"The chief reason is yourself." He spoke cautiously, fearful lest he might lose her attention by rousing her incredulity. Even to himself it sounded preposterous that he, an outsider, should claim to bear so intimate a message from a husband who was dead. "You believed, Lady Dawn, that you had ceased to count in your husband's affections; yet wherever his battalion went, you were present with us. The men and officers knew you, without know
ing who you were. You were with us in the mud of the Somme; you went over the top with us in our attacks. More than one young officer believed himself in love with you. Yours was the last woman's face that many a poor fellow looked upon before he went West. We were an emotional lot. Death made us natural as children. Women meant more to us than they ever had before and than they ever will again, perhaps. The nearness to eternity purged us of impurity. It fired us with a wistful kind of chivalry. The change is hard to express. I've known men, who hadn't a wife or sweetheart, cut strange women's portraits from the illustrated papers and treasure them. As we sit here it sounds a waste of sentiment; out there it seemed tragically pathetic. Every man wanted to believe, even though his believing was a conscious pretense, that there was one woman peculiarly his, who would miss——"
He interrupted himself to glance again across his shoulder, following her eyes where they probed the stealthy shadows. Then he brought his gaze back. "That was how I first learnt to know your face—from the portrait which your husband carried. Into whatever danger he was ordered, you went—you accompanied him in the most real sense: he carried you in his heart. From time to time I got glimpses of you. When he thought no one was looking, he would prop your portrait against the walls of dug-outs with a candle lighted before it, as if you were a saint whom he worshiped. You were the inspiration of his steadfastness to duty. What he did, he did for you. His courage was your cour
age; his kindness was your kindness. He was striving every minute to be worthy of you. I know of what I'm talking, for I did the same for Terry. Late at night one would stumble down greasy dug-out stairs, coming in from a patrol, to find him lost in thought and gazing at you. Or one would find him covering page after page of letters which he never sent. When he was dying, alone and far out in No Man's Land, he must have drawn out your portrait from next his heart. It was so tightly clasped in his hand when we found him, that we couldn't take it from him. I'd almost forgotten all this until two months ago, when I recognized Sargent's painting of you in your sister's house. Then for the first time I discovered your name and who he was. Since then he's given me no rest."
She had been leaning forward, her arm supported on her knee, her chin cushioned in her hand, the white light from the mist-covered meadows falling softly on her through the tall window, revealing the pulse beating in her throat and the trembling of her thin sweet mouth.
"What was it that he wanted you to do for me, Lord Taborley?"
He hesitated, clasping his forehead, like a man whose memory had suddenly gone blank. "I'm not sure. And yet I was sure before I started talking. Didn't you believe that he died hating you?"
She shook her head. "He left a child by me."
"Then, perhaps it wasn't that he hadn't hated you, but that he'd loved you in his last moments. Was it that which he wanted me to tell you?"