She bustled out of the room.
Laura, bent and flushed over the task of putting on stockings, for the grasshopper was still a burden for all her high-handedness, wondered how she was to convey to Aunt Adela that there would be no letters from Justin. And from that passed dully to the knowledge that if she had been patient, if she, wise in her own eyes, had not chosen to force the issue, there would have still been ‘letters’ in her life. And who, pray, was she to have doubted Justin? “H.A.C.—the first week!” This was the man that she would have ruled and schooled!... “A shock—that’s what he wants—a shock.” ... her own words were a bitter taste in her mouth. For now it had come, the shock, the real thing—no crazy schoolgirl artifice—and she was justified to her own undoing. “A private—the first week!”
Justified—thank God she was justified. But there would be no letters from Justin.
CHAPTER XXXI
Justin Cloud and Robin Gedge got their commissions on the same day. But while Robin appeared in Brackenhurst every few weeks, bronzed and broadened, to bewail his stagnancy, Justin, by luck o’war, or, as Robin jealously declared, by pulling wires, was out in France and having parcels sent to him before Brackenhurst had set up its first Belgian Committee. Laura, going in to tea with Mrs. Cloud on her way home from the Supply Depôt in the vicarage barn, would sometimes see the parcels being done up; but she was never asked to help. That was the only difference that Mrs. Cloud ever made in her treatment of Laura. But for that circumstance Laura would have said that she knew nothing of that summer morning in another life. She seldom spoke of Justin, but when she did, it was as gently and openly as usual. Yet that she should not know all that had happened seemed incredible.... Justin told his mother everything ... and surely, if she knew——Did she know?...
The uncertainty made Mrs. Cloud’s unfailing kindness hard to bear.
But it was typical of the girl and the woman alike that they never dreamed of approaching the subject in their almost daily intercourse. If either had been less occupied it is probable that their common anxiety might have loosened at least Laura’s tongue. But Mrs. Cloud was at the head of every good work in the village and Laura, as the year wore to an end, had her hands full at home. For Gran’papa, testily intolerant of cinnamon or sympathy, packing off his daughter to her depôt, submitting grudgingly to his granddaughter’s ministrations, Gran’papa, denying it with every difficult breath, fell ill. “Nothing serious, I hope, Miss Valentine?” “No—only a cold. Every one catches cold in winter time. Gran’papa has a cold.”
But the wet bitter weather of that first winter of war was a harvester who reaped in the camps and training grounds on behalf of death himself, more bloodily busy elsewhere—a harvester whose sickle was chill and his reaping hook pneumonia—a busy harvester who yet had time to go gleaning in the bare homes of the land for such bent and broken straws as had been left behind.
Looking back, looking down the civilian death lists for which nobody has had time these three long years, you see how abnormally the old and the half-old suffered. Death after death in the ’sixties and early ’seventies—’Quite suddenly’—’After a short illness’—it comes over and over again. You think of them as old limpets, wrenched from their rocks of ages, flung, too old to learn to cling again, into the sea of this war. And then, fastening on their shocked feebleness—the cold.