We have been the more disposed to draw these parallels between the Old Faith and its substitute because, by a curious coincidence, Adam’s was the second death to fling sadness over the Villino.
The first was not a personal loss, like that of a servant in the house. It concerned, indeed, a being whom only one of us had seen. It happened far away in the bloody swamps of the Yser; yet, none the less, the tidings filled the little household with mourning.
Among the many exiles flying to our shores from the horror of the advancing Hun were two young mothers with their children--two charming, delicately nurtured, high-born, high-minded women, whose husbands were, one, an officer in the Belgian army, the other, a volunteer working in the ambulance at Calais. The soldier’s wife, the niece of an old friend of ours, a gay, courageous creature, who twice had gone into the line of fire to see her husband, was never tired of speaking to us of “Charley.” He seemed in the end to have become almost a familiar among us. We knew by his photographs that he was handsome, and, by the portions of his letters which she read to us, that he was tender and deep-feeling and strong of courage.
Some weeks ago Charley’s wife left to live with her sister; her cousin still remained with us. It was the latter who was sent for to the telephone that evening when the shadow of death rolled up suddenly and hung over the little house.
An unforgettable moment when she turned from the instrument, crying in accents that pierced one: “_Charley tué! Mon Dieu, mon Dieu, Charley tué!_”
It was when we afterwards learnt the details of the tragedy, which were piteous in the extreme as far as it affected the wife, that the noble consolations of our religion emerged in all their beauty.
The officer had announced an approaching leave, and the joyful anticipation of his little family was commensurate to the love they bore him. As one instance of that love, let it be noted here that his small son, only six years old, could never hear the name of his absent father without tears.
The wife was alone in the garden, resting from the fatigues of a morning spent in preparing for that visit, when a telegram arrived, badly transcribed, in French. She could at first only make out her husband’s name, her brother’s signature, and the words, “Shall be at Calais to-day.”