“Poppycock!” I growled at her. “It’s a pretty pass when sane medical men in their practice begin to fancy—”
“Sh—sh!” she said, interrupting me sharply. “See! Now the child is conscious! Watch!”
I drew back a little from the bedside as Virginia stirred, but I could see the milk-white lids of her eyes—eyes, as I have said, deep and blue and intense like the wall behind her, with their long black lashes. Her slender body shook as if she was undergoing the first rippling torsions of a convulsion. Her face was drawn into such an expression as one might imagine would appear on the face of an angel in agony, and then, gradually, as some renewed circulation relaxed the nerve centres, her breath was expelled with a long patient sigh. And this I noticed,—she did not turn toward us, but with an almost imperceptible twist of her body and the reaching of her little hands she sought the wall.
I confess I half believed that she would float off into the infinite blue of the plaster and be lost in its depths. I found my own eyes following hers. I felt, I think, that I too was conscious of some dreadful or marvelous, horrible or inspiring something behind the partition; but in light of subsequent discoveries my memory may have been distorted. Besides, I have promised none but the cold-blooded facts and I need only assert that the little girl looked, moved her lips, stretched her arms, and then suddenly, as if she had sensed some agony, some fearful turbulence, she cried out softly, her face grew white, her upper lip trembled, she fell back, if one may so speak of an inch of movement, and lay panting on her pillow. The nurse, I think, seized the moment to renew the cold applications. Yet I, who had scoffed, who had sneered at poor MacMechem’s perplexity, stood looking at that blank blue wall, expecting to see it become transparent, to see it open and some uncanny thing emerge, holding out to little Virginia a promise of life or a sentence of death.
My first instinct would have endeavored to shake off the question of the other side of that wall. I would, perhaps, if younger, have rejected the whole impression, declared the girl delirious, and would not now be reciting a story, the conclusion of which never fails to catch my breath. But mine is an empirical science. We deal not so much with weights and measures as with illusive inaccuracies. To be exact is to be a failure. To reject the unknown is to remain a poor doctor, indeed. The issue in this case was defined. Either the congestion of the membranes in the spinal cord was producing a persistent hallucination or else there was, in fact, something going on behind that wall. Either an influence was affecting the child from within or an influence was affecting her from without. I was mad to save her. Even a doctor who habitually views patients and data cards with the same impersonal regard may sometimes feel a call to work for love. And I loved that little child. I meant to exhaust the possibilities. As poor MacMechem had asked the question, I asked it.
I touched Virginia’s hands with the tips of my fingers. Her eyes turned toward me, and again I was sure that no madness was in them. You, too, would have said that, awakened from the intermittent coma, the little thing, though mute and helpless, was none the less still the mistress of her thoughts.
“You have not asked her?” I inquired of Miss Peters.
The woman, folding her arms, at the same time shook her head solemnly.
“No,” she said as if she disapproved.
But I bent over Virginia. “I am the new doctor,” I said. “Do you understand?”