The Gates Between Part 9

The love of healing? The relief of suffering? Sympathy with the wretched? Chivalry for the helpless? Generosity to the poor?

Friends.h.i.+p to the friendless? Were these the motives, all the motives, the _whole_ motives, of him who had in my name ministered in that place so long? Even the love of science? Devotion to a therapeutic creed?

Sacrifice for a surgical doctrine? Enthusiasm for an important professional cause? Did these, and only these, sources of conduct _explain_ the great hospital? Or the surgeon who had created and sustained it?

Where did the motive deteriorate? Where did the alloy come in? How did the sensitiveness to self, the pa.s.sion for fame, the joy of power, amalgamate with all that n.o.ble feeling? How much residuum was there in the solution of that absorption which (outside of my own home) I had thought the purest and highest of my interests in life?

For the first of all the uncounted times that I had entered the hospital for now these many years, I crossed the threshold questioning myself in this manner, and doubting of my fitness to be there, or to be what I had been held to be in that place. Life had carried me gaily and swiftly, as it carries successful men. I had found no time, or made none, to cross-question the sources of conduct. My success had been my religion.

I had the conviction of a prosperous person that the natural emotions of prosperity were about right. Added to this was something of the physician's respect for what was healthful in human life. Good luck, good looks, good nerves, a good income, an enviable reputation for professional skill, personal popularity, and private happiness,--these things had struck me as so wholesome that they must be admirable.

Behind the painted screen which a useful and successful career sets before the souls of men I had been too busy or too light of heart to peer. Now it was as if, in the act or the fact of dying, I had moved a step or two, and looked over the edge of the bright s.h.i.+eld.

Thoughts like these came to me so quietly and so naturally, now, that I wondered why I had not been familiar with them before; it even occurred to me that being very busy did not wholly excuse a live man for not thinking; and it was something in the softened spirit of this strange humility that I opened the noiseless door, and found myself among my old patients in the large ward.

Never before had I entered that sad place that the electric thrill of welcome, which only a physician knows, had not pulsated through it, preceding me, from end to end of the long room. The peculiar _lighting_ of the ward that flashes with the presence of a favourite doctor; the sudden flexible smile on pain-pinched lips; the yearning motion of the eyes in some helpless body where only the eyes can stir; the swift stretching-out of wasted hands; the half-inaudible cry of welcome: "The doctor's come!" "Oh, there's the doctor!" "Why, it's the _doctor_!"--the loving murmur of my name; the low prayer of blessing on it,--oh, never before had I entered my hospital, and missed the least of these.

I thought I was prepared for this, but it was not without a shock that I stood among my old patients, mute and miserable, glancing piteously at them, as they had so often done at me; seeking for their recognition, which I might not have; longing for their welcome, which was not any more for me.

The moans of pain, the querulous replies to nurses, the weary cough or plethoric breathing, the feeble convalescent laughter,--these greeted me; and only these. Like the light that entered at the window, or the air that circulated through the ward, I pa.s.sed unnoticed and unthanked.

Some one called out petulantly that a door had got unfastened, and bade a nurse go shut it, for it blew on her. But when I came up to the bedside of this poor woman, I saw that she was crying.

"She's cried herself half-dead," a nurse said, complainingly. "n.o.body can stop her. She's taking on so for Dr. Thorne."

"I don't blame her," said a little patient from a wheeled-chair.

"Everybody knows what he did for her. She's got one of her attacks,--and look at her! There can't anybody but him stop it.

Whatever we're going to do without the doctor"--

Her own lip quivered, though she was getting well.

"I don't see how the doctor _could_ die!" moaned the very sick woman, weeping afresh, "when there's those that n.o.body but him can keep alive.

It hadn't oughter to be let to be. How are sick folks going to get along without their doctor? It ain't _right_!"

"Lord have mercy on ye, poor creetur," said an old lady from the opposite cot. "Don't take on so. It don't _help_ it any. It ain't agoing to bring the doctor back!"

Sobs arose at this. I could hear them from more beds than I cared to count. Sorrow sat heavily in the ward for my sake. It distressed me to think of the effect of all this depression upon the nervous systems of these poor people. I pa.s.sed from case to case, and watched the ill-effects of the general gloom with a sense of professional disappointment which only physicians will understand as coming uppermost in a man's mind under circ.u.mstances such as these.

My discomfort was increased by the evidences of what I considered mistakes in treatment on the part of my colleagues; some of which had peculiarly disagreed with certain patients since my death had thrown them into other hands. My helplessness before these facts chafed me sorely.

I made no futile effort to make myself known to any of the hospital patients. I had learned too well the limitations of my new condition now. I had in no wise learned to bear them. In truth, I think I bore them less, for my knowledge that these poor creatures did truly love me, and leaned on me, and mourned for me; I found it hard. I think it even occurred to me that a dead man might not be able to bear it to see his wife and child.

"Doctor!" said a low, sweet voice, "Doctor?" My heart leaped within me, as I turned. Where was the highly organized one of all my patients, who had baffled death for love of me? Who had the clairvoyance or clairaudience, or the wonderful tip in the scale of health and disease, which causes such phenomena?

With hungry eyes I gazed from cot to cot. No answering gaze returned to me. Craving their recognition more sorely than they had ever, in the old life, craved mine, in such need of their sympathy as never had the weakest of the whole of them for mine, I scanned them all. No--no.

There was not a patient in the ward who knew me. No.

Stung with the disappointment, I sank into a chair beside the weeping woman's bed, and bowed my face upon my hands. At this instant I was touched upon the shoulder.

"Doctor! Why, Doctor!" said the voice again.

I sprang and caught the speaker by the hands. It was Mrs. Faith. She stood beside me, sweet and smiling.

"The carriage overturned," she said in her quiet way, "I was badly hurt. I only died an hour ago. I started out at once to find you. I want you to see Charley. Charley's still alive. Those doctors don't understand Charley. There's n.o.body I'd trust him to but you. You can save him. Come! You can't think how he asked for you, and cried for you.... I thought I should find you at the hospital. Come quickly, Doctor! Come!"

CHAPTER XI.

Some homesick traveller in a foreign land, where he is known of none and can neither speak nor understand the language of the country; taken ill, let us say, at a remote inn, his strength and credit gone, and he, in pain and fever, hears, one blessed day, the voice of an old friend in the court below. Such a man may think he has--but I doubt if he have--some crude conception of the state of feeling in which I found myself, when recognized in this touching manner by my old patient.

My emotion was so great that I could not conceal it; and she, in her own quick and delicate way, perceiving this almost before I did myself, made as if she saw it not, and lightly adding:

"Hurry, Doctor! I will go before you. Let us lose no time!" led me at once out of the hospital and rapidly away.

In an incredibly, almost confusingly short s.p.a.ce of time, we reached her house; this was done by some method of locomotion not hitherto experienced by me, and which I should, at that time, have found it difficult to describe, unless by saying that she thought us where we wished to be. Perhaps it would be more exact to say, _She felt us_.

It was as if the great power of the mother's love in her had become a new bodily faculty by which she was able, with extraordinary disregard of the laws of distance, to move herself and to draw another to the suffering child. I should say that I perceived at once, in the presence of this sweet woman, that there were possibilities and privileges in the state immediately succeeding death, which had been utterly denied to me, and were still unknown to me. It was easy to see that her personal experience in the new condition differed as much from mine as our lives had differed in the time preceding death. She had been a patient, unworldly, and devout sufferer; a chronic invalid, who bore her lot divinely. Her soul had been as full of trust and gentleness, of the forgetting of self and the service of others, of the scorn of pain, and of what she called trust in Heaven, as any woman's soul could be.

I had never seen the moment when I could withhold my respect from the devout nature of Mrs. Faith, any more than I could from her manner of enduring suffering; or, I might add, if I could expect the remark to be properly understood,--from her strong and intelligent trust in me.

Physicians know what st.u.r.dy qualities it takes to make a good patient.

Perhaps they are, to some extent, the same which go to make a good believer; but in this direction I am less informed.

During our pa.s.sage from the hospital to the house, Mrs. Faith had not spoken to me; her whole being seemed, as nearly as I could understand it, to be absorbed in the process of getting there. It struck me that she was still unpractised in the use of a new and remarkable faculty, which required strict attention from her, like any other as yet unlearned art.

"_You_ are not turned out of your own home it seems!" I exclaimed impulsively, as we entered the house together.

"Oh, no, _no_!" she cried. "Who is? Who could be? Why, Doctor, are _you_?"

"Death is a terrible respecter of persons," I answered drearily. I could not further explain myself at that moment.

"I have been away from Charley a good while," she anxiously replied; "it is the first time I have left him since I died. But I had to find you, Doctor. Charley should not die--I can't have Charley die--for his poor father's sake. But I feel quite safe about him now I have got you."

She said these words in her old bright, trustful way. The thought of my helplessness to justify such trust smote me sorely; but I said nothing then to undeceive her,--how could I?--and we made haste together to the bedside of the injured child.

I saw at a glance that the child was in a bad case. Halt was there, and Dr. Gazell; they were consulting gloomily. The father, haggard with his first bereavement, seemed to have accepted the second as a foregone conclusion; he sat with his face in his hands, beside the little fellow's bed. The boy called for his mother at intervals. A nurse hung about weeping. It was a dismal scene; there was not a spark of hope, or energy, or fight in the whole room. I cried out immoderately that it was enough to kill the well, and protested against the management of the case with the ardent conviction to which my old patient was so used, and in which she believed more thoroughly than I did myself. "They are giving the wrong remedy," I hotly said. "This surgical fever could be controlled,--the boy need not die. But he will! You may as well make up your mind to it, Mrs. Faith. Gazell doesn't understand the little fellow's const.i.tution, and Halt doesn't understand anything."

Now it was that, as I had expected, the mother turned upon me with all a mother's hopeless and heart-breaking want of logic. Surely, I, and only I, could save the boy. Why, I had always taken care of Charley!

Was it possible that I could stand by and see Charley _die_? _She_ should not have died herself if I had been there. She depended upon me to find some way--there must be a way. She never thought I was the kind of a man to be so changed by--by what had happened.

I used to be so full of hope and vigour, and so inventive in a sick-room. It was not reasonable! It was not right! It was not possible that, just because I was a spirit, I could not control the minds or bodies of those live men who were so inferior to me. Why, she thought I could control _any_body. She thought I could conquer _any_thing.

"I don't understand it, Doctor," she said, with something like reproach. "You don't seem to be able to do as much--you don't even know as much as _I_ do, now. And you know what a sick and helpless little woman I've always been,--how ignorant, beside you! I thought you were so wise, so strong, so great. Where has it all gone to, Doctor? What has become of your wisdom and your power? Can't you help me? Can't you"--

"I can do nothing," I interrupted her,--"nothing. I am shorn of it all. It has all gone from me, like the strength of Samson. Spare me, and torment me not.... I cannot heal your child. I am not like you.

I was not prepared for--this condition of things. I did not expect to die. I never thought of becoming a spirit. I find myself extraordinarily embarra.s.sed by it. It is the most unnatural state I ever was in."

"Why, I find it as natural as life," she said, more gently. She had now moved to the bedside, and taken the little fellow in her arms.

"You are not as I," I replied morosely. "We differed--and we differ.

Truly, I believe that if there is anything to be done for your boy, it rests with you, and not with me."