The little divinity and her companion had by this time reached the hospital gates.
‘I hope I shall use the proper words, Geff,’ whispered Dinah, looking flushed and nervous. ‘The kind of exhortation, you know, that clergymen’s wives would give to sick people.’
‘Impossible!’ Geoffrey disencouraged her promptly. ‘Orthodoxy cannot be learnt at a moment’s notice. You must be content to be—yourself! And that is much,’ he added, watching her beautiful, earnest face. ‘Your sermon may well be a silent one. Look, just as you are looking at this moment, and leave the rest to the patient’s human nature. Jack may be a miserable sinner, needing homilies. That is a fact you and I have no certitude about. We know that he is a poor lad, far from his people, laid low in pain and weakness. Depend upon it, the sound of a tender voice, the sight of Dinah Arbuthnot’s face, must prove good medicine, both for his soul and body.’
The tears started to Dinah’s eyes. She was just at that tension point of suppressed emotion when a kindly accent, a word or two of praise, are as hands extended to a drowning man. If Gaston only esteemed her poor personal gifts as Geoffrey did—for, of whatever she thought, to-day, Gaston still was beneath the current of her thinking! Nay (this followed by a descending, yet inevitable sequence of ideas), if Gaston could only hold the opinion of her held—Dinah, remembering events, had a little thrill of shame—by a man like Lord Rex Basire!
Perhaps the sum-total of yoked infelicity might be lessened if careless husbands would reckon with themselves, sometimes, concerning the number of their deserved rivals—such husbands, I mean, as possess wives of Dinah Arbuthnot’s mould. For must not the answer be trumpet-tongued: ‘The whole seeing world!’ Does not every man, save the purblind, range himself by intuition on the side of a young and beautiful and neglected woman? But careless husbands may not have imagination enough for such a stretch, or there may be sympathisers ... outside feminine judges ... mature sirens ... a clever whisper, even, now and then. And so the wife’s heart continues to ache to the last—or gives up aching of a sudden: deeper tragedy, by far.
Dinah’s colour went and came as she traversed the corridors of the hospital beside Geoffrey. The moment they entered Ward A., the men’s accident room, she forgot her want of knowledge, of orthodoxy. ‘Explanation’ was not needed here. She saw only the rows of beds, each bed with its pallid inmate. She felt only that she was Dinah Thurston—among the poor, the simple, the suffering,—among her equals.
The patients in the ward were mostly working-men in the springtime of their strength, the majority of them victims of the late quarry accident. A few, like poor Jack, had been struck down by mishap at sea or in the harbour. Beside nearly every bed was a visitor. Here might be seen a country girl talking in whispers to her sweetheart. Here a pale wife clasped her husband’s hand, or a mother in silent anguish watched her lad’s changed face. On every pillow was a little posy of sweet-smelling cottage flowers, reminding the gaunt sufferers who lay there, patient and uncomplaining, of blue summer sky, of the freshness of fields and gardens, of home.
Number 28 had neither visitor nor posy. Poor Jack came from a remote hamlet among the Devonshire moors. His mates on board the Princess were afloat again. The lad had no friends, save the surgeons and nurses of the Guernsey hospital—and Geff Arbuthnot.
‘Speak to him about his own country,’ Geoffrey whispered, as his companion drew back a little; ‘Jack will dispense with any formal introduction.’
And on this, Dinah, her face overflowing with sweetest womanly compassion, stooped over the low pallet and spoke—a commonplace word or two, unworthy of raising to the dignity of print—a word or two whose homely Devonshire lilt called the blood up to Jack’s temples as though some voice from the old familiar home addressed him.