CHAPTER XVII

Margaret kept her promise to Freddy. During the three days which she spent with the Iretons nothing transpired to make it possible for her to break it. No word, either by letter or by native word of mouth, had arrived from Michael.

Even to Hada.s.sah's generous mind, Michael Amory's conduct seemed strange and inexplicable. His silence, in a manner, condemned him as casual, even if he was not guilty. She began to wonder if he had been carried off his feet by Millicent, if he had been weak and forgetful of Margaret for a little time. Millicent would certainly have done her best to deprive him of his higher instincts and ideals. If he had been faithless to Margaret, he was the type of man who would exaggerate the sin.

When she reviewed the situation calmly, she found that there was much to be said from Freddy Lampton's standpoint, and Margaret herself was growing more and more wounded by her lover's conduct--not so much by the fact that Millicent had been in the desert with him, for she knew the woman's persistence, but by the lack of effort which he had made to explain the situation to her. Even if he had allowed himself to be carried away by Millicent's wiles, she would have forgiven him, for Margaret was very human, and she was no fool. Never had she imagined that her lover was a saint. What she felt it harder and harder every day to forgive was his silence, his want of courage, his lack of trust.

During those three days Margaret's beautiful world and life seemed to have crumbled into dust, just as she had seen the unearthed objects in Egyptian tombs crumble into atoms when the first breath of air from the desert reached them. Her contact with the world of to-day had melted her romance of the desert into thin air. It was a beautiful vision which her strange life had created; it had flourished during her short stay in the Valley. It was not suited for the practical everyday world.

While she was with the Iretons, she tried to interest herself in Hada.s.sah's work as much as possible. She contrived very bravely to put aside her wretchedness and at least appear interested and eager.

Her dignity and self-control added greatly to Michael Ireton's admiration for her. He, too, had been struck by her resemblance to Hada.s.sah, so her beauty appealed to him very strongly.

Hada.s.sah and her husband allowed her to go home to England without protest. Cairo was becoming very hot for an English girl, and they both agreed that it might do Michael Amory good to learn, when he did turn up, that his conduct had hurt Margaret's pride, that she was seriously wounded. As Millicent had spoken to Margaret of Michael as being in robust health, they had banished the idea that his silence was due to illness.

Outwardly Margaret behaved as though the whole episode of her love-affair with Michael Amory was at an end. A woman's life is dog-eared by her love-affairs; this was the first in Margaret's book of life. To the Iretons she was always very insistent that there had been no formal engagement between them, that Michael had not allowed her to think of herself as bound to him in any way--for only one reason he had not considered himself justified in asking her to become his wife or to wait for him. This to the Iretons meant nothing. He had made Margaret love him--that was the essential point--and his sensibilities must have told him that with such a girl love was no light thing. He must have realized that Margaret had given him the one perfect gift in her possession, an unselfish love.

Margaret was very loyal to her lover. It was easy to be that, for in her super-senses she was convinced of his great love for her, as a thing apart from anything else. She found it wise to discuss the mystery of his silence less and less; for she knew that no one but G.o.d knows what is in our hearts, or what He has put there for our consolation, and that to all outward appearances things looked very black for Michael.

And so it came to pa.s.s that she sailed for England in the same boat as Freddy. He had hurried through his business and had managed to secure a pa.s.sage, so as to look after her and be a companion to her on her disconsolate voyage.

On the journey to Ma.r.s.eilles, Margaret discovered qualities in Freddy's character which, even with all her love for him, she had never imagined. For her sake he contrived to hide his anger at Michael for his treatment of her, and thus express a sympathetic understanding of the temptations which had beset him. If Margaret had not suffered, he would have ignored the affair altogether, as a matter which did not concern him. Freddy was very far-seeing. Margaret had kept her promise; she had shown that in spite of her romantic love for Michael her womanly pride had not been wanting. Any opposition or harsh denouncement of her lover would have brought out the obstinacy in her Lampton character. Persecution inflames the ardour of both love and religion. Margaret had confided to Freddy the true state of her feelings--her love was perhaps even greater than ever for the tardy Michael; jealousy had invigorated and reinforced it: but her pride and her love were wounded, and until Michael wrote to her or came to her, with a full and absolute apology and a good reason for his silence, she was determined not to play the part of a woman whose love would submit to any sort of casual treatment.

Freddy was well content. Time would settle things; Margaret was very young; she was scarcely aware yet of the possibilities that were in her own nature, of the things which can make life worth living, as apart from love and its pa.s.sions. Love had buried her under an avalanche of its mystery and revelations.

Their journey home was as uneventful as it was surprising, for summer on the Mediterranean, where there is no spring, opened Margaret's eyes to a new phase of Nature's beauty. There was so much to see, and Freddy was such an excellent companion, that the time pa.s.sed far more quickly and happily than Margaret could have believed possible. Did she know that it was the guarded light, which dispersed her brooding thoughts, thoughts which tried to spoil the beauty of the fairest scenes she had ever seen?

It was a voyage of solace and healing. As they sat together, the brother and sister, idly watching the spell of light resting on an archipelago of dreaming islands, or sailed out of the Bay of Naples on a morning of tender unreality, they little dreamed that in her womb the world was breeding a h.e.l.lish ma.s.sacre of G.o.d's highest creatures, a wholesale slaughter of His children; that that same summer's sun was to fall on fields of crimson, dyed with the blood of civilized nations, precious blood drawn from the veins of patriots and heroes by the lies and l.u.s.t of a war-mad king.

Ischia, lost in its ancient sleep, cradled in the beauty of the world's fairest waters, was to be waked with the bugles of war. From her mountain heights and her seagirt fields she was to send forth her sons, to fight until they became drunk with the smell of blood.

How little did either Margaret or Freddy dream that they were gazing for the last time together upon a land of dreams, upon a world of peace! As they sat and marvelled at a world which under a summer sun seemed as fair as heaven and as pure as an angel's dream, they little realized that Europe nursed and flattered a people more steeped in iniquity and eager for licentious cruelty than any nation recorded in the world's darkest story. The primitive barbarities of uncivilized races, and the war-atrocities of ancient Egypt and a.s.syria, which were familiar to Margaret, and against which Akhnaton had come to preach his mission of peace, were as nothing compared to the acts which were to be committed by a nation which had preached the mission of Jesus for a thousand years, and had carried His doctrines into the farthest corners of the earth.

In the years to come that journey from Alexandria to Ma.r.s.eilles was to be one of the greatest consolations of Margaret's life.

In the days to come, when Margaret, knowing all things and enduring all things, looked back upon the journey, it comforted her to think of how much Freddy had enjoyed his well-earned rest and how eagerly he had looked forward to his holiday in Scotland.

The war, which has set a date in England from which every event of importance counts and will be counted by her people for generations to come, had not been whispered or dreamed of by ordinary people. Like Ischia, England was still dreaming and trusting. Her ideals of honour forbade that she should doubt the honour of a sister-nation, bound to her by the closest ties of blood and sympathy.

When Freddy and Margaret landed in England they went their separate ways.

Margaret, at the outbreak of the war, at once offered her services as a V.A.D. Three months later she was working as a pantry-maid in a private hospital. Her work was very hard and deadly dull, but she had been promised that after working for a time as pantry-maid, she should be allowed to help in the wards. When Freddy left for the Front she was able to say good-bye during her "two hours off."

Fresh air and sunshine, after the dark bas.e.m.e.nt-pantry in which she worked, seemed to her sufficient enjoyment and all the pleasure she wanted. She seldom did anything in these hours but sit on a bench in the garden-square near her hospital and rest her tired feet. For the first month they were so swollen that she could not get on her walking shoes. By four o'clock she was back in her pantry again, setting out cups and saucers on little trays and laying the tea for the staff. Her work was lonely and unrecognized.

After she had washed up and put away the cups which had been used for afternoon tea and also the cups which had been used for the last meal of the day, which was served at seven o'clock in the wards, she went home to her quiet room, in a house on the other side of the square. It was an old house, which had known better days. The locality always carried Margaret's mind back to the gay world into whose society Becky Sharp so persistently pushed her way.

If Margaret was not happy, she was far too busy to be unhappy. She had, except for those two afternoon hours of rest, no time to think; and as thoughts make our heaven or our h.e.l.l, Margaret lived in an intermediate state, for she had none. Her physical tiredness dominated all other sensations.

The war dominated her life; it drilled her, and drove her, and exacted the last fraction of her endurance and courage. It chased personal things away into the dim background of her life. When she thought of the Valley and her experiences there, it was as if she was visualizing, not her own past life, but some story which she had read and remembered with the sharp, clear memory, which never leaves us, of our childhood's days.

With Margaret, as with most people, the war opened up a completely new phase of mental as well as physical experiences. Nor could her thoughts ever be the same again. Margaret's phase resembled the state of a patient gradually recovering from a serious illness, an illness in which she has faced the true proportions of the things belonging to this life, and the triviality of human tragedies as they had existed before the war. Her life had begun all over again. The war was remaking it. After a serious illness or a shattered love-affair no woman can take up life at exactly the same standpoint as before.

Margaret found it impossible to imagine personal ambitions and personal amus.e.m.e.nts ever forming a part of her life again. Happiness brought scorn with the very mention of it. The excitement and the daily-acc.u.mulating list of horrors which shocked the unsuspecting people of England during the first few months of the war, must be vividly in the reader's thoughts while he pictures Margaret in her life as a pantry-maid, a physically-weary pantry-maid, in a vast house in London which had been converted into a hospital. She was only one of the many girls in London in the various homes and hospitals who were drudging with aching limbs and loyal hearts from morning until night.

She preferred being pantry-maid to lift-maid, which was the only other post in the house which she had been offered. Taking visitors up and down in a lift all day long seemed to her more monotonous than washing up cups and saucers which the wounded drank out of, and scrubbing boards and washing out cupboards. Margaret was only doing her humble bit, a bit which required few brains and little education; a bit which necessitated a good deal of st.u.r.dy grit and devotion. Not a soul in the house knew nor cared anything about the life which she had led before the war, and her college record was of less account than the fact that she looked practical and strong. She had been given the post on the strength of her physical perfection rather than her proficiency as a V.A.D.

During the first three months she heard fairly often from Freddy, who was cheerfully enduring what thousands of young Englishmen endured during the early days of training.

If this is a war of second-lieutenants, Freddy was an excellent specimen of the men who have won renown. His physique laughed at hardship; his practical mind adored the order and method which is essentially a part of military efficiency. His work in Egypt, far as it seems removed from modern warfare, served a good purpose when trench-digging and planning became a part of his training.

October had come and still no news had reached him of Michael, nor had Margaret had any word of her lover through the Iretons. Freddy was comforting himself with the a.s.surance that the war had satisfactorily driven him out of Margaret's mind. She seldom mentioned his name in her letters, which were as brief and matter-of-fact as his own.

Sometimes in the busy London streets, and in crowded omnibuses, a vision of the Valley and the smiling Theban hills would rise before her eyes, but it would fade away and become as unreal as the Bible story of the world's creation.

Physical exhaustion made it possible for her to see these visions of the Valley, and the stars in the Southern heavens, with no throbbing in her veins or sense of Michael's lips pressed on her own. Physical labour leaves little expression for fine sentiment and imagination.

On the morning of the day when Margaret was to see Freddy off to the Front, she experienced a curious re-birth of personal existence; she was a partner in the world's agony. Since her work had begun she had lived like a machine; she was outside the great mult.i.tude of the elect; she had no one belonging to her in immediate danger. She had almost envied the personal anxiety of those who had their dearest at the Front.

Having no right to indulge in personal troubles which were entirely outside the subject of the war and the world's welfare, she had ceased to have any existence at all outside her dull duties as pantry-maid.

But on the day of Freddy's departure she had a curious fluttering in her pulses, and a breathless excitement was in the background of all that she did. She found her hands trembling when she placed the cups in their saucers, or poured milk into the jugs.

Freddy's going was to link her to the great brotherhood. The consciousness of his danger would be like the weight of an unborn child under her heart. He was husband and father and lover to her now; he seemed to be taking with him to France the last remnant of her girlhood.

At Charing Cross she found the khaki-clad figure. He was waiting for her below the clock. His men, and hundreds of others, were sitting about at rest, on the few seats which had been provided for soldiers going to the Front, or on the floor. Most of the men were accompanied by proud and tearful relatives or lovers. It was an affecting and typical scene--a peaceful country suddenly torn and driven by the throes and novelty of war.

Margaret had already witnessed such scenes several times. It always left her wondering how any order or method came out of such a bewildering ma.s.s of hastily-organized effort.

Freddy looked so handsome in his uniform that Margaret's heart felt bursting with tragic pride. Nothing was too good to die for England, but surely, surely Freddy was too beautiful to be blinded or disfigured by all the h.e.l.lish contrivances which the brutalized enemy had proved themselves past masters in devising? Even in Egypt he had not been more sunburned, and never had his hair looked so adorably bright and youthful. Margaret could think of nothing but his beauty; it seemed to burst upon her suddenly and unexpectedly.

Freddy was conscious of her pride and admiration, but being true Lamptons, their greeting of one another was characteristically brief.

It was the first time that Freddy had seen his sister in her V.A.D.

uniform; his eyes took in all her points with one quick glance. She looked clean and slight and attractive, and conspicuously well-bred.

Her abundant hair showed to advantage under her blue hat, while her teeth and her eyes seemed to Freddy remarkably beautiful. A V.A.D.

uniform is not becoming, but if a girl is striking-looking, it accentuates her good points; frumps and mediocrities it extinguishes altogether.

"Come and have some tea," Freddy said. "I'm frightfully thirsty."

Margaret walked off with him proudly. He was her own brother, the Freddy she had worked with so long and so intimately in the little hut in Egypt, this alert, dignified soldier. The war was in its infancy; women were still thrilled by khaki, and extraordinarily proud of their men who wore it. Margaret felt so proud of Freddy that she was a little awed by him. In her heart she was kneeling at his feet, while in her subconscious mind there was a prayer, that his beauty and youth might not be spoilt, that his splendid manhood might be given back to England--it had other work to do.

Her tea, which Freddy had ordered in the large tea-room at Charing Cross Station, proved very difficult to swallow. Something filled her throat; it almost choked her, something which was a strange mixture of pride and tears and happiness. She had no desire to eat or drink; she was quite content to sit still. All she wanted to do was just to be near Freddy and look at him.