Part 61 (1/2)
”Naturally she was upset,” he repeated. ”She made Al'mah go and nurse Byng.”
”Al'mah,” repeated Stafford mechanically. ”Al'mah!” His mind rushed back to that night at the opera, when Rudyard had sprung from the box to the stage and had rescued Al'mah from the flames. The world had widened since then.
Al'mah and Jasmine had been under the same roof but now; and Al'mah was nursing Jasmine's husband--surely life was merely farce and tragedy.
At this moment an orderly delivered a message to Barry Whalen. He rose to go, but turned back to Stafford again.
”She'd be glad to see you, I'm certain,” he said. ”You never can tell what a turn sickness will take in camp, and she's looking pretty frail.
We all ought to stand by Byng and whatever belongs to Byng. No need to say that to you; but you've got a lot of work and responsibility, and in the rush you mightn't realize that she's more ill than the chill makes her. I hope you won't mind my saying so in my stupid way.”
Stafford rose and grasped his hand, and a light of wonderful friendliness and comrades.h.i.+p shone in his eyes.
”Beau chevalier! Beau chevalier!” was all he said, and impulsive Barry Whalen went away blinking; for hard as iron as he was physically, and a fighter of courage, his temperament got into his eyes or at his lips very easily.
Stafford looked after him admiringly. ”Lucky the man who has such a friend,” he said aloud--”Sans peur et sans reproche! He could not betray a ”--the waving of wings above him caught his eye--”he could not betray an aasvogel.” His look followed the bird of prey, the servitor of carrion death, as it flew down the wind.
He had absorbed the salt of tears and valour. He had been enveloped in the Will that makes all wills as one, the will of a common purpose; and it had changed his att.i.tude towards his troubles, towards his past, towards his future.
What Barry had said to him, and especially the tale of the New Zealander, had revealed the change which had taken place. The War had purged his mind, cleared his vision. When he left England he was immersed in egoism, submerged by his own miseries. He had isolated himself in a lazaretto of self-reproach and resentment. The universe was tottering because a woman had played him false. Because of this obsession of self, he was eager to be done with it all, to pay a price which he might have paid, had it been possible to meet Rudyard pistol or sword in hand, and die as many such a man has done, without trying to save his own life or to take the life of another. That he could not do. Rudyard did not know the truth, had not the faintest knowledge that Jasmine had been more to himself than an old and dear friend. To pay the price in any other way than by eliminating himself from the equation was to smirch her name, be the ruin of a home, and destroy all hope for the future.
It had seemed to him that there was no other way than to disappear honourably through one of the hundred gates which the war would open to him--to go where Death ambushed the reckless or the brave, and take the stroke meant for him, on a field of honour all too kind to himself and soothing to those good friends who would mourn his going, those who hoped for him the now unattainable things.
In a spirit of stoic despair he had come to the seat of war. He had invited Destiny to sweep him up in her reaping, by placing himself in the ambit of her scythe; but the sharp reaping-hook had pa.s.sed him by.
The innumerable exits were there in the wall of life and none had opened to him; but since the evening when he saw Jasmine at the railway station, there had been an opening of doors in his soul hitherto hidden. Beyond these doors he saw glimpses of a new world--not like the one he had lived in, not so green, so various, or tumultuous, but it had the lure of that peace, not sterile or somnolent, which summons the burdened life, or the soul with a vocation, to the hood of a monk--a busy self-forgetfulness.
Looking after Barry Whalen's retreating figure he saw this new, grave world opening out before him; and as the vision floated before his eyes, Barry's appeal that he should visit Jasmine at the hospital came to him.
Jasmine suffered. He recalled Barry's words: ”She's as thin as she once wasn't, but twice as beautiful. Her eyes are as big as stars, and she can smile still, but it's a new one--a war-smile, I expect. Everything gets a turn of its own at the Front.”
Jasmine suffered in body. He knew that she suffered in mind also. To go to her? Was that his duty? Was it his desire? Did his heart cry out for it either in pity--or in love?
In love? Slowly a warm flood of feeling pa.s.sed through him. It was dimly borne in on him, as he gazed at the hospital in the distance, that this thing called Love, which seizes upon our innermost selves, which takes up residence in the inner sanctuary, may not be dislodged.
It stays on when the darkness comes, reigning in the gloom. Even betrayal, injury, tyranny, do not drive it forth. It continues. No longer is the curtain drawn aside for tribute, for appeal, or for adoration, but It remains until the last footfall dies in the temple, and the portals ate closed forever.
For Stafford the curtain was drawn before the shrine; but love was behind the curtain still.
He would not go to her as Barry had asked. There in Brinkwort's house in the covert of peaches and pomegranates was the man and the only man who should, who must, bring new bloom to her cheek. Her suffering would carry her to Rudyard at the last, unless it might be that one or the other of them had taken Adrian Fellowes' life. If either had done that, there could be no reunion.
He did not know what Al'mah had told Jasmine, the thing which had cleared Jasmine's vision, and made possible a path which should lead from the hospital to the house among the orchard-trees at Brinkwort's Farm.
No, he would not, could not go to Jasmine--unless, it might be, she was dying. A sudden, sharp anxiety possessed him. If, as Barry Whalen suggested, one of those ugly turns should come, which illnesses take in camp, and she should die without a friend near her, without Rudyard by her side! He mounted his horse, and rode towards the hospital.
His inquiries at the hospital relieved his mind. ”If there is no turn for the worse, no complications, she will go on all right, and will be convalescent in a few days,” the medicine-man had said.
He gave instructions for a message to be sent to him if there was any change for the worse. His first impulse, to tell them not to let her know he had inquired, he set aside. There must not be subterfuge or secrecy any longer. Let Destiny take her course.
As he left the hospital, he heard a wounded Boer prisoner say to a Tommy who had fought with him on opposite sides in the same engagement, ”Alles zal recht kom!” All will come right, was the English of it.