I
“We’re entraining on the ‘eleven o’clock’ for New York to-night, Madge. I’m supposed to have my men on the transport to-morrow at noon.” Gordon pulled back a khaki sleeve and looked at his gunmetal wrist-watch. “I must be back at the Armory at nine o’clock sharp. It will take me half an hour to reach it. It’s now five minutes to eight. So I suppose, like most of the boys about the city to-night, I’ve got to cram eternity into thirty-five fateful minutes.” Gordon said the words with a smile. But his features were white as chalk. “I suppose, Madge, it’s good-by!”
“But you didn’t expect orders for two weeks yet, Gordon!” Madeline arose from the divan with a hand against her heart.
“I know it, Madge! But the order came through suddenly.”
“Sit down, Gordon!” The girl’s request was a piteous whisper.
Gordon laid his officer’s cap on a corner of the table.
His new puttees creaked as he sank in an opposite chair.
“Does this mean—our last meeting—before you go to France?” Madelaine groped for the seat behind her and her knees wilted.
“By this time to-morrow night, I’ll be dodging submarines. Ho for a life on the bounding main!” The man’s tone affected a lightness that was ghastly.
Madelaine’s throat was cruelly dry as she appraised his fine figure. His outfit was so new it seemed as though he were only playing at war. He was so clean-shaven his cheeks were blue. His hair was close-cropped. His mouth was firm. His eye was straight and true. He was a man!
“It’s come so quickly! I’m all unprepared—to say good-by—to-night, Gordon, dear!”
“It’s all in the business—the dirty business of wiping the earth clean of Huns. But let’s not talk about that. Let’s talk about ourselves. Let’s talk about—you!”
Madelaine closed her eyes. Her head was light. In her heart was an ache like an ulcer. Then all the nights she had ever lived had narrowed down to this! Gordon was going away and might never come back. Did that ache in her heart mean that at last she knew she loved him? Had she discovered in the past two weeks what it meant for a woman to send a man to war?
“Gordon—it seems—it seems—as if all I’d like to do would be to sit quietly and—say nothing!”
Gordon leaned forward with elbows on his knees. He studied his hands for a moment,—lithe, patrician hands. Very quietly he said:
“I’d like to take that to mean that you care, Madge. A little bit!”
Madelaine pressed her hands against her eyes.
“Oh, Gord,” she said in a hoarse, difficult whisper. “If I only knew—for a certainty. If I only did! If I only could!”
“Doesn’t a woman recognize love when it comes to her, Madge?”
“She should. That’s just it. Maybe that’s the trouble.”
“Madge, what is the trouble between you and me? Is it what went before—the sort of a chap I started out to be?”
“No! No! Somehow I’ve never thought of you that way the last few years. You’re not the same man at all. But—but—it’s a serious thing for a woman to send a man to war under the impression she loves him, when she isn’t sure of it herself. And real love—the long, fine, enduring kind—ought not to leave any room for doubt.”
“I’ve never begged for your love, Madge. I’ll not begin now. I hoped to command it——”
“And oh, how splendidly you’ve done, Gordon! I’m so proud of you—as I see you sitting here in your new uniform now and compare you with a boy I faced one horrible night in a Boston hotel. I’m so proud of you it hurts. But I’m wondering if love can be even commanded, Gordon? It just comes unannounced, for no apparent reason in the world, excepting that two people realize they’ve been created for each other and want to be together always. And Gordon—in fairness to you—I don’t know that our recognition has yet come—that way! Maybe—maybe—the war will show it.”
“I may not come back from the war, Madge.” He did not say it as a threat or in self-pity. It was a simple statement of fact which he made no effort to ignore.
“I know, Gordon! Oh, how I wish I had a few weeks more to decide. You want me, don’t you, dear? There’s no doubt in your love, is there?”
An unusual thing happened, unusual for an erect, clean-cut, strong-jawed young lieutenant in khaki only a few days back from Plattsburg. As Madelaine turned her large, luminous eyes toward his face, she saw his own, brimming tears. Those tears dropped down his smoothly shaven cheeks and off the point of his cleft chin. He made no move to brush them away—did not act as though he realized they were there.
“No, Madelaine,” he said solemnly, “in my love for you there’s no doubt. There’s never been a doubt. And I brought you something to-night I hope to leave with you—as a pledge between us—until ‘the war is over.’”
His fingers were steady, as steady as his voice when he unbuttoned the breast pocket of his uniform and from it took a little box of wine-red plush. He snapped back the cover.
The library lamp caught an iridescent drop of white fire, cold as a thousand winters, pure as a baby’s tear, with all the love and tragedy of the race deep in its refractive depths.
Gordon passed it across.
It was the ring he hoped her to wear,—the gift which stood for his heart. It was significant that the man did not take the ring from its white satin casket. He did not try to crush it on her finger.
The girl gazed down upon it.
“You beautiful, beautiful thing!” she whispered reverently.
“Somehow I had to save it for the last minute, dear. I’ve carried it for weeks because—because—I either wanted to go away deliriously happy or knowing there wasn’t any hope. Then war would be mighty welcome.”
“Don’t say that, Gordon! It—implies a weakness!”
“I might as well be honest, Madge.”
“Gordon, if I take this ring and wear it, I’ll be engaged to you. And if you come back safely, it means that we’ll be married.”
“Pray God I come!”
“Do you know what it means for a girl to be engaged to a man? After the word is spoken, that man will be my life and my world.”
“I know.”
“Then don’t you see at what a cruel disadvantage you’re placing me? To leave this until the last moment so? To ask me to love you forever—while in my heart there’s the least little doubt?”
“You know I didn’t mean it for an intrigue, Madge.”
“True! I can’t conceive of you doing such a thing—now. And yet, oh, Gordon, I want so much to make you happy, to reward you for your manhood and your faith and your hope. And yet, dear boy, I want to be happy, deliriously happy, myself. Not for my own selfishness but because that much will also be due to you!”
Her appeal was suddenly that of the lonely little orphan girl pleading for a chance to give of her nameless life and love to its fullest.
“Gordon!”
“Yes, dear?”
“Can’t we—can’t we—let the war decide?”
“What do you mean, let the war decide?”
“Can’t you go away with my promise that when you return you shall have my answer—with the knowledge that you’re the first man thus far in my life—that I love you more dearly than any other man up till to-night—that the ending of the war may bring more happiness than either of us dare dream? Can’t you go away being happy and temporarily satisfied with that?”
His voice was like aching iron as he asked:
“You wish it, Madelaine?”
“I wish it—yes!”
“And—what of the ring?”
“Because you’re so far the dearest man in my life—closer than any man has yet become—I’ll keep the ring. But it must lie in white satin until I’m sure. Then when the Better World we’re fighting for has come, and you return with victory—perhaps there’ll be an Amethyst Moment when you may take this beautiful thing from its satin and place it on my finger, Gordon. And if the doubt is all washed away, that moment will be very, very sweet. That’s half a promise, Gordon. But it can’t be a full promise—yet. I must know for certain.”
“If you wish it, Madelaine. Above everything, your happiness comes first.”
She moved over so that by leaning forward she could drop her forehead on his tightly interlaced fingers. Her free tears fell upon those fingers. He unclasped them. One hand smoothed her wondrous hair. Then he bent and placed a kiss upon that hair, tenderly.
“I know you love me very much indeed, when you say that, Gordon. A girl could easily trust herself to a man who’d think of her happiness so much at such a time as this.”
For fifteen minutes that would never come again they sat so, the girl’s left hand gripping the wine-colored box and the trinket which meant the ultimate surrender of her womanhood and heart forever. Her deft fingers toyed with the clasp. Her other hand gripped Gordon’s wrist. And that hand was cold.
“And if I don’t come back, dear?” he said hoarsely at last.
“Maybe, Gordon, I’ll wear no other ring—the rest of my life. Who knows?”
“Perhaps, after all, dear girl, it’s better so.”
“But even until I know, I shall have a little song in my heart, dear. I shall have a man at the wars. And he is a man! Of that there’s never a doubt. Not even now, to-night.”
Verily in the life of every man, sooner or later, comes one white-hot moment when small things drop away. Prophets and seers are silenced and dismissed. The earth is without form and void. Darkness is often upon the face of the deep. With only great thoughts, great feelings, great decencies left in nakedness to give what help they can in that zero hour in Gethsemane, a man proves himself, not for what others have tried to make or unmake him, but for what he will be when God has returned and ordered there be light again.
Gordon arose, that last night, that last hour, that last moment, alone with the girl he loved. And because his own happiness would perchance make that girl unhappy, at least cast a shadow upon her happiness, he accepted a great disappointment. And he never murmured.
“I must go,” he said simply.
The girl stood before him, pale and fine, exquisite and fragile, the biggest and best thing that had ever been in his life. Calm eyes were starry now. They were raised to his face. She was trying to smile. She could not send him away knowing she had not smiled.
“Gordon!”
“Yes, dear,” he answered huskily.
“You may kiss me—if you will, Gordon. My lips are yours—just once—to-night—freely.”
He stole his arms about her soft shoulders as though he feared to profane and desecrate a holy thing. She raised her sweet face to his, fearlessly, poignantly, softened with the parting.
He kissed her. But it was not upon her lips. It was upon her fine, cold forehead.
The choice had been his. He could have tasted her lips, but he did not want to remember them—so. He had changed much in the last few years. He went away without that memory to haunt him.
He knew he had lost. Madelaine Theddon would never be his wife.