Wanted, an English Girl

by Moore, Dorothea

  “Did she mind?” Gill asked.

  (Mademoiselle de Monti must have known, of course, all along, but, oh, how pleased dear old Pipchin would be!)

  “Mind? Come and see!” said the Colonel; and so Gill came back to the cellar.

  Rupert-George had managed to get upon his feet—to be accurate, his foot—by now. Perhaps the fact that his arm was round Carina’s slender shoulders had a steadying effect.

  There were other people in the cellar—Von Posen somewhere in the background behind wholesome, beaming British soldiers; but Gillian only really saw those two—very muddy, rather dirty—and one—Rupert-George—decidedly gory—but both glorified beyond the power of outside conditions such as these to matter in the least.

  She stood still for a moment, watching them, then they saw her.

  “Gill darling! ” Carina cried; and Rupert-George added, with something about his cheery voice that wasn’t absolutely steady, “You might at least have the decency to come and shake hands with us after saving all our lives.”

  CHAPTER XXX

  How Gill Came Back

  Mrs. Tracey was waiting impatiently for Elys, Frances and Flossie to come to tea, which was laid out all ready in the gas-lit dining-room.

  The three had come in from the “High” quite ten minutes ago, and only had to take off coats and hats and boots before they came downstairs, but punctuality was a virtue that Aunt Edith never could impart to her girls.

  “They’re worse than ever since Gill went,” she said aloud, as she filled four cups, with an impatient jingle, “and goodness knows they were quite bad enough before. They might remember that I am always in a particular hurry on Fridays, with my Home-Nursing Class at half-past five.”

  Somebody came across the hall as she was speaking and opened the door of the dining-room.

  “Oh, come in and begin your tea, do!” Mrs. Tracey exclaimed irritably. “You’re dreadfully late!”

  “I know I am—quite two months late, Aunt Edith,” a familiar voice said, and Gill came quickly across the room, and stooped to kiss her aunt, as she sat at the tea-table.

  “Gill! where have you come from? My dear child! this is a surprise! Girls! Girls!”

  Gill slipped off the long fur-lined coat that she was wearing and tossed it on a chair.

  “My word, Gill, that’s a lovely coat—do be more careful of it!” Aunt Edith hadn’t changed much, Gill noticed, for all that had come and gone. “Where did you get it?”

  “The Grand-Duchess got it for me in town,” Gill explained. “You should have seen the clothes I arrived in; and it is a surprise, isn’t it? And I would have wired, only we didn’t know whether my new clothes would come in time until the last moment, and I couldn’t very well ask Captain Cartaret—Prince Rupert, I mean—to wire for me after I’d started, could I? And he arranged about the journey for me.”

  “Prince who?” shrieked Aunt Edith, and then the three girls burst in, in a tumultuous heap, and Gill was hugged violently and questions hurled at her, and no one remembered, even for one instant, Aunt Edith’s Home-Nursing Class, nor the cups of tea cooling on the table.

  Flossie’s was the first voice to emerge distinctly from the joyful confusion.

  “Gill has come back swanky. Just look at her hat!”

  “Take it off, Gill; let’s see how it suits me,” Elys said. “Where did you get such lovely things?”

  “She’s been consorting with princes and princesses and everything,” Aunt Edith announced with delightful vagueness. “Go on, Gill; tell us all about it!”

  Aunt Edith and the girls had not really changed at all; they still wanted to hear first about her clothes. She sat down by the fire and told the story of her adventures, with Elys trying on the hat and Flossie the fur-lined gloves, and Aunt Edith and Frances interrupting every other moment.

  The dining-room had grown unaccountably smaller, but everybody in it was exactly as they had been. Only Gill herself had changed.

  “And you’ve been maid of honour to a Grand-Duchess all the time, instead of reading literature with Marie—Annette—Gretchen—what was her name?—oh, Berta,” Aunt Edith said, when they had had the first skim and could think of tea. “Well, all I can say is, Gill, you ought to be very, very grateful to dear Mrs. Trant’s advertisement.”

  “I am—grateful.”

  Gill wondered if the moment had come to explain. It was more difficult to do so than she had expected, for neither her aunt nor her cousins seemed to have the smallest idea that all she had been through was to make the slightest difference to her future.

  “Won’t the girls be excited?” Flossie said, with her habitual giggle. “I say, mother, will Gill go to school to-morrow, or will she have a holiday as she’s only just come back?”

  “I think—at least I know—the Grand-Duchess is writing to you, Aunt Edith,” Gill said. “She was writing from town; you’ll get the letter to-morrow.”

  “The Grand-Duchess writing to me, Gill? Good gracious! what about?”

  Aunt Edith put her cup of tea down and stared at Gillian.

  “About me,” Gill told her. “You see—it’s rather difficult to explain—but after being with her all that dreadful time in Chardille, and afterwards in the more dreadful time when … when we were escaping, and Prince Rupert Alexander was a prisoner and everything—Well, it never could be quite ordinary again, could it? and the Grand-Duchess doesn’t really want me to go back to school, if you don’t mind, Aunt Edith!”

  “Not go back to school? and you only sixteen, and with your living to earn by and by. I never heard of anything so silly,” Aunt Edith burst out. “My dear child, I got you that new hold-all and umbrella and everything, and sent you to Chardille to give your future a chance and …”

  “Aunt Edith, I’m afraid I didn’t explain properly,” Gill said, with heightened colour. “I’m fearfully bad at explaining things, I know. But my … my future is all right, really; for I’m to be with the Grand-Duchess while she is at Strathelders House, and do lessons with Prince Rupert’s half-sister, Lady Barbara Glennie—what we’ve time for, at least, for they have a hospital at Strathelders, and Barbara helps, and of course I shall too, when I’m not with the Grand-Duchess; and when she goes back to Chardille …”

  “You’re going too?—oh, you lucky thing!” breathed Frances, with heart-felt envy.

  “Well, Gillian, all I can say is, it was the luckiest thing in the world that I answered that advertisement,” Aunt Edith said solemnly, and Gill got up and kissed her.

  “Yes, auntie, I shall never forget that I owe everything to you.”

  *

  Gill slept that night in her old bed, close to Elys’, and she and Elys talked to an unmentionable hour.

  Elys had to hear all the many details, which had been left out in the story downstairs. After all, Elys was the person with whom Gill had done everything in old days; Elys heard a great deal.

  “There’ll be no more algebra together,” she said at last, “nor … nor anything!”

  “I shall come back and stay often, I expect,” Gill told her, “and you’ll come to me, of course, as well.”

  “Not when you’re about with princes and princesses,” Elys remarked gloomily. “Things will be quite different.”

  “I’m not different, anyway,” Gill said stoutly.

  “Yes, you are. You’ve done things, you see; while we just stayed at home. …”

  “That was just because they came,” Gill interpolated hastily. “Anyone would, if they just had the chance.”

  Elys said something very nice indeed. “I don’t know about everyone; you would, and you jolly well deserve to get the princes and princesses and the swanky hats and everything. …”

  That really seemed to be the opinion of the entire family after reading the wonderful things which were in the letter that the Grand-Duchess wrote about Gill to Aunt Edith, and Gill found it needful to try to answer a great many questions beginning with “How did you?” She couldn’t exactly g
rumble, because that was the question she had asked with variations all the way to Calais, of Carina and Rupert-George. The whole party had been rushed there in a motor, and at Calais Rupert-George’s ankle received some very necessary attention at a hospital, before the whole party crossed to Dover.

  Rupert-George managed to avoid a hospital ship, as he was not officially in France just then, and a M.O., going back on leave, volunteered to see the damaged ankle through the journey. So they all came together to town, where they were met by a very charming lady, who looked a good deal too young to be Rupert-George’s mother, but who was the Duchess of Strathelders—once Princess Alexander—none the less. And Gill found that, far from being out of it when they were lunching and explaining everything all at once in the Duchess’s town house, that Rupert-George’s mother quite expected her to come with Carina and her husband to Strathelders, and be the sister that Barbara wanted.

  Only Carina, who always understood everything, saw that, much as Gill liked the idea, the being back in England had made her a little homesick for Elys and the others and Aunt Edith, and the dull house at Huntsford. So it was arranged that to-morrow, when the dilapidated clothes, that she would always keep in memory of Tienette, had been replaced by the best that one of the biggest London shops could procure with no notice at all, Gill should go to her own home for the week that Carina and Prince Rupert-Alexander were to spend in town, in order to obtain for their marriage the public recognition which would make it impossible for Waldemar to molest the Grand-Duchess again.

  And that was how it came about that Gillian, in her very new clothes, walked into Aunt Edith’s house next day in time for tea, as though she had only come in from the “High.”

  It was a very happy week, only marred by the efforts of the “Head,” Miss Thorton, to induce Gill to say “a few words” to the assembled High School girls, from Miss Thorton’s own august dais. Gill’s horrified, though polite, refusal to do anything of the kind didn’t altogether get her out of the trouble, for Miss Thorton said the “few words” herself, at considerable length, on an alarming afternoon, the day before Gill was to go North; when the whole High School presented her with a silver-fitted dressing-case, and gave a ringing “three times three” for the girl who had shown herself English. Next morning Gill was seen off at the station by three cousins who were disposed to be tearful, and by an aunt who did not stop at being that way disposed.

  *

  She arrived at Strathelders, as she had arrived long ago at Chardille, in time for tea; only now she was a Gillian who had travelled luxuriously, and to whom smuts no longer adhered. Rupert-George did enquire teasingly if she was sure she hadn’t lost her ticket, as the train slowed down into the little station especially made for the convenience of Strathelders House, and his man came hurrying along the corridor to give him his crutch and help him out of the reserved compartment. Gill laughed at the recollection.

  “Isn’t it funny to think how much has happened just because you were so good-natured that dreadful time?” she said. “If I hadn’t known you first I couldn’t have spoken to you outside Wingeld’s, and you wouldn’t have given me your address …”

  She stopped then, because Carina shivered.

  The Duchess met them at the station with a huge car, when Rupert-George could prop his foot up comfortably. She told Gill, when Carina had been greeted with due form, that Barbara had been very anxious to come too, but had been obliged to wait to welcome Gill at the front door, so as not to crowd the travellers.

  “And you’ll find Dick up to welcome you,” she told them. “He worried his doctor into leave to be on the sofa this afternoon, and was gaily negotiating the purchase of a motor-bicycle when I came away, with his mother looking on like a heroine.”

  “How like Dick! But he can’t ride now?” Carina said.

  “He means to. He declares that you don’t want both legs for it.”

  “He always was a sportsman,” Rupert-George remarked. No one said, “Poor Dick!” Gill noticed. She had cried herself to sleep that first night in town when the Duchess told Carina that the doctors had been unable to save the leg; but no one must insult Dick by pity, that was quite clear.

  And though, a little later when she had got through the meeting with the rather hollow-eyed person flat on the sofa, who had replaced the lively Dick in the green and silver uniform of Chardille, and had been taken by Barbara to her pretty room next Carina’s, she did cry a little, in strict privacy; it was not for pity, she knew that it was not.

  There in the lovely quiet of this haven she had reached, she tried to see something, something that must be seen now, if she were to be worthy of being called friend by the splendid people downstairs—to see that no sacrifice is waste when it is made for one’s country, let the use of it seem ever so far out of sight.

  Gill thought of the piteous little story of Tienette and Bèrnard; of the old sisters of Pont St. Fée and their bright young nephew with his life cut short from sheer brutality, not to serve any purpose, seemingly; of Mademoiselle de Monti, with her matchless beauty marred because the Huns had no respect for the Red Cross; last of all, Dick, not twenty yet, and crippled for life, with nothing to show for it.

  No opportunity for winning honours had come to him. He had fought for England barely a fortnight, and that was the end of active life, as far as he was concerned, for good and all. And yet Dick did not call it waste; it was “a sell” he couldn’t fight again, he had said to her a few minutes ago, and that was all, she knew, that he ever would say. He had had his chance to do something for England, and it did not matter that the something seemed without result, and had cost him so high a price.

  Carina would let Rupert-George go back to the front in the same spirit when his wounds were healed, Gill knew that; and even if he fell, she would not call it waste that the life that he had put into her hands should be laid down for his country—any more than Mademoiselle de Monti had grudged her service, though it, like Tienette’s, appeared an objectless sacrifice.

  It was coming to this Gill, who felt such years older than the Gill who had answered the advertisement of the Baroness with so much unwillingness, that every one can be really serving, and that one need be none the less a soldier because one is not a General, understanding the why and the wherefore of what one is called to do and to bear.

  She was interrupted. Barbara knocked hastily, and ran in.

  “Aren’t you ready, Gillian? Do come. We’re having such fun, and we want you; and Mother says Dick ought to go to bed soon, and he won’t till you come.”

  Gill dashed a wet sponge across her eyes, to take away any suspicion of redness. “I’m ready.”

  The tea-table was set between the great fire in the hall and Dick’s sofa—a position which Rupert-George, whose splinted foot was propped upon a settle less conveniently placed, seemed to consider giving him an unfair advantage, to judge by what the girls heard as they came into the great hall.

  The Duchess was pouring out the tea, and Carina appeared to be waiting impartially upon both the invalids.

  “Hurrah! Babie’s got Gill!” Dick announced in stentorian accents as the girls came round the high carved screen that shut off the fireside corner from the rest of the big hall. “Carina! (Oh, it’s all right, Pipchen isn’t listening) you can show all the favouritism you like about muffins, etc., to Prince Rupert-Alexander now, because I want more tea, not things to eat.”

  “Dick! You have had three cups already,” Carina told him reproachfully; but Dick, undismayed, was holding out a ridiculously thin, white hand for a fourth.

  “I should be bound to have it, if it were my thirteenth,” he declared. “You know you’ll make me have dinner in bed, so I’m bound to drink my toast now. It’s a slight variation on that gulped by our friend the Hun. I drink The Day, but—it’s the day that brought Gillian to Chardille.”

  “Mother dear, brimmers for everyone!” said Rupert-George.

  THE END

 

  Moore, Dorothea, Wanted, an English Girl