Chapter VI

"... No longer can I cast
A glory round about this head of gold.
Glory she wears, but springing from the mould;
Not like the consecration of the past."
MEREDITH.

Dr. Norton proved no false prophet.

Ten days later a very much revived Mark lay propped up in bed, while his mother sat by him, reading aloud, with emphatic relish, an outspoken article from the _National Review_.

The loyal, universal confidence accorded, in August, to a Government mainly responsible for the failure to save Belgium, was already on the wane. The political leopard, it appeared, could not change his spots even to preserve the British Empire from ruin. Increasingly the note of criticism replaced the note of confidence: and to none did the change seem more ominous than to Helen Forsyth and her son. But for Mark, at the moment, no larger anxieties could cloud the joy of regaining his grip on life; of watching his mother's expressive face as she snapped the thread of a sentence to acclaim here or denounce there; till he longed for command of speech to lure her into one of their arguments that, for her, were at once an exasperation and a delight.

Words came more readily now; but still at times, they played him ludicrous and disconcerting tricks, that were not always matter for mirth. Bel--whose sense of humour was an uncertain quantity--too often winced at them; and then they covered him with confusion or pricked him to momentary irritation with her. They would pass, he assured her, as the brain reasserted its full control. The fact that it had proved to be slightly torn would retard things a little; but already he began to move his right hand; and in time recovery would be complete. They must have patience: that was all.

She proclaimed herself a miracle of patience; but there were days when he suspected her of being faintly bored; when her cheerfully persistent injunction to "hurry up and get well" had, to his sensitive ear, an almost metallic ring. Work and the war and the strain of real suffering had wrought inner changes of which he became gradually aware. The fine film of hardness, that dismayed Lady Forsyth, had not been altogether dissolved even by those first wonderful days of reunion; and now when she spoke of painful things, it was fatally apparent to Mark.

He was, in fact, beginning to perceive the woman beneath the glamour; yet the glamour remained, in spite of disillusion. Only when he looked into the future, or was tired and alone, the old distracting doubts assailed him. For purposes of love-making she was inimitable. To that end, she was born. For the larger purposes of wifehood, motherhood, companionship:--well, he had chosen her and he must take his chance----

And all the while, he tried not to be aware that he was watching for one face, waiting for the "real long talk" she had promised him. Others came with increasing frequency; but she never reappeared. What was wrong? The uncertainty grew distracting; but he felt reluctant to speak of her, these days; and when at last, he achieved a casual question to his mother, nervousness made it one of his failures.

"Where is--become--Colette?" was the conundrum that emerged.

"I wrote to her, dear," Lady Forsyth answered, pleased at his remembering. "But I haven't heard yet."

He frowned impatiently. "D-damn it! I mean--Sheila?"

Then he learnt that her mother had claimed her for work at Westover Court, where a number of half convalescent nervous cases were in need of massage and Mrs. Melrose was short of skilled hands.

"Sheila is quite wonderful at it," Lady Forsyth added. "A genuine gift. More magnetism than massage, I verily believe."

Mark smiled at her enthusiasm, but asked no more questions. His belated discovery must not be suffered to get out of hand....

So far, he had been a very saint for patience. But as vigour increased, irritability increased also. In certain moods, the monotony, the dependence, the rubber-tyred routine of the hospital existence irked him to exasperation; and if he were alone with Keith he would let off steam, in an outburst of wholesome profanity.

He did his best not to upset the women; but when a rare fine day flung panels of sunshine across the carpet and a frolic wind set the blind-tassels tap-tapping on the windows he felt like a caged thing. No garden here, as in France, where at least he could commune with trees and sky: and it was no garden he wanted now. It was the road or the heather underfoot; the wilds of Hampshire, the rolling hills of his native Argyll; the sea-salt and heather-fragrant air that, for him, was like no other air on earth. He wanted simply to walk and walk, world without end; only Bobs for company; Bobs, who most certainly was not forgetting his master, though he was accepting with true canine philosophy the homage paid him by the house of Russell.

One night he dreamed of a kingly tramp among the hills and glens beyond Inveraig: Keith walked beside him, while Bobs put the fear of God into rabbits, visible and invisible.

So vivid was the dream that he awoke with the dog's bark and Keith's voice sounding in his ears--woke to find he could scarcely shift himself in bed without help. The contrast jarred so painfully that he cursed that delusive dream and decided to ask a few straight questions when Dr. Norton came, if his unruly member would permit.

They had subjected him to a thorough overhauling the day before: but of information not a crumb could he extract from them, beyond vague encouragement and counsels of patience. And this morning he fared very little better at Dr. Norton's hands.

Norton was a lean tall man, with a humorous grey-green eye and, on occasion, a slightly caustic tongue. He had taken a great liking to this virile, sensitive patient of his; who could thoroughly enjoy a joke at his own expense. But, for all that, even Mark's direct demand for enlightenment failed to entice him from the cautious reserve of his kind.

"My dear Sir Mark," he said, a gleam of sympathy in his grave eye, "it's hardly fair to fling leading questions at men whose reputation might not be worth an hour's purchase if they took to scattering inaccurate prophecies among their patients! The damage to your brain was slight considering what it might have been. With that well-seasoned puttee for a first aid bandage, it's a miracle you didn't die of septic meningitis within a week. The main thing to guard against now is nerve trouble: if you let yourself get worried or uncontrolled. With luck we shall have you out of bed in a week. But it may be more like a month before we can let you out of this."

"Oh--_damn_!" The "good old word of sin" seldom failed him at command.

"Quite so," Norton remarked in his even voice. "It's beastly having to lie up when you don't feel ill. At the same time----"

"Yes, of course--all those other chaps," Mark broke in, feeling suddenly very much ashamed of himself. "Lucky enough getting away--intact. I won't worry. I'll--what's it they say out there--carry on!"

But for some reason--whether because of his dream or because of Dr. Norton's guarded statement, that morning marked a point from which his hopefulness flagged; and the atmosphere about him seemed to suffer some indefinable change that gave Norton's injunction not to worry a slightly satirical tang.

He became too keenly conscious of sympathy in the air; and the more tactfully it was implied, the worse it jarred. His kind, attentive Nurse seemed suddenly kinder, more attentive. His mother's lively humour sounded, at times, a trifle strained. More than once he caught his mother gazing at him with a yearning wistfulness that he had either not noticed or not encountered before. She managed to laugh it off; but it haunted him afterwards.

Worse than all, he detected a fine shade of difference in Bel: at times a hint of constraint in her manner that he tried to dismiss as pure fantasy; at times, a passion of affection, very rare with her. There was less of mere lovers' talk between them now: and in the intervals, a paucity of common interests was revealed. Very often she would read to him; and her visits were growing less regular. Some days she did not come at all; but sent a hurried affectionate note of excuses, lean diet for a man who needed companionship as never before.

And Sheila, except for an occasional letter, appeared to have deserted him utterly.

He put up with this state of things for a week: during which time his arm and speech made good progress towards recovery. Then, suddenly, his patience gave out and he decided to tackle Keith, the only one whose bearing had suffered no perceptible change.

Keith had been away for a few days at Montrose; but he was due in Town that morning: and he came straight from the station to Park Lane.

He looked noticeably tired and worn: but Mark, just then, was fiercely intent on his own determination to be rid of half truths.

"You--you damned lucky devil!" he broke out, holding on to Keith's hand and searching his eyes hungrily for knowledge withheld. "Scotland--mountains--the sea! And I lie here--cursing. How much taller--" the word eluded him and gesture failed--"Oh, _you_ know ... yard measure--longer? They won't tell me. Those infernal doctors. I'm--no coward. Let's have the damage straight. My legs ... rotten, useless. Don't improve."

Keith shook his head, pain unconcealed in his eyes. Then he sat down by the bed and faced the ordeal thrust upon him.

"The chances are--they won't--improve," he said slowly. "That's the damage, Mark. Your spine."

Mark set his teeth and was silent. The breath of tragedy had clean blown out the rushlight of impatience. Keith hoped that Helen would never see him look as he looked then.

"I gather they didn't mend matters ... dragging you to that farm," Keith went on in his low, contained voice. "Not their fault, poor fellows. Very bad ground, Macgregor said; and they were wounded and under fire. But the result is--a lesion----"

"Lesion," Mark repeated frowning with the effort of thought. "Medical stuff. In plain English ... I'm done for ... physically. That it?"

Keith was silent a moment. "That's ... about it: so far as they can tell at present. But there's just a possibility of gradual improvement. A very slow business. And, at best, Dr. Norton fears recovery would only be partial----"

"Thanks very much."

The quiet courtesy of his tone pierced Keith to the heart. He would infinitely sooner have heard Mark swear. The swearing was bound to come, soon or late, and it would be a relief for both.

At present, he merely closed his eyes and lay silent a long, long while, facing naked and unlovely facts with his vivid, forward-looking artist's brain....

Some fool had once said: "_Never_ is a long word"; but no word ever coined was interminable enough to suggest the unnumbered army of days that threatened him--that was the literal effect--between seven and twenty and the merciful end of all. Try as he would, he could not believe in it--yet.

And the others--they had known it a week or more. It must have been hell for them; and it explained everything. Most startlingly, it explained--Bel. If she had seemed, on occasion, to weary of an invalid lover, what manner of use would she have for a husband chained to a wheeled chair? Had he any shadow of right to hold her--now?

Unable to endure the torment of thought, he opened his eyes. Keith still sat there, one elbow on the bed; his hand across his forehead shutting out the vision of Mark's face.

"Keith, old man," he said, and Keith looked up with a start. "Don't you worry. I can--stick it. Others, worse off--eh? Half a life--half a loaf--" He struggled to complete the connection; and failing, tried to smile. "Mother?" he asked sharply and Keith drew in his lips.

"No thought of herself. Only you!"

Then came the word he hardly dared speak. "Bel? She knows too?"

"Yes. She knows."

Another long pause: but he forced himself to go on.

"Keith--can I? Ought I--? Must I lose _every_ thing?"

The words came out in a sudden rush.

"That depends--" Keith answered with slow emphasis--"on her. Naturally--she is free, if she chooses. But she has every right to refuse freedom; to wait ... on the chance.... Picture your mother in such a case."

Mark pictured her; and knew very well that no lover of hers, so placed, would have need to fear the double loss. But Bel--? How imperfectly he knew her, how utterly unsure he was of her even now.

"Why did they keep it from me?" he asked irrelevantly.

"They were afraid for your head, till the three weeks were up."

"Weeks?--what are weeks?" Mark murmured. "Look here--they must leave me alone a bit. Tell them. An hour or two. I'll ring."

"Very well. I will come again, this afternoon."

Keith held out his hand and their mutual grasp supplied all racial disabilities.

They left him alone the greater part of that morning; alone with the news that had come down on him like a guillotine snapping his life in two. It struck him, in his first access of bitterness, that the guillotine would have been the more merciful fate----

But the one practical problem of the moment was Bel. It amazed and hurt him to realise how little he could foretell her line of action in this cruel dilemma. Almost, he could see her rising, dramatically, superbly, to the heroic plane. The difficulty was to see her keeping it up. Throughout all her past "phases" he detected that same incapacity running like a fatal thread. Though it pleased her to pose as a rebel, her instinctive skill lay, rather, in graceful evasion of circumstances that threatened to prove too strong for her. Would she regard a crippled husband as a circumstance that called for graceful evasion? That question she alone could answer. And how--and when was he to ask it?

He could not yet write; and, like all strong natures, he inclined to the spoken word if anything unpleasant must be done; but he still felt quite unfit for the strain of a scene that might end disastrously. He would of a certainty be tripped up by egregious verbal lapses, that, at such a moment, would be intolerable.

If she came, however, he must see her and take his chance.

She did not come; and the uncertainty, following on the shock of knowledge, was none too good for his nerves. Dr. Norton advised a sleeping draught that afternoon and another at night.

These gave him brief and merciful respite from the torment of thought: but morning brought fresh realisation, fresh perplexity. It also brought a letter from Bel.

He scarcely dared open it. Did she know that he knew? And was she too great a coward to face his pain?

Her short note answered neither question.

"Darling Man," she wrote, "this is to tell you that Harry and I must run down to Folkestone for three or four days on account of her work. A big meeting, for one thing; and she wants me to speak. I'm rather keen about it. Not so sure I haven't found my real vocation at last. I looked in yesterday evening to say good-bye: but Nurse said you were asleep and not on any account to be disturbed. So the kisses must be stored up for a few days. Forgive this hurried scrawl. I'll write again from Folkestone. Always your so loving Bel."

He read that "hurried scrawl" several times over without arriving at any clear conclusion, except the obvious one that matters must stand over till her return; unless he could bring himself to write through his mother, an expedient that did not commend itself, except as a last resort.