As she did all this Bill noticed that there was a new air of alertness, of competence about her; there was a light in her eyes, a decision in her actions; she seemed to have more interest in life. And for himself, as he sat at the table with its clean cloth and shining knives and spoons and bright sugar bowl and she handed him his tea just as he liked it, with one lump of sugar and not too much milk, he felt something changing in him suddenly. In a way of speaking it was a kind of rebirth.
They didn’t talk much. Melia was not a talking sort, nor was he except when he had “had a drop,” and he didn’t get “drops” now. Besides, in any case, the army seemed to have taken anything superfluous in the way of talk out of him, as it did with most. But he was honestly glad to be back in the peaceful four walls of his home. And it was not certain, although Melia carefully refrained from hinting as much, that she was not honestly glad to see him there. At all events she got his slippers for him presently out of the boot cupboard; and then, unasked, she made a spill of paper for him and laid it on the table by his elbow, a sufficient intimation that he was expected to light his pipe.
XXI
THEY went to bed at a quarter to ten. For a time they talked and then Bill fell asleep. And he slept as perhaps he had never slept in that room in all the years of their married life. How good the old four-poster seemed! It was a family heirloom in which he had been born forty-one and a half years ago. Many a miserable, almost intolerable night had he passed in it, but this Christmas Eve in the course of ten minutes or so it was giving him one of the best sleeps he had ever known.
He woke in pitch darkness. Melia was breathing placidly and regularly by his side. He didn’t venture to move lest he should disturb her, and he lay motionless but strangely comfortable; somehow it had never given him such exquisite pleasure to lie in that old bed.
Everything was very still; there was none of the intolerable fuss and clatter of barrack life at all hours of the day and night. It was so peaceful that he was just about to doze again when a distant clock began to strike. It was the familiar clock of Saint George’s Church, along Mulcaster Road, a hundred yards or so away, and it told the hour of seven.
Two or three minutes later bells began to ring. It was Christmas morning; they were proclaiming peace on earth and good will towards men. How rum they sounded! Yet as he lay motionless in that bed, with a slow succession of deeply harmonious breaths near by, he wished harm to no man, not even to the Boche. Peace on earth and good will towards men ... yes, and women! Then it was, just in that pulse of time, the inspiration came to him to make Christmas morning memorable.
The idea was very simple. He would steal out of bed without harm to the slumbers of Melia, slip on his clothes in the dark, go downstairs, light the kitchen fire, boil the kettle and presently bring her a cup of tea. Never before had it occurred to him to pay her such a delicate attention, but this morning he appeared to have a new mind and a new heart; somehow, this morning he was seeing things with other eyes.