The Outrage Part 21

"All right, dear," said the vicar; "this is Madame Brandes, who is staying with the Whitakers. She wants to consult me on some personal matter." Then he turned to Dr. Reynolds. "Well, doctor; how do you find our boy?"

"Quite all right. Quite all right," said the doctor. "We shall have him up and playing football again in no time. It is nothing but a strained tendon. Absolutely nothing at all."

Mrs. Yule had gone towards Louise with outstretched hand. "How do you do? I am glad to meet you," she said cordially. "You will stay for tea with us, I hope. My daughter, too, will be so pleased to see you.

Not"--she added, with a little break in her voice--"that she really can see you. Perhaps you have heard that my dear daughter is blind."

"Blind!" Like a tidal wave the sorrow of the world seemed to overwhelm Louise. She felt that the sadness of life was too great to be borne.

"Blind," she said. Then she covered her face and burst into tears.

Mrs. Yule's maternal heart melted; her maternal eyes noted the broken att.i.tude, the tell-tale line of the figure! she stepped quickly forward, holding out both her hands.

"Come, my dear; sit down. Will you let me take your hat off? This English weather is so trying if one is not used to it," murmured Mrs.

Yule with Anglo-Saxon shyness before the stranger's unexpected display of feeling, while the two men turned away and talked together near the window. Mrs. Yule pressed Louise's black-gloved hand in hers. What though this outburst were due, as it probably was, to the woman's condition, to her overwrought nerves, or to who knows what grief and misery of her own? The fact remained--and Mrs. Yule never forgot it--that this storm of tears was evoked by the news of her dear child's affliction. Mrs. Yule's heart was touched.

"You are Belgian, I know," she said in French, sitting down beside Louise and taking one of the black-gloved hands in her own. "I myself was at school in Brussels." And indeed her French was perfect, with just a little touch of Walloon closing the vowels in some of her words. "I would have called on you long ago--I would have asked you to make friends with my daughter whose affliction has so distressed your kind heart; but as you may have heard, my boy met with an accident, and I have not left the house for many days.... Do wait a moment, Dr.

Reynolds," she added as the doctor approached to bid her good-bye. And turning to Louise she introduced him to her as "the kindest of friends and the best of doctors."

"We have met," said Dr. Reynolds, shaking hands with Louise and looking keenly into her face with his piercing, short-sighted eyes. "Madame Brandes's little daughter," he added, turning to Mrs. Yule, "is a patient of mine." There was a moment's silence; then the doctor, turning to the vicar, added in a lower voice: "It seems that their home was invaded, and the child terribly frightened. It is a very sad case.

She has lost her reason and her power of speech."

Mrs. Yule in her turn was deeply moved and quick tears of sympathy gathered in her eyes. With an impulse of tenderest pity she bent suddenly forward and kissed the exile's pale cheek.

Like a flash of lightning in the night, it was revealed to Louise that now or never she must make her confession, now or never attempt a supreme, ultimate effort. This must be her last struggle for life. As she looked from Mrs. Yule's kind, tear-filled eyes to the calm, keen face of the physician hope bounded within her like a living thing. The blood rushed to her cheeks and she rose to her feet.

"Doctor!..." she gasped. Then she turned to Mrs. Yule again, it seemed almost easier to say what must be said, to a woman. "I want to say something.... I must speak...." And again turning to the doctor--"Do you understand me if I speak French?"

Doctor Reynolds looked rather like a timid schoolboy, notwithstanding his spectacles and his red beard, as he replied: "Oh ... _oui, Madame.

Je comp.r.o.ng._"

The vicar stepped forward. Looking from Louise to his wife and to the doctor he said: "Perhaps I had better leave you...."

But Louise quickly extended a trembling hand. "No! Please stay," she pleaded. "You are a priest. You are the doctor of the soul. And my soul is sick unto death."

The vicar took her extended hand. "I shall be honoured by your confidence," he said in courtly fashion, and seating himself beside her waited for her to speak.

Nor did he wait in vain. In eloquent pa.s.sionate words, in the burning accents of her own language, the story of her martyrdom was revealed, her torn and outraged soul laid bare.

In that quiet room in the old-fashioned English vicarage the ghastly scenes of butchery and debauch were enacted again; the foul violence of the enemy, the treason, the drunkenness, the ribaldry of the men who with "mud and blood" on their feet, had trampled on these women's souls--all lived before the horrified listeners, and the martyrdom of the three helpless victims wrung their honest British hearts.

Louise had risen to her feet--a long black figure with a spectral face.

She was Tragedy itself; she was the Spirit of Womanhood crushed and ruined by the war; she was the Grief of the World.

And now she flung herself at the doctor's feet, her arms outstretched, her eyes starting from their orbits, imploring him, in a paroxysm of agony and despair, to release and save her.

She fell face-downwards at his feet, shaken with spasmodic sobs, writhing and quaking as if in the throes of an epileptic fit. Mrs. Yule and the doctor raised her and placed her tenderly on the couch. Water and vinegar were brought, and wet cloths laid on her forehead.

There followed a prolonged silence.

"Unhappy woman!" murmured the vicar, aghast. "Her mind is quite unhinged."

"Yes," said the doctor; but he said it in a different tone, his experienced eye taking in every detail of the tense figure still thrilled and shaken at intervals by a convulsive tremor. "Yes, undoubtedly. She is on the verge of insanity." He paused. Then he looked the vicar full in the face. "And unless she is promptly a.s.sisted she will probably become hopelessly and incurably insane."

A low cry escaped Mrs. Yule's lips. "Oh, hush!" she said, bending over the pallid woman on the couch, fearful lest the appalling verdict might have reached her. But Louise's weary spirit had slipped away into unconsciousness.

"A sad case--a terribly sad case," said the vicar, thoughtfully pushing up his clipped grey moustache with his finger-tips and avoiding the doctor's resolute gaze. "She shall have our earnest prayers."

"And our very best a.s.sistance," said the doctor.

As if the words of comfort had reached her, Louise sighed and opened her eyes.

Mrs. Yule's protecting arm went round her.

"Of course, of course," said Mr. Yule to the doctor. Then he crossed the room and stood by the couch, looking down at Louise. "You will be brave, will you not? You must not give way to despair. We are all here to help and comfort you."

Louise raised herself on her elbow and looked up at him. A dazzling light of hope illuminated her face. Mr. Yule continued gravely and kindly.

"You can rely upon our friendship--nay, more--upon our tenderest affection. Our home is open to you if, as is most probable, Mrs.

Whitaker desires you to leave her house. My wife and daughter will nurse and comfort you, will honour and respect you----" Louise broke into low sobs of grat.i.tude as she grasped Mrs. Yule's hand and raised it to her lips. "And in the hour----" the vicar drew himself up to his full height and spoke in louder, more impressive tones--"and in the hour of your supreme ordeal, you shall not be forsaken."

Louise rose, vacillating, to her feet. "What ... what do you mean?" she gasped. Her countenance was distorted; her eyes burned like black torches in her ashen face.

"I mean," declared the clergyman, his stern eyes fixed relentlessly, almost threateningly, upon the trembling woman, "I mean that whatever you may have suffered at the hands of the iniquitous, you have no right"--he raised his hand and his resonant voice shook with the vehemence of his feeling--"no right yourself to contemplate a crime."

A deep silence held the room. The sacerdotal authority wielded its powerful sway.

"A crime! a crime!" gasped Louise, and the convulsive tremor seized her anew. "Surely it is a greater crime to drive me to my death."

"The laws of nature are sacred," said the vicar, his brow flushing, a diagonal vein starting out upon it; "they may not be set aside. All you can do is humbly to submit to the Divine law."

Louise raised her wild white face and gazed at him helplessly, but Dr.

Reynolds stepped forward and stood beside her. "My dear Yule," he said gravely, "do not let us talk about Divine law in connection with this unhappy woman's plight. We all know that every law, both human and Divine, has been violated and trampled upon by the foul fiends that this war has let loose."

The vicar turned upon him a face flushed with indignation. "Do you mean to say that this would justify an act which is nothing less than murder?"

The doctor made no reply and the vicar looked at him, aghast.

"Reynolds, my good friend! You do not mean to tell me that you would dare to intervene?"

Still the doctor was silent. Louise, her ashen lips parted, her wild eyes fixed upon the two men, awaited her sentence.

"I can come to no hasty decision," said the man of science at last. "But if on further thought I decide that it is my duty--as a man and a physician--to interrupt the course of events, I shall do so." He paused an instant while his eye studied the haggard face and trembling figure of Louise. "_A priori_," he added, "this woman's mental and physical condition would seem to justify me in fulfilling her wish."

"Ah!" It was a cry of delirious joy from Louise. She was tearing her dress from her throat, gasping, catching her breath, shaken with frenzied sobs in a renewed spasm of hysteria.

They had to lift her to the couch again. The doctor hurriedly dissolved two or three tablets of some sedative drug and forced the beverage through Louise's clenched teeth. Then he sat down beside her, holding her thin wrist in his fingers. Soon he felt the disordered intermittent pulse beat more rhythmically; he felt the tense muscles slacken, the quivering nerves relax.

Then he turned to the vicar, who stood with his back to the room looking out of the window at the dreary rain-swept garden.