Part 8

“You may believe it, understand. But you gloss over the other side. The general opinion is that ‘bodily’ isn’t a nice word to use when we discuss love. You and I, as physicians, see every day the results of this dislike to recognize the material side in what has been called the ‘young person.’ Women are taught from childhood to regard the immensely human and emotional sensibilities as linked to sin. The sex-stirring in them, they are led to imagine evil and a wrong to possess. They are taught instinctively to condemn rather than to respect the growth and indications of their own natures. The profound attraction of one sex to the other which marks the purest and most ennobling passion--the trembling delight in the merest touch or caress--the bodily thrill at the passing presence or footfall of the one beloved--these they come to believe a shame to feel and a death to confess. It is the teaching that makes for the morbid. A great deal of mental suffering which leaves its mark upon the growing woman might be avoided if men and women were more honest with themselves. A soulless woman is just as much use in the world as a bodiless one--or a man either, for that matter.”

Dr. Goodno regarded him musingly. “Granted there is a good deal of truth in what you say,” he said. “When I spoke of woman’s love as more of a spiritual and less of a material affinity than man’s, I meant that it does not require so much from the senses to feed upon. Sex has a psychology, and it is a fact which has been universally noted that all that concerns the mental aspect of sex is exhibited in greater proportionate force by women. Does not this seem to imply that love to a woman is more of a mental element and less of a physical?”

“Nonsense! More of a mental, but only so because more of a physical, too. All love’s mental delights come originally from the physical side. How many women do you see falling in love with twisted faces and crooked joints? A hand stands for a hand-clasp; a face for a kiss! Love becomes a ‘spiritual’ passion only after it has blossomed on physical expression. Not before.”

The other shook his head doubtfully.

“If your view were the correct one,” pursued Irwin, “women, in all their habitual acts of fascination (which are Nature’s precursors of love) would strive more to touch the mental, the spiritual side of men. But they don’t. They apply their own self-learned reasoning to the opposite sex. They decorate themselves for man with the feathers of male birds (you’ll find that in your Darwin), which Nature gave the male birds to charm the females. They strike at his senses, and they hit his mental side, when he has any, through them.”

“You’re a sad misogynist, Irwin!” Dr. Goodno was smiling, but there was a sub-note of earnestness beneath the lightness of his tone. “And you forget that women have an imaginative and ideal side which is superior to man’s. They can create the mental, possibly, where men are most dependent upon sense-impression. Love involves more of the soul in woman, Irwin.”

The house surgeon unwound his legs. “Or less,” he said tersely. “Havelock Ellis says a good thing. He says that while a man may be said to live on a plane, a woman is more apt to live on the upward or downward slope of a curve. She is always going up or coming down. That’s why a woman, when an artificial civilization hasn’t stepped in to forbid it, is forever talking about her health. And, spiritually, as well as physically, she is just as apt to be coming down as going up. Her proportion is wrong. Your bad woman disrespects her soul; your good woman disrespects her body. The wholesome woman disrespects neither and respects both. But very few young women are wholesome nowadays. Their training has been against it! The best way for a woman to treat her soul is to realize that her soul and body belong together, and have to live together the rest of her natural life. She needn’t forget this just because she happens to fall in love! No woman can marry a man whom accident has robbed of his physical side and not wrong herself. She shuts off the avenues of her senses. There is no thrill of ear or hand--no comeliness for her eye to dwell upon, and her spiritual love, so beautiful to begin with, starves itself slowly to death!”

“Very good on general principles,” said Dr. Goodno. “That’s the trouble. It’s easy enough to sermonize in the pulpit, or the clinic either, but when we come to concrete examples, it’s difficult. The particular instance is troublesome. Now, in the case of this man in the surgical ward, if he recovered at all, but remained a hopeless cripple, you would pack him off into a rayless solitude for the rest of his life, and tell the girl who loves him to go and love somebody else. You wouldn’t leave it to her--even if he was willing.”

“Wouldn’t _you_?”

“No! I would be afraid to arrogate to myself the judgment upon two human souls. There are times when what we call consistency vanishes and something greater and more noble stands up to make it ashamed. I’ll tell you now, Irwin, if the one woman in the world to me--the woman I loved--if my wife--had been brought where the case we’ve been speaking of promises to be--if there were nothing but her eyes left and the something that is back of them--I tell you, I’d have married her! Yes, and I’d have thanked God for it!”

His companion tossed the dead butt of his cigar into the grate and rose to go to the ward. “Goodno,” he said, and his voice was unsteady, “I believe it! You would; and I wish to the Lord I knew what that meant!”

* * * * *

The superintendent sat long thinking. He was still pondering when his wife entered the room. “I’ve just been talking with Irwin,” he said, “about the last trephine case--the one you spoke to me of. He doesn’t seem too hopeful, I’m sorry to say.”

She did not answer.

“By the way,” he continued, “I saw your new nurse protégée to-day. Langdon, I believe her name is. She is a lovely girl; I think I never saw a brighter, sweeter face in my life.”

Mrs. Goodno had gone to the window and stood looking out. “Doctor,” she said, “I’ve bad news. Dr. Faulkner has just seen Mr. Daunt, and--he is dying.”

Something in her voice caught him. He rose and came beside her, and saw that her eyes were full of tears. He drew her head to his shoulder and smoothed her hair gently. He could feel her hands quiver against his arm. His thoughts fled far away--somewhere--where the one for whose sorrow she cried must be uncomforted. “Poor girl! Poor girl!” he said.

XIX.

As they entered the room, Lois turned the key in its lock and bent a long, penetrating gaze on Margaret.

She lay huddled against the welter of bedclothes, silent, inert, pearl-pale spots on her cheeks like gray-white smothers of foam over fretting rocks. Her eyes were closed and her breath came chokingly, like a child’s after a draught of strong medicine. Suddenly, as Lois stood pondering, she kneeled upright on the bed, holding her arms out before her.

“Oh, God!” she cried, “don’t let him die! Please don’t! He can’t--he can’t die! Why, he’s Richard--Richard Daunt. It’s only an accident. He can’t die that way. God--God!”

“Hush, dear! Oh, dear! What can I say?” cried Lois.

Margaret slipped to the floor, dragging the covers with her, and burying her face in the fleecy cuddle. There she writhed like some trodden thing.

“Oh, dear God!” she sobbed, “just when I knew. He can’t die now! It’s just to punish me; I’ve been wicked, but I didn’t mean to be. I only wanted his good! If he had only died before I knew it! Only let him live till I can tell him, God. I’m not a wicked woman--you know how I tried. A wicked woman wouldn’t have tried. Oh, God, he doesn’t even know! I can’t tell him. I’ve suffered already. If he died, I couldn’t feel worse than I have all this time. Let me think he’s going to die, but don’t let him. _Don’t let him!_ I want him so! It isn’t for that that I want him! I know now. I thought it was the other. But I wasn’t so wicked as that. I’ve been selfish. I’ve been thinking I was good to keep him away, but I wasn’t. I was cruel. He loved me the right way. Oh, if I could only forget how he talked!--and he didn’t know what he was saying. I’ve hated myself ever since. If he dies, I shall hate myself forever! I don’t deserve that! I’m not so bad as that! I _couldn’t_ be. I’m willing to be punished in other ways--in any other way--but not this, God! I can’t stand it!

“I don’t ask for him as he was! I don’t care how he looks! Give him to me just as he is. Give him to me crippled and helpless, and let me care for him all my life. Oh, God, it isn’t so much that I ask! It’s such a little thing for you to grant! Why, every day you let some one get well, some one who isn’t half as much to anybody as he is to me. If I were asking something I oughtn’t to--something sinful, it would be different! But it can’t be bad to want him to get well! I’ll be better all my life to have him. It isn’t much--I’ll never ask you anything else as long as I live! Only let him live--don’t take him away! I don’t care if he can never walk again, if he can only know me, and love me still! God, his life is so precious to me; it’s worth more than all the world. If he died, I would want to die, too. God! Hasn’t he suffered enough? How can you watch him--how can you see what he is suffering now and not let him live? You can if you want to! There are so many millions and millions of people, and this is just one of them. Oh, for Christ’s sake--for Christ’s sake!”

“Oh, Margaret! Margaret!” wailed Lois, falling beside her, as though physical contact could soothe her. “Don’t go on like that! Don’t! Oh, it’s too cruel! You break my heart! Darling, darling! He isn’t dead yet. Maybe--maybe----” She stopped then, choking, but pressing her hands hard on Margaret’s cheeks, on her hair, on her breast, her limbs, as though to press back the nerves that she felt throbbed to bursting.

Margaret struggled to her feet, swaying with the paroxysm just passed. Her eyes were unwet and bright, and her teeth were clenched tightly on her under lip.

“No, he isn’t dead,” she said slowly, as though to force conviction on herself. “He isn’t--dead. Doctors are mistaken sometimes, aren’t they?” she asked dully. “Yes, I know! They are! Dr. Irwin told me so himself. ‘The prognostications of surgery can in no case be considered infallible.’ That’s what he said in the lecture yesterday. I wrote it down in my note-book. That means that he may not die. Oh! I’ve got to believe that. _I’ve got to!_ Can’t you see that I’ve got to? You don’t believe he will live! I see it in your face. When the doctor said that just now, you looked just as he did. He might have stabbed me just as well. Why! I’d rather die myself a million times--but it wouldn’t do any good! It wouldn’t do any good!”

Margaret moved to the fire and spread out her hands before the blaze, as though her mind unconsciously sought relief from strain in an habitual action. But her chattering teeth showed that she was unconscious of its warmth.

She looked up at the countenance of La Belle Jardinière above the fireplace. The mild gaze which had once held reproach now seemed to bend down full of pitiful tenderness. Her bright, miserable eyes rested on the placid figure.

“You don’t know,” she said slowly, “what I am praying for. If it were a little child--_my_ little child--that I were asking for, you would understand. You can only pity me, but you can never, never know!”

She turned and walked up and down the floor, her steps uneven with anguish, her fingers laced and unlaced in tearless convulsion, and her throat contracting with soundless sobs.

Lois watched her, her mind saying over and over to itself: “If she would only cry! If she would only cry!” There was something more terrible than tears in this inarticulate anguish. At last she went and stood in Margaret’s way, clinging entreatingly to her. “Do let me help you, dear! Lie down and let me cover you up and make you some tea! Do please, dear!” She stopped, struck by the ashy pallor of her face.

“No, no, Lois. I can’t stay here! Think! He may be dying _now_! I _must_ go to him! Oh, you have got to let me--they can’t forbid me that. I was going to stay with him to-night, anyway. You know I was! I can’t let him die! He _shan’t_! I’ll fight it off with him. I don’t care what Dr. Faulkner says; I don’t care what you think! You mustn’t say no, Lois! Oh, Lois, darling! I’ll die now, right here, if you don’t.” She dropped on her knees at Lois’s feet, catching her hand and kissing it in grovelling entreaty.

“You know I’ll have to let you, if you ask like that!” cried Lois. “I’m only thinking of you--and of him,” she added. “You know if you should break down----”

“But I won’t--I won’t!” A gulping hiccough strained her, and Lois poured out a glass of water for her hastily, and stood over her while she swallowed it in choking mouthfuls.

XX.

In the dimmed light Margaret bent above Daunt’s bed to wipe away the creeping, beady sweat that lay on the forehead, and laid her fingers on his wrist. Then she came close to Lois. She had bitten her lip raw and her neck throbbed out and in above her close collar.

“It’s fluttering,” she whispered piteously, “and he’s so cold! See how pinched and blue his nose is. Oh, God--Lois!”

The rustle and stir of the early waking city soaked in fine-filtered sounds through the window. Of what use were its multitudinous strivings, its tangled hopes, its varied suffering? The unending quiet of softened noises beyond the spotless, ruffled screens hurt her. She could have screamed, inarticulately, frantically, to scare away that dreadful, stolid, lethargic thing that sprawled in the air. Her nails left little, curved, purpled dents in her palms that smarted when she unclenched her fingers. It would be easier to bear it if he cried out--if he babbled unmeaningness, or hurled reproaches. Only--that still prostration, that anxious expression about the lines of the forehead, that silence, growing into---- No, no! Not that! Not--death!

Lois sat aching fiercely at the smouldering longing in the shadowy depths of the other’s spaniel-like eyes. The tawny-brown surge of her hair, swept back from her forehead, stood out against the white of the blank wall, cameo-like. She suddenly crouched by Lois’s chair, grasping at her. “Lois, Lois!” she said, low and with fearful intensity; “it’s come! Help me to fight it! Help me!”

“What has come? What?”

“Fear! It’s looking at me everywhere. It’s looking between the screens! I must keep it away. If I give up to it, he’ll die! Press my hands--that’s good. Look at him! Didn’t he move then? Wasn’t his face turned more? I’m--cold, Lois.”

An icy frost had silvered her soul. Gaunt arms seemed to stretch from the dimness toward the bed. Then, with an effort which left her weak, she thrust back her imaginings, rose, and sat down by the pillow. Her eyes glanced fearfully from side to side, then above, as though questioning from what direction would come this relentless foe.

Through her dazed brain rushed, clamorous, reiterating, a prayer-blent, defiant appeal. She saw God sitting on a draped throne, but His face was merciless. He would not help her! Of what virtue was this all-filling love of hers if it could not save one little human life? He was dying--dying--dying! And he _must not_ die! She remembered a night, far back in her misty childhood, when she had crept through evening shadows to see a soul take flight. The Death Angel then was a kindly friend sent to set free a shining twin; now it was a ghastly monster, lying in wait and chuckling in the silences.

She pressed Daunt’s nerveless hand between her warm palms and strove to put the whole force of her being into a great passionate desire--a desire to send along this human conductivity the extra current of vitality which she felt throbbing and pressing in her every vein. It seemed as though she must give--give of her own bounding life, to eke out the fading powers of that dying frame. Again and again she breathed out her longing, until the very intensity of her will made her feel dizzy and weak. She would have opened her veins for him. Like the Roman daughter, she would have given her breast to his lips and the warmth from her limbs to aid him.

Once she started. “You shall! You shall!” seemed to patter in flying echoes all about her. It was Daunt’s cry by the fields at Warne, that had gone leaping from his lips to her heart like a vibrant, inspiring fire. Did that virile will still lie living, overlapped with the wing of disease, sending its stubborn strength out now to bolster her own? She glanced at the waxy face, half expecting to see the bloodless lips falling back from the words.

Daunt lay motionless. The ice-pack had been removed from his head, and the shaven temple showed paste-like beneath the bandage-edge. From time to time Lois poured between his lips a teaspoonful of diluted brandy, and, at such times, Margaret would put her strong arms under his head and raise it from the pillow, outwardly calm, but inwardly shuddering with wrenching jerks of pain.

* * * * *

So the slow, weary night dragged away. The house surgeon looked in once, bent over the patient a moment, and, without examination, went away.

The morning broke, and through the walls the dim, murmurous hum of street traffic penetrated in a muffled whisper. Then the gray of the late dawn crept about the room, noiseless-footed, like one walking over graves. Suddenly Lois, who had been sitting with closed eyes, felt a touch on her shoulder. It was Margaret, and she pointed silently to Daunt. Lois started forward with a shrinking fear that the end had come unperceived, but a glance reassured her. The rigid outlines of his features seemed to have relaxed; an indefinable something, a warmth, a tinge, a flexibility seemed to have fallen upon the drawn cheeks. It was something scarce tangible enough to be noted; something evasive, and yet, to Lois’s trained senses, unmistakable. It was a light loosening of the grip of Death, a tentative withdrawing of the forces of the destroyer.

Lois turned with a quick and silent gesture, and the two girls looked at each other steadfastly. Into Margaret’s eyes sprang a trembling, eager light of joy.

“We mustn’t hope too much, dear,” Lois whispered, “but I think--I think that there is a little change. Wait until I call Dr. Irwin.”

The house surgeon bent over the cot with his finger upon Daunt’s pulse. “This is another one on Faulkner,” he said. “It beats all how things will go. Said he’d give him twelve hours, did he? Well, this patient has his own ideas about that. He evidently has marvellous recuperative powers or else the age of miracles isn’t past. Better watch this case very carefully and report to me every hour or so. You can count,” he smiled at Lois, “on being mighty unpopular with Faulkner. He doesn’t like to have his opinions reversed this way, and he is pretty sure to lay it on the nurse.”

As the doctor disappeared, all the strength which Margaret had summoned to her aid seemed to vanish in one great wave of weakening which overspread her spirit. Everything swam before her eyes. She sank upon the chair and laid her arms outstretched upon the table. Then she slowly dropped her head upon them.

XXI.

It was late afternoon. The fiery sun had just dipped below the jagged Adirondack hill-peaks to the south, still casting a carmine glow between the scattered and low-boughed pines. The square window of the high-ceiled sanitarium room was specked with pale-appearing stars, and the snow-draped slopes beneath showed dim in the elusive beauty that lurks in soft color and low tones. Daunt lay silent, facing the window, and Margaret, tired from romping with the doctor’s children, rested on a low hassock beside his reclining chair. Slowly the carmine faded from the snow, and the hastening winter-dark trailed its violescent gossamer up and down the rock-clefts and across the purpling hollows.

He turned his eyes, all at once feeling her lifted gaze. He reached out his right hand and touched the lace edge of her white nurse’s cap, with a faint smile. Something in the smile and the gesture caught at her heart. She leaned suddenly toward him, and taking his hand in both her own, laid her face upon it.

He drew his hand away, breathing sharply.

“Dear!” she said. “Do you remember that afternoon on the sands? You kissed me then! I am the same Margaret now--not changed at all.”

A shudder passed over him, but he did not reply.

Then she knelt beside him, quite close, laying her cheek by his face on the pillow and drawing his one live hand up to her lips. “You are everything to me,” she whispered--“everything, everything! That day on the beach I was happy; but not more happy, dear, than I am now. You were everything else in the world to me then, but now you are _me_, myself! Don’t turn away; look at me!” Reaching over, she drew his nerveless left arm across her neck.

He turned his face to her with an effort, his lips struggling to speak.

“Kiss me!” she commanded.

He tried to push her back. “No! No!” he cried vehemently, drawing away. “That’s past.”

“Not even that! Just think how long I’ve waited!” She was smiling. “Richard,” she said, “do you know what it means for a woman to kneel to a man like this? I haven’t a bit of pride about it. Only think how ashamed I will be if you refuse to take me! What does a woman do when a man refuses her?”

A white pain had settled upon Daunt’s face. “Margaret,” he faltered, “don’t; I can’t stand it! You don’t know what you say.”

She kissed his hand again. “Yes, I do! I am saying just as plainly as I can that I love you; that I belong to you, and that I ask for nothing else but to belong to you as long as I live.”

His hand made a motion of protest.

“I want you just as much as I did the day you first kissed me. I want the right to stay with you always and care for you.”

He winced visibly. “‘Care for me!’” he repeated. “It would be _all_ care. I have nothing to bring you now but sorrow and regret. I’m not the Daunt who offered himself to you at Warne. I’m only a fragment. I had health and hopes then. I had beautiful dreams, Margaret--dreams of work and a home and you. I shan’t ever forget those dreams, but they can never come true!”

She smoothed his hand caressingly. “I have had dreams, too,” she answered. “This is the one that comes oftenest of all. It is about you and me.” She turned her head, with a spot of color in either cheek. “Sometimes it is in the day. You are lying, writing away at a new book of yours, and I am filling your pipe for you, while the tea is getting hot. I see you smile up to me and say, ‘Clever girl! how did you know I wanted a smoke?’ Then you read your last chapter to me, and I tell you how I wouldn’t have said it the way the woman in the story does, and you pretend you are going to change it, and don’t.

“Sometimes it is in the evening, and we are looking out at the sunset just as we have been doing to-night.”

He would have spoken, but she covered his mouth with her hand. His moist breath wrapped her palm.

“And then it is dark and there is a big red lamp on the table--the one I had in my old room--and I am reading the latest novel to you, and when we have got to the end, you are telling me how you would have done it.”

While she had been speaking, glowing and dark-eyed, a mystical peace--a divine forgetfulness had touched him. He lifted his hand to his forehead, feeling her soft fingers. The pictures she painted were so sweet!

Presently he threw his arm down with a swallowed sob. The dream-scene faded, and he lay once more helpless and despairing, weighted with the heaviness of useless limbs, a numb burden for whom there could be no love, no joy, nothing but the inevitable rebuke of enduring pain. He smoothed the wide dun-gold waves of her hair gently.