“None of that—none of that rot! I’d do the same this minute; an’ if there was anything that comed after—if I meet that damned witch in hell tomorrow I’d kill her over again, if her still had a body I could shake the life out of. Now get you gone, an’ let me pass in peace.”
The reverend gentleman departed at his best speed, but presently returned, bringing soups and cordials. With him there came a cottage woman who performed services for the sick. But when Mrs. Badger saw Noah Mundy, she knew that little remained to do.
“He’s gone,” she said, “soft an’ sweet as a baby falls to sleep. Some soap an’ water an’ a coffin be all he wants now, your honor; not this here beautiful broth, nor brandy neither. So you had best go back along, Sir, an’ send Old Mother Dawe up to help me, if you please.”
Eden Phillpotts.
IRON
The child Cecily waited until her brother had made a bridge from a fallen bough, and then clasping her adorably grubby hands about his neck allowed him to carry her across the stream.
“Which way, little sister?” he asked.
A dragon-fly hovered above the water and then darted away, and Cecily with a vague idea of following it chose a sunken path that almost traced the brook in its course. It was a silent little stream running through the sleepy meadows, and where it widened among the pond lilies it almost stopped. Here and there it eddied self-consciously about the yellow flowers and further on it almost rippled in shy haste. And in the golden afternoon Cecily knew that the boy, so clever at building bridges, so capable in the midst of barbed wire, and above all, so kind to her, was wonderful beyond all telling.
When three tiny aeroplanes flew above the trenches, it reminded the boy of the dragon-flies over the brook at home, and once when he crawled through the mud and helped cut away some barbed wire, the barbed wire made him think of a bit of the brook which ran through the pasture. He remembered the wire had made a breakwater of drifting leaves and that Cecily had thrown stones at the leaves until they had slowly floated away in a great clump. And because he imagined himself a victim of unmanly sentiment, he detested these memories; so that after a while they returned no more.
At the training camp he had learned, or thought he had learned, the trick of withdrawing a bayonet after a supposedly unparried lunge. But here as he slipped in the wet snow trying to release the driven bayonet, the thing caught and tore and ripped the flesh. And to keep from falling he crushed and mangled the face beneath him with his heel. . .