"Death comes to set thee free,
Oh, meet him cheerily
As thy true friend;
Then all thy cares shall cease
And in eternal peace
Thy penance end."
"Even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to the sea."
The arrival of the new nurse had been announced to the doctor in charge
of the quarantine station. He waited for her coming in his office.
She entered the room, paused for a moment on the threshold, and then
came forward. The light, to which his back was turned, fell full upon
her face,--a face devoid of bitterness as it was of joy. Her form,
clad in the regulation nurse's garb of blue, showed in strong relief
against the unpainted pine walls of the great doctor's office--a
somewhat broad, low figure, not slight, nor lissome, but most
eloquently womanly. Her lips parted in a question which he did not
hear.
Time had gone back with him. He stood upon a jutting ledge of rock,
which from the ridge hung out into the blue. He was alone, and
waiting--waiting with every faculty of his will strained to the utmost;
looking through a parting in the leaves between the tree-trunks, he
watched for a girl's figure. Far away there was a glimmer of water;
somewhere a village band was practising, but distance deadened all
sound from it save the throb of the heavy drum which pulsed through the
air and seemed to add motion to the heavy, odorous vapor of the summer
night and send it eddying up in perfumed waves about the craggy
platform. Then he saw one coming, flushed, and "foot gilt with all the
blossom dust" of wild venollia, fleabane and spent moondaisies. And
then he held once more a trembling maiden form within his clasp. Again
from out the hollow of his arm there looked up at him two eyes of
clearest, purest glance. Again he dwelt upon the smooth forehead with
its faint upraised brows. Again he kissed the white throat bent
outward like a singing bird's, as her head rested against him and her
eyes met his. Again he saw those eyes grow dim and moist. Again he
felt the encircled form tremble. Again he stilled the appealing lips
with a kiss. Again he vowed eternal faith. Again he heard her say--
"Will you be good enough to tell me my duties?" the new nurse was
saying, in low, strained tones, in a voice without modulation and
suggestive of reiteration.
"What is your name?" he asked, with unstrung joints.
"I am Myron Holder," she said, and looked at him.
Her lips did not quiver. Her cheeks did not flush. Her eyes did not
falter. All the majesty of a wronged womanhood shone upon her brow.
Her glance spoke of a dignity far beyond the gift of man, above the
world's honor--a dignity bought at a terrible price and sealed with a
terrible seal of loneliness and separation.
"Ah!" he said, and leaned upon the table at his side, mentally
acknowledging the strength of her presence. "I am Henry Willis," he
said. "Did you know me?"
"I recognized you when I came into the room," she answered, in a
monotonous tone.
There was a pause. Her eyes rested upon him unwaveringly, and sent
from their depths intolerable meanings of contempt and righteous
indignation and hopeless reproach.
He came a step nearer.
"Let me--" he began. She stepped back--her nostrils dilated.
"Would you be good enough to tell me my duties?" she said.
"Tell me how you came here."
"I am Nurse Myron," she said, and uttered no further word.
He waited in a silence she did not break.
"If you will come with me," he said at length.
She signified her acquiescence and followed him.
Days passed--long days and nights which seemed to outlast eternity in
their dreary passage. Day by day the nurses and physicians did battle
with the foul pestilential scourge they were striving to stifle. The
great Dr. Willis, the eminent bacteriologist, peered and pried
incessantly over his gelatin films, striving to win the secret of
infection and its origin from the minute particles of matter he held
prisoned there. But yet more earnestly did he strive to learn the
secret of one strong, brave soul, hut in vain.
The quality Dr. Willis most admired, respected and understood was Will,
but here it reigned in such transcendent strength that he stood
appalled before it. From that moment of retrospect and recognition he
had awakened with a galling sense of his own inferiority. Never before
had Henry Willis owned the domination of a living will. Now the wide
earth held no sweetness, all his achievements no triumph for him,
unless he could once more possess the woman who had, so long ago, been
wholly his.
They worked side by side. As the cases multiplied, and two of the men
nurses were stricken with the disease, Henry Willis, perforce threw
aside his experiments and flung himself into the fray. Day by day saw
these two drawn closer and closer together by the exigencies of their
peculiar and dreadful position. No more volunteers were forthcoming.
The force in the quarantine station was weakening. The physician,
albeit wiry and of an iron physique, was pale and thin.
Myron Holder's strong frame and brave heart were giving way; only her
will sustained each. Her eyes shone neither steadily nor calmly now,
but burned with desperate courage.
Dr. Willis came to her one day with a newspaper containing reports of
their work. The names of Dr. Henry Willis and Nurse Myron were coupled
with honorable and enduring encomiums. She read it standing in the
corridor before his office door. As she read and gathered the import
of the words, a change overspread her face. Her eyes, of late so hot
and dry, grew moist; her lips trembled; from brow to chin the color
flushed her face, bringing back to it all the charm of a crushed and
subordinate womanhood. She read the article over and looked him full
in the face.
"My name is here and yours," she said. Then, in a voice which had
burst from its shackles at last, and rang out clear and high, "They
should be read above the grave of a nameless child."
She paused a moment--long enough for the man before her to gather the
meaning of her words--long enough to allow memory to whelm her own
heart and break it at last, and then she sank upon the floor, weeping
and crying aloud for her dead child.
When Henry Willis carried her to the office, the first paroxysmal
symptoms of cholera had set in.
* * * * * *
All hope was over. Nurse Myron was dying. Every remedy despairing
skill could suggest had been resorted to, but in vain. Transfusion of
blood had brought not even an evanescent strength. The disease had
culminated, and death was simply a question of minutes--an hour at most.
Her face had become olive in tint, and shone up with Murillo-like
beauty of tint and form from the pillow. Beside her, in all the
abandon of shattered hope, knelt Henry Willis. But to all his pleading
Myron Holder was deaf, until, by the inspiration of despair, he cried
aloud:
"For his sake, to give him a name!"
Then she consented. In the presence of the remnant of nurses left,
blessed by the devoted minister who also lived among these dangers,
Myron Holder and Henry Willis took each other for man and wife.
They were alone. He held her hand, awed by the supernal brightness of
her eyes.
"You will write his name above his grave?" she said. "His real
name--Henry Willis? Do you know what I called him? My--little My."
"Live," he murmured. "Live to let me atone--to be happy--to be adored.
Live--you can if you will."
"Could I?" she said. "Life holds nothing for me; Death him, or
forgetfulness."
Her eyes began to film. He bent over her distractedly, calling her
tender names, pleading for a look--a sign.
"Speak to me--forgive me," he cried. "Myron--Myron!"
"I forgive you," she said, looking at him once again with calm and
steadfast eye of divine forgetfulness. She sank into a stupor, through
which she murmured "My--little My"--tenderly, as to a sleeping child.
Then suddenly her eyes opened, a flood of ineffable brightness
illumined her face, she stretched forth her arms and uttered a name in
a cry of joyous hope, and sank back. The world was over for her.
There but remained the involuntary efforts of life against
annihilation, efforts which, happily, were few and brief. Twenty
minutes after she became a wife, Myron Willis had passed--
"'And surely,' all folk said,
'None ever saw such joy on visage dead.'"
They buried her, as the law required, with the rest of those who died
of the pest. Upon her breast they found an ill-made little bag of
checked blue and white cotton. Within it was a flossy skein of child's
hair tangled by many tears and kisses. They brought it to Dr. Willis,
and he replaced it upon the dead breast with whose secret sobs and
sighs it had risen and fallen for so long.
The newspapers gave a pathetic account of the "Romance in a Quarantine
Station," and told how the famous Dr. Willis, meeting his "girl love"
in the hospital, had married her on her deathbed. The tale cast quite
a romantic lustre over the doctor's somewhat prosaic career of medical
achievement.
There was no word said, however, of their first meeting and parting,
nor of a little grave that to this day is unmarked save for a tiny
tablet whereon is carven one syllable--MY.