Mrs. ——'s indignation never blazes away for more than fifteen seconds; but while the conflagration lasts it is terrific. And on circumstantial evidence the case was black against me. When last seen, Miss Ashley-Smith was entirely willing to be saved. She goes out for a walk with me along a quiet country road, and the next thing you hear is that she has gone back to Ghent. And since, actually and really, it was my obsession that had passed into her, I felt that if I had taken Miss Ashley-Smith down that road and murdered her in a dyke my responsibility wouldn't have been a bit worse, if as bad.
And it seemed to me that all the people scattered among the blankets in that strange room, those that still lay snuggling down amiably in the warmth, and those that had started to their feet in dismay, and those that sat on chairs upright and apart, were hostile with a just and righteous hostility, that they had an intimate knowledge of my crime, and had risen up in abhorrence of the thing I was.
And somewhere, as if they were far off in some blessed place on the other side of this nightmare, I was aware of the merciful and pitiful faces of Mrs. Lambert and Janet McNeil.
Then, close beside me, there was a sudden heaving of the Chaplain's broad shoulders as he faced the room.
And I heard him saying, in the same voice in which he had declared that he was going to hold Matins, that it wasn't my fault at all—that it was he who had persuaded Miss Ashley-Smith to go back to Ghent.[36]
The Chaplain has a moral nerve that never fails him.
Then Mrs. Torrence says that she is going back to protect Miss Ashley-Smith, and Ursula Dearmer says that she is going back to protect Mrs. Torrence, and somebody down in the blankets remarks that the thing was settled last night, and that all this going back is simply rotten.
I can only repeat that it is all my fault, and that therefore, if Mrs. Torrence goes back, nobody is going back with her but me.
And there can be no doubt that three motor ambulances, with possibly the entire Corps inside them, certainly with the five women and the Chaplain and the Commandant, would presently have been seen tearing along the road to Ghent, one in violent pursuit of the other, if we had not telephoned and received news of Miss Ashley-Smith's safe arrival at the "Flandria," and orders that no more women were to return to Ghent.