“What is it, Rose? Why don’t you tell me? Has he been killed?”
“Oh, no—it’s not as bad as that! Oh! mother, don’t look so unhappy—it’s only that he’s ‘wounded and missing.’”
CHAPTER XVIII
“No, ma’am, there was nothing, ma’am, to act, so to speak, in the nature of a warning. Mrs. Guthrie had much enjoyed your visit, and, if I may say so, ma’am, the visit of your young lady, last Thursday. Yesterday she was more cheerful-like than usual, talking a good bit about the Russians. She said that their coming to our help just now in the way they had done had quite reconciled her to them.”
Howse, Major Guthrie’s butler, his one-time soldier-servant, was speaking. By his side was Mrs. Guthrie’s elderly maid, Ponting. Mrs. Otway was standing opposite to them, and they were all three in the middle of the pretty, cheerful morning-room, where it seemed but a few hours ago since she and her daughter had sat with the old lady.
With the mingled pomp, enjoyment, and grief which the presence of death creates in a certain type of mind, Howse went on speaking: “She made quite a hearty tea for her—two bits of bread and butter, and a little piece of tea-cake. And then for her supper she had a sweetbread—a sweetbread and bacon. It’s a comfort to Cook now, ma’am, to remember as how Mrs. Guthrie sent her a message, saying how nicely she thought the bacon had been done. Mrs. Guthrie always liked the bacon to be very dry and curly, ma’am.”
He stopped for a moment, and Mrs. Otway’s eyes filled with tears for the first time.
On entering the house, she had at once been shown the War Office telegram stating that Major Guthrie was wounded and missing, and she had glanced over it with shuddering distress and pain, while her brain kept repeating “wounded and missing—wounded and missing.” What exactly did those sinister words signify? How, if he was missing, could they know he was wounded? How, if he had been wounded, could he be missing?
But soon she had been forced to command her thoughts, and to listen, with an outward air of calmness and interest, to this detailed account of the poor old lady’s last hours.
With unconscious gusto, Howse again took up the sad tale, while the maid stood by, with reddened eyelids, ready to echo and to supplement his narrative.