The Web of Life Part 26

At last he said in a dull voice:

"Mrs. Preston, will you get me pen and ink. I must fill out the usual certificate, stating the disease that caused death," he added meaningly, wheeling about.

She started, stung by his formal words, and fetched writing materials. As he wrote out the certificate, she went into the next room. When she returned, Sommers got up and crossed toward her, impelled by an irresistible desire _to know_.

"I have said that death was due to congestion of the brain, indirectly resulting from illness and operation for the removal of a bullet."

Mrs. Preston stared at him, her face curiously blank, as though to say, 'Why are you so cruel?' He offered her the wisp of paper.

"Put it there!" she cried, motioning to the mantelpiece.

The doctor placed the certificate on the mantel, and then returned to his chair by the lamp.

"Is there anything I can do for you?" he asked abruptly.

"I have done--the necessary things--he will be buried to-morrow afternoon."

Her words came with an effort, as if every voluntary act caused her pain.

"I am sorry that I did not come earlier, to save you these tasks," the doctor answered more gently. "Isn't there some one you would like to send for, some relative or friend?"

She shook her head, looking at him with beseeching eyes. Then they were silent, until the silence was too much to be borne. Sommers rose hastily to take leave.

"I can do nothing more to-night," he said hastily. "I shall come to-morrow."

She made no reply and did not rise. Outside, the place seemed so deadly still! The house was dark; the neighboring avenue, unusually deserted.

Sommers s.h.i.+vered. After he had reached the end of the lane, he turned back, and walked swiftly to the cottage. At the corner he looked into the room where they had been sitting. She was still in the same place where he had left her, by the lamp, her white, almost stern face, with its large, severe lines, staring fiercely into s.p.a.ce. It made him uneasy, this long, tense look that betrayed a mind fixed upon one idea, and that idea! He crept away into the lane to flee from it, and walked swiftly down the cross street toward the lake.

CHAPTER XXII

"It could not be!" he muttered, as he stumbled on in the dark. He was oversuspicious. But how else could the facts be explained? Such deaths, he knew, did not occur to men in Preston's condition,--calm, easy deaths, without the agony of convulsion. _No_, it _must be_. Science was stronger than desire, than character, than human imagination. To disbelieve his scientific knowledge would be to deny the axioms of life.

And why should it not be? Was it not what he had reproached himself for not doing, and reproached his medical brethren as cowards for not daring to do in so many cases? The horror of it, the uncanniness of it, thus stopping the human animal's course as one would stop an ill-regulated watch, had never appealed to him before. "Prejudice!" he cried aloud. His involuntary drawing back was but an unconscious result of the false training of centuries. As a doctor, familiar with death, cheris.h.i.+ng no illusions about the value of the human body, he should not act like a nervous woman, and run away! How brutal he had been to her!

His mind pa.s.sed on, traversing vast areas of speculation by a kind of cerebral shorthand. What would be the result upon humanity if all doctors took this liberty of decision? Where could you draw the distinction between murder and medicine? Was science advanced enough as yet to say any certain thing about the human body and mind? There were always mysterious exceptions which might well make any doctor doubtful of drastic measures.

And the value of human life, so cheap here in this thirsty million of souls, cheap in the hospitals; but really, essentially, at the bottom of things, who knew how cheap it was?

Thus for an hour or more his mind was let loose among the tenebra of life, while his feet pushed on mechanically over the dusty roads that skirted the lake. He had nowhere to go, now that he had broken with the routine of life, and he gave himself up to the unaccustomed debauch of willess thinking. He was conscious at length of traversing the vacant waste where the service-buildings of the Fair had stood. Beyond were the shattered walls of the little convent, wrapped in the soft summer night. There they had sat together and watched the fire die out, while she told her story, and he listened in love.

The real thing--was the woman. This thought stung him like a reproach of cowardice. He had forgotten her! And she was but the instrument in the deed, for he had taught her that this care of a worthless life was sentimental, hysterical. He had urged her to put it away in some easy fas.h.i.+on, to hide it at least, in some sort of an asylum. That she had steadfastly refused to do. Better death outright, she had said. And that which he had feared to undertake, she had done, fearlessly. He had recoiled; it made him tremble to think of her in that act. What cowardice!

These were the consequences of his teaching, of his belief.

What had made her take this resolution so suddenly? There was time, all the time in the world, and having once neglected the thing at the very start, it was curious that she should now, at this late date, make her desperate resolve. Preston had not been worse, more difficult to handle. In fact, when the two women had grown used to his case, the management had been simple enough. He had thought she was inured to the disgust and the horror--placid almost, and taking the thing like one accustomed to pain.

What was the cause of her revolt from her burden? Those filthy words the night they had come back late, when the fellow had stolen downstairs and spied upon them at their coffee. Had the shame of it before him stung her past enduring? Had it eaten into her mind and inflamed her?

But his feverish imagination was not content with this illumination of the facts. Something more lay behind it all. He sat down beside a prostrate column to penetrate the gloom. As he gazed before him into the dark heavens, the blast furnace winked like an evil eye, then silently belched flame and smoke, then relapsed into its seething self. The monster's breath illumined the dusky sky for a few moments. Blackness then fell over all for two minutes, and again the beast reappeared. Far away to the west came through the night a faint roar, like the raving of men. There was a line of light against the horizon: the mob was burning freight cars. Soon the bonfire died down. The cries sounded more and more faintly, and more distinctly came the sharp reports of revolvers or military rifles. The law had taken a hand in the game.

It was a night like this when the first glow of joy had suffused his life; and then had come that night, that wonderful night, which began, in the lurid fire, and ended foully with Preston's words. Here was the key: she too loved, as he had, and this feeling which had drawn them together from the very moment when he had looked from the helpless form on the hospital chair to her had grown, surging up in her heart as in his--until, until she had taken this last stern step, and had--

He had begun to walk once more, heading south, retracing his steps by the most direct line. To leave her thus, with all the horror; thus when she had reached out to him--oh, the shame, the brutality of it! He hastened his steps almost to a run. Perhaps it was already too late; his cold, hard manner had killed her love, crushed her, and she had gone on to the next step. The night was cold now, but his hands were damp with a feverish sweat. How blind, not to have read at once, as she would have done, the whole deed! What she had done, she had done for him, for both, and he had left her to carry the full burden alone. Like a boy, he had wavered at the sight of what she had accomplished so swiftly, so competently, for _their_ sake. To love shamefully, that was not in her, and she had put the cause of shame away. As he hurried on southwards, his thoughts flew out on this new track. She had made the way clear; he must go to her, take her, accept her acts with her love. They were one now.

It was late, past midnight, when he reached the long cross street that led to the lane of the cottage, and the buzz of the pa.s.sing cars no longer disturbed the hoa.r.s.e chorus of frogs. Sommers crept up the lane stealthily to the dark cottage, afraid for what he might find, chilled by the forbidding aspect of the place. Instead of entering the door, he paused by the open window and peered in. Within the gloom of the room he could make out her bent figure, her head fallen forward over her arms. She was sitting where he had left her, but the spell of her tense gaze had broken. She had laid her head upon the table to weep, and had not raised it all these hours. The night wind soughed into the room through the open window, drifting a piece of paper about the floor, poking into the gloom of the interior beyond.

Sommers noiselessly pushed open the door and entered the room. The bent figure did not heed the tread of his steps. He stood over her, knelt down, and wrapped her in his arms.

"Alves!" he whispered.

She roused herself as from a dream and turned her face to his, wonderingly.

"Alves," he stammered, reading eagerly the sombre lines of her face, "I have come back--for always."

Then she spoke, and her voice had a mechanical ring, as if for a long time it had not been used.

"But you left me--why did you come back?"

"You know," he answered, his feverish face close to her white forehead.

"You know!" The face was so cold, so large and sombre, that it seemed to chill his fever.

"I have come to share--to have you, because I love, because we loved--from the first, all through."

At his slow, trembling words, the woman's face filled with the warm blood of returning life. Her flesh paled and flushed, and her eyes lit slowly with pa.s.sion; her arms that had rested limply on the table took life once more and grasped him. The feeling sweeping into her lifeless body thrilled him like fire. She was another woman--he had never known her until this communicating clasp.

"You love me?" she asked, with a moan of inarticulate abandonment.

"Love you, love you, love you, Alves," he repeated in savage iteration.

"Now,--" he kissed her lips. They were no longer cold. "You are mine, mine, do you understand? Nothing shall touch you. _That_ has pa.s.sed!"

For a moment she looked at him in question. But instantly her face smiled in content, and she flashed back his pa.s.sion. She kissed him, drawing him down closer and closer into her warm self.

With this long kiss a new love put forth its strength, not the pale beat.i.tude of his dream, with its sweet wistfulness, its shy desires. That was large and vague and insubstantial, permeating like an odor the humdrum purlieus of the day. This was savage, triumphant, that leaped like flame from his heart to his mouth, that burned blood-red on the black night. It swept away hesitation, a sick man's nicety and doubts, all the prejudices of all times! This was love, unchained, that came like waters from the mountains to quench the thirst of blazing deserts: parched, dry, in dust; now slaked and yet ever thirsty.

"How could it have been otherwise," he murmured, more to himself than to her.

"What?" she asked, startled, withdrawing herself.

"Don't think, don't think!" he exclaimed, in fear of the ebbing of the waters.

Her doubts were calmed, and she yielded to his insistence, slipping into his arms with an unintelligible cry, the satisfied note of desire. For all the waiting of the empty years came this rich payment--love that satisfied, that could never be satisfied.

In the first light of the morning the Ducharme woman, creeping from her room in the rear, caught sight of them. Mrs. Preston's head was lying on the doctor's arm, while he knelt beside the table, watching her pale face in its undisturbed sleep. At the footfall, he roused her gently. Mrs.

Ducharme hastily drew back. She, too, did not seem to have pa.s.sed a peaceful night. Her flabby fat face was sickly white, and she trembled as she opened the side door to the hot morning sun. She threw some small thing into the waste by the door; then looking around to see that she was not observed, she hurled with all her strength a long bottle toward the swamp across the fence. The bottle fell short of the swamp, but it sank among the reeds and the fleurs-de-lys of the margin. Then the woman closed the door softly.