The Red Planet Part 51

But Betty sprang forward and gripped his hand.

"It is you who are the dear," she said. "You, the greatest and loyalest friend a man has ever known. And I'll be loyal to you, never fear."

By what process of enchantment she got an emotion-filled Marigold to the door and shut it behind him, I shall never discover. On its slam she laughed--a queer high note. In one swift movement she was by my knees. And she broke into a pa.s.sion of tears. For me, I was the most mystified man under heaven.

Soon she began to speak, her head bowed.

"I've come to the end of the tether, Majy dear. They've driven me from the hospital--I didn't know how to tell you before--I've been doing all sorts of idiotic things. The doctors say it's a nervous breakdown--I've had rather a bad time--but I thought it contemptible to let one's own wretched little miseries interfere with one's work for the country--so I fought as hard as I could. Indeed I did, Majy dear. But it seems I've been playing the fool without knowing it,--I haven't slept properly for months--and they've sent me away. Oh, they've been all that's kind, of course--I must have at least six months' rest, they say--they talk about nursing homes--I've thought and thought and thought about it until I'm certain. There's only one rest for me, Majy dear." She raised a tear-stained, tense and beautiful face and drew herself up so that one arm leaned on my chair, and the other on my shoulder. "And that is to be with the one human being that is left for me to love--oh, really love--you know what I mean--in the world."

I could only put my hand on her fair young head and say:

"My dear, my dear, you know I love you."

"That is why I'm not afraid to speak. Perfect love casteth out fear--"

I pushed back her hair. "What is it that you want me to do, Betty?" I asked. "My life, such as it is, is at your command."

She looked me full, unflinchingly in the eyes.

"If you would give me the privilege of bearing your name, I should be a proud and happy woman."

We remained there, I don't know how long--she with her hand on my shoulder, I caressing her dear hair. It was a tremendous temptation. To have my beloved Betty in all her exquisite warm loyalty bound to me for the rest of my crippled life. But I found the courage to say:

"My dear, you are young still, with the wonderful future that no one alive can foretell before you, and I am old--"

"You're not fifty."

"Still I am old, I belong to the past--to a sort of affray behind an ant-hill which they called a war. I'm dead, my dear, you are gloriously alive. I'm of the past, as I say. You're of the future. You, my dearest, are the embodiment of the woman of the Great War--" I smiled--"The Woman of the Great War in capital letters. What your destiny is, G.o.d knows. But it isn't to be tied to a Prehistoric Man like me."

She rose and stood, with her beautiful bare arms behind her, sweet, magnificent.

"I am a Woman of the Great War. You are quite right. But in a year or so I shall be like other women of the war who have suffered and spent their lives, a woman of the past--not of the future. All sorts of things have been burned up in it." In a quick gesture she stretched out her hands to me. "Oh, can't you understand?"

I cannot set down the rest of the tender argument. If she had loved me less, she could have lived in my house, like Phyllis, without a thought of the conventions. But loving me dearly, she had got it into her feminine head that the sacredness of the marriage tie would crown with dignity and beauty the part she had resolved to play for my happiness.

Well, if I have yielded I pray it may not be set down to me for selfish exploitation of a woman's exhausted hour. When I said something of the sort, she laughed and cried:

"Why, I'm bullying you into it!"

The First of January, 1917--the dawn to me, a broken derelict, of the annus mirabilis. Somehow, foolishly, illogically, I feel that it will be the annus mirabilis for my beloved country.

And come--after all--I am, in spite of my legs, a Man too of the Great War. I have lived in it, and worked in it, and suffered in it--and in it have I won a Great Thing.

So long as one's soul is sound--that is the Great Matter.

Just before we parted last night, I said to Betty:

"The beginning and end of all this business is that you're afraid of Marigold."

She started back indignantly.

"I'm not! I'm not!"

I laughed. "The Lady protests too much," said I.

The clock struck two. Marigold appeared at the door. He approached Betty.

"I think, Madam, we ought to let the Major go to bed."

"I think, Marigold," said Betty serenely, "we ought to be ashamed of ourselves for keeping him up so late."

THE END