“Captain John Lauder killed in action, December 28.  Official.  War Office.”

It had gone to Mrs. Lauder at Dunoon first, and she had sent it on to me.  That was all it said.  I knew nothing of how my boy had died, or where—­save that it was for his country.

But later I learned that when Sir Thomas Lipton had rung me up he had intended to condole with me.  He had heard on Saturday of my boy’s death.  But when he spoke to me, and understood at once, from the tone of my voice, that I did not know, he had not been able to go on.  His heart was too tender to make it possible for him to be the one to give me that blow—­the heaviest that ever befell me.

CHAPTER VIII

It was on Monday morning, January the first, 1917, that I learned of my boy’s death.  And he had been killed the Thursday before!  He had been dead four days before I knew it!  And yet—­I had known.  Let no one ever tell me again that there is nothing in presentiment.  Why else had I been so sad and uneasy in my mind?  Why else, all through that Sunday, had it been so impossible for me to take comfort in what was said to cheer me?  Some warning had come to me, some sense that all was not well.

Realization came to me slowly.  I sat and stared at that slip of paper, that had come to me like the breath of doom.  Dead!  Dead these four days!  I was never to see the light of his eyes again.  I was never to hear that laugh of his.  I had looked on my boy for the last time.  Could it be true?  Ah, I knew it was!  And it was for this moment that I had been waiting, that we had all been waiting, ever since we had sent John away to fight for his country and do his part.  I think we had all felt that it must come.  We had all known that it was too much to hope that he should be one of those to be spared.

The black despair that had been hovering over me for hours closed down now and enveloped all my senses.  Everything was unreal.  For a time I was quite numb.  But then, as I began to realize and to visualize what it was to mean in my life that my boy was dead there came a great pain.  The iron of realization slowly seared every word of that curt telegram upon my heart.  I said it to myself, over and over again.  And I whispered to myself, as my thoughts took form, over and over, the one terrible word:  “Dead!”

I felt that for me everything had come to an end with the reading of that dire message.  It seemed to me that for me the board of life was black and blank.  For me there was no past and there could be no future.  Everything had been swept away, erased, by one sweep of the hand of a cruel fate.  Oh, there was a past, though!  And it was in that past that I began to delve.  It was made up of every memory I had of my boy.  I fell at once to remembering him.  I clutched at every memory, as if I must grasp them and make sure of them, lest they be taken from me as well as the hope of seeing him again that the telegram had forever snatched away.