WHITE BIRDS; WHITE SNOW; WHITE THOUGHTS.
By degrees Caius was obliged to give up his last lingering belief in the
existence of the lady he loved. It was a curious position to be in, for
he loved her none the less. Two months of work and thought for the
diseased people had slipped away, and by the mere lapse of time, as well
as by every other proof, he had come to know that there was no maiden in
any way connected with Madame Le Maître who answered to the visions he
had seen, or who might be wooed by the man who had ceased to care for
all other women for her sweet sake.
After Caius had arrived the epidemic had become worse, as it had been
prophesied it would, when the people began to exclude the winter air
from their houses. In almost every family upon the little isle there was
a victim, and Caius, under the compelling force of the orders which
Madame Le Maître never gave and the wishes she never expressed, became
nurse as well as doctor, using what skill he had in every possible
office for the sick, working early and late, and many a time the night
through. It was not a time to prattle of the sea-maid to either Madame
Le Maître or O'Shea, who both of them worked at his side in the battle
against death, and were, Caius verily believed, more heroic and
successful combatants than himself. Some solution concerning his
lady-love there must be, and Caius neither forgot nor gave up his
intention of probing the lives of these two to discover what he wished;
but the foreboding that the discovery would work him no weal made it the
easier to lay the matter aside and wait. They were all bound in the same
icy prison; he could afford patience.
The question of the hospital had been solved in this way. Madame Le
Maître had taken O'Shea and his wife and children to live with her, and
such patients as could be persuaded or forced into hospital were taken
to his house and nursed there. Then, also, as the disease became more
prevalent, people who had thus far refused all sanitary measures, in
dire fear opened their doors, and allowed Caius and O'Shea to enter with
whitewash brushes and other means of disinfection.
Caius was successful in this, that, in proportion to the number of
people who were taken ill, the death-rate was only one third of what it
had been before he came. He and his fellow-workers were successful also
in a more radical way, for about the end of January it was suddenly
observed among them that there were no new cases of illness. The ill and
the weak gradually recovered. In a few more weeks the Angels of Death
and Disease retired from the field, and the island was not depopulated.
Whether another outbreak might or might not occur they could not tell;
but knowing the thoroughness of the work which they had done, they were
ready to hope that the victory was complete. Gradually their work
ceased, for there was no one in all the happy island who needed nursing
or medical attendance. Caius found then how wonderfully free the place
was from all those ailments which ordinarily beset humanity.
This was in the middle of February, when the days were growing long, and
even the evening was bright and light upon the islands of snow and the
sea of ice.
It appeared to Caius that Madame Le Maître had grown years older during
the pestilence. Deep lines of weariness had come in her face, and her
eyes were heavy with want of sleep and sympathetic tears. Again and
again he had feared that the disease would attack her, and, indeed, he
knew that it had only been the constant riding about the island hills in
the wonderful air that had kept the little band of workers in health. As
it was, O'Shea had lost a child, and three of the girls in the house of
Madame Le Maître had been ill. Now that the strain was over, Caius
feared prostration that would be worse than the disease itself for the
lady who had kept up so bravely through it all; but, ever feeling an
impossibility in her presence of speaking freely of anything that
concerned herself, he had hardly been able to express the solicitude he
felt before it was relieved by the welcome news that she had travelled
across the bay to pay a visit to Pembroke's wife.
She had gone without either telling Caius of her intention or bidding
him good-bye, and, glad as he was, he felt that he had not deserved this
discourtesy at her hands. Indeed, looking back now, he felt disposed to
resent the indifference with which she had treated him from first to
last. Not as the people's doctor. In that capacity she had been eager
for his services, and grateful to him with a speechless, reverent
gratitude that he felt to be much more than his due; but as a man, as a
companion, as a friend, she had been simply unconscious of his
existence. When she had said to him at the beginning, "You will be
lonely; there is no one on the island to whom you can speak as a
friend," he perceived now that she had excluded herself as well as the
absent world from his companionship. It seemed to him that it had never
once occurred to her that it was in her power to alter this.
Truly, if it had not been for Pembroke, the clergyman, Caius would never
have had a companionable word; and he had found that there were limits
to the interest he could take in Pembroke, that the stock of likings and
disliking that they had in common was not great. Then, too, since the
day on which he had questioned him so vehemently about the relatives of
Madame Le Maître, he fancied that the clergyman had treated him with
apprehensive reserve.
At the time when he had little or nothing to do, and when Madame Le
Maître had left Cloud Island, Caius would have been glad enough to go
and explore the other islands, or to luxuriate again in the cookery of
the old maids at the inn at which he had first been housed. Two
considerations kept him from this holiday-taking. In the first place, in
fear of a case of illness he did not like to leave the island while its
benefactress was away; and, secondly, it was reported that all visitors
from The Cloud were ruthlessly shut out from the houses upon the other
islands, because of the unreasoning terror which had grown concerning
the disease. Whether he, who carried money in his pocket, would be shut
out from these neighbouring islands also, he did not care to inquire. He
felt too angry with the way the inhabitants behaved to have any dealings
with them.
The only means of amusement that remained to Caius in these days were
his horse and a gun that O'Shea lent him. With his lunch in his pocket,
he rode upon the ice as far as he might go and return the same day. He
followed the roads that led by the shores of the other islands; or,
where the wind had swept all depth of snow from the ice, he took a path
according to his own fancy on the untrodden whiteness.
Colonies of Arctic gulls harboured on the island, and the herring gulls
remained through the winter; these, where he could get near their rocks
upon the ice, he at first took delight in shooting; but he soon lost the
zest for this sport, for the birds gave themselves to his gun too
easily. He was capable of deriving pleasure from them other than in
their slaughter, and often he rode under their rocky homes, noting how
dark their white plumage looked against their white resting-places,
where groups of them huddled together upon the icy battlements and
snowdrift towers of the castles that the frost had built them. He would
ride by slowly, and shoot his gun in the air to see them rise and wheel
upward, appearing snow-white against the blue firmament; and watched
them sink again, growing dark as they alighted among the snow and ice.
His warning that he himself must be nearing home was to see the return
of such members of the bird-colony as had been out for the deep-sea
fishing. When he saw them come from afar, flying high, often with their
wings dyed pink in the sunset rays, he knew that his horse must gallop
homeward, or darkness might come and hide such cracks and fissures in
the ice as were dangerous.
The haunts of the birds which he chiefly loved were on the side of the
islands turned to the open sea, for at this time ice had formed on all
sides, and stretched without a break for a mile or so into the open.
There was a joy in riding upon this that made riding upon the bay tame
and uninteresting; for not only was the seaward shore of island and dune
wilder, but the ice here might at any time break from the shore or
divide itself up into large islands, and when the wind blew he fancied
he heard the waves heaving beneath it, and the excitement which comes
with danger, which, by some law of mysterious nature, is one of the
keenest forms of pleasure, would animate his horse and himself as they
flew over it.
His horse was not one of the native ponies; it was a well-bred,
delicately-shaped beast, accustomed to be made a friend of by its rider,
and giving sympathetic response to all his moods. The horse belonged to
Madame Le Maître, and was similar to the one she rode. This, together
with many other things, proved to Caius that the lady who lived so
frugally had command of a certain supply of money, for it could not be
an easy or cheap thing to transport good horses to these islands.
Whatever he did, however his thoughts might be occupied, it was never
long before they veered round to the subject that was rapidly becoming
the one subject of absorbing interest to him. Before he realized what he
did, his mind was confirmed in its habit; at morn, and at noontime, and
at night, he found himself thinking of Madame Le Maître. The lady he was
in love with was the youthful, adventurous maiden who, it seemed, did
not exist; the lady that he was always thinking of was the grave,
subdued, self-sacrificing woman who in some way, he knew not how,
carried the mystery of the other's existence within herself. His mind
was full of almost nothing but questions concerning her, for, admire and
respect her as he might, he thought there was nothing in him that
responded with anything like love to her grave demeanour and burdened
spirit.