CHAPTER XL

When Hamilton hastily entered the room, Annie, frightened and helpless, knelt beside her mistress, chafing her hands. On the opposite side of the couch Kimberly, greatly disturbed, looked up with relief.

Taking a chair at her side, the doctor lifted Alice's arm, took her pulse and sat for some time in silence watching her faint and irregular respiration.

He turned after a moment to Kimberly to learn the slight details of the attack, and listening, retracted the lids of Alice's eyes and examined the pupils. Reflecting again in silence, he turned her head gently from side to side and afterward lifted her arms one after the other to let them fall back beside her on the couch.

Even these slight efforts to obtain some knowledge of Alice's condition seemed to Kimberly disquieting and filled him with apprehension. The doctor turned to Annie. "Has your mistress ever had an experience like this before, Annie?"

"No, doctor, never. She has never been in this way before."

Imogene came hurrying upstairs with Dolly to learn of Alice's condition. They looked upon her unconsciousness with fear and asked whispered questions that intensified Kimberly's uneasiness.

"Do you think we could take her home, doctor?" asked Annie, timidly.

The doctor paused. "I don't think we will try it to-night, Annie. It is quite possible for her to remain here, isn't it?" he asked, looking at Dolly and Kimberly.

"Certainly," returned Dolly. "I will stay. Alice can have these rooms and I will take the blue rooms connecting."

"Then put your mistress to bed at once," said Hamilton to Annie.

"And telephone home, Annie," suggested Dolly, "for whatever you need. I will see the housekeeper right away about the linen."

Kimberly listened to the concise directions of the doctor for immediate measures of relief and followed him mechanically into the hall. Only one thought came out of the strange confusion--Alice was at least under his roof and in his mother's room.

When he returned with the doctor the lights were low and Alice lay with her head pillowed on her loosened hair. The maid and Dolly had hastened away to complete their arrangements for the emergency and for a few moments the two men were alone with their charge.

"Doctor, what do you make of this?" demanded Kimberly.

Hamilton, without taking his eyes from the sick woman, answered thoughtfully: "I can hardly tell until I get at something of the underlying cause. Bryson will be here in a moment. We will hear what he has to say."

Doctor Bryson appeared almost on the word. Hamilton made way for him at Alice's side and the two conferred in an undertone.

Bryson asked many questions of Hamilton and calling for a candle retracted Alice's eyelids to examine the pupils for reaction to the light. The two doctors lost not an unnecessary moment in deliberation. Consulting rapidly together, powerful restoratives were at once prepared and administered through the circulation.

Reduced to external efforts to strengthen the vital functions the two medical men worked as nurses and left nothing undone to overcome the alarming situation. Then for an hour they watched together, closely, the character and frequency of Alice's pulse and breathing.

To Kimberly the conferences of the two men seemed unending. Sometimes they left the room and were gone a long time. He walked to a window to relieve his suspense. Through the open sash came the suppressed hum of motors as the cars, parked below the stables, moved up the hill to receive departing guests and made their way down the long, dark avenue to the highway.

On the eastern horizon a dull gray streak crossed a mirror that lay in the darkness below. Kimberly had to look twice to convince himself that the summer night was already waning.

Annie came into the room and, he was vaguely conscious, was aiding the doctors in a painstaking examination of their patient. Through delicacy Kimberly withdrew, as they persistently questioned the maid in the hope of obtaining the much-needed information concerning her mistress's previous condition; for what Annie could not supply of this they knew they must work without.

Plunged in the gloom of his apprehensions, he saw the doctors coming down the hall toward him and stopped them. "Speak before me," he said with an appeal that was a command. "You both know what I have at stake."

The three retired to the library and Kimberly listened attentively to every phase of the discussion between the two master clinicians as they laid their observations before him. The coma was undisguisedly a serious matter. It seemed to them already ingravescent and, taken in connection with the other symptoms, was even ominous. The two men, without a satisfactory history, and without a hope of obtaining one from the only available source--the suffering woman herself--discussed the case from every side, only to return unwillingly to the conclusion to which everything pointed--that a cerebral lesion underlay the attack.

Their words sent a chill to Kimberly's heart. But the lines of defence were mapped out with speed and precision; a third eminent man, an authority on the brain, was to be sent for at once. Nurses, equal almost in themselves to good practitioners, were to be called in, and finally Hamilton and Bryson arranged that either one or the other should be at the sick-bed every instant to catch a possible moment of consciousness.

Hamilton himself returned to his patient. Bryson at the telephone took up the matter of summoning aid from town, and when he had done threw himself down for a few hours' sleep. Kimberly followed Hamilton and returned to Alice's side. He saw as he bent over her how the expression of her face had changed. It was drawn with a profound suffering. Kimberly sitting noiselessly down took her hand, waiting to be the first to greet her when she should open her eyes.

All Second Lake knew within a day or two of Alice's critical illness. The third doctor had come in the morning and he remained for several days.

Hamilton questioned Annie repeatedly during the period of consultations. "Try to think, Annie," he said once, "has your mistress never at any time complained of her head?"

"Indeed, sir, I cannot remember. She never complained about herself at all. Stop, sir, she did last summer, too--what am I thinking of? I am so confused. She had a fall one night, sir. I found her in her dressing-room unconscious. Oh, she was very sick that night. She told me that she had fallen and her head had struck the table--the back of her head. For days she suffered terribly. Could it have been that, do you think?"

"Put your hand to the place on your head where she complained the pain was."

"How did she happen," Hamilton continued, when Annie had indicated the region, "to fall backward in her own room, Annie?"

"She never told me, doctor. I asked her but I can't remember what she said. It was the night before Mr. MacBirney left Cedar Lodge."

The doctors spent fruitless days in their efforts to overcome the unconsciousness. There was no longer any uncertainty as to the seat of the trouble. It lay in the brain itself and defied every attempt to relieve it. Even a momentary interval of reason was denied to the dumb sufferer.

Kimberly, on the evening of the third day, had summoned his medical advisers to his own room and asked the result of their consultation. The frail and eminent man whom Hamilton and Bryson had brought from town told Kimberly the story. He could grasp only the salient points of what the specialist said: That in a coma such as they faced it was the diagnosis of the underlying conditions that was always important. That this was often difficult; sometimes, as now, impossible. That at times they encountered, as now, a case so obscure as to defy the resources of clinical medicine. Kimberly asked them their judgment as to the issue; the prognosis, they could only tell him, was doubtful, depending wholly upon the gravity of the apoplectic injury.

The Kimberly family rose to the emergency. Aware of the crisis that had come, through Alice, into Robert's life, Imogene and Dolly, on hand day and night, were mother and sister to him and to her. Nowhere in the situation was there any failure or weakening of support.

Hamilton, undismayed in the face of the physical catastrophe he had been called upon so unexpectedly to retrieve, and painfully aware of what the issue meant to his near and dear friend, never for an instant relaxed his efforts.

Seconded by his nurses, reinforced by his counsel and strengthened by Bryson's close co-operation, Hamilton faced the discouragement steadily, knowing only too well that the responsibility must rest, in the end, on him alone.

Absorbed, vigilant, tireless--pouring the reserve energy of years into the sustained struggle of the sleepless days and nights--he strove with every resource of his skill and watched unremittingly for an instant's abatement of the deadly lethargy that was crushing the vitality of the delicate woman before him.

Kimberly, following the slightest details of the sick-room hours, spent the day and the night at the bedside or in pacing the long hall. If he slept it was for an hour and after leaving orders to summon him instantly if Alice woke. They who cared for her knew what he meant by "waking." They knew how long and mutely, sometimes in the day, sometimes in the silence of the night, he watched her face for one returning instant of reason.

They knew how when hope burned low in every other eye it shone always steadily in his. The rising of the sun and its setting meant to him only another day of hope, another night of hope for her; every concern had passed from him except that which was centered in the fight for her life.

Considerate as he was to those about him they feared him, and his instinctive authority made itself felt more keenly in his silence than in his words. The heavy features, the stubborn brow, the slow, steady look became intensified in the long, taciturn vigil. Every day Dolly walked with him and talked with him. She made a bond between him and the world; but she saw how little the world meant when danger came between him and the woman he loved.

One evening the nurses told him that Alice was better. They hoped for a return of consciousness and he sat all night waiting for the precious instant. The next day while he slept, wearied and heartsick, Alice sank. For ten minutes those about her endured a breathless, ageing suspense that sapped their energy and strength, until it was known that the doctor had won the fight and the weary heart had returned to its faint and labored beat. They told Kimberly nothing of it. When he awoke he still thought she was better.

When he came into the room he was so hopeful that he bent over her and fondly called her name. To his consternation and delight her eyes opened at the sound of his voice; it seemed as if she were about to speak. Then her eyes closed again and she lay still. The incident electrified him and he spoke hopefully of it for hours. At midnight he sent Hamilton away, saying he himself was fresh and would be on duty with the nurse until daylight.

The air was sultry. Toward morning a thunder-storm broke violently. Kimberly walked out into the hall to throw the belvedere doors open to the fresh air. As he turned to go back, his heart stopped beating. In the gloom of the darkened gallery a slender, white figure came from the open door of the sick-room and Kimberly saw Alice, with outstretched hands, walking uncertainly toward him. He stood quite still and taking her hands gently as they touched his own he murmured her name.

"Alice! What is it, darling?" She opened her eyes. Their vacancy pierced his heart.

"Baby is crying," she faltered; "I hear my baby. Walter." Her hands groped pitifully within his own. "Walter! Let me go to her!"

She tried to go on but Kimberly restrained and held her for a moment trembling in his arms. "Come with me," he said, leading her slowly back to her pillow. "Let us go to her together."