In remote country districts that memorable Fourth of August, when England declared war on Germany, came and went unostentatiously.
People read the news a trifle breathlessly, reflected with a sigh of contentment on the invincible British Navy, and with a little gust of prideful triumph upon the Expeditionary force—ready to the last burnished button of each man's tunic—and proceeded quietly with their usual avocations.
Then came the soaring Bank Rate, and business men on holiday raced back to London to contend with the new financial conditions and assure their credit. That was all that happened—at first.
Few foresaw that the gaunt, grim Spectre of War had come to dwell in their very midst, nor that soon he would pass from house to house, palace and cottage alike, touching first this man, then that, on the shoulder, with the single word “Come!” on his lips, until gradually the nations, one by one, left their tasks of peace and rose and followed him.
Monkshaven, in common with other seaside towns, witnessed the sudden exodus of City men when the climbing Bank Rate sounded its alarm. Beyond that, the war, for the moment, reacted very little on its daily processes of life. There was no disorganization of amusements—tennis, boating, and bathing went on much as usual, and clever people, proud of their ability to add two and two together and make four of them, announced that it was all explained now why certain young officers in the neighbourhood had been hurriedly recalled a few days previously, and their leave cancelled.
Then came the black news of that long, desperate retreat from Mons, shaking the nation to its very soul, and in the wave of high courage and endeavour that swept responsively across the country, the smaller things began to fall into their little place.
To Sara, stricken by her own individual sorrow, the war came like a rushing, mighty wind, rousing her from the brooding, introspective habit which had laid hold of her and bracing her to take a fresh grip upon life. Its immense demands, the illimitable suffering it carried in its train, lifted her out of the contemplation of her own personal grief into a veritable passion of pity for the world agony beating up around her.
And, with Sara, to compassionate meant to succour. Nor did it require more than the first few weeks of war to demonstrate where such help as she was capable of giving was most sorely needed.
She had been through a course of First Aid and held her certificate, and, thanks to a year in France when she was seventeen—a much-grudged year, at the time, since it had separated her from her beloved Patrick—and to a natural facility for the language, inherited from her French forbears, she spoke French almost as fluently as she did English.
In France they were crying out for nurses, for at that period of the war there was work for any woman who had even a little knowledge plus the grit to face the horrors of those early days, and it was to France that Sara forthwith determined to go.
She had heard that an old friend of Patrick Lovell's, Lady Arronby by name, proposed equipping and taking over to France a party of nurses, and she promptly wrote to her, begging that she might be included in the little company.
Lady Arronby, who had been a sister at a London hospital before her marriage, recollected her old friend's ward very clearly. Sara rarely failed to make a definite impression, even upon people who only knew her slightly, and Lady Arronby, who had known her from her earliest days at Barrow, answered her letter without hesitation.
“I shall be delighted to have you with me,” she had written. “Even though you are not a trained nurse, there's work out there for women of your caliber, my dear. So come. It will be a week or two yet before we have all our equipment, but I am pushing things on as fast as I can, so hold yourself in readiness to come at a day's notice.”
Meanwhile, Sara's earliest personal encounter with the reality of the war came in a few hurried lines from Elisabeth telling her that Major Durward had rejoined the Army and would be going out to France almost immediately.
Sara thrilled, and with the thrill came the answering stab of the sword that was to pierce her again and again through the long months ahead. Garth Trent—the man she loved—could have no part nor lot in this splendid service of England's sons for England! The country wanted brave men now—not men who faltered when faltering meant failure and defeat.
She had not seen Garth since that day—a million years ago it seemed—when she had sent him from her, and he had gone, admitting the justice of her decision.
There was no getting behind that. She would have defied Elisabeth, defied a whole world of slanderous tongues, had they accused him, if he himself had denied the charge. But he had not been able to deny it. It was true—a deadly, official truth, tabulated somewhere in the records of her country, that the man she loved had been cashiered for cowardice.
The knowledge almost crushed her, and she sometimes wondered if there could be a keener suffering, in the whole gamut of human pain, than that which a woman bears whose high pride in her lover has been laid utterly in the dust.
The dread of danger, separation—even death itself—were not comparable with it. Sara envied the women whose men were killed in action. At least, they had a splendid memory to hold which nothing could ever soil or take away.
Sometimes her thoughts wandered fugitively to Tim. Surely here was his chance to break from the bondage his mother had imposed upon him! He had not written to her of late, but she felt convinced that she would have heard from Elisabeth had he volunteered. She was a little puzzled over his silence and inaction. He had seemed so keen last winter at Barrow, when together they had discussed this very subject of soldiering. Could it be that now, when the opportunity offered, Tim was—evading it? But the thought was dismissed almost as swiftly as it had arisen, and Sara blushed scarlet with shame that the bare suspicions should have crossed her mind, even for an instant, recognizing it as the outcrop of that bitter knowledge which had cut at the very roots of her belief in men's courage.
And there were men around her whose readiness to make the great sacrifice combated the poison of one man's failure. Daily she heard of this or that man whom she knew, either personally or by name, having volunteered and been accepted, and very often she had to listen to Miles Herrick's fierce rebellion against the fact that he was ineligible, and endeavour to console him.
But it was Audrey Maynard who plumbed the full depths of bitterness in Herrick's heart. She had been teaching him to knit, and he was floundering through the intricacies of turning his first heel when one day he surprised her by hurling the sock, needles and all, to the other end of the room.
“There's work for a man when his country's at war! My God! Audrey, I don't know how I'm going to bear it—to lie here on my couch, knitting—knitting!—when men are out there dying! Why won't they take a lame man? Can't a lame man fire a gun—and then die like the rest of 'em?”
Audrey looked at him pitifully.
“My dear, war takes only the best—the youngest and the fittest. But there's plenty of work for the women and men at home.”
“For the women and crocks?” countered Miles bitterly.
She smiled at him suddenly.
“Yes—for the crocks, too.”
He shook his head.
“No, Audrey, I'm an utterly useless person—a cumberer of the ground.”
“Not in my eyes, Miles,” she answered quietly.
He met her glance, and read, at last, what—as she told him later—he might have read there any time during the last six months, had he chosen to look for it.
“Do you mean that, Audrey?” he asked, suddenly gripping her hands hard. “All of it—all that it implies?”
She slipped to her knees beside his couch.
“Oh, my dear!” she said, between laughing and crying. “I've been meaning it—'all of it'—for ever so long. Only—only you won't ask me to marry you!”
“How can I? A lame man, and not even a rich one?”
“I believe,” said Audrey composedly, “we've argued both those points before—from a strictly impersonal point of view! Couldn't you—couldn't you get over your objection to coming to live with me at Greenacres, dear?”
Audrey always declared, afterwards, that it had required the most blatant encouragement on her part to induce Miles to propose to her, and that, but for the war—which convinced him that he was of no use to any one else—he never would have done so.
Presumably she was able to supply the requisite stimulus, for when the Lavender Lady joined them later on in the afternoon, she found herself called upon to perform that function of sheer delight to every old maid of the right sort—namely, to bestow her blessing on a pair of newly betrothed lovers.
Sara received the news the next morning, and though naturally, by contrast, it seemed to add a keener edge to her own grief, she was still able to rejoice whole-heartedly over this little harvesting of joy which her two friends had snatched from amid the world's dreadful harvesting of pain and sorrow.
By the same post as the radiant letters from Miles and Audrey came one from Elisabeth Durward. She wrote distractedly.
“Tim is determined to volunteer,” ran her letter. “I can't let him go, Sara. He is my only son, and I don't see why he should be claimed from me by this horrible war. I have persuaded him to wait until he has seen you. That is all he will consent to. So will you come and do what you can to dissuade him? There is a cord by which you could hold him if you would.”
A transient smile crossed Sara's face as she pictured Tim gravely consenting to await her opinion on the matter. He knew—none better!—what it would be, and, without doubt, he had merely agreed to the suggestion in the hope that her presence might ease the strain and serve to comfort his mother a little.
Sara telegraphed that she would come to Barrow Court the following day, and, on her arrival, found Tim waiting for her at the station in his two-seater.
“Well,” he said with a grin, as the little car slid away along the familiar road. “Have you come to persuade me to be a good boy and stay at home, Sara?”
“You know I've not,” she replied, smiling. “I'm gong to talk sense to Elisabeth. Oh! Tim boy, how I envy you! It's splendid to be a man these days.”
He nodded silently, but she could read in his expression the tranquil satisfaction that his decision had brought. She had seen the same look on other men's faces, when, after a long struggle with the woman-love that could not help but long to hold them back, the final decision had been taken.
Arrived at the lodge gates, Tim handed over the car to the chauffeur who met them there, evidently by arrangement.
“I thought we'd walk across the park,” he suggested.
Sara acquiesced delightedly. There was a tender, reminiscent pleasure in strolling along the winding paths that had once been so happily familiar, and, hardly conscious of the sudden silence which had fallen upon her companion, her thoughts slipped back to the old days at Barrow when she had wandered, with Patrick beside her in his wheeled chair, along these selfsame paths.
With a little thrill, half pain, half pleasure, she noted each well-remembered landmark. There was the arbour where they used to shelter from a shower, built with sloped boards at its entrance so that Patrick's chair could easily be wheeled into it; now they were passing the horse-chestnut tree which she herself had planted years ago—with the head gardener's assistance!—in place of one that had been struck by lightning. It had grown into a sturdy young sapling by this time. Here was the Queen's Bench—an old stone seat where Queen Elisabeth was supposed to have once sat and rested for a few minutes when paying a visit to Barrow Court. Sara reflected, with a smile, that if history speaks truly, the Virgin Queen must have spent quite a considerable portion of her time in visiting the houses of her subjects! And here—
“Sara!” Tim's voice broke suddenly across the recollections that were thronging into her mind. There was a curious intent quality in his tone that arrested her attention, filling her with a nervous foreboding of what he had to say.
“Sara, you know, of course, as well as I do, that I am going to volunteer. I let mother send for you, because—well, because I thought you would make it a little easier for her, for one thing. But I had another reason.”
“Had you?” Sara spoke mechanically. They had paused beside the Queen's Bench, and half-unconsciously she laid her ungloved hand caressingly on the seat's high back. The stone struck cold against the warmth of her flesh.
“Yes.” Tim was speaking again, still in that oddly direct manner. “I want to ask you—now, before I go to France—whether there will ever be any chance for me?”
Sara turned her eyes to his face.
“You mean——”
“I mean that I'm asking you once again if you will marry me? If you will—if I can go away leavingmy wifein England, I shall have so much the more to fight for. But if you can't give me the answer I wish—well”—with a curious little smile—“it will make death easier, should it come—that's all.”
The quiet, grave directness of the speech was very unlike the old, impetuous Tim of former days. It brought with it to Sara's mind a definite recognition of the fact that the man had replaced the boy.
“No, Tim,” she responded quietly. “I made one mistake—in promising to marry you when I loved another man. I won't repeat it.”
“But”—Tim's face expressed sheer wonder and amazement—“you don't still care for Garth Trent—for that blackguard? Oh!” remorsefully, as he saw her wince—“forgive me, Sara, but this war makes one feel even more bitterly about such a thing than one would in normal times.”
“I know—I understand,” she replied quietly. “I'm—ashamed of loving him.” She turned her head restlessly aside. “But, don't you see, love can't be made and unmade to order. It justhappens. And it's happened to me. In the circumstances, I can't say I like it. But there it is. I do love Garth—and I can'tunlovehim. At least, not yet.”
“But some day, Sara, some day?” he urged.
She shook her head.
“I shall never marry anybody now, Tim. If—if ever I 'get over' this fool feeling for Garth, I know how it would leave me. I shall be quite cold and hard inside—like that stone”—pointing to the Queen's Bench. “I wish—I wish I had reached that stage now.”
Silently Tim held out his hand, and she laid hers within it, meeting his grave eyes.
“I won't ever bother you again,” he said, at last, quietly. “I think I understand, Sara, and—and, old girl, I'm awfully sorry. I wish I could have saved you—that.”
He stooped his head and kissed her—frankly, as a big brother might, and Sara, recognizing that henceforth she would find in him only the good comrade of earlier days, kissed him back.
“Thank you, Tim,” she said. “I knew you would understand. And, please, we won't ever speak of it again.”
“No, we won't speak of it again,” he answered.
He tucked his arm under hers, and they walked on together in the direction of the house.
“And now,” she said, “let's go to Elisabeth and break it to her that we are—both—going out to France as soon as we can get there.”
He turned to look at her.
“You?” he exclaimed. “You going out? What do you mean?”
“I'm going with Lady Arronby. I want to go—badly. I want to be in the heart of things. You don't suppose”—with a rather shaky little laugh—“that I can stay quietly at home in England—and knit, do you?”
“No, I supposeyoucouldn't. But I don't half like it. The women who go—out there—have got to face things. I shan't like to think of you running risks—”
She laughed outright.
“Tim, if you talk nonsense of that kind, I'll revenge myself by urging Elisabeth to keep you at home,” she declared. “Oh! Tim boy, can't you see that just now I must have something to do—something that will fill up every moment—and keep me from thinking!”
Tim heard the cry that underlay the words. There was no misunderstanding it. He squeezed her arm and nodded.
“All right, old thing, I won't try to dissuade you. I can guess a little of how you're feeling.”
Sara's interview with Elisabeth was very different from anything she had expected. She had anticipated passionate reproaches, tears even, for an attractive women who has been consistently spoiled by her menkind is, of all her sex, the least prepared to bow to the force of circumstances.
But there was none of these things. It almost seemed as though in that first searching glance of hers, which flashed from Sara's face to the well-beloved one of her son, Elisabeth had recognized and accepted that, in the short space of time since these two had met, the decision concerning Tim's future had been taken out of her hands.
It was only when, in the course of their long, intimate talk together, she had drawn from Sara the acknowledgment that she had once again refused to be Tim's wife, that her control wavered.
“But, Sara, surely—surely you can't still have any thought of marrying Garth Trent?” There was a hint of something like terror in her voice.
“No,” Sara responded wearily. “No, I shall never marry—Garth Trent.”
“Then why won't you—why can't you—”
“Marry Tim?”—quietly. “Because, although I shall never marry Garth now, I haven't stopped loving him.”
“Do you mean that you can still care for him—now that you know what kind of man he is?”
“Oh! Good Heavens, Elisabeth!”—the irritation born of frayed nerves hardened Sara's voice so that it was almost unrecognizable—“you can't turn love on and off as you would a tap! I shall never marryanybodynow. Tim understands that, and—you must understand it, too.”
There was no mistaking her passionate sincerity. The truth—that Sara would never, as long as she lived, put another in the place Garth Trent had held—seemed borne in upon Elisabeth that moment.
With a strangled cry she sank back into her chair, and her eyes, fixed on Sara's small, stern-set face, held a strange, beaten look. As she sat there, her hands gripping the chair-arms, there was something about her whole attitude that suggested defeat.
“So it's all been useless—quite useless!” she muttered in a queer, whispering voice.
She was not looking at Sara now. Her vision was turned inward, and she seemed to be utterly oblivious of the other's presence. “Useless!” she repeated, still in that strange, whispering tone.
“What has been useless?” asked Sara curiously.
Elisabeth started, and stared at her for a moment in a vacant fashion. Then, all at once, her mind seemed to come back to the present, and simultaneously the familiar watchful look sprang into her eyes. Sara was oddly conscious of being reminded of a sentry who has momentarily slept at his post, and then, awakening suddenly, feverishly resumed his vigilance.
“What was I saying?” Elisabeth brushed her hand distressfully across her forehead.
“You said that it had all been useless,” repeated Sara. “What did you mean?”
Elisabeth paused a moment before replying.
“I meant that all my hopes were useless,” she explained at last. “The hopes I had that some day you would be Tim's wife.”
“Yes, they're quite useless—if that is what you meant,” replied Sara. But there was a perplexed expression in her eyes. She had a feeling that Elisabeth was not being quite frank with her—that that whispered confession of failure signified something other than the simple interpretations vouchsafed.
The thing worried her a little, nagging at the back of her mind with the pertinacity common to any little unexplained incident that has caught one's attention. But, in the course of a few days, the manifold happenings of daily life drove it out of her thoughts, not to recur until many months had passed and other issues paved the way for its resurgence.
Sara remained at Barrow until Tim had volunteered and been accepted, and the settlement of her own immediate plans synchronizing with this last event, it came about that it was only two hours after Tim's departure that she, too, bade farewell to Elisabeth, in order to join up in London with Lady Arronby's party.
Elisabeth stood at the head of the great flight of granite steps at Barrow and waved her hand as the car bore Sara swiftly away, and across the latter's mind flashed the memory of that day, nearly a year ago, when she herself had stood in the same place, waiting to welcome Elisabeth to her new home.
The contrast between then and now struck her poignantly. She recalled Elisabeth as she had been that day—gracious, smiling, queening it delightfully over her two big men, husband and son, who openly worshipped her. Now, there remained only a great empty house, and that solitary figure on the doorstep, standing there with white face and lips that smiled perfunctorily.
Elisabeth turned slowly back into the house as the car disappeared round the curve of the drive. For her, the moment was doubly bitter. One by one, husband, son, and the woman whom she had ardently longed to see that son's wife, had been claimed from her by the pitiless demands of the madness men call War.
But there was still more for her to face. There was the utter downfall of all her hopes, the defeat of all her purposes. She had striven with the whole force that was in her to assure Tim's happiness. To compass this, she had torn down the curtain of the past, proclaiming a man's shame and hurling headlong into the dust the new life he had built up for himself, and with it had gone a woman's faith, and trust, and happiness.
And it had all been so futile! Two lives ruined, and the purchase price paid in tears of blood; and, after all, Tim's happiness was as utterly remote and beyond attainment as though no torrent of disaster had been let loose to further it! Elisabeth had bartered her soul in vain.
In the solitude which was all the war had left her, she recognized this, and, since she was normally a woman of kind and generous impulses, she suffered in the realization of the spoiled and mutilated lives for which she was responsible.
Not that she would have acted differently were the same choice presented to her again. She did notwantto hurt people, but the primitive maternal instinct, which was the pivot of her being, blinded her to the claims of others if those claims reacted adversely on her son.
Only now, in the bitterness of defeat, as she looked back upon her midnight interview with Garth Trent, she was conscious of a sick repugnance. It had not been a pleasant thing, that thrusting of a knife into an old wound. This, too, she had done for Tim's sake. The pity of it was that Garth had suffered needlessly—uselessly!
She had thought the issue of events hung solely betwixt him and her son, and, with her mind concentrated on this idea, she had overlooked the possibility of any other outcome. But the acceptance of an unexpected sequence had been forced upon her—Sara would never marry any one now! Elisabeth recognized that all her efforts had been in vain.
And the supreme bitterness, from which all that was honest and upright within her shrank with inward shame and self-loathing, lay in the fact that she, above all others, owed Garth Trent—that which he had begged of her in vain—the tribute of silence concerning the past.
As Sara took her seat on board the train for Monkshaven, she was conscious of that strange little thrill of the wanderer returned which is the common possession of the explorer and of the school-girl at their first sight of the old familiar scenes from which they have been exiled.
She could hardly believe that barely a year had elapsed since she had quitted Monkshaven. So many things had happened—so many changes taken place. Audrey had been transformed into Mrs. Herrick; Tim had been given a commission; and Molly, the one-time butterfly, was now become a working-bee—a member of the V.A.D. and working daily at Oldhampton Hospital. Sara could scarcely picture such a metamorphosis!
The worst news had been that of Major Durward's death—he had been killed in action, gallantly leading his men, in the early part of the year. Elisabeth had written to Sara at the time—a wonderfully brave, simple letter, facing her loss with a fortitude which Sara, remembering her adoration for her husband and her curious antipathy to soldiering as a profession, had not dared to anticipate. There was something rather splendid about her quiet acceptance of it. It was Elisabeth at her best—humanly hurt and broken, but almost heroic in her endurance now that the blow had actually fallen. And Sara prayed that no further sacrifice might be demanded from her—prayed that Tim might come through safely. For herself, she mourned Geoffrey Durward as one good comrade does another. She knew that his death would leave a big gap in the ranks of those she counted friends.
It had been a wonderful year—that year which she had passed in France—wonderful in its histories of tragedy and self-sacrifice, and in its revelation both of the brutality and of the infinite fineness of humanity. Few could have passed through such an experience and remained unchanged, certainly no one as acutely sentient and receptive as Sara.
She felt as though she had been pitchforked into a vast melting-pot, where the cast-iron generalizations and traditions which most people consider their opinions grew flexible and fluid in the scorching heat of the furnace, assimilating so much of the other ingredients in the cauldron that they could never reassume their former unqualified and rigid state.
And now that year of crowded life and ardent service was over, and she was side-tracked by medical orders for an indefinite period.
“Go back to England,” her doctor had told her, “to the quietest corner in the country you can find—and try to forget that thereisa war!”
This thin, eager-faced young woman, of whom every one on the hospital staff spoke in such glowing terms, interested him enormously. He could see that her year's work had taken out of her about double what it would have taken out of any one less sensitively alive, and he made a shrewd guess that something over and above the mere hard work accounted for that curiously fine-drawn look which he had observed in her.
During a hastily snatched meal, before the advent of another batch of casualties, he had sounded Lady Arronby on the subject. The latter shook her head.
“I can tell you very little. I believe there was a bad love-affair just before the war. All I know is that she was engaged and that the engagement was broken off very suddenly.”
“Humph! And she's been living on her reserves ever since. Pack her off to England—and do it quick.”
So October found Sara back in England once again, and as the train steamed into Monkshaven station, and her eager gaze fell on the little group of people on the platform, waiting to welcome her return, she felt a sudden rush of tears to her eyes.
She winked them away, and leaned out of the window. They were all there—big Dick Selwyn, and Molly, looking like a masquerading Venus in her V.A.D. uniform, the Lavender Lady and Miles, and—radiant and well-turned-out as ever—Mile's wife.
The Herrick's wedding had taken place very unobtrusively. About a month after Sara had crossed to France, Miles and Audrey had walked quietly into church one morning at nine o'clock and got married.
Monkshaven had been frankly disappointed. The gossips, who had so frequently partaken of Audrey's hospitality and then discussed her acrimoniously, had counted upon the lavish entertainment with which, even in war-time, the wedding of a millionaire's widow might be expected to be celebrated.
Instead of which, there had been this “hole-and-corner” sort of marriage, as the disappointed femininity of Monkshaven chose to call it, and, after a very brief honeymoon, Miles and Audrey had returned and thrown themselves heart and soul into the work of organizing and equipping a convalescent hospital for officers, of which Audrey had undertaken to bear the entire cost.
Henceforth the mouths of Audrey's detractors were closed. She was no longer “that shocking little widow with the dyed hair,” but a woman who had married into a branch of one of the oldest families in the county, and whose immense private fortune had enabled her to give substantial help to her country in its need.
“I think it's simply splendid of you, Audrey,” declared Sara warmly, as they were all partaking of tea at Greenacres, whither Audrey's car had borne them from the station.
Audrey laughed.
“My dear, what else could I do with my money? I've got such a sickening lot of it, you see! Besides”—with a bantering glance at her husband—“I think it was only the prospect of being of some use at my hospital which induced Miles to marry me! He's my private secretary, you know, and boss of the commissariat department.”
Miles saluted.
“Quartermaster, at your service, miss,” he said cheerfully, adding with a chuckle: “I saw my chance of getting a job if I married Audrey, so of course I took it.”
He was looking amazingly well. The fact of being of some use in the world had acted upon him like a tonic, and there was no misinterpreting the glance of complete and happy understanding that passed between him and his wife.
Glad as she was to see it, it served to remind Sara painfully of all that she had missed, to stir anew the aching longing for Garth Trent, which, though struggled against, and beaten down, and sometimes temporarily crowded out by the thousand claims of each day's labour, had been with her all through the long months of her absence from Monkshaven.
It was this which had worn her so fine, not the hard physical work that she had been doing. Always slender, and built on racing lines, there was something almost ethereal about her now, and her sombre eyes looked nearly double their size in her small face of which the contour was so painfully distinct. Yet she was as vivid and alive as ever; she seemed to diffuse, as it were, a kind of spiritual brilliance.
“She makes one think of a flame,” Audrey told her husband when they were alone once more. “There is something sovitalabout her, in spite of that curiously frail look she has.”
Miles nodded.
“She's burning herself out,” he said briefly.
Audrey looked startled.
“What do you mean, Miles?”
“Good Heavens! I should think it's self-evident. She's exactly as much in love with Trent as she was a year ago, and she's fighting against it every hour of her life. And the strain's breaking her.”
“Can't we do something to help?” Audrey put her question with a helpless consciousness of its futility.
Herrick's eyes kindled.
“Nothing,” he answered with quiet decision. “Every one must work out his own salvation—if it's to be a salvation worth having.”
Herrick had delved to the root of the matter when he had declared that Sara was exactly as much in love as she had been a year ago.
She had realized this for herself, and it had converted life into an endless conflict between her love for Garth and her shamed sense of his unworthiness. And now, her return to Monkshaven, to its familiar, memory-haunted scenes, had quickened the struggle into new vitality.
With the broadened outlook born of her recent experiences, she began to ask herself whether a man need be condemned, utterly and for ever, for a momentary loss of nerve—even Elisabeth had admitted that it was probably no more than that! And then, conversely, her fierce detestation of that particular form of weakness, inculcated in her from her childhood by Patrick Lovell, would spring up protestingly, and she would shrink with loathing from the thought that she had given her love to a man who had been convicted of that very thing.
Nor was the attitude he had assumed in regard to the war calculated to placate her. She had learned from Molly that he had abstained from taking up any form of war-work whatsoever. He appeared to be utterly indifferent to the need of the moment, and the whole of Monkshaven buzzed with patriotic disapprobation of his conduct. There were few idle hands there now. A big munitions factory had been established at Oldhampton, and its demands, added to the necessities of the hospital, left no loophole of excuse for slackers.
Sara reflected bitterly that the sole courage of which Garth seemed possessed was a kind of cold, moral courage—brazen-facedness, the townspeople termed it—which enabled him to refuse doggedly to be driven out of Monkshaven, even though the whole weight of public opinion was dead against him.
And then the recollection of that day on Devil's Hood Island, when he had deliberately risked his life to save her reputation, would return to her with overwhelming force—mocking the verdict of the court-martial, repudiating the condemnation which had made her thrust him out of her life.
So the pendulum swung, this way and that, lacerating her heart each time it swept forward or back. But the blind agony of her recoil, when she had first learned the story of that tragic happening on the Indian frontier, was passed.
Then, overmastered by the horror of the thing, she had flung violently away from Garth, feeling herself soiled and dishonoured by the mere fact of her love for him, too revolted to contemplate anything other than the severance of the tie between them as swiftly as possible.
Now, with the widened sympathies and understanding which the past year of intimacy with human nature at its strongest, and at its weakest, had brought her, new thoughts and new possibilities were awaking within her.
The furnace—that fiercely burning furnace of life at its intensest—had done its work.
“Tim is wounded, and has been recommended for the Military Cross.”
Sara made the double announcement quite calmly. The two things so often went together—it was the grey and gold warp and waft of war with which people had long since grown pathetically familiar.
“How splendid!” Molly enthused with sparkling eyes, adding quickly, “I hope he's not very badly wounded?”
“Elisabeth doesn't give any particulars in her letter. I can't understand her,” Sara continued, her brows contracting in a puzzled fashion. “She seems so calm about it. She has always hated the idea of Tim's soldiering, yet now, although she's lost her husband and her son is wounded, she's taking it finely.”
Selwyn looked up from filling his pipe.
“She's answering to the call—like every one else,” he observed quietly.
“No.” Sara shook her head. “I don't feel as though it were that. It's something more individual. Perhaps”—thoughtfully—“it's pride of a kind. The sort of impression I have is that she's so proud—so proud of Geoffrey's fine death, and of Tim's winning the Military Cross, that it has compensated in some way.”
“The war's full of surprises,” remarked Molly reflectively. “I never was so astonished in my life as when I found that Lester Kent's wife believed him to be a model of all the virtues! I wrote and told you—didn't I, Sara?—that he was sent to Oldhampton Hospital? He got smashed up, driving a motor ambulance, you know.”
“Yes, you wrote and said that he died in hospital.”
“Well, his wife came to see him, with her little boy. She was the sweetest thing, and so plucky. 'My dear,' she said to me, after it was all over, 'I hope you'll find a husband as dear and good. He was so loyal and true—and now that he's gone, I shall always have that to remember!'” Molly's eyes had grown very big and bright. “Oh! Sara,” she went on, catching her breath a little, “supposing you hadn't brought me home—that night, she would have had no beautiful memory to help her now.”
“And yet the memory is an utterly false one—though I suppose it will help her just the same! It's knowing the truth that hurts, sometimes.” And Sara's lips twisted a little. “What a droll world it is—of shame and truth all mixed up—the ugly and the beautiful all lumped together!”
“And just now,” put in Selwyn quietly, “it's so full of beauty.”
“Beauty?” exclaimed both girls blankly.
Selwyn nodded, his eyes luminous.
“Isn't heroism beautiful—and self-sacrifice?” he said. “And this war's full of it. Sometimes, when I read the newspapers, I think God Himself must be surprised at the splendid things the men He made have done.”
Sara turned away, swept by the recollection of one man she knew who had nothing splendid, nothing glorious, to his credit. Almost invariably, any discussion of the war ended by hurting her horribly.
“I'll take that basket of flowers across to the 'Convalescent' now, I think,” she said, rising abruptly from her seat by the fire.
Selwyn nodded, mentally anathematizing himself for having driven her thoughts inward, and Molly, who had developed amazingly of late, tactfully refrained from offering to accompany her.
The Convalescent Hospital, situated on the crest of a hill above the town, was a huge mansion which had been originally built by a millionaire named Rattray, who, coming afterwards to financial grief, had found himself too poor to live in it when it was completed. It had been frankly impossible as a dwelling for any one less richly dowered with this world's goods, and, in consequence, when the place was thrown on the market, no purchaser would be found for it—since Monkshaven offered no attraction to millionaires in general.
Since then it had been known as Rattray's Folly, and it was not until Audrey cast covetous eyes upon it for her convalescent soldiers that the “Folly” had served any purpose other than that of a warning to people not to purchase boots too big for them.
A short cut from Sunnyside to the hospital lay through Crabtree Moor, and as Sara took her way across the rough strip of moorland, dotted with clumps of gorse and heather, her thoughts flew back to that day when she and Garth had encountered Black Brady there, and to the ridiculous quarrel which had ensued in consequence of Garth's refusal to condone the man's offence. For days they had not spoken to each other.
Looking backward, how utterly insignificant seemed that petty disagreement now! Had she but known the bitter separation that must come, she would have let no trifling difference, such as this had been, rob her of a single precious moment of their friendship.
She wondered if she and Garth would ever meet again. She had been back in Monkshaven for some weeks now, but he had studiously avoided meeting her, shutting himself up within the solitude of Far End.
And then, with her thoughts still centred round the man she loved, she lifted her eyes and saw him standing quite close to her. He was leaning against a gate which gave egress from the moor into an adjacent pasture field towards which her steps were bent. His arms, loosely folded, rested upon the top of the gate, and he was looking away from her towards the distant vista of sea and cliff. Evidently he had not heard her light footsteps on the springy turf, for he made no movement, but remained absorbed in his thoughts, unconscious of her presence.
Sara halted as though transfixed. For an instant the whole world seemed to rock, and a black mist rose up in front of her, blotting out that solitary figure at the gateway. Her heart beat in great, suffocating throbs, and her throat ached unbearably, as if a hand had closed upon it and were gripping it so tightly that she could not breathe. Then her senses steadied, and her gaze leapt to the face outlined in profile against the cold background of the winter sky.
Her searching eyes, poignantly observant, sensed a subtle difference in it—or, perhaps, less actually a difference than a certain emphasizing of what had been before only latent and foreshadowed. The lean face was still leaner than she had known it, and there were deep lines about the mouth—graven. And the mouth itself held something sternly sweet and austere about the manner of its closing—a severity of self-discipline which one might look to see on the lips of a man who has made the supreme sacrifice of his own will, bludgeoning his desires into submission in response to some finely conceived impulse.
The recognition of this, of the something fine and splendid that had stamped itself on Garth's features, came to Sara in a sudden blazoning flash of recognition. This was not—could not be the face of a weak man or a coward! And for one transcendent moment of glorious belief sheer happiness overwhelmed her.
But, in the same instant, the damning facts stormed up at her—the verdict of the court-martial, the details Elisabeth had supplied, above all, Garth's own inability to deny the charge—and the light of momentary ecstasy flared and went out in darkness.
An inarticulate sound escaped her, forced from her lips by the pang of that sudden frustration of leaping hope, and, hearing it, Garth turned and saw her.
“Sara!” The name rushed from his lips, shaken with a tumult of emotion. And then he was silent, staring at her across the little space that separated them, his hand gripping the topmost bar of the gate as though for actual physical support.
The calm of his face, that lofty serenity which had been impressed upon it, was suddenly all broken up.
“Sara!” he repeated, a ring of incredulity in his tones.
“Yes,” she said flatly. “I've come back.”
She moved towards him, trying to control the trembling that had seized her limbs.
“I—I've just come back from France,” she added, making a lame attempt to speak conventionally.
It was an effort to hold out her hand, and, when his closed around it, she felt her whole body thrill at his touch, just as it had been wont to thrill in those few, short, golden days when their mutual happiness had been undarkened by any shadow from the past. Swiftly, as though all at once afraid, she snatched her hand from his clasp.
“What have you been doing in France?” he asked.
“Nursing,” she answered briefly. “Did you think I could stay here and do—nothing, at such a time as this?”
There was accusation in her tone, but if he felt that her speech reflected in any way upon himself, he showed no sign of it. His eyes were roving over her, marking the changes wrought in the year that had passed since they had met—the sharpened contour of her face, the too slender body, the white fragility of the bare hand which grasped the handle of the basket she was carrying.
“You are looking very ill,” he said, at last, abruptly.
“I'm not ill,” she replied indifferently. “Only a bit over-tired. As soon as I have had a thorough rest I am going back to France.”
“You won't go back there again?” he exclaimed sharply. “You're not fit for such work!”
“Certainly I shall go back—as soon as ever Dr. Selwyn will let me. It's little enough to do for the men who are giving—everything!” Suddenly, the pent-up indignation within her broke bounds. “Garth, how can you stay here when men are fighting, dying—out there?” Her voice vibrated with the sense of personal shame which his apathy inspired in her. “Oh!”—as though she feared he might wound her yet further by advancing the obvious excuse—“I know you're past military age. But other men—older men than you—have gone. I know a man of fifty who bluffed and got in! There are heaps of back doors into the Army these days.”
“And there's a back door out of it—the one through which I was kicked out!” he retorted, his mouth setting itself in the familiar bitter lines.
The scoffing defiance of his attitude baffled her.
“Don't you want to help your country?” she pleaded. It was horrible to her that he should stand aside—inexplicable except in terms of that wretched business on the Indian Frontier, in the hideous truth of which only his own acknowledgment had compelled her to believe.
He looked at her with hard, indifferent eyes.
“My country made me an outcast,” he replied. “I'll remain such.”
Somehow, even in her shamed bewilderment and anger, she sensed the hurt that lay behind the curt speech.
“Men who have been cashiered, men who are too old—they're all going back,” she urged tremulously, snatching at any weapon that suggested itself.
He shrugged his shoulders.
“Let them!”
She stared at him in silence. She felt exactly as though she had been beating against a closed door. With a gesture of hopelessness she turned away, recognizing the futility of pleading with him further.
“One moment”—he stepped in front of her, barring her path. “I want an answer to a question before you go.”
There was something of his old arrogance in the demand—the familiar, dominating quality which had always swayed her. Despite herself, she yielded to it now.
“Well?” she said unwillingly. “What is it you wish to know?”
“I want to know if you are engaged to Tim Durward.”
For an instant the colour rushed into Sara's white face; then it ebbed away, leaving it paler than before.
“No,” she said quietly. “I am not.” She lifted her eyes, accusing, passionately reproachful, to his. “How could you—even ask me that? Did you ever believe I loved you?” she went on fiercely. “And if I did—could I care for any one else?”
A look of triumph leapt into his eyes.
“You care still, then?” he asked, and in his voice was blent all the exultation, and the wonder, and the piercing torment of love itself.
Sara felt herself slipping, knew that she was losing her hold of herself. Soon she would be a-wash in a sea of love, helpless to resist as a bit of driftwood, and then the waters would close over her head and she would be drawn down into the depths of shame which yielding to her love for Garth involved.
She must go—leave him while she had the power. Summoning up her strength, she faced him.
“I do,” she answered steadily. “But I pray God every night of my life that I may soon cease to care.”
And with those few words, limitless in their scorn—for him, and for herself because she still loved him—she turned to go.
But their contempt seemed to pass him by. His eyes burned.
“So Elisabeth has played her stake—and lost!” he muttered to himself. “Ah! Pardon!” he drew aside as she almost brushed past him in her sudden haste to escape—to get away—and stood, with bared head, his eyes fixed on her receding figure.
Soon a bend in the path through the fields hid her from his sight. But, long after she had disappeared, he remained leaning, motionless, against the gateway through which she had passed, his face immobile, twisted and drawn so that it resembled some sculptured mask of Pain, his eyes staring straight in front of him, blank and unseeing.
“Hullo, Trent!”
Miles Herrick, returning from the town to the hospital and taking, like every one else, the short cut across the fields, waved a friendly arm as he caught sight of Garth's figure silhouetted against the sky-line.
Then he drew nearer, and the set, still face of the other filled him with a sudden sense of dismay. There was a new look in it, a kind of dogged hopelessness. It entirely lacked that suggestion of austere sweetness which had made it so difficult to reconcile his smirched reputation with the man himself.
“What is it, Garth?” Instinctively Miles slipped into the more familiar appellation.
Trent looked at him blankly. It seemed as though he had not heard the question, or, at any rate, had not taken in its meaning.
“What did you say?” he muttered, his brows contracting painfully.
Miles slung the various packages with which he was burdened on to the ground, and leaned up leisurely against the gatepost. It was characteristic of him that, although the day was never long enough for the work he crowded into it, he could always find time to give a helping hand to a pal with his back against the wall.
“Out with it, man!” he said. “What's up?”
Slowly recognition came back in the other's eyes.
“What I might have anticipated,” he answered, at last, in a curious flat voice, devoid of expression. “I've sunk a degree or two lower in Sara's estimation since the war broke out.”
Miles regarded him quietly for a moment, a queer, half-humorous glint in his eyes.
“I suppose she doesn't know you've half-beggared yourself, helping on the financial side?”
“A man could hardly do less, could he?” he returned awkwardly. “But if she did know—which she doesn't—it would make no earthly difference.”
“Then—it's because you're not soldiering?”
“Exactly. I've not volunteered.”
“Well”—composedly—“why don't you?”
Trent laughed shortly.
“That's my affair.”
“With your physique you could wangle the age limit,” pursued Miles imperturbably.
“I should have to 'wangle' a good deal more than that,”—harshly. “Have you forgotten that I was chucked from the Army?”
“There's such a thing as enlisting under another name.”
“There is—and then of running up against one of the old crowd and being recognized! It isn't so easy to lose your identity. I've had my lesson on that.”
Miles looked away quickly. The hard, implacable stare of the other man's eyes, with the blazing defiance, hurt him. It spoke too poignantly of a bitterness that had eaten into the heart. But he had put his hand to the plough, and he refused to turn back.
“Wouldn't it”—he spoke with a sudden gentleness, the gentleness of the surgeon handling a torn limb—“wouldn't it help to straighten things out with Sara?”
“If it did, it would only make matters worse. No. Take it from me, Herrick, that soldiering is the one thing of all others I can't do.”
He turned away as though to signify that the discussion was at an end.
“I don't see it,” persisted Miles. “On the contrary, it's the one thing that might make her believe in you. In spite of that Indian Frontier business.”
Garth swung suddenly round, a dull, dangerous gleam in his eyes. But Miles bore the savage glance serenely. He had applied the spur with intention. The other was suffering—suffering intolerably—in a dumb silence that shut him in alone with his agony. That silence must be broken, no matter what the means.
“You'd wipe out the stigma of cowardice, if you volunteered,” he went on deliberately.
Garth laughed derisively.
“Cut it out, Herrick,” he flung back. “I'm not a damned story-book hero, out for whitewash and the V.C.”
But Miles continued undeterred.
“And you'd convince Sara,” he finished quietly.
A stifled exclamation broke from Garth.
“To what end?” he burst out violently. “Can't you realize that's just the one thing in the world forbidden me? Sara is—oh, well, it's impossible to say what she is, but I suppose most good women are half angel. And if I gave her the smallest chance, she'd begin to believe in me again—to ask questions I cannot answer. . . . What's the use? I can't get away from the court-martial and all that followed. I can't clear myself. And I could never offer Sara anything more than a name that has been disgraced—a miserable half-life with a man who can't hold up his head amongst his fellows! Yes”—answering the unspoken question in Herrick's eyes—“I know what you're thinking—that I was willing to marry her once. But I believed, then, that—Garth Trent had cut himself free from the past. Now I know”—more quietly—“that there is no such thing as getting away from the mistakes one has made. . . . I'm tied hand and foot—every way! And it's better Sara should continue to think the worst of me. Then, in the future, she may find some sort of happiness—with Durward, perhaps.” His lips greyed a little, but he went on. “The worse she thinks me, the easier it will be for her to cut me out of her life.”
“Then do you mean”—Miles spoke very slowly—that you are—deliberately—holding back from soldiering?”
“Quite deliberately!” It was like the snap of a tormented animal, baited beyond bearing. “If I could go with a clean name, as other men can——Good God, man! Do you think I haven't thought it out—knocked my head against every stone wall in the whole damned business?”
Miles was silent. There was so much of truth in all Garth said, so much of warped vision, biased by the man's profound bitterness of soul, that he could find no answer.
After a moment Garth spoke again, jerkily, as though under pressure.
“There's my promise to Elisabeth, as well. That binds me if I were recognized and taxed with my identity. I should have to hold my peace—and stick it all over again! . . . There's a limit to a man's endurance.”
Then, after a pause: “If I could go—and be sure of not returning”—grimly—“I'd go to-morrow—the Foreign Legion, anyway. But sometimes a man hasn't even the right to get himself neatly killed out of the way.”
“What are you driving at now?”
“I should think it's plain enough! Don't you see what it would mean to Sara if—that—happened? She'd never believe—afterwards—that I'm as black as I'm painted, and I should saddle her with an intolerable burden of self-reproach. No, the Army is a closed door for me. . . . Damn it, Herrick!” with the sudden nervous violence of a man goaded past endurance. “Can't you understand? I ought never to have come into her life at all. I've only messed things up for her—damnably. The least I can do is to clear out of it so that she'll never regret my going. . . . I've gone under, and a man who's gone under had better stay there.”
Both men were silent—Trent with the bitter, brooding silence of a man who has battered uselessly against the bars that hem him in, and who at last recognizes that they can never be forced asunder, Herrick trying to focus his vision to that of the man beside him.
“No”—Garth spoke with a finality there was no disputing—“I've been buried three-and-twenty years, and my resurrection hasn't been exactly a success. There's no place in the world for me unless some one else pays the price. It's better for every one concerned that I should—stay buried.”