Missing

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

CHAPTER V

'Is Mrs. Sarratt in?' asked Miss Martin of Mrs. Weston's little maid,
Milly.

Milly wore a look of animation, as of one who has been finding the world interesting.

'She's gone a walk—over the bridge, Miss.'

'Has she had news of Mr. Sarratt?'

'Yes, Miss,' said the girl eagerly. 'He's all right. Mrs. Sarratt got a telegram just a couple of hours ago.'

'And you think I shall find her by the lake?'

Milly thought so. Then advancing a step, she said confidentially—

'She's been dreadfully upset this two days, Miss. Not that she'd say anything. But she's looked———'

'I know. I saw her yesterday.'

'And it's been a job to get her to eat anything. Mrs. Weston's been after her with lots of things—tasty you know, Miss—to try and tempt her. But she wouldn't hardly look at them.'

'Thank you, Milly'—said Miss Martin, after a pause. 'Well, I'll find her. Is Miss Cookson here?'

Milly's candid countenance changed at once. She frowned—it might have been said she scowled.

'She came the day Mr. Sarratt went away, Miss. Well of course it's not my place to speak, Miss—but she don't do Mrs. Sarratt no good!' Miss Martin couldn't help a smile—but she shook her head reprovingly all the same, as she hastened away. Milly had been in her Sunday-school class, and they were excellent friends.

Across the Rotha, she pursued a little footpath leading to the lakeside. It was a cold day, with flying clouds and gleams on hill and water. The bosom of Silver How held depths of purple shadow, but there were lights like elves at play, chasing each other along the Easedale fells, and the stony side of Nab Scar.

Beside the water, on a rock, sat Nelly Sarratt. An open telegram and a bundle of letters lay on her lap, her hands loosely folded over them. She was staring at the water and the hills, with absent eyes, and her small face wore an expression—relaxed and sweet—like that of a comforted child, which touched Miss Martin profoundly.

'So you've heard?—you poor thing!' said the elder woman smiling, as she laid a friendly hand on the girl's shoulder.

Nelly looked up—and drew a long deep breath.

'He's all right, and the battalion's going to have three weeks' rest—behind the lines.'

Her dark eyes shone. Hester Martin sat down on the turf beside her.

'Capital! When did you hear last?'

'Just the day before the "push." Of course he couldn't tell me anything—but somehow I knew. And then the papers since—they're pretty ghastly,' said Nelly, with a faint laugh and a shiver. 'The farm under the hill there'—she pointed—'you know about them?'

'Yes. I saw them after the telegram,' said Miss Martin, sadly. 'Of course it was the only son. These small families are too awful. Every married woman ought to have six sons!'

Nelly dropped her face out of sight, shading it with her hands.
Presently she said, in a dreamy voice of content—

'I shall get a letter to-morrow.'

'How do you know?'

Nelly held out the telegram, which said—

'All safe. Posted letter last night. Love.'

'It can't take more than forty-eight hours to come—can it?' Then she lifted her eyes again to the distant farm, with its white front and its dark patch of yews.

'I keep thinking of their telegram—' she said, slowly—'and then of mine. Oh, this war is too horrible!' She threw up her hands with a sudden wild gesture, and then let one of them drop into Hester Martin's grasp. 'In George's last letter he told me he had to go with a message across a bit of ground that was being shelled. He went with a telephonist. He crossed first. The other man was to wait and follow him after an interval. George got across, then the man with the telephone wire started, and was shot—just as he reached George. He fell into George's arms—and died. And it might have been George—it might have been George just as well! It might be George any day!'

Miss Martin looked at her in perplexity. She had no ready-made consolations—she never had. Perhaps it was that which made her kind wrinkled face such a welcome sight to those in trouble. But at last she said—'It is all we women can do—to be patient—and hope—not to let our courage go down.'

Nelly shook her head.

'I am always saying that to myself—but! when the news comes—if it comes—what good will that be to me! Oh, I haven't been idle—indeed I haven't,' she added piteously—'I've worked myself tired every day—just not to think!'

'I know you have,' Miss Martin pressed the hand in hers. 'Well, now, he'll be all safe for a fortnight———'

'Perhaps three weeks,' Nelly corrected her, eagerly. Then she looked round at her new friend, a shy smile lighting up her face, and bringing back its bloom.

'You know he writes to me nearly every day?'

'It's the way people have—war or no war—when they're in love,' said
Hester Martin drily. 'And you—how often?'

'Every day. I haven't missed once. How could I?—when he wants me to write—when I hear so often!' And her free hand closed possessively, greedily, over the letters in her lap.

Hester Martin surveyed her thoughtfully.

'I wouldn't do war-work all day, if I were you,' she said at last. 'Why don't you go on with your sketching?'

'I was going to try this very afternoon. Sir William said he would give me a lesson,' was the listless reply.

'He's coming here?'

'He said he would be walking this way, if it was fine,' said Nelly, indifferently.

Both relapsed into silence. Then Miss Martin enquired after Bridget. The face beside her darkened a little.

'She's very well. She knows about the telegram. She thought I was a great goose to be so anxious. She's making an index now—for the book!'

'The psychology book?'

'Yes!' A pause—then Nelly looked round, flushing.

'I can't talk to Bridget you see—about George—or the war. She just thinks the world's mad—that it's six to one and half a dozen to the other—that it doesn't matter at all who wins—so long of course as the Germans don't come here. And as for me, if I was so foolish as to marry a soldier in the middle of the war, why I must just take the consequences—grin and bear it!'

Her tone and look showed that in her clinging way she had begun to claim the woman beside her as a special friend, while Hester Martin's manner towards her bore witness that the claim excited a warm response—that intimacy and affection had advanced rapidly since George Sarratt's departure.

'Why do you put up with it?' said Miss Martin, sharply. 'Couldn't you get some cousin—some friend to stay with you?'

Nelly shook her head. 'George wanted me to. But I told him I couldn't.
It would mean a quarrel. I could never quarrel with Bridget.'

Miss Martin laughed indignantly. 'Why not—if she makes you miserable?'

'I don't know. I suppose I'm afraid of her. And besides'—the words came reluctantly—: 'she does a lot for me. I ought to be very grateful!'

Yes, Hester Martin did know that, in a sense, Bridget did 'a lot' for her younger sisters. It was not many weeks since she had made their acquaintance, but there had been time for her to see how curiously dependent young Mrs. Sarratt was on Miss Cookson. There was no real sympathy between them; nor could Miss Martin believe that there was ever much sense of kinship. But whenever there was anything to be done involving any friction with the outside world, Bridget was ready to do it, while Nelly invariably shrank from it.

For instance, some rather troublesome legal business connected with Nelly's marriage, and the reinvestment of a small sum of money, had descended on the young wife almost immediately after George's departure. She could hardly bring herself to look at the letter. What did it matter? Let their trustee settle it. To be worrying about it seemed to be somehow taking her mind from George—to be breaking in on that imaginative vision of him, and his life in the trenches, which while it tortured her, yet filled the blank of his absence. So Bridget did it all—corresponded peremptorily with their rather old and incompetent trustee, got all the signatures necessary out of Nelly, and carried the thing through. Again, on another and smaller occasion, Miss Martin had seen the two sisters confronted with a scandalous overcharge for the carriage of some heavy luggage from Manchester. Nelly was aghast; but she would have paid the sum demanded like a lamb, if Bridget had not stepped in—grappled with carter and railway company, while Nelly looked on, helpless but relieved.

It was clear that Nelly's inborn wish to be liked, her quivering responsiveness, together with a strong dose of natural indolence, made her hate disagreement or friction of any kind. She was always yielding—always ready to give in. But when Bridget in her harsh aggravating way fought things out and won, Nelly was indeed often made miserable, by the ricochet of the wrath roused by Bridget's methods upon herself; but she generally ended, all the same, by realising that Bridget had done her a service which she could not have done for herself.

Hester Martin frankly thought the sister odious, and pitied the bride for having to live with her. All the same she often found herself wondering how Nelly would ever manage the practical business of life alone, supposing loneliness fell to her at any time. But why should it fall to her?—unless indeed Sarratt were killed in action. If he survived the war he would make her the best of guides and husbands; she would have children; and her sweetness, her sensitiveness would stiffen under the impact of life to a serviceable toughness. But meanwhile what could she do—poor little Ariadne!—but 'live and be lovely'—sew and knit, and gather sphagnum moss—dreaming half her time, and no doubt crying half the night. What dark circles already round the beautiful eyes! And how transparent were the girl's delicate hands! Miss Martin felt that she was watching a creature on whom love had been acting with a concentrated and stimulating energy, bringing the whole being suddenly and rapidly into flower. And now, what had been only stimulus and warmth had become strain, and, sometimes, anguish, or fear. The poor drooping plant could with difficulty maintain itself.

For the moment however, Nelly, in her vast relief, was ready to talk and think of quite ordinary matters.

'Bridget is in a good temper with me to-day!' she said presently, looking with a smile at her companion—'because—since the telegram came—I told her I would accept Miss Farrell's invitation to go and spend a Sunday with them.'

'Well, it might distract you. But you needn't expect to get much out of
Cicely!'

The old face lit up with its tolerant, half-sarcastic smile.

'I shall be dreadfully afraid of her!' said Nelly.

'No need to be. William will keep her in order. She is a foolish woman, Cicely, and her own worst enemy, but—somehow'—The speaker paused. She was about to say—'somehow I am fond of her'—when she suddenly wondered whether the remark would be true, and stopped herself.

'I think she's very—very good-looking'—said Nelly, heartily. 'Only, why'—she hesitated, but her half-laughing look continued the sentence.

'Why does she blacken her eyebrows, and paint her lips, and powder her cheeks? Is that what you mean?'

Nelly's look was apologetic. 'She doesn't really want it, does she?' she said shyly, as though remembering that she was speaking to a kinswoman of the person discussed. 'She could do so well without it.'

'No—to be quite candid, I don't think she would look so well without it. That's the worst of it. It seems to suit her to be made up!—though everybody knows it is make-up.'

'Of course, if George wanted me to "make up," I should do it at once,' said Nelly, thoughtfully, propping her chin on her hands, and staring at the lake. 'But he hates it. Is—is Miss Farrell—' she looked round—'in love with anybody?'

Miss Martin laughed.

'I'll leave you to find out—when you go there. So if your husband liked you to paint and powder, you would do it?'

The older woman looked curiously at her companion. As she sat there, on a rock above the lake, in a grey nurse's dress with a nurse's bonnet tied under her chin, Hester Martin conveyed an impression of rugged and unconscious strength which seemed to fuse her with the crag behind her. She had been gathering sphagnum moss on the fells almost from sunrise that morning; and by tea-time she was expecting a dozen munition-workers from Barrow, whom she was to house, feed and 'do for,' in her little cottage over the week-end. In the interval, she had climbed the steep path to that white farm where death had just entered, and having mourned with them that mourn, she had come now, as naturally, to rejoice with Nelly Sarratt.

Nelly considered her question, but not in any doubtfulness of mind.

'Indeed, I would,' she said, decidedly. 'Isn't it my duty to make George happy?'

'What "George"? If Mr. Sarratt wanted you to paint and powder——'

'He wouldn't be the "George" I married? There's something in that!' laughed Nelly. Then she lifted her hand to shade her eyes against the westering sun—'Isn't that Sir William coming?'

She pointed doubtfully to a distant figure walking along the path that skirts the western edge of the lake. Miss Martin put up her glasses.

'Certainly. Coming no doubt to give you a lesson. But where are your sketching things?'

Nelly rose in a hurry.

'I forgot about them when I came out. The telegram—' She pressed her hands to her eyes, with a long breath.

'I'll run back for them. Will you tell him?'

She departed, and Hester awaited her cousin. He came slowly along the lake, his slight lameness just visible in his gait—otherwise a splendid figure of a man, with a bare head, bearded and curled, like a Viking in a drawing by William Morris. He carried various artist's gear slung about him, and an alpenstock. His thoughts were apparently busy, for he came within a few yards of Hester Martin, before he saw her.

'Hullo! Hester—you here? I came to get some news of Mrs. Sarratt and her husband. Is he all right?'

Hester repeated the telegram, and added the information that seeing him coming, Mrs. Sarratt had gone in search of her sketching things.

'Ah!—I thought if she'd got good news she might like to begin,' said Farrell. 'Poor thing—she's lucky! Our casualties these last few days have been awful, and the gain very small. Men or guns—that's our choice just now. And it will be months before we get the guns. So practically, there's no choice. Somebody ought to be hung!'

He sat down frowning. But his face soon cleared, and he began to study the point of view.

'Nothing to be made of it but a picture post-card,' he declared.
'However I daresay she'll want to try it. They always do—the beginners.
The more ambitious and impossible the thing, the better.'

'Why don't you teach her?' said Hester, severely.

Farrell laughed.

'Why I only want to amuse her, poor little soul!' he said, as he put his easel together. 'Why should she take it seriously?'

'She's more intelligence than you think.'

'Has she? What a pity! There are so many intelligent people in the world, and so few pretty ones,'

He spoke with a flippant self-confidence that annoyed his cousin. But she knew very well that she was poorly off in the gifts that were required to scourge him. And there already was the light form of Nelly, on the footbridge over the river. Farrell looked up and saw her coming.

'Extraordinary—the grace of the little thing!' he said, half to himself, half to Hester. 'And she knows nothing about it—or seems to.'

'Do you imagine that her husband hasn't told her?' Hester's tone was mocking.

Farrell looked up in wonder. 'Sarratt? of course he has—so far as he has eyes to see it. But he has no idea how remarkable it is.'

'What? His wife's beauty? Nonsense!'

'How could he? It wants a trained eye,' said Farrell, quite serious.
'Hush!—here she comes.'

Nelly came up breathlessly, laden with her own paraphernalia. Farrell at once perceived that she was pale and hollow-eyed. But her expression was radiant.

'How kind of you to come!' she said, looking up at him. 'You know I've had good news—splendid news?'

'I do indeed. I came to ask,' he said gravely. 'He's out of it for a bit?'

'Yes, for three weeks!'

'So you can take a rest from worrying?'

She nodded brightly, but she was not yet quite mistress of her nerves, and her face quivered. He turned away, and began to set his palette, while she seated herself.

Hester watched the lesson for half an hour, till it was time to go and make ready for her munition-workers. And she watched it with increasing pleasure, and increasing scorn of a certain recurrent uneasiness she had not been able to get rid of. Nothing could have been better than Farrell's manner to Ariadne. It was friendly, chivalrous, respectful—all it should be—with a note of protection, of unspoken sympathy, which, coming from a man nearly twenty years older than the little lady herself, was both natural and attractive. He made an excellent teacher besides, handling her efforts with a mixture of criticism and praise, which presently roused Nelly's ambition, and kindled her cheeks and eyes. Time flew and when Hester Martin rose to leave them, Nelly cried out in protest—'It can't be five o'clock!'

'A quarter to—just time to get home before my girls arrive!'

'Oh, and I must go too,' said Nelly regretfully. 'I promised Bridget I would be in for tea. But I was getting on—wasn't I?' She turned to Farrell.

'Swimmingly. But you've only just begun. Next time the sitting must be longer.'

'Will you—will you come in to tea?'—she asked him shyly. 'My sister would be very glad.'

'Many thanks—but I am afraid I can't. I shall be motoring back to Carton to-night. To-morrow is one of my hospital days. I told you how I divided my week, and salved my conscience.'

He smiled down upon her from his great height, his reddish gold hair and beard blown by the wind, and she seemed to realise him as a great, manly, favouring presence, who made her feel at ease.

Hester Martin had already vanished over the bridge, and Farrell and Nelly strolled back more leisurely towards the lodgings, he carrying her canvas sketching bag.

On the way she conveyed to him her own and Bridget's acceptance of the
Carton invitation.

'If Miss Farrell won't mind our clothes—or rather our lack of them! I did mean to have my wedding dress altered into an evening dress—but!——'

She lifted her hand and let it fall, in a sad significant gesture which pleased his fastidious eye.

'You hadn't even the time of the heart for it? I should think not!' he said warmly. 'Who cares about dress nowadays?'

'Your sister!' thought Nelly—but aloud she said—

'Well then we'll come—we'll be delighted to come. May I see the hospital?'

'Of course. It's like any other hospital.'

'Is it very full now?' she asked him uneasily, her bright look clouding.

'Yes—but it ebbs and flows. Sometimes for a day or two all our men depart. Then there is a great rush.'

'Are they bad cases?'

There was an unwilling insistence in her voice, as though her mind dealt with images it would gladly have put away, but could not.

'A good many of them. They send them us as straight as they can from the front. But the surgeons are wonderfully skilful. It's simply marvelous what they can do.'

He seemed to see a shiver pass through her slight shoulders, and he changed the subject at once. The Carton motor should come for her and her sister, he said, whenever they liked, the following Saturday afternoon. The run would take about an hour. Meanwhile—

'Do you want any more books or magazines?' he asked her smiling, with the look of one only eager to be told how to serve her. They had paused in the road outside the lodgings.

'Oh I how could we! You sent us such a bundle!' cried Nelly gratefully. 'We are always finding something new in it. It makes the evenings so different. We will bring them back when we come.'

'Don't hurry. And go on with the drawing. I shall expect to see it a great deal further on next time. It's all right so far.'

He went his way back, speedily, taking a short cut over Loughrigg to his cottage. His thoughts, as he climbed, were very full of Mrs. Sarratt. But they were the thoughts of an artist—of a man who had studied beauty, and the European tradition of beauty, whether in form or landscape, for many years; who had worked—à contre coeur—in a Paris studio, and had copied Tintoret—fervently—in Venice; who had been a collector of most things, from Tanagra figures to Delia Robbias. She made an impression upon him in her lightness and grace, her small proportions, her lissomness of outline, very like that of a Tanagra figure. How had she come to spring from Manchester? What kindred had she with the smoke and grime of a great business city? He fell into amused speculation. Manchester has always possessed colonies of Greek merchants. Somewhere in the past was there some strain of southern blood which might account for her? He remembered a beautiful Greek girl at an Oxford Commemoration, when he had last attended that function; the daughter of a Greek financier settled in London, whose still lovely mother had been drawn and painted interminably by the Burne Jones and William Morris group of artists. She was on a larger scale than Mrs. Sarratt, but the colour of the flesh was the same—as though light shone through alabaster—and the sweetness of the deep-set eyes. Moreover she had produced much the same effect on the bystander, as of a child of nature, a creature of impulse and passion—passion, clinging and self-devoted, not fierce and possessive—through all the more superficial suggestions of reticence and self-control. 'This little creature is only at the beginning of her life'—he thought, with a kind of pity for her very softness and exquisiteness. 'What the deuce will she have made of it, by the end? Why should such beings grow old?'

His interest in her led him gradually to other thoughts—partly disagreeable, partly philosophical. He had once—and only once—found himself involved in a serious love-affair, which, as it had left him a bachelor, had clearly come to no good. It was with a woman much older than himself—gifted—more or less famous—a kind of modern Corinne whom he had met for a month in Rome in his first youth. Corinne had laid siege to him, and he had eagerly, whole-heartedly succumbed. He saw himself, looking back, as the typically befooled and bamboozled mortal; for Corinne, in the end, had thrown him over for a German professor, who admired her books and had a villa on the Janiculum. During the eighteen years which had elapsed since their adventure, he had quite made it up with her, and had often called at the Janiculan villa, with its antiques, its window to the view, and the great Judas tree between it and Rome. His sense of escape—which grew upon him—was always tempered by a keen respect for the lady's disinterestedness, and those high ideals which must have led her—for what else could?—to prefer the German professor, who had so soon become decrepit, to himself. But the result of it all had been that the period of highest susceptibility and effervescence had passed by, leaving him still unmarried. Since then he had had many women-friends, following harmlessly a score of 'chance desires'! But he had never wanted to marry anybody; and the idea of surrendering the solitude and independence of his pleasant existence had now become distasteful to him. Renan in some late book speaks of his life as 'cette charmante promenade à travers la realité.' Farrell could have adopted much the same words about his own—until the war. The war had made him think a good deal, like Sarratt; though the thoughts of a much travelled, epicurean man of the world were naturally very different from those of the young soldier. At least 'the surge and thunder' of the struggle had developed in Farrell a new sensitiveness, a new unrest, as though youth had returned upon him. The easy, drifting days of life before the catastrophe were gone. The 'promenade' was no longer charming. But the jagged and broken landscape through which it was now taking him, held him often—like so many others—breathless with strange awes, strange questionings. And all the more, because, owing to his physical infirmity, he must be perforce a watcher, a discontented watcher, rather than an actor, in the great scene.

* * * * *

That night Nelly, sitting at her open window, with starlight on the lake, and the cluster rose sending its heavy scent into the room—wrote to her husband.

'My darling—it is just a little more than eight hours since I got your telegram. Sometimes it seems like nothing—and then like days—days of happiness. I was very anxious. But I know I oughtn't to write about that. You say it helps you if I keep cheerful, and always expect the best and not the worst. Indeed, George, I do keep cheerful. Ask Miss Martin—ask Bridget—'

At this point two splashes fell, luckily not on the letter, but on the blotting paper beside it, and Nelly hastily lifted her handkerchief to dry a pair of swimming eyes.

'But he can't see—he won't know!' she thought, apologising to herself; yet wrestling at the same time with the sharp temptation to tell him exactly how she had suffered, that he might comfort her. But she repelled it. Her moral sense told her that she ought to be sustaining and strengthening him—rather than be hanging upon him the burden of her own fears and agonies.

She went on bravely—

'Of course, after the news in the paper this morning,—and yesterday—I was worried till I heard. I knew—at any rate I guessed—you must have been in it all. And now you are safe, my own own!—for three whole blessed weeks. Oh, how well I shall sleep all that time—and how much work I shall do! But it won't be all war-work. Sir William Farrell came over to-day, and showed me how to begin a drawing of the lake. I shall finish it for your birthday, darling. Of course you won't want to be bothered with it out there. I shall keep it till you come. The lake is so beautiful to-night, George. It is warmer again, and the stars are all out. The mountains are so blue and quiet—the water so still. But for the owls, everything seems asleep. But they call and call—and the echo goes round the lake. I can just see the island, and the rocks round which the boat drifted—that last night. How good you were to me—how I loved to sit and look at you, with the light on your dear face—and the oars hanging—and the shining water—

'And then I think of where you are—and what you have been seeing in that awful fighting. But not for long. I try to put it away.

'George, darling!—you know what you said when you went away—what you hoped might come—to make us both happy—and take my thoughts off the war? But, dear, it isn't so—you mustn't hope it. I shall be dreadfully sorry if you are disappointed. But you'll only find me—your own Nelly—not changed a bit—when you come back.

'I want to hear everything when you write—how your men did—whether you took any prisoners, whether there was ammunition enough, or whether you were short again? I feel every day that I ought to go and make munitions—but somehow—I can't. We are going to Carton on Saturday. Bridget is extremely pleased. I rather dread it. But I shall be able to write you a long letter about it on Sunday morning, instead of going to church. There is Rydal chapel striking twelve! My darling—my darling!—good-night.'