Kitty slept placidly till six o’clock. She was not aware of Anthony’s
leaving her or of his whispered conversation with Peckham at her door.
She woke to a bright fire and her morning tea with a sense of unusual
security. Peckham always lit her fire early and brought her tea, but
that was usually after a bad night, and this had been a good one.
Kitty’s arm and shoulder felt numb and stiff from the recent attack, but
mere discomfort was a small thing after acute pain. It was a minute or
two before Kitty remembered that the day held a new experience for her.
Her nerves rose unfalteringly to meet it.
“Well, Peckham,” she said, “is it a nice day? Am I to have nothing to
eat, just when I’m hungry?”
“That’s Captain Arden’s orders, Miss Kitty,” said Peckham, firmly, “and
I don’t need to have starched caps and aprons to carry them out. It’s
not many gentlemen would have been wishful to do their nursing
themselves, with me by way of being hands and feet to them, when they
could have had all the certificated sisters, or whatever they call
themselves, and welcome. If I’d been his mother, Captain Arden couldn’t
be more considerate of my feelings, and I can’t say a word to thank him,
Miss Kitty. I should say Ma’am, for fear of not looking like flint, the
way the young ladies do in the hospitals.”
“Dear old Peckham!” said Kitty. “I’ll tell him you’re pleased. Is the
cook down-stairs giving him a good breakfast?”
“I dare say he’ll be able to eat it,” said Peckham, dubiously. “I don’t
wish to say anything about other people’s servants at a moment like
this, Miss Kitty; I will only remark that they mean well and leave it at
that. The h’omlette the cook made him last night looked trod on, and the
tweeny maid wears corsets that pinch her to the bone, and scamps her
work according, as well she may. Only one cup of tea, please, Miss
Kitty, Captain Arden says, and then to lie still till he comes up to
you. You’re not to have no hair pins in, and stockings you must. I wish
I could have gone in with you, my dear lamb, but the captain says he’ll
take care of you there himself.”
“Pooh!” said Kitty, “I sha’n’t need any taking care of. Don’t make faces
at me, Peckham. I know you want to say something religious to me, and I
don’t like religion first thing in the morning. Have you brought in the
lace cap with the butterflies on and my best lawn nightgown? I’ll wear
my blue satin dressing-gown with the old lace collar.”
“I ironed the butterfly cap last night, Miss Kitty,” said Peckham,
severely, “though I must say I think it out of place, butterflies not
being what you should call upon in a time like the present.”
“I don’t know about that, Peckham,” said Kitty. “You’re no more likely
to suit eternity plain than pretty; rather less, I should think.
However, I’ll turn up here all right again, don’t you fret. I shall just
buzz off and then buzz back again, and don’t forget I want the paste
buckles on the blue slippers.”
Peckham produced the blue slippers.
“You stick to Captain Arden, whatever happens,” Kitty added; “he’ll take
care of you. Papa’s no good, poor old thing! I dare say he’d like to be,
but he’s like me; he has expensive tastes. Is that you, Tony? Come in
and see what I look like. It’s a pity you aren’t going to have more
doctors. I shall be rather wasted on only two of you.”
Kitty laughed at him from the fireside. She stood there, blue and white,
like one of the June butterflies that haunt the down country.
“You haven’t seen my post,” she said. “Henry has sent me pink roses, and
your mother a box of her own flowers, the flame-color cyclamen I love
so. It was too sweet of her. And here’s a wire from Daphne. ‘All love
and sympathy. Coming up to-morrow.’ Of course you must stop her; their
baby’s nearly due, isn’t it? But tell her I was awfully glad she wanted
to come; but I’ll tell her that myself, of course, later on. Your people
are most awfully nice, Tony. I’m not surprised—” Kitty broke off
suddenly. She was going to say that she was not surprised he had not
wanted her to know them, but it might hurt him to remember this now; so
she said instead: “I’m not surprised. You’re rather nice yourself.” She
looked up at him with the old provocative light in her eyes.
Anthony drew her to an arm-chair by the fire.
“I didn’t mean you to get dressed so soon,” he said gently. “Hilton
Laurence may be a little late.”
He sat down opposite her, and Kitty drew a cigarette out of a long
silver box, lit it, and put it between his lips.
“You’ll feel happier smoking,” she said kindly. “Men always feel so
stupid before things happen; they don’t know what to do with their
minds. It must be specially boring if they’re clever like you, Tony,
because then they expect to say such awfully good things, and no one can
say good things at last moments.”
“I don’t know that I want to say anything good,” said Anthony; “but it’s
true there are things I’d like to say to you.” He spoke as unemotionally
as possible, but the words forced themselves out of him.
[Illustration: _Like one of the June butterflies that haunt the down
country._]
He could not let her go without a sign into the dark. She would never
hear or speak to him again, because before she had recovered from the
operation, when they had left Kitty in his care, he intended to inject
sufficient morphia to prevent her coming round. He had the syringe in
his pocket now, and as he looked across at her, his mind was registering
the weight of the moments which lay between her life and his action.
“You do trust me, Kitty?” he asked her in a low voice—“trust me to do
what I think best for you?”
Kitty laughed.
“Oh, yes,” she said gently; “you’ll always do right, poor old thing.
Perhaps I might be afraid of what’s right, but I couldn’t be afraid you
wouldn’t do it.”
“You needn’t be afraid, Kitty,” said Anthony, holding her eyes. “I
should do what was wrong without hesitation if I thought it could help
you.”
“That’s nice of you,” said Kitty, appreciatively. “I like people to say
they don’t mind what they do for me; but, still, don’t do wrong. It
would only make you feel uncomfortable. I shall get on all right. D’you
like my buckles?”
Anthony said he did like her buckles.
The room seemed full of the clumsiness of great moments. There was so
much that lay unachieved between them, everything, except the slender
thread of their strange tenderness. Anthony found that he could say no
more; his heart was dumb. He took her in his arms and kissed her. He was
intensely aware of her life, of the response in her, the supple
sweetness of her youth and its surrender; and deeper still he was aware
that his own strength, which he held back for the sake of her frailness,
was as incomplete to hold or protect her as if he had been a cripple.
Her slight, delicate body dragged at the root of his being. Her eyes
smiled into his, sunny, dauntless, challenging eyes, as laughing as an
open stream.
“There,” she said, “off you go to meet your old wise men. Don’t worry
about me. It’ll amuse me to think of all the funny things that may be
going to happen in another half-hour.”
Anthony forced himself to leave her, but his whole being resisted his
will. He felt himself one with Kitty; to go from her was like falling
over a cliff.
He guessed by the slam of the front door that Hilton Laurence had
arrived. He bent his head to meet her lips and left her. It was a cold,
black morning. The little, empty room Anthony had arranged as a theater
was very hot and light, a large fire burned at red heat, and all the
lights were on.
“You’d better have a pick-me-up,” Hilton Laurence observed to Anthony
after they had made their brief arrangements.
“I don’t need one,” said Anthony, quietly. “Shall I fetch her?”
Laurence nodded.
“It’s a rum job not having a nurse,” said the anesthetist, fretfully. “I
do dislike innovations in an operation case.”
“Oh, well, as long as your tools are handy, and you have a man with a
head on to stand by you,” said Laurence, cheerfully, “it’s all the same
in the end. Nurses have a nice look and save a good deal of bother,
especially with a nervous patient. But this isn’t a nervous patient.
She’s had a lot to fight through, poor little woman!”
“For a long job like this, chloroform is the most satisfactory,” said
the anesthetist. “However, we can start with a mixture and see how she
stands it.”
The amazing vision of Kitty broke off their conversation. She had never
looked prettier in her life. The long, blue gown, the butterfly cap, the
delicately reddened lips, brought out the intensity of her great, dark
eyes, alive with spirit and laughter. She wrinkled up her nose as she
entered.
“You poor old things! how hot you have made it for yourselves!” she
said. “I shall soon be the only comfortable person in the room.”
She shook hands with Laurence and the anesthetist, and with a quick
movement sprang sidewise to the table, swinging her feet toward the
floor.
“You didn’t think I could do that with one arm in a sling, did you?” she
asked gaily. “That’s the advantage of being light.”
Her breathing came as swiftly and easily as a child’s. Anthony stood on
one side of her, his hand on her wrist, and the anesthetist on the
other.
Her eyes smiled across the table at Hilton Laurence, and then closed.
She opened them as the anesthetist, satisfied by his examination, began
to give her his last directions in soothing professional tones. Her lips
curved in a faint mocking smile. She looked away from him to Anthony;
behind the laughter in her eyes was a sudden gleam of reassurance. It
was as if her spirit gathered itself up together and called to him not
for help, but to give him help. She had never said in words that she
loved him, but her eyes said it now, definitely, completely, without
wavering. Then they closed finally and did not open again.
“She’s off like a bird,” said the anesthetist, with satisfaction.
Hilton Laurence reappeared from behind a screen ready to begin his task.
No one spoke for a time.
Then Anthony became aware that there was another presence in the room.
It was the same power he had fought the night before.
It filled the room with a strange, preliminary tension before it began
to act.
Anthony’s outer attention was fixed upon Laurence’s needs, but his inner
faculties concentrated to encounter this new element. As he did so, he
discovered that the whole force of his centered will was useless. Hilton
Laurence and his unrivaled skill, the anesthetist and his intent
watchfulness, were nothing against this unseen power; they were blown
before it like leaves in a wind.
In a moment of terrible despair Anthony felt himself flung back and
beaten before the battle had begun. The unseen force had swept them all
aside and broken its way into the life of Kitty. There was a moment of
suspense, and then as quickly as his despair there shot into Anthony’s
brain an amazing and sharp relief.
He knew in a flash that this power was not an enemy. It was true it tore
to pieces the husk of the beloved life, but mercy was at the root of the
destruction. It was tearing her to pieces because the pieces were in the
way, life itself was in the way of Kitty; and Anthony became aware that
what he thought was his enemy was an immense reinforcement.
Once more he centered his will in the struggle, but he went with the
stream now and no longer threw his impotence against it.
He alone was aware of the unseen power, but he saw the others moving at
its bidding.
Anthony knew what had happened to Kitty before the eyes of the
anesthetist had caught the sudden change. He leaned forward and said
quietly—he heard the words slip out into the room without effort or
excitement—“She’s gone.”
Hilton Laurence, bending over a severed vein, said:
“Nonsense! my dear chap, keep your head. She’s as right as rain.” But he
looked up sharply as the anesthetist cried:
“By Jove! he’s right! She’s gone!”
Anthony stood by them curiously unconcerned, while Laurence and the
anesthetist tried one after the other their useless remedies. He obeyed
their flung directions automatically, threw open the window, drew out
the oxygen-cylinder, and filled it; but there was no flicker of a
response.
He had prepared everything. Nothing had been forgotten or overlooked,
and all the time they used their ineffectual, puny efforts over Kitty’s
little broken body, Anthony felt his heart singing within him. They
could not set back the clock. Kitty had escaped them. She was no longer
there.
Swiftly, simply as the lift of a gull’s wing, she had flown, and not for
anything in all the world would Anthony have recalled her.
After a time Hilton Laurence turned away from the table.
“I’m awfully sorry, old boy,” he said defensively. “You see for
yourself, don’t you—it’s no damned good?”
“I’m sure I don’t understand it,” said the anesthetist more defensively
still. “I took every precaution. I’ve never had a case slip like that
before. It’s most disconcerting. I needn’t say, Arden, I’m most terribly
sorry.”
They stood looking at Anthony like school-boys detected in crime by the
head-master. Anthony turned away his face so that they could not see the
triumph in his eyes.
“Of course you did everything,” he said reassuringly, “everything you
could. I am perfectly satisfied that nothing could have saved her. The
lungs were not working properly, and the heart couldn’t carry on. It was
always a risk, but I feel we were justified in trying it.”
“More than justified,” said Laurence in a relieved tone. “In my opinion
it would have been criminal not to have tried. I am most thankful, my
dear boy, you can see it all so sanely.”
“I think I’ll carry her back into her room now,” said Anthony,
uncertainly.
The two men stood aside to let him pass with his light burden.
Peckham was standing by the bed in Kitty’s room. He laid her down
without speaking, and looked across at Peckham.
“She’s all right,” he said gently; “more all right now than we could
ever have made her, Peckham.”
Peckham bowed her head.
“Yes, sir,” she murmured between her sobs. “I felt she was going to be
took. She do look just as she did, poor lamb, when she was a little
girl, sir. One couldn’t, if I may say so, take her naughtiness to heart,
and I can’t go for to believe the good Lord will be any harder.”
Then Peckham left him.
He was alone now with his wife. She was broken like a toy by the hand of
science to which he had entrusted her. All his desires were frustrated
and his endeavors destroyed. He had not even saved Kitty. Something else
had intervened to save her. Anthony was not aware of this power now; the
unresponsiveness of death closed down on him.
His eyes fixed themselves on Kitty’s little lace cap made in the shape
of butterflies, and this last futility broke his heart.