Part 7

At the tone Margaret started in uncontrollable excitement. An inarticulate cry broke from her. She ran to the foot of the bed, and, her fingers straining on the bars, gazed with fearful questioning into the features of the sick man. As she gazed, his head rolled feebly on the pillow, displaying the right side of the face. Then a low, terrible, choking, sobbing cry rose to her lips--a cry of pain, of remonstrance, of desolation. “Why, it’s--it’s my--my--it’s Richard Daunt!”

Lois reached her in a single step and held her, trembling. But after that one bitter sob she was absolutely silent. She hardly breathed; all her soul seemed to be looking out of her deep eyes. The uncouth mumbling went on, uncertain but incessant.

“* * Drennen place. That’s where she is. I’ll find her! Let me go! Quick, take this off my head! I tell you, I’ve _got_ to go! * * * Oh, my dear, don’t you want to see me? You look like an autumn leaf in that scarlet cloak. Come closer to me. Your hair is like flame and you’re pale--pale--pale! Look at me! * * * How dare you treat me this way? How dare you! You knew I’d come to you--you knew I couldn’t help it. Some one told me you didn’t want me to come. * * * It was a letter, wasn’t it? Some one wrote me a letter. But it was a lie!”

Lois readjusted the ice-pack, and the voice died down into broken mutterings. Then he began again:

“Where’s Richard Daunt? You’ve got to make her understand! You’ve got to, and you can’t. You’ve failed. She used to love you, and now she’s gone away and left you. She won’t come back! You can go to the devil! * * * Ardee! See how your hair shines against the old cross! Pray for her soul! Pray--for--her--soul! * * Ardee!”

Margaret bowed her face on her hands, still clasping the bed-rail. Great, clear tears welled up in her eyes and splashed upon the coverlid. She saw, as if through a fleering maze of windy rain-sheets, the dull, round, staring eyes, the yellow skin, the restless fingers and unlovely lips. Then she stood upright, swaying back and putting both hands to her temples as though something tense had snapped in her brain.

A pained wonder was in the look she turned on Lois--something the look of a furred wood-animal caught by the thudding twinge of a bullet. The next moment she threw herself softly on her knees by the cot, stretching her arms across the straightened figure, pressing her lips to the rounded outline of the knees, and between these kisses, lifting her face, swollen with sobless crying, to gaze at the rolling, unrecognizing features beside her. Agony was in the puffed hollows beneath her eyes, and her lips were drawn with the terrible yearning of a mother for her ailing child.

Lois raised her forcefully, yet feeling a strange powerlessness, and drew her away, with a finger on her lip and a warning glance beyond the screens, and Margaret followed her with the tranced gaze of a sleep-walker. There was no repugnance or distrust in it now, or fleshly horror of sickness.

* * * * *

In her room again, she stood before the window, her mind reaching out for the new sweetness that had dropped around her. All that she had thought strongest in her old love had shrunk to pitiful detail. Between her young, lithe body and the broken and ravaged wreck she had seen, there could then be no bond of bounding blood and throbbing flesh; but love, masterful, undismayed, had cried for its own. Something was dissolving within her heart--something breaking down and away of its own weight. She felt the fight finished. It had not been fought out, but the combatants who had gripped throat in the darkness had started back in the new dawn, to behold themselves brothers. There was a primal directness in the blow that had thrust her back--somewhere--back from all self-questionings and the torture of mental misunderstanding, upon herself. It was an appeal to Cæsar. Beneath the decree, the rigidity of belief that had lain back of her determination turned suddenly flexible. She did not try to reason--she felt. But this feeling was ultimate, final. She knew that she could never doubt herself again.

The green glints from the grass-plots on the tree-lined street and the sun on the gray asphalt filled her with a warm tenderness. Every bird in all the world was piping full-throated; every spray on every bush was hung with lush blossoms and drenched with fragrance. The swell of filling lungs and tumultuous blood--the ecstasy of breathing had returned to her. The joy-bitter gladness of the heart and the world, the enfolding arms of the unforgot, clasped her round. It was for her the Soul’s renaissance. The Great Illumination had come!

As Lois gazed at her, mystified, she turned, with both hands pressed against her breast, and laughed.

XVI.

Closing the door, Margaret opened her trunk and from the very bottom produced a slender bunch of letters. She lit the small metal lamp and placed it on the wicker chair, kneeling beside it with an unreasoning sense that there was a fitness in the posture. Her fingers trembled as she touched the black ribbon which held the letters, and she stayed herself, swaying against a chair, as she unknotted it. There were a few folded sheets of paper--pencilled notes left for her--a telegram or two, and four letters. Before she read the first letter, she laid it against her face, lovingly, as though it were a sentient thing. She read them one by one very slowly, sometimes smiling faintly with a childish trembling of the lips--smiles that were followed quickly by tears which gathered in her great eyes and rolled down her cheeks. When she had finished reading the last one, she made a little pile of them. Then, taking from her trunk writing paper, ink and pen, she laid them upon the floor beside the pile of letters and stretched herself full length upon the heavy rug. As she lay leaning upon her elbows, with eyes gazing straight before her, she looked like some desolate, wind-broken reed over which the storm had passed. She wrote slowly, with careful fingers, forming her letters with almost laborious precision, like a little child who writes for a special and fond eye:

“My Beloved: Please forgive me. Please try to forget how cruel I was and think kindly of me. I have been so wretched. All through the slow days since I went away, I have longed so for you. All the many dark nights I have dreamed of you and cried for you. If you could only know now while you are suffering so. If you could only know how I longed for you all that time, I would not suffer so now. I want so much to tell you. I want to tell you that I love you every way and all ways. I loved you this way all the time, only I didn’t know it, and I wanted to love you the way I know I do now. I must have been mad, I think. I was so selfish and so cruel, and I thought I was trying to be so good. I could die when I think that it was I who brought all this suffering upon you. To think that you might have been killed and that I might never have been able to tell you! Richard, I have learned what love is. Do other women ever have to learn it as hardly, I wonder?

“Do you know, it was not until to-day that I knew you were here--that you were hurt? And yet we came here on the same train together. If God had let me know it then, I think I should have died on that long, terrible journey. You did not know what you were saying, and I heard you call ‘Ardee! Ardee!’ just as you used to at the beach. That cry reached out of the dark and took hold of my heart as though it were an invisible hand drawing me to you.

“And I had been running away from you when I came--running away from you and myself. I knew you meant to stay at Warne and see me again. And I knew if I saw you again, I could not struggle any longer--you were so strong. And you were right, too; I know that now, dear.

“The last time I met you in the field, my heart leaped to tell you ‘yes.’ I was so hungry--hungry--hungry for you. And I was afraid of my own self. I distrusted my own heart, but it was only because I wanted to love you with my soul--with the other side of me--the side that I did not know, that I could not feel sure you filled. Oh, you must have thought me unnatural, abnormal, hateful. Dear, such doubts come to women, and they are terrible things. There is more of the elemental in men. The finer--the further passion of love they know, when women fail to grasp it. We have to learn it--it is one of the lessons which men teach us. When my heart was so full of doubt, I made up my mind to crucify my bodily sensibilities. It seemed to me that I must let my soul come uppermost.

“Don’t you remember how I never could bear to look at your collie that was sick, and how terribly ill I got when I tried to tie up your hand the day you cut it? All through my life, I have never been able to look on suffering or pain. I always used to avoid it or shirk it. When I got to thinking, at Warne, of my own soul, it seemed to me that I had been unwomanly and selfish, cruelly, heartlessly selfish, and that I had dwarfed that soul that I must make grow again.

“So I came down here.

“All along I have had such a horror of this place. I could not overcome it. Every hour was full of misery.

“To-day I went through the wards and I found you.

“Dearest, I am so happy and I am so miserable--miserable because I have found you suffering. Every moment is a long agony to me. And happy because I have found myself. My soul and I are friends again. Some wonderful miracle was worked for me to-day, and it is so brilliant, so wonderful, that it has left no room in my mind for anything else.

“It was not the old familiar face that I saw against the pillows to-night. It was not the old dear voice that called to me. It was not the old Daunt. The wavy hair is gone, and there is no color in your cheeks. But, dear, when I saw your poor face all drawn and your lips all cracked with fever, my heart came up in my throat so that I could not breathe. I wanted to kiss your face, your hands. I wanted to kiss even the bandages that were around your head. I wanted to put my arms around you. I felt strong enough to keep anything from you--even death. All in a moment it seemed to me that I was your mother, and you were my little child who was sick. And yet so much more so--infinitely much more than that. It came to me then like a flash, how wrong--wickedly wrong I had been. Everything disappeared but you and me. It was not your body that I loved. It was not the body that that broken thing had been that I loved, but it was you--_you_, the inner something for whose sake I had loved the Richard Daunt that I knew.

“You could not speak to me. You did not know that I was there. You could not plead with me, but my own self pleaded. You’ll never have to beg me to stay or go with you again. You need me now--only I know how much. You cannot even know that I am near you, that I am talking to you, that I am telling you all about it. I know that you will never see this letter, and yet somehow it eases my heart a little to write it. I have read over all the letters that you have sent me, and they are such brave, such true letters. I understand them now. They have been read and cried over a great many times since you wrote them.

“I am waiting now every day, every hour when I can tell you all this with my own lips, and when your dear eyes will open again and smile up into mine with the old boyish smile--and when you will put your arms around my neck and tell me that you know all about it, and that you forgive me.”

Her tears had been dropping fast upon the page, and she stopped from time to time to wipe them with the draping meshes of her loose, rust-colored hair. She did not even turn as she heard a hand at the door.

“Why, Margaret!” said Lois, “it is two o’clock in the morning, and I have just finished my last round. Come, child, you must go to bed at once. I see that I have got to be a stern chaperon. What! writing?”

“It is a letter,” said Margaret. “I have just finished it.” She lifted the tongs and poked the fire-logs until there was a crackling blaze, then she gathered up the loose ink-stained sheets carefully, and, leaning forward, laid them in a square white heap upon the red embers. The flame sprang up and around them, reaching for them voraciously. And Lois, seeing the action, but making no comment, came and sat down on the rug beside Margaret, and wistfully and tenderly drew the brown, bowed head into her sisterly arms.

XVII.

“Lois”--Mrs. Goodno, standing in the doorway, drew her favorite close beside her--“look at the picture coming down the hall! Isn’t she beautiful?” There was a spontaneous and genuine admiration in her tone as she spoke.

A something indefinable, an atmosphere of loveliness, seemed to breathe from Margaret’s every motion as she came toward them. Her cheeks had a delicate flush, her glance was bright and roving, and her perfect lips were tremulous. Her look had a new mystery in it--a brooding tenderness, like the look of a young mother.

“All through the nurses’ lecture this morning,” said Lois, “I noticed her. When she smiled it made one want to smile, too!”

As Margaret reached them and greeted Mrs. Goodno, Lois joined her, and the two girls walked down the hall together to their room.

“Now,” said Lois, as she took a text-book from the drab-backed row on the low corner shelf, and assumed a judicial demeanor, “I’m morally certain that you haven’t studied your Weeks-Shaw this morning, and I’m going to quiz you.”

Margaret broke into a laugh. “Try it,” she said gayly. “You’re going to ask me to define health, and to show the difference between objective and subjective symptoms, and tell you what is a mulberry-tongue. Health is a perfect circulation of pure blood in a sound organism. How is that?”

“Good!” Lois, sitting down by the window, was laughing, too. “When the doctor quizzes you, you may not know it so well! Suppose you explain to me the theory of counter-irritants.”

Margaret swooped down upon her, and kneeling by her chair, put both hands over the page, looking up into her face. “Don’t!” she said. “What do I care for it all to-day! Oh, Lois! Lois!” she whispered in the hushed voice of a child about to tell a dear secret, “I am so happy! I am so happy that I can’t tell it! To think that I can watch him and nurse him, and take his temperature! I can help cure him and see him get better and better every day. When he talks, he pronounces queerly and his words get all jumbled up, and his sentences have no ends to them, but I love to hear it--I know what they are trying to say! He is so weak that I feel as if I were his mother. I know you’ve told Mrs. Goodno; haven’t you, dear? Somehow I knew it just now when she smiled at us! I don’t care if you did--not a bit--if she will only let me stay by him.”

Lois patted the bronzing gloss of the uplifted head. “I did tell her,” she said. “I thought I ought to--but she understands. Never fear about that.”

“I wonder what makes me so happy! I love all the world, Lois! Did you ever feel that way?”

The light wing of a shadow brushed the face above her, and deep in its eyes darkled a something hidden there that was almost envy.

The voice went running on: “Suppose he should open his eyes suddenly to-night--conscious! Do you know what I would do? I would slip off this apron all in a minute, so he should see me and know me first of all. I have my hair the way he likes it. I wish I could do more for him! Love is service. I want to tire myself out doing things to help him. Why, only think! It was my fault he was hurt. I sent him away when it was breaking my heart to do it.”

“If he should know you to-day, dear,” Lois said, her face flashing into a smile, “it ought to help him get well. There is joy bubbling out all over you!”

“I’m so glad he’s not conscious now, for when he isn’t he doesn’t suffer. Sometimes last night he seemed to, and then I ached all over to suffer for him. I could laugh out loud through the pain, to think that I was bearing it for him! Oh, Lois, I haven’t understood. I see now what you love in this life here. It isn’t only bodies that you are curing; it’s souls--that you’re making sound houses for.”

Drawing Lois’s arm through hers, Margaret pointed to where the huge entrance showed, from the deep window. “Do you know, the first day we came in there together, I was the unhappiest girl in the world. It seemed as though I was being dragged into some dreadful black cave, where there was no sun, no flowers, nothing but ghastly sights and people that were dying! The first day I went with you through the wards I hated it. I wanted to shut my eyes and run away as far as I could from it!”

“I know that; I saw it.”

“But now that is all changed. I never shall see a body suffer again without wanting to put my hands on it and soothe it. Life is so much sweeter and deeper than I knew! It’s hard to be quiet. I’m walking to music. I must go around all the time singing. It seems wicked of me to be so happy when I know that it will be days and days yet before he can even sit up and let me read to him. But I can’t help it. I was so wretched all the time before, that the joy now seems to be a part of me. It seems to be his joy, too. He would be glad if he could know that, in spite of all I thought and everything I said, I love him now as he wanted me to, and that nothing ever can come between us again! Isn’t it time to go in yet? I can hardly wait for the hour!”

Lois looked at her watch. “It’s near enough,” she said. “Come. Dr. Faulkner is somewhere in the ward now, and I must get instructions.”

* * * * *

Daunt lay perfectly quiet, his restless hand still. An orderly was changing the phials upon the glass-topped table and nodded to them.

Lois darted a quick glance at the face on the pillow, and her own changed. A stealthy fear crept over her. Margaret’s head was turned away toward the cot. How should she tell her? How let her know that subtle change of the last few hours that her own trained eye noted? How let out for her the strenuous agony that waited in that room? The pitiful unconsciousness of evil in the graceful posture went through her with a start of anguish.

The soft footfall of the visiting surgeon drew near, and with swift prescience she moved close to Margaret. He bent over the figure in rapid professional inquiry and consulted the chart, nodding his head as he tabulated his observations in a running, semi-audible comment.

“H--m! well-developed septic fever. Delirium comes on at night, you say, nurse. Eh? H--m! Pulse very rapid and stringy--hurried and shallow breathing--eyes dull, with inequality of pupils. H--m! Face flushed--lips blue--extremities cold. Lips and teeth covered with sordes--typical case. H--m! Complete lethargy--clammy sweat--face assuming a hippocratic type. Temperature sub-normal. H--m! Yes. Nurse, please preserve all notes of this case. It’s interesting. Very. Like to see it in the ‘Record.’”

“What are the probabilities, doctor?” It was the sentence. Lois’s lips were trembling, and she put a hand on Margaret’s arm.

“Probabilities? H--m! Give him about twelve hours and that’s generous. Never any hope in a case of this kind. Why, the man’s dying now. Look at his face.”

A piteous, chalky whiteness swept like a wave over Margaret’s cheeks, but she had made no sound. When the doctor was quite gone, she swerved a little on her feet, as though her limbs had weakened, and her lips opened and shut voicelessly, as if whispering to herself. Lois dreaded a cry, but there was none; she only shut her eyes, and covered her poor face, gone suddenly pinched and pallid, with her two hands.

“Wait, Margaret.” Lois held out a hand whose professional coolness was touched with an unwonted tremor. “Wait a moment, dear.” She ran to the hall to see that no one was in sight. Then running back and putting her arm around Margaret’s shoulders, she led her, blind and unresisting, to the stair.

XVIII.

The house surgeon stretched his long legs lazily in a corner of the office and looked at the hospital superintendent through the purplish haze from his cigar. “I wonder, Goodno,” he said, “that you have time to get interested in any one case among so many. I’d like to see the one you speak of pull through; it’s a rather unusual case, and a trephine always absorbs me.”

Dr. Goodno lighted a companion cigar. “My interest in him isn’t wholly professional,” he answered slowly. “It’s personal. In the first place, he isn’t an Italian stevedore or a Pole peddler from Baxter street. He is a man of a great deal of promise. He has published a book or two, I believe. And in the second place, my wife is very much concerned.”

“Always seems to be the trouble, doesn’t it? Enter a romance!” Dr. Irwin waved his hand widely.

“Yes, it’s a romance. To tell the truth, Irwin, Mrs. Goodno knows of the young woman, and I can’t tell you how anxious she is about him. There’s nothing sadder to me than a case like that.”

“Ah!” the other said, “that’s because you’re a married man. The rest of us haven’t time to grow sympathetic. I should say that the particular young woman would be a great deal better off, judging from present indications, if he _did_ die.”

“Why?”

“Because, if he should recover from this septic condition, he’s more than likely to be a stick for the rest of his life. It’s even chances he never puts foot to the ground again. Such men are better dead, and if you gave them their choice, most of them would prefer it.”

“I didn’t know it was as bad as that. Dr. Faulkner’s earlier prognosis was more favorable.”

“Yes, but I don’t like his temperature of the last two days. He’s got septic symptoms, and you know how quickly such a course ends. Well, we’ll soon know, though that’s more consolation to us than it might be to him, I suppose.” He drummed with his fingers on the arm of the chair. “As for the girl,” he continued. “Love? Pshaw! She’ll get over it. What sensible woman, when she’s got beyond the mooning age and the foreign missionary age, wants a cripple for a husband? If this patient should live in that way, this girl you speak of would probably get the silly notion that she wanted to marry him--trust a woman, especially a young woman, for that! If she’s beautiful or wealthy, or particularly talented, it’s all the more likely she would insist on tying herself up to him and nurse him and feed him gruel till her hair was gray. And what would she get out of it?”

“There might be worse lives than that.” Dr. Goodno spoke reflectively.

“For her, I presume you mean?”

“Yes. Woman’s love is less of a physical affinity and more a consciousness of spiritual attraction than man’s.”

“Teach your women that. It’s not without its merits as a working doctrine. The time a woman isn’t thinking about servants or babies she generally spends thinking about her soul. The word soul to her is as fascinating as a canary to an Angora cat. She takes so much stock in heaven only because she’s been told it isn’t material. Your material philosophies were all invented and patented by men; it’s the women who keep your spiritual religions running.”

“How would _you_ have it?”

“Oh, it’s all right as far as heaven goes! Let them believe anything they want to. But when you bring the all-soul idea down into every-day life, it’s mawkish. When you go about preaching that love is a spiritual ‘affinity,’ for instance.”

“Well?”