Letty looked round her. “Well, I’ll just sit over here.” She went to a chair at the back of the room, in a corner on a line with the door. “I won’t give any trouble. The minute he begins to—to live I’ll go.”
It was Barbara who arranged the matter peaceably, mollifying Miss Gallifer. Without explaining who Letty was she insisted on her right to remain. If Miss Gallifer was mystified, it was no more than Miss Towell was, or anyone else who touched the situation at a tangent. To that Barbara was indifferent, while Letty didn’t think of it.
In rallying her forces Barbara’s first recollection had been, “I must be a sport.” With theoretical sporting instincts she knew herself the kind of sport who doesn’t always run true to form. Hating meanness she could lapse into the mean, and toward Letty herself had so lapsed. That accident she must guard against. The issues were so big that whatever happened, she couldn’t afford to reproach herself. Self-reproach would not only magnify defeat but poison success, since, if she availed herself of her advantages, no success would ever prove worth while.
For her own sake rather than for Letty’s she made use of the hour while the doctors were again in consultation to explain the possibilities. She would have the whole thing clearly understood. Whether or not Letty did understand it she wasn’t quite sure, since she seemed cut off from thought-communication. She 341 listened, nodded, was docile to instructions, but made no response.
To be as lucid as possible Barbara put it in this way: “Since you’ve left him, and I’ve broken my engagement he’ll be absolutely free to choose; and yet, you must remember, we may—we may both lose him.”
That both should lose him seemed indeed the more probable after the consultation. All the doctors looked grave, even Dr. Lancing. His dinner-party manner had forsaken him as he talked to Barbara, his emphasis being thrown on the word “prepared.” It was still one of those cases in which you couldn’t tell, though so far the symptoms were not encouraging. He felt himself bound in honor to say as much as that, hoping, however, for the best.
Closing the front door on him Barbara felt herself shaken by a frightful possibility. If he never regained consciousness that would “settle it.” The suspense would be over. Her fate would be determined. She would no longer have to wonder and doubt, to strive or to cry. No longer would she run the risk of seeing another woman get him. She would find that which her tempestuous nature craved before everything—rest, peace, release from the impulse to battle and dominate. Not by words, not so much as by thought, but only in wild emotion she knew that, as far as she was concerned, it might be better for him to die. If he lived, and chose herself, the storm would only begin again. If he lived and chose the other....
But as to that she could see no reasonable prospect. She had only to look at Letty, shrinking in her corner of the bedroom, to judge any such mischance impossible. 342 She was so humble; so negligible; so much a bit of flotsam of the streets. She had an appeal of her own, of course; but an appeal so lowly as to be obscured by the wayside dust which covered it. What was the flower to which Rash had now and then compared her? Wasn’t that what he called it—the dust flower?—that ragged blue thing of byways and backyards, which you couldn’t touch without washing your hands afterwards. No, no! Not even the legal tie which nominally bound them could hold in the face of this inequality. It would be too grotesque.
The hours passed. The night nurse was now installed, and was reading Keith Macdermot’s Destiny. She was one of those tall, slender women whom you see to be all bone. As businesslike as Miss Gallifer, and quite as detached, Miss Moines was brisk and systematic. It being her habit to subdue a household to herself before she entered on her duties her eyes regarded Miss Walbrook and Letty with the startled glance of a horse’s.
For before going Miss Gallifer had given her a hint. “You’ll have to do a lot of side-stepping here. This is the famous House of Mystery. You’ll find two nuts upstairs—that’s what I’d call them if they were men—but they’re women—girls, sort of—and you’ve just got to leave them alone. One’s a high-stepper—regular society—was engaged to the patient and now acts as if she’d married him; and the other—well, perhaps you can make her out; I can’t. Seems a little off. May be the poor castaway, once loved, and now broken-hearted but faithful, you read about in books. Anyhow, there they are, and you’d best let them be. 343 It won’t be for more than—well, I give him twenty-four hours at the most. I begin to think that for once old Wisdom is right. Good-looker too, poor fellow, and can’t be more than thirty-five. I wonder what could have happened? I suppose they’ll go into that at the inquest.”