Or it was a courtroom scene. He was fighting hard for somebody's life, he pleaded passionately in low murmurs. The man hadn't meant to do wrong, Gentlemen of the Jury, he had meant well, only somehow things were against him and he had got into trouble.... Your Honour, before you pronounce sentence, I ask to be heard....
Then he was in a storm, the snow blinded him, he was freezing, couldn't go on ... or in a desert, lost, crying for water. Always the struggle of mind and body against odds, it seemed, a desperate losing battle....
Mary would watch this, always calm, cool, alert for anything she could do to relieve or supplement the nurses. When she gave way it was after she had locked herself into a room alone, and then it was not an emotional breakdown but a drop into nothingness. She would lie with her eyes shut, feeling nothing, caring for nothing. Somewhere there was a dumb sense of injury, of injustice—but even this seemed not to matter, since there was no one to complain to.... Things were like this.
As the days went by, all outside the sickroom became more shadowy to her. Even Jim coming in to see her, grown suddenly a man in this trouble, stalwart and serious; her father's visits, the young doctor, Horace Lavery, her daily consultations with Nora—her mind, aloof and critical, received and registered all the detail of life, dealt with it, but it had the thin quality of shadow. The reality was there with Laurence. Sometimes he murmured her name, spoke to her; not recognizing her there beside him, but seeing her far in the past—tenderly. There seemed no harshness in his memory of her, no pain from those battles they had gone through or the long estrangement. His tone was appealing, it had a child-like pathetic demand. He wanted her to do something about this that was bothering him.
Then came a day when the fever broke. Instead of going up toward night it went down. The patient slept quietly a good deal of the night, and woke in the dawn, conscious.
Mary too had slept soundly that night for the first time; waking she saw the beaming face of the nurse.
"You can go in, he's quite himself.... But don't let him talk, he's too weak."
He lay there, too weak indeed even to put out his hand toward her, but his eyes welcomed her. How young those eyes looked, vividly blue in his wasted face! The outline of his face under the black beard was that of his youth and his body was slender as in youth. He smiled at her faintly. She knelt beside him and kissed him lightly with deep tenderness, and whispered that he mustn't try to talk, thank God he was better, but he must be very quiet and get back his strength, everything was all right. His eyes smiled at her, rested on her face with the old warmth of youthful love. He whispered her name.
The nurse came in with some soup, and Mary fed him like a child, with deep solicitude, with delight. His eyes closed, he must sleep again; but when she moved he stirred to keep her there. She nodded and drew a chair to the bedside and sat motionless long after he slept.