When anything happened, Julian's first instinct was to happen with it. He had never been in the rear of a situation in his life. The blow of the Austrian ultimatum reached him on a yacht in mid-channel. There was a cabinet minister on board, for whose sake the yacht slewed round to make her way swiftly back to port. Julian went directly to him.
"Look here," he said, "we've got to go in. You grasp that, don't you?"
Julian had one idea in his head, the cabinet minister had a great many; every one but Julian was leaving him alone to sort these ideas out. Julian spent the six hours in which they were flying to port in eradicating one by one every idea except his own.
The two men stood together, leaning over the ship's side. It was a clear summer evening, with a bloom upon the waters. The lights of the boats they passed—green and red and gold—were like glow-worms in a Southern night. The sea was very easy under them; it had little movement of its own, and parted like riven gauze to let the ship through.
"We can't let France go under," Julian pleaded. "Look at her, son—stripped, after 1870. How she's sprung up! But thin, you know—thin, like a gallant boy.
"Immoral small families? By Gad! how righteous comfortable people are! How could she help it? Look what she's had to carry—indemnities, cursed war burdens, and now the three-years service! But she's carried 'em. I know the French. I've Irish in me, and that helps me to value their lucidity. Lucidity's sense, you know, it ain't anything dressy or imaginative, it's horse-sense gone clean as lightning. The French are a civilized people. Go to Paris,—not the Paris of our luxury-rotted rich, who have only asked it to be a little private sink of their own,—but to a Frenchman's Paris. Well, you'll find him there, brain and a heart under it. And, good Lord, what nerve!
"I tell you we've got to get down to our own nerve. We've fatted it on the top, but the French haven't. They're like live wire, with no cover to it. They're the most serious people on earth, fire without smoke. It 'u'd be an unspeakable shame to help set that damned Prussian heel on them again. When it comes, it'll come as solid as the mountain that blotted out Messina, as solid and as senseless, and you'll let that happen because we aren't 'involved!' Good Heavens, man, don't sop yourself or your conscience with catchwords! If this war comes, and I feel in my bones it's on us, any man who isn't involved is a cur."
The cabinet minister interrupted him. He cleared his throat, and said that he was hopeful steps might be taken.
Julian flung himself upon the phrase.
"Of course they'll be taken," he shouted across the quiet, shadowy sea. "They're being taken every minute. Are we the only fellows who've got feet?
"What about strategic railways? Ever studied 'em? What about this spring's having seen Alsace and Lorraine white with camps? What about Tirpitz slipping his navy votes through the Reichstag, Socialists and all? I beg your pardon; it's not your department, of course. We've let a strip of sea as small as a South American river cut us off from the plain speech of other nations. What speech? My good sir, the plain speech of other nations is their acts. But it's no use raking up what we've slid over. We've the national habit of sliding, it's a gift like any other, and if you've a good eye for ice, it doesn't let you in. But what Liberal Government ever had a good eye for the ice in Europe. I'm speaking bitterly, but I'm a Liberal myself, and I've seen in odd places of the earth that it's no good going slap through an adverse fact, smiling. You disarm nothing but yourself."
"We are not," said the cabinet minister, who had a happy disposition and a strong desire not to be shaken out of it, "really tied up to any Balkan outbreak—I mean necessarily, of course. Other issues might come in. But I see no reason, my dear Sir Julian, why we should, in this very disagreeable crisis, not remind ourselves—and I am, like you, one of the greatest admirers of the French—that an entente isnotan alliance. Political sympathy can do a great deal to affect these questions. I can imagine a very strong note—"
"Is an engagement nothing till you've got the ring on?" asked Julian, savagely. "Are you going to let down France, who's not very often, but has just lately, trusted us? If we do, let me tell you this: we shall deserve exactly what we shall get. And make no mistake about it; we shall get it. The channel ports, taken from a vindictive, broken France, used, as they ought to be used, dead against us. A little luck and a dark night, and I wouldn't givethatfor England."
Julian flung his lighted cigarette into the sea; a faint hiss, and the spark beneath them was sucked into darkness. Neither of the two men moved. Julian lit another cigarette, and the cabinet minister gazed down into the lightless sea. After a pause he said in a different voice:
"Look here, Verny, I've been impressed, devilish impressed, by what you've said; but have you considered what kind of force we've got? Picked men, I grant you, but, as you say yourself, when the Germans do come on, they'll come like half a mountain moving. What's the use of sending out a handful of grasshoppers to meet half a mountain?"
Julian laughed.
"Are you a great man on dog-fights?" he asked. "I've seen a bulldog, quite a small chap he was, bring down a Great Dane the size of a calf. The Dane had got a collie by the throat; friend of my little chap's, I fancy. He couldn't get at the Dane's throat, for fear of piling his weight on the collie; so he just stepped forward and took half a leg between his teeth, and buried his head in it. I heard the bone crack. The Dane tried to face it out,—he was a plucky fellow and the size of a house,—but after a bit he felt held down. So he wheeled round and seized the bull by a piece of back (the collie crawled off, he'd had enough, poor brute!), but the bull didn't stir. He went on cracking that bone; he gave the Dane all the back he wanted. Devil a bitheturned till the whole leg went like a split match, that hurled the Dane over, and I had to take Chang (that was his name) off, or he'd have finished him up. He'd just begun to enjoy the fight, with half his back chawed over!
"We've got a navy that'll do just that to Germany if we hold on long enough. Don't you forget it. It's pressure that tells against size—pressure on the right spot, and persistent."
The cabinet minister tried to say to himself that countries weren't like dogs; but he was a truthful man, and he thought that on the whole they were.
England rose up suddenly before them out of the darkness. They were coming into Plymouth Sound. The port lights held them steadily for a minute, and the steam yacht bustled soberly toward the docks.
"If your little lot sit down under this," said Julian, straightening his shoulders and holding the other man with his insistent eyes, "by God! I'll cut my throat and say, 'Here died a Briton whose country had lost its soul.'"
"Bit of Irish in him of course," murmured the cabinet minister as Julian swung away from him. "Still, I suppose what I shall say is that on the whole, taking everything into consideration, I think we should be wiser to support France."
Julian had spent thirty-two years—his mother included his first—in seeing what he wanted to do and doing it. He had never consulted anybody else, because he had always seen his way clearly, but he had made from time to time reports to his mother. He had been hostile to his father, who had opposed him weakly and sometimes unfairly till he died. Julian never felt disheartened or found any opposition in himself to what he wanted to do. Opposition in others he liked and overcame. Nothing in him warned him that love demands participation and resents exclusion.
On landing, he hurried to London, and went at once to see an old friend of his in the War Office.
"Look here, Burton," he said, "you remember 1911, don't you?"
Burton drew on the blotting-paper with a pencil; he was almost overwhelmingly cautious. If he had not been, many more serious things than caution would have been overwhelmed.
"I think," he said, "if I remember right, you went abroad."
Julian chuckled.
"I was a German navvy for six months," he said. "I ate like a German, I drank thirty bottles of beer at one sitting for a bet, and I lost my head and my temper in German. It seems as if the best thing I can do just now is to repeat the experiment."
"You did it at your own risk," Burton reminded him. "It was certainly serviceable, but we limited our communications with you as much as possible. If it should enter into your mind to do such a thing again, we should of course have no communication with you whatever. Also, you would need German papers—birth certificates, registrations. I really do not know at a time like this what you might not find necessary. The work, if you came back, would be invaluable."
Julian nodded.
"Don't you bother yourself about papers," he said. "I've been in a German consular office, and I've got a German birth-certificate. It's one of the things I do particularly well. As long as they're not suspicious they won't ram the papers home, and I don't propose to let them get suspicious. I shall be Cæsar's wife. Three years of Heidelberg have oiled my throat to it. My mother tells me I often speak English in a hearty German voice. My idea is to go out as soon as possible, through Belgium. They'll strike there, I feel pretty sure, and I'll come back the same way—October to November, if I can. You can put about that I 'm off to the Arctic Ocean. If I'm not back by Christmas, don't expect me. I shall have no communication with any one until my return."
Burton smiled.
"My dear Julian," he said, "one moment. I have not yet congratulated you upon your engagement. I do so with all my heart. But do you intend to tell Miss Young? She may not like the Arctic Ocean or she may expect you to fight. She will also, no doubt, look for some communication from you; and, as you very rightly assert, there can be no communication whatever with anybody until you return."
Julian hunched up his shoulders and whistled.
"She's the pick of women," he said softly. "Leave her to me."
"It's all going to be left to you," said Burton, gravely. "If you live, you'll get no apparent acknowledgment; if you die, no one will ever know how. I do not say this to dissuade you,—there are too many things we want to know,—but when I saw the announcement of your engagement in the paper, I said, 'Well, we've lost him.'"
Julian rose, and walked to the window. Until that moment he had not given Marian a thought. He was full of a lover's images of her, but he had not connected them with what he was going to do. He remembered what Marian's inconspicuous-looking little friend had said to her, "honest as crystal, equable, strong."
Then he turned back to his friend.
"You haven't lost me," he said steadily. "After all, if we're up against anything at all, Burton, we're up against a pretty big thing. I must do exactly what is most useful. Of course I'd rather fight. One likes one's name to go down and all that, and I'd like to please Marian; but the point, both for her and for me, will be the job."
"Ah," said Burton. "Then if you'll just come with me, I'll take you to a fellow who will let you know what we want particularly just now to find out. You're quite right as far as we are concerned; but it's not fair to rush a man into our kind of fight. It's not like any other kind. It's risks without prizes."
"What you get out of a risk," said Julian, with a certain gravity, "is a prize."
Burton looked at him curiously; he rested his hand for a moment on his friend's shoulder.
"That's a jolly good phrase, Julian," he said quietly, "and I think it's true; but it's not necessarily a personal prize. You pay the piper, and he plays the tune; but you mightn't be there to listen to the tune."
"Don't be a croaking, weather-beaten, moth-eaten old Scotch raven!" laughed Julian. "Take my word for it; you get what you want out of life if you put all you've got into it. That's just at this moment what I propose to put."
"And that," said Burton, without returning his smile, "is what we propose to take, Julian."
Amberley hung upon a cliff of land above the water meadows. Rising high behind it, fold on fold, were the Sussex Downs, without lines, without rigidity, as soft as drifting snow.
The village had been the seat of a tremendous castle,—little of these famous ruins were left,—but the old, yellow stone walls still girdled Amberley in the shape of a broken crown.
There was only one street, a sleepy, winding, white down road, which ran between mossy barns and deep-thatched cottages under the Amberley Wall. The castle was older than Amberley House, yet Amberley House was a respectable three hundred years, and had been all that time the home of countless Vernys. It had not retreated into relentless privacy, as most old English homes have done; it stood, with its wide porch, stoutly upon the moss-grown cobbles.
But it was better than its promises. If it had no park, there lay behind its frontage not a park, but a garden—a garden that fitted in with nature, only to excel it.
Lady Verny loved two things, her garden and her son; but she had been able to do most with her garden. There were terraces that swung from point to point above the long, blue valley; there was a lawn hemmed in by black yew hedges, over which the downs piled themselves, bare and high, with only the clouds beyond them. There was a sunken rose-garden, with rough-tiled pathways leading to a lake with swans. Three hundred years had helped Lady Verny with the lawn, but the herbaceous borders had been her own affair. Julian, crossing the lawn toward her, was the same strange mixture of her hand and time; and she had always known that when she had done all she could for Julian and the garden, she would have to give both up. With all their difficulties, their beauties, and their sullen patches, they would pass into the hands of some young and untried person unchosen by herself.
The person had been chosen now. Marian was already at Amberley for a week-end, and knowing that Julian was expected, she had left Lady Verny sitting by the tea-table under the yew hedge and gone up toward the downs.
Julian would like this; he would not wish his bride to meet him half-way. He would delight in Marian's aloofness; her deliberate and delicate coldness would seem to him like the bloom upon a grape. But the coldness of a future daughter-in-law is not the quality which most endears her to a mother.
"Julian," Lady Verny said to herself as he approached her, "will make a very trying lover. If he is absorbed in Marian, he will interfere with her; and if he is absorbed in anything else, he will ignore her. He needs a great deal of judicious teasing. Marian takes herself too seriously to see the fun of Julian; she only sees the fun of sex. She was quite right to go up to the downs. It'll amuse him to pursue her now, but it'll bore him later; and in the end he'll find out that she doesn't keep him off because she's got so much to give, but because she's so afraid of giving anything."
"Where's Marian?" asked Julian before he kissed her.
"She went up toward the downs," said Lady Verny. "She left no directions behind her. She's a will-o'-the-wisp, my dear."
Julian laughed.
"She knew I'd follow her," he said; "but I'll have my tea first, please."
"She has always been followed, I imagine," said Lady Verny, giving him his tea, "and she has always known it."
Julian looked pleased; this was the kind of wife he wanted, a woman used to admiration, and who never made the fatal mistake of seeking it. He had not much knowledge of women, but he had very strong opinions about them, unshaken by any personal reckoning. One opinion was that nothing too much can be done for a good woman. She must be protected, cared for, and served under every ordeal in life. She must be like a precious jewel; bars, safes, banks, must be constructed to insure her inaccessibility from all the dangers of the open world.
She must be seen—the East receded from him at this point—and admired; but she must be immaculate. That is to say, she must at no time in her career personally handle an experience. She must be a wife and mother (unmarried women, though often presumably virtuous, were only the shabby bankrupts of their sex), but, once married and a mother, she must be kept as far as possible from all the implications of these tremendous facts.
Bad women were unsexed. That is to say, no law applied to them; they were as outcast as a man who cheats at cards. The simile was not exact, as the women were occasionally themselves the cheated; but it was near enough for Julian. There were of course considerably more female outcasts than card-sharpers; but this was fortunate, for inadvertently they protected good women, in a manner in which card-sharpers have not been known to protect good men. But Julian thought men needed no protection, only women who were safe, needed it.
Julian was kinder to women than his opinions promised, because, being strong, he was on the whole gentle toward those who were weak; but his kindness was a personal idiosyncrasy, not a principle.
Lady Verny looked at him a little helplessly. There was something she wanted very much to say to him, but she suffered from the disability of being his mother. There is an unwritten law that mothers should not touch upon vital matters with their sons. Lady Verny believed that Julian was a victim of passion. She did not think he had understood Marian's nature, and she knew that when passion burns itself out, one of two things is left, comradeship or resentment. She had lived with resentment for twenty years, and she knew that it was not an easy thing to live with, and that it would have been worth while had she known more about it earlier, to have found out if there was comradeship under the passion before the flames of it had burned her boats.
"I wonder," she said consideringly, gazing into the bottom of her tea-cup, "if your lovely Marian has a sense of humor?"
"Humor?" said Julian, taking two savory sandwiches and wrapping them in bread and butter. "What does she want with humor at her age? It's one of the things people fall back on when they've come croppers. Besides, I don't believe in comradeship between the sexes. Infernally dull policy; sort of thing that appeals to a bookworm. What I like is a little friendly scrapping. Honor's easy! I never have cared much for brains in a woman."
He smiled at the woman he knew best in the world, who had brains, and had given him the fruit of them all her life, with kindly tolerance.
Probably she was jealous; but she wouldn't be tiresome if she was, and he would make things as easy for her as possible.
Lady Verny saw that Julian thought that she was jealous. She looked away from him to the terrace where he had fallen as a baby and struck his head against the stone cornice of the sun-dial.
She could never look at the sun-dial without seeing the whole scene happen again—and the dreadful pause that followed it when the small, limp figure lay without moving. Julian was the only child she had ever had. She shivered in the hot summer air and gave up the subject of human love. There is generally too much to be said about it to make it a good subject of conversation except for lovers, who only want each other.
She pointed to the newspaper that lay between them; that also was serious.
"My dear," she said quietly, "this appears to be a very bad business?"
"Yes," Julian acknowledged. "This time there'll be no ducking; there's nothing to duck under."
"And I dare say," said his mother, without moving the strong, quiet hands that lay on her lap, "you have been thinking what you are going to do in it?"
"Oh, yes, I've decided," said Julian. "I shall be off in ten days. You'll guess where, but no one else must know."
"It was a big risk before, Julian," she said tentatively.
"This time it'll be a bigger one," he answered, meeting her eyes with a flash of his pleased blue ones. "That's all. It'll need a jolly lot of thinking out."
"And you've—and Marian has agreed to it?" Lady Verny asked anxiously.
"I haven't told her yet," said Julian, easily. "It didn't occur to me to mention it to her first any more than to you. I knew you'd both understand. Obviously it was the one thing I could do. She'll see that, of course."
"I'm different," said Lady Verny, with a twist of her ironic mouth. "I'm your mother. A mother takes what is given; a wife expects all there is to give."
Julian looked a little uncomfortable. Burton, who was a man, and might therefore be assumed to know better than a woman what a woman felt, had come to the same conclusion.
Julian was prepared to give everything he had to Marian—Amberley and all his money and himself. There was something in the marriage service that put it very well, but didn't, as far as he remembered, say anything to include plans.
"I hope she likes Amberley?" he ventured.
Lady Verny filled his cup a second time, and answered tranquilly:
"Marian thinks it a charming little place to run down to for week-ends." Then she added very gently: "This is going to be very hard for Marian, Julian. You'll remember that, won't you, when you tell her?"
"Damnably hard," said Julian under his breath. "Of course I'll remember. I wish to Heaven she'd marry me first. By Jove, I'llmakeher!"
Lady Verny's lips closed tightly. She wasn't going to tell Julian anything, because she did not believe in telling things to people who will in the course of time find them out for themselves. She knew that Marian would not marry him at a moment's notice. She knew that he was asking Marian already to stand a very serious burden, and she did not think Marian's was the type of love that cares for very serious and unexpected burdens. She gazed at the bushes of blue anchusa; the gardener had planted pink monthly roses a little too thickly among them. She could alter that; she did not think there was anything else she could alter.
Julian strode toward the downs full of seriousness, eagerness, and pride, and in her heart Lady Verny prayed not that God's will might be done, which seemed to her mind superfluous, but that it might as far as possible be made to square with Julian's. She was a wise and even a just woman, but she thought that Providence might be persuaded to stretch a point or two for Julian.
Julian walked easily and swiftly up the slopes of the downs, whistling as he went. He knew the point from which he would be sure to see his flying nymph. The air was full of the songs of larks; beneath his feet the short grasses and wild thyme sent up a clean and pungent fragrance.
The little, comfortable beauties of the summer's day filled his heart with gladness. There was no sound in all the sleepy country-side; the peaceful shining clouds floated over the low green hills as vague as waking dreams.
The cropping of the sheep upon the downs, the searching, spiral laughter of the larks, were part of the air itself; and the shadows ran an interminable race across the long green meadows.
Julian had had experiences of love before, but he had never been in love as he was now. He compared these earlier efforts in his mind with the light clouds that melted into the sunshine. Marian was the sunshine; she thrilled and warmed his whole being. She was like an adventure to him. He felt very humble in his heart to think the sun had cared to shine upon him, and very strong to meet its shining.
He noticed little things he had never noticed before: the feathery, fine stalks of the harebells, and the blue butterflies that moved among them like traveling flowers. Usually, when he walked, he noticed only the quickest way to reach his goal. He noticed that now, but he tried not to crush the small down flowers on his way.
He caught sight of Marian from a ridge of down, sitting motionless and erect upon the rim of an old chalk-pit. A long, blue veil hung over her shoulders like the wings of a blue butterfly fluttering before him. She saw his shadow before he reached her, and threw her head back with a little gesture that was half a welcome and half a defiance.
He came swiftly across the grass toward her, but it was she who was breathless when he took her in his arms.
"Trying to run away from me, are you?" he asked, smiling down at her. "The world's too small here, and it's mine, you know. You shouldn't have come here if you had wanted to escape me."
"Let me go, Julian," she murmured. "I'm sure there's a shepherd close by. Sit down and be sensible."
"Shepherds be hanged!" said Julian, kissing her. "Do you suppose anybody's ever been more sensible than I feel now? Kissing you is the most sensible thing a man ever did; but don't let anybody else guess it."
He sat down at her feet and looked up into the beautiful, flushed face above him. It was as lovely as a lifted flower; but unlike the flower, it was not very soft. It was even like a slightly sophisticated hothouse flower; but she had the look of race he loved. Her level, penciled brows, small, straight nose, curved lips, and chin like a firm, round apple, were the heritage of generations of handsome lives. Her coloring was only a stain of pink upon a delicate, clear whiteness; but the eyes beneath the low, smooth forehead, were disappointing. They were well-cut hazel eyes, without light in them. They lay in her head a little flat, like the pieces of a broken mirror.
Just now they were at their tenderest. Her whole face, bending over him, cool and sweet as the southwest wind and as provocative as the flying clouds, moved his heart almost unbearably. She was like an English summer day, and he knew now what it would mean to leave her.
"I couldn't bear to stay down there," she explained. "I was frightened, not of you, you absurd person, but of being glad. I'm afraid I don't like big feelings very much. I can't explain exactly, but the papers frightened me. I wanted to see you too much. Yes, sir, you may keep that for a prize to your vanity; and I knew that if there should be war—" She stopped, her lovely lips trembled a little. "I shall have to let you go so soon!" she whispered.
He bowed his head over her hand and kissed it passionately.
"If I could spare you this pain," he said, "I'd take a thousand lives—and lose them to do it!"
"No! no!" she murmured. "Keep one, Julian!"
He lifted his head and looked at her steadily.
"I swear I'll keep it," he said. "I'll keep it, and bring it back to you, cost what it may."
It did not look as if it were going to cost very much, with the light clouds passing overhead, and the soft down grasses under them; and their great citadels of youth and love about them, unmenaced and erect.
"I've a piece of work I've got to do," Julian went on, "and I can't tell you anything about it. It'll take me three months, I fancy. I can fight afterward."
She looked at him with eyes in which astonishment turned almost hostile.
"Not fighting?" she said. "But what do you mean, Julian? If we go in, every one must fight. I know you're not a soldier, but there'll be volunteers. With all your adventures and experiences, they are sure to give you a good post. Everybody knows you. What do you mean—a job you can't tell me about—unless, of course it's something naval?"
Julian turned his face to the wild thyme. He shook his head.
"No, not that," he said. "Can't you trust me, Marian?"
"Trust you!" she said impatiently. "Of course I can trust you, but why be so mysterious? Mightn't I equally say, 'Why don't you trust me?'"
"It's part of my job," said Julian quietly, "not to trust the ground we're on or the larks in the sky or the light of my heart,—that's you, Marian,—and it doesn't happen to be the easiest part of my job."
He waited for her to make it easier for him, but he waited in vain. Marian expected easy things, but she did not expect to have to make things easy. These two expectations seldom go together.
"Do you mean to tell me that you are going to be some kind of spy?" she asked in a tone of frank disgust. "Oh, Julian! I couldn't bear it! It's so—so—un-English!"
Julian chuckled. He ought not to have chuckled. If a man does not like a woman with brains, he must learn not to laugh at their absence. Marian stiffened under his laughter.
"England's got to be awfully un-English in some ways if it wants to win this war," he explained. "But you mustn't even to yourself put a name to what I'm going to be. I'm just on a job that'll take me three months, and I'm afraid, my darling, I can't send you a word. That cuts me all to bits, but you're so brave, so brave, you'll let me go."
He buried his head in the grass; he was not brave enough to bear to see the strain he was putting on her courage. Nor was Marian.
"No, Julian," she said, "you mustn't ask such a thing of me. Not to know where you are, and not to be able to tell any one what you are doing! To let you go out into the dark at a time like this! It's too much to ask of me. Promise me you'll give up all idea of it, and try to get a commission like other people. Surely that's hard enough for me. But I'll bear that; I will never make it difficult for you by a word or a look; I wouldn't hold you back a day! You've not settled anything of course?"
He told her that he had settled everything, and that in two days he must go.
A terrible silence fell between them, a cold silence that was like the pressure of a stone. Neither of them moved or looked at the other. Julian took her hand. She did not withdraw it from him, but she left it in his as unresponsive as a fallen leaf.
"Marian," he whispered, "Marian. Love me a little."
She would not turn her face to him.
"Why do you talk to me of love," she asked bitterly, "when without consulting me you do something which involves your whole life and mine!"
He caught her in his arms and held her close to him, kissing her cold lips till they answered him.
"My darling! my darling!" he whispered, "I love you like this and like this! It's sheer murder to leave you! I feel as if it would break me. But I've got to go. Don't you see, don't you understand? It's work I do well, it's important, just now it's more important than fighting; it's not one man's life that hangs on it, but it's thousands. Believe me, there's no dishonor in it. Love me or you'll break me, Marian! Don't be against me. I couldn't stand it. Say you'll let me go, for if I go and you don't say it, I'll go as a broken man."
She pushed him gently away from her, considering him. She knew her terrible power. She was very angry with him, and she had hurt him as much as she meant to hurt him. She had no intention whatever of breaking him. If he was going to do this kind of work, he must do it well. Perhaps, after all, it was rather important; but important or not, he should have asked her first. She laid her small hand over his big one with a delicate pressure.
"Never settle such a thing again without telling me," she said gravely.
Julian promised quickly that he never would. He saw for the first time that love was not liberty, and for the moment he preferred love. He had not felt deeply enough to know that there is a way in which you may widen liberty and yet keep love.
"I shall let you go," Marian said gently, "and I shall try to bear it as best I can."
At the thought of how difficult it was going to be to bear, not to be able to tell anybody anything, she cried a little. Her face was uncontorted by her tears. They streamed down her blossom-colored cheeks like drops of pearly dew. Julian thought her tears were softness, and he struck at his chance. Now perhaps she would surrender to his hidden hope.
He pleaded, with her head against his heart, that she would marry him, marry him now—at once. He could arrange it all in twenty-four hours. He presented a thousand impetuous arguments. All his wits and his ardor fought for him against her soft, closed eyes. She was his; she would be his forever. He would go with that great possession in his heart; he would go like a man crowned to meet his future.
She opened her eyes at last and moved away from him. At that instant she would have liked to marry him, she would have liked it very much; but besides the fact that she had no things, there loomed the blank uncertainty of the future. Would she be a wife or a widow, and how should she know which she was? There were more immediate difficulties. Her parents were in Scotland; hurried weddings were always very awkward; you couldn't have bridesmaids or wedding presents; and a few hours' honeymoon, with an indefinite parting ahead of it, would be extremely painful.
Even if a marriage under all these disabilities was legal—wouldn't it be worse than illegal—wouldn't it be rather funny?
Julian was sometimes impossible; he had been nearly overwhelming, but he was quite impossible. He might be a dangerous man to marry in a hurry. She would have to train him first.
"It's out of the question, Julian," she said firmly. "The whole future is too uncertain. I should love to—but I can't do it. It wouldn't be right for me to do it. We must wait till you come back."
Julian returned to his study of the short down grasses. He knew that if she had loved to—she would have done it. He had a moment that was bitter with doubt and pain; then his love rose up and swallowed it. He saw the uncertainty for her.
He wanted her now because he knew that he might never have her. He wanted her with the fierce hunger of a pirate for a prize; but the very sharpness of his desire made him see that it was sheer selfishness to press his point. He overlooked the fact that it would have been perfectly useless. No pressure would have changed Marian. Pressure had done what it could for her already: it had moved her to tears. She dried them now, and suggested that they had stayed on the downs long enough.
It sometimes seemed to Stella as if Chaliapine had brought on the war. Those last long golden summer days were filled with his music, and then suddenly out of them flashed the tents in the park, the processions of soldiers and bands, the grim stir that swept over London like a squall striking the surface of a summer sea.
The town hall did not collapse, but it shook. It was a place where, as a rule, the usual things took place, and even unusual things happened usually; but there were several weeks at the beginning of the war when all day long strange things happened strangely. Offices were changed, the routine of years was swept up like dust into a dust-pan, and a new routine, subject to further waves of change, took its place. Workers voluntarily offered to do work that they were unaccustomed to do. The council hall became a recruiting office. No. 8, the peculiar sanctum of the sanitary inspector, was given up to an army surveyor. Tramps asked the cashier questions. It was like the first act of "Boris Goudonoff." Even food was carried about on trays, and as for proclamations, somebody or other was proclaiming something all day long.
There was no religion and no dancing, but there was the same sense of brooding, implacable fate; it took the place of music, and seemed, without hurry and without pause, to be carrying them all along in a secret rhythm of its own toward an unseen goal.
Mr. Leslie Travers ruled most of the town hall committees, and he required innumerable statistics to be compiled and ready to be launched intimidatingly at the first sign of any opposition to his ruling.
Stella, to whom the work of compiling fell, had very little time to consider the war.
When she got home she usually went to sleep. From time to time she heard Mrs. Waring announcing that there was no such thing as war and Eurydice reciting battle-odes to Belgium.
For the first time in her life Eurydice shared a common cause. She was inclined to believe that England was fighting for liberty. She knew that France was, partly because France was on the other side of the channel and partly because of the French Revolution. The destruction of Louvain settled the question of Belgium. To Eurydice, whatever was destroyed was holy. Later on she became a violent pacifist because Mr. Bolt said that we ourselves were Prussian; but for the moment nobody, not even Mr. Bolt, had traced this evasive parallel.
Professor Waring wrote several letters to the papers, asking what precautions the Belgians were taking about Sanskrit manuscript. He had a feeling that King Albert, though doubtless an estimable young man and useful in the trenches, might, like most kings, have been insufficiently educated to appreciate the importance of Sanskrit. That men should die in large numbers to protect their country was an unfortunate incident frequent in history, but that a Sanskrit manuscript should be destroyed was a national calamity, for the manuscript could never be replaced.
He made an abortive effort to reach Belgium and see about it himself, but at the Foreign Office he was stopped by a young man with a single eyeglass, from whom the professor had demanded a passport. The exact expression used by this ignorant young person was, "I'm awfully sorry, sir, but I'm afraid just at present Sanskrit manuscript will have to rip."
Professor Waring promptly addressed letters of remonstrance and advice to several German professors upon the subject. They were returned to him after three weeks, with a brief intimation that he was not to communicate with the enemy. Professor Waring had considered German professors to be his natural enemies all his life; this had been his chief reason for communicating with them. He was fitted, as few officials in the Foreign Office can ever have been fitted, to point out to the German professors the joints in their armor.
They had a great deal of armor and very few joints, and it discouraged Professor Waring to leave these unpierced spots to the perhaps less-practised hands of neutrals.
But it was not until the destruction of Louvain that he grasped to the full the reaction of his former antagonists. When Professor Waring read a signed letter from some of the German professors agreeing to the destruction of the famous Belgian library he acquiesced in the war. He stood in front of his wife and woke Stella up in order to make his declaration.
"Henrietta, thereisa war," he announced. "It is useless for you to assert that there is not. Not onlyisthere a war, but there should be one; and if I were twenty years younger, though wholly unaccustomed to the noisy mechanisms of physical destruction, I should join in it. As it is, I propose to write a treatise upon the German mind. It is not one of my subjects, and I shall probably have to neglect valuable work in order to undertake it; still, my researches into the rough Stone Age will no doubt greatly assist me. Many just parallels have already occurred to me. I hope that no one in this house will be guilty of so uneducated a frame of mind as to sympathize with the Teutonic iconoclasts even to the extent of asserting, as I believe I heard you assert just now, Henrietta, that none of them exist."
Mrs. Waring murmured gently that she thought an intense hopefulness might refine degraded natures, but the next day she bought wool and began to knit a muffler. She had capitulated to the fact of the war. While she knitted she patiently asserted that there was no life, truth, intelligence, or force in matter; and Stella, when she came home in the evening, picked up the dropped stitches.
It was strange to Stella that her only personal link with the war was a man whom she had seen only once and might never see again. She thought persistently of Julian. She thought of him for Marian's sake, because Marian was half frozen with misery. She thought of him because unconsciously he stood in her mind for England. He was an adventurer, half-god, half-child, who had the habit of winning without the application of fear. She thought of him because he was the only young, good-looking man of her own class with whom she had ever talked.
Marian was afraid that Stella might think she had been unsympathetic to Julian about his mission. She told Stella, with her usual direct honesty, how angry she had been with him.
"I know I was nasty to him," she said. "I can't bear to have any one involve me first and tell me about it afterward."
"Of course you can't," agreed Stella, flaming up with a gust of annoyance more vivid than Marian's own. "How like him! How exactly like him to be so high-handed! Fancy whirling you along behind him as if you were a sack of potatoes! Of course you were annoyed, and I hope you gave him a good sharp quarrel. One only has to look at Julian to see that he ought to be quarreled with at regular intervals in an agreeable way for the rest of his life."
"I don't like quarrels," Marian said slowly. "They don't seem to me to be at all agreeable; but I don't think Julian will act without consulting me again."
Stella looked at Marian curiously. What was this power that Marian had, which moved with every fold of her dress, and stood at guard behind her quiet eyes? How had she made Julian understand without quarreling that he must never repeat his independences? Stella was sure Marianhadmade him understand it. It would be of no use to ask Marian how she had done it, because Marian would only laugh and say: "Nonsense! It was perfectly easy." She probably did not know herself what was the secret of her power; she would merely in every circumstance in life composedly and effectively use it. Was it perhaps that though Julian had involved her actions, he had never involved Marian? Was love a game in which the weakest lover always wins?
"Of course I've never been in love," Stella said slowly, "and I haven't the slightest idea how it's done or what happens to you; but I fancy quarreling might be made very agreeable. Love is so tremendous, isn't it, that there must be room for concealed batteries and cavalry charges; and yet of course you know all the time that you are loving the person more and more outrageously, so that nothing gets wasted or destroyed except the edges you are knocking off for readjustments."
"I don't think I do love Julian outrageously," Marian objected. "I didn't, you see, do what he wanted: he had a mad idea of getting a special license and having a whirlwind wedding, leaving me directly afterward. Of course I couldn't consent to that."
"Couldn't you?" asked Stella, wonderingly. "I don't see that it matters much, you know, when you give that kind of thing to a person you love. If you do love them, I suppose it shows you're willing to marry them, doesn't it? But how, when, or where is like the sound of the dinner-bell. You don't owe your dinner to the dinner-bell; it's simply an arrangement for bringing you to the table. Marriage always seems to me just like that. I should have married Julian in a second if I'd been you; but I should have made him understand that I wasn't a sack of potatoes, if I'd had to box his ears regularly every few minutes for twenty-four hours at a stretch."
"Surely marriage is sacred," said Marian, gravely. Stella's point of view was so odd that Marian thought it rather coarse.
"But it needn't be long," objected Stella; "you can be short and sacred simultaneously. In fact, I think I could be more sacred if I was quick about it; I should only get bored if I was long."
"You have such a funny way of putting things," said Marian, a little impatiently. "Of course I know what you mean, but I don't like being hurried. I love Julian dearly, and I will marry him when there is time for us to do it quietly and properly. Meanwhile it's quite awful not hearing from him. I have never been so miserable in my life."
Stella sat on the floor at Marian's feet with Marian's misery. She entered into it so deeply that after a time Marian felt surprised as well as comforted. She had not thought grief so pictorial. She felt herself placed on a pinnacle and lifted above the ranks of happier lovers. She thought it was her love for Julian that held her there; she did not know that it was Stella's love for her. Stella for a time saw only Marian—Marian frozen in a vast suspense, Marian racked with silences and tortured with imagined dangers. She did not see Julian until Marian had gone, and then suddenly she put her hands to her throat, as if she could not bear the sharp pulsation of fear that assailed her. If all this time they were only fearing half enough and Julian should be dead?
She whispered, "Julian dead!" Then she knew that she was not feeling any more for Marian. She was feeling for herself. Fortunately, she knew this didn't matter. Feeling for oneself was sharp and abominable, but it could be controlled. It did not count; and she could keep this much of Julian—the fear that he might be dead. It would not interfere with Marian or with Julian. Hopes interfere: but Stella had no personal hopes; she did not even envisage them. She claimed only the freedom of her fears.
It is disconcerting to believe that you are the possessor of one kind of temper—a cold, deadly, on-the-spot temper—which cuts through the insignificant flurries of other people like a knife through butter, and then to find a sloppy explosiveness burst from you unaware.
Mr. Travers had never dreamed that in the town hall itself he could ever be led to lose a thing he had in such entire control as his temper. He did not lose it when the blushing Mr. Belk had the audacity to stop him in mid-career, on his way to his sanctum through No. 7, the outer office of his assistant clerks, though they were, as a body, strictly forbidden to address him while passing to and fro. Mr. Belk was so ill advised as to say:
"If you please, sir, it's four o'clock, and Miss Waring hasn't been out to lunch yet." Mr. Travers merely ran his eye over Mr. Belk as a fishmonger runs his eyes over vulnerable portions of cod laid out for cutting, and brought down his chopper at an expert angle.
"Since when, Mr. Belk," he asked, with weary irony, "has Miss Waring's lunch been on your list of duties?"
Then he passed swiftly into his office and faced Stella, closing the door behind him. Temper shook him as a rough wind shakes an insignificant obstacle. He could not hold it; it was gone. It blew inside out like a deranged umbrella. He glared at Miss Waring. There was nothing in her slight, bent figure, with its heavy, brown hair neatly plaited in a crown about her head, which should have roused any town clerk to sudden fury.
"It's abominable," Mr. Travers exclaimed, bringing his trembling hand down with a bang upon Stella's table, "how women behave!"
Stella said out loud, "One hundred pounds, ten shillings, and sixpence," and then looked up at her employer. She asked very quietly who had vexed him. There might have been a fugitive gleam of laughter at the back of her eyes, but there were shadows under them that made her look too tired for laughter.
"You, of course," he cried. "How are we ever to get through with our work if you won't eat? It's so silly! It's so tiresome! It's so uncalled for! Why are you doing these wretched lists now?"
"Because," said Stella—and now the laughter ran out at him unexpectedly and tripped him up—"the town clerk has a meeting at five o'clock at which these statistics must be at hand to justify him in having his own way!"
"Put them down!" said Mr. Travers savagely. Stella laid down her pen with the ready obedience which can be made so baffling when it proceeds from an unconsenting will. "Now go out and get something to eat," he went on, "while I do the wretched things. And don't let this occur again. If you have too much to do,—and I know the correspondence gets more and more every day,—mention it. We must get some help in."
She was gone before he had finished his sentence—gone with that absurd dimple in the corner of her cheek and the sliding laughter of her eyes.
She had left behind her a curious, restless emptiness, as if the very room itself waited impatiently for her return. It was half an hour before she came back. The town clerk had had to answer three telephone messages and four telegrams. If the outer office had not known that he was there and Miss Waring wasn't, he would have had more interruptions. Nevertheless, the figures had helped Mr. Travers to recover his temper.
He was an expert accountant, and you can take figures upon their face-value. They are not like women; they have no dimples.
Mr. Travers was prepared to be the stern, but just, employer again. He remained seated, and Stella leaned over his shoulder. He had not expected that she would do this.
"What have you had to eat?" he asked. It was not at all what he had intended to say to Stella.
"A cup of tea, two ham sandwiches, and a bun:—such a magnificent spread for seven-pence!" replied Stella, cheerfully. "You've forgotten to put in what the insurance will be—there at the bottom of the page."
Mr. Travers rose to his feet. He was taller than Stella, and he considered that he had a commanding presence. Stella slid back into her seat.
"You ought to have had," said Mr. Travers, with labored quietness, "beefsteak and a glass of port."
"Anybody could tell," said Stella, tranquilly, "that you are an abstemious man, Mr. Travers. Port! Portandsteak! You mean porter. All real drinkers know that port is sacred. Bottles of it covered with exquisite cobwebs are kept for choice occasions; they are brought in softly by stately butlers, walking delicately like Agag. It is drunk in companionable splendor, tenderly ministered to by nothing more solid than a walnut, and it follows the courses of the sun. There, you did quite a lot while I was away, and if you don't mind just looking through those landlords' repairing leases on your desk, I dare say I shall have finished this before five."
Mr. Travers opened his mouth, shut it again, and returned to his repairing leases. He was not an employer any more. He was not an icy, mysterious tyrant ruling over a trembling and docile universe: his own secretary had literally told him to run away and play!
But it was in the night watches that the worst truth struck him. He had been furious with Miss Waring for not spending more upon her lunch, he had upbraided her for it, and she had never turned round and said, "Look what I earn!" The opportunity was made to her hand. "How can women secretaries earning a hundred a year eat three-and-sixpenny lunches?" That ought to have been her answer. Why wasn't it? She hadn't been too stupid to see it. She had seen it, and she had instantly, before he had had time to see it himself, covered it up and hidden it under that uncalled-for eulogy on port. It was not fear. She hadn't been afraid to stand up to him (uncalled-for eulogieswerestanding up to him); besides she had previously called him unfair to his face. It was just something that Miss Waringwas—something that made the color spring into Mr. Traver's face in the dark till his cheeks burned; something that had made Mr. Belk dare his chief's displeasure to get her lunch; something that wasn't business.
"She wouldn't take an advantage, because I'd given it to her," he said to himself. "I thought everybody took an advantage when they had the sense to see it; but she doesn't, though she has plenty of sense. But the world couldn't go on like that."
This brilliant idea reassured Mr. Travers; he stopped blushing. He was relieved to think that the world couldn't go on like Stella; but there was something in him, a faint contradictory something, that made him glad that Stella didn't go on like the world.
He went to sleep with these two points unreconciled.
Stella had always known that it would come; she had spent two months far-seeing it. It had usually taken the form of a telegram falling out of Mrs. Waring's wool, or Eurydice standing upon the steps, Cassandra-like, to greet her with a message from Marian. Marian would come to give her the message, but she wouldn't wait; she would drive swiftly away in a motor, and leave the broken universe behind her. But disasters do not come as we have planned their coming.
It was a dull November day, the streets were full of dying leaves, and at the end of all the cross-roads surrounding the town hall a blue mist hung like a curtain. Marian, in black velvet and furs, with old Spanish ear-rings gleaming from her shell-like ears, stood in disgust upon the steps of the town hall. Her small face was frozen with unexpected pain, but she could still feel annoyed with the porter. She stood in the thronged corridor and asked decisively for Miss Waring.
The porter told her that Miss Waring worked in No. 7, or, at any rate, No. 7 would know where she was working.
Marian stared slightly over the porter's head.
"My good man," she said, "how am I to know where No. 7 is? Go and tell her to come to me. Here is my card."
All the way to No. 7 the porter concocted brilliant retorts to this order. He would tell her he was not a footman and that this wasn't Buckingham Palace. He would say roughly that, if she had eyes in her head, she could find No. 7 for herself. But he was intimidated by Marian's ear-rings. A secret fear that she might turn out to be the lord mayor's daughter drove him to No. 7.
Stella was filing letters when he knocked, and when he saw the card she knew the messenger had come; but she did not forget to say as usual, "Oh, thank you, Humphreys."
She finished filing the letters before she looked for Mr. Travers.
He was coming out of the council chamber at the top of a flight of stairs. She stood there for a moment, holding him with her eyes, her lips parted. She looked like a bird that has been caught in a room and despairs of finding the way out.
Her face was strained and eager, and her sensitive eyebrows were drawn together in a little tortured frown; but she spoke quietly as soon as her breath came back to her.
"Mr. Travers, a friend of mine is in trouble. May I go to her for the afternoon? There is still a great deal to do,—I know I ought not to ask you to let me go,—but Mr. Belk and Miss Flint are so kind that I am sure they would help me. I—I should be very grateful if you could spare me."
"Certainly not," said Mr. Travers, sharply. "I mean, of course, you can go; but I won't have Mr. Belk or Miss Flint near me. I will do the work myself."
"Oh," she cried, aghast at this magnanimous humility on the part of her employer, "please don't! Do let me ask them! I'd so much rather—"
Mr. Travers waved her away. He wanted to do the work himself, and he wanted her to be aghast. He descended the stairs rapidly beside her.
"You may leave immediately, Miss Waring," he said sternly as they reached No. 7; "and I will make my own arrangements about your work."
Stella fled. Again he felt the sense of wings, as if he had opened a window, and a bird had flown past him into liberty.
He did not want her to be grateful, but he thought she might have looked back. She had noticed him only as a barrier unexpectedly fallen. She had not seen how strange it was that a barrier of so stubborn and erect a nature as Mr. Travers should have consented to fall.
If any one else had asked him for an afternoon with a friend in trouble, Mr. Travers knew that he would have said, "Your friends' troubles must take place outside office-hours." But when he had seen Stella's face he had forgotten office-hours.
Marian was sitting on a chair in the corridor. Her expression implied that there was no such thing as a town hall, and that the chair was a mere concession to unnecessary space. She said, as she saw Stella:
"Please be quick about putting your things on. Yes, it's bad news about Julian."
Stella was quick. Marian said no more until they were seated together in the motor; then she gave Stella a letter she had received from Lady Verny. Lady Verny wrote:
My dear Marian: You must prepare yourself for a great distress. Julian is in England, but he is very much injured. I want you to go to him at once. Whenever he is conscious he asks for you. My dear, if he recovers,—and they think that if he has an incentive to live he will live,—he will be partially paralyzed. I know that he will want to free you, and it will be right that you should even now feel free; but till then—for a month—will you give him all you can? All he needs to live? It is a great deal to ask of you, but I think you are good and kind, and that I shall not ask this of you in vain. His life is valuable, and will still be so, for his brain is not affected. Before he relapsed into unconsciousness he was able to give the Government the information he acquired. I think it is not wrong to help him to live; but of course I am his mother, and it is difficult for me to judge. All this is very terrible for you, even the deciding of whether you ought to help him to live or not. If I might suggest anything to you, it would be to talk about it with that friend of yours, Miss Waring.Come to me when you have seen him. Do not think, whatever your decision is, that I shall not realize what it costs you, or fail to do all in my power to help you to carry it out.Yours affectionately,Helen Verny.
My dear Marian: You must prepare yourself for a great distress. Julian is in England, but he is very much injured. I want you to go to him at once. Whenever he is conscious he asks for you. My dear, if he recovers,—and they think that if he has an incentive to live he will live,—he will be partially paralyzed. I know that he will want to free you, and it will be right that you should even now feel free; but till then—for a month—will you give him all you can? All he needs to live? It is a great deal to ask of you, but I think you are good and kind, and that I shall not ask this of you in vain. His life is valuable, and will still be so, for his brain is not affected. Before he relapsed into unconsciousness he was able to give the Government the information he acquired. I think it is not wrong to help him to live; but of course I am his mother, and it is difficult for me to judge. All this is very terrible for you, even the deciding of whether you ought to help him to live or not. If I might suggest anything to you, it would be to talk about it with that friend of yours, Miss Waring.
Come to me when you have seen him. Do not think, whatever your decision is, that I shall not realize what it costs you, or fail to do all in my power to help you to carry it out.
Yours affectionately,Helen Verny.
Stella dropped the letter and looked at Marian. Marian sat erect, and her eyes burned. She was tearless and outraged by sorrow. There are people who take joy as a personal virtue and sorrow as a personal insult, and Marian was one of these people. Happiness had softened and uplifted her; pain struck her down and humiliated her solid sense of pride.
"Why wasn't he killed?" she asked bitterly, meeting Stella's questioning eyes. "I could have borne his being killed. Value! What does Lady Verny mean by value? His career is smashed; his life is to all intents and purposes over. And mine with it! It is very kind of her to say he will release me. I do not need his mother to tell me that. She seems to have overlooked the fact that I have given him my word! Is it likely that I should fail him or that I could consent to be released? I do not need any one to tell me my duty. But I hate life! Ihateit! I think it all stupid, vile, senseless! Why did I ever meet him? What good has love been to me? A few hours' happiness, and then this martyrdom set like a trap to catch us! And I don't like invalids. I have never seen any one very ill. I sha'n't know what to say to him."
"Oh, yes, you will, when you see him," said Stella; it was all that for a while she could say.
She had always believed that Marian had a deep, but close-locked, nature. Love presumably would be the key.
It was unlocked now. Pain had unlocked it, instead of love, and Stella shivered at the tearless hardness, the sharp, shallow sense of personal privation that occupied Marian's heart. She had not yet thought of Julian.
Stella told herself that Marian's was only the blindness of the unimaginative. The moment Marian saw Julian it would pass, and yield before the directer illumination of the heart. Marian's nature was perhaps one of those that yields very slowly to pain. When she saw Julian she would forget everything else. She would not think of her losses and sacrifices any more, or her duties. Stella felt curiously stung and wasted by Marian's use of the word "duty." Was that all there was for the woman whom Julian loved? Was that all there was for Julian!
But she could deal only with what Marian had; so, when she spoke again, Stella said all she could to comfort Marian. She spoke of Julian's courage; she said no life in Julian could be useless that left his brain free to act. She suggested that he would find a new career for himself, and she pictured his future successes. Beneath her lips and her quick outer mind she thought only of Julian, broken.
They stopped in a large, quiet square, at the door of a private hospital. There was no sound but the half-notes of birds stirring at twilight in the small square garden, and far off the muffled murmur of distant streets.
A nurse opened the door.
"You are Miss Young?" she said to Marian. "Yes, of course, we were expecting you. Sister would like to see you first."
They stood for a moment in a small neat office. The sister rose from an old Dutch bureau, one of the traces of the house's former occupants, and held out her hand to Marian. Her eyes rested with intentness upon the girl's face.
"Sir Julian is almost certain to know you," she said gently, "but you mustn't talk much to him. He has been much weakened by exposure. He lay in a wood for three days without food or water. There is every hope of his partial recovery, Miss Young; but he needs rest and reassurance. We can give him the rest here, but we must look to you to help us to bring back to him the love of life."
Marian stood with her beautiful head raised proudly. She waited for a moment to control her voice; then she asked quietly:
"Is the paralysis likely to be permanent?"
The sister moved a chair toward her, but Marian shook her head.
"It is a state of partial paralysis. He will be able to get about on crutches," the sister replied. "Won't you rest for a few moments before going up to him, Miss Young?"
"No, thank you," said Marian; "I will go up to him at once."
She turned quickly toward the door, and meeting Stella's eyes, she took and held her arm tightly for a moment, and then, loosing it, walked quickly toward the stairs. Stella followed her as if she had no being. She had lost all consciousness of herself. She was a thought that clung to Julian, an unbodied idea fixed upon the cross of Julian's pain. She did not see the staircase up which she passed; she walked through the wood in which Julian had lain three days.
He was in a large, airy room with two other men. Stella did not know which was Julian until he opened his eyes. There was no color in his face, and very little substance. The other men were raised in bed and looked alive, but Julian lay like something made of wax and run into a mold. Only his eyes lived—lived and flickered, and held on to his drifting consciousness.
The nurse guided Marian to his bed, and, drawing a chair forward, placed it close to him. Marian leaned down and kissed his forehead. She had determined to do that, whatever he looked like; and she did it.
His lips moved. She bent down, and a whisper reached her: "I said I'd come back to you, and I have." Then he closed his eyes. He had nothing further to say.
Marian did not cry. After the first moment she did not look at Julian; she looked away from him out of the window. She did not feel that it was Julian who lay there like a broken toy. It was her duty. She had submitted to it; but nothing in her responded to this submission except her iron will.
The nurse had forgotten to bring a chair for Stella. She leaned against the door until a red-haired boy with a bandaged arm, on the bed nearest to her, exclaimed earnestly:
"Do take my chair! You look awfully done."
She was able to take his chair because her hands were less blind than any other part of her, and she smiled at him because she had the habit of smiling when she thanked people. Then her eyes went back to Julian. Her heart had never left him; and she knew now that it never would leave him again.
She did not know how long or short it was before Marian rose gracefully, and said in her clear, sweet voice, "I shall come again to-morrow, Julian."
Marian stopped at each of the other bedsides before she joined Stella. She said little, friendly, inclusive words to the other two men, which made them feel as if they would like to sweep the floor under her feet.
"All the same," the red-haired man explained after the door closed, "it was the untidy little one, piled up against the door, that minded most. I dare say she was his sister."
He had no need to lower his voice, though he did lower it, for fear of its reaching Julian.
Julian had been reassured, and now he was resting. Consciousness had altogether receded from him, perhaps that it might give him a better chance of resting.