The Hermit of Far End Part 52

There was a long silence. Then, at last, Miles held out his hand.

"You've beaten me," he said sadly. "I won't destroy the letters. As I said, they are a trust. But the secret is safe with me, after this.

You've tied my hands."

Trent smiled grimly.

"You'll get used to it," he commented. "Mine have been tied for three-and-twenty years--though even yet I don't wear my bonds with grace, precisely."

He had become once more the hermit of old acquaintance--sardonic, harsh, his emotions hidden beneath that curt indifference of manner with which those who knew him were painfully familiar.

The two men shook hands in silence, and a few minutes later, Herrick, left alone, replaced the letters in the drawer whence he had taken them, and, turning the key upon them, slipped it into his pocket.

CHAPTER x.x.x

DEFEAT

In remote country districts that memorable Fourth of August, when England declared war on Germany, came and went unostentatiously.

People read the news a trifle breathlessly, reflected with a sigh of contentment on the invincible British Navy, and with a little gust of prideful triumph upon the Expeditionary force--ready to the last burnished b.u.t.ton of each man's tunic--and proceeded quietly with their usual avocations.

Then came the soaring Bank Rate, and business men on holiday raced back to London to contend with the new financial conditions and a.s.sure their credit. That was all that happened--at first.

Few foresaw that the gaunt, grim Spectre of War had come to dwell in their very midst, nor that soon he would pa.s.s from house to house, palace and cottage alike, touching first this man, then that, on the shoulder, with the single word "Come!" on his lips, until gradually the nations, one by one, left their tasks of peace and rose and followed him.

Monkshaven, in common with other seaside towns, witnessed the sudden exodus of City men when the climbing Bank Rate sounded its alarm.

Beyond that, the war, for the moment, reacted very little on its daily processes of life. There was no disorganization of amus.e.m.e.nts--tennis, boating, and bathing went on much as usual, and clever people, proud of their ability to add two and two together and make four of them, announced that it was all explained now why certain young officers in the neighbourhood had been hurriedly recalled a few days previously, and their leave cancelled.

Then came the black news of that long, desperate retreat from Mons, shaking the nation to its very soul, and in the wave of high courage and endeavour that swept responsively across the country, the smaller things began to fall into their little place.

To Sara, stricken by her own individual sorrow, the war came like a rus.h.i.+ng, mighty wind, rousing her from the brooding, introspective habit which had laid hold of her and bracing her to take a fresh grip upon life. Its immense demands, the illimitable suffering it carried in its train, lifted her out of the contemplation of her own personal grief into a veritable pa.s.sion of pity for the world agony beating up around her.

And, with Sara, to compa.s.sionate meant to succour. Nor did it require more than the first few weeks of war to demonstrate where such help as she was capable of giving was most sorely needed.

She had been through a course of First Aid and held her certificate, and, thanks to a year in France when she was seventeen--a much-grudged year, at the time, since it had separated her from her beloved Patrick--and to a natural facility for the language, inherited from her French forbears, she spoke French almost as fluently as she did English.

In France they were crying out for nurses, for at that period of the war there was work for any woman who had even a little knowledge plus the grit to face the horrors of those early days, and it was to France that Sara forthwith determined to go.

She had heard that an old friend of Patrick Lovell's, Lady Arronby by name, proposed equipping and taking over to France a party of nurses, and she promptly wrote to her, begging that she might be included in the little company.

Lady Arronby, who had been a sister at a London hospital before her marriage, recollected her old friend's ward very clearly. Sara rarely failed to make a definite impression, even upon people who only knew her slightly, and Lady Arronby, who had known her from her earliest days at Barrow, answered her letter without hesitation.

"I shall be delighted to have you with me," she had written. "Even though you are not a trained nurse, there's work out there for women of your caliber, my dear. So come. It will be a week or two yet before we have all our equipment, but I am pus.h.i.+ng things on as fast as I can, so hold yourself in readiness to come at a day's notice."

Meanwhile, Sara's earliest personal encounter with the reality of the war came in a few hurried lines from Elisabeth telling her that Major Durward had rejoined the Army and would be going out to France almost immediately.

Sara thrilled, and with the thrill came the answering stab of the sword that was to pierce her again and again through the long months ahead.

Garth Trent--the man she loved--could have no part nor lot in this splendid service of England's sons for England! The country wanted brave men now--not men who faltered when faltering meant failure and defeat.

She had not seen Garth since that day--a million years ago it seemed--when she had sent him from her, and he had gone, admitting the justice of her decision.

There was no getting behind that. She would have defied Elisabeth, defied a whole world of slanderous tongues, had they accused him, if he himself had denied the charge. But he had not been able to deny it. It was true--a deadly, official truth, tabulated somewhere in the records of her country, that the man she loved had been cas.h.i.+ered for cowardice.

The knowledge almost crushed her, and she sometimes wondered if there could be a keener suffering, in the whole gamut of human pain, than that which a woman bears whose high pride in her lover has been laid utterly in the dust.

The dread of danger, separation--even death itself--were not comparable with it. Sara envied the women whose men were killed in action. At least, they had a splendid memory to hold which nothing could ever soil or take away.

Sometimes her thoughts wandered fugitively to Tim. Surely here was his chance to break from the bondage his mother had imposed upon him! He had not written to her of late, but she felt convinced that she would have heard from Elisabeth had he volunteered. She was a little puzzled over his silence and inaction. He had seemed so keen last winter at Barrow, when together they had discussed this very subject of soldiering. Could it be that now, when the opportunity offered, Tim was--evading it? But the thought was dismissed almost as swiftly as it had arisen, and Sara blushed scarlet with shame that the bare suspicions should have crossed her mind, even for an instant, recognizing it as the outcrop of that bitter knowledge which had cut at the very roots of her belief in men's courage.

And there were men around her whose readiness to make the great sacrifice combated the poison of one man's failure. Daily she heard of this or that man whom she knew, either personally or by name, having volunteered and been accepted, and very often she had to listen to Miles Herrick's fierce rebellion against the fact that he was ineligible, and endeavour to console him.

But it was Audrey Maynard who plumbed the full depths of bitterness in Herrick's heart. She had been teaching him to knit, and he was floundering through the intricacies of turning his first heel when one day he surprised her by hurling the sock, needles and all, to the other end of the room.

"There's work for a man when his country's at war! My G.o.d! Audrey, I don't know how I'm going to bear it--to lie here on my couch, knitting--_knitting!_--when men are out there dying! Why won't they take a lame man? Can't a lame man fire a gun--and then die like the rest of 'em?"

Audrey looked at him pitifully.

"My dear, war takes only the best--the youngest and the fittest. But there's plenty of work for the women and men at home."

"For the women and crocks?" countered Miles bitterly.

She smiled at him suddenly.

"Yes--for the crocks, too."

He shook his head.

"No, Audrey, I'm an utterly useless person--a c.u.mberer of the ground."

"Not in my eyes, Miles," she answered quietly.

He met her glance, and read, at last, what--as she told him later--he might have read there any time during the last six months, had he chosen to look for it.

"Do you mean that, Audrey?" he asked, suddenly gripping her hands hard.

"All of it--all that it implies?"

She slipped to her knees beside his couch.

"Oh, my dear!" she said, between laughing and crying. "I've been meaning it--'all of it'--for ever so long. Only--only you won't ask me to marry you!"

"How can I? A lame man, and not even a rich one?"

"I believe," said Audrey composedly, "we've argued both those points before--from a strictly impersonal point of view! Couldn't you--couldn't you get over your objection to coming to live with me at Greenacres, dear?"

Audrey always declared, afterwards, that it had required the most blatant encouragement on her part to induce Miles to propose to her, and that, but for the war--which convinced him that he was of no use to any one else--he never would have done so.

Presumably she was able to supply the requisite stimulus, for when the Lavender Lady joined them later on in the afternoon, she found herself called upon to perform that function of sheer delight to every old maid of the right sort--namely, to bestow her blessing on a pair of newly betrothed lovers.