Chapter I

"Love is swift of foot,
Love's a man of war,
And can hit and can shoot
From far."
GEORGE HERBERT.

It was on the first of December that Sir Mark Forsyth was officially reported killed; and it was upon an evening of early November, on a battle-scarred road of Northern France, that a certain waggon-load of dead and wounded men jolted leisurely towards a certain village lately recaptured by the Prussians. The open body of the cart was spacious and full of straw that had once been tolerably clean, but was now defiled with mud and blood. It held six men--two French, three British, and one German. Two of them were obviously dead, three were as obviously alive and in cruel pain. The sixth, who wore a kilt and a blood-stained puttee wound about his head, lay on his back, motionless, wide-eyed, watching a bank of grey cloud dissolve into shredded wisps of gold. Presently the sun broke through and smiled upon the aftermath of battle as upon the sheaves of some peaceful harvest garnered with thanks and praise.

In this unceremonious fashion was Mark removed from the farm where Macgregor had been forced to leave him--dead, to all appearance, or at the point of death.

Of how he came to be there, in such woeful company, he knew nothing. His brain seemed blurred and curiously inert. He felt no pain, only a horrid faintness; utter exhaustion from loss of blood. He would have given the world for a sip of brandy. Where was his flask? he wondered vaguely, but felt too weak to stir a finger.

Above him, beside the driver, sat a little French doctor, talking and gesticulating vehemently. He might be of use, Mark reflected with feeble impatience, if one could only attract his attention.

Summoning all his ebbing strength, he tried to shout. The sole result was a horrid choking sensation and an abortive noise in his throat.

He grew suddenly alarmed. What did it mean? And where were they going? Had he, possibly, been taken prisoner in spite of himself?

There was none to enlighten him, even could he have spoken; and the torment of uncertainty remained. The fact that he suffered no physical pain was a minor item to be thankful for. Not altogether a minor item, perhaps, judging from sounds emitted by the German at the far end of the cart. Between groans and broken curses he was calling impartially on God and his mother.

The last galvanised Mark's brain into momentary life. What of his own mother--and Bel? Would they believe him killed? How long was it since his clock of time had stopped dead? Would it ever be set going again? And--what of the fight?

More questions--nothing but questions--unanswered and unanswerable. They buzzed about him like hornets; and to be rid of them he fell back on memory. He recalled a world that rained shells and shrapnel--a violent, friendly and increasingly muddy world, in which Allies and enemies were wildly intermingled, till it was cleft from end to end by long and opposing lines of trenches, with a No Man's Land of varying width between. In the No Man's Land things had happened: things that left a scar on the memory--things a man could not talk about and, most unhappily, could not forget. In those early days reliefs were few and infrequent; and Mark looked back on trench life as an endless age of strain--nerve and body and imaginative brain racked to the limit of endurance, and under all a dogged resolve that there should be no limit of endurance but the arbitrary limit of death.

Too vividly he remembered those last days, when grey-green battalions had been hurled against them, wave on wave, till his Highlanders, who stood like rocks in a storm, had been forced to retire by an urgent order from those who alone knew when wisdom demanded sacrifice of ground rather than of men. Stubbornly, foot by foot, they had fallen back from their hard-won position. Then--consternation ... and confusion. The battalion on their right seemed to have melted away.

But the enemy allowed them no breathing space for dismay. They were in dire peril: and Mark lost not a moment in rallying his men for a final desperate stand.... Suddenly, in the midst of it, when the struggle was fiercest, the earth had seemed to collapse under him. He recalled a horrid sensation of falling backwards, headlong--into nothingness.

At that point his memory broke off short. The rest was a meaningless jumble of sights and sensations like a troubled dream.

He was lying in a turnip-field. Something had happened to his head. Blood was flowing freely, but he felt no pain. In vain he tried to move. Weakness flowed over him. Living and conscious, he lay there among the dead, listening to the roar of battle that rolled steadily farther away; fearful exceedingly lest they should bury or burn him; or, finding him alive, should take him prisoner while this ignominious helplessness hung like lead upon his limbs.

At times he could hear voices and men passing. But very soon darkness fell again; and out of the darkness came a vision of Macgregor's face. He remembered trying to speak, and the feel of the man's rough cheek when he patted it in sign of recognition. To his intense relief, he had felt them trying to move him. What had come of it? Where were they now?

The questions were at him afresh and the haunting thought of his mother. Once more he summoned all his strength in an effort to reach her mentally. He had succeeded in doing so on more than one occasion. But now, the attempt was lunacy. It simply exhausted his last remnant of strength, and once more he slipped back into the outer dark....

By some miracle, his resolute spirit hung on to the thread of life that remained; and when next it struggled up from the bottomless pit, the cart and the jolting and the smell of blood had vanished like all the other dreams. He was lying on a bed. He could feel the blanket against his chin. The air he breathed was faintly impregnated with antiseptics and the scent of clean straw.

As his brain cleared, he heard women's voices murmuring rhythmically in a foreign tongue. Too weak and weary to stir, he lay awhile steeped in contentment, till that rhythmical murmur resolved itself into Latin prayers. French nuns, good souls, must be praying by his bed.

Next moment, the chill trickle of water on his face made him start and open his eyes. One of the nuns was bending over him.

"Our Lady be praised," she said softly. "The spirit has returned. Monsieur will drink this, and strength will also return."

She held a cup to his lips; warm milk dashed with brandy--pure nectar! It seemed to set life stirring in his veins, even as the woman's face set some vague memory stirring in his mind. The breadth of brow and cheek-bones, the mouth, with its resolute softness and the deep dent above the chin, struck a note of dim familiarity; but he felt far too lazy and comfortable to search for a clue.

The barn-like room in which he found himself was no hospital, but a rough makeshift. There were but half a dozen beds like his own. The remaining sufferers lay on straw pallets; and the little French doctor, whose profile he recognised, appeared to be in charge. That fact, and the presence of nuns made him hopeful of being in the right hands. If only he could ask! But the curse of dumbness was on him still; and a fear that it might be permanent chilled the flow of returning life.

The other nuns had risen and moved away. She whom they called Sœur Colette stood smiling down on him.

"Ça va bien," she said. "Monsieur comprend?"

He made a sign of assent, then with his left hand and eyebrow, tried to convey the question he could not ask. Her face lit up.

"Le bon Dieu soit bénit. Monsieur desires a little conversation. As much as one can, I will relate."

Serene and smiling, she sat beside him on a low stool. It was purely refreshing to hear a woman's voice again.

"M. le docteur," she told him, "a saint of God with a rough tongue, gathered up many dead and wounded from the terrible battle, more than a week ago, and brought them here to the Red Cross Hospital, then in the hands of my people. Now--Mary Mother, pity us!--it is once more taken by the Prussians. The hospital is seized for themselves, and M. le docteur is graciously permitted to use this ruined farm. Those, alas, who recover become prisoners of war. Monsieur himself on arriving was as one dead; and, next evening, we of the Sisterhood must pray for the souls of the departed. But I, who came to kneel near Monsieur, said: 'This, surely, is not death.' While others summoned M. le docteur, myself I found, by the mercy of God, one pulse, so small, so feeble, there in the neck of Monsieur. Imaginez!"

Mark smiled his crooked smile and lifted his eyebrows. He found it hard to believe in her fairy tale. But, if it were true, this woman, with the beautiful familiar face, had evidently been his good angel.

She was explaining to him now the nature of his wound, and how splinters of bone pressing on the brain made him powerless to speak or move. These the little doctor had partially lifted. But the complete operation was a delicate one; and he would prefer to wait awhile, in hopes that the tide of battle should roll eastward again.

"It might be well for Monsieur, then, to seem as one dead," Sœur Colette explained, with a flicker of humour in her great dark eyes. "They would not think him worth the trouble to remove; and in Paris all is possible."

Mark had need of the utmost consolation he could extract from that thought. For, as strength returned, impatience returned also, and his imprisoned spirit girded at the hampering hulk of a body over which it had lost command--for how long?

Questions again! He grew to hate them heartily. Wherever he turned for relief, there one or more would spring up to confound him; and at moments of supreme exasperation, his brain seemed alive with notes of interrogation, seeking answers and finding none. More than once he vowed mentally that if he regained the power of speech, he would never again ask a question while he lived.

And he suffered more than exasperation during those interminable November days. The very inactivity of his body seemed to induce a restless activity of mind. Fleeting inspirations mocked him: wonderful, impossible ideas for bas-reliefs and great symbolic figures. Strange moods swept through him and strange unreasoning fears. There were visions also--and dreams: visions of things he would have given years of life to forget; dreams from which he awoke in a cold sweat, so shaken that he would lie staring at the darkness, positively afraid to close his eyes.

Very often the dreams were nightmare distortions of realities. These had a horrid knack of recurring at intervals; and the one most dreaded by Mark concerned a minor incident of No Man's Land that had been permanently photographed on his brain.

Always it began at the same point: dusk, illumined fitfully by searchlights and bursting shells; the silhouetted figure of a Sapper subaltern walking coolly into the open with his coil of wire; then the scream of a bursting shell--and there, where the boy had stood, was a mound of earth and debris at a crater's rim.

Later on, the moon revealed something that moved fitfully near the edge of the mound. It was the leg of that Sapper subaltern--buried alive. Under heavy and persistent enemy fire, any attempt at rescue would have been madness; and Mark, digging and carrying all that night, had prayed that a second shell might put the boy out of his misery. But in the morning the leg still moved, and continued to move at intervals all day; till Mark, fresh to such horrors, could endure it no more.

That night, when the firing slackened a little, another figure, armed with a spade, had crept over the parapet and walked coolly out into the open.

And again, just as it reached the mound, a shell screamed and the earth yawned--and when Mark recovered consciousness, he was lying on his face a good many yards nearer his own trenches, himself half buried in the debris of that other mound, which was now no more. He thanked God the boy was dead; but the memory of that twenty-four hours had haunted him for weeks; and now with pitiless persistence it haunted his dreams.

The fact that he could neither speak nor shake off mental obsessions by a rousing walk, aggravated their tyranny over him; and there were times when it crazed him, almost, to lie there, like a felled tree, powerless even to ask how he could let his dear ones know he was alive.

One morning, in such a mood, he tried to convey by gesture this question that so troubled him; and, to his delight, Sœur Colette understood almost at once. No, Monsieur could neither send nor receive letters until the good day when "les poilus" or "les Tommies" came to their rescue. And Monsieur had lost his talisman.

Mark's left hand went quickly to his throat. It was true. The precious silver disc and silver chain were gone. He glanced at his wrist. No leather-coated watch--his mother's gift. Filled with sudden, acute dismay, he went through the dumb show of feeling in coat-pockets.

Again Sœur Colette understood and shook her head. There was nothing in Monsieur's coat--nothing at all. Monsieur le docteur could discover neither his name nor his regiment. In proof of her statement, she brought him the coat. It was rifled very completely. His flask, his gold pencil--Sheila's present--his letter-case and letters--all gone. The very buttons and badges had been neatly removed; a finishing touch that suggested the gentle German.

And Mark lay there realising that, unless and until he recovered his speech, he was lost, absolutely--even his identity gone.

He was not merely a log, but a nameless log. He chafed at the ignominy of it, as a man in sore straits will chafe at a trifle, yet endure the worst with fortitude.

Suddenly, with vast relief, he remembered his brogues. If only he could tell Sœur Colette to look inside them!

But the attempt produced such wild and ludicrous misunderstandings that the little nun grew embarrassed and Mark gave it up in despair. Perhaps his brogues had also been stolen by the Germans. After all, his precious name was no earthly use to him at present, and the future was a blank.

In this monotonous fashion the first weeks of November ebbed away. On the whole they were left in peace, except for periodical incursions of a rough-mannered German officer with aggressive moustaches, a high narrow forehead, and unmistakable Prussian eyes.

It was his joke, when in a humorous mood, to bid the fierce little doctor hurry up with his contributions for the nearest prison camp in the Fatherland. More than once he infuriated Mark by alluding to him as "that English swine." But it was the thinly-veiled insolence of the man's manner to Sœur Colette that made him long most vehemently for command of his hands and tongue. Happily for himself, and for those who loved him, he could do no more than glare and clench a hidden fist.

On one occasion it chanced that Captain Adler encountered the flame of impotent wrath in his eyes, and the sight appeared to tickle his Teutonic sense of humour. With deliberate relish and a sneering smile he looked Mark over from head to foot, then turned to the doctor who stood near, inwardly nervous, outwardly fiercer than ever.

"Doubtless the hoch wohlgeboren a without-fear-or-reproach knight is," he remarked, with a contemptuous jerk of his thumb. "But never again will he for the fair-and-distressed lady of his admiration one blow of revenge strike."

Mark could only set his teeth. Sœur Colette, who knew a little German, bent very low over the young Frenchman she was feeding; and the Prussian, chuckling audibly, swung out of the barn.

That afternoon there came a lull in the unceasing rain and wind. The sky cleared and the sun shone out with a divine effulgence upon all the ruin and tragedy wrought by man.

Since Mark's arrival there had been only one such golden interval. It had lasted several days, and he had succeeded in conveying his great wish to be out in the open. So to-day the little doctor and his orderly carried him, bed and all, into the homely garden.

There, storm-draggled chrysanthemums made patches of colour. Stray leaves of Virginia creeper flamed on the walls; and the farmhouse itself gaped roofless to the indifferent heavens. A dovecot, battered and empty of doves, leaned drunkenly against the barn that was their hospital. The poplars behind it, etched delicately upon the blue, had been stripped, in this terrible autumn, of branches as well as leaves; and the fields beyond were pock-marked by shell fire. Yet peasant women still patiently tended the wounded earth and its products.

Some way off, on rising ground, stood the feudal chateau--what remained of it: headless turrets, gables shattered and distorted; windows, like empty eye-sockets, mere gaping holes. And the garden, beneath, sloping downward to the river, was a chaos of trampled shrubberies and twisted iron.

Mark, in his utter loneliness, cut off from letters and activity and the companionable gift of speech, could, at least, thank God for the "silver streak" and the grey battleships that preserved his own most sacred treasures from a like fate. But thought of those treasures so tormented him and roused such a buzzing swarm of questions, that he refrained--as far as possible--from futile excursions into the future or the past; and he began to grow impatient for the advent of Sœur Colette with his chocolate.

He accepted, without after-thought, the fact that it was always she who attended him and entertained him; nor was he disposed to quarrel with the arrangement. He had discovered by this time why she created about him an atmosphere of home and of assurance that all was well. Dreaming one night of Sheila, he had waked in the morning to find Sœur Colette standing by his bed; and the haunting sense of familiarity was a puzzle no longer.

For a moment Mark had fancied he must still be dreaming. Then the nun spoke and the illusion vanished. But the charm remained; a charm that carried him back to early days before Bel's disturbing witchery had changed the complexion of life. In his isolation and bitter uncertainty, he surrendered himself, instinctively, to this blessed illusion of home. It was his one real solace throughout those grey, interminable weeks.

What their one-sided talks and increasing friendliness might mean to Sœur Colette he neither knew, nor sought to know. As a nun, he deemed her sacred, a being set apart. He was apt to forget--as the insolent Adler never forgot--that a nun is nevertheless a woman. But to-day, as the minutes lagged past and she did not appear, there stirred in him an emotion other than mere impatience--an emotion belonging to that virile world where a man could walk and talk and fight and hold a woman in his arms.

He checked himself sharply. That would never do. It was almost as if, through this unknown Frenchwoman, the spirit of Sheila were drawing him back to his old allegiance that, in those July days before the deluge, had been on the verge--he knew it now--of blossoming into a strong and deep love. And she--? Had she, possibly, begun to care? But that also, would never do. He had chosen; or, to be more accurate, Bel had chosen and he had succumbed.

He surveyed his great prostrate figure almost with disgust. Would Bel, as revealed in her recent letters, have any use for a lover who could neither pay her compliments nor take her in his arms? Strange how, in these few weeks, she seemed to have slipped away from him. Even her face eluded his memory. It was the face and form of his virile little mother that was most constantly with him in these days.

Now, deliberately, he called up a vision of an earlier Bel--unknown, irresistible, ardently desired--sitting on a rock beside the burn awaiting his avowal, while he fondly believed her dreaming her own dreams. This time memory played him no tricks; and the very vividness of the scene intensified his dawning perception of a change, gradual, indefinable, that had crept into their relation since war wrenched them apart. Her first letters, he remembered, had bothered him; and he had found the same lack, the same touch of artificiality in those that had followed him to France. His very hunger for them had only increased the vague disappointment they so often produced. He recalled a remark of hers: "Separations are rather uncanny things." Curiously true--in her own case. While she was with him, it seemed, she approximated instinctively to the woman he would have her be. Without him, she became simply the product of her unsatisfactory antecedents.

Well, he had lost her letters with the rest of his kit; and on the whole he was not sorry....

Just as impatience revived afresh, Sœur Colette and the chocolate appeared at last.

Sight of her recalled the morning's incident and she saw the recollection in his eyes.

"Monsieur must not so concern himself on my account," she said, after apologies for the delay. "If Monsieur could know what one has seen, what one has passed through unharmed, since they drove us from our convent! I have no fear. I am shielded by Our Lady!"

For a few seconds Mark looked hard at her. Then, to her amazement, he blurted out two words, the first he had uttered for a month. "Tell me," he said. His voice sounded strange; but he had produced the right words, and he saw his own exultation repeated in her eyes.

"Ah, Monsieur!" she cried. "It will come at last--the miracle. We have prayed without ceasing. And now--one must obey Monsieur's first command! But it is a story too terrible for altogether telling, Monsieur understands?"

Monsieur understood very well; but he had a great wish to know more of this sainted woman, who smiled with Sheila's smile and spoke with her voice. So in the quiet of that golden afternoon she told him--sitting on the doctor's camp-stool--of the town in Northern France that was her home, and of the bombardment that was the beginning of sorrows; when people lived in their cellars under the shadow of a greater fear than the fear of death. For after the shells came the Uhlans, demanding money and wine and women; above all wine and more wine, drowning their manhood so that no form of brutality came amiss.

With the same unimpassioned detachment, she told him of her own Sisterhood that, in pity, had stayed to help the wounded, and of "la petite Pauline." A novice, beautiful and spirited, she had resented the coarse gallantry of certain German soldiers. Her contempt had roused the devil in them. Embraces not willingly given, must be taken by force.

"And she--poor innocent--she died in my arms, crazed with terror and torment. And they laughed ... those devils!" She was silent a moment, looking out over the disfigured landscape. "Monsieur, there are things that even the good God Himself can surely never forgive."

Rising abruptly, she left him--haunted, enraged, half wishing he had not asked for her tale. Yet these were the very abominations that, if ever he reached home again, must be remembered, verified, and mercilessly avenged. She was right, that small fearless woman: there were things that God Himself could not forgive.

From that day there came a slight change in Mark's happy relation with Sœur Colette. Her likeness to Sheila worried him now, almost as much as it had charmed him before. The sense of having unconsciously slipped away from Bel set him idealising her afresh; regilding her halo, till she became again almost the Bel of that July afternoon in the glen, before the shock of her repudiation had temporarily shaken his faith and love.

Sœur Colette, dimly aware of some jar in their communion, suffered her own private shock of awakening. While all went smoothly, she had suspected nothing. Now she knew--and shame overwhelmed her. While her lips had prayed daily for the victorious return of French or British soldiers, her heart, dedicated to the Mother of God, had been secretly dreading the end of this, the one idyll of her saintly life. And because she shrank from confession of that most human lapse, she devised for herself certain penances that failed signally to still the strange new disturbance within.

At last, on a day, the dull thunder she had prayed for reverberated along the horizon. By slow degrees it rolled nearer, steadily nearer, till Mark could distinguish the familiar note of bursting shells. Then it was that he began to ask himself--would the Germans think him worth taking along with them as a prisoner of war?

He hoped they might not even be given time to save their own skins.