The Romance of His Life Part 5

He had stood up in his place in the House and had said something of that kind, and had been cheered.

But that was a year ago.

Now the iron had entered into England's soul, and into his soul. He had long since volunteered, and he was going to France to-morrow after an arduous training. He had come home to say good-bye.

He might never come back. He might never see his Catherine, his beautiful young wife, again, or his son Michael, that minute, bald, amazing new comer with the waving clenched fists, and the pink soles as soft as Catherine's cheek.

And as John Damer, that extremely able successful wealthy man of thirty, sat on the wooden bench in the clearing he suddenly realised that, for the first time in his life, he was profoundly unhappy.

How often he had come up here by the steep path through the wood, as a child, as a lad, as a man, and had cast himself down on the heather, and had looked out across that wonderful panorama of upland and lowland, with its scattered villages and old churches, and the wide band of the river taking its slow curving course among the level pastures and broad water meadows.

That river had given him the power to instal electric light in his home, the dignified Elizabethan house, standing in its level gardens, below the hill. He could look down on its twisted chimneys and ivied walls as he sat. How determined his father had been against such an innovation as electric light, but he had put it in after the old man's death. There was enough water power to have lit forty houses as large as his.

Far away in the haze lay the city where his factories were. Their great chimneys were visible even at this distance belching forth smoke, which, etherealised by distance, hung like a blue cloud over the city.

He liked to look at it. That low lying cloud reminded him of his great prosperity. And all the coal he used for the furnaces came from his own coal fields.

But who would take care of all the business he had built up if he fell in this accursed war? Who would comfort Catherine, and who would bring up his son when he grew beyond his mother's control?

Yet this was England, spread out before his eyes, England in peril calling to him her son who dumbly loved her, to come to her aid.

His eyes filled with tears, and he did not see his wife till she was close beside him, standing in a thin white gown, holding her hat by a long black ribbon, the suns.h.i.+ne on her amber hair.

She was pale, and her very beauty seemed veiled by grief.

She sat down by him, and smiled valiantly at him. Presently she said gently:

"Perhaps in years to come, John, you and I shall sit together on this bench as old people, and Michael will be very kind, but rather critical of us, as quite behind the times."

And then had come the parting, the crossing, the first sound as of distant thunder; and then interminable days of monotony; and mud, and lack of sleep, and noise unceasing; and a certain gun which blew out the candle in his dug-out every time it fired--and _then_! a rending of the whole world, and himself standing in the midst of entire chaos and overthrow, with blood running down his face.

"I'm done for," he said, as he fell forward into an abyss of darkness and silence, beyond the roar of the guns.

PART II

1965

It was fifty years later.

Michael's wife, Serena, was waiting for her husband. The gallery in which she sat was full of memorials of the past. The walls were covered with portraits of Damers. Michael's grandfather in a blue frock coat and light grey trousers. Michael's father, John Damer, ruddy and determined in tweeds, with a favourite dog. Michael himself, not so ruddy, nor so determined, in white smock and blue stockings. Michael's mother, beautiful and austere in her robe of office.

Presently an aeroplane droned overhead, which she knew meant the departure of the great Indian doctor, and a moment later Michael came slowly down the landing steps in the garden, and entered the gallery.

"The operation has been entirely successful," he said.

They looked gravely at each other.

"It seems incredible," she said.

"He said it was a simple case, that all through those years while Father was unconscious the skull had been slowly drawing together and mending itself, that he only released a slight lesion in the brain. He has gone back to Lucknow for an urgent case, but he says he will look in again in a couple of days time if I let him know there is an adverse symptom. He said he felt sure all would go well, but that we must guard him from sudden shocks, and break to him very gradually that it is fifty years since he was. .h.i.t at Ypres."

"He'll wake up in his own room where he has lain so long," said Serena.

"Has the nurse changed yet?"

"Yes. We made up the uniform from the old ill.u.s.trated papers. Blue gown, white cap and a red cross on the arm."

"We had better get into our things, too," said Michael nervously.

"The blue serge suit is on your bed, and a collar and a tie. I found them in the oak chest. They must have been forgotten."

"And you?"

"I will wear your Mother's gown which she wore at your christening. She kept it all her life."

A few minutes later Michael, uneasy in a serge suit which was too tight for him, and his wife in a short grey gown entered the sick room and sat down one on each side of the bed. The nurse, excited and self-conscious in her unfamiliar attire, withdrew to the window.

The old, old man on the bed stirred uneasily, and his white beard quivered. His wide eyes looked vacantly at his son, as they had looked at him all Michael's life. Serena, with a hand that trembled a little, poured a few drops into a spoon, and put them into the half-open lips.

Then they held their breath and watched.

John Damer frowned. A bewildered look came into his vacant eyes, and he closed them. And he, who had spoken no word for fifty years, said in a thin quavering voice:

"The guns have ceased."

He opened his eyes suddenly. They wandered to the light, and fell upon the nurse near the window.

"I am in hospital," he said.

"No. You are in your own home," said Michael, laying his hand on the ancient wrinkled hand.

The dim sunken eyes turned slowly in the direction of the voice.

"Father," said the old man looking full at Michael. "Father! well, you do look blooming."

The colour rushed to Michael's face. He had expected complications, and had prepared numberless phrases in his mind to meet imaginary dilemmas.

But he had never thought of this.

"Not Father," said Serena intervening. "You are forgetting. Father died before you married, and you put up that beautiful monument to him in the Church."

"So I did," said the old man, testily. "So I did, but he is exactly like him all the same, only Father never wore his clothes too tight for him and a made up tie--never."

Michael, the best dressed man of his day, was bereft of speech.

"You're a little confused still," said Serena. "You were wounded in the head at Ypres. You have been ill a long time."

There was a silence.