The Rough Road Part 17

"Oh, the poor boy! It will be worse than ever for him."

"It will," said Peggy. "But I think it splendid of him to try. How did he bring himself to do it?"

"Breed tells," said the Dean. "That's what every one seems to have forgotten. He's a thoroughbred Doggie. There's the old French proverb: _Bon chien cha.s.se de race._"

Peggy looked at him gratefully. "You're very comforting," she said.

"We must knit him some socks," observed Mrs. Conover. "I hear those supplied to the army are very rough and ready."

"My dear," smiled the Dean, "Marmaduke's considerable income does not cease because his pay in the army is one and twopence a day; and I should think he would have the sense to provide himself with adequate underclothing. Also, judging from the account of your shopping orgy in London, he has already laid in a stock that would last out several Antarctic winters."

The Dean tapped his egg gently.

"Then what can we do for the poor boy?" asked his wife.

The Dean scooped the top of his egg off with a vicious thrust.

"We can cut out slanderous tongues," said he.

There had been much calumniating cackle in the little town; nay, more: cackle is of geese; there had been venom of the snakiest kind. The Deanery, father and mother and daughter, each in their several ways, had suffered greatly. It is hard to stand up against poisoned ridicule.

"My dear," continued the Dean, "it will be our business to smite the Philistines, hip and thigh. The reasons which guided Marmaduke in the resignation of his commission are the concern of n.o.body. The fact remains that Mr. Marmaduke Trevor resigned his commission in order to----"

Peggy interrupted with a smile. "'In order to'--isn't that a bit Jesuitical, daddy?"

"I have a great respect for the Jesuits, my dear," said the Dean, holding out an impressive egg-spoon. "The fact remains, in the eyes of the world, as I remarked, that Mr. Marmaduke Trevor of Denby Hall, a man of fortune and high position in the county, resigned his commission in order, for reasons best known to himself, to serve his country more effectively in the humbler ranks of the army, and--my dear, this egg is far too full for war time"--with a hazardous plunge of his spoon he had made a yellow yelky horror of the egg-sh.e.l.l--"and I'm going to proclaim the fact far and wide, and--indeed--rub it in."

"That'll be jolly decent of you, daddy," said his daughter. "It will help a lot."

In the failure of Marmaduke to retain his commission the family honour had not been concerned. The boy had done his best. They blamed not him but the disastrous training that had unfitted him for the command of men. They reproached themselves for their haste in throwing him headlong into the fiercest element of the national struggle towards efficiency. They could have found an easier school, in which he could have learned to do his share creditably in the national work. Many young men of their acquaintance, far more capable than Marmaduke, were wearing the uniform of a less strenuous branch of the service. It had been a blunder, a failure, but without loss of honour. But when slanderous tongues attacked poor Doggie for running away with a yelp from a little hards.h.i.+p; when a story or two of Doggie's career in the regiment arrived in Durdlebury, highly flavoured in transit and more and more poisoned as it went from mouth to mouth; when a legend was spread abroad that he had bolted from Salisbury Plain and was run to earth in a Turkish Bath in London, and was only saved from court-martial by family influence, then the family honour of the Conovers was wounded to its proud English depths. And they could say nothing. They had only Doggie's word to go upon; they accepted it unquestioningly, but they knew no details. Doggie had disappeared.

Naturally, they contradicted these evil rumours. The good folks of Durdlebury expected them to do so, and listened with well-bred incredulity. To the question, "Where is he now and what is he going to do?" they could only answer, "We don't know." They were helpless.

Peggy had a bitter quarrel with one of her intimates, Nancy Murdoch, daughter of the doctor who had proclaimed the soundness of Marmaduke's const.i.tution.

"He may have told you so, dear," said Nancy, "but how do you know?"

"Because whatever else he may be, he's not a liar," retorted Peggy.

Nancy gave the most delicate suspicion of a shrug to her pretty shoulders.

That was the beginning of it. Peggy, naturally combative, armed for the fight and defended Marmaduke.

"You talk as though you were still engaged to him," said Nancy.

"So I am," declared Peggy rashly.

"Then where's your engagement ring?"

"Where I choose to keep it."

The retort lacked originality and conviction.

"You can't send it back to him, because you don't know where he is.

And what did Mrs. Conover mean by telling mother that Mr. Trevor had broken off the engagement?"

"She never told her any such thing," cried Peggy mendaciously. For Mrs. Conover had committed the indiscretion under a.s.surance of silence.

"Pardon me," said Nancy, much on her dignity. "Of course I understand your denying it. It isn't pleasant to be thrown over by any man--but by a man like Doggie Trevor----"

"You're a spiteful beast, Nancy, and I'll never speak to you again.

You've neither womanly decency nor Christian feeling." And Peggy marched out of the doctor's house.

As a result of the quarrel, however, she resumed the wearing of the ring, which she flaunted defiantly with left hand deliberately ungloved. Hitherto she had not been certain of the continuance of the engagement. Marmaduke's repudiation was definite enough; but it had been dictated by his sensitive honour. It lay with her to agree or decline. She had pa.s.sed through wearisome days of doubt. A physically sound fighting man sent about his business as being unfit for war does not appear a romantic figure in a girl's eyes. She was bitterly disappointed with Doggie for the sudden withering of her hopes. Had he fulfilled them she could have loved him wholeheartedly, after the simple way of women; for her s.e.x, exhilarated by the barbaric convulsion of the land, clamoured for something heroic, something at least intensely masculine, in which she could find feminine exultation. She also felt resentment at his flight from the Savoy, his silence and practical disappearance. Although not blaming him unjustly, she failed to realize the spiritual piteousness of his plight. If the war has done anything in this country, it has saved the young women of the gentler cla.s.ses, at any rate, from the abyss of sordid and cynical materialism. Hesitating to announce the rupture of the engagement, she allowed it to remain in a state of suspended animation, and as a symbolic act, ceased to wear the ring. Nancy's taunts had goaded her to a more heroic att.i.tude. The first person to whom she showed the newly-ringed hand was her mother.

"The engagement isn't off until I declare it's off. I'm going to play the game."

"You know best, dear," said the gentle Mrs. Conover. "But it's all very upsetting."

Then Doggie's letter brought comfort and gladness to the Deanery. It rea.s.sured them as to his fate. It healed the wounded family honour. It justified Peggy in playing the game.

She took the letter round to Dr. Murdoch's and thrust it into the hand of an astonished Nancy, with whom since the quarrel she had not been on speaking terms.

"This is in Marmaduke's handwriting. You recognize it. Just read the top line when I've folded it. 'I have enlisted in the 10th Wess.e.x.'

See?" She withdrew the letter. "Now, what could a man, let alone an honourable gentleman, do more? Say you're sorry for having said beastly things about him."

Nancy, who had regretted the loss of a lifelong friends.h.i.+p, professed her sorrow.

"The least you can do then, is to go round and spread the news, and say you've seen the letter with your own eyes."

To several others, on a triumphant round of visits, did she show the vindicating sentence. Any soft young fool, she a.s.serted, with the directness and not unattractive truculence of her generation, can get a commission and muddle through, but it took a man to enlist as a private soldier.

"Everybody recognizes now, darling," said the reconciled Nancy a few days later, "that Doggie is a top-hole, splendid chap. But I think I ought to tell you that you're boring Durdlebury stiff."

Peggy laughed. It was good to be engaged to a man no longer under a cloud.

"It will all come right, dear old thing," she wrote to Doggie. "It's a cinch, as the Americans say. You'll soon get used to it--especially if you can realize what it means to me. 'Saving face' has been an awful business. Now it's all over. Of course, I'll accept the two-seater.

I've had lessons in driving since you went away--I had thoughts of going out to France to drive Y.M.C.A. cars, but that's off for the present. I'll love the two-seater. Sw.a.n.k won't be the word. But 'a parting gift' is all rot. The engagement stands and all Durdlebury knows it..." and so on, and so on. She set herself out, honestly, loyally, to be the kindest girl in the world to Doggie. Mrs. Conover happened to come into the drawing-room just as she was licking the stamp. She thumped it on the envelope with her palm and, looking round from the writing-desk against the wall, showed her mother a flushed and smiling face.

"If anybody says I'm not good--the goodest thing the cathedral has turned out for half a dozen centuries--I'll tear her horrid eyes out from their sockets!"

"My dear!" cried her horrified mother.

Doggie kept the letter unopened in his tunic pocket until he could find solitude in which to read it. After morning parade he wandered to the deserted trench at the end of the camp, where the stuffed sacks, representing German defenders, were hung for bayonet practice. It was a noon of grey mist through which the alignments of huts and tents were barely visible. Instinctively avoiding the wet earth of the parados, he went round, and, tired after the recent spell of physical drill, sat down on the equally wet sandbags of the model parapet, a pathetic, lonely little khaki figure isolated for the moment by the kindly mist from an uncomprehending world.

He read Peggy's letter several times. He recognized her goodness, her loyalty. The grateful tears even came to his eyes and he brushed them away hurriedly with a swift look round. But his heart beat none the faster. A long-faded memory of childhood came back to him in regained colour. Some quarrel with Peggy. What it was all about he had entirely forgotten; but he remembered her little flushed face and her angry words: "Well, I'm a sport and you ain't!" He remembered also rebuking her priggishly for unintelligible language and mincing away. He read the letter again in the light of this flash of memory. The only difference between it and the childish speech lay in the fact that instead of a declaration of contrasts, she now uttered a declaration of similitudes. They were both "sports." There she was wrong. Doggie shook his head. In her sense of the word he was not a "sport." A sport takes chances, plays the game with a smile on his lips. There was no smile on his. He loathed the game with a sickening, s.h.i.+vering loathing. He was engaged in it because a conglomeration of irresistible forces had driven him into the _melee_. It never occurred to Doggie that he was under orders of his own soul. This simple yet stupendous fact never occurred to Peggy.

He sat on the wet sandbags and thought and thought. Though he reproached himself for base ingrat.i.tude, the letter did not satisfy him. It left his heart cold. What he sought in it he did not know. It was something he could not find, something that was not there. The sea-mist thickened around him. Peggy seemed very far away.... He was still engaged to her--for it would be monstrous to persist in his withdrawal. He must accept the situation which she decreed. He owed that to her loyalty. But how to continue the correspondence? It was hard enough to write from Salisbury Plain; from here it was well-nigh impossible.