Elizabeth's Campaign Part 43

And she remembered how she, in her first youth, had suffered from the dominance and the accomplishment of older women; women who gave a girl no chance, who must have all the admiration, and all the opportunities, who would coolly and cruelly s.n.a.t.c.h a girl's lover from her.

'And that's how I've appeared to Pamela!' thought Elizabeth between laughing and crying. 'Yet all I did was to talk about ash for aeroplanes! Oh, you poor child--you poor child!'

She seemed to feel Pamela's pain in her own heart--she who had had love and lost it.

'Am I just an odious, clever woman?' She sat down and hated herself.

All the pa.s.sing vanity that had been stirred in her by Sir Henry's compliments, all the natural pleasure she had taken in the success of her great adventure as a business woman, in the ease with which she, the Squire's paid secretary, had lately begun to lead the patriotic effort of an English county--how petty, how despicable even, it seemed, in presence of a boy who had given his all!--even beside a girl in love!

And the Squire--'Was I hard to him too?'

The night came down. All the strange or beautiful shapes in the library wavered and flickered under the firelight--the glorious Nike--the Eros--the n.o.ble sketch of the boy in his cricketing dress....

The following morning came a telegram from Aubrey Mannering to Mrs.

Gaddesden. Elizabeth had done her best to propitiate her but she remained cold and th.o.r.n.y, and when the telegram came she was pleased that the news came to her first, and--tragic as it was--that Elizabeth had to ask her for it!

'Terrible wounds. Fear no hope. We shall bring him home as soon as possible.'

But an hour later arrived another--from the Squire to Elizabeth.

'Have a bed got ready in the library. Desmond's wish. Also accommodation near for surgeon and nurses. May be able to cross to-morrow. Will wire.'

But it was nearly two days before the final message arrived--from Pamela to her sister. 'Expect us 7.20 to-night.'

By that time the ground-floor of the west wing had been transformed into a temporary ward with its adjuncts, under the direction of a Fallerton doctor, who had brought Desmond into the world and pulled him through his childish illnesses. Elizabeth had moved most of the statues, transferred the Sargent sketch to the drawing-room, and put all the small archaeological litter out of sight. But the Nike was too big and heavy to be moved, and Elizabeth remembered that Desmond had always admired 'the jolly old thing' with its eager outstretched wings and splendid brow. Doctor Renshaw shook his head over the library as a hospital ward, and ordered a vast amount of meticulous cleaning and disinfection.

'No hope?' he said, frowning. 'How do we know? Anyway there shall be no poison I can help.' But the boy's wish was law.

On the afternoon before the arrival, Elizabeth was seized with restlessness. When there was nothing more to be done in the way of hospital provision (for which a list of everything needed had been sent ahead to Doctor Renshaw)--of flowers, of fair linen--and when, in spite of the spring sun shining in through all the open windows on the bare spotless boards, she could hardly bear the sight and meaning of the transformation which had come over the room, she found herself aimlessly wandering about the big house, filled with a ghostly sense of past and future. What was to be the real meaning of her life at Mannering? She could not have deserted the Squire in the present crisis. She had indeed no false modesty as to what her help would mean, practically, to this household under the shadow of death. At least she could run the cook and the servants, wrestle with the food difficulties, and keep the Squire's most essential business going.

But afterwards? She shivered at the word. Yes, afterwards she would go! And Pamela should reign.

Suddenly, in a back pa.s.sage, leading from her office to the housekeeper's room, she came upon a boy of fourteen, Forest's hall-boy, really a drudge-of-all-work, on whom essential things depended. He was sitting on a chair beside the luggage lift absorbed in some work, over which his head was bent, while an eager tip of tongue showed through his tightened lips.

'What are you doing, Jim?' Elizabeth paused beside the boy, who had always appeared to her as a simple, docile creature, not very likely to make much way in a jostling world.

'Please, Miss, I'm knitting,' said Jim, raising a flushed face.

'Knitting! Knitting what?'

'Knitting a sock for my big brother. He's in France, Miss. Mother learnt me.'

Elizabeth was silent a moment, watching the clumsy fingers as they struggled with the needles.

'Are you very fond of your brother, Jim?' she asked at last.

'Yes, Miss,' said the boy, stooping a little lower over his work.

Then he added, 'There's only him and me--and mother. Father was killed last year.'

'Do you know where he is?'

'No, Miss. But Mr. Desmond told me when he was here he might perhaps see him. And I had a letter from Mr. Desmond ten days ago. He'd come across Bob, and he wrote me a letter.'

And out of his pocket he pulled a grimy envelope, and put it into Elizabeth's hands.

'Do you want me to read it, Jim?'

'Please, Miss.' But she was hardly able to read the letters for the dimness in her eyes. Just a boyish letter--from a boy to a boy. But it had in it, quite unconsciously, the sacred touch that 'makes us men.'

A little later she was in the village, where a woman she knew--one Mary Wilson--was dying, a woman who had been used to come up to do charing work at the Hall, before the last illness of a bed-ridden father kept her at home. Mary was still under fifty, plain, clumsy, and the hardest worker in the village. She lived at the outbreak of war with her father and mother. Her brother had been killed at Pa.s.schendaele, and Mary's interest in life had vanished with him.

But all through the winter she had nursed her father night and day through a horrible illness. Often, as Elizabeth had now discovered, in the bitterest cold of the winter, she had had no bed but the flagstones of the kitchen. Not a word of complaint--and a few shillings for both of them to live upon!

At last the father died. And the night he died Mary staggered across to the wretched cottage of a couple of old-age pensioners opposite.

'I must rest a bit,' she said, and sitting down in a chair by the fire she fainted. Influenza had been on her for some days, and now pneumonia had set in. The old people would not hear of her being taken back to her deserted cottage. They gave up their own room to her; they did everything for her their feeble strength allowed. But the fierce disease beat down her small remaining strength.

Elizabeth, since the story came to her knowledge, had done her best to help. But it was too late.

She went now to kneel at the beside of the dying woman. Mary's weary eyes lifted, and she smiled faintly at the lady who had been kind to her. Then unconsciousness returned, and the village nurse gave it as her opinion that the end was near.

Elizabeth looked round the room. Thank G.o.d the cottage did not belong to the Squire! The bedroom was about ten feet by seven, with a sloping thatched roof, supported by beams three centuries old. The one window was about two feet square. The nurse pointed to it.

'The doctor said no pneumonia case could possibly recover in a room like this. And there are dozens of them, Miss, in this village. Oh, Mary is glad to go. She nursed her mother for years, and then her father for years. She never had a day's pleasure, and she was as good as gold.'

Elizabeth held the clammy, misshapen hand, pressing her lips to it when she rose to go, as to the garment of a saint.

Then she walked quickly back through the fading spring day, her heart torn with prayer and remorse--remorse that such a life as Mary Wilson's should have been possible within reach of her own life and she not know it; and pa.s.sionate praying for a better world, through and after the long anguish of the war.

'Else for what will these boys have given their lives!--what meaning in the suffering and the agony!--or in the world which permits and begets them?'

Then, at last, it was past seven o'clock. The dusk had fallen, and the stars were coming out in a pure pale blue, over the leafless trees. Elizabeth and Alice Gaddesden stood waiting at the open door of the hall. A motor ambulance was meeting the train. They would soon be here now.

Elizabeth turned to Mrs. Gaddesden.

'Won't you give a last look and see if it is all right?'

Alice's weak, pretty face cleared, as she went off to give a final survey to Desmond's room. She admitted that Elizabeth had been 'nice' that day, and all the days before. Perhaps she had been hasty.

Lights among the distant trees! Elizabeth thought of the boy who had gone out from that door, two months before, in the charm and beauty of his young manhood. What wreck was it they were bringing back?

Then the remembrance stabbed her of that curt note from France--of what Mrs. Gaddesden had said. She withdrew into the background. With all the rest to help, she would not be wanted. Yes, she had been too masterful, too prominent.

Two motors appeared, the ambulance motor behind another. They drew up at the side door leading direct through a small lobby to the library, and the Squire, his eldest son, and Captain Chicksands stepped out--then Pamela.

Pamela ran up to her sister. The girl's eyes were red with crying, but she was composed.

'On the whole, he has borne the journey well. Where is Miss Bremerton?'

Elizabeth, hearing her name, emerged from the shadow in which she was standing. To her astonishment Pamela threw an arm round her neck and kissed her.