'We had the small car out and ready in ten minutes, and, by good luck, there was a motor-transport man on leave, who had come to see a brother in the hospital. We laid hands on him, and he drove us here. But it's a mercy we're not sitting on the Raise! You remember that heap of stones on the top of the Raise, that thing they say is a barrow—the grave of some old British party before the Flood?—well, the motor gave out there! Herbert and the chauffeur sat under it in the snow and worked at it. I thought the river was coming over the road, and that the wind would blow us all away. But it'll be all right for your crossing to-morrow—the storm will have quite gone down. Herbert thinks you'll start about twelve o'clock,—and you'll be at the camp that same night. Oh, isn't it wonderful!—isn't it ripping?' cried Cicely under her breath, stooping down to kiss Nelly, while the two men talked at the carriage window.—'You're going to get him home! We'll have the best men in London to look after him. He'll pull through, you'll see—he'll pull through!'
Nelly sank into a seat and closed her eyes. Cicely's talk—why did she call Marsworth 'Herbert'?—was almost unbearable to her. She knew through every vein that she was going across the Channel—to see George die. If only she were in time!—if only she might hold him in her arms once more! Would the train never go?
Farrell, in spite of snow and storm, pushed his way back to Carton that night. In that long motor drive a man took counsel with himself on whom the war had laid a chastening and refining hand. The human personality cannot spend itself on tasks of pity and service without taking the colour of them, without rising insensibly to the height of them. They may have been carelessly adopted, or imposed from without. But the mere doing of them exalts. As the dyer's hand is 'subdued to what it works in,' so the man that is always about some generous business for his fellow-men suffers thereby, insensibly, a change, which is part of the 'heavenly alchemy' for ever alive in the world. It was so at any rate with William Farrell. The two years of his hospital work—hard, honest grappling with the problems of human pain and its relief—had made a far nobler man of him. So now, in this solitary hour, he looked his trouble—courageously, chivalrously—in the face. The crash of all his immediate hopes was bitter indeed. What matter! Let him think only of those two poor things about to meet in France.
As to the future, he was well aware of the emotional depths in Nelly's nature. George Sarratt's claim upon her life and memory would now be doubly strong. For, with that long and intimate observation of the war which his hospital experience had brought him, Farrell was keenly aware of the merciful fact that the mere distance which, generally speaking, the war imposes between the man dying on the battle-field and those who love him at home, inevitably breaks the blow. The nerves of the woman who loses her husband or her son are, at least, not tortured by the actual sight of his wounds and death. The suffering is spiritual, and the tender benumbing touch of religion or patriotism, or the remaining affections of life, has less to fight with than when the physical senses themselves are racked with acute memories of bodily wounds and bodily death. It is not that sorrow is less deep, or memory less tenacious; but both are less ruinous to the person sorrowing. So, at least, Farrell had often seen it, among even the most loving and passionate of women. Nelly's renascence in the quiet Westmorland life had been a fresh instance of it; and he had good reason for thinking that, but for the tragic reappearance of George Sarratt, it would not have taken very long,—a few months more, perhaps—before she would have been persuaded to let herself love, and be loved again.
But now, every fibre in her delicate being—physical and spiritual—would be racked by the sight of Sarratt's suffering and death. And no doubt—pure, scrupulous little soul!—she would be tormented by the thought of what had just passed between herself and him, before the news from France arrived. He might as well look that in the face.
Well!—patience and time—there was nothing else to look to. He braced himself to both, as he sped homeward through the high snowy roads, and dropped through sleeping Keswick to Bassenthwaite and Carton. Then with the sight of the hospital, the Red Cross flag drooping above its doorway, as he drove up to it, the burden and interest of his great responsibilities returned upon him. He jumped out to say a few cheery words of thanks to his chauffeur, and went on with a rapid step to his office on the ground floor, where he found important letters and telegrams awaiting him. He dealt with them till far into the night. But the thought of Nelly never really left him; nor that haunting physical memory of her soft head upon his shoulder.
CHAPTER XVI
Of the weary hours which intervened between her meeting with Cicely and Marsworth at Windermere station and her sight of Dr. Howson on the rain-beaten quay at Bolougne, Nelly Sarratt could afterwards have given no clear account. Of all the strings that were pulled, and the exalted persons invoked, in order to place her as quickly as possible by the side of her dying husband, she knew practically nothing. Cicely and Marsworth, with Farrell to help them at the other end of a telegraph wire, did everything. Passports and special permits were available in a minimum of time. In the winter dawn at Euston Station, there was the grey-headed Miss Eustace waiting; and two famous Army doctors journeyed to Charing Cross a few hours later, on purpose to warn the wife of the condition in which she was likely to find her husband, and to give her kindly advice as to how she could help him most. The case had already made a sensation at the Army Medical Headquarters; the reports on it from France were being eagerly followed; and when the young wife appeared from the north, her pathetic beauty quickened the general sympathy. Nelly's path to France was smoothed in every possible way. No Royalty could have been more anxiously thought for.
But she herself realised scarcely anything about it. It was her nature to be grateful, sweet, responsive; but her gratitude and her sweetness during these hours were automatic, unconscious. She was the spectator, so to speak, of a moving picture which carried her on with it, in which she was merely passive. The crowded boat, the grey misty sea, the destroyers to right and left, she was aware of them in one connection only—as part of the process by which she and George were to meet again.
But at last the boat was alongside the quays of the French port, and through sheets of rain she saw the lights of a climbing town, and the gleaming roadways of the docks. Crowds of men in khaki; a park of big guns, their wet nozzles glittering under the electric lamps overhead; hundreds of tethered horses; a long line of motor lorries;—the scene to her was all a vague confusion, as Cicely, efficient and masterful as usual, made a way for them both along the deck of the steamer through close ranks of soldiers—a draft waiting their orders to disembark. Then as they stepped on land, perception sharpened in a moment. A tall man in khaki—whom she recognised as Dr. Howson—came eagerly forward.