CHAPTER XXVI
"THE SERVICE OF SHINING"
Away down the crooked street sounds a faint clang of the Towncrier's bell. Uncle Darcy is out again with it, after his long, shut-in winter. But he is coming very, very slowly. Even the warm sunshine of this wonderful May afternoon cannot quicken his rheumatic old feet so that they do more than crawl along. It will be at least half an hour before he reaches the Green Stairs. He will sit down to rest a bit on the bottom step, as he always does now, and I'll run down and meet him there.
He helps me more than anyone else, because, more than anyone else, he understands what I am enduring. He remembers what he endured all those anxious years when Danny was missing. It's a comfort to have him tell me over and over how his "line to live by" kept him afloat and brought him into port with all flags flying, and that it will do the same for me if I only hold to it fast and hard enough. So I set my teeth together and repeat grimly as he used to do:
"I will not bate a jot
Of heart or hope, but still bear up and steer
Right onward."
But my imagination won't let me say it in a way to do much good. It keeps showing me dreadful pictures of Richard; of what might have happened to him. I keep seeing his body in some God-forsaken field, lying shattered and marred past recognition by the enemy's guns, his dead face turned up to the sky. Or I see him falling headlong to earth in a blazing plane, or, worst of all, in the filth of a German prison camp, weak, wounded, famishing for food and water and tortured in a thousand ways that only the minds of those demons can invent. All the things I've read as happening to other men I imagine happening to him. I see those things over and over and over till I nearly go mad.
When I fold the gauze into bandages and sew the long seams in the hospital garments, with every movement and every stitch I wonder if he needs such comforts, and if needing them, they are given or denied him. I know it doesn't do any good to say that I am hoping as long as I persist in such imaginings, but I don't want to think about anything but Richard. My hands go on working in a normal way, but when I'm not torturing myself as to his whereabouts, I am re-living the past, or picturing the empty years ahead if he should never come back to me. I can't help it.
Because in one of his letters he mentioned that old figurehead on the roof of the Tupman's portico, I have taken to walking past the house every day. Everything even remotely connected with him seems sacred now, even the things he used to laugh at. Because the memory of the figurehead helped him to hang on to the wrecked plane till rescue came, I feel as grateful to it as if it were a human being. Every time I pass it I tell myself I won't stop hoping for a single minute. I won't let myself believe anything else but that he'll come back to me some day. Then with the next breath comes that awful vision of him lying dead in some lonely spot where he can never be found, and it seems to me I simply can't go on living.
"Cousin James" still writes encouragingly, but as the weeks go by and no trace of him can be found in any of the hospitals and no news of him comes through any of the foreign offices, the suspense is getting to be unbearable. I can't admit to anyone how horribly afraid I am, but it is a relief to confess it here. Now that I've done so, I'll run down and talk to Uncle Darcy awhile. He is the living embodiment of hope and faith. The confident, happy way with which he looks forward to joining Aunt Elspeth soon makes me feel better every time I am with him. It brings back what Richard said the day she was buried: "All that they were to each other we will be to one another, and more." If I could only be sure that after this terrible waiting will come such long, placid years as they had! Years of growing nearer and dearer, in a union that old age only strengthens, and death cannot sever.