Knight Without Armour

She smiled, and seemed very happy in contemplation of it. After a pause she went on to ask if he had yet told Stapen that he did not intend to take the child with them.

He answered that he hadn’t, but that he would do so whenever the matter became urgent.

She said: “I suppose we can’t possibly take her with us?”

“Do you want to?” he asked; and she replied: “I would like to, if we could, but of course it’s for you to decide. It’s you who’d have all the bother of both of us, isn’t it?”

“It isn’t bother I’d mind. It’s danger—to you.”

“Do you think there would he much danger?”

“More than I’d care to risk.”

“I know. I agree. We won’t have her.”

“I wish we could, for your sake.”

“Oh no, it doesn’t matter. I don’t quite know why I’m worrying you so much about it.”

“You’re really keen on having her, then, if we could?”

She answered then, almost sobbing: “Terribly, darling—terribly. And I don’t know why.”

A few hours later the sudden improvement in her condition disappeared with equal suddenness, and the fever, after its respite, seemed to attack her with renewed venom. To A.J. the change was the bitterest of blows, and all the old iron rage stalked through his veins again. He could not look at the rapidly recovering child downstairs without a clench of dislike; but for her, he worked it out, they would never have called at Stapen’s house, and Daly would never have been ill. (Yet that, he knew in his heart, was far from certain; the whole district was typhus-ridden, and it was impossible to establish how and from whom contagion had been passed.)

On the tenth day he knew that the crisis was approaching; if she survived it, she would almost certainly recover. He was at her bedside hour after hour, helping in ail the details of nursing; Stapen’s wife and himself, though they rarely exchanged more than sharp question and answer, were grimly together in the struggle. And it was not only a struggle against disease, for every day the search for the barest essentials of food was a battle in itself. Only rarely could milk be obtained, while nourishing soups and other invalid delicacies were quite beyond possibility. The last of the food that he had brought with him from Novarodar had long since been consumed, so that now he too was relying on the acquisitive efforts of Stapen’s wife. Sometimes she went out early in the morning, with the temperature far below freezing- point, and came back at dusk, after tramping many miles—with nothing. A.J. never offered her copious sympathy, as Stapen did, yet there was between them always a secret comprehension of the agonies of the day. When he looked up from Daly’s flushed and twitching face it was often to sec Stapen’s wife gazing from the other side of the bed with queer, companionable grimness.

Once while Daly was sleeping they held a curious whispered conversation across the bed. She asked him how he intended to proceed when Daly was better, and then, after he had explained to her his plans, she said: “You’ll find the child a nuisance—perhaps a danger, too. There’s a very strict watch on all the frontiers.”

“I know that.”

“I wonder you bother to take her with you at all.”

“Oh?” He was surprised, and waited for her to continue. She said, after a pause: “Look after your own affairs—that would be my advice, if you asked for it.”

“And the child?”

“She can stay here.”

“For how long?”

“For always, if necessary. I don’t see that it matters whether she’s here or in a king’s palace, so long as she’s happy. And the way the world is just now, princesses haven’t much chance of happiness.”

“What would your husband say to that, I wonder?”

“Oh, him?”

She uttered the monosyllable with such overwhelming emphasis that it was not even contemptuous.

Neither of them pursued the argument farther. Yet it was strange how the problem of the child was growing in importance; hardly an hour passed now without some delirious mention of it by Daly. It seemed to be on her mind to the exclusion of all other problems. On the twelfth day she suddenly became clear-headed and told A.J. that she was going to get better. Then, with her next breath, she said: “But if I don’t, you will take the girl with you alone, won’t you?”

That word ’alone’—his first glimpse into another world—sank on his heart till he could scarcely reason out an answer of any kind.

She went on: “will you promise that—to take her with you alone—if—if I don’t—”

“But You are—oh, you are going to get better!”

“Darling, yes, of course I am. But still, I want your promise.”

He could do nothing but assent. But a moment later he said: “She would be all right, you know, left here—the Stapens would give her a good home.”

“But she’s ours—the only thing we can call ours, anyway. I’m pretending she belongs to us—I want somebody to belong to us. Do you understand?”

He nodded desperately.

“And so you do promise, then?”

“Yes, yes. You can trust me.”