It seemed, however, not to be in Mr Keelings power to do what he thought wisest, for after a minute or two of ringing silence, he appeared with the news that there were no cabs to be got. It was snowing heavily and they were all out.[Pg 127]
ONE:"To tell the truth," said Arthur, after a moment's consideration, "I thought you came out of the sky."
ONE:"Ah, but we move south at day-light; the prisoners and wounded we send east, to Hazlehurst," said our leader, with a restraining hand on Quinn's knee. The other lieutenant made some inquiry of him, and the doctor was ignored, but stayed on, and as I stood waiting to be noticed I gathered a number of facts. The lightly injured would go in a plantation wagon; for the few gravely hurt there was the Harpers' ambulance, which had just arrived to take the ladies back to Squire Wall's, near Brookhaven, alas! instead of to Louisiana. For the ladies Charlotte's spring-wagon was to be appropriated, one of them riding beside it on horseback, and there was to be sent with them, besides Charlotte's old black driver, "a reliable man well mounted." Whoever that was to be it was not Harry, for he was to go south with a small guard, bearing the body of the Louisiana captain to his home between the hostile lines behind Port Hudson.Outwardly the days passed precisely as usual. They had made their appointment, and no further allusion or reminder was necessary. Each evening brought nearer the hour of azure in that hollow among the empty downs, and he desired neither to shorten nor to lengthen out the days that separated him from it. But to him everything, except that moment, regular but rarely recurring, when her eye sought his with need and love in it,{298} seemed dream-like and unsubstantial. Nothing had power either to vex or please him. He was, as always, busy all day, and transacted his own or municipal business with all his usual thoroughness and acute judgment. But it all went on outside him; the terra-cotta cupolas which his industry had reared in the market-place were as unreal as the new system of drainage in the lower part of the town, which he had exerted all his influence to get carried through the obdurate conservatism that pointed to the low-death rate of Bracebridge under the old conditions. He got his way; all his life he had been accustomed to dominate and command and organise. Then when his days work was done, and he returned home for dinner and the ensuing hours, which lately had been so intolerable, he found they irritated him no longer, and the fatuous drip of his wifes conversation was no more to him than some gutter that discharged not into his house but into the street outside. Simply he cared nothing for it, nor, when his failure to get elected to the County Club occurred to him, did he care: it appeared to have happened, but it must have happened to some stranger. Sometimes, before the pink clock announced that it was half-past ten, he would leave the drawing-room and go to his library, to see whether in his books there was to be found anything that stimulated his reactions {299}towards life. But they had no message: they were dumb or he was deaf. Even the catalogue showed no sign of life: it was Norahs work, of course, but it was not Norah.
TWO:I'll bear the toil, endure the pain, Supported by thy word."
TWO:She was deep in her work now when her brother joined her. Charles was suffering from a cold of paralysing severity, and she looked up with a certain anxiety as a fit of coughing took him, for he was liable to bad bronchitis.A HIGH-PRIEST IN FULL COSTUME. A HIGH-PRIEST IN FULL COSTUME.
It was easy to see out of the depths of futilities that Mrs Keeling was pleased, and her husband retired to his dressing-room and shut the door on her raptures.That intense vividness of perception that had been lit within him when, half an hour ago, the clock on his chimney-piece chimed, still blazed.{302} He noticed a hundred minute details in the room, his ear separated the hum of the street below into its component ingredients: there was a boy whistling, there was a motor standing with its engines still working, there was a street-cry concerning daffodils, another concerning evening papers. Memory was similarly awake: he remembered that his wife was giving a little dinner-party this evening, that Silverdale, who was setting out on his mission to the docks next day, was to be among the guests, and that Alice expected that the slippers of Maltese crosses would be back from being made up, in time for him to take them with him. He recalled, out of the well of years, how in the early days of his married life Emmeline had made him a pair of slippers which did not fit, and in the same breath remembered the exact look of her face this very morning when a message had come from her cook saying that she could not get a bit of salmon anywhere. And as each impression registered itself on eye and ear and memory, he hated it. But nothing concerning Norah came into his mind: sometimes for a moment a blank floated across it, behind which perhaps was Norah, but she produced no image on it. He could not even recollect her face: he did not know what she was like. There was the horror of it all: everything in the world but she had the vividness of nightmare, and she, the only thing that did not belong to nightmare, had gone from him.{303}"You can hardly go anywhere in the world where there is an approach to civilization without finding our canned goods, as the merchants call them. They are widely known and appreciated, and well deserve the reputation they bear."
