They both paused. Then Justine said: “What horse was she riding?”
“Impulse, Miss.” The butler looked at his large responsible watch. “It’s not late—” he said, more to himself than to her.
“No. Has she been riding Impulse lately?”
“No, Miss. Not since that day the mare nearly had her off. I understood Mr. Amherst did not wish it.”
Justine went back to Cicely and the fairy-tale.—As she took up the thread of the Princess’s adventures, she asked herself why she had ever had any hope of helping Bessy. The seeds of disaster were in the poor creature’s soul…. Even when she appeared to be moved, lifted out of herself, her escaping impulses were always dragged back to the magnetic centre of hard distrust and resistance that sometimes forms the core of soft-fibred natures. As she had answered her husband’s previous appeal by her flight to the woman he disliked, so she answered this one by riding the horse he feared…. Justine’s last illusions crumbled. The distance between two such natures was unspannable. Amherst had done well to remain away…and with a tidal rush her sympathies swept back to his side….
The governess came to claim Cicely. One of the footmen came to put another log on the fire. Then the rite of removing the tea-table was majestically performed—the ceremonial that had so often jarred on Amherst’s nerves. As she watched it, Justine had a vague sense of the immutability of the household routine—a queer awed feeling that, whatever happened, a machine so perfectly adjusted would work on inexorably, like a natural law….
She rose to look out of the window, staring vainly into blackness between the parted curtains. As she turned back, passing the writing-table, she noticed that Cicely’s irruption had made her forget to post her letters—an unusual oversight. A glance at the clock told her that she was not too late for the mail—reminding her, at the same time, that it was scarcely three hours since Bessy had started on her ride…. She saw the foolishness of her fears. Even in winter, Bessy often rode for more than three hours; and now that the days were growing longer–-
Suddenly reassured, Justine went out into the hall, intending to carry her batch of letters to the red pillar-box by the door. As she did so, a cold blast struck her. Could it be that for once the faultless routine of the house had been relaxed, that one of the servants had left the outer door ajar? She walked over to the vestibule—yes, both doors were wide. The night rushed in on a vicious wind. As she pushed the vestibule door shut, she heard the dogs sniffing and whining on the threshold. She crossed the vestibule, and heard voices and the tramping of feet in the darkness—then saw a lantern gleam. Suddenly Knowles shot out of the night—the lantern struck on his bleached face.
Justine, stepping back, pressed the electric button in the wall, and the wide doorstep was abruptly illuminated, with its huddled, pushing, heavily-breathing group…black figures writhing out of darkness, strange faces distorted in the glare.
“Bessy!” she cried, and sprang forward; but suddenly Wyant was before her, his hand on her arm; and as the dreadful group struggled by into the hall, he froze her to him with a whisper: “The spine–-“
XXVI
WITHIN Justine there was a moment’s darkness; then, like terror-struck workers rallying to their tasks, every faculty was again at its post, receiving and transmitting signals, taking observations, anticipating orders, making her brain ring with the hum of a controlled activity.
She had known the sensation before—the transmuting of terror and pity into this miraculous lucidity of thought and action; but never had it snatched her from such depths. Oh, thank heaven for her knowledge now—for the trained mind that could take command of her senses and bend them firmly to its service!
Wyant seconded her well, after a moment’s ague-fit of fear. She pitied and pardoned the moment, aware of its cause, and respecting him for the way in which he rose above it into the clear air of professional self-command. Through the first hours they worked shoulder to shoulder, conscious of each other only as of kindred will-powers, stretched to the utmost tension of discernment and activity, and hardly needing speech or look to further their swift co-operation. It was thus that she had known him in the hospital, in the heat of his youthful zeaclass="underline" the doctor she liked best to work with, because no other so tempered ardour with judgment.
The great surgeon, arriving from town at midnight, confirmed his diagnosis: there was undoubted injury to the spine. Other consultants were summoned in haste, and in the winter dawn the verdict was pronounced—a fractured vertebra, and possibly lesion of the cord….
Justine got a moment alone when the surgeons returned to the sick-room. Other nurses were there now, capped, aproned, quickly and silently unpacking their appliances…. She must call a halt, clear her brain again, decide rapidly what was to be done next…. Oh, if only the crawling hours could bring Amherst! It was strange that there was no telegram yet—no, not strange, after all, since it was barely six in the morning, and her message had not been despatched till seven the night before. It was not unlikely that, in that little southern settlement, the telegraph office closed at six.
She stood in Bessy’s sitting-room, her forehead pressed to the window-pane, her eyes straining out into the thin February darkness, through which the morning star swam white. As soon as she had yielded her place to the other nurses her nervous tension relaxed, and she hung again above the deeps of anguish, terrified and weak. In a moment the necessity for action would snatch her back to a firm footing—her thoughts would clear, her will affirm itself, all the wheels of the complex machine resume their functions. But now she felt only the horror….
She knew so well what was going on in the next room. Dr. Garford, the great surgeon, who had known her at Saint Elizabeth’s, had evidently expected her to take command of the nurses he had brought from town; but there were enough without her, and there were other cares which, for the moment, she only could assume—the despatching of messages to the scattered family, the incessant telephoning and telegraphing to town, the general guidance of the household swinging rudderless in the tide of disaster. Cicely, above all, must be watched over and guarded from alarm. The little governess, reduced to a twittering heap of fears, had been quarantined in a distant room till reason returned to her; and the child, meanwhile, slept quietly in the old nurse’s care.
Cicely would wake presently, and Justine must go up to her with a bright face; other duties would press thick on the heels of this; their feet were already on the threshold. But meanwhile she could only follow in imagination what was going on in the other room….
She had often thought with dread of such a contingency. She always sympathized too much with her patients—she knew it was the joint in her armour. Her quick-gushing pity lay too near that professional exterior which she had managed to endue with such a bright glaze of insensibility that some sentimental patients—without much the matter—had been known to call her “a little hard.” How, then, should she steel herself if it fell to her lot to witness a cruel accident to some one she loved, and to have to perform a nurse’s duties, steadily, expertly, unflinchingly, while every fibre was torn with inward anguish?
She knew the horror of it now—and she knew also that her self-enforced exile from the sick-room was a hundred times worse. To stand there, knowing, with each tick of the clock, what was being said and done within—how the great luxurious room, with its pale draperies and scented cushions, and the hundred pretty trifles strewing the lace toilet-table and the delicate old furniture, was being swept bare, cleared for action like a ship’s deck, drearily garnished with rows of instruments, rolls of medicated cotton, oiled silk, bottles, bandages, water-pillows—all the grim paraphernalia of the awful rites of pain: to know this, and to be able to call up with torturing vividness that poor pale face on the pillows, vague-eyed, expressionless, perhaps, as she had last seen it, or—worse yet—stirred already with the first creeping pangs of consciousness: to have these images slowly, deliberately burn themselves into her brain, and to be aware, at the same time, of that underlying moral disaster, of which the accident seemed the monstrous outward symbol—ah, this was worse than anything she had ever dreamed!