The Second Fiddle Part 10

Come to me when you have seen him. Do not think, whatever your decision is, that I shall not realize what it costs you, or fail to do all in my power to help you to carry it out.

Yours affectionately,

HELEN VERNY.

Stella dropped the letter and looked at Marian. Marian sat erect, and her eyes burned. She was tearless and outraged by sorrow. There are people who take joy as a personal virtue and sorrow as a personal insult, and Marian was one of these people. Happiness had softened and uplifted her; pain struck her down and humiliated her solid sense of pride.

"Why wasn't he killed?" she asked bitterly, meeting Stella's questioning eyes. "I could have borne his being killed. Value! What does Lady Verny mean by value? His career is smashed; his life is to all intents and purposes over. And mine with it! It is very kind of her to say he will release me. I do not need his mother to tell me that. She seems to have overlooked the fact that I have given him my word! Is it likely that I should fail him or that I could consent to be released? I do not need any one to tell me my duty. But I hate life! I _hate_ it! I think it all stupid, vile, senseless! Why did I ever meet him? What good has love been to me? A few hours' happiness, and then this martyrdom set like a trap to catch us! And I don't like invalids. I have never seen any one very ill. I sha'n't know what to say to him."

"Oh, yes, you will, when you see him," said Stella; it was all that for a while she could say.

She had always believed that Marian had a deep, but close-locked, nature. Love presumably would be the key.

It was unlocked now. Pain had unlocked it, instead of love, and Stella s.h.i.+vered at the tearless hardness, the sharp, shallow sense of personal privation that occupied Marian's heart. She had not yet thought of Julian.

Stella told herself that Marian's was only the blindness of the unimaginative. The moment Marian saw Julian it would pa.s.s, and yield before the directer illumination of the heart. Marian's nature was perhaps one of those that yields very slowly to pain. When she saw Julian she would forget everything else. She would not think of her losses and sacrifices any more, or her duties. Stella felt curiously stung and wasted by Marian's use of the word "duty." Was that all there was for the woman whom Julian loved? Was that all there was for Julian!

But she could deal only with what Marian had; so, when she spoke again, Stella said all she could to comfort Marian. She spoke of Julian's courage; she said no life in Julian could be useless that left his brain free to act. She suggested that he would find a new career for himself, and she pictured his future successes. Beneath her lips and her quick outer mind she thought only of Julian, broken.

They stopped in a large, quiet square, at the door of a private hospital. There was no sound but the half-notes of birds stirring at twilight in the small square garden, and far off the m.u.f.fled murmur of distant streets.

A nurse opened the door.

"You are Miss Young?" she said to Marian. "Yes, of course, we were expecting you. Sister would like to see you first."

They stood for a moment in a small neat office. The sister rose from an old Dutch bureau, one of the traces of the house's former occupants, and held out her hand to Marian. Her eyes rested with intentness upon the girl's face.

"Sir Julian is almost certain to know you," she said gently, "but you mustn't talk much to him. He has been much weakened by exposure. He lay in a wood for three days without food or water. There is every hope of his partial recovery, Miss Young; but he needs rest and rea.s.surance. We can give him the rest here, but we must look to you to help us to bring back to him the love of life."

Marian stood with her beautiful head raised proudly. She waited for a moment to control her voice; then she asked quietly:

"Is the paralysis likely to be permanent?"

The sister moved a chair toward her, but Marian shook her head.

"It is a state of partial paralysis. He will be able to get about on crutches," the sister replied. "Won't you rest for a few moments before going up to him, Miss Young?"

"No, thank you," said Marian; "I will go up to him at once."

She turned quickly toward the door, and meeting Stella's eyes, she took and held her arm tightly for a moment, and then, loosing it, walked quickly toward the stairs. Stella followed her as if she had no being.

She had lost all consciousness of herself. She was a thought that clung to Julian, an unbodied idea fixed upon the cross of Julian's pain. She did not see the staircase up which she pa.s.sed; she walked through the wood in which Julian had lain three days.

He was in a large, airy room with two other men. Stella did not know which was Julian until he opened his eyes. There was no color in his face, and very little substance. The other men were raised in bed and looked alive, but Julian lay like something made of wax and run into a mold. Only his eyes lived--lived and flickered, and held on to his drifting consciousness.

The nurse guided Marian to his bed, and, drawing a chair forward, placed it close to him. Marian leaned down and kissed his forehead. She had determined to do that, whatever he looked like; and she did it.

His lips moved. She bent down, and a whisper reached her: "I said I'd come back to you, and I have." Then he closed his eyes. He had nothing further to say.

Marian did not cry. After the first moment she did not look at Julian; she looked away from him out of the window. She did not feel that it was Julian who lay there like a broken toy. It was her duty. She had submitted to it; but nothing in her responded to this submission except her iron will.

The nurse had forgotten to bring a chair for Stella. She leaned against the door until a red-haired boy with a bandaged arm, on the bed nearest to her, exclaimed earnestly:

"Do take my chair! You look awfully done."

She was able to take his chair because her hands were less blind than any other part of her, and she smiled at him because she had the habit of smiling when she thanked people. Then her eyes went back to Julian.

Her heart had never left him; and she knew now that it never would leave him again.

She did not know how long or short it was before Marian rose gracefully, and said in her clear, sweet voice, "I shall come again to-morrow, Julian."

Marian stopped at each of the other bedsides before she joined Stella.

She said little, friendly, inclusive words to the other two men, which made them feel as if they would like to sweep the floor under her feet.

"All the same," the red-haired man explained after the door closed, "it was the untidy little one, piled up against the door, that minded most.

I dare say she was his sister."

He had no need to lower his voice, though he did lower it, for fear of its reaching Julian.

Julian had been rea.s.sured, and now he was resting. Consciousness had altogether receded from him, perhaps that it might give him a better chance of resting.

CHAPTER XIII

Julian roused himself with the feeling that he had said only half of what he had intended to say to Marian. It had been in his mind a long time. It was while he was lying out under the pine-trees that he had realized what he had got to say to Marian if he ever got back. There was a complicated cipher message for the Government, which he had kept quite clear in his mind, and eventually given to an intelligent doctor to send off; and there was the message to Marian, which he himself would have to say when he saw her.

"I've come back, as I promised; but I can't marry you now, of course.

I'm a crock."

The first time he saw Marian he had got through only the first part of the sentence. There was no hurry about the rest of it. The doctor and the sister had both a.s.sured him that there was no hurry. They had been very kind, and quite as honest as their profession permitted. They said Marian would come back, and he could tell her then.

They admitted, when he cross-questioned them with all the sharpness of which he was capable, that he would be a cripple. They did not bother him with futile commiserations. They gave him quietly and kindly the facts he asked for. He would never be able to walk again, but he could get about easily on crutches.

Julian did not want to live very much, but his mother's eyes hurt him when he tried not to; and then Marian came again, and he got through the rest of his sentence.

"You see," he explained in a low whisper which sounded in his head like a gong, "marriage is quite out of the question."

Marian was there with smiles and flowers, just as he had so often pictured her; but she sat down with a curious solidity, and her voice sounded clearer than it had sounded in his dreams.

"Nothing alters our engagement, Julian," she said. "Nothing can."

She spoke with a finality that stopped his thinking. He had finished his sentence, and it seemed hardly fair to be expected to start another on the spur of the moment. He gave himself up to a feeling of intense relief: he had got off his cipher to the Government and he had released Marian.

He had known these were going to be difficult things to do. The cipher had been the worst. The French doctor had taken some time to understand that Julian must neither die nor be attended to until he had sent the cipher off; and now the business about Marian was over, too. He had only to lie there and look at her day by day coming in with roses. They did not talk much. Julian never spoke of his symptoms, but they were too radical to free him. He lay under them like a creature pinned under the wreckage of a railway accident.

Slowly, day by day, his strength came back to him; and as it came back, peace receded. His eyes lost their old adoring indulgence; they seemed to be watching Marian covertly, anxious for some gift that she was withholding from him. He did not demand this as a right, as the old Julian would have done, breaking down the barriers of her pride to reach it. He pleaded for it with shamed eyes that met hers only to glance away. Something in her that was not cruelty as much as a baffling desire to escape him made her refuse to give him what his eyes asked.

Julian had loved her for her elusiveness, and the uncaptured does not yield readily to any appeal from the hunter. The prize is to the strong.