Chapter 46

'_My God! My God!_'

The cry was David's. He had reeled back against the table in his study, his hand upon an open book, his face turned to Doctor Mildmay, who was standing by the fireplace.

'Of course, I can't be sure,' said the doctor hastily, almost guiltily. 'You must not take it upon my authority alone. Try and throw it off your mind. Take your wife up to town to see Selby or Paget, and if I am wrong I shall be too thankful! And, above all, don't frighten her. Take care--she will be down again directly.'

'You say,' said David, thickly, 'that if it were what you suspect, operation would be difficult. Yes, I see there is something of the sort here.'

He turned, shaking all over, to the book beside him, which was a medical treatise he had just taken down from his scientific bookcase.

'It would be certainly difficult,' said the doctor, frowning, his lower lip pushed forward in a stress of thought, 'but it would have to be attempted. Only, on the temporal bone it will be a puzzle to go deep enough.'

David's eye ran along the page beside him. 'Sarcoma, which was originally regarded with far less terror than cancer (carcinoma), is now generally held by doctors to be more malignant and more deadly. There is much less pain, but surgery can do less, and death is in most cases infinitely more rapid.'

'Hush!' said the doctor, with short decision, 'I hear her coming down again. Let me speak.'

Lucy, who had run upstairs to quiet a yell of crying from Sandy immediately after Doctor Mildmay had finished his examination of her swollen cheek, opened the door as he spoke. She was slightly flushed, and her eyes were more wide open and restless than usual. David was apparently bending over a drawer which he had opened on the farther side of his writing-table. The doctor's face was entirely as usual.

'Well now, Mrs. Grieve,' he said cheerily, 'we have been agreeing--your husband and I--that it will be best for you to go up to London and have that cheek looked at by one of the crack surgeons. They will give you the best advice as to what to do with it. It is not a common ailment, and we are very fine fellows down here, but of course we can't get the experience, in a particular line of cases, of one of the first-rate surgical specialists. Do you think you could go to-morrow? I could make an appointment for you by telegraph to-day.'

Lucy gave a little unsteady, affected laugh.

'I don't see how I can go all in a moment like that,' she said. 'It doesn't matter! Why don't you give me something for it, and it will go away.'

'Oh! but it does matter,' said the doctor, firmly. 'Lumps like that are serious things, and mustn't be trifled with.'

'But what will they want to do to it?' said Lucy nervously. She was standing with one long, thin hand resting lightly on the back of a chair, looking from David, whose face and figure were blurred to her by the dazzle of afternoon light coming in through the window, to Doctor Mildmay.

The doctor cleared his throat.

'They would only want to do what was best for you in every way,' he said; 'you may be sure of that. Could you be very brave if they advised you that it ought to be removed?'

She gave a little shriek.

'What! you mean cut it out--cut it away!' she cried, shaking, and looking at him with the frowning anger of a child. 'Why, it would leave an ugly mark, a hideous mark!'

'No, it wouldn't. The mark would disfigure you much less than the swelling. They would take care to draw the skin together again neatly, and you could easily arrange your hair a little. But you ought to get a first-rate opinion.'

'What is it? what do you call it?' said Lucy, irritably. 'I can't think why you make such a fuss.'

'Well, it might be various things,' he said evasively. 'Any way, you take my advice, and have it seen to. I can telegraph as I go from here.'

'I could take you up to-morrow,' said David, coming forward in answer to the disturbed look she threw him. Now that her flush had faded, how pale and drooping she was in the strong light! 'It would be better, dear, to do what Doctor Mildmay recommends. And you never mind a day in London, you know.'

Did she detect any difference in the voice? She moved up to him, and he put his arm round her.

'Must I?' she said, helplessly; 'it's such a bore, to-morrow particularly. I had promised to take Sandy out to tea.'

'Well, let that young man go without a treat for once,' said the doctor, laughing. 'He has a deal too many, anyway. Very well, that's settled. I will telegraph as I go to the train. Just come here a moment, Grieve.'

The two went out together. When David returned, any one who had happened to be in the hall would have seen that he could hardly open the sitting-room door, so fumbling were his movements. As he passed through the room to reach the study he caught sight of his own face in a glass, and stopping, with clenched hands, pulled himself together by the effort of his whole being.

When he opened the study-door, Lucy was hunting about his table in a quick, impatient way.

'I can't think where you keep your india-rubber rings, David. I want to put one round a parcel for Dora.'

He found one for her. Then she stood by the fire, as the sunset-light faded into dusk, and poured out to him a story of domestic grievances. Sarah, their cook, wished to leave and be married--it was very unexpected and very inconsiderate, and Lucy did not believe the young man was steady; and how on earth was she to find another cook? It was enough to drive one wild, the difficulty of getting cooks in Manchester.

For nearly an hour, till the supper-bell rang, she stood there, with her foot on the fender, chattering in a somewhat sharp, shrill way. Not one word would she say, or let him say, of London or the doctor's visit.

After supper, as they went back into the study, David looked for the railway-guide. 'The 10. 15 will do,' he said. 'Mildmay has made the appointment for three. We can just get up in time.'

'It is great nonsense!' said Lucy, pouting. 'The question is, can we get back? I must get back. I don't want to leave Sandy for the night. He's got a cold.'

It seemed to David that something clutched at his breath and voice. Was it he or some one else that said:--

'That will be too tiring, dear. We shall have to stay the night.'

'No, I must get back,' said Lucy, obstinately.

Afterwards she brought her work as usual, and he professed to smoke and read. But the evening passed, for him, beneath his outward quiet, in a hideous whirl of images and sensations, which ultimately wore itself out, and led to a mood of dulness and numbness. Every now and then, as he sat there, with the fire crackling, and the familiar walls and books about him, he felt himself sinking, as it were, in a sudden abyss of horror; then, again, the scene of the afternoon seemed to him absurd, and he despised his own panic. He dwelt upon everything the doctor had said about the rarity, the exceptional nature of such an illness. Well, what is rare does not happen--not to oneself--that was what he seemed to be clinging to at last.

When Lucy went up to bed, he followed her in about a quarter of an hour.

'Why, you are early!' she said, opening her eyes.

'I am tired,' he said. 'There was a great press of work to-day. I want a long night.'

In reality, he could not bear her out of his sight. Hour after hour he tossed restlessly, beside her quiet sleep, till the spring morning broke.

They left Manchester next morning in a bitter east wind. As she passed through the hall to the cab, Lucy left a little note for Dora on the table, with instructions that it should be posted.

'I want her to come and see him at his bedtime,' she said, 'for of course we can't get back for that.'

David said nothing. When they got to the station, he dared not even propose to her the extra comfort of first class, lest he should intensify the alarm he perfectly well divined under her offhand, flighty manner.

By three o'clock they were in the waiting-room of the famous doctor they had come to see. Lucy looked round her nervously as they entered, with quick, dilating nostrils, and across David there swept a sudden choking memory of the trapped and fluttering birds he had sometimes seen in his boyhood struggling beneath a birdcatcher's net on the moors.

As the appointment was at an unusual time, they were not kept waiting very long by the great man. He received them with a sort of kindly distance, made his examination very quickly, and asked her a number of general questions, entering the answers in his large patients' book.

Then he leant back in his chair, looking thoughtfully at Lucy over his spectacles.

'Well,' he said at last, with a perfectly cheerful and businesslike voice, 'I am quite clear there is only one thing to be done, Mrs. Grieve. You must have that growth removed.'

Lucy flushed.

'I want you to give me something to take it away,' she said, half sullenly, half defiantly. She was sitting very erect, in a little tight-fitting black jacket, with her small black hat and veil on her knee.

'No, I am sorry to say nothing can be done in that way. If you were my daughter or sister, I should say to you, have that lump removed without a day's, an hour's unnecessary delay. These growths are not to be trifled with.'

He spoke with a mild yet penetrating observance of her. A number of reflections were passing rapidly through his mind. The operation was a most unpromising one, but it was clearly the surgeon's duty to try it. The chances were that it would prolong life which was now speedily and directly threatened, owing to the proximity of the growth to certain vital points.

'When could you do it?' said David, so hoarsely that he had to repeat his question. He was standing with his arm on the mantelpiece, looking down on the surgeon and his wife.

The great man lifted his eyebrows, and looked at his engagement-book attentively.

'I _could_ do it to-morrow,' he said at last; 'and the sooner, the better. Have you got lodgings? or can I help you? And--'

Then he stopped, and looked at Lucy. 'Let me settle things with your husband, Mrs. Grieve,' he said, with a kindly smile. 'You look tired after your journey. You will find a fire and some newspapers in the waiting-room.'

And, with a suavity not to be gainsaid, he ushered her himself across the hall, and shut the waiting-room door upon her. Then he came back to David.

A little while after a bell rang, and the man-servant who answered it presently took some brandy into the consulting-room. Lucy meanwhile sat, in a dazed way, looking out of window at the square garden, where the lilacs were already in full leaf in spite of the east wind.

When her husband and the doctor came in she sprang up, looking partly awkward, partly resentful. Why had they been discussing it all without her?

'Well, Mrs. Grieve,' said the doctor, 'your husband is just going to take you on to see the lodgings I recommend. By good luck they are just vacant. Then, if you like them, you know, you can settle in at once.'

'But I haven't brought anything for the night,' cried Lucy in an injured voice, looking at David.

'We will telegraph to Dora, darling,' he said, taking up her bag and umbrella from the table; 'but now we mustn't keep Mr. Selby. He has to go out.'

'How long will it take?' interrupted Lucy, addressing the surgeon. 'Can I get back next day?'

'Oh no! you will have to be four or five days in town. But don't alarm yourself, Mrs. Grieve. You won't know anything at all about the operation itself; your husband will look after you, and then a little patience--and hope for the best. Now I really must be off. Good-bye to you--good-bye to you.'

And he hurried off, leaving them to find their own cab. When they got in, Lucy said, passionately:--

'I want to go back, David. I want Sandy. I won't go to these lodgings.'

Then courage came to him. He took her hand.

'Dear, dear wife--for my sake--for Sandy's!'

She stared at him--at his white face.

'Shall I die?' she cried, with the same passionate tone.

'No, no, no!' he said, kissing the quivering hand, and seeing no one but her in the world, though they were driving through the crowd of Regent Street. 'But we must do everything Mr. Selby said. That hateful thing must be taken away--it is so near--think for yourself!--to the eye and the brain; and it might go downwards to the throat. You will be brave, won't you? We will look after you so--Dora and I.'

Lucy sank back in the cab, with a sudden collapse of nerve and spirit. David hung over her, comforting her, one moment promising her that in a few days she should have Sandy again, and be quite well; the next, checked and turned to stone by the memory of the terrible possibilities freely revealed to him in his private talk with Mr. Selby, and by the sense that he might be soothing the present only to make the future more awful.

'David! she is in such fearful pain! The nurse says she must have more morphia. They didn't give her enough. Will you run to Mr. Selby's house? You won't find him, of course--he is on his round--but his assistant, who was with him here just now, went back there. Run for him at once.'

It was Dora who spoke, as she closed the folding-doors of the inner room where Lucy lay. David, who was crouching over the fire in the sitting-room, whither the nurse had banished him for a while, after the operation, sprang up, and disappeared in an instant. Those faint, distant sounds of anguish which had been in his ear for half an hour or more, ever since the doctors had departed, declaring that everything was satisfactorily over, had been more than his manhood could bear.

He returned in an incredibly short space of time with a young surgeon, who at once administered another injection of morphia.

'A highly sensitive patient,' he said to David, 'and the nerves have, no doubt, been badly cut. But she will do now.'

And, indeed, the moaning had ceased. She lay with closed eyes--so small a creature in the wide bed--her head and face swathed in bandages. But the breathing was growing even and soft. She was once more unconscious.

The doctor touched David's hand and went, after a word with the nurse.

'Won't you go into the next room, sir, and have your tea? Mrs. Grieve is sure to sleep now,' said the nurse to him in her compassion.

He shook his head, and sat down near the foot of the bed. The nurse went into the dressing-room a moment to speak to Dora, who was doing some unpacking there, and he was left alone with his wife.

The sounds of the street came into the silent room, and every now and then he had a start of agony, thinking that she was moving again--that she was in pain again. But no, she slept; her breath came gently through the childish parted lips, and the dim light--for the nurse had drawn the curtains on the lengthening April day--hid her pallor and the ghastliness of the dressings.

Forty-eight hours ago, and they were in the garden with Sandy! And now life seemed to have passed for ever into this half-light of misery. Everything had dropped away from him--the interests of his business, his books, his social projects. He and she were shut out from the living world. Would she ever rise from that bed again--ever look at him with the old look?

He sat on there, hour after hour, till Dora coaxed him into the sitting-room for a while, and tried to make him take some food. But he could not touch it, and how the sudden gas which the servant lit glared on his sunken eyes! He waited on his companion mechanically, then sat, with his head on his hand, listening for the sound of the doctors' steps.

When they came, they hardly disturbed their patient. She moaned at being touched; but everything was right, and the violent pain which had unexpectedly followed the operation was not likely to recur.

'And what a blessing that she took the chloroform so well, with hardly any after-effects!' said Mr. Selby cheerily, drawing on his gloves in the sitting-room. 'Well, Mr. Grieve, you have got a good nurse, and can leave your wife to her with perfect peace of mind. You must sleep, or you will knock up; let me give you a sleeping draught.'

'Oh! I shall sleep,' said David, impatiently. 'You considered the operation successful--completely successful?'

The surgeon looked gravely into the fire.

'I shall know more in a week or so,' he said. 'I have never disguised from you, Mr. Grieve, how serious and difficult the case was. Still, we have done what was right--we can but wait for the issue.'

An hour later Dora looked into the sitting-room, and said softly:--

'She would like to see you, David.'

He went in, holding his breath. There was a night-light in the room, and her face was lying in deep shadow.

He knelt down beside her, and kissed her hand.

'My darling!' he said--and his voice was quite firm and steady--'are you easier now?'

'Yes,' she said faintly. 'Where are you going to sleep?'

'In a room just beyond Dora's room. She could make me hear in a moment if you wanted me.'

Then, as he looked closer, he saw that about her head was thrown the broad white lace scarf she had worn round her neck on the journey up. And as he bent to her, she suddenly opened her languid eyes, and gazed at him full. For the moment it was as though she were given back to him.

'I made Dora put it on,' she said feebly, moving her hand towards the lace. 'Does it hide all those nasty bandages?'

'Yes. I can't see them at all.'

'Is it pretty?'

The little gleam of a smile nearly broke down his self-command.

'Very,' he said, with a quivering lip.

She closed her eyes again.

'Oh! I hope Lizzie will look after Sandy,' she said after a while, with a long sigh.

Not a word now of wilfulness, of self-assertion! After the sullenness and revolt of the day before, which had lasted intermittently almost up to the coming of the doctors, nothing could be more speaking, more pathetic, than this helpless acquiescence.

'I mustn't stay with you,' he said. 'You ought to be going to sleep again. Nurse will give you something if you can't.'

'I'm quite comfortable,' she said, sleepily. 'There isn't any pain.'

And she seemed to pass quickly and easily into sleep as he sat looking at her.

An hour or two later, Dora, who could not sleep from the effects of fatigue and emotion, was lying in her uncomfortable stretcher-bed, thinking with a sort of incredulity of all that had passed since David's telegram had reached her the day before, or puzzling herself to know how her employers could possibly spare her for another three or four days' holiday, when she was startled by some recurrent sounds from the room beyond her own. David was sleeping there, and Dora, with her woman's quickness, had at once perceived that the partition between them was very thin, and had been as still as a mouse in going to bed.

The sound alarmed her, though she could not make it out. Instinctively she put her ear to the wall. After a minute or two she hastily moved away, and hiding her head under the bedclothes, fell to soft crying and praying.

For it was the deep rending sound of suppressed weeping, the weeping of a strong man who believes himself alone with his grief and with God. That she should have heard it at all filled her with a sort of shame.

Things, however, looked much brighter on the following morning. The wound caused by the operation was naturally sore and stiff, and the dressing was painful; but when the doctor's visit was over, and Lucy was lying in the halo of her white scarf on her fresh pillows, in a room which Dora and the nurse had made daintily neat and straight, her own cheerfulness was astonishing. She made Dora go out and get her some patterns for Sandy's summer suits, and when they came she lay turning them over from time to time, or weakly twisting first one and then another round her finger. She was, of course, perpetually anxious to know when she would be well, and whether the scar would be very bad; but on the whole she was a docile and promising patient, and she even began to see some gleams of virtue in Mr. Selby, for whom at first she had taken the strongest dislike.

Meanwhile, David, haunted always by a horrible knowledge which was hid from her, could get nothing decided for the future out of the doctors.

'We must wait,' said Mr. Selby; 'for the present all is healing well, but I wish we could get up her general strength. It must have been running down badly of late.'

Whereupon David was left reproaching himself for blindness and neglect, the real truth being that, with any one of Lucy's thin elastic frame and restless temperament, a good deal of health-degeneration may go on without its becoming conspicuous.

A few days passed. Dora was forced to go back to work; but as she was to take up her quarters at the Merton Road house, and to write long accounts of Sandy to his mother every day, Lucy saw her depart with considerable equanimity. Dora left her patient on the sofa, a white and ghostly figure, but already talking eagerly of returning to Manchester in a week. When she heard the cab roll off, Lucy lay back on her cushions and counted the minutes till David should come in from the British Museum, whither, because of her improvement, he had gone to clear up one or two bibliographical points. She caressed the thought of being left alone with him, except for the nurse--left to that tender and special care he was bestowing on her so richly, and through which she seemed to hold and know him afresh.

When he came in she reproached him for being late, and both enjoyed and scouted his pleas in answer.

'Well, I don't care,' she said obstinately; 'I wanted you.'

Then she heaved a long sigh.

'David, I made nurse let me look at the horrid place this morning. I shall always be a fright--it's no good.'

But he knew her well enough to perceive that she was not really very downcast, and that she had already devised ways and means of hiding the mark as much as possible.

'It doesn't hurt or trouble you at all?' he asked her anxiously.

'No, of course not,' she said impatiently. 'It's getting well. Do ask nurse to bring me my tea.'

The nurse brought it, and she and David spoiled their invalid with small attentions.

'It's nice being waited on,' said Lucy when it was over, settling herself to rest with a little sigh of sensuous satisfaction.

Another week passed, and all seemed to be doing well, though Mr. Selby would say nothing as yet of allowing her to move. Then came a night when she was restless; and in the morning the wound troubled her, and she was extremely irritable and depressed. The moment the nurse gave him the news at his door in the early morning, David's face changed. He dressed, and went off for Mr. Selby, who came at once.

'Yes,' he said gravely, after his visit, as he shut the folding-doors of Lucy's room behind him--'yes, I am sorry to say there is a return. Now the question is, what to do.'

He came and stood by the fireplace, legs apart, head down, debating with himself. David, haggard and unshorn, watched him helplessly.

'We could operate again,' he said thoughtfully, 'but it would cut her about terribly. And I can't disguise from you, Mr. Grieve'--as he raised his head and caught sight of his companion his tone softened insensibly--'that, in my opinion, it would be all but useless. I more than suspect, from my observation to-day, that there are already secondary growths in the lung. Probably they have been there for some time.'

There was a silence.

'Then we can do nothing,' said David.

'Nothing effectual, alas!' said the doctor, slowly. 'Palliatives, of course, we can use, of many kinds. But there will not be much pain.'

'Will it be long?'

David was standing with his back to the doctor, looking out of window, and Mr. Selby only just heard the words.

'I fear it will be a rapid case,' he said reluctantly. 'This return is rapid, and there are many indications this morning I don't like. But don't wish it prolonged, my dear sir!--have courage for her and yourself.'

The words were not mere platitudes--the soul of a good man looked from the clear and masterful eyes. He described the directions he had left with the nurse, and promised to come again in the evening. Then he grasped David's hand, and would have gone away quickly. But David, following him mechanically to the door, suddenly recollected himself.

'Could we move her?' he asked; 'she may crave to get home, or to some warm place.'

'Yes, you can move her,' the doctor said, decidedly. 'With an invalid-carriage and a nurse you can do it. We will talk about it when I come again to-night.'

'A ghastly case,' he was saying to himself as he went downstairs, 'and, thank heaven! a rare one. Strange and mysterious thing it is, with its ghoulish preference for the young. Poor thing! poor thing! and yesterday she was so cheerful--she would tell me all about her boy.'