"I remember," said John Damer at last. "Have they taken the Ridge?"
"Yes, long ago."
"Long ago? Oh! can it be--is it possible? Have we?"--the old man reared himself suddenly in bed, and raised two thin gnarled arms. "Have we--won the war?"
"Yes," said Michael, as Serena put her arms round his father, and laid him back on his pillow. "We have won the war."
John Damer lay back panting, trembling from head to foot.
"Thank G.o.d," he said, and in his sunken lashless eyes two tears gathered, and ran down the grey furrows of his cheeks, and lost themselves in his long white beard.
They gave him the sedative which the doctor had left ready for him, and when he had sunk back into unconsciousness, they stole out of the room.
They went back to the picture gallery looking on the gardens, and Michael gazed long at the portrait of his grandfather in the blue frock coat.
"Am I so like him?" he said with a sort of sob.
"Very like."
He sat down and hid his face in his hands.
"Poor soul," he said. "Poor soul. He"s up against it. Do you know I had almost forgotten we had "won the war" as he called it. There have been so many worse conflicts since that act of supreme German folly and wickedness."
"Not what he would call wars," said Serena. "He only means battles with soldiers in uniforms, and trenches and guns."
"How on earth are we to break to him that his wife is dead, and that I am his son, and that he is eighty years of age, and that Jack is his grandson."
"It must come to him gradually."
"In the meanwhile I shall take off these vile clothes and get back into my own. Serena, what can a made-up tie be, and why is it wrong?"
Michael tore off his tie and looked resentfully at it at arm"s length.
"It is just like the pictures, it seems correct, and it fastens all right with a hook and eye."
"It is the first time your taste in dress has been questioned, and naturally it p.r.i.c.ks," said Serena smiling at her husband. "It is lucky Jack did not hear it."
"I don"t know who Jack inherits his slovenliness and his clumsiness from," said Michael. "Why on earth can"t he sit on his smock without crumpling it. I can. He may be a great intellect, I think he is; he takes after my mother, there is no doubt, but he can"t fold his cloak on his shoulder, he can"t help a woman into her aeroplane, and he is so careless that he can"t alight in London on a roof without coming down either on the sky doorway, or the sky-light. He has broken so many sky-lights and jammed so many roof doors that nowadays he actually goes to ground and sneaks up in the lift."
Serena was accustomed to these outbursts of irritation. They meant that her nervous, highly strung Michael was perturbed about something else.
In this case the something else was not far to seek. He recurred to it at once.
"Will Father ever understand about Jack and Catherine? Will he ever in his extreme old age understand about anything?"
"His mind is still thirty," said Serena. "The Iceland brain specialist said that as well as Ali Khan, and all the other doctors. That is where they say the danger lies, and where the tragedy lies."
"But how are we to meet it," said Michael walking up and down. Presently he stopped in front of his wife and said as one who has solved a problem!
"I think on the whole I had better leave the matter of breaking things to Father entirely in your hands. It will come better from you than from me."
And the pictures of the various wives of the various ancestors heard once more the familiar phrase, to which their wifely ears had been so well accustomed in their day from the lips of their lords, when anything uncomfortable had to be done.
So Michael left it to Serena, and in the weeks which followed she guided her father-in-law, with the endless tenderness of a mother teaching a child to walk, round some very sharp corners, which nearly cost him his life, which, so deeply was her heart wrung for him, she almost hoped would cost him his life.
With a courage that never failed him, and which awed her, he learned slowly that he was eighty years of age, that his wife had died ten years ago, at sixty, that Michael was his son, and that he had a very clever grandson called John after him, one of the ablest delegates of the National Congress, and a grand-daughter called Catherine. She tried to tell him how they had lost a few months earlier their eldest son, Jasper, one of the pioneers of a new movement which was costing as many lives as flight had cost England fifty years earlier.
"He failed to materialise at the appointed spot," said Serena, "I sometimes wonder whether his Indian instructor kept back something essential. The Indians have known for generations how to disintegrate and materialise again in another place, but it does not come easy to our Western blood. Jasper went away, but he never came back."
John Damer looked incredulously at Serena, and she saw that he had not understood. She never spoke of it again.
As the days pa.s.sed John, fearful always of some new pang, nevertheless asked many questions of Serena when he was alone with her.
"Tell me about my wife. She was just twenty when I left her."
"She grieved for you with her whole heart."
"Did she--marry again? I would rather know if she did. She would have been right to do so in order to have someone to help her to bring up Michael."
"She never married again. How could she when you were alive, and in the house."
"I forgot."
"She hoped to the last you would be completely restored. All the greatest doctors in the world were called in, and they a.s.sured her it was only a question of time. Wonderful discoveries had been made in the Great War as to wounds in the head. But they only gradually learnt to apply them. And the years pa.s.sed and pa.s.sed."
"It would have been kinder to let me die."
"Did doctors let people die when you were young?"
John shook his head.
"They are the same now," she said.
"And I suppose Catherine spent her life here, caring for her child, and me, and the poor. She loved the poor."
"She cared for you and Michael, and she worked ceaselessly for the cause of the oppressed. She battled for it. She went into Parliament as it was called in those days, as soon as the age for women members was lowered from thirty to twenty-one. She strove for the restriction of the White Slave Traffic, and for safeguarding children from the great disease.
Some terrible evils were abated by her determined advocacy. But she always said she did not meet the same opposition the first women doctors did a hundred years ago, or as Florence Nightingale had to conquer when she set out to improve the condition of the soldier in hospital and in barracks, and to reduce the barbarities of the workhouses."
"I should have thought she would have been better employed in her own home, that she would have been wiser to leave these difficult subjects, especially the White Slave Traffic--to men."
"They had been left to men for a long time," said Serena.
The day came when he was wheeled out into the garden in the old mahogany wheel chair which his father had used in the last years of his life.
Serena was sitting beside him. When was she not beside him! Michael, at a little distance, was talking to two of the gardeners.