“Is this Rose? Dear little Rose! I am alone, dear child. I have not brought a maid. My husband went down to Southampton early this morning to wait for the hospital ship. I was so grateful for your mother’s kind telegram. It will be an infinite comfort to stay with you both. But I think Sir John may find it more convenient to stay at an hotel.” She grew a little pink, and Rose Otway, whose perceptions as to a great deal that is sad or strange in human nature, had grown of late, felt a little rush of anger against Sir John Blake.
As they left the station, Rose was able to ask the questions she was longing to ask. But Lady Blake knew nothing. “No, we have had no details at all. Only just the telegram telling us that he has been severely wounded—severely, you know, is much less serious than dangerously—and that he was being sent to Sir Jacques Robey’s hospital at Witanbury. It seems so strange that Jervis should be coming here—so strange, but, my dear, so very happy too! My husband says that they probably show the wounded officers a list of hospitals, and perhaps give them a certain measure of choice.”
They did not say much during the short drive to the Close; they simply held each other’s hands. And Rose’s feeling of indignation against Jervis’s father grew and grew. How could he be impatient, still less unkind, to this sweet, gentle woman?
There followed a time of anxious waiting at the Trellis House, and, reluctantly, Rose began to understand why Sir John Blake was impatient with his wife. Lady Blake could not sit still; and she made no effort to command her nerves. In her gentle voice she suggested every painful possibility, from the torpedoing of the hospital ship in the Channel to a bad break down, or even a worse accident, to the motor ambulances which were to convey Jervis and four other wounded officers to Witanbury.
But at last, when even Sir Jacques himself had quite given them up for that night, three motor ambulances drove into the Close, and round to the temporary hospital.
And then such a curious, pathetic scene took place in the courtyard of “Robey’s.” Improvised flares and two electric reading-lamps, brought hurriedly through the windows of the drawing-room, shone on the group of waiting people—nurses ready to step forward when wanted; Sir Jacques Robey and a young surgeon who had come up from the Witanbury Cottage Hospital; Lady Blake trembling with cold and excitement close to Mrs. Otway and Rose; and a number of others who had less reason and excuse for being there.
From a seat by one of the drivers there jumped down Sir John Blake. He looked round him with a keen glance, and then made his way straight to where his wife was standing. Taking no notice of her, he addressed the girl standing by her side. “Is this Rose,” he said—“Rose Otway?” and taking her hand gripped it hard. “He’s borne the journey very well,” he said quickly, reassuringly; and then, at last, he looked at his wife. She was gazing at him with imploring, anxious eyes. “Well,” he said impatiently, “well, my dear, what is it you want to say to me?”
She murmured something nervously, and Rose hurriedly said, “Lady Blake wants to know where Jervis was wounded.”
“A fragment of shell struck his left arm—but the real mischief was done to his right leg. When the building in which he and his company were resting was shelled, a beam fell on it. I should have thought myself that it would have been better to have kept him, for at any rate a while, at Boulogne. But they now think it wiser, if it be in any way possible, to bring them straight back.”
Rose hardly heard what he said. She was absorbed in wondering which of the stretchers now being brought out of the ambulances bore the form of Jervis Blake; but she accepted, with a quiet submission which increased the great surgeon’s already good opinion of her, his decree that no one excepting himself and his nurses was to see or speak to any of the wounded that night.