“But her body! Oh, Miss Long, did you hear what she said?” cried Bertha, with a sob.
“Yes; but the body is such a small matter compared with the brain, and in time who can say but what she may be quite well again. Stranger things have happened, and doctors are human and likely to make mistakes like the rest of us,” said Eunice, in a cheerful tone; then she added, with a graver note in her voice, “Meanwhile, she has you, and what a blessing you will be in the house! It will be your chance of paying back to your cousin the care she gave to you and your sisters when your mother died.”
Bertha drew a sharp breath and turned away without answering. This was a side of the question she had not looked at before. She had entirely ignored her own responsibility in the matter in that night’s wild revolt, and the recollection of it was like a fetter to bind her to the life from which she was so anxious to escape.
Tom did not wake until daylight, and then he was himself again, at least it was a comfort to know there was no fear of having him for an invalid also; and Bertha tried to rally her drooping spirits as the day wore on, telling herself that most probably things would not be so bad or so black as at first they had threatened.
It was late in the afternoon when the doctor came, and Grace was just rousing out of her deep, drug-induced sleep. Again it was Eunice and the doctor who were shut up with her, while Bertha waited in anxious dread outside the closed door, and Tom, who did not know that there was anything to dread, hovered round, so glad and thankful that his wife was still alive, that it made Bertha’s heart ache to watch him.
Why, oh why had Eunice not warned him of what might be in store? It seemed so cruel to let him hope when perhaps there was no hope.
“What a long time the doctor is in there! Was he as long yesterday?” Tom asked, coming restlessly into the kitchen and standing by the table where Bertha was busy breadmaking. To her it was like the grimmest irony of things that daily work had to be done, whatever issues were at stake. But she only nodded her head in reply, for at that moment the doctor came out of the room, and, crossing to the outer door, beckoned to Tom to follow him. Bertha heaved a great sigh of relief. At least she had been spared the heavy task of letting him know of the trouble which might be in store for him.
In about ten minutes he was back again with such a look on his face as she had never seen there before, and she caught her breath in a little gasp of amazement. It was a glorified expression that he wore, and it lifted him above the commonplace.
“Can I go in?” he asked, as Eunice at this moment appeared on the threshold of the inner room; and when the little woman nodded her head, he passed in and shut the door behind him.
If trouble could make a plain man look like that, surely it could not be unmixed disaster! That was the thought in Bertha’s mind for the remainder of the day, and though she tried to escape it she could not. All her life she had worshipped beauty wherever she could find it. Tom Ellis had seemed hitherto to be only a struggling unlettered farmer, more intent on making money than improving his intellectual standing; but the blow which might have felled a less noble soul had left him standing erect and strong, so surely the disaster had wrought him only good.