CHAPTER XXII
THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW
After that interview with Scott there followed a long, long period of pain and weakness for Dinah. She who had never known before what it meant to be ill went down to the Valley of the Shadow and lingered there for many days and nights. And there came a time when those who watched beside her began to despair of her ever turning back.
So completely had she lost touch with the ordinary things of life that she knew but little of what went on around her, dwelling as it were apart, conscious sometimes of agonizing pain, but more often of a dreadful sinking as of one overwhelmed in the billows of an everlasting sea. At such times she would cling piteously to any succouring hand, crying to them to hold her up—only to hold her up. And if the hand were the hand of Greatheart, she always found comfort at length and a sense of security that none other could impart.
Her fancy played about him very curiously in those days. She saw him in many guises,—as prince, as knight, as magician; but never as the mean and insignificant figure which first had caught her attention on that sunny morning before the fancy-dress ball.
This man who sat beside her bed of suffering for hours together because she fretted when he went away, who held her up when the gathering billows threatened to overwhelm her fainting soul, who prayed for her with the utmost simplicity when she told him piteously that she could not pray for herself, this man was above and beyond all ordinary standards. She looked up to him with reverence, as one of colossal strength who had power with God.
But she never dreamed again that golden dream of Greatheart in his shining armour with the light of a great worship in his eyes. That had been a wild flight of presumptuous fancy that never could come true.
His was not the only hand to which she clung during those terrible days of fear and suffering. Another presence was almost constantly beside her night and day,—a tender, motherly presence that watched over and ministered to her with a devotion that never slackened. For some time Dinah could not find a name for this gracious and comforting presence, but one day when a figure clothed in a violet dressing-gown stooped over her to give her nourishment an illuminating memory came to her, and from that moment this loving nurse of hers filled a particular niche in her heart which was dedicated to the Purple Empress. She could think of no other name for her. That quiet and stately presence seemed to demand a royal appellation. In her calmer moments Dinah liked to lie and watch the still face with its crown of silvery hair. She loved the touch of the white hands that always knew with unerring intuition exactly what needed to be done. There seemed to be healing in their touch.
Very strangely the thought of Eustace never came to her, or coming, but flitted unrecorded and undetained across the surface of her mind. He had receded with all the rest of the world into the far, far distance that lay behind her. He had no place in this region of many shadows where these others so tenderly guided her wandering feet. No one else had any place there save old Biddy who, being never absent, seemed a part of the atmosphere, and the doctor who came and went like a presiding genie in that waste of desolation.
She did not welcome his visits, although he was invariably kind, for on one occasion she caught a low murmur from him to the effect that her mother had better come to her, and this suggestion had thrown her into a most painful state of apprehension. She had implored them weeping to let her mother stay away, and they had hushed her with soothing promises; but she never saw the doctor thereafter without a nervous dread that she might also see her mother's gaunt figure accompanying him. And she was sure—quite sure—that her mother would be very angry with her when she saw her helplessness.