Virginia

"You don"t think he is seriously sick, do you, doctor? Is there any need to be alarmed?" she asked, and her voice entreated him to allay her anxiety.

The doctor, a benevolent soul in a body which had run to fat from lack of exercise, was engaged in holding Harry"s tongue down with a silver spoon, while, in spite of the child"s furious protests, he leisurely examined his throat. When the operation was over, and Harry, crying, choking, and kicking, rolled into Virginia"s arms, she put the question again, vaguely rebelling against the gravity in the kind old face which was turned half away from her:

"There"s nothing really the matter, is there, doctor?"

He turned to her, and laid a caressing, if heavy, hand on her shoulder, which shook suddenly under the thin folds of her dressing-gown. After forty years in which he had watched suffering and death, he preserved still his native repugnance to contact with any side of life that did not have a comfortable feeling to it.

"Oh, we"ll get him all right soon, with some good nursing," he said gently, "but I think we"re going to have a bit of an illness on our hands."

"But not serious, doctor? It isn"t anything serious?"

She felt suddenly so weak that she could hardly stand, and instinctively she reached out to grasp the large, protecting arm of the physician.

Even then his bland professional smile, which had in it something of the serene detachment of the everlasting purpose of which it was a part, did not fade, hardly changed even, on his features.

"Well, I think we"d better get the other children away. It might be serious if they all had it on our hands."

"Had it? Had what? Oh, doctor--not--diphtheria?"

She brought out the word with a face of such unutterable horror that he turned his eyes away, lest the memory of her look should interfere with his treatment of the next case he visited. There was something infernal in the sound of the thing which always knocked over the mothers of his generation. He had never seen one of them who could hear it without going to pieces on his hands; and for that reason he never mentioned the disease by name unless they drove him to it. They feared it as they might have feared the plague--and even more! If the medical profession would begin calling it something else, he wondered if the unmitigated terror of it wouldn"t partially subside?

"Well, it looks like that now, Jinny," he said soothingly; "but we"ll come out all right, never fear. It isn"t a bad case, you know, and the chief thing is to get the other children out of danger."

At this she went over like a log on the bed, and it was only after he had found the bottle of camphor on the mantelpiece and held it to her nostrils, that she revived sufficiently to sit up again. But as soon as her strength came back, her courage surprised and rejoiced him. After that one sign of weakness, she became suddenly strong, and he knew by the expression of her face, for he had had great experience with mothers, that he could count on her not to break down again while he needed her.

"I"d like to get a tent made of some sheets and keep a kettle boiling under it," he said, for he was an old man and belonged to the dark ages of medicine. "But first of all I"ll get the children over to your mother"s. They"d better not come in here again. I"ll ask the servant to attend to them."

"You"ll find her in the dining-room," replied Virginia, while she straightened Harry"s bed and made him more comfortable. The weakness had pa.s.sed, leaving a numbed and hardened feeling as though she had turned to wood; and when, a little later, she looked out of the door to wave good-bye to Lucy and Jenny, she was amazed to find that she felt almost indifferent. Every emotion, even her capacity for physical sensation, seemed to respond to the immediate need of her, to the exhaustless demands on her bodily strength and her courage. As long as there was anything to be done, she was sure now that she should be able to keep up and not lose control of herself.

"May we come back soon, mamma?" asked Lucy, standing on tiptoe to wave at her.

"Just as soon as Harry is well, darling. Ask grandpa to pray that he will be well soon, won"t you?"

"Jenny"ll pay," lisped the baby, from Doctor Fraser"s arms, where, with her cap on one side and her little feet kicking delightedly, she was beguiled by the promise of a birthday cake over at grandma"s.

"I"ll look in again in an hour or two," said the doctor in his jovial tones as he swung down the stairs. Then Lucy pattered after him, and in a few minutes the front door closed loudly behind them, and Virginia went back to the nursery, where Harry was coughing the strangling cough that tore at her heart.

By nightfall he had grown very ill, and when the next dawn came, it found her, wan, haggard, and sleepless, fighting beside the old doctor under the improvised tent of sheets which covered the little bed. The thought of self went from her so utterly that she only remembered she was alive when Marthy brought food and tried to force it between her lips.

"But you must swallow it, ma"am. You need to keep up your strength."

"How do you think he looks, Marthy? Does he feel quite so hot to you? He seems to breathe a little better, doesn"t he?"

And during the long day, while the patch of sunlight grew larger, lay for an hour like yellow silk on the windowsill, and then slowly dwindled into the shadow, she sat, without moving, between the bed and the table on which stood the bottles of medicine, a gla.s.s, and a pitcher of water.

When the child slept, overcome by the stupor of fever, she watched him, with drawn breath, lest he should fade away from her if she were to withdraw her pa.s.sionate gaze for an instant. When he awoke and lay moaning, while his little body shook with the long stifling gasps that struggled between his lips, she held him tightly clasped in her arms, with a woman"s pathetic faith in the power of a physical pressure to withstand the immaterial forces of death. A hundred times during the day he aroused himself, stirred faintly in his feverish sleep, and called her name in the voice of terror with which he used to summon her in the night.

"It isn"t the black man now, darling, is it? Remember there is no black man, and mamma is close here beside you."

No, it wasn"t the black man; he wasn"t afraid of the darkness now, but he would like to have his ship. When she brought it, he played for a few minutes, and dozed off still grasping the toy in his hands. At twelve the doctor came, and again at four, when the patch of sunlight, by which she told the hours, had begun to grow fainter on the windowsill.

"He is better, doctor, isn"t he? Don"t you notice that he struggles less when he breathes?"

He looked at her with an expression of contemplative pity in his old watery eyes, and she gave a little cry and stretched out her hands, blindly groping.

"Doctor, I"ll do anything--anything, if you"ll only save him." An impulse to reach beyond him to some impersonal, cosmic Power greater than he was, made her add desperately: "I"ll never ask for anything else in my life. I"ll give up everything, if you"ll only promise me that you will save him."

She stood up, drawing her thin figure, as tense as a cord, to its full height, and beneath the flowered blue dressing-gown her shoulder blades showed sharply under their fragile covering of flesh. Her hair, which she had not undone since the first shock of Harry"s illness, hung in straight folds on either side of her pallid and haggard face. Even the colour of her eyes seemed to have changed, for their flower-like blue had faded to a dull grey.

"If we can pull through the night, Jinny," he said huskily, and added almost sternly, "you must bear up, so much depends on you. Remember, it is your first serious illness, but it may not be your last. You"ve got to take the pang of motherhood along with the pleasure, my dear----"

The pang of motherhood! Long after he had left her, and she had heard the street gate click behind him, she sat motionless, repeating the words, by Harry"s little bed. The pang of motherhood--this was what she was suffering--the poignant suspense, the quivering waiting, the abject terror of loss, the unutterable anguish of the nerves, as if one"s heart were being slowly torn out of one"s body. She had had the joy, and now she was enduring the inevitable pang which is bound up, like a hidden pulse, in every mortal delight. Never pleasure without pain, never growth without decay, never life without death. The Law ruled even in love, and all the pitiful little sacrifices which one offered to Omnipotence, which one offered blindly to the Power that might separate, with a flaming sword, the cause from the effect, the substance from the shadow--what of them? While Harry lay there, wrapped in that burning stupor, she prayed, not as she had been taught to pray in her childhood, not with the humble and resigned worship of civilization, but in the wild and threatening lament of a savage who seeks to reach the ears of an implacable deity. In the last twenty-four hours the Unknown Power she entreated had changed, in her imagination, to an idol who responded only to the shedding of blood.

"Only spare my child and I will give up everything else!" she cried from the extremity of her anguish. The sharp edge of the bed hurt her bosom and she pressed frantically against it. Had it been possible to lacerate her body, to cut her flesh with knives, she might have found some pitiable comfort in the mere physical pain. Beside the agony in her mind, a pang of the flesh would have been almost a joy.

When at last she rose from her knees, Harry lay, breathing quietly, with his eyes closed and the toy ship on the blanket beside him. His childish features had shrunken in a day until they appeared only half their natural size, and a faint bluish tinge had crept over his face, wiping out all the sweet rosy colour. But he had swallowed a few spoonfuls of his last cup of broth, and the painful choking sound had ceased for a minute. The change, slight as it was, had followed so closely upon her prayers, that, while it lasted, she pa.s.sed through one of those spiritual crises which alter the whole aspect of life. An emotion, which was a curious mixture of superst.i.tious terror and religious faith, swept over her, reviving and invigorating her heart.

She had abased herself in the dust before G.o.d--she had offered all her life to Him if He would spare her child--and had He not answered? Might not Harry"s illness, indeed, have been sent to punish her for her neglect? A shudder of abhorrence pa.s.sed through her as she remembered the fox-hunt, and her pa.s.sion of jealousy. The roll of blue silk, lying upstairs in a closet in the third storey, appeared to her now not as a temptation to vanity, but as a reminder of the mortal sin which had almost cost her the life of her child. And suppose G.o.d had not stopped her in time--suppose she had gone to Atlantic City as Oliver had begged her to do?

In the room the light faded softly, melting first like frost from the mirror in the corner beyond the j.a.panese screen, creeping slowly across the marble surface of the washstand, lingering, in little ripples, on the green sash of the windowsill. Out of doors it was still day, and from where she sat by Harry"s bed, she could see, under the raised tent, every detail of the street standing out distinctly in the grey twilight. Across the way the houses were beginning to show lights at the windows, and the old lamplighter was balancing himself unsteadily on his ladder at the corner. On the mulberry tree near the crossing the broad bronze leaves swung back and forth in the wind, which sighed restlessly around the house and drove the naked tendrils of a summer vine against the green shutters at the window. The fire had gone down, and after she had made it up very softly, she bent over Harry again, as if she feared that he might have slipped out of her grasp while she had crossed the room.

"If he only lives, I will let everything else go. I will think of nothing except my children. It will make no difference to me if I do look ten years older than Abby does. Nothing on earth will make any difference to me, if only G.o.d will let him get well."

And with the vow, it seemed to her that she laid her youth down on the altar of that unseen Power whose mercy she invoked. Let her prayer only be heard and she would demand nothing more of life--she would spend all her future years in the willing service of love. Was it possible that she had imagined herself unhappy thirty-six hours ago--thirty-six hours ago when her child was not threatened? As she looked back on her past life, it seemed to her that every minute had been crowned with happiness. Even the loss of her newborn baby appeared such a little thing--such a little thing beside the loss of Harry, her only son. Mere freedom from anxiety showed to her now as a condition of positive bliss.

Six o"clock struck, and Marthy knocked at the door with a cup of milk.

"Do you think he"ll be able to swallow any of it?" she asked, and there were tears in her eyes.

"He is better, Marthy, I am sure he is better. Has mother been here this afternoon?"

"She stopped at the door, but she didn"t like to come in on account of the children. They are both well, she says, and send you their love. Do you want any more water in the kettle, ma"am?"

The kettle, which was simmering away beside Harry"s bed, under the tent of sheets, was pa.s.sed to Marthy through the crack in the door; and when in a few minutes the girl returned with fresh water, Virginia whispered to her that he had taken three spoonfuls of milk.

"And he let me mop his throat with turpentine," she said in quivering tones. "I am sure--oh, I am sure he is better."

"I am praying every minute," replied Marthy, weeping; and it seemed suddenly to Virginia that a wave of understanding pa.s.sed between her and the ignorant mulatto girl, whom she had always regarded as of different clay from herself. With that miraculous power of grief to level all things, she felt that the barriers of knowledge, of race, of all the pitiful superiorities with which human beings have obscured and decorated the underlying spirit of life, had melted back into the nothingness from which they had emerged in the beginning. This feeling of oneness, which would have surprised and startled her yesterday, appeared so natural to her now, that, after the first instant of recognition, she hardly thought of it again.

"Thank you, Marthy," she answered gently, and closing the door, went back to her chair under the raised corner of the sheet. When the doctor came at nine o"clock she was sitting there, in the same position, so still and tense that she seemed hardly to be breathing, so ashen grey that the sheet hanging above her head showed deadly white by contrast with her face. In those three hours she knew that the clinging tendrils of personal desire had relaxed their hold forever on life and youth.

"If he doesn"t get worse, we"ll pull through," said the doctor, turning from his examination of Harry to lay his hand, which felt as heavy as lead, on her shoulder. "We"ve an even chance--if his heart doesn"t go back on us." And he added, "Most mothers are good nurses, Jinny, but I never saw a better one than you are--unless it was your own mother. You get it from her, I reckon. I remember when you went through diphtheria how she sent your father to stay with one of the neighbours, and shut herself up with old Ailsey to nurse you. I don"t believe she undressed or closed her eyes for a week."

Her own mother! So she was not the only one who had suffered this anguish--other women, many women, had been through it before she was born. It was a part of that immemorial pang of motherhood of which the old doctor had spoken. "But, was I ever in danger? Was I as ill as Harry?" she asked.

"For twenty-four hours we thought you"d slip through our fingers every minute. "Twas only your mother"s nursing that kept you alive--I"ve told her that twenty times. She never spared herself an instant, and, it may have been my imagination, but she never seemed to me to be the same woman afterwards. Something had gone out of her."

Now she understood, now she knew, something had gone out of her, also, and this something was youth. No woman who had fought with death for a child could ever be the same afterwards--could ever value again the small personal joys, when she carried the memory of supreme joy or supreme anguish buried within her heart. She remembered that her mother had never seemed young to her, not even in her earliest childhood; and she understood now why this had been so, why the deeper experiences of life rob the smaller ones of all vividness, of all poignancy. It had been so easy for her mother to give up little things, to deny herself, to do without, to make no further demands on life after the great demands had been granted her. How often had she said unthinkingly in her girlhood, "Mother, you never want anything for yourself." Ah, she knew now what it meant, and with the knowledge a longing seized her to throw herself into her mother"s arms, to sob out her understanding and her sympathy, to let her feel before it was too late that she comprehended every step of the way, every throb of the agony!

"I"d spend the night with you, Jinny, if I didn"t have to be with Milly Carrington, who has two children down with it," said the doctor; "but if there"s any change, get Marthy to come for me. If not, I"ll be sure to look in again before daybreak."

When he had gone, she moved the night lamp to the corner of the washstand, and after swallowing hastily a cup of coffee which Marthy had brought to her before the doctor"s visit, and which had grown quite tepid and unpalatable, she resumed her patient watch under the raised end of the sheet. The whole of life, the whole of the universe even, had narrowed down for her into that faint circle of light which the lamp drew around Harry"s little bed. It was as if this narrow circle beat with a separate pulse, divided from the rest of existence by its intense, its throbbing vitality. Here was concentrated for her all that the world had to offer of hope, fear, rapture, or anguish. The littleness and the terrible significance of the individual destiny were gathered into that faintly quivering centre of s.p.a.ce--so small a part of the universe, and yet containing the whole universe within itself!