So absorbed was he in his ministrations that he failed to heed the sound of excited whisperings which came to him from beyond the door. It was not until the creaking of the hinges had warned him that the door was ajar, that he looked up from his occupation. At that moment there was a rustle of silk, the noise of swift footsteps across the bare boards, and Prudence was at the opposite side of the bed.
The soft oval of the girl’s face was drawn, and deep lines of anxious thought had broken up the smooth expanse of her forehead. Her eyes seemed to be straining out of their sockets, and the whites were bloodshot. She did not speak, but her look displayed an anguish unspeakable. Her eyes were turned upon the face of the prostrate man; she did not appear to see the minister. Her look suggested some mute question, which seemed to pass from her troubled eyes to the silent figure. Watching her, Danvers understood that, for the present, it would be dangerous to break the dreadful silence that held her. He stooped again and drew back the waistcoat and began to cut away the under-garments from Grey’s chest.
Swiftly as the minister’s deft fingers moved about the man’s body, his thoughts travelled faster. He was not a man given to morbid sentimentality; his calling demanded too much of the practical side of human nature. He was there to aid his flock, materially as well as spiritually, but at the moment he felt positively sick in the stomach with sorrow and pity for the woman who stood like a statue on the other side of what he knew to be this man’s deathbed. He dared not look over at her again. Instead, he bent 127 his head lower and concentrated his, mind on the work before him.
The silence continued, broken only by an occasional heavy gasp of breath from the girl. The dripping shirt was cut clear of the man’s chest, and the woollen under-shirt was treated in a similar manner. The exposed flesh was crimson with the blood which was slowly oozing from a small wound a few inches higher up in the chest than where the heart was so faintly beating. One glance sufficed to tell the parson that medical aid would be useless. The wound was through the lungs.
For a moment he hesitated. His better sense warned him to keep silence, but pity urged him to speak. Pity swayed him with the stronger hand.
“He is alive,” he said. And the next moment he regretted his words.
The tension of the girl’s dreadful expression relaxed instantly. It was as the lifting of a dead weight which had crushed her heart within her. She had been numbed, paralyzed. Actual suffering had not been hers, she had experienced a suspension of feeling which had resulted from the shock. But that suspension was far more dreadful than the most acute suffering. Her whole soul had asked her senses, “What is it?” and the waiting for the answer had been to her in the nature of a blank.
The minister’s low murmured sentence had supplied her with an answer. “He is alive.” The words touched the springs of life within her and a glad flush swept over her straining nerves. Reason once more resumed its sway, and thought flowed through her brain in an unchecked torrent It seemed to 128 Prudence as though some barrier had suddenly shut off the simple life which had always been hers, and had opened out for her a fresh existence in which she found herself alone with the still, broken body of her lover. For one brief instant her lips quivered, and a faint in-catching of the breath told of the woman, which, at the first return of feeling, had leapt uppermost in her. But before the maturity of emotion brought about the breakdown, a calm strength came to her aid and steadied her nerves and checked the tears which had so suddenly come into her eyes. Women are like this. At a crisis in sickness they rise superior to all emotion. When the crisis is past, whether for good or ill, it is different.
The water was brought, and the minister set about cleaning the discoloured flesh, while Prudence looked on in silence. She was very pale, and her eyes were painfully bright. While her gaze followed the gentle movements of the minister, her thoughts were running swiftly over the scenes of her life in which the wounded man had played his part. She remembered every look of the now closed eyes, and every expression of his well-loved features. She called to mind his words of hope, and the carefully-laid plans for his advancement. Nor was there any taint of his selfishness in her recollection of these things. Everything about him, to her, was good and true. She loved him with all the passionate intensity of one who had only just attained to perfect womanhood. He had been to her something of a hero, by reason of his headstrong, dominating ways––ways which more often attract the love of woman in the first flush of her youth than in her maturer, more experienced years.