It snowed hard the next morning. The General, waking, found the day nurse in charge. Bronson came in to get him ready for his breakfast. There was about the old man an air of suppressed excitement. He hurried a little in his preparations for the General's bath. But everything was done with exactness, and it was not until the General was shaved and sitting up in his gorgeous mandarin robe that Bronson said, "I'd like to go out for an hour or two this morning, if you can spare me, sir—"
"In this snow? I thought you hated snow. You've always been a perfect pussy cat about the cold, Bronson."
"Yes, sir, but this is very important, sir."
The General ran his eye over the spruce figure.
"And you are all dressed up. I hope you are not going to be married, Bronson."
It was an old joke between them. Bronson was a pre-destined bachelor, and the General knew it.
But he liked to tease him.
"No, sir. I'll be back in time to look after your lunch, sir."
The General had been growing stronger, so that he spent several hours each day in his chair. When Bronson had gone, he rose and moved restlessly about the room. The day nurse cautioned him. "The Doctor doesn't want you to exert yourself, General Drake."
He was always courteous, but none the less he meant to have his own way. "Don't worry, Miss Martin. I'll take the responsibility."
He shuffled out into the hall. When she would have followed, he waved her back. "I am perfectly able to go alone," he told her.
She stood on the threshold watching him. She was very young and she was a little afraid of him. Her eyes, as she looked upon him, saw an obstinate old man in a gay dressing gown. And the man in the gay dressing gown felt old until he faced suddenly his wife's picture on the stairs.
It had been weeks since he had seen it, and in those weeks much had happened. Her smiling presence came to him freshly, as the spring might come to one housed through a long winter, or the dawn after a dark night.
"Edith!"
He leaned upon the balustrade. The nurse, coming out, warned him. "Indeed, you'd better stay in your room."
"I'm all right. Please don't worry. You 'tend to your knitting, and I'll take care of myself."
She insisted, however, on bringing out a chair and a rug. "Perhaps it will be a change for you to sit in the hall," she conceded, and tucked him in, and he found himself trembling a little from weakness, and glad of the support which the chair gave him.
It seemed very pleasant to sit there with Edith smiling at him. For the first time in many weeks his mind was at rest. Ever since Hilda had come he had felt the pressure of an exciting presence. He felt this morning free from it, and glad to be free.
What a wife Edith had been! Holding him always to his highest and best, yet loving him even when he stumbled and fell. Bending above him in her beautiful charity and understanding, raising him up, fostering his self-respect in those moments of depression when he had despised himself.
What other woman would have done it? What other woman would have kept her love for him through it all? For she had loved him. It had never been his money with her. She would have clung to him in sickness and in poverty.
But Hilda loved his money. He knew it now as absolutely as if she had said it. For the first time in weeks he saw clearly. Last night his eyes had been opened.
He had been roused towards morning by those soft sounds in the second room, which he had heard more than once in the passing weeks. In his feverish moments, it had not seemed unlikely that his wife might be there, coming back to haunt, with her gentle presence, the familiar rooms. There was, indeed, her light step, the rustle of her silken garments—.
Half-asleep he had listened, then had opened his eyes to find the night-lamp burning, Hilda's book under it and Hilda gone!
The minutes passed as still his ears were strained. There was not a sound in the house but that silken rustle. He wondered if he sought Edith if she would speak to him. He rose and reached for his dressing gown.
Hilda had grown careless; there was no screen in front of the second door, and the crack was wide. The General standing in the dark saw her before his wife's mirror, wearing his wife's jewels, wrapped in the cloak which his wife had worn—triumphant—beautiful!
It was that air of triumph which repelled him. It was a discordant note in the Cophetua theme. He had liked her in her nurse's white. In the trappings which did not belong to her she showed herself a trifle vulgar—less than a lady.
He had crept back to bed, and wide-awake, he had worked it all out in his mind. It was his money which Hilda wanted, the things that he could give her; he meant to her pink parasols and satin slippers, and diamonds and pearls and ermines and sables, and a check-book, with unlimited credit everywhere.
And to get the things that she wanted, she had given him that which had stolen away his brains, which might indeed have done more than that—which might have killed his soul.
He had heard her come in, but he had simulated sleep. She had seated herself by the little table, and had gone on with her book. Between his half-closed eyes he had studied her—seeing her with new eyes—the hard line of her lips, the long white hands, the heaviness of her chin.
Then he had slept, and had waked to find the day nurse on duty. He felt that he should be glad never to see Hilda again. He dreaded the night when he must once more speak to her.
He was very tired sitting there in his chair. The rug had slipped from his knees. He tried to reach for it and failed. But he did not want to call the day nurse. He wanted some one with him who—cared. He raised his poor old eyes to the lady in the picture. He was cold and tired.
He wished that Bronson would come back—good old Bronson, to pull up the rug. He wished that Derry might come.
A door below opened and shut. Some one was ascending the stairs. Some one who walked with a light step—some one slim and youthful, in a white gown—!
"Edith—?"
But Edith's hair had not been crinkled and copper-colored, and Edith would have come straight up to him; she would not have hesitated on the top step as if afraid to advance.
"Who are you?"
"Jean—"
"Jean?"
"Derry's wife."
"Come here." He tried to reach out his hand to her, but could not. His tongue felt thick—.
She knelt beside his chair. Her head was bare. She wore no wrap. "We were married this morning. And my own father has gone—to France—and I wanted a father—"
"Did Derry tell you to come?"
"Bronson begged me. He was at the wedding—"
"Old Bronson?" He tried to smile, but the smile was twisted.
She was looking up at him fearfully, but her voice did not falter. "I came to tell you that Derry loves you. He doesn't want your money, oh, you know that he doesn't want it. But he is going away to the—war, and he may be killed, so many men are—killed. And he—loves you—"
"Where is he?"
"I wouldn't let him come. You see, you said things which were hard for him to forgive. I was afraid you might say such things again."
He knew that he would never say them. "Tell him that—I love him." He tried to sit up. "Tell him that he is—my son."
He fell back. He heard her quick cry, "Bronson—"
Bronson came running up the stairs, and the nurse who had watched the scene dazedly from the threshold of the General's room ran, too.
Weighted down by a sense of increasing numbness he lifted his agonized eyes to Jean. "Stay with me—stay—"
Hilda, waked by the day nurse, raged. "You should have called me at once when he left his room. Why didn't you call me?"
"Because I felt myself competent to manage the case."
"You see how you have managed it—I will be down in a minute. Get everybody out—"
Her composed manner when she came down showed nothing of that which was seething within her.
She found Jean in bridal-white sitting by the bed and holding the General's hand. The doctor had been sent for, Derry had been sent for—things were being swept out of her hands. She blamed it, still hiding her anger under a quiet manner, on Jean.
"He has had a stroke. It was probably the excitement of your coming."
The day nurse intervened. "It was before she came, Miss Merritt, that I saw him reach for the rug. I was puzzled and started to investigate, and then I saw her on the stairs—" She smiled at Jean. Never in her limited young life had the day nurse seen such a lovely bride, and she did not in the least like Miss Merritt.
Derry coming a little later held Jean's hand in his while he faced Hilda. "What does the doctor say?"
The truth came reluctantly. "He may be unconscious for days. He may never wake up—"
"I do not think we shall need your services—. I will send you a check for any amount you may name."
"But—"
"Whatever claim you may have upon him will be settled when he is in a condition to settle anything; until then, my wife and I shall stay—"
Hilda went upstairs and packed her bag. So her house of dreams tumbled about her. So she left behind her the tiara and the pearl collar with the diamond slides, and the velvet cloak with the ermine collar. Poor Hilda, with her head held high, going out of the shadowed house.
And taking Hilda's place, oh, more than taking her place, was Jean—and this was her wedding day. The little rose-colored drawing room had needed all of its rose to counteract the gray of the world outside, with the snow and Daddy's car standing ready to take him to the station.
But always there had been the thought of Derry to uphold her, and the wonder of their love. Nothing could rob her of that.
He had held her in his arms the night before, and had said, "Tomorrow we shall be in Woodstock, and shall listen to the chimes—"
And now it was tomorrow, and they were here in this great grim house with Death at the door.
Quite miraculously Emily arrived, and she and Bronson made a boudoir of Derry's sitting-room. They filled it with flowers, as was fitting for a bridal-bower. Jean's little trunk had been sent on to Woodstock, but there was her bag, and a supply of things which Emily brought from home.
A new night nurse came, and Miss Martin was retained for the day. The snow still fell, and the old man in the lacquered bed was still unconscious, his stertorous breathing sounding through the house.
And it was her wedding day!
They dined in the great room where Derry's ancestors gazed down on them. Emily was there, and it was a bridal feast, with things ordered hurriedly. Bronson, too, had seen to that. But they ate little. Emily talked and Derry ably supplemented her efforts.
But Jean was silent. It was all so different from what one might expect—! She still wore her white dress. It was a rather superlative frock with much cobwebby lace that had been her mother's, and in the place of her own small string of pearls was the longer string which had been her father's last gift to her. She had worn no veil, her crinkled copper hair in all its beauty had been uncovered.
"I can't believe that the lovely, lovely lady at the other end of the table is my wife," Derry told Miss Emily.
Jean smiled at him. She felt as if she were smiling from a great distance—and she had to look at him over a perfect thicket of orchids. "Shall I always have to sit so far away from you, Derry?" she asked in a very small voice.
"My dearest, no—" and he came and stood behind her, and reached for her little coffee cup and drank where her lips had touched, shamelessly, before the eyes of the sympathetic and romantic Miss Emily.
And now Emily had gone! And at last Jean and Derry were alone in the bridal bower, and Jean was telling Derry again what his father had said. "He begged me to stay—"
Their eyes met. "Dearest, dearest," Derry said, "what is life doing to me?"
"It has given you me, Derry"—such a little, little whisper.
"My beloved—yes."
The next morning they talked it over.
"What am I to do? He needs me more than ever—"
"There must be some way out, Derry."
But what way? The Tin Soldier had jumped from the shelf, but he had fallen through a crack! And the war was going on without him—!
Christmas morning found the General conscious. He was restless until Jean was brought to him. He had a feeling that she had saved him from Hilda. He wanted her where he could see her. "Don't leave me," he begged.
She slipped away to eat her Christmas dinner with Derry and Emily and Margaret. It was an early dinner on account of the children. They ate in the big dining room, and after dinner there was a tree, with Ulrich Stölle playing Father Christmas. It had come about quite naturally that he should be asked. It had been unthinkable that Derry could enter into the spirit of it, so Emily had ventured to suggest Ulrich. "He will make an ideal Santa Claus."
But it developed that he was not to be Santa Claus at all. He was to be Father Christmas, with a wreath of mistletoe instead of a red cap.
Teddy was intensely curious about the change. "But why isn't he Santa Claus?" he asked.
"Well, Santa Claus was—made in Germany."
"Oh!"
"But now he has joined the Allies and changed his name."
"Oh!"
"And he wears mistletoe, because mistletoe is the Christmas bush, and red caps don't really mean anything, do they?"
"No, but Mother—"
"Yes?"
"If Santa Claus has joined the Allies what will the little German children do?"
What indeed?
Jean had trimmed a little tree for the General, and the children carried it up to him carefully and sang a carol—having first arranged on his table, under the lamp, the purple camels, to create an atmosphere.
"'We three kings of Orient are,Bearing gifts we traverse farField and fountain, moor and mountain,Following yonder star—'"
"Yonner 'tar," piped Margaret-Mary.
"Yon-der-er ste-yar," trailed Teddy's falsetto.
"'Oh, star of wonder, star of might,Star with royal beauty bright,Westward leading, still proceeding,Guide us to the perfect light—'"
Twenty-four hours ago Hilda's book had lain where the purple camels now played their little part in the great Christmas drama. In the soul of the stricken old man on the bed entered something of the peace of the holy season.
"Oh, 'tar of wonner—"
"Ste-yar of wonder-er—" chimed the little voices.
When the song was finished, Margaret-Mary made a little curtsey and Teddy made a manly bow, and then they took their purple camels and left the tree on the table with its one small candle burning.
The General laid his left hand over Jean's—his right was useless—and said to Derry: "Your mother's jewels are my Christmas gift to her. No matter what happens, I want her to have them."
The evening waned, and the General still held Jean's hand. Every bone in her body ached. Never before had she grown weary in the service of others. She told herself as she sat there that she had always been a sort of sugar-and-spice-and-everything-nice sort of person. It was only fair that she should have her share of hardness.
The nurse begged her in a whisper to leave the General. "He won't know." But when Jean moved, that poor left hand tightened on hers and she shook her head.
Then Derry came and sat with his arm about her.
"My darling, you must rest."
She laid her head against her husband's shoulder, as he sat beside her. After a while she slept, and the nurse unlocked the clinging old fingers, and Derry carried his little wife to bed.
And so Christmas passed, and the other days, wonderful days in spite of the shadow which hung over the big house. For youth and love laugh at forebodings and they pushed as far back into their minds as possible, the thought of the thing which had to be faced.
But at last Derry faced it. "It is my self-respect, Jean."
They were sitting in her room with Muffin, wistful and devoted, on the rug at Jean's feet. The old dog, having been banished at first by Bronson, had viewed his master's wife with distrust. Gradually she had won him over, so that now, when she was not in the room, he hunted up a shoe or a glove, and sat with it until she came back.
"It is my self-respect, Jean-Joan."
She admitted that. "But—?"
"I can't stay out of the fighting and call myself a man. It has come to that with me."
She knew that it had come to that. She had thought a great deal about it. She lay awake at night thinking about it. She thought of it as she sat by the General's bed, day after day, holding his hand.
The doctor's report had been cautious, but it had amounted to this—the General might live to a green old age, some men rallied remarkably after such a shock. He rather thought the General might rally, but then again he might not, and anyhow he would be tied for months, perhaps for years, to his chair.
The old man was giving to his daughter-in-law an affection compounded of that which he had given to his wife and to his son. It was as if in coming up the stairs in her white gown on her wedding day, Jean had brought a bit of Edith back to him. For deep in his heart he knew that without her, Derry would not have come.
So he clung pathetically to that little hand, which seemed the only anchor in his sea of loneliness. Pathetically his old eyes begged her to stay. "You won't leave me, Jean?" And she would promise, and sit day after day and late into the night, holding his hand.
And as she sat with him, there grew up gradually within her a conviction which strengthened as the days went by. She could tell the very moment when she had first thought of it. She had left the General with Bronson while she went to dress for dinner. Derry was waiting for her, and usually she would have flown to him, glad of the moment when they might be together. But something halted her at the head of the stairs. It was as if a hand had been put in front of her, barring the way.
The painted lady was looking at her with smiling eyes, but back of the eyes she seemed to discern a wistful appeal—"I want you to stay. No matter what happens I beg that you will stay."
But Jean didn't want to stay. All the youth in her rebelled against the thing that she saw ahead of her. She yearned to be free—to live and love as she pleased, not a prisoner in that shadowed room.
So she pushed it away from her, and so there came one morning a letter from her father.
"Drusilla went over on the same boat. It was a surprising thing to find her there. Since I landed, I haven't seen her. But I met Captain Hewes in Paris, and he was looking for her.
"I had never known how fine she was until those days on the boat. It was wonderful on the nights when everything was darkened and we were feeling our way through the danger zone, to have her sing for us. I believe we should all have gone to the bottom singing with her if a submarine had sunk us.
"I am finding myself busier than I have ever been before, finding myself, indeed, facing the most stupendous thing in the world. It isn't the wounded men or the dead men or the heart-breaking aspect of the refugees that gets me, it is the sight of the devastated country—made barren and blackened into hell not by devils, but by those who have called themselves men. When I think of our own country, ready soon to bud and bloom with the spring, and of this country where spring will come and go, oh, many springs, before there will be bud and bloom, I am overwhelmed by the tragic contrast. How can we laugh over there when they are crying here? Perhaps more than anything else, the difference in conditions was brought home to me as I motored the other day through a country where there was absolutely no sign of life, not a tree or a bird—except those war birds, the aeroplanes, hovering above the horizon.
"Well, as we stopped our car for some slight repairs, there rose up from a deserted trench, a lean cat with a kitten in her mouth. Oh, such a starved old cat, Jean, gray and war-worn. And her kitten was little and blind, and when she had laid it at our feet, she went back and got another. Then she stood over them, mewing, her eyes big and hungry. But she was not afraid of us, or if she was afraid, she stood her ground, asking help for those helpless babies.
"Jean, I thought of Polly Ann. Of all the petted Polly Anns in America, and then of this starved old thing, and they seemed so typical. You are playing the glad game over there, and it is easy to play it with enough to eat and plenty to wear, and away from the horror of it all. But how could that old pussy-cat be glad, how could she be anything but frightened and hungry and begging my help?
"Well, we took her in. We had some food with us, and we gave her all she could eat, and then she curled up on a pile of bags in the bottom of the car, and lay there with her kittens, as happy as if we were not going lickety-split over the shell-torn spaces.
"And that your tender heart may be at rest, I may as well tell you that she and the kittens are living in great content in a country house where one of the officers who was in the car with us is installed. We have named her Dolores, but it is ceasing to be appropriate. She is no longer sad, and while she is on somewhat slim fare like the rest of us, she is a great hunter and catches mice in the barn, so that she is growing strong and smooth, and she is not, perhaps, to be pitied as much as Polly Ann on her pink cushion.
"And here I am writing about cats, while the only thing that is really in my heart is—You.
"Ever since the moment I left you, I have carried with me the vision of you in your wedding gown—my dear, my dear. Perhaps it is just as well that I left when I did, for I am most inordinately jealous of Derry, not only because he has you, but because he has love and life before him, while I, already, am looking back.
"My work here is, as you would say, 'wonderful.' How I should like to hear you say it! There are things which in all my years of practice, I have never met before. How could I meet them? It has taken this generation of doctors to wrestle with the problem of treating men tortured by gas, and with nerves shaken by sights and sounds without parallel in the history of the world.
"But I am not going to tell you of it. I would rather tell you how much I love you and miss you, and how glad I am that you are not here to see it all. Yet I would have all Americans think of those who are here, and I would have you help until it—hurts. You must know, my Jean, how moved I am by it, when I ask you, whom I have always shielded, to give help until it hurts—
"I have had a letter from Hilda. She wants to come over. I haven't answered the letter. But when I do, I shall tell her that there may be something that she can do, but it will not be with me. I need women who can see the pathos of such things as that starved cat and kittens out there among the shell-holes, and Hilda would never have seen it. She would have left the cat to starve."
Jean found herself crying over the letter. "I am not helping at all, Derry."
"My dear, you are."
"I am not. I am just sitting on a pink cushion, like Polly Ann—-"
It was the first flash he had seen for days of her girlish petulance. He smiled. "That sounds like the Jean of yesterday."
"Did you like the Jean of yesterday better than the Jean of to-day?"
"There is only one Jean for me—yesterday, today and forever."
She stood a little away from him. "Derry, I've been thinking and thinking—"
He put a finger under her chin and turned her face up to him. "What have you been thinking, Jean-Joan?"
"That you must go—and I will take care of your father."
"You?"
"Yes. Why not, Derry?"
"I won't have you sacrificed."
"But you want me to be brave."
"Yes. But not burdened. I won't have it, my dear."
"But—you promised your mother. I am sure she would be glad to let me keep your promise."
She was brave now. Braver than he knew.
"I can't see it," he said, fiercely. "I can see myself leaving you with Emily, in your own house—to live your own life. But not to sit in Dad's room, day after day, sacrificing your youth as I sacrificed my childhood and boyhood—my manhood—. I am over thirty, Jean, and I have always been treated like a boy. It isn't right, Jean; our lives are our own, not his."
"It is right. Nobody's life seems to be his own in these days. And you must go—and I can't leave him. He is so old, and helpless, Derry, like the poor pussy-cat over there in France. His eyes are like that—hungry, and they beg—. And oh, Derry, I mustn't be like Polly Ann, on a pink cushion—."
She tried to laugh and broke down. He caught her up in his arms. Light as thistledown, young and lovely!
She sobbed on his heart, but she held to her high resolve. He must go—and she would stay. And at last he gave in.
He had loved her dearly, but he had not looked for this, that she would give herself to hardness for the sake of another. For the first time he saw in his little wife something of the heroic quality which had seemed to set his mother apart and above, as it were, all other women.
The wooden trumpeters that were carved on the door blew with all their might, so that their cheeks were much larger than before. Yes, they blew "Trutter-a-trutt—trutter-a-trutt—" …
Jean's world was no longer wonderful—not in the sense that it had once been, with all the glamour of girlish dreams and of youthful visions.
She had never thought of life as a thing like this in the days when she had danced down to the confectioner's, intent on good times.
But now, with her father away, with Derry away, with the city frozen and white, and with not enough coal to go around, with many of the rooms in the house shut that fuel might be conserved, with Margaret and the children and Nurse installed as guests at the General's until the weather grew warmer, with Emily transforming her Toy Shop into a surgical dressings station, and with her father-in-law turning over to her incredible amounts of money for the Red Cross and Liberty Bonds and War Stamps, life began to take on new aspects of responsibility and seriousness.
She could never have kept her balance in the midst of it all, if Derry had not written every day. Her father wrote every day, also, but there were long intervals between his letters, and then they were apt to arrive all at once, a great packet of them, to be read and re-read and passed around.
But Derry's letters, brought to her room every morning by Bronson, contained the elixir which sent her to her day's work with shining eyes and flushed cheeks. Sometimes she read bits of them to Bronson. Sometimes, indeed, there were only a few lines for herself, for Derry was being intensively trained in a Southern camp, working like an ant, with innumerable other ants, all in olive-drab, with different colored cords around their hats.
Sometimes she read bits of the letters to Margaret at breakfast, and after breakfast she would go up to the General and read everything to him except the precious words which Derry had meant for her very own self.
And then she and the General would tell each other how really extraordinary Derry was!
It was a never-failing subject, of intense interest to both of them. For there was always this to remember, that if the world was no longer a radiant and shining world, if the day's task was hard, and if now and then in the middle of the night she wept tears of loneliness, if there were heavy things to bear, and hard things and sad things, one fact shone brilliantly above all others, Derry was as wonderful as ever!
"There was never such a boy," the General would chant in his deep bass.
"Never," Jean would pipe in her clear treble.
And when they had chorused thus for a while, the General would dictate a letter to Derry, for his hand was shaky, and Jean would write it out for him, and then she would write a letter of her own, and after that the day was blank, and the night until the next morning when another letter came. So she lived from letter to letter.
"You have never seen Washington like this," she wrote one day in February, "we keep only a little fire in the furnace, and I am wearing flannels for the first time in my life. We dine in sweaters, and the children are round and rosy in the cold. And the food steams in the icy air of the dining room, and you can't imagine how different it all is—with the servants bundled up like the rest of us. We keep your father warm by burning wood in the fireplace of his room, and we have given half the coal in the cellar to people who haven't any."
"I am helping Cook with the conservation menus, and it is funny to see how topsy-turvy everything is. It is perfectly patriotic to eat mushrooms and lobsters and squabs and ducklings, and it is unpatriotic to serve sausages and wheat cakes. And Cook can't get adjusted to it. She will insist upon bacon for breakfast, because well-regulated families since the Flood have eaten bacon—and she feels that in some way we are sacrificing self-respect or our social status when we refrain.
"Your father is such an old dear, Derry. He has war bread and milk for lunch, and I carry it to him myself in the pretty old porcelain bowl that he likes so much.
"It was one day when I brought the milk that he spoke of Hilda. 'Where is she?'
"I told him that she was still in town, and that you had given her a check which would carry her over a year or two, and he said that he was glad—that he should not like to see her suffer. The porcelain bowl had reminded him of her. She had asked him once what it cost, and after she had found out, she had never used it. She evidently stood quite in awe of anything so expensive.
"Your mother and I are getting to be very good friends, dearest. When I am dreadfully homesick for you, I go and sit on the stairs, and she smiles at me. It is terribly cold in the hall, and I wrap myself up in your fur coat, and it is almost like having your arms around me."
She was surely making the best of things, this little Jean, when she found comfort in being mothered by a painted lady on the stairs, and in being embraced by a fur coat which had once been worn by her husband!
She kept Derry's tin soldier, which Drusilla had given him, on her desk. "You shall have him when you go to France, but until then he is a good little comrade, and I say; 'Good-morning' to him and 'Good-night.' Yet I sometimes wonder whether he likes it there on the shelf, and whether he is crying, 'I want to go to the wars—'"
She was very busy every morning in Emily's room, working on the surgical dressings. She hated it all. She hated the oakum and the gauze, the cotton and the compresses, the pneumonia jackets and the split-irrigation pads, the wipes, the triangulars, the many-tailed and the scultetus. Other women might speak lightly of five-yard rolls as dressing for stumps, of paper-backs "used in the treatment of large suppurating wounds." Jean shivered and turned white at these things. Her vivid imagination went beyond the little work-room with its white-veiled women to those hospitals back of the battle line where mutilated men lay waiting for the compresses and the wipes and the bandages, men in awful agony—.
But the lesson she was learning was that of harnessing her emotions to the day's work; and if her world was no longer wonderful in a care-free sense, it was a rather splendid world of unselfishness and self-sacrifice, although she was not conscious of this, but felt it vaguely.
She wore now, most of the time, her nun's frock of gray, which had seemed to foreshadow something of her future on that glorified day when Derry had first come to her. She had laid away many of her lovely things, and one morning Teddy remarked on the change.
"You don't dwess up any more."
Nurse stood back of his chair. "Dress—"
"Dur-wess."
"Don't you like this dress, Teddy?"
"I liked the boo one."
"Blue—"
"Ble-yew, an' the pink one, and all the shiny ones you used to wear at night."
"Blue dresses and pink dresses and shiny dresses cost a lot of money, Teddy, and I shouldn't have any money left for Thrift Stamps."
Thrift stamps were a language understood by Teddy, as he would not have understood the larger transactions of Liberty Bonds. He and the General held long conversations as to the best means of obtaining a large supply of stamps, and the General having listened to Margaret who wanted the boy to work for his offering, suggested an entrancing plan. Teddy was to feed the fishes in the dining-room aquarium, he was to feed Muffin, and he was to feed Polly Ann.
It sounded simple, but there were difficulties. In the first place he had to face Cook, and Cook hated to have children in the kitchen.
"But you'd have to face more than that if you were grown up and in the trenches. And Hodgson is really very kind."
"Well, she doesn't look kind, Mother."
"Why not?"
"Well, she doesn't smile, and her face is wed."
"Red, dear."
"Ur-ed—. And when I ask her for milk for Polly, she says 'Milk for cats,' and when she gets it out, she slams the 'frigerator door."
"Refrigerator, dear."
"Rif-iggerator."
But in the main Teddy went to his task valiantly. He conserved bones for Muffin and left-over corn-meal cakes. Polly Ann dined rather monotonously on fish boiled with war-bread crusts, on the back of Cook's big range. Hodgson was conscientious and salted it and cooled it, and kept it in a little covered granite pail, and it was from this pail that Teddy ladled stew into Polly Ann's blue saucer. "Mother says it is very good of you, Hodgson, to take so much trouble."
Hodgson, whose face was redder than ever, as she broiled mushrooms for lunch, grunted, "I'd rather do it than have other people messin' around."
Teddy surveyed her anxiously. "You don't mind having me here, do you, Hodgson?"
His cheeks were rosy, his bronze hair bright, his sturdy legs planted a trifle apart, Polly's dish in one hand, the big spoon in the other. "No, I don't mind," she admitted, but it was some time before she acknowledged even to herself how glad she was when that bright figure appeared.
Feeding the fishes presented few problems, and gradually thrift stamps filled the little book, and there was a war stamp, and more thrift stamps and more war stamps, and Muffin and Polly Ann waxed fat and friendly, and were a very lion and lamb for lying down together.
Then there came a day when Teddy, feeding the fishes in the aquarium, heard somebody say that Hodgson's son was in the war.
He went at once to the kitchen. "Why didn't you tell me?" he asked the cook, standing in front of her where she sat cutting chives and peppers and celery on a little board for salad.
"Tell you what?"
"That your boy was in Fwance."
Hodgson's red face grew redder, and to Teddy's consternation, a tear ran down her cheek.
He stood staring at her, then flew upstairs to his mother. "Cook's cryin'."
"Teddy—"
"She is. Because her son is in Fwance."
After that when he went down to get things for Muffin and Polly Ann, he said how s'prised he was and how nice it was now that he knew, and wasn't she pr-roud? And he fancied that Hodgson was kinder and softer. She told him the name of her son. It was Charley, and she and Teddy talked a great deal about Charley, and Teddy sent him some chocolate, and Hodgson told Margaret. "He's a lovely boy, Mrs. Morgan. May you never raise him to fight."
"I should want him to be as brave as his father, Hodgson."
"Yes. My boy's brave, but it was hard to let him go." Then, struck by the look on Margaret's face, she said, "Forgive me, ma'am; if mine is taken from me, I'd like to feel as you do. You ain't makin' other people unhappy over it."
"I think it is because my husband still lives for me, Hodgson."
Hodgson cried into her apron. "It ain't all of us that has your faith. But if I loses him, I'll do my best."
And so the painted lady on the stairs saw all the sinister things that Hilda had brought into the big house swept out of it. She saw Hodgson the cook trying to be brave, and bringing up Margaret's tea in the afternoons for the sake of the moment when she might speak of her boy to one who would understand; she saw Emily, coming home dead tired after a hard day's work, but with her face illumined. She saw Margaret smiling, with tears in her heart, she saw Jean putting aside childish things to become one of the women that the world needed.
Brave women all of them, women with a vision, women raised to heroic heights by the need of the hour!
The men, too, were heroic. Indeed, the General, trying to control his appetite, was almost pathetically heroic. He had given up sugar, although he hated his coffee without it, and he had a little boy's appetite for pies and cakes.
"When the war is over," he told Teddy, "we will order a cake that's as high as a house, and we will eat it together."
Teddy giggled. "With frostin'?"
"Yes. I remember when Derry was a lad that we used to tell him the story of the people who baked a cake so big that they had to climb ladders to reach the top. Well, that's the kind of cake we'll have."
Yet while he made a joke of it, he confessed to Jean. "It is harder than fighting battles. I'd rather face a gun than deny myself the things that I like to eat and drink."
Bronson was contributing to the Red Cross and buying Liberty Bonds, and that was brave of Bronson. For Bronson was close, and the hardest thing that he had to do was to part with his money, or to take less interest than his rather canny investments had made possible.
And Teddy, the man of his family, came one morning to his mother. "I've just got to do it," he said in a rather shaky voice.
"Do what, dear?"
"Send my books to the soldiers."
She let him do it, although she knew how it tore his heart. You see, there were the Jungle Books, which he knew the soldiers would like, and "Treasure Island," and "The Swiss Family Robinson," and "Huckleberry Finn." He brought his fairy books, too, and laid them on the altar of patriotism, and "Toby Tyler," which had been his father's, and "Under the Lilacs," which he adored because of little brown-faced Ben and his dog, Sancho.
He was rapturously content when his mother decided that the fairy books and Toby and brown-faced Ben might still be his companions. "You see the soldiers are men, dear, and they probably read these when they were little boys."
"But won't I wead them when I grow up, Mother?"
"You may want to read older books."
But Teddy was secretly resolved that age should not wither nor custom stale the charms of the beloved volumes. And that he should love them to the end. His mother thought that he might grow tired of them some day and told him so.
"I can wead them to my little boys," he said, hopefully, "and to their little boys after that," and having thus established a long line of prospective worshippers of his own special gods, he turned to other things.
General Drake, growing gradually better, went now and then in his warm closed car for a ride through the Park. Usually Jean was with him, or Bronson, and now and then Nurse with the children.
It was one morning when the children were with him that he said to Nurse: "Take them into the Lion House for a half hour, I'll drive around and come back for you."
Nurse demurred. "You are sure that you won't mind being left, sir?"
"Why not?" sharply. "I am perfectly able to take care of myself."
He watched them go in, then he gave orders to drive at once to the Connecticut Avenue entrance.
A woman stood by the gate, a tall woman in a long blue cloak and a close blue bonnet. In the clear cold, her coloring showed vivid pink and white. The General spoke through the tube; the chauffeur descended and opened the door.
"If you will get in," the General said to the woman, "you can tell me what you have to say—"
"Perhaps I should not have asked it," Hilda said, hesitating, "but I had seen you riding in the Park, and I thought of this way—I couldn't of course, come to the house."
"No." He had sunk down among his robes. "No."
"I felt that perhaps you had been led to—misunderstand." She came directly to the point. "I wanted to know—what I had done—what had made the difference. I couldn't believe that you had not meant what you said."
He stirred uneasily. "I have been very ill—"
Her long white hands were ungloved, the diamonds that he had given her sparkled as she drew the ring off slowly. "I felt that I ought to give you this—if it was all really over."
"It is all over. But keep it—please."
"I should like to keep it," she admitted frankly, "because, you see, I've never had a ring like this."
It was the Cophetua and Beggar Maid motif but it left him cold. "Hilda," he said, "I saw you that night trying on my wife's jewels. That was my reason."
She was plainly disconcerted. "But that was child's play. I had never had anything—it was like a child—dressing up."
"It was not like that to me. I think I had been a rather fatuous fool—thinking that there might be in me something that you might care for. But I knew then that without my money—you wouldn't care—"
"People's motives are always mixed," she told him. "You know that."
"Yes, I know."
"You liked me because I was young and made you feel young. I liked you because you could give me things."
"Yes. But now the glamour is gone. You make me feel a thousand years old, Hilda."
"Why?" in great surprise.
"Because I know that if I had no wealth to offer you, you would see me for what I am, an aged broken creature for whom you have no tenderness—"
It was time for him to be getting back to the Lion House. They stopped again at the gate. "If you will keep the ring," he said, "I shall be glad to think that you have it. Jean gays Derry gave you a check. If it is not enough to buy pink parasols, will you let me give you another?" He was speaking with the ease of his accustomed manner.
"No; I am not an—adventuress, though you seem to think that I am, and to condemn me for it."
"I condemn you only for one thing—for that flat bottle behind the books."
"But you wanted it."
"For that reason you should have kept it away. You should have obeyed orders."
"You asked me to doff my cap, so I—doffed my discipline." She was standing on the ground, holding the door open as she talked; again he was aware of the charm of her pink and white.
"Good-bye, Hilda." He reached out his hand to her.
She took it. "I am going to France."
"When?"
"As soon as I can." She stepped back and the door was shut between them. As the car turned, Hilda waved her hand, and the General had a sense of sudden keen regret as the tall cloaked figure with its look of youth and resoluteness faded into the distance.
When he reached the Lion House the children were waiting. "Did you hear him roar?" Teddy asked as he climbed in.
"No."
"Well, he did, and we came out 'cause it fwightened Peggy."
"Frightened—" from Nurse.
"Fr-ightened. But I liked the leopards best."
"Why?"
"Because they're pre-itty."
"You can't always trust—pretty things."
"Can't you tre-ust—leopards—General Drake?"
The General was not sure, and presently he fell into silence. His mind was on a pretty woman whom he could not trust.
That night he said to Jean, "Hilda is going to France."
"Oh—how do you know?"
"I met her in the Park."
He was sitting, very tired, in his big chair. Jean's little hand was in his.
"Poor Hilda," he said at last, looking into the fire, as if he saw there the vision of his lost dreams.
"Oh, no—" Jean protested.
"Yes, my dear, there is so much that is good in the worst of us, and so much that is bad in the best—and perhaps she struggles with temptations which never assail you."
Jean's lips were set in an obstinate line. "Daddy was always saying things like that about Hilda."
"Well, we men are apt to be charitable—to beauty in distress." The General was keenly and humorously aware that if Hilda had been ugly, he might not have been so anxious about the pink parasol. He might not, indeed, have pitied her at all!
And now in Jean's heart grew up a sharply defined fear of Hilda. In the old days there had been cordial dislike, jealousy, perhaps, but never anything like this. The question persisted in the back of her mind. If Hilda went to France, would she see Daddy and weave her wicked spells. To find the General melting into pity, in spite of the chaos which Hilda's treachery had created, was to wonder if Daddy, too, might melt.
She wrote to Derry about it.