CHAPTER XLVIII
Withinthe silken walls of Patty’s body, still beautiful as a jar of rose leaves, a secret enemy was brooding, building. A tulip tree, a tree of death was pushing its roots all through her flesh.
There had been no pain at first and nothing to warn her that life was confusedly conspiring against itself.
Then there were subtle distresses, strange shafts of anguish like javelins thrown from ambush. Her suspicions were so terrifying that she had feared to see a doctor.
But now RoBards compelled her to go with him to consult an eminent surgeon. She endured his professional scrutiny, his rude caresses. At last he spoke with a dreadful kindliness and did not rebuke her as of old for indiscretions or neglects. He told her that there was trouble within that needed attention as soon as she was a little stronger. She smiled wanly and went out to the waiting carriage.
To RoBards who lingered for a last word, Dr. Marlowe whispered: “For Christ’s sake, don’t tell her. It’s cancer!”
If death could have come to him from fright, RoBards would have died then. He toppled as if he had been smitten with the back of a broadsword.
He turned eyes of childlike appeal to the dismal eyes of the physician, who was more helpless than his victims since he knew better than they how much woe is abroad.
Dr. Marlowe laid a hand on RoBards’ shoulder as a man might say: “I will go to the guillotine with you. The only dignity left is bravery. Let us not forget our etiquette.”
But to be brave for another’s doom! To be plucky about the fact that his wife, his sweetheart, the infanta of his love, was to be torn to pieces slowly by the black leopard of that death—this was a cowardly bravery to his thinking. Hewas brave enough to confess his utter, abject terror. He went through what thousands had once felt when their beloved were summoned to the torture chamber.
He fought his panic down lest Patty be alarmed. He wrestled with the mouth muscles that wanted to scream protests and curses; and he made them smile when he went out and sank in the carriage beside her and told the driver “Home!” as one might say “To the Inquisition!”
And Patty smiled at him and hummed:
“We-e-e-eave no mo-o-ore silks, ye Ly-y-ons loo-oo-oo-ooms.”
She knew that the doctor was glazing over his fatal discovery. She knew that her husband’s smile was but the grimace of one poisoned with the sardonic weed. She was afraid, though, to reveal her intuition lest she lose control of her own terrors, leaping and baying like mad hounds at the leashes of her nerves.
The only hope the coupled humans had of maintaining a decent composure was in keeping up the lie. They were calm as well-bred people are when a theatre catches fire and they disdain to join the shrieking, trampling herd.
They had tickets for a play that night. It seemed best to go. The play was sad at times and Patty wept softly. RoBards’ hand hunted for hers and found it, and the two hands clung together, embracing like the Babes in the Wood with night and the wild beasts gathering about them.
After a dreadful delay, there was a more dreadful operation, and once more RoBards blessed the names of Morton, Jackson, and Wells for the sleep they gave his beloved during the nightmare of the knives. But only for a while, since the pain, after a brief frustration, flowed back like a dammed river when the dam gives way.
When he demanded more of the drug, the physician protested: “We must not be careless. It is a habit-forming drug, you know.”
But pain was a habit-forming poison, too. The operation was too late to do more than prolong the day of execution.
All over the world men were delving into the ancientmystery. But nobody knew. Nobody could find out a why or a wherefore. Some day somebody would surely stumble on the cause and then the cure would turn up. The answer would be simple perhaps.
But it would be too late for Patty.
What followed was unspeakable, too cruel to recount, beyond the reach of sympathy. Minutes seemingly unbearable heaped up into hours, hours into mornings, afternoons, slow evenings, eternal, lonely nights. Days and nights became weeks, months.
The doctor, weary of the spectacle of Patty’s woe, gave the drug recklessly. It had passed the point of mattering whether it were habit-forming or not.
And then immunity began. As the disease itself was the ironic parody of life, so the precious gift of immunity became the hideous denial of relief.
The solace in drugs lost all potency. The poor wretch was naked before the fiends. The hell the Bible pronounced upon the non-elect was brought up to earth before its time.
Dr. Chirnside slept now with his fathers, but his successor called upon Patty to minister comfort. He was a stern reversion to the Puritan type that deified its own granite. When he was gone, Patty was in dismay indeed. For now the torture was perfected by a last exquisite subtlety, the only thing left to increase it: the feeling that it was deserved. Remorse was added to the weapons of this invisible Torquemada.
From Patty’s blenched, writhen lips, between her gnashing teeth slipped the words:
“Honey, it’s a punishment on me for my wickedness.”
“No, no, no! What wickedness have you ever done?”
“Oh, you know well enough. You cried hard enough once. And there have been so many cruel things I have done, so many mean evil thoughts, so many little goodnesses I put off. God is remembering those things against me.”
“You make God more cruel than man. How could he be? It’s blasphemy to blame him for your misery.”
He thought, of course, of Harry Chalender. Harry Chalender!—Harry Chalender, who had never repented a crime, never reformed, never spared a home or a virtue or failed to abet a weakness. Yet he was hale and smirking still at life, an heroic rake still fluttering the young girls’ hearts, garnering the praises of men. If God were punishing sin, how could he pass Harry Chalender by, and let him live untouched?
But Patty’s head swung back and forth:
“God can never forgive me, I suppose. But you do—don’t you, honey?—you forgive me?”
“I have nothing to forgive you for. You have been my angel always. I adore you.”
She clenched his hand with gratitude and then she wrung it as a throe wrung her. It was RoBards that cried, screamed:
“Oh, I don’t want you to suffer. I don’t want it! I don’t want it! I can’t stand it!”
He was in such frenzy of sympathy that she put out her pale, twitching hand and caressed his bowed head, and felt sorry for his sorrow.
But night and day, day and night!
She groaned: “The worst of it is, honey, that there’s no end of it till there’s an end of me. If I could only die soon! That’s the only remedy, dear heart. I pray for death, but it won’t come. I used to be so afraid of it, and now I love it—next to you.”
Again and again the surgeons took her away, and brought her back lessened. Sometimes she pleaded with RoBards against a return to that table, clinging with her flaccid little fingers to his sleeve, imploring him not to let them hurt her, if he loved her. And his love of her made him drive her back.
She sighed again and again in a kind of aloofness from herself:
“Oh, my pretty body, my poor little, pretty, pretty body, how sorry I am for you!”
And once, as they carried her along the corridor she whispered to her husband:
“I always wanted to be good, honey. And I tried to. I always wanted to be all that you wanted me to be; and you always wanted me to be everything that was—wonderful. But somehow I couldn’t be—wonderful. You forgive me, though, don’t you? I always loved you. Sometimes it must have seemed as if I cared more for somebody else. But that was just weakness—restlessness—something like a fever or a chill that I couldn’t help. But all the time I loved you. And you have loved me gloriously. That is all the pride my poor body and I have left—that we were loved by so good a man as you.”
She suffered most perhaps because of the flight of her beauty before the ravages of her enemy.
But underneath the mask of her pain, RoBards could always see the pretty thing she was when she was a bride asleep against his shoulder on the long drive up to Tuliptree Farm. And when at last they let her go back there to escape the noise of the city, he rode beside her again behind slow-trotting horses. But now they were in an ambulance lent them by one of the military hospitals.
They were far longer than then in getting out of the city into the green, for the city had flowed outward and outward in a tide that never ebbed, never surrendered what fields it claimed.
But as the last of the city drew back into the distance, she sighed wearily:
“Good-by, New York. I always loved you. I’ll never see you again.”
He remembered how she had bidden it farewell on that first flight from the cholera. She had married him in terror, but he was glad that she was not the wife of that Chalender who was still in the battle front, winning more and more fame while Immy languished on the Pacific coast, and Patty here. RoBards owned Patty now. He had earned her love by a lifetime of devout fidelity. And she was won to him.
As he looked down at the pallid face on the pillow it wasstill that winsome face in the scuttle hat, that pink rose in the basket, jostling against his shoulder while she slept.
She sighed often now: “I’m not nice any more. I’m terrible. Go away!”
But the lavender of memory kept her sweet.