But it was that kiss which made all the difference in my afterthought of him. It was a confession on his part, too, and a bit of self-revelation.
Behind it lay a nature of vast, splendid qualities--strong, n.o.ble, dominating, meant to be used for good--all ruined by self-love. Of the Brokenshire family, of whom I am so fond and to whom I owe so much, he was the one toward whom, by some blind, spontaneous, subconscious sympathy of my own, I have been most urgently attracted. If his soul was twisted by pa.s.sions as his face became twisted by them, too--well, who is there among us of whom something of the sort may not be said; and yet G.o.d has patience with us all.
Howard Brokenshire and I were foes, and we fought; but we fought as so many thousands, so many millions, have fought in the short time since that day; we fought as those who, when the veils are suddenly stripped away, when they are helpless on the battle-field after the battle, or on hospital cots lined side by side, recognize one another as men and brethren. And so, when my baby was born I called him after him. I wanted the name as a symbol--not only to myself, but to the Brokenshire family--that there was no bitterness in my heart.
At present let me say that, though pained, I was scarcely surprised to read in the New York papers on the following afternoon that Mr. J.
Howard Brokenshire, the eminent financier, had, on the previous evening, been taken with a paralytic seizure while in his motor on the way from his daughter"s house to his own. He was conscious when carried indoors, but he had lost the power of speech. The doctors indicated overwork in connection with foreign affairs as the predisposing cause.
From Mrs. Rossiter I heard as each successive shock overtook him. Very pitifully the giant was laid low. Very tenderly--so Ethel has written me--Mrs. Brokenshire has watched over him--and yet, I suppose, with a terrible tragic expectation in her heart, which no one but myself, and perhaps Stacy Grainger, can have shared with her. Howard Brokenshire died on that early morning when his country went to war.
I stayed in New York just long enough to receive my boxes from Newport.
On getting out of the train at Halifax Larry Strangways received me in his arms.
And this time I saw no little dining-room, with myself seating the guests; I saw no ba.s.sinet and no baby. I saw nothing but him. I knew nothing but him. He was all to me. It was the difference.
And not the least of my surprises, when I came to find out, was the fact that it was Jim Rossiter who had sent him there--Jim Rossiter, whom I had rather despised as a selfish, cat-like person, with not much thought beyond "ridin" and racin"," and pills and medicinal waters. That was true of him; and yet he took the trouble to get into touch with Stacy Grainger--as a Brokenshire only by affinity, he could do it--to use his influence at Washington and Ottawa to get Larry Strangways a week"s leave from Princess Patricia"s regiment--to watch over my movements in New York and know the train I should take--and wire to Larry Strangways the hour of my arrival. When I think of it I grow maudlin at the thought of the good there is in every one.
We were married within the week at the old church which was once a center for Loyalist refugees from New England, beneath which some of them lie buried, and where I was baptized. When my husband returned to Valcartier I went--to be near him--to Quebec. After he sailed for England I, too, sailed, and met him there. I kept near him in England, taking such nursing training as I could while he trained in other ways.
I was not many miles away from him when, in the spring of the next year, he was badly cut up at Bois Grenier, near Neuve Chapelle.
He was one of the two or three Canadians to hold a listening post half-way between the hostile lines, where they could hear the slightest movement of the enemy and signal back. A Maxim swept the dugout at intervals, and now and then a sh.e.l.l burst near them. My husband was wounded in a leg and his right arm was shattered.
When I was permitted to see him at Amiens the arm had been taken off and the doctors were doing what they could to save the leg. Fortunately, they have succeeded; and now he walks with no more than a noticeable limp. He is a captain in Princess Patricia"s regiment and a D. S. O.
Later he was taken to the American Women"s Hospital, at Paignton, in Devonshire, and there again I had the joy of being near him. I couldn"t take care of him--I had not the skill, and perhaps my nerve would have failed me--but I worked in the kitchen and was sometimes allowed to take him his food and feed him. I think the hope, the expectation, of my doing this was what brought him out of the profound silence into which he was plunged when he arrived.
That was the only sign of mental suffering I ever saw in him. For the physical suffering he never seemed to care. But something deep and far off, and beyond the beyond of self-consciousness, seemed to have been reached by what he had seen and heard and done. It was said of Lazarus, after his recall to life by Christ, that he never spoke of what he had experienced in those four days; and I can say as much of my husband.
When his mind reverts to the months in France and Flanders he grows dumb. He grows dumb and his spirit moves away from me. It moves away from me and from everything that is of this world. It is among scenes past speech, past understanding, past imagining. He is Lazarus back in the world, but with secrets in his keeping which no one may learn but those who have learned them where he did.
When he came to Paignton he was far removed from us; but little by little he reapproached. I helped to restore him; and then, when the baby was born, the return to earth was quickened.
To have my baby I went over to Torquay, where I had six quiet contented weeks in a room overlooking the peac.o.c.k-blue waters of Tor Bay, with the kindly roof that sheltered my husband in the distance. When I had recovered I went to a cottage at Paignton, where, when he left the hospital, he joined me. As the healing of the leg has been so slow, we have been in the lovely Devon country ever since, till, a few weeks ago, the British Government allowed us to cross on the ship that brought the British Commissioners to Washington.
I have just been in to look at him. He is sound asleep, lying on his left side, the coverlet sagging slightly at the shoulder where the right arm is gone. He is getting accustomed to using his left hand, but not rapidly. Meantime he is my other baby; and, in a way, I love to have it so. I can be more to him. In proportion as he needs me the bond is closer.
He is a grave man now. The smile that used to flash like a sword between us is never there any more. When he smiles it is with a long, slow smile that comes from far away--perhaps from life as it was before the war. It is a sweet smile, a brave one, one infinitely touching; and it pierces me to the heart.
He didn"t have to forfeit his American citizenship in becoming one of the glorious Princess Pats. They were glad to have him on any terms. He is an American and I am one. I thought I became one without feeling any difference. It seemed to me I had been born one, just as I had been born a subject of the dear old queen. But on the night of our landing in Halifax, a military band came and played the "Star-spangled Banner"
before my uncle"s door, and I burst into the first tears I had shed since my marriage.
Through everything else I had been upheld; but at the strains of that anthem, and all it implied, I broke down helplessly. When we went to the door and my husband stood to listen to the cheering of my friends, in his khaki with the empty sleeve, and the fine, stirring, n.o.ble air was played again, his eyes, as well as mine, were wet.
It recalled to me what he said once when I was allowed to relieve the night nurse and sit beside him at Paignton. He woke in the small hours and smiled at me--his distant, dreamy smile. His only words--words he seemed to bring with him out of the lands of sleep, in which perhaps he lived again what now was past for him--his only words were:
"You know the Stars and Stripes were at Bois Grenier."
"How?" I asked, to humor him, thinking him delirious.
He laughed--the first thing that could be called a laugh since they had brought him there.
"Sewn or my undershirt--over my heart! It will be there again," he added, "floating openly!"
And almost immediately he fell asleep once more.
And, after all, it is to be there again--floating openly. The time-struggle has taken it and will carry it aloft. It has taken other flags, too--flags of Asia; flags of South America; flags of the islands of the seas. As my husband predicted long ago, mankind is divided into just two camps. So be it! G.o.d knows I don"t want war. I have been too near it, and too closely touched by it, ever to wish again to hear a cannon-shot or see a sword. But I suppose it is all a part of the great War in Heaven.
Michael and his angels are fighting, and the dragon is fighting and his angels. By that I do not mean that all the good is on one side and all the evil on the other. G.o.d forbid! There is good and evil on both sides.
On both sides doubtless evil is being purged away and the new, true man is coming to his own.
If I think most of the spiritualization of France, and the consecration of the British Empire, and the coming of a new manhood to the United States, it is because these are the countries I know best. I should be sorry, I should be hopeless, were I not to believe that, above bloodshed, and cruelty, and hatred, and l.u.s.t, and suffering, and all that is abominable, the Holy Ghost is breathing on every nation of mankind.
When it is all over, and we have begun to live again, there will be a great Renaissance. It will be what the word implies--a veritable New Birth. The sword shall be beaten to a plowshare and the spear to a pruning-hook. "Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more."
So, in this gray light, growing so silvery that as day advances it becomes positively golden, I turn to my Bible. It is extraordinary how comforting the Bible has become in these days when hearts have been lifted up into long-unexplored regions of terror and courage. Men and women who had given up reading it, men and women who have never read it at all, turn its pages with trembling hands and find the wisdom of the ages. And so I read what for the moment have become to me its most strengthening words:
In your patience possess ye your souls. . . . There shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring; men"s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth; for the powers of heaven shall be shaken. . . . And when these things begin to come to pa.s.s, then look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh.
That is what I believe--that through this travail of the New Birth for all mankind redemption is on the way.
It is coming like the sunrise I now see over the ocean. In it are the glories that never were on land or sea. It paints the things which have never entered into the heart of man, but which G.o.d has prepared for them that love him. It is the future; it is Heaven. Not a future that no man will live to see; not a Heaven beyond death and the blue sky. It is a future so nigh as to be at the doors; it is the Kingdom of Heaven within us.
Meantime there is saffron pulsating into emerald, and emerald into rose, and rose into lilac, and lilac into pearl, and pearl into the great gray canopy that has hardly as yet been touched with light.
And the great gray ocean is responding a fleck of color here, a hint of glory there; and now, stealing westward, from wavelet to wavelet, stealing and ever stealing, nearer and still more near, a wide, golden pathway, as if some Mighty One were coming straight to me. "Even so, come, Lord Jesus."
Even so I look up, and lift up my head. Even so I possess my soul in patience.
Even so, too, I think of Mildred Brokenshire"s words:
"Life is not a blind impulse, working blindly. It is a beneficent, rectifying power."
THE END