Georgina's Service Stars

by Annie F. Johnston

Aunt Elspeth sat dozing in her wheeled chair inside the screen door. When we went in she didn't recognize Father. Had to be told who he was. But when she got it through her head that it was "Judson, grown up and come back from sea," she was fairly childish in her welcome of him. She wanted him to hide as he used to do when he was a boy and let "Dan'l" guess who was there when he came home. And Father humored her, and we went out into the kitchen when we heard Uncle Darcy click the gate-latch. Then in her childish delight at his home-coming she forgot everything else. She even forgot we were in the house, so, of course, couldn't ask him to guess who was there.

He came in breathing hard, for the length of the town is a long walk when one is "eighty odd." He had been crying a church supper, and was so tired his feet could scarcely drag him along. But he didn't sit down—just put the big bell on the mantel and went over to Aunt Elspeth. And then, somehow, the tenderness of a lifetime seemed expressed in the way he bent down and laid his weatherbeaten old cheek against her wrinkled one for a moment, and took her helpless old hands in his, feeling them anxiously and trying to warm them between his rough palms.

There was something so touching in his unspoken devotion and the way she clung to him, as if the brief separation of a few hours had been one of days, that I felt a lump in my throat and glanced up to see that the little scene seemed to affect Father in the same way.

Then Uncle Darcy fumbled in his pocket and brought out a paper bag and laid it in her lap, watching her with a pleased twinkle in his dim eyes, while she eagerly untwisted the neck and peered in to find a big, sugary cinnamon bun.

"You're so good to me, Dan'l," she said quaveringly. "Always so good. You're the best man the Lord ever made."

And he patted her shoulder and pulled the cushions up behind her, saying, "Tut, lass! You'll spoil me, talking that way."

Then Father cleared his throat and went into the room, and Uncle Darcy's delight at seeing him was worth going far to see. You'd have thought it was his own son come home again. But even in the midst of all they had to say to each other it was plain that his mind was on Aunt Elspeth's comfort. Twice he got up to slap at a fly which had found its way in through the screens to her annoyance, and another time to change the position of her chair when the shifting sunlight reached her face.

On the way home I asked, "Did you ever see such devotion?" I was so sure that Father would answer that he never had, that I was surprised and somewhat taken aback by his emphatic yes. His face looked so stern and sad that I couldn't understand it. We walked nearly a block before he added,

"It was an old, old couple, just like Uncle Darcy and Aunt Elspeth. I kept thinking of them all the time I was at Fishburn Court. Their home was just as peaceful, their devotion to each other as absolute. It was in Belgium. The Huns came and tore them apart. Bayoneted her right before the old man's agonized eyes, and drove him off with the other villagers like frightened, helpless sheep, to die in the open. When he wandered back weeks afterward, dazed and half-starved, he found every home in the village in ruins. His was burned to the ground. Only the well was left, but when he drank of it he nearly died. It had been poisoned. He's in an asylum now, near Paris. Fortunately, his memory is gone."

When I cried out at the hideousness of it, Father put his arm across my shoulder a moment saying, "Forgive me, dear. I wish I might keep the knowledge of such horrors from you, but we are at a place now where even the youngest must be made to realize that the only thing in the world worth while is the winning of this war. Sometimes I feel that I must stop every one I meet and tell them of the horrors I have seen, till they feel and see as I do."