The young man in the corner glanced up suddenly, pushed the white pasteboard box to one side, and then pushed it back again where it had been. Turning his head, he looked with fixed, opaque eyes through the window; and immediately, as if moved by a spring, every head in the room turned toward the window and looked out into the rain. "It must be over," General Archbald thought. "It must be over by now." Taking out his watch, he glanced at the face of it, pondering, while all the eyes in the room turned slowly and followed his movements. Two hours since they had taken her away. Time to go back. Nothing like that could possibly take two whole hours.
Rising from the sofa, he crossed the room slowly and carefully and went to the door. Before he had taken a step into the hall, a needle of burning pain stabbed into his joints, and he thought, with tightened lips, "Why is it always like this? Why is pain so much sharper, so much more living than joy?" As he steadied himself with his stick, Mrs. Archbald hurried out of Eva's room, and slipped to his side. "It is over, Father, and she stood it splendidly. John has just told us, and he says Doctor Bridges was wonderful. I am so thankful."
He tried to follow her words, to take in all she was telling him. But the pain in his joints was too intense. "Yes, I'm thankful, I'm thankful," he repeated. "If it is over, may we go home now?"
"Yes, we'd better go home. George is coming with us. I have persuaded him not to stay with her when she comes from under the ether. She asked me not to leave him."
"Then we'd better go, we'd better go." For he had borne all he could bear. This pain was growing worse every minute. "Do we have to wait long?"
"Just a minute. He is to join us in the car as soon as she is brought down. He isn't satisfied to go until he has had a glimpse of her, but after she comes to, she will be too sick to see any one, even George—especially George." To the old man's astonishment, he found that Cora, who so seldom cried naturally, was crying now as if she enjoyed it. "I can't help it," she said, taking a handkerchief out of her bag and wiping her eyes. "I can't help it," her voice was a sob, "because I have a feeling that she would rather not—would rather not--"
Yes, he had felt that too. In his heart he was convinced that Eva did not wish to come back. "One has no choice," he murmured, more to himself than to Cora. "Unfortunately, in such matters, one has no choice."
"I don't know what they told her; but she seemed to know that she might, even if she lived through it, be an invalid for a long time—for a very long time."
"Shall we go down now?"
"I told George to come out to the car. George," she continued, as if she were thinking of something else, "can be very trying." Then, still thinking of something else, she began to weep afresh, and he realized, with a dull recoil from emotion, that she was putting herself in Eva's place, and responding with Eva's temperament, not with her own.
"Let's go, let's go," he said urgently. "It will be easier outside in the air." Clinging to her arm, he hurried her downstairs, into the hall, and through the door of the hospital. As they crossed the pavement, he noticed that the rain had stopped and the heavy clouds in the west were scattered by a spear of sunlight. While they waited for George, the old man huddled down in one corner of the car and counted the red-hot twinges of pain in his joints. One, two, three; then over again, one, two, three. Eva an invalid, he thought, without feeling the sharp edge of the blow. No matter how long the world lasted, there would never be another woman like her. Nature had ceased to make queenly women. There was the fiery dart coming back. One, two, three. Would George keep them waiting much longer? One, two, three.
Mrs. Archbald leaned over and patted his hand. "As soon as I am at home, I shall go down on my knees and thank God that she came through it so well."
CHAPTER 6
George left the hospital as if he were running. The skin about his mouth was drawn and sallow, and there were swollen and inflamed puffs under his eyes.
"She looks well," he said. "I had a glimpse as they were taking her into the room, and she looked like a girl asleep." Then jerking off his hat and running his hand through his hair, he added desperately, "I've come to the end. Of course I'm going back a little later, but I must have a smoke and a drink."
"Why not take a nap?" Mrs. Archbald inquired. "The nurse told me you were at the hospital nearly all night. It is much better for Eva not to try to see her until she feels better."
"Yes, I know." He caught eagerly at the suggestion. "She won't have anybody with her when she is sick. As if a thing like that made any difference to me."
"Well, it's better to humour her. Will you come in and let me make you a julep?" Though Mrs. Archbald disapproved of a julep in the early hours of the day, she realized, being a broad-minded woman, that there are exceptions to every rule of right living. "I am sure Father needs a thimbleful, but he never touches a drop until after sunset."
"Thank you, I'd better go straight home. I'm not fit company just now for anybody, and I know you both need a rest. I shall never forget how you stood by us." His voice was flat with fatigue, and the General saw that he was at last empty of words. In the recoil from overstrained emotion, all that mattered was a brief escape from too intense a reality.
When the car reached his gate, he muttered, "I shall never cease to be grateful," as automatically as if the words were spoken by a machine. A moment later he jumped out of the car, entered the gate without glancing back, and went rapidly up the path to the small grey porch, where the wistaria was just beginning to bloom.
"It is a pity," Mrs. Archbald sighed, as they drove on to the red brick house, set well within a black iron fence, at the other end of the block, "that strong emotions have so little staying power."
"If strong emotions had staying power, my dear, none of us could survive them."
Again Mrs. Archbald sighed and considered. "I sometimes wonder if two persons who love each other so deeply can ever be happy together."
"It is a question. Certainly, the great lovers of history are not often the happy lovers."
As the car stopped, and Jenny Blair waved to them from the window, her mother remarked uneasily, "Well, after to-day, I shall never doubt his devotion. Perhaps they might have been happier if she had been less jealous by nature."
"Or he more faithful. . . ." Baxter had opened the door of the car, and while the old man stepped cautiously to the pavement, he tried to remember that Eva had her faults as a wife, that she was exacting in little ways, as close as the bark on a tree (so Cora had said), and jealous of every look George turned on a woman. But it was in vain that he forced himself to dwell on her failings. A great love, he thought, is always exacting; it was for George's sake that she had learned to be penny wise; and every chaste woman, according to the code of his youth, is naturally jealous. No matter how firmly he recited her imperfections by name, he found that they scattered like specks of dust before the memory of her face above the grey blanket on the stretcher, with her two childish plaits brought forward over her bosom.