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

dark. The strychnine injected had given him strength.

'Give me that jelly--and the champagne. Feed me, Nelly! But have you had any food?'

The stress laid on the '_you_' the tone of his voice, were so like his old self that Nelly caught her breath. A ray of mad hope stole in. She began to feed him, and as she did so, the Sister, as though she had heard Sarratt's question, came quietly in with a tray on which was some food for Nelly, and put it down beside her. Then she disappeared again.

With difficulty, Sarratt swallowed a few mouthfuls of jelly and champagne. Then his left hand--the right was helpless--made a faint but peremptory sign, and Nelly obediently took some food under his dimly smiling eyes.

'I have thought of this so often,' he murmured--I knew you'd come. It's been like someone walking through a dark passage that was getting lighter. Only once--I had a curious dream. I thought I saw Bridget'

Nelly, trembling, took away his tray and her own, and then knelt down again beside him. She kissed his forehead, and tried to divert his thoughts by asking him if he was warm enough. His hands were very cold. Should she make up the fire?

'Oh, no,--it's all right. But wasn't it strange? Suddenly, I seemed to be looking at her--quite close--and she at me. And I was worried because I had seen her more distinctly than I could remember you. Come nearer--put your dear head against me. Oh, if I could only hold you, as I used to!'

There was silence a little. But the wine had flushed him, and when the bloodless lids lifted again, there was more life in the eyes.

'Nelly, poor darling, have you been very lonely?--Were the Farrells kind to you?'

'Yes, George, very kind. They did everything--everything they could.'

'Sir William promised me'--he said, gratefully. 'And where have you been all the time? At Rydal?'

'No. I was ill--after the news came----'

'Poor Nelly!'

'And Sir William lent us one of his farms--near his cottage--do you remember?'

'A little. That was kind of him--very kind. Nelly--I want to send him a message----'

'Yes.'

'Give him my grateful thanks, darling,--and--and--my blessing.'

Nelly hid her face against him, and he felt the convulsion of tearless sobbing that passed through her.

'Poor Nelly!'--he said again, touching her hand tenderly. Then after another pause--'Sit there, darling, where I can see you--your dear head, and your eyes, and your pretty neck. You must go to bed soon, you know--but just a little while! Now tell me what you have been doing. Talk to me. I won't talk. I'll rest--but I shall hear. That's so wonderful--that I _can_ hear you. I've been living in such a queer world--no tongue--no ears--no mind, hardly--only my eyes.'

She obeyed him by a great effort. She talked to him--of what, she hardly knew!--about her months in London and Torquay--: about her illness--the farm--Hester Martin--and Cicely.

When she came to speak of her friendship with Cicely, he smiled in surprise, his eyes still shut.

'That's jolly, dearest. You remember, I didn't like her. She wasn't at all nice to you--once. But thank her for me--please.'

'She's here now, George, she brought me here. She wouldn't let me come alone.'

'God bless her!' he said, under his breath. 'I'll see her--to-morrow. Now go on talking. You won't mind if I go to sleep? They won't let you stop here, dear. You'll be upstairs. But you'll come early--won't you?'

They gave him morphia, and he went to sleep under her eyes. Then the night nurse came in, and the surgeon from the hospital opposite, with Howson. And Cicely took Nelly away.

Cicely had made everything ready in the little bare room upstairs. But when she had helped Nelly to undress, she did not linger.

'Knock on the wall, if you want me. It is only wood, I shall hear directly.'

Nelly kissed her and she went. For nothing in her tender service that day was Nelly more grateful to her.

Then Nelly put out her light, and drawing up the blind, she sat for long staring into the moonlight night. The rain had stopped, but the wind was high over the sea, which lay before her a tumbled mass of waves, not a hundred yards away. To her right was the Casino, a subdued light shining through the blinds of its glass verandahs, behind which she sometimes saw figures passing--nurses and doctors on their various errands. Were there men dying there to-night--like her George?

The anguish that held her, poor child, was no simple sorrow. Never--she knew it doubly now--had she ceased to love her husband. She had told Farrell the truth--'If George now were to come in at that door, there would be no other man in the world for me!' And yet, while George was dying, and at the very moment that he was asking for her, she had been in Farrell's arms, and yielding to his kisses. George would never know; but that only made her remorse the more torturing. She could never confess to him--that indeed was her misery. He would die, and her unfaith would stand between them for ever.

A cleverer, a more experienced, a more practical woman, in such a case, would have found a hundred excuses and justifications for herself that never occurred to Nelly Sarratt, to this young immature creature, in whom the passionate love of her marriage had roused feelings and emotions, which, when the man on whom they were spent was taken from her, were still the master-light of all her seeing--still so strong and absorbing, that, in her widowed state, they were like blind forces searching unconsciously for some new support, some new thing to love. She had nearly died for love--and then when her young strength revived it had become plain that she could only live for love. Her hands had met the hands seeking hers, inevitably, instinctively. To refuse, to stand aloof, to cause pain--that had been the torment, the impossibility, for one who had learnt so well how to give and to make happy. There was in it no sensual element--only Augustine's 'love of loving.' Yet her stricken conscience told her that, in her moral indecision, if the situation had lasted much longer, she had not been able to make up her mind to marry Farrell quickly, she might easily have become his mistress, through sheer weakness, sheer dread of his suffering, sheer longing to be loved.

Explanations and excuses, for any more seasoned student of human nature, emerged on every hand. Nelly in her despair allowed herself none of them. It merely seemed to her, in this night vigil, that she was unworthy to touch her George, to nurse him, to uphold him; utterly unworthy of all this reverent pity and affection that was being lavished upon her for his sake.

She sat up most of the night, wrapped in her fur cloak, alive to any sound from the room below. And about four in the morning, she stole down the stairs to listen at his door. There one of the nurses found her, and moved with pity, brought her in. They settled her in an arm-chair near him; and then with the tardy coming of the November day, she watched the sad waking that was so many hours nearer death, at that moment when man's life is at its wretchedest, and all the forces of the underworld seem to be let loose upon it.

And there, for five days and nights, with the briefest possible intervals for food, and the sleep of exhaustion, she sat beside him. She was dimly conscious of the people about her, of the boundless tenderness and skill that was poured out upon the poor sufferer at her side; she did everything for George that the nurses could shew her how to do--; it was the one grain of personal desire left in her, and doctors and nurses developed the most ingenious pity in devising things for her to do, and in letting every remedy that soothed his pain, or cleared his mind, go, as far as possible, through her hands. And there were moments when she would walk blindly along the sea beach with Cicely, finding a stimulus to endure in the sharpness of the winter wind, or looking in vague wonder at the great distant camp, with its streets of hospitals, its long lines of huts, its training-grounds, and the bodies of men at work upon them. Here, the war came home to her, as a vast machine by which George, like millions of others, had been caught and crushed. She shuddered to think of it.

At intervals Sarratt still spoke a good deal, though rarely after their third day together. He asked her once--'Dear, did you ever send for my letter?' She paused a moment to think. 'You mean the letter you left for me--in case?' He made a sign of assent, and then smiled into the face bending over him. 'Read it again, darling. I mean it all now, as I did then.' She could only kiss him softly--without tears. After the first day she never cried.

On the last night of his life, when she thought that all speech was over, and that she would never hear his voice, or see a conscious look, again, he opened his eyes suddenly, and she heard--'I love you, sweetheart! I love you, sweetheart!' twice over. That was the last sound. Towards midnight he died.

Next morning Cicely wrote to Farrell:--

'We are coming home to-morrow after they bury him in the cemetery here. Please get Hester--_whatever she may be doing_--to throw it up, and come and meet us. She is the only person who can help Nelly now for a bit Nelly pines for Rydal--where they were together. She would go to Hester's cottage. Tell Hester.

'Why, old boy, do such things happen? That's what I keep asking--not being a saint, like these dear nurses here, who really have been angelic. I am the only one who rebels. George Sarratt was so patient--so terribly patient! And Nelly is just crushed--for the moment, though I sometimes expect to see a strange energy in her before long. But I keep knocking my head all day, and part of the night--the very small part that I'm not asleep--against the questions that everybody seems to have asked since the world began--and I know that I am a fool, and go on doing it.

'George Sarratt, I think, was a simple Christian, and died like one. He seemed to like the Chaplain, which was a comfort. How much any of that means to Nelly I don't know.'

She also wrote to Marsworth:--

'Meet us, please, at Charing Cross. I have no spirit to answer your last letters as they deserve. But I give you notice that I don't thrive on too sweet a diet--and praise is positively bad for me. It wrinkles me up the wrong way.

'What can be done about that incredible sister? She ought to know that Nelly is determined not to see her. Just think!--they might have had nearly a month together, and she cut it down to five days!

('Dear Herbert, say anything you like, and the sweeter the better!)

'Yours,

'CICELY.'


CHAPTER XVII

'Well--what news?' said Farrell abruptly. For Cicely had come into his library with a letter in her hand. The library was a fine eighteenth-century room still preserved intact amid the general appropriation of the big house by the hospital, and when he was not busy in his office, it was his place of refuge.