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

irritation. Really, after a fortnight, they might have done with that kind of demonstrativeness. All the same, Nelly was quite extraordinarily pretty--prettier than ever. While the sister was slowly putting on her hat before the only mirror the sitting-room possessed, she was keenly conscious of the two figures near the window, of the man in khaki sitting on the arm of Nelly's chair, holding her hand, and looking down upon her, of Nelly's flushed cheek and bending head. What a baby she looked!--scarcely seventeen. Yet she was really twenty-one--old enough, by a long way, to have done better for herself than this! Oh, George, in himself, was well enough. If he came back from the war, his new-made sister-in-law supposed she would get used to him in time. Bridget however did not find it easy to get on with men, especially young men, of whom she knew very few. For eight or ten years now, she had looked upon them chiefly as awkward and inconvenient facts in women's lives. Before that time, she could remember a few silly feelings on her own part, especially with regard to a young clerk of her father's, who had made love to her up to the very day when he shamefacedly told her that he was already engaged, and would soon be married. That event had been a shock to her, and had made her cautious and suspicious towards men ever since. Her life was now full of quite other interests--incoherent and changeable, but strong while they lasted. Nelly's state of bliss awoke no answering sympathy in her.

'Well, good-bye, Nelly,' she said, when she had put on her things--advancing towards them, while the lieutenant rose to his feet. 'I expect Mrs. Weston will make you comfortable. I ordered in all the things for to-morrow.'

'Everything's _charming_!' said Nelly, as she put her arms round her sister. 'It was awfully good of you to see to it all. Will you come over to lunch to-morrow? We might take you somewhere.'

'Oh, don't bother about me! You won't want me. I'll look in some time. I've got a lot of work to do.'

Nelly withdrew her arms. George Sarratt surveyed his sister-in-law with curiosity.

'Work?' he repeated, with his pleasant, rather puzzled smile.

'What are you doing now, Bridget?' said Nelly, softly, stroking the sleeve of her sister's jacket, but really conscious only of the man beside her.

'Reading some proof-sheets for a friend,' was the rather short reply, as Bridget released herself.

'Something dreadfully difficult?' laughed Nelly.

'I don't know what you mean by difficult,' said Bridget ungraciously, looking for her gloves. 'It's psychology--that's all. Lucy Fenn's bringing out another volume of essays.'

'It sounds awful!' said George Sarratt, laughing. 'I wish I knew what psychology was about. But can't you take a holiday?--just this week?'

He looked at her rather gravely. But Bridget shook her head, and again said good-bye. George Sarratt took her downstairs, and saw her off on her bicycle. Then he returned smiling, to his wife.

'I say, Bridget makes me feel a dunce! Is she really such a learned party?'

Nelly's dark eyes danced a little. 'I suppose she is--but she doesn't stick to anything. It's always something different. A few months ago, it was geology; and we used to go out for walks with a hammer and a bag. Last year it was _the_-ology! Our poor clergyman, Mr. Richardson, was no match for Bridget at all. She could always bowl him over.'

'Somehow all the "ologies" seem very far away--don't they?' murmured Sarratt, after they had laughed together. They were standing at the window again, his arm close round her, her small dark head pressed against him. There was ecstasy in their nearness to each other--in the silver beauty of the lake--in the soft coming of the June evening; and in that stern fact itself that in one short week, he would have left her, would be facing death or mutilation, day after day, in the trenches on the Ypres salient. While he held her, all sorts of images flitted through his mind--of which he would not have told her for the world--horrible facts of bloody war. In eight months he had seen plenty of them. The signs of them were graven on his young face, on his eyes, round which a slight permanent frown, as of perplexity, seemed to have settled, and on his mouth which was no longer naif and boyish, but would always drop with repose into a hard compressed line.

Nelly looked up.

'Everything's far away'--she whispered--'but this--and you!' He kissed her upturned lips--and there was silence.

Then a robin singing outside in the evening hush, sent a message to them. Nelly with an effort drew herself away.

'Shan't we go out? We'll tell Mrs. Weston to put supper on the table, and we can come in when we like. But I'll just unpack a little first--in our room.'

She disappeared through a door at the end of the sitting-room. Her last words--softly spoken--produced a kind of shock of joy in Sarratt. He sat motionless, hearing the echo of them, till she reappeared. When she came back, she had taken off her serge travelling dress and was wearing a little gown of some white cotton stuff, with a blue cloak, the evening having turned chilly, and a hat with a blue ribbon. In this garb she was a vision of innocent beauty; wherein refinement and a touch of strangeness combined with the dark brilliance of eyes and hair, with the pale, slightly sunburnt skin, the small features and tiny throat, to rivet the spectator. And she probably knew it, for she flushed slightly under her husband's eyes.

'Oh, what a paradise!' she said, under her breath, pointing to the scene beyond the window. Then--lifting appealing hands to him--'Take me there!'


CHAPTER II

The newly-married pair crossed a wooden bridge over the stream from the Lake, and found themselves on its further shore, a shore as untouched and unspoilt now as when Wordsworth knew it, a hundred years ago. The sun had only just vanished out of sight behind the Grasmere fells, and the long Westmorland after-glow would linger for nearly a couple of hours yet. After much rain the skies were clear, and all the omens fair. But the rain had left its laughing message behind; in the full river, in the streams leaping down the fells, in the freshness of every living thing--the new-leafed trees, the grass with its flowers, the rushes spreading their light armies through the flooded margins of the lake, and bending to the light wind, which had just, as though in mischief, blotted out the dream-world in the water, and set it rippling eastwards in one sheet of living silver, broken only by a cloud-shadow at its further end. Fragrance was everywhere--from the trees, the young fern, the grass; and from the shining west, the shadowed fells, the brilliant water, there breathed a voice of triumphant beauty, of unconquered peace, which presently affected George Sarratt strangely.

They had just passed through a little wood; and in its friendly gloom, he had put his arm round his wife so that they had lingered a little, loth to leave its shelter. But now they had emerged again upon the radiance of the fell-side, and he had found a stone for Nelly to rest on.

'That those places in France, and that sky--should be in the same world!' he said, under his breath, pointing to the glow on the eastern fells, as he threw himself down on the turf beside her.

Her face flushed with exercise and happiness suddenly darkened.

'Don't--don't talk of them to-night!'--she said passionately--'not to-night--just to-night, George!'

And she stooped impetuously to lay her hand on his lips. He kissed the hand, held it, and remained silent, his eyes fixed upon the lake. On that day week he would probably just have rejoined his regiment. It was somewhere in the neighbourhood of Bailleul. Hot work, he heard, was expected. There was still a scandalous shortage of ammunition--and if there was really to be a 'push,' the losses would be appalling. Man after man that he knew had been killed within a week--two or three days--twenty-four hours even!--of rejoining. Supposing that within a fortnight Nelly sat here, looking at this lake, with the War Office telegram in her hand--'Deeply regret to inform you, etc.' This was not a subject on which he had ever allowed himself to dwell, more than in his changed circumstances he was bound to dwell. Every soldier, normally, expects to get through. But of course he had done everything that was necessary for Nelly. His will was in the proper hands; and the night before their wedding he had written a letter to her, to be given her if he fell. Otherwise he had taken little account of possible death; nor had it cost him any trouble to banish the thought of it.

But the beauty of the evening--of this old earth, which takes no account of the perishing of men--and Nelly's warm life beside him, hanging upon his, perhaps already containing within it the mysterious promise of another life, had suddenly brought upon him a tremor of soul--an inward shudder. Did he really believe in existence after death--in a meeting again, in some dim other scene, if they were violently parted now? He had been confirmed while at school. His parents were Church people of a rather languid type, and it seemed the natural thing to do. Since then he had occasionally taken the Communion, largely to please an elder school-friend, who was ardently devout, and was now a Chaplain on the Western front. But what did it really mean to him?--what would it mean to _her_--if she were left alone? Images passed through his mind--the sights of the trenches--shattered and dying bodies. What was the _soul_?--had it really an independent life? _Something_ there was in men--quite rough and common men--something revealed by war and the sufferings of war--so splendid, so infinitely beyond anything he had ever dreamed of in ordinary life, that to think of it roused in him a passion of hidden feeling--perhaps adoration--but vague and speechless--adoration of he knew not what. He did not speak easily of his feeling, even to his young wife, to whom marriage had so closely, so ineffably bound him. But as he lay on the grass looking up at her--smiling--obeying her command of silence, his thoughts ranged irrepressibly. Supposing he fell, and she lived on--years and years--to be an old woman? Old! Nelly? Impossible! He put his hand gently on the slender foot, and felt the pulsing life in it. 'Dearest!' she murmured at his touch, and their eyes met tenderly.

'I should be content--' he thought--'if we could just live _this_ life out! I don't believe I should want another life. But to go--and leave her; to go--just at the beginning--before one knows anything--before one has finished anything--'

And again his eyes wandered from her to the suffusion of light and colour on the lake. 'How could anyone ever want anything better than this earth--this life--at its best--if only one were allowed a full and normal share of it!' And he thought again, almost with a leap of exasperation, of those dead and mangled men--out there--in France. Who was responsible--God?--or man? But man's will is--must be--something dependent--something included in God's will. If God really existed, and if He willed war, and sudden death--then there must be another life. Or else the power that devised the world was not a good, but an evil--at best, a blind one.

But while his young brain was racing through the old puzzles in the old ways, Nelly was thinking of something quite different. Her delicate small