“I’ll never be the same man again; I feel that. It’s shortened my life by a many years. So it has with them over there.” He jerks his thumb towards his comrades in misfortune. “They’ll none of them ever be the same men again.”
The Signora tries feebly to protest, but the nurse acquiesces placidly. It is the hospital way, and not a bad way either; misfortunes are not minimized, they are faced.
The Signora has an unconquerable timidity where other people’s reticences are concerned, and was far from emulating the amiable audacity of a close relative--at present on a visit to the Villino--whose voice she hears raised in the distance with query after query: “Where was it? In your leg? Does it hurt? Do you mind? Do you want to go back again?” But when she sees that the men indubitably like this frank attack, and respond, smiling and stimulated, the silence of her Canadian begins to weigh upon her. She tries him with a bashful question:
“No, not in a town. Three hundred and eighty miles away from the nearest of any importance.”
“Oh, dear! Then it must take you a long time to hear from your people.”
The post only comes to his home out yonder once a week, anyhow, but he hasn’t heard but once since he left. Not at all since he came to England wounded.
“Oh, dear!” exclaimed the Signora again, scenting a grievance. “But if it’s so far away, you couldn’t have heard yet.”
The lowering copper-hued countenance--it is curiously un-English, and reminds one vaguely of those frowning black marble busts in the Capitol: young Emperors already savagely conscious of their own unlimited power--takes a deeper gloom.
He could have heard. No. 9 had had a letter that morning, and _his_ home was forty miles further north.
“Had No. 9 a letter?” asks the little Sister.
She sits plump and placid in her cloak, and looks like a dove puffing out her feathers in the sunshine. We have said she has a cooing voice.
“Yes, he had,” says the Canadian, and digs a vindictive finger into the dry grass.
The Signora, fearing the conversation is going to lapse, plunges into the breach.
“What was your work at home? Farming, I suppose.”
This remark meets with an unexpected success. The poor, fierce eyes--that seem never to have ceased from contemplation of unpardonable injury since that day at Ypres when the fumes of hell belched up before them--brighten.