"For twenty-four hours we thought you'd slip through our fingers every minute. 'Twas only your mother's nursing that kept you alive—I've told her that twenty times. She never spared herself an instant, and, it may have been my imagination, but she never seemed to me to be the same woman afterwards. Something had gone out of her."
Now she understood, now she knew, something had gone out of her, also, and this something was youth. No woman who had fought with death for a child could ever be the same afterwards—could ever value again the small personal joys, when she carried the memory of supreme joy or supreme anguish buried within her heart. She remembered that her mother had never seemed young to her, not even in her earliest childhood; and she understood now why this had been so, why the deeper experiences of life rob the smaller ones of all vividness, of all poignancy. It had been so easy for her mother to give up little things, to deny herself, to do without, to make no further demands on life after the great demands had been granted her. How often had she said unthinkingly in her girlhood, "Mother, you never want anything for yourself." Ah, she knew now what it meant, and with the knowledge a longing seized her to throw herself into her mother's arms, to sob out her understanding and her sympathy, to let her feel before it was too late that she comprehended every step of the way, every throb of the agony!
"I'd spend the night with you, Jinny, if I didn't have to be with Milly Carrington, who has two children down with it," said the doctor; "but if there's any change, get Marthy to come for me. If not, I'll be sure to look in again before daybreak."
When he had gone, she moved the night lamp to the corner of the washstand, and after swallowing hastily a cup of coffee which Marthy had brought to her before the doctor's visit, and which had grown quite tepid and unpalatable, she resumed her patient watch under the raised end of the sheet. The whole of life, the whole of the universe even, had narrowed down for her into that faint circle of light which the lamp drew around Harry's little bed. It was as if this narrow circle beat with a separate pulse, divided from the rest of existence by its intense, its throbbing vitality. Here was concentrated for her all that the world had to offer of hope, fear, rapture, or anguish. The littleness and the terrible significance of the individual destiny were gathered into that faintly quivering centre of space—so small a part of the universe, and yet containing the whole universe within itself!
Outside, in the street, she could see a half-bared bough of the mulberry tree, arching against a square of window, from which the white curtains were drawn back; and in order to quiet her broken and disjointed thoughts, she began to count the leaves as they fell, one by one, turning softly at the stem, and then floating out into the darkness beyond. "One. Two. How long that leaf takes to loosen. He is better. The doctor certainly thought that he was better. If he only gets well. O God, let him get well, and I will serve you all my life! Three—four—five—For twenty-four hours we thought you would slip through our fingers. Somebody said that—somebody—it must have been the doctor. And he was talking of me, not of Harry. That was twenty-six years ago, and my mother was enduring then all this agony that I am feeling to-night. Twenty-six years ago—perhaps at this very hour, she sat beside me alone as I am sitting now by Harry. And before that other women went through it. All the world over, wherever there are mothers—north, south, east, west—from the first baby that was born on the earth—they have every one suffered what I am suffering now—for it is the pang of motherhood! To escape it one must escape birth and escape the love that is greater than one's self." And she understood suddenly that suffering and love are inseparable, that when one loves another more than one's self, one has opened the gate by which anguish will enter. She had forgotten to count the leaves, and when she remembered and looked again, the last one had fallen. Against the parted white curtains, the naked bough arched black and solitary. Even the small silent birds that had swayed dejectedly to and fro on the branches all day had flown off into the darkness. Presently, the light in the window went out, and as the hours wore on, a fine drizzling rain began to fall, as soft as tears, from the starless sky over the mulberry tree. A sense of isolation greater than any she had ever known attacked her like a physical chill, and rising, she went over to the fire and stirred the pile of coal into a flame. She was alone in her despair, and she realized, with a feeling of terror, that one is always alone when one despairs, that there is a secret chamber in every soul where neither love nor sympathy can follow one. If Oliver were here beside her—if he were standing close to her in that throbbing circle around the bed—she would still be separated from him by the immensity of that inner space which is not measured by physical distances. "No, even if he were here, he could not reach me," she said, and an instant later, with one of those piercing illuminations which visit even perfectly normal women in moments of great intensity, she thought quickly, "If every woman told the truth to herself, would she say that there is something in her which love has never reached?" Then, reproaching herself because she had left the bed for a minute, she went back again and bent over the unconscious child, her whole slender body curving itself passionately into an embrace. His face was ashen white, except where the skin around his mouth was discoloured with a faint bluish tinge. His flesh, even his bones, appeared to have shrunk almost away in twenty-four hours. It was impossible to imagine that he was the rosy, laughing boy, who had crawled into her arms only two nights ago. The disease held him like some unseen spiritual enemy, against which all physical weapons were as useless as the little toys of a child. How could one fight that sinister power which had removed him to an illimitable distance while he was still in her arms? The troubled stupor, which had in it none of the quiet and the restfulness of sleep, terrorized her as utterly as if it had been the personal spirit of evil. The invisible forces of Life and Death seemed battling in the quivering air within that small circle of light.
While she bent over him, he stirred, raised himself, and then fell back in a paroxysm of coughing. The violence of the spasm shook his fragile little body as a rough wind shakes a flower on a stalk. Over his face the bluish tinge spread like a shadow, and into his eyes there came the expression of wondering terror which she had seen before only in the eyes of young startled animals. For an instant it seemed almost as if the devil of disease were wrestling inside of him, as if the small vital force she called life would be beaten out in the struggle. Then the agony passed; the strangling sound ceased, and he grew quiet, while she wiped the poison from his mouth and nostrils, and made him swallow a few drops of milk out of a teaspoon.
At the moment, while she fell on her knees by his bedside, it seemed to her that she had reached that deep place beyond which there is nothing.
"You've pulled him through. We'll have him out of bed before many days now," said the old doctor at daybreak, and he added cheerfully, "By the way, your husband came in the front door with me. He wanted to rush up here at once, but I'm keeping him away because he is obliged to go back to the bank."
"Poor Oliver," said Virginia gently. "It is terrible on him. He must be so anxious." But even while she uttered the words, she was conscious of a curious sensation of unreality, as though she were speaking of a person whom she had known in another life. It was three days since she had seen Oliver, and in those three days she had lived and died many times.