A Charmed Life | Page 4

man. His voice suggested that he
was about to shake her. "How dare you?"
She abandoned that position and attacked from one more logical.
"But why punish me?" she protested. "Do I want the war? Do I want to
free Cuba? No! I want YOU, and if you go, you are the one who is sure
to be killed. You are so big--and so brave, and you will be rushing in
wherever the fighting is, and then--then you will die." She raised her
eyes and looked at him as though seeing him from a great distance.
"And," she added fatefully, "I will die, too, or maybe I will have to live,
to live without you for years, for many miserable years."
Fearfully, with great caution, as though in his joy in her he might crush
her in his hands, the young man drew her to him and held her close.
After a silence he whispered. "But, you know that nothing can happen
to me. Not now, that God has let me love you. He could not be so cruel.
He would not have given me such happiness to take it from me. A man
who loves you, as I love you, cannot come to any harm. And the man
YOU love is immortal, immune. He holds a charmed life. So long as
you love him, he must live."
The eyes of the girl smiled up at him through her tears. She lifted her
lips to his. "Then you will never die!" she said.
She held him away from her. "Listen!" she whispered. "What you say is
true. It must be true, because you are always right. I love you so that
nothing can harm you. My love will be a charm. It will hang around
your neck and protect you, and keep you, and bring you back to me.
When you are in danger my love will save you. For, while it lives, I
live. When it dies--"
Chesterton kissed her quickly.
"What happens then," he said, "doesn't matter."
The war game had run its happy-go-lucky course briefly and brilliantly,

with "glory enough for all," even for Chesterton. For, in no previous
campaign had good fortune so persistently stood smiling at his elbow.
At each moment of the war that was critical, picturesque, dramatic, by
some lucky accident he found himself among those present. He could
not lose. Even when his press boat broke down at Cardenas, a Yankee
cruiser and two Spanish gun-boats, apparently for his sole benefit,
engaged in an impromptu duel within range of his megaphone. When
his horse went lame, the column with which he had wished to advance,
passed forward to the front unmolested, while the rear guard, to which
he had been forced to join his fortune, fought its way through the
stifling underbrush.
Between his news despatches, when he was not singing the praises of
his fellow-countrymen, or copying lists of their killed and wounded, he
wrote to Miss Armitage. His letters were scrawled on yellow copy
paper and consisted of repetitions of the three words, "I love you,"
rearranged, illuminated, and intensified.
Each letter began much in the same way. "The war is still going on.
You can read about it in the papers. What I want you to know is that I
love you as no man ever--" And so on for many pages.
From her only one of the letters she wrote reached him. It was picked
up in the sand at Siboney after the medical corps, in an effort to wipe
out the yellow-fever, had set fire to the post- office tent.
She had written it some weeks before from her summer home at
Newport, and in it she said: "When you went to the front, I thought no
woman could love more than I did then. But, now I know. At least I
know one girl who can. She cannot write it. She can never tell you.
You must just believe.
"Each day I hear from you, for as soon as the paper comes, I take it
down to the rocks and read your cables, and I look south across the
ocean to Cuba, and try to see you in all that fighting and heat and fever.
But I am not afraid. For each morning I wake to find I love you more;
that it has grown stronger, more wonderful, more hard to bear. And I
know the charm I gave you grows with it, and is more powerful, and
that it will bring you back to me wearing new honors, 'bearing your
sheaves with you.'
"As though I cared for your new honors. I want YOU, YOU,
YOU--only YOU."

When Santiago surrendered and the invading army settled down to
arrange terms of peace, and imbibe fever, and General Miles