II
Meanwhile Roy, with his stout young skull almost riven by a glancing Boche nose-cap, lay tossing and muttering in a Base Hospital.
One dream beset and obsessed him for weeks. He, Roy Birnie—the soldierly, the punctilious, the immaculate—had been haled by an escort of overwhelming numbers and terrifying appearance before his commanding officer—Uncle Alan, swollen to enormous size and invested with Mephistophelean eyebrows—upon the charge of coming upon parade improperly dressed. It was not merely a question of an unbuttoned pocket, or a pair of badly-wound puttees; he had paraded in his shirt-sleeves—minus his tunic! And in his dream, try as he might, poor Roy could not for the life of him recall, in response to the nightmare cross-examination of his satanic superior and relative, what he had done with it.
All he could recollect was that he had wrapped it round someone—someone who appeared to have lost his own and to be badly in need of another; because he was lying on the ground in the mud. Roy had fitful glimpses of the face—the face of a man dying in great pain, but in great peace—a strangely familiar face. Roy had tried to converse with its owner; but in his dreams their intercourse was limited chiefly to intensely affectionate smiles. Then, suddenly, he had recognised the face, and was stooping, in an awkward, boyish fashion, to kiss it, when something happened, and he remembered no more.
III
Gradually these troubled visions faded, and with the steady healing of his wound came healthy sleep and tranquillity of mind. Finally he came to himself; and one bright morning in May was carried on board a hospital ship and transferred, across the most efficiently guarded strip of water in the world, to a convalescent hospital in a great country house in Kent.
That night he slept in a little room in a long passage full of doors, behind each of which lay a boy, seldom older than himself, who had squandered his youth, mayhap a limb, too often his whole constitution, in the service of his country.
Next morning, when he awoke, the sun was streaming down the passage. All the doors stood wide open, and the air was rent by a raucous and irregular chorus, proceeding from the doorways and beginning:
Nurse, Nurse, I'm feeling rather worse;
Come and kiss me on my little brow!
Words of rebuke were audible, and the riot died down. A majestic young woman, admirably composed, presented herself at Roy's door.