Avery stood irresolute. "It is one of those hallucinations," he
thought. "This shock--following the wreck--has confused me." The
voice was not repeated; and after a few moments' hesitation he opened
the door of his wife's room.
It was neither dark nor light in the chamber; something like twilight
filled the room, which, unlike the house, was not heavy with the
excessive perfume of flowers. A handful of violets (modest, winning,
and like Jean) was all that had been admitted; these stood on a table
beside her Bible and prayer-book, her little portfolio, and her pen and
inkstand.
In his wretchedness Marshall duly perceived the delicate thought which
had ordered that his should be the first flowers to touch her dear body.
He came up with his poor roses in his hand. Jean seemed to have waited
for them. He could have said that she uttered a little, low laugh when
she saw him cross the room.... Impossible to believe that she did not
see him! She lay so easily, so vitally, that the conviction forced
itself upon him that there was some hideous mistake. "Perhaps I am
still in the water," he thought, "and this is one of the visions that
come to drowning people."
"I may be dead, myself," he added. "Who knows? But _Jean_ is not
dead." He thrust up the shade, and let the November day full into the
room. It fell strongly upon her bright hair and her most lovely face.
He called her by her name two or three times. It might be said that he
expected her to stir and stretch out her hands to him.
"I never thought you would die," he argued. "You know I did n't, Jean.
Why, you told me yourself you should live for years.... Jean, my girl!
they 've blundered somehow. You _could n't_ die, you _would n't_ die,
Jean, while I was on that cruel trip.... I was sorry I went. I was
ashamed of myself for leaving you.... I hurried back--and I was
shipwrecked--I was almost drowned. I 'll never leave you again, dear
darling! I 'll never leave you again as long as I live!"
These words ached through his mind. He could hardly have said whether
he spoke them aloud or not. He sat down on the edge of the bed beside
her. By some carefulness, probably Helen Thorne's, the usual ghastly
circumstance of death was spared Jean. She lay quite naturally and
happily in her own bed, in her lace-frilled night-dress, with her
bright hair braided as she used to braid it for the night. Except for
her pallor--and she had been a little pale so long that this was not
oppressive--she wore one of her charming looks. The conviction that
she was not dead persisted in the husband almost to the point of
pugnacity. It occurred to him that if he lifted her she would cling to
him, and comfort herself against his heart.
"Come, Jean!" he said. He held out his arms. "Forgive me, Jean.... I
shall never forgive myself."
Then he stooped to kiss her; and _then_ he slid to his knees, and hid
his face in his shaking hands, and uttered no cry, nor any word or
sound.
He was so still, and he was still so long, that his friends took alarm
for him, and Helen Thorne quietly opened the door. When she saw him,
she retreated as quietly, went downstairs, and called his little girl.
Pink trotted up noisily as Pink always did, hurried to her mother's
room, and hesitated on the threshold. When she said "Hullo, Papa!" her
father turned and saw her standing there. He made an instinctive
movement towards her; the child ran to him; he caught her, and kissed
her little hands and hair, and Pink said: "Crying, Papa? Have you got
'e toofache? ... Come to Mummer Dee. She 'll comfort you."
Into the Church of the Happy Saints, where Jean was used to worship
(for she was a religious woman, in her quiet, unobtrusive way), they
carried her for her last prayer and chant. And it was noticed how many
people there were among the mourners of this gentle lady to whom she
had done some kindness, forgotten by every one except themselves, or,
more likely, not known to any one else; obscure people, those who had
not many friends, and especially sick people, the not helpless, but not
curable, whom life and death alike pass by. In her short, invalid life
Jean had remembered everybody within her reach who bore this fate; and
it would never be known now in what sweet fashion she had contrived to
make over to these poor souls a precious portion of her abounding
courage, or the gift of Jean's own sympathy. This was something quite
peculiar to herself. It was finer than the shading of words in a poem,
as reverent as the motion of feeling in a prayer, and always as womanly
as Jean.
He who followed her to her burial in such a trance of anguish as few
men know who love a wife and cherish her (as so many do, that women may
well thank Heaven for their manly number),--he who had loved, but had
not cherished, looked into Jean's open grave, and believed that in all
the world he stood most desolate among afflicted men.
"I left her to die alone," he said. He grasped Pink's little hand till
he hurt the child, and she wrenched it away. He did not even notice
this, and his empty hand retained its shape as the little girl's
fingers had left it. "I went on a gunning trip. And she asked me not
to go. And she died alone." ...
The clergyman's voice intoning sacred words smote upon and did not
soothe this comfortless man.
"_He that believeth on Me._" ...
"Jean believed on me. And I failed her. And she is dead."
Pink crept up to his side again, and put her fingers back into his
still outstretched hand. Perhaps it was the child's touch;
perhaps--God knew--it was some effluence from the unseen life within
whose mystery the deathless love of the dead wife had ceased from the
power of expression; but something at that instant poured vigor into
the abjectly miserable man. His first consciousness that Jean was not
dead rushed back upon him at the mouth of her grave. It seemed,
indeed, no grave, but a couch cut in a catafalque of autumn leaves.
"There is some mistake," he thought, as he had thought before. He
lifted his bared head to the November sky in a kind of exaltation.
This did not fail him until he came back into his desolate home. He
stood staring at the swept and garnished house. The disarray of the
funeral was quite removed. His wife's room was ordered as usual; its
windows stood open. Some of the dreadful flowers were still left about
the house. He pulled them savagely from their places and threw them
away. The servants stood crying in the hall; and the strange
professional nurse, who had remained with the baby, came up and offered
him the child--somewhat as if it had been a Bible text, he thought. He
took the little thing into his arms, piously; but the baby began to
cry, and hit him in the eyes with both fists.
"It's after her he do be cryin'," said Molly.
Avery handed her the child in silence. As he turned to go upstairs,
Pink ran after him.
"Papa," said Pink, "do you expect Mummer Dee to make a very _long_
visit in heaven? I should fink it was time for her to come home, by
supper, shouldn't you, Papa?"
In their own rooms Marshall Avery sat him down alone. He bolted all
the doors, and walked from limit to limit of the narrow space--his room
and hers, with the door open between that he used to close because the
baby bothered him. It stood wide open now. In his room some of his
neckties and clothes were lying about; Jean used to attend to his
things herself, even after she was ill--too ill, perhaps; he remembered
reminding her rather positively if any of these trifles were neglected;
once she had said, "I 'm not _quite_ strong enough to-day."
On his bureau stood her photograph, framed in silver--a fair picture,
in a white gown, with lace about the throat. It had Jean's own eyes;
but nothing ever gave the expression of her mouth. He stood looking at
her picture.
Presently he put it down, and came back into his wife's room. He shut
the windows, for he shivered with cold, and stared about. The empty
bed was made, straight and stark. The violets were drooping on the
table beside her Bible, her basket, and her portfolio. He picked these
things up, and laid them down again. He went mechanically to the
bureau and opened the upper drawer. All her little dainty belongings
were folded in their places,--her gloves, her handkerchiefs, the laces
that she fancied, and the blond ribbons that she wore--the blue, the
rose, the lavender, and the corn.
In this drawer a long narrow piece of white tissue-paper lay folded
carefully across the glove box. He opened it idly. Something fell
from it and seemed to leap to his fingers, and cling as if it would not
leave them. It was a thick lock of her own long bright hair.
He caught it to his breast, his cheek, his lips. He cherished it
wildly, as he would now have cherished her. The forgotten tenderness,
the omitted gentleness of life, lavished itself on death, as remorse
will lavish what love passed by. The touch of her hair on his hands
smote the retreating form of his illusion out of him. He could not
deceive himself any longer.
"Jean _is_ dead," he said distinctly.
He threw himself down on her lounge and tried to collect himself, as he
would for any other event of life--that he might meet it manfully.
"She is really dead," he repeated. "I have got to live without her,
... and those children ... no mother. I must arouse myself. I must
bear it, as other men do."
Even as the words turned themselves like poisoned wires through his
mind the conviction that his sorrow was not like the sorrow of other
men rushed upon him. What had he done to her? Oh, what had he been to
her--his poor Jean? He turned his head and thrust his face into the
depths of her blue pillow. A delicate breath stole from it--the violet
perfume that Jean used about her bedroom because he fancied it. He
sprang from the lounge, and began to pace the room madly to and fro.
Now there rose about him, wave by wave, like the rising of an awful
tide, the overlooked but irresistible force of the common life which
married man and woman share--incidents that he would rather have died
than recall, words, looks, scenes, which it shattered his soul and body
to remember.
A solemn sea, they widened and spread about him. He felt himself torn
from his feet and tossed into the surge of them.
It seemed to him that every tenderness he had shown his wife was
drowning out of his consciousness. But every hard thing he had ever
done rose and rolled upon him--an unkind look, a harsh word, a little
neglect here, a certain indifference there; an occasion when he had
made her miserable and could just as easily have made her happy; a time
when she had asked--Jean so seldom asked--for some trifling attention
which he had omitted to bestow; the desolate look she wore on a given
day; the patient eyes she lifted, heart-sick with sore surprise, once
when he ...
The worst of it was in thinking how it was when she began to be weak
and ill. Jean was not a complaining woman, never a whining invalid,
but resolute, sweet, and cheerful. Like an air-plant on oxygen, she
existed on his tenderness. He had offered it to her when he felt like
it. Well, busy, bustling man--out of his bounteous health and freedom,
what comfort had he given to this imprisoned woman? The passing of his
moods? The attention of his whims? The fragments of his time? The
blunt edge of his sympathy?
One night he had come in late, when he could quite as well have come
two hours before; he found her by the open window, gasping for breath
in the cold night air, in her blue gown, with her braided hair, her
lovely look, the dear expression in her eyes. She had not reproached
him ... he wished from his soul, now, that she _had_ reproached him,
sometimes; it would have done him good; it would have dashed cold water
on his fainting sense of duty to her; he was the kind of man who would
have responded to it like a man. But she was not the kind of woman to
do it. And she never had. So he had slid into those easy habits of
accepting the invalid, anyhow; as a fact not to be put too much in the
foreground of his daily life ... not to intrude too much. And she had
not protested, had not cried out against the frost that gathered in his
heart.
She had trodden her _via dolorosa_ alone. As she had endured, so she
had died. He thought that if he had only been with her then, he could
have borne it all.
His mind veered off from this swiftly, almost as if it were unhinged,
and began to dwell upon what he would do for her if he had her again,
living, warm, breathing, sweet. The only comfort he could get was in
thinking how he would comfort her ... now; how he would cherish her ...
now; the love he would waste, the tenderness he would invent--new forms
of it, that no husband in the world had ever thought of, to make a wife
happy. Oh, the honor in which he would hold her least and lightest
wish! The summer of the heart in which she should blossom!--she who
had perished in the winter of his neglect; she who was under the
catafalque of autumn leaves out there in the gathering November storm.
Terrible that it should storm the first night that Jean lay in her
grave!
"God! God!" he cried. "If I could have her back for one hour--for one
_instant_!"
"This way, Avery--turn your head this way. Here is the air. The
window is open. Don't struggle so. It is all right. Breathe
naturally," added the dentist. "Come, take it quietly. There is no
harm done. The tooth is out. I never knew the gas work more easily."
Marshall Avery battled up and pushed his friend away. The cold air,
dashing in from the open window, chafed his face smartly. He drank it
in gulps before he could manage to speak. It was raining, and the
storm wet the sill. A few drops spattered over and hit his hand.
"Armstrong!--for Heaven's sake!--if there's any mercy in you"--
"That's a large phrase for a small occasion, Avery. I have n't
committed murder, you know."
"I 'm not so sure of it," muttered Avery, staring about. "I don't
understand. Did I have another tooth out--after all that--happened?"
"I should hope not. I must say you make as much fuss over this one
molar as a child or a clergyman," answered the dentist brusquely. "We
regard those as our most troublesome classes."
"Did you give me chloroform?"
"I don't give chloroform."
"Gas, then?"
"Why, certainly, I gave gas."
"Did I ask for it?"
"Yes. You asked for it. Even if you had n't--You don't bear pain, you
know, Avery, with that composure"--
"Armstrong? Say, Armstrong. When you went over to the club with me"--
The dentist twisted his mustache.
--"was Romer's yacht lying out in the river then? I seem to remember
that you did n't want me to take that trip. And you did n't know it
would blow a gale, either. And you did n't know that she"--
"Get up, Avery, and walk about the room. You come to slowly."
"And when the wreck got into the papers--she could n't bear that....
She was so ill when I left her ... Armstrong! Was it you kept me here
in this blanked chair while my wife was dying?"
Dr. Armstrong laughed aloud. Avery sprang towards him. He had a muddy
intention of seizing the dentist by the throat. But a thought occurred
to him which held him back. Now, as his consciousness clarified, he
saw brilliant and beautiful light throbbing about him; he seemed to
float in it, as if he were poised in mid-heaven. A scintillation in
his brain shot into glory, and broke as it fell into a thousand rays
and jets of joy.
"Do you mean to tell me I never went on that accursed cruise--with a
fool gun--to murder ducks ... and left my wife dangerously sick? Do
you mean that Jean ... is n't ... Say, Armstrong, you would n't make
game of a man in a position like mine, if you knew... Armstrong!"
piteously, "my wife is n't _living_--is she, Armstrong?"
"She was, the last I heard," replied the dentist, sterilizing his
instruments with a cool and scientific attention. "That was when you
sat down in this chair to have your tooth out."
As Avery dashed by him the dentist put out a detaining hand.
"Wait a second, Avery. I don't consider you quite fit to go yet.
Here--wait a minute!"
But the horses of Aurora, flying and flaming through the morning skies,
could not have held the man back. A madman--delirious with joy--he
swept through the hall and flung the door open. Dr. Armstrong ran
after him to give him his hat, but Avery paid no attention to the
dentist.
Bareheaded, fleet-footed, with quivering lip, with shining eye, he fled
down the street. Like the hurricane that had never sunk the Dream, he
swept past the club. He saw the fellows through the window; their
cigars gleamed in their mouths and in their hands; they looked to him
like marionettes moving on a mimic stage; he felt as if he would like
to kick them over, and see if they would rattle as they rolled. As he
rushed, hatless, past the Church of the Happy Saints, an officer on
night duty recognized the lawyer, and touched his helmet in surprise,
but did not follow the disordered figure--Mr. Avery was not a drinking
man. He was allowed to pursue his eccentricity undisturbed. He met
one or two men he knew, and they said, "Hilloa, Avery!" But he did not
answer them. He ran on in the rain; his heart sang:--
"I did n't do it--_I never did it_! I did not treat her so. _I was
not that fellow_. Oh, thank God, I was not that brute!" He hurried on
till he lost his breath; then collected himself, and came up more
quietly to his own door.
He felt for his latch-key, and was relieved to find it in his pocket,
as usual; the impression that it lay off the Shoals somewhere at the
bottom had not entirely vanished yet. He opened the door and closed it
softly. The hall gas was burning. Otherwise the house was dark. It
was perfectly still. The silence somewhat checked his mood, and the
violence of his haste abated; with it abated an indefinable measure of
his happiness. He raised his hand to take off his hat; then found that
he had not worn any. It occurred to him that he had better not waken
Jean too abruptly--it might hurt her: he was going to be very
thoughtful of Jean. She must not be startled. He went upstairs
quietly.
In the upper hall he paused. Pink, in the nursery, was grinding her
teeth in her sleep. The baby was not restless, and Molly was sleeping
heavily. From his wife's room there came no sound.
Jean almost always waked when he came home late, if indeed she had
slept at all before she heard his step. But this was not inevitable.
Sometimes he did not arouse her. And he remembered that to-night she
had been feeble, and had not got to sleep as early as usual. As he
stood uncertain before her door the clock on the mantel struck eleven.
He passed on, and into his own room. He wondered if he ought to
undress and go to bed without disturbing her. But he could not bring
himself to do this. He was still too much agitated; and the necessity
of keeping quiet did not tend to calm him. He turned up his gas, and
the light rose warmly. Then he saw that the door into his wife's room
was partly open. "Jean!" he said softly. She did not answer him.
Sometimes, if she were sleepy, or exhausted, she did not incline to
talk when he came home.
"Jean?" he repeated, "are you awake, my darling? I want to speak to
you.... I _must_ speak to you," added the husband impetuously, when
Jean did not reply.
He pushed the door wide and went in. The only light in the room came
from the night candle, which was burning dimly. It was a blue candle,
and it had a certain ghastly look to him, as he stood gazing across the
little table at the bed.
"After all," he thought, "I suppose I ought not to wake her--just
because I 've got all that to tell her."
He stood, undecided what to do.
Jean was lying on the bed in her lace-frilled nightdress, with her
bright hair braided in long braids, as she wore it for the night.
Something in her attitude and expression startled him. So she had
lain--so she had looked-- His temples throbbed suddenly. The blood
froze at his heart.
"Jean!" he cried loudly. "_Dear_ Jean!"
But Jean did not reply. He sprang to her, and tore open the nightdress
at her throat; he crushed at her hands; they were quite cold. He put
his ear to her heart; he could not hear it beat. Jean lay in her
loveliness, with gentle, half-open eyes, and a desolate little smile on
her sweet lips, as she might have looked when she called him and asked
him to come back and kiss her good-night. And he had not come. One of
her hands clasped the cord of the electric bell. But no one had heard
Jean's bell.
Now, the truth smote the man like the hammer of Thor. His wandering
spirit--gone; who knew how? who knew where? while the brain drifted
into anaesthesia--had sought out and clutched to itself the terrible
fact. At the instant when this perception reached his consciousness
there came with it the familiar delusion of his vision.
"Jean cannot be dead. There must be some mistake."
He dashed to the window, opened it wide, and raised her towards the
air. The sleeping maid, aroused and terrified, rushed to his help. In
his agony he noticed that the children were both crying--Pink like a
lady, and the boy like a little wild beast. Pink began to wail:
"Mummer Dee! Mummer Dee!"
Jean did not stir.
He dispatched the servants madly--one to the telephone, one for
stimulants; while he rubbed his wife's hands and feet, and tried to get
brandy between her lips in the futile fashion of the inexperienced. He
could not stimulate any signs of life, and he dared not leave her.
Molly reported, sobbing, that Dr. Thorne was not at home, but that Mrs.
Thorne had bade her call the nearest doctor; she had rung up the one at
the corner, and he was coming.
The nearest doctor came, and he lost no time about it. He was a
stranger, and young. Avery looked stupidly at his inexperienced face.
The physician stooped and put his ear to Jean's heart. He went through
the form of feeling the pulse, and busied himself in various uncertain
ways about her. In a short time he rose, and stood looking at the
carpet. He did not meet the husband's eye.
"You can keep on stimulating if you like," he said. "Perhaps you would
feel better. But in my opinion it is of no use."
"For God's sake, man, are n't you going to _do_ something?" demanded
the husband in a voice which the nearest doctor had occasion to
remember.
"In my opinion the patient is dead," persisted the stranger. He turned
and took up his hat. "I will do anything you like, of course, sir," he
added politely. "But life is extinct."
Avery made no reply, and the strange physician went uncomfortably away.
Avery stared after him with bloodshot eyes. He now held his wife, half
sitting, against his own warm body; he had a confused idea that he
could will her alive, or love her alive; that if he could make her
understand how it all was, she _could_ not die. She loved him too
much. But Jean's gray face fell upon his breast like stiffening clay.
Her pulse was imperceptible. He turned piteously to the Irish girl.
"Molly! Can't _you_ think of anything more we can do for her?"
At this moment a carriage dashed to the door, and came to a violent
stop.
"Mother of God!" cried Molly. "Here is Dr. Thorne!"
With a resounding noise Esmerald Thorne flung back the opening front
door. With his hat on his head he cleared the stairs. Molly stood
wringing her hands on the threshold of Mrs. Avery's room. He hurled
the girl away as if she had been a wrong prescription left by a
blundering rival. His blazing eye concentrated itself on the patient
like a burning-glass. That which had been Jean Avery, half reclining,
held against her husband's heart, lay unresponsive. One arm with its
slender hand hung over the edge of the bed, straight down.
"Change the position!" cried Dr. Thorne loudly. "Put her head
down--so--flat--perfectly horizontal. Now get out of my way--the whole
of you."
He knelt beside the bed, and with great gentleness, curiously at
contrast with his imperious and one might have called it angry manner,
put his ear to Jean's heart.
"It's dead she is. The other doctor do be sayin' so," sobbed Molly,
who found it perplexing that Mr. Avery did not speak, and felt that the
courtesies of the distressing occasion devolved upon herself. Dr.
Thorne held up an imperious finger. In the stillness which obeyed him
the clock on the mantel ticked obtrusively, like the rhythm of life in
a vital organism.
At the instant when he reached her side, Dr. Thorne had laid Jean's
hanging hand gently upon the bed, warming it and covering it as he did
so. But he had paid no attention to it otherwise till now, when he was
seen to put his fingers on the wrist. It occurred to Avery that the
physician did this rather to satisfy or to sustain hope in the family
than from any definite end which he himself hoped to attain by it. The
husband managed to articulate.
"Is there any pulse?"
"No."
"Does her heart beat?"
Dr. Thorne made no reply. He was putting a colorless, odorless liquid
between her lips. His expression of indignation deepened. One might
have said that he was in a rage with death. His first impulse to
express that emotion noisily had passed. He issued his orders with
perfect quiet and consummate self-possession, but the family fled
before them like leaves before the wind. Stimulants, hot water, hot
stones, fell into the doctor's hands. He took control of the
despairing household as a great general takes command of a terrible
retreat. Stern, uncompromising, rigid, he flung his whole being
against the fate which had snatched his old patient beyond his rescue.
His face was almost as white as Jean's.
"There sits the man as fights with death!" cried Molly, in
uncontrollable excitement. She and the cook fell on their knees.
Pink, in her nightdress, stole in, and leaned against the door; the
child was too frightened to cry. The baby had gone to sleep. The
house grew ominously still. The mantel clock struck the half-hour. It
was now half-past eleven. Avery glanced at the physician's face, and
buried his own in his hands.
The doctor rose, and stood frowning. He seemed to hesitate for the
first time since he had been in the room.
"Is there no heart-beat yet? Can't you detect _any_thing?" asked Avery
again. He could not help it. Dr. Thorne looked at him; the physician
seemed to treat the question as he would an insult.
"When I have anything to say, I 'll say it," he answered roughly. He
stood pondering.
"A glass!" he called peremptorily. Molly handed him a tumbler. He
pushed it away.
"I said a _glass_! A mirror!"
Some one handed him Jean's little silver toilet hand-glass. The
physician held it to her lips, and laid it down. After a moment's
irresolution he took it up, and bending over the body put it to the
woman's lips again, and studied it intently for some moments. Avery
asked no questions this time, nor did he dare glance at the glass.
"How long," demanded Dr. Thorne suddenly, "has she been like this?"
"I found her so when I came in. It was then eleven o'clock."
"How long had she been alone?"
"I went out at twenty minutes past ten. I went to have a tooth
extracted. That was forty minutes."
"Did she speak to you when you went out?"
"Yes--she spoke to me."
"What did she say?"
Marshall Avery made no reply.
"Were there any symptoms of this heart-failure then? Out with it!--No.
Never mind. It's evident enough."
The clock on the mantel struck the quarter before twelve.
"She has been as she is an hour and a quarter," said Dr. Thorne. His
voice and manner were disheartened. He stood a moment pondering, with
a dark face.
"Do you call her dead?" entreated Avery. It seemed to him that he had
reached the limit of endurance. He would pull the worst down on his
head at one toppling blow.
"_No!_" cried the physician, in a deep, reverberating tone.
"But is it death?" persisted Avery wildly.
"I do not know," said Dr. Thorne.
"Do you give her up?"
"_No!_" thundered Dr. Thorne again. "The drowned have been
resuscitated after six hours," he added between his teeth. "That's the
latest contention."
At this moment a messenger summoned by telephone from the corner
pharmacy arrived, running, and pealed and thundered at the door. Some
one laid upon the bed within the doctor's reach a small pasteboard box.
He opened it in silence, and took from it a tiny crystal or shell of
thin glass. This he broke upon a handkerchief, and held the linen
cautiously to Jean's face. A powerful, pungent odor filled the room.
Avery felt his head whirl as he breathed it. The doctor removed the
handkerchief and scrutinized Jean's face. Neither hope nor despair
could be detected on his own. Without a word he went to work again.
Not discarding, but not now depending altogether on the aid of warmth,
stimulants, and the remedies upon which he had been trained to rely in
his duels with death, the physician turned the force of his will and
his skill in the direction of another class of experiments.
So far as he could, and at such disadvantage as he must, he put certain
of the modern processes of artificial respiration to the proof. He did
not allow himself to be hampered in this desperate expedient by an
element of danger involved in lifting the patient's arms above her
head; for Jean had passed far beyond all ordinary perils. Obstacles
seemed to serve only to whip his audacity. His countenance grew dogged
and grim. He worked with an ineffable gentleness, and with an
indomitable determination that gave a definite grandeur to his bearing.
Avery looked on with dull, blind eyes; he felt that he was witnessing
an unsuccessful attempt at miracle. He began to resent it as an
interference with the sanctity of death. He began to wish that the
doctor would let his wife alone. The clock on the mantel struck
twelve. Pink had fallen asleep, and somebody had carried her back to
her own bed. The two women huddled together by the door. The
physician had ceased to speak to any person. His square jaws came
together like steel machinery that had been locked. In his eyes
immeasurable pity gathered; but no one could see his eyes. The clock
timed the quarter past midnight.
Avery had now moved round to the other side of the bed; he buried his
face in his wife's pillow, and, unobserved, put out his hand to touch
her. He reached and clasped her thin left hand on which her
wedding-ring hung loosely. Her fingers were not very cold,--he had
often known them colder when she was ill,--and as his hand closed over
them it seemed to him for a wild instant that hers melted within it;
that it relaxed, or warmed beneath his touch.
"I am going mad," he thought. He raised his head. The clock called
half-past twelve. Dr. Thorne was holding the little mirror at Jean's
lips again. A silvery film--as delicate as mist, as mysterious as
life, as mighty as joy--clouded it from end to end.
"_Jean Avery!_" cried the physician, in a ringing tone.
Afterwards Avery thought of that other Healer who summoned his dearest
friend from the retreat of death "in a loud voice." But at the moment
he thought not at all. For Jean sighed gently and turned her face, and
her husband's eyes were the first she saw when the light of her own
high soul returned to hers.
In the dim of the dawn Avery followed the exhausted physician into the
hall, and led him to an empty room.
"Rest, if you can, doctor," he pleaded; "we can call you. If she
sleep, she shall do well," he added in a broken voice. The miracle was
yet in his mind.
"Unless you see some change, she may sleep one hour. Call me by then,"
said Dr. Thorne abstractedly. "And telephone my wife and the hospital
that I spend the morning here." He turned his face to the window.
Avery, glancing at it in the gray light, saw that great tears were
falling unashamed down the doctor's cheeks.
"These sudden deaths are so horrible!" he muttered. "They are the
felonies of Nature." Long after this, when the eminent physician met
the fate which has been elsewhere recorded of him, and which those who
have read his memoirs may recall, Marshall Avery remembered these
words; and the expression of the man's face as he uttered them.
He went back to his wife's room, and lay down on the bed by her side.
She slept like some sweet child who was tired out with a nervous
strain, and would wake, by the sanctities of Nature, refreshed for
vigorous life. He dared not fall asleep himself for a careless moment,
but propped himself on one elbow and watched her hungrily. Her pulse
beat weakly yet, but with some steadiness, and rose in volume as the
day deepened. In fact, the tide was coming to the flood.
Off there on the Shoals, reaching up around the gray Cape, inch upon
patient inch, the waves climbed to their appointed places. With them
the vitality of the woman, obeying the most mysterious law in Nature's
mighty code, advanced, and held its own.
Avery looked at his wife, sleeping, as she, waking, would never see him
look. All that was noble in shame, all that was permanent in love,
harmonized in his eyes. Between his rapture and his reverence, resolve
itself seemed to escape him, like a spirit winged for flight because no
longer needed in a human heart, being invisibly displaced by stronger
angels whose names are known only to the love of married man and woman
when ultimate fate has challenged it and found defeat.
Avery's lips moved. He spoke inaudible things. "All I ask," he said,
"is another chance." He was not what is called a praying man. But
when he had said this, he added the words--"Thou God!"
Jean stirred at this moment. The morning was strong in the room. Her
own smile swept across her face like a wing of light.
"Dear," she said distinctly, "did you have the tooth out? Did it hurt
you very much? You poor, poor boy!"
She put up her weak hand and touched his cheek.
The doctor could not sleep. He stole in anxiously.
Jean had closed her eyes once more. They opened happily as he entered.
"Why, doctor! You here? What for?"
As if by accident Dr. Thorne's fingers brushed her wrist. The
physician's face assumed a noble radiance. He looked affectionately at
his old patient.
"Oh, I thought I 'd drop in and see how you were getting along." He
smiled indulgently. "Go to sleep again," he said, in a comfortable
tone.
But Avery followed the doctor; as love has pursued the healers of all
ages from the sick-room to the garrison of the utter truth.
The two men stood in the dusky hall. The physician was the first to
speak.
"Well, I 've done my part, Avery. Now"--
"You have wrought a miracle," said the husband, with much emotion.
"Work you a greater, then!" commanded Dr. Thorne. He did not speak
gently. But a certain entreaty in the attitude of the shaken man
subdued him.
"With love all things are possible," persisted the physician in his
other voice. "I have always said that she was not incurable. Now the
difference is"--
Avery did not reply. It was not for the doctor to know what the
difference was. That was for Jean ... only for Jean. He went back to
his wife's room, and knelt beside her bed.
She seemed to have missed him, for she put out her hand wistfully;
there was a touch of timidity in the motion, as if she were not sure
that he would stay, or that he would be happy in staying; he perceived
that she questioned herself whether she were an inconvenience to him.
She tried to say something about ordering his breakfast, and to ask if
she had kept him awake much. But Jean was very weak. She found it
hard to talk. He remembered that she must not be agitated. He laid
his cheek upon her hand, and hid his broken face.
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By Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
(MRS. WARD)
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