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

Anyway, Nelly, you may think yourselves highly honoured--'

'Darling, isn't that basket ready?' said Sarratt, coming to his wife's aid. 'We're losing the best of the day--and if Bridget really won't go with us--'

Bridget frowned and rose.

'How are the proofs getting on?' said Sarratt, smiling, as she bade him a careless good-bye.

Bridget drew herself up.

'I never talk about my work.'

'I suppose that's a good rule,' he said doubtfully, 'especially now that there's so much else to talk about. The Russian news to-day is pretty bad!'

A dark look of anxiety crossed the young man's face. For it was the days of the great Russian retreat in Galicia and Poland, and every soldier looking on, knew with gnashing of teeth that the happenings in the East meant a long postponement of our own advance.

'Oh, I never trouble about the war!' said Bridget, with a half-contemptuous note in her voice that fairly set George Sarratt on fire. He flushed violently, and Nelly looked at him in alarm. But he said nothing. Nelly however with a merry side-glance at him, unseen by Bridget, interposed to prevent him from escorting Bridget downstairs. She went herself. Most sisters would have dispensed with or omitted this small attention; but Nelly always treated Bridget with a certain ceremony. When she returned, she threw her arms round George's neck, half laughing, and half inclined to cry.

'Oh, George, I do wish I had a nicer sister to give you!' But George had entirely recovered himself.

'We shall get on perfectly!' he declared, kissing the soft head that leant against him. 'Give me a little time, darling. She's new to me!--I'm new to her.'

Nelly sighed, and went to put on her hat. In her opinion it was no more easy to like Bridget after three years than three hours. It was certain that she and George would never suit each other. At the same time Nelly was quite conscious that she owed Bridget a good deal. But for the fact that Bridget did the housekeeping, that Bridget saw to the investment of their small moneys, and had generally managed the business of their joint life, Nelly would not have been able to dream, and sketch, and read, as it was her delight to do. It might be, as she had said to Sarratt, that Bridget managed because she liked managing. All the same Nelly knew, not without some prickings of conscience as to her own dependence, that when George was gone, she would never be able to get on without Bridget.

Into what a world of delight the two plunged when they set forth! The more it rains in the Westmorland country, the more heavenly are the days when the clouds forget to rain! There were white flocks of them in the June sky as the new-married pair crossed the wooden bridge beyond the garden, leading to the further side of the lake, but they were sailing serene and sunlit in the blue, as though their whole business were to dapple the hills with blue and violet shadows, or sometimes to throw a dazzling reflection down into the quiet water. There had been rain, torrential rain, just before the Sarratts arrived, so that the river was full and noisy, and all the little becks clattering down the fell, in their haste to reach the lake, were boasting to the summer air, as though in forty-eight hours of rainlessness they would not be as dry and dumb as ever again. The air was fresh, in spite of the Midsummer sun, and youth and health danced in the veins of the lovers. And yet not without a touch of something feverish, something abnormal, because of that day--that shrouded day--standing sentinel at the end of the week. They never spoke of it, but they never forgot it. It entered into each clinging grasp he gave her hand as he helped her up or down some steep or rugged bit of path--into the lingering look of her brown eyes, which thanked him, smiling--into the moments of silence, when they rested amid the springing bracken, and the whole scene of mountain, cloud and water spoke with that sudden tragic note of all supreme beauty, in a world of 'brittleness.' But they were not often silent. There was so much to say. They were still exploring each other, after the hurry of their marriage, and short engagement. For a time she chattered to him about her own early life--their old red-brick house in a Manchester suburb, with its good-sized rooms, its mahogany doors, its garden, in which her father used to work--his only pleasure, after his wife's death, besides 'the concerts'--'You know we've awfully good music in Manchester!' As for her own scattered and scanty education, she had begun to speak of it almost with bitterness. George's talk and recollections betrayed quite unconsciously the standards of the academic or highly-trained professional class to which all his father's kindred belonged; and his only sister, a remarkably gifted girl, who had died of pneumonia at eighteen, just as she was going to Girton, seemed to Nelly, when he occasionally described or referred to her, a miracle--a terrifying miracle--of learning and accomplishment.

Once indeed, she broke out in distress:--'Oh, George, I don't know anything! Why wasn't I sent to school! We had a wretched little governess who taught us nothing. And then I'm lazy--I never was ambitious--like Bridget. Do you mind that I'm so stupid--do you mind?'

And she laid her hands on his knee, as they sat together among the fern, while her eyes searched his face in a real anxiety.

What joy it was to laugh at her--to tease her!

'_How_ stupid are you, darling? Tell me, exactly. It is of course a terrible business. If I'd only known--'

But she would be serious.

'I don't know _any_ languages, George! Just a little French--but you'd be ashamed if you heard me talking it. As to history--don't ask!' She shrugged her shoulders despairingly. Then her face brightened. 'But there's something! I do love poetry--I've read a lot of poetry.'

'That's all right--so have I,' he said, promptly.

'Isn't it strange--' her tone was thoughtful--'how people care for poetry nowadays! A few years ago, one never heard of people--ordinary people--_buying_ poetry, new poetry--or reading it. But I know a shop in Manchester that's just full of poetry--new books and old books--and the shop-man told me that people buy it almost more than anything. Isn't it funny? What makes them do it? Is it the war?'

Sarratt considered it, while making a smooth path for a gorgeous green beetle through the bit of turf beside him.

'I suppose it's the war,' he said at last. 'It does change fellows. It's easy enough to go along bluffing and fooling in ordinary times. Most men don't know what they think--or what they feel--or whether they feel anything. But somehow--out there--when you see the things other fellows are doing--when you know the things you may have to do yourself--well----'

'Yes, yes--go on!' she said eagerly, and he went on, but reluctantly, for he had seen her shiver, and the white lids fall a moment over her eyes.

'--It doesn't seem unnatural--or hypocritical--or canting--to talk and feel--sometimes--as you couldn't talk or feel at home, with life going on just as usual. I've had to censor letters, you see, darling--and the letters some of the roughest and stupidest fellows write, you'd never believe. And there's no pretence in it either. What would be the good of pretending out there? No--it's just the pace life goes--and the fire--and the strain of it. It's awful--and _horrible_--and yet you wouldn't not be there for the world.'

His voice dropped a little; he looked out with veiled eyes upon the lake chequered with the blue and white of its inverted sky. Nelly guessed--trembling--at the procession of images that was passing through them; and felt for a moment strangely separated from him--separated and desolate.

'George, it's dreadful now--to be a woman!'

She spoke in a low appealing voice, pressing up against him, as though she begged the soul in him that had been momentarily unconscious of her, to come back to her.

He laughed, and the vision before his eyes broke up.

'Darling, it's adorable now--to be a woman! How I shall think of you, when I'm out there!--away from all the grime and the horror--sitting by this lake, and looking--as you do now.'

He drew a little further away from her, and lying on his elbows on the grass, he began to read her, as it were, from top to toe, that he might fix every detail in his mind.

'I like that little hat so much, Nelly!--and that blue cloak is just ripping! And what's that you've got at your waist--a silver buckle?--yes! I gave it you. Mind you wear it, when I'm away, and tell me you're wearing it--then I can fancy it.'

'Will you ever have time--to think of me--George?'

She bent towards him.

He laughed.

'Well, not when I'm going over the parapet to attack the Boches. Honestly, one thinks of nothing then but how one can get one's men across. But you won't come off badly, my little Nell--for thoughts--night or day. And you mustn't think of us too sentimentally. It's quite true that men write wonderful letters--and wonderful verse too--men of all ranks--things you'd never dream they could write. I've got a little pocket-book full that I've collected. I've left it in London, but I'll show you some day. But bless you, nobody _talks_ about their feelings at the front. We're a pretty slangy lot in the trenches, and when we're in billets, we read novels and rag each other--and _sleep_--my word, we do sleep!'

He rolled on his back, and drew his hat over his eyes a moment, for even in the fresh mountain air the June sun was fierce. Nelly sat still, watching him, as he had watched her--all the young strength and comeliness of the man to whom she had given herself.

And as she did so there came swooping down upon her, like the blinding wings of a Fury, the remembrance of a battle picture she had seen that morning: a bursting shell--limp figures on the ground. Oh not George--not _George_--never! The agony ran through her, and her fingers gripped the turf beside her. Then it passed, and she was silently proud that she had been able to hide it. But it had left her pale and restless. She sprang up, and they went along the high path leading to Grasmere and Langdale.

Presently at the top of the little neck which separates Rydal from Grasmere they came upon an odd cavalcade. In front walked an elderly lady, with a huge open bag slung round her, in which she carried an amazing load of the sphagnum moss that English and Scotch women were gathering at that moment all over the English and Scotch mountains for the surgical purposes of the war. Behind her came a pony, with a boy. The pony was laden with the same moss, so was the boy. The lady's face was purple with exertion, and in her best days she could never have been other than plain; her figure was shapeless. She stopped the pony as she neared the Sarratts, and addressed them--panting.

'I beg your pardon!--but have you by chance seen another lady carrying a bag like mine? I brought a friend with me to help gather this stuff--but we seem to have missed each other on the top of Silver How--and I can't imagine what's happened to her.'

The voice was exceedingly musical and refined--but there was a touch of power in it--a curious note