Straight on before them stretched the street, a wide and unobstructed way at first, but narrowing a little farther on, where there were, besides, buildings going up, and great piles of lumber standing far out in the road, and heaps of sand, and mortar-beds. Could he possibly get the horses under control before they reached those cruel lumber piles, where to be thrown meant death or worse? They were running wildly, and it was down hill all the way. She did not believe that human strength could do it, not even Neil’s, and he was as strong as he was tender. She looked down at his hands and noticed how white the knuckles were, and how the veins stood out, and then she bent her head that she might not see those fatal obstructions in their way, and clasped her hands as tightly as her lips. She found herself senselessly repeating, over and over, as if it were a charm, “Broad is the way ... that leadeth to destruction.”
It was a June morning, cool and sweet. If ever, life is dear in June. Her eyes fell on the great bunch of white roses in her lap. He had put them in her hands just as they were starting, and then had bent suddenly and left a quick kiss on the hands. It was only the other day he had told her that he had never, from the very first hour they met, seen her hands without longing to fill them with flowers. Would she be pleased to take notice, now that he possessed the right, he meant to exercise it?
Poor roses! Must they be crushed and mangled, too? She did not like the thought of scarlet stains upon their whiteness, and with some wild thought of saving them—for were they not his roses?—she flung them with a sudden gesture into the street.
“Oh, Christ!” she cried, voicelessly, “spare both of us—or neither!”
It was just then that the horses swerved and reared, the carriage struck something in the road and tilted sharply to the right. She clutched the side involuntarily and kept her seat. When, a second later, the carriage had righted itself, and the horses, more terrified still and now wholly uncontrolled, were dashing forward again, the place beside her was vacant, and the reins were dragging on the ground.
She shut her eyes and waited. It was not long to wait. There came a crash, a whirl, and then unconsciousness.
The evening papers contained an account of the fortunate escape from serious disaster of Mr. Neil Hardesty and Miss Mildred Fabian, who were on their way to a field meeting of the Hambeth Historical Society when the young blooded horses Mr. Hardesty was driving took fright at a bonfire at the corner of State and Market Streets, and started to run. Owing to the sharp down-grade at this point, their driver was unable to control them. After keeping their course in a mad gallop down State Street for a quarter of a mile, the carriage struck an obstruction, tipped, and Mr. Hardesty was thrown out, being severely bruised, but sustaining no serious injuries. The horses continued running wildly for two blocks more, when one of them ran against a lamp-post and was knocked down, upsetting the carriage and throwing Miss Fabian out. She was picked up unconscious, but beyond a cut on the head was also fortunately uninjured. Mr. Hardesty and Miss Fabian were to be congratulated upon the results of the runaway, as such an accident could hardly occur once in a hundred times without more serious, and probably fatal, consequences.
It was some two weeks later that the family physician, consulting with Mrs. Fabian in the hall, shook his head and said he did not understand it; there was no apparent reason why Miss Mildred should not have rallied immediately from the accident. The shock to her nervous system had doubtless been greater than he had at first supposed. Still, she had been in sound health, and there seemed no sufficient cause for her marked weakness and depression. He would prepare a tonic and send it up.
Meeting Neil Hardesty, himself an unfledged medical student, entering the house, the doctor stopped to observe:
“You must try to rouse your fiancée a little. Can’t you cheer her up, Hardesty? She seems very much depressed nervously. Perhaps it is only natural after such a close shave as you had. I did not care to look death in the face at that age. It sometimes startles young people and happy ones.”
Neil shook his head with an anxious look.
“It is not that,” he said, “for she is half an angel already. But I will do my best,” and he passed on through the broad, airy, darkened hall to the high veranda at the back of the house, where he knew he should find her at that hour.
The veranda overlooked the garden, blazing just then with the flowers of early July. She was lying languidly in her sea-chair; there were books around her, but she had not been reading; and work, but she had not been sewing. One hand was lifted shading her face. The lines around her mouth were fixed as if she were in pain.
He came forward quickly and knelt beside the chair. He was carrying some brilliant clusters of scarlet lilies, and he caught the small and rather chilly hand, and held it over them as if to warm it in their splendid flame.
“Do you know that you look cold?” he demanded. “I want you to look at these and hold them till you are warmed through and through. What an absurd child it is to look so chilly in July!”
She raised her eyes and let them rest on him with a sudden radiant expression of satisfaction.
“It is because you are so unkind as to go away—occasionally,” she remarked. “Do I ever look cold or unhappy or dissatisfied while you are here?”
“Once or twice in the last two weeks you have been all of that. Sweetheart, I must know what it means. Don’t you see you must tell me? How can one do anything for you when one doesn’t know what is the matter? And I am under orders to see that you get well forthwith. The doctor has given you up—to me!”
He was startled when, instead of the laughing answer for which he looked, she caught her breath with half a sob.
“Must I tell you?” she said. “Neil, I do not dare! When you are here I know it is not so. It is only when you are away from me that the hideous thought comes. And I fight it so! It is only because I am tired with fighting it that I do not get strong.”
“Dear, what can you mean?”
She shook her head.
“It is too horrible, and you would never forgive me, though I know it cannot be true. Oh, Neil, Neil, Neil!”
“Mildred, this is folly. I insist that you tell me at once.” His tone had lost its tender playfulness and was peremptory now. “Don’t you see that you are torturing me?” he said.
She looked at him helplessly.
“That day,” she said, reluctantly, “when the carriage tipped and you went out, I thought—I thought you jumped. Neil, don’t look so; I knew you could not have done it, and yet I can’t get rid of the thought, and it tortures me that I can think it—of you. Oh, I have hurt you!”
He was no longer kneeling beside her, but had risen and was leaning against one of the pillars of the veranda, looking down at her with an expression she had never dreamed of seeing in his eyes when they rested on her face. He was white to the lips.
“You thought that? You have thought it these two weeks?”
“I tell you it is torture. Neil, say you did not, and let me be at rest.”
“And you ask me to deny it? You?” His voice was very bitter. “I wonder if you know what you are saying?”
“Neil, Neil, say you did not!”
He set his teeth.
“Never!”
He broke the silence which followed by asking, wearily, at last:
“What was your idea in telling me this, Mildred? Of course you knew it was the sort of thing that is irrevocable.”
“I knew nothing except that I must get rid of the thought.”
“Can’t you imagine what it is to a man to be charged with cowardice?”
“I charge nothing. But if you would only deny it!”
“Oh, this is hopeless!” he said, with an impatient groan. “It is irremediable. If I denied it, you would still doubt; but even if you did not, I could never forget that you had once thought me a coward. There are some things one may not forgive.”
Silence again.
“And my—my wife must never have doubted me.”
She raised her eyes at last.
“If you are going, pray go at once,” she said. “I am too weak for this.”
She said it, but she did not mean it. After all, it was the one impossible thing on earth that anything should come between them. Surely she could not alter the course of two lives by five minutes of unguarded hysterical speech or a week or two of unfounded fretting.
But he took up his hat, and turned it in his hands.
“As you wish,” he said, coldly, and then “Good-morning,” and was gone.
“I think that is all,” said the hurried, jaded doctor to the Northern nurse. “The child is convalescent—you understand about the nourishment?—and you know what to do for Mrs. Leroy? I shall bring some one who will stay with her husband within the hour.”
Outside was the glare of sun upon white sand—a pitiless sun, whose rising and setting seemed the only things done in due order in all the hushed and fever-smitten city. Within was a shaded green gloom and the anguished moaning of a sick woman.
Mildred Fabian, alone with her patients and the one servant who had not deserted the house, faced her work and felt her heart rise with exultation—a singular, sustaining joy that never yet had failed her in the hour of need. The certainty of hard work, the consciousness of danger, the proximity of death—these acted always upon her like some subtle stimulant. If she had tried to explain this, which she did not, she would perhaps have said that at no other time did she have such an overwhelming conviction of the soul’s supremacy as in the hours of human extremity. And this conviction, strongest in the teeth of all that would seem most vehemently to deny it, was to her nothing less than intoxicating.
She was not one of the women to whom there still seems much left in life when love is gone. To be sure, she had the consolations of religion and a certain sweet reasonableness of temperament which prompted her to pick up the pieces after a crash, and make the most of what might be left. But she was obliged to do this in her own way. She was sorry, but she could not do it in her mother’s way.
When she told her family that her engagement was at an end, that she did not care to explain how the break came, and that if they meant to be kind they would please not bother her about it, she knew that her mother would have been pleased to have her take up her old life with a little more apparent enthusiasm for it than she had ever shown before. To be a little gayer, a little more occupied, a little prettier if possible, and certainly a little more fascinating—that was her mother’s idea of saving the pieces. But Mildred’s way was different, and after dutifully endeavoring to carry out her mother’s conception of the conduct proper to the circumstances with a dismal lack of success, she took her own path, which led her through a training school for nurses first, and so, ultimately, to Jacksonville.
The long day wore slowly into night. The doctor had returned very shortly with a man, whether physician or nurse she did not know, whom he left with Mr. Leroy. The little maid, who had been dozing in the upper hall, received some orders concerning the preparation of food which she proceeded to execute. The convalescent child rested well. The sick woman passed from the first to the second stage of the disease and was more quiet. The doctor came again after nightfall. He looked at her charges wearily, and told Mildred that the master of the house would not rally.
“He is my friend, and I can do no more for him,” he said, almost with apathy.
The night passed as even nights in sick-rooms will, and at last it began to grow toward day. The nurse became suddenly conscious of deadly weariness and need of rest. She called the servant and left her in charge, with a few directions and the injunction to call her at need, and then stole down the stairs to snatch, before she rested, the breath of morning air she craved.
As she stood at the veranda’s edge in the twilight coolness and twilight hush watching the whitening sky, there came steps behind her, and turning, she came face to face with Neil Hardesty. She stared at him with unbelieving eyes.
“Yes, it is I,” he said.
“You were with Mr. Leroy?” she asked. “Are you going?”
“My work is over here,” he answered, quietly. “I am going to send—some one else.”
She bent her head a second’s space with the swift passing courtesy paid death by those to whom it has become a more familiar friend than life itself, then lifted it, and for a minute they surveyed each other gravely.
“This is like meeting you on the other side of the grave,” she said. “How came you here? I thought you were in California.”
“I thought you were in Europe.”
“I was for awhile, but there was nothing there I wanted. Then I came back and entered the training school. After this is over I have arranged to join the sisterhood of St. Margaret. I think I can do better work so.”
“Let me advise you not to mistake your destiny. You were surely meant for the life of home and society, and can do a thousand-fold more good that way.”
“You do not know,” she answered, simply. “I am very happy in my life. It suits me utterly. I have never been so perfectly at peace.”
“But it will wear you out,” he murmured.
She looked at him out of her great eyes, surprisedly. It was a look he knew of old.
“Why, I expect it to,” she answered.
There was a little silence before she went on, apparently without effort:
“I am glad to come across you again, for there is one thing I have wanted to say to you almost ever since we parted, and it has grieved me to think I might never be able to say it. It is this. While I do not regret anything else, and while I am sure now that it was best for both of us—or else it would not have happened—I have always been sorry that the break between us came in the way it did. I regret that. It hurts me still when I remember of what I accused you. I am sure I was unjust. No wonder you were bitter against me. I have often prayed that that bitterness might pass out of your soul, and that I might know it. So—I ask your forgiveness for my suspicion. It will make me happier to know you have quite forgiven me.”
He did not answer. She waited patiently.
“Surely”—she spoke with pained surprise—“surely you can forgive me now?”
“Oh, God!”
She looked at his set face uncomprehending. Why should it be with such a mighty effort that he unclosed his lips at last? His voice came forced and hard.
“I—I did it, Mildred. I was the coward that you thought me. I don’t know what insensate fear came over me and took possession of me utterly, but it was nothing to the fear I felt afterwards—for those two weeks—that you might suspect me of it. And when I knew you did I was mad with grief and anger at myself, and yet—it seems to me below contempt—I tried to save my miserable pride. But I have always meant that you should know at last.”
She looked at him with blank uncomprehension.
“I did it,” he repeated, doggedly, and waited for the change he thought to see upon her face. It came, but with a difference.
“You—you did it?” for the idea made its way but slowly to her mind. “Then”—with a rush of feeling that she hardly understood, and an impetuous, tender gesture—“then let me comfort you.”
It was the voice of the woman who had loved him, and not of any Sister of Charity, however gracious, that he heard again, but he turned sharply away.
“God forbid,” he said, and she shrank from the misery in his voice; “God forbid that even you should take away my punishment. Don’t you see? It is all the comfort I dare have, to go where there is danger and to face death when I can, till the day comes when I am not afraid, for I am a coward yet.”
She stretched her hands out toward him blindly. I am afraid that she forgot just then all the boasted sweetness of her present life, her years of training, and her coming postulancy at St. Margaret’s, as well as the heinousness of his offence. She forgot everything, save that this was Neil, and that he suffered.
But all that she, being a woman and merciful, forgot, he, being a man and something more than just, remembered.
“Good-by, and God be with you,” he said.
“Neil!” she cried. “Neil!”
But his face was set steadfastly toward the heart of the stricken city, and he neither answered nor looked back.
The future sister of St. Margaret’s watched him with a heart that ached as she had thought it could never ache again. All the hard-won peace of her patient years, which she thought so secure a possession, had gone at once and was as though it had not been; for he, with all his weaknesses upon him, was still the man she loved.
“Lord, give him back to me!” she cried, yet felt the cry was futile.
Slowly she climbed the stairs again, wondering where was the courage and quiet confidence that had sustained her so short a time ago.
Was it true, then, that heaven was only excellent when earth could not be had? She was the coward now. In her mind there were but two thoughts—the desire to see him again, and a new, appalling fear of death.
She re-entered the sick-room where the girl was watching her patients with awed eyes.
“You need not stay here,” she said, softly. “I cannot sleep now. I will call you when I can.”