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

which were so natural to him, and in general so unconscious and innocent.

And now he never attempted them. What did that mean? Simply--so Cicely thought--that he was in love, and dared venture such things no longer. But all the same there were plenty of devices open to him by which week after week he surrounded Nelly with a network of care, which implied that he was always thinking of her; which were in fact a caress, breathing a subtle and restrained devotion, more appealing than anything more open. And Cicely seemed to see Nelly yielding--unconsciously; unconsciously 'spoilt,' and learning to depend on the 'spoiler.' Why did Hester seem so anxious always about Farrell's influence with Nelly--so ready to ward him off, if she could? For after all, thought Cicely, easily, however long it might take for Nelly to recover her hold on life, and to clear up the legal situation, there could be but one end of it. Willy meant to marry this little woman; and in the long run no woman would be able to resist him.

* * * * *

The friends set out to stroll homewards through the long May evening, talking of the hideous Irish news--how incredible amid the young splendour of the Westmorland May!--or of the progress of the war.

Meanwhile Bridget Cookson was walking to meet them from the Rydal end of the Lake. She was accompanied by a Manchester friend, a young doctor, Howson by name, who had known the sisters before Nelly's marriage. He had come to Ambleside in charge of a patient that morning, and was going back on the morrow, and then to France. Bridget had stumbled on him in Ambleside, and finding he had a free evening had invited him to come and sup with them. And a vivid recollection of Nelly Cookson as a girl had induced him to accept. He had been present indeed at the Sarratt wedding, and could never forget Nelly as a bride, the jessamine wreath above her dark eyes, and all the exquisite shapeliness of her slight form, in the white childish dress of fine Indian muslin, which seemed to him the prettiest bridal garment he had ever seen. And now--poor little soul!

'You think she still hopes?'

Bridget shrugged her shoulders.

'She says so. But she has put on mourning at last--a few weeks ago.'

'People do turn up, you know,' said the doctor musing. 'There have been some wonderful stories.'

'They don't turn up now,' said Bridget positively--'now that the enquiries are done properly.'

'Oh, the Germans are pretty casual--and the hospital returns are far from complete, I hear. However the probabilities, no doubt, are all on the side of death.'

'The War Office are certain of it,' said Bridget with emphasis. 'But it's no good trying to persuade her. I don't try.'

'No, why should you? Poor thing! Well, I'm off to X---- next week,' said the young man. 'I shall keep my eyes open there, in case anything about him should turn up.'

Bridget frowned slightly, and her face flushed.

'Should you know him again, if you saw him?' she asked, abruptly.

'I think so,' said the doctor with slight hesitation, 'I remember him very well at the wedding. Tall and slight?--not handsome exactly, but a good-looking gentlemanly chap? Oh yes, I remember him. But of course, to be alive now, if by some miraculous chance he were alive, and not to have let you know--why he must have had some brain mischief--paralysis--or----'

'He isn't alive!' said Bridget impatiently. 'The War Office have no doubts whatever.'

Howson was rather surprised at the sudden acerbity of her tone. But his momentary impression was immediately lost in the interest roused in him by the emergence from the wood, in front, of Nelly and Cicely. He was a warm-hearted fellow, himself just married, and the approach of the black-veiled figure, which he had last seen in bridal white, touched him like an incident in a play.

Nelly recognised him from a short distance, and went a little pale.

'Who is that with your sister?' asked Cicely.

'It is a man we knew in Manchester,--Doctor Howson.'

'Did you expect him?'

'Oh no.' After a minute she added--'He was at our wedding. I haven't seen him since.'

Cicely was sorry for her. But when the walkers met, Nelly greeted the young man very quietly. He himself was evidently moved. He held her hand a little, and gave her a quick, scrutinising look. Then he moved on beside her, and Cicely, in order to give Nelly the opportunity of talking to him for which she evidently wished, was forced to carry off Bridget, and endure her company patiently all the way home.

When Nelly and the doctor arrived, following close on the two in front, Cicely cried out that Nelly must go and lie down at once till supper. She looked indeed a deplorable little wraith; and the doctor, casting, again, a professional eye on her, backed up Cicely.

Nelly smiled, resisted, and finally disappeared.

'You'll have to take care of her,' said Howson to Bridget. 'She looks to me as if she couldn't stand any strain.'

'Well, she's not going to have any. This place is quiet enough! She's been talking of munition-work, but of course we didn't let her.'

Cicely took the young man aside and expounded her brother's plan of the farm on the western side of Loughrigg. Howson asked questions about its aspect, and general comfort, giving his approval in the end.

'Oh, she'll pull through,' he said kindly, 'but she must go slow. This kind of loss is harder to bear--physically--than death straight out. I've promised her'--he turned to Bridget--'to make all the enquiries I can. She asked me that at once.'

After supper, just as Howson was departing, Farrell appeared, having driven himself over through the long May evening, ostensibly to take Cicely home, but really for the joy of an hour in Nelly's company.

He sat beside her in the garden, after Howson's departure, reading to her, by the lingering light, the poems of a great friend of his who had been killed at Gallipoli. Nelly was knitting, but her needles were often laid upon her knee, while she listened with all her mind, and sometimes with tears in her eyes, that were hidden by the softly dropping dusk. She said little, but what she did say came now from a greatly intensified inner life, and a sharpened intelligence; while all the time, the charm that belonged to her physical self, her voice, her movements, was at work on Farrell, so that he felt his hour with her a delight after his hard day's work. And she too rested in his presence, and his friendship. It was not possible now for her to rebuff him, to refuse his care. She had tried, tried honestly, as Cicely saw, to live independently--to 'endure hardness.' And the attempt had broken down. The strange, protesting feeling, too, that she was doing some wrong to George by accepting it was passing away. She was George's, she would always be his, to her dying day; but to live without being loved, to tear herself from those who wished to love her--for that she had proved too weak. She knew it, and was not unconscious of a certain moral defeat; as she looked out upon all the strenuous and splendid things that women were doing in the war.

* * * * *

Farrell and Cicely sped homeward through a night that was all but day. Cicely scarcely spoke; she was thinking of Marsworth. Farrell had still in his veins the sweetness of Nelly's presence. But there were other thoughts too in his mind, the natural thoughts of an Englishman at war. Once, over their heads, through the luminous northern sky, there passed an aeroplane flying south-west high above the fells. Was it coming from the North Sea, from the neighbourhood of that invincible Fleet, on which all hung, by which all was sustained? He thought of the great ships, and the men commanding them, as greyhounds straining in the leash. What touch of fate would let them loose at last?

The Carton hospital was now full of men fresh from the front. The casualties were endless. A thousand a night often along the French front--and yet no real advance. The far-flung battle was practically at a stand-still. And beyond, the chaos in the Balkans, the Serbian debacle! No--the world was full of lamentation, mourning and woe; and who could tell how Armageddon would turn? His quick mind travelled through all the alternative possibilities ahead, on fire for his country. But always, after each digression through the problems of the war, thought came back to the cottage at Rydal, and Nelly on the lawn, her white throat emerging from the thin black dress, her hands clasped on her lap, her eyes turned to him as he read.

And all the time it was _just_ conceivable that Sarratt might still be discovered. At that thought, the summer night darkened.


CHAPTER XI

In the summer of 1916, a dark and miserable June, all chilly showers and lowering clouds, followed on the short-lived joys of May. But all through it, still more through the early weeks of July, the spiritual heaven for English hearts was brightening. In June, two months before she was expected to move, Russia flung herself on the Eastern front of the enemy. Brussiloff's victorious advance drove great wedges into the German line, and the effect on that marvellous six months' battle, which we foolishly call the Siege of Verdun, was soon to be seen. Hard pressed they were, those heroes of Verdun!--how hard pressed no one in England knew outside the War Office and the Cabinet, till the worst was over, and the Crown Prince, 'with his dead and his shame,' had recoiled in sullen defeat from the prey that need fear him no more.

Then on the first of July, the British army, after a bombardment the like of which had never yet been seen in war, leapt from its trenches on the Somme front, and England held her breath while her new Armies proved of what stuff they were made. In those great days 'there were no stragglers--none!' said an eye-witness in amazement. The incredible became everywhere the common and the achieved. Life was laid down as at a festival. 'From your happy son'--wrote a boy, as a heading to his last letter on this earth.

And by the end of July the sun was ablaze again on the English fields and harvests. Days of amazing beauty followed each other amid the Westmorland fells; with nights of moonlight on sleeping lakes, and murmuring becks; or nights of starlit dark, with that mysterious glow in the north-west which in the northern valleys so often links the evening with the dawn.

How often through these nights Nelly Sarratt lay awake, in her new white room in Mountain Ash Farm!--the broad low window beside her open to the night, to that 'Venus's Looking Glass' of Loughrigg Tarn below her, and to the great heights beyond, now dissolving under the moon-magic, now rosy with dawn, and now wreathed in the floating cloud which crept in light and silver along the purple of the crags. To have been lifted to