Ann stopped, and went on, half-laughing, half-crying:
"Like poor Mrs. Clark, one of my women. She told me how she had gone out and helped a sick neighbour, and coming home had seen some children, whose father was fighting and whose mother was ill, playing in the rain, and she had taken them in and given them a hot meal. As they were leaving the postman brought her a letter saying her son was dead in Mesopotamia. She said to me, defiantly, as if she were scoring off Providence, 'I'm no gaun tae pray nae mair,' and I knew exactly what she felt."
"Oh, the poor woman," said Mrs. Douglas weeping.
"I thought," Ann went on, "that if no wire came that day it would mean that Davie had got through—but at tea-time it came. I went into Glasgow next morning by the first train to tell you. Phoebe was washing the front door steps at No. 10, and she told me you and Miss Barbara were in the dining-room at breakfast. I stood in the doorway and looked at you. You were laughing and telling Miss Barbara something funny that had been in one of Davie's letters. I felt like a murderer standing there. When I went into the room your face lit up for a moment, and then you realised. 'It is the laddie?' you whispered, and I nodded. You neither spoke nor cried, but stood looking before you as if you were thinking very deeply about something, then 'I would like to go home,' you said...."
"And to think," Mrs. Douglas said, breaking a long silence, "that I am only one of millions of mothers who will go mourning to their graves."
"I know, Mother. I know. But you wouldn't ask him back even if that were possible. You wouldn't, if you could, take 'the purple of his blood out of the cross on the breastplate of England.' Don't you love these words of Ruskin? It's the proudest thing we have to think about, and, honestly—I'm not just saying this—I believe that the men who lie out there have the best of it. The men who came back will, most of them, have to fight a grim struggle, for living is none too pleasant just now, and they will grow old, and bald, and ill-tempered, and they have all to die in the end. What is twenty more years of life but twenty more years of fearing death? But our men whose sacrifice was accepted, and who were allowed to pour out the sweet, red wine of youth, passed at one bound from glorious life to glorious life. 'Eld shall not make a mock of that dear head.' They know not age or weariness or defeat."
CHAPTER XXIV
The December day had run its short and stormy course and the sun was going down in anger, with streaks of crimson and orange, and great purple clouds. Only over the top of the far hills was one long line of placid pale primrose, like some calm landlocked bay amid seas of tumbling waters.
Mrs. Douglas, crossing the room to get a paper from the table, paused at the wide window and looked out. Desolate the landscape looked, the stretch of moorland, and the sodden fields, and the empty highroad running like a ribbon between hills now dark with rain.