The Nest Builder Part 47

"Yes, my dear; torpedoed her without warning. My, ain't that terrible?

It says they hope most of the pa.s.sengers are saved--but they don't know yet."

"Let me see!" Mary bent over her shoulder. "The Lusitania gone!" she whispered, awed.

"No, no!" exclaimed the Sparrow suddenly, hurrying off the porch. "Ellie not pour sand over his head! No, naughty!"

Mary sank into her chair with the paper. There was the staring black headline, but she could hardly believe it. The Lusitania gone? The great s.h.i.+p she knew so well, on which she and Stefan had met, gone! Lying in the ooze, with fish darting above the decks where she had walked with Stefan. Those hundreds of cabins a labyrinth for fish to lose their way in--all rotting in the black sea currents. The possible loss of life had not yet come home to her. It was inconceivable that there would not have been ample time for every one to escape. But the s.h.i.+p, the great English s.h.i.+p! So swift--so proud!

Dropping the paper, she walked slowly across the garden and the lane, and found her way to a little seat she had made on the side of the bluff overlooking the water. Here, her back to a tree trunk, she sat immobile, trying to still the turmoil of memories that rose within her.

The Lusitania gone!

It seemed like the breaking of the last link that bound her to the past.

All the belief, all the wonder of that time were already gone, and now the s.h.i.+p, her loves.h.i.+p, was gone, too, lost forever to the sight of men.

She saw again its crowded decks, saw the lithe, picturesque figure of the young artist with the eager face bending over her--

"Won't you be perfectly kind, and come for a walk?"

She saw the saloon on her engagement night when she sang at the s.h.i.+p's concert. What were the last words she had sung?

"Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty-- Love's a stuff will not endure."

Alas, how unconsciously prophetic she had been. Nothing had endured, neither love, nor faith, nor the great s.h.i.+p of their pilgrimage herself.

Other memories crowded. Their honeymoon at Shadeham, the sweet early days of their studio life, her glorious pride in his great painting of love exalted.... The night of Constance's party, when, after her singing, her husband had left his place by Miss Berber and crossed the room so eagerly to her side. Their first weeks at the Byrdsnest--how happy they had been then, and how wors.h.i.+pfully he had looked at her the morning their son was born. All gone. She had another baby now, but he had never seen it--never would see it, she supposed. Her memory traveled on, flitting over the dark places and lingering at every sunny peak of their marriage journey. Their week in Vermont! How they had skated and danced together; how much he seemed to love her then! Even the day he sailed for France he seemed to care for her. "Why are we parting?"

he had cried, kissing her. Yes, even then their marriage, for all the clouds upon it, had seemed real--she had never doubted in her inmost heart that they were each other's.

With a stab of the old agony, Mary remembered the day she got his letter admitting his relations with Felicity. The unbelievable breakdown of her whole life! His easy, lightly made excuses. He, in whose arms she had lain a hundred times, with whom she had first learnt the sacrament of love, had given himself to another woman, had given all that most close and sacred intimacy of love, and had written, "I cannot say with truth that I regret it." How she had lived through the reading of those words she did not know. Grief does not kill, or surely she would have died that hour. Her own strength, and the miracle of life within her, alone stayed her longing for death. It was ten months ago; she had lived down much since then, had schooled herself daily to forgetfulness; yet now again the unutterable pang swept over her--the desolation of loss, and the incapacity to believe that such loss could be.

She rebelled against the needlessness of it all now, as she had done then, in those bitter days before her little Rosamond came to half-a.s.suage her pain.

Well, he had redeemed himself in a way. The day James Farraday came to tell her that Stefan had enlisted, some part of her load was eased. The father of her children was not all ign.o.ble.

Mary mused on. How would it end? Would Stefan live? Should she--could she--ever see him again? She thanked G.o.d he was there, serving the country he loved. "The only thing he ever really loved, perhaps," she thought. She supposed he would be killed--all that genius lost like so much more of value that the world was sc.r.a.pping to-day--and then it would all be quite gone--

Through the trees dropped the insistent sound of a baby's cry to its mother. She rose; the heavy clouds of memory fell away. The past was gone; she lived for the future, and the future was in her children.

The next morning Mary had just bathed the baby, and was settling her in her carriage, when the Sparrow, who, seated on the porch with Elliston, was engaged in cutting war maps from the papers and pasting them in an enormous sc.r.a.pbook, gave a warning cough.

"Here comes Mr. McEwan," she whispered, in the hushed voice reserved by her simple type for allusions to the afflicted.

"Oh, poor dear," said Mary, hurrying across the lawn to meet him. She felt more than ever sympathetic toward him, for Mac's wife had died in a New Hamps.h.i.+re sanitarium only a few weeks before, and all his hopes of mending her poor broken spirit were at an end. Reaching the gate, she gave an involuntary cry.

McEwan was stumbling toward her almost like a drunken man. His face was red, his eyes bloodshot; a morning paper trailed loosely from his hand.

"Mary," he cried, "I came back from the station to see ye--hae ye heard, my girl?"

"Wallace!" she exclaimed, frightened, "what is it? What has happened?"

She led him to a seat on the porch; he sank into it unresisting. Miss Mason pushed away her sc.r.a.pbook, white-faced.

"The Lusitania! They were na' saved, Mary. There's o'er a thousand gone. O'er a hundred Americans--hundreds of women and little bairns, Mary--like yours--Canadian mithers and bairns going to be near their brave lads--babies, Mary." And the big fellow dropped his rough head on his arms and sobbed like a child.

"Oh, Wallace; oh, Wallace!" whispered Mary, fairly wringing her hands; "it can't be! Over a thousand lost?"

"Aye," he cried suddenly, bringing his heavy fist down with a crash on the wicker table, "they drooned them like rats--G.o.d d.a.m.n their b.l.o.o.d.y souls."

His face, crimson with rage and pity, worked uncontrollably. Mary covered her eyes with her hands. The Sparrow sat petrified. The little Elliston, terrified by their strange aspects, burst into loud wails.

"There, darling; there, mother's boy," crooned Mary soothingly, pressing her wet cheek to his.

"Little bairns like that, Mary," McEwan repeated brokenly. Mary gathered the child close into her arms. They sat in stunned horror.

"Weel," said McEwan at last, more quietly. "I'll be going o'er to enlist. I would ha' gone long sine, but that me poor girl would ha'

thocht I'd desairted her. She doesna' need me now, and there's eno' left for the lad. Aye, this is me call. I was ay a slow man to wrath, Mary, but now if I can but kill one German before I die--" His great fist clenched again on the table.

"Oh, don't, dear man, don't," whispered Mary, with trembling lips, laying her cool hand over his. "You're right; you must go. But don't feel so terribly."

His grip relaxed; his big hand lay under hers quietly.

"I could envy you, Wallace, being able to go. It's hard for us who have to stay here, just waiting. My poor sister has lost her husband already, and I don't know whether mine is alive or dead. And now you're going!

Elliston's pet uncle!" She smiled at him affectionately through her tears.

"I'll write you if I hear aught about the Foreign Legion, Mary," he said, under his breath.

She pressed his hand in grat.i.tude. "When shall you go?" she asked.

"By the next boat."

"Go by the American Line."

His jaw set grimly. "Aye, I will. They shall no torpedo me till I've had ae shot at them!"

Mary rose. "Now, Wallace, you are to stay and lunch with us. You must let us make much of the latest family hero while we have him. Eh, Sparrow?"

"Yes," nodded Miss Mason emphatically, "I've hated the British ever since the Revolution--I and my parents and my grandparents--but I guess I'm with them, and those that fight for them, from now on."

II

On the Monday following the sinking of the Lusitania, James Farraday received a letter from the American Hospital in Paris, written in French in a shaky hand, and signed Adolph Jensen.

New York was still strained and breathless from Sat.u.r.day's horror. Men sat idle in their offices reading edition after edition of the papers, rage mounting in their hearts. Flags were at half mast. Little work was being done anywhere save at the newspaper offices, which were keyed to the highest pitch. Farraday's office was hushed. Those members of his staff who were responsible for The Child at Home--largely women, all picked for their knowledge of child life--were the worst demoralized.