But withal a silent voice within her gave the lie to her vehemence. Some element of her character that had been rigid and intact was crumbling down. An old, sweet something, that a dreadful mill had ground and crushed and annihilated, was rising whole and undefiled, superior to any petty distinction, regardless of all that lifted combative in her inheritance, not to be gainsaid or denied.
She leaned closer, listening to the incoherent words and broken phrases borne on the turbid channels of fever. But she could not link them together into meaning. Only one name he spoke clearly over and over again—the name Hugh Stires—repeated with the dreary monotony of a child conning a lesson. She noted the mark across his brow. Before her marriage, in her blindness, she had used to wonder what it was like. It was not in the least disfiguring—it gave a touch of the extraordinary. It was so small she did not wonder that in that ecstatic moment of her bride's kiss she had not seen it.
Slowly, half fearfully, she stretched out her hand and laid it on his. As if at the touch the mutterings ceased. The eyes opened, and a confused, troubled look crept to them. Then they closed again, and the look faded out into a peace that remained.
Jessica dropped to her knees and buried her face in the blanket, burning and chilling with an indescribable sensation of mingled pain and pleasure. She scarcely knew what she was thinking. It seemed to her that his very weakness and helplessness voiced again the something that had sounded in the music of the violin, when the buried, forgotten past had cried out its pain and shame and plea, half unconsciously—to her! A thrill ran through her, the sense of moral power of the weak over the strong, of the feminine over the masculine.
A rising flush stained her cheeks. With a sudden impulse, and with a guilty backward glance, she bent and touched her lips to his forehead.
She drew back quickly, her face flooded with color, caught her breath, then, drawing her hood over her head, went swiftly to the door and was swallowed up in the darkness.
CHAPTER XIX THE EVIL EYE
Harry Sanderson, harking back from the perilous pathway of fever, was to see himself in the light of reawakened instincts. The man of no memories, in his pointless wanderings, had felt dissatisfaction, a fierce resentment, a savage unrest, but morally he had not suffered. The spiritual elements of the maturer growth had slept. At a woman's look they had awakened, to rise to full stature under the strange spell of melody. When the real, remorseful nature, newly emerged, found itself an object of animadversion and contempt, face to face with a past of shame and reproach, the shock had been profound. The stirring of the old conscience was as painful as is the first gasp of air to the drowned lung. It had thrown the brain into a fever to whose fierce onslaught the body had temporarily succumbed.