JOHN RISCA, at thirty-four, with a ward of twenty, and with the normal
hope of a man's life withered at the root, regarded himself as an
elderly man. He looked older than his years. Ragged streaks of gray
appeared in his black hair, and the lines deepened on his heavy brow.
There are some men who, no matter what their circumstances may be, never
take themselves happily. To do so is a gift; and it was denied to John
Risca.
Two years had passed since his wife's release. During the years of their
separation before her imprisonment, she had counted for little in his
thoughts save as a gate barring the way to happiness. She had never
molested him, never stood in the way of his ordinary life. In her prison
she had begun by being a horror haunting his dreams; gradually she
had dwindled into a kind of paralyzed force, had faded into a shadow
incapable of action. But since her return to the living world he had
felt her hatred as an influence, vague, but active, let loose upon
the earth. He dreaded contact with her, however indirect, and through
whatever agency; but contact was inevitable. Whereas formerly she
had been content to live according to the terms of their agreement on
separation, now she made demands. One of them, however, he considered
reasonable. In Smith Street, the scene of her misdeeds, she led the life
of a pariah dog. She was friendless. Her own relatives had cast her off.
The tradespeople round about supplied her reluctantly with necessaries
and refused to exchange words with her when she entered their shops.
Children hooted her in the streets. John, foreseeing unpleasantness, had
offered to find her a home in the country. But this, being town-bred,
she had declined. Let her change her name, she urged, and seek other
London quarters. He agreed. She adopted the name of Rawlings and moved
to a flat off the Fulham Road. To the suggestion of a different part
of London altogether she turned a deaf ear. She had lived in that
neighbourhood all her days and would feel lost elsewhere. The common
Londoner has almost the local instinct of a villager. She would also,
she said, be near her mother, who still let lodgings in Brompton.
“If your mother refuses to see you,” said John, when they were
discussing the matter, “I see no reason for your being near her.”
She counselled him, in her vernacular, to mind his own business.
“So long as I don't come and live next to you, what have you got to do
with it?”
“I certainly am not called upon to protect your mother,” said he. He
smiled grimly, remembering the hard-bitten veteran of a thousand fights
with impecunious and recalcitrant lodgers. She could very well look
after herself.
The Bences, much against her will, though she dared not openly rebel,
accompanied her to the flat. Her installation was expensive. He paid
readily enough. But then came demands for money, insidious enough at
first for his compliance, then monstrous, vindictive. She incurred
reckless debts; not those of a woman who desires to make a show in the
world by covering herself with costly dresses and furs and jewels or by
dashing about in expensive equipages.
That side of life was unfamiliar to her, and class instinct quenched the
imagination to crave it. She had been bred to regard cabs as luxuries
of the idle rich, and it never occurred to her to travel in London
otherwise than by omnibus or rail. Her wilful extravagance was of a
different nature. She ran up bills with the petty tradesmen of the
neighbourhood for articles for which she had no use; for flowers which
she deliberately threw into the dust-bin; for ready-made raiment which
she never wore,--jackets at three pounds, ten and six, and hats at ten
shillings,--cheap jewelry, watches, and trinkets which she stored away
in boxes. There was a gaudy set of furniture with which she bought a
kind of reconciliation with her mother. When county-court summonses came
in, she demanded money from John. When he refused, she posted him the
summonses.
Meanwhile he found that she had struck up acquaintance with some
helter-skelter, though respectable, folks in the flat below. The
discovery pleased him. It is good for no human being, virtuous or
depraved, to sit from month's end to month's end in stark loneliness.
She forced him to the threat of revealing her identity to her new
friends if she did not mend her ways. She mended them; but he felt his
hands soiled by the ignoble weapons with which he had to fight.
After that she was quiet for months. Then one rainy afternoon, as he
was walking downward with bent head, he ran into her in Maida Vale, the
broad thoroughfare that merges into Kilburn. She started back with a
quick gasp of fear.
“What are you doing in this part of London?” he asked angrily.
She plucked up courage. “I'm free to walk where I like, and just you
jolly well don't try to stop me.”'
“You were going to my house.”
“I was n't. But supposing I was. What have you got to hide from me? My
successor? Some little tuppenny-ha'penny piece of damaged goods you 've
picked up cheap? Think I want to see her? What do you suppose I care?
Just let me pass.”
He thrust aside the wet umbrella which she pushed rudely into his face.
“First tell me what you are doing here. Fulham people don't come to
Maida Vale just to take a walk in the rain.”
“I was going to see some friends,” she replied sulkily.
A motor-omnibus came surging down toward them. At his hail it stopped.
“Get into that at once, or it will be the worse for you.”
He took her arm in his powerful grip and dragged her to the curb.
“You bullying brute!” she hissed through her thin lips.
But she entered the 'bus. John watched it until it whizzed into space,
and then retracing his steps, he went home and mounted guard by the
window of his aunt's gimcrack drawing-room, to the huge delight of
its unsuspecting mistress. But his wife did not double back, as he
anticipated; nor did he see her again in the neighbourhood.
Thenceforward, save for irritating pin-pricks reminding him of her
existence, such as futile revolts against the supervision of the Bences
and occasional demands for money, she ceased to worry him. But since the
day when he caught her about to spy on his home-life, her shadow, like
that of some obscene bird, hovered over him perpetually. What she
had tried to do then she might have already done, she might do in the
future. The horrible sense of insecurity oppressed him: it is that which
ages a man who cannot take himself happily.
Otherwise the two years had passed with no great stir. The recurrence
of seasons alone surprised him now and then into a realization of the
flight of time. He had succeeded to the editorship of the weekly review
of which he had been assistant editor; he had published a little book
on the “Casual Ward of Workhouses,” a despised hash of journalistic
articles which had brought him considerable recognition; leader writers
had quoted him flatteringly, and his publishers clamoured for another
book on a cognate subject; the President of the Local Government Board
had invited him to a discussion of the matter, with a view to possible
legislation; honours fell thick upon him; but, if it had been a shower
of frogs, his disgust could not have been greater. For about the same
time he had published a chunky, doughy novel destined to set the world
aflame, which sold about a couple of hundred copies. He had cursed
all things cursable and uncursable without in any way affecting the
heartless rhythm of life. The world went on serenely, and in his glum
fashion he found himself going on with the world.
Unity mended his socks and poured out his tea day after day, unchanging
in her dull and common scragginess. Neither fine clothes, nor jewels,
nor Aunt Gladys's maxims could turn her into a young lady. Miss Lindon
sighed, Unity's inability to purr genteelly at tea-parties, the breath
of female autumn's being, was the main sorrow in the mild lady's heart.
She used to dream of the swelling pride with which she might have
listened to Unity playing the “Liederohne Worte” or Stephen Heller or
“The Brook” (such a pretty piece!), before the ladies purring on the
gim-crack chairs. But the dream was poignantly vain. She had striven
with vast goodness to teach Unity to play the piano, and the girl had
honestly tried to learn; but as her brain could not master the mystery
of the various keys, and as her ear was not acute enough to enable her
to sing “Sun of my soul, thou Saviour dear,” in tune, the study of music
had to be struck out of her curriculum. And she could not talk to the
faded gentlewomen who came to the house, and to whose houses Miss Lindon
took her. The ordeal always made her perspire, and little beads settled
on her snub nose, and she knew it was not ladylike. Such a thing, said
Miss Lindon, ought never to happen. But it did, in defiance of all
the laws of gentility. So Miss Lindon sighed. But none of these things
wrecked the peace of the home. Uneventful serenity reigned in the little
house at Kilburn.
Walter Herold went on playing his exquisite miniatures of parts, and,
in theatrical terminology, he became very expensive, and prospered
exceedingly in his profession; his relations with John remained
unaltered; Miss Lindon loved him, first because he was John's intimate,
secondly (and here was a reason which she did not avow) because he
had the gift of making her feel that, despite seven and fifty years of
spinsterhood, she was still the most fascinating of her sex, and thirdly
because he reminded her of poor Captain Featherstone, killed in the Zulu
War, who was such a very clever amateur conjurer, and could act charades
in a way that would make you die of laughing. And Unity came to him with
her problems; and, as they both loved John Risca and Stellamaris, of
whom (a thing undreamed of by John, for he rarely mentioned the fairy
princess's name to Unity) they talked inordinately, the bond between
them was strengthened by links ever freshly forged. And finally, in
the sea-chamber at Southcliff, Herold maintained his rank of Great High
Favourite, and companioned his august mistress on her fairy vagabondage
along the roads that led no whither in the Land That Never Was.
And Stellamaris herself? She was twenty. John, still Great High
Belovedest, still finding his perfect rest from care, his enchanted
haven, in the great, wide-windowed room looking out to sea, wondered at
the commonplace fact. Not long ago, it seemed to him, she had been but
the fragile wraith of a child, with arms that you might pass through
a signet-ring, and hands no bigger than an acacia-leaf. He had sat but
yesterday full on the bed, without danger to the tiny feet which were
far away from him. And now the little child had passed into the woman.
Thanks to devotion, the world's learning, the resources of the
civilized earth, the life-giving air of the sea, her malady had scarcely
interfered with bodily growth. And the child's beauty had not been
fleeting. It had remained, and matured into that of the woman.
Unconsciously John had drifted away from childish things in his long and
precious talks with her.
One day she rebuked him.
“Great High Belovedest,” she said, “you have n't told me of the palace
and Lilias and Niphetos for months and months. Or is it years?”
He laughed. “It must be years. You don't realize that you 're grown up.”
“So every one says. I often wonder what it really means.”
“You 've developed,” said he.
“How?” she persisted.
“You've got longer and broader and--”
She laughed to hide a swift, pink confusion. “I know that, you silly
dear. The doctor's always taking measurements of me and making funny
calculations--cubing out the contents, as Mr. Wratislaw used to say. I
know I'm enormous. That's an external matter of yards and feet,”--she
spoke as if her proportions were Brobdingnagian,--“but I 'm referring to
inner things. How am I different, in myself, from what I was four years
ago?”
John scratched a somewhat puzzled head. How could he explain to her
that of which he himself was not quite certain? In the normal case
the phenomenon of manhood or womanhood, apart from the physical
side,--allowing for the moment that the physical side can be set
apart,--is a matter of a wider experience of life, of a million
observations unconsciously correlated by a fully developed brain. It
implies a differentiation between the facts and fancies of existence.
The adult of twenty-one who takes seriously the make-believe of the
dolls' house, and, sticking a paper crown on her head, asks you to
recognize her as a queen, is merely an imbecile. The sane adult plays at
mock tea-parties and crowns itself monarch in obedience to a different
set of impulses altogether, either through sheer gaiety of heart,
frankly making unto itself no illusions, or using make-believe as a
symbol of the highest expression of life--videlicet, art--of which the
human mind is capable. And, although we know very well that there are
adults, many of advanced years, whom circumstances have so perverted
that the Alpha and Omega of their lives is the pursuit either of a
little ball or of a verminous animal over the surface of God's arresting
earth, or else, it may be, a series of conjectures as to the comparative
velocities of unimportant quadrupeds, yet none of them (at loose on
society) would have the lunacy or the depravity to maintain that such
pursuit or conjecture is a vital element in the scheme of existence.
Even these who appear still to dwell in the play-world of the child
have the essential faculty of discrimination. They have, in dull
intervals between round or ride, encountered sorrow and pain and passion
and wickedness and fierce struggle and despair. To them the sordid
tragedies of criminal courts, the bestial poverty of slums, are
commonplaces of knowledge. Any one of them can reel off a dozen
instances of the treachery of false friends, the faithlessness of
women, the corruption of commercial or political life. To them are also
revealed splendours of heroism and self-sacrifice. They have a million
data whence to deduce a serviceable philosophy. They are beyond all
question grown up. But what wider experience of life had Stellamaris
gained in the four years between the ages of sixteen and twenty? What
fresh facts of existence had been presented to her for observation and
correlation? What data had she for that deduction of a philosophy which
marks the adult? Neither harm nor spell nor charm had come the lovely
lady any nearer during the last four years than during those of her
childhood. The Unwritten Law had prevailed as strong as ever. The
routine of the sea-chamber had remained unchanged. Her reading,
jealously selected, had brought her no closer to the sad core of many
human things. The gulls and the waves and the golden sunset clouds were
still her high companions. What did people mean when they said she had
grown up? John continued for some time to scratch a puzzled head.
“Are you not aware of any change in yourself?” he asked.
She reflected for a moment. “No,” she replied seriously. “Of course
I know more. I can speak French and Italian--” Professors of these
tongues, duly hedged about with ceremonial, had for a long time past
attended in the sea-chamber--“and I know lots more of history and
geography and geology and astronomy and zoology--oh, Belovedest dear,
I 'm dying to see a giraffe! Do you think if he stood on the beach
he could stick his head through the window and look at me? And a
hippopotamus--can't you bring one in on a string? Or do you think
Constable would bite him?”
John expounded the cases of the giraffe and the hippopotamus with great
gravity. Her eyebrows contracted ever so little, and a spark danced in
her eyes as she waited for the end of the lecture.
“Oh, dear, can't you see a joke?”
“Joke?”
“Why, yes. Don't you think I know all about hippopotamuses?”
“Four years ago,” said John, “if I had told you that a wyvern and a
unicorn were coming to tea, you would have believed me. Now you would
n't. You 've grown up. That's what I meant.”
“I see,” said Stellamaris.
But she did n't; for she turned the conversation back to the palace.
“I'm afraid, dear,” said he, “that the cats are dead and Arachne has
married a stock-broker, and I 've been so busy that the palace has run
to seed.”
“I thought she was going to marry a duke,” said Stella, whose memory for
unimportant detail was femininely tenacious.
“The duke was caught by Miss Cassandra P. Wurgles,” said John, once more
launched on the sea of romance.
“What a funny name,” said Stella.
“It's the kind of name,” he replied, “always given in English fiction to
the heiresses of the Middle West of America.”
“Was she an heiress?”
“Worth billions. After they were married they do say she would n't let
the duke wipe his razor on anything less valuable than a thousand-dollar
bill.”
“I don't think that's quite true,” laughed Stella.
“I don't know,” said John. “Anyhow, Arachne fell back on a stock-broker
named Maclsaac, and now there's no one to look after the palace.”
“No one at all?” Her voice was full of pity.
“Not a soul,” said he.
A tragic pause followed this forlorn declaration. “Dear Belovedest,”
said Stella, very seriously, “I do wish I could come and set it right
for you.”
Their eyes met. John sighed.
“I wish you could,” said he. “There 's a fairy wand standing in the
corner which no one but you can touch. It gives every one else an
electric shock that sends them head over heels. But if you could get
it and wave it about the place, you would make all sorts of dead things
come to glorious life, and fill all the garden walks with flowers, and
make the waters live again in the fountains.”
It was the John Risca whom she had always known that spoke, the John
Risca of whom Herold had occasional flashes, so that he could discount
his usual gloomy petulance and love the essential man, the John Risca
whose hand poor dumb, little Unity Blake had laid against her cheek--the
best and purest John Risca, a will-o'-the-wisp gleam to all his nearest
save Stellamaris; but to Stellamaris just the ordinary, commonplace,
unaltering, and unalterable John Risca, the Great High Belovedest of her
earliest memories. He had said things like this a hundred thousand times
before. Yet now the colour rose once more into her cheeks, and a mist
such as might surround a dewdrop veiled her eyes.
“What makes you think I could do all that for you?” she asked.
“I don't know, my dear,” said John. “You seem to belong to another
world.” He stumbled. “You 're just a fairy sort of creature.”
The answer did not satisfy the instinctive innermost whence sprang the
question; but it served. Woman since the beginning of things has had to
content herself with half-answers from man, seeing that she vouchsafes
him scarcely any answers at all. She smiled and stretched out her hand.
John took it in his clumsy fingers. It was whiter than any hand in the
world, veined with the faintest of faint blue.
“Anyhow,” she said, “you ought n't to have neglected the palace.”
“What was I to do?” he asked whimsically. “You 've been so busy growing
up that you've had no time to help me to run it.”
“Oh!” she said. She withdrew her hand. “Oh, Belovedest, how can you say
such a thing!”
“You yourself,” laughed John, “asked whether it was months or years
since we talked of it.”
“I 've never stopped thinking about it,” she protested, and she went on
protesting. But, like the Shakspearian lady, she protested too much.
“You've grown up, Stellamaris,” said John.
But how much of the old fairy-tale she still believed in he could
not gauge. He went away, man with the muck-rake that he was, with the
uncomfortable conviction that the roots of her child's faith survived.
And yet she had grown up, and John, for the life of him, could not
understand it. He was puzzled, because the sweet reverence of the man
for the thing of sea-foam and cloud mystery that she had been to him
all his man's life could not dream of physiological development. She
was longer and broader; that met the eye. Living in her extraordinary
seclusion from the multitudinous winds of earth, she could feel no
breath of the storms that shake humanity into the myriad moulds of
character. The physical side (other than mere linear and cubical
expansion) apart, there was no possibility of change from childhood
to womanhood. But John counted without his host--Nature, the host who
claims reckoning from us all, kick though we may against her tyrannies;
Nature, with her frank indecencies, her uncompromising, but loving,
realism. The physical side in the development of any human being cannot
be set apart. That passage of every maiden across the ford where brook
and river meet is accomplished without a good, careless man's knowledge
or conjecture. He kisses her to-day, as he has kissed her since she
toddled with bare legs, and she responds, and it means little more to
her than an acidulated drop. He shall kiss her to-morrow, and she shall
grow as red as any turkey-cock, and cast down her eyes, and go through
all the pretty antics characteristic, since the beginning of time, of a
self-conscious sex. And the man shall go away scratching his head in a
deuce of a puzzle.
Another year passed. Stella was twenty-one. The routine of the Channel
House, of the house at Kilburn, of the Fulham flat, went on unchanged
and unchanging. Time seems unimportant as a positive agent in human
affairs. It is the solvent of sorrow, but it cannot create joy. From its
benumbing influence no drama seems to spring. It is events--and events,
too, no matter how trivial--that have their roots mysteriously deep in
time that shake the world and make the drama which we call history. And
it was an event, apparently trivial, but sudden, unlooked for, amazing,
that shook the lives whose history is here recorded.
One morning, in obedience to a peremptory telegram from Sir Oliver
Blount, John Risca met him at the Imperial Club. The old man rose from
his seat near the entrance of the smoking-room into which John was
shown, and excitedly wrung both his hands. “My dear boy, you must come
to Southcliff at once.” Two or three times before he had been brought
down post-haste by Sir Oliver, only to find himself needed as a mediator
between husband and wife. He shook himself free.
“Out of the question, Oliver. I 'm overwhelmed with work. I 've got my
syndicate article to do, and the review goes to press to-night.”
“You don't understand. It 's our darling Stella. This morning she lifted
her head from the pillow.”
“But that's her death-warrant,” cried John, quickly. “It's her
life-warrant. The fatal thing we've been warned against all these years
is no longer fatal. She can move her head easily, painlessly. Don't you
see?” The weak old eyes were wet.
“My God!” said John. His breath came fast, and he clapped his great
hand on the other's lean shoulders. “But that means--great God in
heaven!”.--his voice shook--“what may it not mean?”
“It may mean everything,” said Sir Oliver.
From time to time throughout Stella's life the great magicians of
science had entered the sea-chamber and departed thence, shaking sad
and certain heads. With proper care, they said, Stellamaris might
live--might live, indeed, until her hair turned white and her young
cheeks shrivelled with age; but of leaving that bed by the window and
going forth into the outer world there was no hope or question. Still,
Nature, the inscrutable, the whimsical, might be cozened by treatment
into working a miracle. At any rate, no harm would be done by trying,
and her guardians would have the consoling assurance that nothing
had been left undone. They prescribed after their high knowledge, and
pocketed their high fees, and went their way. Dr. Ransome, Stella's
lifelong doctor and worshipper, carried out each great magician's
orders, and, as prophesied, nothing ever happened either for good or
harm.
But, six months ago, a greater magician than all, one Wilhelm von
Pfeiler of Vienna, who by working miracles on his own account with newly
discovered and stupendous forces had begun to startle scientific Europe,
happened to be in England, and was summoned to the sea-chamber. He was a
dark, silky-bearded man in whose eyes brooded perpetual melancholy. He,
too, shook his head and said “Perhaps.” Ransome, who had seized with
high hopes on the wandering magician, found him vastly depressing. His
“Perhaps” was more mournfully hopeless than the others' “No.” He spoke
little, for he knew no English, and Ransome's German, like that of
Stella's household, was scanty; but Ransome understood him to croak
platitudes about time and youth and growth and nature being factors in
the case. As to his newly discovered treatment, well, it might have some
effect; he was certain of nothing; as yet no sure deductions could be
drawn from his experiments; everything concerning the application of
these new forces was at the empirical stage. So profound a melancholy
rang in his utterances that he left Lady Blount weeping bitterly, and
convinced that he had passed death-sentence on their beloved being. Then
a near-sighted, taciturn young man, a budding magician who had sat at
Von Pfeiler's feet in Vienna, came down from London with apparatus worth
a hundred times its weight in gold. And nothing happened or seemed about
to happen. Stella called him the gnome.
All this John knew. Like the rest of Stella's satellites, accustomed for
years to the unhesitating pronouncements of the great specialists and
to their unhealing remedies, he had little faith in Von Pfeiler. The
taciturn young surgeon who had been administering the treatment kept his
own counsel and gave no encouragement to questioners. John had agreed
with Sir Oliver that it was a waste of time and money--a fabulous amount
of money; but the treatment amused Stella, and she liked the gnome, whom
every one else detested, because he loved dogs, and cured Constable,
now growing old and rheumatic, of a stiff leg. So every one suffered the
gnome patiently.
And now the miracle had been worked. Stella had lifted her head from the
pillow. The two men sat tremulous with hope.
“I 've been so upset,” said Sir Oliver, “and so has Julia. We had words.
Why, I don't know. I love our darling quite as much as she does; but
Julia is trying. Waiter! Get me a brandy and soda. What will you have?
Nothing? I don't usually drink spirits in the morning, John; but I feel
I need it. I'm getting old and can't stand shocks.”
“What does Ransome say?”
“He 's off his head. Every one 's off his head. The very dog is rushing
about like a lunatic. Nearly knocked me down in the garden.”
“And Cassilis?”
Cassilis was the gnome.
“Ransome has telegraphed him to come down at once. But I thought I'd run
up and tell you. We might go together to see him and fetch him back with
us. You 'll come, won't you?”
“Come? Why, of course I'll come. What do you think I 'll do? Stay in
London at such a time and send her a post-card to say I'm glad?”
“You said something about seeing your review through the press.”
“Oh, confound the review! It can go to the devil!” cried John.
London ablaze with revolution would have been a small matter compared
with this world-shaking event, the lifting of a girl's head.
“It will be such a comfort to me,” said the old man. “I don't know
what to do. I can't rest. My mind's in a maze. It's like the raising of
Jairus's daughter.”
“Let us do some telephoning,” said John.
They went out together. John rang up Cassilis. He had been out all the
morning and would not be returning for another hour. John rang up Herold
at a theatre where he knew him to be rehearsing, and gave him the glad
news. They returned to the smoking-room. Sir Oliver drank off his brandy
and soda at one gulp.
“And Stella herself? What does she make of it?”
“The only one not upset in the house. That little girl 's an angel,
John.” He blew his nose violently. “It appears she was stretching out
her arm to pat the old dog's chaps, overreached herself a bit, and
mechanically her head came away from the pillow. She called out to
nurse, 'Nurse, I 've lifted my head.' Nurse flew up to her. 'What do you
mean, darling?' She showed her. She showed her, by God! Nurse forbade
her to do it any more, and flew down-stairs like a wildcat to tell us.
Then we telephoned to Ransome. He saw her; she did it for him; then
he came to us white and shaking all over. Naturally I wanted to see the
darling child do it, too. Julia interfered. Stella must n't do it again
till Cassilis came. Then we had the words. She said I was eaten through
with egotism--I! Now, am I, John?”
Presently Herold dashed, in, aflame with excitement. The story, such as
it was, had to be told anew.
“I 'll come with you to Cassilis, and then on to Southcliff.”
“But your rehearsal?” said John.
Herold confounded the rehearsal, even as John had confounded his review.
In the presence of this thrilling wonder, trivialities had no place.
Cassilis received this agitated and unusual deputation without a flicker
of surprise. He was a baldheaded, prematurely old young man, with great,
round spectacles. He gave one the air of an inhuman custodian of awful
secrets.
“I presume you have called with reference to this,” said he, indicating
a telegram which he held in his hand. “I've just opened it.”
“Yes,” said Sir Oliver. “Is n't it wonderful? You must come down with us
at once.”
“It's very inconvenient for me to leave London.”
“My dear sir, you must throw over every engagement.”
The shadow of a smile passed over the young man's features.
“If you press the point, I'll come.”
“But are n't you astounded at what has occurred? Don't you understand
Ransome's message?”
“Perfectly,” said Cassilis. “I 've already written to Dr. von Pfeiler--a
week: ago--detailing the progress and full success of the case.”
“Then you know all about it?” asked John. “Naturally. I've been
practising her at it for the last fortnight, though she did n't realize
what I was doing.”
“Then why on earth did n't you tell us?”
“I had arranged to tell you to-morrow,” said Cassilis.
“I don't think you've acted rightly, sir,” cried Sir Oliver.
“Never mind that,” said Herold. “Mr. Cassilis doubtless has his
excellent reasons. The main thing is, Will her cure go beyond this? Will
she get well and strong? Will she be able to walk about God's earth like
anybody else?”
The little gnome-like man straightened with his toe a rucked corner
of the hearth-rug. He paused deliberately before replying, apparently
unmoved by the anxious eyes bent on him. There was a span of agonized
silence. Then he spoke:
“This time next year she will be leading a woman's normal life.”
[Illustration: 0180]
The words fell clear-cut on the quiet of the room. The three men uttered
not a word. Cassilis, asking their leave to make some small preparations
for his journey, left them. Then, relieved of his presence, they drew
together and pressed one another's hands and stood speechless, like
children suddenly brought to the brink of some new wonderland.