The Best Short Stories of 1917 Part 69

He looked round with a smile. He had not been killed. It was all a mistake. He was going to speak....

Footsteps sounded hollow in the empty church. She turned and glanced down the dim aisle.

It was an old s.e.xton or verger who approached. "I thought I heard you call," he said.

"I was speaking to my husband." But Hugh was nowhere to be seen.

"He was here a moment ago." She looked about in anguish. "He must have gone to the door."

"There's n.o.body here," said the old man gently. "Only you and me. Ladies are often taken funny since the war. There was one in here yesterday afternoon said she was married in this church and her husband had promised to meet her here. Perhaps you were married here?"

"No," said Mrs. Wilton, desolately. "I was married in India."

It might have been two or three days after that, when she went into a small Italian restaurant in the Bayswater district. She often went out for her meals now: she had developed an exhausting cough, and she found that it somehow became less troublesome when she was in a public place looking at strange faces. In her flat there were all the things that Hugh had used; the trunks and bags still had his name on them with the labels of places where they had been together. They were like stabs. In the restaurant, people came and went, many soldiers too among them, just glancing at her in her corner.

This day, as it chanced, she was rather late and there n.o.body there. She was very tired. She nibbled at the food they brought her. She could almost have cried from tiredness and loneliness and the ache in her heart.

Then suddenly he was before her, sitting there opposite at the table. It was as it was in the days of their engagement, when they used sometimes to lunch at restaurants. He was not in uniform. He smiled at her and urged her to eat, just as he used in those days....

I met her that afternoon as she was crossing Kensington Gardens, and she told me about it.

"I have been with Hugh." She seemed most happy.

"Did he say anything?"

"N-no. Yes. I think he did, but I could not quite hear. My head was so very tired. The next time----"

I did not see her for some time after that. She found, I think, that by going to places where she had once seen him--the old church, the little restaurant--she was more certain to see him again. She never saw him at home. But in the street or the park he would often walk along beside her. Once he saved her from being run over. She said she actually felt his hand grabbing her arm, suddenly, when the car was nearly upon her.

She had given me the address of the clairvoyant; and it is through that strange woman that I know--or seem to know--what followed.

Mrs. Wilton was not exactly ill last winter, not so ill, at least, as to keep to her bedroom. But she was very thin, and her great handsome eyes always seemed to be staring at some point beyond, searching. There was a look in them that seamen's eyes sometimes have when they are drawing on a coast of which they are not very certain. She lived almost in solitude: she hardly ever saw anybody except when they sought her out.

To those who were anxious about her she laughed and said she was very well.

One sunny morning she was lying awake, waiting for the maid to bring her tea. The shy London sunlight peeped through the blinds. The room had a fresh and happy look.

When she heard the door open she thought that the maid had come in. Then she saw that Hugh was standing at the foot of the bed. He was in uniform this time, and looked as he had looked the day he went away.

"Oh, Hugh, speak to me! Will you not say just one word?"

He smiled and threw back his head, just as he used to in the old days at her mother's house when he wanted to call her out of the room without attracting the attention of the others. He moved towards the door, still signing to her to follow him. He picked up her slippers on his way and held them out to her as if he wanted her to put them on. She slipped out of bed hastily....

It is strange that when they came to look through her things after her death the slippers could never be found.

"A CERTAIN RICH MAN----"[18]

[Note 18: Copyright, 1917, by Charles Scribner's Sons. Copyright, 1918, by Lawrence Perry.]

BY LAWRENCE PERRY

From _Scribner's Magazine._

Evelyn Colcord glanced up the table with the appraising eye of a young hostess who had already established a reputation for her dinners. The room had been decorated with a happy effect of national colors, merged with those of the allied nations, and neither in the table nor its appointments was a flaw revealed--while the low, contented murmur of conversation and light laughter attending completion of the first course afforded a.s.surance that the company was well chosen and the atmosphere a.s.sertive in qualities that made for equanimity and good cheer.

She smiled slightly, nodding at the butler, who had been watching her anxiously, and then glanced out the corner of her eye at Professor Simec, seated at her right. She had entertained doubts concerning him, had, in fact, resented the business necessity which had brought him thither as guest of honor, not through any emotion approximating inhospitality but wholly because of her mistrust as to the effect of this alien note upon her dinner, which was quite impromptu, having been arranged at the eleventh hour in deference to the wishes of Jerry Dane, a partner of Colcord's, who was handling the firm's foreign war patents.

She had done the best she could as to guests, had done exceedingly well, as it chanced, fortune having favored her especially in the cases of several of those who sat about the table. And now Simec was fully involved in conversation with Bessie Dane, who seemed deeply interested. As for the man, weazened and attenuate, she could catch only his profile--the bulging, hairless brow, and beard curling outward from the tip, forming sort of a crescent, which she found hardly less sinister than the cynical twist where grizzled whiskers and mustaches conjoined and the cold, level white eyes that she had noted as dominant characteristics when he was presented.

Simec was a laboratory recluse who had found his _metier_ in the war.

Rumor credited to him at least one of the deadliest chemical combinations employed by the allied armies. But it was merely rumor; nothing definite was known. These are things of which little is hinted and less said. None the less, intangible as were his practical achievements--whatever they might be--his reputation was substantial, enhanced, small doubt, by the very vagueness of his endeavors. The element of mystery, which his physical appearance tended not to allay, invested him, as it were, with a thaumaturgic veil through which was dimly revealed the man. It was as though his personality was merely a nexus to the things he stood for and had done, so that he appeared to Evelyn less a human ent.i.ty than a symbol. But at least Bessie Dane was interested and the fine atmosphere of the table was without a taint.

Shrugging almost imperceptibly, she withdrew her eyes and looked across the table with an expression which Nicholas Colcord could have interpreted had he not been engrossed with Sybil Latham. Evelyn studied him with admiring tenderness as he lounged in his chair, toying idly with a fork, smiling at something his partner was saying, while her mind ran lovingly over the dominant traits of a personality which was so strong, so keenly alive, so sensitive to decent, manly things, so perfectly balanced.

Failing to catch his eye, Evelyn turned to her plate filled with a subtle melancholy. When would there be another dinner like this? Not, at all events, until the war was over. Nick had spoken about this--very definitely; there would be no more entertaining. She had agreed with him, of course, not, however, escaping the conviction that her husband's viewpoint was more or less in keeping with a certain unusual sombreness which she had caught creeping into his mood in the past year or so.

Still, everybody who amounted to anything was pulling up on the bit and doing something or talking of doing something or other for the country.

It was already a.s.sured that the season would be insufferably dull--from a social standpoint at least. Evelyn could not suppress a certain resentment. She was not one of those who had found an element of thrill in the suddenly altered perspectives. Her plans for the spring season had been laid; engagements had been accepted or declined, as functions promised to be worth while or uninteresting; all the delicate interlocking machinery of the life in which Evelyn Colcord moved, somewhat prominently, was in motion--then the sudden checking of the wheels: war.

Now there were memories of her husband's sober words; now there was young Jeffery Latham at her elbow--he had been almost shot to pieces in France--now there was Simec, the genius of diabolical achievement....

What were things coming to? Even the weather had gone wrong. Outside, an unseasonable cold rain, lashed by a northeast gale, was driving against the panes of the French windows, and the sizzling effulgence of an arc-lamp revealed pools of water lying on the asphalt of the avenue....

The dry, softly modulated voice of Captain Latham at her left lifted Evelyn from her trend of sombre revery.

"Nick is looking uncommonly fit--he'll go in for the cavalry, I suppose."

The young British officer spoke more with a half-humorous effort at conversation than any other motive, but she turned to him with a gesture of appeal.

"Jeffery," she said, "you make me shiver!"

The man stared at her curiously.

"Why, I--I'm sorry. I'm sure I didn't--"

"Oh, of course," she interrupted, "I know you didn't. Don't be silly. As for me, I'm perfectly foolish, don't you know. Only"--she paused--"I detest war talk. It's so fearfully upsetting. It seems only yesterday that it was a subject to drag in when conversation lagged. But now--"

Latham's quizzical reply was almost upon his lips, when, evidently changing his mind, he spoke dryly.