“He didn't do it!”
Suddenly, Sara found herself saying the words aloud in the darkness and solitude of the night.
Since her meeting with Garth, on her way to the hospital, every hour had been an hour of conflict. That brief, strained interview had shaken her to the depths of her being, and, unable to sleep when night came, she had lain, staring wide-eyed into the dark, struggling against its influence.
Little enough had been said. It had been the silences, the dumb, passion-filled silences, vibrant with all that must not be spoken, which had tried her endurance to the utmost, and she had fled, at last, incontinently, because she had felt her resolution weakening each moment she and Garth remained together—because, with him beside her, the love against which she had been fighting for twelve long months had wakened into fierce life again, beating down her puny efforts to withstand it.
The mere sound of his voice, the lightest touch of his hand, had power to thrill her from head to foot, to rock those barriers which his own act had forced her to build up between them.
The recollection of that one perfect moment, when the serene austerity of his face had given the lie to that of which he was accused, lingered with her, a faint elusive thread of hope which would not leave her, urging, suggesting, combating the hard facts to which he himself had given ruthless confirmation.
Almost without her cognizance, Sara's characteristic, vehement belief in whomsoever she loved—stunned at the first moment of Elisabeth's revelation—had been gradually creeping back to feeble, halting life, weakened at times by the mass of evidence arrayed against it, yet still alive—growing and strengthening secretly within her as an unborn babe grows and strengthens.
And since that moment on the moor, when her eyes had searched Garth's face—his face with the mask off—the dormant belief within her had sprung into conscious knowledge.
Throughout the long hours of the night she had fought against it, deeming it but the passionate outcome of her love for the man himself. Shewantedto believe him innocent; it was only her love for him which had raised this phantom doubt of the charges brought against him; the wish had been father to the thought. So she told herself, struggling conscientiously against that to which she longed to yield.
And then, making a mockery of the hateful thing of which he had been accused, her individual knowledge of Garth himself rose up and confronted her accusingly.
Nothing that she had ever known of him had pointed to any lack of courage. It had been on no sudden, splendid impulse of a moment that he had plunged into the sea and fought that treacherous, racing tide off Devil's Hood Island. Quite composedly, deliberately, he had calculated the risks—and taken them!
Once more, she recalled the vision of his face as she had seen it yesterday, in that instant before he had perceived her nearness to him—strong and steadfast, imprinted with a disciplined nobility—and the repudiation of his dishonour leapt spontaneously from her lips.
“He didn't do it!”
She had spoken involuntarily, the thought rushing into words before she was aware, and the sound of her own voice in the darkness startled her. It seemed almost like a voice from some Otherwhere, authoritatively assuring her of all she had ached to believe.
She lay back on her pillows, smiling a little at the illusion. But the sense of peace, of blessed assuredness, remained with her. She had struggled through the darkness of those bitter months of unbelief, and now she had come out into the light on the other side. She felt dreamily contented and at rest, and presently she fell asleep, trustfully, as a little child may sleep, the smile still on her lips.
With morning came reaction—blank, sordid reaction, depressing her unutterably.
Amid the score of trifling details incidental to the day's arrangements, with the usual uninspiring conversation prevalent at the breakfast-table going on around her, the mood of the previous night, informed, as it had been, with that triumphant sense of exaltation, slipped from her like a garment.
Supposing she were to tell them—to tell Selwyn and Molly—that, without any further evidence, she was convinced of Garth's innocence? Why, they would think she had gone mad! Regretfully, with infinite pain it might be, but still none the less conclusively, they had accepted the fact of his guilt. And indeed, what else could be expected of them, seeing that he had himself acknowledged it?
And yet—that inner feeling of belief which had stirred into new life refused to be repressed.
Mechanically she went about the small daily duties which made up life at Sunnyside—interviewed Jane Crab, read the newspapers to Mrs. Selwyn, accomplished the necessary shopping in the town, each and all with a mind that was only superficially concerned with the matter in hand, while, behind this screen of commonplace routine, she felt as though her soul were struggling impotently to release itself from the bonds which had bound it in a tyranny of anguish for twelve long months.
In the afternoon, she paid a visit to the Convalescent Hospital. She made a practice of going there at least once a day and giving what assistance she could. Frequently she relieved Miles of part of his secretarial work, or checked through with him the invoices of goods received. There were always plenty of odd jobs to be done, and, after her strenuous work in France, she found it utterly impossible to settle down to the life of masterly inactivity which Selwyn had prescribed for her.
Audrey greeted her with a little flurry of excitement.
“Do you know that there was a Zepp over Oldhampton last night?” she asked, as they went upstairs together. “Did you hear it?”
Sara shook her head. The memory of the previous night surged over her like the memory of a vivid dream—the absolute assurance it had brought her of Garth's innocence, an assurance which had grown vague and doubtful with the daylight, just as the happenings of a dream grow blurred and indistinct.
“No, I didn't hear anything,” she replied absently. “Did they do much damage? I suppose they were after the munitions factory?”
“Yes. They dropped one bomb, that's all. It fell in a field, luckily. But goodness knows how they got over without any one's spotting them! Everybody's asking where our search-lights were. As for our anti-aircraft guns, they've never had the opportunity yet to do anything more than try our nerves by practicing! And last night a golden opportunity came and went unobserved.”
“The milkman was babbling to Jane about Zeppelins this morning, but I thought it was probably only the result of overnight potations at 'The Jolly Sailorman.'”
“No, it was the real thing—'made in Germany,'” smiled Audrey. “I begin to feel as if we were quite the hub of the universe, now that the Zepps have acknowledged our existence.”
They paused outside the door of the room allotted to her husband's activities.
“Miles will be glad to see you to-day,” she pursued. “He's bemoaning a new manifestation of war-fever among the feminine population of Monkshaven. Go in to him, will you? I must run off—I've got a million things to see to. You're not looking very fit to-day”—suddenly observing the other's white face and shadowed eyes. “Are you feeling up to work?”
Sara nodded indifferently.
“Quite,” she said. “I shouldn't have come otherwise.”
Miles welcomed her joyfully.
“Bless you, my dear!” he exclaimed. “You're the very woman I wanted to see. I'm snowed under with fool letters from females anxious to entertain 'our poor, brave, wounded officers.' Head 'em off, will you?” He thrust a bundle of letters into her hands. Then, as she moved toward the windows, and the cold, searching light of the wintry sunshine fell full on her face, his voice altered. “What is it? What has happened, Sara?” he asked quickly.
She looked at him dumbly. Her lips moved, but no sound came. The sudden question, accompanied by the swift, penetrating glance of Miles's brown eyes, had taken her off her guard.
He limped across to her.
“Not a stroke of work for you to-day,” he said decisively, taking the bundle of letters out of her hands. “Now tell me what's wrong?”
She looked away from him, a slow, shamed red creeping into her face. At last—
“I've seen Garth,” she said very low.
Herrick nodded. He knew what that meeting had meant to one of these two friends of his. Now he was to see the reverse of the medal. He waited, his silence sympathetic and far more helpful than any eager, probing question, however well-intentioned.
“Miles,” she burst out suddenly, “I'm—I'm wretched!”
“How's that?” He did not make the mistake of attributing her outburst to a transient mood of depression. Something deeper lay behind it.
“Since I saw Garth yesterday I've been asking myself whether—whether I've been doing him a ghastly injustice”—she moistened her dry lips—“whether he was really guilty of—running away.”
“Ah!” Miles stuffed his hands in his pockets and limped the length of the room and back. In that moment, he realized something of the maddening, galling restraint of the bondage under which Garth Trent had lived for years—the bondage of silence, and, within his pockets, his hands were clenched when he halted again at Sara's side.
“Why?” he shot at her.
She hesitated. Then she caught her breath a little hysterically.
“Why—because—because I just can't believe it! . . . I've seen a lot since I went away. I've seen brave men—and I've seen men . . . who were afraid.” She turned her head aside. “They—the ones who were afraid—didn't look . . . as Garth looks.”
Herrick made no comment. He put a question.
“What are you going to do?”
“I don't know. I expect you think I'm a fool? I've nothing to go on—on the contrary, I've Garth's own admission that—that hewascashiered. And yet——Oh! Miles, if he were only doing anything—now—it would be easier to believe in him! But—he holds absolutely aloof. It's as though hewereafraid—still.”
“Have you ever thought”—Herrick spoke slowly, without looking at her—“what this year of war must have meant to a man who has been a soldier—and is one no longer?” His eyes came back to her face meditatively.
“How—what do you mean?” she whispered.
“You've only got to look at the man to know what I mean. I think—since the war broke out—that Trent has been through the bitterness of death.”
“But—but he could have enlisted—got in somehow—under another name, had hewantedto fight. Or he might have gone out and driven an ambulance car—as Lester Kent did.”
Sara was putting to Herrick the very arguments which had arisen in her own mind to confound the intuitive belief of which she had been conscious since that moment of inward revelation on Crabtree Moor—putting them forward in all their repulsive ugliness of fact, in the desperate hope that Herrick might find some way to refute them.
“Some men might have done, perhaps,” answered Miles quietly. “But not a man of Trent's temperament. Some trees bend in a storm—and when the worst of it is past, they spring erect again. Somecan't; they break.”
The words recalled to Sara's mind with sudden vividness the last letter Patrick Lovell had ever written her—the one which he had left in the Chippendale bureau for her to receive after his death. He had applied almost those identical words to the Malincourt temperament, of which he had recognized the share she had inherited. And she realized that her guardian and Miles Herrick had been equally discerning. Though differing in its effect upon each of them, consequent upon individual idiosyncrasy, the fact remained that she and Garth were both “breaking” beneath the strain which destiny had imposed on them.
With the memory of Patrick's letter came an inexpressible longing for the man himself—for the kindly, helping hand which he would have stretched out to her in this crisis of her life. She felt sure that, had he been beside her now, his shrewd counsel would have cleared away the mists of doubt and indecision which had closed about her.
But since he was no longer there to be appealed to, she had turned instinctively to Herrick, and, somehow, he had failed her. He had not given her a definite expression of his own belief. She had been humanly craving to hear that he, too, believed in Garth, notwithstanding the evidence against him—that he had some explanation to offer of that ghastly tragedy of the court-martial episode. And instead, he had only hazarded some tolerant suggestions—sympathetic to Garth, it is true, but not carrying with them the vital, unqualified assurance she had longed to hear.
In spite of this, she knew that Herrick's friendship with Garth had remained unbroken by the knowledge of the Indian Frontier story. The personal relations of the two men were unchanged, and she felt as though Miles were withholding something from her, observing a reticence for which she could find no explanation. He had been very kind and understanding—it would not have been Miles had he been otherwise—but he had not helped her much. In some curious way she felt as though he had thrown the whole onus of coming to a decision, unaided by advice, upon her shoulders.
She returned to Sunnyside oppressed with a homesick longing for Patrick. The two years which had elapsed since his death had blunted the edge of her sorrow—as time inevitably must—but she still missed the shrewd, kindly, worldly-wise old man unspeakably, and just now, thrown back upon herself in some indefinable way by Miles's attitude, her whole heart cried out for that other who was gone.
She wondered if he knew how much she needed him. She almost believed that he must know—wherever he might be now, she felt that Patrick would never have forgotten the child of the woman whom, in this world, he had loved so long and faithfully.
With an instinctive craving for some tangible memory of him, she unlocked the leather case which held her mother's miniature, together with the last letter which Patrick had ever written; and, unfolding the letter, began to read it once again.
Somehow, there seemed comfort in the very wording of it, in every little characteristic phrase that had been Patrick's, in the familiar appellation, “Little old pal,” which he had kept for her alone.
All at once her fingers gripped the letter more tightly, her attentions riveted by a certain passage towards the end.
“. . . And when love comes to you, never forget that it is the biggest thing in the world, the one altogether good and perfect gift. Don't let any twopenny-halfpenny considerations of worldly advantage influence you, or the tittle-tattle of other folks, and even if it seems that something unsurmountable lies between you and the fulfillment of love, go over it, or round it, or through it! If it's real love, your faith must be big enough to remove the mountains in the way—or to go over them.”
Had Patrick foreseen the exact circumstances in which his “little old pal” would one day find herself, he could not have written anything more strangely applicable.
Sara sat still, every nerve of her taut and strung. She felt as though she had laid bare the whole of her trouble, revealed her inmost soul in all its anguished perplexity, to those shrewd blue eyes which had been wont to see so clearly through externals, piercing infallibly to the very heart of things.
Patrick had always possessed that supreme gift of being able to separate the grain from the chaff—to distinguish unerringly between essentials and non-essentials, and now, in the quiet, wise counsel of an old letter, Sara found an answer to all the questionings that had made so bitter a thing of life.
It was almost as if some one had torn down a curtain from before her eyes, rent asunder a veil which had been distorting and obscuring the values of things.
Mountains! There were mountains indeed betwixt her and Garth—and there was no way round them or through them! But now—now she would go over them—go straight ahead, unregarding of the mountains between, to where Garth and love awaited her.
No man is all angel—or all devil. Supposing Garthhadbeen guilty of cowardice, had had his one moment of weakness? She no longer cared! He was hers, her lover, alike in his weakness and in his strength. She had known men in France shrink in terror at the evil droning of a shell, and then die selflessly that others might live.
“Your faith must be big enough to remove the mountains in the way—or to go over them,” Patrick had written.
And Sara, hiding her face in her hands, thanked God that now, at last, her faith was big enough, and that love—“the one altogether good and perfect gift”—was still hers if she would only go over the mountains.
“GARTH TRENT, COWARD.”
The words, in staring white capital letters, had been chalked up by some one on the big wooden double-doors that shut the world out from Far End.
Sara stood quite still, gazing at them fixedly, and a tense white-heat of anger flared up within her. Who had dared to put such an insult upon the man she loved?
“Coward!” No one had ever actually applied that term to Garth in her hearing. They had skirted delicately round it, or wrapped up its meaning in some less harsh-sounding tangle of phrases, and although she had bitterly used the word herself, now that the opprobrious expression publicly confronted her, writ large by some unfriendly hand, she was swept by a sheer fury of indignant denial. It roused in her the immediate instinct to defend, to range herself unmistakably on Garth's side against a world of traducers.
With a faint smile of self-mockery, she realized that had this flagrant insult been leveled at him in the beginning, had her first knowledge of the black shadow which hung over him been thus brutally flung at her, instead of diffidently, reluctantly broken to her by Elisabeth, she would probably, with the instinctive partisanship of woman for her mate, have utterly refused to credit it—against all reason and all proof.
She wondered who could have done this thing, nailed this insult to Garth's very door. The illiterate characters stamped it as the work of some one in the lower walks of life, and, with a frown of annoyance, Sara promptly—and quite correctly—ascribed it to Black Brady.
“I never forgits to pay back,” he had told her once, belligerently. Probably this was his notion of getting even with the man who had prosecuted him for poaching. But had Brady realized that, in retaliating upon Trent, he would be giving pain to his beloved Sara, whom he had grown to regard with a humble, dog-like devotion, he would certainly have refrained from recording his vengeance upon Garth's gateway.
Surmising that Garth could not have seen the offending legend—or it would scarcely have been left for all who can to read—Sara whipped out her handkerchief and set to work to rub it off. He should not see it if she could help it!
But Black Brady had done his work very thoroughly, and she was still diligently scrubbing at it with an inadequate piece of cambric when she heard steps behind her, and wheeling round, found herself confronted by Garth himself.
His eyes rested indifferently and without surprise upon the chalked-up words, then turned to Sara's face inquiringly.
“Why are you doing that?” he asked. “Is—cleaning gates the latest form of war-work?”
Sara, her face scarlet, answered reluctantly.
“I didn't want you to see it.”
A curious expression flashed into his eyes.
“I saw it—two hours ago.”
“And you left it there?”—with amazement.
“Why not? It's true, isn't it?”
And in that moment the long struggle in Sara's heart ended, and she answered out of the fullness of the faith that was in her.
“No! It isnottrue! I've been a fool to believe it for an instant. But I'm one no longer. I don't believe it.” She paused, then, very deliberately and steadily, she put her question.
“Garth—tell me, were you ever guilty of cowardice?”
“The court-martial thought so.”
Sara's foot tapped impatiently on the ground.
“Please answer my question,” she said quickly.
But he remained unmoved.
“Elisabeth Durward has surely supplied you with all the information on that subject which you require,” he said in expressionless tones, and Sara was conscious anew of the maddening feeling of impotence with which a contest of wills between herself and Garth never failed to imbue her.
“Garth”—there was appeal in her voice, yet it was still very steady and determined—“I want to know whatyousay about it. What Elisabeth—or any one else—may say, doesn't matter any longer.”
Something in the quiet depth of emotion in her voice momentarily broke through his guard. He made an involuntary movement towards her, then checked himself, and, with an effort, resumed his former detached manner.
“More important than anything either I, or Elisabeth, can say, is the verdict of the court,” he answered.
The deadly calm of his voice ripped away her last remnant of composure.
“The verdict of the court!” she burst out. “Damnthe verdict of the court!”
“I have done—many a time!”—bitterly.
“Garth,” she came a step nearer to him and her sombre eyes blazed into his. “Iwillhave an answer! For God's sake, don't fence with me any longer! . . . There have been misunderstandings enough, reticences enough, between us. For this once, let us be honest with each other. I pretended I didn't care—I pretended I could go on living, believing you to be what—what they have called you. And I can't! . . . I can't go on. . . . I can't bear it any longer. You must answer me!Were you guilty?”
He was white to the lips by the time she had finished, and his eyes held a look of dumb torture. Twice he essayed to answer her, but no sound came.
At last he turned away, as though the passionate question in her face—the eager, hungry longing to hear her faith confirmed—were more than he could bear.
“I cannot deny it.” The words came hoarsely, almost whispered.
Her eyes never left his face.
“I didn't ask you to deny it,” she persisted doggedly. “I asked you—were you guilty?”
Again there fell as heavy silence. Then, reluctantly, as if the admission were dragged from him, he spoke.
“I'm afraid I can give you no other answer to that question.”
A light like the tender, tremulous shining of dawn broke across Sara's face.
“Then youweren'tguilty!” she exclaimed, and there was a deep, surpassing joy in her shaken tones. “I knew it! I was sure of it. Oh! Garth, Garth, what a fool I've been! And oh! My dear, why did you do it? Why did you let me go on thinking you—what it almost killed me to think?”
He stared down at her with wondering, uncertain eyes.
“But I've just told you that I can't deny it!”
She smiled at him—a smile of absolute content, with a gleam of humour at the back of it.
“I didn't ask you to deny it. I asked you to own to it; I tried to make you—every way. And you can't!”
“But—”
She laid her hand across his mouth—laughing the tender, triumphant laughter of a woman who has won, and knows that she has.
“You needn't blacken yourself any longer on my account, Garth. I shall never again believe anything that you may say against—the man I love.”
She stood leaning a little towards him, surrender in every line of her slender body, and her face was like a white flame—transfigured, radiant with some secret, mystic glory of love's imparting.
With an inarticulate cry he opened wide his arms and she went to him—swiftly, unerringly, like a homing bird—and, as he folded her close against his breast and laid his lips to hers, all the hunger and the longing of the empty past was in his kiss. For the moment, pain and bitterness and regret were swept away in that ecstasy of reunion.
Presently, with a little sigh of spent rapture, she leaned away from him.
“To think we've wasted a whole year,” she said regretfully. “Garth, I wish I had trusted you better!” There was a sweet humility of repentance in her tones.
“I don't see why you should trust me now,” he rejoined quietly. “The facts remain as before.”
“Only that the verdict of the court-martial was wrong,” she said swiftly. “There was some horrible mistake. I am sure of it—I know it! Garth!”—after a moment's pause—“are you going to tell me everything? I have the right to know—haven't I?—now that I'm going to be your wife.”
She felt the clasp of his arms relax, and, looking up quickly, she saw his face suddenly revert to its old lines of weariness. Slowly, reluctantly, he drew away from her.
“Garth!” There was a shrilling note of apprehension in her voice. “Garth! What is it? Why do you look like that?”
It was a full minute before he answered. When he did, he spoke heavily, as one who knows that his next words will dash all the joy out of life.
“Because,” he said quietly, “I can no more tell you anything now than I could before. I can't clear myself, Sara!”
Her eyes were fixed on his.
“Do you mean—you willneverbe able to?” she asked incredulously.
“Yes, I mean that.”
“Answer me one more question, Garth. Is it that youcannot—orwill notclear yourself?”
“Imustnot,” he replied steadily. “I am not the only one concerned in the matter. There is some one to whom I owe it to be silent. Honour forbids that I should even try to clear myself. Now you know all—all that I can ever tell you.”
“Who is it?” The question leaped from her, and Garth's answer came with an irrevocability of refusal there was no combating.
“That I cannot tell you—or any one.”
Sara's mouth twitched. Her face was very white, but her eyes were shining.
“And you have borne this—all these years?” she said. “You have known that you could clear yourself and have refrained?”
“There was no choice,” he answered quietly. “I took on a certain liability—years ago, and because it has turned out to be a much heavier liability than I anticipated gives me no excuse for repudiating it now.”
For a moment Sara hid her face in her hands. When she uncovered it again there was something almost akin to awe in her eyes.
“Will you ever forgive me, Garth, for doubting you?” she whispered.
“Forgive you?” He smiled. “What else could you have done, sweetheart? I don't know, even now, why you believe in me,” he added wonderingly.
“Just because—” she began, and fell silent, realizing that her belief had no reason, but was founded on the intuitive knowledge of a love that has suffered and won out on the other side.
When next she spoke it was with the simple, frank directness characteristic of her.
“Thank God that I can prove that I do trust you—absolutely. When will you marry me, Garth?”
“When will I marry you?” He repeated the words slowly, as though they conveyed no meaning to him.
“Yes. I want every one to know, to see that I believe in you. I want to stand at your side—go shares. Do you remember, once, how we settled that married life meant going shares in everything—good and bad?” She smiled a little at the remembrance drawn from the small store of memories that was all her few days of unclouded love had given her. “I want—my share, Garth.”
For a moment he was silent. Then he spoke, and the quiet finality of his tones struck her like a blow.
“We can never marry, Sara.”
“Never—marry!” she repeated dazedly. Quick fear seized her, and she rushed on impetuously: “Then you haven't forgiven me, after all—you don't believe that I trust you! Oh! How can I make youknowthat I do? Garth—”
“Oh, my dear,” he interrupted swiftly. “Don't misunderstand me. I know that you believe in me now—and I thank God for it! And as for forgiveness, as I told you, I have nothing to forgive. You'd have had need of the faith that removes mountains”—Sara started at the repetition of Patrick's very words—“to have believed in me under the circumstances.” He paused a moment, and when he spoke again there was something triumphant in his tones—a serene gladness and contentment. “You and I, beloved, are right with each other—now and always. Nothing can ever again come between us to divide us as we have been divided this last year. But, none the less,” and his voice took on a steadfast note of resolve, “I cannot marry you. I thought I could—I thought the past had sunk into oblivion, and that I might take the gift of love you offered me. . . . But I was wrong.”
“No! No! You were not wrong!” She was clinging to him in a sudden terror that even now their happiness was slipping from them. “The past has nothing to say to you and me. It can't come between us. . . . You have only to take me, Garth”—tremulously. “Let meshowthat my love is stronger than ill repute. Let me come to you and stand by you as your wife. The past can't hurt us, then!”
He shook his head.
“The past never loses its power to hurt,” he answered. “I've learned that. As far as the world you belong to is concerned, I'm finished, and I won't drag the woman I love through the same hell I've been through. That's what it would mean, you know. You would be singled out, pointed at, as the wife of a man who was chucked out of the Service. There would be no place in the world for you. You would be ostracized—because you were my wife.”
“I shouldn't care,” she urged. “Surely I can bear—what you have borne? . . . I shouldn't mind—anything—so long as we were together.”
He drew her close to him, his lips against her hair.
“Beloved!” he said, a great wonder in his voice. “Oh! Littlebravething! What have I ever done that you should love me like that?”
Sara winked away a tear, and a rather tremulous smile hovered round her mouth.
“I don't know, I'm sure,” she acknowledged a little shakily. “But I do. Garth, youwillmarry me?”
He lifted his bent head, his eyes gazing straight ahead of him, as though envisioning the lonely future and defying it.
“No,” he said resolutely. “No. God helping me, I will never marry you, Sara. I have—no right to marry. It could only bring you misery. Dear, I must shield you, even from yourself—from your own big, generous impulses which would let you join your life to mine. . . . Love is denied to us—denied through my own act of long ago. But if you'll give me friendship. . . .” She could sense the sudden passionate entreaty behind the words. “Sara! Friendship is worth while—such friendship as ours would be! Are you brave enough, strong enough, to give me that—since I may not ask for more?”
There was a long silence, while Sara lay very still against his breast, her face hidden.
In that silence, her spirit met and faced the ultimate issue—for there was that in Garth's voice which told her that his decision not to marry her was immutable. Could she—oh God!—could she give him what he asked? Give only part to the man to whom she longed to give all that a woman has to give? It would be far easier to go away—to put him out of her life for ever.
And yet—he asked this of her! He needed something that she could still give—the comradeship which was all that they two might ever know of love. . . .
When at last she raised her face to his, it was ashen, but her small chin was out-thrust, her eyes were like stars, and the grip of her slim hands on his shoulders was as iron.
“I'm strong enough to give you anything that you want,” she said quietly.
She had made the supreme sacrifice; she was ready to be his friend.
A sad and wistful gravity hung about their parting. Their lips met and clung together, but it was in a kiss of renunciation, not of passion.
He held her in his arms a moment longer.
“Never forget I'm loving you—always,” he said steadily. “Call me your friend—but remember, in my heart I shall always be your lover.”
Her eyes met his, unflinching, infinitely faithful.
“And I—I, too, shall be loving you,” she answered, simply. “Always, Garth—always.”
Tim was home on sick leave, and, after two perfect weeks of reunion, Elisabeth had written to ask if he might come down to Sunnyside, suggesting that the sea-breezes might advance his convalescence.
“I wonder Mrs. Durward cares to spare him,” commented Selwyn in some surprise. “It seems out of keeping with her general attitude. However, we shall be delighted to have him here. Write and say so, will you, Sara?”
Sara acquiesced briefly, flushing a little. She thought she could read the motive at the back of Elisabeth's proposal—the spirit which, putting up a gallant fight even in the very face of defeat, could make yet a final effort to secure success by throwing Tim and the woman he loved together in the dangerously seductive intimacy of the same household.
But Sara had no fear that Tim would avail himself of the opportunity thus provided in the way Elisabeth doubtless hoped he might. That matter had been finally settled between herself and him before he went to France, and she knew that he would never again ask her to be his wife. So she wrote to him serenely, telling him to come down to Monkshaven as soon as he liked; and a few days later found him installed at Sunnyside, nominally under Dr. Selwyn's care.
He was the same unaffected, spontaneous Tim as of yore, and hugely embarrassed by any reference to his winning of the Military Cross, firmly refusing to discuss the manner of it, even with Sara.
“I just got on with my job—like dozens of other fellows,” was all he would say.
It was from a brother officer that Sara learned, later, than Tim had “got on with his job” under a hellish enemy fire, in spite of being twice wounded; and had thus saved the immediate situation in his vicinity—and, incidentally, the lives of many of his comrades.
He seemed to Sara to have become at once both older and younger than in former days. He had all the hilarious good spirits evinced by nine out of ten of the boys who came home on leave—the cheery capacity to laugh at the hardships and dangers of the front, to poke good-natured fun at “old Fritz” and to make a jest of the German shells and the Flanders mud, treating the whole great adventure of war as though it were the finest game invented.
Yet back of the mirth and laughter in the blue eyes lurked something new and strange and grave—inexpressibly touching—that indefinable something which one senses shrinkingly in the young eyes of the boys who have come back.
It hurt Sara somehow—that look of which she caught glimpses now and then, in quiet moments, and she set herself to drive it away, or, at least, to keep it at bay as much as possible, by filling every available moment with occupation or amusement.
“I don't want him to think about what it was like—out there,” she told Molly. “His eyes make my heart ache, sometimes. They're too young to have seen—such things. Suggest something we can play at to-day!”
So they threw themselves, heart and soul, into the task of entertaining Tim, and, since he was very willing to be entertained, the weeks at Sunnyside slipped by in a little whirl of gaiety, winding up with a badminton tournament, at which Tim—whose right arm had not yet quite recovered from the effects of the German bullet it had stopped—played a left-handed game, and triumphantly maneuvered himself and his partner into the semi-finals.
Probably—leniently handicapped, as they were, in the circumstances—they would have won the tournament, but that, unluckily, in leaping to reach a shuttle soaring high above his head, Tim somehow missed his footing and came down heavily, with his leg twisted underneath him.
“Broken ankle,” announced Selwyn briefly, when he had made his examination.
Tim opened his eyes—he had lost consciousness, momentarily, from the pain.
“Damn!” he observed succinctly. “That'll make it the very devil of a time before I can get back to France!” Then, to Sara, who could be heard murmuring something about writing to Elisabeth: “Not much, old thing, you don't! She'd fuss herself, no end. Just write—and say—it's a sprain.” And he promptly fainted again.
They got him back to Sunnyside while he was still unconscious, and when he returned to an intelligent understanding of material matters, he found himself in bed, with a hump-like excrescence in front of him keeping the weight of the bedclothes from the injured limb.
“Did I faint?” he asked morosely.
“Yes. Lucky you did, too,” responded Sara cheerfully. “Doctor Dick rigged your ankle up all nice and comfy without your being any the wiser.”
“Fainted—like a girl—over a broken ankle, my hat!”—with immense scorn.
Sara was hard put to it not to laugh outright at his face of disgust.
“You might remember that you're not strong yet,” she suggested soothingly.
They talked for a little, and presently Tim, whose eyelids had been blinking somnolently for some time, gave vent to an unmistakable yawn.
“I'm—I'm confoundedly sleepy,” he murmured apologetically.
“Then go to sleep,” came promptly from Sara. “It's quite the best thing you can do. I'll run off and write a judicious letter to Elisabeth—about your sprain”—smiling.
With a glance round to see that he had candle, matches, and a hand-bell within reach, she turned out the lamp and slipped quietly away. Tim was asleep almost before she had quitted the room.
It was several hours later when Sara sat up in bed, broad awake, in response to the vigorous shaking that some one was administering to her.
She opened her eyes to the yellow glare of a candle. Behind the glare materialized a vision of Jane Crab, attired in a red flannel dressing-gown, and with her hair tightly strained into four skimpy plaits which stuck out horizontally from her head like the surviving rays of a badly damaged halo.
“Miss Sara! Miss Sara!” She apostrophized the rudely awakened sleeper in a sibilant whisper, as though afraid of being overheard. “Get up, quick! They 'Uns is 'ere!”
“Whois here?” exclaimed Sara, somewhat startled.
“The Zepps, miss—the Zepps! The guns are firing off every minute or two. There!”—as the blurred thunder of anti-aircraft guns boomed in the distance. “There they go again!”
Sara leaped out of bed in an instant, hastily pulling on a fascinating silk kimono and thrusting her bare feet into a pair of scarlet Turkish slippers.
“One may as well die tidy,” she reflected philosophically. Then, turning to Jane—
“Where's the doctor?” she demanded.
“Trying to get the mistress downstairs. She's that scared, she won't budge from her bed.”
Sara giggled—Jane's face was very expressive.
“Well, I'm going into Mr. Durward's room,” she announced. “We shall see better there.”
Jane's little beady eyes glittered.
“Aye, I'd like to see them at their devil's work,” she allowed fondly, with a threatening “Just-let-me-catch-them-at-it!” intonation in her voice.
Sara laughed, and they both repaired to Tim's room, encountering Molly on the way and sweeping her along in their train. They found Tim volubly cursing his inability to get up and “watch the fun.”
“Look out and tell me if you can see the blighters,” he commanded.
As Sara threw open the window, a dull, thudding sound came up to them from the direction of Oldhampton. There was a sullen menace in the distance-dulled reverberation.
Molly gurgled with the nervous excitement of a first experience under fire.
“That's a bomb!” she whispered breathlessly.
She, and Sara, and Jane Crab wedged themselves together in the open window and leaned far out, peering into the moonless dark. As they watched, a search-light leapt into being, and a pencil of light moved flickeringly across the sky. Then another and another—sweeping hither and thither like the blind feelers of some hidden octopus seeking its prey. There was something horribly uncanny in those long, straight shafts of light wavering uncertainly across the dense darkness of the night sky.
“Can you see the Zepp?” demanded Tim, with lively interest, from his bed.
“No, it's pitch black—too dark to see a thing,” replied Sara.
Exactly as she spoke, a brilliant light hung for a moment suspended in the dark arch of the sky, then shivered into a blaze of garish effulgence, girdling the countryside and illuminating every road and building, every field, and tree, and ditch, as brightly as though it were broad daylight.
“A star-shell!” gasped Molly. “What a beastly thing! Positively”—giggling nervously—“I believe they can see right inside this room!”
“'Tisn't decent!” fulminated Jane indignantly, clutching with modest fingers at her scanty dressing-gown and straining it tightly across her chest whilst she backed hastily from the vicinity of the window. “Lightin' up sudden like that in the middle of the night! I feel for all the world as though I hadn't got a stitch on me! Come away from the window, do, miss——”
The light failed as suddenly as it had flared, and a warning crash, throbbing up against their ears, startled her into silence.
“That's a trifle too near to be pleasant,” exclaimed Tim sharply. “Go downstairs, you three! Do you hear?”
Simultaneously, Selwyn shouted from below—
“Come downstairs! Come down at once! Quick, Sara! I'm coming up to carry Tim down—and Minnie won't stay alone. Comeon!”
Obedient to something urgent and imperative in the voices of both men—something that breathed of danger—the three women hastened from the room. Jane's candle flared and went out in the draught from the suddenly opened door, and in the smothering darkness they stumbled pell-mell down the stairs.
A dim light burning in the hall showed them Mrs. Selwyn cowering against her husband, her face hidden, sobbing hysterically, and in a moment Sara had taken Dick's place, wrapping her strong arms about the shuddering woman.
“Go on!” she whispered to him. “Go and get Tim down!”
He nodded, releasing himself with gentle force from his wife's clinging fingers, which had closed upon his arm like a vise.
Immediately she lifted up her voice in a thin, querulous shriek—
“No! Dick, Dick—don't leave me!Dick”—
. . . And then it came—sped from that hovering Hate which hung above—dropping soundlessly, implacable through the utter darkness of the night and crashing into devilish life against a corner of the house.
Followed by a terrible flash and roar—a chaos of unimaginable sound. It seemed as though the whole world had split into fragments and were rocketing off into space; and, in quick succession, came the rumble of falling beams and masonry, and the dense dust of disintegrated plaster mingling with the fumes of high explosive.
Sara was conscious of being shot violently across the hall, and then everything went out in illimitable black darkness.