Chapter XII

Dinner ended. Little, pink-eyed Mrs. Bell enveloped herself in her Shetland shawls and discreetly vanished, with a plaintive murmur of good-night. Yaill, with set, formal courtesy, giving precedence to the Church--followed Father Inghame and Katharine through a curtained archway communicating with the adjoining drawing-room.

"Thank you, Miss Forbis, but I will not stay for coffee. I have to make a visit to the chapel--and write some letters, and after night-prayers I shall go to bed, for I am beat out. I only wanted to say that Father Haildon, the priest in charge of your Parish Church at Birkleas, will celebrate the Requiem Mass on Monday; and that the Father Superior of the Monastery at Scraeside," he named a place some miles distant from Birkleas,--"will esteem it an honour to be permitted to assist. He will bring a Jesuit priest from London who is staying at the Monastery (Father Bevan, of Farm Place, Grosvenor Crescent)--and all are agreed that ten o'clock will be the most suitable hour. The boys of the Birkleas choir will drive over in the break with Father Haildon; and the lady who acts as organist will take the place of Mrs. Bell. That is all, except to wish you a very good night!" He shook hands with Miss Forbis and moved in the direction of the door opening on the hall, adding: "Mass will be at half-past seven as usual to-morrow. Perhaps--" his eyes went doubtfully to the tall khaki figure and downward-bent, thoughtful face of Yaill, who stood upon the worn tiger-skin hearthrug with a hand gripping the ledge of the mantelshelf: "perhaps as Whishaw's grandson has influenza, Colonel Yaill would like to serve Mass?"

There was an instant's pause before Yaill answered. He stared into the wood and peat fire blazing in the antique bowed steel grate, and seemed as though he had not heard. A log hissed; spurted brilliant flame; broke and fell--scattering sparks upon the old Dutch hearth-tiles. Two or three lodged upon the tiger-skin, mingling the fragrance of the charring apple-wood with the ugly acrid tang of frizzling hair. Then Yaill said, punctuating the sentence with stamps of his boot-heel:

"I fear I must--ask--to be excused, sir."

The priest's response was the gentle opening and closing of the door. Then with her long light step and a whisper of silken draperies, Katharine crossed over and stood on the hearth at her lover's side. He did not move or lift his head, but his starved heart answered the call of her nearness with a leap of fierce delight. His arm went out and round her, and she leaned lightly against him, and whispered against his cheek, close to his ear:

"If you knew what joy it is to me, to have you! ... Dear Edward! I am not much good at words--but you understand?"

He said, stiffening his lips against his teeth to check their trembling:

"No words have yet been made to express what you are to me--Dearest of all women!--and have been always, since the blessed hour when I saw you first!"

She was not a woman from whom to exact caresses. You waited the moment when she was pleased to give. Now she swayed nearer and her bosom brushed his--and the world went dim as they exchanged a kiss....

Last time they had met she had worn a Regulation tunic and short uniform skirt of blue serge, thick high Service boots and a plain blue felt hat with an enamelled Red Cross badge, and had been no less beautiful in his eyes. Now her tall lithe shapeliness was in silken raiment, like the beautiful arched feet in their buckled shoes. The rigorous plainness of her mourning dress added to her beauty, with its pure strong outlines and rich creamy skin. Her high-bred simplicity was the dominant note of her--or was it her generosity, her sympathy, or her piety? ...

A man had once said to Yaill in the early stages of the friendship that had changed so quickly into passionate love:

"She would be enchanting if she were not so holy!"

And Yaill had answered, with his grave eyes following her:

"Holiness is the bloom upon the nectarine."

Well, it was true. She was all the more attractive for the piety that graced her beauty, the devotion that exhaled from her, unconsciously as the fragrance from the rose.... Like Yaill's dead mother, she had no use for a man who was not religious. She had a standard and expected her beloveds to live up to it. And Yaill had done so, according to his lights.

She leaned closer, and her long, beautiful arm curved across his tunic, and her fond hand stroked the ribbons on his breast. Lingering over them, enumerating with silently moving lips the list of her man's distinctions, from the orange-centred blue and red of the Queen's medal of the South African War of 1899-1901, to the red ribbon of the Victoria Cross; the rainbow of the Star of Mons: the blue-edged red of the D.S.O. the white-mauve-white of the Military Cross; and the green, red-lined ribbon of Belgium's Croix de Guerre--with the sweet colour coming and going in her cheeks, and her dark lashes lowered over the shining cairngorm eyes. His sick heart ached anew, she was so wifely; and so womanly in her insistence on her point. For she went on urging:

"Then, I may tell Father Inghame that you will serve Mass on my father's last day in the old home, and in his place? ... He would yield the privilege to no one--unless it were my brother Julian--so gladly as to you. Say that I may say 'Yes!'"

Yaill's deep voice answered, slowly and heavily:

"He was a good man. No better ever lived, I am quite certain. And under most conceivable circumstances--to me his wish would be law. But I cannot take his place beside the altar or even attend at Mass."

He felt her start. She asked him quickly:

"There is some reason--"

"There is of course a reason!" He stirred a smouldering log with the toe of his high boot.

"Your health?" Her voice had the sharpened edge of anxiety, and her bosom rose and fell with her quickened breath. His starved eyes dwelt on the modelling of her wide brows, the black lashes of the sweet eyelids that dropped under his scrutiny, the setting of her head on the throat's white column, the superb width of her shoulders, the arch of her deep chest....

"Your health.... There is more to hear than I have been told--is there not? Don't keep--anything back from me, Edward. Nothing is so terrible to bear as suspense."

"There is nothing.... Have you ever known me keep anything back from you, my dearest?" he asked, in wonder at his own hypocrisy. For he knew that to have answered, "I have lost the Faith" would be to her an overwhelming blow. "Now tell me of Julian. You wrote to me that"--the speaker hesitated, mentally groping, "that he had applied to his Superior General and got leave to volunteer for service as a Chaplain with the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force."

"That was in last December. But the permission was delayed, as I wrote you later, and he sailed for Lemnos with the 29th Division a year ago this February. We heard from him next from Gallipoli,--such brave, cheerful letters. But since August 21st.... Oh, Edward!" She caught her breath sharply and paled and reddened. "Since the 21st not a line--not a single line!"

Yaill's forehead knitted in the effort to remember. Thin, thin ice here. He must go warily....

She went on:

"We know from the despatches published in the newspapers and from letters written to us by friends of Julian's, that he went forward with his brigade when the 29th Division fought through the scrub-fire to the top of Scimitar Hill.... When the terrible Turkish shrapnel swept them back down the hillside Julian stayed with the wounded--giving First Aid and comforting the dying. A brother Religious of St. Gerard who was with the Eleventh Division, visited us here afterwards and told us; 'Father Forbis was splendid!' ... 'One of the Church's many heroes!' he called him. But he could enlighten us no more than the people at the War Office.... And it broke my heart to look at Father--as the weeks went by and by without bringing any news.... He bore it in silence, but he has suffered dreadfully. I have heard him over and over, walking up and down at night in his bedroom. And by day one could see him hanging on the hope of a wire from Whitehall. Oh, Edward!--the wire that never will come, perhaps! That last day I saw Father alive, when he rode out with his Adjutant to put the last polish on the Fourth and Fifth Squadron of his Yeomanry at Cauldstanes Muirlees Racecourse--he looked so beautiful that my heart swelled big for pride in him,--and so sorrowful that I had to run away to cry. And he waved to me and rode up the brae without looking back to wave again, and--"

Here Katharine broke down and sobbed, and Yaill caressed his love and soothed her, setting fresh tears running in the channels that had long been dry. She had wept bitterly when Mark had been killed at Mons, though when the Tweedburgh Regiment had been wiped out near Loos, and Yaill had suffered in the blowing-in of the advanced telephone-communication dug-out, the news had reached her on the morning of an attack by German aircraft on the Clearing Hospital, and there had been not a single moment to spend in selfish grief. This last blow, coming as it had, had left her numbed to the centre of her being. Until this moment she had not cried at all ...

Yaill said, when she grew calm at last, lifting his strong brown hand to his lips, and drying with a kiss a shining drop that had fallen on it:

"We must hope for the best for Julian. He may be a prisoner with the Turks, or wounded,"--he spoke hoarsely--"or suffering after some such fashion as--makes it impossible to communicate with--those whom he loves."

"My dear," she said, knowing that his own case rose in mind, "my poor, poor dear!" And the wretched man grew sick at heart and shuddered. The mothering note in her voice called to him across the years of an engagement senselessly prolonged, that he might have heard it cooing to their children, or whispering love-words through many, many wasted nights. And the more hopelessly he yearned to her, the more he shrank from the solicitude in her sweet eyes. He had seen those eyes flame with generous anger, and sparkling with mirth, and dewy with tenderness. Now they were full of sorrow mingled with love for him. He tried to imagine how they would look her scorn....

For when she knew all the truth, she must despise him. That was the thing that made his heart a hell. The knowledge that no one could possibly believe in the innocence of the fellow who had done this hideous, brutal, beastly thing.

"Shell-shock, no doubt!" He heard the voices saying it, and saw the shake of sympathetic heads. "Shell-shock! ... How quite frightfully sad!" And through the eyeholes of the masks of sympathy, pity, commiseration--he saw the wriggle of the little snake of Doubt.

Were the truth known to the world, no one could ever believe it. He would lie, therefore, until it came to light. He would have the joy of these last hours spent beside Katharine, to remember when she banished him for ever from her side.

To Katharine, whose sore heart was eased by that burst of weeping, the joy of Edward restored shone through her sorrow as the sun through a snow-fog or a mountain mist. By and by, when Yaill settled into a well-known arm-chair, she hesitated but another instant before sinking with one swift, supple movement, down upon the hearthrug at her lover's side. He refused to smoke; she knew out of respect for the presence of Death in that bereaved, masterless house. She whispered, leaning her forehead against his shoulder, surrendering her hand to the warm, strong, masculine clasp:

"By and by we will go in together and see him. Shall we not, dearest? He would wish it!"

Yaill muttered, looking at the engagement-ring of Indian turquoises that he had placed years back on the fair womanly hand within his own:

"Certainly. If it will not be--too hard for you!"

"Too hard! O no, dear Edward!" The hearth-blaze lightened on her broad forehead as she raised it. "The hardness will be when he is there no longer, to talk to and to look at and to pray for.... To pray to, as well, being with the Holy Souls. It is wonderful to think now; '_He is with my mother!_'"

"And Mark, and your little sister Rosamond."

"And Julian, perhaps. He knows now, whether Julian was killed or taken prisoner.... Turks are cruel to their captives, are they not?"

"Sometimes...."

The muscle in Yaill's thin cheek twitched. He moved restlessly:

"Sometimes.... But do not dwell on these possibilities, or torture yourself with useless conjectures. Even in the shadow of the bereavement that has fallen upon this dear home, we are together.... Together, Katharine!"

She turned and kissed the fine dark khaki cloth of his sleeve, lingeringly echoing:

"'Together.' Doesn't it seem--rather too good to be real? After all that has been--the cruel years of parting, the shock of calamity; the rush and roar of events, the ugly things of War, the horror of dreadful news--the suspense of waiting--for letters from you--letters that never came--"

"I could not--did not--" he stammered miserably and broke off.

Her strong, fine hand closed upon his reassuringly.

"My own love, did I ever for a moment, lose faith in you? Did I ever cease to write, though I never heard? ..."

He groaned in spirit, remembering his discovery of those letters.... Square envelopes containing two or three sheets of ribbed linen note-paper, covered with Katharine's clear free script.... The pocket of an old writing-case of his was stuffed with them--they had crammed that damned Japanese workbox to the lid!

Again she breathed:

"Though I never heard from you I kept on writing. Each letter like a cry from my heart to yours."

Words burst from him:

"As God hears me, I never got one of those letters!"

She drew a troubled breath and said wonderingly, with sweet, perplexed eyes seeking light from his:

"Not at the time they were written, dear, possibly. But your nurse did read them to you, Edward?--as soon as you could bear it, that is."

"Did she?"

"She was very kind. I was very grateful to her."

"Was she? ... Were you? ..."

The sweat stood in beads upon his brow and temples, and his strained knuckles showed white through the sunburnt skin.

"Kind, I mean, in writing to break the cruel truth to me, that you--Edward!--let us forget about this!"

"It will be best," he said in a low constrained tone, not looking at her. "But tell me first what truth she broke to you?"

"The truth--" He felt her warm mouth upon his hand, "that your mind was quite a blank with regard to me. That was the news that came in her first letter from the Convalescent Camp at B---- Base. I have not kept the letter--I could not!--but the date I shall remember always. October 28th, 1915."

It had been true then. The effort to remember; to conjure up figures, faces, associations, places, out of the Great Blank that had followed the shell-burst--had been attended by blinding headache, spasms of sickness and nights of insomnia. Katharine went on:

"I wrote to her--Nurse Burtonshaw--at the Camp,--and thanked her, and said that I would go on writing to you exactly the same. My work involved some risk. If I had been killed, you would have learned from those letters that I never once forgot you, Edward, dear! So I asked your nurse to put them by in some safe keeping-place, and when God in His Mercy should restore my darling's memory, to give them to him, with his Katharine's love. For I never doubted that you would recover, Edward. If I had, for one moment--how could I have gone on working? I must have given up hope! I must--"

The break in her dear voice supplied the missing end to the sentence:

"I must have broken down and died!"