They pronounced him “out of danger.” Nurse Prothero brought him many letters. He read them languidly. It appeared that Peter had been moving heaven and earth to find out if he lived: Patricia wrote asking him if he wanted books, cigarettes: Prout wrote and sent on a package of press-cuttings: his name had been in the “Roll of Honour”: the literary press of England noticed him, praised him, printed his photograph in their columns. But Francis Gordon cared for none of these old things. He wanted Beatrice!
He used to lie there, hour after hour, screened from the world, thinking of her. His mind went back to days before the War, and he saw himself as he had been: the tango-dancing champagne-bibbing egotist, very proud of his little literary achievements, neither good nor bad, merely a drifter. He saw himself, ruined financially, miserable. And he met her again, in his dreams; sailed with her, once again, the tropic seas of their delight.
Beatrice, the Woman Denied! Surely that God who had once denied her to him, calling him unworthy, would not refuse her to him now. Surely, now, he might say to himself, in clean pride: “I have done my Work; paid full price for any happiness this world can offer me?” . . .
And then, five weeks after he had written, came her cable: “Am anxious,” she wired, “have you told me the truth about your wounds.” He spread the cablegram on his bed; read it again and again. Intuition, sounder than judgment, told him the truth. To this girl, five thousand miles removed from the cataclysm of Europe, he stood for “heroism”—a vague figure dowered with all the virtues of war. It needed only a word, a _weak_ word, to make her love him.
The mere thought was a flaring temptation. Why not? If ever man had earned woman. . . .
When the doctor made his midday visit, Francis—looking down at his swathed legs—asked one straight question.
“You mean,” said the doctor, “is there any reason, any physical reason, why you should not marry?”
“But I shall always be more or less a cripple?”
“You will walk with a limp—a slight limp. That isn’t being a cripple.”
Alone, he fought the problem out again: and decision came to him, clear-cut, obvious. She was twenty, rich, beautiful: he, a cripple—and a pauper cripple into the bargain. Leaving God out of the question, to take her in marriage would not be the act of a gentleman. . . . Chivalrous, stubborn, a fool if you will but no weakling, he traced the answer to her cablegram: “Much better thanks writing.”
