It was going now. Yes. In wave after wave, each less poignant than the one before, the pain left her. She lifted her head, wet her lips—wiped her forehead with the handkerchief still damp from her tears. Her eyes were tired and dim; the altar swam mistily. She looked across to Father Vernon, and he, noting her restlessness at last, rose and, with a low genuflection on both knees, beckoned her, and passed before her from the church.
In the open air she revived, and even began to doubt the reality of what she had just undergone. There is a dream-like quality about intense pain that makes it hard to estimate it truly afterward. The car was waiting, in a dark slum that had once been a walled country lane smelling of mould and verdure. Even now the warm restlessness of spring could be felt in its fetid air. The chauffeur sat sideways upon his seat, reading some strange by-product of literature in a green cover. A dozen or so of ragged children, shock-headed and sore of face, clustered round the headlights like so many poor scorched flies. She shared the coppers in her purse between them.
"Write me from Hindhead," Vernon said, at the door of the car; "and come to see me again when you get back. Be sure, my dear, God has some great mercy for you after this. And if I were you, I should see some one about the headaches. Nerves? Oh, yes! but it never does harm to have good advice. Good-bye, good-bye! God bless you, my dear. Now then, babies, why aren't the lot of you in bed?"
The car rolled, smoothly and swiftly, southward and westward. Through brawling, chaffering Saturday night markets; through the old "Square Mile," deserted now, its mysterious lanes coiling away to left and right in tortuous perspective; across the Circus, in whose midst the bronze archer poises himself, choosing his prey and aiming his unseen arrow day and night at the spinning wheel of pleasure; round the sweep of the Quadrant—and home. Two and two, two and two; the men leaning over the women, the women leaning toward the men. Nature, after all, was slightly vulgar. To be placed—by circumstances—out of reach of its allurement had compensations—lent dignity to the point of view. It was almost enough to make one turn to virtue to have to share vice with so many....
There she went again! Phrases, phrases! Well, it was just as well, since, after all, there wasn't much else left for her now. How tired she was of it all! And what was the great mercy that Father Vernon had predicted so confidently?... Home, at last.
"Three hours, probably more," the doctor said. It was Pemmer-Lloyd, the great cancer specialist from Weymouth Street, just round the corner. He was in golfing tweeds, and felt justly aggrieved that, with so many general practitioners in the neighborhood, he should have been called away from breakfast, for this. The nine forty-five to Amersham was out of the question now.
One window-blind had been drawn up, crookedly and hurriedly, and through the rhomboidal opening a sinister light fell upon the disorder of the room. Two frightened maids and a housekeeper stood at the foot of the bed, watching the doctor, with inane hope upon their faces. One of the maids was crying, but looking about her curiously at the same time.
"Done? No! of course nothing can be done. Am I not telling you she has been dead over three hours. Had any doctor been attending her lately?"