“Captain Fort, Nollie. Will you give him some coffee? I'm afraid I must go out.”
When he had gone, Noel looked at her visitor drinking his coffee. He had been out there, too, and he was alive; with only a little limp. The visitor smiled and said:
“What were you thinking about when we came in?”
Noel frowned, she hated to show her feelings.
“Yes! he's gone to the Front. Won't you have a cigarette?”
“I want one awfully. I think sitting still and waiting is more dreadful than anything in the world.”
“Except, knowing that others are waiting. When I was out there I used to worry horribly over my mother. She was ill at the time. The cruelest thing in war is the anxiety of people about each other—nothing touches that.”
The words exactly summed up Noel's hourly thought. He said nice things, this man with the long legs and the thin brown bumpy face!
“I wish I were a man,” she said, “I think women have much the worst time in the war. Is your mother old?” But of course she was old why he was old himself!
“You lost your mother when you were a babe, didn't you?”
“Yes. That's her portrait.” At the end of the room, hanging on a strip of black velvet was a pastel, very faint in colouring, as though faded, of a young woman, with an eager, sweet face, dark eyes, and bent a little forward, as if questioning her painter. Fort went up to it.
“It's not a bit like you. But she must have been a very sweet woman.”
“It's a sort of presence in the room. I wish I were like her!”
Fort turned. “No,” he said; “no. Better as you are. It would only have spoiled a complete thing.”
“It comes from Daddy—only he doesn't know, because he's a perfect saint; but I know he's had a devil somewhere, or he couldn't be the saint he is.”
“H'm!” said Fort. “That's very deep: and I believe it's true—the saints did have devils.”
“Poor Daddy's devil has been dead ages. It's been starved out of him, I think.”
“Does your devil ever get away with you?”
Noel felt her cheeks growing red under his stare, and she turned to the window:
Vividly there had come before her the dark Abbey, and the moon balancing over the top of the crumbling wall, and the white owl flying across. And, speaking to the air, she said:
“It makes you do things that you want to do.”