"We refuse your terms, your lordship," said the leader of the deputation.
Outside the manager's office where the meeting of delegates was being held, the works of the Biggie factory lay deserted in the autumn sunlight. There was no sign of harvest there for man or beast. The huge engines seemed asleep, the tall factory chimney showed a cenotaph proclaiming a dead life. Here and there among the rows of workmen's houses were knots of men despondently expectant, a shrill woman or two voiced her wrongs aggressively, the children in the gutter looked dirty, unkempt, pale.
Lord Blackborough stared steadily at the speaker. "Then you hold that I am bound to start these works again, despite the fact that they have been running at a loss for some years; and you hold also that I am bound to give you a rise in wages?"
"The men in these works cannot accept a less wage than that received in others which, excuse me, being better managed, pay their owners well--far too well," replied Mr. Green. He was a singularly able-looking man, curiously taut and trim in words, speech, manner, apparently in soul.
"Then I am not only to receive no return on my capital, but I am to spend other capital in paying you, until Germany ceases to make our goods cheaper than we can. Is this fair?" asked Lord Blackborough.
"Quite fair, your lordship," replied the leader; "if only because the capital you own has been wrung unjustly from us--from labour."
"All capital must be, as you call it, 'wrung' from labour. It does not create itself. I offer you this capital at a very low rate of interest, one and a half per cent. If labour cannot hope to make even so much, over and above livelihood, that seems an end to any enlargement of trade."
There was a pause; then Lord Blackborough smiled. "I cannot complain if the figures before you make you hesitate; for to me they are convincing. Let us, therefore, pass over that offer. My next is one to re-open the works, but on a different system. An eight-hours' day, piecework, and no limitations of trades-unions or any other organisation regarding the out-run of any individual."
A faint stir could be heard amongst some of the older men; but Mr. Green still stood spokesman.
"That is absolutely out of the question, your lordship," he said decisively; "we are all of us trades-union men. Labour must reserve to itself the right to legislate for the general good of the labourer; if it does not, who will? No one!" His tone grew bitter. "We have no right to accept a form of payment which will not give a living wage to----"
"To the weakest, to the bad workmen, the laziest, the most drunken," put in Lord Blackborough. "Personally, I do not see any reason at all why that class of worker should continue to live. You only have to level down to them. But I am not here to combat your views, only to receive your ultimatum. You refuse?"
Mr. Green brought his hand down on the table with dramatic force.
"In the name of Labour we refuse the unjust, iniquitous----"
"Thank you," said Lord Blackborough urbanely, then turned to the secretary. "Mr. Woods! Have you those documents ready?"
"They are here, your lordship." Ned Blackborough threw off his gravity, and holding the papers given him in his hand, smiled round the company, which, as if moved thereto by some magic in his manner, rose also. Mr. Green looked from one to the other. "What had this tyrannical employer of labour up his sleeve?
"Men," said the employer of labour frankly, "I am going to pay you with these," he waved the papers, "for listening to me for five minutes. Labour, they say, is dissociating itself from Capital, Capital from Labour. That may be so. I have nothing to do with that. Personally I have money. I have no work. I don't want money and I do want work. That is my position.
"But what I do see here in this England of ours is that labour is dissociating itself from work. It is labouring all day, and bringing forth--as little as it can! It claims the right to do this little. Well! let it if it likes! But why should it deny to any man the right to work at the rate of which he was born physically capable? Why should it make a swift worker take eight hours to do what he can do in four? If I were to put any one of you on oath, you would admit that it is far harder work to dawdle through eight hours than to work through eight hours. I've seen many bricklayers, painters, plasterers lately hard put to it how to eke out the time, and yet preserve an air of occupation, and I have no doubt you have most of you felt this. Now, think what this means. It is labour,hard labour!this, the enslavement of free work. Neither body nor mind gain full exercise, muscles and brain decay, the type goes down. But this is the system of the day; we begin it in school, where we let children dawdle eleven years over what they ought to learn in half the time. It greets the boy in his first workshop--it dogs his footsteps everywhere, turning work into labour. Work is--is play! Labour is--is the Devil! What beats me is this. Why, instead of slaving and dawdling, shouldn't the good workman, classed together, of course, be allowed to work, say, four hours, and then go their way? It would give us some chance of breeding a type of Englishman that is now fast dying out, that soon must pass away altogether. Men! don't be fools! Men! don't be slaves.
"That is all I have to say. Now for the payment. This is a free deed of gift of these works, made out, with a few necessary legal restrictions, in the name of you delegates, to be held in trust for the workers therein, and this is a cheque for the capital necessary to work it for six months. I have already signed both. I was so certain, you see, that your friend and leader, Mr. Green, would reject my other very reasonable proposals that I came prepared. Will you take them, Mr. Green? My solicitor is here, and you can arrange with him: my part is done!"
"Am I to understand----" almost gasped Mr. Green.
Lord Blackborough's face sharpened to the keenest edge of contempt. "Yes! You are to understand, sir, that, tired of being abused up hill and down dale in your organs for behaving like a sensible man, I am behaving like a fool. Well, men! Labour and Capital have for once met and kissed each other. See that they don't fall out again!"
Mr. Green stood with the papers in his hand for a second then he flung them on the table.
"You fling our own money to us as if we were dogs!" he began hotly.
"Dogs!" echoed Ned Blackborough in the same tone. "I would far liefer give it to the dogs than to you--you men who will have the handling of it. It is you who starved those poor children, not I. Their fathers could keep them in comfort for five-and-twenty shillings a week; you made them stand for out six-and-twenty--as if it mattered--as if money, physical comfort, even freedom, counted for anything in a man's search for happiness. That----." He pulled himself up quivering, feeling the uselessness of speech. "Come, Woods!" he said, "it is time I left this Temple of Mammon! Good-day, gentlemen."
"That is a clear waste of a hundred thousand pounds," mourned Mr. Woods as they crossed the courtyard; "you can't get beyond human nature, my lord. Each man will naturally go for that gold, the cleverest of them will get it, and so capital will re-arise out of its own ashes. You must begin further down--with the children."
"Set up a school, eh? Woods, in which they would be taught the truth--that work and play are merely interchangeable terms for occupation. Hullo! What's up?"
A small crowd of women, mostly carrying babies, but a few of them carrying baskets, stood at the gates blocking the way. Beyond them waited the motor-car, the chauffeur standing at the crank ready to start.
Ned Blackborough walked on until he nearly touched the first woman. She was better dressed than the rest, but who for all that had a coarse, violent face.
"Do you want anything?" he asked quietly. "If you don't, you might let me pass."
"Do we want!" she began in a rhetorical voice. "Yes! we want the bread you have stole from our children."
"Why not give them some of your husband's dinner?" he replied, pointing to her basket, on the top of which lay several knives and forks. There was a titter, for she was, in truth, carrying refreshment for Mr. Green and his colleagues. She flushed scarlet.
"My husband!" she echoed. "Yes! where is the money you have stole from our husbands? But you'll find that we aren't slaves like the ones you drove in the Indies before you were kicked out! The British workpeople are not to be treated like black niggers or Chinese coolies."
"Good God! woman," cried Ned, losing patience, "if you have nothing better to say than to trump up the last scurrilous article in theTaskmaster--Here! Woods, follow on--I'm not going to be stopped."
In an instant they were the centre of a band of excited women, the next they were in the car, and thechauffeurwas running back to take his seat.
"I don't want to hurt you," called Ned as he turned on power, "but if some of you don't stand back there will be an accident!"
"Cowards! Fools! Don't let him go without an answer," shrieked the woman with the basket, who was entangled two deep in the backward rush. The next moment there very nearly was an accident, since, failing of all else, the angry orator flung the first thing she could lay her hands upon--the handful of knives and forks--at the car with her full force, and one of the missiles, a three-pronged iron fork, buried itself in the fleshy part of Ned's right hand, as it held the steerer, making him and it swerve.
The fork quivered as he steadied the wheel. Then he turned and raised his hat with his other hand.
"Thank you!" he said, and the word fell on a half-awed, half-alarmed silence.
"She didn't mean to do it," began Woods hurriedly. "Shall I pull it out, my lord?"
"Of course she didn't," replied Ned coolly. "If she had meant to do it, she would have killed a baby. That sort of woman is built that way. Wait a bit, Woods, till we are through the works. I look like a blessed St. Sebastian with it quivering in my flesh!"
"You ought to have that seen to," said little Woods when the surgical operation was over, and they had had to call on thechauffeur'shandkerchief as well as their own. "It has gone very deep."
"I'll get Ramsay to tie it up properly. We can go back by Egworth," replied Lord Blackborough.
They met Peter Ramsay on the steps, carrying a leathern instrument-bag.
"Come along to my room," he said cheerfully. "I've everything I want in here."
As they opened the door a woman's figure rose hurriedly from an evidently searching inquiry into the contents of a bottom drawer, for under-vests and stockings lay strewn about.
Both Helen Tressilian and Dr. Ramsay blushed scarlet, but Ned's eyes twinkled. "Caught in the act, my dear! Caught in the act!" he said amusedly.
"I thought--I hoped--he had gone out for a long while on an urgent call," retorted Mrs. Tressilian, looking quite viciously at the doctor, who, to hide his vexation, was searching in his bag.
"I am sorry I disappointed your expectations, Mrs. Tressilian," he said stiffly, "but when I arrived I was not wanted. The man was dead."
Helen looked as if she had received a blow in the face. Her lip quivered.
"Undo these rags, will you?" said Ned to her kindly, wishing in his heart that he could take them and shake them together once and for all. "I haven't much time to lose."
She had forgotten her annoyance in sympathy when Dr. Ramsay looked up from his task.
"I'm afraid I shall have to hurt you a bit. I don't like those very deep holes, possibly from a dirty fork----"
"It wasn't very clean," admitted Ned.
"Perhaps I had better call Sister Ann----" began the doctor doubtfully, and Helen flushed up in a second.
"I have done some work of the kind, Dr. Ramsay," she said; "but if you prefer----"
The challenge was too direct. "If you do not mind, I shall be glad," he replied, bending over a little array of instruments on the table. "Will you stand here, Lord Blackborough. Hold the hand so, Nurse Helen, and be ready, please, with the carbolised gauze."
Half-way through Ned winced; and the doctor said sharply, "That was my fault. Move your hand a little, Nurse Helen; it gets in my way."
"There! that's done!" he continued at last. "Now for the bandages."
Was it only fancy, or was Ned Blackborough right in thinking that the supple, skilful hands were not quite so skilful as usual, that there was an unwonted nervousness about them?
He pondered over this as, being hurried, he went downstairs, leaving Helen tidying up, Peter Ramsay sterilising his instruments before putting them away. He left behind him also a sense of stress in the air, a feeling on the part of both those busy people that things could no longer go on as they had been going on. Suddenly Peter Ramsay flung aside a probe, and walked up to Helen decisively.
"Helen!" he said. "I shall have to go away if you won't marry me. Think me as much a fool as you like--the fact remains. You saw--you must have seen how disgracefully I did that simple little thing. Why? Because you were there--because your hand touched mine."
"I will never offer to interfere with your work again!" she said coldly.
"Interfere!" he echoed with a bitter little laugh. "You always interfere! I feel the very touch of your hands upon my clothes."
A slow crimson stained her very forehead. "I am sorry, I will never touch them again."
"That will do no good," he replied gloomily. "Can you not see that your influence touches my life at every point? When I go through the wards I hear you have just passed, I almost see the flutter of your dress. I am always reminded, I am always thinking of you. If you will not marry me, I must go away."
"I cannot marry you, and I have told you why. It is not as though I did not know what love meant. I have known it, and--and I do not know it now. But you need not go away. I will go."
"That, you shall not do," he replied, his chin setting itself long and stern. "Besides it would be no good. This place is redolent of you--your goodness, your sweetness. Oh! Helen, Helen! If you will only marry me, love will come--for you like me--I don't believe there is any one you like better--except perhaps Ned Blackborough."
"Ned!" she echoed, glad of evasion, "poor Ned! I have had such a curious feeling lately that he is in some way maimed; and yet not maimed. I don't know how to express it, but he seems to me to be using his soul more and his body less."
"I wish I could get rid of my body," muttered Dr. Ramsay so quaintly that Helen perforce had to smile; whereat, he said aggrievedly, "It isn't all that either, Mrs. Tressilian; love----"
She checked him with a soft sympathising hand. "Do I not know what love is? Dr. Ramsay! I cannot pity you."
"Then I shall have to go," he said obstinately. "I will not have my work spoiled by any woman."
She felt small somehow; a trifle remorseful perhaps as she left the room. He certainly had been rather dejected of late and it was such a pity.
And Ned also! He was not dejected, but he was changed, curiously changed.
In truth the past six weeks, since the night when he had outwatched the stars, to be met in the dawn by the mischance of a confidence not intended for his ears, had changed him a great deal. He had not seen Aura since. He had purposely left New Park, before she was well enough to receive visitors, and had only returned to it after she had been moved for a freshening up at the seaside. But he had heard of her constantly from Ted, who, after two or three days of intense anxiety, had gone back to business with renewed zest. This time interruption had apparently been beneficial; at least the first few days of Aura's convalescence and disappointment had been cheered by him with the most sanguine of outlooks on the future. He even went so far as to say that, perhaps after all, things were best as they were. They would move into a still better house, and be able to set up properly before taking upon themselves the responsibilities of life.
Aura had said "Perhaps," and after he had gone had lain and cried softly to herself. There is nothing in the wide world so sacred to a woman as her grief for the child which has died to save her life. It is grief of the most inward type, unknown, unrecognised by others, which lasts through the years and grows no slighter than it was when in the dim, between life and death, she first learns that her child has paid the ransom for her.
In a way, therefore, the doubt, which by degrees grew into a certainty, that Fate had denied motherhood to her, had at first almost brought her comfort.
If there was no probability of her being more fortunate in the future, happiness neither awaited her, nor could there be any rivalry between the dead child and a living one. There was a tragedy in both lives, not only in the one.
Such thoughts as these, aided by the very intensity of her grief, kept her going until she began to face the world again at the sea-side. Then came one of those fiery furnaces of the soul through which so few pass unscathed. She used to wander down at the ebb low tide, past the groups of children building castles in the sand, past the uttermost outermost little waving fringe of sea-spoil left, but for a brief half hour, by the regretful retreat of the waves, and gaze out over the long, low sand-banks, claimed as their own by clouds of fluttering, settling, fluttering seagulls.
The tide had truly ebbed--the mud-flats of life lay bare. Her thoughts were like the gulls, never still for a second. Only in the slack tide of the estuary there was rest for a moment, and the long, brown arms of the seaweed waved sleepily, seeming to call her to rest with them.
So she would go back again to her lodgings, but in the night time she would rise and draw up her blind and look out.
And lo! the tide was up again, the sea lay like a sheet of silver and there was no more land, neither was there any sound of tears.
Thus, after a time, she came back to the new house on which Ted, during her absence, had been lavishing enough money, he felt, to prove his undying affection twice over. He was quite full of its many advantages when she finally arrived there. For one thing, they would be able to entertain in it; and entertainments would be a great feature in his coming life. One of the chief reasons for Mr. Hirsch's enormous success had been his genius for givingrecherchédinners. Ted could not hope to rival him; still with thecordon bleue'shelp--here he became exceedingly affectionate--much was possible. They must certainly entertain Mr. Hirsch and his daughter. Oh yes! had not Aura heard of the daughter? Mr. Hirsch had imported her ready-made, grown-up--really a very nice-looking girl--from Berlin? She was about twenty, and no one had had any idea Hirsch was a widower; but he seemed devoted to the girl, and to have given up the search for a wife which had been his pursuit for years.
The fact of the matter being, though Ted did not know it, that, having failed once more in his endeavours to marry a well-connected Englishwoman, Mr. Hirsch had fallen back on a less legal establishment of his youth for which he had always paid with scrupulous honour. Hence Miss Hirsch who, being a goodnatured creature like her father, bid fair to fill up his affections and give him the home for which, as he grew older, he was beginning to yearn.
Anyhow Mr. and Miss Hirsch would have to be entertained when they came to Blackborough, and Aura should have the long talked-of pink satin gown in which to receive them. It might even be possible to put them up. There were two good rooms on the first floor which would not be wanted yet awhile. Aura might see them after she had had her tea.
"Thanks, Ted," she replied hurriedly, "but--but perhaps I've done enough for to-day. I can see them tomorrow."
Just those few minutes of facing the new house, the new life had wearied her absolutely. And she had other things to face in the near future. Sooner or later she felt that she ought to tell her husband that those rooms would never in all human probability be wanted.
But she could not tell him now. That was beyond her strength.
"Mrs. Edward Cruttenden requests the pleasure of Lord Blackborough's company at dinner."
It was a printed card, and Ned Blackborough laid it down on the table, feeling that the world was getting beyond him.
This was about a week or so after Aura's return, and he had intended to call on her that very afternoon. Now he refrained.
"I am so sorry we had to give you such short notice," said Ted, whom he met in the street next day, "but the Hirschs were coming down unexpectedly and it had to be hurried. I hope you can come."
"Oh! I am coming all right," said Ned a trifle surlily. "I hope it won't be too much for Aura."
Ted looked at him with immense surprise. "My dear fellow! Aura is as well as she can be, and awfully interested in it. Well! I'm glad you can come. You'll like Miss Hirsch, she's charming, so fresh and gay."
It was a real parlourmaid who announced Lord Blackborough this time, and he saw a furtive green-grocer in the background; otherwise the house seemed to him much the same, only larger, more pretentious. The drawing-room was distinctly more--what was the word? chaste. Yes! distinctly more chaste. It was white and gold, and was that Aura in a pink satin dress--ye heavens above! in pink satin! She did not look ill, but as their eyes met he was conscious of a distinct shock. There was something wanting in them, the best part of her was not there.
Where was it?
The question absorbed him even while he was being presented to Miss Hirsch, a jolly, handsome, rather stout girl, also--as the fates would have it--in pink satin. But she was literally ablaze with diamonds.
"Aha! my old friend Blackborough!" laughed Mr. Hirsch explosively, "this is good sight for sore eyes. Make me your compliments for my daughter, sir."
"I prefer to make them to Miss Hirsch herself," replied Ned gallantly, and then they went in to dinner.
It was an excellent repast. Ted had evidently pursued the only course consonant with success. He had ordered it direct from Benoist's and kept the minions of the great caterer out of evidence. Iced mellon gave place toconsommé biscuit,truite a l'auroretofilets financieres,poularde casseroleto something else, until at the end the conversation became interspersed with cigarettes and coffee.
It was an enormous success; and all the time Ned Blackborough was wondering what had become of Aura, whither she had gone. Only once did he get a glimpse of what he had known in the past, and that was when, after Miss Hirsch had sung like a second-class professional (in other words like her mother) to his accompaniment, he had asked Aura if he might not accompany her also.
"My dear Blackborough," Ted had exclaimed, "after such singing as Miss Hirsch has just given us, I'm sure my wife would hardly like----"
"ButIshould like," he had interrupted imperturbably.
Then it was that Aura had said swiftly in an undertone--
"Please don't."
He had obeyed, as he had obeyed the same order once before. But that night he sat up again and drank whisky and water and smoked opium-sodden cigarettes, and the next day he went down to call, for he did not intend that sort of thing should go on.
She did not intend it should either. He found her in the back garden, which was really quite of a decent size, busy planting something between the prim privets, and eunonyms and variegated hollies which, even in this late autumn, gave the wall-surrounding shrubbery a semblance of green.
"Do you know what I am planting?" she asked frankly. "I am planting someiris alata."
He narrowed his eyes and looked at her.
"Hardly in the most beautiful place in the world," he said cynically.
"That won't make them any the less beautiful," she replied and then suddenly her whole face melted, her eyes shone with tears, with smiles, with happiness, regrets, with fair passions and bountiful pities and love without stain. "Oh, Ned! Ned!" she cried, holding out her hand to him again. "I have to beg your pardon for so much--I have to thank you for so much--which shall I do first?"
What could he do save take her hand as frankly as it was given and say "Neither." Since between them he knew there was no possibility of gratitude, no possibility of forgiveness.
So they began to talk, not of her illness or of these later days at all, but of Cwmfaernog, and Plas Afon, and how she had found the snake-stone under the old yew-tree.
"I always wear it, you know, at least I do nowadays," she said, and drawing up her loose sleeve showed it to him worn as an amulet, warm against the fair whiteness of her skin. His heart gave a throb. For all her courage then, she was not happy. Such trifles tell of a search for support.
Then Ted came in, breezy and full of life. It had been a success last night, had it not? The pink satin had not suited Aura quite so well as he had hoped; not so well as it had suited Miss Hirsch, who had looked ripping. Perhaps it ought to have been blue. Or perhaps it was the diamonds that did the trick. Had any one ever seen better diamonds than Miss Hirsch's?
Anyhow, it had been a great success, and they must give some more dinner-parties and get into the way of entertaining.
Aura might ask Mrs. Tressilian and Dr. Ramsay as a beginning.
"You won't get Ramsay," remarked Ned Blackborough; "he is away in Vienna. He has taken three months' leave, but he put in a very good man for the time."
In truth, St. Helena's Hospital was, as Peter Ramsay had declared it would, getting on quite as well without him as it did with him. The only person who was dissatisfied with the new state of affairs was Helen Tressilian, and she was frankly in a very bad temper both with him and with herself. It was so foolish of him. Had she not known it would be absolutely useless she would have sent in her own resignation, but what good would it have done? It would only have made matters worse, since he would never return if she went. All she could do was to hope very sincerely that the three months' change would effect its object, and that he would forget her.
And yet even this did not quite soothe her irritation, even this was not quite what she wanted.
What did she want? She was taking herself severely to task one afternoon when Sister Ann came in looking grave.
"I have just had a letter with some rather bad news in it," she said. "I hope it isn't true, but it sounds serious. It is from my friend who I told you had gone to study at Vienna."
Helen's heart leapt to her mouth. "Well?" she said impatiently, wondering the while with a sudden feeling of dread why she should feel so disturbed.
"I'll read you what he says. 'We are all a bit downhearted just now because Ramsay, who is one of the nicest fellows who ever lived, is ill with pyæmia. It would be a thousand pities if he were to go out, for he is quite the best operator here. Of course he is being well looked after, but it must be awful away from all one's friends.'"
Helen went deadly white. "Do you think it is true?" she asked almost helplessly.
Sister Ann re-folded the letter methodically. "It must betrue, of course, and it is not unlikely. You know he was always a trifle reckless when there was anything to be done even here. One can only hope he is not so very bad. You will send a wire, I suppose?"
"Yes," replied Helen. "Of course we will send a wire--and--yes. I will send a wire, I think."
"It is terribly sad," said Sister Ann, for all her invariable cheerfulness, quite mournfully. "Apart from his immense value to the world, he was such a dear soul in so many ways. I have often thought what an excellent husband and father he would have made."
After she had gone, to tell the news presumably in that even tone of voice, Helen thought with a rush of resentment, the latter sat in a perfect tumult of emotion. Anger, pity, regret all fought for first place. What right, for instance, had Sister Ann to use the past tense in speaking of Dr. Ramsay? He was not dead.
Dead?
Impossible, incredible! It could not, it must not be true!
But what good would a wire be to a man lying perhaps unconscious, at any rate alone?
She stood up pushing her hair back from her forehead. A great wave of pity for him, but more for herself, overcame her; she stared out of the room scarcely seeing what was before her.
Just on the opposite side of the room a long pier glass filled up the space between the two tall windows. It was growing dusk, and the mirror showed dark and empty looking against the light. No, not quite empty, there was a figure in it going away from her into the darkness. It was the figure of a man making haste. It hurried on, its back towards her, down an interminable pathway that was lost in the shadows. It was going, oh, so fast! And she recognized it. It was Peter Ramsay as she had last seen him hurrying away to catch his train. It grew smaller and smaller, it overtook the shadows, they gathered it in.
"No! no!" she cried aloud. "Don't go--don t go!"
Was there a pause? She could not tell. The vision vanished, and she was left to the knowledge that she had once more almost over-stepped the bounds of the unseen, and to a dim sense of something unsuspected in herself.
One thing was certain. He must not go, thinking she cared not at all. How many hours was it to Vienna? That mattered very little if she started as quickly as she could. She must get there sooner or later.
Half an hour afterwards she was at the station, and by midnight she was standing looking out at the stars from the deck of a Channel steamer with the lights of Calais ahead of her. She did not regret her impulse, all she thought of was that somehow that figure she had seen losing itself in the shadows must be stopped, must be brought back to the light.
It was a wearisome journey. She had left without due preparation, she was all unused to foreign travelling, and she did not care to forage for food for fear she might be left behind.
So it was rather a dejected Helen Tressilian who got out in the struggling daylight of a November day at the Haupt Bahnhof, and, after a while, found herself driving, she literally knew not whither, through wide streets and narrow streets to the public hospital. It was there, she knew, that Peter Ramsay was working, so there she hoped to have news of him at once. But she had reckoned without the formalism of German institutions. At first she could hardly elicit the fact that there was such a person as a Scotch physician by name Ramsay in Vienna, for she had called him English, and that error, a grave one to the foreigner, had seemed to discredit her altogether.
Then who was she? Sister or mother? If not, what claim had she to be admitted to the bedside of the "dangerously-sick un-friend-recognising patient?" She had better see the Chief-Head-Over-Superintendent, and if he consented, perhaps!
So she drove off again disheartened. The Chief-Head-Over-Superintendent was out, and after waiting for him till she grew sick and cold she determined to follow him to the Medical College. Here she was met by more formalities, to which was added a suggestion that, not being a relation, she should go to the British consulate and get a certificate that she was of the "due-respectable-and-to-be-admitted-friends."
And then, suddenly, to her despair at the delay, came the memory of Pagenheim. It was silly of her not to have thought of him before. Yes. She would go to Pagenheim; he was her only hope.
She was shown into a room stuffed full of furniture, where a florid, bearded man had evidently just been smoking.
He sat looking with immense interest at the card she had sent in.
"Mein Gott!" he said, going on in fairly idiomatic English. "But your names! T r e s--s i l----"
"Tressilian," said Helen impatiently.
"Tres--silian! Now, Miss, what does that mean? Tre--three--sil-i-an. Does it mean three fools? Wass fur ein--Gott in Himmel! you are crying--Gnädige Fraulein, pardon."
It was the truth. Helen, worn out by her long and hungry journey, disappointed, driven from pillar to post, had found it too much that her last hope should waste precious time in philological studies.
"I beg your pardon," she said, stifling her tears, "but I have come all the way from England to see Dr. Ramsay, and now I cannot get at him. Do help me if you can."
Dr. Pagenheim blew out his cheeks as if a pipe might have been a consolation to him. "Soh! You--you cannot be his mother--you--you are his sister, doubtless?"
Helen, behind her handkerchief, shook her head. "I--I am a nurse," she said faintly, "and I have come on purpose----"
"But, gnädige Fraulein," interposed the great man, becoming professional, "he is already nursed, nursed devotedly. There is no place for you I fear. It is against the rules. If you were a relation it were different."
Helen looked up at him, goaded to desperation.
"But--but I am more than that, Dr. Pagenheim," she said. "I--I am engaged to be married to him."
The blond, florid face melted into instant sentiment, the tongue into German.
"Soh! Oh Love! Love! What dost thou not? So he is betrothed and we knew it not? Stay! is your name Helen?"
"Yes. Helen Tressilian," she replied.
"Liebes Kind!" cried the great professsor. "He has in his delirium called for you by name. Dry your tears, we will mend him for you surely. Helen! Ach! that is an all-powerful, love-compelling name-of-uttermost victory, so have no fear. You shall to him go so soon as I can get on my boots." He stuck out a big slippered foot in explanation and encouragement as he beamed on her.
"If I might have a glass of milk," Helen felt emboldened to say. "I haven't had time, somehow----"
"Gott in Himmel! She is hungry," roared the professor. "Oh, Love! Love! what dost thou not? Greta," this to the elderly servant who answered his furious ringing. "Milk, food, drink, everything for this gracious-betrothed-one while I put on my boots."
Fortified by hot coffee and a roll, Helen, being whirled through the streets of Vienna in the doctor'scoupé, felt that, come what might, she did not repent her hasty impulse. Even if Peter Ramsay lived.
"Thou must remember,liebes kind," came the professor's jovial voice all softened to warning, "he is very ill; only the good God knows how ill. But we are doing our best for him. The high fever has gone, but the weakness remains. You must be very quiet."
"I am a nurse," she said, "I know." In a way it was only as a nurse that she had come, only because she could not bear to think of him dying alone.
It seemed an interminable age that she sat in thecoupéwhile Dr. Pagenheim was preparing the hospital authorities. It was quite a small place, almost private: a place reserved by the doctors for their most serious cases. It had a conventional air, and Helen as she sat could see a sister of charity or two, with large white-winged caps, moving about. Would they let her in? Surely Dr. Pagenheim was powerful enough for that. He came back after a time with the matron, a severe looking sister, with a weary face. He was much graver. "You can see him, and, if you are quiet, you can remain; but he will not know you."
Did he not? As she entered the wide, white ward, empty save for the bed set in the middle, the low, hurried muttering from the figure which lay on it ceased for a moment. It almost seemed as if the mutterer was listening. Then he began again, too low to be intelligible even to the English ears which bent over to listen. The nurses, two fair, simple-faced sisters, looked at her with kindly compassion and curiosity.
"He is so restless," said one, speaking in the low, even sing-song which so many nurses acquire as a kind of whisper. "If he could only sleep; but we dare not give drugs, his heart is so weak."
His right hand, all bandaged up to the elbow, lay slung in a shifting cradle just above the bed-clothes, his left, the fingers closing and unclosing with a terrible regularity, hung half over the bedside. She slipped hers into it and it closed on hers tightly, so tightly that after a time the blood seemed to seek a way through her fingertips. The muttering became more distinct.
"Number 36. I am not sure about number 36."
"He is doing very well," she replied softly. "Sister Ann is quite pleased with him. The dressings were not in the least disturbed, and he slept all night without drugs. He is to have beef-tea to-day," the muttering had ceased, the sick man lay quite still, the grip of his hand was slackening, "and to-morrow he will have chicken, and then, if he will only sleep, sleep, sleep quite quietly, sleep--sleep--sleep."
"Gnädige Fraulein," came the nurse's whisper, "seat yourself so, there must be no movement if possible."
How long she sat there, her hand in his, she did not know, long enough anyhow to feel that, when, or how, or why she knew not, the very touch of him had become dear to her, for it was not only the tingling of the veins after the almost benumbing pressure of his fingers which sent the thrill to her heart and her brain. He had told her the truth: the past was in the present.
After a time he stirred, swallowed a spoonful of nourishment, and slept again. Another nurse stole into the room and whispered with the two in a corner. Helen could not see their calm, fair, untroubled faces, but she could hear one word, a word they had renounced for themselves, which for all that sent a thrill through their woman hearts.
"Love--true love!"
Was it that? Or had she merely wrecked herself and him for something evanescent, worth little? Helen was half asleep herself, all she realised was that something had brought rest to him for the time.
So when the bad turn came again he was stronger, but so long as she was in the room the painful restlessness never returned. And day by day the dressers were more satisfied.
"Helen of Troy is sufficient to bring any man back from the grave,lich du liebe Gott, what will not the true love do?" beamed Herr Pagenheim, and the nurses sighed and smiled. Finally, there came a day when Peter Ramsay really opened his eyes, found Helen beside him, and closed them again contentedly. After this came cogitation, so by degrees a puzzled look grew to his eyes.
"It was awfully good of you to come and help nurse me," he said weakly at last. "How did you find out I was ill?"
"Sister Ann had a letter, so I came. I knew you must be alone," she replied sedately.
"It must have been an awful journey for you. I feel so sorry about it," he continued almost impatiently. "You must have had a lot of trouble. And then, when you got here--what beats me is, why did they let you in? They are so strict."
She felt the colour rising to her face. "Oh! I managed," she said evasively. "Now, you really must take your Valentine's extract and go to sleep."
He shifted restlessly. "How can I go to sleep when I am worried?" he said pitifully, fretfully as a child. "I tell you it must have given you a lot of trouble, and I'm so vexed."
Her face grew tender as she bent over him. "I assure you I had no trouble at all. It was quite easy. Will you--will you promise me to go to sleep if I tell you how--how I managed?"
"Do," he said with a little sigh. "I really want to know."
"They asked me if I were your mother or your sister," she said, scarcely able to speak for her trembling lips. "So I said no--but--but that I was engaged to be married to you."
He lay quite still. He did not even put out his hand to hers, but the swift tears ran down his hollow cheeks and wetted the pillow.
"You promised you would go to sleep, dear," she said softly, and he closed his eyes, once more like a child.