Rilla of Ingleside
to me--who will never be born to me now.'
"'It isn't ladylike to talk like that,' said Cousin Sophia in a shocked
tone; and then Gertrude laughed right out, so wildly that Cousin Sophia
was really frightened. And when poor tortured Gertrude, unable to
endure it any longer, hurried out of the room, Cousin Sophia asked
mother if the blow hadn't affected Miss Oliver's mind.
"'I suffered the loss of two good kind partners,' she said, 'but it did
not affect me like that.'
"I should think it wouldn't! Those poor men must have been thankful to
die.
"I heard Gertrude walking up and down her room most of the night. She
walked like that every night. But never so long as that night. And once
I heard her give a dreadful sudden little cry as if she had been
stabbed. I couldn't sleep for suffering with her; and I couldn't help
her. I thought the night would never end. But it did; and then 'joy
came in the morning' as the Bible says. Only it didn't come exactly in
the morning but well along in the afternoon. The telephone rang and I
answered it. It was old Mrs. Grant speaking from Charlottetown, and her
news was that it was all a mistake--Robert wasn't killed at all; he had
only been slightly wounded in the arm and was safe in the hospital out
of harm's way for a time anyhow. They hadn't learned yet how the
mistake had happened but supposed there must have been another Robert
Grant.
"I hung up the telephone and flew to Rainbow Valley. I'm sure I did
fly--I can't remember my feet ever touching the ground. I met Gertrude
on her way home from school in the glade of spruces where we used to
play, and I just gasped out the news to her. I ought to have had more
sense, of course. But I was so crazy with joy and excitement that I
never stopped to think. Gertrude just dropped there among the golden
young ferns as if she had been shot. The fright it gave me ought to
make me sensible--in this respect at least--for the rest of my life. I
thought I had killed her--I remembered that her mother had died very
suddenly from heart failure when quite a young woman. It seemed years
to me before I discovered that her heart was still beating. A pretty
time I had! I never saw anybody faint before, and I knew there was
nobody up at the house to help, because everybody else had gone to the
station to meet Di and Nan coming home from Redmond. But I
knew--theoretically--how people in a faint should be treated, and now I
know it practically. Luckily the brook was handy, and after I had
worked frantically over her for a while Gertrude came back to life. She
never said one word about my news and I didn't dare to refer to it
again. I helped her walk up through the maple grove and up to her room,
and then she said, 'Rob--is--living,' as if the words were torn out of
her, and flung herself on her bed and cried and cried and cried. I
never saw anyone cry so before. All the tears that she hadn't shed all
that week came then. She cried most of last night, I think, but her
face this morning looked as if she had seen a vision of some kind, and
we were all so happy that we were almost afraid.
"Di and Nan are home for a couple of weeks. Then they go back to Red
Cross work in the training camp at Kingsport. I envy them. Father says
I'm doing just as good work here, with Jims and my Junior Reds. But it
lacks the romance theirs must have.
"Kut has fallen. It was almost a relief when it did fall, we had been
dreading it so long. It crushed us flat for a day and then we picked up
and put it behind us. Cousin Sophia was as gloomy as usual and came
over and groaned that the British were losing everywhere.
"'They're good losers,' said Susan grimly. 'When they lose a thing they
keep on looking till they find it again! Anyhow, my king and country
need me now to cut potato sets for the back garden, so get you a knife
and help me, Sophia Crawford. It will divert your thoughts and keep you
from worrying over a campaign that you are not called upon to run.'
"Susan is an old brick, and the way she flattens out poor Cousin Sophia
is beautiful to behold.
"As for Verdun, the battle goes on and on, and we see-saw between hope
and fear. But I know that strange dream of Miss Oliver's foretold the
victory of France. 'They shall not pass.'"
CHAPTER XX
NORMAN DOUGLAS SPEAKS OUT IN MEETING
"Where are you wandering, Anne o' mine?" asked the doctor, who even
yet, after twenty-four years of marriage, occasionally addressed his
wife thus when nobody was about. Anne was sitting on the veranda steps,
gazing absently over the wonderful bridal world of spring blossom,
Beyond the white orchard was a copse of dark young firs and creamy wild
cherries, where the robins were whistling madly; for it was evening and
the fire of early stars was burning over the maple grove.
Anne came back with a little sigh.
"I was just taking relief from intolerable realities in a dream,
Gilbert--a dream that all our children were home again--and all small
again--playing in Rainbow Valley. It is always so silent now--but I was
imagining I heard clear voices and gay, childish sounds coming up as I
used to. I could hear Jem's whistle and Walter's yodel, and the twins'
laughter, and for just a few blessed minutes I forgot about the guns on
the Western front, and had a little false, sweet happiness."
The doctor did not answer. Sometimes his work tricked him into
forgetting for a few moments the Western front, but not often. There
was a good deal of grey now in his still thick curls that had not been
there two years ago. Yet he smiled down into the starry eyes he
loved--the eyes that had once been so full of laughter, and now seemed
always full of unshed tears.
Susan wandered by with a hoe in her hand and her second best bonnet on
her head.
"I have just finished reading a piece in the Enterprise which told of a
couple being married in an aeroplane. Do you think it would be legal,
doctor dear?" she inquired anxiously.
"I think so," said the doctor gravely.
"Well," said Susan dubiously, "it seems to me that a wedding is too
solemn for anything so giddy as an aeroplane. But nothing is the same
as it used to be. Well, it is half an hour yet before prayer-meeting
time, so I am going around to the kitchen garden to have a little
evening hate with the weeds. But all the time I am strafing them I will
be thinking about this new worry in the Trentino. I do not like this
Austrian caper, Mrs. Dr. dear."
"Nor I," said Mrs. Blythe ruefully. "All the forenoon I preserved
rhubarb with my hands and waited for the war news with my soul. When it
came I shrivelled. Well, I suppose I must go and get ready for the
prayer-meeting, too."
Every village has its own little unwritten history, handed down from
lip to lip through the generations, of tragic, comic, and dramatic
events. They are told at weddings and festivals, and rehearsed around
winter firesides. And in these oral annals of Glen St. Mary the tale of
the union prayer-meeting held that night in the Methodist Church was
destined to fill an imperishable place.
The union prayer-meeting was Mr. Arnold's idea. The county battalion,
which had been training all winter in Charlottetown, was to leave
shortly for overseas. The Four Winds Harbour boys belonging to it from
the Glen and over-harbour and Harbour Head and Upper Glen were all home
on their last leave, and Mr. Arnold thought, properly enough, that it
would be a fitting thing to hold a union prayer-meeting for them before
they went away. Mr. Meredith having agreed, the meeting was announced
to be held in the Methodist Church. Glen prayer-meetings were not apt
to be too well attended, but on this particular evening the Methodist
Church was crowded. Everybody who could go was there. Even Miss
Cornelia came--and it was the first time in her life that Miss Cornelia
had ever set foot inside a Methodist Church. It took no less than a
world conflict to bring that about.
"I used to hate Methodists," said Miss Cornelia calmly, when her
husband expressed surprise over her going, "but I don't hate them now.
There is no sense in hating Methodists when there is a Kaiser or a
Hindenburg in the world."
So Miss Cornelia went. Norman Douglas and his wife went too. And
Whiskers-on-the-moon strutted up the aisle to a front pew, as if he
fully realized what a distinction he conferred upon the building.
People were somewhat surprised that he should be there, since he
usually avoided all assemblages connected in any way with the war. But
Mr. Meredith had said that he hoped his session would be well
represented, and Mr. Pryor had evidently taken the request to heart. He
wore his best black suit and white tie, his thick, tight, iron-grey
curls were neatly arranged, and his broad, red round face looked, as
Susan most uncharitably thought, more "sanctimonious" than ever.
"The minute I saw that man coming into the Church, looking like that, I
felt that mischief was brewing, Mrs. Dr. dear," she said afterwards.
"What form it would take I could not tell, but I knew from face of him
that he had come there for no good."
The prayer-meeting opened conventionally and continued quietly. Mr.
Meredith spoke first with his usual eloquence and feeling. Mr. Arnold
followed with an address which even Miss Cornelia had to confess was
irreproachable in taste and subject-matter.
And then Mr. Arnold asked Mr. Pryor to lead in prayer.
Miss Cornelia had always averred that Mr. Arnold had no gumption. Miss
Cornelia was not apt to err on the side of charity in her judgment of
Methodist ministers, but in this case she did not greatly overshoot the
mark. The Rev. Mr. Arnold certainly did not have much of that
desirable, indefinable quality known as gumption, or he would never
have asked Whiskers-on-the-moon to lead in prayer at a khaki
prayer-meeting. He thought he was returning the compliment to Mr.
Meredith, who, at the conclusion of his address, had asked a Methodist
deacon to lead.
Some people expected Mr. Pryor to refuse grumpily--and that would have
made enough scandal. But Mr. Pryor bounded briskly to his feet,
unctuously said, "Let us pray," and forthwith prayed. In a sonorous
voice which penetrated to every corner of the crowded building Mr.
Pryor poured forth a flood of fluent words, and was well on in his
prayer before his dazed and horrified audience awakened to the fact
that they were listening to a pacifist appeal of the rankest sort. Mr.
Pryor had at least the courage of his convictions; or perhaps, as
people afterwards said, he thought he was safe in a church and that it
was an excellent chance to air certain opinions he dared not voice
elsewhere, for fear of being mobbed. He prayed that the unholy war
might cease--that the deluded armies being driven to slaughter on the
Western front might have their eyes opened to their iniquity and repent
while yet there was time--that the poor young men present in khaki, who
had been hounded into a path of murder and militarism, should yet be
rescued--
Mr. Pryor had got this far without let or hindrance; and so paralysed
were his hearers, and so deeply imbued with their born-and-bred
conviction that no disturbance must ever be made in a church, no matter
what the provocation, that it seemed likely that he would continue
unchecked to the end. But one man at least in that audience was not
hampered by inherited or acquired reverence for the sacred edifice.
Norman Douglas was, as Susan had often vowed crisply, nothing more or
less than a "pagan." But he was a rampantly patriotic pagan, and when
the significance of what Mr. Pryor was saying fully dawned on him,
Norman Douglas suddenly went berserk. With a positive roar he bounded
to his feet in his side pew, facing the audience, and shouted in tones
of thunder: