The White Sister Part 8

'I am sorry,' answered the physician, with a smile, 'but it is my business to have a head instead. You asked my opinion and I have given it, as I would to another doctor. The old-fashioned ones would laugh at me, the younger ones would understand.'

'If you could only make the poor child sleep a little! Is there nothing?'

'She is not neurasthenic,' the doctor objected. 'It would be of no use to give her sleeping medicines, for after a few days they would have no effect, except to excite her nerves unnaturally.'

'Or something to give her an appet.i.te,' suggested Madame Bernard vaguely.

'She has an excellent appet.i.te if she only knew it. The reason why she does not eat is that she does not know she is hungry, though she is half starved. I served in the African campaign when I was a young military surgeon. I have seen healthy men faint for want of food when they had plenty at hand because they could not realise that they were hungry in their intense preoccupation. Great emotions close the entrance to the stomach, often for a considerable time. It is well known, and it is easier than you think to form the habit of living on next to nothing. It is the first step that counts.'

'As they said of Saint Denis when he carried his head three steps after it was cut off,' said Madame Bernard thoughtfully, and without a smile.

'Precisely,' the doctor a.s.sented. 'I myself have seen a man sit his horse at a full gallop, without relaxing his hold, for fifty yards after he had been shot through the head. The seat of the nerves that direct automatic motion is not in the brain, but appears to be in the body, near the spine. When it is not injured, what used to be called unconscious cerebration may continue for several seconds after death.

Similarly, bodily habits, like feeling hunger or being insensible to it, appear to have their origin in those ganglions and not in any sort of thought. Consequently, thought alone, without a strong exercise of the will, has little effect upon such habits of the body. When a man does a thing he does not mean to do, and says "I cannot help it," he is admitting this fact. If you were to ask Donna Angela if she means to starve herself to death deliberately, she would deny it with indignation, but would tell you that she really cannot eat, and meanwhile she is starving. Give her a comparatively harmless illness like the measles, severe enough to break up the ordinary automatic habits of the body, and she will eat again, with an excellent appet.i.te. In all probability I could give her the measles by artificial means, but unfortunately that sort of treatment is not yet authorised!'

The young doctor, who was not by any means a dreamer, seemed much amused at his own conclusion, which looks absurd even on paper, and Madame Bernard did not believe a word he said. In questions of medicine women are divided into two great cla.s.ses, those who will consult any doctor and try anything, and those who only ask the doctor's opinion when they are forced to, and who generally do precisely the opposite of what he suggests. This is a more practical view and is probably the safer, if they must go to one of the two extremes. Moreover, doctors are so much inclined to disagree that when three of them give a unanimous opinion it is apt to be worthless.

The only immediate result of Madame Bernard's consultation with the doctor was that she disappointed one of her pupils the next day in order to gain an hour, which she devoted to making a very exquisite 'mousse de volaille' for Angela. The poor girl was much touched, but could only eat two or three mouthfuls, and the effort she made to overcome her repugnance was so unmistakable that the good little Frenchwoman was more anxious for her than hurt at the failure.

She had tried two sciences, she said to herself, but the doctor of medicine had talked the nonsense of theories to her, and the combined wisdom of Vatel, Brillat-Savarin, and Careme had proved fruitless. A person who could not eat Madame Bernard's 'mousse de volaille' could only be cured by a miracle. Accordingly, she determined to consult a churchman without delay, and went out early in the afternoon. Angela did not notice that she was dressed with more than usual care, as if for a visit of importance.

She had been gone about half-an-hour, and the young girl was sitting in her accustomed place, listless and apathetic as usual, when the door-bell rang, and a moment later the woman-servant came in, saying that a foreign gentleman was on the landing who insisted on seeing Angela, even though she was alone. After giving a long and not flattering description of his appearance, the woman held out the card he had given her. Angela glanced at it and read the name of Filmore Durand, and above, in pencil, half-a-dozen words: 'I have brought you a portrait.'

Angela did not understand in the least, though she tried hard to concentrate her thoughts.

'Ask the gentleman to come in,' she answered at last, hardly knowing what she said.

She turned her face to the window again, and in the course of thirty seconds, when she was roused by Durand's voice in the room, she had almost forgotten that he was in the house. She had not heard English spoken since she had left his studio on the morning when her father died, and she started at the sound. For weeks, nothing had made such an impression on her.

She rose to receive the great painter, who was standing near the table in the middle of the room, looking at her in surprise and real anxiety, for she was little more than a shadow of the girl he had painted six weeks or two months earlier. He himself had brought in a good-sized picture, wrapped in new brown paper; it stood beside him on the floor, reaching as high as his waist, and his left hand rested on the upper edge. He held out the other to Angela, who took it apathetically.

'You have been very ill,' he said in a tone of concern.

'No,' she answered. 'I am only a little tired. Will you not sit down?'

She sank into her seat again, and one thin hand lay on the cushioned arm of the chair. Instead of seating himself, Durand lifted the picture, still wrapped up, and set it upright on the table, so that it faced her.

'I heard,' he said in a low voice, 'so I did this for you from memory and a photograph.'

There was a sudden crackling and tearing of the strong paper as he ripped it off with a single movement, and then there was absolute silence for some time. Angela seemed not even to breathe, as she leaned forward with parted lips and unwinking, wondering eyes.

Then, without even a warning breath, a cry broke from her heart.

'He is not dead! You have seen him again! He is alive--they have cheated me!'

Then she choked and leaned back, pressing her handkerchief to her mouth.

Instead of answering, the painter bent his head and looked down sideways at his own astounding handiwork, and for the second time in that year he was almost satisfied. Presently, as Angela said nothing more, he was going to move the canvas, to show it in a better light, but she thought he meant to take it away.

'No!' she cried imperatively. 'Not yet! Let me see it--let me understand----'

Her words died away and she was silent again, her eyes fixed on the portrait. At last she rose, came forward, and laid both her thin hands on the narrow black and gold frame.

'I must have it,' she said. 'You must let me have it, though I cannot pay for it. But I will some day. I will work till I can earn enough money, or till I die--and if that comes soon, they will give you back the picture. You cannot take it away!'

Durand saw that she had not understood.

'It is for you,' he said. 'I painted it to give to you. You see, after your father died, I kept yours--I never meant them to have it, but it seemed as if I owed you something for it, and this is to pay my debt.

Do you see?'

'How kind you are!' she cried. 'How very, very kind! I do not quite follow the idea--my head is always so tired now--but I knew you would understand how I should feel--if I accepted it without any return!'

So far as arithmetic went, the man of genius and the broken-hearted girl were equally far from ordinary reckoning. Durand knew that by a turn of luck he had been able to keep the only portrait he had ever been sorry to part with when it was finished, and he was intimately convinced that he owed somebody something for such an unexpected pleasure; on her side, Angela was quite sure that unless the portrait of the man she had loved was to be an equivalent for some sort of obligation she could not be satisfied to keep it all her life unpaid for.

It filled the little sitting-room with light and colour, as a t.i.tian might have done; it was as intensely alive as Giovanni Severi had been--the eyes were full of those quick little coruscations of fire that had made them so unlike those of other men, the impulsive nostrils seemed to quiver, the healthy young blood seemed to come and go in the tanned cheeks, the square shoulders were just ready to make that quick, impatient little movement that had been so characteristic of him, so like the sudden tension of every muscle when a thoroughbred scents sport or danger. No ordinary artist would ever have seen all there was in the man, even in a dozen sittings, but the twin gifts of sight and memory had unconsciously absorbed and held the whole, and a skill that was never outdone in its time had made memory itself visible on the canvas. Something that was neither a 'harmless illness'

nor a 'miracle' had waked Angela from her torpor.

'How can I thank you?' she asked, after a long pause. 'You do not know what it is to me to see his living face--you will call it an illusion--it seems as if----'

She broke off suddenly and pressed her handkerchief to her lips again.

'Only what you call the unreal can last unchanged for a while,' the painter said, catching at the word she had used, and thinking more of his art than of her. 'Only an ideal can be eternal, but every honest attempt to give it shape has a longer life than any living creature.

Nature makes only to destroy, but art creates for the very sake of preserving the beautiful.'

She heard each sentence, but was too absorbed in the portrait to follow his meaning closely. Perhaps it would have escaped her if she had tried.

'Only good and evil are everlasting,' she said, almost unconsciously repeating words she had heard somewhere when she was a child.

Durand looked at her quickly, but he saw that she was not really thinking.

'What is "good"?' he asked, as if he were sure that there was no answer to the question.

It attracted her attention, and she turned to him; she was coming back to life.

'Whatever helps people is good,' she said.

'The French proverb says "Help thyself and G.o.d will help thee,"'

suggested Durand.

'No, it should be "Help others, and G.o.d will help you,"' Angela answered.

The artist fixed his eyes on her as he nodded a silent a.s.sent; and suddenly, though her face was so changed, he knew it was more like his portrait of her than ever, and that the prophecy of his hand was coming to fulfilment.

He stayed a moment longer, and asked if he could be of any service to her or Madame Bernard. She thanked him vaguely, and almost smiled. He felt instinctively that she was thinking of what she had last said, and was wishing that some one would tell her how she might do something for others, rather than that another should do anything for her.

She went with him to the door at the head of the stairs and let him out herself.

'Thank you,' she said, 'thank you! You don't know what you have done for me!'