He did not turn his head till at the end of five minutes Anne came to his side. She was very pale but quite self-possessed.
"Mrs. Errol has gone to her room," she said. "She wished to be alone."
"Gone to have a good cry, eh?" said Capper. "Healthiest thing she could do. And what about you?"
She smiled with lips that faintly quivered. "I am quite all right, Doctor. And--I have ordered luncheon."
He turned fully round and looked her up and down with lightning swiftness. "You"re a very remarkable woman, Lady Carfax," he said after a moment.
"I hope you may never be disappointed in me," she answered gravely.
"I hope so too," he said, "for there is a good deal dependent upon you."
"What do you mean?" She raised her clear eyes interrogatively.
But he baffled her, as he baffled everyone, with the very keenness of his own scrutiny. He began to crack all his fingers in turn.
"I mean," he said, "that even I can"t work miracles by myself. I can do the elementary part. I can cut and saw and sew, but I can"t heal. I can"t give life. That"s the woman"s part. That"s where I count on you. And I don"t think you are going to fail me, Lady Carfax."
"I promise you I will do my utmost," she said very earnestly.
He nodded. "I believe you will. But even so, you can"t do too much. It"s a serious case, even more serious than I expected. I don"t say this to alarm you, but I guess you had better know it. It"ll be a tough, uphill fight, and he"ll need a deal of pushing behind. It may entail more than you dream of--a big sacrifice perhaps; who knows? But you women don"t shy at sacrifices. And, believe me, he"s worth a sacrifice."
"He deserves the best," she said warmly.
"Yes, but you don"t take me," said Capper.
He paused a moment, then suddenly laid a quiet hand on her shoulder. "I may be a wise man," he said, "and again I may be a meddling fool. You and the G.o.ds must decide between you. But I"m old enough to be your father anyway. So p"r"aps you"ll bear with me. Lady Carfax, hasn"t it struck you that a time will come--probably pretty soon--when he will begin to reach out for something that you--and you alone--can give?"
Anne"s quick gesture of protest was his answer. She stood motionless, her eyes still raised, waiting for him to continue. But he felt her tremble under his hand. He knew that inwardly she was not so calm as she would have had him think.
He went on in his precise, emotionless fashion, as though he perceived nothing. "He won"t ask for it--anyway till he feels he can make a fair return. He will never ask a sacrifice of you. He will break his heart sooner. The point is, Are you capable of offering the sacrifice unasked?
For that is what it amounts to, now that the G.o.ds have cleared the way."
"Ah!" Anne said. "And--if--not?"
She spoke rather as if to gain time than because she desired an answer.
But he answered her nevertheless very quietly, without a shade of emotion, as if he were discussing some technical matter of no personal interest to him. Only as he answered he took his hand from her shoulder and thrust it back into his pocket.
"In that case he will die, having nothing left to live for. He probably won"t suffer much, simply go out like a candle. He hasn"t much vitality.
He may die either way. There is no responsibility attached--only possibilities."
He turned with the words, and walked across the room with the air of a man who has said his say.
She uttered no word to stop him, nor did she move to follow. She stood alone with her face to the grey storm-clouds that drifted perpetually overhead. Somehow she did not for a moment doubt the truth of what Capper had just told her. She even felt sub-consciously that she had known it for some time. Neither did she ask herself what she was going to do. For deep in the heart of her she knew already. Deep in the heart of her she knew that when Lucas Errol began to reach out for something which she alone could give, it would not be in vain. He had given of his best to her, and she was ready to give of her best in return. If she could not give him pa.s.sion, she could give him that which was infinitely greater--a deep, abiding love, a devotion born of complete sympathy. She could give him happiness, and in the giving she might find it for herself.
Over in the west the clouds were breaking, and a shaft of pale sunshine streamed upon the distant hills, turning the woods to living gold. Her eyes brightened a little as they caught the radiance. It seemed as if the door before which she had knelt so long in impotence were opening to her at last, as if one more opportunity were to be given her even yet after long and bitter failure of turning her corner of the desert into a garden of flowers and singing birds.
CHAPTER IV
THE MESSAGE
It was nearly a month after Lucas Errol"s operation that Bertie and his bride came home from their honeymoon and began the congenial task of setting their house in order.
Dot was thoroughly in her element. The minutest details were to her matters of vital importance.
"We must make it comfy," she said to Bertie, and Bertie fully agreed.
He had relinquished his study of the law, and had resumed his secretarial duties, well aware that Lucas could ill spare him. He was in fact Lucas"s right hand just then, and the burden that devolved upon him was no light one. But he bore it with a cheerful spirit, for Lucas was making progress. Despite his utter helplessness, despite the inevitable confinement to one room, despite the weariness and the irksomeness which day by day were his portion, Lucas was very gradually gaining ground.
Already he suffered less severely and slept more naturally.
His last words to Capper at parting had been, "Come again in the spring and complete the cure. I shall be ready for you."
And Capper had smiled upon him with something approaching geniality and had answered, "You"ll do it, and so shall I. So long then!"
But the months that intervened were the chief stumbling-block, and Capper knew it. He knew that his patient would have to face difficulties and drawbacks that might well dismay the bravest. He knew of the reaction that must surely come when the vitality was low, and progress became imperceptible, and the long imprisonment almost unendurable. He knew of the fever that would lurk in the quickening blood, of the torturing cramp that would draw the unused muscles, of the depression that was its mental counterpart, of the black despair that would hang like a paralysing weight upon soul and body, of the _ennui_, of the weariness of life, of the piteous weakness that nothing could alleviate.
He had to a certain extent warned Lucas what to expect; but the time for these things had not yet arrived. He was hardly yet past the first stage, and his courage was buoyed up by high hopes as yet undashed. He had faced worse things without blenching, and he had not begun to feel the monotony that Capper had dreaded as his worst enemy.
He took a keen interest in the doings of the young couple at the Dower House, and Dot"s breezy presence was ever welcome.
As for Anne, she went to and fro between Baronmead and the Manor, of which her husband"s will had left her sole mistress, no longer leading a hermit"s life, no longer clinging to her solitude, grave and quiet, but not wholly unhappy. Those few words Capper had spoken on the day of Lucas"s operation had made a marvellous difference to her outlook. They had made it possible for her to break down the prison-walls that surrounded her. They had given her strength to leave the past behind her, all vain regrets and cruel disillusionments, to put away despair and rise above depression. They had given her courage to go on.
Of Nap no word was ever spoken in her presence. He might have been dead, so completely had he dropped out of her life. In fact, he was scarcely ever mentioned by anyone, a fact which aroused in Dot a curiously keen indignation, but upon which a certain shyness kept her from commenting.
She kept him faithfully in mind, praying for him as regularly as she prayed for old Squinny, who still lingered on with exasperating tenacity, and continued to enjoy such help, spiritual or otherwise, as he could extract from the parson"s daughter.
That Bertie strongly disapproved of his brother she was aware, but she held no very high opinion of Bertie"s judgment, though even he could scarcely have forbidden her to pray for the black sheep of the family.
She had not been brought up to rely upon anyone"s judgment but her own, and, deeply as she loved him, she could not help regarding her husband as headlong and inclined to prejudice. He was young, she reflected, and doubtless these small defects would disappear as he grew older. True, he was nearly four years her senior; but Dot did not regard years as in any degree a measure of age. It was all a question of development, she would say, and some people--women especially--developed much more quickly than others. She herself, for instance--At which stage of the argument Bertie invariably said or did something rude, and the rest of her logic became somewhat confused. He was a dear boy and she couldn"t possibly be cross with him, but somehow he never seemed to realise when she was in earnest.
Another of the deficiencies of youth!
Meanwhile she occupied herself in her new home with all the zest of the young housewife, returned calls with commendable punctuality, and settled down once more to the many parochial duties which had been her ever-increasing responsibility for almost as long as she could remember.
"You are not going to slave like this always," Bertie said to her one evening, when she came in late through a November drizzle to find him waiting for her.
"I must do what I"ve got to do," said Dot practically, suffering him to remove her wet coat.
"All very well," said Bertie, whose chin looked somewhat more square than usual. "But I"m not going to have my wife wearing herself out over what after all is not her business."
"My dear boy!" Dot laughed aloud, twining her arm in his. "I think you forget, don"t you, that I was the rector"s daughter before I was your wife? I must do these things. There is no one else to do them."
"Skittles!" said Bertie rudely.
"Yes, dear, but that"s no argument. Let"s go and have tea, and for goodness" sake don"t frown at me like that. It"s positively appalling.