Theydrove quietly through the dusty, sultry streets, and came in a few minutes to Lammermoor. Mrs. Raymond conversed all the time in a low, monotonous voice, like the tones of some one talking in their sleep, chiefly in defence of her husband, though Jeannie had said no word about him.
“Colonel Raymond is so very strong himself,” she said, “and I think sometimes that he doesn’t quite make allowance for the children. But he disagrees with me, and I dare say he is right. He always finds a good walk, he says, the best cure for a headache or a feeling of tiredness; he says such things are best walked off. But with children, you know, it may be different; they are so easily tired, and the Colonel always walks very fast. But Maria’s walk yesterday certainly did her no good, and my husband was as anxious as myself to-day that some one should see her,and the doctors were all out. That was why I came for you, and it is so good of you to come. Colonel Raymond is terrified for the child; he does not at all like illness in the house. He has seen so much illness in In—in his service. And here we are!”
Jeannie followed Mrs. Raymond up the narrow gravel walk and up the three stone steps, with balls at the top and bottom, into Lammermoor. A strong smell of tobacco and camphor was apparent in the hall.
“Colonel Raymond says smoking is the best disinfectant,” explained his wife, “and he has been sprinkling camphor about in the study and in the dining-room. He says camphor is a good disinfectant, too.”
Jeannie sniffed.
“I should recommend you to open all the doors and windows in the house and let in some fresh air,” she said. “Fresh air is better than either camphor or tobacco.”
“I will tell my husband what you say,” said Mrs. Raymond. “Will you step into the drawing-room a moment, Miss Avesham? I know Robert would like to see you.”
“I really haven’t time,” said Jeannie. “I must be back at the hospital at three.”
“Then perhaps you will come upstairs straight?” said the other.
The house reeked of the Colonel’s disinfectants as they mounted the stairs. On the first floor the door into his dressing-room was just open, disclosing a view of him putting some clothes into a small valise, with a cigar in his mouth, and in his shirt-sleeves.
“Oh, here is Robert,” said Mrs. Raymond, in her thin voice. “Robert, here is Miss Avesham very kindly come to see Maria. What are you doing, dear?”
The Colonel treated Jeannie to his best military bow, and took the cigar out of his mouth, but his usual heartiness was absent from his greeting.
“Very kind of you, very kind, I am sure, Miss Avesham,” he said, “to come and see our poor little Maria. The hot weather—she feels the hot weather, poor child.”
A curious, grim look came into Jeannie’s face. Like most people who have the salt of courage necessary for the conduct of life she felt unkindly toward cowardice. She noticedalso that this bluff and gallant gentleman did not advance to meet her, but rather retreated farther into his room. She remembered also the confidence that Miss Clifford had made her on the stair-case, and she hardened her heart.
“How do you do, Colonel Raymond?” she said, still advancing toward him, but the Colonel retreated behind his open luggage.
“What are you doing, Robert?” asked his wife again, in the same voice.
Colonel Raymond did not reply at once, and Jeannie did not break his silence.
“Well, I’m packing,” he said, at length. “If there’s illness in the house a man is only in the way. Better make myself scarce, you know; better make myself scarce.”
Jeannie looked at him fixedly for a moment. Then, breaking into a smile:
“You need not be frightened,” she said. “For any one well over forty there is really no risk, even when typhoid is about. And I thought you said it was only the hot weather that had tried your daughter. Well, Mrs. Raymond, I have to be back at the hospitalvery soon, and I think we had better go and see your daughter at once.”
She turned her back on the Colonel, and followed Mrs. Raymond to a higher story.
“My husband is very careful about infection,” said the latter as they mounted the stairs. “That is so right, is it not? But I did not know he was thinking of going away.”
“He is quite right to be careful of infection,” said Jeannie. “But there is no need for him to go; and, indeed, we do not know if there is any reason yet.”
Maria slept in the same room with one of her sisters, the eldest having the dignity of a room to herself. Jeannie cast one glance at the little haggard, fevered face, and took out her thermometer.
“Put it under your tongue, dear,” she said, “and keep it there till I take it away. Don’t bite it. No, it’s not medicine; it doesn’t taste nasty.”
She glanced at it at the end of half a minute.
“That’s all right,” she said, reassuringly. “How do you feel?”
“Headache,” piped the little feeble voice from the bed.
“We’ll soon make that all right then,” said Jeannie. “Now lie quite still and covered up, and your mother will come to you again.”
“And I sha’n’t go a walk to-day?” said Maria.
“No, you shall stay in bed and rest. You are a little tired.”
Jeannie closed the door when they came out.
“Yes, she has high fever,” she said to Mrs. Raymond. “Go and sit with her, and don’t let her raise herself in bed. I am afraid it is typhoid, but we can’t tell yet. I will see you again before I leave the house. I am just going to speak to your husband, unless you will take the responsibility of what you do.”
“You must speak to him, then,” said Mrs. Raymond. “But please remember, dear Miss Avesham, how careful he is about infection.”
“Yes, I will remember,” said Jeannie.
The dressing-room door was shut whenshe went downstairs again, and she knocked at it. It flew open, and it seemed to Jeannie that the Colonel thought he was opening to his wife.
“I want to speak to you, Colonel Raymond,” she said. “Oh, please don’t apologize for the state of your room. I have only a minute, and you need not come downstairs.”
“You have seen Maria?” asked the Colonel.
“Yes; she is ill. She must be treated as if she had typhoid.”
“God bless my soul!” exclaimed the Colonel. “Why, I have seen men die of it like flies!”
“They are dying of it like flies here,” said Jeannie. “Now I don’t want to dissuade you from going away, though for a man of your age there is really no risk. Still there is no telling what fright will do. If you were frightened of whooping-cough you might still catch it. But I want to know this. Will you send your daughter to the hospital? She will be as well looked after there as here; it will take anxiety off your wife, and youcan take the other two children away with you. Might I trouble you to open the window? This mixture of camphor and cigar is overpowering.”
“She would go as a paying patient?” asked the Colonel.
“Of course,” said Jeannie.
“Then, upon my soul, Miss Avesham, I think we’ll keep her here. She’ll be better looked after in her own home. My wife is an excellent nurse, and any little delicacies she might require will be more easily supplied at home.”
“As you will,” said Jeannie. “If, as I am afraid, it is typhoid, you will of course have to have two trained nurses, by day and night. Mrs. Raymond told me the decision would be with you.”
Colonel Raymond looked undecided, and slipped on his coat.
“Very difficult to decide,” he said, “very difficult. Which do you recommend, Miss Avesham?”
“It is difficult to choose,” said Jeannie. “Ah, it lightened again; I hope we shall have rain. As you say, perhaps she wouldbe more comfortable here. Please tell me at once. I am going straight back to the hospital, and I will tell them to send an ambulance if you decide she should go.”
“Well, she shall go, she shall go,” said the Colonel. “Nothing like proper treatment.”
“I think you have decided right,” said Jeannie. “The other child who sleeps in the same room must, of course, be removed at once. You have a spare room? If not, no doubt you could make her a bed here in your dressing-room.”
“That would be possible,” said the Colonel.
“And since the case is removed,” said Jeannie, “it will no longer be necessary for you to go away. Please don’t trouble to come down, as I can let myself out.”
As Jeannie left the house she noticed that the south was black with cloud. The texture of it was different to what it had been during the last fortnight of congested weather. The sky was no longer leaden and dry, but moist and dark with imminent rain. A little wind was beginning to blow in fitful gusts fromthe same quarter, and leaves nearly dead danced with clouds of whirling dust about the road. Already in the air was the hint of a change; her heart was lighter, for the two hours had been like a caress to her troubled spirit. She had been worn with fruitless effort; the collar of the suffering world chafed her, but one hand brought healing to her, and her heart was holpen.
She reported the case of probable typhoid to a doctor, and went back to her ward. Nurse James met her with a smiling face, and when Nurse James smiled it was not without reason.
“That girl you left so ill this morning is no worse,” she said. “If anything, she is a little stronger. Dr. Maitland thinks that the sudden drop in the temperature may be after all a sudden turn for the better. He says it occasionally happens. Certainly if there had been perforation we should have known by now. Watch her very carefully.”
All the afternoon remote lightning winked distantly in the sky, and the answering thunder got ever gradually louder and more continuous. The wind had veered intothe north-west, and was coming in sudden claps and buffets of hot air, and the storm, a distant rack of coppery, hard-edged cloud, distinct and different from the heavy, soft vapours overhead, was approaching slowly from the opposite quarter. The oppression of the air was as intolerable as ever, and strangely more acute, the remote heavens seemed to be pressing down on the earth like a hot lid over a stewing pot. But in the ward there was a general feeling of cheerfulness, easy to perceive, hard to define, a survival doubtless in man of the curious instinct in animals which makes them smell an approaching storm and warns the domestic sort that an earthquake is coming. The earth and the fever-stricken town were waiting for a change, which could not be for the worse. Of them all, only the girl who had been almost despaired of that morning lay quite still and apathetic, and again and again Jeannie went to her bedside betwixt hope and fear.
About five the storm burst in riotous elements. For an hour before that the strain had been almost unbearable. The forked flashes of lightning, the dry growl of thethunder had approached nearer and nearer, and all the earth seemed to pause, finger on lip, for the catastrophe. Now and then a few rain-drops as big as pennies fell down upon the pavements, and vanished again like a breath on a frosty morning on the hot, thirsty stones. Then suddenly the heavens burst, a ribbon of blue fire leaped downward from the zenith, and the noise of the thunder was as if the sky had cracked. One woman half raised herself in bed and cried, “Lord, have mercy!” but at the end of the words came a sound as if a thousand snakes had hissed in the street outside, the blessed whisper of rain, and all was changed.
The girl who was so ill moved slightly and laid one hand outside the bed-clothes; the woman who had cried aloud lay back in bed smiling; Jeannie felt a pulse rise in her throat and subside again, and outside the hiss of the snakes changed to a drumming on the roof, which got gradually louder and more insistent. Perpendicularly it fell, like rods of steel, and as the seconds added themselves into minutes the roofs, drains, and gutter-pipes began to gurgle and chuckle to themselves, and never was there a song so sweet. These guttural sounds grew ever fuller, and in a few minutes, with a great splash, they choked and overflowed in bubbling laughter. Again and yet again the lightning tore a path through the clouds, and at each reverberation in the baptism of fire the earth grew regenerate and young. The hot, stifling smell of the last six weeks turned to something infinitely fresh and vigorous, and down the pavements and over the roads began to flow the flushing streams.
Five was the hour of the afternoon milk and beef-tea, and Carmel hour, as it seemed to Jeannie, of the evening sacrifice. Food and the healing rain were poured out, a sign of His hand, abundant, health-giving. Exultantly she went her rounds, and found smiling faces. One only did not smile, for the girl lay in deep, natural sleep, as if the racket and tumult outside were a lullaby to her. Outside it had grown very dark; the wind had ceased; but as if to compensate for the darkness, from moment to moment an intolerable brilliance of lightning made a tenfold brightness. It was as if the town was beleaguered by the artillery of the sky, and from right and left fired unceasingly the guns of heaven. In the intervals between the flashes colour was blotted out from the world, dark roofs and black trees huddled together to meet a sky scarcely more luminous. Then in a moment the colour would be restored. The geraniums in the boxes outside the window, black before, leaped into their scarlet liveries; the black elm-tops, a dark blob, became an outlined company of green leaves, and the tiled roofs of the houses were red once more. A noise as of a hundred sacks of marbles poured out on to a wooden floor endorsed the truths, and once again the world became shadow and the click of gutters.
By six the first violence of the storm was momentarily abated. Sullen, blessed rain-clouds hung ready to burst, but when Jeannie and Miss Fortescue came to leave the hospital they passed unwetted down to Bolton Street. In Jeannie’s head an easy melody of love and joy bubbled and repeated, and listening to it she was silent. But Aunt Em spoke.
“I wish I had brought goloshes,” she said.“But I am glad this rain has come; it will flush the drains.”
It was Miss Fortescue’s habit, though those who knew her best least suspected it, to commend herself and those she loved to the special care of God every night. Though she never talked about religion, there was nothing in the world more real to her than her communion with things unseen. But she never lost sight of her undoubted connection also with things seen, and to-night her devotions were tepid. For at dinner Jeannie had been altogether unaccountable, the obsession of gravity and responsibility which had beleaguered her during the past week was altogether absent, and Miss Fortescue wondered what had driven it away. She had laughed and spilled things with the mastery of custom, and after dinner she had stopped in the dining-room with Arthur, smoking a cigarette.
Now Jeannie’s cigarette was, properly speaking, not a cigarette at all, but a barometer. It argued a very rare content and an almost passionate acceptance of the present circumstances of life. For weeks past, and more especially since this epidemic had cometo the town, Jeannie could no more have smoked than she could have flown, and something, so argued Miss Fortescue, must have occurred to send her needle up this sky-high weather. The thunder-storm and the clearing of the air no doubt were predisposing causes, and so also might be reckoned the wonderful turn for the better of the case of the girl whose life had been despaired of that morning. But Miss Fortescue was not content to accept these alone as sufficient reasons. They would have occasioned relief, but no more, and this sudden rise in the barometer was due to the removal of a more marked depression. So, instead of going to bed, she put on her dressing-gown, and knocked softly at Jeannie’s door, and receiving no answer went in.
The room was brilliantly lighted. Jeannie seemed to have lit all the candles she could find, and she herself was standing far from the door by the wide-flung window and looking out into the night. She too had taken off her dress and put on a short-sleeved dressing-gown, which left her arms bare to nearly the shoulder. Her hair was hanging down her back in a great black river as faras her waist, and her face, nearly in profile, was cut like a cameo against the dark square of the night. The rain had begun to fall heavily again, and the room was filled with the “sh-sh-sh” of the drinking grass. Just as Miss Fortescue stood at the door the blackness outside turned to a sheet of blue flame, and the thousand rods of the rain became for a moment a prism of colour. Jeannie started, and turning half round saw her aunt. A smile of great happiness played round her mouth, and she held up her head, listening. In another half second came the great gongs of thunder in answer to the lightning, and she laughed with pleasure.
“Hear them, hear them!” she cried. “Oh, Aunt Em, isn’t it splendid? And the rain! Oh, the rain! Have you come for a talk? That is good also, for I cannot go to bed yet. Let us pull out our chairs to the window.”
Now, Miss Fortescue hated thunder-storms and snakes and German bands, but she hated thunder-storms the most. But Jeannie’s happiness was too infectious to be denied, and she sat down in the chair by her.
“Oh, I am so happy!” cried Jeannie. “Listen at the rivers down the gravel walks. There won’t be a flower in the garden to-morrow.”
“I don’t know that that is altogether an advantage,” said Aunt Em. “Haven’t you got a better reason than that?”
“Hundreds,” said Jeannie. “I am sane again. I was looking at things awry, and I have been put right.”
“Who put you right?” asked Aunt Em.
“Why, Mr. Collingwood!” said Jeannie. “He was here this afternoon.”
“I didn’t know that,” said Miss Fortescue.
Jeannie looked at her with frank surprise.
“That never occurred to me,” she said. “Now I come to think of it, you couldn’t have known. He came just after lunch, and we talked together for about half an hour.”
Again a ribbon of instantaneous flame was dangled from the sky, and the thunder replied with a short, unechoed clap. Miss Fortescue’s chair was a little behind Jeannie’s, and as the girl leaned eagerly forward at the lightning she saw the bright, wholesome colour flood her face and arms. And when she turned to her, the transcendent brilliance in her face was a thing to wonder at.
“Yes, even that,” said Jeannie, employing the figure of speech known as hiatus. “Oh, Aunt Em! And to think that you never knew all I have known so well this afternoon.”
There was something infinitely simple and noble in the girl’s gesture of happiness, and Miss Fortescue’s eyes were suddenly dim.
“Jeannie, you mean it?” she cried.
“I mean it. I did not mean to tell you yet, yet I never meant not to. Have you guessed, or have I told you? I hardly know. It matters less. But so it is!”
“Jeannie, Jeannie!” cried Miss Fortescue, and the girl was folded in her arms.
For a moment she lay there, her face buried on Miss Fortescue’s shoulder, her hair lying in coils, her arms, warm, supple, clinging, clasped round her neck, and for half a quarter of that embrace jealousy of all the insolent happiness of youth rose bitter in the elder woman’s throat. Here was a younglife, one very dear to her, made suddenly complete, and with a pang as overpowering as it was brief, Miss Fortescue raged inwardly over her unfinished, incompleted life. But the next moment all in her that was womanly, all that was true and good rose triumphant. Her outward cynicism, her assumed hardness, fell from her like a peeled bark, and the heart of the tree was sound. But Jeannie had felt the slack return to her eager embrace, and she raised her head.
“You do not understand what it means to me,” she said. “You have never known.”
But Miss Fortescue’s arms closed round her.
“Yes, dear, I have known,” she said, “though that was one of the things you never knew about me. I have known, dear Jeannie——”
Jeannie raised herself to a kneeling position by her chair, and the inimitable unselfishness of love stung her heart.
“I am a little brute,” she said, quietly. “First forgive me, and then we will talk.”
She looked up in the other’s face, and for a moment hardly recognised her. The plain,strong face was no longer there; a dim-eyed girl sat in the chair above her.
“That is no word from me to you, Jeannie,” she said. “It is an insolence to say one forgives those one loves. But I have known.”
A crowd of confused, scarcely remembered moments suddenly sprang into Jeannie’s mind. She looked like one awakened suddenly from sleep by a loud noise.
“Tell me,” she said.
Miss Fortescue shook her head.
“The thing is past,” she replied. “I have buried it.”
Again the wild bull’s-eye of the storm flashed through the window, and Miss Fortescue drew instinctively away. But Jeannie’s arm detained her.
“Do tell me,” she said again, “unless it would hurt you.”
“It would not hurt me,” said Miss Fortescue.
Jeannie suddenly stood up.
“What do you mean?” she said. “Is it possible that I guess, Aunt Em?”
Again the light of youth flooded Miss Fortescue’s face.
“Yes, dear, it is possible,” she said.
“My father,” said Jeannie, simply.
“Yes, your father.”
Jeannie sat down on the arm of Miss Fortescue’s chair, and kissed her impulsively.
“Oh, Aunt Em, Aunt Em,” she said. “And I never knew. Yet that was natural. I could not have known, could I, until I was able to know, until to-day in fact, and it was like you, so like you, to give us no possibility of guessing. Tell me all, unless it is bitter to you.”
“There is no bitterness about love,” said Miss Fortescue, gently. “How it is possible for a woman to love and be bitter, even though her love is not returned, I cannot guess. But once, so I thought, my love was returned. I do not know; I may be wrong. Then he met your mother, and—and they were very happy. And how, unless I was the lowest of God’s creatures, could I wish anything more than that my sister and the man I loved should love each other.”
There was a long silence, broken only by the steady hiss of the rain on the grass outside. Jeannie’s head lay on Miss Fortescue’s shoulder, but she did not speak. The occasion lay beyond the realm of words, and could be met only by that great silence which is the language of hearts. The familiar figure of her aunt had been suddenly transformed, her care and protection for the children of her sister had on the moment become to Jeannie a thing more sweet and tender than she had ever dreamed of, the mask playful, severe, grotesque even, which she had known was only a mask, was removed, and how fair-featured a soil lay below. She could not estimate the sweet strength which even then had been so powerless to imbitter, nor what must have been the daily sacrifice in her life. It was not for her either, she felt, to judge her father. Perhaps, as Miss Fortescue had said, he had never loved her, or at any rate had never known she loved him. Jeannie was only ten when her mother died, and since then Aunt Em had always lived with them, a mother—how truly so, she never knew till this moment—to all three of them.
But presently Miss Fortescue went on, still without any tremor in her voice.
“So all this has been another bond between us, dear Jeannie,” she said. “I have always felt that as the sister of your mother and as a woman who loved your father, God, in that inscrutable way of His, gave me a peculiar charge. And the charge has been very sweet to me. Oh, my dear, I don’t say it was always easy. It would be foolish to pretend that, but nothing that is easy is worth doing. That is always a consolation—no, not a consolation, but a strength—when one’s way seems difficult. Perhaps all difficult things are not worth doing, but it is only among them that you find anything that is. And when a difficult thing lies so clearly in one’s path as this, one may take it for granted that one is meant to try one’s hand at it. And I have tried, Jeannie.”
Jeannie’s face was still buried on her shoulder.
“Oh, Aunt Em, Aunt Em,” was all she could say.
Aunt Em stroked her hair gently.
“And then this unreasonable old aunt of yours,” she continued, “in order to crown her efforts, comes like a burglar into your room and makes you cry.”
Jeannie lifted her head and smiled at her through her tears.
“I am not crying unhappily,” she said; “and really, I am going to cry no more. I was crying only because things were so big, and the world was so fine, and I was so little. Is that reasonable, do you think? I rather believe it is. Oh, Aunt Em, if I could only tell you how I honor you!”
“I prefer that you should love me a little, Jeannie; that is quite enough. Spare me a little from Jack; there will be plenty left. Oh, my dear, I am so glad! I always liked that rude young man who painted your portrait. Weeks ago I knew he loved you, and I hoped—I hoped that you might love him.”
“How could I help it?” cried Jeannie. “And what have I done that this great gift should come to me?”
“You have grown up into an attractive young woman,” remarked Aunt Em, with a brisk return to her more usual attitude toward life, “and he into an attractive young man. That, to judge by the marriages one often sees, is more than enough.”
Jeannie laughed.
“Oh, I am happy, I am happy!” she cried. “What a day I have had: that girl turned the corner, the blessed rain fell, I talked with Jack in the garden, and I have talked to you.”
“And now you are going to bed,” said Miss Fortescue. “So I shall be off to my room. Kiss me, my dear, once more.”
She rose as she spoke, and Jeannie, bending from her height, kissed her on the forehead and on the cheeks, and without another word Aunt Em took up her candle and went back to her room.
It was already after midnight and Jeannie undressed quickly and, putting out her illumination of candles, got into bed. How long she lay there without sleeping she did not know, but at last the myriad-voiced rain outside blended indistinguishable into tones she knew, and in her dreams she communed with Jack.
All night long the storm bellowed and flickered about the town, but about four in the morning the guns of heaven were silent, and the rain began to fall less heavily, and when Jeannie woke, soon after six, the roomwas filled with the transparent aqueous light of a clear dawn. A smell of unutterable cleanliness came in through the open window, and from her bed she saw the last star fade in the dove-coloured sky. Short as had been her sleep, she felt no inclination to lie in bed, and got up and went to the bath-room. A rain-gauge was on the leads outside, and stepping out through the open window she examined it and saw that two inches of rain had fallen in the night. The flowers in the garden-beds, as she had expected, were beaten down and robbed of their petals, and the smaller gravel from the paths had been swept on to the grass in a spreading delta. The stalwart-leaved mulberry had not suffered, and the outline of leaves was cut out with lavishness and clearness against the tenderness of the sky. Above no traces of the overpast tempest lingered: the pale blue of the zenith melted with imperceptible gradation into the dove colour of the horizons on the west and north, in the south-west the pink of the dawn was already growing gilded before the sun imminent to rise. Already, so it seemed to Jeannie, a flush of green had spread over the grass,and the glistening house-roofs, so long dust-ridden, looked clean again. Above all, the intolerable oppression of the air was no more than a sick dream of night, and to be abroad in this exquisite dawn was like coming out of an ill-ventilated tunnel into the coolness of Alpine pastures. Even as she looked a beam of the risen day shot its level arrow and struck the elm-trees in the close, and with the aptest punctuality a thrush scudded out of the bushes below her and poured out a throatful of repeated song. And on the moment a verse from the song of songs chimed in her head. “The rain is over and past, the flowers appear on the earth, the time of the singing birds has come.”
She stood looking out over the fair rejuvenated earth, smiling. At last she turned.
“Indeed it has come,” she said.
Beforeanother week was over the fresh cases of typhoid had ceased. During the three days immediately following the thunder-storm rain had fallen again and again, heavily and all night long. By day the same liquid autumn weather had stretched its length of sunlit creamy hours as the morning on which Jeannie had watched the sunrise over the cleaned earth, but every evening at sunset the thick, desired clouds came trooping out of the south-west, and made night full of the noise of rain. The wells, swiftly fed by the spongy chalk, had filled, the foul water of the polluted springs was no longer drawn on, and the gorging microbe, with its holocaust of victims, Jeannie’s fiend of the garden-scene, found none to drink from his shrine. The first cases which had occurred were hardly out of the doctor’s hands before the epidemic ceased, as suddenly as it had begun, but there was now no lack but rather aplethora of nurses, for typhoid is the nurses’ favourite disease, since in it each case depends so entirely on them, and nothing is dearer to the skilled than responsibility.
This being the case, both Jeannie and Miss Fortescue had, in the fourth week since the epidemic began, given up their places at the hospital. Regular trained nurses were there in abundance, and there was no longer need for them. But to both the sacrifice of giving up their work was far greater than the original risk of taking it up. For several weeks certainly their lives had centred on one thing, the victory over the microbe, and to think only of one thing, even for three weeks of a life, wears a rut in it, and a jolt is necessitated by passing out of the rut.
Jeannie, after the momentous midnight talk with her aunt, had not been encouraged to allude to the subject again, nor had she wished it. That curious flood of confidence had passed by in spate, like the thunder-storm that had raged simultaneously outside, and, like the sediment of gravel which the storm had made on the grass, there lingered in Miss Fortescue’s manner a conscious andexpressed reminiscence of what had passed between them. An added tenderness in little things was there, hard to define, but impossible not to appreciate. Both of them, moreover, had something of that quality which is supposed to be confined to the sterner sex, who, when greatly moved, say, “Good-night, old chap,” and all is said.
This fortnight of deluged nights had brought about its natural consequences. The inimitable baby was to return to Wroxton, and, as was quite natural, Jack Collingwood was going to accompany it and its nurse in their hazardous forty-mile journey from town. The day had been fixed for its return, and the arrival, though the train was not certainly known, might be expected about Monday. So Jeannie, at first contrary to Miss Fortescue’s expectation, but on second thoughts conformably to them, went out for a walk about eleven, and said no word about meeting them at the station.
It was God’s own morning, a forenoon of brilliant autumnal sunshine, which caressed the yellowing trees, as if to remind the foliage that, though old, it might still be beautiful. The soap-suds of a light hoar-frost had been sprinkled in the meadows during the night, but when Jeannie set out at eleven they had already been melted to living drops, which hung in the long-leaved grasses, turning them into a pod of diamond peas. The stream by which she walked with Toby, now outgrown his puppyhood, and developing into a dog embarrassed with length of limb, was brimmed with the fallen rains, but the alchemy of the chalk and gravel beds, in which its lot was cast, was a filter for the turgid waters, and though brimming it was as translucent as in the summer days. The tall flowering herbs of the water-side dangled their stalks in the swollen water, and the reeds, breast-high in summer, were swimming in a plentiful bath. Only the trees were changed, yet who should say that the breath of winter had disfigured them? Here and there, it is true, the heavy-leaved chestnuts were being stripped by invisible hands, and a mound of their fallen yellow glory lay high around them, but the limes were pyramids of unminted gold, and the beeches mines of undelved copper. Sleek speckled trout, securein their close time, flicked with a riot of broken bubbles and cut the fast-flowing stream, and their ripples were already swallowed by the water ere their returning plunge cut the surface again.
What else was Jeannie’s goal but the mill with the red-walled garden? The mill was working, and good was the omen, and the thicker growing weeds below the weir were still as Jack Collingwood had seen them. A soda-water of bubbles foamed from the prison of the darkness, and the stream shook off the remembrance of its more utilitarian moments in a froth of eddying waters. The plank bridge spanned the now sober-going river, and Toby followed her sedately, yet quivering for his bath.
Indeed, this day no one had disappointment in store. Again and again he rescued his drowning stick from the eddies, and the halo of his shaking made the meadow damp. And when, with a yard of pink tongue hanging out, he had rolled himself into an apology for a dry dog, Jeannie sat down on her cloak, and let the abundance of the autumn speak to her.
“Here, it was here,” said the river, “here he passed, and we did not know it was he. Did we not know? Ah, we only did not tell you.”
And the grass of the meadow-land chimed in like distant bells.
“Here, it was here,” it said, “and we knew. And you knew, Jeannie, but you did not know you knew.”
And the grass laughed, like a child who laughs for no reason, except that it laughs, as a whiff of west wind passed over it.
“And Toby shook himself,” the grass continued, “and you were afraid of your dress. Your dress! As if a man looks at a maid’s dress!”
A more sonorous breath passed through the clump of elms near by.
“And he came,” they said, “and we knew him. He had looked at the water, he had looked at the meadows, he had looked at us, but none of us were what he looked for. He looked for one, for one, for the one,” and their branches clashed together.
Jeannie, in her seat where her hat had lain as Miss Fortescue made tea, gave a greatsigh, and this filled her lungs with the living air.
“I did not know,” she answered. “How should I have known?”
“The way of a man with a maid,” said the grass. “Oh, I have seen often in summer evenings——”
“Yes, and we have seen,” said a hundred leaves of the brambles. “You have no idea of their folly. They sail little boats of straw or leaves, and wonder which will win. But for me, I always let the maid’s boat win. I do not care so much for the young men.”
“But I care, I care,” said the river. “The young men bathe in me, and with strong arms, and laughing, they deride my waves, or from the top of high ladders they throw themselves headlong to meet me. But I love them, and loving them I do not suffer them to touch the ooze of the bed, but bear them gently up, and they know not it was I, but say to each other, ‘That was a good header!’”
But the elms answered softly:
“Both I love, the man and the maid, for both sit by me, and tell their love. And thespell of the woodland and the country is in their blood, though they know it not—for who can make love in towns?—and it is I who bring them together. Even now he comes, he comes, he comes—” and a louder blast swept through them.
Jeannie heard and understood.
“He comes,” she said softly to herself. “I knew he would come.”
And round the corner of the garden of the mill he came.
Toby gave a tentative growl to the intruder, in case he should prove unwelcome; but the growl had not ceased vibrating in his throat, and Jeannie had not time to correct him, when he recognised, and ran to meet Jack, muzzling a wet nose into his hand. He spoke to the dog in his low, soft voice, but he had no word seemingly for Jeannie, nor she for him, and in silence he sat down on the grass beside her. But on neither side was there embarrassment in that pause, but each drank deep of the other’s presence. Jeannie looked at him with wide-open eyes, and he at her. At length he gave a long sigh.
“You, it is you,” he said simply.
Jeannie smiled at him. The great good pause was over.
“How did you know I should be here?” she asked.
“How could it have been otherwise? It was part of the whole plan.”
“What plan?” asked she, and her heart told her.
“The plan of you and me. The great plan,” he said; “God’s plan for us.”
She leaned forward toward him.
“Oh, Jack,” she said, “it is so? Is it indeed so?”
And he bent his face to hers, and the plan was sealed, and the stream and the trees and meadows were the witnesses thereof.
They sat there, it may have been for a few hundred years, or half an hour or so, and then by a common consent rose. Whether they walked back to Wroxton or not they scarcely knew; it may have been that the surface of the earth was fitted for them on a circular tape, which slid away beneath their feet, and stopped revolving only when they reached the garden door at Bolton Street. There certainly it stopped, for Jack said:
“We will tell them, will we not, Jeannie?”
“Aunt Em knows,” she said. “She guessed, or I told her, I don’t know which, the evening after we sat in the garden. But we will tell Arthur.”
“And baby?” suggested Jack.
Jeannie’s face suddenly grew grave.
“Oh, what a little pig I am!” she said. “How is baby? I had forgotten.”
“As fat as—as a baby,” said Jack, at loss for a simile.
Aunt Em was in the garden, with a pair of thick gloves on and a spade in her hand. She called it gardening, and was alone in this opinion. She was standing with her back to them as they entered, and seemed to be employed in spearing the young and tender chrysanthemums. She was so absorbed in her destructive pursuit that she did not hear their steps till they were close to her, and she looked up with a snap.
“You, Jeannie,” she said, at length, “and you, Jack.”
Once again, as in her midnight talk with her niece, her face grew young and her eyes dim.
“Thank God!” she said, and dropping her spade she gave a gardening-gloved hand to each.
A sound of abundance of broken glass came from the far end of the garden, and down the path shortly afterward came Arthur.
“If you don’t look where you go,” he explained, “you’ll go into the cucumber-frames. Aunt Em, I sha’n’t garden any more. How many chrysanthemums have you killed?”
He looked plaintively at Aunt Em, then curiously at the two others. Suddenly he burst out laughing, and threw his hat in the air. It stuck in the mulberry-tree.
“Hurrah!” he cried. “Jack, old chap, how splendid! What lucky people you both are!”
“And what will Cousin Robert say?” asked Aunt Em. “He will think he was right all along.”
“He is at liberty to think precisely what he pleases,” said Jeannie, withdrawing her arm from Jack’s. “Oh, Jack, you don’t know about that; you can be told now. I must go and see the baby. And it is lunch time.”
Jack followed her with his eyes into the house, and turning to Arthur gave him a great hit in the chest, after the manner of a happy young man.
“You blazing fool!” he said, and Arthur understood, and smote him back.
There was no reason for keeping the engagement secret, and Wroxton, like Athens of old, ever anxious to hear some new thing, was not slow though prolix in discussing the exciting news. Miss Clara Clifford was among the first to receive it, for that very afternoon, while Jack had gone to tell Canon and Mrs. Collingwood about it, she met Jeannie in the street. Ever since Jeannie had been so friendly to her in the matter of the picture she had regarded her with a mixture of worship and affection, and during the weeks of the typhoid she had, so to speak, built a temple to her. A warm heart beat underneath Miss Clara’s flat bosom, and its capacity for loving had never yet been put to the stretch. But Jeannie, with her beauty, her engaging grace, her kindness to herself, and her unquestioning devotion to the sick, had stormed and taken her. She was of a different orderto the people of Miss Clifford’s world, and nightly Miss Clifford dreamed of the aristocracy no longer as beings apart, but as her friends. Jeannie met her as she was walking down the High Street, turned her round, and insisted on her going her way, and not much insistence was required.
“Oh, I have something to tell you,” she said, “which I am sure will interest you. Oh, there’s Jim! Jim, you don’t look any worse for your typhoid; you see you were sensible and came to hospital at once. The class will begin again on Saturday. I shall see you? Yes?”
Miss Clifford glowed with appreciation while Jeannie talked to her policeman, and the two went on together.
“What was I saying?” she continued. “Oh, yes! Do you remember once your telling me that I was engaged to Jack Collingwood? Well, now it is I who tell you that.”
Miss Clifford stepped into a puddle, and stood there.
“Oh, Miss Avesham!” she said. “I hope you will be very happy. To think that—dear me, how things turn out!”
“There is no secret about it,” said Jeannie; “you may tell whom you please. Only I should be rather glad, just in the way of private revenge, if you did not tell Colonel Raymond first. But as you please.”
“Miss Avesham,” said Miss Clara, impressively, “I would not tell Colonel Raymond for five gold mines.”
Jeannie laughed.
“Is he back yet?” she asked. “He went away, I think, a fortnight ago, when that poor little mite of his got typhoid.”
“He came back yesterday,” said Miss Clara.
They had reached Bolton Street, and here Jeannie had to turn off.
“Good-bye, Miss Clifford,” she said. “I’m so glad I met you, and told you myself.”
Miss Clifford felt herself a mere mass of congested sentiment which for the life of her she could not put words to.
“I must go home,” she said, “for Phœbe and I are going calling this afternoon. And, oh, I can not say things, but God bless you, dear Miss Avesham!”
Jeanniewas standing on the first tee of the Wroxton golf links, doing what is technically known as addressing her ball. In other words, her driver was moving spasmodically backward and forward behind it, and she was thinking about her right foot. Some six yards behind her stood two impassive caddies, and Jack was standing opposite her ball and to the right of her.
“Don’t press,” he said, “and go back slowly. Let your left heel come off the ground quite naturally as the club goes back. Oh, keep your head still! Your spine is a pivot round which the arms work. And keep your eye on the ball.”
Jeannie’s club trailed very slowly back to about the level of her right shoulder, when suddenly an idea struck her, and she paused.
“Jack, how can I see my club head on the back swing out of my left eye if I am to look at the ball?” she asked.
“If you are going to argue, stand at ease,” said Jack. “You will certainly miss the ball if you pause on the top of your swing. Let’s talk it out, and take your stroke afterward.”
Jeannie was looking fixedly at the ball.
“Don’t talk when I’m playing,” she said, and with a long breath raised her club a little higher. Then she hit furiously, and a frenzied ball hid itself in long grass some ten yards in front of the tee.
“I told you so,” she exclaimed.
“Have it again,” said Jack.
“No, certainly not,” said Jeannie. “Oh, yes; I think I will. I will start now. That was trial.”
“About the club head,” explained Jack, “it’s like this. You can see it, but you don’t look at it. You look at the ball, and at nothing else whatever. But do remember that you have to hit a part of the ball which you don’t see at all.”
Jeannie’s caddie had teed her ball again.
“Then what’s the use of looking at it?” she asked.
“In about five years, if you stick to it, you will understand,” he said.
Jeannie shifted uneasily on her feet. Then another idea struck her.
“Then tell me that in five years’ time,” she said. “But for practical purposes, what am I to do this minute?”
There were already another couple waiting to start, one of which was Colonel Raymond. Jeannie saw him, and nothing in the world would have induced her to let him pass. Jack guessed as much.
“Hit this ball as hard as ever you can,” he said.
Jeannie shortened the intended swing, and threw her club at the ball. Oddly enough, it rose clear of the grass, towered, and fell a full hundred yards off, and getting a forward kick was like a bolted rabbit.
“I told you so,” she said again.
From behind came Cousin Robert’s voice.
“By gad!” he exclaimed loudly. But Jeannie did not turn round, and said negligently to Jack:
“Topped!”
Now, the ball was anything but topped, and Jack, struggling with inward laughter, sent a careless hooked drive down wind andfar. Then, as is natural at golf, the great silences of the game which isolates the player from the whole world closed round them and they went forward.
Thereafter came distress and difficulties. A bunker welcomed Jeannie’s second, and the bunker retained her third. A sky-sweeping iron shot was recorded as her fourth, and the fifth leaped across the green as if a wasp had stung it. Jack, meantime, had laid his second nearly dead, and four was sufficient.
“That sha’n’t count,” said Jeannie; “we’ll begin now. The handicap is as follows: We both play on till we reach the green, do you see, and then the scoring begins. We are like as we lie on the green, Jack, and after that you give me a stroke a hole. And I’ll play you for half a crown,” she added, with a burst of reckless speculation.
It was an afternoon of spring, a day of that exquisite temper seldom felt except in our much-maligned climate. April had laid aside its outbreaks of petulant rain, and wore the face of a laughing child. The great grave downs over which they played were scoured by a westerly wind, which swelledthe buds and smoothed out the creases in the little buttons of green which were bursting from the hawthorn. From the height an admirable expanse of big, wholesome country was visible on every side: to the west the houses of Wroxton stood red and glimmering in a hollow in the hills, and climbed the slopes of the circle. In the middle rose the gray Cathedral piercing the blue veil of pure air in which the lower houses were enveloped, and the tower was gilded with the sunshine. North and east lay a delectable land, where broad fields alternated with woods, round which hovered, like a green mist, the first outbreak of bursting leaves, and down the centre of the valley, unseen but traceable from a livelier flush of green, ran the river. To the south there were only downs, rising and falling in strong undulations like the muscles of strong arms interlaced. Overhead skylarks carolled unseen in the blue, or dropped, when their song was done, among the grass, breathless and drunken with music; the earth had renewed its lease of life, and the everlasting fountains of youth were unsealed again. Never since the seasons hadbegun their courses was winter farther away, and never since Adam had walked with Eve in the garden had love touched two lives more closely than it touched Jeannie and Jack as they went over the breezy downs, club in hand.
The details of the play would not be interesting even to golfers, to others tedious; but it may be remarked that Jack drove long balls, which started low and rose inexplicably toward the end of their flight, and that a clean ball rising suddenly against a blue sky is invariably felt to be a stimulating object.
“It must be so nice,” remarked Jeannie, “if it doesn’t hurt to be a golf ball. You lie there seeing nothing except blades of grass close round you, and then suddenly the ground races away from you, and you rise, rise, like that one did, over a bank and a road, and drop on the smooth short grass of the green.”
“The hole must be unpleasant,” said Jack. “You go trotting over the green, and then suddenly tumble into a horrible, small, dark prison, with iron at the bottom.”
“Yes, and somebody says ‘Good shot!’ but they take you out again. Oh, Jack, may I take off my hat?”
All mankind may be divided into those who like hats and those who do not. Some people habitually wear a hat unless there is a real reason, like a church or royalty, for taking it off, but to others a hat is to be always discarded if possible. Both Jeannie and the other were habitually hatless folk, a characteristic which goes hand-in-hand with a love for wind and large open places, and is borne out, to endless issues, in the normal attitude of the mind toward problems of life.
She gave it to her caddie to carry for her, and shook her head to free it of its prison-house shades.
“That is better,” she said. “Now my drives will go ten yards farther.”
Colonel Raymond, meantime, playing behind them, was lavish of advice to his opponent.
“Cultivate a style,” he said. “Hew out a style for yourself, and the rest will follow. Ah!”—and he watched his own ball, which he had topped heavily with his mashie, skipand bump over the outlying banks of a bunker and roll up gently to the hole.
“A useful stroke that,” said this incomparable man. “I picked it up from poor young Tom Morris. Time and again have I seen him skim his ball over the rough stuff and lay it dead. A fine, useful shot.”
Useful the shot undoubtedly was, and certainly there was no showiness about it, a quality which Colonel Raymond detested.
“You’ve got to get into the hole,” was his maxim. “Well, get there,” and he missed his putt.
Colonel Raymond, on his return to Wroxton after the recovery of Maria, had been at first a little disconcerted to find that the engagement of Cousin Jeannie was common property. Mrs. Raymond, no doubt, would have mentioned it in her letters to him, but the Colonel had begged her not to write at all.
“The other children will be with me,” he had said, “and a letter may so easily carry infection. Why, there was a man in India who got the cholera simply through a letter. So don’t write, Constance. Send me a telegram every day or two to say how Maria is,and don’t fret yourself. Worry and fright, as Cousin Jeannie said, are to be avoided.”
But almost before the first shock of the news had conveyed itself to the Colonel, he saw his ingenious way out of it.
“Didn’t I say they were engaged all along?” he roared to his old cronies. “I remember nearly letting it out one evening here. It was intended, as I said, not to be known at once, and I kept my counsel. But I remember letting it slip once at Miss Clifford’s. Ask her if it is not so. I knew all along, all along. Is that your lead, partner? A devilish poor one.”
As soon as the year’s mourning for Jeannie’s father was over the marriage was to take place—that is to say, they would not be married till June. Never had a courtship run more smoothly, and never did the course of true love behave less proverbially.
Canon Collingwood took the engagement as he took most things in life, with placid enjoyment, but the event had moved Mrs. Collingwood beyond the run of worldly matters. Like the rest of Wroxton, every time she had been brought in contact with Jeannie shehad been moved to something warmer than mere liking, even when she disagreed with her, at the charm and simplicity of the girl. There were some people, like herself, who did many unselfish things from a sense of duty; Jeannie, on the other hand, seemed to do them from inclination, and her sense of duty was as invisible as the string which binds together a pearl necklace. All that could be seen were the series of beautiful shining acts; what made the series was left to conjecture. Mrs. Collingwood’s necklace of shining acts was differently constructed. There were hard, black knots in it, and the string showed between each pearl, and it looked remarkably strong. There was no fear whatever of its breaking.
Weeks before the time for the wedding the new dresses of the Miss Cliffords were ready. They were purple, real purple, fit for empresses, and their bonnets were purple, too. They had also both of them left cards at Bolton Street, with P. P. C. written in the corner. This was not meant to imply that they were going away, or to express a hint that Jeannie was; but Miss Phœbe remembered that cards had been left on a curate of her father’s just before his marriage and his promotion to a parsonage, and P. P. C. was connected in her mind with congratulations. The Miss Cliffords had had some discussion of the etiquette of high life prescribed on such occasions, and this had been fixed upon as a safe and elegant thing to do.
“It does not matter so much for you, Clara,” Phœbe had said, “because you saw Miss Avesham. I could not go and call in person and sit in the drawing-room and say pretty things, for I should feel so hot and awkward. It would be better simply to leave cards at the door. I hear in London that it is a very general custom to do so without even asking if people are in.”
“That seems so cold,” said Clara.
“It is better to be cold than to seem as if one were putting one’s self forward. As for P. P. C., I am sure that is right. I remember writing P. P. C. on the cards we left on Mr. Hopkinson as well as anything.”
“It would be a pity if it meant something different,” said Clara. “You see, Phœbe, neither of us can recollect what it stands for.”
“It is French, I am sure,” said Phœbe. “Let us see. What could it be? C. I think must becongratulations. To convey now.Pour prendre!Of course that is it. I rememberpour prendreperfectly now.Pour prendre congratulations.I hope you are satisfied now, Clara.”
“Yes, Phœbe. I feel sure you must be right,” said her sister. “But shall we not send a little present together? Miss Avesham has been very good to me.”
Phœbe tossed her head. This was a covert allusion to that terrible affair of the picture.
“A diamond necklace, perhaps,” she said scornfully; “or would you prefer a pearl and diamond tiara?”
This cutting irony on the part of Phœbe closed the discussion for the time being; but Clara bore the thing in mind, and eventually decided on a silver bootjack and an ode of congratulation in the Wroxton Chronicle. Phœbe had not negatived this proposition when she had advanced it before, but of late she had been very sharp with her sister, and for weeks past she had not looked well; habitually she had a high colour, but of late shehad become sallow and gray in skin. More than once Clara had asked whether she would not see a doctor, but Phœbe had always met the suggestion with a disdainful refusal. She had played hardly at all on her mandolin lately, and when the household work was over she would sit in a chair in her corner, with her hands on her lap, doing nothing. If Clara came in when she was sitting like this, she would jump up and pretend to occupy herself with something, for she did not wish her sister to see her tears. But when alone she would seldom do anything, and day by day a curious gnawing pain below her right collar-bone grew worse and worse. The pain, whatever it was, was not continuous. If she slept well at night it was usually bad the next day, or had been bad the day before; but if her night had been disturbed by it, in these early days, she usually passed a comfortable day. A little lump had appeared there below the skin, and Phœbe, before her bed-room glass, looked at it with some anxiety, and called it a rheumatic swelling. As such she rubbed it with embrocation, which did not seem to make it any better.
Both Clara and Phœbe were accustomed, even when alone, to dress for dinner. In the winter, when the evenings were cold, this usually only meant the donning of Sunday clothes; but when the milder days of spring succeeded, they faced each other in low dresses. By the beginning of April Clara had already worn her low dress more than once, but Phœbe never. It was still chilly, she said, and if Clara did not take care she would catch cold.
Phœbe had a horror of doctors. To call in a doctor implied that you thought that you were ill. Turkey rhubarb, quinine, and embrocation, according to her, were a trinity of greater potency than the whole college of surgeons, and she was not naturally nervous. She even doubted whether the epidemic of typhoid which had visited Wroxton in the autumn might not have been made too much of, and a plentiful exhibition of the staple drugs, she thought, should have been tried first. For this swelling underneath her collar-bone she tried all these in succession, but smarting, deafness, and general upset seemed only to have added to her discomfort. Thepain, which at first had been only a dull ache, grew intenser. At times it stabbed and pierced her, and now, after a day of pain, a sleepless, tossing night succeeded.
She was still firmly determined not to see a doctor; but when one afternoon, Clara being out, she had met Jeannie in the street, and had been persuaded to go to Bolton Street to have tea with her, Jeannie saying it would be a kindness, since she was alone, she confessed, in answer to a question of hers, that she was not well.
“I have pain,” she said, “oh, such pain! And it is all I can do to prevent Clara seeing it. I cannot sleep for it. Oh, Miss Avesham, do tell me that it is nothing.”
Jeannie had felt anxious when she saw her that day, but she tried to be consoling.
“Very likely it is nothing,” she said. “But one cannot tell. Do see a doctor at once. The thing worries you and makes you ill. If there is anything wrong, it ought to be attended to; but if you are assured it is nothing, that will be a relief, will it not?”
“But Clara will know,” objected Phœbe. “If it is anything wrong she would fret so.”
“Oh, you are absurd,” said Jeannie, frankly. “Supposing nothing is wrong, you need never tell her. But supposing you ought to see a doctor, how she would blame herself for not having insisted. Where is the pain?”
Miss Phœbe, with much diffidence, alluded distantly to her collar-bone.
“I think it is probably rheumatic,” she added.
Jeannie rang the bell, and went to the table to write a note.
“Now, Miss Phœbe,” she said, “you are going to see the doctor here and now. Don’t say you won’t, for it is no use. I am writing to Dr. Maitland; he will be at home by now, and I am sure he will come here at once. You see, in this way your sister will not know.”
The poor lady leaned back in her chair, almost with relief.
“It is very kind of you,” she said. “And indeed I think Clara must see if it went on any longer.”
Jeannie gave the note to the butler, and when he had left the room:
“I am sure it is wise, Miss Phœbe,” she said. “Why, if I or Arthur have an ache in our little finger we fill the house with surgeons. There is never anything the matter, and they tell us so. Now Dr. Maitland will be here in ten minutes or less. You shall go to my room, and he will look at you there.”
“It is very kind of you,” said Phœbe; “and you will not tell Clara?”
“Never without your consent,” said Jeannie. “Come, let us go upstairs.”
Dr. Maitland was in, and in ten minutes he was at Bolton Street. He was shown into the drawing-room, and Jeannie came down stairs to him.
“She looks as if it were only one thing,” she said. “But don’t tell her. When you have seen her, come and tell me. She is upstairs.”
After he had gone Jeannie went to the window and looked out. The full abundance of spring was in the air; the false death of winter was over, and all living things rejoiced in this renewal of the world. The grass of the lawn was starred with young crocuses, gnarled trees put out their sheavesof tender living leaves; all was as it had been twelve months ago. But in the lives of men no such renewal and repetition is admitted. The year passes, and they are a year nearer to the grim apparition of decay and death. It seemed to her a long time before the footstep of the doctor again sounded on the stairs. She faced round again into the room to meet him.
“I have not told her,” he said, “as you desired. But there is no doubt—cancer.”
“Would any operation give her a chance?”
“A chance certainly, but a more than doubtful one. It is of five months’ growth at least.”
“If she had come earlier this chance would have been better?” asked Jeannie.
“Undoubtedly.”
“Shall I tell her?” she asked.
“She had better be told. The operation would be dangerous. If it is left, the end is certain, and probably—though one can never tell—not far distant. It is a case where she must decide whether to have the operation or not.”
“Do you recommend it?”
“Scarcely. If I was in the same condition I would not have it done.”
Jeannie stood silent a moment.
“Oh, poor thing, poor thing!” she said. “And I suppose I must tell her.”
She put her hands before her eyes for a space, and then gave herself a little shake.
“What a coward one is!” she said. “Thank you very much, Dr. Maitland. I will let you know about it.”
“I will tell her if you wish, Miss Avesham,” said he.
“No; I know her better than you,” said Jeannie. “Good-bye. I shall go upstairs at once to her.”
Dr. Maitland shook hands with her; he felt an intense admiration for her.