But when the morning came I could not be sure that Betty was dead.
They brought me a telegram.
In wrenching the envelope off I tore the message twice. My fingers could hardly piece the signature together. I realised, at last, the Duncombe housemaid's name. My mother was sinking, she said; and we were expected back by the night train.
The message had been sent an hour after we left home. It reached Lowndes Square seven hours before I had come beating at the door. That it had lain in the hall forgotten seemed to me hardly to matter now. Not even to-day could I go home.
I seemed to see the future. If my mother had not died in the night, the end would very quickly come. There was mercy there.
As for me—I knew I should not die till I was sure that Betty was out of the world. As thoughto our best, our only friend, I turned to the thought of her physical weakness.
But I must be sure. I rose up out of my bed ... and Darkness took me in her arms.
I was ill a long, long while.
Whenever a time came that found me free of fever, able to think again, what could I think except that, even if Betty were dead—there were the others.
The unhappy man had said that always, always there were others.
So I had seen "the need" wrong. The lamp of a young girl's hope, held up in her little world, to help her to find a mate—that light was pale beside the red glare of this fierce demand from men.
And the people who knew least went on saying it wasn't true. And the people who knew most said: there are many thousand "lost sisters" in London.
Who would help me to find mine?—or to sleep once more, knowing Bettina safely dead!
Nothing to hope from the foggy, self-bemused mystic, whose face alternated with that of the nurse in and out of my dreaming and my waking.Long ago she had turned away from service, even from knowledge. There was "no evil, except as a figment of mortal mind." Peace! peace!—and this battle nightly at her gate! Just once her doors burst open, and she was made aware. The sound would soon be faint in her ears, and then would cease.
Who else?
Not her friend, the Healer—whose way of healing was to look away from the wound.
Could I trust even Eric to help? The man who had set his work before his love—who had said: "If all the people in the house were dying, if the house were falling about my ears and I thought I was 'getting it'—I'd let the house fall and the folks die and go on tracking the Secret home." Even if that were not quite seriously meant, no more than all the other good men and true, would that one leave the lesser task and set himself to cure this cancer at the heart of the world.
Eric, and all the rest (this it was that crushed hope out of my heart)—they all knew.
And they accepted this thing.
That was the thought that again and again toreme out of my bed, and brought the great Darkness down.
In the grey intervals I was conscious of Mrs. Harborough's being more and more in the room. I came to look for her.
She spoke sometimes of my father. She imagined I was like him. To think that made her very gentle and, I believe, brought her a kind of light.
I wondered about the doctor. How had she been brought to have someone tending me who did not call himself a Healer, yet who I felt might well have cured any malady but mine?
She had forbidden the nurse to talk to me about my sister, so that I was the more surprised the day Mrs. Harborough spoke of Betty of her own accord. "If you will try to get strong," she said, "I will tell you what has been done to find her. And when you are really well I will do all that any one woman can to help."
So we talked a little—just a little now and then, about the things I thought of endlessly. And not vaguely either. She saw how vagueness maddened me. We faced things. How she had misunderstoodmy mother. That could never be made up now. My mother never knew why we were not with her, nor even that we were not there. Consciousness had never come back to her. I heard of all that Eric had done, and that his was the last face she knew. He had stayed with her all that night, to the end.
There were letters for me from him. Soon, now, I should have my letters.
He had been many times to ask about me.
Aboutme! What was he doing about.... But no, that was for me alone. Up and down the streets I should go, looking into the eyes of outcasts under city lamps—looking for the eyes I knew.
Nor could I wait till I was well. Night by night I went upon the quest. Catching distant glimpses of Bettina in my dreams, struggling to reach her, for ever losing her in the turmoil of streets and the roar of stations, till the thought of Bettina was merged in overmastering terror of the noise and evil which was London.
The moment I was a little better they tried to get me to sleep without an opiate. The doctor made so great a point of this, I did all in mypower not to disappoint him, and for no reason in the world but that something in his voice reminded me of Eric—just a little. Nobody knew how much of the time, behind closed eyes, my mind was broad awake....
Oh, the London nights!—airless, endless. And the anguish of those haunted hours before dawn. My country ears, so used to silence or the note of birds, strained to interpret London sounds before break of day.
Hardly any honest, individual voices, and yet no moment quiet. Incessantly the distant rumbling of ...something. I could never tell what. It was the roar of London streets by day, attenuated, held at bay, but never conquered—the bustle and clang muffled in the huge blanket of the night.
The strongest impression about it was just of the vague, unverifiable thing beingthere—an enemy breathing in the dark. Sometimes it started up with a rattle of chains.
"Mail-carts," said the nurse.
And that other sound—like one's idea of battering-rams thundering at fortress walls—the nurse would have me believe that to such an accompanimentdid milk make entry into London! Sometimes the thick air was so sharply torn by horn, or pierced by whistle, that I would start up in my bed trembling, listening, till the dying clamour sunk once more to the level of the giant's breathing.
When I was not delirious, the reason I lay still was sometimes half a nightmare reason; a feeling that the muffled night-sounds were like the bees at home in the rhododendron, drumming softly so long as we sat still. The moment we rose up the bees rose too, with angry commotion, ready to fly in our faces and sting. Just so with that muted hum of London. If I were not very still, if I were to rise and venture out, all the stinging, angry noises would rise, too, and overwhelm me.
And out there in the heart of the swarm, Bettina. Being stung and stung, till feeling died.
One day, when my head was clearer, I seemed to have lain a great while waiting for someone to come. I asked where Mrs. Harborough was.
She was "engaged for the moment."
Presently I asked what kept her. The nurse rang and sent a message.
Mrs. Harborough came up at once. She had been talking to Mr. Annan, she said. And would I like to see him?
No. I shrank under the bedclothes, and turned my face to the wall.
An afternoon, soon after that, brought me the sudden clear sense of Eric's being again in the house. I was sure that he timed his visits so that he might see the doctor. When the doctor left the room that afternoon I asked if Mr. Annan had been again.
Yes; and did I want to see him now?
No.
"He has come to-day with another friend of yours," said Mrs. Harborough, lingering.
"One of the Helmstones?" I asked dully.
"No; Mr. Dallas."
Ranny! Ranny was downstairs. The happy, care-free people were going still about the world.
"Is he married?" I asked.
"Married?" Mrs. Harborough seemed surprised. Certainly, he seemed free to devote a great deal of time to us. Mr. Annan and he between them had left no means untried, she said.
"I have been told a thousand times," I interrupted, "that everything has been done, but no one ever tells me what." I fell to crying.
Looking more stirred than I had ever thought to see her, she told me that young Dallas had offered rewards, and had gone from place to place in search....
I seized her hands. I made her sit by the bedside.
Yes, and always he had come back here, making his report and asking questions.
Eric brought the doctors and the nurses ... but Ranny had done better. Ranny had stirred up Scotland Yard. When Eric told him the nurse had said I was for ever raving about barred windows,Ranny had flung out of my aunt's drawing-room and was gone a day and a night.
Yes, he came back. He had found the house. He got a warrant, and he went with the police when they made their search. He had seen the woman. She brazened it out. She had never heard of either Bettina or me.
Mystory? Oh, very possible, she said, that I and my sister had been "seeing life." No uncommon thing for young women to lie about their escapades. "Drugged?" the usual excuse.
The next day I asked them to let me see Ranny. They refused.
I did not sleep that night.
The doctor came earlier the next morning and was troubled. "What is it?" he said.
I told him. "I will promise to be very quiet," I said. I would promise anything if they would only let me see Ranny.
Mrs. Harborough went out and sent a message. Mr. Dallas was staying quite near, she said. But I waited for him for a thousand years. And then ... a footstep on the stair.
My heart drew quivering back from the two-edged knife of Wanting-to-know and Dreading-to-know.Then all that poignancy of feeling fell to dulness, for the step was not Ranny's and not Eric's. I had never heard this slow, uncertain footfall.
The door opened, and it was Ranny.
He did not look at me.
His eyes went circling low, like swallows before rain. They settled on the coverlid till, slowly, he had come and stood beside me.
Then Ranny lifted his eyes....
Oh, poor eyes! Poor soul looking out of them!
"Ranny," I whispered, "speak to me."
"I have failed," he said. He leaned heavily against the chair.
"I have heard," I managed to say, "how hard you have been trying...."
"But I have failed!" he said once more; and I hope I may never again hear such an accent.
I pointed to the chair ... we could neither of us speak for a while. And then he cleared his throat.
"They took her out of that house and hid her," he said. "And then they took her abroad. Itraced her to their house in Paris. But she had gone. Always I have been too late."
When I could speak I said: "You are a good friend, Ranny...."
He made an impatient gesture. "Nothing is any good!" He stood up. "But I wanted you to know that I am trying.... Trying still. Nothing that you could do but I am doing it. Will you believe that?"
"But, Ranny," I said, "how can you do all this? Haven't you ... other claims?"
"Other claims?" he said, as though he had never heard of them.
"You surely did have other claims?"
"I thought I had. But when this came I saw they were nothing." He stopped an instant near the door. "You don't believe I would lie to you?"
"No," I said.
"Then get well.Youhave something to live for. You and Annan. Not like me."
He went out with that strange-sounding step.
They were sorry they had let him come. A new night nurse was sent. Two doctors, now. And, either I dreamed it or, at the worse times, Eric was there as well. But always when I was myself, and the haunted night had given way to day, his face was gone. Yet his care was all about me. The doctors were friends of his; the nurses of his choosing.
I cannot explain why, but ferreting out these facts gave me something less than the comfort they might be thought to bring. Why was he troubling about me? Why was he not spending every thought and every hour in trying to find Bettina?
Ranny had meant it well, telling me I had something to live for besides Betty, and giving that something a name. But it was an ill turn; a sword in my side for many a day and night. It gave me a ceaseless smart of anger against Eric. I was jealous, too, that it had been Ranny, and not Eric, who had been taking all these journeys.Ranny had been working day and night. Ranny was the person we owed most to—Betty and I.
And was I to lie there, suffocated by all this care, and leave a boy like Ranny (a boy I had expected so little of) to spend himself, soul and substance, for my sister?
How dared Eric think that he and I were going to be happy, while Ranny searched the capitals of Europe, and while Bettina....
One night, or early morning rather, stands out clear.
Vaguely I remembered a renewed struggle, and a fresh defeat. Now, strangely, unaccountably, I had waked out of deep sleep with a feeling quite safe and sure, at last, that Betty was free.
The night-light had burned out. A pearly greyness filled the room.
The nurse was sitting by the window, wrapped in a shawl.
Her head, leaning against the window-frame, was thrown back as though to look at something.
I don't know whether it was the shawl drawnabout drooped shoulders, or the association of a lifted face by the window, but I thought of the hop-picker. And of the promise I had made. Yes, and kept.
As long as I had been at Duncombe after that haggard woman passed, no other with my knowing had gone hungry away.
Not all suffering, then, was utterly vain.
What was the white-capped figure looking at—so steadily, so long?
I raised myself on my elbow, and leaned forward till I, too, could see. A tracery of branches, bare, against a clear-coloured sky; and through the crossing lines, a little white moon looked through its sky-lattice into the open window of my room.
I got up, so weak I had to cling hold of table and chair, till I stood by the nurse. She was asleep, poor soul! But I hardly noticed her then. I was looking up in a kind of ecstasy, for it seemed to me that a pale young face—not like the Bettina I had known, and still Bettina's face, was leaning down out of Heaven to bring me comfort.
But as I looked I saw there was high purpose as well as a world of pity in the face—as thoughshe would have me know that not in vain her innocence had borne the burden of sin.
And I was full of wondering. Till, suddenly, I realised that not to comfort me alone, nor mainly, was Betty leaning out of heaven ...she was come to do for others what no one had done for her.
Then the agony of the sacrifice swept over me afresh. I remembered I had gone back into that last Darkness saying, as I had said ten thousand times before: "Why had this come to Betty?"
And now again I asked: "Why had it to be you?"
Through the gentle grey of morning Betty seemed to be leading me into the Light. For the answer to my question was that the suffering of evil-doers had never been fruitful as the suffering of the innocent had been.
Was there, then, some life-principle in such pain?
A voice said: "You shall find in mortal ill, the seed of Immortal Good."
I knelt down by the window and thanked my sister.
Others shall thank her, too.
Variations in spelling, hyphenation, and use of accents appear as in the original.End of line hyphenations have been rejoined.Obvious typographical errors have been changed.