"Ah-h!" Her long eyes blazed resentment. "If anyone but yourself had called you that! ... Send him back!" she pleaded, jealously. "From henceforward nobody is to fetch you—or carry you either, except Me!"
So Sherbrand laughed in his companioned darkness, waved again, and shouted to the orderly to go back. What he said was lost in the racket accompanying the arrival of a German H.E. shell.
For still at intervals during each day and sometimes at night-time the sad dignity of the deserted City of the Salient was outraged by these monstrous messengers of hate. The thing came from the enemy's position east of the city, and fell with a hideous droning note in the wooded park by the Dixmude Gate.
A shattering crash followed—as though the roof of the world were tumbling in. The green park of budding trees was rent and splintered, cratered and riven as though a Dinosaur had died there of acute rabies, biting and tearing and howking up the earth.
Love is a wonderful wit-quickener in necessity. It taught Patrine Saxham, the woman of limitations, exactly what to do at the moment when the great shell droned down to ground. Irresistible as a mountain torrent, she leaped straight for the blind man before her, hurling him backwards by the sudden impact, over-balancing and bearing him down. Pinning him with the sheer weight of her vigorous young body—covering him as Nature teaches a tigress to cover her menaced cub, whilst their ears were deafened with the appalling detonation, the solid earth heaved and billowed under their prone, locked bodies, and the air surged and winnowed about them as though beaten by the passage of huge invisible wings.
"Is this Death?" she asked herself. "Then—for both!" was her half-conscious prayer. But Death passed by in a blizzard of scorching gases, splinters of rending steel, gravel, and stones, splintered timber and pulverised soil, leaving a huge cloud of reddish-yellow billowing over the Plaine d'Amour. A brown powder that stank of verbena, thickly coated all visible objects. Hair, skin, and clothes were tinted to uniformity, and a smothering oppression burdened the lungs. Yet as Patrine lay gasping, nerveless, beaten, that fierce new-kindled instinct of protection lived in her, potent, vital with possibilities as the spark in the battery or the germ in the cell.
The Great Test had found her not wanting nor unready. The dross of self had been burned away in the flame of a passion high and pure. The Crown of a noble womanhood was hers in that great moment when her body had made a rampart for the shielding of her love.
Under the heave of her bosom Sherbrand's broad chest panted. He lived—and her heart went up in a rush of passionate thanks to Heaven. She moved from him, quaking in every nerve and fibre, crouched beside him, found her handkerchief, and wiped the pungent dust from his face. It was pale, the mouth and eyes were closed, the nostrils fluttered with quick panting. His head had struck against the ground when her leap had hurled him backwards. He had been stunned, she told herself. He would revive soon.
"Patrine!" he choked out, opening his eyes.
"Pat's here by you, my darling!" She slipped her strong arm under his neck and helped him to sit up: