brow, and as Justine slipped away after dinner she felt that she left
Bessy to something more serious than the usual business conference.
How serious, she was to learn that very night, when, in the small hours,
her friend burst in on her tearfully. Bessy was ruined--ruined--that was
what Mr. Tredegar had come to tell her! She might have known he would
not have travelled to Lynbrook for a trifle.... She had expected to find
herself cramped, restricted--to be warned that she must "manage,"
hateful word!... But this! This was incredible! Unendurable! There was
no money to build the gymnasium--none at all! And all because it had
been swallowed up at Westmore--because the ridiculous changes there,
the changes that nobody wanted, nobody approved of--that Truscomb and
all the other experts had opposed and derided from the first--these
changes, even modified and arrested, had already involved so much of her
income, that it might be years--yes, he said _years_!--before she would
feel herself free again--free of her own fortune, of Cicely's
fortune...of the money poor Dick Westmore had meant his wife and child
to enjoy!
Justine listened anxiously to this confused outpouring of resentments.
Bessy's born incapacity for figures made it indeed possible that the
facts came on her as a surprise--that she had quite forgotten the
temporary reduction of her income, and had begun to imagine that what
she had saved in one direction was hers to spend in another. All this
was conceivable. But why had Mr. Tredegar drawn so dark a picture of the
future? Or was it only that, thwarted of her immediate desire, Bessy's
disappointment blackened the farthest verge of her horizon? Justine,
though aware of her friend's lack of perspective, suspected that a
conniving hand had helped to throw the prospect out of drawing....
Could it be possible, then, that Mr. Tredegar was among those who
desired a divorce? That the influences at which Mrs. Ansell had hinted
proceeded not only from Blanche Carbury and her group? Helpless amid
this rush of forebodings, Justine could do no more than soothe and
restrain--to reason would have been idle. She had never till now
realized how completely she had lost ground with Bessy.
"The humiliation--before my friends! Oh, I was warned...my father, every
one...for Cicely's sake I was warned...but I wouldn't listen--and _now_!
From the first it was all he cared for--in Europe, even, he was always
dragging me to factories. _Me?_--I was only the owner of Westmore! He
wanted power--power, that's all--when he lost it he left me...oh, I'm
glad now my baby is dead! Glad there's nothing between us--nothing,
nothing in the world to tie us together any longer!"
The disproportion between this violent grief and its trivial cause would
have struck Justine as simply grotesque, had she not understood that the
incident of the gymnasium, which followed with cumulative pressure on a
series of similar episodes, seemed to Bessy like the reaching out of a
retaliatory hand--a mocking reminder that she was still imprisoned in
the consequences of her unhappy marriage.
Such folly seemed past weeping for--it froze Justine's compassion into
disdain, till she remembered that the sources of our sorrow are
sometimes nobler than their means of expression, and that a baffled
unappeased love was perhaps the real cause of Bessy's anger against her
husband.
At any rate, the moment was a critical one, and Justine remembered with
a pang that Mrs. Ansell had foreseen such a contingency, and implored
her to take measures against it. She had refused, from a sincere dread
of precipitating a definite estrangement--but had she been right in
judging the situation so logically? With a creature of Bessy's emotional
uncertainties the result of contending influences was really
incalculable--it might still be that, at this juncture, Amherst's return
would bring about a reaction of better feelings....
Justine sat and mused on these things after leaving her friend exhausted
upon a tearful pillow. She felt that she had perhaps taken too large a
survey of the situation--that the question whether there could ever be
happiness between this tormented pair was not one to concern those who
struggled for their welfare. Most marriages are a patch-work of jarring
tastes and ill-assorted ambitions--if here and there, for a moment, two
colours blend, two textures are the same, so much the better for the
pattern! Justine, certainly, could foresee in reunion no positive
happiness for either of her friends; but she saw positive disaster for
Bessy in separation from her husband....
Suddenly she rose from her chair by the falling fire, and crossed over
to the writing-table. She would write to Amherst herself--she would tell
him to come. The decision once reached, hope flowed back to her
heart--the joy of action so often deceived her into immediate faith in
its results!
"Dear Mr. Amherst," she wrote, "the last time I saw you, you told me you
would remember what I said. I ask you to do so now--to remember that I
urged you not to be away too long. I believe you ought to come back now,
though I know Bessy will not ask you to. I am writing without her
knowledge, but with the conviction that she needs you, though perhaps
without knowing it herself...."
She paused, and laid down her pen. Why did it make her so happy to write
to him? Was it merely the sense of recovered helpfulness, or something
warmer, more personal, that made it a joy to trace his name, and to
remind him of their last intimate exchange of words? Well--perhaps it
was that too. There were moments when she was so mortally lonely that
any sympathetic contact with another life sent a glow into her
veins--that she was thankful to warm herself at any fire.
XXV
BESSY, languidly glancing through her midday mail some five days later,
uttered a slight exclamation as she withdrew her finger-tip from the
flap of the envelope she had begun to open.
It was a black sleety day, with an east wind bowing the trees beyond the
drenched window-panes, and the two friends, after luncheon, had
withdrawn to the library, where Justine sat writing notes for Bessy,
while the latter lay back in her arm-chair, in the state of dreamy
listlessness into which she always sank when not under the stimulus of
amusement or exercise.
She sat suddenly upright as her eyes fell on the letter.
"I beg your pardon! I thought it was for me," she said, holding it out
to Justine.
The latter reddened as she glanced at the superscription. It had not
occurred to her that Amherst would reply to her appeal: she had pictured
him springing on the first north-bound train, perhaps not even pausing
to announce his return to his wife.... And to receive his letter under
Bessy's eye was undeniably embarrassing, since Justine felt the
necessity of keeping her intervention secret.
But under Bessy's eye she certainly was--it continued to rest on her
curiously, speculatively, with an under-gleam of malicious significance.
"So stupid of me--I can't imagine why I should have expected my husband
to write to me!" Bessy went on, leaning back in lazy contemplation of
her other letters, but still obliquely including Justine in her angle of
vision.
The latter, after a moment's pause, broke the seal and read.
"Millfield, Georgia.
"My dear Miss Brent,
"Your letter reached me yesterday and I have thought it over
carefully. I appreciate the feeling that prompted it--but I don't
know that any friend, however kind and discerning, can give the
final advice in such matters. You tell me you are sure my wife will
not ask me to return--well, under present conditions that seems to
me a sufficient reason for staying away.
"Meanwhile, I assure you that I have remembered all you said to me
that day. I have made no binding arrangement here--nothing to
involve my future action--and I have done this solely because you
asked it. This will tell you better than words how much I value
your advice, and what strong reasons I must have for not following
it now.
"I suppose there are no more exploring parties in this weather. I
wish I could show Cicely some of the birds down here.
"Yours faithfully,
"John Amherst.
"Please don't let my wife ride Impulse."
Latent under Justine's acute consciousness of what this letter meant,
was the sense of Bessy's inferences and conjectures. She could feel them
actually piercing the page in her hand like some hypersensitive visual
organ to which matter offers no obstruction. Or rather, baffled in their
endeavour, they were evoking out of the unseen, heaven knew what
fantastic structure of intrigue--scrawling over the innocent page with
burning evidences of perfidy and collusion....
One thing became instantly clear to her: she must show the letter to
Bessy. She ran her eyes over it again, trying to disentangle the
consequences. There was the allusion to their talk in town--well, she
had told Bessy of that! But the careless reference to their woodland
excursions--what might not Bessy, in her present mood, make of it?
Justine's uppermost thought was of distress at the failure of her plan.
Perhaps she might still have induced Amherst to come back, had it not
been for this accident; but now that hope was destroyed.
She raised her eyes and met Bessy's. "Will you read it?" she said,
holding out the letter.
Bessy received it with lifted brows, and a protesting murmur--but as she
read, Justine saw the blood mount under her clear skin, invade the
temples, the nape, even the little flower-like ears; then it receded as
suddenly, ebbing at last from the very lips, so that the smile with
which she looked up from her reading was as white as if she had been
under the stress of physical pain.
"So you have written my husband to come back?"
"As you see."
Bessy looked her straight in the eyes. "I am very much obliged to
you--extremely obliged!"
Justine met the look quietly. "Which means that you resent my
interference----"
"Oh, I leave you to call it that!" Bessy mocked, tossing the letter down
on the table at her side.
"Bessy! Don't take it in that way. If I made a mistake I did so with the
hope of helping you. How can I stand by, after all these months
together, and see you deliberately destroying your life without trying
to stop you?"
The smile withered on Bessy's lips. "It is very dear and good of you--I
know you're never happy unless you're helping people--but in this case I
can only repeat what my husband says. He and I don't often look at
things in the same light--but I quite agree with him that the management
of such matters is best left to--to the persons concerned."
Justine hesitated. "I might answer that, if you take that view, it was
inconsistent of you to talk with me so openly. You've certainly made me
feel that you wanted help--you've turned to me for it. But perhaps that
does not justify my writing to Mr. Amherst without your knowing it."
Bessy laughed. "Ah, my dear, you knew that if you asked me the letter
would never be sent!"
"Perhaps I did," said Justine simply. "I was trying to help you against
your will."
"Well, you see the result." Bessy laid a derisive touch on the letter.
"Do you understand now whose fault it is if I am alone?"
Justine faced her steadily. "There is nothing in Mr. Amherst's letter to
make me change my opinion. I still think it lies with you to bring him
back."
Bessy raised a glittering face to her--all hardness and laughter. "Such
modesty, my dear! As if I had a chance of succeeding where you failed!"
She sprang up, brushing the curls from her temples with a petulant
gesture. "Don't mind me if I'm cross--but I've had a dose of preaching
from Maria Ansell, and I don't know why my friends should treat me like
a puppet without any preferences of my own, and press me upon a man who
has done his best to show that he doesn't want me. As a matter of fact,
he and I are luckily agreed on that point too--and I'm afraid all the
good advice in the world won't persuade us to change our opinion!"
Justine held her ground. "If I believed that of either of you, I
shouldn't have written--I should not be pleading with you now--And Mr.
Amherst doesn't believe it either," she added, after a pause, conscious
of the risk she was taking, but thinking the words might act like a blow
in the face of a person sinking under a deadly narcotic.
Bessy's smile deepened to a sneer. "I see you've talked me over
thoroughly--and on _his_ views I ought perhaps not to have risked an
opinion----"
"We have not talked you over," Justine exclaimed. "Mr. Amherst could
never talk of you...in the way you think...." And under the light
staccato of Bessy's laugh she found resolution to add: "It is not in
that way that I know what he feels."
"Ah? I should be curious to hear, then----"
Justine turned to the letter, which still lay between them. "Will you
read the last sentence again? The postscript, I mean."
Bessy, after a surprised glance at her, took the letter up with the
deprecating murmur of one who acts under compulsion rather than dispute
about a trifle.
"The postscript? Let me see...'Don't let my wife ride Impulse.'--_Et
puis?_" she murmured, dropping the page again.
"Well, does it tell you nothing? It's a cold letter--at first I thought
so--the letter of a man who believes himself deeply hurt--so deeply that
he will make no advance, no sign of relenting. That's what I thought
when I first read it...but the postscript undoes it all."
Justine, as she spoke, had drawn near Bessy, laying a hand on her arm,
and shedding on her the radiance of a face all charity and sweet
compassion. It was her rare gift, at such moments, to forget her own
relation to the person for whose fate she was concerned, to cast aside
all consciousness of criticism and distrust in the heart she strove to
reach, as pitiful people forget their physical timidity in the attempt
to help a wounded animal.
For a moment Bessy seemed to waver. The colour flickered faintly up her
cheek, her long lashes drooped--she had the tenderest lids!--and all her
face seemed melting under the beams of Justine's ardour. But the letter
was still in her hand--her eyes, in sinking, fell upon it, and she
sounded beneath her breath the fatal phrase: "'I have done this solely
because you asked it.'
"After such a tribute to your influence I don't wonder you feel
competent to set everybody's affairs in order! But take my advice, my
dear--_don't_ ask me not to ride Impulse!"
The pity froze on Justine's lip: she shrank back cut to the quick. For a
moment the silence between the two women rang with the flight of arrowy,
wounding thoughts; then Bessy's anger flagged, she gave one of her
embarrassed half-laughs, and turning back, laid a deprecating touch on
her friend's arm.
"I didn't mean that, Justine...but let us not talk now--I can't!"
Justine did not move: the reaction could not come as quickly in her
case. But she turned on Bessy two eyes full of pardon, full of
speechless pity...and Bessy received the look silently before she moved
to the door and went out.
"Oh, poor thing--poor thing!" Justine gasped as the door closed.
She had already forgotten her own hurt--she was alone again with Bessy's
sterile pain. She stood staring before her for a moment--then her eyes
fell on Amherst's letter, which had fluttered to the floor between them.
The fatal letter! If it had not come at that unlucky moment perhaps she
might still have gained her end.... She picked it up and re-read it.
Yes--there were phrases in it that a wounded suspicious heart might
misconstrue.... Yet Bessy's last words had absolved her.... Why had she
not answered them? Why had she stood there dumb? The blow to her pride
had been too deep, had been dealt too unexpectedly--for one miserable
moment she had thought first of herself! Ah, that importunate,
irrepressible self--the _moi haissable_ of the Christian--if only one
could tear it from one's breast! She had missed an opportunity--her last
opportunity perhaps! By this time, even, a hundred hostile influences,
cold whispers of vanity, of selfishness, of worldly pride, might have
drawn their freezing ring about Bessy's heart....
Justine started up to follow her...then paused, recalling her last
words. "Let us not talk now--I can't!" She had no right to intrude on
that bleeding privacy--if the chance had been hers she had lost it. She
dropped back into her seat at the desk, hiding her face in her hands.
Presently she heard the clock strike, and true to her tireless instinct
of activity, she lifted her head, took up her pen, and went on with the
correspondence she had dropped.... It was hard at first to collect her
thoughts, or even to summon to her pen the conventional phrases that
sufficed for most of the notes. Groping for a word, she pushed aside her
writing and stared out at the sallow frozen landscape framed by the
window at which she sat. The sleet had ceased, and hollows of sunless
blue showed through the driving wind-clouds. A hard sky and a hard
ground--frost-bound ringing earth under rigid ice-mailed trees.
As Justine looked out, shivering a little, she saw a woman's figure
riding down the avenue toward the gate. The figure disappeared behind a
clump of evergreens--showed again farther down, through the boughs of a
skeleton beech--and revealed itself in the next open space as
Bessy--Bessy in the saddle on a day of glaring frost, when no horse
could keep his footing out of a walk!
Justine went to the window and strained her eyes for a confirming
glimpse. Yes--it was Bessy! There was no mistaking that light flexible
figure, every line swaying true to the beat of the horse's stride. But
Justine remembered that Bessy had not meant to ride--had countermanded
her horse because of the bad going.... Well, she was a perfect
horsewoman and had no doubt chosen her surest-footed mount...probably
the brown cob, Tony Lumpkin.
But when did Tony's sides shine so bright through the leafless branches?
And when did he sweep his rider on with such long free play of the
hind-quarters? Horse and rider shot into sight again, rounding the curve
of the avenue near the gates, and in a break of sunlight Justine saw the
glitter of chestnut flanks--and remembered that Impulse was the only
chestnut in the stables....
* * * * *
She went back to her seat and continued writing. Bessy had left a
formidable heap of bills and letters; and when this was demolished,
Justine had her own correspondence to despatch. She had heard that
morning from the matron of Saint Elizabeth's: an interesting "case" was
offered her, but she must come within two days. For the first few hours
she had wavered, loath to leave Lynbrook without some definite light on
her friend's future; but now Amherst's letter had shed that light--or
rather, had deepened the obscurity--and she had no pretext for lingering
on where her uselessness had been so amply demonstrated.
She wrote to the matron accepting the engagement; and the acceptance
involved the writing of other letters, the general reorganizing of that
minute polity, the life of Justine Brent. She smiled a little to think
how easily she could be displaced and transplanted--how slender were her
material impedimenta, how few her invisible bonds! She was as light and
detachable as a dead leaf on the autumn breeze--yet she was in the
season of sap and flower, when there is life and song in the trees!
But she did not think long of herself, for an undefinable anxiety ran
through her thoughts like a black thread. It found expression, now and
then, in the long glances she threw through the window--in her rising to
consult the clock and compare her watch with it--in a nervous snatch of
humming as she paced the room once or twice before going back to her
desk....
Why was Bessy so late? Dusk was falling already--the early end of the
cold slate-hued day. But Bessy always rode late--there was always a
rational answer to Justine's irrational conjectures.... It was the sight
of those chestnut flanks that tormented her--she knew of Bessy's
previous struggles with the mare. But the indulging of idle
apprehensions was not in her nature, and when the tea-tray came, and
with it Cicely, sparkling from a gusty walk, and coral-pink in her cloud
of crinkled hair, Justine sprang up and cast off her cares.
It cost her a pang, again, to see the lamps lit and the curtains
drawn--shutting in the warmth and brightness of the house from that
wind-swept frozen twilight through which Bessy rode alone. But the icy
touch of the thought slipped from Justine's mind as she bent above the
tea-tray, gravely measuring Cicely's milk into a "grown-up" teacup,
hearing the confidential details of the child's day, and capping them
with banter and fantastic narrative.
She was not sorry to go--ah, no! The house had become a prison to her,
with ghosts walking its dreary floors. But to lose Cicely would be
bitter--she had not felt how bitter till the child pressed against her
in the firelight, insisting raptly, with little sharp elbows stabbing
her knee: "And _then_ what happened, Justine?"
The door opened, and some one came in to look at the fire. Justine,
through the mazes of her fairy-tale, was dimly conscious that it was
Knowles, and not one of the footmen...the proud Knowles, who never
mended the fires himself.... As he passed out again, hovering slowly
down the long room, she rose, leaving Cicely on the hearth-rug, and
followed him to the door.
"Has Mrs. Amherst not come in?" she asked, not knowing why she wished to
ask it out of the child's hearing.
"No, miss. I looked in myself to see--thinking she might have come by
the side-door."
"She may have gone to her sitting-room."
"She's not upstairs."
They both paused. Then Justine said: "What horse was she riding?"
"Impulse, Miss." The butler looked at his large responsible watch. "It's
not late--" he said, more to himself than to her.
"No. Has she been riding Impulse lately?"
"No, Miss. Not since that day the mare nearly had her off. I understood
Mr. Amherst did not wish it."
Justine went back to Cicely and the fairy-tale.--As she took up the
thread of the Princess's adventures, she asked herself why she had ever
had any hope of helping Bessy. The seeds of disaster were in the poor
creature's soul.... Even when she appeared to be moved, lifted out of
herself, her escaping impulses were always dragged back to the magnetic
centre of hard distrust and resistance that sometimes forms the core of
soft-fibred natures. As she had answered her husband's previous appeal
by her flight to the woman he disliked, so she answered this one by
riding the horse he feared.... Justine's last illusions crumbled. The
distance between two such natures was unspannable. Amherst had done well
to remain away...and with a tidal rush her sympathies swept back to his
side....
* * * * *
The governess came to claim Cicely. One of the footmen came to put
another log on the fire. Then the rite of removing the tea-table was
majestically performed--the ceremonial that had so often jarred on
Amherst's nerves. As she watched it, Justine had a vague sense of the
immutability of the household routine--a queer awed feeling that,
whatever happened, a machine so perfectly adjusted would work on
inexorably, like a natural law....
She rose to look out of the window, staring vainly into blackness
between the parted curtains. As she turned back, passing the
writing-table, she noticed that Cicely's irruption had made her forget
to post her letters--an unusual oversight. A glance at the clock told
her that she was not too late for the mail--reminding her, at the same
time, that it was scarcely three hours since Bessy had started on her
ride.... She saw the foolishness of her fears. Even in winter, Bessy
often rode for more than three hours; and now that the days were growing
longer----
Suddenly reassured, Justine went out into the hall, intending to carry
her batch of letters to the red pillar-box by the door. As she did so, a
cold blast struck her. Could it be that for once the faultless routine
of the house had been relaxed, that one of the servants had left the
outer door ajar? She walked over to the vestibule--yes, both doors were
wide. The night rushed in on a vicious wind. As she pushed the vestibule
door shut, she heard the dogs sniffing and whining on the threshold. She
crossed the vestibule, and heard voices and the tramping of feet in the
darkness--then saw a lantern gleam. Suddenly Knowles shot out of the
night--the lantern struck on his bleached face.
Justine, stepping back, pressed the electric button in the wall, and the
wide door-step was abruptly illuminated, with its huddled, pushing,
heavily-breathing group...black figures writhing out of darkness,
strange faces distorted in the glare.
"Bessy!" she cried, and sprang forward; but suddenly Wyant was before
her, his hand on her arm; and as the dreadful group struggled by into
the hall, he froze her to him with a whisper: "The spine----"
XXVI
WITHIN Justine there was a moment's darkness; then, like terror-struck
workers rallying to their tasks, every faculty was again at its post,
receiving and transmitting signals, taking observations, anticipating
orders, making her brain ring with the hum of a controlled activity.
She had known the sensation before--the transmuting of terror and pity
into this miraculous lucidity of thought and action; but never had it
snatched her from such depths. Oh, thank heaven for her knowledge
now--for the trained mind that could take command of her senses and bend
them firmly to its service!
Wyant seconded her well, after a moment's ague-fit of fear. She pitied
and pardoned the moment, aware of its cause, and respecting him for the
way in which he rose above it into the clear air of professional
self-command. Through the first hours they worked shoulder to shoulder,
conscious of each other only as of kindred will-powers, stretched to the
utmost tension of discernment and activity, and hardly needing speech or
look to further their swift co-operation. It was thus that she had known
him in the hospital, in the heat of his youthful zeal: the doctor she
liked best to work with, because no other so tempered ardour with
judgment.
The great surgeon, arriving from town at midnight, confirmed his
diagnosis: there was undoubted injury to the spine. Other consultants
were summoned in haste, and in the winter dawn the verdict was
pronounced--a fractured vertebra, and possibly lesion of the cord....
Justine got a moment alone when the surgeons returned to the sick-room.
Other nurses were there now, capped, aproned, quickly and silently
unpacking their appliances.... She must call a halt, clear her brain
again, decide rapidly what was to be done next.... Oh, if only the
crawling hours could bring Amherst! It was strange that there was no
telegram yet--no, not strange, after all, since it was barely six in the
morning, and her message had not been despatched till seven the night
before. It was not unlikely that, in that little southern settlement,
the telegraph office closed at six.
She stood in Bessy's sitting-room, her forehead pressed to the
window-pane, her eyes straining out into the thin February darkness,
through which the morning star swam white. As soon as she had yielded
her place to the other nurses her nervous tension relaxed, and she hung
again above the deeps of anguish, terrified and weak. In a moment the
necessity for action would snatch her back to a firm footing--her
thoughts would clear, her will affirm itself, all the wheels of the
complex machine resume their functions. But now she felt only the
horror....
She knew so well what was going on in the next room. Dr. Garford, the
great surgeon, who had known her at Saint Elizabeth's, had evidently
expected her to take command of the nurses he had brought from town;
but there were enough without her, and there were other cares which, for
the moment, she only could assume--the despatching of messages to the
scattered family, the incessant telephoning and telegraphing to town,
the general guidance of the household swinging rudderless in the tide of
disaster. Cicely, above all, must be watched over and guarded from
alarm. The little governess, reduced to a twittering heap of fears, had
been quarantined in a distant room till reason returned to her; and the
child, meanwhile, slept quietly in the old nurse's care.
Cicely would wake presently, and Justine must go up to her with a bright
face; other duties would press thick on the heels of this; their feet
were already on the threshold. But meanwhile she could only follow in
imagination what was going on in the other room....
She had often thought with dread of such a contingency. She always
sympathized too much with her patients--she knew it was the joint in her
armour. Her quick-gushing pity lay too near that professional exterior
which she had managed to endue with such a bright glaze of insensibility
that some sentimental patients--without much the matter--had been known
to call her "a little hard." How, then, should she steel herself if it
fell to her lot to witness a cruel accident to some one she loved, and
to have to perform a nurse's duties, steadily, expertly, unflinchingly,
while every fibre was torn with inward anguish?
She knew the horror of it now--and she knew also that her self-enforced
exile from the sick-room was a hundred times worse. To stand there,
knowing, with each tick of the clock, what was being said and done
within--how the great luxurious room, with its pale draperies and
scented cushions, and the hundred pretty trifles strewing the lace
toilet-table and the delicate old furniture, was being swept bare,
cleared for action like a ship's deck, drearily garnished with rows of
instruments, rolls of medicated cotton, oiled silk, bottles, bandages,
water-pillows--all the grim paraphernalia of the awful rites of pain: to
know this, and to be able to call up with torturing vividness that poor
pale face on the pillows, vague-eyed, expressionless, perhaps, as she
had last seen it, or--worse yet--stirred already with the first creeping
pangs of consciousness: to have these images slowly, deliberately burn
themselves into her brain, and to be aware, at the same time, of that
underlying moral disaster, of which the accident seemed the monstrous
outward symbol--ah, this was worse than anything she had ever dreamed!
She knew that the final verdict could not be pronounced till the
operation which was about to take place should reveal the extent of
injury to the spine. Bessy, in falling, must have struck on the back of
her head and shoulders, and it was but too probable that the fractured
vertebra had caused a bruise if not a lesion of the spinal cord. In that
case paralysis was certain--and a slow crawling death the almost
inevitable outcome. There had been cases, of course--Justine's
professional memory evoked them--cases of so-called "recovery," where
actual death was kept at bay, a semblance of life preserved for years in
the poor petrified body.... But the mind shrank from such a fate for
Bessy. And it might still be that the injury to the spine was not
grave--though, here again, the fracturing of the fourth vertebra was
ominous.
The door opened and some one came from the inner room--Wyant, in search
of an instrument-case. Justine turned and they looked at each other.
"It will be now?"
"Yes. Dr. Garford asked if there was no one you could send for."
"No one but Mr. Tredegar and the Halford Gaineses. They'll be here this
evening, I suppose."
They exchanged a discouraged glance, knowing how little difference the
presence of the Halford Gaineses would make.
"He wanted to know if there was no telegram from Amherst."
"No."
"Then they mean to begin."
A nursemaid appeared in the doorway. "Miss Cicely--" she said; and
Justine bounded upstairs.
The day's work had begun. From Cicely to the governess--from the
governess to the housekeeper--from the telephone to the
writing-table--Justine vibrated back and forth, quick, noiseless,
self-possessed--sobering, guiding, controlling her confused and
panic-stricken world. It seemed to her that half the day had elapsed
before the telegraph office at Lynbrook opened--she was at the telephone
at the stroke of the hour. No telegram? Only one--a message from Halford
Gaines--"Arrive at eight tonight." Amherst was still silent! Was there a
difference of time to be allowed for? She tried to remember, to
calculate, but her brain was too crowded with other thoughts.... She
turned away from the instrument discouraged.
Whenever she had time to think, she was overwhelmed by the weight of her
solitude. Mr. Langhope was in Egypt, accessible only through a London
banker--Mrs. Ansell presumably wandering on the continent. Her cables
might not reach them for days. And among the throng of Lynbrook
habitues, she knew not to whom to turn. To loose the Telfer tribe and
Mrs. Carbury upon that stricken house--her thought revolted from it, and
she was thankful to know that February had dispersed their migratory
flock to southern shores. But if only Amherst would come!
Cicely and the tranquillized governess had been despatched on a walk
with the dogs, and Justine was returning upstairs when she met one of
the servants with a telegram. She tore it open with a great throb of
relief. It was her own message to Amherst--_address unknown_....
Had she misdirected it, then? In that first blinding moment her mind
might so easily have failed her. But no--there was the name of the town
before her...Millfield, Georgia...the same name as in his letter.... She
had made no mistake, but he was gone! Gone--and without leaving an
address.... For a moment her tired mind refused to work; then she roused
herself, ran down the stairs again, and rang up the telegraph-office.
The thing to do, of course, was to telegraph to the owner of the
mills--of whose very name she was ignorant!--enquiring where Amherst
was, and asking him to forward the message. Precious hours must be lost
meanwhile--but, after all, they were waiting for no one upstairs.
* * * * *
The verdict had been pronounced: dislocation and fracture of the fourth
vertebra, with consequent injury to the spinal cord. Dr. Garford and
Wyant came out alone to tell her. The surgeon ran over the technical
details, her brain instantly at attention as he developed his diagnosis
and issued his orders. She asked no questions as to the future--she
knew it was impossible to tell. But there were no immediate signs of a
fatal ending: the patient had rallied well, and the general conditions
were not unfavourable.
"You have heard from Mr. Amherst?" Dr. Garford concluded.
"Not yet...he may be travelling," Justine faltered, unwilling to say
that her telegram had been returned. As she spoke there was a tap on the
door, and a folded paper was handed in--a telegram telephoned from the
village.
"Amherst gone South America to study possibilities cotton growing have
cabled our correspondent Buenos Ayres."
Concealment was no longer possible. Justine handed the message to the
surgeon.
"Ah--and there would be no chance of finding his address among Mrs.
Amherst's papers?"
"I think not--no."
"Well--we must keep her alive, Wyant."
"Yes, sir."
* * * * *
At dusk, Justine sat in the library, waiting for Cicely to be brought to
her. A lull had descended on the house--a new order developed out of the
morning's chaos. With soundless steps, with lowered voices, the
machinery of life was carried on. And Justine, caught in one of the
pauses of inaction which she had fought off since morning, was reliving,
for the hundredth time, her few moments at Bessy's bedside....
She had been summoned in the course of the afternoon, and stealing into
the darkened room, had bent over the bed while the nurses noiselessly
withdrew. There lay the white face which had been burnt into her inward
vision--the motionless body, and the head stirring ceaselessly, as
though to release the agitation of the imprisoned limbs. Bessy's eyes
turned to her, drawing her down.
"Am I going to die, Justine?"
"No."
"The pain is...so awful...."
"It will pass...you will sleep...."
"Cicely----"
"She has gone for a walk. You'll see her presently."
The eyes faded, releasing Justine. She stole away, and the nurses came
back.
Bessy had spoken of Cicely--but not a word of her husband! Perhaps her
poor dazed mind groped for him, or perhaps it shrank from his name....
Justine was thankful for her silence. For the moment her heart was
bitter against Amherst. Why, so soon after her appeal and his answer,
had he been false to the spirit of their agreement? This unannounced,
unexplained departure was nothing less than a breach of his tacit
pledge--the pledge not to break definitely with Lynbrook. And why had he
gone to South America? She drew her aching brows together, trying to
retrace a vague memory of some allusion to the cotton-growing
capabilities of the region.... Yes, he had spoken of it once in talking
of the world's area of cotton production. But what impulse had sent him
off on such an exploration? Mere unrest, perhaps--the intolerable burden
of his useless life? The questions spun round and round in her head,
weary, profitless, yet persistent....
It was a relief when Cicely came--a relief to measure out the cambric
tea, to make the terrier beg for ginger-bread, even to take up the
thread of the interrupted fairy-tale--though through it all she was
wrung by the thought that, just twenty-four hours earlier, she and the
child had sat in the same place, listening for the trot of Bessy's
horse....
The day passed: the hands of the clocks moved, food was cooked and
served, blinds were drawn up or down, lamps lit and fires renewed...all
these tokens of the passage of time took place before her, while her
real consciousness seemed to hang in some dim central void, where
nothing happened, nothing would ever happen....
And now Cicely was in bed, the last "long-distance" call was answered,
the last orders to kitchen and stable had been despatched, Wyant had
stolen down to her with his hourly report--"no change"--and she was
waiting in the library for the Gaineses.
Carriage-wheels on the gravel: they were there at last. Justine started up
and went into the hall. As she passed out of the library the outer door
opened, and the gusty night swooped in--as, at the same hour the day
before, it had swooped in ahead of the dreadful procession--preceding now
the carriageful of Hanaford relations: Mr. Gaines, red-glazed, brief and
interrogatory; Westy, small, nervous, ill at ease with his grief; and Mrs.
Gaines, supreme in the possession of a consolatory yet funereal manner,
and sinking on Justine's breast with the solemn whisper: "Have you sent
for the clergyman?"
XXVII
THE house was empty again.
A week had passed since Bessy's accident, and friends and relations had
dispersed. The household had fallen into its routine, the routine of
sickness and silence, and once more the perfectly-adjusted machine was
working on steadily, inexorably, like a natural law....
So at least it seemed to Justine's nerves, intolerably stretched, at
times, on the rack of solitude, of suspense, of forebodings. She had
been thankful when the Gaineses left--doubly thankful when a telegram
from Bermuda declared Mrs. Carbury to be "in despair" at her inability
to fly to Bessy's side--thankful even that Mr. Tredegar's professional
engagements made it impossible for him to do more than come down, every
second or third day, for a few hours; yet, though in some ways it was a
relief to be again in sole command, there were moments when the weight
of responsibility, and the inability to cry out her fears and her
uncertainties, seemed almost unendurable.
Wyant was her chief reliance. He had risen so gallantly above his
weakness, become again so completely the indefatigable worker of former
days, that she accused herself of injustice in ascribing to physical
causes the vague eye and tremulous hand which might merely have
betokened a passing access of nervous sensibility. Now, at any rate, he
had his nerves so well under control, and had shown such a grasp of the
case, and such marked executive capacity, that on the third day after
the accident Dr. Garford, withdrawing his own assistant, had left him in
control at Lynbrook.
At the same time Justine had taken up her attendance in the sick-room,
replacing one of the subordinate nurses who had been suddenly called
away. She had done this the more willingly because Bessy, who was now
conscious for the greater part of the time, had asked for her once or
twice, and had seemed easier when she was in the room. But she still
gave only occasional aid, relieving the other nurses when they dined or
rested, but keeping herself partly free in order to have an eye on the
household, and give a few hours daily to Cicely.
All this had become part of a system that already seemed as old as
memory. She could hardly recall what life had been before the
accident--the seven dreadful days seemed as long as the days of
creation. Every morning she rose to the same report--"no change"--and
every day passed without a word from Amherst. Minor news, of course, had
come: poor Mr. Langhope, at length overtaken at Wady Halfa, was
hastening back as fast as ship and rail could carry him; Mrs. Ansell,
anchored at Algiers with her invalid, cabled anxious enquiries; but
still no word from Amherst. The correspondent at Buenos Ayres had simply
cabled "Not here. Will enquire"--and since then, silence.
Justine had taken to sitting in a small room beyond Amherst's bedroom,
near enough to Bessy to be within call, yet accessible to the rest of
the household. The walls were hung with old prints, and with two or
three photographs of early Italian pictures; and in a low bookcase
Amherst had put the books he had brought from Hanaford--the English
poets, the Greek dramatists, some text-books of biology and kindred
subjects, and a few stray well-worn volumes: Lecky's European Morals,
Carlyle's translation of Wilhelm Meister, Seneca, Epictetus, a German
grammar, a pocket Bacon.
It was unlike any other room at Lynbrook--even through her benumbing
misery, Justine felt the relief of escaping there from the rest of the
great soulless house. Sometimes she took up one of the books and read a
page or two, letting the beat of the verse lull her throbbing brain, or
the strong words of stoic wisdom sink into her heart. And even when
there was no time for these brief flights from reality, it soothed her
to feel herself in the presence of great thoughts--to know that in this
room, among these books, another restless baffled mind had sought escape
from the "dusty answer" of life. Her hours there made her think less
bitterly of Amherst--but also, alas, made her see more clearly the
irreconcilable difference between the two natures she had striven to
reunite. That which was the essence of life to one was a meaningless
shadow to the other; and the gulf between them was too wide for the
imagination of either to bridge.
As she sat there on the seventh afternoon there was a knock on the door
and Wyant entered. She had only time to notice that he was very
pale--she had been struck once or twice with his look of sudden
exhaustion, which passed as quickly as it came--then she saw that he
carried a telegram, and her mind flew back to its central anxiety. She
grew pale herself as she read the message.
"He has been found--at Corrientes. It will take him at least a month to
get here."
"A month--good God!"
"And it may take Mr. Langhope longer." Their eyes met. "It's too
long----?" she asked.
"I don't know--I don't know." He shivered slightly, turning away into
the window.
Justine sat down to dash off messages to Mr. Tredegar and the Gaineses:
Amherst's return must be made known at once. When she glanced up, Wyant
was standing near her. His air of intense weariness had passed, and he
looked calm and ready for action.
"Shall I take these down?"
"No. Ring, please. I want to ask you a few questions."
The servant who answered the bell brought in a tea-tray, and Justine,
having despatched the telegrams, seated herself and began to pour out
her tea. Food had been repugnant to her during the first anguished
unsettled days, but with the resumption of the nurse's systematic habits
the nurse's punctual appetite returned. Every drop of energy must be
husbanded now, and only sleep and nourishment could fill the empty
cisterns.
She held out a cup to Wyant, but he drew back with a gesture of
aversion.
"Thanks; I'm not hungry."
"You ought to eat more."
"No, no. I'm very well."
She lifted her head, revived by the warm draught. The mechanical act of
nourishment performed, her mind leapt back to the prospect of Amherst's
return. A whole month before he reached Lynbrook! He had instructed her
where news might find him on the way ... but a whole month to wait!
She looked at Wyant, and they read each other's thoughts.
"It's a long time," he said.
"Yes."
"But Garford can do wonders--and she's very strong."
Justine shuddered. Just so a skilled agent of the Inquisition might have
spoken, calculating how much longer the power of suffering might be
artificially preserved in a body broken on the wheel....
"How does she seem to you today?"
"The general conditions are about the same. The heart keeps up
wonderfully, but there is a little more oppression of the diaphragm."
"Yes--her breathing is harder. Last night she suffered horribly at
times."
"Oh--she'll suffer," Wyant murmured. "Of course the hypodermics can be
increased."
"Just what did Dr. Garford say this morning?"
"He is astonished at her strength."
"But there's no hope?--I don't know why I ask!"
"Hope?" Wyant looked at her. "You mean of what's called recovery--of
deferring death indefinitely?"
She nodded.
"How can Garford tell--or any one? We all know there have been cases
where such injury to the cord has not caused death. This may be one of
those cases; but the biggest man couldn't say now."
Justine hid her eyes. "What a fate!"
"Recovery? Yes. Keeping people alive in such cases is one of the
refinements of cruelty that it was left for Christianity to invent."
"And yet--?"
"And yet--it's got to be! Science herself says so--not for the patient,
of course; but for herself--for unborn generations, rather. Queer, isn't
it? The two creeds are at one."
Justine murmured through her clasped hands: "I wish she were not so
strong----"
"Yes; it's wonderful what those frail petted bodies can stand. The fight
is going to be a hard one."
She rose with a shiver. "I must go to Cicely----" The rector of Saint
Anne's had called again. Justine, in obedience to Mrs. Gaines's
suggestion, had summoned him from Clifton the day after the accident;
but, supported by the surgeons and Wyant, she had resisted his admission
to the sick-room. Bessy's religious practices had been purely
mechanical: her faith had never been associated with the graver moments
of her life, and the apparition of a clerical figure at her bedside
would portend not consolation but calamity. Since it was all-important
that her nervous strength should be sustained, and the gravity of the
situation kept from her, Mrs. Gaines yielded to the medical commands,
consoled by the ready acquiescence of the rector. But before she left
she extracted a promise that he would call frequently at Lynbrook, and
wait his opportunity to say an uplifting word to Mrs. Amherst.
The Reverend Ernest Lynde, who was a young man, with more zeal than
experience, deemed it his duty to obey this injunction to the letter;
but hitherto he had had to content himself with a talk with the
housekeeper, or a brief word on the doorstep from Wyant. Today, however,
he had asked somewhat insistently for Miss Brent; and Justine, who was
free at the moment, felt that she could not refuse to go down. She had
seen him only in the pulpit, when once or twice, in Bessy's absence, she
had taken Cicely to church: he struck her as a grave young man, with a
fine voice but halting speech. His sermons were earnest but ineffective.
As he rose to meet her, she felt that she should like him better out of
church. His glance was clear and honest, and there was sweetness in his
hesitating smile.
"I am sorry to seem persistent--but I heard you had news of Mr.
Langhope, and I was anxious to know the particulars," he explained.
Justine replied that her message had overtaken Mr. Langhope at Wady
Haifa, and that he hoped to reach Alexandria in time to catch a steamer
to Brindisi at the end of the week.
"Not till then? So it will be almost three weeks--?"
"As nearly as I can calculate, a month."
The rector hesitated. "And Mr. Amherst?"
"He is coming back too."
"Ah, you have heard? I'm glad of that. He will be here soon?"
"No. He is in South America--at Buenos Ayres. There will be no steamer
for some days, and he may not get here till after Mr. Langhope."
Mr. Lynde looked at her kindly, with grave eyes that proffered help.
"This is terrible for you, Miss Brent."
"Yes," Justine answered simply.
"And Mrs. Amherst's condition----?"
"It is about the same."
"The doctors are hopeful?"
"They have not lost hope."
"She seems to keep her strength wonderfully."
"Yes, wonderfully."
Mr. Lynde paused, looking downward, and awkwardly turning his soft
clerical hat in his large kind-looking hands. "One might almost see in
it a dispensation--_we_ should see one, Miss Brent."
"_We?_" She glanced up apologetically, not quite sure that her tired
mind had followed his meaning.
"We, I mean, who believe...that not one sparrow falls to the ground...."
He flushed, and went on in a more mundane tone: "I am glad you have the
hope of Mr. Langhope's arrival to keep you up. Modern science--thank
heaven!--can do such wonders in sustaining and prolonging life that,
even if there is little chance of recovery, the faint spark may be
nursed until...."
He paused again, conscious that the dusky-browed young woman, slenderly
erect in her dark blue linen and nurse's cap, was examining him with an
intentness which contrasted curiously with the absent-minded glance she
had dropped on him in entering.
"In such cases," she said in a low tone, "there is practically no chance
of recovery."
"So I understand."
"Even if there were, it would probably be death-in-life: complete
paralysis of the lower body."
He shuddered. "A dreadful fate! She was so gay and active----"
"Yes--and the struggle with death, for the next few weeks, must involve
incessant suffering...frightful suffering...perhaps vainly...."
"I feared so," he murmured, his kind face paling.
"Then why do you thank heaven that modern science has found such
wonderful ways of prolonging life?"
He raised his head with a start and their eyes met. He saw that the
nurse's face was pale and calm--almost judicial in its composure--and
his self-possession returned to him.
"As a Christian," he answered, with his slow smile, "I can hardly do
otherwise."
Justine continued to consider him thoughtfully. "The men of the older
generation--clergymen, I mean," she went on in a low controlled voice,
"would of course take that view--must take it. But the conditions are so
changed--so many undreamed-of means of prolonging life--prolonging
suffering--have been discovered and applied in the last few years, that
I wondered...in my profession one often wonders...."
"I understand," he rejoined sympathetically, forgetting his youth and
his inexperience in the simple desire to bring solace to a troubled
mind. "I understand your feeling--but you need have no doubt. Human
life is sacred, and the fact that, even in this materialistic age,
science is continually struggling to preserve and prolong it,
shows--very beautifully, I think--how all things work together to
fulfill the divine will."
"Then you believe that the divine will delights in mere pain--mere
meaningless animal suffering--for its own sake?"
"Surely not; but for the sake of the spiritual life that may be
mysteriously wrung out of it."
Justine bent her puzzled brows on him. "I could understand that view of
moral suffering--or even of physical pain moderate enough to leave the
mind clear, and to call forth qualities of endurance and renunciation.
But where the body has been crushed to a pulp, and the mind is no more
than a machine for the registering of sense-impressions of physical
anguish, of what use can such suffering be to its owner--or to the
divine will?"
The young rector looked at her sadly, almost severely. "There, Miss
Brent, we touch on inscrutable things, and human reason must leave the
answer to faith."
Justine pondered. "So that--one may say--Christianity recognizes no
exceptions--?"
"None--none," its authorized exponent pronounced emphatically.
"Then Christianity and science are agreed." She rose, and the young
rector, with visible reluctance, stood up also.
"That, again, is one of the most striking evidences--" he began; and
then, as the necessity of taking leave was forced upon him, he added
appealingly: "I understand your uncertainties, your questionings, and I
wish I could have made my point clearer----"
"Thank you; it is quite clear. The reasons, of course, are different;
but the result is exactly the same."
She held out her hand, smiling sadly on him, and with a sudden return of
youth and self-consciousness, he murmured shyly: "I feel for you"--the
man in him yearning over her loneliness, though the pastor dared not
press his help....
XXVIII
THAT evening, when Justine took her place at the bedside, and the other
two nurses had gone down to supper, Bessy turned her head slightly,
resting her eyes on her friend.
The rose-shaded lamp cast a tint of life on her face, and the dark
circles of pain made her eyes look deeper and brighter. Justine was
almost deceived by the delusive semblance of vitality, and a hope that
was half anguish stirred in her. She sat down by the bed, clasping the
hand on the sheet.
"You feel better tonight?"
"I breathe...better...." The words came brokenly, between long pauses,
but without the hard agonized gasps of the previous night.
"That's a good sign." Justine paused, and then, letting her fingers
glide once or twice over the back of Bessy's hand--"You know, dear, Mr.
Amherst is coming," she leaned down to say.
Bessy's eyes moved again, slowly, inscrutably. She had never asked for
her husband.
"Soon?" she whispered.
"He had started on a long journey--to out-of-the-way places--to study
something about cotton growing--my message has just overtaken him,"
Justine explained.
Bessy lay still, her breast straining for breath. She remained so long
without speaking that Justine began to think she was falling back into
the somnolent state that intervened between her moments of complete
consciousness. But at length she lifted her lids again, and her lips
stirred.
"He will be...long...coming?"
"Some days."
"How...many?"
"We can't tell yet."
Silence again. Bessy's features seemed to shrink into a kind of waxen
quietude--as though her face were seen under clear water, a long way
down. And then, as she lay thus, without sound or movement, two tears
forced themselves through her lashes and rolled down her cheeks.
Justine, bending close, wiped them away. "Bessy--"
The wet lashes were raised--an anguished look met her gaze.
"I--I can't bear it...."
"What, dear?"
"The pain.... Shan't I die...before?"
"You may get well, Bessy."
Justine felt her hand quiver. "Walk again...?"
"Perhaps...not that."
"_This?_ I can't bear it...." Her head drooped sideways, turning away
toward the wall.
Justine, that night, kept her vigil with an aching heart. The news of
Amherst's return had produced no sign of happiness in his wife--- the
tears had been forced from her merely by the dread of being kept alive
during the long days of pain before he came. The medical explanation
might have been that repeated crises of intense physical anguish, and
the deep lassitude succeeding them, had so overlaid all other feelings,
or at least so benumbed their expression, that it was impossible to
conjecture how Bessy's little half-smothered spark of soul had really
been affected by the news. But Justine did not believe in this argument.
Her experience among the sick had convinced her, on the contrary, that
the shafts of grief or joy will find a crack in the heaviest armour of
physical pain, that the tiniest gleam of hope will light up depths of
mental inanition, and somehow send a ray to the surface.... It was true
that Bessy had never known how to bear pain, and that her own sensations
had always formed the centre of her universe--yet, for that very reason,
if the thought of seeing Amherst had made her happier it would have
lifted, at least momentarily, the weight of death from her body.
Justine, at first, had almost feared the contrary effect--feared that
the moral depression might show itself in a lowering of physical
resistance. But the body kept up its obstinate struggle against death,
drawing strength from sources of vitality unsuspected in that frail
envelope. The surgeon's report the next day was more favourable, and
every day won from death pointed now to a faint chance of recovery.
Such at least was Wyant's view. Dr. Garford and the consulting surgeons
had not yet declared themselves; but the young doctor, strung to the
highest point of watchfulness, and constantly in attendance on the
patient, was tending toward a hopeful prognosis. The growing conviction
spurred him to fresh efforts; at Dr. Garford's request, he had
temporarily handed over his Clifton practice to a young New York doctor
in need of change, and having installed himself at Lynbrook he gave up
his days and nights to Mrs. Amherst's case.
"If any one can save her, Wyant will," Dr. Garford had declared to
Justine, when, on the tenth day after the accident, the surgeons held
their third consultation. Dr. Garford reserved his own judgment. He had
seen cases--they had all seen cases...but just at present the signs
might point either way.... Meanwhile Wyant's confidence was an
invaluable asset toward the patient's chances of recovery. Hopefulness
in the physician was almost as necessary as in the patient--contact with
such faith had been known to work miracles.
Justine listened in silence, wishing that she too could hope. But
whichever way the prognosis pointed, she felt only a dull despair. She
believed no more than Dr. Garford in the chance of recovery--that
conviction seemed to her a mirage of Wyant's imagination, of his boyish
ambition to achieve the impossible--and every hopeful symptom pointed,
in her mind, only to a longer period of useless suffering.
Her hours at Bessy's side deepened her revolt against the energy spent
in the fight with death. Since Bessy had learned that her husband was
returning she had never, by sign or word, reverted to the fact. Except
for a gleam of tenderness, now and then, when Cicely was brought to
her, she seemed to have sunk back into herself, as though her poor
little flicker of consciousness were wholly centred in the contemplation
of its pain. It was not that her mind was clouded--only that it was
immersed, absorbed, in that dread mystery of disproportionate anguish
which a capricious fate had laid on it.... And what if she recovered, as
they called it? If the flood-tide of pain should ebb, leaving her
stranded, a helpless wreck on the desert shores of inactivity? What
would life be to Bessy without movement? Thought would never set her
blood flowing--motion, in her, could only take the form of the physical
processes. Her love for Amherst was dead--even if it flickered into life
again, it could but put the spark to smouldering discords and
resentments; and would her one uncontaminated sentiment--her affection
for Cicely--suffice to reconcile her to the desolate half-life which was
the utmost that science could hold out?
Here again, Justine's experience answered no. She did not believe in
Bessy's powers of moral recuperation--her body seemed less near death
than her spirit. Life had been poured out to her in generous measure,
and she had spilled the precious draught--the few drops remaining in the
cup could no longer renew her strength.
Pity, not condemnation--profound illimitable pity--flowed from this
conclusion of Justine's. To a compassionate heart there could be no
sadder instance of the wastefulness of life than this struggle of the
small half-formed soul with a destiny too heavy for its strength. If
Bessy had had any moral hope to fight for, every pang of suffering would
have been worth enduring; but it was intolerable to witness the
spectacle of her useless pain.
Incessant commerce with such thoughts made Justine, as the days passed,
crave any escape from solitude, any contact with other ideas. Even the
reappearance of Westy Gaines, bringing a breath of common-place
conventional grief into the haunted silence of the house, was a respite
from her questionings. If it was hard to talk to him, to answer his
enquiries, to assent to his platitudes, it was harder, a thousand times,
to go on talking to herself....
Mr. Tredegar's coming was a distinct relief. His dryness was like
cautery to her wound. Mr. Tredegar undoubtedly grieved for Bessy; but
his grief struck inward, exuding only now and then, through the fissures
of his hard manner, in a touch of extra solemnity, the more laboured
rounding of a period. Yet, on the whole, it was to his feeling that
Justine felt her own to be most akin. If his stoic acceptance of the
inevitable proceeded from the resolve to spare himself pain, that at
least was a form of strength, an indication of character. She had never
cared for the fluencies of invertebrate sentiment.
Now, on the evening of the day after her talk with Bessy, it was more
than ever a solace to escape from the torment of her thoughts into the
rarefied air of Mr. Tredegar's presence. The day had been a bad one for
the patient, and Justine's distress had been increased by the receipt of
a cable from Mr. Langhope, announcing that, owing to delay in reaching
Brindisi, he had missed the fast steamer from Cherbourg, and would not
arrive till four or five days later than he had expected. Mr. Tredegar,
in response to her report, had announced his intention of coming down by
a late train, and now he and Justine and Dr. Wyant, after dining
together, were seated before the fire in the smoking-room.
"I take it, then," Mr. Tredegar said, turning to Wyant, "that the
chances of her living to see her father are very slight."
The young doctor raised his head eagerly. "Not in my opinion, sir.
Unless unforeseen complications arise, I can almost promise to keep her
alive for another month--I'm not afraid to call it six weeks!"
"H'm--Garford doesn't say so."
"No; Dr. Garford argues from precedent."
"And you?" Mr. Tredegar's thin lips were visited by the ghost of a
smile.
"Oh, I don't argue--I just feel my way," said Wyant imperturbably.
"And yet you don't hesitate to predict----"
"No, I don't, sir; because the case, as I see it, presents certain
definite indications." He began to enumerate them, cleverly avoiding the
use of technicalities and trying to make his point clear by the use of
simple illustration and analogy. It sickened Justine to listen to his
passionate exposition--she had heard it so often, she believed in it so
little.
Mr. Tredegar turned a probing glance on him as he ended. "Then, today
even, you believe not only in the possibility of prolonging life, but of
ultimate recovery?"
Wyant hesitated. "I won't call it recovery--today. Say--life
indefinitely prolonged."
"And the paralysis?"
"It might disappear--after a few months--or a few years."
"Such an outcome would be unusual?"
"Exceptional. But then there _are_ exceptions. And I'm straining every
nerve to make this one!"
"And the suffering--such as today's, for instance--is unavoidable?"
"Unhappily."
"And bound to increase?"
"Well--as the anaesthetics lose their effect...."
There was a tap on the door, and one of the nurses entered to report to
Wyant. He went out with her, and Justine was left with Mr. Tredegar.
He turned to her thoughtfully. "That young fellow seems sure of himself.
You believe in him?"
Justine hesitated. "Not in his expectation of recovery--no one does."
"But you think they can keep the poor child alive till Langhope and her
husband get back?"
There was a moment's pause; then Justine murmured: "It can be done...I
think...."
"Yes--it's horrible," said Mr. Tredegar suddenly, as if in answer to her
thought.
She looked up in surprise, and saw his eye resting on her with what
seemed like a mist of sympathy on its vitreous surface. Her lips
trembled, parting as if for speech--but she looked away without
answering.
"These new devices for keeping people alive," Mr. Tredegar continued;
"they increase the suffering besides prolonging it?"
"Yes--in some cases."
"In this case?"
"I am afraid so."
The lawyer drew out his fine cambric handkerchief, and furtively wiped a
slight dampness from his forehead. "I wish to God she had been killed!"
he said.
Justine lifted her head again, with an answering exclamation. "Oh, yes!"
"It's infernal--the time they can make it last."
"It's useless!" Justine broke out.
"Useless?" He turned his critical glance on her. "Well, that's beside
the point--since it's inevitable."
She wavered a moment--but his words had loosened the bonds about her
heart, and she could not check herself so suddenly. "Why inevitable?"
Mr. Tredegar looked at her in surprise, as though wondering at so
unprofessional an utterance from one who, under ordinary circumstances,
showed the absolute self-control and submission of the well-disciplined
nurse.
"Human life is sacred," he said sententiously.
"Ah, that must have been decreed by some one who had never suffered!"
Justine exclaimed.
Mr. Tredegar smiled compassionately: he evidently knew how to make
allowances for the fact that she was overwrought by the sight of her
friend's suffering: "Society decreed it--not one person," he corrected.
"Society--science--religion!" she murmured, as if to herself.
"Precisely. It's the universal consensus--the result of the world's
accumulated experience. Cruel in individual instances--necessary for the
general welfare. Of course your training has taught you all this; but I
can understand that at such a time...."
"Yes," she said, rising wearily as Wyant came in.
* * * * *
Her worst misery, now, was to have to discuss Bessy's condition with
Wyant. To the young physician Bessy was no longer a suffering,
agonizing creature: she was a case--a beautiful case. As the problem
developed new intricacies, becoming more and more of a challenge to his
faculties of observation and inference, Justine saw the abstract
scientific passion supersede his personal feeling of pity. Though his
professional skill made him exquisitely tender to the patient under his
hands, he seemed hardly conscious that she was a woman who had
befriended him, and whom he had so lately seen in the brightness of
health and enjoyment. This view was normal enough--it was, as Justine
knew, the ideal state of mind for the successful physician, in whom
sympathy for the patient as an individual must often impede swift choice
and unfaltering action. But what she shrank from was his resolve to save
Bessy's life--a resolve fortified to the point of exasperation by the
scepticism of the consulting surgeons, who saw in it only the
youngster's natural desire to distinguish himself by performing a feat
which his elders deemed impossible.
As the days dragged on, and Bessy's sufferings increased, Justine longed
for a protesting word from Dr. Garford or one of his colleagues. In her
hospital experience she had encountered cases where the useless agonies
of death were mercifully shortened by the physician; why was not this a
case for such treatment? The answer was simple enough--in the first
place, it was the duty of the surgeons to keep their patient alive till
her husband and her father could reach her; and secondly, there was that
faint illusive hope of so-called recovery, in which none of them
believed, yet which they could not ignore in their treatment. The
evening after Mr. Tredegar's departure Wyant was setting this forth at
great length to Justine. Bessy had had a bad morning: the bronchial
symptoms which had developed a day or two before had greatly increased
her distress, and there had been, at dawn, a moment of weakness when it
seemed that some pitiful power was about to defeat the relentless
efforts of science. But Wyant had fought off the peril. By the prompt
and audacious use of stimulants--by a rapid marshalling of resources, a
display of self-reliance and authority, which Justine could not but
admire as she mechanically seconded his efforts--the spark of life had
been revived, and Bessy won back for fresh suffering.
"Yes--I say it can be done: tonight I say it more than ever," Wyant
exclaimed, pushing the disordered hair from his forehead, and leaning
toward Justine across the table on which their brief evening meal had
been served. "I say the way the heart has rallied proves that we've got
more strength to draw on than any of them have been willing to admit.
The breathing's better too. If we can fight off the degenerative
processes--and, by George, I believe we can!" He looked up suddenly at
Justine. "With you to work with, I believe I could do anything. How you
do back a man up! You think with your hands--with every individual
finger!"
Justine turned her eyes away: she felt a shudder of repulsion steal over
her tired body. It was not that she detected any note of personal
admiration in his praise--he had commended her as the surgeon might
commend a fine instrument fashioned for his use. But that she should be
the instrument to serve such a purpose--that her skill, her promptness,
her gift of divining and interpreting the will she worked with, should
be at the service of this implacable scientific passion! Ah, no--she
could be silent no longer....
She looked up at Wyant, and their eyes met.
"Why do you do it?" she asked.
He stared, as if thinking that she referred to some special point in his
treatment. "Do what?"
"It's so useless...you all know she must die."
"I know nothing of the kind...and even the others are not so sure
today." He began to go over it all again--repeating his arguments,
developing new theories, trying to force into her reluctant mind his own
faith in the possibility of success.
* * * * *
Justine sat resting her chin on her clasped hands, her eyes gazing
straight before her under dark tormented brows. When he paused she
remained silent.
"Well--don't you believe me?" he broke out with sudden asperity.
"I don't know...I can't tell...."
"But as long as there's a doubt, even--a doubt my way--and I'll show you
there is, if you'll give me time----"
"How much time?" she murmured, without shifting her gaze.
"Ah--that depends on ourselves: on you and me chiefly. That's what
Garford admits. _They_ can't do much now--they've got to leave the game
to us. It's a question of incessant vigilance...of utilizing every hour,
every moment.... Time's all I ask, and _you_ can give it to me, if any
one can!"
Under the challenge of his tone Justine rose to her feet with a low
murmur of fear. "Ah, don't ask me!"
"Don't ask you----?"
"I can't--I can't."
Wyant stood up also, turning on her an astonished glance.
"You can't what--?"
Their eyes met, and she thought she read in his a sudden divination of
her inmost thoughts. The discovery electrified her flagging strength,
restoring her to immediate clearness of brain. She saw the gulf of
self-betrayal over which she had hung, and the nearness of the peril
nerved her to a last effort of dissimulation.
"I can't...talk of it...any longer," she faltered, letting her tears
flow, and turning on him a face of pure womanly weakness.
Wyant looked at her without answering. Did he distrust even these plain
physical evidences of exhaustion, or was he merely disappointed in her,
as in one whom he had believed to be above the emotional failings of her
sex?
"You're over-tired," he said coldly. "Take tonight to rest. Miss Mace
can replace you for the next few hours--and I may need you more
tomorrow."
XXIX
FOUR more days had passed. Bessy seldom spoke when Justine was with her.
She was wrapped in a thickening cloud of opiates--morphia by day,
bromides, sulphonal, chloral hydrate at night. When the cloud broke and
consciousness emerged, it was centred in the one acute point of bodily
anguish. Darting throes of neuralgia, agonized oppression of the breath,
the diffused misery of the whole helpless body--these were reducing
their victim to a mere instrument on which pain played its incessant
deadly variations. Once or twice she turned her dull eyes on Justine,
breathing out: "I want to die," as some inevitable lifting or
readjusting thrilled her body with fresh pangs; but there were no signs
of contact with the outer world--she had ceased even to ask for
Cicely....
And yet, according to the doctors, the patient held her own. Certain
alarming symptoms had diminished, and while others persisted, the
strength to fight them persisted too. With such strength to call on,
what fresh agonies were reserved for the poor body when the narcotics
had lost their power?
That was the question always before Justine. She never again betrayed
her fears to Wyant--she carried out his orders with morbid precision,
trembling lest any failure in efficiency should revive his suspicions.
She hardly knew what she feared his suspecting--she only had a confused
sense that they were enemies, and that she was the weaker of the two.
And then the anaesthetics began to fail. It was the sixteenth day since
the accident, and the resources of alleviation were almost exhausted. It
was not sure, even now, that Bessy was going to die--and she was
certainly going to suffer a long time. Wyant seemed hardly conscious of
the increase of pain--his whole mind was fixed on the prognosis. What
matter if the patient suffered, as long as he proved his case? That, of
course, was not his way of putting it. In reality, he did all he could
to allay the pain, surpassed himself in new devices and experiments. But
death confronted him implacably, claiming his due: so many hours robbed
from him, so much tribute to pay; and Wyant, setting his teeth, fought
on--and Bessy paid.
* * * * *
Justine had begun to notice that it was hard for her to get a word alone
with Dr. Garford. The other nurses were not in the way--it was Wyant who
always contrived to be there. Perhaps she was unreasonable in seeing a
special intention in his presence: it was natural enough that the two
persons in charge of the case should confer together with their chief.
But his persistence annoyed her, and she was glad when, one afternoon,
the surgeon asked him to telephone an important message to town.
As soon as the door had closed, Justine said to Dr. Garford: "She is
beginning to suffer terribly."
He answered with the large impersonal gesture of the man to whom
physical suffering has become a painful general fact of life, no longer
divisible into individual cases. "We are doing all we can."
"Yes." She paused, and then raised her eyes to his dry kind face. "Is
there any hope?"
Another gesture--the fatalistic sweep of the lifted palms. "The next ten
days will tell--the fight is on, as Wyant says. And if any one can do
it, that young fellow can. There's stuff in him--and infernal
ambition."
"Yes: but do _you_ believe she can live--?"
Dr. Garford smiled indulgently on such unprofessional insistence; but
she was past wondering what they must all think of her.
"My dear Miss Brent," he said, "I have reached the age when one always
leaves a door open to the unexpected."
As he spoke, a slight sound at her back made her turn. Wyant was behind
her--he must have entered as she put her question. And he certainly
could not have had time to descend the stairs, walk the length of the
house, ring up New York, and deliver Dr Garford's message.... The same
thought seemed to strike the surgeon. "Hello, Wyant?" he said.
"Line busy," said Wyant curtly.
* * * * *
About this time, Justine gave up her night vigils. She could no longer
face the struggle of the dawn hour, when life ebbs lowest; and since her
duties extended beyond the sick-room she could fairly plead that she was
more needed about the house by day. But Wyant protested: he wanted her
most at the difficult hour.
"You know you're taking a chance from her," he said, almost sternly.
"Oh, no----"
He looked at her searchingly. "You don't feel up to it?"
"No."
He turned away with a slight shrug; but she knew he resented her
defection.
The day watches were miserable enough. It was the nineteenth day now;
and Justine lay on the sofa in Amherst's sitting-room, trying to nerve
herself for the nurse's summons. A page torn out of the calendar lay
before her--she had been calculating again how many days must elapse
before Mr. Langhope could arrive. Ten days--ten days and ten nights! And
the length of the nights was double.... As for Amherst, it was
impossible to set a date for his coming, for his steamer from Buenos
Ayres called at various ports on the way northward, and the length of
her stay at each was dependent on the delivery of freight, and on the
dilatoriness of the South American official.
She threw down the calendar and leaned back, pressing her hands to her
temples. Oh, for a word with Amherst--he alone would have understood
what she was undergoing! Mr. Langhope's coming would make no
difference--or rather, it would only increase the difficulty of the
situation. Instinctively Justine felt that, though his heart would be
wrung by the sight of Bessy's pain, his cry would be the familiar one,
the traditional one: _Keep her alive!_ Under his surface originality,
his verbal audacities and ironies, Mr. Langhope was the creature of
accepted forms, inherited opinions: he had never really thought for
himself on any of the pressing problems of life.
But Amherst was different. Close contact with many forms of wretchedness
had freed him from the bondage of accepted opinion. He looked at life
through no eyes but his own; and what he saw, he confessed to seeing. He
never tried to evade the consequences of his discoveries.
Justine's remembrance flew back to their first meeting at Hanaford, when
his confidence in his own powers was still unshaken, his trust in others
unimpaired. And, gradually, she began to relive each detail of their
talk at Dillon's bedside--her first impression of him, as he walked down
the ward; the first sound of his voice; her surprised sense of his
authority; her almost involuntary submission to his will.... Then her
thoughts passed on to their walk home from the hospital--she recalled
his sober yet unsparing summary of the situation at Westmore, and the
note of insight with which he touched on the hardships of the
workers.... Then, word by word, their talk about Dillon came
back...Amherst's indignation and pity...his shudder of revolt at the
man's doom.
"_In your work, don't you ever feel tempted to set a poor devil free?_"
And then, after her conventional murmur of protest: "_To save what,
when all the good of life is gone?_"
To distract her thoughts she stretched her hand toward the book-case,
taking out the first volume in reach--the little copy of Bacon. She
leaned back, fluttering its pages aimlessly--so wrapped in her own
misery that the meaning of the words could not reach her. It was useless
to try to read: every perception of the outer world was lost in the hum
of inner activity that made her mind like a forge throbbing with heat
and noise. But suddenly her glance fell on some pencilled sentences on
the fly-leaf. They were in Amherst's hand, and the sight arrested her as
though she had heard him speak.
_La vraie morale se moque de la morale...._
_We perish because we follow other men's examples...._
_Socrates used to call the opinions of the many by the name of
Lamiae--bugbears to frighten children...._
A rush of air seemed to have been let into her stifled mind. Were they
his own thoughts? No--her memory recalled some confused association with
great names. But at least they must represent his beliefs--must embody
deeply-felt convictions--or he would scarcely have taken the trouble to
record them.
She murmured over the last sentence once or twice: _The opinions of the
many--bugbears to frighten children...._ Yes, she had often heard him
speak of current judgments in that way...she had never known a mind so
free from the spell of the Lamiae.
* * * * *
Some one knocked, and she put aside the book and rose to her feet. It
was a maid bringing a note from Wyant.
"There has been a motor accident beyond Clifton, and I have been sent
for. I think I can safely be away for two or three hours, but ring me up
at Clifton if you want me. Miss Mace has instructions, and Garford's
assistant will be down at seven."
She looked at the clock: it was just three, the hour at which she was to
relieve Miss Mace. She smoothed the hair from her forehead, straightened
her cap, tied on the apron she had laid aside....
As she entered Bessy's sitting-room the nurse came out, memoranda in
hand. The two moved to the window for a moment's conference, and as the
wintry light fell on Miss Mace's face, Justine saw that it was white
with fatigue.
"You're ill!" she exclaimed.
The nurse shook her head. "No--but it's awful...this afternoon...." Her
glance turned to the sick-room.
"Go and rest--I'll stay till bedtime," Justine said.
"Miss Safford's down with another headache."
"I know: it doesn't matter. I'm quite fresh."
"You _do_ look rested!" the other exclaimed, her eyes lingering
enviously on Justine's face.
She stole away, and Justine entered the room. It was true that she felt
fresh--a new spring of hope had welled up in her. She had her nerves in
hand again, she had regained her steady vision of life....
But in the room, as the nurse had said, it was awful. The time had come
when the effect of the anaesthetics must be carefully husbanded, when
long intervals of pain must purchase the diminishing moments of relief.
Yet from Wyant's standpoint it was a good day--things were looking well,
as he would have phrased it. And each day now was a fresh victory.
Justine went through her task mechanically. The glow of strength and
courage remained, steeling her to bear what had broken down Miss Mace's
professional fortitude. But when she sat down by the bed Bessy's moaning
began to wear on her. It was no longer the utterance of human pain, but
the monotonous whimper of an animal--the kind of sound that a
compassionate hand would instinctively crush into silence. But her hand
had other duties; she must keep watch on pulse and heart, must reinforce
their action with the tremendous stimulants which Wyant was now using,
and, having revived fresh sensibility to pain, must presently try to
allay it by the cautious use of narcotics.
It was all simple enough--but suppose she should not do it? Suppose she
left the stimulants untouched? Wyant was absent, one nurse exhausted
with fatigue, the other laid low by headache. Justine had the field to
herself. For three hours at least no one was likely to cross the
threshold of the sick-room.... Ah, if no more time were needed! But
there was too much life in Bessy--her youth was fighting too hard for
her! She would not sink out of life in three hours...and Justine could
not count on more than that.
She looked at the little travelling-clock on the dressing-table, and saw
that its hands marked four. An hour had passed already.... She rose and
administered the prescribed restorative; then she took the pulse, and
listened to the beat of the heart. Strong still--too strong!
As she lifted her head, the vague animal wailing ceased, and she heard
her name: "Justine----"
She bent down eagerly. "Yes?"
No answer: the wailing had begun again. But the one word showed her that
the mind still lived in its torture-house, that the poor powerless body
before her was not yet a mere bundle of senseless reflexes, but her
friend Bessy Amherst, dying, and feeling herself die....
Justine reseated herself, and the vigil began again. The second hour
ebbed slowly--ah, no, it was flying now! Her eyes were on the hands of
the clock and they seemed leagued against her to devour the precious
minutes. And now she could see by certain spasmodic symptoms that
another crisis of pain was approaching--one of the struggles that Wyant,
at times, had almost seemed to court and exult in.
Bessy's eyes turned on her again. "_Justine_----"
She knew what that meant: it was an appeal for the hypodermic needle.
The little instrument lay at hand, beside a newly-filled bottle of
morphia. But she must wait--must let the pain grow more severe. Yet she
could not turn her gaze from Bessy, and Bessy's eyes entreated her
again--_Justine_! There was really no word now--the whimperings were
uninterrupted. But Justine heard an inner voice, and its pleading shook
her heart. She rose and filled the syringe--and returning with it, bent
above the bed....
* * * * *
She lifted her head and looked at the clock. The second hour had passed.
As she looked, she heard a step in the sitting-room. Who could it be?
Not Dr. Garford's assistant--he was not due till seven. She listened
again.... One of the nurses? No, not a woman's step----
The door opened, and Wyant came in. Justine stood by the bed without
moving toward him. He paused also, as if surprised to see her there
motionless. In the intense silence she fancied for a moment that she
heard Bessy's violent agonized breathing. She tried to speak, to drown
the sound of the breathing; but her lips trembled too much, and she
remained silent.
Wyant seemed to hear nothing. He stood so still that she felt she must
move forward. As she did so, she picked up from the table by the bed the
memoranda that it was her duty to submit to him.
"Well?" he said, in the familiar sick-room whisper.
"She is dead."
He fell back a step, glaring at her, white and incredulous.
"_Dead?_--When----?"
"A few minutes ago...."
"_Dead--?_ It's not possible!"
He swept past her, shouldering her aside, pushing in an electric button
as he sprang to the bed. She perceived then that the room had been
almost in darkness. She recovered command of herself, and followed him.
He was going through the usual rapid examination--pulse, heart,
breath--hanging over the bed like some angry animal balked of its prey.
Then he lifted the lids and bent close above the eyes.
"Take the shade off that lamp!" he commanded.
Justine obeyed him.
He stooped down again to examine the eyes...he remained stooping a long
time. Suddenly he stood up and faced her.
"Had she been in great pain?"
"Yes."
"Worse than usual?"
"Yes."
"What had you done?"
"Nothing--there was no time."
"No time?" He broke off to sweep the room again with his excited
incredulous glance. "Where are the others? Why were you here alone?" he
demanded.
"It came suddenly. I was going to call----"
Their eyes met for a moment. Her face was perfectly calm--she could feel
that her lips no longer trembled. She was not in the least afraid of
Wyant's scrutiny.
As he continued to look at her, his expression slowly passed from
incredulous wrath to something softer--more human--she could not tell
what....
"This has been too much for you--go and send one of the others.... It's
all over," he said.