Since I wrote you last I have been to Scotland.
War has shaken the foundations of our Kingdom by the Sea. It has ceased to be a haven and become in very truth a coast defense. The cliffs bristle with guns, they have crept up from the fort, till the nearest one is over the garden wall not fifty yards away. There it stands with its gleaming nozzle to the sea, the gunners unsleeping night and day by its side.
It has become horrible and menacing. Its old-world intimate charm, which belongs to simple places untouched by conventionality, has surely gone, forever sacrificed, as so much else has been, to the monster that has convulsed the world.
When we could not keep the Boy we laid him here in the place he so loved—and it was a crumb of comfort in our sorrow to feel that if he had been given choice he would himself have chosen to sleep on the windy hill above the shore where in his childhood days he used to paddle with his fat brown legs, and his bucket gripped hard in his podgy little hands.
As I sat there by his white cross on the windy hill and listened to the beat of the surf on the rocks below, I wondered what he was thinking of it all, and I felt glad that his dear dust was sleeping sweetly, his soul safe in the Father's House. I think I must tell you here, my soul's friend, of a strange story I have had sent to me from France, a story which affects me and mine. The Boy had his father's genius for friendship, and clung to his chums with all the ardour of his nature. I lost sight of his chief one when Oxford swallowed him. In a busy life like mine there is not time to do all the things one wants to do. The garden of friendship even has to suffer through the lack of cultivation.
This chum was starting what promised to be a brilliant professional career when the war threw him into the vortex. As a young lieutenant of the Engineers he crossed to France and received his death wounds at La Bassée. I was in France at the time and could so easily have found him in the hospital among the sand dunes near Wimereux, only I did not know. I did not even see his name in the Times. You know we don't read the lists so carefully now, most of us are afraid. After a time I got a letter from his mother telling me how he had died. He had lingered three weeks, suffering no pain, fully aware that he could not recover, ready to die as he had lived, without fear, bravely, as brave men only can and do die. His mother was with him to the end. I am not sure whether I envy her. Mine went in a flash without pain or warning, or possible shrinking, straight from one home of love to another. It must wring a mother's heart to watch the candle flickering out so slowly. She wanted to be with him night and day, but he always urged her to leave him at night; both because she never slept and he was better alone. She was very sad until he said one night, "Do go mother, I am never lonely you know, for when you go, Ned comes. He is here all the time—and I want you to know he's waiting for me and I'll be all right over there." All right over there! God, how beautiful it is, and how it comforted me to feel that my son is no more lonely in the Father's House.
Those things are not figments of the imagination, Cornelia—the veil is very thin, and the Lord Christ Himself walks with these dear lads and shows them the way home.
I am glad they are both out of it now—safe forevermore.
My sister, Janet, whom you never met, and who has so long cared for our summer home, is no longer able. She has never really recovered the shock of the Boy's passing—and though she stoutly denies it, the strain of the war had told on her very much. She must have a rest and get away for a while from the guns of the coast defence. So we have let the house. Conceive it, Cornelia, if you can—strangers living and sleeping and possessing our Kingdom by the Sea!
The house the children loved best of all the houses in the world is now in military possession! How truly Florence touched the spring when she said, "Every day there is something to be given up."