There was no mistaking her pa.s.sionate sincerity. The truth--that Sara would never, as long as she lived, put another in the place Garth Trent had held--seemed borne in upon Elisabeth that moment.
With a strangled cry she sank back into her chair, and her eyes, fixed on Sara"s small, stern-set face, held a strange, beaten look. As she sat there, her hands gripping the chair-arms, there was something about her whole att.i.tude that suggested defeat.
"So it"s all been useless--quite useless!" she muttered in a queer, whispering voice.
She was not looking at Sara now. Her vision was turned inward, and she seemed to be utterly oblivious of the other"s presence. "Useless!" she repeated, still in that strange, whispering tone.
"What has been useless?" asked Sara curiously.
Elisabeth started, and stared at her for a moment in a vacant fashion.
Then, all at once, her mind seemed to come back to the present, and simultaneously the familiar watchful look sprang into her eyes. Sara was oddly conscious of being reminded of a sentry who has momentarily slept at his post, and then, awakening suddenly, feverishly resumed his vigilance.
"What was I saying?" Elisabeth brushed her hand distressfully across her forehead.
"You said that it had all been useless," repeated Sara. "What did you mean?"
Elisabeth paused a moment before replying.
"I meant that all my hopes were useless," she explained at last. "The hopes I had that some day you would be Tim"s wife."
"Yes, they"re quite useless--if that is what you meant," replied Sara.
But there was a perplexed expression in her eyes. She had a feeling that Elisabeth was not being quite frank with her--that that whispered confession of failure signified something other than the simple interpretations vouchsafed.
The thing worried her a little, nagging at the back of her mind with the pertinacity common to any little unexplained incident that has caught one"s attention. But, in the course of a few days, the manifold happenings of daily life drove it out of her thoughts, not to recur until many months had pa.s.sed and other issues paved the way for its resurgence.
Sara remained at Barrow until Tim had volunteered and been accepted, and the settlement of her own immediate plans synchronizing with this last event, it came about that it was only two hours after Tim"s departure that she, too, bade farewell to Elisabeth, in order to join up in London with Lady Arronby"s party.
Elisabeth stood at the head of the great flight of granite steps at Barrow and waved her hand as the car bore Sara swiftly away, and across the latter"s mind flashed the memory of that day, nearly a year ago, when she herself had stood in the same place, waiting to welcome Elisabeth to her new home.
The contrast between then and now struck her poignantly. She recalled Elisabeth as she had been that day--gracious, smiling, queening it delightfully over her two big men, husband and son, who openly worshipped her. Now, there remained only a great empty house, and that solitary figure on the doorstep, standing there with white face and lips that smiled perfunctorily.
Elisabeth turned slowly back into the house as the car disappeared round the curve of the drive. For her, the moment was doubly bitter. One by one, husband, son, and the woman whom she had ardently longed to see that son"s wife, had been claimed from her by the pitiless demands of the madness men call War.
But there was still more for her to face. There was the utter downfall of all her hopes, the defeat of all her purposes. She had striven with the whole force that was in her to a.s.sure Tim"s happiness. To compa.s.s this, she had torn down the curtain of the past, proclaiming a man"s shame and hurling headlong into the dust the new life he had built up for himself, and with it had gone a woman"s faith, and trust, and happiness.
And it had all been so futile! Two lives ruined, and the purchase price paid in tears of blood; and, after all, Tim"s happiness was as utterly remote and beyond attainment as though no torrent of disaster had been let loose to further it! Elisabeth had bartered her soul in vain.
In the solitude which was all the war had left her, she recognized this, and, since she was normally a woman of kind and generous impulses, she suffered in the realization of the spoiled and mutilated lives for which she was responsible.
Not that she would have acted differently were the same choice presented to her again. She did not _want_ to hurt people, but the primitive maternal instinct, which was the pivot of her being, blinded her to the claims of others if those claims reacted adversely on her son.
Only now, in the bitterness of defeat, as she looked back upon her midnight interview with Garth Trent, she was conscious of a sick repugnance. It had not been a pleasant thing, that thrusting of a knife into an old wound. This, too, she had done for Tim"s sake. The pity of it was that Garth had suffered needlessly--uselessly!
She had thought the issue of events hung solely betwixt him and her son, and, with her mind concentrated on this idea, she had overlooked the possibility of any other outcome. But the acceptance of an unexpected sequence had been forced upon her--Sara would never marry any one now!
Elisabeth recognized that all her efforts had been in vain.
And the supreme bitterness, from which all that was honest and upright within her shrank with inward shame and self-loathing, lay in the fact that she, above all others, owed Garth Trent--that which he had begged of her in vain--the tribute of silence concerning the past.
CHAPTER x.x.xI
THE FURNACE
As Sara took her seat on board the train for Monkshaven, she was conscious of that strange little thrill of the wanderer returned which is the common possession of the explorer and of the school-girl at their first sight of the old familiar scenes from which they have been exiled.
She could hardly believe that barely a year had elapsed since she had quitted Monkshaven. So many things had happened--so many changes taken place. Audrey had been transformed into Mrs. Herrick; Tim had been given a commission; and Molly, the one-time b.u.t.terfly, was now become a working-bee--a member of the V.A.D. and working daily at Oldhampton Hospital. Sara could scarcely picture such a metamorphosis!
The worst news had been that of Major Durward"s death--he had been killed in action, gallantly leading his men, in the early part of the year. Elisabeth had written to Sara at the time--a wonderfully brave, simple letter, facing her loss with a fort.i.tude which Sara, remembering her adoration for her husband and her curious antipathy to soldiering as a profession, had not dared to antic.i.p.ate. There was something rather splendid about her quiet acceptance of it. It was Elisabeth at her best--humanly hurt and broken, but almost heroic in her endurance now that the blow had actually fallen. And Sara prayed that no further sacrifice might be demanded from her--prayed that Tim might come through safely. For herself, she mourned Geoffrey Durward as one good comrade does another. She knew that his death would leave a big gap in the ranks of those she counted friends.
It had been a wonderful year--that year which she had pa.s.sed in France--wonderful in its histories of tragedy and self-sacrifice, and in its revelation both of the brutality and of the infinite fineness of humanity. Few could have pa.s.sed through such an experience and remained unchanged, certainly no one as acutely sentient and receptive as Sara.
She felt as though she had been pitchforked into a vast melting-pot, where the cast-iron generalizations and traditions which most people consider their opinions grew flexible and fluid in the scorching heat of the furnace, a.s.similating so much of the other ingredients in the cauldron that they could never rea.s.sume their former unqualified and rigid state.
And now that year of crowded life and ardent service was over, and she was side-tracked by medical orders for an indefinite period.
"Go back to England," her doctor had told her, "to the quietest corner in the country you can find--and try to forget that there _is_ a war!"
This thin, eager-faced young woman, of whom every one on the hospital staff spoke in such glowing terms, interested him enormously. He could see that her year"s work had taken out of her about double what it would have taken out of any one less sensitively alive, and he made a shrewd guess that something over and above the mere hard work accounted for that curiously fine-drawn look which he had observed in her.
During a hastily s.n.a.t.c.hed meal, before the advent of another batch of casualties, he had sounded Lady Arronby on the subject. The latter shook her head.
"I can tell you very little. I believe there was a bad love-affair just before the war. All I know is that she was engaged and that the engagement was broken off very suddenly."
"Humph! And she"s been living on her reserves ever since. Pack her off to England--and do it quick."
So October found Sara back in England once again, and as the train steamed into Monkshaven station, and her eager gaze fell on the little group of people on the platform, waiting to welcome her return, she felt a sudden rush of tears to her eyes.
She winked them away, and leaned out of the window. They were all there--big d.i.c.k Selwyn, and Molly, looking like a masquerading Venus in her V.A.D. uniform, the Lavender Lady and Miles, and--radiant and well-turned-out as ever--Mile"s wife.
The Herrick"s wedding had taken place very un.o.btrusively. About a month after Sara had crossed to France, Miles and Audrey had walked quietly into church one morning at nine o"clock and got married.
Monkshaven had been frankly disappointed. The gossips, who had so frequently partaken of Audrey"s hospitality and then discussed her acrimoniously, had counted upon the lavish entertainment with which, even in war-time, the wedding of a millionaire"s widow might be expected to be celebrated.
Instead of which, there had been this "hole-and-corner" sort of marriage, as the disappointed femininity of Monkshaven chose to call it, and, after a very brief honeymoon, Miles and Audrey had returned and thrown themselves heart and soul into the work of organizing and equipping a convalescent hospital for officers, of which Audrey had undertaken to bear the entire cost.
Henceforth the mouths of Audrey"s detractors were closed. She was no longer "that shocking little widow with the dyed hair," but a woman who had married into a branch of one of the oldest families in the county, and whose immense private fortune had enabled her to give substantial help to her country in its need.
"I think it"s simply splendid of you, Audrey," declared Sara warmly, as they were all partaking of tea at Greenacres, whither Audrey"s car had borne them from the station.
Audrey laughed.
"My dear, what else could I do with my money? I"ve got such a sickening lot of it, you see! Besides"--with a bantering glance at her husband--"I think it was only the prospect of being of some use at my hospital which induced Miles to marry me! He"s my private secretary, you know, and boss of the commissariat department."
Miles saluted.
"Quartermaster, at your service, miss," he said cheerfully, adding with a chuckle: "I saw my chance of getting a job if I married Audrey, so of course I took it."