer was to spring it on me that he'd decided to take me up instead of Herter. My face was to be watched as this news was flung at me. If I showed the slightest trace of uneasiness, itwould be a sign that I had played a trick and feared to fall its victim. In that case the 'third degree' was to be applied until I owned up, and could be haled away for punishment."There was just time to carry out this programme, and Hupfer fell for it. Herter had put me wise beforehand, and I knew what to expect. His real plan was to stand behind Hupfer, the Bosch Ace, and bash him on the head with a spanner, while his (Hupfer's) whole attention was fixed on me. We would then undress the fellow. I would take his clothes, and we'd put him into mine. Hupfer's body (stunned, not dead, we hoped) we would lay behind a pile of petrol tins. I acting as pilot, would trust to my disguise and the darkness of night not to be spotted when the two mechanics threw open the hangar doors."Everything happened as we'd arranged, without a hitch—again, all credit to Herter! When we'd hidden the limp Ace, trussed up in my prison rig, Herter yelled to the waiting men, in a good imitation of Hupfer's voice. We ran smoothly out of the hangar, and were given a fine send off. How soon the Bosches found out how they'd been spoofed, I don't know. It couldn't have been long though, as my prison guard was in attendance. The great thing was, we went up in grand style. Otherwise—but we needn't now think of the 'otherwise'!"Our next danger lay in taking the wrong direction, getting farther back in Boschland instead of over the frontier. I kept my wits, fortunately, so that turned out all right. Still, there remained the chance of being shot down by the French, and blown with our own bombs into kingdom come. But, by good luck it was a clear night. No excuse for getting lost! And when I was sure we were well over the French lines, I planed down to alight in a field."The alert was out for us, of course, and a fierce barrage put up, but I flew high till I was ready for a dive. We'd hardly landed, when thepoilusswarmed like bees, but that was what we wanted. You must imagine the scene that followed, till I can tell you by word of mouth!"I shall have made my report, and have been given leave to start for a visit to my family by to-morrow I hope."Yours till the end,"JIM."
THE LETTER
"Miss O'Malley,
"Once I met a lady whose name, as I understood it, was not unlike yours now, given me by Doctor Paul Herter. I cannot think that you and she are one. That lady, I'd swear, would be incapable of—let me say, placing herself in a false position.
"Though you will not recognize my handwriting, I've said enough for you to guess that James Wyndham Beckett is your correspondent. I have had the address typed because, for my parents' sake and to spare them distress, it seems that you and Imust reach some understanding before I venture to let them know that I'm alive.
"If you are worthy to be called 'friend' by such a man as Paul Herter, you will wish to atone for certain conduct, by carrying out the request I make now. I must trust you to do so. But first let me relieve my mind of any fear for yourself. I have not contradicted the story you told Herter about our engagement. What I shall say to my parents when I meet them, as I hope soon to do, depends upon circumstances. Till you and I have had a private conversation, you will oblige me by letting things remain as they are. I have strong reasons for this wish. One of them—the only one I need explain now, is that it will seem natural to them I should write to my fiancée—a young, strong girl able to bear the shock of a great surprise—asking her to break the news gently and tactfully to my father and mother. I do ask you to do this. How to do it I must leave to you. But when you've told my parents that I'm alive, that I've escaped, that I'm in Paris with Herter, that as soon as my official business of reporting myself is finished, I'll get leave, you may put into their hands the following pages of this letter. They will not think it strange that the girl I am engaged to should keep the first part for her own eyes. Thus, without your being compromised, they will learn my adventures without having to wait until I come. But there's just room enough left on this first sheet to reiterate that, when Herter found me, and gave me the somewhat disconcerting news of my engagement to his friend, a Miss O'Malley travelling with my parents, I—simply listened. Rather than excite his suspicions I did not even yield to curiosity, and try to draw out a description. I could not be sure then that I should ever see you, or my people, for escape was difficult and there were more chances against than for my getting out of Germany alive. Now, in all human certainty I shall arrive at the Château d'Andelle (I got the addressat the bank), and you owe it to me to remain on the spot till we can thrash out our affair together. I will begin on anewsheet the story of the last few months since my capture. You must forgive me if it bores you. In reality it is for my parents, when you have prepared their minds, and I don't think it will bore them....
"We came a bad cropper. I was thrown clear of the machine, but knew nothing until I waked up, feeling like a bag of broken bones. It was night, and I saw a huge fountain of red flame and a lot of dark figures like silhouettes moving between it and me. That brought me out of my stupor. I knew my plane must have taken fire as it crashed down, and I was pretty sure the silhouettes were Germans. I looked around for my observer, and called to him in a low voice, hoping the Bosch wouldn't hear, over the noise of the fire. Nobody answered. Later I found out that the poor chap had been caught under the car. I pray he died before the flames reached him!
"As I got my wits back, I planned to try and hide myself under some bushes I could see not far off, till the coast was clear; but I couldn't move. I seemed to be thoroughly smashed up, and began to think it was the end of thingsici-basfor me. After a while I must have fainted. By and by I had a dream of jolting along through a blazing desert, on the back of a lame camel. It was rather fierce, that jolting! It shook me out of my faint, and when I opened my eyes it was to find myself on a stretcher carried by fellows in German gray. They took me to a field hospital, and I guessed by the look of things that it was close to the first lines. It made me sick to think how near I must be to our own front—yet so far!
"Well, I won't be long-winded about what happened next. I can go into details when we meet. It turned out that I had a leg, an arm, and some ribs smashed. The Bosch surgeon wasn't half bad, as Bosches go, but he was a bit brusque. Iheard him say right out to the anæsthetist, it seemed a pity to waste good ether on me, as there wasn't one chance in five to save my life. Still, I'd be an experiment! Before I went off under the stuff I told them who I was, for I'd heard they were sometimes fairly decent to enemy aviators, and I hoped to get a message through to my people. I was feeling as stupid as an owl, but I did think I saw a change come over the men's faces when they heard my name. Later, putting two and two together, I concluded that Germany was just the kind of business nation to know all about the dear old Governor. I might have realized that, out of sheer spite against the United States for bursting into the war, they'd enjoy letting a man of James Beckett Senior's importance go on believing his son was dead. I bet they put my name over the grave of my poor, burned pal, Hank Lee! It would be the thoroughgoing sort of thing they do, when they make up their minds to create an impression.
"I didn't die, though! Spite for spite, I got well. But it took some time. One of my lungs had been damaged a bit by a broken rib, and the doctors prescribed an open-air cure, after I'd begun to crawl again. I was put with a lot of T. B.'s, if you know what that means, in a camp hospital. Not far off was a huge 'camouflaged' aerodrome and a village of hangars. I heard that flying men were being trained there. I used to think I'd give my head to get to the place, but I never hoped to do it—till Herter came.
"Now I will tell you how he came—which I can freely do, as we are both safe in Paris, having come from somewhere near Compiègne. One of the first things Herter said about you was that you must have guessed where he was going, and more or less for what purpose. For that purpose he was the ideal man: a Lorrainer of Germanized Lorraine; German his native tongue—(though he hates it)—and clever as Machiavelli. He "escaped" from France into Germany, told a tale about killinga French sentry and creeping across No Man's Land at night, in order to get to the German lines. It was a big risk, but Herter is as brave and resourceful a man as I ever met. He got the Bosches to believe that he was badly ill in Paris when the war broke out and couldn't slip away, otherwise he'd have sprung to do his loyal duty to the Fatherland. He persuaded them that his lot being cast in France for the time, he'd resolved to serve Germany by spying, until he could somehow bolt across the frontier. He spun a specious tale about pretending to the French to have French sympathies, and winning the confidence of high-up men, by serving as a surgeon on several fronts. To prove his German patriotism he had notes to show, realistically made on thin silk paper, and hidden inside the lining of his coat.
"Herter's mission in Boschland isn't my business or yours; but I'm allowed to say that it was concerned with aeroplanes. There was something he had to find out, and hehasfound it out, or he wouldn't be back on this side of the lines. Because he hoped to be among German flying-men, he hinted to you that he might be able to do you some service. It occurred to him that he might learn where my grave was and let you know. Nothing further was in his thoughts then—or until he happened to draw out a piece of unexpected information in a roundabout way.
"His trick of getting across to the flying-men was smart, like all his tricks. The valuable (?) notes he'd brought into Germany mostly concerned new French and American inventions in that line. That was his 'speciality.' And when he had handed the notes over with explanations, he continued his programme by asking for a job as surgeon in a field hospital. (You see, he hoped to get back to France before the worthlessness of his notes was discovered.) When he'd proved his qualifications, he got his job like a shot. They were only too glad of his services. Pretending to have been in American training-camps, it was easy to bring up my name in a casual way. Laughing that rather sinister laugh of his, which you will remember, Herter told a couple of flying chaps he had promised a girl to find Jim Beckett's grave. One of the fellows laughed too, and made a remark which set Herter thinking. Later, he was able to refer to the subject again, and learned enough to suspect that there was something fishy about the Bosch announcement of my death and burial. He tells me that, at this point, he was able to send you a verbal message by a consumptive prisoner about to be repatriated. Whether you got that message or not who knows?
"His idea was to send another (in a way he won't explain even to me) when he'd picked up further news. But as things turned out, there was no time. Besides, it wasn't necessary. It looked hopeful that we might be our own carrier pigeons, or else—cease to exist.
"What happened was that Herter heard I was alive and in a hospital not far behind the lines. Just at this time he had got hold of the very secret he'd come to seek. The sooner he could make a dash for home the better: but if possible, he wished to take me with him. He had the impression that to do so would please his friend Miss O'Malley! How it was to be worked he didn't see until an odd sort of American bombing machine fell, between an aerodrome it had attempted to destroy, and Herter's hospital. They knew it was American, only because of its two occupants, both killed. The machine was considerably smashed up, but experts found traces of something amazingly novel, which they couldn't understand. Herter was called to the scene, because he had pretended to be up in the latest American flying 'stunts.' The minute he saw the wreckage an inspiration jumped into his head.
"He confessed himself puzzled by the mysterious details, thought them important, and said: 'It seems to me thisresembles the engine and wings of the James Beckett invention I heard so much about. But I didn't know it was far enough ahead yet to be in use. A pity the inventor was killed. He might have come in handy.
"Well, they put those words in their pipes and smoked them—knowing, of course, that I was very much alive and almost within a stone's throw.
"I had always pretended not to understand German: thought ignorance of the language might serve my plans some day or other. The chap they sent to fetch me dropped a few words to a doctor in my hearing. And so, though I wasn't told where I was being taken or why I was to go, I'd about caught on to the fact that I was supposed to have invented the plans for a new bombing biplane. That made me wonder if a friend was at work under the rose: and I was ready for anything when I got to the scene of the smash.
"Fortunately, none of the Bosches on the spot could speak English fluently, and I appeared more of a fool at French than German. Herter—entirely trusted by his German pals—was told off to talk English with me; and a flash of his eye said,herewas the friend! It was only a flash, and I couldn't be sure, but it put me on thequi vive. I noticed that in asking me the question he was told to ask, he emphasized certain words which needed no emphasis, and spoke them slowly, with a look that made me determine to fix each one in my mind. This I did, and putting them together when I got the chance, I made out, 'I want to get you home. Say you invented this model, and could put the thing in working trim.'
"That was a big order! If I said it and could keep my word, would it be a patriotic job to present the enemy with a perfectly good machine, of a new make, in the place of a wreck they didn't understand? This was my first thought. But the second reminded me of a sentence I'd constructed with some ofthe emphasized words; 'I want to get you home.' How did he expect to get me home—if not by air?
"With that I caught a glimpse of the plan, as one sometimes catches sight of the earth through a break in massed clouds when flying. If the man meant to help me, I would help him. If he turned out a fraud, the Germans shouldn't profit by his treachery I'd stop that game at the last moment, if I died for it!
"You will know nothing about the new and curious bombing biplane of super-speed invented by Leroy Harman of Galbraith, Texas. But Father knows as much as any one not an expert in aeronautics can know. When the Government wouldn't believe in Harman, Father financed him by my advice. I left home for France before the trial machine that was to convince officialdom had come into being; and I didn't even know whether it had made good. But the minute I saw what lay on the ground, surrounded by a ring of Germans, I said to myself; 'Good old Leroy!'
"I'd seen so much of his plans that they remained printed on my brain, and I could—if I would—set that biplane on its wings again almost as easily as if Ihadinvented it.
"Odd that the Bosches and I both trusted Herter, seeing he must be false to one side or other! But he's that sort of man. And I always take a tip from my own instinct before listening to my reason. Maybe that's why I didn't do badly in my brief career as a flier. Anyhow, I played up to Herter; and I got the job of superintending the reconstruction of poor Harman's damaged machine. It was a lovely job for a prisoner, though they watched me as a German cat would watch an Allied mouse. Herter was nearly always on the spot, however, for he'd made himself responsible for me. Also, he'd offered to pump me about what was best in the air world on my side of the water: how many aeroplanes of different sorts America could turn out insix months, etc. We contrived a cypher on diagrams I made. It was a clever one, but the credit was Herter's.
"The Bosches were waiting impatiently for my work to be done, in order to try out the machine, and if satisfactory, spawn a brood of their own on the same model. I was equally impatient. I hoped to fly off with the biplane before they had time to copy it!
"A wounded Ace of theirs, Anton Hupfer, was for ever hanging round. He was to take up the 'plane when it was ready. But Herter industriously chummed with him, and not for nothing. To Herter was due the 'discovery' of the inventor; and as he boasted experience in flying, he asked the privilege of being Hupfer's companion on the trial trip.
"The success of this trip would depend even more on the machine's worth as a bomber than on her speed and climbing qualities. It was, therefore, to be undertaken at night, with a full complement of real bombs to drop upon headquarters at Compiègne. Herter had suggested this. Daylight wouldn't have suited for a start.
"An hour before the appointed time he dashed in upon Hupfer to confide that a sudden suspicion concerning me was troubling him. He had noticed a queer expression on my face as I gave the engine a last look over! If I had done some obscure damage to this so new type of machine, the mechanics might not detect its nature. Herter didn't wish to harm me, if his suspicion was unfounded, he explained, but he proposed a drastic proof of my good faith. I was to be hauled out of bed, and hurried without warning to look at the biplane in her hangar. The mechanics were to be sent outside, there to wait for a signal to open the doors: this to avoid gossip if I was honest after all. Hupfer was to spring it on me that he'd decided to take me up instead of Herter. My face was to be watched as this news was flung at me. If I showed the slightest trace of uneasiness, itwould be a sign that I had played a trick and feared to fall its victim. In that case the 'third degree' was to be applied until I owned up, and could be haled away for punishment.
"There was just time to carry out this programme, and Hupfer fell for it. Herter had put me wise beforehand, and I knew what to expect. His real plan was to stand behind Hupfer, the Bosch Ace, and bash him on the head with a spanner, while his (Hupfer's) whole attention was fixed on me. We would then undress the fellow. I would take his clothes, and we'd put him into mine. Hupfer's body (stunned, not dead, we hoped) we would lay behind a pile of petrol tins. I acting as pilot, would trust to my disguise and the darkness of night not to be spotted when the two mechanics threw open the hangar doors.
"Everything happened as we'd arranged, without a hitch—again, all credit to Herter! When we'd hidden the limp Ace, trussed up in my prison rig, Herter yelled to the waiting men, in a good imitation of Hupfer's voice. We ran smoothly out of the hangar, and were given a fine send off. How soon the Bosches found out how they'd been spoofed, I don't know. It couldn't have been long though, as my prison guard was in attendance. The great thing was, we went up in grand style. Otherwise—but we needn't now think of the 'otherwise'!
"Our next danger lay in taking the wrong direction, getting farther back in Boschland instead of over the frontier. I kept my wits, fortunately, so that turned out all right. Still, there remained the chance of being shot down by the French, and blown with our own bombs into kingdom come. But, by good luck it was a clear night. No excuse for getting lost! And when I was sure we were well over the French lines, I planed down to alight in a field.
"The alert was out for us, of course, and a fierce barrage put up, but I flew high till I was ready for a dive. We'd hardly landed, when thepoilusswarmed like bees, but that was what we wanted. You must imagine the scene that followed, till I can tell you by word of mouth!
"I shall have made my report, and have been given leave to start for a visit to my family by to-morrow I hope.
"Yours till the end,
"JIM."
"Yours till the end!" Rather a smart, cynical way of winding up those "exhibition pages" was it not, Padre? The secret translation of that signature is: "Yours, you brute, till I can get rid of you with least damage to my parents' susceptibilities!"
I shall obey, and wait for the interview. It's like waiting to be shot at dawn!
I persuaded Brian to tell Father Beckett. I wasn't worthy. But the dear old man came straight to me, transfigured, to make me go with him to his wife, even before he had finished reading the letter.
"You must come," he said—and when Father Beckett says "must," in a certain tone, one does. It's then that the resemblance, more in expression than feature, between him and his son shines out like a light. "It will save mother the trouble of asking for you," he went on, dragging me joyously with him, his arm round my waist. "She'd do that, first thing, sure! Why, do you suppose we forget Jim's as much to you as to us? Haven't you shown us that, every day since we met?"
What answer could I give? I gave none.
Mother Beckett had been lying down for the afternoon nap which by my orders she takes every day. She'd just waked, and was sitting up on the lounge, when her husband softly opened the door to peep in. The only light was firelight, leaping in an open grate.
"Come in, come in!" she greeted us in her silver tinkle of a voice. "Oh, you didn't disturb me. I was awake. I thought I'd ring for tea. But I didn't after all. I'd had such a beautiful dream, I hated to come out of it."
"I bet it was a dream about Jim!" said Father Beckett. He drew me into the room, and the little lady pulled medown beside her on the wide, cushiony lounge. Her husband's special arm-chair was close by, but he didn't subside into it as usual at this cosy hour of the afternoon. Instead, he knelt stiffly down on one knee, and took the tiny, ringed hand held out to him. "You wouldn't think a dream beautiful, unless Jim was in it!"
"Yes I would, ifyouwere in it, dear," she reproached him. "Or Molly. But Jim was in this dream. I saw him as plainly as I see you both. He walked in at the door, the way he used to do at home, saying: 'Hello, Mother, I've been looking for you everywhere!' You know, Father how you and Jimmy used to feel injured if you called me and I couldn't be found in a minute. In this dream though, we didn't seem to be back home. I wasn't sure where we were: only—I was sure——" She stopped, with a catch in her voice. But Father Beckett took up the sentence where she let it drop. "Sure of Jim?"
"Yes. He was so real!"
"Well then, Mother darling, I guess the dream ought not to have been back home, but here, in this very house. For here's where Jim will come."
"Oh, I do feel that!" she agreed, trying to "camouflage" a tear with a smile. "Jim's with me all the time."
"Not yet," said Father Beckett, with a stolid gentleness. "Not yet. Not the real Jim. But he'll come."
"You mean, when Molly and I've finished putting out all his treasures in the den, just as he'd like to see them?"
"He might come before you get the den ready. He might come—any day now—even to-morrow." The gnarled brown hand smoothed the small, shrivelled white one with nervous strokes and passes.
"Father!" she sat up suddenly, straight and rigid among her cushions. "You've heard—you're trying to break something to me. Tell me right out. Jim's alive!"
She snatched her hand free, and bending forward, flung both arms round the old man's neck before he could answer. I sprang up to give them room. I thought they had forgotten me. But no. Out came Father Beckett's big hand to snatch my dress.
"This child got the news—a letter," he explained. "The boy was afraid of the shock for us. He thought she——"
"A shock of joy—why,thatgives life—not death!" sobbed and laughed Mother Beckett. "But it was right to let Molly know first. She's more to him than we are now. Oh, Father—Father—our Jim's alive—alive! I think in my soul I knew it all the time. I never felt he was gone. He must have sent me thoughts. Dear ones, I want to pray. I want to thank God—now, this instant, before I hear more—before I read the letter. We three together—on our knees!"
Padre, when I was on my knees, with the thin little arm of Jim's mother thrilling my shoulder, my face hidden in the cushions, I could only say: "God, forgive!" and echo the thanksgiving of those two loving hearts. I didn't pray not to be punished. I almost want to be punished—since Brian is safe, and my punishment can't spoil his future.
The patriotic Becketts have given up the big gray car, now they've settled down at the Château d'Andelle: and our one-legged soldier-chauffeur has departed, to conducta military motor. For the moment there's only the O'Farrell Red Cross taxi, not yet gone about its legitimate business; so it was Julian who took Father Beckett to the far-off railway station, to meet Jim Beckett the next day but one—Julian—of all people on earth!
Father Beckett begged me to be of the party, and Mother Beckett—too frail still for so long and cold a drive—piled up her persuasions. But I was firm. I didn't like going to meet trains, I said. It was prosaic. I was allowed to stop at home, therefore, with my dear little lady: the last time, I told myself, that she would ever love and "mother" me. Once Jim and I had settled our affairs in that "interview" I was ordered to wait for, I should be the black sheep, turned out of the fold.
There was just one reason why I'd have liked to be in the car to bring Jim back from the station. Knowing Julian-Puck, I was convinced that despite Father Beckett's presence he'd contrive a chance to thrust some entering wedge of mischief into Jim Beckett's head. Not that it was needed! If he'd read the first pages of Jim's letter—the secret pages—he would have known that. But the night the great news came to the château, he whispered into my ear: "You seem to be taking things easy. Sure you won't change your mind and bolt with me?—or do you count on your invincible charm, "über alles"?
I didn't even answer. I merely looked. Perhaps he took it for a defiant look, though Heaven knows it wasn't. I was past defiance. In any case, such as the look was, it shut him up. And after that the brooding storm behind his eyes made me wonder (when I'd time to think of it) whatcouphe was meditating. There would never be achance like the chance at the station before Jim had met me. Julian was sharp enough, dramatic enough to see that. I pictured him somehow corralling Jim for an instant, while Father Beckett carried on a conversation of signs with a worriedporteuse. Julian would be able to do in an instant as much damage to a character as most men could do in an hour!
A little added disgust for me on Jim's part, however, what could it matter? I tried to argue. When a thing is already black, can it be painted blacker?
Still, I was foolish enough to wish that our good old one-legged soldier might have stayed to bring Jim home.
Mother Beckett would have compelled me to be with her at the open door to meet "our darling boy," but that I could not bear. It would be as trying for him as for me, and I had to spare him the ordeal at any price.
"Don't make me do that," I begged, with real tears in my voice. "I—I've set my heart on seeing Jim for the first time alone. He wants it too—I know he does."
She gazed at me for some long seconds, with the clear blue eyes which seemed—though only seemed!—to read my soul. In reality she saw quite another soul than mine. The darling crystallizes to radiant beauty all souls of those she loves, as objects are crystallized by frost, or by sparkling salt in a salt mine.
"Well, you must have a good and loving reason, I'm sure. And probably your love has taught you to know better than I can, what Jim would want you to do," she said. "It shall be just as you wish, dear. Only you must grant one little favour in return to please me. You are to waitfor Jim in theden. When his Father and I have hugged and kissed him a few times, and made certain he's not one of my dreams, we'll lead him up to that door, and leave him outside. It shall be my hand that shuts the door when he's gone in. And I shan't tell him one word about the den. It shall be a surprise. But he won't notice a thing until—until you and he have been together for a while, I guess—not even the hobby-horse! He'll see nothing except you, Molly—you!"
I implored—I argued—in vain. The making of the den had been her inspiration. It was monstrous that I should have to greet her son there. The pleasure of the den-surprise would be for ever spoilt for Jim. But I couldn't explain that to his mother. I had to yield at last, tongue-tied and miserable beyond words.
I haven't described the den to you, Padre. I will do it now, in the pause, the hush, before the storm.
It's a quaint room, with a little round tower in each of the two front corners. One of these Mother Beckett has turned into a refuge for broken-down toys, all Jim's early favourites, which he'd never let her throw away: the famous spotted hobby-horse starred in the centre of the stage: oh, but a noble, red-nostrilled beast, whose eternal prance has something of the endless dignity of the Laocoön! The second tower is a miniature library, whose shelves are crowded with the pet books of Jim's boyhood—queer books, some of them, for a child to choose: "Byron," "Letters of Pliny," Plutarch's "Lives," Gibbon's "Rome," "Morte d'Arthur," Maeterlinck's "Life of the Bee," Kingsland's "Scientific Idealism," with several quite learned volumes of astronomy and geology, side by sidewith Gulliver and all kinds of travel and story-books which we have most of us adored. It was I who had the task of sorting and arranging this motley collection, and I can hardly tell you, Padre, how I loved doing it!
The room isn't large, so the ten or twelve pictures on the walls are not lost in a desert of bare spaces. These pictures, the toys, the books, tennis-rackets, golf-clubs and two lovely old Persian prayer-rugs are all of Jim's treasures brought to France. He must have been a boy of individual, independent nature, for it seems he disliked the idea of killing things for pleasure, and was never a hunter or even a fisherman. Consequently, there are no monster fish under glass, or rare birds or butterflies, or stuffed animals. He must have loved wild creatures though, for five of the beloved pictures are masterly oil-paintings by well-known artists, of lions and tigers and stags,chez eux, happy and at home, not being hunted, or standing agonized at bay. Oh, getting this den in order has taught me more about the real Jim than a girl can learn about a man in ordinary acquaintance in a year! But then I had a wonderful foundation to begin building upon: that day in the rose-arbour—the red-rose day of my life.
Well, when the car was expected back from the station, bringing Jim home to his mother, I went by her command to the den. Even that was better than having to meet him in the presence of those two dear souls who trusted and loved me only second to him. And yet everything in the den which had meant something in Jim's life, seemed to cry out at me, as I shut the door and stood alone with them—and my pounding heart—to wait.
I didn't know how to make the time pass. I was toorestless to sit down. I wouldn't let myself look out of the window to see the car come along the drive. I dared not walk up and down like the caged thing I was, lest the floor should creak, for the tower-room—the den—is over the entrance-hall. I felt like a hunted animal—I, the one creature to whom Jim Beckett deliberately meant to be cruel! I, in this room which was a tribute to his kindness of heart, his faithfulness, his loyalty! But why should it not be so? I had no right to call upon these qualities of his.
The horn of the little Red Cross taxi! It must be turning in at the gate. How well I knew its gay, conceited tootle! An eighth of a mile, and the car would reach the house. Even the poor worn-out taxi couldn't be five minutes doing that!...
If I ran to the window between the towers I could see! No, I wouldn't; Icouldn't. I should scream—or faint—or do something else idiotic, if I saw Jim Beckett getting out of the car, and his mother flying to meet him. I had never felt like this in my whole life—not in any suspense, not in any danger.
Instinctively I walked as far from the window as I could. I sought sanctuary under Brian's cathedral picture—the picture that had introduced me to Jim. Yes, sanctuary I sought, for in that room my brother's work was my one excuse to intrude!
By this time the car must have arrived. The front door must have flown open in welcome. Now Mother Beckett must be crying tears of joy in the arms of her son, Father Beckett gazing at the blessed sight, speechless with ecstasy!
What should I be doing at this moment, if I had yielded to their wish and stopped downstairs with them? Just how far would Jim have gone in keeping up the tragic farce? Would he have kissed me? Would he——?
The vision was so blazing bright that I covered my eyes to shut it out. Not that I hated it. Oh no, I loved it too well!
So, for a while, I stood, my hands pressed over my eyes, my ears strained to catch distant sounds—yet wishing not to hear. Suddenly, close by, there came the click of a latch. My hands dropped like broken clock weights. I opened my eyes. Jim Beckett was in the room, and the door was shut.