Part 70 (2/2)

But the young men asked no questions. They came--glad to come. Roused out of a lethargy which had bound them. Waked by a ringing old voice.

The General was rather quiet when he reached home. Jean and Bronson, who had suffered torments, watched him with concerned eyes. And, as if he divined it, he laid his hand over Jean's. ”I did a good day's work, my dear. I got two men for the Army, and I'm going to get more--”

And he did get more. He went not only in the rain, but in the warmth of the sun, when the old fruit trees bloomed along the tow path, and the backs of the mules were s.h.i.+ning black, and the women came out on deck with their was.h.i.+ng.

And always he spoke to the men of marching feet--. Now and then he sang for them in that thin old voice whose thinness was so overlaid by the pa.s.sion of his patriotism that those who listened found no flaw in it.

”He has sounded forth the trumpet that has never called retreat, He is sifting forth the hearts of men before his Judgment seat, O be swift my soul to answer him, be jubilant my feet, Our G.o.d is marching on--”

There was no faltering now, no fumbled words. With head up, singing--”Be jubilant, my feet--”

Sometimes he took Jean with him, but not always. ”There are places that I don't like to have you go, my dear, but those are where I get my men.”

At other times when he came out to where she sat in the car there would flash before his eyes the vision of his wife's face, as she, too, had once sat there, waiting--

Sometimes he took the children, and rode with them on a slow-moving barge from one lock to another, with the limousine meeting them at the end.

So he travelled the old paths, innocently, as he might have travelled them throughout the years.

Yet if he thought of those difficult years, he said never a word. He felt, perhaps, that there was nothing to say. He took to himself no credit for the things he was doing. If age and infirmity had brought to him a realization of all that he had missed, he was surely not to be praised for doing that which was, obviously, his duty.

Yet it gave him a new zest for life, and left Jean freer than she had been before. It left her, too, without the fear of him, which had robbed their relations.h.i.+p of all sense of security.

”You see, I never knew,” she wrote in her memory book, ”what might happen. I had visions of myself going after him in the night as Derry had gone and his mother. I used to dream about it, and dread it.”

Yet she had said nothing of her dread to Derry in her smiling letters, and as men think of women, he had thought of her in the sick room as a guardian angel, s.h.i.+ning and serene.

And now, faint and far came to the men in the cantonments the sound of battles across the sea. The bugles calling them each morning seemed to say, ”Soon, soon, you will go, you will go, you will go--”

To Derry, listening, it seemed the echo of the fairy trumpets, ”_Trutter-a-trutt, trutter-a-trutt, you will go, you will go, you will go--_”

It was strange how the thought of it drew him, drew him as even the thoughts of Jean his bride did not draw--. He remembered that years ago he had smiled with a tinge of tolerant sophistication over the old lines:

”I could not love thee, dear, so much, Loved I not honor more--”

Yet here it was, a truth in his own life. A woman meaning more to him than she could ever have meant in times of peace, because he could go forth to fight for her, his life at stake, for her. It was for her, and for other women that his sword was unsheathed.

”If only they could understand it,” he wrote to Jean. ”You haven't any idea what rotten letters some of the women write. Blaming the men for going over seas. Blaming them for going into it at all. Taking it as a personal offense that their lovers have left them. 'If you had loved me, you couldn't have left me,' was the way one woman put it, and I found a poor fellow mooning over it and asked him what was the matter.

'It isn't a question of what we want to do, it is a question of what we've got to do, if we call ourselves men,' he said. But she couldn't see that, she was measuring her emotions by an inch rule.

”But, thank G.o.d, most of the women are the real thing--true as steel and brave. And it is those women that the men wors.h.i.+p. It is a masculine trait to want to be a sort of hero in the eyes of the woman you love. When she doesn't look at it that way, your plumes droop!”

And now the bugles rang with a clearer note--not, ”You will go, you will go--” but, ”Do not wait, do not wait, do not wait.”

The cry from abroad was Macedonian. ”Come over and help us!” It was to America that the ghosts of those fighting hordes appealed.

<script>