"How--what do you mean?" she whispered.
"You"ve only got to look at the man to know what I mean. I think--since the war broke out--that Trent has been through the bitterness of death."
"But--but he could have enlisted--got in somehow--under another name, had he _wanted_ to fight. Or he might have gone out and driven an ambulance car--as Lester Kent did."
Sara was putting to Herrick the very arguments which had arisen in her own mind to confound the intuitive belief of which she had been conscious since that moment of inward revelation on Crabtree Moor--putting them forward in all their repulsive ugliness of fact, in the desperate hope that Herrick might find some way to refute them.
"Some men might have done, perhaps," answered Miles quietly. "But not a man of Trent"s temperament. Some trees bend in a storm--and when the worst of it is past, they spring erect again. Some _can"t_; they break."
The words recalled to Sara"s mind with sudden vividness the last letter Patrick Lovell had ever written her--the one which he had left in the Chippendale bureau for her to receive after his death. He had applied almost those identical words to the Malincourt temperament, of which he had recognized the share she had inherited. And she realized that her guardian and Miles Herrick had been equally discerning. Though differing in its effect upon each of them, consequent upon individual idiosyncrasy, the fact remained that she and Garth were both "breaking"
beneath the strain which destiny had imposed on them.
With the memory of Patrick"s letter came an inexpressible longing for the man himself--for the kindly, helping hand which he would have stretched out to her in this crisis of her life. She felt sure that, had he been beside her now, his shrewd counsel would have cleared away the mists of doubt and indecision which had closed about her.
But since he was no longer there to be appealed to, she had turned instinctively to Herrick, and, somehow, he had failed her. He had not given her a definite expression of his own belief. She had been humanly craving to hear that he, too, believed in Garth, notwithstanding the evidence against him--that he had some explanation to offer of that ghastly tragedy of the court-martial episode. And instead, he had only hazarded some tolerant suggestions--sympathetic to Garth, it is true, but not carrying with them the vital, unqualified a.s.surance she had longed to hear.
In spite of this, she knew that Herrick"s friendship with Garth had remained unbroken by the knowledge of the Indian Frontier story. The personal relations of the two men were unchanged, and she felt as though Miles were withholding something from her, observing a reticence for which she could find no explanation. He had been very kind and understanding--it would not have been Miles had he been otherwise--but he had not helped her much. In some curious way she felt as though he had thrown the whole onus of coming to a decision, unaided by advice, upon her shoulders.
She returned to Sunnyside oppressed with a homesick longing for Patrick.
The two years which had elapsed since his death had blunted the edge of her sorrow--as time inevitably must--but she still missed the shrewd, kindly, worldly-wise old man unspeakably, and just now, thrown back upon herself in some indefinable way by Miles"s att.i.tude, her whole heart cried out for that other who was gone.
She wondered if he knew how much she needed him. She almost believed that he must know--wherever he might be now, she felt that Patrick would never have forgotten the child of the woman whom, in this world, he had loved so long and faithfully.
With an instinctive craving for some tangible memory of him, she unlocked the leather case which held her mother"s miniature, together with the last letter which Patrick had ever written; and, unfolding the letter, began to read it once again.
Somehow, there seemed comfort in the very wording of it, in every little characteristic phrase that had been Patrick"s, in the familiar appellation, "Little old pal," which he had kept for her alone.
All at once her fingers gripped the letter more tightly, her attentions riveted by a certain pa.s.sage towards the end.
". . . And when love comes to you, never forget that it is the biggest thing in the world, the one altogether good and perfect gift. Don"t let any twopenny-halfpenny considerations of worldly advantage influence you, or the t.i.ttle-tattle of other folks, and even if it seems that something unsurmountable lies between you and the fulfillment of love, go over it, or round it, or through it! If it"s real love, your faith must be big enough to remove the mountains in the way--or to go over them."
Had Patrick foreseen the exact circ.u.mstances in which his "little old pal" would one day find herself, he could not have written anything more strangely applicable.
Sara sat still, every nerve of her taut and strung. She felt as though she had laid bare the whole of her trouble, revealed her inmost soul in all its anguished perplexity, to those shrewd blue eyes which had been wont to see so clearly through externals, piercing infallibly to the very heart of things.
Patrick had always possessed that supreme gift of being able to separate the grain from the chaff--to distinguish unerringly between essentials and non-essentials, and now, in the quiet, wise counsel of an old letter, Sara found an answer to all the questionings that had made so bitter a thing of life.
It was almost as if some one had torn down a curtain from before her eyes, rent asunder a veil which had been distorting and obscuring the values of things.
Mountains! There were mountains indeed betwixt her and Garth--and there was no way round them or through them! But now--now she would go over them--go straight ahead, unregarding of the mountains between, to where Garth and love awaited her.
No man is all angel--or all devil. Supposing Garth _had_ been guilty of cowardice, had had his one moment of weakness? She no longer cared! He was hers, her lover, alike in his weakness and in his strength. She had known men in France shrink in terror at the evil droning of a sh.e.l.l, and then die selflessly that others might live.
"Your faith must be big enough to remove the mountains in the way--or to go over them," Patrick had written.
And Sara, hiding her face in her hands, thanked G.o.d that now, at last, her faith was big enough, and that love--"the one altogether good and perfect gift"--was still hers if she would only go over the mountains.
CHAPTER x.x.xIV
THE TRIUMPH OF LOVE
"GARTH TRENT, COWARD."
The words, in staring white capital letters, had been chalked up by some one on the big wooden double-doors that shut the world out from Far End.
Sara stood quite still, gazing at them fixedly, and a tense white-heat of anger flared up within her. Who had dared to put such an insult upon the man she loved?
"_Coward_!" No one had ever actually applied that term to Garth in her hearing. They had skirted delicately round it, or wrapped up its meaning in some less harsh-sounding tangle of phrases, and although she had bitterly used the word herself, now that the opprobrious expression publicly confronted her, writ large by some unfriendly hand, she was swept by a sheer fury of indignant denial. It roused in her the immediate instinct to defend, to range herself unmistakably on Garth"s side against a world of traducers.
With a faint smile of self-mockery, she realized that had this flagrant insult been leveled at him in the beginning, had her first knowledge of the black shadow which hung over him been thus brutally flung at her, instead of diffidently, reluctantly broken to her by Elisabeth, she would probably, with the instinctive partisanship of woman for her mate, have utterly refused to credit it--against all reason and all proof.
She wondered who could have done this ting, nailed this insult to Garth"s very door. The illiterate characters stamped it as the work of some one in the lower walks of life, and, with a frown of annoyance, Sara promptly--and quite correctly--ascribed it to Black Brady.
"I never forgits to pay back," he had told her once, belligerently.
Probably this was his notion of getting even with the man who had prosecuted him for poaching. But had Brady realized that, in retaliating upon Trent, he would be giving pain to his beloved Sara, whom he had grown to regard with a humble, dog-like devotion, he would certainly have refrained from recording his vengeance upon Garth"s gateway.
Surmising that Garth could not have seen the offending legend--or it would scarcely have been left for all who can to read--Sara whipped out her handkerchief and set to work to rub it off. He should not see it if she could help it!
But Black Brady had done his work very thoroughly, and she was still diligently scrubbing at it with an inadequate piece of cambric when she heard steps behind her, and wheeling round, found herself confronted by Garth himself.
His eyes rested indifferently and without surprise upon the chalked-up words, then turned to Sara"s face inquiringly.
"Why are you doing that?" he asked. "Is--cleaning gates the latest form of war-work?"
Sara, her face scarlet, answered reluctantly.
"I didn"t want you to see it."
A curious expression flashed into his eyes.
"I saw it--two hours ago."
"And you left it there?"--with amazement.
"Why not? It"s true, isn"t it?"
And in that moment the long struggle in Sara"s heart ended, and she answered out of the fullness of the faith that was in her.
"No! It is _not_ true! I"ve been a fool to believe it for an instant.
But I"m one no longer. I don"t believe it." She paused, then, very deliberately and steadily, she put her question.
"Garth--tell me, were you ever guilty of cowardice?"
"The court-martial thought so."
Sara"s foot tapped impatiently on the ground.