The Boy with Wings Part 52

London wore her dreariest winter livery of mud-brown and fog-yellow, and at three o'clock on such an afternoon there would have been brilliant lights everywhere ... any other, ordinary year.

This year, Londoners had to find their way as best they could through the gloom.

Across a wide Square with a railed and shrubberied garden in the centre of it, there picked her way a very tall girl in furs that clung about her as bushy ivy hangs about some slender tree. She wore a dark velvet coat broadly belted over her strait hips, and upon her impish head there was perched one of the little, back velvet, half-military caps that were still the mode. This girl peered up at the numbers of the great houses at the side of the Square; finally, seeing the gilt-lettered inscription that she sought above one of the doors,

"ANNEXE TO THE CONVALESCENT HOME FOR WOUNDED OFFICERS,"

she rang the bell.

The door was opened to her by a small trim damsel in the garb of the Girl-Guides, who ushered her into a large and ornate hall, and into the presence of a fresh-coloured, fair-haired Personage--she was evidently no less--in nurse's uniform.

This Personage gazed upon the visitor with a suspicious and disapproving look.

"I wonder why? It isn't because I'm not blamelessly tidy for once in my life, and she can't guess that the furs and the brown velvet suit are cast-offs from the opulent," thought the visitor swiftly. Aloud she added in her clear, nonchalant tone: "I have come to see Mr. Scott, please."

"There is the visiting-hour. It is not quite three yet," said the nurse forbiddingly.

"I'll wait, then," said the visitor. For two minutes she waited. Then the nurse approached her with a note-book and a pencil.

"Will you write your name down here?" she said austerely. And upon a page inscribed "_Mr. M. Scott_" the visitor wrote her name, "Miss Leslie Long."

"Will you come up?" the nurse said reluctantly. And Leslie ascended a broad red-carpeted stairway, and was shown into a great room of parquet floors and long windows and painted panels that had been a drawing-room, and that was now turned by a row of small beds on great castors and by several screens into a hospital-ward.

A blonde youth in a pink pyjama jacket, and with his arm in a black silken sling, was sitting up in bed and chatting to a white-moustached gentleman beside him; another of the wounded was sitting by one of the great fire-places, reading; a couple were playing picquet in a corner, under a smiling Academy portrait of the mistress of the mansion.

"Mr. Scott is sitting up to-day, in the ante-room," vouchsafed the nurse. And Leslie Long entered, through a connecting door, a small room to the right.

One wall of it was hung with a drapery of ancient brown tapestry, showing giant figures amidst giant foliage; beneath it was a low couch.

Upon this, covered with a black, panther-skin rug, there lay, half sitting up, supported on his elbow, the young wounded officer whom Leslie had come to see.

"Frightfully good of you, this," he said cheerfully, as she appeared.

She looked down at him.

For the moment she could not speak. She set down on his couch the sheaf of golden chrysanthemums that she had brought, and the copy of the _Natal Newsletter_ that she had thought might cheer him. She found herself about to say a very foolish thing: "So they left you your handsome eyes, Monty."

The face in which those eyes shone now was thin and drawn; and it seemed as if all the blood had been drained from it. His crutches stood in the corner at the foot of the couch. He was Monty Scott, the Dean's son, once a medical student and would-be sculptor. Yes; he had been a dilettante artist once, but he looked a thorough soldier now. The small moustache and the close-cropped hair suited him well. He had enlisted in the Halberdiers at the beginning of the War. He had got his commission and had lost his leg at Ypres.

Not again would he wear that Black Panther get-up to any fancy-dress dance.... Never again.

This was the thought, trivial and irrelevant enough, that flashed through Leslie's mind, bringing with it a rush of tears that she had to bite her lips to check. She had to clench her nails into her palms, to open her black eyes widely and smilingly, and to speak in the clearest and most flippant tone that she could summon.

"Hullo, Monty! Nice to see you again; now that I _can_ see you. You wounded warriors _are_ guarded by a dragon!--thanks, I'll sit down here." She turned the low chair by the couch with its back to the light.

"Yes, I could hardly get your Ministering-Angel-Thou to let me through.

Glared at me as if she thought I was after the spoons. (I suppose that's exactly what some of them _are_ after," suggested Miss Long, laughing quite naturally.) "She evidently took me for just another predatory feline come to send the patient's temperature soaring upwards. It's not often I'm crushed, but----"

"Oh, Nurse Elsa is all right," said the patient, laughing too. "You know, I think she feels bound to be careful about new people. She seems to have a mania for imagining that everybody fresh may be a German spy!"

"A _German_? Why should she think that?"

"Oh, possibly because--well----" Young Scott lowered his voice and glanced towards that connecting door. But it had been shut. "Because she happens to be 'naturalised' herself, you know!"

They talked; Leslie ever more lightly as she was more deeply touched by the sight of the young man on his couch. So helpless, he who had been so full of movement and fitness and supple youth! So pluckily, resolutely gay, he who had been so early put out of the fun!

Lightly he told Leslie the bare details of his wound. It had been in a field of beet that he had been pipped; when he had been seeing to some barbed wire with a sergeant and a couple of his men, at nightfall. One of those snipers had got him.

"And I was downed in a second," he said ruefully. "_I_ couldn't get the beggar!"

Leslie thought of the young, mortally-wounded Mercutio and his impatient cry of "_What! Is he gone, and hath nothing?_" It was the only complaint at his lot that was ever to pa.s.s the lips of this other fighter.

She looked at him, and her heart swelled with pride for him. It sank with shame for herself. She had always held him--well, not as lightly as she said she had. There had been always the sneaking tenderness for the tall, infatuated boy whom she'd laughed at. But why "sneaking"? Why had she laughed? She had thought him so much less than herself. She said she knew so much more. What vanity and cra.s.s, superficial folly! A new thrill took her suddenly. Could it be that War, that had cut everybody's life in two, had worked another wonder?

Presently he remarked, "I say, your friends, the poor Dampiers! I suppose nothing's ever been heard of them, after that day that they found out at the Works that his wife had started with him, when he set off for France, and disappeared?"

"Nothing," said Leslie quietly, "Whether it was an accident with his new engine, or whether they were killed by a shot from a German aeroplane they met, we shan't ever know now. It must have been over the sea....

Nothing has ever been found. Much the best way, I think. I said so to poor young Mr. Ryan, the man who let her take his place. He was beside himself when he turned up at the Aircraft place again and found that nothing had been heard. He said he'd killed her. I told him she would think he'd done more for her than anybody she knew. The best time to go out! No growing old and growing dull and perhaps growing ill and being kept half alive by bothering doctors, for years.... No growing out of love with each other, ever! They, at least, have had something that nothing can spoil."

Monty Scott, turning his small, close-cropped head of a soldier and his white face towards the tapestry, blurted out: "Well! At all events they've _had_ it. But even having it 'spoilt' is better than never having had any----"

He checked himself abruptly.

He was not going to whine now over his own ill-luck in love to her, to Leslie, who had turned him down three times. Not much.

In the suddenly tense atmosphere of the little room overlooking the wide, dim Square, the girl felt the young man's resolution--a resolution that he would keep. He would never ask her for another favour.

He cleared his throat and spoke in an altered tone, casual, matter-of-fact.

"Awfully pretty, the little girl that Dampier married, wasn't she?

Usen't she to live at that Club of yours? I think I saw her once, somewhere or other----"

"Yes. You did," said Leslie quickly, and a little breathlessly as though she, too, had just taken a resolution. "At that dance. That river dance.

She was the Cherub-girl. And I wore my mauve Nijinski things. You remember that time, Monty?"

"Oh, yes," said the wounded man shortly, "I remember."

There was a slight, uneasy movement under the panther-skin rug.

He hadn't thought that Leslie would have reminded him of those times.

Not of that dance, when, with his hands on her hips and her hands clasped at the back of his neck, he had swung round with her in the maddest of waltzes.... He wouldn't have expected her to _remind_ him!

Nor was he expecting the next thing that Leslie did. She slipped from that low chair on to her knees by the couch. Her furs touched his hand, delicate and whiter now than a woman's, and he took it quickly away. He could not look at the vivid, impish face with the black, mocking eyes and the red, mocking mouth that had always bewitched him. Had he looked, he would have seen that the mockery was gone from both. It was gone, too, from Leslie's voice when she next spoke, close to him.

"Monty! At that dance---- Have you forgotten? We were walking by the river--and you said--you asked----"

"Yes, yes; all right. Please don't mind," muttered the man who had been the Black Panther hastily. It was pretty awful, having girls _sorry_ for one!

She went on kneeling by him. "I told you that I wasn't in the mood!"

"Yes; but--I say, it doesn't matter one sc.r.a.p, thanks," declared Monty Scott, very hoa.r.s.ely.