Book the Second: THE SENDING (continued 4)

Edward was waiting for her in the garden after long years of separation, but Father would have wished her to be particularly gracious to this queer young man from Cornhill. Father had looked forward to his coming with extraordinary interest.... He would have towed him off to his den; and they would have been boxed up hours together, questioning and answering.... And you would have heard the Jew's big voice booming down the gallery in spite of the thickness of the old oak door....

She broke a silence that grew awkward, saying in her mellow tones:

"About the borrowing of the money for the building of the Tower, here on our Scottish Border, there must be some story.... He—my dearest—" her thought went tenderly to the sleeper lying not far off in the sacred silence of the chapel—"he always said there must be one, and that we should light on it some day. We have our legend about the Roman tribune Marcus Fabius (who must have been a son of Philoremus Florens Fabius). He was bred by a community of Coptic monks in Egypt, and came over to Britain in the service of the Emperor Constantine. But beyond his signature appended to a queer lead-sealed parchment covered with crabbed brown Gothic handwriting—a kind of Twelfth century builder's estimate—kept with other family papers in our strong-room—where the wonderful crumbly Title Deed of Kir Saba and all the rest shall join it presently!—of Sir Hew, hardly anything is known."

"I'll tell you what I've crammed of Hew." The speaker went on, feeling for his sentences, sometimes using the excellent if archaic English of the translated letter, other times reverting to modern slang: "He was a Crusader who had served Baldwin I, King of Jerusalem"—(the thick mouth under the cropped black moustache sneered a little)—"first as page and cupbearer, afterwards as body-squire, and later on as a Knight, in Baldwin's last campaign of 1118. He got what one might call a Blighty wound—an arrow through the fleshy part of the thigh—in 1145—driving the Egyptians under Nureddin, their Sultan, out of the castles and coast-towns of Palestine; and the fever of the country—malaria, we'd call it!—seems to have given him beans. But being recovered of his wound under the care of Issachar Ben Hazaël, who tended him as his own son in his house near Joppa, he rebuilt and adorned the Tower of Kir Saba, which had been held as a fortress by the invading Paynims—that means the Egyptians under the Abbasside—and then 'wearying of Palestine'—this was in 1146—'bethought him of quitting the Holy Land and returning to Britain straightway.' ..."

Katharine was listening, fair cheek on white hand, as some twelfth-century lady of the Forbis race might have listened to the tale of Hew....

"But want of boodle intervened, according to Hew's chronicler. Restoring castles even in those days, sometimes spelt bankruptcy, and 'being impoverished'—I'm quoting from a contemporaneous document—'firstly by the great cost of hewn stone and timber; and secondly by his excessive love of good wine, feasting and prodigality; the shows of jugglers, the songs of minstrels—and the company of the daughters of Delilah, this Knight cast about to raise money upon loan.'"

The narrator broke off to comment:

"A sporty boy, Hew, evidently,—and not the first Brass Hat who's enlivened his H.Q. on a War Front—with imported talent and beauty—of the Musical Comedy kind. So being short of cash to settle his accounts, and charter ships to carry him home, and incidentally rebuild the Tower of Kir Saba in North Britain 'so as to make the dwelling seemly for a lord of his estate,' Sir Hew engineered a loan from the Jew, Issachar Ben Hazaël of Joppa—the Joppa of those days is Jaffa to-day,—and the facts I'm giving are taken from a letter, written in the Twelfth Century lingua Franca, and the usual Gothic hand. I've a translation as well as the original, which of course is our property.... Means nothing to me but brown scratches on mouldy sheepskin, though to my pal Harding, ex-Curator of the Mediæval Manuscript Dep. at the British Museum—it would have been toffee and peppermint-rock. First-class man, my pal Harding—killed last March at Richebourg St. V." He answered Katharine's look of interrogation. "A German prisoner shot him from the rear, in our trenches.... And I went balmy and laid out the Hun! ..."

"You mean that you—killed the prisoner who did it?" Miss Forbis' cairngorm eyes were cold and judicial in their regard.

"Exactly." John nodded, and Katharine told herself that the man was a brute as well as a bounder. "But I seem to have been getting away from Sir Hew...."

"Perhaps you have!" Sarcasm was lost upon this pachydermatous person, who murdered prisoners in calm defiance of the Geneva Convention. "Why did he want to build another Kir Saba here on the Border?"

"Because—though he'd got a Tower here already, he didn't consider it seemly for a lord of his swagger, being only 'of great stones unmortared and unbevelled, standing inside a paled enclosure of wattle and posts and earth.'"

"Then that is why the old chronicles call it a pale-tower?" Katharine's interest was eager and vivid now....

"A pale-tower. I expect so. And the bags of French gold were wanted to pay the architect's fee and the wages of the stone-quarriers; and 'the lime and sand wherewith to mortar the stone, and the cost of the clippings of a troop of the Scots King's horse, the better to bind the same.' So the mortgage of Kir Saba was drawn up, signed and sealed—you've got it there with the rest—and you ought to have a duplicate somewhere! And the bags of French gold were packed in boxes and sent down to Sir Hew's ship. He had three of 'em, high-sterned three-banked galleys with scarlet-lug-sails, to take him and his servants, and his Arab horses, and the rest of his baggage home to Britain—and the one he chose for his own use was called The Scottish Crown...."

"Oh—do go on!" Katharine began to see Sir Hew, healed of his arrow-wound by the Jew's skill, with the brown of Syrian suns on his fair skin, and their bleach on his yellow hair—going home to rebuild his Tower and rear his long-legged, broad-shouldered race of Forbis. "This part of the story is wonderfully interesting. If only Father had been alive to hear it to-day!"

"There's not so much to tell. Hew got ready to sail. Old Issachar Ben Hazaël loaded him with gifts; myrrh and spices, incense and dried raisins,—Egyptian hangings and silk embroideries, mother-of-pearl and turquoises; ivory and rare woods—fresh fruit for the voyage and so on.... And Hew took all that he could get—not that I'm inclined to blame him! But at the last minute he wanted a thing with which my ancestor wasn't inclined to part.... Issachar Hazaël had a daughter.... It seems—" The tone changed.... The sentences came dropping from the heavy mouth like strings of cold, weighty, slippery, polished beads of jade—or so it seemed to Katharine: "It seems that my ancestress and Sir Hew had met at our house—it is our house still!—if the Turks have left it standing amongst the orange and olive-groves to the nor'east of Jaffa. And—the girl was beautiful, and Hew—was a Crusader...."

"He—wished to marry her?" The tone was enigmatical.

"He broached the subject of marrying her—an hour before he sailed."

"With what success?"

"With the—result that might have been expected."

Their looks crossed like swords. And resentment burned in Katharine. She stiffened and drew more upright in her chair.

"The Jew—refused to entertain my ancestor's proposal?"

"Just that. He said to him"—the voice of the speaker changed and deepened:

"'Thou hast the gold and the goods. Depart with that which is thine to the country of thine adoption. When the money is recovered in the fulness of time, the title-deeds concerning Kir Saba will be given back again.... For'"—

The big voice echoed among the rafters of the heavily-beamed room, making a brass Chinese gong hung upon a stand at the further end, vibrate with a faint tenor humming....

"'For by a great oath sworn by a forefather of our race in ancient times, we of the Hazaël are bound to succour the children of thy House unto the final generation. That oath we have kept, and will keep, Sir Knight. But we do not defile the pure stream of Jewish lineage with the blood of Gentile veins. I have spoken!' ..."

Fierce scarlet leaped to the roots of Katharine's hair. As though the speaker had struck or insulted her, she rose from her seat with one swift supple movement,—and so stood facing him, quivering with wrath. He too had risen—and thus the woman and the man opposed each other in a silence that both knew hostile; pregnant with hatred, racial, religious—sprung green and poisonous from the dust of nearly two thousand years....

"He dared to speak so to a Scottish gentleman! A Jew!" ...

The great black eyes beneath Hazel's heavy eyebrows burned like live coals. His deep voice echoed:

"A Jew, Miss Forbis. A representative of the People who received the Law from Sinai. Who possessed, besides the Torah, Literature, Poetry, Arts and Sciences—even when a rabble of Aryan nations, swept North by the besom of some Assyrian conqueror—rolled into the Caucasus through the Pass of Dariel. Verily, verily!—and peopled Russia and Germany,—crossing lakes and seas and rivers on log-rafts and in boats of osiers and skins. And paddling across the North Sea—and building forts of tree-trunks at the mouth of an estuary—laid the foundations of the British Nation of which you boast to-day!"

XIX

So they stood face to face, the Occident and the Orient, until the tact of the woman, the subtlety of the man—suggested the compromise of an exchanged smile.

"After all it is very Ancient History.... I think," said Katharine with a gleam of mirth in her eyes of gold and bramble-dew, "that your ancestor was discourteous, and mine—"

"A little bit premature. Or tardy from another point of view,—in asking for what he'd got already. For Sir Hew and my ancestress had been married a week or so back—by a Catholic friar who had baptised Judith—after having received her abjuration of her Jewish faith. Between them they broke the news to Issachar Hazaël, 'who at first made naught of the Lady Judith's entreaties, but after many tears, embraces and cajoleries, suffered himself to be persuaded to sit with them at meat.'"

"Did he? ... I should have suspected—"

"Rats—if I'd been in the sandals of the Lady Judith—and I'd have made an inner bull if I had! 'He would taste of no dish'—according to my Twelfth Century scribe—but he 'filled an ancient silver cup with the best wine of Kir Saba, and touched it with his lips once: seeming to drink while dropping into the goblet under cover of his beard, which was white as the snow of Herman, and fully an ell long—a ring of black onyx incarven very curiously, having a head of the Greek Hercules-with his club and lion-mask.'"

"The ring you wear. The fellow to my ring! And it was poisoned?"

"This ring I wear—the signet from his hand. There's a little compartment with a spring-lid, back of the setting, so I suppose it held poison—as you say, when he 'did hand the goblet to the Lady Judith, bidding her pledge him. But Sir Hew, stretching forth his hand in sport, laid hold of the goblet, whereupon said Hazaël: "Drink first, my Lady Forbis!" and she answered: "That will I right gladly, O my father! but thou and mine husband must kiss me first!" So she took the kisses and gave them back, and quaffed off the cup right merrily—and died as though she had been struck by lightning, not falling down, but sitting stiff and smiling in her chair....'"

There was a silence in the room. Then Katharine murmured, still vibrating:

"Women knew how to love in those days!" ...

"And men knew how to hate!" ...

"And is that all?"

"All, except that Sir Hew leaped up, and cried, when the corpse fell down out of the chair upon the daïs strewn with lion-skins: 'We were wed by a priest! I dealt honourably by her!' And Issachar said,—and I think he comes out of it pretty well on the whole: 'What is honour in thine esteem is dishonour in mine! For the girl, she was begotten of these my loins.... Take what is thine, Sir Knight, and depart an' thou will to thine own adopted country. I deal as I choose with that which is mine own!' Straight off the ice, I call that. Fine old fellow!"

Katharine said, a little breathlessly, for the thrill of a great tragic happening seemed to be in the air:

"Yes, it was great, and terrible and merciless...."

"Hardly to Judith. When he'd once got her over in Britain, Hew would have gone back to the Beauty Chorus. For I'm not over struck on Hew," said John Hazel with a queer quirk of his fleshy underlip. "He appears to have anticipated the Profiteer's motto of the present date. Perhaps you've heard it? 'Self first, me next, and I'll take whatever's left over!' Now I've gone and made you wild with me all over again!"

His huge size, and his genuine ruefulness, contrasted so queerly that Katharine, still tingling to the finger-tips at the insult to Sir Hew, was forced to smile.

"It is a mercy we are not likely to meet often, Mr. Hazel. We should quarrel inevitably. And yet—" There was sweetness in the smile of her eyes of cairngorm brown as she stretched out her long arm and offered her hand to him, saying: "And yet, in a tight place, I would trust you before most men!"

"Give me the chance, Miss Forbis!" His black eyes flashed in their deep caves as her white hand was engulfed in his huge brown one.

"If there is need," she said, "I will not fail to!"

"It's a bargain then!" said John Hazel, and released the hand. "Now I must be going. I have trespassed on your time most frightfully." He turned and reached down to the floor and picked up the cowskin bag....

"One moment, Mr. Hazel!" For he was striding towards the door, and urgently as she desired to be quit of her strange untimely visitor, the sacred bond of old fidelity, exerted its strong invisible influence between these two, so utterly dissimilar—making her add, even as she laid her hand on Whishaw's summoning bell: "You would—would you not wish to attend my father's funeral?"

"I meant to, whether you were willing or not! ..."

The tone robbed the assertive words of all offence. She answered:

"Thank you. He will be laid to rest in the vault in our little private burying-ground the day after to-morrow. Monday morning, immediately after the Requiem Mass at ten. If it will be difficult or bad for you,"—her glance was kind for the hollow cheeks and the bagginess of the khaki on the great wasted body—"to drive over from Cauldstanes in this sharp weather at so early an hour—I know my father would have been glad to—to have you stay...." She added as Whishaw opened the door: "Perhaps you would dine with us to-morrow and sleep the night here?"

"It would put you out." His vast shoulders filled the open doorway, the lintel of which just cleared his towering head. He added as Whishaw faintly clacked behind him: "It's awfully good of you to suggest finding me a bivvy, but the motor-bike that brought me over here to-day—it belongs to the son of the landlady at the Cross Keys—will hold together long enough—at least I hope so!—to carry me over the distance again. But there's one thing I'll ask you. Not, as a favour, mind you!—but as a right, to let me—see him!"

Whishaw again forgot himself so far as to clack, this time distinctly. Miss Forbis' momentary hesitation was dissipated by the sound. She bent her head in grave assent, took her black lace veil and blue-check apron from the writing-table, saying to John Hazel:

"Wait here one instant!" and quitted the room, closely followed by her ancient serving-man.

As the door shut behind them John Hazel's expression altered. His beetling eyebrows drew into a savage line over his great hooked nose, and his swarthy colour faded to ashen brown. His coarse mouth hardened grimly as he crossed with long, noiseless strides to the open terrace-window, and stood there for a moment, quietly looking out. At the first glimpse the sunshiny terrace showed deserted of the pacing khaki figure.... Then the crack of a kindled match broke the silence. Yaill stepped from behind the buttress that had sheltered him as he had paused to light another pipe. The fragrance of the good weed came to Hazel's nostrils, as their eyes met for the second time that day....

"Did you wish to speak to me, by any chance?"

The great menacing figure blocking the window-frame slewed its head in the customary quarter-turn, and raised ar hand in the usual salute.

"As man to man—not as private to field-officer—I have something urgent to say to you, Colonel Yaill."

A pale light flickered in the sorrowful grey eyes he looked at. Was it irresolution, anger, apprehension? The actual truth he utterly failed to guess. Relief.... The die cast, the doubt resolved, the tangle straightened.... The path clear for the lonely feet till death....

"Have you? Well, carry on! We have no hearers. Will you come outside, or shall I come in? ..."

John stepped back. Yaill entered. The men confronted each other. There was one instant's pause before Hazel said:

"This is Saturday forenoon—"

"Twelve pip emma precisely." Yaill glanced at the cheap new watch upon his wrist. A flush burned his thin brown cheeks as he remembered that the bauble had been Lucy's wedding-gift.

"Twelve Saturday.... The Funeral is to be on Monday at ten o'clock...."

"You are incorrect. Monday at ten-thirty...."

"I aim at being plain and short with you, sir. If by three o'clock on Monday afternoon you have not told Miss Forbis of your marriage, I am going to save you the trouble, Colonel Yaill."

"Indeed?" ... Yaill's face was deathly under its sun-tan. "Perhaps you'll tell me who the Hell you are?" ...

John answered with a grim inexpressive visage:

"You can see for yourself. A London Territorial.... Ranker as long as this blasted old War goes on.... And a kind of—family friend of this house of Forbis.... If you're taking any further explanation—I'm bound to tell you you won't get it here...."

"Very well. Your name? ..." It was the crisp, curt tone that marks the caste of the officer, making the other stiffen against his will:

"Private John Benn Hazel, No. 000. X Platoon—Company F. 4th Battalion, 448th City of London Fusiliers, sir."

"I shall remember. Good-day to you, Private Hazel. And carry on!"

"You may be sure I will!"

The door-handle turned as the short, stern colloquy ended. Both men looked round and saw Katharine standing near the door. Her black lace veil draped her head with mystery. In her hand was a little bunch of purple violets, whose perfume made rich sweetness in the air.... She made a sign to Hazel that he should follow her, gave one swift glance of tenderness to Edward, and left the room, followed by his enemy....

"I was going to give him these. Perhaps you would like to?" she said, putting the flowers in John's great hand. He mumbled something she did not catch, but she understood that he would like to, as she led the way down the vaulted corridor—pausing before opening the chapel door to stroke the decrepit pointer-bitch Dawtie, who lay with her muzzle between her forepaws, keeping guard over the sleeper who would wake in Time no more....

Then she passed into the sacred place; bent in reverence before the Presence in the Tabernacle, and led the way up the little aisle closely followed by John. He heard her say in a low, clear voice, as he stood near the feet of the old man who lay in the long oak coffin:

"Father dear, here is a friend of ours whom you have wished to see! ..."

Just as though the old man lying there had not been dead at all.... He—Sir Philip—must have been a tall man, rather narrow than broad-chested; and in youth his fine aquiline-featured face, now set in the sternness of death, might have belonged to his ancestor Marcus Fabius—that Tribune of Constantine,—who superintended the building of fortified camps on the Scottish Border—and planted millions of barbed iron prongs on the brae-sides and in the moss-hags for the bedevilment of naked Celtic feet.

So John laid the bunch of violets below the stiff grey hands that were clasped over a Crucifix and had a Rosary threaded between their rigid fingers,—and rode back on his borrowed motor-bike to the Cross Keys at Cauldstanes—an ancient stone box full of prehistoric smells (stale beer and boiled cabbage predominating)—and slept in a bedroom with an uphill floor, crowded with glass-fronted cases of stuffed salmon and trout, owls, heron, and moth-eaten brocks and foxes.

XX

On Monday John attended the Funeral, driving out to Kerr's Arbour in the dog-cart, in company of Mr. Kellar, the Cauldstanes solicitor and notary, who had heard, possibly through Mrs. Govan, that the big black sojer-man from London was "somehow conneckit wi' the family at Kerr's."

Khaki predominated, for the General commanding at the P—— Depot attended with his aide-de-camp, and the officers of the Fourth and Fifth Squadrons of the Tweedburgh Light Horse officiated as pall-bearers at the burial of their Chief.... In the company of the handful of troopers detailed to act as escort, John Hazel remained near the door of the chapel throughout the Requiem Mass. Declining with obstinate shakes of the head Whishaw's hoarse-whispered invitations that he should "tak' a move up and sit wi' the family" in the parallel rows of benches close-packed by County friends and tenants, and a relative here and there.... Red Cross uniforms were worn by many among the women,—nor was wanting the khaki of the L.L.W.S.L. If the green eyes of Trixie Lady Wastwood picked out among the troopers on the benches near the west door, her fellow-traveller of two days previously—John remained ignorant of the fact.

Bolt upright against the plastered wall left of the chapel door, his great height lifting him above the heads of the congregation, his hawk-vision showed him through an unfamiliar, glittering haziness—the long coffin covered with the Union Jack, on its black-draped trestles, with its single wreath of violets, gathered and placed there that morning by the daughter's loving hand....

An old-type long brass-scabbarded R.H.A. sword with the heavy-fringed sash of faded crimson, rested on the Red, White and Blue, with the soldier's medals and decorations.... The Burmese War Medal of 1826, the four-barred Crimean medal with its faded blue yellow-edged ribbon, the medal of the Indian Mutiny, ribbon white and scarlet; the Turkish Order of the Medjidie with its star and crimson circle, the Maltese Cross of the C.B., the K.C.V.O., the Belgian Order of Leopold; and the eight-pointed, red-enamelled gold Cross of the Pontifical Order of St. Gregory....

Two figures kneeling on prie-dieux on the right of the coffin nearest the gate in the Communion-rail, drew and held the black hawk-eyes from the beginning of the Rite to its close. A tall brown-haired man in khaki, and a woman in deepest mourning, tall also, and bending like a palm in tempest under her shrouding black crape veil. When the fragrant incense rose at the chant of the Responsory:

"Libera me Domine, de morte æterna."

When the Kyrie Eleison wailed out, and the Paternoster filled the silence; when the priest circled the bier, asperging the feet, the middle and the head of the corpse with the consecrated Water; when the prayer of Hope and Faith ended with the intoned "Amen" and Yaill rose to his feet and stepped to the head of the coffin—John Hazel got up too from the back-bench, where he was sitting: glowering, reluctant but driven on by a Force he could not but obey....

That unseen hand that had thrust down his head when he entered the presence of Katharine had him again in its resistless grip.... He went up the little aisle between the packed benches, moving with long, noiseless strides, and took his place opposite Yaill. Had he been asked why he did this, he would have mumbled that it had seemed only the decent thing to lend a hand, and yet the impulse, rendered into words, would have been capable of a nobler interpretation:

"Thou hast here no son to bear thee to thy tomb. Therefore, let me render thee this service, whom, never having heard thy voice or touched thy living hand,—I, by the oath of my forefather, nevertheless am bound to serve. And after thee those that are thine, as long as life remains to me!"

The muttered word of command was drowned by the harmonium. The troopers detailed as bearers clanked up the aisle, Yaill's hand steadying the coffin as they lifted it—John Hazel taking upon his shoulders his full share of its weight. Seeing the words, "Because thou hast no son," written in letters of golden fire upon the frescoed stone walls, in violet and orange and fiery crimson across the face of the rose-window in the ogive over the West door, as the escort formed in file at the head of the procession and passed out by a side-exit, heralding the bearer of the Crucifix with its child-borne lights, the chanting choir, the tall young officer with the black-craped regimental Standard, and—carried by five tall Light Horsemen and one taller infantryman—its pall borne by officers of the Fourth and Fifth Squadrons—the coffin of their dead Chief....

So they bore him to the little private burial-place at the foot of the wood-shagged hill that rose behind Kerr's Arbour, touched by the long shadow of its Tower when the sun moved towards the south....

Before the steps leading to the gate of the open vault, the escort of troopers halted and turned inwards, making a lane for the dead man to pass through, as they rested on arms reversed. The coffin was lowered, again asperged by the celebrating priest and incensed with the words:

"Eco sum resurréctio et vita, qui credit in Me etiam—si mórtuus fuerit vivet...."

During the singing of the Canticle Edward Yaill led forward Katharine Forbis. John Hazel, standing in rank with the bearers, caught full view of her death-white, tear-drenched face. Something wrenched at his heart as the priest assisting offered her a silver shell of sacred earth, and she scattered some upon the lid of the coffin—from which the Union Jack with the sword and decorations were now removed. Yaill followed suit: some old friends and Mrs. Bell and the lawyer, Mr. Kellar, pressed forward to take part in this significant act. But Katharine's eyes beckoned and Hazel's answered. He held his palm; she poured from the silver shell—and the soil from the Mount of Olives streamed between his fingers in a thin brown stream, dulling the purple petals of the violets....

And then, moving slowly under the weight of the burden, came the slow descent of the steps leading into the vault, where—to the solemn company of the departed—ranged upon rock-hewn shelves in their modern oak or old-world lead, or antique granite coffins,—Philip, last Forbis of the male line save Julian,—supposing Julian yet to be numbered amongst the living,—was joined with the solemn blessing of his Church.

John Hazel's stern black eyes met Yaill's grey ones, as in unison with others they lent their strength to place the heavy coffin on the stone shelf appointed for its repose. When it slid to its place, their glances again encountered. Yaill was livid and spent and panting, for the effort had taxed him. But he gave back the other's look with cold composure, brushing a little dust from his ringed sleeve. Then, only delaying to replace upon the coffin its wreath of violets—he mounted the moss-grown steps—following the celebrant—and drew Katharine's cold hand once more within his arm.

"Attention! Present! ... Slope arms!"

As the ponderous door of the vault was shut and locked, the sharp voice of the commander of the escort broke the awed silence. The trumpeter sounded the Last Post—and three times the ringing crash of the volley startled to flight the rooks of the home-wood and the jackdaws of the Tower. As the small procession of friends, mourners and clergy returned from the burial-ground to the slow recital of the De Profundis, Yaill thought bitterly:

"Out of the depths I have cried, and no One has heard me. Yet, what had I done amiss?"

The County, with genuine regret tinging its discreetly-conventional condolences, rolled away in its landau-limousines or open cars. The officiating priests,—Father Haddon of the parish church at Birkleas,—the Father Superior of the Benedictine Monastery,—his guest the Jesuit from Farm Place, and Father Inghame,—pleaded an engagement to early dinner at Scraeside. The cars that had brought the General and his aide, and one or two elderly County magnates, remained outside the courtyard railings; their owners having stayed to lunch, as did the officers of the Tweedburgh Light Horse. At the board, Yaill did the honours, aided by Mr. Kellar, the Mistress of Kerr's not being present. A strange, ungenial banquet, crowning a strange, sorrowful day, that,—like how many others that had preceded it,—seemed to the host to be woven of the stuff of dreams. Only the rosy Kellar and one or two of the juniors grew merry over the Forbis port, while John Hazel,—who had shortly declined all hospitable offers of refreshment, rode back to Cauldstanes on Alec Govan's rickety "Sunray,"—thinking of the eyes that had silently bidden him participate in the final rite that only the nearest share.

The reading of the Will in the dead man's library followed the departure of the guests. There were a few personal legacies to friends and pensioners. Kerr's Arbour, with its eleven-hundred acres of moss-hag and moorland, its few productive farms and its neglected coverts, would, did Julian live, be Julian's, with reversion to Katharine and her heirs.

Over that windfall of £8000, rosy Mr. Kellar chuckled, or would have, had the solemnity of the occasion allowed. It would apply at this juncture to pay outstanding debts of Captain Mark's,—who had been something of a spendthrift—patch up yawning holes in the rent-roll, where the master of Kerr's Arbour had foregone the rents of such tenants as had volunteered for military service—pay the expenses of the funeral,—and swell with the balance remaining the tale of odd thousands, that, with her mother's little fortune,—would, if invested in four per cent War Bonds—provide Miss Forbis with an income approximating to £700 a year.

"This is a sad day, Colonel Yaill—a sad black day for a' of us!" said the lawyer, as Whishaw helped him into his shaggy overcoat. "But Gude be thanked! the warst o't is ower. We're looking to yoursel' now, an' to Miss Forbis, to bring back life and happiness to Kerr's. Ye'll be blessed in your pairtner—" the good man was sorely henpecked—"a sonsy, sweet body that can be relied on neither to stick nor fling! Not but housekeeping in these times is a trial an' a hertbreik. Mrs. Kellar is sore put to it by the scarceness o' sugar an' fat. She made ninety-eight punds of blackberry-an'-apple jam for the Expeditionary Arrmy last September—an' some clever billie put her up to the eking out the sugar wi' saut. I fand mysel' sadly the warse for having tasted it by accident, an' Toch!—if the lads at the Front get muckle o' that stuff intil them, I tell her she'll be fechtin' on the side o' the Huns. Here comes the meir an' cairt. Is there no one wanting a cast to Cauldstanes? ... Put in the black bag, Erchie Whishaw, no' in the well to be overlooked, but juist between my feet. And Gude-bye again to ye, Colonel Yaill, and an auld freend's love to Miss Forbis! This has been a black sair day for a' of us ... but thanks be to Providence! we're at the end o't!" ...

Yaill thought as the gravel of the courtyard shirred under the wheels of the retreating dog-cart, "More black, more sore than the good man dreams! And my part in it is not yet finished. Old Webster never conjured up a grimmer tragedy. For at ten o'clock I lend a hand to bury Katharine's father. Upon the stroke of three I stab the daughter to the heart. And having killed her love for me—at four—possibly earlier—I say Farewell to God's Forget—unlucky Edward Yaill!"

XXI

He went to Katharine, before three o'clock, in the little oak parlour, a panelled, chintz-hung, feminine nest that her dead mother had loved—looking over the South garden, across the now frozen expanse of a curlew-haunted lake.

She rose up out of her low chair by the hearthside at the welcome sight of Edward, and at her dear look his fetters seemed to fall from him and for one blessed minute he forgot—in the bliss of their embrace....

Attar of roses is composed of two essential oils, both scentless. When these meet and mingle, a divine perfume is born. So from the meeting of two pure and noble souls an ideal passion is engendered. Love that is founded on the rock of Reality,—yet capped with the cloud-domes of Imagination, cloaked with the glamour—exhaling the sweetness of Poetry and Romance.

It may be that these two had loved each other too purely for their earthly welfare. But as they settled into talk, fond, intimate, personal—tinged with Katharine's sacred sorrow, and yet illuminated with their joy—it seemed to Yaill that he had never yet tasted such happiness, as in this long-delayed, long-desired exchange of touch and thought and feeling—this perfect comradeship between woman and man.

Three o'clock sounded from the clock upon the mantelshelf, a Tudor toy in enamel openwork, whose tiny chime had rung for many a lover's meeting—and hastened many a lover's parting—but never heralded one more tragic than was coming now. He raised his head from its sweet rest on her beloved shoulder, and slowly loosed the yearning arms that had girdled her supple waist. Now,—now let the revelation come—the sooner the better. But how to bring it about? ...

Unwitting Katharine assisted here, by telling him how that morning Dawtie, the General's old pointer-bitch, had been found dead and already stiffened at her post outside the chapel door. Yaill said, scarce knowing what he uttered:

"You will be even—lonelier—without her. You must let me find you another dog to fill her empty place."

"Edward?"

Her sweet eyes lifted to his face. She saw him changed—changing. Deep lines graven on the broad brow that had smoothed under her kisses. Folds of bitterness from either wing of the large sensitive nostrils to the corners of the lips.

"Dear Edward, Dawtie was very old, and very seldom with me. And there are Bran and Laddie—if I should need the companionship of dogs. But soon now, very soon—there is nothing to prevent it"—She looked calmly in his face as he knelt on the rug beside her, stiffly upright, not touching her, both hands gripping the arm of her chair—"in a very few weeks—we shall be married, shall we not?"

He did not speak, and her eyes wavered from his, and a blush burned over her whole fair body: for was it not the man's part to speak such words as these? She said again: "Shall we not?" ... There was a terrible pause.... The clock chimed the quarter-hour....

"Shall we not, Edward, loving as we do—after these cruel years of delay?" ...

Unable to credit her own vision, she saw creeping into his grey eyes—was it reluctance, distaste or dismay? ... A shock went through her.... Rushing sounds filled her ears and through them she heard her own voice crying to him:

"Edward! ... For God's sake, don't look at me so! Something is wrong.... My dearest, tell me!" ...

Her arms went out to draw him close, and came back empty. He had drawn back, avoiding them, and risen to his feet. A quiver passed over his thin brown face, such as in windless weather will ripple the sleeping surface of some quiet forest pool. And the question came from her that she had never dreamed of asking:

"Is it that you do not love me—in the marriage sense—any more? Am I nothing but a friend? ... Answer.... I command you—answer!"

Yaill's face was drawn and grey. He said,—keeping stiff control upon the muscles of his lips:

"You are the one woman I worship.... I have never known another whose person so charms me, whose nature so appeals to me,—whose mind is so clear and full,—whose sympathy is so warm, so sweet, whose soul so answers to mine—"

"Edward!" ...

All reassured, she breathed the name in a tone of exquisite tenderness. He made her a sign that he had not done, and went slowly on:

"I have desired—desire you now as man desires the woman he worships. When our marriage was postponed by the death of your mother—when the Regiment was ordered to India and you could not leave your father—when this thrice-accursed War burst on the world in a blizzard of fire and steel, and I had to leave you almost at the church-door—God is my witness that I suffered! Far more than I could tell you, Katharine!"

"Love of my heart, I know it! ..."

He signed to her again for silence:

"Do not interrupt me! All this is hard to say.... But though my heart often cried out to you in those mad years of filthy fighting—living, eating and sleeping—did we ever sleep?—in the company of the Dead—while the world one had known and lived in—the world of pretty women—decent clothes, pleasant week-ends, jolly shooting-parties, sport, play, good hunters and easily-running cars—seemed—except in short flashes of intervals—to have been dead for cycles of ages—I was buoyed up by my hopes of you, my thoughts of you—your letters and our short rare blessed meetings. Glimpses of Paradise to a soul in Purgatory! You will believe that, will you not, Katharine?" ...

One tear glittered on his hard cheek. Oh! to have dried it with her kisses, and whispered comfort to her dearest, wrought to this desperate mood by some unknown cause.... But she sat still as he had bidden, soothed by his words of tenderness, yet with a little shivering premonition beginning to quicken at the roots of her heart:

"Then came the Great Disaster.... Oh! why didn't I marry you, when I got back to England—"

"My love," she said, "my precious dear!—I asked you to, you know!"

He made a despairing gesture of assenting:

"And I would not accept the gift you offered in your generosity—dear love, sweet woman!—best friend an unlucky devil ever had or could have! ..."

"Why?"

That "Why?" came like a moan from her. He answered sadly:

"Because I wanted to go away alone somewhere. To look my new self in the face, or to recapture the lost me. Thousands of men have felt the same—feel like that even at this moment—coming back with raw nerves and jumbled brains out of the hell of War."

"Then God help the women who love them!" said Katharine Forbis.

"They will suffer," said Edward Yaill, "until they have learned to understand the men. As you, pearl of women!—understood me, and pitied me. Can I ever forget that!"

"Stop!" She held up her hand in warning. "Do not praise me. For I believed your heart had changed to me. For a long time I believed it, and suffered horribly.... And then thank God, I found out one day that it was not so." ...

"When I came Home to tell you I had got back the Regiment.... There was just time—we could have made the time—to have got married then.... What stepped in? ... Fate! Was it Fate, Katharine? ..."

She knew their chance of happiness had been baulked again as ever by the inconquerable vacillation of this brave man she loved. But unshaken in her loyalty, she looked back at Edward, repeating with unfaltering lips:

"Just Fate—I suppose. Let us leave it at that and look forward to the Future. And the years we may have to spend together if it be God's Will."

Her voice blurred with held-back tears;

"But—don't keep me waiting any longer, dear Edward! I never have—never could have dreamed the possibility of changing towards you.... But if I get more lonely—if I get much more lonely than I am now—"

Was it possible that cry of tortured womanhood could have come from Katharine? Must she, his proud one, stoop, and stoop to plead? With clasped hands and yearning eyes of pain entreating—

"O Edward! don't keep me waiting long! Think of the years—"

He said with forced deliberation:

"We may even yet have years to spend together—if you have courage to forgive a grievous wrong!"

"What do you mean? ... How have you wronged? ... Have you not told me—"

Her voice had the sharpness of the stab he had dealt her, as she rose up out of her fireside chair.

"I will tell you what I mean—what I meant to have spared you, had not the man who came here yesterday with the documents from Palestine—had not that man threatened to tell you if I did not."

"To tell me what? Let me hear it now! You look ill, Edward!"

"To tell you that I am married!" said Edward Yaill....

As she stood before him, straight and tall, he saw the life go out of her. For an instant he looked on a dead, bloodless thing. Then the banished blood rushed back from about her heart. Her lips and eyes retained the look of life, but the face was a stranger's, and not Katharine's. Nor was it Katharine's voice that said:

"To tell me that you are married? ... Who is she?"

He hardly recognised his own voice saying:

"She is a nurse.... She was attached to the Convalescent Camp at B—— Base."

"Ah! ... And her name?" ...

"Lucy Burtonshaw."

"Ah! ..."

The interjection dropped from her pale lips like an icicle. But her breeding wrapped her in an impregnable mantle of dignity. His sense of her new remoteness was desolating as she asked him:

"And why are you here with me and not with Lucy Burtonshaw? I beg her pardon!—I should have said, Mrs. Edward Yaill. Can you explain?"

"I can explain absolutely. Whether you would believe me—that is another thing!"

"Let—let me think! ..." She put her hand to her forehead, pushing back her hair with a gesture of bewilderment. All her world lay in ruins round her, since those few sentences had fallen from his lips....

Rejected.... Betrayed.... Cast off.... She, Katharine Forbis, so great, so beloved, so beautiful,—the desired of many honourable, brave, high-born, handsome and wealthy men. Edward Yaill had never been told how many aspirants had sought her,—how many brilliant offers she had steadfastly set aside. Choosing for years to walk in maiden loneliness—keeping her priceless treasure of splendid womanhood stored up,—hoarded away to this unutterable end....

She moaned, and put her hand to her heart an instant when he said she would not believe if he explained himself. Nothing cut deeper or more cruelly than that. She said with the calmness of a mortally-wounded gentlewoman:

"I have not deserved that you should so judge me.... Say what you think is to be said for you.... This person—this lady who is now your wife—is the nurse—unless I am mistaken?—to whom I entrusted my letters to keep in charge for you?"

"The same. And she betrayed the trust.... She kept your letters. It was only on Thursday morning they first reached my hands." Always chary of gesture, he stretched them out to her, and drew them back and clenched—and let them fall again. "But for the accident of my getting the last letter you wrote me, upon the morning I was discharged from the Convalescent Camp—I might never have known—never remembered—" His voice broke. He turned away and leaned upon the mantelshelf, and bowed his shamed head over his folded arms.

"Edward! ..."

Her hand went out and lightly touched his shoulder. He thrilled at the tone in which she spoke his name:

"Edward, tell everything, and I will listen! ..."

He said in a choked voice, averting his face from her that she might not see the tears that brimmed and fell:

"God bless you for your mercy to me, Katharine! ... But the story is so wild and so incredible—I dare not hope for your entire belief.... You have believed in my devoted love for you.... I have lived, all these years, for you alone.... Yet last Thursday, when I awakened from that strange illusion—in the room at that Coombe Bay hotel"—Katharine shuddered—"I was married," he made a despairing gesture,—"married to a poor, weak, commonplace girl."

"She is your wife.... You are bound to remember it...."

He said:

"I have done so far more than she deserves.... I have written to my solicitors—have provided for her generously.... Do not think me capable of leaving her to poverty.... But I cannot—will not share my life with her! ..."

"Loneliness can be worse to bear than poverty. And—once again—remember—she is your wife!"

"She is welcome to what good may be got from that position! She has schemed for it—"

"Be just to her.... You have owned to me that you told her you were poor. Why? ..."

"Heaven knows why—or Hell! I have no answer.... But she had only to ask—to make inquiries—to be enlightened on the subject of my money!"

Chivalrous Katharine flashed out in defence of her enemy.

"Do you suppose the surgeons at the Camp would have told her? Or that your medical report would have supplied such details? Or do you think Burke's 'Landed Gentry' is a work of reference accessible to nurses? ..."

He broke out with whirling words—frantic asseverations. He would get a divorce.... A suit for Nullity could be obtained under the circumstances—once the circumstances should be made clear. Another touch of contempt frosted her tone as she said to him:

"The marriage is legal. And though you seem to have forgotten your religion—when you speak of divorce to me, I must ask you to remember that I am a Catholic woman, Colonel Yaill!"

"Forgive me! ..."

He sat down haggard and exhausted.... She, too, resumed her seat, for her strength was failing fast.... And so they sat in a sorrowful-grim travesty of the old happy comradeship. She looked so sorrow-stricken and yet so sweet as she sat there in her mourning for her lost one,—that the heart of Yaill was more than ever tortured by the fierce agony of hopeless love.

"Think!—" he said to her desperately, "for I cannot.... Is there no way of escape from this horrible pitfall into which I have tumbled with open eyes? Think! ... Or cannot you think of anything, Katharine? ..."

She said to him gently:

"Wait.... I will think, and tell you presently.... Only wait and be patient a little, my poor dear!"

For she could not withhold her compassion and forgiveness from this man with the furrowed face of anguish, and the haunted, desperate eyes. No longer her hero, her ideal of perfect manliness and honour,—but a mere man, to be loved and pitied, and made excuses for. Or—her sick heart knew a ray of Hope.... In her white cheeks dawned a tinge of colour.... Was he one of the innumerable, blameless martyrs made by the accursed War?

XXII

She could bear to live if Edward proved a martyr and not a traitor. Oh! let him be the other woman's husband if it must be—as long as Katharine knew him guiltless. She bent her brow and set her rare mental powers of clear thought, reasonable argument and logical deduction, to trace a mean between a biassed partisanship and common justice.... One had known such strange, abnormal things result from shellshock.... And Edward loved her.... Oh! most entirely loved her.... It would be possible to live on, empty of joy, bare of all happiness—if Edward were a martyr.... God send it might prove so....

She gripped the arms of her chair and shut her eyes, striving to reconstruct the situation, assembling all the evidence upon his side; trying to live through all those twilit months the life of the man with the jangled nerves, and the numbed and blunted brain.... Just, generous, noble-minded Katharine, incapable of pettiness, great in her desolation.... She opened her eyes, to encounter the sorrowful stare of his—and began to speak, calmly, almost cheerfully—drawing him on insensibly to talk to her of that day....

That day in September of the previous year, when in those trenches south of Loos the First Battalion of the "Tweedburghs" had been wiped out, almost to a man, for the second time in the War.

"Why should you want to hear that story again—and now?" he pleaded: "My God, don't ask me to tell it now! ..."

But she asked it with her steady eyes upon him; and he obeyed her with knitted brows and twitching lips and cold sweat upon his face:

"The Germans had started shelling our front-line parapet at 5.30 that morning.... At a rough calculation they pounded us with eleven hundred guns.... Half the battalion were in the front line, and half in supports. And we had been given instructions to hold those trenches at any cost...."

He licked his dry lips and threw her a dog-like glance of entreaty. But she waited inexorably and he went on:

"We had taken them by assault and we weren't willing to lose them. Our guns gave back Hell for leather, but we kept getting Super-Hell. News kept coming through to us at Battalion Headquarters, of casualties, fresh casualties.... Always killed—hardly ever wounded! ... My God—my God! ... And at last I and my Adjutant—Cameron-Bain—were left at Headquarters with a few orderlies, cooks and bottle-washers. We'd sent up practically every man through the barrage to help 'em carry on.... And all my officers were killed except two. Jameson and Kinray-Heptown, the officers in charge of the Advanced Line Wireless and Telephone Communications. Don't ask to hear the rest. What good can it do? ..."

"It is my right," she answered him, "to hear this story from you.... And I am waiting...."

So he went on:

"There came a minute when Cameron-Bain and I stared at each other blankly across a pit of horror. We found the Advanced Line Communications getting queer and dribbling into incoherency.... Then they stopped.... And we knew that the worst had happened—though we waited, hoping against hope that Kinray-Heptown would speak again. Then we tossed up a penny to decide which of us— This hurts! ... Must I carry through with it to the end? ..."

Her great maternal heart wept tears of blood for him. But yes.... For his sake she compelled him to carry through....

"I called 'Tails' and won, though Bain swore I hadn't.... Then we shook hands and I went up through the German barrage. Trains of stretcher-bearers and wounded—our stretcher-bearers and our wounded—lay dead upon that horrible road.... And I got to Supports—and found them evacuated, except for the Dead—there were plenty of dead men! Gas was being sent over from our Advanced trench by somebody—the wind being in our favour—if nothing else was! But the German guns kept on sending over High Explosive—5.9 shell—and shrapnel: and the fire of their machine-guns—they were enfilading us from two angles—came at us like a solid wall of lead! ..."

He wetted his parched lips and rubbed his forehead. And still she waited for him to tell the rest.

"I got to the Advanced trenches.... Hardly even challenged! The few men left alive there looked at me as if I'd been a ghost. But they carried on, and I pushed through to the T. & W. dug-out, to find it had been blown in by a High Velocity Shell. Kinray-Heptown, our T.C.O., lay dead—sprawling over the table, his blood and brains and so on—all mixed up horribly with the débris. And his assistant—Jameson—was in the same case. But the Wireless and telephone installations were in working-trim,—so I took them both over—receiving and transmitting messages in Morse Code from the connected Advanced Posts through Cameron-Bain to Brigade Headquarters, until one by one they left off talking, and I took off the head-band and put down the receiver—"

He might have but now come in out of the rain, his haggard face so streamed with wet....

"Because I knew they were all dead and that I was alone.... Then a blaze of hot yellow light filled the place—and the table reared on its hind-legs—and Kinray-Heptown—dead as stone and covered with blood, and with his skull—you know!—I've told you!—Heptown stood bolt upright a second—and then went for me!"

He laughed, the loud, unnaturally harsh laugh that had startled Katharine on the night of his arrival....

"High Explosive plays queer tricks. Another 5.9 shell had landed in the dug-out—and I was pinned down with Heptown on top of me—and the heavy case of the Wireless outfit on top of him—and the corrugated zinc, and sandbags, and earth of the roof on top of all! And I lay there with his awful face crushed down on mine, and remembered," he laughed again harshly, "what a silly kind of ass he used to be.... Always running after new women and howling for sympathy—because he was such a poor devil, without a rap beyond his pay—and hadn't a living relative in the world...."

"Edward! O Edward! my poor love! ..."

He did not hear her voice of throbbing tenderness. He was passing through that unspeakable ordeal again:

"A dismal man. They called him 'Gummidge' in the Regiment, and the nickname fitted the beggar to a 'T.' How I crawled out from under him ... can't imagine for the life of me! Probably my tin hat saved me from smothering.... They say I'd not a rag on when they found me—yellow as a guinea from melinite and smeared with blood—not mine, but Heptown's! Poor devil!—not a rap beyond his pay—not a living soul belonging to him in the world! ..."

He shuddered, and knitted his hands together closely, and so sat rigid—battling with some invisible power that strove with him for mastery of will....

"Edward! ..."

She was kneeling by his chair,—her arms wrapped round about him, her cheek to his,—the swell and heave of her bosom close to his—her warmth and sweetness his—all his once more....

"All is quite clear to me now. You have not wronged me! You are blameless—my man of men! Listen, dear Edward! In some way strange to us, clear to neurologists—when you lay buried alive, pinned down helpless by the body of that poor dead officer, the horror of those dreadful minutes—or hours—stamped his personality—branded it, I might better say—upon your memory so that you could not forget it if you would! The story you told to that poor girl afterwards—your conviction that you were poor, unloved and friendless—all came from that—were part of the strange obsession. Dear, in my eyes you are quite blameless. Forgive me, Edward, if"—he felt the sob she bravely kept back—"in the first agony of hearing what you have told me—I let myself feel resentful towards you!"

"Katharine!"

He drew a great breath of relief, and his load was lightened. She believed.... Oh, wonder of wonders, she believed.... He faltered:

"Then you do not hate and despise me? ..."

Her swift kiss touched his hands. He heard her saying:

"On the contrary, I admire, I love, I worship you!—my hero, my martyr—my King—my man of men! ..."

"KATHARINE!"

In the rapture of that declaration Yaill would have embraced her; clasped her close to his starving heart and covered her with caresses. But she freed herself from him gently and with decision, though he pleaded humbly for a single kiss.

"Dear, when we say Good-bye, then I will kiss you. It is my right, I shall not waive my claim. We were husband and wife in soul if not in actuality—we are parted—not through any mutual change of feeling, but by an act of the inscrutable Will of God. You have a wife—it is for us to remember it!—and so I ask you to go away from here—"

"'Go!' ... Leave you now? ..."

His face grew hard and obstinate.

"Why should I leave you? Do we not love each other? Have we not, as you say yourself, been one in heart for all these years! ... We have done no wrong, so why should we suffer? And, if I leave you, where am I to go? Not back to that woman? ..."

A spasm contracted her white face to a pinched mask of jealousy. He hardly knew the voice that came through the clenched teeth and stiffened lips:

"Why not? She is your wife!"

"My wife through a vulgar deceit. Don't say you hold her guiltless?"

"Almost, if she believed you!" she forced herself to say.

"And this is your love!" he snarled at her, stung to injustice.

She answered—and the voice was once more Katharine's:

"This is my love! ..."

He wheeled to the fireplace and stood in thought, resting his elbow on the mantelshelf. When he looked back at her it was to say:

"And if I obey you now and leave you, what are your plans? What do you intend to do?"

She told him:

"I had made up my mind—supposing you had left me this time without settling a definite date for our marriage—that I would get drafted out to the East to help Hilda. You remember Lady Donnithorpe? She was a great friend of mine, I have often told you, when we were girls together at Chalkcliff—fellow-pupils at the Convent of the Sisters of the Sacred Heart.... Sir Hugo is on the Staff of the Commander-in-Chief at Cairo. Hilda is Commandant of the Red Cross Hospital at Montana—seventeen miles from Alexandria—standing in wonderful grounds. It was formerly, or so I understand—a palace of the ex-Khedive. I could drive a car for them, or nurse—I have my certificate—"

"You seem to have got your plans all ready cut and dried—without much reference to me! ..."

His face was wrung as he looked round at her.

"Don't be cruel, Edward! Do not let me remember by-and-by—that on this day that sees me shorn of everything, you were unkind—for the first time...."

He gave a short, impatient groan.

"Who is unkind to both of us but yourself? But you shall be obeyed—I will leave Kerr's Arbour."

Each of the five words gave her its separate stab. She never winced, but said to him unfalteringly:

"There is a train from Cauldstanes at six o'clock. You could catch the King's Cross Express by changing at Carlisle...."

"And it is now four-thirty."

From habit he had glanced at the cheap watch strapped upon his wrist.... The heavy lines between his knitted brows deepened and a vein throbbed in his temple, as he stripped the poor trinket from his wrist and dropped it into the glowing heart of the fire. The glass burst with a sharp little crack—and the leather strap writhed among the hot, devouring flames so like some reptile dying in torment that Katharine turned her eyes away. As Yaill's hard, level voice went on saying:

"From Cauldstanes, six o'clock! ... Thanks! that train would suit me very well. Please no—don't ring!" Her hand had gone out to touch the stud of the bell beside the fireplace. "Don't trouble to order any kind of trap.... I had much rather walk. Some hard tramping in the frosty air will do me good.... Really.... I should prefer it! ..."

"But—your luggage!" She looked at him anxiously.

"My kit! ..." He could have laughed outright, but he controlled himself by main force, and went on in the same stiff, formal tone: "Send it to-morrow morning by an early train to my Club in Pall Mall. I shall take care to leave it properly addressed, so that you have no trouble of any kind—"

"Edward.... Be just ... be fair! Don't—torture me like this!"

The cry broke from Katharine barely of her volition. She caught him by the wrists.

"How am I torturing you?" he asked her coldly.

"What have you decided to do?" Her eyes were on a level with his, begging, commanding. "Tell me! ..." She caught him by the wrists. "Are you going back—to her? ..."

"No!"

Her hands had been like steel upon Yaill's wrists. Her eyes, tawny and fierce as those of an enraged lioness, were fixed upon his. The pang of pity she had felt for the poor giver of the destroyed watch was lost in her anguished sense of her own despoliation,—her own helpless impotence to hold her usurped rights.... But at that deep, stern No! from him her hands grew weak upon his wrists, and the lioness-fury in her eyes died out and left them tender....

"I have said to you that I cannot share my life with her—the woman I have married. I swear to you she shall want for nothing—be treated honourably! As to my plans—the most definite is to go to the Near East and find your brother Julian. Not to fight with Turks for the Holy Sepulchre. My faith is dead in me. When God gives me back You, then I will be friends with Him! Until then—"

"Oh, Edward, hush! ..."

"I will not shock you more, dearest of living women. Give me that one last kiss, and say: 'Good luck to you on your road!' For at the end of the road I may find your brother Julian. In some Turkish prison—enclosure or labour-camp, working under the lash. Now will you kiss—"

"Not here, dear Edward! ..."

She draped her head with the black-lace veil that had been her dead mother's, and smiled—how could she bear to smile?—as she held out her hand....

"We will say our Good-bye in the chapel.... Come, my dearest! ..."

He could not resist her look, her touch.... Together, they went out....

The fragrance of incense was sweet in the still place, the treasure-chamber of this Catholic dwelling; where you felt the Blessed Sacrament as a guarded Flame, a vital Essence, a Presence mysterious and impalpable, yet instinct with latent Power and conserved Force. When Katharine bowed in adoration of her Lord and Master, Yaill stood erect, silently defying Him,—with set jaws and scowling brows, and hard glittering eyes.

But when Katharine rose, and again took his hand, his icy armour melted. His eyes softened and he yielded to her touch like a big, docile child. She drew him to the small Communion-rail—knelt on the worn red cushion, and was silent; gathering strength to speak, fighting with her anguish; while the haggard frowning man stood stiffly waiting at her side.

A moment more and Katharine's low voice flowed out upon the silence. She said, to the Living Presence in the Veiled Tabernacle:

"My Saviour and my God, Thou seest at Thy Footstool two of Thy servants, who after long years of love and fidelity, and patient waiting and hopes often frustrated, are parted—for life perhaps—as if Death had come between. We do not know—"

The sweet voice wavered and then went on steadily:

"We do not know why we must suffer—we only know it is Thy Will. And we offer Thee—O give us strength to offer Thee! this agony of parting—in submission to Thy Majesty and in expiation of our sins—

"What sins?" Yaill asked her in a deep, stern voice.

She seemed not to hear, and went on speaking:

"The sins that we weak mortals have committed in our lives. And now to Thy care, Who didst offer Thyself a living Sacrifice for the redemption of the world upon the Altar of the Cross—I commend my beloved whom Thou hast taken from me! Preserve him in body and in soul from every sort of danger. Guide him, guard him—lead him upon his path in life.... And if—"

She heard Yaill's boot-heel grind upon the stone, and knew that he was trembling....

"Let this end! ..." he said below his breath. "Do you hear me! End now, Katharine! ..."

But she went on, fighting,—had he known the truth,—for the soul of him, her dearest:

"And if we may never be one on earth, O let us be one in Heaven! ..."

Yaill gritted his teeth savagely, and a rending sob tore through his frame. The tears were streaming down his face as he stammered out to her, gulping and choking:

"Lend me ... hanky ... Kathy! I can't find—"

She gave him her handkerchief as a mother might a child, and went resolutely on to the end of her prayer.

"And now before Thee, here present in the Blessed Sacrament as truly as when Thou didst walk with Thy Beloved upon this sorrowful earth,—I promise to be faithful to Edward Yaill my lover, in body and soul, through Life till Death, and in the Eternal Life! ..."

He gave a hoarse inarticulate cry and sank to his knees beside her. She turned and folded him in her arms, and his face sank on her bosom, and the black-lace veil that draped her head fell over his too. It smelt of violets. His scalding tears wetted her neck.... She lifted his face and kissed him,—with all her soul kissed him. But a fold of her mother's black-lace veil came between her mouth and his.

XXIII

Long after Edward Yaill had gone, and Night had settled down upon Kerr's Arbour, old James Whishaw hobbled noiselessly into the chapel to find Katharine kneeling there. He bent his own stiff rheumatic knees upon a chair behind her, and waited, and said a prayer for the daughter of his dead master, dear to him as a daughter of his own. Her face was hidden in her hands, her lace veil fell over them. No movement stirred its patterned folds, no sigh nor sob escaped her.... She might have been the statue of a kneeling woman, wrought in black marble or ebony.

"Miss Forbis, mem!" the ancient servitor whispered after an interval. There was no response. Grown desperate, he ventured a fresh appeal.

"Miss Katharine! ... Miss Kathy, for your ain sake!—for a' our sakes—"

The quavering terror in the cracked, familiar voice reached her. She stirred, and answered:

"You, Whishaw? ... Am I wanted? ... Who—"

She tried to rise to her feet, but could not. The old man hurried to her and lent his feeble strength to help her, and she rose up and they came out of the church together, slowly, arm in arm. As the door swung-to behind them, she put back her veil and whispered:

"Has Colonel Yaill?—"

The butler hardly recognised the drained white face she turned to him. Her voice was a mere thread of sound, the shadow of itself.

"He has gone this hoor an' mair," he said, "an' a wire has juist come for him. My bairn—Miss Katharine, dearie!—there is anither for him that's gane! An' O I doot bad news in baith, by word the bringer dropped wi' them—"

"Give me the wires.... I understand...." she said. "The messenger has gossiped?"

"They're weel kent for loose-tongued, claverin' bodies at Cauldstanes Post Office," owned Whishaw, adding bitterly: "Nor ye'll no' bind Discretion on Meggy Proodfoot, wi' the King's Croon on her airm." He took the salver with the two orange envelopes from a console table in the hall, and brought it to his mistress, entreating: "Gin' ye could see yer ain face ye wad be frichtit, Miss Katharine. Let me get ye a glass o' wine before ye'se open them, my lamb!"

But Katharine mingled no juice of the grape with this, her latest draught of the strong black wine of Sorrow. She opened the envelope that bore Yaill's name, and by the light of the great wood fire that blazed in the hall hearthplace, deciphered the message it contained.

"This must be re-telegraphed to Edward's London Club," flashed through her mind before the vile sense of the words upon the sheet drove clearly home to her; and then she started as though their concentrated venom had seared to the very bone.

"Have discovered where you are. Return instantly or I shall follow. Your wife, Lucy Yaill. Tor View, Coombe Bay."

A moment Katharine staggered under the shock. Then with the fierce blood burning in her cheeks, she won her shaken composure back, saying as she encountered the Watery blue stare of her ancient servitor:

"There is nothing to trouble us in this. I know it to be not important." And she crumpled up the flimsy sheet and dropped it into the midmost of the fire, adding: "We will not trouble Colonel Yaill by forwarding it at all."

Then she opened the other orange envelope. It held a communication from the Casualty Department at the War Office, and told her with official brevity that her brother Julian was dead.

"Regret to inform news received from eye-witness confirms report that Father Julian Forbis, O.S.G., R.C. Chaplain —th Brigade, 29th Division, Mediterranean Forces, Gallipoli, was killed on August 21st by direct hit Turkish shrapnel shell during storming of Scimitar Hill. No remains recoverable."

She read out the withering message of disaster in a low clear voice devoid of a trace of expression. The butler and the servants who had gathered in the hall broke into sobs and lamentations. But what avail are tears and outcries? They are only of use to vent the sorrow that is neither poignant or profound. Miss Forbis went to the drawing-room and penned some telegrams; one to the Father Superior of Julian's Monastery at Clerport, one to Julian's dearest friend, in the trenches before Arras,—a brief note to the lawyer and notary, Mr. Kellar,—already (through that local Post Office leakage) in possession of the intelligence,—and a third telegram for Colonel Edward Yaill, addressed to his London Club.

And then, moving mechanically as an automaton, she went from the room, encountered Whishaw and gave the messages to be taken into Cauldstanes that night by a mounted groom. The wires to be left at the private house of the postmaster for despatch in the early morning; the note to be handed to Mr. Kellar, sitting with his old cronies over his toddy and his well-loved rubber of whist.

Mrs. Bell, Miss Forbis's elderly companion (worn out by the day's sorrowful ceremonial) had long retired to her room. Time enough to break the news to her upon the following morning. Katharine ordered the wearied servants to shut up the house and go to bed, and herself set the example. But when her tearful maid had quitted her for the night, reluctantly and wistfully,—she could not bear the notion of lying down in that now desolate house to rest. It stifled her. So she dressed again,—threw over all a hooded woollen mantle, took a small electric lantern and went out of the room....

To ascend above the level of ordinary daily existence, to climb a height and draw into the lungs long breaths of purer air, seems to be a craving shared by not only those whose bodies are racked and worn by chronic suffering, but by those others who in heart and soul are wrung by mental pain. The Lawgiver of Israel ascended into the fastnesses of Sinai—not only to receive the commands of the Most High—but to hide his anguish at the backslidings of his rebellious people—turning to unholy commerce with Egyptian god-devils and Canaanitish idols,—from the pure worship of the One God. And His Son was wont to climb the solitary heights of mountains, when He was weary with the healing of multitudes—and oppressed with His burden of human woe! And since His day, how many others have known the need, and sought the same alleviation:

Descending to the ground-floor, Katharine, barely of her own volition, passed through a small, heavy baize-covered door at the northern end of the hall. It led into the Tower, and she crossed a great stone-flagged, stone-vaulted room lighted by narrow window-slits high in the massive stone walls, unlocked another door with a key that was in the lock, huge and old-fashioned, but oiled and working smoothly, and came out at the foot of the narrow stone stairway that spiralled, storey by storey, to the top of the Tower.

She was weary, but the turmoil and anguish of her spirit set the claims of the body out of court. She moved on, tall and stern and beautiful, flashing her guiding light on a jutting stone in the wall here, or a broken step there,—just as though she were conducting some visitor to admire the famous view from the battlements.

The young moon of February rode high in the southern heavens. The Standard hung at half-mast from the flagstaff of the Tower. There was little wind to stir its heavy pendent folds, what there was came almost balmily in drifts from the west.

Some belated workman or field-labourer was going home across the policy,—or possibly some gamekeeper or shepherd may have been setting out upon his nightly rounds. The night being dark and still, he sang; perhaps because he was sorrowful, possibly because he was happy; it may have been to cheer his loneliness. But whoever he was, he had a voice; a sweet, if untutored baritone,—and the matchless beauty and poignant pathos of "The Land o' the Leal" beat in wave upon wave of anguish, and sorrow, and yearning, upon Katharine's tortured soul....

"O God!" she cried aloud in her anguish, "I cannot bear it. Desolate, desolate, stripped bare of everything! ... All of them taken!—Mark and my father, and to-day Edward! ... O Edward, my love! and Julian! ... Ah! ..."

And her own cry was flung back from the battlements, so thin, so weirdly eldritch that she shuddered at the sound....

Madness was near my Katharine in that hour of abandonment. But when the wild spirit of Marioun Forbis, whose tragic tale I have not time to tell here, cried to her: "Be bold! One leap will end it!" and the thin ghostly hands of proud, sinful Countess Edith plucked at her garments to drag her to the battlements; and Mistress Juliana, who starved herself to death for grief because her too-severely punished babe had died in a fit in the dark cupboard where it had been shut up after a whipping, lent her impalpable, invisible aid to urge her kinswoman to the desperate deed,—the saintly Mother St. Edward, Abbess of the Brigittine Convent of Syon (stripped of all and driven thence to exile with her Community by the edict of fierce Elizabeth), whispered of submission to the Divine Will. And heroic Madam Lucy—who nursed her smitten household back to life through the days when the Great Plague raged in England,—and only lay down to die at length when all she loved were safe,—leaned to her ear and whispered "Courage!" and countless other noble women of her ancient race gathered about her then....

And at last the memory of her own lost, beloved mother rose up to aid her, and the Mother of All Mothers—pitying her faithful daughter's anguish—interceded with Her Divine Son that the gift of prayer might be restored to ease the breaking heart....

It came like a spate among the hills after long drought, and Katharine fell upon her knees, and leaned her aching head against the rough-hewn stone, and told God all her trouble, and knew that He heard.... Then she rose up calmed and comforted, and so went down the Tower stair and back to her bedroom. And slept and dreamed of a gigantic man,—tawny-brown of skin, and with a vast black beard, fierce black eyes and a great hooked nose exactly like John Hazel's,—wrapped in a vast hooded mantle—carrying an iron-shod staff like St. Christopher's—and wearing immense boots such as are never seen now. He went before her over a desert which she needs must traverse, seeking for the lost Julian—a waved expanse of scorching yellow sand, peopled by ugly Things that lived in burrows, and kept popping up their diabolical horned heads to mock and gibe at Katharine.... Then the Bearded One stood in the midst of a raging torrent (which it seemed that Katharine must negotiate), and leaned on his immense staff to steady himself, stretching out the other hand to help her across.... There was a black onyx intaglio of Hercules in an antique setting of greenish gold on his huge forefinger.... And his vast hand, as it enfolded hers, felt warm and friendly and kind. And she asked, for the black eyes under the dense black brows were more like than ever:

"You're John Hazel, really, aren't you? ..."

And the huge man answered, in a booming bass, showing great white teeth in the thicket of his hirsuteness:

"Nay, daughter of the race of him I loved! But John Hazaël is of me!"

XXIV

Wonderful times, these of which I write, fruitful in world-shaking happenings, hecatombs of slaughtered men; sledge-hammer strokes of Fate and Destiny. Sudden descents of long-suspended swords upon anointed heads. Tragedies, calamities, dazzling adventures, murders and massacres, high deeds of patriotism, stirring deeds of heroism, wakening admiration, pity or terror. Who shall marvel that into this whirlpool of great events the Mysterious Disappearance of A Well Known British Commanding Officer (as recorded by the Press under the above and similar headings) dropped with as little sensation as the fall of a pair of binoculars from an aviator's hand.

"Staying at Kerr's Arbour, N.B."—I quote from one of the newspaper paragraphs, "the officer, a well-known personality in Society, possessing a great record of distinguished service with the famous Tweedburgh Regiment of Infantry, left the house at which he was an honoured guest, after the funeral of Sir Philip Forbis, which he had attended in the morning, and has not been since heard of. It transpires that Colonel Yaill had intended to walk to Cauldstanes Station, for the purpose of taking a late afternoon train to the junction of Carlisle. He had ordered his luggage to be forwarded to his London Club on the morning following, and carried with him nothing but a trench-coat and a walking-stick. The calamity which has again befallen the 'Tweedburghs' since the appointment of Colonel E. A. Yaill to command the regiment, will be fresh in the sympathetic memory of every reader. On September 1915, Colonel Yaill made his way to the front-line trenches through a blizzard of German H.E. and finding of the few living men left in them not one unwounded, took over and carried on the Telephone and Wireless Communications with Brigade and Divisional H.Q. until for the second time the dug-out containing the installations was blown in by a High Velocity shell. Severe shock was sustained by the gallant officer, who was discovered later, alive but quite dazed, and taken to Hospital. Since then he has successfully undergone treatment at the B—— Base Hospital Camp, which he quitted little more than a week ago, with a convalescent discharge. To add to the strange interest, and thicken the mystery of the case, it has transpired that on the morning he left the Hospital Camp at B—— the missing officer was married to a young and attractive lady, by name Miss Lucy Burtonshaw, serving with her Red Cross Unit at the B—— Base Convalescent Camp, as a certified nurse. Up to the present we can only record that whether the disappearance of Colonel Yaill may be ascribed to foul play, or a sudden loss of memory, no clue has been discovered up-to-date which throws any light upon his whereabouts. At his country home, 'The Grange,' Scraefell, N. Cumberland, his sisters, the Misses Olive and Isabella Yaill, are in the utmost distress and anxiety regarding his probable fate. At his Club The Services, in Pall Mall, no communication has been received from him, nor can his brother, Mr. Anthony Yaill, K.C., or Sir Arthur Ely, head of the eminent firm of Ely and Ely, for many years solicitors to the Yaill family, supply any information whatever concerning the missing officer."

Private John Hazel, returned to the bosom of his family at Campden Hill, read this, or a similar paragraph, in the morning Wire, and somewhere towards forenoon of the same day, received a telegram, the perusal of which gave him another unexpected thrill. It ran as follows:

"Can you come? In great anxiety. Katharine Forbis Kerr's Arbour T.O. Cauldstanes Tweedburgh N.B."

He had written a brief, business-like note from the Cross Keys Hotel on the day of his return from her father's funeral, taking leave of Miss Forbis, repeating his offer of service, and enclosing an address from whence, in case of need, he might always be communicated with. Strangely soon the call had come. Strangely natural, as in the run of long-accustomed things it seemed to be responding to the appeal, to answer by the messenger waiting the reply:

"Thank you. Coming by next train."

He pitchforked a few necessaries into a battered suit-case, left a pencilled note upon the lid of Mrs. Hazel's large, responsible Red Cross work-basket—for his mother now invariably left home directly after breakfast, for the Work Rooms in Mayfair—where, in the delectable company of Duchesses—she spent the hours in the manufacture of Life-Saving Waistcoats for the Fleet, and felt Hospital slippers, until six-thirty. Consuming luncheon, carried in a plated box, and rigorously relegated to such forms of nourishment as may without reproach be assimilated by patriotic British digestive organs in War-time; taking a frugal tea on the scene of activity; and returning at seven to partake of a dinner of generous succulence. Having thus discharged his duty as a son, John departed by taxi for King's Cross, catching the very next express leaving for the North....

The room he had previously occupied at the Cross Keys was vacant. He stepped into its queer conglomeration of ancient smells, and the glass-eyed society of the birds and beasts and fishes in their musty cases, and it might have been that he had never gone away, but that Mrs. Govan in person served his supper in the clammy coffee-room, a part-knitted khaki-coloured sock, bristling with steel knitting-needles, tucked under a stout arm, and the ball bulging the pocket of her apron of black silk.

"Eh, dear!" Mrs. Govan had ceased to address John as "Private" since she had realised his somewhat indeterminate yet undeniable connection with "the family" at Kerr's. "Eh, Mr. Hazel! but this is grievous! ... And to think that I met Cornel Yaill wi' the meir an' cart the vera' nicht he cam' down to atten' the Funeral. Gin' auld Sir Philip cud have kent! But Providence was mercifu'. And sair it has irkit me to think o' Miss Forbis a' alane there at Kerr's, like the last aipple on the strippit tree, as I hae said to Govan, an' telegrams rattlin' ower the wires wi' 'Reply Paid' to the lave o' them—from a' the warld and's wife, beggin' an' prayin' till her: 'Darling Katharine, let us come to you, or if not, winna you come to us,' and gettin' answer: 'A thousand thanks, but no. Lovingly, Katharine.' An' sae, when I e'en kent she had sent for ye, I juist drew a free sough."

Evidently there had been a serious leakage from the Cauldstanes Telegraph Office. John mentally registered the evidence as Mrs. Govan continued:

"Ye'll have haird the latest news o' Cornel Yaill, dootless?"

"Has he been found?" her guest inquired, eliciting the shrill disclaimer:

"Na, na! We'se hae the Police traipsin' in an' out the bar makin' their inquiries—an' the wee laddies in the short breeks—the Boy Scouts I suld say! scoorin' ower the face o' the lan', but neither bone nor feather o' the man hae they fand for a' their pains! And mair nor me an' Govan thinks," she pursed her lips mysteriously, "that it'll be no' for's ain guid when they rin the Cornel doon—wherever's his hidie-hole! Weel free o' siccan a mislaird rogue Miss Forbis may coont hersel! Marriet on a stranger wumman—faugh!—an' the bauld, traipsin' craitur huntin' him doon, un' telegrams to the verra door o' Kerr's Arbour. 'Have knowledge whaur ye are. Return instantly, or I will follow. Your wife, Lucy Yaill.' Set her up for a shameless hussy!—an' the brawest leddy in Tweedshire—ay', an' the haill o' Scotland—wi' grand, gentlemen many a ane etchin' to pit a ring on the white hand o' her—"

Mrs. Govan broke off in the midst of her tirade with a sense of genuine alarm. For the blazing black eyes under the heavy brows of John Hazel were sternly set upon her; and the great hooked nose—"siccan glowering e'en, an' siccan a hawk's neb!—eneuch to fricht a body!" seemed fraught with threatenings of doom to come. He said in his deep voice:

"Miss Forbis will hardly thank you for your praise of herself personally, if you couple with it such confoundedly libellous abuse of her nearest and dearest friend."

"Guidsake! ... I'm sure I never thocht.... To be sure naething is kenned for certain.... Ye'll keip it frae Miss Forbis, sir, if I said onything to offend! ..." and the flurried woman bumped down the dish upon the cloth and vanished, leaving John Hazel wondering why on earth he had stuck up for the man.

He slept with the stuffed birds and beasts that night, and next morning, after breakfast, the mare Brownie being under the veterinary for a chill, the old black horse, her stable-companion, having been sent to the blacksmith's for roughing, and Alec Govan's motor-cycle having been requisitioned for the postman's uses—John set out on foot for Kerr's Arbour.

It was piercing cold; the east wind carried the bitter tang of the North Sea, the country lay under a fresh cloak of new-fallen snow, and the chilled thrushes and blackbirds and robins huddled disconsolately in the cropped hedges, and the low bushes and plumps of ivy swaddling old tree-stumps in the plantations by the roadside. As John Hazel's long active legs left the miles behind—what was a road ankle-deep in snow to a Territorial who had wintered in Flemish trenches!—he wondered somewhat as to the nature of the service Katharine Forbis would require at his willing hands.

Help, it might prove, in some further efforts to gain intelligence of the man who had vanished so suddenly.... Who could not be traced, nor ever would be, until the body should be found.... For Edward Yaill was dead, most certainly. Once Katharine Forbis had showed you plainly she despised you, how could you bear to live any more? Yaill had had that much of manhood left in him. So he had gone out with a definite purpose,—and in some dense plantation, or lonely granite quarry, thick-draped with curtains of bramble, had shot himself; creeping well in under the growths to be securely hidden, and died—and there an end of him....

Odd how those miserable grey eyes, with their haunting stare of agony, kept rising up before John Hazel, as he tramped over the hog-backed Roman road over which how many old dead-and-gone Forbis of Kerr's had led their bow and spearmen against the Picts, or Viking pirates from the wild North Sea; or pricked forth to the Wars of Balliol or Bruce—or set out in state and pageantry, with fair ladies in painted litters, or on gaily-caparisoned palfreys—to the Court of the Scots' King at Stirling or Edinburgh. And he wondered at the strange, impersonal love he felt for them, so brave, so bold, so tender, so gallant and gracious—from the Roman Prætor of Alexandria—who had given the black onyx ring to his (John Hazel's) ancestor—down to Sir Rupert the Cavalier, and the fine old General and the lost Julian, and Katharine....

Ah, Katharine! ... Again he saw her noble face irradiated by the glow and glamour, the mysterious beauty that transfigure even a plain woman when she loves with all her soul.

And then the face of Yaill, with its anguish and despair, rose up before him clearer than ever. He heard the compassionate voice of the V.A.D. woman saying:

"His wretched, wretched eyes! ... I hope I'm not going to dream of them! Oh! there must be something to be said for a man who looks like that! ..."

Suppose the man were innocent—the luckless sport of horrible circumstances! ... Had John Hazel been of Scottish blood, he would have said, "I'm fey." Being what he was, he said vigorously, "I'm a bally idiot!" and continued tramping along the snowy road.

Past the hollow way, crossed by a strip of ice, where the snow on the overhanging trees was thawing in long drips and splashes, and the benumbed birds showed more active signs of life. Out of the hollow way, on the left a dense plantation, on the opposite side to, and about a quarter of a mile below the iron gate of the entrance to the Kerr's Arbour private road.

XXV

A whistle shrilled near by, keen, sharp and silvery. John Hazel stiffened at the sound, as a seasoned soldier will. But nothing was in sight but a wee tow-headed laddie, "a kid" John would have called him—in a ragged suit of moleskins, cut down from adult-sized garments, who perched on the topmost round of the hog-backed stile leading into the plantation, and blew a shining whistle, from which a lanyard hung.

The small boy saw John start, and thrilled with secret exultation. To own a silver whistle and have no one to admire you is really little better than having none at all. So he blew again, lustily, with one eye on the big black "soger," and John Hazel pulled up steaming, and passed the time of day....

"Who are you, you queer little beggar, and where did you get that whistle?" he began.

At this the small boy scrambled down from the gate, and came to the roadside. He was a freckled child of eight or so, with wide gaps where first teeth had retired from the conflict, and a nose that sadly needed wiping, and broken festering chilblains on his swollen ears and hands. But his sharp blue eyes were bright on the stranger's as he answered:

"I am nae no beggar ava, but Meggy Proodfoot's wee laddie. An' I fand the bonny whistle in yonner woodie the morn."

By the jerk of the cracked and swollen thumb John guessed "woodie" meant plantation. He said, blowing out his long brown cheeks, and scowling with mock ferocity:

"That's a real soldier's whistle, not a thing for a kid to play with. You should give it to your daddy. He's a soldier, I suppose?"

The small boy returned, grinning:

"I dinna ken—for my daddie is no' a kirk daddie. Some say he maun be Keeper Todd, but my mother says it's no'! She's thinkin' he's the engineer that cam' wi' the steam-thrasher,—an' she ca's me a puir come-by-chance when she has a drappy on. I'm no mindin'!" The freckled face turned up to John's grinned hardily:

"Give me hold of that whistle a minute, you infantile philosopher," said John Hazel, and took it in his hand. It bore the silver hall-mark,—was an officer's signal-whistle. On the butt was engraved in clear fine letters:

"E. A. Yaill (R.C.) Lieut. Col. R. Tweedburgh Infantry Regt."

Here was the clue. Was the secret hidden in that plantation? John Hazel's face became so grim that it terrified the boy.

"Gie me my whustle back, man, an' let me gang awa' hame, noo! Ye'll no tak it fra' me?" he stuttered, blinking back the tears.

"I must take it from you, for I know the man who lost it. But I'll give you half-a-crown instead, to buy another," said John.... "You'll like the new one awfully!" ... John added as the coin changed owners. "And I'll give you another sixpence for sweeties if you'll tell me what else you found in the wood."

"Naething at a' but a bit o' broon cloth—soger's cloth like yon—" A stubby finger pointed at John's sleeve—"stickin' oot o' a tod's howe, an' the bit white string near by."

"You mean the lanyard. Well, then—"

"Eh, then I pu'ed the wee bit string an' the siller whustle cam' oot wi't, an' sae I took the whustle an' ran awa' to pley. An' when I saw ye comin' I thocht ye were the Man. Noo gie me the bawbee!"

"You mean the sixpence! Tell me about the Man you mean,—and earn a shilling instead."

"Ay! The Man was dressed like yoursel is—but grand, like an officer, wi' gowd on his bonnet an' sleeves, an' mair ribbons on his breast. No the day's day, but back in the week, I'm thinkin' it was Monunday!—I seen him comin' doon the road, an' he fleyt me wi' his een."

"He scared you with his eyes? What did you do then?"

"I bude to rin awa' at first, because 'twas gettin' fell mirk-like. An' sair I wantit my tea and lardy-piece. But I didna' rin ower far. I muntit the fence an' keeked roun' a buss, an' saw him loup in ower. An' he gaed intil the woodie, an' cam' oot nae mair!"

Come By Chance pointed with a chilblained hand to the stile of the plantation, and brought the hand deftly back to show its empty palm. The shilling having followed the half-crown into a pocket of the cut-down corduroys:

"Hae ye anither?" the recipient demanded avidly.

"No, but I might give twopence more to hear how the Man came out."

"He didna!"

A shadow seemed to fall on the brightness of the snow, and the wind's bite grew keener. John Hazel echoed:

"Didn't come out? Are you quite sure?"

"Ay, yea! for though I hing aboot to see, he showed nae bone nor feather. An' at lang last—when I'se fell hungert for my piece—an' fain to rin hame to my mither—anither man louped oot intil the road, an' cam' alang by."

"How do you know it wasn't the Man?"

"Because he was no' braw like the ither! He had nae gowd on his bonnet, an' his claithes were hamely like my daddie's,—or they wad be, gin my mither wad own that my daddie was Keeper Todd."

John Hazel suddenly knew that the chill shadow had passed, and that the sun was shining. And he tossed another shilling to Come By Chance, saying:

"There's another bob for you, you queer little rascal. Cut before I change my mind and want the money back!"

And as the tow-headed took to his chilblained heels, revealing in his hurried flight that his shirt-tail hung out through a ragged hole at the back of his corduroys, John Hazel jumping the hog-backed stile, dived into the plantation. Something told him that he would come out much wiser than he went in.