The Old Blood Part 40

"I am writing to your father for you and telling him that you will be as good as ever," she continued. "The miracle man says that the pain will be bad, and if it is too bad, clap your hands and they will stop it. But he would rather not, if you can endure it."

Phil gave her hand two pressures to signify that he understood, and had a pressure in response before she withdrew her hand with a fluttering, nervous quickness. This return pressure helped. It was like comrades.h.i.+p in battle. He was not making the fight alone.

Next, they were doing something to his eyes, which were finally covered with a compress. The people out in that silent blackness were divided into cla.s.ses: She and they. Then they were doing something to his ears. The eye and the ear experts said the same as Bricktop. Both would try; for all three were big men, who said just what they meant.

Phil, guessing their purpose, waited for the message on his arm.

"It is all right," she wrote again. "They say you will see again and hear again as well as ever."

He believed her with the faith of those men in the court who followed Bricktop with their confident eyes. Soon the pain came; needlelike shoots of broken nerves that had been numbed by shock. A thousand needles sewing, p.r.i.c.king, leaping, burning, drowning the hammer-beats!

"But I'll stick it!" thought Phil.

CHAPTER XXIX

IN HER PLACE AGAIN

The numbing horror of it--and to have come into her life--hers!

Enveloping horror, the horror of war personified, drove Henriette out of the ward, on with mechanical steps toward a deserted part of the beach, where she could be alone and think before she faced Lady Truckleford's lot.

Her gospel of life had been a gospel of beauty: a delight in her own beauty as a source of power; a dislike of all things that were not comely; a choice of surroundings in the fas.h.i.+oning of a beautiful world, selected and detached in a charming egoism, where she was supreme. Phil had come from afar and played a knightly part; she had fitted him into that world. It was the end--the end of upward glances into his eyes; of profile turned in the certainty of holding his impelled, prolonged regard of admiration; of sauntering in woodland paths; of rhythmic swing in step across the fields; of fair afternoons with him posing and herself posing as she leisurely played with her brush--of the most delectable of all her experiences.

Those finely-chiselled features which she had painted, which had been the security of masculine strength in her fright as he carried her to the cover of the gully, their elation when she spoke of the woman who waited when the man went out to fight--and that monstrous fact against a pillow in the hospital!

War had made its test in kind. All the soft, pampered years were in reckoning for her, as the suffering years were for Helen. Her instinct was to fly to her quiet studio in Paris, as a child flies indoors to its mother from a storm dragon; but public opinion, personified to her distraction by Lady Truckleford's lot, would not permit this. Her friends knew that he was her cousin; and Lady Violet's teasing had been the reflection of general knowledge of the situation between the two.

No one would more quickly appreciate than they in their own beautiful world that any conventional outcome would now be impossible, yet none readier to point the finger at heartlessness. They would expect devoted attention to him for a certain period in his ghastly misfortune.

Had she courage? Could she bear standing by his bedside and looking at his bandaged face? She must! Her part became clear. Her cousin and friend had been maimed; she pitied him; suffering should go with her grief for him in a way that would engage the sympathy of all. What were they saying at Lady Truckleford's at this minute? Their opinion had come to mean much to her. They knew only that she had put her hands to her eyes and screamed and staggered out of doors. Was not this the natural result of such a shock? And the next? It would be to inquire about him.

Starting back to the ward, a new horror presented itself on the way.

All her life she might be known as the woman who was waiting for a man, who returned to her a blind, deaf wreck. He would exist, haunting her memory, invading her beautiful world with a mutilating hand. If only--she shuddered at the thought which easily became familiar in an era when the quick became the dead as a matter of course out where the guns were firing. Perhaps he was already gone. She gasped and halted as she found the possibility hastening her steps. The man for whom she had waited, though they had not really been engaged as she kept reminding herself, would have fallen in action and the slate would be clean.

She was at the door of the ward and heard her voice asking a nurse how he was.

"He's transferred to Dr. Smith. There's been an operation. I've not heard the result," replied the nurse coldly; for a woman finds it as easy to speak coldly to another woman who is beautiful as a man finds it difficult.

"And my sister?" asked Henrietta.

"She went across with the stretcher."

As Henriette made a turn in the path which brought her in sight of the Oral Surgery sign, Helen was pa.s.sing under it and coming toward her.

She was pale and faint with exhaustion from the strain which had ended with that final tax on her strength, as she put all she had into the message of optimism which she had written on Phil's arm. So near had she been to him, so bound up with him in thought and feeling, that coming suddenly face to face with Henriette affected her strangely.

She had a tightening in her throat and Henriette a stifling constraint along with her suspense. After a silence, Helen was the first to speak.

"He stood the operation well," she said.

"And he will live--live?" Henriette asked, her breath catching on the words.

Helen remembered now how her sister had put her hands over her eyes and screamed. Afterwards she had not thought of Henriette, only of him.

It had been too horrible for Henriette to bear. Henriette loved him and he loved her, and her eyes to Helen's revealed her suffering in the past two hours. Now she had come back as one in a dream, afraid to ask how he was.

"Yes, he will live, Henriette--oh, how awful it has been for you! His body is as good as ever. He will live and make the fight. He has promised--such a hard fight!"

"Then he had wished to die? He was going to, you mean, and--and----"

Henriette wrenched out the words.

"Yes, and the doctor says that he would have died. It is all a matter of will-power. But we told him that he would get his sight and hearing back and except for some little scars will be the same as before."

"Will he?"

"He must! We must not allow him or ourselves to think anything else.

Just must--must!"

"Yes!" Henriette breathed faintly.

"Will you go in and see him?"

"I----" Henriette hesitated. "No, not to-night!" she concluded.

The two sisters walked along the path in silence, which was a gripping silence for both. When they came to the parting of the ways to their quarters, Helen took Henriette's hand in hers.

"There is another reason why he wants to live. You asked him to," she said.

"I--I could not bear it--I went out. How could I? What do you mean?"

"The will was everything in the crisis, as I said. Often such cases--well--some one had to speak to him and tell him it would all come out right when it was so hard for him to breathe, or he would not have tried to breathe any more. So I wrote on his arm and asked him to live for--for the sake of those who loved him--and he could not see that it was I--and I signed it H!"

Henriette withdrew her hand from Helen's in a spasm which shook her frame. She opened her lips to speak, but would not trust her own tongue and whirling brain.

"Again you took my place!" she exclaimed, at last.

"It was for you--to give him hope to inspire him for the fight!" Helen replied, with pa.s.sionate conviction.

"Yes--yes, I understand. I can't think! It's too horrible! Go on taking my place--you can--it's easier for you! Yes, go on! It unstrings me too much now to see him--yes, look after him, encourage him. Go on--only don't tell any one the ruse that you are playing!"

she concluded, with a burst of emphatic coherency before she bolted along the path, murmuring to herself: "Yes, that is it--that is the way out!"

Over at Lady Truckleford's lot they had been thinking of little else but Henriette. How would she take it? The lot was gathered in the reception-room before going into dinner, and when Henriette entered all eyes were covertly or openly upon her. Lady Violet took the lead by springing up and kissing Henriette on the cheek.

"You poor dear!" breathed Lady Violet. "Of course we've heard, and we've all felt for you!"

Henriette, pale in her distress, had never seemed more beautiful to Captain Landor, who had had a bullet through the arm. Usually Henriette cut his meat for dinner; but to-night Lady Violet was a.s.sured of the privilege.

"I have just come from inquiring as to the result of the operation,"

said Henriette. "He is resting easily. As you know, he is really a distant cousin of Helen's and mine and we were all fond of one another.

We had such good times together at Mervaux. It was so fine of him to stay and fight instead of going home. Then this! You can't imagine the shock of it!"

"Terrible!" gasped Lady Violet. "We all know what it means to you."