Part 4 (2/2)

From very perversity her heart turned to other interests. She was desperately in love with soldiers _en ma.s.se_ and individually. There was safety in numbers and a canceling rivalry between those who were going out perhaps to death and those who had come back from the jaws of death variously the worse for the experience.

The blind would have been irresistible in their groping need of comfort, if there had not been the maimed of body or mind putting out their incessant pleas for a gramercy of love. Those whose wounds were hideous took on an uncanny beauty from their sacrifice.

She busied herself about them and suffered ecstasies of pity.

She wanted to go to France and get near to danger, to help the freshly wounded, to stanch the spouting arteries, to lend courage to the souls dismayed by the first horror of the understanding that thenceforth they must go through life piecemeal.

But whenever she made application she met some vague rebuff. Her appeals were pa.s.sed on and on and the blame for their failure was referred always to some remote personage impossible to reach.

Eventually it dawned on her that there was actually an official intention to keep her out of France. This stupefied her for a time.

One day it came over her that she was herself suspect. This seemed ridiculous beyond words in view of her abhorrence of the German cause in large and in detail. Ransacking her soul for an explanation, she ran upon the idea that it was because of her a.s.sociation with the Weblings.

She was ashamed to have given such a thought pa.s.sage through her mind.

But it came back as often as she drove it out and then the thought began to hover about her that perhaps the suspicion was not so insane as she believed. The public is generally unreasonable, but its intuitions, like a woman's, are the resultants of such complex instincts that they are above a.n.a.lysis.

But the note-carrying went on, and she could not escape from the suspicion or its shadow of disgrace. Like a hateful buzzard it was always somewhere in her sky.

Once the suspicion had domiciled itself in her world, it was incessantly confirmed by the minutiae of every-day existence. The interchange of messages with Nicky Easton grew unexplainable on any other ground. The theory of secret financial dealings looked ludicrous; or if the dealings were financial, they must be some of the trading with the enemy that was so much discussed in the papers.

She felt that she had been conniving in one of the spy-plots that all the Empire was talking about. She grew afraid to the last degree of fear. She saw herself on the scaffold. She resolved to carry no more messages.

But the next request of Sir Joseph's found her complying automatically.

It had come to be her habit to do what he asked her to do, and to take pride in the service as a small installment on her infinite debt. And every time her resentment rose to an overboiling point, Sir Joseph or Lady Webling would show her some exquisite kindness or do some great public service that won commendation from on high.

One day when she was keyed up to protest Lady Webling discharged Fraulein Ernst for her pro-Germanism and engaged an English nurse.

Another day Lady Webling asked her to go on a visit to a hospital.

There she lavished tenderness on the British wounded and ignored the German. How could Marie Louise suspect her of being anti-British?

Another time when Marie Louise was almost ready to rebel she saw Sir Joseph's name heading a war subscription, and that night he made, at a public meeting, a speech denouncing Germany in terms of vitriol.

After all, Marie Louise was not English. And America was still neutral. The President had wrung from Germany a promise of better behavior, and in a sneaking way the promise was kept, with many a violation quickly apologized for.

Still, England wrestled for her life. There seemed to be hardly room in the papers for the mere names of the dead and the wounded, and those still more pitiable ones, the missing.

Marie Louise lost many a friend, and all of her friends lost and lost.

She wore herself out in suffering for others, in visiting the sick, the forlorn, the anxious, the newly bereaved.

The strain on Marie Louise's heart was the more exhausting because she had a craven feeling all the while that perhaps she was being used somehow as a tool for the destruction of English plans and men. She tried to get the courage to open one of those messages, but she was afraid that she might find confirmation. She made up her mind again and again to put the question point-blank to Sir Joseph, but her tongue faltered. If he were guilty, he would deny it; if he were innocent, the accusation would break his heart. She hated Nicky too much to ask him. He would lie in any case.

She was nagged incessantly by a gadfly of conscience that buzzed in her ears the counsel to tell the police. Sometimes on her way to a tryst with Easton a spirit in her feet led her toward a police station, but another spirit carried her past, for she would visualize the sure consequences of such an exposure. If her suspicions were false, she would be exposed as a combination of dastard and dolt. If they were true, she would be sending Sir Joseph and Lady Webling perhaps to the gallows.

To betray those who had been so angelic to her was simply unthinkable.

Irresolution and meditation made her a very Hamlet of postponement and inaction. Hamlet had only a ghost for counselor, and a mother to be the first victim of his rashness. No wonder he hesitated. And Marie Louise had only hysterical suspicion to account for her thoughts; and the victims of her first step would be the only father and mother she had ever really known. America itself was another Hamlet of debate and indecision, weighing evidences, pondering theories, deferring the sword, hoping that Germany would throw away the baser half. And all the while time slid away, lives slid away, nations fell.

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