“No!” she cried, shifting her grasp to his hand. “No; you are mine now! And I shall not turn you over to yourself again until the problem is solved!”
Hitt met them as they came out of the room. “Well,” he said, “I’ve kept Madam Beaubien informed as well as I could. But she’s been worried. Where are you going?”
“Home,” she said simply. “We’ll be back at three––perhaps.”
But at three that afternoon the Beaubien telephoned to Hitt that Carmen would not be down.
“She will not leave the boy,” the woman said. “She holds him––I don’t know how. And I know he is trying desperately to help her. But––I never saw any one stand as she does! Lewis is here, but he doesn’t interfere. We’re going to put a bed in his room, and Sidney will sleep there. Yes, I’ll keep you informed. Tell Ned, won’t you?”
Haynerd stormed; but the tempest was all on the surface. “I know, I know,” he said, in reply to Hitt’s explanation. “That boy’s life is more to her than a million newspapers, or anything else in the universe just at present. She’ll win! The devil can’t look her in the face! I––I wish I were––What are you standing there for? Go ’long and get to work!”
In the little Beaubien cottage that afternoon the angry waves of human fear, of human craving, of hatred, wrath, and utter misery mounted heaven-high, and fell again. Upon them walked the Christ. As the night-shadows gathered, Sidney Ames, racked and exhausted, fell into a deep sleep. Then Carmen left his bedside and went into the little parlor, where sat the Beaubien and Father Waite.
“Here,” she said, handing a hypodermic needle and a vial of tablets to the latter. “He didn’t use them. And now,” she continued, “you must work with me, and stand––firm! Sidney’s enemies are those of his own mental household. It is our task to drive them out. We have got to uproot from his consciousness the thought that alcohol and drugs are a power. Hatred and self-condemnation, as well as self-love, voiced in a sense of injury, are other mental enemies that have got to be driven out, too. There is absolutely no human help! It is all mental, every bit of it! You have got to know that, and stand with me. We are going to prove the Christ-principle omnipotent with respect to these seeming things.