Ruth received the food, consumed it, and sank down upon her pallet. Her great venture thus had come to an end; her life was forfeit; and by all that she had dared and done, she had accomplished—nothing.
No; more than nothing. She had caused the arrest of De Trevenac and those taken with him; she had aided at least a little in the frightful labors of the retreat from Mirevaux. She had saved the life of Gerry Hull!
She never before had permitted herself to think that she had saved Gerry; without her he might have been able to free himself from under his machine. But now she let herself believe.
This gave her a share in the battles which he had fought over the advancing enemy lines. Yes; she had accomplished more than nothing. Yet how much less than she had dreamed! And all of her dream—or most of it—might actually have come true! She had possessed the German plan; indeed, she still possessed the knowledge of the front of the next assault and something of the detail of the enemy operations! She had committed it, verbally, to Fayal and to others of her guides; so it was possible that it might yet reach the allied lines. But she realized that, even though Fayal or one of the others sent the word through, it must completely lack authority; it must reach the French as merely a rumor—a trick of the enemy, perhaps; it could not be heeded.
She sat up with muscles all through her tugging taut. It seemed that with her frantic strength, with her bare hands she must rend those stones and escape, not to save herself, but to return to the allied lines and tell them what she knew. But the coldness of the stones, when she touched them, shocked her to realizations.
Tomorrow—or perhaps even today—the enemy might take her out and kill her. And while death—her individual, personal annihilation—had become a matter of amazingly small account, yet the recognition that with death must come withdrawal, perhaps, even from knowledge of how the battle was going upon that line where the fate of all the world was at stake, where Britons and French fought as she had seen them fight, and where, at last, America was arriving—that crushed her down to her pallet and with despair quite overwhelmed her.
So she set herself to thinking of Gerry. He was alive, perhaps; a prisoner, therefore, and to be returned some day when the war was over, to marry Lady Agnes, while she.... Ruth did not shudder when she thought of herself dead.
Perhaps Gerry was dead; then she would be going at once to join him. And if they merely took her out and shot her today, or tomorrow, or some day soon, without doing anything more to her than that, she might find Gerry and rejoin him, much as she had been when he had known her and—yes—liked her. Without having suffered indignity, that was. These cold stones seemed at least to assure her of this. So she lay and thought of him while the slit of light crept slowly from left to right as the sun swung to the west and she listened for the step of those who would come to her cell.
CHAPTER XX
AN OFFICERS’ PRISON
Gerry, when shot down over the German lines, had succeeded in making that “some sort of landing” which his comrades had reported.