The wind was fair, and the yacht fled under full canvas.
"She walks right along!" cried Romer. He was exhilarated by the speed of his boat, which was, in fact, a racer, and built in all her lines to get over a triangular course in the least possible time. He talked about her safe points to the landsman (who responded with the satisfaction of ignorance), but the final end of the Dream's being was speed, unqualified by inferior considerations. To this American idol, boats, like men, are sacrificed as matters of course. One scarcely makes conversation on so obvious a topic.
To tell the truth, Avery was not especially fond of yachting, and the careening of the Dream under the pleasant westerly did not arouse in him that enthusiasm which, somehow, he had expected to experience on this trip. When the water ran over the rail, he changed his seat to windward. When it rushed over, he held on to something. Tom Romer chaffed him amiably.
"Why, this is only a fair sailing day!" he cried. "Wait till it breezes up."
"Oh, I shall enjoy it if it comes," replied the lawyer. In fact, he was enjoying nothing. His thoughts surged like the water through which the yacht was driving. Their depth was enveloped and disguised in foam. When Romer said proudly, "She's making twelve knots!" his guest reflected, "I 'm so much farther away from her."
The same personal pronoun answered for the sportsman and the husband. Before the Dream was off Plymouth, the little cruise had assumed the proportions of an Atlantic voyage to the landsman's imagination.
By noon he remembered that in his hurry to get off he had made no definite provision with Jean about telegrams from, but only for messages to her. All that was arranged in the note, but he had torn up the note. With that leisurely appreciation of unpleasant facts which is so natural to the sanguine, and so incomprehensible by the anxious temperament, it occurred to him in the course of the afternoon that his wife had seemed much less well than usual when he bade her good-by; in fact, that he had never seen her look precisely as she did that morning. He began to acknowledge distinctly to himself that he wished he knew how she was.
He grew definitely uneasy as the early autumn twilight dulled the color of the water and the horizon of the distant shore. They were well on the Shoals now, for the breeze was stiff, and the yacht ran at a spanking pace. The wind was not going down with the sun, but rose strongly. The landsman began to be a little seasick, which somehow added to his moral discomfort.
"How can I get a telegram off?" he asked abruptly, much in the tone in which he would have called for a district messenger in the court-house.
"Oh, I might tap a cable for you, I suppose," returned his host, with twitching mustache. "Look here," added Romer. "What is it—mal de mer? or nostalgia? Do you want to be put ashore?"
"Not at all," replied Avery, with the pugnacity which men are accustomed to mistake for high ethical obligations to their own sex. "I only want to get a message to my wife. You see, I promised her."
"We 'll run into Wood's Hole in the morning, by all means," said Romer cordially. "It's a great place for ducks, anyhow, off there."
"Oh—ducks?" repeated Avery stupidly. He had forgotten that they came to kill ducks.
"We 're goin' to have a breeze o' wind," observed one of the crew, who was lowering the jib-topsail.
"I'd like to take the dispatch myself, when we get there, if I may," the seasick lawyer hazarded, somewhat timidly. But next morning, when the Dream dropped anchor off Wood's Hole, and the tender was lowered, he was flat in his berth. He could not take the dispatch, and a detail of two from the crew bounced off with it, pounding over the choppy sea. The frail and fashionable tender looked like one of the little Florida shells that are sold by the quart; there was now a considerable sea; the yacht herself was pretty wet. Romer was in excellent spirits.
"We might get a duck or two before breakfast, if it isn't too rough," he suggested. "Sorry you 're laid up."
"Oh—ducks?" repeated Avery again. He wished he could have a chance to forget that he had left his wife too ill to lift her head, and had come wallowing out here to kill ducks.
"I can't remember that a duck ever did me any harm," he said savagely, aloud.
He heard the occasional report of guns over his head with a sense of personal injury. Nobody hit any ducks, and he was glad of it. The Dream cruised about, he did not know where. He had ceased to feel any interest in her movements. He did not even ask where they had anchored for the night. The wind rose steadily throughout the day. As the force of the blow increased, his physical miseries ascended and his moral consciousness declined. His anxiety for his wife blurred away in a befuddled sense of his own condition.
"I don't believe she's any worse off than I am," he thought. This reflection gave him some comfort. He slept again that night the shattered sleep of the seasick and unhappy, and woke with a cry.
A port-hole of gray dawn darkened by green waters was in the stateroom, which seemed to be standing on its experienced and seaworthy head. The yacht was keeling and pitching weakly. Tom Romer stood beside the berth, looking at his guest; he did not smile. It was an uncommon thing to see Tom Romer without a smile. The yachtsman wore oilskins and a sou'wester, and dripped with salt water like a Grand Banker.
"God! Romer, what's the matter?" Avery got to his feet at once. He forgot that he was seasick. His bodily distresses fled before the swift, strong lash of fright.
"The fact is," replied Romer slowly, "we 've struck a confounded gale—aNovembergale," he added. "It's turned easterly. She 's been dragging her anchor since two. Now"—
"Now what?" demanded Avery sharply. He staggered into his clothes without waiting for an answer.
"Well—we 've snapped our road."
"Road?" The landsman struggled to recall his limited stock of nautical phrases. "That's the rope you tie your anchor to? Oh! What are you going to do?" he asked, with unnatural humility. The fatal helplessness of ignorance overwhelmed him. If he ever lived to get back, he would turn the tables, and conduct Romer through a complicated lawsuit.
"Run into the Sound if I can," returned Romer. "It won't do to get caught on some of these shoals round here."
"Of course not," replied Avery, who did not know a shoal from a siren. "Say, Romer, what's the amount of danger? Out with it!"
"Oh, she's good for it," said the yachtsman lightly. Then his voice and manner changed. His insouciant black eyes peered suddenly at his guest as if from a small, keen, marine lens.
"Say, old fellow," he said slowly, "I hope there was n't any sort of a quarrel,—you know,—any domestic unpleasantness, before you came on this trip? I wish to blank I 'd left you ashore."
"Quarrel? A demon could n't quarrel with my wife!" exploded Avery.
"That was my impression," returned his host. "Beg pardon, Avery. You see—to be honest, I can't say exactly how we 're coming out of this. There are several things which might happen. I thought"—the sportsman stammered, and stopped.
"If you should pull through and I should n't," said Avery, lifting a gray face,—"I 'm not a swimmer, and you are,—tell her I 'd give my immortal soul if I had n't left her. Tell her—I—God! Romer, she was very sick! She did n't want me to go."
"I 've always thought," said the bachelor, "that ifIhad a wife—a woman like that"— His face hardened perceptibly, dripping under his sou'wester. "You fellows don't know what you 've got," he added abruptly. He scrambled up the companionway without looking back. Avery followed him abjectly.
At this moment the yacht groaned, grated, and keeled suddenly. Water poured over the rail. The deck rang with cries. Avery got up, and held on to something. It proved to be the main-sheet. It ran through his fingers like a saw, and escaped. Confusedly he heard the mate crying:—
"We 've struck, sir! She 's stove in!"
"Well," replied the owner coolly, "get the boats over, then."
He did not look at his guest. Avery looked at the water. It seemed to leap up after him, hike a beast amused with a ghastly play. Oddly, he recalled at that moment coming in one day—it was after she knew what ailed her—and finding Jean with a book face down on her lap. He picked it up and read, "The vision of sudden death." He had laughed at her, and scolded her for filling her mind with such things.
"You don'tquiteunderstand, dear," she had answered.
"Come," said Romer, whose remarkable self-possession somehow increased rather than diminished Avery's alarm, "we have n't as much time to spare as I would like. Hold hard there while Mr. Avery gets aboard!"
The tender was prancing like a mustang on a prairie, for there was really a swamping sea. The landsman was clumsy and nervous, missed his footing, and fell.
As he went under he cried, in a piercing voice, "Tell my wife"— When the water drove into his throat and lungs, he thought how he had seen her fight for her breath, patiently, hours at a time. She had told him once that it was like drowning.
It was two days after this that a man who attracted some attention among the passengers got off the Shore train at the old station in the city.
Marshall Avery seemed to himself to see this man as if he saw another person, and felt a curious interest in his appearance and movements. The man was dressed in borrowed clothes that did not fit; his face was haggard and heavily lined; he had no baggage, and showed some excitement of manner, calling several hackmen at once, and berating the one he selected for being too slow. A kind of maniacal hurry possessed him.
"Drive for your life!" he said. He did not lean back in the carriage, but sat up straight, as if he could not spare time to be comfortable. When the hack door slammed Avery saw the man no more, but seemed to crouch and crawl so far within his personality that it was impossible to observe the traveler from the outside.
Avery had never in his life before been in the throat of death, and been spewed out, like a creature unwelcome, unfit to die. The rage of the gale was in his ears yet; the crash of the waves seemed to crush his chest in. Occasionally he wiped his face or throat, as if salt water dashed on it still. He had made up his mind definitely—he would never tell Jean the details. She would not be able to bear them. It might do her a harm. He would simply say that the yacht got caught in a blow, and struck, and that the tender brought him ashore. She would not understand what this meant. Why should she know that he went overboard in the process? Or what a blank of a time they had to fish him out? Or even to bring him to, for that matter? Why tell her how long the tender had tossed about like a chip in that whirlpool? It was unnecessary to explain hell to her. To say, "We snapped an oar; we had to scull in a hurricane," would convey little idea to her. And she would be so distressed that one of the crew was lost. The Dream was sunk. Romer had remained on the Cape to try to recover the body of his mate. He, Marshall Avery, her husband, had been saved alive, and had come back to her. What else concerned, or, indeed, what else could interest her? In ten minutes nothing would interest either of them, except that he had her in his arms again.... Jean! He thrust his face out of the hack window and cried:—
"Drive faster, man! I 'm not going to a funeral."
The driver laid the whip on and put the horse to a gallop. The passenger leaned back on the cushions now for the first time and drew a full breath.
"Jean!" he repeated, "Jean!Jean!"
The tower of the Church of the Happy Saints rose before his straining eyes against the cold November sky. It was clear and sunny after the storm; bleak, though. He shivered a little as he came in sight of the club. A sick distaste for the very building overcame him. A flash of the river where the Dream had anchored glittered between the houses. He turned away his face. He thought:—
"I wonder when she got the telegrams?" The first one must have reached her by noon of the second day out. This last, sent by night delivery from the little Cape village where the shipwrecked party had landed (he had routed out the operator from his bed to do it)—this last telegram ought to have found her by breakfast-time. She would know by now that he was safe. She might have had—well, admit that she must have had some black hours. Possibly the papers—but he had seen no papers. It had been a pity about the telephone. He had searched everywhere for the Blue Bell. He had found one in a grocery, but the tempest had gnawed the long-distance wire through. He would tell her all about it now in six minutes—in five—poor Jean!
No—stop. He would carry her some flowers. It would take but a minute. She thought so much of such little attentions. The driver reined up sharply at the corner florist's; it was Avery's own florist, but the salesman was a stranger, a newcomer. He brought a dozen inferior tea-roses out with an apology.
"Sorry, sir, but they are all we have left. We 've been sending everything to Mr. Avery's."
Avery stared at the man stupidly. Was Jean entertaining? Some ladies' lunch? Then she was much better. Or was she so ill that people were sending flowers, as people do, for lack of any better way of expressing a useless sympathy? He felt his hands and feet turn as cold as the seas of Cape Cod.
"Drive slower," he said. But the fellow did not hear him, and the hack rushed on. At the passenger's door it stopped with a lurch. Avery got out slowly. The house looked much as usual, except that a shade in Jean's bedroom was drawn. It was just the hour when she sometimes tried to sleep after an ill night. The husband trod softly up the long steps. He felt for his latch-key, but remembered that he had never seen it since he went overboard. He turned to ring the bell.
As he did so something touched his hand disagreeably; a gust of November wind twisted it around and around his wrist. Avery threw the thing off with a cry of horror.
He had leaned up heavily against the door, and when Molly opened it suddenly, he well-nigh fell into the house.
"Oh, sir!" said Molly. She had been crying, and looked worn. He stood with his tea-roses in his hand staring at her; he did not speak. He heard the baby crying in the nursery, and Pink's little feet trotting about somewhere. The house was heavy with flowers,—roses, violets, tuberoses,—a sickening mixture of scents. He tried several times to speak, but his dry throat refused.
"What's happened?" he managed to demand at last, fiercely, as if that would help anything.
"The doctor's here. He 'll tell you, sir," said Molly. She did not look him in the eye, but went softly and knocked at the library door. Avery started to go upstairs.
"Oh, Mr. Avery," cried Molly, "don't you do that; don't you, sir!"
Then Dr. Thorne stepped out of the library. "Wait a minute, Avery," he said, in a quiet, matter-of-fact tone, which at once restored Avery's composure. "Just come in here before you go up, will you?"
Marshall Avery obeyed. He stepped into the library. And Dr. Thorne shut the door.
The two men regarded each other for a moment in surcharged silence. The distracted husband stood trembling pitiably. He passed his left hand over his eyes, then pushed it over his right wrist several times, as if he were pushing away an obstruction.
"I don't seem to be quite right in the head, Thorne," he pleaded. "I thought there was—something on the doorbell.... I 've been shipwrecked. I 'm not—just myself.... Why don't you speak to me?Doctor!Doctor!"
"I find it—difficult," replied the experienced physician, with embarrassment. "The case is—unusual. Mrs. Avery"—
"Give me the worst!" cried the tortured man.
"That is impossible," said Esmerald Thorne, in a deep voice. He turned away and went to the window, where he stood looking out into the back yard. Kate was hanging out some sheets and other bedding. Avery noticed this circumstance—he had got up and stood behind the doctor—as people notice the pettiest items in the largest crises of their lives. A small fluttering white thing on the line arrested his attention. It was the silk Spanish shawl which he had given his wife.
He put out his hand—groped, as a seeing man suddenly smitten blind will grope—and, fumbling, found the doctor's arm and clutched it. Then he toppled; his weight came heavily, and the physician caught him before he struck the floor.
He pushed the brandy away from his lips and struggled up. Even at that moment it occurred to him that Esmerald Thorne looked at him with something like aversion.
"When did she die?"
"Yesterday."
"What time?"
"At the ebb of the tide. It was eleven o'clock in the morning."
"Who was with her?"
"The servants."
"Oh, my God, Thorne! Nobody else? Were n't you there?"
"I got there.... I doubt if she knew it.... It was only twenty minutes before the end. Hush! Avery, hush! Don't groan like that, man. Nobody is to blame. If only—you"— Dr. Thorne checked himself, savagely, as he did when he was moved beyond endurance.
"Oh, I take it all!" cried Avery. He stooped as if he bent his broad shoulders to receive some mighty burden. "I shall carry itall... forever. Men have gone mad," he added, more calmly, "for much less than I have got to face."
"If you find yourself strong enough," said the physician, "I shall try to put you in possession of the facts." Again, as before, Avery thought he noticed an expression of aversion on the countenance of his old friend. Cowering, he bowed before it. It was part of his punishment; and he had already begun to feel that nothing but a consciousness of punishment could give him any comfort now.
"Will you go up and see her first?" asked Dr. Thorne, as if to gain time. "She looks very lovely," he added, with quivering lip.
But the room rang to such a cry as the man of mercy—used to human emergency, and old before his time in the assuagement of human anguish—had never heard.
It softened Dr. Thorne a little, and he tried to be more gentle. He did not succeed altogether. Iron and fire were in the doctor's nature, and the metal did not melt for Marshall Avery.
He began quietly, with a marked reserve. Mrs. Avery, he said, had been very ill on the morning that her husband started. He had hurried to the house, as requested; her condition was so alarming that, after doing what he could to relieve her, he had driven rapidly to the river-wall back of the club, hoping to signal the yacht before it was out of reach; he had even dispatched some one in a row-boat, and some one else on a bicycle, hoping to overtake the Dream at the draw. The patient must have been low enough all night; and being subject to such attacks—
"I had warned you," said the physician coldly. "I explained to you the true nature of her condition. I have done my best for a year to prevent just this catastrophe.... No. I don't mean to be a brute. I don't want to dwell on that view of it. You don't need my reproaches. Of course you know how she took that trip of yours. When the storm came up, she—well, she suffered," said the doctor grimly. "And the wreck got into the papers. We did our best to keep them from her. But you know she was a reading woman. And then her anxiety.... And you hadn't given us any address to telegraph to. When she began to sink, we could not notify you. I should have sent a tug after you if it had n't been for the gale— What do you take me for?Of courseI provided a nurse. And my wife would have been here, but she was out of town. She only returned last night. Helen did n't get here in time, either. It was most unfortunate. I sent the best woman I could command. My regular staff were all on duty somewhere. That was the infernal part of it. I had to take this stranger. I gave her every order. But Mrs. Avery seemed to rally that morning. She deceived us all. She deceived me; I admit it. The woman must needs take her two hours off just then—and Mrs. Avery got hold of the paper. That's the worst of it. She read the account of the wreck all through. You see, the reporters gave the party up. She was unconscious when I got here. Once she seemed to know me. But I cannot honestly say that I believe she did. I don't think I have anything more to say. Not just now, anyhow." Esmerald Thorne turned away and looked out of the window again, tapping on the sill with his fingers—scornfully one might have said.
"We made the best arrangements we could. Some relatives telegraphed. And the interment"—
"Oh, have some mercy, Thorne! I have borne all I can—fromyou." ...
"Esmerald?" As if a spirit had stirred it, the library door opened inwards slowly. A womanly voice embodied in a fair and stately presence melted into the room.
"Oh, my dear! my dear!" said Helen Thorne. "Leave him tome."
As the stricken man lifted his face from the lash of his fellow-man, the woman put out her hands and gathered his, as if he had been a broken child.
"Oh," she said, "don't take it so! Don't think of itthatway. It would break Jean's heart.... She loved you so! ... And she knew you did n't know how sick she was. Any wife would know that—if her husband loved her, and if she loved him. And you did love her. And she knew you did. She used to tell me how sure she was of your true love—and how precious it was to her, and how much she ... cared for you."
Helen's voice faltered on these last three words; she pronounced them with infinite tenderness; it was the pathos of woman pleading for womanhood, or love defending love.
"And she would n't want you to be tortured so—now. Oh, she would be the first of us all to forgive you for any mistake you made, or any wrong you did. She would understand just how it all came about, better than any of us can—better than you do yourself. Jean always understood. She wanted nothing, nothing in this world, but for you to be happy. She was so grieved because she was sick, and could not go about with you, and make it as cheerful for you at home as she used to do. She used to tell me—oh, she used to tell me so many things about how she felt, and every feeling she ever had was purer and tenderer and truer than the feeling of any other woman that I ever knew! She was the noblest woman—the loveliest, ... and she lovedyou.... Why, she could n't bear it—she could n'tbearit, dead up there as she is, if we let you suffer like this, and did not try ... if I did not try to comfort you."
Helen's own tears broke her choking words. But the heart-break of the man's sobs came now at last; and they had such a sound that the doctor covered his eyes, and stood with bowed head, as if he had been the culprit, not the judge, before the awful courts of human error, remorse, and love, in which no man may doom his fellow, since God's verdict awaits.
"Come, Mr. Avery," said Helen. She stooped and picked up the tea-roses, which had fallen and were scattered on the floor, put them into his cold hand—and then drew away. "She 'd rather you would go up alone," said Helen Thorne.
He passed out through the open door. His two friends fell back. The children could be heard in the dining-room: Molly was trying to keep them quiet there. It seemed to him as if he waded through hot-house flowers, the air was so thick with their repugnant scent. He crawled upstairs, steadying himself by the banister. The hall below looked small and dark, like a pit. His head swam, and it occurred to him that if he fell he would fall to a great depth. He clung to the wretched tea-roses that he had brought her. He remembered that this was the last thing he could ever do for her.
Outside the door of her room he stopped. His lips stirred. He found himself repeating the old, commonplace words wrung from the despair of mourners since grief was young in the story of the world:—
"It is all over. This is the end."
"No," said a distinct voice near him, "it is not the end."
Starting, he stared about him. The hall was quite empty, above and below. The nursery door was closed. The children and Molly could be heard in the dining-room. No person was within the radius of speech with him. The door of Jean's chamber was shut.
The roses shook in his hand.
Avery stood irresolute. "It is one of those hallucinations," he thought. "This shock—following the wreck—has confused me." The voice was not repeated; and after a few moments' hesitation he opened the door of his wife's room.
It was neither dark nor light in the chamber; something like twilight filled the room, which, unlike the house, was not heavy with the excessive perfume of flowers. A handful of violets (modest, winning, and like Jean) was all that had been admitted; these stood on a table beside her Bible and prayer-book, her little portfolio, and her pen and inkstand.
In his wretchedness Marshall duly perceived the delicate thought which had ordered that his should be the first flowers to touch her dear body.
He came up with his poor roses in his hand. Jean seemed to have waited for them. He could have said that she uttered a little, low laugh when she saw him cross the room.... Impossible to believe that she did not see him! She lay so easily, so vitally, that the conviction forced itself upon him that there was some hideous mistake. "Perhaps I am still in the water," he thought, "and this is one of the visions that come to drowning people."
"I may be dead, myself," he added. "Who knows? ButJeanis not dead." He thrust up the shade, and let the November day full into the room. It fell strongly upon her bright hair and her most lovely face. He called her by her name two or three times. It might be said that he expected her to stir and stretch out her hands to him.
"I never thought you would die," he argued. "You know I did n't, Jean. Why, you told me yourself you should live for years.... Jean, my girl! they 've blundered somehow. Youcould n'tdie, youwould n'tdie, Jean, while I was on that cruel trip.... I was sorry I went. I was ashamed of myself for leaving you.... I hurried back—and I was shipwrecked—I was almost drowned. I 'll never leave you again, dear darling! I 'll never leave you again as long as I live!"
These words ached through his mind. He could hardly have said whether he spoke them aloud or not. He sat down on the edge of the bed beside her. By some carefulness, probably Helen Thorne's, the usual ghastly circumstance of death was spared Jean. She lay quite naturally and happily in her own bed, in her lace-frilled night-dress, with her bright hair braided as she used to braid it for the night. Except for her pallor—and she had been a little pale so long that this was not oppressive—she wore one of her charming looks. The conviction that she was not dead persisted in the husband almost to the point of pugnacity. It occurred to him that if he lifted her she would cling to him, and comfort herself against his heart.
"Come, Jean!" he said. He held out his arms. "Forgive me, Jean.... I shall never forgive myself."
Then he stooped to kiss her; andthenhe slid to his knees, and hid his face in his shaking hands, and uttered no cry, nor any word or sound.
He was so still, and he was still so long, that his friends took alarm for him, and Helen Thorne quietly opened the door. When she saw him, she retreated as quietly, went downstairs, and called his little girl.
Pink trotted up noisily as Pink always did, hurried to her mother's room, and hesitated on the threshold. When she said "Hullo, Papa!" her father turned and saw her standing there. He made an instinctive movement towards her; the child ran to him; he caught her, and kissed her little hands and hair, and Pink said: "Crying, Papa? Have you got 'e toofache? ... Come to Mummer Dee. She 'll comfort you."
Into the Church of the Happy Saints, where Jean was used to worship (for she was a religious woman, in her quiet, unobtrusive way), they carried her for her last prayer and chant. And it was noticed how many people there were among the mourners of this gentle lady to whom she had done some kindness, forgotten by every one except themselves, or, more likely, not known to any one else; obscure people, those who had not many friends, and especially sick people, the not helpless, but not curable, whom life and death alike pass by. In her short, invalid life Jean had remembered everybody within her reach who bore this fate; and it would never be known now in what sweet fashion she had contrived to make over to these poor souls a precious portion of her abounding courage, or the gift of Jean's own sympathy. This was something quite peculiar to herself. It was finer than the shading of words in a poem, as reverent as the motion of feeling in a prayer, and always as womanly as Jean.
He who followed her to her burial in such a trance of anguish as few men know who love a wife and cherish her (as so many do, that women may well thank Heaven for their manly number),—he who had loved, but had not cherished, looked into Jean's open grave, and believed that in all the world he stood most desolate among afflicted men.
"I left her to die alone," he said. He grasped Pink's little hand till he hurt the child, and she wrenched it away. He did not even notice this, and his empty hand retained its shape as the little girl's fingers had left it. "I went on a gunning trip. And she asked me not to go. And she died alone." ...
The clergyman's voice intoning sacred words smote upon and did not soothe this comfortless man.
"He that believeth on Me." ...
"Jean believed on me. And I failed her. And she is dead."
Pink crept up to his side again, and put her fingers back into his still outstretched hand. Perhaps it was the child's touch; perhaps—God knew—it was some effluence from the unseen life within whose mystery the deathless love of the dead wife had ceased from the power of expression; but something at that instant poured vigor into the abjectly miserable man. His first consciousness that Jean was not dead rushed back upon him at the mouth of her grave. It seemed, indeed, no grave, but a couch cut in a catafalque of autumn leaves.
"There is some mistake," he thought, as he had thought before. He lifted his bared head to the November sky in a kind of exaltation.
This did not fail him until he came back into his desolate home. He stood staring at the swept and garnished house. The disarray of the funeral was quite removed. His wife's room was ordered as usual; its windows stood open. Some of the dreadful flowers were still left about the house. He pulled them savagely from their places and threw them away. The servants stood crying in the hall; and the strange professional nurse, who had remained with the baby, came up and offered him the child—somewhat as if it had been a Bible text, he thought. He took the little thing into his arms, piously; but the baby began to cry, and hit him in the eyes with both fists.
"It's after her he do be cryin'," said Molly.
Avery handed her the child in silence. As he turned to go upstairs, Pink ran after him.
"Papa," said Pink, "do you expect Mummer Dee to make a verylongvisit in heaven? I should fink it was time for her to come home, by supper, shouldn't you, Papa?"
In their own rooms Marshall Avery sat him down alone. He bolted all the doors, and walked from limit to limit of the narrow space—his room and hers, with the door open between that he used to close because the baby bothered him. It stood wide open now. In his room some of his neckties and clothes were lying about; Jean used to attend to his things herself, even after she was ill—too ill, perhaps; he remembered reminding her rather positively if any of these trifles were neglected; once she had said, "I 'm notquitestrong enough to-day."
On his bureau stood her photograph, framed in silver—a fair picture, in a white gown, with lace about the throat. It had Jean's own eyes; but nothing ever gave the expression of her mouth. He stood looking at her picture.
Presently he put it down, and came back into his wife's room. He shut the windows, for he shivered with cold, and stared about. The empty bed was made, straight and stark. The violets were drooping on the table beside her Bible, her basket, and her portfolio. He picked these things up, and laid them down again. He went mechanically to the bureau and opened the upper drawer. All her little dainty belongings were folded in their places,—her gloves, her handkerchiefs, the laces that she fancied, and the blond ribbons that she wore—the blue, the rose, the lavender, and the corn.
In this drawer a long narrow piece of white tissue-paper lay folded carefully across the glove box. He opened it idly. Something fell from it and seemed to leap to his fingers, and cling as if it would not leave them. It was a thick lock of her own long bright hair.
He caught it to his breast, his cheek, his lips. He cherished it wildly, as he would now have cherished her. The forgotten tenderness, the omitted gentleness of life, lavished itself on death, as remorse will lavish what love passed by. The touch of her hair on his hands smote the retreating form of his illusion out of him. He could not deceive himself any longer.
"Jeanisdead," he said distinctly.
He threw himself down on her lounge and tried to collect himself, as he would for any other event of life—that he might meet it manfully.
"She is really dead," he repeated. "I have got to live without her, ... and those children ... no mother. I must arouse myself. I must bear it, as other men do."
Even as the words turned themselves like poisoned wires through his mind the conviction that his sorrow was not like the sorrow of other men rushed upon him. What had he done to her? Oh, what had he been to her—his poor Jean? He turned his head and thrust his face into the depths of her blue pillow. A delicate breath stole from it—the violet perfume that Jean used about her bedroom because he fancied it. He sprang from the lounge, and began to pace the room madly to and fro.
Now there rose about him, wave by wave, like the rising of an awful tide, the overlooked but irresistible force of the common life which married man and woman share—incidents that he would rather have died than recall, words, looks, scenes, which it shattered his soul and body to remember.
A solemn sea, they widened and spread about him. He felt himself torn from his feet and tossed into the surge of them.
It seemed to him that every tenderness he had shown his wife was drowning out of his consciousness. But every hard thing he had ever done rose and rolled upon him—an unkind look, a harsh word, a little neglect here, a certain indifference there; an occasion when he had made her miserable and could just as easily have made her happy; a time when she had asked—Jean so seldom asked—for some trifling attention which he had omitted to bestow; the desolate look she wore on a given day; the patient eyes she lifted, heart-sick with sore surprise, once when he ...
The worst of it was in thinking how it was when she began to be weak and ill. Jean was not a complaining woman, never a whining invalid, but resolute, sweet, and cheerful. Like an air-plant on oxygen, she existed on his tenderness. He had offered it to her when he felt like it. Well, busy, bustling man—out of his bounteous health and freedom, what comfort had he given to this imprisoned woman? The passing of his moods? The attention of his whims? The fragments of his time? The blunt edge of his sympathy?
One night he had come in late, when he could quite as well have come two hours before; he found her by the open window, gasping for breath in the cold night air, in her blue gown, with her braided hair, her lovely look, the dear expression in her eyes. She had not reproached him ... he wished from his soul, now, that shehadreproached him, sometimes; it would have done him good; it would have dashed cold water on his fainting sense of duty to her; he was the kind of man who would have responded to it like a man. But she was not the kind of woman to do it. And she never had. So he had slid into those easy habits of accepting the invalid, anyhow; as a fact not to be put too much in the foreground of his daily life ... not to intrude too much. And she had not protested, had not cried out against the frost that gathered in his heart.
She had trodden hervia dolorosaalone. As she had endured, so she had died. He thought that if he had only been with her then, he could have borne it all.
His mind veered off from this swiftly, almost as if it were unhinged, and began to dwell upon what he would do for her if he had her again, living, warm, breathing, sweet. The only comfort he could get was in thinking how he would comfort her ... now; how he would cherish her ... now; the love he would waste, the tenderness he would invent—new forms of it, that no husband in the world had ever thought of, to make a wife happy. Oh, the honor in which he would hold her least and lightest wish! The summer of the heart in which she should blossom!—she who had perished in the winter of his neglect; she who was under the catafalque of autumn leaves out there in the gathering November storm. Terrible that it should storm the first night that Jean lay in her grave!
"God! God!" he cried. "If I could have her back for one hour—for oneinstant!"
"This way, Avery—turn your head this way. Here is the air. The window is open. Don't struggle so. It is all right. Breathe naturally," added the dentist. "Come, take it quietly. There is no harm done. The tooth is out. I never knew the gas work more easily."
Marshall Avery battled up and pushed his friend away. The cold air, dashing in from the open window, chafed his face smartly. He drank it in gulps before he could manage to speak. It was raining, and the storm wet the sill. A few drops spattered over and hit his hand.
"Armstrong!—for Heaven's sake!—if there's any mercy in you"—
"That's a large phrase for a small occasion, Avery. I have n't committed murder, you know."
"I 'm not so sure of it," muttered Avery, staring about. "I don't understand. Did I have another tooth out—after all that—happened?"
"I should hope not. I must say you make as much fuss over this one molar as a child or a clergyman," answered the dentist brusquely. "We regard those as our most troublesome classes."
"Did you give me chloroform?"
"I don't give chloroform."
"Gas, then?"
"Why, certainly, I gave gas."
"Did I ask for it?"
"Yes. You asked for it. Even if you had n't—You don't bear pain, you know, Avery, with that composure"—
"Armstrong? Say, Armstrong. When you went over to the club with me"—
The dentist twisted his mustache.
—"was Romer's yacht lying out in the river then? I seem to remember that you did n't want me to take that trip. And you did n't know it would blow a gale, either. And you did n't know that she"—
"Get up, Avery, and walk about the room. You come to slowly."
"And when the wreck got into the papers—she could n't bear that.... She was so ill when I left her ... Armstrong! Was it you kept me here in this blanked chair while my wife was dying?"
Dr. Armstrong laughed aloud. Avery sprang towards him. He had a muddy intention of seizing the dentist by the throat. But a thought occurred to him which held him back. Now, as his consciousness clarified, he saw brilliant and beautiful light throbbing about him; he seemed to float in it, as if he were poised in mid-heaven. A scintillation in his brain shot into glory, and broke as it fell into a thousand rays and jets of joy.
"Do you mean to tell me I never went on that accursed cruise—with a fool gun—to murder ducks ... and left my wife dangerously sick? Do you mean that Jean ... is n't ... Say, Armstrong, you would n't make game of a man in a position like mine, if you knew... Armstrong!" piteously, "my wife is n'tliving—is she, Armstrong?"
"She was, the last I heard," replied the dentist, sterilizing his instruments with a cool and scientific attention. "That was when you sat down in this chair to have your tooth out."
As Avery dashed by him the dentist put out a detaining hand.
"Wait a second, Avery. I don't consider you quite fit to go yet. Here—wait a minute!"
But the horses of Aurora, flying and flaming through the morning skies, could not have held the man back. A madman—delirious with joy—he swept through the hall and flung the door open. Dr. Armstrong ran after him to give him his hat, but Avery paid no attention to the dentist.
Bareheaded, fleet-footed, with quivering lip, with shining eye, he fled down the street. Like the hurricane that had never sunk the Dream, he swept past the club. He saw the fellows through the window; their cigars gleamed in their mouths and in their hands; they looked to him like marionettes moving on a mimic stage; he felt as if he would like to kick them over, and see if they would rattle as they rolled. As he rushed, hatless, past the Church of the Happy Saints, an officer on night duty recognized the lawyer, and touched his helmet in surprise, but did not follow the disordered figure—Mr. Avery was not a drinking man. He was allowed to pursue his eccentricity undisturbed. He met one or two men he knew, and they said, "Hilloa, Avery!" But he did not answer them. He ran on in the rain; his heart sang:—
"I did n't do it—I never did it! I did not treat her so.I was not that fellow. Oh, thank God, I was not that brute!" He hurried on till he lost his breath; then collected himself, and came up more quietly to his own door.
He felt for his latch-key, and was relieved to find it in his pocket, as usual; the impression that it lay off the Shoals somewhere at the bottom had not entirely vanished yet. He opened the door and closed it softly. The hall gas was burning. Otherwise the house was dark. It was perfectly still. The silence somewhat checked his mood, and the violence of his haste abated; with it abated an indefinable measure of his happiness. He raised his hand to take off his hat; then found that he had not worn any. It occurred to him that he had better not waken Jean too abruptly—it might hurt her: he was going to be very thoughtful of Jean. She must not be startled. He went upstairs quietly.
In the upper hall he paused. Pink, in the nursery, was grinding her teeth in her sleep. The baby was not restless, and Molly was sleeping heavily. From his wife's room there came no sound.
Jean almost always waked when he came home late, if indeed she had slept at all before she heard his step. But this was not inevitable. Sometimes he did not arouse her. And he remembered that to-night she had been feeble, and had not got to sleep as early as usual. As he stood uncertain before her door the clock on the mantel struck eleven.
He passed on, and into his own room. He wondered if he ought to undress and go to bed without disturbing her. But he could not bring himself to do this. He was still too much agitated; and the necessity of keeping quiet did not tend to calm him. He turned up his gas, and the light rose warmly. Then he saw that the door into his wife's room was partly open. "Jean!" he said softly. She did not answer him. Sometimes, if she were sleepy, or exhausted, she did not incline to talk when he came home.
"Jean?" he repeated, "are you awake, my darling? I want to speak to you.... Imustspeak to you," added the husband impetuously, when Jean did not reply.
He pushed the door wide and went in. The only light in the room came from the night candle, which was burning dimly. It was a blue candle, and it had a certain ghastly look to him, as he stood gazing across the little table at the bed.
"After all," he thought, "I suppose I ought not to wake her—just because I 've got all that to tell her."
He stood, undecided what to do.
Jean was lying on the bed in her lace-frilled nightdress, with her bright hair braided in long braids, as she wore it for the night. Something in her attitude and expression startled him. So she had lain—so she had looked— His temples throbbed suddenly. The blood froze at his heart.
"Jean!" he cried loudly. "DearJean!"
But Jean did not reply. He sprang to her, and tore open the nightdress at her throat; he crushed at her hands; they were quite cold. He put his ear to her heart; he could not hear it beat. Jean lay in her loveliness, with gentle, half-open eyes, and a desolate little smile on her sweet lips, as she might have looked when she called him and asked him to come back and kiss her good-night. And he had not come. One of her hands clasped the cord of the electric bell. But no one had heard Jean's bell.
Now, the truth smote the man like the hammer of Thor. His wandering spirit—gone; who knew how? who knew where? while the brain drifted into anæsthesia—had sought out and clutched to itself the terrible fact. At the instant when this perception reached his consciousness there came with it the familiar delusion of his vision.
"Jean cannot be dead. There must be some mistake."
He dashed to the window, opened it wide, and raised her towards the air. The sleeping maid, aroused and terrified, rushed to his help. In his agony he noticed that the children were both crying—Pink like a lady, and the boy like a little wild beast. Pink began to wail: "Mummer Dee! Mummer Dee!"
Jean did not stir.
He dispatched the servants madly—one to the telephone, one for stimulants; while he rubbed his wife's hands and feet, and tried to get brandy between her lips in the futile fashion of the inexperienced. He could not stimulate any signs of life, and he dared not leave her. Molly reported, sobbing, that Dr. Thorne was not at home, but that Mrs. Thorne had bade her call the nearest doctor; she had rung up the one at the corner, and he was coming.
The nearest doctor came, and he lost no time about it. He was a stranger, and young. Avery looked stupidly at his inexperienced face. The physician stooped and put his ear to Jean's heart. He went through the form of feeling the pulse, and busied himself in various uncertain ways about her. In a short time he rose, and stood looking at the carpet. He did not meet the husband's eye.
"You can keep on stimulating if you like," he said. "Perhaps you would feel better. But in my opinion it is of no use."
"For God's sake, man, are n't you going todosomething?" demanded the husband in a voice which the nearest doctor had occasion to remember.
"In my opinion the patient is dead," persisted the stranger. He turned and took up his hat. "I will do anything you like, of course, sir," he added politely. "But life is extinct."
Avery made no reply, and the strange physician went uncomfortably away. Avery stared after him with bloodshot eyes. He now held his wife, half sitting, against his own warm body; he had a confused idea that he could will her alive, or love her alive; that if he could make her understand how it all was, shecouldnot die. She loved him too much. But Jean's gray face fell upon his breast like stiffening clay. Her pulse was imperceptible. He turned piteously to the Irish girl.
"Molly! Can'tyouthink of anything more we can do for her?"
At this moment a carriage dashed to the door, and came to a violent stop.
"Mother of God!" cried Molly. "Here is Dr. Thorne!"
With a resounding noise Esmerald Thorne flung back the opening front door. With his hat on his head he cleared the stairs. Molly stood wringing her hands on the threshold of Mrs. Avery's room. He hurled the girl away as if she had been a wrong prescription left by a blundering rival. His blazing eye concentrated itself on the patient like a burning-glass. That which had been Jean Avery, half reclining, held against her husband's heart, lay unresponsive. One arm with its slender hand hung over the edge of the bed, straight down.
"Change the position!" cried Dr. Thorne loudly. "Put her head down—so—flat—perfectly horizontal. Now get out of my way—the whole of you."
He knelt beside the bed, and with great gentleness, curiously at contrast with his imperious and one might have called it angry manner, put his ear to Jean's heart.
"It's dead she is. The other doctor do be sayin' so," sobbed Molly, who found it perplexing that Mr. Avery did not speak, and felt that the courtesies of the distressing occasion devolved upon herself. Dr. Thorne held up an imperious finger. In the stillness which obeyed him the clock on the mantel ticked obtrusively, like the rhythm of life in a vital organism.
At the instant when he reached her side, Dr. Thorne had laid Jean's hanging hand gently upon the bed, warming it and covering it as he did so. But he had paid no attention to it otherwise till now, when he was seen to put his fingers on the wrist. It occurred to Avery that the physician did this rather to satisfy or to sustain hope in the family than from any definite end which he himself hoped to attain by it. The husband managed to articulate.
"Is there any pulse?"
"No."
"Does her heart beat?"
Dr. Thorne made no reply. He was putting a colorless, odorless liquid between her lips. His expression of indignation deepened. One might have said that he was in a rage with death. His first impulse to express that emotion noisily had passed. He issued his orders with perfect quiet and consummate self-possession, but the family fled before them like leaves before the wind. Stimulants, hot water, hot stones, fell into the doctor's hands. He took control of the despairing household as a great general takes command of a terrible retreat. Stern, uncompromising, rigid, he flung his whole being against the fate which had snatched his old patient beyond his rescue. His face was almost as white as Jean's.
"There sits the man as fights with death!" cried Molly, in uncontrollable excitement. She and the cook fell on their knees. Pink, in her nightdress, stole in, and leaned against the door; the child was too frightened to cry. The baby had gone to sleep. The house grew ominously still. The mantel clock struck the half-hour. It was now half-past eleven. Avery glanced at the physician's face, and buried his own in his hands.
The doctor rose, and stood frowning. He seemed to hesitate for the first time since he had been in the room.
"Is there no heart-beat yet? Can't you detectanything?" asked Avery again. He could not help it. Dr. Thorne looked at him; the physician seemed to treat the question as he would an insult.
"When I have anything to say, I 'll say it," he answered roughly. He stood pondering.
"A glass!" he called peremptorily. Molly handed him a tumbler. He pushed it away.
"I said aglass! A mirror!"
Some one handed him Jean's little silver toilet hand-glass. The physician held it to her lips, and laid it down. After a moment's irresolution he took it up, and bending over the body put it to the woman's lips again, and studied it intently for some moments. Avery asked no questions this time, nor did he dare glance at the glass.
"How long," demanded Dr. Thorne suddenly, "has she been like this?"
"I found her so when I came in. It was then eleven o'clock."
"How long had she been alone?"
"I went out at twenty minutes past ten. I went to have a tooth extracted. That was forty minutes."
"Did she speak to you when you went out?"
"Yes—she spoke to me."
"What did she say?"
Marshall Avery made no reply.
"Were there any symptoms of this heart-failure then? Out with it!—No. Never mind. It's evident enough."
The clock on the mantel struck the quarter before twelve.
"She has been as she is an hour and a quarter," said Dr. Thorne. His voice and manner were disheartened. He stood a moment pondering, with a dark face.
"Do you call her dead?" entreated Avery. It seemed to him that he had reached the limit of endurance. He would pull the worst down on his head at one toppling blow.
"No!" cried the physician, in a deep, reverberating tone.
"But is it death?" persisted Avery wildly.
"I do not know," said Dr. Thorne.
"Do you give her up?"
"No!" thundered Dr. Thorne again. "The drowned have been resuscitated after six hours," he added between his teeth. "That's the latest contention."
At this moment a messenger summoned by telephone from the corner pharmacy arrived, running, and pealed and thundered at the door. Some one laid upon the bed within the doctor's reach a small pasteboard box. He opened it in silence, and took from it a tiny crystal or shell of thin glass. This he broke upon a handkerchief, and held the linen cautiously to Jean's face. A powerful, pungent odor filled the room. Avery felt his head whirl as he breathed it. The doctor removed the handkerchief and scrutinized Jean's face. Neither hope nor despair could be detected on his own. Without a word he went to work again.
Not discarding, but not now depending altogether on the aid of warmth, stimulants, and the remedies upon which he had been trained to rely in his duels with death, the physician turned the force of his will and his skill in the direction of another class of experiments.
So far as he could, and at such disadvantage as he must, he put certain of the modern processes of artificial respiration to the proof. He did not allow himself to be hampered in this desperate expedient by an element of danger involved in lifting the patient's arms above her head; for Jean had passed far beyond all ordinary perils. Obstacles seemed to serve only to whip his audacity. His countenance grew dogged and grim. He worked with an ineffable gentleness, and with an indomitable determination that gave a definite grandeur to his bearing.
Avery looked on with dull, blind eyes; he felt that he was witnessing an unsuccessful attempt at miracle. He began to resent it as an interference with the sanctity of death. He began to wish that the doctor would let his wife alone. The clock on the mantel struck twelve. Pink had fallen asleep, and somebody had carried her back to her own bed. The two women huddled together by the door. The physician had ceased to speak to any person. His square jaws came together like steel machinery that had been locked. In his eyes immeasurable pity gathered; but no one could see his eyes. The clock timed the quarter past midnight.
Avery had now moved round to the other side of the bed; he buried his face in his wife's pillow, and, unobserved, put out his hand to touch her. He reached and clasped her thin left hand on which her wedding-ring hung loosely. Her fingers were not very cold,—he had often known them colder when she was ill,—and as his hand closed over them it seemed to him for a wild instant that hers melted within it; that it relaxed, or warmed beneath his touch.
"I am going mad," he thought. He raised his head. The clock called half-past twelve. Dr. Thorne was holding the little mirror at Jean's lips again. A silvery film—as delicate as mist, as mysterious as life, as mighty as joy—clouded it from end to end.
"Jean Avery!" cried the physician, in a ringing tone.
Afterwards Avery thought of that other Healer who summoned his dearest friend from the retreat of death "in a loud voice." But at the moment he thought not at all. For Jean sighed gently and turned her face, and her husband's eyes were the first she saw when the light of her own high soul returned to hers.