CHAPTER XVIII
The news of Freddy's death reached Margaret only a fortnight later; it came to her from the War Office in the ordinary official way. He had not died, as he would have wished to have died, in action, in a great offensive against the enemy; he had been sniped, shot through the head when he raised its brightness for half a minute above the parapet of his trench. His courage and ability had never been put to the test; he had fallen like a first year's bird hit by a deadly shot.
His youth and brains and beauty were the offerings which he had laid on the altar of Liberty. Fame had been denied him.
As England's blackest days passed, and Margaret read in the papers the horrible accounts of the poisonous gas which was blinding and suffocating our men at the front, and when hospital nurses told her of the pitiful "gas" cases which they had seen, Freddy's painless death became almost a thing to be thankful for.
Pessimism was running its course. Germany's triumphs were magnified, the Allies' work belittled. She had come to think that it could only have been a case of time before he would either have been permanently injured or killed; the death-rate of officers was terrible. Freddy had died as he had lived, an almost perfect example of England's manhood—a striking proof that her decadence was an ugly scandal, whose birthplace was Berlin. It was one of Germany's many clever forms of propaganda, intended to undermine England's prestige in the eyes of neutrals when the "great day" came.
CHAPTER XIX
A few weeks after Freddy's death a curious thing happened to Margaret, a thing which shook her nerves and disturbed the automatic calm into which she had drilled her thoughts.
She was still a hard-working pantry-maid, doing the same daily round of apparently unwarlike work. She was thankful that she had got it to do, and considered herself lucky, for the waiting lists of able and eager V.A.D.'s, whose names were down at hospitals and convalescent homes, ran into many figures, girls who were longing to be given any sort of occupation, however humble, which would place them amongst the women of England who were really in touch with the agony of the world. Margaret had still the promise before her of promotion, the hope that eventually she would reach the wards. Time would make its demands on the long lists of V.A.D.'s who were unemployed and eager for work. It would not be long before they would all be required. Someone else would step into her humble post when she was promoted. It was merely a case of patience and pluck; the voluntary hospitals were dependent on voluntary aid. She gave hers gladly.
It was a very lonely, self-contained Margaret who wandered about London during her "off-hours." Two hours gave her very little time for making expeditions or seeing the sights of London, which were all unknown to her, so she spent the greater part of her time in the secluded garden-square close to her lodgings. It always reminded her of a small public garden in Paris, in the old-fashioned quarter of the city, in which she had lived for a year with a French family while she was perfecting her French. The odd mixture of people who frequented it, and monopolized the seats in it for hours at a time, interested her. The work which they brought with them was as diverse as it was peculiar. Not a few of the regular habitués made a home of it, even on wet days, only returning to their shelter to sleep. Youth and elegance seldom entered it, except, it might be, when a pair of lovers, of non-British birth, drifted into it, seeking refuge from the madding crowd.
A London church, as black and white with smoke and the wearing winds of time as the marble churches of Lombardy, raised its belfry, of unnamable architecture, picturesquely above the square on one side, while a portion of its graveyard, which had been incorporated in the garden-square, and which seemed to Margaret in its shabby condition much older and more pathetically forlorn than the temple-tombs under the Theban hills, attracted the aged and the melancholy.