The Boy with Wings
wished, heedless that a stranger's eye might see it. Leslie, for
instance, wrote to one of her medical students, now working with the
R.A.M.C. in Paris, as "My dear Harry--and the Censor," adding an
occasional parenthesis: "_You won't understand this expression, Mr.
Censor, as it is merely a quite silly family joke!_" She, Gwenna, felt
utterly unable to write down more than a tithe of the tender things that
she would have liked to say. To-night she had a longing to pour out her
heart to him ... oh, and she would say _something_! Even if she tore up
that sheet and wrote another. She scribbled down hastily: "Darling boy,
do you know I miss you more _every day_; nobody has _ever_ missed
anybody _so dreadfully_."
Here she was wrong, though she did not know it. It was true that she
longed hungrily for the sight of that dear blonde face, with its blue,
intrepid eyes, for the sound of that deep and gentle voice, and for the
touch of those hands, those strongly modelled lips. But all these things
had been a new joy, scarcely realised before it was gone. She would have
told you that it made it worse for her. Actually it meant that she was
spared much. Her lover's presence had been a gift given and snatched
away; not the comradeship of years that, missing, would seem even as the
loss of a limb to her. The ties of daily habit and custom which
strengthen that many-stranded cord of Love had not yet been woven
between these two lovers.
"I sometimes think it was really _awfully selfish_ of me to _marry_
you," Gwenna wrote, thinking to herself, "Oh, bother that old
Censor, just for once." She went on more hurriedly:
"You might have married somebody like that Miss Muriel Conyers,
with those frightfully lovely clothes and _all_ her people able to
help you on in the Army, or somebody very beautiful and _rich_,
anybody would have been glad to have you, and I _know_ I am just a
little _nobody_, and not a bit clever and even Leslie used to say
I had a Welshy accent sometimes when I speak, and I daresay _lots_
of people will think, oh, 'how _could_ he!--why, she isn't even
very _pretty_!'"
She raised her eyes, deeper and brighter in the lamplight, and gave a
questioning glance at her reflection in the oval, swung mirror on the
dressing-table at which she wrote. It would have been a captious critic
indeed that could have called her anything less than very pretty at that
moment; with her little face flushed and intent, a mixture of child and
woman in the expression of her eyes and about her soft, parted lips.
Above the ruffle of her night-gown her throat rose proudly; thick and
creamy and smooth. She remembered something he'd told her that afternoon
at Kew. He'd said that she always reminded him of any kind of white
flower that was sturdy and sweet; a posy of white clover, a white,
night-blooming stock, some kinds of white roses.... She would like to
send him a flower, in this letter, to remind him.
She glanced towards the open casement, where the curtain waved. Under
the shading foliage of the clematis that grew up to the cottage-roof
there had climbed the spray of a belated rose. "Rose Menie" was its
name. Mrs. Crewe had said that it would not flower that year. But there
was one bud, half-hidden by leaves, swelling on its sappy twig, close to
Gwenna's window-sill.
"It'll come out in a day or so," Gwenna thought.
"I'll send it to him, if it comes out white.... _He_ was pleased with my
looks!"
So, reassured, she turned to the letter again, and added:
"The only thing is, that whatever sort of wife you'd married, they
_couldn't_ have loved you like I do, or been so proud of being your
wife; _really_ sometimes I can _hardly believe_ that I am really
and truly married to----"
She broke off, and again lifted her curly head from bending above the
paper.
There had been a light tap at the door behind her.
"Come in," called Gwenna, writing down as she did so, "here is the
little maid coming to bring me up my hot milk; now, darling, darling
boy, I _do hope_ they give you enough to eat wherever you are----"
Behind her the white door opened and shut. But the maid did not appear
at Gwenna's elbow with the tray that held that glass of hot milk and the
plate of biscuits. The person who had entered gazed silently across the
quiet girlish room at the little lissom figure clad in that soft crumple
of pink and white, sitting writing by the dressing-table, at the
cherub's head, backed by the globe of the lamp that spun a golden
aureole into that wreath of curls.
There was a pause so long that Gwenna, wondering, raised her head.
She gave another glance into the oval mirror that stood on the
dressing-table just in front of her.... And there she saw, not the
homely, aproned figure of the little maid that she had expected to see,
but the last thing that she had expected.
It was a picture like, and unlike, a scene she had beheld long, long
ago, framed in the ornate gold-bordered oval mirror in the drawing-room
at the Smiths'. Over her pink-clad shoulder, she saw reflected a broad,
khaki-covered chest, a khaki sleeve, a blonde boy's face that moved
nearer to her own. Even as she sat there, transfixed by surprise, those
blue and intrepid eyes of Icarus looked, laughing joyously, full into
hers, and held her gaze as a hand might have held her own.
"It's only me," said a deep and gentle voice, almost shyly. "I say----"
"_You!_" she cried, in a voice that rang with amazement, but not with
fright; though he, it seemed, was hurrying out hasty warnings to the
Little Thing not to be frightened.... He'd thought it better than
startling her with a wire.... Mrs. Crewe had met him at the door ...
he'd come straight up: hoped she didn't think he was a ghost---- Not for
a second had she thought so!
Instantly she had known him for her granted and incarnate heart's
desire, her Flyer, home from the Front, her husband to whom she had that
moment been writing as she sat there.
She sprang to her feet.
She whirled round.
She could not have told whether she had first flung herself into those
strong arms of his, or whether he had snatched her up into them.
All that mattered was that they were round her now, lifting and holding
her as though they would never let her go again.
When Reveille sounded from the Camp on the plain, the sun was bright on
that clematis-grown wall outside the window of Gwenna's bridal-room.
It gilded the September foliage about the window-sill It also touched a
gem of passionate colour, set among the leaves of the Rose Menie.
That red rose had broken into blossom in the night.
PART III
_SEPTEMBER, NINETEEN-FOURTEEN_
CHAPTER I
A WAR-TIME HONEYMOON
The morning after Paul Dampier's arrival from the Front he and his wife
started off on the honeymoon trip that had been for so many weeks
deferred.
They motored from the Aircraft Works to London, where they stopped to do
a little shopping, and where Gwenna was in raptures of pride to see the
effect produced by the Beloved in the uniform that suited him so well.
For every passer-by in the street must turn to look, with quickened
interest now, at an Army Aviator. Even the young men in their uniforms
gave a glance at the soldier whose tunic buttoned at the side and whose
cap had the tilt that gave to the shape of his blonde head something
bird-like, falcon-like. And every girl in the restaurant where they
lunched murmured, "Look," to her companion, "that's some one in the
Royal Flying Corps," and was all eyes for that kit which, at a time when
all khaki was romantic, had a special, super-glamour of its own.
But the blue eyes of the man who wore it were for no one but the girl
with whom he was taking his first meal alone together since they had
been man and wife.
Her own glance was still hazy with delight. Oh, to see him there facing
her, over the little round table set in a corner!
They ate cold beef and crusty loaf and cheese in memory of their first
lunch together in that field, long ago. They drank cider, touching
glasses and wishing each other all luck and a happy life.
"And fine weather for the whole of our week's honeymoon," added the
bridegroom as he set down his glass. "Lord, I know how it _can_ pour in
your Wales."
For it was to Wales that they went on by the afternoon train from
Euston; to Gwenna's home, arriving late that evening. The Reverend Hugh
Lloyd was away on a round of preaching-visits about Dolgelly. They had
his black-henlike housekeeper to chirp and bustle about them with much
adoring service; and they would have the Chapel House to themselves.
"But we won't be _in_ the house much," Gwenna decided, "unless it
pours."
It did not pour the next morning. It was cloudless and windless and
warm. And looking round on the familiar landscape that she had known
when she was a little child, it seemed now to Gwenna as if War could not
be. As if it were all a dream and a delusion. There was no khaki to be
met in that little hillside village of purple slate and grey stone. Only
one or two well-known figures were missing from it. A keeper from one of
the big houses on the other side of the river, and an English chauffeur
had joined the colours, but that nine-days' wonder was over now. Peace
had made her retreat in these mountain fastnesses that had once echoed
to the war-shouts and the harp-music of a race so martial.
It was the music that had survived....
Paul Dampier had put on again that well-known and well-worn grey tweed
jacket of his, so that he also no longer recalled War. He had come right
away from all that, as she had known he would; come safely back to her.
Here he was, with her, and with a miracle between them, in this valley
of crystal brooks and golden bracken and purple slopes. It was meant
that they two should be together thus. Nothing could have stopped it.
She felt herself exulting and triumphing over all the Fates who might
have tried to stop it; and over all the Forces that might have tried to
keep him from her. His work on the Machine? Pooh! That had actually
helped to bring them together! The Great War? Here he was, home from the
War!
"I've always, always wanted to be with you in the real country, and I
never have," she told him, as together they ran down the slate steps of
Uncle Hugh's porch after breakfast and turned up a path between the
sunny larch-grown steeps. That path would be a torrent in the winter
time. Now the slate pebbles of it were hot under the sun. "I don't
really count that _country_, that field, that day----"
"Didn't seem to mind it when we were there," he teased her as he walked
beside her swinging the luncheon basket that Margaret had put up for
them. "I mean of course when _I_ was there."
Gwenna affected to gasp over the conceit of men. "If I've _got_ to be
with one," she told him as if wearily, "I'd rather it was in a nice
place for me to listen to his nonsense."
"Wasn't any 'nonsense,' as you call it, in that field."
"No," agreed Gwenna, "there wasn't."
He looked sideways and down at her as she climbed that hill-path,
hatless, sure-footed and supple. Then a narrow turn in the path made her
walk a little ahead of him. She was wearing a very simple little sheath
of a grey cotton or muslin or something frock, with a white turn-down
collar that he hadn't seen her in before, he thought. Suited her awfully
well. (Being a man, he could not be expected to recognise it for the
grey linen that she'd had on when he'd come upon her that afternoon,
high up on the scaffolding at Westminster.)
"Yes, though, there was 'nonsense,'" he said, now suddenly answering her
last speech. "Fact of the matter is, it was dashed nonsense to waste
such a lot of time."