"_Is_ there anything more about your coming back from the Front to fetch the P.D.Q.? Oh, it _would_ be so lovely to see you even for a _few days_. I sometimes feel as if I had _never, never_ seen you----"
She sighed deeply in the quiet, lamp-lit room, where the chintz-cas.e.m.e.nt curtains stirred faintly above the open window. It had been so long, so long, all this time of being without him. Why, she had scarcely had a week of knowing him hers, before there had come that rushed War-bridal and the Good-bye! And all she had to live on were her memories and a glazed picture postcard, and a packet of pencil-scrawled letters of which the folds were worn into slits. She couldn"t even write to him as she would have wished. Always there brooded over her that spectre "The Censor," who possibly read every letter that was addressed to a man at the Front. Gwenna knew that some people at home wrote anything they wished, heedless that a stranger"s eye might see it. Leslie, for instance, wrote to one of her medical students, now working with the R.A.M.C. in Paris, as "My dear Harry--and the Censor," adding an occasional parenthesis: "_You won"t understand this expression, Mr.
Censor, as it is merely a quite silly family joke!_" She, Gwenna, felt utterly unable to write down more than a t.i.the of the tender things that she would have liked to say. To-night she had a longing to pour out her heart to him ... oh, and she would say _something_! Even if she tore up that sheet and wrote another. She scribbled down hastily: "Darling boy, do you know I miss you more _every day_; n.o.body has _ever_ missed anybody _so dreadfully_."
Here she was wrong, though she did not know it. It was true that she longed hungrily for the sight of that dear blonde face, with its blue, intrepid eyes, for the sound of that deep and gentle voice, and for the touch of those hands, those strongly modelled lips. But all these things had been a new joy, scarcely realised before it was gone. She would have told you that it made it worse for her. Actually it meant that she was spared much. Her lover"s presence had been a gift given and s.n.a.t.c.hed away; not the comradeship of years that, missing, would seem even as the loss of a limb to her. The ties of daily habit and custom which strengthen that many-stranded cord of Love had not yet been woven between these two lovers.
"I sometimes think it was really _awfully selfish_ of me to _marry_ you," Gwenna wrote, thinking to herself, "Oh, bother that old Censor, just for once." She went on more hurriedly:
"You might have married somebody like that Miss Muriel Conyers, with those frightfully lovely clothes and _all_ her people able to help you on in the Army, or somebody very beautiful and _rich_, anybody would have been glad to have you, and I _know_ I am just a little _n.o.body_, and not a bit clever and even Leslie used to say I had a Welshy accent sometimes when I speak, and I daresay _lots_ of people will think, oh, "how _could_ he!--why, she isn"t even very _pretty_!""
She raised her eyes, deeper and brighter in the lamplight, and gave a questioning glance at her reflection in the oval, swung mirror on the dressing-table at which she wrote. It would have been a captious critic indeed that could have called her anything less than very pretty at that moment; with her little face flushed and intent, a mixture of child and woman in the expression of her eyes and about her soft, parted lips.
Above the ruffle of her night-gown her throat rose proudly; thick and creamy and smooth. She remembered something he"d told her that afternoon at Kew. He"d said that she always reminded him of any kind of white flower that was st.u.r.dy and sweet; a posy of white clover, a white, night-blooming stock, some kinds of white roses.... She would like to send him a flower, in this letter, to remind him.
She glanced towards the open cas.e.m.e.nt, where the curtain waved. Under the shading foliage of the clematis that grew up to the cottage-roof there had climbed the spray of a belated rose. "Rose Menie" was its name. Mrs. Crewe had said that it would not flower that year. But there was one bud, half-hidden by leaves, swelling on its sappy twig, close to Gwenna"s window-sill.
"It"ll come out in a day or so," Gwenna thought.
"I"ll send it to him, if it comes out white.... _He_ was pleased with my looks!"
So, rea.s.sured, she turned to the letter again, and added:
"The only thing is, that whatever sort of wife you"d married, they _couldn"t_ have loved you like I do, or been so proud of being your wife; _really_ sometimes I can _hardly believe_ that I am really and truly married to----"
She broke off, and again lifted her curly head from bending above the paper.
There had been a light tap at the door behind her.
"Come in," called Gwenna, writing down as she did so, "here is the little maid coming to bring me up my hot milk; now, darling, darling boy, I _do hope_ they give you enough to eat wherever you are----"
Behind her the white door opened and shut. But the maid did not appear at Gwenna"s elbow with the tray that held that gla.s.s of hot milk and the plate of biscuits. The person who had entered gazed silently across the quiet girlish room at the little lissom figure clad in that soft crumple of pink and white, sitting writing by the dressing-table, at the cherub"s head, backed by the globe of the lamp that spun a golden aureole into that wreath of curls.
There was a pause so long that Gwenna, wondering, raised her head.
She gave another glance into the oval mirror that stood on the dressing-table just in front of her.... And there she saw, not the homely, ap.r.o.ned figure of the little maid that she had expected to see, but the last thing that she had expected.
It was a picture like, and unlike, a scene she had beheld long, long ago, framed in the ornate gold-bordered oval mirror in the drawing-room at the Smiths". Over her pink-clad shoulder, she saw reflected a broad, khaki-covered chest, a khaki sleeve, a blonde boy"s face that moved nearer to her own. Even as she sat there, transfixed by surprise, those blue and intrepid eyes of Icarus looked, laughing joyously, full into hers, and held her gaze as a hand might have held her own.
"It"s only me," said a deep and gentle voice, almost shyly. "I say----"
"_You!_" she cried, in a voice that rang with amazement, but not with fright; though he, it seemed, was hurrying out hasty warnings to the Little Thing not to be frightened.... He"d thought it better than startling her with a wire.... Mrs. Crewe had met him at the door ...
he"d come straight up: hoped she didn"t think he was a ghost---- Not for a second had she thought so!
Instantly she had known him for her granted and incarnate heart"s desire, her Flyer, home from the Front, her husband to whom she had that moment been writing as she sat there.
She sprang to her feet.
She whirled round.
She could not have told whether she had first flung herself into those strong arms of his, or whether he had s.n.a.t.c.hed her up into them.
All that mattered was that they were round her now, lifting and holding her as though they would never let her go again.
When Reveille sounded from the Camp on the plain, the sun was bright on that clematis-grown wall outside the window of Gwenna"s bridal-room.
It gilded the September foliage about the window-sill It also touched a gem of pa.s.sionate colour, set among the leaves of the Rose Menie.
That red rose had broken into blossom in the night.
PART III
_SEPTEMBER, NINETEEN-FOURTEEN_
CHAPTER I
A WAR-TIME HONEYMOON
The morning after Paul Dampier"s arrival from the Front he and his wife started off on the honeymoon trip that had been for so many weeks deferred.
They motored from the Aircraft Works to London, where they stopped to do a little shopping, and where Gwenna was in raptures of pride to see the effect produced by the Beloved in the uniform that suited him so well.
For every pa.s.ser-by in the street must turn to look, with quickened interest now, at an Army Aviator. Even the young men in their uniforms gave a glance at the soldier whose tunic b.u.t.toned at the side and whose cap had the tilt that gave to the shape of his blonde head something bird-like, falcon-like. And every girl in the restaurant where they lunched murmured, "Look," to her companion, "that"s some one in the Royal Flying Corps," and was all eyes for that kit which, at a time when all khaki was romantic, had a special, super-glamour of its own.
But the blue eyes of the man who wore it were for no one but the girl with whom he was taking his first meal alone together since they had been man and wife.
Her own glance was still hazy with delight. Oh, to see him there facing her, over the little round table set in a corner!
They ate cold beef and crusty loaf and cheese in memory of their first lunch together in that field, long ago. They drank cider, touching gla.s.ses and wishing each other all luck and a happy life.
"And fine weather for the whole of our week"s honeymoon," added the bridegroom as he set down his gla.s.s. "Lord, I know how it _can_ pour in your Wales."
For it was to Wales that they went on by the afternoon train from Euston; to Gwenna"s home, arriving late that evening. The Reverend Hugh Lloyd was away on a round of preaching-visits about Dolgelly. They had his black-henlike housekeeper to chirp and bustle about them with much adoring service; and they would have the Chapel House to themselves.
"But we won"t be _in_ the house much," Gwenna decided, "unless it pours."
It did not pour the next morning. It was cloudless and windless and warm. And looking round on the familiar landscape that she had known when she was a little child, it seemed now to Gwenna as if War could not be. As if it were all a dream and a delusion. There was no khaki to be met in that little hillside village of purple slate and grey stone. Only one or two well-known figures were missing from it. A keeper from one of the big houses on the other side of the river, and an English chauffeur had joined the colours, but that nine-days" wonder was over now. Peace had made her retreat in these mountain fastnesses that had once echoed to the war-shouts and the harp-music of a race so martial.
It was the music that had survived....
Paul Dampier had put on again that well-known and well-worn grey tweed jacket of his, so that he also no longer recalled War. He had come right away from all that, as she had known he would; come safely back to her.
Here he was, with her, and with a miracle between them, in this valley of crystal brooks and golden bracken and purple slopes. It was meant that they two should be together thus. Nothing could have stopped it.
She felt herself exulting and triumphing over all the Fates who might have tried to stop it; and over all the Forces that might have tried to keep him from her. His work on the Machine? Pooh! That had actually helped to bring them together! The Great War? Here he was, home from the War!