Outside the passer-by paused to look curiously at the house. David Trench hovered between life and death, and the town forgot the summer heat in its anxious sympathy. No one had known what a great man he was, what an irreparable loss his death would mean to the community. All over the town little groups of prominent men discussed the catastrophe with hushed breathing. The labourers who had done David’s bidding for years wiped furtive tears from their eyes when they were told that the case was all but hopeless.
Fifty—the meridian of life! A younger man would stand a better chance. Dr. Schubert feared a spinal lesion. Yet the shock to the nervous system might account for the torpor that had prevailed, with fleeting lucid intervals, for four days. If that were all, the human machine would right itself presently.
Early Sunday morning Mr. Marksley had come to the house to inquire about the patient, and to repudiate any responsibility for the accident ... and had encountered Lavinia Trench’s tongue in a manner that he was not likely to forget. She had another score to settle with this man and his family, unnamed but not absent from the motive power of her attack. The outburst had a salutary effect on the woman who, after the first excitement of David’s home-coming, had moved with the automatism of a sleep-walker. When he had gone, she sought Judith. Larimore must go at once and arrange with Dr. Schubert for consultation, the best surgeon in St. Louis.
III
When they were alone, she fell on her daughter-in-law’s neck, sobbing hysterically: “Oh, oh, oh, if he dies I shall go distracted. He doesn’t dare to die ... now. If he was going to die, why couldn’t it have been sooner? Oh, my God in heaven, what am I saying? Judith, can’t you save him? Don’t you know what it would mean for him to die now?”
“Try to be calm, mother. The case isn’t quite desperate.”
“Oh, but my case is desperate. You don’t know.... If you could have heard him, last night! He said the most terrible thing. He must have been thinking it, or it wouldn’t have slipped out like that, when his mind was wandering. When you think a thing over and over, you say it without meaning to. He took my hands and said he was only a carpenter’s son ... but Ch—rist was a carpenter’s son, too ... and it was worth carrying a cross all these years, to have me, when I belonged to another man.”
“Mother! Oh, this is pitiful.”
“I wanted to get down on my knees and tell him that I never belonged to any other man. I wanted to confess that I was the vilest sinner, and unworthy of his love. It wasn’t me, at all. I was standing to one side, looking at David and me, and thinking what I would do it I was in Vine Larimore’s place. And when I walked away, there didn’t seem to be any floor under my feet.”
“Mother, dear, why didn’t you open your heart to him, when you were so close?”