The Amazing Interlude Part 43

"The peace of G.o.d that pa.s.seth all understanding be and abide with you all, forevermore. Amen."

Sara Lee listened, and from the step below her Harvey watched her with furtive, haggard eyes. He had not heard the benediction.

"The peace of G.o.d!" she said slowly. "There is only one peace of G.o.d, Harvey, and that is service. I am going back."

"Service!" he scoffed. "You are going back to him!"

"I'm afraid he is not there any more. I am going back to work. But if he is there--"

Harvey slid the ring into his pocket. "What if he's not there," he demanded bitterly. "If you think, after all this, that I'm going to wait, on the chance of your coming back to me, you're mistaken. I've been a laughing stock long enough."

In the light of her new decision Sara Lee viewed him for the first time with the pitiless eyes of women who have lost a faith. She saw him for what he was, not deliberately cruel, not even unkindly, but selfish, small, without vision. Harvey was for his own fireside, his office, his little family group. His labor would always be for himself and his own.

Whereas Sara Lee was, now and forever, for all the world, her hands consecrated to bind up its little wounds and to soothe its great ones.

Harvey craved a cheap and easy peace. She wanted no peace except that bought by service, the peace of a tired body, the peace of the little house in Belgium where, after days of torture, weary men found quiet and ease and the cheer of the open door.

XXIX

Late in October Sara Lee went back to the little house of mercy; went unaccredited, and with her own money. She had sold her bit of property.

In London she went to the Traverses, as before. But with a difference too. For Sara Lee had learned the strangeness of the English, who are slow to friendships but who never forget. Indeed a telegram met her at Liverpool asking her to stop with them in London. She replied, refusing, but thanking them, and saying she would call the next afternoon.

Everything was the same at Morley's: Rather a larger percentage of men in uniform, perhaps; greater crowds in the square; a little less of the optimism which in the spring had predicted victory before autumn. But the same high courage, for all that.

August greeted her like an old friend. Even the waiters bowed to her, and upstairs the elderly chambermaid fussed over her like a mother.

"And you're going back!" she exclaimed. "Fancy that, now! You are brave, miss."

But her keen eyes saw a change in Sara Lee. Her smile was the same, but there were times when she forgot to finish a sentence, and she stood, that first morning, for an hour by the window, looking out as if she saw nothing.

She went, before the visit to the Traverses, to the Church of Saint Martin in the Fields. It was empty, save for a woman in a corner, who did not kneel, but sat staring quietly before her. Sara Lee prayed an inarticulate bit of a prayer, that what the Traverses would have to tell her should not be the thing that she feared, but that, if it were, she be given courage to meet it and to go on with her work.

The Traverses would know; Mrs. Cameron was a friend. They would know about Henri, and about Jean. Soon, within the hour, she would learn everything. So she asked for strength, and then sat there for a time, letting the peace of the old church quiet her, as had the broken walls and shattered altar of that other church, across the channel.

It was rather a surprise to Sara Lee to have Mrs. Travers put her arms about her and kiss her. Mr. Travers, too, patted her hand when he took it. But they had, for all that, the reserve of their cla.s.s. Much that they felt about Sara Lee they did not express even to each other.

"We are so grateful to you," Mrs. Travers said. "I am only one mother, and of course now--" She looked down at her black dress. "But how many others there are who will want to thank you, when this terrible thing is over and they learn about you!"

Mr. Travers had been eying Sara Lee.

"Didn't use you up, did it?" he asked. "You're not looking quite fit."

Sara Lee was very pale just then. In a moment she would know.

"I'm quite well," she said. "I--do you hear from Mrs. Cameron?"

"Frequently. She has worked hard, but she is not young." It was Mrs.

Travers who spoke. "She's afraid of the winter there. I rather think, since you want to go back, that she will be glad to turn your domain over to you for a time."

"Then--the little house is still there?"

"Indeed, yes! A very famous little house, indeed. But it is always known as your house. She has felt like a temporary chatelaine. She always thought you would come back."

Tea had come, as before. The momentary stir gave her a chance to brace herself. Mr. Travers brought her cup to her and smiled gently down at her.

"We have a plan to talk over," he said, "when you have had your tea. I hope you will agree to it."

He went back to the hearthrug.

"When I was there before," Sara Lee said, trying to hold her cup steady, "there was a young Belgian officer who was very kind to me. Indeed, all the credit for what I did belongs to him. And since I went home I haven't heard--"

Her voice broke suddenly. Mr. Travers glanced at his wife. Not for nothing had Mrs. Cameron written her long letters to these old friends, in the quiet summer afternoons when the sun shone down on the lifeless street before the little house.

"I'm afraid we have bad news for you." Mrs. Travers put down her untasted tea. "Or rather, we have no news. Of course," she added, seeing Sara Lee's eyes, "in this war no news may be the best--that is, he may be a prisoner."

"That," Sara Lee heard herself say, "is impossible. If they captured him they would shoot him."

Mrs. Travers nodded silently. They knew Henri's business, too, by that time, and that there was no hope for a captured spy.

"And--Jean?"

They did not know of Jean; so she told them, still in that far-away voice. And at last Mrs. Travers brought an early letter of Mrs.

Cameron's and read a part of it aloud.

"He seems to have been delirious," she read, holding her reading gla.s.ses to her eyes. "A friend of his, very devoted to him, was missing, and he learned this somehow.

"He escaped from the hospital and got away in an ambulance. He came straight here and wakened us. There had been a wounded man in the machine, and he left him on our doorstep. When I got to the door the car was going wildly toward the Front, with both lamps lighted. We did not understand then, of course, and no one thought of following it. The ambulance was found smashed by a sh.e.l.l the next morning, and at first we thought that he had been in it. But there was no sign that he had been, and that night one of the men from the trenches insisted that he had climbed out of a firing trench where the soldier stood, and had gone forward, bareheaded, toward the German lines.

"I am afraid it was the end. The men, however, who all loved him, do not think so. It seems that he has done miracles again and again. I understand that along the whole Belgian line they watch for him at night.

The other night a German on reconnoissance got very close to our wire, and was greeted not by shots but by a wild hurrah. He was almost paralyzed with surprise. They brought him here on the way back to the prison camp, and he still looked dazed."

Sara Lee sat with her hands clenched. Mrs. Travers folded the letter and put it back into its envelope.

"How long ago was that?" Sara Lee asked in a low tone. "Because, if he was coming back at all--"

"Four months."

Suddenly Sara Lee stood up.

"I think I ought to tell you," she said with a dead-white face, "that I am responsible. He cared for me; and I was in love with him too. Only I didn't know it then. I let him bring me to England, because--I suppose it was because I loved him. I didn't think then that it was that. I was engaged to a man at home."

"Sit down," said Mr. Travers. "My dear child, nothing can be your fault."

"He came with me, and the Germans got through. He had had word, but--"