CHAPTER XXIV.
"Death comes to set thee free,
Oh, meet him cheerily
As thy true friend;
Then all thy cares shall cease
And in eternal peace
Thy penance end."
"Even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to the sea."
The arrival of the new nurse had been announced to the doctor in charge of the quarantine station. He waited for her coming in his office. She entered the room, paused for a moment on the threshold, and then came forward. The light, to which his back was turned, fell full upon her face,—a face devoid of bitterness as it was of joy. Her form, clad in the regulation nurse's garb of blue, showed in strong relief against the unpainted pine walls of the great doctor's office—a somewhat broad, low figure, not slight, nor lissome, but most eloquently womanly. Her lips parted in a question which he did not hear.
Time had gone back with him. He stood upon a jutting ledge of rock, which from the ridge hung out into the blue. He was alone, and waiting—waiting with every faculty of his will strained to the utmost; looking through a parting in the leaves between the tree-trunks, he watched for a girl's figure. Far away there was a glimmer of water; somewhere a village band was practising, but distance deadened all sound from it save the throb of the heavy drum which pulsed through the air and seemed to add motion to the heavy, odorous vapor of the summer night and send it eddying up in perfumed waves about the craggy platform. Then he saw one coming, flushed, and "foot gilt with all the blossom dust" of wild venollia, fleabane and spent moondaisies. And then he held once more a trembling maiden form within his clasp. Again from out the hollow of his arm there looked up at him two eyes of clearest, purest glance. Again he dwelt upon the smooth forehead with its faint upraised brows. Again he kissed the white throat bent outward like a singing bird's, as her head rested against him and her eyes met his. Again he saw those eyes grow dim and moist. Again he felt the encircled form tremble. Again he stilled the appealing lips with a kiss. Again he vowed eternal faith. Again he heard her say—
"Will you be good enough to tell me my duties?" the new nurse was saying, in low, strained tones, in a voice without modulation and suggestive of reiteration.
"What is your name?" he asked, with unstrung joints.
"I am Myron Holder," she said, and looked at him.
Her lips did not quiver. Her cheeks did not flush. Her eyes did not falter. All the majesty of a wronged womanhood shone upon her brow. Her glance spoke of a dignity far beyond the gift of man, above the world's honor—a dignity bought at a terrible price and sealed with a terrible seal of loneliness and separation.
"Ah!" he said, and leaned upon the table at his side, mentally acknowledging the strength of her presence. "I am Henry Willis," he said. "Did you know me?"
"I recognized you when I came into the room," she answered, in a monotonous tone.
There was a pause. Her eyes rested upon him unwaveringly, and sent from their depths intolerable meanings of contempt and righteous indignation and hopeless reproach.
He came a step nearer.
"Let me—" he began. She stepped back—her nostrils dilated.
"Would you be good enough to tell me my duties?" she said.
"Tell me how you came here."
"I am Nurse Myron," she said, and uttered no further word.
He waited in a silence she did not break.
"If you will come with me," he said at length.
She signified her acquiescence and followed him.
Days passed—long days and nights which seemed to outlast eternity in their dreary passage. Day by day the nurses and physicians did battle with the foul pestilential scourge they were striving to stifle. The great Dr. Willis, the eminent bacteriologist, peered and pried incessantly over his gelatin films, striving to win the secret of infection and its origin from the minute particles of matter he held prisoned there. But yet more earnestly did he strive to learn the secret of one strong, brave soul, hut in vain.
The quality Dr. Willis most admired, respected and understood was Will, but here it reigned in such transcendent strength that he stood appalled before it. From that moment of retrospect and recognition he had awakened with a galling sense of his own inferiority. Never before had Henry Willis owned the domination of a living will. Now the wide earth held no sweetness, all his achievements no triumph for him, unless he could once more possess the woman who had, so long ago, been wholly his.
They worked side by side. As the cases multiplied, and two of the men nurses were stricken with the disease, Henry Willis, perforce threw aside his experiments and flung himself into the fray. Day by day saw these two drawn closer and closer together by the exigencies of their peculiar and dreadful position. No more volunteers were forthcoming. The force in the quarantine station was weakening. The physician, albeit wiry and of an iron physique, was pale and thin.
Myron Holder's strong frame and brave heart were giving way; only her will sustained each. Her eyes shone neither steadily nor calmly now, but burned with desperate courage.
Dr. Willis came to her one day with a newspaper containing reports of their work. The names of Dr. Henry Willis and Nurse Myron were coupled with honorable and enduring encomiums. She read it standing in the corridor before his office door. As she read and gathered the import of the words, a change overspread her face. Her eyes, of late so hot and dry, grew moist; her lips trembled; from brow to chin the color flushed her face, bringing back to it all the charm of a crushed and subordinate womanhood. She read the article over and looked him full in the face.
"My name is here and yours," she said. Then, in a voice which had burst from its shackles at last, and rang out clear and high, "They should be read above the grave of a nameless child."
She paused a moment—long enough for the man before her to gather the meaning of her words—long enough to allow memory to whelm her own heart and break it at last, and then she sank upon the floor, weeping and crying aloud for her dead child.
When Henry Willis carried her to the office, the first paroxysmal symptoms of cholera had set in.
* * * * * *
All hope was over. Nurse Myron was dying. Every remedy despairing skill could suggest had been resorted to, but in vain. Transfusion of blood had brought not even an evanescent strength. The disease had culminated, and death was simply a question of minutes—an hour at most.
Her face had become olive in tint, and shone up with Murillo-like beauty of tint and form from the pillow. Beside her, in all the abandon of shattered hope, knelt Henry Willis. But to all his pleading Myron Holder was deaf, until, by the inspiration of despair, he cried aloud:
"For his sake, to give him a name!"
Then she consented. In the presence of the remnant of nurses left, blessed by the devoted minister who also lived among these dangers, Myron Holder and Henry Willis took each other for man and wife.
They were alone. He held her hand, awed by the supernal brightness of her eyes.
"You will write his name above his grave?" she said. "His real name—Henry Willis? Do you know what I called him? My—little My."
"Live," he murmured. "Live to let me atone—to be happy—to be adored. Live—you can if you will."
"Could I?" she said. "Life holds nothing for me; Death him, or forgetfulness."
Her eyes began to film. He bent over her distractedly, calling her tender names, pleading for a look—a sign.
"Speak to me—forgive me," he cried. "Myron—Myron!"
"I forgive you," she said, looking at him once again with calm and steadfast eye of divine forgetfulness. She sank into a stupor, through which she murmured "My—little My"—tenderly, as to a sleeping child. Then suddenly her eyes opened, a flood of ineffable brightness illumined her face, she stretched forth her arms and uttered a name in a cry of joyous hope, and sank back. The world was over for her. There but remained the involuntary efforts of life against annihilation, efforts which, happily, were few and brief. Twenty minutes after she became a wife, Myron Willis had passed—
"'And surely,' all folk said,
'None ever saw such joy on visage dead.'"
They buried her, as the law required, with the rest of those who died of the pest. Upon her breast they found an ill-made little bag of checked blue and white cotton. Within it was a flossy skein of child's hair tangled by many tears and kisses. They brought it to Dr. Willis, and he replaced it upon the dead breast with whose secret sobs and sighs it had risen and fallen for so long.
The newspapers gave a pathetic account of the "Romance in a Quarantine Station," and told how the famous Dr. Willis, meeting his "girl love" in the hospital, had married her on her deathbed. The tale cast quite a romantic lustre over the doctor's somewhat prosaic career of medical achievement.
There was no word said, however, of their first meeting and parting, nor of a little grave that to this day is unmarked save for a tiny tablet whereon is carven one syllable—MY.