"God! And she saved my life. Elizabeth, I'd give mine for her, a dozen times over, but——"
"What she needs is for you to give it to her, not for her: give it once and for all, to have and to hold while your heart's in your body."
I fired advice at him like bullets from a Maxim gun, and every bullet reached its billet. I was so carried away by my wish for joy to rise from tragedy that I hardly knew what I said, yet I felt that I had caught Lorillard and carried him with me. The next thing I definitely knew with my mere brain, I was sitting down with elbows on Robert's desk, facing him as he leaned toward me. My whole self was a listening Ear, while he told—as a man hypnotized might tell the hypnotizer—the tale of his acquaintance with Joyce Arnold.
I'd already learned from his letter and from words she had let drop that Joyce had nursed him in a hospital in France, when she was "doing her bit" as a V. A. D. But she had been silent about the life-saving episode, which had won for her a decoration and Robert Lorillard's deep admiration and gratitude.
It seemed that during an air raid, when German machines were bombing the hospital, Joyce had in her ward three officers just operated upon, and too weak to walk. A bomb fell and killed one of these as Joyce and another nurse were about to move his cot into the next ward. Then, in a sudden horror of darkness and noise of destroying aeroplanes, she had carried Robert in her arms to a place of comparative safety. After that she had returned to her own ward and got the other man who lay in his cot, though her fellow nurse had been struck down, wounded or dead.
"How she did it I've never known, or she either," said Lorillard, dreaming back into the past. "She's tall and strong, of course, and at that time I was reduced to a living skeleton. Still, even in my bones I'm a good deal bigger than she is. The weight must have been enough to crush her, yet she carried me from one ward to another, in the dark, when the light had been struck out. And the wound in my side never bled a drop. It was like a miracle."
"'Spect she loved you lots already, without quite knowing it," I told him. "There've been miracles going on in the world ever since Christ, and they always will go on, because love works them, and only love. At least, that's my idea! And I don't believe God would have let Joyce work that one, the way she did, if He hadn't meant her love to wake love in you."
"If I could think so," said Robert, "it would make all the difference; for I've been fighting my own heart with the whole strength of my soul, and it's been a hard struggle. I felt it would be such a hideous treachery to June—my beautiful June, who gave herself to me as a goddess might to a mortal!—the meanest ingratitude to let another woman take her place when her back is turned—even such a splendid woman as Joyce Arnold."
"I know just how you feel," I humoured him. "You remember, I was with June when she threw herself into your arms and offered to marry you. You were in love with her, and you'd never dreamed till that minute there was any hope. But that was a different love from this, I'm sure, because no two girls could be more different, one from another, than June Dana and Joyce Arnold. Your love for June was just glorious romance. Perhaps, if she'd lived, and you and she had passed years together as husband and wife, the wonderful colours of the glory would have faded a little. She tired so of every-day things. But Joyce is born to be the companion of a man she loves, and she would never tire or let him tire. You and June hardly had enough time together to realize that you were married. And it's over three years and a half since she—since the gods who loved her let her die young. She can't come to this world again. She basked in joy herself; and she won't grudge it to you, if she knows. And for you, joy and Joyce are one, for the rest of both your lives."
Lorillard sprang up suddenly and seized my hands.