The Summons | Page 5

treble of her voice, she was boyish. "What a pretty boy she would make!" was the first thought until you noticed the slim delicacy of her hands and feet, the burnish of gold on the dark wealth of her hair, the fine chiselling of brow and nose and chin. Then it was seen that she was all woman. She was tall and yet never looked tall. It seemed that you could pick her up with a finger, but try and she warned you of the weakness of your arm. She was a baffling person. She ran and walked with the joyous insolence of eighteen, yet at any moment some veil might be rolled up in her eyes and face to show you for one tragic instant a Lady of Sorrows.
She leaned towards Luttrell, and as Hardiman had foreseen the perfume of her hair stormed his senses.
"Tell me!" she breathed, and Luttrell, with his arguments and reasons cut and dried and conned over pat for delivery, began nevertheless to babble. There were the Olympic Games. She herself must have seen how they were fatal to their own purpose. Troubles were coming--battles behind the troubles. All soldiers knew! They knew this too--the phrase of a young Lieutenant-Colonel lecturing at the Staff College.
"Battles are not won either by sheer force or pure right, but by the one or the other of those two Powers which has Discipline as its Chief of Staff."
He was implying neither very tactfully nor clearly that he was on the way to dwindling into an undisciplined soldier. But it did not matter in the least. For Stella Croyle was not listening. All this was totally unimportant. Men always went about and about when they had difficult things to say to women. Her eyes never left his face and she would know surely enough when those words were rising to his lips which it was necessary that she should mark and understand. Meanwhile her perplexities and fears grew.
"Of course it can't be that," she assured herself again and again, but with a dreadful catch at her heart. "Oh no, it can't be that."
"That," was the separation which some day or another--after a long and wondrous period--both were agreed, must come. But, consoling herself with the thought that she would be prepared, she had always set the day on so distant an horizon that it had no terrors for her. Now it suddenly dismayed her, a terror close at hand. Here on this crowded balcony joyous with lights and gay voices and invaded by all the subtle invitations of a summer night above the water! Oh no, it was not possible!
Luttrell put his hand to his breast pocket and Stella watched and listened now with all her soul. More than once during dinner she had seen him touch that pocket in an abstraction. He drew from it two papers, one the cablegram which he had received from Cairo, the other Hardiman's reply. He handed her the first of the two.
"This reached me this morning."
Stella Croyle studied the paper with her heart in her mouth. But the letters would not be still.
"Oh, what does it mean?" she cried.
"It offers me service abroad."
Stella's face flushed and turned white. She bent her head over the cablegram.
"At Cairo," she said, with a little gasp of relief. After all Cairo was not so far. A week, and one was at Cairo.
"Further south, in the Sudan--Heaven knows where!"
"Too far then?" she suggested. "Too far."
"For you? Yes! Too far," Luttrell replied.
Stella lifted a tragic face towards him; and though he winced he met her eyes.
"But you are not going! You can't go!"
Luttrell handed to her the second paper.
"You never wrote this," she said very quickly.
"Yet it is what I would have written."
Stella Croyle shot one swift glance at Sir Charles Hardiman. She had recognised his handwriting. Hardiman was in Luttrell's cabin while the rest of the party waited on the deck and the launch throbbed at the gangway. If a woman's glance had power, he would have been stricken that instant. But she wasted no more than a glance upon the worldly-wiseman at the head of their table. She turned again to the first telegram.
"This is an answer, this cablegram from Cairo?"
"Yes."
"To a cable of yours?"
"Sent three days ago."
The answers she received were clear, unhesitating. It was a voice from a rock speaking! So utterly mistaken was she; and so completely Luttrell bent every nerve to the service of shortening the hour of misery. The appalling moment was then actually upon her. She had foreseen it--so she thought. But it caught her nevertheless unprepared as death catches a sinner on his bed.
She stared at the telegrams--not reading them. His arguments and prefaces--the Olympic Games, Discipline and the rest of it--what she had caught of them, she blew away