"Ah, then, not justice! But have pity, or forget and go by! Only let me keep him. I love him. I will not let him go."
The protest seems almost as persistent as the law. After all, it might be itself a law or an amendment in process of making, this protest. But if Gard Windham should not go on that adventure and exploration, inferred by Mavering to be, perhaps, Arctic in character, and should linger back to life in the course of event and not by virtue of an amendment, probably Helen would not care how it came about.
She did not care how the men with the stretcher looked, how they took off their caps or whispered. The moving train and the steamboat were vague things aside. Both were crowded, but no one spoke to her. It seemed to be arranged, recognized, and admitted.
A group gathered about Mavering on deck, who said: "Why, it appears to me a situation that doesn't admit of remark. It looks like a case of stand off and clear the road. It has that distinguished appearance." And there was a murmur of assent.
The wounded, sitting or lying about on both decks and in the cabin, were wretched and sinister sights. Some babbled in delirium; a few, like Gard, were sunk in torpor, unconscious of their issues. The steamer ploughed through splashing and gurgling water. The driven, wintry clouds streamed across the sky, gray and ragged as battle-torn banners. Hawks floated over the river, graceful in their savage hunt over the double-decked steamer loaded with human pain bound for the hospitals. And Helen noticed and remembered nothing of it. She seemed to herself more like a ghost alone with Gard, who was another ghost. Empty space was around them, the existence of both so tenuous that it consisted only of the faint pulse-beat in his wrist, which she held. This beat was the measure of the flight of time, and the slender thread that bound the world together. It used to seem to her that Gard was too intangible, almost unreal. One could not say what he was like. What did he mean by: "I don't care whether I'm an admirable person or not; I'm a partially illuminated point, floating along I don't know where or why. What's the use of caring? There's too much before and after?" Or: "Every one lives in a dungeon; he doesn't know any other dungeon than his own?" And when he used to play the organ in Saint Mary's and fill the great church with mystical voices, he had seemed to her something not of the daily world, but of a world partly like the one in which she built her own fanciful castles; only it was wider and more peculiar, and the powers in it were strong and strange. However apart from Gard himself her idea of him may have been, it was one which this long watch beside him, the touch of the slow pulse, and the knowledge of how closely he now at least moved along the frontier of shadows, only made more intimate. The organ was not needed to interpret him. She felt that she knew what he was like. She thought the pulse-beat spoke, as the organ used to speak, with the same swift, immediate presence, and that, when she whispered "You must stay," it throbbed an answer: "You mean, come back. You've no idea how far it is down here, and very curious. But maybe I can, if you'll hold your end of whatever it is." And so the crowd and the murmur, the babbling in delirium of the man on the next stretcher, the laboring of the steamer ploughing up stream, the passing of hours, all seemed moved apart from her. Sometimes the distant consciousness would seem to almost or quite return, and look out at her under wavering eyelashes. The lips moved, and she fancied they said, "I knew you were there." She became aware, at the same time, that the steamer had stopped, that the stretchers were being carried out in procession, and that over her stood Mavering, Rachel, and Thaddeus Bourn; and of these she was hardly aware enough to be surprised at Thaddeus. When they came to the house with the white door, and he drew her aside a moment, she half resisted in a dazed way, and felt as if not to be close to Gard were against nature and reason. Thaddeus drew her into the sitting-room. The men had carried Gard to the room beyond. They had set down the stretcher and were moving him.
"In point of fact," began Thaddeus, "I've come to take you home. Your mother is—a—not so well. I fear it is quite serious. I wrote you, but it did not at that time seem serious. A woman of astonishing placidity, my dear, which I have sometimes felt tempted to recommend, in fact, to your imitation. But the circumstances are such now that it would not. I might say, be in good taste. Her condition is, I regret to say—seems to be—but perhaps to-morrow."
He was not sure she heard him.
"Oh yes, to-morrow."