"The way will mercifully be opened unto me. A light will be shown as a lamp to my feet."
Anne's murmured words were barely to be heard, yet they bore, nevertheless, to the three men who listened, the full strength of her faith, firm as the Rock of Ages.
The doctor arose hurriedly and went out into the passage, and stood for a while in the doorway, looking at the quiet big road, at the peace of the green earth, and at the sunlight flooding the blue heavens. When he turned back his sunken eyes were wet and he could not meet Anne's gaze nor the sick man's, which was also turned upon him with all its dumb, restless, desperate misery—with all its terrible voiceless clamor for relief.
"I don't know what to do," he said, trying to speak lightly, but sighing in spite of himself and spreading out his hands. "I suppose we'll have to give it up, Tom, old fellow. Well, maybe Anne knows best after all. These wives of ours usually do know better what is good for us than we know ourselves. A good wife is always more to be depended upon than medicine when a man's pulling through a tedious convalescence. You don't need any more medicine. I am coming, though, every day, if I can—just as a neighbor, to see how you are getting along."
He turned away from the sick man. He could not look at him without being compelled to renew the struggle with Anne; that infinitely cruel, that ineffably piteous struggle which wrung his own heart, and which would be useless in the end. He took one of Anne's cold little hands in his warm large clasp, thinking how small and weak it was to hold so firmly to its mistaken ideals, how much more firm than his own, which was not strong enough to hold to an unmistakable duty. And then he and Lynn Gordon went away, as best they could go, both feeling as the conscientious and the impressionable must always feel after having, however unwillingly, stirred the depths of the deep, still pool of another's life.
Out of the house, and out of hearing, the doctor became, however, once more himself in a measure. He smote his powerful thigh with his strong hand, and upbraided himself aloud for most disgraceful moral cowardice. He convicted himself, almost in a shout, of having deserted Tom Watson—poor devil—and of having virtually run away, like the veriest coward, simply because he knew that, in a moment more, he would have been crying like any child. And all on account of the silly fanaticism of a woman with a mind no wider than a cambric needle—sheer foolishness, morbid sentimentality—and much more of the same tenor, while Lynn Gordon laughed at him a little nervously.
"But, foolish or wise, she believes what she does believe. By the eternal, I'd like to hear any man doubt it! Why, young sir, that little slim, unbending splinter of a woman is the stuff that they threw to the beasts in old Rome!"
There was no consciousness of heroism in Anne's own sadly humble thoughts. When the doctor and the young man were gone, she bent down silently and kissed her husband with tender timidity, as if begging his forgiveness for what she could not help. Kneeling by his side, as she often knelt in her unwearying service, she strove to look into his averted face, and to meet and to hold his miserable eyes with her own clear gaze, from which the clouds were fast drifting away. The white light behind her strange eyes had sunk low under the shock, and had died out in the stress of terror; but it was gradually beginning to rise and shine again through the crystal windows of her soul. Her husband did not look at her; he seemed not to hear what she said; he was staring after the two men who were walking away down the big road, his look straining to follow them as a chained animal strains its fetters toward companionship. Anne saw nothing of this; she was not a bright woman, and entirely without imagination. She saw only that he did not notice her, that she was far from his thoughts. And she was used to being over-looked by her husband, and accustomed to being forgotten by him. She arose and went quietly across the room, and brought a footstool, and sat down upon it by his side, laying her head on the arm of his chair, with her hands folded on her lap.
She was not weeping,—she had never been a crying woman,—and in truth she was not more unhappy at this moment than she had been for years. She was, indeed, even less unhappy, now that the shock was well over and the danger safely passed. A feeling of peace was in truth already hovering in her breast, though very timidly, as a frightened dove comes slowly back to its nest. This spirit of peace had begun to brood in Anne's lonely heart soon after her husband's hurt, although Anne herself was scarcely aware of the fact. Through the endless months of his greatest suffering she had been not only upheld, but comforted, by the growing belief—changing little by little to exaltation—that the torture was but a fiery furnace intended for the purification of her husband's soul and her own—for she, too, suffered with every pang which wrenched his shattered body. It was a terrible faith, and yet it was the faith of the martyrs; and Anne held not back from sealing it, as they sealed it, with life itself,—ay! even unto the dear life of her husband, which was infinitely dearer to her than her own. For she loved him as none save a nature such as hers can love; with an intense, narrow, almost fierce and wholly terrible concentration. It was a love which had almost entirely excluded every one else; not only every other man, but her father and mother and sisters and brothers, all had been shut out from her inmost heart, from her earliest youth till this latest moment when she sat unnoticed by her husband's side. He had never loved her with the best love that he was capable of giving. Love is perhaps never quite equal, certainly it never seems equal, in any marriage. The one always loves more, or less, than the other. And then, in circumscribed lives, such as Anne's and Tom's were, both men and women choose the one whom they prefer from among the few whom they chance to know; they cannot choose from a large number which might possibly have induced a different selection. But the width of the world would not have altered Anne's choice. And a love like hers changes no more with time than it is influenced by environment; it is too little of the flesh, and too much of the spirit to age, or to wither, or to grow cold. Even her husband's neglect had made no difference through all the unhappy years of her married life; even his disregard of religion did not lessen or alter her love, although it put her and her husband farther apart than they might otherwise have been, and came nearer than all else to breaking her heart. She could bear the loss of happiness in her daily life; she could bear to be deprived of her husband's society day after day and night after night, by interests and associations in which she had no part,—living was but waiting, anyway, to Anne. But she could not bear the thought of the Long Time without the beloved. To Anne, as much as to any mediæval saint in any rock-ribbed cell, the longest, happiest earthly life measured nothing against a glorious eternity. Her husband was handsome, spirited, high-hearted, masterful, compelling, and kind, too, in his careless way; another woman might have been happy and proud to be his wife; but Anne's heart had ached from first to last for the one thing of which she never spoke, and for which she was always praying.