“The best is that she may see you and talk to you and die. That is what both you and she, I think, would be right to choose. The worst is that she may get a little better, and drag on, for weeks perhaps, even go back to England. Then there would be that long, unwilling struggle to cling to life, a struggle that is instinctive only, and does not represent the will or the desire.”
“Then there is no hope of real recovery?”
“No.”
Hugh got up from his chair and walked across to the window. It was drawing near to sunset, and the snowpeaks opposite were already beginning to flame, while down in the valley below and all across to the heights opposite lay the transparent darkening shadow of evening. No breeze stirred, a windless calm lay over the meadows, the pines, the cloudless sky. Within him, too, there was calm: despair, hopelessness might be in his heart, but there were other and bigger things—love and the imperishable memory of beautiful days.
After a moment the doctor rose too.
“I am going now,” he said, “but I shall be back later. If I could do any good by waiting, I would of course wait. You know all there is to be known. If she wakes and asks for you, you may of course go to her.”
“May I go and look at her a moment as she sleeps?” asked Hugh.
“Yes, but go very quietly. Take your shoes off.”
Hugh went up the passage to where at the far end her bedroom door stood wide open, so that she might have all the air that could be got. Yet, though his heart was inside that room, he paused a moment at the door fearing what he might be going to see, dreading to look on what the cruel hand of suffering and mortal weakness had done. But next moment he had conquered that, and went in, and his fear was so groundless that he no longer remembered that he had feared.
She lay without pillows, so that her head was level with her body, and her arms lay outside the sheet. And as he looked at her face it seemed to him for a moment that all her illness, all she had gone through since the autumn, was but a dream, so untroubled was her sleep, so calm and natural her whole look. She did not look ill, even, and her mouth smiled a little with parted lips. Yet the nurse was there, the apparatus of illness was there, the faint sweet smell of ether still hung a little in the room.