Miss Stuart's Legacy Part 34

"Yes, dear," she replied, looking at him again with a smile; "but we shall have time to talk of that by and by. You haven't given me half the budget of news. And do you know, Phil, I begin to suspect that in writing you tell all the pleasant things and keep back the disagreeables. Now that isn't fair; as children say, it spoils the game."

"Does it? Well, I won't do it again. Let me see what is the most unpleasant story I have heard for the last few months. Ah--yes! that is about the worst." He paused with a frown.

"Well?"

"Only Shunker Das is dead. That isn't very distressful; but you remember Kirpo?"

"Why, Philip, it was her husband who--"

"Yes, of course, of course; but I was not thinking of that; only of the day when she came out of the coolies' hut with a child in her arms, and told us why he was called Nuttu. Well, it is a horrid story, Belle, but that pitiless old fatalist the Khan, who was my informant, saw the hand of high heaven in it. Shunker got the telegram informing him that he was to be made a _Rai Bahadur_, and another announcing his son's death by the same messenger. Ghastly, wasn't it? He had a fit, and though he lived for some weeks they never could understand a word he said, though he talked incessantly. One can imagine what he wanted from the sequel. Well, at his funeral-pyre, up turns Kirpo with a strapping boy of about eight years old, and there was an awful scene.

She swore it was Shunker's son, and made the child defile the ashes.

Do you remember her face that day, and how I said she hated somebody?

Great Heavens! there is something perfectly devilish in the idea of such a revenge."

"And yet we talk calmly enough of the sins of the fathers being visited on the children." She paused as the church clock struck eleven. "It is time I went to see my bairns, Phil. Will you come too?

They will be at their best; the out-ones just in from the garden, the in-ones ready for their midday rest. They look so comfortable all tucked up in their cots."

The bravest man winces sometimes, and Philip, despite the five years, had never forgotten that day of mirk and fog when he had first seen John Raby's child, and Belle had bidden him go away if he could not be satisfied with what she had to give him. To be satisfied, or go away!

Both, it had seemed to him then, equally impossible; yet he had done both. Still the memory was painful. "You are going to build the new wing next year, I suppose?" he said as indifferently as he could when, leaving the shady wilderness, they made their way along the gravel walks which were seamed in every direction by the wheel-marks of invalid carriages.

"It depends," she replied quickly, answering the effort in his tone by a grateful look. "I may not have to build it. I may not be here. I am to go where I am most wanted; that was settled long ago, Phil."

He was silent; what was there to say?

Side by side they climbed the terrace steps to reach the front of the hospital which looked right across a stretch of wind-swept down to the open sea. A row of perambulators and wheeled couches stood under a glazed verandah, and above the level lines of square windows the words "SMITH'S HOME FOR INCURABLE CHILDREN" showed in big gold letters as a bal.u.s.trade to the semi-Grecian facade.

Belle glanced up at it before pa.s.sing through the noiseless swinging doors. "I always wish I had been in time to stop that awful inscription," she said; "but it was scarcely worth while pulling it all down. You see none of them can read. We take them young, and those who stop don't live to be old; that is one thing to be thankful for.

You don't like my speaking of it, Phil, but I often wonder what would have become of this empty sh.e.l.l of a house if my Jack had been born as most children are born,--as I wished him to be born. Some one would have carried on the work, I suppose, if I hadn't, and yet,--these bairns might have been G.o.d knows where, instead of in the sunlight."

She opened an inner door, and signed to him to pa.s.s before her. There was sunlight there, and no lack of it, though it shone on sights which to Philip Marsden's unaccustomed eyes seemed to dim the brightness.

Rows of little crutches along the walls, weary unchildlike faces resting on the low divans in the windows; in the centre a more cheerful picture of little ones gathered round a table set with bread and milk.

"This is my show room and these are my show babies," said Belle with a smile. "We all get about more or less and play by ourselves; don't we, nurse? And some of us, like Georgie here, are going home again because we are too strong for the place. We don't keep noisy, romping, rioting ragam.u.f.fins, do we, children?"

The face she turned up to hers as she pa.s.sed grinned doubtfully, but all the other little white faces dimpled and wrinkled with mirth at the very idea of Georgie's exile. They went up stairs now, into more suns.h.i.+ne streaming on rows of beds where childhood wore away with no pleasure beyond a languid joy at a new picture-book or a bunch of flowers. Here they trod softly, for some of the little ones were already asleep.

"Where is Freddy?" asked Belle in a whisper of the nurse busy smoothing an empty cot.

"He seemed so restless this morning, ma'am, that Dr. Simmonds thought we had better put him in the White Ward; he was afraid--"

Belle pa.s.sed on, her face a shade graver, and as Philip followed her up another wide staircase she paused before a closed door and asked him to wait for her; she would not be long.

He caught a glimpse of a smaller, more home-like room, white and still, with the light shaded from the open windows. Then he stood leaning against the bannisters, watching the dancing motes in a sunbeam slanting down from the skylight overhead; a skylight looking as if it were glazed with sapphire.

"That was the White Ward," said Belle, coming out and pa.s.sing upward through the beam of light. She spoke almost cheerfully, but Philip, who had faced death, and worse horrors than death, many a time without a qualm, felt himself s.h.i.+ver. Once again they paused before a closed door and she gave Philip a hurried half-appealing glance, before she said nervously, "I have Jack in this ward now. Dr. Simmonds thinks it good for him to be with the other children, and he seems to like it better."

It was the sunniest room of all, for the windows were set wide open, and the blinds drawn up. The scent of the roses from Belle's garden drifted in with the cool fresh wind. The children had evidently all been out, for a pile of hats and cloaks lay on the table, but they were now seated on their cots awaiting their turn for lunch. Philip's eyes, travelling down the row of beds, rested on a crop of golden curls, and he gave a little exclamation, half groan, half sigh. That was a face he could not mistake, strange and wistful as it was; not an unintelligent face either, and great heavens! how like the father's as it fell stricken to death.

"Listen!" said Belle, touching his arm. A nurse pa.s.sing with a tray paused in pleased expectancy.

"Jack!" her voice echoed softly through the silence.

The golden head turned, the veriest ghost of a smile came to the pinched face, and the thin little hands stretched themselves aimlessly into s.p.a.ce with a sudden plaintive cry which sent a lump to Philip's throat.

"Lor!" protested the nurse full of pride; "didn't he say it beautiful clear that time? Mother? Yes, it is mother, my pretty; and you knows her voice, don't you, dearie? just as well as any on us."

Belle sate down on the cot, gathering the child in her arms, and the yellow curls nestled down contentedly on her shoulder. A mite of a boy with great wide blue eyes fixed on the only face he ever recognises.

"Do you think him grown at all?" she asked; then seeing Philip's look bent over the child and kissed the blue veins on the large forehead.

There was a pa.s.sion of protection in her kisses. "If he were the only one, Phil, I should break my heart about it; but there are so many,--and,--and it is so causeless." Her eyes seemed to pa.s.s beyond the child and she went on more cheerfully, "Then he is such a contented little fellow when he is with me,--aren't you, Jack?"

Again came the ghost of a smile, and the same plaintive cry. Philip walked to the window and looked out on the roses. It was a very slight thing, that cry, to have come between a man and a woman,--if it had come between them. He turned to look at Belle instinctively, and found her looking at him. No! nothing had come between them. Before the insoluble problem of what Belle held in her arms love seemed to him forever divorced from marriage. The veriest pariah, born of G.o.d knows what, or of whom, the outcome of the basest pa.s.sion, might enter the world fair and strong and capable, while their child, if they married, bringing each to each a pure devotion, might be as these children here.

He crossed the room again and sate down on the bed beside her. "How many have you in the hospital now?" he asked in a low voice, for Jack, contented and comfortable, was evidently falling asleep.

"Fifty; but Dr. Simmonds says he could fill a hundred beds to-morrow.

It is the best place, he declares, of its kind."

"Would you undertake so much?"

She shook her head. "I never know,--no one knows from day to day. They are all so frail. Freddy, for instance, was no worse yesterday, and to-day! There are plenty to fill my place here when,--when the time comes."

"It may never come. Besides," he added, "I may be incurable myself ere long. Don't you remember promising me the gatekeeper's place if ever I was pensioned off minus a leg or an arm?"

"Did I?" she answered in the same light tone, as she rose to lay little Jack on his pillow and draw the blanket over him. "Then I must warn the present old cripple that his place isn't a permanent one.

Isn't he like his father, Phil?" she added, laying her hand on the child's pretty soft curls.

"Very."

They pa.s.sed along the sunny corridors again and so out into the open air. Philip drew his hand over his forehead as if to brush away puzzling thoughts, and gave a sigh of relief. "Come down to the cliffs with me, Belle," he said. "There is plenty of time before lunch, and I feel as if I wanted a blow. It's rather an irrelevant remark, but I wonder what will become of the babies if women become men?"

They crossed the downs keeping step together, and walking rapidly as if to leave something behind, finally seating themselves in a niche between two great white pillars of chalk, whence they could see the waves ebbing and flowing among the rocks at their feet. The horizon and the sky were blent into one pale blue, so that the fis.h.i.+ng boats with their red-brown sails seemed hovering between earth and heaven.

"How long is it this time?" she asked after a pause. "The usual three months?"

"Yes! the usual three months from the frontier. That leaves me six weeks with you; six whole weeks."

There was another pause. "Philip!" she said suddenly, "I'll marry you to-morrow if you like,--if,--if it would make you happier."

He was sitting with his hands between his knees, looking out absently over the waves below. He did not stir, but she could see a smile struggling with his gravity.

"My dear Belle! The banns haven't been called."

"Perhaps we could afford a special license on the easy-purchase system by monthly instalments," she suggested quite as gravely. "But really, Philip, when I see you--"

"Growing so old; don't be afraid of the truth, Belle. Am I very bald?"

"Bald! No, but you are grizzling fast, Phil; and when the fact is brought home to me by seeing it afresh, I ask myself why you shouldn't have a wife and children."

"I could, of course; there are plenty of young ladies now on the frontier. Oh, Belle! I thought we had settled this long ago. You can't leave Jack; you wouldn't with a clear conscience, if you could. I can't leave the regiment; I shouldn't like to, if I could. Is not that an end of marriage from our point of view? Besides," he turned to her now with a smile full of infinite tenderness, "I am not at all sure that I do want to marry you. When perfection comes into a man's life, can you not understand his being a little afraid--"