Part 17 (1/2)

”And his name?”

Again Tabs was striving to remember where he had seen the unknown woman's face. He _had_ seen it--of that he was certain. He had the sense that the circ.u.mstances under which he had seen it had been tragic. If he could only make Maisie reveal the name, he might recall.

VII

”His name was Lord Dawn.” Seeing the instant puckering of his brows, she asked quickly, ”You knew him?”

”Knew him!” Tabs pondered the question. ”I'm not sure. But Lady Dawn--I've heard a good deal about her. She had a nursing unit in France, didn't she? Of course she had; you and Terry were with her. It was in her hospital that Terry met Braithwaite. She pa.s.sed me yesterday, driving with the Queen in the Park; not that I noticed her. It was Terry who did that.” He came slowly over from the window to the fireplace and stood gazing level with the picture above the mantelpiece. He spoke wonderingly, ”The most beautiful woman in England, they say! So this is Lady Dawn!”

When he had finished his inspection, his interest and absorption were so great that he did what he had vowed he would never do again--he sat down for a second time on the couch beside her.

”There's something wrong,” he said quietly. ”Either you're misinformed or I'm mistaken. Let's get things straight.”

She made no attempt to conceal her amus.e.m.e.nt. She attributed his seriousness to sudden infatuation--an infatuation which made him seem ridiculously inconstant after his recent professions concerning Terry.

”Something wrong!” she echoed mockingly. ”If you think that I've exaggerated anything that I've told you about----” She glanced up at the portrait. ”I don't think I'm likely to be misinformed. After all, I'm her----”

”I didn't mean that,” he interrupted impatiently. ”I was referring to Lord Dawn. If he's the same man, I think both you and she have misjudged him.”

Maisie laughed. ”Lord Dawn was sufficiently definite. I'm not misjudging him. He left no room for misjudgment.”

”But you said that he had died hating her.”

”He did, as far as we know. He gave no sign to the contrary.”

”But does she, Lady Dawn, think that?”

”Think that he hated her?”

”No, that he died hating her?”

Maisie picked up a cigarette from the table and looked to Tabs for a match. She was getting bored. ”Why, certainly. One doesn't want to be cynical, but all the deaths on the casualty-lists weren't total losses.

Some of them were releases. They weren't all--well, to put it mildly, occasions for wearing the deepest mourning. There were English wives to whom German sh.e.l.ls were merciful--more merciful than English law. If they took lives, there were cases in which they restored freedom.”

As Tabs struck a match and held it to her cigarette, his hand trembled.

He had to steady his pa.s.sion before he asked his question. ”And you think that she, Lady Dawn, was one of these?”

Maisie blew out a lazy puff of smoke. ”Everybody thinks so.” Then she added pointedly, ”Everybody who knows her and has a right to an opinion.”

Tabs refused to be put off. There was a polite forbearance in his tone when he spoke. ”The first thing to do is to make sure that my Dawn was the same as yours. Mine was known to us by no t.i.tle; he was a Captain in the same battalion as myself. He was killed in front of Pozieres.--Ah, I see by the way you start, that so was yours! But here's where the difference comes in; mine loved his wife, if she was his wife, more dearly than any man I have known. His devotion was the talk of the regiment.”

She flipped the ash off her cigarette. ”Then that puts him out of the running, doesn't it?”

It was the studied carelessness of her gesture that released the trigger of his indignation and made it leap out beyond control. There was in his mind the vision of those blood-baths of the Somme, where men had drowned in the putrescence and been flattened by sh.e.l.ls like flies against a wall. They hadn't all been good before they had reached their ordeal. They had come, as most men come, from every kind of prison-house of l.u.s.t and human error. But they'd been good when they had died. They'd been reborn into valor and tenderness. And now, to hear their imperfections discussed in this pleasant room, so entirely feminine, where everything was safe and warm! Their imperfections were so small as compared with their sacrifice. Modern-day Christs, that's what they were! Christs by the thousands, who had found no Josephs of Arimathea to hide their defilement in garden-sepulchres. There they lay at this moment in the wilderness of corruption where they had fallen, while living people between puffs of cigarettes, undertook to explain why they should not be regretted.

”Puts him out of the running! It doesn't.”

He leapt to his feet and commenced to drag himself up and down the room, limping backwards and forwards, while she pressed lazily against the cus.h.i.+ons at a loss to account for his excitement.

”It doesn't,” he repeated, pausing opposite to her. ”He's still in the running. The Dawn whom I knew was a very silent man. He was a man with a sorrow. It made him careless. He was in the war to die. We all knew it.