The White Sister Part 33

There is always a pencil with a memorandum-pad in every private room of a hospital, for the use of the nurse and the doctor. The Mother Superior took both from the table and sat down close to the bed, and Giovanni dictated what he had to say in a clear and businesslike way that surprised her, great as her experience had been. When he had finished, he asked her to read it over to him, and pointed out one small correction to be made.

'I think I can sign it with my left hand, if you will hold it up for me,' he said.

His fingers traced his name with the pencil, though very unsteadily, and he begged her to send it to headquarters at once. There was always some one on duty there, he explained, if it was only the subaltern commanding the guard. She need not be afraid of leaving him alone for a few moments, he added, for he was in no pain and did not feel at all faint. Besides, she would now send him another nurse--he had not thanked her for taking care of him herself during the night--he hoped she would forgive his omission--he was still----

And thereupon, while in the very act of speaking, he fell asleep again, exhausted by the effort he had made, and still under the influence of the strong drug. The Mother understood, glanced at him and slipped away, closing the door very softly. She knew that stage of awakening from the influence of opium, with its alternating 'zones' of sleep and waking.

It was half-past five now, and a spring morning, and all was astir downstairs; lay sisters were gathering the broken gla.s.s into baskets, the portress was clearing away the wreck of broken panes from the outer hall, and the nun who had charge of the chapel was preparing the altar for matins. No one was surprised to see the Mother Superior in the cloister so early, for she was often the first to rise and almost always the last to go to rest; the novices said that the little white volcano never slept at all, but was only 'quiescent' during a part of the night.

She found one of the orderlies scrubbing the outer doorstep, and despatched him at once with Giovanni's report, which she had put into an envelope and directed. He was to bring back an answer if there was any; and when he was gone, as he had not finished his job, she took the scrubbing broom in her small hands and finished it herself, with more energy, perhaps, than had been expended upon the stones for some time. Before she had quite done, the portress caught sight of her and was filled with horror.

'For the love of heaven!' she cried, trying to take the broom herself.

The nun would not let it go, however, and pushed her aside gently, with a smile.

'If any one should see your Reverence!' protested the portress.

'My dear Anna,' answered the Mother Superior, giving the finis.h.i.+ng strokes, 'they would see an old woman was.h.i.+ng a doorstep, and no harm would be done.'

But the example remained impressed on the good lay sister's mind for ever, and to her last days she will never tire of telling the novices how the Mother Superior washed the doorstep of the hospital herself on the morning after the explosion at Monteverde.

The delivery of the report produced a more immediate result than either Giovanni or the Mother had expected. The accident had happened near sunset, and the story of Giovanni's heroic behaviour had been repeated everywhere before midnight. The men who had found him had, of course, reported the fact after the first confusion was over, but it was some time before the news got up to any superior officer, though the King's aide-de-camp had left instructions that any information about Giovanni was to be telephoned to the Quirinal at once. When it had been understood at last that he was in the private hospital of the White Sisters, badly injured but alive, it was too late to think of sending an officer to make inquiries in person. On the other hand, six o'clock in the morning is not too early for most modern sovereigns, general officers, and members of the really hard-working professions, among which literature is sometimes included. In half-an-hour Giovanni's little report had been read, copied, telephoned, and telegraphed, and in less than half-an-hour more a magnificent personage in the uniform of a colonel of cavalry on the General Staff, accompanied by a less gorgeous but extremely smart subaltern, stopped at the door of the Convent hospital in a Court carriage. He came to ask after Captain Severi on behalf of the Sovereign, and to ascertain whether he could perhaps be seen during the morning. He was told that this must depend on the surgeon's decision; he expressed his thanks to the portress with extreme civility and drove away again. Before long other officers came to make similar inquiries, in various uniforms and in slightly varying degrees of smartness, from the representative of the War Office and the Commander-in-Chief's aide-de-camp to unpretending subalterns in undress uniform, who were on more or less friendly terms with Giovanni and were suddenly very proud of it, since he had become a hero.

Then came the reporters and besieged the door for news--an untidy lot of men at that hour, unshaven, hastily dressed, and very sorry for themselves because they had been beaten up by their respective papers so early in the morning. They were also extremely disappointed because the portress had no story to tell and would not hear of letting them in; and they variously described her afterwards as Cerberus, Argus, and the Angel of the Flaming Sword, which things agree not well together. The portress had a busy morning, even after Doctor Pieri had come and had written out a bulletin which she could show to all comers as an official statement of the injured man's condition.

The great surgeon and the Mother Superior sat on opposite sides of his bed, and now that the sun had risen high the blinds were half drawn together and hooked in the old-fas.h.i.+oned Roman way, to keep out some of the light, while the gla.s.s was left open. A broad stripe of suns.h.i.+ne fell across the counterpane below Giovanni's knees, and a sharp twittering and a rus.h.i.+ng of wings broke the stillness every few seconds, as the circling swallows flew past the half-open window.

'So you refuse to undergo the operation?' Pieri said, after a long pause. 'Is that your last word? Shall I go away and leave you to die?'

'How long will that take?' asked Giovanni calmly.

'Probably from four to ten days, according to circ.u.mstances,' replied the surgeon.

'Say a week, more or less. Will it hurt much?'

'Not unless you have lockjaw, which is possible. If you do, you will suffer.'

'Horribly,' said the Mother Superior, unconsciously covering her eyes with one hand for a moment; she had seen men die of teta.n.u.s.

'You will give me anaesthetics,' Giovanni answered philosophically.

'Besides, I would rather bear pain for a day or two than go through life a cripple with an empty sleeve!'

'It is deliberate suicide,' said the Mother Superior sadly.

'I incline to think so, too,' echoed the surgeon, 'though I believe the priests do not exactly consider it so.'

Though he was half paralysed by his injury, Giovanni Severi smiled grimly.

'It would be very amusing if I died with the priests on my side after all,' he said, 'and against our good Mother Superior, too! You don't know how kind she is, Doctor; she has sat up all night with me herself!'

Pieri was surprised, and looked quietly at the nun, who immediately rose and went to the window, pretending to arrange the blinds better.

But there are moments when the truth seems to reveal itself directly to more than one person at the same time. The surgeon, whose intuitions were almost feminine in their swift directness, guessed at once why the Mother did not answer: not only she had not sat up with Giovanni herself, but she had allowed Sister Giovanna to do so, and as the patient had not wakened and recognised his nurse, it was not desirable that he should now know the truth. As for Giovanni himself, the certainty that came over him was more like 'thought-reading,' for neither he himself nor any one else could have explained the steps of reasoning by which he reached his conclusion. It was probably a mere guess, which happened to be right, and was founded on a little anxious shrinking of the Mother Superior's head and shoulders when she crossed the room and went to the window, as if she had something to hide.

Giovanni saw it, and then his eyes met Pieri's for a moment, and each was sure that the other knew.

'I need not ask you,' Giovanni said, 'whether you are absolutely sure that I must die if you do not take off my arm at the shoulder?'

'Humanly speaking,' replied the other gravely, 'I am quite sure that gangrene will set in before to-morrow morning, and that is certain death in your case.'

'Why do you say, in my case?'

'Because,' Pieri answered with a little impatience, 'if it began in your foot, for instance, or in your hand, it would take some little time to reach the vital parts, and the arm or leg could still be amputated; but in your case it will set in so near the heart that no operation will be of any use after it begins. Do you understand?'

'Perfectly. I shall take less time to die, for the same reason.'

Severi was very quiet about it; but the Mother Superior turned on him suddenly from the window, her small face very white.

'It is suicide,' she said--'deliberate, intentional suicide, and no right-thinking man, priest or layman, would call it by any other name, let Doctor Pieri say what he will! You are in full possession of your senses, and even of your health and strength, at this moment, and you are a.s.sured that you run no risk if you submit to the doctors, but that if you will not you must die! You are choosing death where you can choose life, and that is suicide if anything is! Doctor Pieri knows well enough what a good priest would say, and so do I, who have been a nurse for a quarter of a century! If the injury were internal, and if there were a real risk to your life in operating, you would have the right, the moral right, to choose between the danger of dying under ether and the comparative certainty of dying of the injury. But this is a specific case. You are young, strong, absolutely healthy, and the chance of your dying from the anaesthetic is not one in thousands, whereas, if nothing is done, death is certain. I ask you, before G.o.d and man and on your honour, whether you do not know that you are committing suicide--nothing less than cowardly, dastardly self-murder!'

'If I am, it is my affair,' answered Giovanni coldly; 'but you need not leave out the rest. You believe that if I choose to die I shall go straight to everlasting punishment. I believe that if there is a G.o.d--and I do not deny that there may be--I shall not be d.a.m.ned because I would rather not live at all than go on living as half a man. And now, if you will let me have a cup of coffee and a roll, I shall be very grateful, for I have had nothing to eat since yesterday at one o'clock!'

He probably knew well enough what such a request meant just then--the putting off of a possible operation for hours, owing to the impossibility of giving ether to a man who has lately eaten anything.

The Mother Superior and the surgeon looked at each other rather blankly.

'Shall I die any sooner if I am starved?' asked Giovanni almost roughly.

Pieri began to explain the danger, but Severi at once grew more impatient.

'I know all that,' he said, 'and I have told you my decision. I refuse to undergo an operation. If you choose to make me suffer from starvation I suppose it is in your power, though I am not sure. I fancy I can still stand and walk, and even my one hand may be of some use! If you do not give me something to eat, I shall get out of bed and fight my way to the larder!'

He smiled as he uttered the threat, as if he were not jesting about his own death. Pieri did not like it, and turned to the door.

'Since you talk of fighting,' he said, 'I would give you ether by force, if I could, and let the law do what it would after I had saved your life in spite of you! If you chose to blow your brains out afterwards, that would not concern me!'

Thereupon he disappeared, shutting the door more sharply than doctors usually do when they leave a sick-room. The Mother Superior went to the bedside and leaned over Giovanni, looking into his eyes with an expression of profoundest entreaty.

'I implore you to change your mind,' she said in a low and beseeching voice, 'for the sake of the mother who bore you----'

'She is dead,' Giovanni answered quietly.

'For the sake of them that live and love you, them----'

'There is only one, Mother, and you know it; but for that only one's love I would live, not merely with one arm, but if every bone in my body were broken and twisted out of shape beyond remedy. Mother, go and tell her so, and bring me her answer--will you?'

The nun straightened herself, and her face showed what she suffered; but Giovanni did not understand.

'You are afraid,' he said, with rising contempt in his tone. 'You are afraid to take my message. It would move her! It might tempt her from the right way! It might put it into her head to beg for a dispensation after all, and the sin would be on your soul! I understand--I did not really mean that you should ask her. You let her watch here last night when you knew I could not waken, but you were careful that she should be gone before I opened my eyes. You see, I have guessed the truth! I only wonder why you let her stay at all!'

He moved his head impatiently on the pillow. The Mother Superior had drawn herself up rather proudly, folding her hands under her scapular and looking down at him coldly, her face like a marble mask again.