“Ah, yes, that is true, but in a different sense. Strength to struggle with a fever is one thing; strength to pick up when it is gone is another. Yesterday, every moment the fire was flaming, burning out his life—now every moment is a gain. Look at him. He’s asleep. He hasn’t been asleep, to call sleeping—not honest sleep—for days and nights.”
All this was but as the blowing of the wind to Letitia. She did not hear the words. She heard only over and over again, “the fever is gone——” But by this time she had begun to call her strength to her, to remember dully that she must not betray herself. She interrupted the doctor in the midst of his phrase.
“Do you mean that he will live?” she said again.
“As long, I hope,” said the doctor, promptly, “as his best friends could desire.”
“I don’t seem to understand,” Letitia said. “I thought all hope was over. I thought he was dying. Why did you make me think so—and my husband, too?”
“I am sorry if I have given you unnecessary pain, Mrs. Parke——”
“Oh, unnecessary! it was all unnecessary, I suppose. You have—you have frightened us for nothing, Dr. Barker; given us such days—and nights.” She broke into a little wild laugh. “And all the time there was nothing in it!” she cried.
The nurse had dried her eyes and was staring at this strange exhibition, and Letitia had begun to perceive that she had got out of her own control, and could not recover the command of her words and looks. She had been so taken by surprise, so overwhelmed by the sudden shock that the commotion in her brain was like madness. It was all she could do not to shriek out, to fly at the spectators like a wild cat. How dared they look and see what she had not the strength to conceal?
“I will go,” she said, “and call John; he will tell you what he thinks,” with the impulse of a maddened woman to bring a man’s strength into her quarrel and punish her adversary. What she thought John could do to Dr. Barker she did not know; and indeed she did not go to tell John. She returned to her room which she had left only a few minutes before, and from which she chased the frightened housemaids with a stamp on the floor which made them fly wildly, leaving brooms and dusters behind. The windows were all open, the sunshine bursting in in a great twinkling of light after yesterday’s rain. She locked the door that she might be alone, and closed the windows one after another with a sound like thunder. To give expression to the rage that devoured her was something, a necessity, the only way of getting out her passion. The fever gone, the fever gone! the fever which was her friend, which had worked for her, which had promised everything—everything that her heart desired. And they looked her in the face and told her it was gone! the fools and hypocrites, that vile woman crying in her falseness, the man triumphing over her, pretending to congratulate her when he must have known—— How could they help knowing? They must have known! They had done it on purpose to make her betray herself, to surprise her thoughts, to exult over her. And she had been so sure, so easy in her mind, so certain that everything was going well! Oh, oh!—her breath of rage could command no more expression than that common monosyllable. She could not appeal to God as people do in such wild shocks of passion. It was not God who could be appealed to. The other perhaps if she had known how—there are times when devil-worship might be a relief if it could be done.
“My God!” said Dr. Barker, who was not so restrained. “She is wild with disappointment and rage. Did she wish the boy to die?”