CHAPTER XIII.

That same evening, a good deal later on, Lady Forsyth sat at her dressing-table, brushing out her hair, recalling, with pride, Mark’s vivid speech, the cheers, the record ‘bag’ of recruits, and wondering if he would forget to come for his usual good-night.

His room opened out of hers; and the door between stood chronically ajar—a companionable habit begun in her first days of loneliness after his father’s death. He rarely missed the little ceremony of early tea, when he would establish himself at the foot of the bed and argue, or read aloud, or simply ‘rag’ her, as the spirit moved him. Then he would wander in and out, in the later stages of dressing, hindering and delighting her in about equal measure. Or they would carry on a violent argument through the open door, a pair of disembodied voices, till some climax would bring one or other gesticulating to the threshold. These morning and evening hours were the times of their most formidable encounters, their wildest nonsense, their utmost joy in each other’s society, exhibited in a manner peculiar to themselves. At night the ‘hair-brush interview’ had become a regular institution. It might be over in ten minutes or last till midnight, according to their mood. This was the time for graver matters, for the give and take of advice; and although there might be little outward show of sentiment, those hours of comradeship were among the most sacred treasures of the mother’s heart.

To-night she brushed till her arm ached, listening for his footstep; and the moment she put the hated thing down, he came, bringing with him the whiff of cigarette smoke she loved.

Standing behind her, he took her head between his hands, lightly passed his fingers through her hair and smiled at her in the glass. She was responsive as a cat when her hair was caressed; and he knew it.

‘Poor deserted little Mums!’ he said. ‘Had you given me up in despair?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘And how long would you have hung on past despair point?’ he asked with a twinkle.

‘Probably half an hour.... What have you done with your lady-love?’

‘Ordered her to bed.’

‘So early? All for my benefit? I scent an ulterior motive.’

He laughed and pulled her hair. ‘Your instinct’s infallible! It’s this marrying business. I know I promised to wait; but the whole face of the world has changed since then.’

He detected the faint compression of her lips.

‘Mums, you’re incorrigible. She’s a delicious thing.’

‘Who says otherwise?’

‘You do—internally! Not a mite of use throwing dust in my eyes. When you’re converted I shall know it, to the tick of a minute. Meantime’—he moved over to the window and stood there facing her—‘the question is, in a war like this, oughtn’t one to marry, if possible, before going out? She got on to war weddings this evening, and I was tongue-tied. That mustn’t happen again. What’s your notion? D’you still think—wait?’

A pause. She dreaded, as he did, the possibility of Wynchcombe Friars passing into the hands of Everard Forsyth and his son, whose views were not their views, except in matters political. Had the wife in question been Sheila, her answer would have been unhesitating. As it was, she parried his awkward question with another.

‘What do you think yourself, Mark?’

He laughed.

‘Oh, you clever woman! I have my answer. And in this case ... I believe you’re right. Personally, I’m game to marry her at once. But ... there are other considerations. Seems her precious Harry’s been rubbing into her that these war marriages aren’t fair on women—that it’s a bigger shadow on their lives losing a husband than a lover. It’s a tragic sort of start, I admit; and once we’re married the wrench of separation would surely be harder for both. Then, as regards myself, you know how this coming struggle has obsessed my mind; how we’ve doubted, both of us, the spirit of modern England—the selfish, commercial spirit of the red-necktie brand. And now that I see the old country shaming our doubts, I simply want to fling myself into this business—heart and brain and body. And, frankly, I’ve a feeling I could give myself to things with a freer mind ... as a bachelor. That’s the truth—for your very private ear. Thirdly and lastly, if we married, she ought to be here with you. And I’m doubtful if you’d either of you relish that arrangement, lacking me to do buffer state. See?’

‘I do see, very clearly,’ she answered, smiling at him with grave tenderness, her elbows on the table, her chin in her hands.

‘Thought you would. There’s only one thing worries me. As my wife—if the worst happened, she’d at least be well provided for. Seems she has literally no money, and a very fair gift for spending it.’

Helen’s quick brain—lightened by her relief—sprang to instant decision. ‘You could settle that by adding a codicil to your will. Those investments of father’s that are not tied up with the place would give her quite a comfortable income.’

‘Capital! Fool I was not to think of it. Simply forestall my instructions about her marriage settlement. We’ll fix it up at once and I’ll talk things over with her to-morrow. See how she feels about it herself.’

They discussed details for another half-hour; then, in his peremptory fashion, he ordered her to bed.

‘God bless you,’ she whispered as he shed a kiss on her hair. ‘This afternoon I was the proudest mother in England.’

‘O fool woman—just because I’ve caught the gift of the gab! With practice I might even degenerate into a politician. Just as well I’m in for a few years of the silent service. Go to sleep quick, and don’t let yourself be bogey-ridden by German devilments.’

But though wisdom endorsed his command, she disobeyed it flatly. There was no sleep in her brain; and instead of going to bed, she sat down in the window-seat, leaned against the woodwork and looked out upon the still serenity of garden, terrace and pinewood, softly illumined by an unclouded moon. The very peace and beauty of those moonlit August nights had an uncanny power of intensifying the inner visions that daylight and ceaseless occupation kept partially in check. She could not now look upon the moon without seeing the sacked villages, the human wreckage of battle that the same impartial goddess illumined, over there, on the shell-battered fields of Belgium and France.

Earlier in the day her spirit had been uplifted by Miss Sorabji’s beautiful letter ‘England in Earnest’; by her exhortation, from the Gita, ‘Think of this not as a war, but as a sacrifice of arms demanded of the gods.’ But now, in the peace and silence of night, it was the anguish of the flight from Tirlemont that lived before her eyes and chilled her blood. Too vividly, she pictured the flaming town; the rush of panic-stricken people; women and children, shot, bayonetted, ruthlessly ridden down. And already there were whispers of things infinitely worse than killing—things unnamable, at thought of which imagination blenched—

From that great, confused mass of misery there emerged the pathetic figure of one fugitive peasant woman and five children who stood bewildered in the Place de la Gare, crying all of them as if their hearts would break. That morning the German soldiery had killed the woman’s husband and trampled two of her children to death before her face—a minor item in an orgy of horrors. But it is the poignant personal detail that pierces the heart: and the acute realisation of one mother’s anguish brought sudden tears to Helen’s eyes.

So blurred was the moonlit garden, when she looked down into it, that a shadow moving at the end of the terrace set her heart fluttering in her throat.

Spy hunting and spy mania were in the air. Almost every day brought its crop of tales, credible and incredible: horses poisoned wholesale at Aldershot, mysterious gun-emplacements, hidden arms and ammunition in the least expected places. Even allowing for exaggeration, these tales were sufficiently disturbing. They gave a creepy, yet rather thrilling sense of insecurity to things as perennially and unshakably secure as the Bank of England or Westminster Abbey. Nor could even those symbols of stability be reckoned immune, with the financial world in convulsions and a mysterious fleet of Zeppelins threatening to bombard London!

In the over-civilised and over-legislated world that came by a violent end in July 1914, the uncertainty of life had been little more than a pious phrase, spasmodically justified by events. Now it was an impious fact, vaguely or acutely felt almost every hour of the day—by none more acutely than by Helen Forsyth with her quick sensibilities and vivid brain. Even Mark admitted that she was keeping her head creditably on the whole; but in certain moods she was capable of demanding a drastic search for gun-emplacements in her own grounds or suspecting a secret store of ammunition among the ruins of Wynchcombe Abbey, all on the strength of a semi-German gardener dismissed years ago. Only last week a suspicious, Teutonic-looking individual had come to the back door and put the cook ‘all in a tremor’ by asking superfluous questions about the neighbourhood. And now this mysterious wanderer in the garden—at such an hour—!

She was on her feet, brushing aside the tears that obscured her vision. But the shadow had vanished behind a bush and did not seem disposed to reappear. For a second she stood hesitating. If she called Mark, he would either laugh at her or scold her for not being in bed. The creature was probably harmless. She would creep downstairs quietly and explore. For all her nerves and fanciful fears, she was no coward in the grain. Hastily twisting up her hair, she slipped on a long opera coat and crept noiselessly down into the drawing-room. There she found that the French window leading on to the terrace had been left unlocked.

‘How careless of Mark!’ she murmured; and, with fluttering pulse, stepped out into the moonlight.

There he was again! Summoning all her courage she went forward, uncertain even now what she meant to say.

The shadowy figure had turned. It was coming towards her. Then—with a start of recognition she stopped dead.

‘Keith!’ she exclaimed softly, and could have laughed aloud in her relief.

‘Helen—what are you doing out here?’ he asked, an odd thrill in his low voice.

‘What are you doing?’ she retorted. ‘Frightening me out of my life! I saw a suspicious-looking shadow; and—don’t laugh at me—I thought it might be a spy.’

‘And you came down to tackle him alone! Just like you. Supposing it had been?’

‘Oh—thank goodness it’s not! But don’t you ever give me away.’ Helen’s laugh ended in an involuntary shiver.

‘Cold?’ he asked quickly.

‘No—no. Let’s walk a little and feel normal.’

He moved on beside her, anxious, yet deeply content. Then: ‘Helen,’ he said suddenly, ‘if you’re going to let things get on your nerves like this, you’ll be done for. Your best chance is to take up some absorbing war-work; the harder the better.’

‘What work? And where?’ He caught a note of desperation in her tone. ‘Scrubbing hospital floors? Or playing about with Belgians and invalids here, while Sheila is at Boulogne, you scouring France in our car, and Mark in the thick of it all? He wants me to stay here, I know. But, Keith, I simply can’t. What else, though, can a useless woman of fifty do?’

‘To start with, she can refrain from calling herself useless, which is a libel! To go on with—’ He paused, regarding her. The supposed spy was meditating a bold suggestion. ‘Helen—could you ... would you ... come out with me as my orderly? If so, I could confine my activities to the Base. I verily believe you’d find the real thing less nerve-racking than the nightmares of an imagination like yours. But, could you stand it, physically? And ... would the conventions permit?’

Her low laugh answered him straight away. ‘My dear Keith, talk of inspiration! It would just save my soul alive. I can act infinitely better than I can endure. I should feel nearer to Mark. And as for the conventions, I hanged them all years ago. What harm, if the poor dead things are drawn and quartered?’ She checked herself and looked up at him. ‘Will you take your Bible oath that I shouldn’t simply be in the way?’

‘I’ll take it on as many Bibles as you like to produce,’ he answered, with becoming gravity. ‘But I’m thinking ... for your sake ... another woman.... How about Sheila?’

‘Sheila! Lovely.’

‘Would she give up her precious massage?’

‘If I wanted her, she’d give up anything. But—the massage wouldn’t bring her up against the worst horrors. Your work would. And she’s full young—barely three and twenty.’

‘She is that. Though, if I’m any good at observation, I should say the stature of her spirit is far in advance of her years. She gives me the impression of great reserve power, that girl. She never seems to put out her full strength, or to waste it in kicking against the pricks.’

‘One for me!’ Lady Forsyth murmured meekly.

‘Yes, one for you! And I make bold to prophesy she would be worth five of you in a painful emergency.’

He made that unflattering statement in a tone of such extraordinary tenderness that she beamed as at a compliment.

‘Let the righteous smite me friendly—when I deserve it! You seem to have made a close study of my Sheila. It only remains to secure her services and Mark’s consent—’

‘Mother!’ His deep voice called suddenly from the window. ‘I’m ashamed of you. Come in at once!’

‘Coming!’ she called back, adding under her breath: ‘Keith, remember I only came down for a book. And you found me locking you out.’

Then she hurried away, obedient always to the voice of her son.

Nightmares had been effectually dispelled.

Bel’s hope that the War Office would be merciful was not fulfilled. The Great Man, who worked day and night, creating new armies, had need of every promising semblance of an officer he could lay hands on; and Mark’s name was a recommendation in itself.

Bel was given little more than a week in which to be ‘heavenly good’; and it must be admitted that she made the most of it. She took kindly, on the whole, to Mark’s solution of the marriage problem. How far her acquiescence was due to his exceeding thoughtfulness in the matter of money it might be invidious to inquire. There remained the fact that Harry O’Neill—scenting a possible war wedding—had skilfully put forward her own pronounced views on the subject; while, incidentally, spoiling her idol more egregiously than ever. And the girl herself leaned towards a more auspicious beginning of her married life. Mark found her oddly superstitious on the subject; and, with her gift for evading unpleasant facts, she had risen readily to the optimistic conviction that the war would be over by Christmas or the New Year. Apparently it did not occur to her, or to others of her persuasion, that a short war could only mean victory for Germany. But there seemed little use in dispelling an illusion that kept her happy; and, in her case, could do no harm.

So she clung unchallenged to her comforting belief; and, the great question being settled, Mark was free to consider other matters.

To start with, there was Keith’s amazing proposition to enlist Mums—a project that did not square with Mark’s private plan for keeping her safely wrapped in cotton wool and harmless war-activities at Wynchcombe Friars. Son-like, he had scarce realised how infinitely dear she was to him, till her eagerness to cross the Channel had driven him to consider the possibility in all its bearings. And the inclusion of Sheila in the programme brought to light his hidden tenderness for her that seemed in no way diminished by his passion for Bel. Why the deuce couldn’t the women be reasonable, and stay in England where there would be work enough for all? And what business had Keith to go encouraging them? But so plainly were the three enamoured of their idea that in the end he had not the heart to damp them.

In the privacy of his thoughts, he thanked goodness that Bel could be trusted not to emulate them; though her attitude towards the war was now less hostile than it had been. The very air she breathed was impregnated with war-fever, war-talk and war-realities. It was increasingly evident that new activities were going to become the fashion; and she was of those who unquestioningly follow a fashion, lead it where it may. Having no taste for the menial work of hospitals or for tending the sick and wounded, she had elected to help in some sort of women’s work engineered by Harry, ‘the Cause’ being temporarily extinct. So far as possible she turned away her eyes from beholding and her heart from feeling the full measure of the invisible horror, which, to more imaginative minds, became too acutely visible and audible during that critical last week of August 1914.

For by now, across the Channel, the Great Retreat had begun. Days that, at Wynchcombe Friars, slipped by all too fast, seemed over there, to have neither beginning nor end. Common standards of time were lost in that ceaseless, sleepless nightmare of dogged marching and still more dogged fighting, whenever Prussian hordes gave the broken remnant of an army a chance to turn and smite, as the British soldier can smite even in retreat.

It was from Le Cateau that an officer friend sent a pencil scrawl to Mark.

Mark handed that letter to Bel.

‘There’s one in the eye for your precious Maitland,’ he remarked coolly. ‘Copy it out verbatim, please, and send it to him with my compliments!’

And Bel obeyed with exemplary meekness. She had rather objected to the tone of Maitland’s last letter; and, in her own fashion, she was very much impressed. Heroism, a long way off and entirely unconnected with one’s self, was an admirable thing in man.

It was near the end of August, when the Channel ports were being evacuated and the fall of Paris seemed merely a matter of days, that Mark at last found his name in the Gazette coupled with that of a distinguished Highland regiment; and in record time he was ready—uniform, equipment, parting presents and all.

Like most of his race and kind, he would have preferred an informal departure—casual ‘good-byes,’ as though he were going off on business for a week or so. But he had won the hearts of his people by justice, understanding, and the personal touch that was a tradition at Wynchcombe Friars: he had inspired them, by precept and exhortation, to give of their best ungrudgingly; and he could not deny them the legitimate thrill of speeding his departure with congratulations and cheers.

Only on Sunday, his last day, he evaded one ordeal by limiting his attendance at church to early service with his mother. Bel had little taste for early rising, and Mark did not press the point.

In the afternoon he delighted his humbler friends—wives of the gamekeeper, the coachman and the manager of his industrial colony—by calling on them in full uniform. Though he occasionally wore the kilt and glengarry at Inveraig, his Hampshire folk had never seen him thus attired; and their open admiration was so embarrassing that, after several hours of it, he returned limp and exhausted, clamouring for whisky and soda and the society of Bel, who could always be trusted to keep her admiration within bounds.

To her he devoted the evening; and early on Monday the more personal farewells must be said; the cheerful, casual note vigorously maintained. It was not ‘the real thing’ yet; and the women, in their hearts, prayed that ‘the real thing’ might be deferred for many months to come. Meantime, unless England was favoured with an invasion, he would be safe enough on the south-east coast of Scotland; and later on, if rooms were available, he would permit his mother and Bel to intrude upon his violent industry for a week.

Keith drove them all to the station, and behold, outside the gray stone gateway, an impromptu guard of honour lined the road to Westover: villagers and farm hands, weavers and metal-workers, women, children and ineligible men. At sight of the motor, they broke into shouts and ragged cheers that would have moved a heart many degrees less responsive than the heart of Mark Forsyth.

‘Drive slower, man,’ he said to Keith; and, standing up in the car, he waved his glengarry—giving them shout for shout—till he could no more.

That vision of him, so standing, with the morning light in his eyes, the sun upon his chestnut-red hair and his kilt blown back by the wind, remained stamped indelibly upon his mother’s brain....

CHAPTER XIV.

The dream of that coveted week at Mark’s war station came true about the middle of September. More: it was a success—a blessed memory unspoiled by any jarring note—and it brought the two women nearer to each other than they had been yet.

They found Mark in charge of a double company, chiefly armed with broomsticks, handling his Highlanders to some purpose; giving his spare hours to revolver practice, with plump German targets in view. His Colonel, who lost no time in making friends with Lady Forsyth, spoke of him in glowing terms, and gave his womenfolk every facility for seeing the coast defences prepared against the promised invasion. They wandered, shivering inwardly, through a maze of genuine trenches, heavily sandbagged, that, in the event of a landing, were to be held ‘at all costs.’ They inspected cunning entanglements of barbed wire on the beach and underground forts that looked more like heat bumps on the face of the earth than strong defensive positions; and they heard amazing stories of spies, though the Government had nominally demolished the system.

Everything conspired to make those few September days an untarnished memory. The tide of retreat had turned. The miracle had happened, and the Germans, flung back from the gates of Paris, had been brilliantly defeated on the Marne. Hopeful souls dreamed again of a swift and decisive issue. But the Great Brain piling up armies in Whitehall still pinned his faith on England’s ‘last million men.’

In fact, there was only one flaw in the week of their content: it passed too soon. Then the price must be paid in the renewed wrench of parting, and for the first time Lady Forsyth saw tears in Bel’s eyes. They were not allowed to fall, but they were unmistakably there.

Of course they must come again, Mark assured them at the last. ‘The C.O. has fallen in love with Mums! He’d be heart-broken if I didn’t give him another chance. And he’s a useful chap to please. So that settles it!’

But towards the end of September, before there was time even to think of another chance, Mark had his orders. A decimated battalion was clamouring for reinforcements; and a message flashed to Wynchcombe Friars that he would be home next day on forty-eight hours’ leave, picking up Bel in town.

That blunt announcement drove the blood from Lady Forsyth’s face. Sheila was back with her again, and Keith had just returned from a week’s absence on business connected with the Forsyth-Macnair car.

‘He’s got his wish,’ was all she said: and went quickly out of the room.

Next morning they arrived—the two of them—Mark rather defiantly cheerful, Bel more than a little subdued. Lady Forsyth had never liked the girl better than in those two days.

To the women it seemed hard that so many of his precious hours at home must be squandered on business. But Mark had to face the fact that he might never return, and to make his dispositions accordingly. It had always been his wish to emulate his father and be practically his own land agent. But four years of minority and the long absence in Europe had obliged him to employ a trustworthy man of experience; and he was thankful for it now. George Russell, happily well over forty, had proved as capable as he was devoted, which is saying a good deal for his capacity. He possessed, moreover, a shrewder business head than either mother or son; and on occasion, to Mark’s huge delight, he would assume a tenderly protective attitude, as of one whose mission in life was to save them from themselves.

In the matter of Belgian refugees, he regretted to report that Lady Forsyth was not sufficiently discriminating. They were proving, as was natural, ‘a very mixed lot,’ and Russell had a positive flair for the wrong sort. It was not fair on Sir Mark to crowd up his cottages with ‘foreign riff-raff’: the deserving would make a quite sufficient drain on his limited resources. The good fellow learnt with unconcealed relief that Lady Forsyth would soon be going to Boulogne with Miss Melrose and that he would be left practically in charge of everything.

Mark himself was thankful for business details that relieved the underlying strain. But he refused on this occasion to bid any official ‘good-byes.’ He had taken leave of his people when he joined the army. This final wrench was his own most private and personal affair, as they would doubtless understand.

Tea on the terrace was a creditably cheerful meal; and it was not till near dinner-time that Mark managed to slip away by himself for an hour of quiet communing with the land he loved—the woods, the river and the lordly ruins that, for him, were written all over with the inner history of his own brief twenty-seven years. Bel had asked him more than once how he could bear to leave it all; and to-night, as he saw the red sun tangled among his pine-tops, that question so shook his fortitude that he challenged it with another. Could he bear to think of German troops defiling the fair and stately face of it, terrorising with torture and outrage the men and women whose welfare was his main concern in life? Confronted with that challenge, the coward question fled ashamed.

After dinner he had half an hour’s talk with Sheila, into whose hands he solemnly commended his more mercurial mother. ‘She’s a jewel of price,’ he added frankly, ‘but in certain moods she takes some managing. And on the whole you’re better at it than old Keith. Don’t let her crock up from the strain of it all. And write to me. Promise.’

She promised—and his mind felt more at rest.

Later on he took Bel out on to the terrace, where they paced up and down in the starlight, talking fitfully. Time was too short for all they had to say; and for that very reason they could not say one half of it. Interludes of silence increased. At last came one so prolonged that, by a mutual impulse, they came to a standstill, near a low stone bench, confronting each other and the inexorable fact.

‘Oh Mark—to-morrow!’ Bel breathed unsteadily, her dim face close to his. ‘It seems impossible.’

For answer he took hold of her, and sitting down, gathered her on to his knees. Then, amazed, he heard her whisper at his ear: ‘Darling—I’m horribly afraid. I keep feeling—I shall never get you back.’

It was spoken at last, the fear of perpetual parting that knocked at both their hearts. But the man knew that spectre must be ignored.

‘I’ll come back with any luck, my Bel,’ he said, kissing her, ‘to claim you for good, and worry your life out! I vote we marry the first leave I get.’

He passed his hand slowly down her bare arm. ‘Darling, you’re cold,’ he said. ‘There’s a dew and a half falling. Come in at once. Are we down-hearted?—No!’

The light of the hall showed her on the verge of tears. But she pulled herself together and he dismissed her with a blessing that meant more to him than to her.

In the drawing-room he found Keith alone, with a solitary electric light switched on, smoking by the open window; a privilege Helen permitted him for the sake of his company.

‘Hullo! Gone—both of ’em?’ Mark asked in surprise.

‘Yes. I ordered them off. They looked strained and tired. Couldn’t read. Couldn’t talk. Your mother has some letters to write, I think. She left word—would you look in?’

‘Bless her, she takes things beastly hard.’

‘She does,’ Keith assented briefly; and Mark proceeded to fill his pipe.

During the process Keith watched him, appraising his straight, clean manhood and cursing the devilish nature of modern war.

Presently, when Mark had finished with his pipe, he spoke.

‘Keith, old chap, on the strength of peculiar circumstances and the general uncertainty of things, I’m going to make an infernally impertinent remark. To begin with, mother’s most distractingly on my mind. I’ve fixed up most things, with a view to—possible contingencies. But I don’t seem able to fix up her. If I’m knocked out—she’s simply done for. Not even this precious work of hers for consolation. It all goes to Uncle Everard, who’ll make an end of our colony straight away. She’ll lose everything at a stroke, except Inveraig. And she—alone there—!’

He set his teeth hard, and Keith passed a long thin hand across his eyes. ‘That’s the tragedy of it,’ he said, adding, with forced lightness. ‘Where does the impertinence come in?’

‘It’s jolly well coming in now. Don’t bite my head off. Truth is, I’m not stone blind; and just lately—I’ve been wondering ... why the deuce don’t you make a match of it? You and Mums!’

Macnair started, and his face looked rather a queer colour in the dim light.

‘Great heavens, Mark! Talk of explosives!’

For the moment he could get no further, and Mark was puzzled. ‘You mean—it’s never occurred to you?’

‘I mean nothing of the sort.’

‘Then I bet you do want to bite my head off—’

‘I’m not ... so sure,’ he said slowly. His voice was more natural now. ‘I always like your sledge-hammer directness. At the same time—’ He rose and paced the length of the room, revolving that amazing proposition.

‘If I thought there was a ghost of a chance,’ Mark persisted, as Keith turned in his stride, ‘it would take a ton weight off my mind.’

‘Not to mention mine,’ Keith answered smiling; and when he reached the window he put a hand on Mark’s shoulder. ‘As it seems a case of plain speaking to-night, I may as well admit the truth. She’s been the star of my life for fifteen years—and I’d give all I possess to marry her.’

Mark’s eyebrows went up.

‘And she ten years a widow! Why not have a shot at it, old chap, and make this Boulogne trip a sort of war honeymoon—’

‘My dear boy! The pace you young fellows travel! And you ignore ... there’s Helen herself to be reckoned with—’

For the first time in his life Mark saw the blood mount into Keith’s face and heard him hesitate over his mother’s name—phenomena that checked his fluency a little but rather increased his zeal.

‘Well, if you don’t have a try,’ he said, ‘hanged if the C.O. won’t forestall you. He’s dead smitten. Two lovers at fifty—she ought to be ashamed of herself!’

But Keith seemed no way perturbed by the possibility of a rival.

‘If she ever marries again,’ he said quietly, ‘it will be myself. But, Mark, is it possible you’ve never realised that, for her, your father is still as much alive as when he walked this earth? There’s a modest percentage of human beings so made, and a good few of them are Scots. For them there is actually neither death, nor separation. I believe your father still bars my way, as much as he did when—I first loved her. Of course ... I may exaggerate!’

‘Hope you do!’ Mark was deeply moved. ‘She doesn’t often speak of him to me.’

‘Nor to me. But—when she does, it’s quite clear.’

‘’M. Rough luck. All the same, if the worst happens, give me your word you’ll have a try ... for her sake and mine as well as your own. No one would dream there’s ten years between you.’

Keith simply held out his hand and Mark’s closed on it hard. The good understanding that had always existed between them was complete.

Mark found his mother writing letters in bed. He had accused her more than once of writing them in her bath. She looked strained and tired, as Keith said; but in her blue dressing-jacket, with hair demurely parted and a thick plait over her shoulder, she appeared younger, if anything, than the man he had left downstairs.

‘Incurable woman!’ he said lightly. ‘Who’s your victim this time?’

She told him; and while she read out snatches of her letter, Mark—watching her with new eyes—wondered, had she the least inkling? Would a word from him be of any service to Keith?

Curiosity impelled him to talk of the Boulogne trip, to enlarge on his confidence in Keith, and even to touch on the unconventional character of the whole plan. Neither in look nor tone could he detect a glimmer of after-thought or shadow of self-consciousness. The causes of her satisfaction were clear as daylight: longing to be in the same country as himself, candid pleasure in Keith’s and Sheila’s company, and her innate love of getting off the beaten track.

‘It’s just one of the many beautiful things that a genuine, understanding friendship makes possible,’ she concluded, stamping and sealing her letter: and Mark began to feel rather sorry for Keith. But he wisely refrained from any hint of his own knowledge. It would probably do no good and would certainly spoil her pleasure in going.

Instead, he commandeered her writing-board, an act of tyranny that would normally have involved a fight. Her unnatural meekness hurt him more sharply than any words of love, could she have brought herself to speak them. When he came back to the bed, she indicated a little pile of Active Service Compendiums and a pocket Red-letter Testament on the table beside her. She had already given him his wrist-watch and a silver flask.

‘That from me,’ she said, touching the Book, ‘and those for me. I shall be hungry for news, remember, and out of touch with Bel, who will get it all.’

‘Not quite all—faithless and unbelieving!’ he answered, echoing her lightness. Then he added with decision: ‘You’re not coming up to town, Mums; not even to the station—understand? It’ll be bad enough having Bel. But she’s cooler all through. No matter how brave you are, I can always feel you quivering inside. And I couldn’t stand it. Nor could you.’

She shook her head. ‘It was only—a temptation. Not to miss....’

A spasm crossed her face, and he went down on his knees beside her.

‘Darling, if we are going to make fools of ourselves,’ he said huskily, ‘I’d better be off. It’s near midnight. Time you were asleep.’ No answer; and he spoke still lower. ‘Give me your blessing, Mums—like when I went to school.’

Still without speaking, she laid her hands on his bowed head; and from his heart he echoed her passionate silent plea for his safe return.

Then he stood up and kissed her good-night.

For sheer misery and discomfort nothing could exceed the actual hour or two before departure. Bel could be with him in his room while he ‘completed his mobilisation.’ The rest could only hang about aimlessly, making futile talk or inventing futile occupations to keep thought at bay. In the background several maids and a grey-haired butler hovered fitfully; and Bobs, a picture of abject misery, lay awaiting his master at the foot of the stairs.

He came at last, in a violent hurry, shouting an order to Keith and springing clean over the prostrate Bobs.

Bel followed more leisurely, flushed a little, but controlled. Then the hovering servants came forward and Helen slipped quietly into her husband’s study.

There, at last, Mark came to her—followed by an apparently tailless Bobs.

Somehow she contrived to smile. Then his arms were round her, crushing her to him.

‘God bless you,’ he whispered. ‘Don’t fret. It’s going to be all right. And—if it isn’t ... it’ll still be all right.’

Then he kissed her again and let her go.

From the threshold he waved to her, smiling resolutely, though tears stood in his eyes. She waved back to him. The door shut between them. He was gone.

As she stood motionless, fighting back her grief, she was startled by that sharp, familiar pang in the region of her heart, and a momentary darkness as if a raven’s wing had brushed across her eyes. She shivered and kneeled hastily down to comfort the desolate Bobs, while her tears fell, unchecked now, upon his rough brown head.

CHAPTER XV.

Wynchcombe Friars without Mark was no place to tarry in, but there seemed no end to the delays; and Keith turned even these to good account by teaching Sheila to drive the Forsyth-Macnair car. Two drivers with one orderly would get through twice the work.

It was near the middle of October when, at last, they found themselves speeding towards Folkestone. Keith, who had laid aside philosophy ‘for the duration of the war,’ delighted in his own small ark of salvation as a captain delights in his ship. From ‘stem to stern’ she was perfect as skill and money could make her; fitted up with four stretchers and bedding; crammed to the limit of her capacity with first-aid appliances and a minimum of luggage.

Here and there autumn had laid a fiery finger on the woods. Birches and elms were tipped with gold. Otherwise the October sun, riding in a cloudless heaven, suggested high summer. Mark had been gone nearly a fortnight. Two brief cheerful letters assured his mother he was alive and well. Till she could see him again, those simple facts were all that vitally concerned herself; though pessimists prophesied invasion by Zeppelin and transport; and over there across the Channel, Belgium continued her heroic stand against the all-devouring, all-defiling German Army.

The fall of Antwerp had resounded through Europe like the knell of doom. For a time, even the bravest were shaken with dismay, and the stream of refugees increased daily. The streets of Folkestone overflowed with that pitiful flotsam of wrecked cities. Some wept; some cursed; some prayed; but the prevailing expression was a terrible stunned indifference, as though shock on shock had hammered them into automata that could move and eat and sleep, but could no longer feel.

In Boulogne—when they reached it—the flotsam of wrecked battalions was more in evidence. Things were still primitive here as regards organisation, but already the place was an English colony. The British Red Cross Society was beginning to make things move and owners of private cars were doing splendid service. To these were now added the unrelated trio from Wynchcombe Friars. But their first objective was Rouen, where a young Stuart nephew lay badly wounded, craving for the sight of a face from home. His invalid mother could not get to him; so Lady Forsyth went in her stead, only to find on arrival that the boy had been dead an hour. For the sake of that far-away mother she asked to see him, though privately she dreaded the ordeal. She was aware, suddenly, of a very unheroic shrinking from close contact with the awful actualities of war. But that shrinking in no way affected her zeal for the work in hand.

News that a train-load of casualties was expected that evening sent them full speed to the station. It was dusk when they arrived to find the train in and the process of unloading begun. At the entrance, a group of Red Cross officials stood talking and laughing, hardened by habit to the painful scene. As the car drew up they crowded round, admiring it and questioning Macnair, while tragic burdens were carried past them in the half light.

Helen, too overwrought to make allowances, wondered how Keith had the patience to answer them.

Presently, her attention was caught by a number of black shadows, like wheelbarrows abnormally large and high.

‘What are those?’ she asked a porter, and discovered that they were severely wounded men, on wheeled stretchers, either too brave or too exhausted to utter a sound of complaint.

At that she could restrain herself no longer.

‘Keith,’ she exclaimed, flagrantly interrupting a Medical Authority with a passion for cars, ‘why are those unfortunate men kept hanging about in this noisy place? Can’t we get four of them away?’

But Medical Authority checked her impatience in a tone of mild reproof.

‘Those fellows are all right where they are, Lady Forsyth,’ he said. ‘They’re not fit to be moved off their stretchers. So we’re waiting for the trams. If you like to back into the station, you may pick up some milder cases who’ll be glad of a lift.’

They backed in accordingly and picked up two maimed men and a remarkably cheerful subaltern with his left arm in a sling and a bandage across one eye. As they passed out, Keith offered to return for another load; and, to Helen’s disgust, the offer was politely declined.

By the time they reached the field hospital—a collection of marquees, fitted up with electric light—it was nearly ten o’clock.

‘Quite early; but as we don’t seem to be wanted, I suppose we must go to bed,’ Helen remarked with doleful emphasis, as they re-settled the car. ‘I feel distinctly snubbed. Four out of three hundred! What’s that?’

‘A beginning—and no bad one!’ Keith answered placidly, filling his pipe. ‘Fanshawe says if we report ourselves at Boulogne we shall get all the work we want. There’s heavy fighting on the north—a big battle developing for Ypres and Calais.’

To Boulogne they returned accordingly, and had no cause this time to feel either snubbed or superfluous. There was still a famine of cars at the Base and the wounded were arriving in thousands: their bodies mangled and mutilated; their spirits, in the main, unquenched.

Macnair and his party drove up to their hotel at noon, and their greeting from the Red Cross Authority was very much to the point.

‘All available cars wanted immediately at the Gare Maritime. Better get some lunch first.’

That lunch was of the briefest. Keith dumped their luggage in the hall without so much as asking if there were rooms to be had. Helen did not even open the coveted letter from Mark till they were back in the motor, speeding towards the bare unsheltered gare, where impromptu and comfortless hospital trains disgorged their tragic loads. Mercifully the sun of that miraculous autumn still shone unclouded; and, by the time autumn gave place to the wettest winter in decades, better arrangements had been made.

All that afternoon they worked unceasingly, and late into the night. Back and forth, back and forth between station and hospital, jolting inevitably over railway lines, and a strip of merciless cobble pavement that, for men with shattered limbs, hurriedly dressed, involved several minutes of excruciating agony.

‘Keith, couldn’t they possibly take up that cruel bit of pavé?’ Helen pleaded after their seventh journey with three men at death’s door. ‘Even a raw road would be better than those stones.’

‘I’ll move heaven and earth to get it improved,’ he assured her, little guessing that he had pledged himself to a labour of Hercules.

By the time they could take breath and think about finding beds, they were all dead weary, sustained only by the knowledge that they had given their mite of service to the utmost of their power. In Mark’s letter, which Helen had scarcely found time to read, there was a sentence on this head that had haunted her brain throughout those strenuous hours.

‘Oh Mums, if only the good casual folk at home could be made see even the half of what we see in the way of wanton destruction and calculated brutality, wherever the gentle German has left his trail, they’d possibly begin to realise the powers of evil we’re up against in this war, and things in general would march to a different tune. But they can’t see. That’s the trouble. And hearing about such things isn’t the same at all. If we’re ever going to win through hell to human conditions again, it won’t be merely by signing cheques and making speeches, but by the individual personal service of every man and woman in whatever capacity; and I’m proud to feel you three are giving it like Trojans. God bless you all!’

She stood gleaning a few more scraps under an electric light, when Keith came up to say he had secured a room for her and Sheila; and a friendly Irish doctor had offered him a bed in his hospital train.

‘I’m in great luck with my two assistants,’ he added, smiling down at her eager, tired face. ‘Sheila betters my expectation, which is saying a good deal. Her self-possession to-day astonished me. She’d have the nerve for advance ambulance work in the firing line, I do believe. But I’m glad we’ve got her safe here.’

He glanced towards her where she sat at a writing-table, scribbling a hurried letter to Mark in praise of their mutually beloved Mums. Then he went up and touched her shoulder.

‘Good-night, Sheila,’ he said. ‘Get to bed sharp, both of you. I’ll call for you to-morrow.’

‘We’ll be ready early,’ she answered, looking up at him; and he discovered, to his surprise, that her eyes were swimming in tears.

There was a certain monotony about the days of unremitting work that followed—a monotony tinged with its own peculiar high lights and shadows; with beauty and terror, fortitude and anguish, the incoming and outgoing pulse-beat of life at the Base. Scarcely a day passed without some minor incident, some flash of human revelation that none of them would forget while they lived.

For Helen—with every nerve responsive to the suffering around them—the strain of it all proved no light matter; yet, in retrospect, she counted those terrible days as among the richest experiences of her life.

To her it was distracting that wounded men should suffer additional miseries from the fact that even in two and a half months of war it had been impossible to cope with all the complex needs of the situation. Hospitals were few and quite inadequate. The magnificent ambulance trains of later days were still in the workshops at home; while untiring men on the spot did the best they could with the high, comfortless passenger coaches of France. Even the more luxurious sleeping carriages were too cramped for the ingress and egress of badly wounded men; and when, at last, these were landed, like so many bales of goods, on the unsheltered platform of the gare, shortage of ambulance cars and trained stretcher-bearers added the finishing touch to their nightmare journey. But soon after Keith’s arrival, the zeal and organisation of the British Red Cross began to make themselves felt, in this respect as in others. Every ambulance that could be raised in London was rushed across to Boulogne, till in a few days there were eighty of one kind or another plying between train and hospital and ship.

For all that, there was still need of superhuman exertion to cope, even inadequately, with the terrible stream of wounded—the backwash, as it were, from the Homeric struggle round Ypres. In that region the Belgians were making their last desperate stand, and war-worn British divisions—haggard, sleepless, cruelly depleted—were still miraculously holding their own against army corps on army corps of fresh German troops heartened by an overwhelming superiority in guns and shells. There—during those awful days—whole battalions of the finest troops on earth practically ceased to exist; and thence came the main influx of comfortless, overcrowded trains.

Steadily the tale of wounded swelled, till it reached an average of two thousand a day. And what were eighty cars among so many? Little better than the five loaves and two small fishes in Galilee; and here was no hope of miraculous intervention. The outstanding miracle of that golden October—when England neither knew her peril nor the full cost of her salvation—was the superhuman fortitude of those that were broken on the wheel and the untiring energy of those who served them in the teeth of baffling conditions.

Day after day the open platform was thronged with men on stretchers in all stages of mental and bodily collapse: British, Indian, French, Belgian, German—brothers all, for the moment, in suffering if in nothing else. Some stared wildly and talked nonsense; some were apathetic; some incurably cheerful, though often their wounds had not been dressed for days.

The lack of trained stretcher-bearers was a serious difficulty till St. John Ambulance Association came to the rescue. Porters, willing but unskilful, did what they could. Keith himself, and others like him, helped to carry scores of men. From early morning till near midnight the cars of rescue ran to and fro; but in spite of every effort there were unavoidable delays. Men died there on the stretchers, or in draughty cars, while red-tape regulations kept them waiting outside hospitals and ships. And that cruel strip of pavé remained unsmoothed, though Keith had pressed the point with unauthorised persistence. And Helen cursed—so far as her ladyhood permitted—every time they crossed it with patients in the last extremity.

The unceasing rush of work left small leisure for nightmares, or even for anxiety; but the strain and pain of it were taxing her nerves to breaking-point. Always, as they drew near the familiar crowded station, there sprang the inevitable question: ‘Will it be Mark this time?’ But, though the passing days brought many from his regiment, Mark was not found among them.

As for Sheila, her sensitive spirit felt the test more acutely than either of the elders, who kept watchful eyes on her, were allowed to suspect. Only by clinging desperately to her childhood’s code of courage could she save herself, at times, from the ignominy of collapse. It was sustaining, too, to feel that Keith trusted her, that Helen relied on her; and Mark’s occasional letters—full of a brotherly tenderness that showed little in his speech—made it seem possible to win through anything without flinching visibly. The fact that she could face this inferno of pain and death and mental anguish without a sense of bitterness or rebellion was more of an asset than she knew. It was, in fact, the keystone of her character, the secret of her spiritual poise. For to accept, actively to accept, spells capacity to transcend; but that she had still to discover.

They had little time, any of them, for abstract or personal thought. The war, and its pressing demands on them, constituted their life. Keith had secured a small private sitting-room, where they could enjoy an occasional evening of quiet and rest. But as work was seldom over till near eleven, such oases were rare indeed. At times their heads felt stunned with the eternal rattling to and fro, their hearts numbed by contact with the awful harvest of a modern battlefield. But on the whole they loved their work, and would not have been otherwhere for a kingdom.

They grew skilled in the art of talking the men’s minds away from their sufferings; and Sheila—‘Mouse’ though she was—showed so notable a gift for this form of spiritual healing, that Lady Forsyth finally christened her ‘Queen of the Poor Things.’ Some mother-quality in her touch and tone seemed to go straight to their hearts. Men who left the station groaning and clenching their teeth, to keep the curses back, would surprisingly soon be conjured into recounting their adventures, or, better still, talking of wives and children at home.

Keith himself confessed that he had never properly appreciated the British Tommy till he carried him wounded, and Helen lost her heart a dozen times over. More than once, when they chanced upon men shattered and bandaged past human recognition, she came very near losing her head; but only once did she disgrace herself by fainting outright.

On that occasion Keith carried her straight back to their hotel, laid her on the sofa and stayed by her till she was sufficiently recovered to feel very much ashamed of herself.

‘Promise I won’t do it again,’ she assured him, as he stood leaning over her.

‘No, that you certainly won’t,’ he said sternly. ‘If ever you do, I shall pack you straight off home. To-night, for a punishment, you’ll go early to bed. Sheila will be quite safe with me.’

Argument and rebellion were useless. Moreover, she was honestly exhausted, and before ten o’clock she was sound asleep. But even weariness could not break the habit of short rest, and by one of the morning she was amazingly wide awake.

Some distant sound had roused her, and now it drew nearer—footsteps and voices; men cheering and singing of ‘la gloire’ and ‘la mort.’ Nearer still they came, tramping along the pavement, till they were almost under her open window.

Then she was aware of a discordant note in that gallant chorus. One voice, raised in terror and remonstrance, was trying to dominate those other voices that were obviously shouting it down.

‘J’ai peur! Mon Dieu, camarades, j’ai peur!’

The words reached her distinctly now. But the rest, unheeding, sang louder than ever of ‘la mort’ and ‘la gloire.’

Possibly they were sorry for him. The coward is the unhappiest of men. Yet he too, being ‘enfant de la patrie,’ must go, even as others went; and Helen Forsyth, hearing him go, found the tears streaming down her face—not for the coercion of one reluctant citizen, but for the unending horror and misery of it all: the fear and the anguish and the calculated cruelty that were so infinitely worse than death.

Sheila, sleeping the profound sleep of healthily exhausted youth, stirred not an eyelash even when the noise was at its height. But for Helen that pitiful interlude had put an end to rest and had opened the door to nightmare memories and her own most private fears.

Since the letter that greeted her, there had been one barren field post-card. Even that was ten days old. And away there, in the trenches, the struggle seemed to wax fiercer every hour.

The blank parallelogram of her window gleamed pale grey before, in spite of herself, she fell asleep.

The strain of Mark’s sudden silence told upon the others also. It was tacitly assumed that postal arrangements were disorganised. Each hoped that the rest believed in that consoling fiction; but privately, they were sceptics all.

Helen continued to post his paper and her own thick envelope every other day in the hope that he was still to be found somewhere in the terrible maze of trenches that drew England’s best and bravest as a magnet draws steel.

Meantime they were thankful for unremitting work—for the constant movement and interest of life at the Base. Young officers, eager for action, might be bored to extinction by a few weeks in camp or in one of the crowded hotels; but an observer, blessed with humour and a large love of human nature, could not fail to find at every turn food for thought, for laughter and for tears.

War is neither all horror, nor all heroism, or it could not be waged by flesh and blood. Soldiers who can die like gods, or fight as the beasts that perish, are, in the intervals, men of like passions with their kind. And genuine soldiers were scarce among those who now poured into Boulogne, to fill the gaps in that dangerously thin line round Ypres—Territorials and schoolmasters, clergymen and clerks, lords of commerce and lords of the land; dissimilar in almost every essential, yet welded together by one common resolve, one common faith: a crusade indeed, as Mark had said.

And the manifold needs of a host undreamed of by the wildest, wickedest ‘militarists,’ demanded the existence of that other army chiefly congregated at the Base: doctors, nurses, chaplains, ambulance folk, owners of private cars, and those sorrowful birds of passage—relations of dying or dangerously wounded men. On the quays, in streets and hotels they thronged, those incongruous fragments of the world’s greatest drama; and Lady Forsyth never tired of watching them or listening to their snatches of talk. Neither weariness, nor nightmare visions, nor anxiety, even, could blunt the edge of her keen interest in the human panorama.

‘Oh, Sheila, my lamb,’ she exclaimed one evening after a day of very varied emotions, ‘aren’t people—all sorts and kinds of them—passionately interesting? Even when I’m laid on the uttermost shelf I shall still be always peeping over the edge!’

‘And you’ll always find me peeping up at you,’ the girl answered, smiling at the quaint conceit. ‘It’s simply wonderful, being with you—through all this!’

A temporary lull in the stream of wounded was followed, too soon, by a renewed rush of hospital trains filled to overflowing—the harvest of a fresh German onslaught. But by this time there were more cars and more stretcher-bearers. Ambulance trains, splendidly equipped, were being hurried out from England; and the Customs sheds at the station had become a great shelter, roughly partitioned into dressing-stations, for those who had need of immediate care. From this seed of voluntary effort there sprang up, in time, a big stationary hospital; but by then the Forsyth-Macnair car was needed elsewhere.

Meantime, in every effort to minimise the sufferings of the men he served, Keith was actively to the fore. Helen herself was amazed at his energy and versatility—he whom she had hitherto regarded as a man wedded entirely to books and thought. But among all the surprises of a war rich in surprise, good and evil, were none more remarkable than such unlooked-for revelations of human capacity and character.

Day in, day out, the work went on. There were strange discoveries, sad and glad, on that ever-crowded platform; but of the three they looked for—Mark, Maurice and Ralph—never a sign, as yet.

(To be continued.)