“One can never say as much,” was the answer. “I should not myself like to lie insensible in a burning house, close to a partition which fell eventually. At the least you might have been crippled and disfigured for life.”
A groan burst from John’s breast when he found himself alone on that weary lingering night. How long it seemed!—years almost since the excitement of the fire which had sustained him for the moment, though he was not aware of it. He put his hand up to his eyes, and found that there were tears in them, and despised himself, which added another thorn to his pillow. He had nobody to console him; nobody to keep him from brooding over the sudden misery. Was it a fit revenge of fate upon him for his feeling of right in regard to Kate? He had felt that he had a right to her because he had saved her life. Was it possible that he had taken an ungenerous advantage of that? He went back over the whole matter, and he said to himself that, had he loved a girl so much out of his sphere, without this claim upon her, he would have smothered his love, and made up his mind from the beginning that it was useless. But the sense that he had saved her life had given him a sense of power—yes, of ungenerous power—over her. And now he himself had fallen into the same subjection. Another man had saved his life; or, at least, was supposed by others, and no doubt would himself believe that he had done so. Fred Huntley, whom she had taken into her confidence, to whom she had described the state of the affairs between them, whose advice almost she had asked on a matter which never should have been breathed to profane ears—Fred Huntley had saved his life. He groaned in his solitude, and put up his hand to his eyes, and despised himself. “I had better cry over it, like a sick baby,” he said to himself, with savage irony; and oh to think that was all, all he could do!
Next morning John insisted on getting up, in utter disobedience to his doctor. He had his arm in a sling, but what did that matter? and he had still the plaster on the cuts on his forehead. He tried to read, but that was not possible. He wrote to his mother as best he could with his left hand, telling her there had been a fire, and that he had burned his fingers pulling some papers out of it—“nothing of the least importance,” he said. And when he had done that he paused and hesitated. Should he write to Kate? He had not done it for several days past. It was the longest gap that had ever occurred in their correspondence. His heart yearned a little within him notwithstanding all its wounds; yet after he had taken up the pen he flung it down again in the sickness of his heart. Why should he write? She must have heard all about it from Fred Huntley and from her father. She had heard, no doubt, that Fred had saved his life—and she had taken no notice. Why should she take any notice? It did not humiliate a woman to be under such an obligation, but it did humiliate a man. John rose and stalked about his little room, which scarcely left him space enough for four steps from end to end. He stared out hopelessly at the window which looked into the little humble suburban street with its tiny gardens; and then he went and stared into the little glass over the mantelpiece, which was scarcely tall enough to reflect him unless he stooped. A pretty sight he was to look at; three lines of plaster on his forehead, marks of scorching on his cheek, dark lines of pain under his eyes, and the restless, anxious, uneasy expression of extreme suffering on his scarred face. He was not an Adonis at the best, poor John, and he was conscious of it. What was there in him that she should care for him? She had been overborne by his claim of right over her. It had been ungenerous of him; he had put forth a plea which never ought to be urged, and which another man now had the right of urging over himself. With a groan of renewed anguish he threw himself down on the little sofa, and leaned his head and his folded arms on the table at which he had been writing his mother’s letter. He had nothing to fall back upon: all his life and hopes he had given up for this, and here was what it had come to. He had no capability left in his mind but of despair.
It was, no doubt, because he was so absorbed in his own feelings and unconscious of what was passing, that he heard nothing of any arrival at the door. He scarcely raised his head when the door of his own little sitting-room was opened. “I want nothing, thanks,” he said, turning his back on his officious landlady, he thought. She must have come into the room more officious than ever, for there was a faint rustling sound of a woman’s dress, and that sense of some one in the room which is so infallible; but John only turned his back the more obstinately. Then all at once there came something that breathed over him like a wind from the south, something made up of soft touch, soft sound, soft breath. “John, my poor John!” said the voice; and the touch was as of two arms going round that poor wounded head of his. It was impossible—it could not be. He suffered his hands to be drawn down from his face, his head to be encircled in the arms, and said to himself that it was a dream. “Am I mad?” he said, half aloud; “am I losing my head?—for I know it cannot be.”
“What cannot be? and why should not it be?” said Kate, in his ear. “Oh, you unkind, cruel John! Did you want me to break my heart without a word or a message from you? Not even to see papa! not to send me a single line! to leave me to think you were dying or something, and you not even in bed. If I were not so glad, I should be in a dreadful passion. You horrid, cruel, brave, dear old John!”
He did not know what to think or say. All his evil thoughts slid away from him unawares, as the ice melts. There was no reason for it; but the sun had shone on them, and they were gone. He took hold of, and kept fast in his, the hands that had touched his aching head. “I do not think it is you,” he said; “I am afraid to look lest it should not be you.”
“I know better than that,” said Kate; “it is because you will not let me see your face. Poor dear face!” cried the impulsive girl, and cried a little, and dropped a sudden, soft, momentary kiss upon the scorched cheek. That was her tribute to the solemnity of the occasion. And then she laughed half hysterically. “John, dear, you are so ugly, and I like you so,” she said; and sat down by him, and clasped his arm with both her hands. John’s heart had melted into the foolishest tenderness and joy by this time. He was so happy that his very pain seemed to him the tingling of pleasure. “I cannot think it is you,” he said, looking down upon her with a fondness which could find no words.
“I have come all this way to see him,” she cried, “and evidently now he thinks it is not proper. Look, I have brought Parsons with me. There she is standing in the window all this time, not to intrude upon us. Do you think I am improper now?”
“Hush!” he said, softly; “don’t blaspheme yourself. Because I cannot say anything except wonder to feel myself so happy——”
“My poor John, my poor dear old John!” she said, leaning the fairy head against him which ought to have had a crown of stars round it instead of a mite of a bonnet. Kate took no thought of her bonnet at that moment. She sat by his side, and talked and talked, healing his wounds with her soft words. And Parsons drew a chair quietly to her and sat down in the window, turning her back upon the pair. “Lord, if I was to behave like that,” Parsons was saying to herself, “and somebody a-looking on!” And she sat and stared out of the window, and attracted a barrel-organ, which came and played before her, with a pair of keen Italian eyes gleaming at her over it from among the black elf-locks. Parsons shook her head at the performer; but her presence was enough for him, and he kept on grinding “La Donna é Mobile” slowly and steadily, through her thoughts and through the murmuring conversation of the other two. Neither Kate nor John paid any attention to the music. They had not heard it, they would have said; and yet it was strange how the air would return to both of them in later times.