The Fruit of the Tree: Chapter 26

Chapter 26

WITHIN Justine there was a moment's darkness; then, like terror-struck
workers rallying to their tasks, every faculty was again at its post,
receiving and transmitting signals, taking observations, anticipating
orders, making her brain ring with the hum of a controlled activity.

She had known the sensation before--the transmuting of terror and pity
into this miraculous lucidity of thought and action; but never had it
snatched her from such depths. Oh, thank heaven for her knowledge
now--for the trained mind that could take command of her senses and bend
them firmly to its service!

Wyant seconded her well, after a moment's ague-fit of fear. She pitied
and pardoned the moment, aware of its cause, and respecting him for the
way in which he rose above it into the clear air of professional
self-command. Through the first hours they worked shoulder to shoulder,
conscious of each other only as of kindred will-powers, stretched to the
utmost tension of discernment and activity, and hardly needing speech or
look to further their swift co-operation. It was thus that she had known
him in the hospital, in the heat of his youthful zeal: the doctor she
liked best to work with, because no other so tempered ardour with
judgment.

The great surgeon, arriving from town at midnight, confirmed his
diagnosis: there was undoubted injury to the spine. Other consultants
were summoned in haste, and in the winter dawn the verdict was
pronounced--a fractured vertebra, and possibly lesion of the cord....

Justine got a moment alone when the surgeons returned to the sick-room.
Other nurses were there now, capped, aproned, quickly and silently
unpacking their appliances.... She must call a halt, clear her brain
again, decide rapidly what was to be done next.... Oh, if only the
crawling hours could bring Amherst! It was strange that there was no
telegram yet--no, not strange, after all, since it was barely six in the
morning, and her message had not been despatched till seven the night
before. It was not unlikely that, in that little southern settlement,
the telegraph office closed at six.

She stood in Bessy's sitting-room, her forehead pressed to the
window-pane, her eyes straining out into the thin February darkness,
through which the morning star swam white. As soon as she had yielded
her place to the other nurses her nervous tension relaxed, and she hung
again above the deeps of anguish, terrified and weak. In a moment the
necessity for action would snatch her back to a firm footing--her
thoughts would clear, her will affirm itself, all the wheels of the
complex machine resume their functions. But now she felt only the
horror....

She knew so well what was going on in the next room. Dr. Garford, the
great surgeon, who had known her at Saint Elizabeth's, had evidently
expected her to take command of the nurses he had brought from town;
but there were enough without her, and there were other cares which, for
the moment, she only could assume--the despatching of messages to the
scattered family, the incessant telephoning and telegraphing to town,
the general guidance of the household swinging rudderless in the tide of
disaster. Cicely, above all, must be watched over and guarded from
alarm. The little governess, reduced to a twittering heap of fears, had
been quarantined in a distant room till reason returned to her; and the
child, meanwhile, slept quietly in the old nurse's care.

Cicely would wake presently, and Justine must go up to her with a bright
face; other duties would press thick on the heels of this; their feet
were already on the threshold. But meanwhile she could only follow in
imagination what was going on in the other room....

She had often thought with dread of such a contingency. She always
sympathized too much with her patients--she knew it was the joint in her
armour. Her quick-gushing pity lay too near that professional exterior
which she had managed to endue with such a bright glaze of insensibility
that some sentimental patients--without much the matter--had been known
to call her "a little hard." How, then, should she steel herself if it
fell to her lot to witness a cruel accident to some one she loved, and
to have to perform a nurse's duties, steadily, expertly, unflinchingly,
while every fibre was torn with inward anguish?

She knew the horror of it now--and she knew also that her self-enforced
exile from the sick-room was a hundred times worse. To stand there,
knowing, with each tick of the clock, what was being said and done
within--how the great luxurious room, with its pale draperies and
scented cushions, and the hundred pretty trifles strewing the lace
toilet-table and the delicate old furniture, was being swept bare,
cleared for action like a ship's deck, drearily garnished with rows of
instruments, rolls of medicated cotton, oiled silk, bottles, bandages,
water-pillows--all the grim paraphernalia of the awful rites of pain: to
know this, and to be able to call up with torturing vividness that poor
pale face on the pillows, vague-eyed, expressionless, perhaps, as she
had last seen it, or--worse yet--stirred already with the first creeping
pangs of consciousness: to have these images slowly, deliberately burn
themselves into her brain, and to be aware, at the same time, of that
underlying moral disaster, of which the accident seemed the monstrous
outward symbol--ah, this was worse than anything she had ever dreamed!

She knew that the final verdict could not be pronounced till the
operation which was about to take place should reveal the extent of
injury to the spine. Bessy, in falling, must have struck on the back of
her head and shoulders, and it was but too probable that the fractured
vertebra had caused a bruise if not a lesion of the spinal cord. In that
case paralysis was certain--and a slow crawling death the almost
inevitable outcome. There had been cases, of course--Justine's
professional memory evoked them--cases of so-called "recovery," where
actual death was kept at bay, a semblance of life preserved for years in
the poor petrified body.... But the mind shrank from such a fate for
Bessy. And it might still be that the injury to the spine was not
grave--though, here again, the fracturing of the fourth vertebra was
ominous.

The door opened and some one came from the inner room--Wyant, in search
of an instrument-case. Justine turned and they looked at each other.

"It will be now?"

"Yes. Dr. Garford asked if there was no one you could send for."

"No one but Mr. Tredegar and the Halford Gaineses. They'll be here this
evening, I suppose."

They exchanged a discouraged glance, knowing how little difference the
presence of the Halford Gaineses would make.

"He wanted to know if there was no telegram from Amherst."

"No."

"Then they mean to begin."

A nursemaid appeared in the doorway. "Miss Cicely--" she said; and
Justine bounded upstairs.

The day's work had begun. From Cicely to the governess--from the
governess to the housekeeper--from the telephone to the
writing-table--Justine vibrated back and forth, quick, noiseless,
self-possessed--sobering, guiding, controlling her confused and
panic-stricken world. It seemed to her that half the day had elapsed
before the telegraph office at Lynbrook opened--she was at the telephone
at the stroke of the hour. No telegram? Only one--a message from Halford
Gaines--"Arrive at eight tonight." Amherst was still silent! Was there a
difference of time to be allowed for? She tried to remember, to
calculate, but her brain was too crowded with other thoughts.... She
turned away from the instrument discouraged.

Whenever she had time to think, she was overwhelmed by the weight of her
solitude. Mr. Langhope was in Egypt, accessible only through a London
banker--Mrs. Ansell presumably wandering on the continent. Her cables
might not reach them for days. And among the throng of Lynbrook
habitu�s, she knew not to whom to turn. To loose the Telfer tribe and
Mrs. Carbury upon that stricken house--her thought revolted from it, and
she was thankful to know that February had dispersed their migratory
flock to southern shores. But if only Amherst would come!

Cicely and the tranquillized governess had been despatched on a walk
with the dogs, and Justine was returning upstairs when she met one of
the servants with a telegram. She tore it open with a great throb of
relief. It was her own message to Amherst--_address unknown_....

Had she misdirected it, then? In that first blinding moment her mind
might so easily have failed her. But no--there was the name of the town
before her...Millfield, Georgia...the same name as in his letter.... She
had made no mistake, but he was gone! Gone--and without leaving an
address.... For a moment her tired mind refused to work; then she roused
herself, ran down the stairs again, and rang up the telegraph-office.
The thing to do, of course, was to telegraph to the owner of the
mills--of whose very name she was ignorant!--enquiring where Amherst
was, and asking him to forward the message. Precious hours must be lost
meanwhile--but, after all, they were waiting for no one upstairs.

* * * * *

The verdict had been pronounced: dislocation and fracture of the fourth
vertebra, with consequent injury to the spinal cord. Dr. Garford and
Wyant came out alone to tell her. The surgeon ran over the technical
details, her brain instantly at attention as he developed his diagnosis
and issued his orders. She asked no questions as to the future--she
knew it was impossible to tell. But there were no immediate signs of a
fatal ending: the patient had rallied well, and the general conditions
were not unfavourable.

"You have heard from Mr. Amherst?" Dr. Garford concluded.

"Not yet...he may be travelling," Justine faltered, unwilling to say
that her telegram had been returned. As she spoke there was a tap on the
door, and a folded paper was handed in--a telegram telephoned from the
village.

"Amherst gone South America to study possibilities cotton growing have
cabled our correspondent Buenos Ayres."

Concealment was no longer possible. Justine handed the message to the
surgeon.

"Ah--and there would be no chance of finding his address among Mrs.
Amherst's papers?"

"I think not--no."

"Well--we must keep her alive, Wyant."

"Yes, sir."

* * * * *

At dusk, Justine sat in the library, waiting for Cicely to be brought to
her. A lull had descended on the house--a new order developed out of the
morning's chaos. With soundless steps, with lowered voices, the
machinery of life was carried on. And Justine, caught in one of the
pauses of inaction which she had fought off since morning, was reliving,
for the hundredth time, her few moments at Bessy's bedside....

She had been summoned in the course of the afternoon, and stealing into
the darkened room, had bent over the bed while the nurses noiselessly
withdrew. There lay the white face which had been burnt into her inward
vision--the motionless body, and the head stirring ceaselessly, as
though to release the agitation of the imprisoned limbs. Bessy's eyes
turned to her, drawing her down.

"Am I going to die, Justine?"

"No."

"The pain is...so awful...."

"It will pass...you will sleep...."

"Cicely----"

"She has gone for a walk. You'll see her presently."

The eyes faded, releasing Justine. She stole away, and the nurses came
back.

Bessy had spoken of Cicely--but not a word of her husband! Perhaps her
poor dazed mind groped for him, or perhaps it shrank from his name....
Justine was thankful for her silence. For the moment her heart was
bitter against Amherst. Why, so soon after her appeal and his answer,
had he been false to the spirit of their agreement? This unannounced,
unexplained departure was nothing less than a breach of his tacit
pledge--the pledge not to break definitely with Lynbrook. And why had he
gone to South America? She drew her aching brows together, trying to
retrace a vague memory of some allusion to the cotton-growing
capabilities of the region.... Yes, he had spoken of it once in talking
of the world's area of cotton production. But what impulse had sent him
off on such an exploration? Mere unrest, perhaps--the intolerable burden
of his useless life? The questions spun round and round in her head,
weary, profitless, yet persistent....

It was a relief when Cicely came--a relief to measure out the cambric
tea, to make the terrier beg for ginger-bread, even to take up the
thread of the interrupted fairy-tale--though through it all she was
wrung by the thought that, just twenty-four hours earlier, she and the
child had sat in the same place, listening for the trot of Bessy's
horse....

The day passed: the hands of the clocks moved, food was cooked and
served, blinds were drawn up or down, lamps lit and fires renewed...all
these tokens of the passage of time took place before her, while her
real consciousness seemed to hang in some dim central void, where
nothing happened, nothing would ever happen....

And now Cicely was in bed, the last "long-distance" call was answered,
the last orders to kitchen and stable had been despatched, Wyant had
stolen down to her with his hourly report--"no change"--and she was
waiting in the library for the Gaineses.

Carriage-wheels on the gravel: they were there at last. Justine started up
and went into the hall. As she passed out of the library the outer door
opened, and the gusty night swooped in--as, at the same hour the day
before, it had swooped in ahead of the dreadful procession--preceding now
the carriageful of Hanaford relations: Mr. Gaines, red-glazed, brief and
interrogatory; Westy, small, nervous, ill at ease with his grief; and Mrs.
Gaines, supreme in the possession of a consolatory yet funereal manner,
and sinking on Justine's breast with the solemn whisper: "Have you sent
for the clergyman?"

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