During the short time which Freddy was at the Front, how different her thoughts had been! His beauty and ability seemed to say to her, as she watched him on that memorable afternoon at the station, "Whom the gods love die young." He seemed to typify to her England's brave and beautiful young whom the war chose for its victims. The wages of the war were England's youth and devotion. She knew that much as Freddy loved his work and enjoyed his life, he would be the last to grudge his death. It was she herself who so ardently wished that he had died in action; that his brains and ability had been given a chance; that he could have done as he would have wished to do, taken a life for a life; that he could avenge in honest warfare the hideous death of his comrades.
This letter from Hadassah made Margaret realize the awful fact that Freddy was dead as nothing else had done, that his death meant that she could never, never again consult him, or speak to him, or hope to hear from him. It was not only a case of patience and the distance of half the world between them; it was a case of never, never again on this earth. She had scarcely known the meaning of death until this starvation for his sympathy revealed itself to her. The awful difference between mere distance and death had escaped her. Hundreds of men were dying, but death was talked of unconvincingly, superficially.
Now, by some strange means, she suddenly saw the years of doing without Freddy stretching out before her. The Valley where his work lay would never see him again. His brains and extraordinary energy were lost to the world; his archaeological work would be taken over by others.
The pent-up tears which Margaret had not shed when she received the news of his death, or during all the busy days which followed it, mingled themselves with the unrestrained weeping which Nature sent to save her overwrought system. She cried uninterruptedly, until the urgency of tears subsided. She dried her eyes and braced herself up. Her weeping had stopped suddenly; it had exhausted itself.
It seemed to her that she could almost hear a voice repeating to her a sentence out of Hadassah's letter. It was strikingly like Hadassah's own voice. "Try to remember that your wonderful brother is still doing his bit. He is working hard, wherever he is—be sure of this, for it is what he would wish."
* * * * * *
Margaret carried this thought in her mind as she returned to her pantry. Hadassah was right. Freddy was working; wherever he was, he was busy, for he could not be happy if he was not working and helping on the cause of the Allies. Freddy had been one of the few enthusiasts in the early days of the war who had never pretended, even to himself, that England's primary object in declaring war against Germany was to avenge the devastation of Belgium. He knew that England had to enter it to save herself and France from a similar devastation.
When she was busy at work again, Margaret said to herself, "Of all the strange things which have happened during the last six months, perhaps the strangest of all is the fact that in all the wide world, the only human being to whom I should dream of applying for help or for sympathy in the things that matter is Hadassah Ireton, Hadassah the Syrian, whose marriage with an Englishman of good family would have so shocked and horrified me not so very long ago!"
A smile of amusement changed the expression of her face. She was thinking of Hadassah as she really was, and of the outcast Hadassah as she would have pictured her. The smile lost itself in the shame with which the memory of her ignorance and prejudice filled her. How well Hadassah and her husband could afford to forget the narrow-mindedness and the conceit of it all!