The man into whom he had been transformed was he who lived through the next few days at Darreuch even as though life were a kindly faithful thing. Many other men, he told himself, must have lived as he did and he wondered if any of them ever forgot it. It was a thing set apart.

He sat by Robin's side; they talked together; he retired to his own rooms or went out for a long walk, coming back to her to talk again, or read aloud, or to consider with her the marvel of the small thing by her side, examining curled hands and feet with curious interest.

"But though they look so little, they are not really," she always said.

"See how long his fingers are and how they taper. And his foot is long, too, and narrow and arched. Donal's was like it."

"Was," she said, and he wondered if she might not feel a pang as he himself did.

He wondered often and sometimes, when he sat alone in his room at night, found something more than wonder in his mind--something that, if she had not forbidden it, would have been fear because of strange things he saw in her.

He could not question her. He dared not even remotely touch on the dream. She was so well, her child was so well. She was as any young mother might have been who could be serene in her husband's absence because she knew he was safe and would soon return.

"Is she always as calm?" he once asked Dowie. "Does she never seem to be reminded of what would have been if he were alive?"

Dowie shook her head and he saw that the old anxiousness came back upon her.

"My lord, she believes he _is_ alive when she sees him. That's what troubles me even in my thankfulness. I don't understand, G.o.d help me! I was afraid when she saw the child that it might all come over her again in a way that would do her awful harm. But when I laid the little thing down by her she just lay there herself and looked at it as if something was uplifting her. And in a few seconds she whispered, 'He is like Donal.' And then she said to herself, soft but quite clear, 'Donal, Donal!' And never a tear rose. Perhaps," hesitating over it, "it's the blessedness of _time_. A child's a wonderful thing--and so is time.

Sometimes," a queer sigh broke from her, "when I've been hard put to it by trouble, I've said to myself, 'Well the Almighty did give us _time_--whatever else he takes away.'"

But Coombe mysteriously felt that it was not merely time which had calmed her, though any explanation founded on material reasoning became more remote each day. The thought which came to him at times had no connection with temporal things. He found he was gravely asking himself what aspect mere life would have worn if Alixe had come to him every night in such form as had given him belief in the absolute reality of her being. If he had been convinced that he heard the voice of Alixe--if she had smiled and touched him with her white hands as she had never touched him in life--if her eyes had been unafraid and they had spoken together "only of happy things"--and had understood as one soul--what could the mere days have held of hurt? There was only one possible reply and it seemed to explain his feeling that she was sustained by something which was not alone the mere blessedness of time.

He became conscious one morning of the presence of a new expression in her eyes. There was a brave radiance in them and, before, he had known that in their radiance there had been no necessity for bravery. He felt a subtle but curious difference.

Her child had been long asleep and she lay like a white dove on her pillows when he came to make his brief good-night visit. She was very still and seemed to be thinking. Her touch on his arm was as the touch of a b.u.t.terfly when she at last put out her hand to him.

"He may not come to-night," she said.

He put his own hand over hers and hoped it was done quietly.

"But to-morrow night?" trusting that his tone was quiet also. It must be quiet.

"Perhaps not for a good many nights. He does not know. I must not ask things. I never do."

"But it has been so wonderful that you know--"

On what plane was he--on what plane was she? What plane were they talking about with such undoubtingness? Heaven be praised his voice actually sounded natural.

"I do not know much--except that he is Donal. And I can never feel as if I were dead again--never."

"No," he answered. "Never!"

She lay so still for a few minutes that if her eyes had not been open he would have thought she was falling asleep. They were so dreamy that perhaps she was falling asleep and he softly rose to leave her.

"I think--he is trying to come nearer," she murmured. "Good-night, dear."

CHAPTER XL

Ominous hours had come and gone; waves of gloom had surged in and receded, but never receded far enough. It was as though the rising and falling of some primaeval storm was the background of all thought and life and its pandemonium of sound foretold the far-off heaving of some vast tidal wave, gathering its unearthly power as it swelled.

Coombe talking to his close friend in her few quiet hours at Eaton Square, found a support in the very atmosphere surrounding her.

"The world at war creates a prehistoric uproar," he said. "The earth called out of chaos to take form may have produced some such tempestuous crash. But there is a far-off glow--"

"You believe--something--I believe too. But the prehistoric darkness and uproar are so appalling. One loses hold." The d.u.c.h.ess leaned forward her voice dropping. "What do you know that I do not?"

"The light usually breaks in the East," Coombe answered.

"It is breaking in the West to-day. It has always been there and it has been spreading from the first. At any moment it may set the sky aflame."

For as time had gone on the world had beheld the colossal spectacle of a huge nation in the melting pot. And, as it was as a nation the composite result of the fusion of all the countries of the earth, the breath-suspended lookers-on beheld it in effect, pa.s.sionately commercial, pa.s.sionately generous, pa.s.sionately sordid, pa.s.sionately romantic, chivalrous, cautious, limited, bounded. As American wealth and sympathy poured in where need was most dire, bitterness became silent through sheer discretion's sake, when for no more honest reason. As the commercial tendency expressed itself in readiness and efficiency, sneering condemnation had become less loud.

"It will happen. It is the result of the ideals really," Coombe said further. "And it will come to pa.s.s at the exact psychological moment. If they had come in at the beginning they would have faced the first full force of the monstrous tidal wave of the colossal German belief in its own omnipotence--and they would have faced it unawakened, unenraged by monstrosities and half incredulous of the truth. It was not even their fight then--and raw fighters need a flaming cause. But the tower of agonies has built itself to its tottering height before their blazing eyes. Now it is their fight because it is the fight of the whole world.

Others have borne the first fierce heat and burden of the day, but they will rush in young and untouched by calamity--bounding, shouting and singing. They will come armed with all that long-borne horrors and maddening human fatigue most need. I repeat--it will occur at the exact psychological moment. They will bring red-hot blood and furious unbounded courage-- And it will be the end."

In fact Coombe waited with a tense sensation of being too tightly strung. He had hours when he felt that something might snap. But nothing must snap yet. He was too inextricably entangled in the arduous work even to go to Darreuch for rest. He did not go for weeks. All was well there however--marvellously well it seemed, even when he held in mind a letter from Robin which had ended:--

"He has not come back. But I am not afraid. I promised him I would never be afraid again."

In dark and tired hours he steadied himself with a singular half-realised belief that she would not--that somehow some strange thing would be left to her, whatsoever was taken away. It was because he felt as if he were nearing the end of his tether. He had become hypersensitive to noises, to the sounds in the streets, to the strain and grief in faces he saw as he walked or drove.

After lying awake all one night without a moment of blank peace he came down pale and saw that his hand shook as he held his coffee cup. It was a livid sort of morning and when he went out for the sake of exercise he found he was looking at each of the strained faces as if it held some answer to an unformed question. He realised that the tenseness of both mind and body had increased. For no reason whatever he was restrung by a sense of waiting for something--as if something were going to happen.

He went back to Coombe House and when he crossed the threshold he confronted the elderly unliveried man who had stood at his place for years--and the usually unperturbed face was agitated so nearly to panic that he stopped and addressed him.

"Has anything happened?"

"My lord--a Red Cross nurse--has brought"--he was actually quite unsteady--too unsteady to finish, for the next moment the Red Cross nurse was at his side--looking very whitely fresh and clean and with a nice, serious youngish face.

"I need not prepare you for good news--even if it is a sort of shock,"

she said, watching him closely. "I have brought Captain Muir back to you."

"You have brought--?" he exclaimed.

"He has been in one of the worst German prisons. He was left for dead on the field and taken prisoner. We must not ask him questions. I don't know why he is alive. He escaped, G.o.d knows how. At this time he does not know himself. I saw him on the boat. He asked me to take charge of him," she spoke very quickly. "He is a skeleton, poor boy. Come."

She led the way to his own private room. She went on talking short hurried sentences, but he scarcely heard her. This, then, was what he had been waiting for. Why had he not known? This tremendous thing was really not so tremendous after all because it had happened in other cases before-- Yet he had never once thought of it.

"He would not let his wife or his mother see him until he looked more like himself," he heard the Red Cross nurse say as he entered the room.

Donal was lying stretched at full length on a sofa. He looked abnormally long, because he was so thin that he was, as the nurse had said, a skeleton. His face was almost a death's head, but his blue eyes looked out of their great hollow sockets clear as tarn water, and with the smile which Coombe would not have forgotten howsoever long life had dragged out.