The Gates Between Part 10

Halt and Gazell were now consulting in an undertone, touching the selection of a certain remedy; no one noticed them, and they droned on.

The mother crooned over the child, and caressed him, and breathed upon his sunken little face, and poured her soul out over him in precious floods and wastes of tenderness as mothers do.

"Live, my little son!" she whispered. "Live, live!"

But I, meanwhile, was watching the two physicians miserably. "There!"

I said, "they have dropped the phial on the floor. See, that is the one they ought to have. It rolled away. They don't mean to take it.

They will give him the wrong thing. Oh, how can they?"

But now the mother, when she heard me speak, swiftly and gently removed her arms from beneath the boy, and, advancing to the hesitating men, stood silently between them, and laid a hand upon the arm of each.

While she stood there she had a rapt, high look of such sort that I could in no wise have addressed her.

"Are you _sure_, Dr. Gazell?" asked Halt.

"I _think_ so," said Gazell.

He stooped, after a moment's hesitation, and picked up the phial from the floor, read its label; laid it down, looked at the child, and hesitated again.

The mother at this juncture sunk upon her knees and bowed her shining face. I thought she seemed to be at prayer. I too bowed my head; but it was for reverence at the sight of her. It was long since I had prayed. I did not find it natural to do so. A strange discontent, something almost like an inclination to prayer, came upon me. But that was all. I would rather have had the power to turn those two men out of the room, and pour the saving remedy upon my little patient's burning tongue with my own flesh-and-blood fingers, and a hearty objurgation on the professional blunder which I had come in time to rectify.

"Dr. Halt," said Dr. Gazell, slowly, "with your approval I think I will change my mind. On the whole, the indications point to--this. I trust it is the appropriate remedy."

He removed the cork from the phial as he spoke, and, rising, pa.s.sed quickly to the bedside of the child.

The mother had now arisen from her knees, and followed him, and got her arms about the boy again, and set her soul to brooding over him in the way that loving women have. I was of no further service to her, and I had vanished from her thought, which had no more room at that moment for anything except the child than the arms with which she clasped him.

It amazed me--I was going to say it appalled me--that no person in the room should seem to have consciousness of her presence. She was like an invisible star. How incredible that love like that, and the power of it, could be dependent upon the paltry senses of what are called live people for so much as the proofs of its existence.

"It is not scientific," I caught myself saying, as I turned away, "there is a flaw in the logic somewhere. There seems to be a snapped link between two sets of facts. There is no deficiency of data; the difficulty lies wholly in collating them."

How, indeed, should I--how did I but a few days since--myself regard such "data" as presumed to indicate the continuance of human life beyond the point of physical decay!

"After all," I thought, as I wandered from the house in which I felt myself forgotten and superfluous, and pursued my lonely way, I knew not whither and I knew not why,--"after all, there is another life. I really did not think it."

It seemed now to have been an extraordinary narrowness of intellect in me that I had not at least attached more weight to the universal human hypothesis. I did not precisely wonder from a personal point of view that I had not definitely believed it; but I wondered that I had not given the possibility the sort of attention which a view of so much dignity deserved. It really annoyed me that I had made that kind of mistake.

We, at least, were alive,--my old patient and I. Whether others, or how many, or of what sort, I could not tell; I had yet seen no other spirit. What was the life-force in this new condition of things?

Where was the central cell? What _made_ us go on living? Habit? Or selection? Thought? Emotion? Vigour? If the last, what species of vigour? What was that in the individual which gave it strength to stay? Whence came the reproductive power which was able to carry on the species under such terrible antagonism as the fact of death? If in the body, where was the common element between that attenuated invalid and my robust organization? If in the soul, between the suffering saint and the joyous man of the world, where again was our common moral protoplasm?

Nothing occurred to me at the time, at least, as offering any spiritual likeness between myself and Mrs. Faith, but the fact that we were both people of strong affections which had been highly cultivated. Might not a woman _love_ herself into continued existence who felt for any creature what she did for that child?

And I--G.o.d knew, if there were a G.o.d, how it was with me. If I had never done anything, if I had never been anything, if I had never felt anything else in all my life, that was fit to _last_, I had loved one woman, and her only, and had thought high thoughts for her, and felt great emotions for her, and forgotten self for her sake, and thought it sweet to suffer for her, and been a better man for love of her. And I had loved her,--oh, I had so loved her, that I knew in my soul ten thousand deaths could not murder that living love.

And I had spoken to her--I had said to her--like any low and brutal fellow, any common wife-tormentor--I had gone from her dear presence to this mute life wherein there was neither speech nor language; where neither earth, nor heaven, nor my love, nor my remorse, nor all my anguish, nor my shame, could give my sealed lips the power to say, Forgive.

Now, while I was cast thus abroad upon the night,--for it was night,--sorely shaken and groaning in spirit, taking no care where my homeless feet should lead me, I lifted my eyes suddenly, and looked straight on before me, and behold! shining afar, fair and sweet and clear, I saw and recognized the lights of my own home.

I was still at some distance from the spot, and, beside myself with joy, I started to run unto it. With the swift motions which spirits make, and which I was beginning now to master in a clumsy manner and low degree, I came, compa.s.sing the s.p.a.ce between myself and all I loved or longed for, and so brought myself tumultuously into the street where the house stood; there, at a stone's throw from it, I felt myself suddenly stifled with my haste, or from some cause, and, pausing (as we used to say) to gather breath, I found that I was stricken back, and fettered to the ground.

There was no wind. The night was perfectly still. Not a leaf quivered on the topmost branch of the linden which tapped our chamber-window.

Yet a Power like a mighty rushing blast gainsaid me and smote me where I was.

Not a step, though I writhed for it, not a breath nearer, though my heart should break for it, could I take or make to reach her. This was my doom. Within clasp of her dear arms, within sight of her sweet face,--for there! while I stood struggling, I saw a woman's shadow rise and stir upon the dimly lighted wall,--thus to be denied and bidden back from her seemed to me more than heart could bear.

While I stood, quite unmanned by what had happened, incredulous of my punishment, and yearning to her through the little distance, and stretching out my hands toward her, and brokenly babbling her dear name, she moved, and I saw her quite distinctly, even as I had seen her that last time. She stood midway between the unlighted parlour and the lighted library beyond. The drop-light with the scarlet shade blazed behind her.

I noticed that to-night, as on that other night, the baby was not with her; and I wondered why. She stood alone. She moved up and down the room; she had a weary step. Her dress, I saw, was black, dead black.

Her white hands, clasped before her, shone with startling brilliancy upon the sombre stuff she wore. Her lovely head was bent a little, and she seemed to be gazing at me whom she could not see. Then I cried with such a cry, it seemed as if the very living must needs hear:--

"Helen! Helen! _Helen_!"

But she stood quite still; leaning her pale face toward me, like some listening creature that was stricken deaf.

The sight was more sorrowful than I could brave; for the first time since I had died I succ.u.mbed into something like a swoon, and lost my miserable consciousness in the street before her door.

CHAPTER XII.

When I came again to myself I found that what I should once have called a "phenomenon" had taken place. The city, the dim street, the familiar architecture of my home, the streams of light from the long windows, the leaves of the linden tapping on the gla.s.s, the woman's shadow on the wall, and the stirring toward me of the form and face I loved,--these had vanished.

I was in a strange place; and I was a stranger in it. It seemed rather a lonely place at first, though it was not unpleasing to me as I looked abroad. The scenery was mountainous and solemn, but it was therefore on a large scale and restful to the eye. It had more grandeur than beauty, to my first impression; but I remembered that I was not in a condition of mind to be receptive of the merely beautiful, which might exist for me without my perception of it, even as the life of the dead existed without the perception of the living. Death, if it had taught me less up to that time than it might have done to n.o.bler men, had at least done so much as this: it had accustomed me to respect the unseen, and to regard its possible action upon the seen as a matter of import.

As I looked forth upon the hills and skies, the plains and forests, and on to the distant signs of human habitation in the scenery about me, I thought:--

"I am in a world where it is probable that there exist a thousand things which I cannot understand to one which I can."

It seemed to me a very uncomfortable state of affairs, whatever it was.

I felt estranged from this place, even before I was acquainted with it.

Nothing in my nature responded to its atmosphere; or, if so, petulantly and with a kind of helpless antagonism, like the first cry of the new-born infant in the old life.

As I got myself languidly to my feet, and idly trod the path which lay before me, for lack of knowing any better thing to do, I began to perceive that others moved about the scene; that I was not, as I had thought, alone, but one of a company, each going on his errand as he would. I only seemed to have no errand; and I was at a great distance from these people, whose presence, however, though so remote, gave me something of the sense of companionship which one whose home is in a lonely spot upon a harbour coast has in watching the head-lights of anch.o.r.ed ships upon dark nights. Communication there is none, but desolation is less for knowing that there could be, or for fancying that there might.

Across the s.p.a.ce between us, I looked upon my fellow-citizens in this new country, with a dull emotion not unlike grat.i.tude for their existence; but I felt little curiosity about them. I was too unhappy to be so easily diverted. It seemed to me that the memory of my wife would become a mania to me, if I could in no way make known to her how utterly I loved her and how I scorned myself. I cannot say that I felt much definite interest in the novel circ.u.mstances surrounding me, except as possible resources for some escape from the situation, as it stood between herself and me. If I could compa.s.s any means of communicating with her, I believed that I could accept my doom, let it take me where it might or make of me what it would.

Walking thus drearily, alone, and not sorry to be alone in that unfamiliar company, lost in the fixed idea of my own misery, I suddenly heard light footsteps hurrying behind me. I thought:--

"There is another spirit; one more of the newly dead, come to this strange place."

But I did not find it worth my while to turn and greet him, being so wrapt in my own fate; and when a soft hand touched my arm, I moved from it with something like dismay.

"Why, Doctor!" said the gentle voice of Mrs. Faith, "did I startle you?

I have been hunting for you everywhere," she added, laughing lightly.

"I was afraid you would feel rather desolate. It is a pity. Now, I am as _happy_!"

"Did Charley live?" I asked immediately.

"Oh yes, Charley lived; what we used to call living, when we were there. Poor Charley! I keep thinking how he would enjoy everything if he were here with me. But his father needed him. It makes me so happy! I am very happy! Tell me, Doctor, what do you think of this place? How does it strike you?"