XXVIII
Uponnone of them did the burden of these weighty times lie so heavily as on Lois Luard and Alma Dare.
They both received occasional letters indeed, but Ray’s, though always full of cheery hopefulness, were very irregular and subject to lack of continuity through one and another occasionally getting lost on the way. And, great as was Lois’s joy and thankfulness when one arrived, telling of his safety and good health eight or ten days before, she could never lose sight of the terrible fact that five minutes after he had written it the end might have come.
With what agonising anxiety she scanned each long, fateful casualty list as it came out, only those who have done that same can know. Sore, sore on wives and mothers, and on all whose men were at the front, were those days when the desperate German rush on Calais and the coast was stayed by the still greater and more desperate valour of our little army, fighting odds as David fought Goliath of Gath. The mighty deeds done in those days will never be told in full, for in full by one Eyewitness only were they seen, and He speaks not.
But doings so Homeric are of necessity costly. Britain and the world at large were delivered from the Menace, but Sorrow swept through the land.
Alma continued to receive word of Con, but at irregular intervals and always by the hand of Robert Grant, R.A.M.C., Con himself being still unable to put pen to paper.
Mr. Grant, however, wrote with a clerkly hand, and Alma came to know it well and to like it. The words were Con’s own for the most part, but the writer occasionally appended as postscript a few remarks of his own, always hopeful and encouraging, but neither of them at any time gave anyclue to the nature of these troublesome wounds which prevented the sufferer using his pen.
And this worried Alma not a little. She enquired as to them more than once but received no explicit answers, and the matter began to get somewhat on her nerves.
Fortunately they were almost run off their feet at the hospital, and with the certainty that Con was at all events alive she devoted herself heart and soul to her patients, and that left her small time for her own personal anxieties.
Lois missed Uncle Tony dreadfully. Her assiduous care of him had occupied her mind and kept her thoughts off her own troubles. Her eyes were opened to the strange guise in which blessings are sometimes vouchsafed to us.
But now that Uncle Tony was gone her fears for Ray loomed larger and larger. She envied Alma her over-hard work and her knowledge of the worst. For herself—in spite of herself—she lived in constant fear, and cast about for some engrossing work that should constrain her mind in other directions.
She spent much time on her knees these days,—when not bodily, still in heart. And she came to recognise, as never before, the wonderful applicability of the Psalms to all the affairs of human life, especially to those who are in trouble and fearful of the future. She could hardly open her Bible at the Psalms without coming straight on some verse that might have been written for herself and the times. Even the damnatory passages satisfactorily fulfilled her desires, since they obviously applied to the Germans, against whom, as the causers of all the trouble and the imperillers of what she held dearest, her feelings grew ever more bitter.
The terrible waste of humanity’s best, this all-superfluous sorrow thrust upon a world which never lacked for sorrows, the inhuman savagery of this new German warfare, the impossibility, as it seemed to her, of any single man coming out alive, from the inferno of shot and shell described by the papers, and those awful casualty lists,—all these layheavy on her soul in spite of all her utmost efforts after hope and faith.
“Alma was right. I must get to work or I shall go mad,” she said to herself.
And after consultation with Auntie Mitt and her mother, they decided, with an eye to Uncle Tony’s wishes in the matter, to offer the hospitality of Oakdene to the War Office for any wounded they chose to send, either officers or privates.
In due course an official came down, inspected the premises, indicated the necessary preparations, and presently the house was as busy as a hive with the ordered doings of ten wounded officers and four nurses in charge. And in face of the actual and urgent necessities of these warmly-welcomed guests, neither Lois nor Auntie Mitt nor Mrs Dare had a spare moment to waste on their own anxieties and fears.