Her advent to Jansen was propitious. Smallpox in its most virulent form
had broken out in the French-Canadian portion of the town, and, coming
with some professional nurses from the East, herself an amateur, to
attend the sufferers, she worked with such skill and devotion that the
official thanks of the Corporation were offered her, together with a
tiny gold watch, the gift of grateful citizens. But she still remained
on at Jansen, saying always, however, that she was “going East in the
spring.”
Five years had passed, and still she had not gone East, but remained
perched in the rooms she had first taken, over the Imperial Bank, while
the town grew up swiftly round her. And even when the young bank
manager married, and wished to take over the rooms, she sent him to the
right-about from his own premises in her gay, masterful way. The young
manager behaved well in the circumstances, because he had asked her to
marry him, and she had dismissed him with a warning against challenging
his own happiness--that was the way she had put it. Perhaps he was
galled the less because others had striven for the same prize, and had
been thrust back, with an almost tender misgiving as to their sense of
self-preservation and sanity. Some of them were eligible enough, and all
were of some position in the West. Yet she smiled them firmly away, to
the wonder of Jansen, and to its satisfaction, for was it not a tribute
to all that she would distinguish no particular unit by her permanent
favour? But for one so sprightly and almost frivolous in manner at
times, the self-denial seemed incongruous. She was unconventional enough
to sit on the side-walk with a half-dozen children round her
blowing bubbles, or to romp in any garden, or in the street, playing
Puss-in-the-ring; yet this only made her more popular. Jansen’s
admiration was at its highest, however, when she rode in the annual
steeplechase with the best horsemen of the province. She had the gift of
doing as well as of being.
“‘Tis the light heart she has, and slippin’ in and out of things like a
humming-bird, no easier to ketch, and no longer to stay,” said Finden,
the rich Irish landbroker, suggestively to Father Bourassa, the huge
French-Canadian priest who had worked with her through all the dark
weeks of the smallpox epidemic, and who knew what lay beneath the outer
gaiety. She had been buoyant of spirit beside the beds of the sick, and
her words were full of raillery and humour, yet there was ever a gentle
note behind all; and the priest had seen her eyes shining with tears, as
she bent over some stricken sufferer bound upon an interminable journey.
“Bedad! as bright a little spark as ever struck off the steel,” added
Finden to the priest, with a sidelong, inquisitive look, “but a heart no
bigger than a marrowfat pea-selfishness, all self. Keepin’ herself for
herself when there’s manny a good man needin’ her. Mother o’ Moses, how
manny! From Terry O’Ryan, brother of a peer, at Latouche, to Bernard
Bapty, son of a millionaire, at Vancouver, there’s a string o’ them. All
pride and self; and as fair a lot they’ve been as ever entered for the
Marriage Cup. Now, isn’t that so, father?”
Finden’s brogue did not come from a plebeian origin. It was part of his
commercial equipment, an asset of his boyhood spent among the peasants
on the family estate in Galway.
Father Bourassa fanned himself with the black broadbrim hat he wore, and
looked benignly but quizzically on the wiry, sharp-faced Irishman.
“You t’ink her heart is leetla. But perhaps it is your mind not so big
enough to see--hein?” The priest laughed noiselessly, showing
white teeth. “Was it so selfish in Madame to refuse the name of
Finden--n’est-ce pas?”
Finden flushed, then burst into a laugh. “I’d almost forgotten I was one
of them--the first almost. Blessed be he that expects nothing, for he’ll
get it, sure. It was my duty, and I did it. Was she to feel that Jansen
did not price her high? Bedad, father, I rose betimes and did it, before
anny man should say he set me the lead. Before the carpet in the parlour
was down, and with the bare boards soundin’ to my words, I offered her
the name of Finden.”
“And so--the first of the long line! Bien, it is an honour.” The priest
paused a moment, looked at Finden with a curious reflective look, and
then said: “And so you t’ink there is no one; that she will say yes not
at all--no?”
They were sitting on Father Bourassa’s veranda, on the outskirts of
the town, above the great river, along which had travelled millions of
bygone people, fighting, roaming, hunting, trapping; and they could hear
it rushing past, see the swirling eddies, the impetuous currents, the
occasional rafts moving majestically down the stream. They were facing
the wild North, where civilisation was hacking and hewing and ploughing
its way to newer and newer cities, in an empire ever spreading to the
Pole.
Finden’s glance loitered on this scene before he replied. At length,
screwing up one eye, and with a suggestive smile, he answered: “Sure,
it’s all a matter of time, to the selfishest woman. ‘Tis not the same
with women as with men; you see, they don’t get younger--that’s a point.
But”--he gave a meaning glance at the priest--“but perhaps she’s not
going to wait for that, after all. And there he rides, a fine figure of
a man, too, if I have to say it!”
“M’sieu’ Varley?” the priest responded, and watched a galloping horseman
to whom Finden had pointed, till he rounded the corner of a little wood.
“Varley, the great London surgeon, sure! Say, father, it’s a hundred to
one she’d take him, if--”
There was a curious look in Father Bourassa’s face, a cloud in his eyes.
He sighed. “London, it is ver’ far away,” he remarked obliquely.
“What’s to that? If she is with the right man, near or far is nothing.”
“So far--from home,” said the priest reflectively, but his eyes
furtively watched the other’s face.
“But home’s where man and wife are.”
The priest now looked him straight in the eyes. “Then, as you say, she
will not marry M’sieu’ Varley--hein?”
The humour died out of Finden’s face. His eyes met the priest’s eyes
steadily. “Did I say that? Then my tongue wasn’t making a fool of me,
after all. How did you guess I knew--everything, father?”
“A priest knows many t’ings--so.”
There was a moment of gloom, then the Irishman brightened. He came
straight to the heart of the mystery around which they had been
maneuvering. “Have you seen her husband--Meydon--this year? It isn’t his
usual time to come yet.”
Father Bourassa’s eyes drew those of his friend into, the light of a new
understanding and revelation. They understood and trusted each other.
“Helas! He is there in the hospital,” he answered, and nodded towards
a building not far away, which had been part of an old Hudson’s Bay
Company’s fort. It had been hastily adapted as a hospital for the
smallpox victims.
“Oh, it’s Meydon, is it, that bad case I heard of to-day?”
The priest nodded again and ‘pointed. “Voila, Madame Meydon, she is
coming. She has seen him--her hoosban’.”
Finden’s eyes followed the gesture. The little widow of Jansen was
coming from the hospital, walking slowly towards the river.
“As purty a woman, too--as purty and as straight bewhiles. What is the
matter with him--with Meydon?” Finden asked, after a moment.
“An accident in the woods--so. He arrive, it is las’ night, from Great
Slave Lake.”
Finden sighed. “Ten years ago he was a man to look at twice--before he
did It and got away. Now his own mother wouldn’t know him--bad ‘cess
to him! I knew him from the cradle almost. I spotted him here by a
knife-cut I gave him in the hand when we were lads together. A divil of
a timper always both of us had, but the good-nature was with me, and I
didn’t drink and gamble and carry a pistol. It’s ten years since he did
the killing, down in Quebec, and I don’t suppose the police will get
him now. He’s been counted dead. I recognised him here the night after I
asked her how she liked the name of Finden. She doesn’t know that I
ever knew him. And he didn’t recognise me-twenty-five years since we met
before! It would be better if he went under the sod. Is he pretty sick,
father?”
“He will die unless the surgeon’s knife it cure him before twenty-four
hours, and--”
“And Doctor Brydon is sick, and Doctor Hadley away at Winnipeg, and this
is two hundred miles from nowhere! It looks as if the police’ll never
get him, eh?”
“You have not tell any one--never?”
Finden laughed. “Though I’m not a priest, I can lock myself up as tight
as anny. There’s no tongue that’s so tied, when tying’s needed, as the
one that babbles most bewhiles. Babbling covers a lot of secrets.”
“So you t’ink it better Meydon should die, as Hadley is away and Brydon
is sick-hein?”
“Oh, I think--”
Finden stopped short, for a horse’s hoofs sounded on the turf beside
the house, and presently Varley, the great London surgeon, rounded the
corner and stopped his horse in front of the veranda.
He lifted his hat to the priest. “I hear there’s a bad case at the
hospital,” he said.
“It is ver’ dangerous,” answered Father Bourassa; “but, voila, come in!
There is something cool to drink. Ah yes, he is ver’ bad, that man from
the Great Slave Lake.”
Inside the house, with the cooling drinks, Varley pressed his questions,
and presently, much interested, told at some length of singular cases
which had passed through his hands--one a man with his neck broken, who
had lived for six months afterward.
“Broken as a man’s neck is broken by hanging--dislocation, really--the
disjointing of the medulla oblongata, if you don’t mind technicalities,”
he said. “But I kept him living just the same. Time enough for him
to repent in and get ready to go. A most interesting case. He was a
criminal, too, and wanted to die; but you have to keep life going if you
can, to the last inch of resistance.”
The priest looked thoughtfully out of the window; Finden’s eyes were
screwed up in a questioning way, but neither made any response to
Varley’s remarks. There was a long minute’s silence. They were all three
roused by hearing a light footstep on the veranda.
Father Bourassa put down his glass and hastened into the hallway.
Finden caught a glimpse of a woman’s figure, and, without a word, passed
abruptly from the dining-room where they were, into the priest’s study,
leaving Varley alone. Varley turned to look after him, stared, and
shrugged his shoulders.
“The manners of the West,” he said good-humouredly, and turned again to
the hallway, from whence came the sound of the priest’s voice.
Presently there was another voice--a woman’s. He flushed slightly and
involuntarily straightened himself.
“Valerie,” he murmured.
An instant afterwards she entered the room with the priest. She was
dressed in a severely simple suit of grey, which set off to advantage
her slim, graceful figure. There seemed no reason why she should have
been called the little widow of Jansen, for she was not small, but
she was very finely and delicately made, and the name had been but an
expression of Jansen’s paternal feeling for her. She had always had a
good deal of fresh colour, but to-day she seemed pale, though her eyes
had a strange disturbing light. It was not that they brightened on
seeing this man before her; they had been brighter, burningly bright,
when she left the hospital, where, since it had been built, she had been
the one visitor of authority--Jansen had given her that honour. She had
a gift of smiling, and she smiled now, but it came from grace of mind
rather than from humour. As Finden had said, “She was for ever acting,
and never doin’ any harm by it.”
Certainly she was doing no harm by it now; nevertheless, it was acting.
Could it be otherwise, with what was behind her life--a husband who had
ruined her youth, had committed homicide, had escaped capture, but
who had not subsequently died, as the world believed he had done, so
circumstantial was the evidence. He was not man enough to make the
accepted belief in his death a fact. What could she do but act, since
the day she got a letter from the Far North, which took her out to
Jansen, nominally to nurse those stricken with smallpox under Father
Bourassa’s care, actually to be where her wretched husband could come to
her once a year, as he had asked with an impossible selfishness?
Each year she had seen him for an hour or less, giving him money,
speaking to him over a gulf so wide that it seemed sometimes as though
her voice could not be heard across it; each year opening a grave to
look at the embalmed face of one who had long since died in shame, which
only brought back the cruellest of all memories, that which one would
give one’s best years to forget. With a fortitude beyond description she
had faced it, gently, quietly, but firmly faced it--firmly, because she
had to be firm in keeping him within those bounds the invasion of
which would have killed her. And after the first struggle with his
unchangeable brutality it had been easier: for into his degenerate brain
there had come a faint understanding of the real situation and of her.
He had kept his side of the gulf, but gloating on this touch between the
old luxurious, indulgent life, with its refined vices, and this present
coarse, hard life, where pleasures were few and gross. The free Northern
life of toil and hardship had not refined him. He greedily hung over
this treasure, which was not for his spending, yet was his own--as
though in a bank he had hoards of money which he might not withdraw.
So the years had gone on, with their recurrent dreaded anniversaries,
carrying misery almost too great to be borne by this woman mated to the
loathed phantom of a sad, dead life; and when this black day of each
year was over, for a few days afterwards she went nowhere, was seen
by none. Yet, when she did appear again, it was with her old laughing
manner, her cheerful and teasing words, her quick response to the
emotions of others.
So it had gone till Varley had come to follow the open air life for four
months, after a heavy illness due to blood-poisoning got in his surgical
work in London. She had been able to live her life without too great a
struggle till he came. Other men had flattered her vanity, had given her
a sense of power, had made her understand her possibilities, but nothing
more--nothing of what Varley brought with him. And before three months
had gone, she knew that no man had ever interested her as Varley had
done. Ten years before, she would not have appreciated or understood
him, this intellectual, clean-shaven, rigidly abstemious man, whose
pleasures belonged to the fishing-rod and the gun and the horse, and
who had come to be so great a friend of him who had been her best
friend--Father Bourassa. Father Bourassa had come to know the truth--not
from her, for she had ever been a Protestant, but from her husband, who,
Catholic by birth and a renegade from all religion, had had a moment of
spurious emotion, when he went and confessed to Father Bourassa and
got absolution, pleading for the priest’s care of his wife. Afterwards
Father Bourassa made up his mind that the confession had a purpose
behind it other than repentance, and he deeply resented the use to which
he thought he was being put--a kind of spy upon the beautiful woman
whom Jansen loved, and who, in spite of any outward flippancy, was above
reproach.
In vital things the instinct becomes abnormally acute, and, one day,
when the priest looked at her commiseratingly, she had divined what
moved him. However it was, she drove him into a corner with a question
to which he dare not answer yes, but to which he might not answer no,
and did not; and she realised that he knew the truth, and she was the
better for his knowing, though her secret was no longer a secret. She
was not aware that Finden also knew. Then Varley came, bringing a new
joy and interest in her life, and a new suffering also, for she realised
that if she were free, and Varley asked her to marry him, she would
consent.
But when he did ask her, she said no with a pang that cut her heart in
two. He had stayed his four months, and it was now six months, and he
was going at last-tomorrow. He had stayed to give her time to learn to
say yes, and to take her back with him to London; and she knew that he
would speak again to-day, and that she must say no again; but she had
kept him from saying the words till now. And the man who had ruined her
life and had poisoned her true spirit was come back broken and battered.
He was hanging between life and death; and now--for he was going
to-morrow--Varley would speak again.
The half-hour she had just spent in the hospital with Meydon had tried
her cruelly. She had left the building in a vortex of conflicting
emotions, with the call of duty and of honour ringing through a thousand
other voices of temptation and desire, the inner pleadings for a little
happiness while yet she was young. After she married Meydon, there had
only been a few short weeks of joy before her black disillusion came,
and she had realised how bitter must be her martyrdom.
When she left the hospital, she seemed moving in a dream, as one,
intoxicated by some elixir, might move unheeding among event and
accident and vexing life and roaring multitudes. And all the while the
river flowing through the endless prairies, high-banked, ennobled by
living woods, lipped with green, kept surging in her ears, inviting her,
alluring her--alluring her with a force too deep and powerful for weak
human nature to bear for long. It would ease her pain, it said; it would
still the tumult and the storm; it would solve her problem, it would
give her peace. But as she moved along the river-bank among the trees,
she met the little niece of the priest, who lived in his house, singing
as though she was born but to sing, a song which Finden had written and
Father Bourassa had set to music. Did not the distant West know Father
Bourassa’s gift, and did not Protestants attend Mass to hear him play
the organ afterwards? The fresh, clear voice of the child rang through
the trees, stealing the stricken heart away from the lure of the river:
“Will you come back home, where the young larks are singin’?
The door is open wide, and the bells of Lynn are ringin’;
There’s a little lake I know,
And a boat you used to row
To the shore beyond that’s quiet--will you come back home?
Will you come back, darlin’? Never heed the pain and blightin’,
Never trouble that you’re wounded, that you bear the scars of
fightin’;
Here’s the luck o’ Heaven to you,
Here’s the hand of love will brew you
The cup of peace--ah, darlin’, will you come back home?”
She stood listening for a few moments, and, under the spell of the
fresh, young voice, the homely, heart-searching words, and the intimate
sweetness of the woods, the despairing apathy lifted slowly away.
She started forwards again with a new understanding, her footsteps
quickened. She would go to Father Bourassa. He would understand. She
would tell him all. He would help her to do what now she knew she must
do, ask Leonard Varley to save her husband’s life--Leonard Varley to
save her husband’s life!
When she stepped upon the veranda of the priest’s house, she did not
know that Varley was inside. She had no time to think. She was ushered
into the room where he was, with the confusing fact of his presence
fresh upon her. She had had but a word or two with the priest, but
enough for him to know what she meant to do, and that it must be done at
once.
Varley advanced to meet her. She shuddered inwardly to think what a
difference there was between the fallen creature she had left behind
in the hospital and this tall, dark, self-contained man, whose name was
familiar in the surgeries of Europe, who had climbed from being the son
of a clockmaker to his present distinguished place.
“Have you come for absolution, also?” he asked with a smile; “or is it
to get a bill of excommunication against your only enemy--there couldn’t
be more than one?”
Cheerful as his words were, he was shrewdly observing her, for her
paleness, and the strange light in her eyes, gave him a sense of
anxiety. He wondered what trouble was on her.
“Excommunication?” he repeated.
The unintended truth went home. She winced, even as she responded with
that quaint note in her voice which gave humour to her speech. “Yes,
excommunication,” she replied; “but why an enemy? Do we not need to
excommunicate our friends sometimes?”
“That is a hard saying,” he answered soberly. Tears sprang to her eyes,
but she mastered herself, and brought the crisis abruptly.
“I want you to save a man’s life,” she said, with her eyes looking
straight into his. “Will you do it?”
His face grew grave and eager. “I want you to save a man’s happiness,”
he answered. “Will you do it?”
“That man yonder will die unless your skill saves him,” she urged.
“This man here will go away unhappy and alone, unless your heart
befriends him,” he replied, coming closer to her.
“At sunrise to-morrow he goes.” He tried to take her hand.
“Oh, please, please,” she pleaded, with a quick, protesting gesture.
“Sunrise is far off, but the man’s fate is near, and you must save him.
You only can do so, for Doctor Hadley is away, and Doctor Brydon is
sick, and in any case Doctor Brydon dare not attempt the operation
alone. It is too critical and difficult, he says.”
“So I have heard,” he answered, with a new note in his voice, his
professional instinct roused in spite of himself. “Who is this man? What
interests you in him?”
“To how many unknown people have you given your skill for nothing--your
skill and all your experience to utter strangers, no matter how low or
poor! Is it not so? Well, I cannot give to strangers what you have given
to so many, but I can help in my own way.”
“You want me to see the man at once?”
“If you will.”
“What is his name? I know of his accident and the circumstances.”
She hesitated for an instant, then said, “He is called Draper--a trapper
and woodsman.”
“But I was going away to-morrow at sunrise. All my arrangements are
made,” he urged, his eyes holding hers, his passion swimming in his eyes
again.
“But you will not see a man die, if you can save him?” she pleaded,
unable now to meet his look, its mastery and its depth.
Her heart had almost leaped with joy at the suggestion that he could not
stay; but as suddenly self-reproach and shame filled her mind, and she
had challenged him so. But yet, what right had she to sacrifice this man
she loved to the perverted criminal who had spoiled her youth and taken
away from her every dear illusion of her life and heart? By every right
of justice and humanity she was no more the wife of Henry Meydon than if
she had never seen him. He had forfeited every claim upon her, dragged
in the mire her unspotted life--unspotted, for in all temptation, in her
defenceless position, she had kept the whole commandment; she had, while
at the mercy of her own temperament, fought her way through all, with
a weeping heart and laughing lips. Had she not longed for a little
home with a great love, and a strong, true man? Ah, it had been lonely,
bitterly lonely! Yet she had remained true to the scoundrel, from whom
she could not free herself without putting him in the grasp of the law
to atone for his crime. She was punished for his crimes; she was
denied the exercise of her womanhood in order to shield him. Still she
remembered that once she had loved him, those years ago, when he first
won her heart from those so much better than he, who loved her so much
more honestly; and this memory had helped her in a way. She had tried to
be true to it, that dead, lost thing, of which this man who came once a
year to see her, and now, lying with his life at stake in the hospital,
was the repellent ghost.
“Ah, you will not see him die?” she urged.
“It seems to move you greatly what happens to this man,” he said, his
determined dark eyes searching hers, for she baffled him. If she could
feel so much for a “casual,” why not a little more feeling for him?
Suddenly, as he drew her eyes to him again, there came the conviction
that they were full of feeling for him. They were sending a message,
an appealing, passionate message, which told him more than he had ever
heard from her or seen in her face before. Yes, she was his! Without a
spoken word she had told him so. What, then, held her back? But women
were a race by themselves, and he knew that he must wait till she chose
to have him know what she had unintentionally conveyed but now.
“Yes, I am moved,” she continued slowly. “Who can tell what this man
might do with his life, if it is saved! Don’t you think of that? It
isn’t the importance of a life that’s at stake; it’s the importance of
living; and we do not live alone, do we?”
His mind was made up. “I will not, cannot promise anything till I have
seen him. But I will go and see him, and I’ll send you word later what I
can do, or not do. Will that satisfy you? If I cannot do it, I will come
to say good-by.”
Her face was set with suppressed feeling. She held out her hand to him
impulsively, and was about to speak, but suddenly caught the hand away
again from his thrilling grasp and, turning hurriedly, left the room. In
the hall she met Father Bourassa.
“Go with him to the hospital,” she whispered, and disappeared through
the doorway.
Immediately after she had gone, a man came driving hard to bring Father
Bourassa to visit a dying Catholic in the prairie, and it was Finden who
accompanied Varley to the hospital, waited for him till his examination
of the “casual” was concluded, and met him outside.
“Can it be done?” he asked of Varley. “I’ll take word to Father
Bourassa.”
“It can be done--it will be done,” answered Varley absently. “I do not
understand the man. He has been in a different sphere of life. He tried
to hide it, but the speech--occasionally! I wonder.”
“You wonder if he’s worth saving?”
Varley shrugged his shoulders impatiently. “No, that’s not what I
meant.”
Finden smiled to himself. “Is it a difficult case?” he asked.
“Critical and delicate; but it has been my specialty.”
“One of the local doctors couldn’t do it, I suppose?”
“They would be foolish to try.”
“And you are going away at sunrise to-morrow?”
“Who told you that?” Varley’s voice was abrupt, impatient.
“I heard you say so-everybody knows it.... That’s a bad man yonder,
Varley.” He jerked his thumb towards the hospital. “A terrible bad man,
he’s been. A gentleman once, and fell down--fell down hard. He’s done
more harm than most men. He’s broken a woman’s heart and spoilt her
life, and, if he lives, there’s no chance for her, none at all. He
killed a man, and the law wants him; and she can’t free herself without
ruining him; and she can’t marry the man she loves because of that
villain yonder, crying for his life to be saved. By Josh and by Joan,
but it’s a shame, a dirty shame, it is!”
Suddenly Varley turned and gripped his arm with fingers of steel.
“His name--his real name?”
“His name’s Meydon--and a dirty shame it is, Varley.”
Varley was white. He had been leading his horse and talking to Finden.
He mounted quickly now, and was about to ride away, but stopped short
again. “Who knows--who knows the truth?” he asked.
“Father Bourassa and me--no others,” he answered. “I knew Meydon thirty
years ago.”
There was a moment’s hesitation, then Varley said hoarsely, “Tell
me--tell me all.”
When all was told, he turned his horse towards the wide waste of the
prairie, and galloped away. Finden watched him till he was lost to view
beyond the bluff.
“Now, a man like that, you can’t guess what he’ll do,” he said
reflectively. “He’s a high-stepper, and there’s no telling what
foolishness will get hold of him. It’d be safer if he got lost on
the prairie for twenty-four hours. He said that Meydon’s only got
twenty-four hours, if the trick isn’t done! Well--”
He took a penny from his pocket. “I’ll toss for it. Heads he does it,
and tails he doesn’t.”
He tossed. It came down heads. “Well, there’s one more fool in the world
than I thought,” he said philosophically, as though he had settled the
question; as though the man riding away into the prairie with a dark
problem to be solved had told the penny what he meant to do.
Mrs. Meydon, Father Bourassa, and Finden stood in the little
waiting-room of the hospital at Jansen, one at each window, and watched
the wild thunderstorm which had broken over the prairie. The white
heliographs of the elements flashed their warnings across the black sky,
and the roaring artillery of the thunder came after, making the circle
of prairie and tree and stream a theatre of anger and conflict. The
streets of Jansen were washed with flood, and the green and gold things
of garden and field and harvest crumbled beneath the sheets of rain.
The faces at the window of the little room of the hospital, however,
were but half-conscious of the storm; it seemed only an accompaniment of
their thoughts, to typify the elements of tragedy surrounding them.
For Varley there had been but one thing to do. A life might be saved,
and it was his duty to save it. He had ridden back from the prairie as
the sun was setting the night before, and had made all arrangements at
the hospital, giving orders that Meydon should have no food whatever
till the operation was performed the next afternoon, and nothing to
drink except a little brandy-and-water.
The operation was performed successfully, and Varley had issued from
the operating-room with the look of a man who had gone through an ordeal
which had taxed his nerve to the utmost, to find Valerie Meydon waiting,
with a piteous, dazed look in her eyes. But this look passed when she
heard him say, “All right!” The words brought a sense of relief, for
if he had failed it would have seemed almost unbearable in the
circumstances--the cup of trembling must be drunk to the dregs.
Few words had passed between them, and he had gone, while she remained
behind with Father Bourassa, till the patient should wake from the sleep
into which he had fallen when Varley left.
But within two hours they sent for Varley again, for Meydon was in
evident danger. Varley had come, and had now been with the patient for
some time.
At last the door opened and Varley came in quickly. He beckoned to Mrs.
Meydon and to Father Bourassa. “He wishes to speak with you,” he said to
her. “There is little time.”
Her eyes scarcely saw him, as she left the room and passed to where
Meydon lay nerveless, but with wide-open eyes, waiting for her. The
eyes closed, however, before she reached the bed. Presently they opened
again, but the lids remained fixed. He did not hear what she said.
......................
In the little waiting-room, Finden said to Varley, “What happened?”
“Food was absolutely forbidden, but he got it from another patient early
this morning while the nurse was out for a moment. It has killed him.”
“‘Twas the least he could do, but no credit’s due him. It was to be. I’m
not envying Father Bourassa nor her there with him.”
Varley made no reply. He was watching the receding storm with eyes which
told nothing.
Finden spoke once more, but Varley did not hear him. Presently the door
opened and Father Bourassa entered. He made a gesture of the hand to
signify that all was over.
Outside, the sun was breaking through the clouds upon the Western
prairie, and there floated through the evening air the sound of a
child’s voice singing beneath the trees that fringed the river:
“Will you come back, darlin’? Never heed the pain and blightin’,
Never trouble that you’re wounded, that you bear the scars of
fightin’;
Here’s the luck o’ Heaven to you,
Here’s the hand of love will brew you
The cup of peace-ah, darlin’, will you come back home?”