They were. The mental agony she had been through had etherialized her face, added to its look of age and gravity, but imparted likewise a sort of "awfulness." She exhaled an aura of righteous authority. She had been through the furnace, and foolishness and petulance had been burnt out of her ... though, thank goodness, she retained some sense of humour. She had probably never been so handsome from the painter's point of view, though one could not imagine a young man falling in love with her now.
Her personality was first definitely noted by the Bruxellois the day that von Bissing's funeral cortège passed through the streets of Brussels on its way to Germany. Vivien Warren was sufficiently restored to health then to stand on the steps of some monument and cry "Vive la Belgique! À bas les tyrans!" The policemen and the spies looked another way and affected deafness. They had orders not to arrest her unless she actually resorted to firearms or other lethal weapons.
It was said that her appeal for Bertie Adams did reach the Emperor, two days too late; that he pished and pshawed over von Bissing's cruel precipitancy. "Englishmen," he muttered to his entourage, "don't assassinate. The Irish do. But how I'm going to make peace with England, I don't know...!"
(His Hell on Earth must have been that few people admired the English character more than he did, and yet, unprovoked, he had blundered into war with England.)
However, though it was too late to save "this lunatic Adams," he gave orders that Vivie was to be let alone. He even, through Gräfin von Stachelberg, transmitted to her his regrets that she and her mother had been treated so cavalierly at the Hotel Impérial. It was not through any orders of his.
So: Vivie became quite a power in Brussels during that last anxious year and a half of waiting, between May, 1917, and November, 1918. German soldiers, still limping from their wounds, saluted her in the street, remembering her kindness in hospital, and the letters she unweariedly wrote at their dictation to their wives and families—for she had become quite a scholar in German. The scanty remains of the British Colony and the great ladies among the patriotic Belgians now realized how false were the stories that had circulated about her in the first year of the War; and extended to her their friendship. And the Spanish Minister who had taken the place of the American as protector of British subjects, invited her to all the fêtes he gave for Belgian charities and Red Cross funds. Through his Legation she endeavoured to send information to the Y.M.C.A. and to Bertie's widow that Albert Adams of the Y.M.C.A. "had died in Brussels from the consequences of the War."
I dare say in the autumn of 1917, if Vivien Warren had applied through the Spanish Minister for a passport to leave Belgium for some neutral country, it would have been accorded to her: the German authorities would have been thankful to see her no more. She reminded them of one of the cruellest acts of their administration. But she preferred to stay for the historical revenge of seeing the Germans driven out of Belgium, and Belgian independence restored. And she could not go lest Bertie's grave should be forgotten. In common with Edith Cavell, Gabrielle Petit, Philippe Bauck, and the other forty or fifty victims of von Bissing's "Terror," he had been buried in the grassy slopes of the amphitheatre of the Rifle range, near where he had been executed. Every Sunday, wet or fine, Vivien went there with fresh flowers. She had marked the actual grave with a small wooden cross bearing his name, till the time should come when she could have his remains transferred to English soil.
One day, as she was leaving the hospital in the autumn of 1917, a shabby man pushed into her hand a soiled, way-worn copy of the Times, a fortnight old. "Three francs," he whispered. She paid him. It was no uncommon thing for her or one of her English or Belgian acquaintances to buy the Times or some other English daily at a price ranging from one franc to ten, and then pass it round the friendly circle of subscribers who apportioned the cost. On this occasion she opened her Times in the tram, going home, and glanced at its columns. In any one but "Mees Varennes" in these days of 1917, 1918, this would have been a punishable offence; but in her case no spy or policeman noted the infringement of regulations about the enemy press. On one of the pages she read the account of a bad air-raid on Portland Place, and a reference—with a short obituary notice elsewhere—to the death of one of the victims of the German bombs. This was "Linda, Lady Rossiter, the dearly loved wife of Sir Michael Rossiter, whose discoveries in the way of bone grafting and other forms of curative surgery had been among the outstanding achievements in etc., etc."
"Dear me!" said Vivien to herself, as the tram coursed on beyond her usual stopping place and the conductor obstinately looked the other way, "I'm glad she lived to be Lady Rossiter. It must have given her such pleasure. Poor thing! And to think the knowledge that he's a widower hardly stirs my pulses one extra beat. And how I loved that man, seven years, six years, five years ago! Hullo! Where am I? Miles from the Rue Haute! Conducteur! Arrêtez, s'il vous plaît."