“Thanks, Peggy. We shall come back here as soon as she can be moved. We settled that.”
CHAPTER XIX
HUGH had taken the telegram with him, and on his journey he read it and re-read it. In London, at Victoria station, it could be construed one way, at Dover it could be construed another way. Waiting at Laon, the probability inclined toward the Victoria interpretation, but with the wheels going swiftly round again he thought the Dover interpretation might be right. But when, in the dim, frosty hour before dawn he awoke, after a short sleep, just as the train came into Basle, he knew that the two interpretations were one. What it came to was this—Edith had an attack of syncope, failure of the heart. She had rallied; as soon as she could be moved she must be moved down to some lower and less stimulating air. This attack had taken place on the morning she would have written to him. When she recovered she sent the telegram saying she had not written because she was so busy. Then a second attack had come on. The second telegram was sent by the doctor.
The wheels of the train made a continuous throbbing, punctuated beat, and as they sped on between the flower-strewn pastures he was conscious of little else but this pulsation. Just occasionally some vivid flash of consciousness came over him, so that for a moment the sword of suspense pierced him or the hot hand of sorrow lay heavy on his head, or, again, for a moment only, he was conscious of the exquisite beauty of the blossoming spring, but for the most part his mind was inert and dull, feeling no more than the droning of the wheels. He merely had to sit still and be taken to Davos. He would feel again when he got there; just now he was no more than a parcel. Sometimes for a space the wheels seemed like some voice he knew—Peggy’s, for instance, saying, in staccato, some ridiculous sentence. For ten minutes at a time she would say, “Tel-e-gram—on—the—hall—table—tel-e-gram—on—the—hall—table.” Or Daisy, in her childish treble would repeat, “I—did—the land-ing—net—I—did—the—land-ing net,” sentences he had heard just before the reading of the telegram. Or, again, sometimes, still to the beat of the labouring train, some very distant voice sang. But the wheels never tuned themselves to Edith’s voice.
All the time, too, below the numbness and the apathy there was something of the horror of his own smallness, and of the sense, as under some anæsthetic, of infinite distance. All the kindly and lovely things of the world were withdrawn.
Landquart already! He could scarcely believe that he had been more than an hour or two in the train since Basle. The journey had not seemed interminably long; it had seemed, on the contrary, incredibly short. He had to change here and get into the light mountain railway which would take him up, up home. Where she was, was home.
The languor of spring hung heavy in these valleys, but before long, as they mounted, the cooler, more vivid air began to stream down from the austere heights. And then it was that the magnet of home began to pull, the apathy dropped from him, he felt and realised on what journey he had come. Patiently and slowly the train climbed up the pass to Wolf-gang, and with its own momentum dropped down into the valley of Davos. There lay the lake, still reflecting without tremor the pines of the hillside; there lay the quiet sunshine, brooding serene and luminous, in this dawn and youth of the year, and there, above the village, stood the roof and wooden walls and deep balconies of his home.
It was but ten minutes’ walk there from the upper station, and he left his servant to look after the luggage and walked up the little path between the fields that he knew so well. And in that serene peace he came back to himself, even as his hurrying feet were taking him back to her. He did not know what he expected, except that she was waiting for him to come. And then, while he was yet a couple of hundred yards from the house, he saw the figure of a man coming down toward him. In a moment he saw it was the doctor.
“I meant to meet the train, my dear boy,” he said, “but I couldn’t leave her. Yes, she is better, a little better. She knows you are coming.”
He looked at Hugh a moment with quiet, pitiful eyes.