"That 's little Eustace," she answered, with no trace of the softness of regret which had hushed her tone when she spoke of her mother. "My little baby; he 'd have been a big boy now. He was like his father—very like. Everybody noticed it. And that"—her finger passed on—"is George Penfold, Sergeant-Major in the Guards. His widow married again, a gunner in the Navy."
No sorrow for little Eustace. He, at any rate, would never see his dreams dislimn and fail him; no wife would watch the slow night through for his unsteady step nor read the dishonor written in his eyes. The first of the crosses in the barbed wire enclosure, Mrs. Jakes' empty and aching heart and her quick smile of triumph at his easy victory over all the snares of life—these and the faint, whitening photograph remained of little Eustace. Many a man leaves less when his time comes in South Africa.
"The weather is holding up nicely," she would say at breakfast. "Almost too fine, isn't it? But I suppose we oughtn't complain."
It was a meal over which one lingered, for with the end of it there closed the eventful period of the day. While it lasted, the Sanatorium was at its best; one saw one's fellows in faint hues of glamour after the night's separation and heard them speak with a sense of receiving news. But the hour exhausted them of interest and one left the table, when all pretexts for remaining there had been expended, to face the emptiness of a morning already stale. That, in truth, was the price one paid for healing, the wearing, smothering monotony of the idle days, when there was nothing to do and one saw oneself a part of the stagnation that ruled the place. Mrs. Jakes withdrew herself to become the motor of the domestic machinery, and till lunch time was not available for countenance and support. Ford occupied himself gravely with his little canvases, plastering upon them strange travesties of landscape, and was busy and intent and impatient of interruption for long periods at a time, while Mr. Samson, keeping a sufficient offing from all human contact, alternately strutted to and fro upon the stoep in a short quarter-deck promenade of ten steps and a right about turn, and lay in a deck chair with a writing case upon his knee and wrote fitfully and with deep thought long, important looking letters which never reached the post.
"You 're feeling the need of something to do," Ford told Margaret, when in desperation she came behind him and watched him modeling—as it seemed—in burnt sienna. "Why don't you knit—or something?"
"Knit?" said Margaret with huge scorn.
"You 'll come to it," he warned her. "There was a chap here before you came who taught himself the harp. A nuisance he was, too, but he said he 'd have been a gibbering idiot without it."
"That was n't saying much, perhaps," retorted Margaret.
"Oh, I don't know. He was a barrister of sorts, I believe. Not many barristers who can play the harp, you know."
"For goodness' sake, don't knead the stuff like that!" cried Margaret, watching his thumb at work. "You 're painting, not—not civil engineering! But what were you?"