Where was Jack at this moment, this quiet moment of a monotonous English winter day?—so like the days of all the other years that it was impossible to think of what was happening a few hours' journey away across the Channel. Impossible to think of it; yet the thick throb of her heart spoke to the full of its significance. She had told herself from the beginning—passionate, rebellious creature as, at bottom, she knew herself to be, always in need of discipline and only in these later years schooled to a control and submission that, in her youth, she would have believed impossible to her—she had told herself, when he had gone from her, that, as a soldier’s widow, she must see her soldier son go to death. She must give him to that; be ready for it; and if he came back to her it would be as if he were born again, a gift, a grace, unexpected and unclaimed. She must feel, for herself as well as for her country, that these days of dread were also days of a splendour and beauty unmatched by any in England’s history, and that a soldier’s widow must ask for no more glorious fate for her son than death in such a cause. She had told herself all this many times; yet, as she sat there, her hands folded on her lap, her eyes on the stream below, she felt that she was now merely motherhood, tense, huddled, throbbing and longing, longing for its child.
Then, suddenly, she heard Jack’s footsteps. They came, quick and light, along the garden path; they entered the wood; they were near, but softened by the fallen leaves. And, half rising, afraid of her own joy, she hardly knew that she saw him before she was in his arms; and it was better to meet thus, in the blindness and darkness of their embrace, her cheek pressed against his hair, his head buried close between her neck and shoulder.
“Jack!—Jack!” she heard herself say.
He said nothing, holding her tightly to him, with quick breaths; and even after she had opened her eyes and could look down at him,—her own, her dear, beautiful Jack,—could see the nut-brown head, the smooth brown cheek, the firm brown hand which grasped her, he did not for a long time raise his head and look at her. When, at last, he did look up, she could not tell, through her tears, whether, like herself, he was trying to smile.
They sat down together on the bench. She did not ask him why he had not wired. That question pressed too sharply on her heart; to ask might seem to reproach.
“Darling—you are so thin,—so much older,—but you look—strong and well.”
“We’re all of us extraordinarily fit, mummy. It’s wholesome, living in mud.”
“And wholesome living among bursting shells? I had your last letter telling of that miraculous escape.”
“There have been a lot more since then. Every day seems a miracle—that one’s alive at the end of it.”
“But you get used to it?”