XXXVI
"AND YET—"
"What's the big idea?"
Dicky looked up from the breakfast table with a mildly astonished air as I came hurriedly into the room dressed for the street, wearing my hat, and carrying my coat over my arm.
"I'm going into town with you," I returned quietly.
"Shopping, I suppose." The words sounded idle enough, but I, who knew
Dicky so well, recognized the note of watchfulness in the query.
"I shall probably go into some of the shops before I return," I said carelessly, "but the real reason of my going into the city is Mrs. Stewart. I should have gone to see her yesterday."
Dicky frowned involuntarily, but his face cleared again in an instant.
It was the second day after he had brought me the terrible news that
Jack Bickett, my brother-cousin, was reported killed "somewhere in
France." I knew that Dicky, in his heart, did not wish me to go to see
Mrs. Stewart, but I also knew that he was ashamed to give voice to his
reluctance.
When Dicky spoke at last, it was with just the right shade of cordial acquiescence in his voice.
"Of course you must go to see her," he said, "but are you sure you're feeling fit enough? It will try your nerves, I imagine."
Far better than Dicky could guess I knew what the day's ordeal would be. Mrs. Stewart had been very fond of my brother-cousin. With my mother, she had hoped that he and I would some day care for each other. With her queer partisan ideas of loyalty, when Dicky had been so cruelly unjust to me about Jack, she had wished me to divorce Dicky and marry Jack, even though Jack himself had never whispered such a solution of my life's problem. That she believed me to be responsible for his going to the war I knew. I dreaded inexpressibly the idea of facing her.
But when, after a rather silent trip to the city with Dicky, I stood again in Mrs. Stewart's little upstairs sitting-room, I found only a very sorrowful old woman, not a reproachful one.
"I thought you'd come today," she said, and her voice was tired, dispirited. I felt a sudden compunction seize me that my visits to her had been so few since Jack's going.
"I couldn't have kept away," I said, and then my old friend dropped my hand, which she had been holding, and, sinking into a chair, put her wrinkled old hands up to her face. I saw the slow tears trickling through her fingers, and I knelt by her side and drew her head against my shoulder, comforting her as she once had comforted me.
Mrs. Stewart was never one to give way to emotion, and it was but a few moments before she drew herself erect, wiped her eyes, and said quietly:
"I'll show you the cablegram."
She went to her desk, and drew out the message, clipped, abbreviated in the puzzling fashion of cablegrams:
"Regret inform you, Bickett killed, action French front. Details
later."
(Signed) "CAILLARD."
"Caillard? Caillard?" Where had I heard that name? Then I suddenly remembered. Paul Caillard was the friend with whom Jack had gone across the ocean to the Great War. I examined the paper carefully.
"I thought Dicky said you received the usual official notification," I remarked.
"That's what I told him," she replied. "That's it."
"But this isn't an official message," I persisted.
"Why isn't it?"
I explained the difference haltingly, and spoke of the wonderful system of identification in the French army, with every man tagged with a metal identification check.
"You will probably receive the official notification in a few days," I commented.
A queer, startled expression flashed into her face. She opened her mouth, as if to speak, and then, looking at me sharply, closed it again. Reaching out her hand for the cablegram, she folded it mechanically, as if thinking of something far away, then going to her desk, put it away, and stood as if thinking deeply for two or three minutes, which seemed an hour to me.
At last I saw her body straighten. She gave a little shake of her shoulders, as if rousing herself, and, turning from the desk, came toward me. I saw that she held in her hand a bundle of letters.
"I understand that you and Jack made some fool agreement that he was not to write to you, and that you were not even to read his letters to me. I'm not expressing my opinion about it, but now that he's gone, I'm going to turn these letters over to you. I'm not blind, you know. Most of them were all really written to you, even if I did receive them. Poor lad! It seems such a pity he should be struck down just as a little happiness seemed coming his way."
She put the letters in my hands, and, turning swiftly, went out of the room. I knew her well enough to realize that she would not return until I had read the messages from Jack. But what in the world did she mean by her last words?
I drew a big, easy chair to the fireside, and began to read the missives. Some were short, some were long, but all were filled with a quiet courage and cheerfulness that I knew had illuminated not only Jack's letters to his old friend, but his life and the lives of others wherever he had been. Every one of them had some reference to me—an inquiry after my health, an injunction to Mrs. Stewart to be sure to keep track of my happiness, a little kodak print or other souvenir marked "For Margaret if I do not come back."
I felt guilty, remorseful, that I had seen so little of Mrs. Stewart since his departure. My own affairs, especially my long, terrible summer's experience with Grace Draper, had shut everything else from my mind.
One letter in particular made my eyes brim with sudden tears. The first of it had been cheery, with entertaining little accounts of the few poor bits of humor which the soldiers in the trenches extracted from their terrible every day round. Along toward the end a sudden impulse seemed to have swept the writer's pen into a more sombre channel.
"I have been thinking much, dear old friend," he wrote, "of the futility of human desires. Life in the trenches is rather conducive to that form of mediation, as you may imagine. You know, none better, how I loved Margaret, how I wanted to make her my wife—I often wonder whether if I had not delayed so long, 'fearing my fate too much,' I might not have won her. But thoughts, like that are worse than useless.
"Instead, there has come to me a clearer understanding of Margaret, a better insight into the golden heart of her. If she had never met the other man, or some one like him, I believe I could have made her happy, kept her contented. But I realize fully that having met him there could never be any other man for her but him. Her love for him is like a flame, transforming her. I could never have called forth such passion from her. I see clearly now how foolish it was in me to have hoped it. There was nothing in the humdrum, commonplace brotherly affection which she thought I gave her to arouse the romance which I know slumbers under that calm, cold exterior of hers.
"Sometimes I query, too, whether my love for Margaret had that flame-like quality which characterizes her love for her husband. Margaret has always been so much a part of my life that my love for her began I could not tell when, and grew and strengthened with the years. There never has been any other woman but Margaret in my life. Even if I should ever come out of this living hell, which I doubt, I do not believe there ever will be another.
"And yet—"
"I have just been summoned for duty. Good-by, dear friend, until the next time. Lovingly yours, Jack Bickett."
I laid the letter aside with a queer little startled feeling at my heart.
Those two little words, "and yet," at the end of Jack's letter gave me much food for thought. Was it possible that before his death Jack had realized that his love for me was not the consuming passion he had thought it, but partook more of the fraternal affection that I had had for him?
I hoped for Jack's sake that this was so.
"And yet—"
I ran through the rest of the letters rapidly. One, the third from the last, arrested my attention sharply.
"Such a pleasant thing happened to me today," Jack wrote, "one of the unexpected gleams of sunlight that are so much brighter because of the general gloom against which they are reflected.
"I was given a week's furlough last Saturday and went up to Paris with my friend, Paul Caillard. He had a friend in a hospital on the way there, headed by Dr. Braithwaite, the celebrated surgeon of Detroit."
I caught my breath. As well as if I had already read the words, I knew what was coming.
"At an unexpected turn in the corridor I almost knocked over a little nurse who was hurrying toward the office. She looked up at me startled, out of the prettiest brown eyes I ever saw, and then stopped, staring at me as if I had been a ghost. I stared back, frankly, for her face was familiar to me, although for the moment I could not tell where I had seen her before.
"Then, half-shyly, she spoke, and her voice matched her eyes.
"'You are Mr. Bickett, are you not, Mrs. Graham's cousin?'
"For a moment I did not realize that 'Mrs. Graham' was Margaret. But that gave me no clue to the identity of the girl. Then all at once it came to me.
"'I know you now,' I said. 'You are Mark Earle's little sister,
Katherine.'"
So they had met at last, Jack Bickett, my brother-cousin, and Katherine Sonnot, the little nurse who had taken care of my mother-in-law, and whom I had learned to love as a dear friend.
Was I glad or sorry, I wondered, as I picked up Jack's letter again that I had crushed any feeling I might have had in the matter, and had spoken the word to Dr. Braithwaite that resulted in Katharine's joining the eminent surgeon's staff of nurses? It seemed a pity to have these two meet only to be torn apart so soon by death.
"I cannot begin to tell you how delighted I was when we recognized each other. You can imagine over here that to one American the meeting with another American, especially if both have the same friends, is an event. Luckily, Miss Sonnot was just about to have an afternoon off when we met, and if she had an engagement—which she denied—she was kind enough to break it for me. I need not tell you that I spent the most delightful afternoon I have had since coming over here.
"You can be sure that I at once exerted all the influence I had through my friend, Caillard, and his friend in the hospital to secure as much free time for Miss Sonnot as possible for the time I was to be on furlough. It is like getting home after being away so long to talk to this brave, sensible, beautiful young girl—for she deserves all of the adjectives."
In the two letters which were the last ones numbered by Mrs. Stewart, Jack spoke again and again of the little nurse. Almost the last line of his last letter, written after he returned to the front, spoke of her.
"Little Miss Sonnot and I correspond," he wrote, "and you can have no idea how much good her letters do me. They are like fresh, sweet breezes glowing through the miasma of life in the trenches."
I folded the letters, put them back into their envelopes, and arranged them as Mrs. Stewart had given them to me. When she came back into the room she found me still holding them and staring into the fire.
"Did you read them all?" she asked.
"Yes," I replied.
"Don't you think those last ones sounded as if he were really getting interested in that little nurse?" she demanded.
There was a peculiar intonation in her voice which told me that in her own queer little way she was trying to punish me for my failure to come to see her oftener with inquiries about Jack. She evidently thought that my vanity would be piqued at the thought of Jack becoming interested in any other woman after his life-long devotion to me.
But I flatter myself that my voice was absolutely non-committal as I answered her.
"Yes, I do," I agreed, "and what a tragedy it seems that he should be snatched away from the prospect of happiness."
The words were sincere. I was sure.
And yet—