'Yes,' she said, 'I suppose so.' She sat silent a little time. 'But then it was you who came,' she urged again. 'We used to be quiet and happy in our own way, even if we were unprogressive and unintelligent. It seems, to a woman, we might have been left alone.'
'Ah, but,' he said, 'there were bigger issues than that at stake. You have read—I can see that you have read—you must know why we are fighting.'
'Somewhere at the top,' she said, with a wan smile, 'there may be a few—a very few—on both sides who know. But our men don't know. They have been told they will lose their liberty and homes if they don't fight; that is all any of my cousins knew, and they went off to death, not cheerfully, but because there was nothing else to be done. Your men, of course they come because they are sent, and they fight their best because they are brave and obey orders. We have been insolent—isn't that what you say of us?—and we must be crushed. But some of you must know the rights of it all. Think how much wiser you are than we. You read while we plough. Those of you who know should stay behind.'
'No,' he smiled; 'that is not our way either. We are no different from you. We pay a few great men to do the thinking for us, and if they say it's got to be fighting, then, whatever it seems to us individually, collectively we just shoot.'
The fire burnt lower and lower; it was the only light in the room, for the oil-lamp, exhausted, had died out. Outside the rain still fell in straight soaking sheets over the thatched roof of the little house. A wind moaned restlessly over the empty country; you fancied it was lost and full of woe, because it had no trees to wander through. Once or twice a horse whinnied, once or twice there came through the night the inexpressibly mournful sound of the bleat of a sheep. You felt the rain was like no other rain at all; it seemed as if the land, swollen-eyed, was weeping in the quiet of midnight for its unutterable woes.
The girl's head drooped back against the wall. Sleep had claimed her; but, by the anguish of the mouth and the pitiful stirring of the breast, you knew it was but to show her the body of her young husband, cast with a score of others in a trench, all wet with red.
Stevenson sat, a cold sweat upon his brow; he felt he was the only soul awake on all the frightful continent.
Then through the silence of the house came a woman's voice reading the Bible—the mother seated a foot away from her quiet son. The thin wood offered no resistance to the sound of her voice.
'"Gather up thy wares out of the land, O thou that abidest in the siege. For thus saith the Lord, Behold, I will sling out the inhabitants of the land at this time, and will distress them, that they may feel it. Woe is me for my hurt! My wound is grievous: but I said, Truly this is my grief, and I must bear it."'
The sound of the voice pierced into Linda's wretched slumbers. She opened dilated eyes, and stared wildly at Mortimer. And the voice went on again: