It was spring once more. In the garden of the Byrdsnest flowering shrubs were in bloom; the beds were studded with daffodils; the scent of lilac filled the air. Birds flashed and sang, for it was May, high May, and the nests were built. Mary, warm-cheeked in the sun, and wearing a broad-brimmed hat and a pair of gardening gloves, was thinning out a clump of cornflowers. At one corner of the lawn, shaded by a flowering dog-wood, was a small sand-pit, and in this a yellow-haired two-year-old boy diligently poured sand through a wire sieve. In a white perambulator lay a pink, brown-haired, baby girl, soundly sleeping, a tiny thumb held comfortably in her mouth. Now and then Mary straightened from her task and tiptoed over to the baby, to see that she was still in the shade, or that no flies disturbed her.
Mary's face was not that of a happy woman, but it was the face of one who has found peace. It was graver than of old, but lightened whenever she looked at her children with an expression of proud tenderness. She was dressed in the simplest of white cotton gowns, beneath which the lines of her figure showed a little fuller, but strong and graceful as ever. She looked very womanly, very desirable, as she bent over the baby's carriage.
Lily emerged from the front door, and set a tea-tray upon the low porch table. She lingered for a moment, glancing with pride at the verandah with its green rocking chairs, hammock, and white creeping-rug.
“My, Mrs. Byrd, don't our new porch look nice, now it's all done?” she exclaimed, beaming.
“Yes,” said Mary, dropping into a rocking-chair to drink her tea, and throwing off her hat to loosen the warm waves of hair about her forehead, “isn't it awfully pretty? I don't know how we should have managed without it on damp mornings, now that Baby wants to crawl all the time. Ah, here is Miss Mason!” she exclaimed, smiling as that spinster, in white shirtwaist and alpaca skirt, dismounted from a smart bicycle at the gate.
“Any letters, Sparrow?”
Miss Mason, extracting several parcels from her carrier, flopped gratefully into a rocker, and drew off her gloves.
“One or two,” she said. “Here, Lily; here's your marmalade, and here's the soap, and a letter for you. There are a few bills, Mary, and a couple of notes—” she passed them across—“and here's an afternoon paper one of the Haven youngsters handed me as I passed him on the road. He called out something about another atrocity. I haven't looked at it. I hate to open the things these days.”
“I know,” nodded Mary, busy with her letters, “so do I. This is from Mr. Gunther, from California. He's been there all the winter, you know. Oh, how nice; he's coming back! Says we are to expect a visit from him soon,” Mary exclaimed, with a pleased smile. “Here's a line from Constance,” she went on. “Everything is doing splendidly in her garden, she says. She wants us all to go up in June, before she begins her auto speaking trip. Don't you think it would be nice!”
“Perfectly elegant,” said the Sparrow. “I'm glad she's taking a little rest. I thought she looked real tired this spring.”
“She works so frightfully hard.”
“Land sakes, work agrees withyou, Mary! You look simply great. If your new book does as well as the old one I suppose porches won't satisfy you—you'll be wanting to build an ell on the house?”
“That's just what I do want,” said Mary, smiling. “I want to have a spare room, and proper place for the babies. We're awfully crowded. Did I tell you Mr. Farraday had some lovely plans that he had made years ago, for a wing?”
“You don't say!”
“Yes, but I'm afraid we'll have to wait another year for that, till I can increase my short story output.”
“My, it seems to me you write them like a streak.”
Mary shook her head. “No, after Baby is weaned I expect to work faster, and ever so much better.”
“Well, if you do any better than you are doing, Frances Hodgson Burnett won't be in it; that's all I can say.”
“Oh, Sparrow!” smiled Mary, “she writes real grown-up novels, too, and I can only do silly little children's things.”
“They're not silly, Mary Byrd, I can tell you that,” sniffed Miss Mason, shaking out her paper.
“My gracious!” She turned a shocked face to Mary. “What do you suppose those Germans have done now? Sunk the Lusitania!”
“The Lusitania?” exclaimed Mary, incredulously.
“Yes, my dear; torpedoed her without warning. My, ain't that terrible? It says they hope most of the passengers are saved—but they don't know yet.”
“Let me see!” Mary bent over her shoulder. “The Lusitania gone!” she whispered, awed.
“No, no!” exclaimed the Sparrow suddenly, hurrying off the porch. “Ellie not pour sand over his head! No, naughty!”
Mary sank into her chair with the paper. There was the staring black headline, but she could hardly believe it. The Lusitania gone? The great ship she knew so well, on which she and Stefan had met, gone! Lying in the ooze, with fish darting above the decks where she had walked with Stefan. Those hundreds of cabins a labyrinth for fish to lose their way in—all rotting in the black sea currents. The possible loss of life had not yet come home to her. It was inconceivable that there would not have been ample time for every one to escape. But the ship, the great English ship! So swift—so proud!
Dropping the paper, she walked slowly across the garden and the lane, and found her way to a little seat she had made on the side of the bluff overlooking the water. Here, her back to a tree trunk, she sat immobile, trying to still the turmoil of memories that rose within her.
The Lusitania gone!
It seemed like the breaking of the last link that bound her to the past. All the belief, all the wonder of that time were already gone, and now the ship, her loveship, was gone, too, lost forever to the sight of men.
She saw again its crowded decks, saw the lithe, picturesque figure of the young artist with the eager face bending over her—
“Won't you be perfectly kind, and come for a walk?”
She saw the saloon on her engagement night when she sang at the ship's concert. What were the last words she had sung?
“Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty—Love's a stuff will not endure.”
Alas, how unconsciously prophetic she had been. Nothing had endured, neither love, nor faith, nor the great ship of their pilgrimage herself.
Other memories crowded. Their honeymoon at Shadeham, the sweet early days of their studio life, her glorious pride in his great painting of love exalted.... The night of Constance's party, when, after her singing, her husband had left his place by Miss Berber and crossed the room so eagerly to her side. Their first weeks at the Byrdsnest—how happy they had been then, and how worshipfully he had looked at her the morning their son was born. All gone. She had another baby now, but he had never seen it—never would see it, she supposed. Her memory traveled on, flitting over the dark places and lingering at every sunny peak of their marriage journey. Their week in Vermont! How they had skated and danced together; how much he seemed to love her then! Even the day he sailed for France he seemed to care for her. “Why are we parting?” he had cried, kissing her. Yes, even then their marriage, for all the clouds upon it, had seemed real—she had never doubted in her inmost heart that they were each other's.
With a stab of the old agony, Mary remembered the day she got his letter admitting his relations with Felicity. The unbelievable breakdown of her whole life! His easy, lightly made excuses. He, in whose arms she had lain a hundred times, with whom she had first learnt the sacrament of love, had given himself to another woman, had given all that most close and sacred intimacy of love, and had written, “I cannot say with truth that I regret it.” How she had lived through the reading of those words she did not know. Grief does not kill, or surely she would have died that hour. Her own strength, and the miracle of life within her, alone stayed her longing for death. It was ten months ago; she had lived down much since then, had schooled herself daily to forgetfulness; yet now again the unutterable pang swept over her—the desolation of loss, and the incapacity to believe that such loss could be.
She rebelled against the needlessness of it all now, as she had done then, in those bitter days before her little Rosamond came to half-assuage her pain.
Well, he had redeemed himself in a way. The day James Farraday came to tell her that Stefan had enlisted, some part of her load was eased. The father of her children was not all ignoble.
Mary mused on. How would it end? Would Stefan live? Should she—could she—ever see him again? She thanked God he was there, serving the country he loved. “The only thing he ever really loved, perhaps,” she thought. She supposed he would be killed—all that genius lost like so much more of value that the world was scrapping to-day—and then it would all be quite gone—
Through the trees dropped the insistent sound of a baby's cry to its mother. She rose; the heavy clouds of memory fell away. The past was gone; she lived for the future, and the future was in her children.
The next morning Mary had just bathed the baby, and was settling her in her carriage, when the Sparrow, who, seated on the porch with Elliston, was engaged in cutting war maps from the papers and pasting them in an enormous scrapbook, gave a warning cough.
“Here comes Mr. McEwan,” she whispered, in the hushed voice reserved by her simple type for allusions to the afflicted.
“Oh, poor dear,” said Mary, hurrying across the lawn to meet him. She felt more than ever sympathetic toward him, for Mac's wife had died in a New Hampshire sanitarium only a few weeks before, and all his hopes of mending her poor broken spirit were at an end. Reaching the gate, she gave an involuntary cry.
McEwan was stumbling toward her almost like a drunken man. His face was red, his eyes bloodshot; a morning paper trailed loosely from his hand.
“Mary,” he cried, “I came back from the station to see ye—hae ye heard, my girl?”
“Wallace!” she exclaimed, frightened, “what is it? What has happened?” She led him to a seat on the porch; he sank into it unresisting. Miss Mason pushed away her scrapbook, white-faced.
“The Lusitania! They were na' saved, Mary. There's o'er a thousand gone. O'er a hundred Americans—hundreds of women and little bairns, Mary—like yours—Canadian mithers and bairns going to be near their brave lads—babies, Mary.” And the big fellow dropped his rough head on his arms and sobbed like a child.
“Oh, Wallace; oh, Wallace!” whispered Mary, fairly wringing her hands; “it can't be! Over a thousand lost?”
“Aye,” he cried suddenly, bringing his heavy fist down with a crash on the wicker table, “they drooned them like rats—God damn their bloody souls.”
His face, crimson with rage and pity, worked uncontrollably. Mary covered her eyes with her hands. The Sparrow sat petrified. The little Elliston, terrified by their strange aspects, burst into loud wails.
“There, darling; there, mother's boy,” crooned Mary soothingly, pressing her wet cheek to his.
“Little bairns like that, Mary,” McEwan repeated brokenly. Mary gathered the child close into her arms. They sat in stunned horror.
“Weel,” said McEwan at last, more quietly. “I'll be going o'er to enlist. I would ha' gone long sine, but that me poor girl would ha' thocht I'd desairted her. She doesna' need me now, and there's eno' left for the lad. Aye, this is me call. I was ay a slow man to wrath, Mary, but now if I can but kill one German before I die—” His great fist clenched again on the table.
“Oh, don't, dear man, don't,” whispered Mary, with trembling lips, laying her cool hand over his. “You're right; you must go. But don't feel so terribly.”
His grip relaxed; his big hand lay under hers quietly.
“I could envy you, Wallace, being able to go. It's hard for us who have to stay here, just waiting. My poor sister has lost her husband already, and I don't know whether mine is alive or dead. And now you're going! Elliston's pet uncle!” She smiled at him affectionately through her tears.
“I'll write you if I hear aught about the Foreign Legion, Mary,” he said, under his breath.
She pressed his hand in gratitude. “When shall you go?” she asked.
“By the next boat.”
“Go by the American Line.”
His jaw set grimly. “Aye, I will. They shall no torpedo me till I've had ae shot at them!”
Mary rose. “Now, Wallace, you are to stay and lunch with us. You must let us make much of the latest family hero while we have him. Eh, Sparrow?”
“Yes,” nodded Miss Mason emphatically, “I've hated the British ever since the Revolution—I and my parents and my grandparents—but I guess I'm with them, and those that fight for them, from now on.”
On the Monday following the sinking of the Lusitania, James Farraday received a letter from the American Hospital in Paris, written in French in a shaky hand, and signed Adolph Jensen.
New York was still strained and breathless from Saturday's horror. Men sat idle in their offices reading edition after edition of the papers, rage mounting in their hearts. Flags were at half mast. Little work was being done anywhere save at the newspaper offices, which were keyed to the highest pitch. Farraday's office was hushed. Those members of his staff who were responsible for The Child at Home—largely women, all picked for their knowledge of child life—were the worst demoralized. How think of children's play-time stories when those little bodies were being brought into Queenstown harbor? Farraday himself, the efficient, the concentrated, sat absent-mindedly reading the papers, or drumming a slow, ceaseless tap with his fingers upon the desk. The general gloom was enhanced by their knowledge that Mac, their dear absurd Mac, was going. But they were all proud of him.
By two o'clock Farraday had read all the news twice over, and Adolph's letter three times.
Telephoning for his car to meet him, he left the office and caught an early afternoon train home. He drove straight to the Byrdsnest and found Mary alone in the sitting room.
She rose swiftly and pressed his hand:
“Oh, my dear friend,” she murmured, “isn't it terrible?”
He nodded. “Sit down, Mary, my dear girl.” He spoke very quietly, unconsciously calling her by name for the first time. “I have something to tell you.”
She turned white.
“No,” he said quickly, “he isn't dead.”
She sat down, trembling.
“I have a letter from Adolph Jensen. They are both wounded, and in the American Hospital in Paris. The Foreign Legion has suffered heavily. Jensen is convalescent, and returns to the front. He was beside your husband in the trench. It was a shell. Byrd was hit in the back. My dear child—” he stopped for a moment. “Mary—”
“Go on,” she whispered through stiff lips.
“He is paralyzed, my dear, from the hips down.”
She stared at him.
“Oh, no, James—oh, no, James—oh, no!” she whispered, over and over.
“Yes, my poor child. He is quite convalescent, and going about the wards in a wheeled chair. But he will never be able to walk again.”
“Why,” said Mary, wonderingly, “he never used to be still—he always ran, and skipped, like a child.” Her breast heaved. “He always ran, James—” she began to cry—the tears rolled down her cheeks—she ran quickly out of the room, sobbing.
James waited in silence, smoking a pipe, his face set in lines of inexpressible sadness. In half an hour she returned. Her eyes were swollen, but she was calm again.
“I'm sorry to have kept you waiting so long,” she said, with a pitiful attempt at a smile. “Please read me the letter, will you?”
James read the French text. Stefan had been so brave in the trenches, always kept up a good heart. He used to sing to the others. A shell had struck the trench; they were nearly all killed or wounded. Stefan knew he would walk no more, but he was still so brave, with a smile for every one. He was drawing, too, wonderful pencil drawings of the front. Adolph thought they were much more wonderful than anything he had ever done. All the nurses and wounded asked for them. Adolph would be going back in a month. He ventured to ask Mr. Farraday to lay the affair before Mrs. Byrd. Stefan had no money, and no one to take care of him when he left the hospital. He, Adolph, would do all that was possible, but he was sure that his friend should go home. Stefan often, very often, spoke of his wife to Adolph. He wore a ring of hers. Would Mr. Farraday use his good offices?
James folded the letter and looked at Mary.
“I must go and fetch him,” she said simply.
“Mrs. Byrd—Mary—I want you to let me go. Mac has offered to do it before enlisting, but I don't think your husband cared for Mac, and he always liked me. It wouldn't be fair to the baby for you to go, and it would be very painful for you. But it will give me real happiness—the first thing I've been able to do in this awful business.”
“Oh, no, James, I couldn't let you. Your work—it is too much altogether.”
“The office can manage without me for three weeks. I want you to let me do this for you both—it's such a small thing.”
“I feel I ought to go, James,” she reiterated, “I ought to be there.”
“You can't take the baby—and she mustn't suffer,” he urged. “There will be any amount of red tape. You really must let me go.”
They discussed it for some time, and at last she agreed, for the sake of the small Rosamond. She began to see, too, that there would be much for her to do at this end. With her racial habit of being coolest in an emergency, Mary found herself mentally reorganizing the régime of the Byrdsnest, and rapidly reviewing one possible means after another of ensuring Stefan's comfort. She talked over her plans with James, and before he left that afternoon their arrangements were made. On one point he was obliged to give way. Stefan's money, which he had returned to Mary before enlisting, was still intact, and she insisted it should be used for the expenses of the double journey. Enough would be left to carry out her plans at this end, and Stefan would know that he was in no sense an object of charity.
James, anxious as he was to help his friends in all ways, had to admit that she was right. He was infinitely relieved that the necessity for practical action had so completely steadied her. He knew now that she would be almost too busy in the intervening weeks for distress.
The next day James engaged his passage, sent a long cable to Adolph, and performed prodigies of work at the office. By means of some wire-pulling he and Mac succeeded in securing a cabin together on the next American liner out.
Meanwhile, Mary began her campaign. At breakfast she expounded her plans to Miss Mason, who had received the news overnight.
“You see, Sparrow,” she said, “we don't know how much quiet he will need, but we couldn't give himanyin this little cottage, with the babies. So I shall fit up the studio—a big room for him, a small one for the nurse, and a bath. The nurse will be the hardest part, for I'm sure he would rather have a man. The terrible helplessness”—her voice faltered for a second—“would humiliate him before a woman. But it must be the right man, Sparrow, some one he can like—who won't jar him—and some one we can afford to keep permanently. I've been thinking about it all night and, do you know, I have an idea. Do you remember my telling you about Adolph Jensen's brother?”
“The old one, who failed over here?”
“Yes. Stefan helped him, you know, and I'm sure he was awfully grateful. When the Berber shop changed hands in January, I wondered what would become of him; I believe Miss Berber was only using him out of kindness. It seems to me he might be just the person, if we could find him.”
“You're a smart girl, Mary, and as plucky as they make 'em,” nodded the spinster.
“Oh, Sparrow, when I think of his helplessness! He, who always wanted wings!” Mary half choked.
“Now,” said Miss Mason, rising briskly, “we've got to act, not think. Come along, child, and let's go over to the barn.” Gratefully Mary followed her.
Enquiries at the now cheapened and popularized Berber studio elicited Jensen's old address, and Mary drove there in a taxi, only to find that he had moved to an even poorer quarter of the city. She discovered his lodgings at last, in a slum on the lower east side. He was out, looking for a job, the landlady thought, but Mary left a note for him, with a bill inside it, asking him to come out to Crab's Bay the next morning. She hurried back to Rosamond, and found that the excellent Sparrow had already held lively conferences with the village builders and plumbers.
“I told 'em they'd get a bonus for finishing the job in three weeks, and I guess I got the whole outfit on the jump,” said she with satisfaction. “Though the dear Lord knows,” she added, “if the plumbers get through on schedule it'll be the first time in history.”
When Henrik Jensen arrived next day Mary took an instant liking to him. He was shabbier and more hopeless than ever, but his eyes were kind, his mouth gentle, and when she spoke of Stefan his face lighted up.
She told him the story of the two friends, of his brother's wound and Stefan's crippling, and saw that his eyes filled with tears.
“He was wonderful to me, Mrs. Byrd, he gave me a chance. I was making good, too, till Miss Berber left and the whole scheme fell to pieces. I'm glad Adolph is with him; it was very gracious of you to let me hear about it.”
“Are you very busy now, Mr. Jensen?”
He smiled hopelessly.
“Yes, very busy—looking for work. I'm down and out, Mrs. Byrd.”
She unfolded her scheme to him. Stefan would need some one near him night and day. He would be miserable with a servant; he would—she knew—feel his helplessness more keenly in the presence of a woman. She herself could help, but she had her work, and the children. Mr. Jensen would be one of the family. She could offer him a home, and a salary which she hoped would be sufficient for his needs—
“I have no needs, Mrs. Byrd,” he interrupted at this point, his eyes shining with eagerness. “Enough clothes for decency, that's all. If I could be of some use to your husband, to my friend and Adolph's, I should ask no more of life. I'm a hopeless failure, ma'am, and getting old—you don't know what it is like to feel utterly useless.”
Mary listened to his gentle voice and watched his fine hands—hands used to appraising delicate, beautiful things. The longer they talked, the more certain she felt that here was the ideal person, one bound to her husband by ties of gratitude, and whose ministrations could not possibly offend him.
She rang up Mrs. Farraday, put the case to her, and obtained her offer of a room to house Mr. Jensen while the repairs were making. She arranged with him to return next day with his belongings, and advanced a part of his salary for immediate expenses. Mary wanted him to come to her at once, both out of sympathy for his wretched circumstances, and because she wished thoroughly to know him before Stefan's return.
Luckily, the Sparrow took to Jensen at once, so there was nothing to fear on that score. For the Sparrow was now a permanent part of Mary's life. She had a small independent income, but no home—her widowed sister having gone west to live with a daughter—and she looked upon herself as the appointed guardian of the Byrdsnest. Not only did she relieve Mary of the housekeeping, and help Lily with the household tasks, which she adored, but she had practically taken the place of nurse to the children, leaving Mary hours of freedom for her work which would otherwise have been unattainable.
The competency of the two friends achieved the impossible in the next few weeks, as it had done on the memorable first day of Mary's housekeeping. Mr. Jensen, with his trained taste, was invaluable for shopping expeditions, going back and forth to the city with catalogues, samples, and orders.
In a little over three weeks Stefan's old studio had been transformed into a bed-sitting-room, with every comfort that an invalid could desire, and the further end of it had been partitioned into a bathroom and a small bedroom for Mr. Jensen, with a separate outside entrance.
“Oh, if only I had the new wing,” sighed Mary.
“This will be even quieter for him, Mrs. Byrd, and the chair can be wheeled so quickly to the house,” replied Mr. Jensen.
The back window of Mary's sitting room had been enlarged to glass doors, and from these a concrete path ran to the studio entrance. Mary planned to make it a covered way after the summer.
The day the wheeled chair arrived it was hard for her to keep back the tears. It was a beautifully made thing of springs, cushions, and rubber tires. It could be pushed, or hand-propelled by the occupant. It could be lowered, heightened, or tilted. It was all that a chair could be—but how to picture Stefan in it, he of the lithe steps and quick, agile movements, the sudden turns, and the swift, almost running walk? Her heart trembled with pity at the thought.
They had already received an “all well” cable from Paris, and three weeks after he had sailed, James telegraphed that they were starting. He had waited for the American line—he would have been gone a month.
As the day of landing approached, Mary became intensely nervous. She decided not to meet the boat, and sent James a wireless to that effect. She could not see Stefan first among all those crowds; her instinct told her that he, too, would not wish it.
The ship docked on Saturday. The day before, the last touches had been put to Stefan's quarters. They were as perfect as care and taste could make them. Early on Saturday morning Mr. Jensen started for the city, carrying a big bunch of roses—Mary's welcome to her husband. While the Sparrow flew about the house gilding the lily of cleanliness, Mary, with Elliston at her skirts, picked the flowers destined for Stefan's room. These she arranged in every available vase—the studio sang with them. Every now and then she would think of some trifle to beautify it further—a drawing from her sitting room—her oldest pewter plate for another ashtray—a pine pillow from her bedroom. Elliston's fat legs became so tired with ceaselessly trotting back and forth behind her that he began to cry with fatigue, and was put to bed for his nap. Rosamond waked, demanding dinner and amusement.
The endless morning began to pass, and all this while Mary had not thought!
At lunch time James telephoned. They would be out by three o'clock. Stefan had stood the journey well, was delighted with the roses, and to see Jensen. He was wonderfully brave and cheerful.
Mary was trembling as she hung up the receiver. He was here, he was on the way; and still, she had not thought!
Both children asleep, the last conceivable preparation made, Mary settled herself on the porch at last, to face what was coming.
The Sparrow peeped out at her.
“I guess you'd as soon be left alone, my dear,” she said, tactfully.
“Yes, please, Sparrow,” Mary replied, with a nervous smile. The little spinster slipped away.
What did she feel for Stefan? Mary wondered. Pity, deep pity? Yes. But that she would feel for any wounded soldier. Admiration for his courage? That, too, any one of the war's million heroes could call forth. Determination to do her full duty by this stricken member of her family? Of course, she would have done that for any relative. Love? No. Mary felt no love for Stefan. That had died, nearly a year ago, died in agony and humiliation. She could not feel that her lover, her husband, was returning to her. She waited only for a wounded man to whom she owed the duty of all kindness.
Suddenly, her heart shook with fear. What if she were unable to show him more than pity, more than kindness? What if he, stricken, helpless, should feel her lack of warmth, and tenderness, should feel himself a stranger here in this his only refuge? Oh, no, no! She must do better than that. She must act a part. He must feel himself cared for, wanted. Surely he, who had lost everything, could ask so much for old love's sake? ... But if she could not give it? Terror assailed her, the terror of giving pain; for she knew that of all women she was least capable of insincerity. “I don't know how to act,” she cried to herself, pitifully.
A car honked in the lane. They were here. She jumped up and ran to the gate, wheeling the waiting chair outside it. Farraday's big car rounded the bend—three men sat in the tonneau. Seeing them, Mary ran suddenly back inside the gate; her eyes fell, she dared not look.
The car had stopped. Through half-raised lids she saw James alight. The chauffeur ran to the chair. Jensen stood up in the car, and some one was lifted from it. The chair wheeled about and came toward her. It was through the gate—it was only a yard away.
“Mary,” said a voice. She looked up.
There was the well-known face, strangely young, the eyes large and shadowed. There was his smile, eager, and very anxious now. There were his hands, those finely nervous hands. They lay on a rug, beneath which were the once swift limbs that could never move again. He was all hers now. His wings were broken, and, broken, he was returning to the nest.
“Mary!”
She made one step forward. Stooping, she gathered his head to her breast, that breast where, loverlike, it had lain a hundred times. Her arms held him close, her tears ran down upon his hair.
“My boy!” she cried.
Here was no lover, no husband to be forgiven. Cradled upon her heart there lay only her first, her most wayward, and her best loved child.
Mary never told Stefan of those nightmare moments before his arrival. From the instant that her deepest passion, the maternal, had answered to his need, she knew neither doubt nor unhappiness.
She settled down to the task of creating by her labor and love a home where her three dependents and her three faithful helpmates could find the maximum of happiness and peace.
The life of the Byrdsnest centered about Stefan; every one thought first of him and his needs. Next in order of consideration came Ellie and little Rosamond. Then Lily had to be remembered. She must not be overworked; she must take enough time off. Henrik, too, must not be over-conscientious. He must allow Mary to relieve him often enough. As for the Sparrow, she must not wear herself out flying in three directions at once. She must not tire her eyes learning typewriting. But at this point Mary's commands were apt to be met with contempt.
“Now, Mary Byrd,” the Sparrow would chirp truculently, “you 'tend to your business, and let me 'tend to mine. Anybody would think that we were all to save ourselves in this house but you. As for my typing, it's funny if I can't save you something on those miserable stenographers' bills.”
Mary was wonderfully happy in these days—happier in a sense than she had ever been, for she had found, beyond all question, the full work for hands to do. And to her love for her children there was added not merely her maternal tenderness for Stefan, but a deep and growing admiration.
For Stefan was changed not only in the body, but in the spirit. Everybody remarked it. The fierce fires of war seemed to have burnt away his old confident egotism. In giving himself to France he had found more than he had lost; for, by a strange paradox, in the midst of death he had found belief in life.
“Mary, my beautiful,” he said to her one day in September, as he worked at an adjustable drawing board which swung across his knees, “did you ever wonder why all my old pictures used to be of rapid movement, nearly all of running or flying?”
“Yes, dearest, I used to try often to think out the significance of it.”
They were in the studio. Mary had just dropped her pencil after a couple of hours' work on a new serial she was writing. She often worked now in Stefan's room. He was busy with a series of drawings of the war. He had tried different media—pastel, ink, pencils, and chalks—to see which were the easiest for sedentary work.
“It's good-bye to oils,” he had said, “I couldn't paint a foot from the canvas.”
Now he was using a mixture of chalk and charcoal, and was in the act of finishing the sixth drawing of his series. The big doors of the barn were opened wide to the sunny lawn, gay with a riot of multicolored dahlias.
“It's odd,” said Stefan, pushing away his board and turning the wheels of his chair so that he faced the brilliant stillness of the garden, “but I seem never to have understood my work till now. I used always to paint flight partly because it was beautiful in itself but also, I think, with some hazy notion that swift creatures could always escape from the ugliness of life.”
Mary came and sat by him, taking his hand.
“It seems to me,” he went on, “that I spent my life flying from what I thought was ugly. I always refused to face realities, Mary, unless they were pleasant. I fled even from the great reality of our marriage because it meant responsibilities and monotony, and they seemed ugly things to me. And now, Mary,” he smiled, “now that I can never shoulder responsibilities again, and am condemned to lifelong monotony”—she pressed his hand—“neither seems ugly any more. The truth is, I thought I fled to get away from things, and it was really to get away from myself. Now that I've seen such horrors, such awful suffering, and such unbelievable sacrifice, I have something to think about so much more real than my vain, egotistical self. I know what my work is now, something much better than just creating beauty. I gave my body to France—that was nothing. But now I have to give her my soul—I have to try and make it a voice to tell the world a little of what she has done. Am I too vain, dearest, in thinking that these really say something big?”
He nodded toward his first five drawings, which hung in a row on the wall.
“Oh, Stefan, you know what I think of them,” she said, her eyes shining.
“Would you mind pinning up the new one, Mary, so that we can see them all together?”
She rose and, unfastening the drawing from its board, pinned it beside the others. Then she turned his chair to face them, and they both looked silently at the pictures.
They were drawings of the French lines, and the peasant life behind them. Dead soldiers, old women by a grave, young mothers following the plow—men tense, just before action. The subjects were already familiar enough through the work of war correspondents and photographers, but the treatment was that of a great artist. The soul of a nation was there—which is always so much greater than the soul of an individual. The drawings were not of men and women, but of one of the world's greatest races at the moment of its transfiguration.
For the twentieth time Mary's eyes moistened as she looked at them.
The shadows began to lengthen. Shouts came from the slope, and presently Ellie's sturdy form appeared through the trees, followed by the somewhat disheveled Sparrow carrying Rosamond, who was smiting her shoulder and crowing loudly.
“I'll come and help you in a few minutes, Sparrow,” Mary called, as the procession crossed the lawn, her face beaming love upon it.
“Can you spare the few minutes, dear?” Stefan asked, watching her.
“Yes, indeed, they won't need me yet.”
The light was quite golden now; the dahlias seemed on fire under it.
“Mary,” said Stefan, “I've been thinking a lot about you lately.”
“Have you, dear?”
“Yes, I never tried to understand you in the old days. I had never met your sort of woman before, and didn't trouble to think about you except as a beautiful being to love. I was too busy thinking about myself,” he smiled. “I wondered, without understanding it, where you got your strength, why everything you touched seemed to turn to order and helpfulness under your hands. I think now it is because you are always so true to life—to the things life really means. Every one always approves and upholds you, because in you the race itself is expressed, not merely one of its sports, as with me.”
She looked a little puzzled. “Do you mean, dearest, because I have children?”
“No, Beautiful, any one can do that. I mean because you have in perfect balance and control all the qualities that should be passed on to children, if the race is to be happy. You are so divinely normal, Mary, that's what it is, and yet you are not dull.”
“Oh, I'm afraid I am,” smiled Mary, “rather a bromide, in fact.”
He shook his head, with his old brilliant smile.
“No, dearest, nobody as beautiful and as vital as you can be dull to any one who is not out of tune with life. I used to be that, so I'm afraid I thought you so, now and then.”
“I know you did,” she laughed, “and I thought you fearfully erratic.”
He laughed back. They had both passed the stage in which the truth has power to hurt.
“I remember Mr. Gunther talking to me a little as you have been doing,” she recalled, “when he came to model me. I don't quite understand either of you. I think you're just foolishly prejudiced in my favor because you admire me.”
“What about the Farradays, and Constance, and the Sparrow and Lily and Henrik and McEwan and the Havens and Madame Corriani and—”
“Oh, stop!” she laughed, covering his mouth with her hand.
“And even in Paris,” he concluded, holding the hand, “Adolph, and—yes, and Felicity Berber. Are they all 'prejudiced in your favor'?”
“Why do you include the last named?” she asked, rather low. It was the first time Felicity had been spoken of between them.
“She threw me over, Mary, the hour she discovered how it was with you,” he said quietly.
“That was rather decent of her. I'm glad you told me that,” she answered after a pause.
“All this brings me to what I really want to say,” he continued, still holding her hand in his. “You are so alive, youarelife; and yet you're chained to a half-dead man.”
“Oh, don't, dearest,” she whispered, deeply distressed.
“Yes, let me finish. I shan't last very long, my dear—two or three years, perhaps—long enough to say what I must about France. I want you to go on living to the full. I want you to marry again, Mary, and have more beautiful, strong children.”
“Oh, darling, don't! Don't speak of such things,” she begged, her lips trembling.
“I've finished, Beautiful. That's all I wanted to say. Just for you to remember,” he smiled.
Her arms went round him. “You're bad,” she whispered, “I shan't remember.”
“Here comes Henrik,” he replied. “Run in to your babies.”
He watched her swinging steps as, after a farewell kiss, she sped down the little path.