Jean made a face, but he agreed that he would stay in.
Margot immediately called in a doctor. He was as reassuring as doctors usually are. Jean would need very careful nursing, he said; there was a spot on his left lung, and his heart was terribly over-strained and weak. Still, he had youth on his side. Margot mustn’t be alarmed; the first thing was to bring down the temperature and to keep up his strength.
Margot despatched Madame Selba to her father’s friends, broke her theatre engagements and threw herself body and soul into the struggle with the thermometer. She would get the temperature down! Margot knew no more than Jean how many days and weeks passed before that blessed moment when the thermometer definitely dropped. She knew that she told the doctor that Jean was to have everything that money could buy, and that to buy the things the doctor ordered she spent the last of her savings. Her days passed making poultices, cooking, pawning furniture round the corner, thinking of all that Jean could possibly want, and seeing that he had it. When he was quiet she prayed. She had a theory that at night she slept.
There was only one thing that Jean wanted that Margot could not supply; and he wanted that incessantly, and cried for it as a dying man cries for water.
“Liane! Liane!” Jean moaned over and over again, and Margot tried to get Liane for Jean. She wrote to her—and when she got back the cruel answer: “Madame de Brances knows no such person as Monsieur Jean D’Ucelles and regrets that she cannot oblige Mademoiselle Selba,” Margot cried.
Sometimes he would think Margot was Liane, and then the look came into his eyes which Margot had never seen there for herself, and Margot would answer it with a tenderness that surely Liane had never felt for Jean or for anyone else. And for the moment Jean would be satisfied, only an hour later to rend her heart anew with the same low, impatient murmur, “Liane! Liane!”
“Yes,” said the doctor with his finger on Jean’s pulse and his eye on the clock, “he’ll pull through now, I think, but you’ll have to feed him up, you know; he’s had a close shave, and he is desperately weak.”
The doctor was not supposed to be a sympathetic man, he had very little time for it, and experience had buried his heart under the dust of innumerable human needs; yet he paused for a moment as he saw the look in Margot’s eyes; it was the Magnificat come to life again, and it touched the doctor.
“I should suggest your feeding up yourself, you know,” he said kindly. “That young fellow owes his life to you; his kind of case depends almost entirely on good nursing.”
The look in Margot’s eyes deepened, her lips trembled so that she could not speak; the doctor shook hands with her and hurried away.