The verdict of the specialists brought no lessening of the strain. It was too soon to judge; the shock was severe, and it was a question of strength holding out. Too soon to talk about the eyes. That must be left. There were injuries, no doubt, but in the present condition of inflammation and collapse it was only possible to wait. And to wait was, to the distracted mother, the most unbearable torture she could have had to endure.
The great house was quiet as the grave; the three guests had departed, little Geoff had been carried away by the vicar’s wife to the refuge of her own full, healthful nursery. The boy was shocked and silenced by the thought of his brother’s danger, but at five years of age a continuance of grief is as little to be expected as desired, and nothing could be left to chance. A cry beneath the window, a sudden, unexpected noise might be sufficient to turn the frail balance.
Pixie was alone, more helplessly, achingly alone than she had been in her life. The doors of the sickroom were closed against her. Joan had no need of her. Joan wanted Geoffrey—Geoffrey, only—Geoffrey alone to herself. Even Bridgie’s telegraphed offer had been refused. “Not now! No. Don’t let her come—later on,” Esmeralda said, and turned restlessly away, impatient even of the slight interruption.
If it had been an ordinary, middle-class house, wherein sudden illness brings so much strain and upset, Pixie would have expended herself in service, and have found comfort in so doing, but in the great ordered house all moved like a well-oiled machine. Meals appeared on the table at the ordinary hours, were carried away untouched, to be replaced by others equally tempting, equally futile. Banks of flowers bloomed in the empty rooms, servants flitted about their duties; there was no stir, no stress, no overwork, no need at all for a poor little sister-in-law; nothing for her to do but wander disconsolately from room to room, from garden to garden, to weep alone, and pour out her tender heart in a passion of love and prayer.
“Christ, there are so many little boys in your heaven—leave us Jack! God, have pity on Esmeralda! She’s his mother. ... Her beloved son ... Must he go?”
The silent house felt like a prison. Pixie opened a side door and crept out into the garden. The sun was shining cloudlessly, the scent of flowers hung on the air, the birds sang blithely overhead; to a sorrowful heart there seemed something almost brutal in this indifference of Nature. How could the sun shine when a little innocent human soul lay suffering cruel torture in that upper room?
Pixie made her way to her favourite seat at the end of a long, straight path, bordered on each side by square-cut hedges of yew. On the north side the great bush had grown to a height of eight or ten feet, with a width almost as great; on the southern side the hedge was kept trimmed to a level of four feet, to allow a view of the sloping park. For two hundred yards the path lay straight as a die between those grand old hedges; occasionally a peacock strutted proudly along its length, trailing its tail over the gravel, and then the final touch of picturesqueness was given to the scene, but even the approach of an ordinary humdrum human had an effect of dignity, of importance, in such old-world surroundings. It gratified Pixie’s keen sense of what it dramatically termed “a situation” to place herself in this point of vantage and act the part of audience; and to-day, though no one more interesting than a gardener was likely to appear, she yet made instinctively for the accustomed place. The sombre green of the yew was more in accord with her mood than the riot of blossom in the gardens beyond, and she was out of sight of those terrible upper windows. At any moment, as it seemed, a hand from within might stretch out to lower those blinds ... Could one live through the moment that saw them fall?
Pixie leaned back in her seat, and lived dreamily over the happenings of the last three days. The morning after the accident the three visitors had made haste to pack, and depart in different directions—Honor and Robert Carr to town, Stanor Vaughan to friends at the other side of the county. Honor had relied on Robert’s escort, but he had hurried off by the nine o’clock train, excusing himself on the score of urgent business, which fact added largely to the girl’s depression.
It was four, o’clock. All day long Pixie had been alone, unneeded, unobserved, for Joan refused to leave the nursery floor, even for meals, and Geoffrey remained by her side. Looking back over the whole course of her life, the girl could not remember a time when she had been so utterly thrown on herself. Always there had been some one at hand to love, to pity, to demand. At school, at the time of her father’s death, there had been a bevy of dear girl friends—saintly Margaret, spectacled Kate, Clara of the high forehead and long upper lip, Lottie, pretty and clever, each vieing with the other to minister to her needs. Pixie followed in thought the history of each old friend. Margaret had become a missionary and had sailed for far-off China, Clara was mistress in a High School, Lottie lived in India, married to a soldier husband, Kate was domiciled as governess in Scotland. All were far away, all engrossed in new interests, new surroundings.
Later on, in Pixie’s own life, a lonely time had come when she had been sent to Paris, to finish her education in the home of the dear school Mademoiselle. She had been lonely then, it is true—homesick, homeland-sick, so sick that she had even contemplated running away. But how good they had been to her;—Mademoiselle and her dear old father—how wise, how tactful, above all, how kind! Monsieur had died a few years before and gone to his last “repose,” and Mademoiselle—marvellous and incredible fact—Mademoiselle had married a grey-bearded, bald-headed personage whom her English visitor had mentally classed as