The Kingdom Round the Corner Part 17

"And his name?"

Again Tabs was striving to remember where he had seen the unknown woman's face. He _had_ seen it--of that he was certain. He had the sense that the circ.u.mstances under which he had seen it had been tragic. If he could only make Maisie reveal the name, he might recall.

VII

"His name was Lord Dawn." Seeing the instant puckering of his brows, she asked quickly, "You knew him?"

"Knew him!" Tabs pondered the question. "I'm not sure. But Lady Dawn--I've heard a good deal about her. She had a nursing unit in France, didn't she? Of course she had; you and Terry were with her. It was in her hospital that Terry met Braithwaite. She pa.s.sed me yesterday, driving with the Queen in the Park; not that I noticed her. It was Terry who did that." He came slowly over from the window to the fireplace and stood gazing level with the picture above the mantelpiece. He spoke wonderingly, "The most beautiful woman in England, they say! So this is Lady Dawn!"

When he had finished his inspection, his interest and absorption were so great that he did what he had vowed he would never do again--he sat down for a second time on the couch beside her.

"There's something wrong," he said quietly. "Either you're misinformed or I'm mistaken. Let's get things straight."

She made no attempt to conceal her amus.e.m.e.nt. She attributed his seriousness to sudden infatuation--an infatuation which made him seem ridiculously inconstant after his recent professions concerning Terry.

"Something wrong!" she echoed mockingly. "If you think that I've exaggerated anything that I've told you about----" She glanced up at the portrait. "I don't think I'm likely to be misinformed. After all, I'm her----"

"I didn't mean that," he interrupted impatiently. "I was referring to Lord Dawn. If he's the same man, I think both you and she have misjudged him."

Maisie laughed. "Lord Dawn was sufficiently definite. I'm not misjudging him. He left no room for misjudgment."

"But you said that he had died hating her."

"He did, as far as we know. He gave no sign to the contrary."

"But does she, Lady Dawn, think that?"

"Think that he hated her?"

"No, that he died hating her?"

Maisie picked up a cigarette from the table and looked to Tabs for a match. She was getting bored. "Why, certainly. One doesn't want to be cynical, but all the deaths on the casualty-lists weren't total losses.

Some of them were releases. They weren't all--well, to put it mildly, occasions for wearing the deepest mourning. There were English wives to whom German sh.e.l.ls were merciful--more merciful than English law. If they took lives, there were cases in which they restored freedom."

As Tabs struck a match and held it to her cigarette, his hand trembled.

He had to steady his pa.s.sion before he asked his question. "And you think that she, Lady Dawn, was one of these?"

Maisie blew out a lazy puff of smoke. "Everybody thinks so." Then she added pointedly, "Everybody who knows her and has a right to an opinion."

Tabs refused to be put off. There was a polite forbearance in his tone when he spoke. "The first thing to do is to make sure that my Dawn was the same as yours. Mine was known to us by no t.i.tle; he was a Captain in the same battalion as myself. He was killed in front of Pozieres.--Ah, I see by the way you start, that so was yours! But here's where the difference comes in; mine loved his wife, if she was his wife, more dearly than any man I have known. His devotion was the talk of the regiment."

She flipped the ash off her cigarette. "Then that puts him out of the running, doesn't it?"

It was the studied carelessness of her gesture that released the trigger of his indignation and made it leap out beyond control. There was in his mind the vision of those blood-baths of the Somme, where men had drowned in the putrescence and been flattened by sh.e.l.ls like flies against a wall. They hadn't all been good before they had reached their ordeal. They had come, as most men come, from every kind of prison-house of l.u.s.t and human error. But they'd been good when they had died. They'd been reborn into valor and tenderness. And now, to hear their imperfections discussed in this pleasant room, so entirely feminine, where everything was safe and warm! Their imperfections were so small as compared with their sacrifice. Modern-day Christs, that's what they were! Christs by the thousands, who had found no Josephs of Arimathea to hide their defilement in garden-sepulchres. There they lay at this moment in the wilderness of corruption where they had fallen, while living people between puffs of cigarettes, undertook to explain why they should not be regretted.

"Puts him out of the running! It doesn't."

He leapt to his feet and commenced to drag himself up and down the room, limping backwards and forwards, while she pressed lazily against the cushions at a loss to account for his excitement.

"It doesn't," he repeated, pausing opposite to her. "He's still in the running. The Dawn whom I knew was a very silent man. He was a man with a sorrow. It made him careless. He was in the war to die. We all knew it.

The men adored him because of it. He was the finest officer in the finest of battalions."

He became aware that he was frightening her and sank his voice. The lowered tone only made what he said the more dreadfully impressive.

"There was something funny about him." He all but whispered it.

"Something funny that we couldn't understand. We couldn't understand why he should want so much to die. The reason why we couldn't understand was a woman's photograph."

She looked up at him timidly. "Yes!"

"Wherever he went he carried it. When he went into an attack, he carried it next his heart. In billets he slept with it beneath his pillow. He pinned it against the walls of dug-outs. That was where I saw it. I remember now. It was smeared with the mud of a hundred trenches--Boche trenches as well as ours. It looked down on curious sights, did that woman's printed face in the photo." He laughed harshly. "Sights that those of us who were there will spend the rest of our lives in an effort to forget. And here you and I sit and talk---- Well, as I was saying, we couldn't fathom why he should be so keen on death when there was that woman in the world for whom he cared--for whom he cared right up to the last. It was at the Somme, in the attack on Pozieres, that he went west.

He was in command of a company that got cut off. When we found him, he had that bit of cardboard so tightly clasped that we couldn't take it from him."

He paused, suddenly exhausted. His indignation had burnt itself out.

"I'm tired," he apologized. "I'm afraid I let myself get out of hand. I scared you for a moment. I'm sorry. Do you mind if I sit down?"

She pushed the table back to make it easier for him to take a place beside her. "It's all right," she consoled him. "I know that you're only just out of hospital. Terry told me. You're not really recovered yet.

Besides, it was my fault; I spoke lightly. I wasn't thinking what I said. But I don't feel lightly about these things. I couldn't." Then she said something which struck him oddly. "You know my man's out there."

What did she mean by _her man_? If she had said _her men_, he could have comprehended. She had lost three husbands in the war. But why did she particularize and say, "My man"? It seemed cruel to the rest. And which of the three was it that she regarded as so peculiarly hers.

He jerked his thoughts back. "There was something you told me about Lord Dawn; you said it explained him. How did it go? I think you said that he hated his wife as men hate G.o.d, because they love Him so much and yet He won't come down. Well, out there it wasn't like that. Dawn climbed up to her; yes, and perhaps beyond her. Out there he didn't need to pretend to hate her; he could afford to love her without loss of self-respect. I suppose he thought it was too late to tell her after all that had gone before."

"Either that," Maisie a.s.sented, "or else---- It would be like him. Or else because he was too much of a sportsman. As it was, if he were killed, she wouldn't need to be sorry. But if he wrote her that he loved her and had always loved her, and then got killed---- Don't you see, that's where her remorse would start?"

Tabs nodded. "And yet she was his last thought. She ought to know it.

It's monstrous that she should go on believing----" He broke off. And then, "She must be told. It's merest justice--whatever it costs."

VIII

The light had been failing while they had talked. A tap fell on the door. Coming at that moment when their nerves were jangled, it sounded ominous. Their heads turned sharply. Maisie's voice was unsteady when she asked, "What is it? What do you want?"

"It's Porter, Madam. Dinner is served."

"Oh, come in, Porter. Have you laid a place for Lord Taborley?"

As the maid entered, Tabs rose. "I had no idea---- Why, I've been here for hours. I really must apologize, Mrs. Lockwood, and be going."

However much his reception had been prearranged, dinner had formed no part of the program. The slightly puzzled expression on Maisie's watch-dog's face betrayed that fact to him at a glance.

Maisie laid an arresting hand on his arm. To the maid she said cheerfully, "It's all right, Porter; Lord Taborley is staying."

As Porter was making her exit, he commenced again to protest. Maisie silenced his objections by leaning against him warningly. "You've talked of everything except me," she whispered; "it was about me you came to talk. You _must_ before we part."

Following her across the hall to the dining-room, he reflected on her ability for getting him into deeper and yet deeper water. He had the feeling that he was being led somewhere against his will--somewhere that might be for his good or for his harm, but which would inevitably cut him off from many of his old affections. He had the discomforting sense that he was doing something disloyal to Terry. Heaven knew what promises might not be exacted from him before the evening ended. When would it end? He would have to stay for at least an hour after coffee--that would bring him to nine o'clock. Sir Tobias Beddow would have been expecting him long before that to deliver his account of the result of his mission. Furthermore, Sir Tobias would be demanding an explanation as to how it was that, having asked for Terry's hand the night before, he was still unengaged to her. If he postponed the interview till to-morrow, it would create the appearance of lukewarmness. He couldn't very well excuse himself by saying that he'd spent the afternoon and evening with Maisie. And he couldn't get Maisie to let him off on the plea that Sir Tobias, her harshest critic, was waiting for him. Besides, he had accomplished nothing as yet; Adair Easterday had not been mentioned.

If ever he made good his escape, he prayed that he might never again encounter a woman possessed of charm. His paramount desire was to seize his hat and make a furtive exit. There was nothing to prevent him but the politeness due from a man to a woman--and she traded on it. As he pa.s.sed into the dining-room he was secretly on his guard. "I wonder what she'll do next to inveigle me?" was his thought.