The Return of the Soldier - novelonlinefull.com
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"I wish she would hurry up. She's got to do it sooner or later."
My spirit was asleep in horror. Out there Margaret was breaking his heart and hers, using words like a hammer, looking wise, doing it so well.
"Aren't they coming back?" asked Kitty. "I wish you'd look."
There was nothing in the garden; only a column of birds swinging across the lake of green light that lay before the sunset.
A long time after Kitty spoke once more:
"Jenny, do look again."
There had fallen a twilight which was a wistfulness of the earth. Under the cedar-boughs I dimly saw a figure mothering something in her arms.
Almost had she dissolved into the shadows; in another moment the night would have her. With his back turned on this fading unhappiness Chris walked across the lawn. He was looking up under his brows at the over-arching house as though it were a hated place to which, against all his hopes, business had forced him to return. He stepped aside to avoid a patch of brightness cast by a lighted window on the gra.s.s; lights in our house were worse than darkness, affection worse than hate elsewhere.
He wore a dreadful, decent smile; I knew how his voice would resolutely lift in greeting us. He walked not loose-limbed like a boy, as he had done that very afternoon, but with the soldier's hard tread upon the heel. It recalled to me that, bad as we were, we were yet not the worst circ.u.mstance of his return. When we had lifted the yoke of our embraces from his shoulders he would go back to that flooded trench in Flanders, under that sky more full of flying death than clouds, to that No-Man's-Land where bullets fall like rain on the rotting faces of the dead.
"Jenny, aren't they there?" Kitty asked again.
"They're both there."
"Is he coming back?"
"He's coming back."
"Jenny! Jenny! How does he look?"
"Oh,"--how could I say it?--"every inch a soldier."
She crept behind me to the window, peered over my shoulder and saw.
I heard her suck in her breath with satisfaction.
"He's cured!" she whispered slowly. "He's cured!"
THE END
