X
A SYMPATHY OF WOE
Titus Andronicus, iii. 1.
The first sensation which returning consciousness brought to Berenice Morison, after the shock of the collision and the feeling that the whole train had been hurled confusedly into space, was that of coming into fresher air as if she were emerging from the depths of the sea. Opening her eyes without comprehending where she was or what had happened, she found herself on the side of an overturned car. Around her were dreadful noises, yells, groans, cries, shouts; her nostrils were filled with the reek of burning stuffs; the light of lanterns and of torches blinded her eyes; a sense of horror oppressed her; appalling calamity which she could not understand seemed to have overtaken her; and she shuddered with terror unspeakable. Her first impulse was to shriek and to attempt to flee from the fearful things which surrounded her; but instantly the self-control of returning reason made itself felt.
Berenice found herself supported by a couple of men, and it became clear to her in an instant that she had just been lifted from that pit below where she could see the glint of flame and the blinding smother of smoke, and from which came such heartrending cries that she instinctively tried to cover her ears. In the movement she realized that beside the hold which her rescuers had of her, she was grasped by other arms; that she was in the embrace of a man apparently dead. In the dim light her dazed sense did not recognize him, and she struggled to release herself from the hold of this corpse.
"Take him away from me!" she shrieked hysterically in mingled terror and repulsion.
"Gently, gently," said one of the men who held her. "He's got killed tryin' to save yer."
"If this cut in his arm was in your back," remarked the other, who was unlocking the hands so strongly clasped behind her, "it'd 'a' been a finisher."
Her head reeled, and she nearly swooned again; but somehow she found herself released, and passed down from the car into the arms of more men.
"For God's sake, hurry," one of them said. "It's getting too hot to stand here."
A blistering puff of smoke enwrapped her as she went down. She saw a face blackened and ghastly advance in the flaring light of a lantern. Hands that seemed to come out of a cloud and a great darkness helped and sustained her, until she was out of the instant press beside the burning car. When once she was free and stood upon her feet, she regained something like self-possession. Her head swam, but she realized the situation and felt that she was able to help herself.
"I am not hurt," she said to those who would have assisted her. "Don't mind me."
As she spoke, the body of a man was passed out of the smoke close to her, and she saw that it was Wynne. Instantly she remembered being flung into his arms, although what followed she could not recall. She looked at him now with a piercing conviction that he was dead. His cassock hung about him in rags, his face was smeared with blood and grime, his arm hung limp and bleeding. The words of the rescuer on the car-roof came to her, and she saw in the disfigured form of the young deacon the body of the man who had given his life for hers. Instantly all her powers rallied to help and if possible to save him.
"Bring him this way," she said, stepping forward eagerly, her weakness forgotten. "I'll take care of him."
She moved out of the smoke without any clear idea where she was going or what she could do. The hurt man was brought after her, one of the many that were being carried as dead weights among the confused and agonized crowd. At a short distance from the track there were hastily arranged car-cushions, coats, and loose coverings thrown down on a bank half covered with snow. Here the bearers laid Wynne, hurrying back to their work with a precipitancy which seemed to Berenice heartless.
The scene which Berenice took in at a glance was so wild and terrible that it stamped itself on her brain in a flash. Lanterns were burning all about, dancing and flitting to and fro like fireflies in a mist. The eye caught everywhere glimpses by their light of disordered groups, dim and dreadful as a nightmare. Close about her were the victims heaped as if from a battlefield, the wounded moaning in pain, the women wailing over the dying or the dead, each with cruel egotism intent upon her own, and seizing upon any helper with terrible eagerness of despair. A hundred feet away, lighted by the flames which were beginning to thrust quick tongues through the smoke and the darkness, was a long heap of shapeless wreck, about which dark figures were swarming like midges about a bonfire. She could distinguish in the middle of the line the two locomotives silhouetted against the darkness, standing half on end like two grotesque monsters rearing in deadly conflict. Every moment the flames became fiercer, and the hurrying lanterns moved more wildly.
It was Wynne, however, that claimed her attention. One swift glance took in the awful picture, and then she sank down on her knees beside him as he lay, bleeding and insensible, perhaps dead. For a moment she was ready to cast herself down on the snow in helplessness and in terror at the horrors of the situation; but the grit of stout Puritan ancestors was in her fibres, the moral endurance which finds in the sense of a duty to be done an inspiration that lifts above all difficulties. Her work was before her; to abandon it impossible.
The flames of the burning car brightened with appalling rapidity. Shrieks arose so piercing that they wrung her heart as if with a physical agony. It was the car from which she and Wynne had been taken which was now that hell of fire. Its glare lit up the pale and bleeding face beside her, and she realized that at that minute they might have been in that awful agony. She began to sob wildly, but she began, too, to try to bring Wynne back to consciousness. She took snow in her hands and put it to his forehead; she twisted her handkerchief about his arm to stop its bleeding. She tried to recall what she had heard at Emergency Lectures, with a strong determination forcing herself to remember. Kneeling in the snow, in the light of the burning car, her heart torn by the cries of the suffering, trembling with excitement, fear, and the shock she had undergone, sobbing almost hysterically, she yet constrained herself to do her best, binding up his arm with strips of her clothing, and trying to bring back his senses.
A physician came to her without her knowing until he was at her side. He bent to examine Wynne, and Berenice tried to repress her sobs that she might talk to him, and take his directions. The life of Wynne might depend upon her calmness. She caught up more snow, and pressed it to her own temples.
"Is he much hurt?" she asked feverishly.
"It is not dangerous as far as I can judge," the doctor answered hurriedly. "Get him away from here as soon as you can."
She looked after him as he hurried on to other patients, and her first feeling was one of indignation. Then it occurred to her that his going so soon must mean that her patient was less hurt than she had feared. But why was Wynne so long insensible? She knelt beside him again, and as she did so he opened his eyes.
"Where am I?" he cried feebly.
He tried to start up, but fell back with a groan.
"There has been an accident," she said hurriedly. "It's all right now.
You are safe. Are you in much pain?"
"Are you hurt?" he demanded almost fiercely.
"No, no; never mind me."
He struggled again to rise, but fell back with a groan. She put her hand on his shoulder.
"Lie still," she commanded authoritatively. "I'll see what can be done.
Lie still while I look about."
A second car was burning, and the whole place was aglare with yellow light. The wild groups stood out black against the trodden and dingy snow, while overhead rolled clouds of sooty smoke. It occurred to Berenice that the accident had taken place so near Brookfield that many persons must have come from the town. She seized a respectable-looking man by the arm, and asked him if he knew of any way in which she could get an injured friend to Brookfield. He stared at her a moment as if it was impossible at such a time to receive words in their ordinary meaning, but when the question had been repeated he answered that there were some hackmen from town in the crowd. He helped her to find one, and as Mrs. Morison was well known, Berenice had little further difficulty. Wynne submitted to being half led, half carried through the crowd, and when at last with the assistance of the hackman Berenice got him into the carriage he fainted again.
Singular and frightful to Berenice was that ride. The terrors through which she had passed, the shock, mental and physical, which she had undergone, had almost prostrated her. As soon as she was in the carriage she broke out into hysterical tears. The fainting of her companion, however, called her attention from herself, forcing her to think of him. She supported his head on her shoulder, lifting his wounded arm on to her lap; and into her heart came that thrill of interest and compassion which is the instinctive response of a woman to the appeal of masculine helplessness. A woman's love is apt to be half maternal, and she who nurses a man is for the time being in place of his mother. Berenice's thoughts were in a whirl, but pity for the hurt man at her side was her most conscious feeling. She remembered the words of her rescuer, and endowed Wynne with the nobility which belongs to him who risks his life for another. What had happened she could not tell. She remembered the awful terror of the collision, and mistily of being hurled into his arms; but after that came a blank until the moment of her rescue. It was evident that Wynne had in some way been hurt in protecting her, and the very vagueness of the service he had rendered made the deed loom larger in her imagination. She felt his breath warm on her cheek, and suddenly into her dispassionate musings there came a fresh sense, which made her face grow hot. She was angry at the absurdity of flushing there in the dark, and asked herself why the mere breath on her cheek of an insensible and wounded man should set her to blushing like a self-conscious fool! Then she remembered how he had held her in his arms, and she grew more self-conscious still. A jolt made her companion moan, and in a twinkling all else was forgotten in the anxiety of getting to shelter and aid.
When the carriage stopped before the house of Mrs. Morison, the old lady and a servant appeared instantly, rushing out to see what the arrival meant. Almost before the carriage had come to a stand-still, Berenice put her head out of the window and called as cheerily as she could:—
"All right, grandmamma."
She could not keep her voice steady, and she could only try to carry off her emotion by a laugh which was rather shaky and hysterical. She could not rise, for Wynne's head was on her shoulder. The carriage door was torn open, and she felt her grandmother's arms about her in the darkness.
"My darling! My darling!" she heard murmured in a sobbing voice.
"Look out, grandmother," she said, embracing Mrs. Morison with her one free arm; "I've brought a man with me, and he's hurt. I think he's fainted."
There is nothing so efficacious in restraining the outpouring of emotion as the necessity of attending to practical details. The need of getting Wynne out of the hack and into the house as speedily and as safely as possible restored Mrs. Morison to calmness, and although for the rest of the evening and for many days after she and her granddaughter had a fashion of rushing into each other's arms in the most unexpected manner, they now devoted themselves to the unconscious young deacon.
Wynne revived again when he was lifted out of the carriage, and when he had been, with the friendly aid of the driver, got into the house and given a little brandy, he came once more to his complete if somewhat shaken senses. He was too weak from the shock and the loss of blood to resist anything that his friends chose to do to him, and although he feebly protested against being quartered upon Mrs. Morison, his protest was not in the least heeded.
"Say no more about it," Mrs. Morison said, with a quiet smile. "You are here, and you are to stay here. There is nowhere else for you to go, even if you don't like our hospitality."
"That isn't it," he began feebly; "only I've no claim"—
"There, that will do," Berenice interposed with decision. "Do you suppose, grandmother, that it's possible to get anybody to come and see his arm?"
"I'm afraid not, dear," was the answer. "Everybody's at the wreck. I've been cowering down in the corner of the fire for what seemed to me years since Mehitabel came rushing in with the news; and all the time I've heard people driving past the house on their way out of town."
"There ain't a man left," put in Mehitabel, a severe elderly servant, who had the air of being personally responsible for her mistress, and of being bound to fulfill her duties faithfully, even if the effort killed her. "I see Dr. Strong go gallopin' past first, and the other doctors was all after him; even to that little squinchy electrical image that's round the corner on Front Street."
"Electrical image?" repeated Berenice.
"She means the eclectic physician," explained Mrs. Morison. "I'm sure that there's no use in sending for the doctors now. Later we will see. We must manage the best we can. If I hurt you, Mr. Wynne, you must tell me."
Berenice looked on, sick with the sight of the blood, while her grandmother examined the wounded arm. Wynne shrank a little, but Berenice noted that he bore the pain pluckily. The sleeve was cut to the shoulder, and his arm laid bare. A jagged cut was revealed reaching from the wrist to the elbow; a cut so ugly in appearance that the girl went faint again.
"There, there, Miss Bee," old Mehitabel said, taking her by the shoulder. "You've had enough of this sort of thing for one night. You'll dream gray hairs all over your head if you don't get out."
But Berenice refused to give up her place. She stood beside Wynne while her grandmother examined the arm, handing the things that were wanted; fighting with the faintness that came over her in waves.
"No, Mehitabel," said she. "I'm made of better stuff than you think."
In her heart she had a half unconscious feeling that she had been inclined to hold this man in contempt because of his priestly garb; and that she owed him this reparation. She did not know what had occurred in that overturned car; but she looked back to it as to a horror of great darkness in which Wynne had risked his life for hers. She felt that she could not do less than to stand by while the wound he had received in her service was being attended to. It was Wynne himself who put her away.
"You are too kind, Miss Morison," he said; "but you are not fit to do this. I beg that you'll not stay. Your face shows how hard it is for you."
The first thought that shot through her mind was one of relief that she now might properly leave her self-inflicted task; the second was a pang of self-reproach that she should wish to leave it; the third and lasting was a sense of pleasure that even in his pain he had not failed to note her face and divine her feelings.
"Mr. Wynne is right," Mrs. Morison added decisively. "Mehitabel can help me, my dear. Go into the other room and let Rosa get you a cup of tea."
"It won't be much of a cup of tea," Mehitabel commented grimly. "That fool of a girl's got it into her head that it's a good time to cry for her doxy, because he's a brakeman on some other train."
Berenice smiled at the characteristic crispness and the absurd speech of the old servant. She remembered Mehitabel from the days when in pinafores she used to visit here, and when she looked upon the tall, gaunt woman with an awe which was saved from being terror only by the fact that she had learned to associate with that abrupt speech an after gift of crisp cakes. Mehitabel was to her as much a part of the establishment as were the tall chairs, the lion-headed fire-dogs, or the silver which had belonged to her grandmother's grandmother.
Passing into the dining-room Berenice summoned the afflicted Rosa, who came with face all be-blubbered with tears, and who sniffed audibly as soon as she caught sight of the visitor.
"How do you do, Rosa? I wouldn't cry, if I were you," Berenice said.
"Mehitabel says that this wasn't his train."
"Oh, I know it, Miss," responded Rosa, with more tears; "but I can't help thinking how dreadful it would be if it was; and me not to know whether he was dead or alive. It don't seem to me I could ever marry him, not to be able to tell whether he'd come home any day dead or alive. I'll have to give him up, Miss; and he's real kind and free-handed."
Her tears flowed so freely at the thought of giving up her lover that they splashed on Berenice's hand as Rosa leaned over to reach for something on the table.
"Well, Rosa," Miss Morison remarked, smiling at the absurdity of the maid, and wiping her hand, "I'm sorry that you feel so bad; but I don't like to be deluged with tears."
"Indeed, Miss," Rosa returned penitently, "I didn't mean to cry on you; but tears come so easy in this world. We're all born crying."
Berenice laughed in spite of herself.
"If we are born crying," she said, "that's reason enough for our smiling when we've outgrown being babies."
"That's all well enough for you," Rosa retorted with fresh tears. "You've got your man here all safe if he is hurt a little; and I don't know"—
Berenice broke in with indignant amazement, feeling her face burn.
"My man!" she exclaimed. "How dare you speak to me like that! Mr. Wynne is nothing to me. He's only a clergyman that was hurt saving my life."
She broke off with a laugh somewhat hysterical. Her nerves were not under control yet.
"I'm sure I didn't mean," wailed the girl, "to say anything wrong."
"There, there, Rosa," the other interrupted. "We are both upset. You shouldn't take so much for granted, or talk to me about 'men.'"
But in her mind the phrase repeated itself vexatiously: "your man."