Barnaby Part 30

Lady Henrietta had turned to Susan.

"Oh," she said, with the air of one who wished to demonstrate to an over-anxious circle that she had her wits about her--"that telegram--!

Of course you can't go now. We must wire up to town.--"

The girl listened to her without at first comprehending.

"Oh,--the telegram," she repeated. How pathetically absurd that futile invention sounded now.

"I must go to him," she said.

The doctor nodded encouragement.

"I'll bring a nurse back with me when I come again," he promised.

Into the girl's pale cheek came a sudden colour. She lifted her head and her eyes shone. She held out her hand, and all at once it was steady.

"No one else;--no one but me!" she cried.

Oh, the farce was not played out; the curtain was not down. She was still his wife to that audience; it was to her he belonged, to no other.... Desperately she stood on her rights;--the poor, fict.i.tious rights she had purchased with all that pain.

"_You_ can't nurse him," the doctor was saying gently. "You'd break down; you would make yourself ill. You don't know what you would be undertaking."

But Barnaby's mother was on her side.

"Fiddlesticks!" said she. She had brightened unaccountably; in her voice ran a queer little tremor of satisfaction. "Let her make herself ill if she likes. Why shouldn't she? I've no patience with modern vices, calling in hirelings--! A wife's place is with her husband, not quaking outside his door."

Susan was looking bravely in the doctor's doubtful face.

"You can trust me," she said, on her pale lips a wistful flicker that hardly was a smile.--"I too was a--hireling, once. I know how."

She knew he must yield. What man would dare to stop her? What man would dare to dispute her claim? Only Barnaby himself, who might one day laugh at the tragic humour of her a.s.sumption. A kind of despairing joy shook her soul, and was blotted in a pa.s.sionate eagerness of devotion. Barnaby was hurt, perhaps dying, ... and nothing could conjure her from his side.

CHAPTER XI

The house had become very quiet.

Under Barnaby's windows and right down the avenue the crunching granite was spread with tan. The servants moved silently about their work, even in the far kitchens whence not a sound could be heard.

For a long time he was unconscious; for a long time he lay breathing heavily, and they could not tell if he was in pain. Other doctors came down from London, and Lady Henrietta had to be told what it was that the girl was fighting with that pale and steady face.

"It's love, sheer love, that keeps her going," said one witness to another, watching her courage in the deeps of agony and uncertainty, and, at last, in the breakers of hope.

She was safe in giving herself without stint, because for a long while he did not know her, and it did not matter to him who it was that was soothing him with a pa.s.sionate gentleness of which his jarred brain would have no knowledge when it recovered its normal tone. She could sit at his bedside hus.h.i.+ng him, whispering that she loved him, she loved him, and he must sleep.

Sometimes he talked to her in unintelligible mutterings, sometimes his rambling speeches, without beginning or end, were bitter to understand.

"You mustn't mind what he says," the doctor warned her kindly. "It's certain to be rubbish. Generally they go over and over some silly thing they remember.--I had a patient once who got into fearful trouble through winding off something about a murder he had read in a book."

--That was after he had stood awhile listening gravely to Barnaby's restless talk.

--"I'll find a way out. Wait a bit, my darling.... We'll not have our lives ruined by that mad marriage. I'll find a way out for us."

It was not always the same. Sometimes in the night it would be--"I tell you she's my wife. No, no, not the other. Awfully good joke, what? Mustn't lose my head, though; mustn't lose my head."

And Susan would lay her cheek against his in an agony lest he should hurt himself with his excitement.

"Sleep!" she would whisper, "oh, my dearest, lie still and sleep...."

"But I love her. Don't you know that? I can't marry my girl. Because I love her;--just because I love her--mustn't lose my head!"

Once after she had quieted him, and he had lain a little while motionless he called her.

"Are you there?" he said. His voice was so sensible that she trembled.

"Yes," she said softly, and he gave a sigh of content. But soon he was muttering again, and restless.

"She wants me to sleep," he was repeating, "she wants me to sleep."

No, he had not known who she was. She bent over him, smoothing his forehead with a tender and anxious hand. Sometimes her touch was magnetic.

"Yes," she said. "Hush, my dearest."

"Kiss me," he murmured suddenly, "and I'll go to sleep."

And since at all costs he must be coaxed to slumber, she kissed him for the woman who was not there.

Slowly he turned the corner, slowly.

And at last she found him watching her one morning as she came towards him with a cup in her hand, across the great, wide room. She liked this room; it was so vast and simple. Its battered furniture must have been his when he was a boy. And there was no clutter of pictures and photographs; only a few ancient oil-paintings of hounds and horses.

Above his bed a square patch in the wall-paper that was unfaded, betrayed where a woman's portrait had hung once and had been taken down.

"Hullo!" he said.

He lay looking at her, thin and haggard, but his whimsical smile unchanged.

"It's she," he said, "or is it the stuff that dreams are made of?"

"It is she," said Susan.

"I've been ill, haven't I?" he said. "And I say, Susan, have you been nursing me?"

"Yes," she said, steadily.

"I thought so. I've had a kind of feeling that you were there. What's it all about? Wasn't I down at the jumps with Rackham,--and the horse went up--? Did I get damaged?"