The Blower of Bubbles Part 20

Never did sounds of sweetest music fall more gratefully on human ears than the words uttered by Private Waller on the night of October 16, 1916, on No Man's Land, Somewhere in France.

"Thank G.o.d!" cried Montague, his voice weak and quavering.

"Waller--old--boy."

"d.a.m.n!" muttered Private Waller. The Germans, with customary fiendishness, were searching the ground with rifle-fire to prevent any attempt at rescue. "Are you much hurt, pard?"

"I'm used up pretty bad," Montague answered weakly, and in incorrect English. Things change in No Man's Land.

"I'm the third as has come after you," whispered Waller; "Sykes and Thompson got theirs."

"Coming--for me?" Montague's voice trailed off into a querulous sob.

"Sure--those of us as got back shook hands on it that we'd get the Duke back dead or alive."

Montague tried to speak, but only two scalding tears slowly trickled down his cheeks. He was weak from loss of blood, and he was learning a bitter lesson in the moonlight on the stricken field.

"I'll hoist you up as easy as I can," whispered Private Waller eagerly, "and I'll sort of crawl; and if they spot us, I'll let you down easy.

Come on, pard."

Fifty yards--that was all--but fifty yards of unspeakable agony. The blood flowed again from Dennis's wounds and matted over Waller's hair.

A dozen times he would have fainted, but he grit his teeth, and crawling, grasping, falling, Waller took him to the edge of the trench.

And then a bullet caught the little man, and he dropped.

"Good-bye, pard," he said.

So died Private W. Waller, of His Majesty's Canadian Expeditionary Force.

X

Almost a year later, a one-armed man was walking along a quiet street in the northern suburbs of a great Canadian city. He paused at a pretty little cottage that nestled in a well-kept garden to speak to a young woman whose black dress was mute testimony to her tragic bereavement.

"'Ow can I ever thank you, Mr. Montague," she said, "for giving me this cottage and going guardian to little 'Arry? And your wife, too, is that kind and beautiful that after she comes--and she is in and out nearly hevery day--I feel as if an angel had been 'ere. Well, if here ain't little 'Arry with his face all dirty!"

A st.u.r.dy urchin stumbled forward, and in some way the one-armed man hoisted him to his shoulder.

"h.e.l.lo, pard!" said Montague.

The little chap chuckled and pulled at his hat.

"I often wonders," said the little mother, "why you always calls him 'pard.' Bill used to call you his pard, but I knew all along you wasn't. You was a gentleman, Mr. Montague."

"Mrs. Waller," said Montague, and his voice was very low and soft, "I lay one night, wounded and dying, on No Man's Land. Your husband came for me, and he called me 'pard,' and he died for me. Perhaps you may understand a little of--what it means to me now."

Tears, bitter tears, the heritage of war. Mrs. Waller wept silently, and Montague's eyes looked past the garden, past the countryside, and saw neither trees nor houses, but a strip of land guarded by wire entanglements, and two lines of trenches where men lived, and laughed, and learned, and died.

A little later the same one-armed man stood at a gate that gave entrance to a splendid lawn. It was his home, and as he stood for a moment drinking in the calm and peace of Nature at sundown, a girl emerged from the house and came towards him with outstretched hands.

Wonderfully happy, maimed, but filled with deep content, Dennis Montague, the man who had scoffed, went forward to meet his wife, the girl who had had the courage to hurt the thing she loved. And the deepening rays of the setting sun spread a golden carpet for them to walk upon.

THE AIRY PRINCE

I

On a hillock that overlooked a mill-stream in Picardy, a girl of sixteen was lying, face downwards, reading a book. The noise of the water tumbling over the chute was a song to which her ears had grown accustomed, but more than once she looked up as the October wind rose and fell in a chromatic whine. A dark, thickening cloud crept sullenly towards the earth, throwing its shadow on her book.

She gazed up at it and sighed.

A black cat, his green eyes glowing suspiciously in the fading light, stalked from the mill-house and furtively watched a wanton leaf that was flirting hilariously with the autumn breeze, until, still coquetting, it was caught by the stream and carried to destruction.

The cat's teeth showed for a moment in a sinister grin. Cautiously measuring each step, he climbed to the top of the hillock, crouched suspiciously as a blade of gra.s.s moved in the wind, then scampered boldly up to the girl and settled ostentatiously upon the open pages of the book, for a siesta.

"_Tiens!_" The girl started, laughingly caught the offender by the ear, and pulled him to one side. "Louis, you have very bad manners," she said, speaking in French. "You come so, without asking permission, and you go to sleep on _The Fairy Prince_. Wake up, Louis! To you I am speaking."

The cat opened his eyes, bent them on her with a reproving look, and slowly closed them once more.

"Louis! Wake up--listen! I will read to you _The Fairy Prince_, and if you go to sleep I'll have you gr-r-r-r-ound into black flour. See there now!"

Louis scratched his ear with a hind paw, rubbed his nose with a fore one, sneezed, opened his eyes to their widest, and generally indicated that he was thoroughly awake--in fact, was not likely ever to sleep again in this world. His little mistress gathered her shawl more tightly about her shoulders, and, crossing one foot over the other, s.h.i.+fted her position to secure the acme of comfort.

"Now then, my friend, attention! This is all about a little girl--like me, Louis, only she was pretty. Tell me, Louis, am I pretty, eh? Stop yawning when I ask you a question. You sleep almost all day and all night, and when you do wake up--you yawn. Pouf! Such laziness! So--this is the story. This little girl, she lived like me in a house away, ever so far away, from everything, and she was very unhappy. You understand, Louis, she was _so_ lonesome. And every night she would cry herself to sleep--as I do sometimes, because--because----Wake up, you wicked cat!"

The feline culprit stretched his paws and sat up rigidly, like a slumbering wors.h.i.+per in church who has been detected in the act, but tries to indicate that he has merely been lost in contemplation of the preacher's theme. The girl frowned at Louis, and, laughing gaily, rubbed her cheek against his head.

Her laugh had hardly ended when, as her ear caught the note of melancholy in the wind, she looked up, and her face, which had hovered a moment before between a frown and a smile, was shadowed by a musing expression that left her eyes dreamy and her lips drooping in the slightest and most sensitive of curves. Her dark hair, rippling into curls, fell back from a forehead whose fullness and whiteness added to the spiritual innocence of her countenance. Without being faultless, her face had an elusive mobility of expression that altered with each mood as swiftly as the surface of a pool lying exposed to the caprices of an April morning.

"Is it not a pretty story, Louis?" Of a sudden the filmy dreaminess of her eyes had lifted, and their dark-brown depths sparkled with life. "I am so glad at the convent they made me learn to read. But it is dreadfully difficult, my friend--there are such big words, you see.

Well, Louis, this little girl went one day for a walk to the top of a hill--but you shall hear exactly how it is."

She carefully found the place in the book, and, with a finger following each line in case she should miss any of it, proceeded to read in that ecstatic and unreal style of voice inevitable to young people when uttering other thoughts than their own.

"'... Reaching the top of the hill, the most beautiful little girl in the world, whose eyes were brighter than stars, and whose lips were redder than the heart of a rose' (like me, Louis--yes?) 'sat down on a fallen tree and started to sing a song which she had learned from a solitary shepherd near her home.'--It does not say, Louis, but I think, perhaps, the music goes like this:

"'Maman, dites moi ce qu'on sent quand on aime.

Est-ce plaisir, est-ce tourment?

Je suis tout le jour dans une peine extreme, Et la nuit, je ne sais comment.

Si quelqu'un pres....

"'And just then she saw a handsome cavalier approaching on foot.' (Is it not exciting, Louis?) 'He was tall and young, and was the bravest soldier in all France. He was so brave and handsome that every one called him "The Fairy Prince"'--Listen, Louis, to the wind."

The lowering clouds threw black shadows over the fields; the hurrying water of the mill-stream turned the color of ink as it made, shudderingly, for the fall of the chute. Through the ominous rise and fall of the October wind came the sound of an aeroplane in the clouds, to be lost a moment later in a boisterous rush of wind that swept the girl's tresses.

"Come, Louis, under my shawl--so! It is cold, is it not? As soon as we finish this part of the story, we shall go in by the stove and work until bed-time, then.... Do you ever dream, Louis?"