The Great Amulet Part 48

"No change at all?"

"Not the slightest. But I know . . she's alive."

Mackay scrutinised the awful stillness on the bed.

"We must try hypodermic injection," he said gently. "And in the meantime . . ." he went over to a table strewn with sick-room paraphernalia, and poured out half a pint of champagne, "you'll please drink that."

And as Desmond obeyed automatically, his hand shook so that the edge of the tumbler rattled against his teeth. The body was beginning to a.s.sert itself at last. But the stinging liquid revived him; and in a silence, broken only by an abrupt direction or request from the Scotchman, the last available resources were tried again and yet again, without result. Finally Mackay looked up, and Desmond read the verdict in his eyes.

"My dear man, it's no use," he said simply. "She's beyond our reach now."

Desmond's lips whitened: but he braced his shoulders. "She's not. I don't believe it," he answered, on a toneless note of decision. And the other knew that only the slow torture of the night-watches could brand the truth into his brain.

With a gesture of weariness, infinitely pathetic, he turned back to the bed, and bending down, mechanically rearranged the sheet, and smoothed a crease or two out of the pillow. The bowed back and shoulders, despite their suppleness and strength, had in them a pathos too deep for tears: and Mackay, feeling himself dismissed, went noiselessly out.

For a long moment Desmond's unnatural stoicism held firm. Then, deep down in him, something seemed to snap. With a dry, choking sob, he flung himself on his knees beside the bed, and the waters came in even unto his soul.

It seemed a thing incredible that one hour could hold such a store of anguish. The half of his personality, the hidden life of heart and spirit, seemed dead already: and in that first shuddering sense of loneliness, time was not.

A familiar choking sensation recalled him to outward things. The punkah coolie had fallen asleep; and in a fever of irritation he sprang to his feet. Then the thought pierced him: "What on earth does it matter . . now?"

But the trivial p.r.i.c.k of discomfort had, in some inexplicable fashion, readjusted the balance of things; reawakened the conviction that had so strangely upheld him throughout the day; and with it the spirit of 'no surrender,' which was the very essence of the man. All the tales he had heard of cholera patients literally dragged from the brink of the grave by devoted nursing crowded in upon him, like reinforcements backing up a forlorn hope, and once again he bent over his wife, caressing the crisp upward sweep of her hair.

"Honor, you _shall_ live. By G.o.d, you shall!" he whispered low in her ear, as though her spirit could hear and take comfort from the a.s.surance.

A downward jerk of the punkah rope set the great frill flapping with ostentatious vigour; and he himself set to work again no less vigorously; fighting death hand to hand with every weapon at command.

He clung to his renewed hope with a desperation that was terrible; realising more acutely than before that to let go of her was to fall into nameless s.p.a.ces void of companionship and love. Once or twice the flicker of the punkah frill created an illusion of movement in the face, and his heart leapt into his throat, only to sink to the depths again when he discovered his mistake. But nothing now could turn him from his purpose; or quench that indomitable determination to succeed which is one of the strongest levers of the world.

And at long-last, when persistence had begun to seem mere folly, came the first faint shadow of change. Slowly, very slowly, her face appeared to be losing the bluish tinge of cholera. Fearful lest imagination should be cheating him, he fetched the lamp, and held it over her. Unquestionably the colour had improved.

The loose chimney rattled as he set down the lamp; and he spilled half the brandy he tried to pour into a spoon. Then, steadying himself by a supreme effort, he managed to pour a little of it between her lips, watching with suspended breath for the least sign of moisture at the corners. A drop or two trickled uselessly out, but the muscles of her throat stirred slightly, and the rest was retained.

Then for a moment Desmond let himself go. With a low cry he leaned down, and slipping both arms under her, pressed his lips upon her cold ones, long and pa.s.sionately, as though he would impart to her the very power of his spirit, the living warmth of his body and heart. And at length, he was aware of a faint unmistakable attempt to return his pressure. He could have shouted for sheer triumph. It was as if he had created her anew. But love, having achieved its perfect work, must be kept under subjection till the accepted moment.

A little more brandy, a little more chafing of hands and limbs, and the miracle was complete. By degrees, as imperceptible as the coming of dawn, life stole back in response to his touch. She stirred, drew a deep breath, and opened her eyes.

"Theo, . . is it you? Have I . . got you . . still?"

It was her own voice, clear and low, no longer the husky whisper of cholera. The caress in it penetrated like pain; and tears, sharp as knives, forced their way between his lids.

"Yes, my darling; . . . and I've got _you_ still," he answered, his tenderness hovering over her like a flutter of wings.

"But what happened? I thought . . ."

"Don't tire your dear head with thinking. By G.o.d's mercy, I dragged you back from the utmost edge of things; and you've come to stay.

That's enough for me."

Ten minutes later she was sleeping, lightly and naturally, her head nestling in the crook of his elbow, one hand clinging to a morsel of his shirt; while he leaned above her, half-sitting, half-lying on the extreme edge of the bed, not daring to shift his strained position by so much as a hair's-breadth; till overwhelming weariness had its way with him, and he slept also, his head fallen back against the wall.

When at last he awoke, a pale shaft of light was feeling its way across the room from the long gla.s.s door that gave upon the verandah. Outside in the garden the crows and squirrels were awake, and talkative. The well-wheel had begun its plaintive music, punctuated with the plash of falling water, and the new day, in a sheet of flame, rolled up unconcernedly from the other side of the world.

Honor had turned over in her sleep, leaving him free to rise, and stretch himself exhaustedly; and as he stood looking down upon the night's achievement, upon the rhythmical rise and fall of his wife's breast beneath its light covering, new fires were kindled in the man's deep heart; new intimations of the height and depth, and power of that 'grand impulsion,' which men call Love; and with these, a new humility that forced him down upon his knees in a wordless ecstasy of thanksgiving.

CHAPTER XXIII.

"They are one and one, with a shadowy third; One near one is too far."

--Browning.

Quita was troubled.

A full week had elapsed since that day so strangely compounded of rapture and dread; of matter-of-fact service, and shy, tender intimacies that had seemed to set a seal on the completeness of their reunion. Yet, in the days that followed, she had been increasingly aware of a nameless something, an indefinable constraint between them, which instinct told her would not have been there if conscience had surrendered all along the line.

It was not his mere avoidance, after the first, of caresses congenial to the opening phase of marriage that disconcerted her. Such emotional reticence squared with her idea of the man. She would not have had him otherwise. They were sure of one another; and in both natures pa.s.sion was proud and fastidious. It could thrive without much lip-service.

The undefined aloofness that troubled Quita was spiritual, rather than physical. She was conscious of walls within walls, separating her from his essential self; and behind these again of an un.o.btrusive reserve force, whose power of endurance she could not estimate; because her dealings with Michael's shallower nature had afforded her no experience of a moral stability free from the warp of the personal equation. It was as if some intangible part of him, over which she could establish no hold, stood persistently afar off,--tormented, but immovable.

She could not know that the form of opium administered during his illness had revived and strengthened temptation when he himself was physically unfit to cope with it; that by her impulsive return to him, at a critical moment, she was forcing him open-eyed toward a catastrophe more lasting, more terrible for them both, than the initial harm done by her rejection of him five years ago. Reserve and self-disgust made speech on the subject seem a thing impossible; while his mere man's chivalry shrank from allowing her to guess that by an act of seeming reparation, she had run grave risk of putting real reparation out of her power. Once only did the love that consumed him break through the restraint he put upon himself in sheer self-defence.

It was the first day he had been allowed up at a normal hour; and coming into the dining-room, he had found her alone at her easel, near one of the long gla.s.s doors. At the sound of his step she turned her canvas round swiftly, and came to him with a glad lift of her head. He took her hands in his big grasp, and kissed her forehead.

"Good morning, la.s.s," he said. "You never told me you had brought that with you. Couldn't be divorced from it, eh? What's the great work now? May I see?"

"But yes, naturally. I've been keeping it as a surprise for you. I don't believe I should ever have got through this last fortnight without it. _Voila_!"

She set it facing him, and standing so with her eyes on the picture, waited eagerly for his word of praise. But as the seconds pa.s.sed, and it did not come, she turned, to find him looking at her, not at the picture; his teeth tormenting his lower lip; a suspicious film dimming the clear blue of his eyes. Emboldened by this last incredible phenomenon, she came and stood close to him, yet without touching him.

"Darling, you do like it, don't you? I can't complete it till you give me a few sittings; but then--it will be my masterpiece. I shall never show it, at home, though. It's too much a part of myself . . . my very inmost self."

And he could not withhold the demonstration that such a confession provoked.

"Oh, my dear," he said at last, without releasing her. "You made too little of me once; and now you're making too much. I'm not worth it all."

She put a hand on his lips.

"Be quiet! I won't hear you when you talk so. Look properly at my picture now. You haven't told me it's good."

"Of course it's good. Amazingly good. But . . ." he laughed, a short contented laugh--"it's beyond me how you could be misguided enough to waste your remarkable talent in perpetuating anything so ugly!"

Her smile hinted at superior knowledge; yet she paid his obvious sincerity the compliment of not contradicting his final statement.

"In the first place, because I love it. And in the second place, because, for all true artists, who see in form and colour just a soul's attempts at self-expression, there is more essential beauty in certain kinds . . . of ugliness, than in the most faultless symmetry of lines and curves. One is almost tempted to say that there is no such thing as actual ugliness; that it is all a matter of understanding, of seeing deep enough. For instance, I find that essential beauty I spoke of in Mrs Olliver's face."

"Ah . . . so do I; of a rare quality."