A Woman Martyr

by Alice M. Diehl

"If the police appear with a warrant they cannot refuse to listen to me," he said. "So I shall take up my abode here, and leave my patients to my partner and our assistant."

The honeymoon was waning in the most dismal of fashions. The house was wrapped in gloom. Joan had recovered consciousness to suffer agonies of pain, and fall into the delirium of fever. The prolonged chill of being the sport of the storm, with so terrible a shock to follow, had resulted in pneumonia. A specialist was summoned from town. He gave no hope. When his fiat was pronounced a look of relief came upon Vansittart's worn, lined features. The specialist went away wondering, but old Doctor Walters understood.

Then the stricken husband took up his position at his wife's pillow, and banished every one. Whatever his life might contain in the future of hideous retrospection, for those few short hours left he would watch his erring darling yield up her soul to the great Judge who alone knew the frail clay he had made, without any human soul witnessing his agony.

Joan had been raving, madly, incoherently of the past and present, tossing and writhing, now and then clamouring and groaning. But a few minutes after Vansittart had banished the nurses and taken up his position by her side, she seemed to grow calmer.

Was it possible that at least she might die in peace, free from those horrible fantasies, those cruel pains?

He watched her anxiously hour after hour. As the delirium abated the restlessness ceased, and she seemed to fall asleep. He had come to her at midnight. When the grey dawn crept into the room Joan was asleep, and as he lay and gazed wearily at her, his head drooped until it rested on the pillow.

After a succession of wild, tormenting dreams--a purgatory of horrible physical sufferings--Joan slept. She was vaguely conscious of Vansittart's nearness, vaguely sensible that relief had come. The sleep was like heaven after hell.

Then at last another kind of dream was added to her sense of slumber. She felt that something greater and nobler had been added to her life, and that it was all around and about. In the tremendous vastness and solidity of the new influence all seemed petty, small; she knew that she, Vansittart, Mercier, Vera, all were but dancing specks in a gorgeous sunlight.....

Vansittart awoke with a start, a feeling of guilt, fear, and a pain in his arm from some heavy weight.

Then a horrible cry startled the nurse who was keeping vigil in the next room. She rushed in and up to the bed.