Missing, Mrs. Humphry Ward [free e books to read online .TXT] 📗

a certain pessimist and pacifist household she had been visiting in Manchester, as to the unfavourable situation in France, and the dead certainty of the loss of Verdun; passing glibly on to the 'bad staff work' on the British side, and the 'poor quality of the new officers compared to the old,' etc.--Cicely visibly turned up her nose, and with a few deft, cat-like strokes put a raw provincial in her place. She, Cicely, of course--she made it plain, by a casual hint or two--had just come from the very centre of things; from living on a social diet of nothing less choice than Cabinet Ministers and leading Generals--Bonar Law, Asquith, Curzon, Briand, Lloyd George, Thomas, the great Joffre himself. Bridget began to scowl a little, and had it been anyone else than Cicely Farrell who was thus chastising her, would soon have turned her back upon them. For she was no indiscriminate respecter of persons, and cared nothing at all about rank or social prestige. But from a Farrell she took all things patiently; till Cicely, suddenly discovering that her victim was giving her no sport, called peremptorily to 'Willy' to help her put on her cloak. But Farrell was having some last words with Nelly, and Marsworth came forward--

'Let me--'

'Oh thank you!' said Cicely carelessly, 'I can manage it myself.' And she did not allow him to touch it.

Marsworth retreated, and Hester, who had seen the little incident, whispered indignantly in her cousin's ear--

'Cicely!--you are a wicked little wretch!'

But Cicely only laughed, and her feather made defiant nods and flourishes all the way downstairs.

'Come along Marsworth, my boy,' said Farrell when the good-byes were said, and Hester stood watching their departure, while Cicely chattered from the motor, where she sat wrapped in furs against a rising east wind. 'Outside--or inside?' He pointed to the car.

'Outside, thank you,' said Marsworth, with decision. He promptly took his place beside the chauffeur, and Farrell and his sister were left to each other's company. Farrell had seldom known his companion more cross and provoking than she was during the long motor ride home; and on their arrival at Carton she jumped out of the car, and with barely a nod to Marsworth, vanished into the house.

* * * * *

Meanwhile Nelly had let Hester install her on the Carton couch, and lay there well shawled, beside the window, her delicate face turned to the lake and the mountains. Bridget was unpacking, and Hester was just departing to her own house. Nelly could hardly let her go. For a month now, Hester had been with her at Torquay, while Bridget was pursuing some fresh 'work' in London. And Nelly's desolate heart had found both calm and bracing in Hester's tenderness. For the plain shapeless spinster was one of those rare beings who in the Lampadephoria of life, hand on the Lamp of Love, pure and undefiled, as they received it from men and women, like themselves, now dead.

But Hester went at last, and Nelly was alone. The lake lay steeped in a rich twilight, into which the stars were rising. The purple breast of Silver How across the water breathed of shelter, of rest, of things ineffable. Nelly's eyes were full of tears, and her hands clasped on her breast scarcely kept down the sobbing. There, under the hands, was the letter which George had written to her, the night before he left her. She had been told of its existence within a few days of his disappearance; and though she longed for it, a stubborn instinct had bade her refuse to have it, refuse to open it. 'No!--I was only to open it, if George was dead. And he is not dead!' And as time went on, it had seemed to her for months, as if to open it, would be in some mysterious way to seal his fate. But at last she had sent for it--at last she had read it--with bitter tears.

She would wear no black for him--her lost lover. She told herself to hope still. But she was, in truth, beginning to despair. And into her veins, all unconsciously, as into those of the old brown earth, the tides of youth, the will to live, were slowly, slowly, surging back.


CHAPTER X

'You have gone far enough,' said Cicely imperiously. 'I am going to take you home.'

'Let me sit a little first. It's all so lovely. Nelly dropped into the soft springy turf, dried by a mild east wind, and lay curled up under a rock, every tremulous nerve in her still frail body played on by the concert of earth and sky before her. It was May; the sky was china-blue, and the clouds sailed white upon it. The hawthorns too were white upon the fell-side, beside the ageing gold of the gorse, while below, the lake lay like roughened silver in its mountain cup, and on the sides of Nab Scar, below the screes, the bronze of the oaks ran in and out among the feathery green of the larch plantations, or the flowering grass of the hay-meadows dropping to the lake. The most spiritual moment of the mountain spring was over. This was earth in her moment of ferment, rushing towards the fruition of summer.

Nelly's youth was keenly, automatically conscious of the physical pleasure of the day; except indeed for recurrent moments, when that very pleasure revived the sharpness of grief. Soon it would be the anniversary of her wedding day. Every hour of that day, and of the honeymoon bliss which followed it, seemed to be still so close to her. Surely she had only to put out her hand to find his, and all the horror and the anguish swept away. Directly she shut her eyes on this spring scene, she was in that other life, which had been, and therefore must still be.

But she had not been talking of him with Cicely. She very seldom talked of him now, or of the past. She kept up correspondence with half a dozen men of his company--the brother officer to whom Sarratt had given his last letter--a sergeant, and three or four privates, who had written to her about him. She had made friends with them all, especially with the young lieutenant. They seemed to like hearing from her; and she followed all their migrations and promotions with a constant sympathy. One of them had just written to her from a hospital at Boulogne. He had been seriously wounded in a small affair near Festubert early in May. He was getting better he said, but he hardly cared whether he recovered or not. Everybody he cared for in the regiment had 'gone west' in the fighting of the preceding month. No big push either,--just many little affairs that came to nothing--it was 'damned luck!' There was one of his officers that he couldn't get over--he couldn't get over 'Mr. Edward' being killed. He--the writer--had been Mr. Edward's servant for a month or two--having known his people at home--and a nicer young fellow never stepped. 'When I go back, I'm going to look for Mr. Edward--they say he was buried close to the trenches where he fell, and I'm going to put him in some quiet place; and then when the war's over we can bring him back to Baston Magna, and lay him with his own people in Baston churchyard.'

'I wonder who Mr. Edward was,' said Nelly to herself, with half shut eyes. She had entirely forgotten Cicely's neighbourhood. But Cicely turned round, and asked her what she was thinking of. Nelly repeated the letter, and Cicely suddenly shewed agitation--'Edward!--Baston Magna!--he means Edward Longmore!'

Cicely rarely cried. When she was moved, she had a way of turning a grey-white, and speaking with particular deliberation, as though every word were an effort. Of late, for some mysterious reason, she only indulged occasionally in 'make-up'; there was no rouge, at any rate, on this afternoon, to disguise her change of colour. She looked oddly at Nelly.

'I danced with him at Christmas,' she said. 'There was a very smart party at a house in Grosvenor Square. The Prince was there, home on short leave, and about twenty young men in khaki, and twenty girls. Edward Longmore was there--he wrote to me afterwards. Oh, he was much younger than I. He was the dearest, handsomest, bravest little fellow. When I saw his name in the list--I just'--she ground her small white teeth--'I just _cursed_ the war! Do you know'--she rolled over on the grass beside Nelly, her chin in her hands--'the July before the war, I used to play tennis in a garden near London. There were always five or six boys hanging about there--jolly handsome boys, with everything that anybody could want--family, and money, and lots of friends--all the world before them. And there's not one of them left. They're all _dead_--_dead_! Think of that! Boys of twenty and twenty-one. What'll the girls do they used to play and dance with? All their playfellows are gone. They can't marry--they'll never marry. It hadn't anything to do with me, of course. I'm twenty-eight. I felt like a mother to them! But I shan't marry either!'

Nelly didn't answer for a moment. Then she put out a hand and turned Cicely's face towards her.

'Where is he?--and what is he doing?' she said, half laughing, but always with that something behind her smile which seemed to set her apart.

Cicely sat up.

'He? Oh, that gentleman! Well, _he_ has got some fresh work--just the work he wanted, he says, in the Intelligence Department, and he writes to Willy that life is "extraordinarily interesting," and he's "glad to have lived to see this thing, horrible as it is."'

'Well, you wouldn't wish him to be miserable?'

'I should have no objection at all to his being miserable,' said Cicely calmly, 'but I am not such a fool as to suppose that I should ever know it, if he were.'

'Cicely!'

Cicely took up a stalk of grass, and began to bite it. Her eyes seemed on fire. Nelly was suddenly aware of the flaming up of fierce elemental things in this fashionably dressed young woman whose time was oddly divided between an important share in the running of her brother's hospital, and a hungry search after such gaieties as a world at war might still provide her with. She could spend one night absorbed in some critical case, and eagerly rendering the humblest V.A.D. service to the trained nurses whom her brother paid; and the next morning she would travel to London in order to spend the second night in one of those small dances at great houses of which she had spoken to Nelly, where the presence of men just come from, or just departing to, the firing line lent a zest to the talk and the flirting, the jealousies and triumphs of the evening that the dances of peace must do without. Then after a morning of wild spending in the shops she would take a midday train back to Cumberland and duty.

Nelly, looking at her, wondered afresh how they had ever come to be friends. Yet they were friends, and her interest in Cicely's affairs was one of the slender threads drawing her back to life.

It had all happened when she was ill at the flat; after that letter from the Geneva Red Cross which reported that in spite of exhaustive enquiries among German hospitals, and in