In the room below Mrs. Price, also, was looking out of the bay window, watching her son disappear down the avenue. She had not been reading, and she had heard him come down into the hall, but let him go without another word. He walked slowly, erect as the Colonel used to walk. Tears dropped from her eyes,—tears of mortification. For in her heart she knew that he would come back some day, this woman who had lured him having fallen from him like a dead leaf. She sat on at the window until the Colonel's figure appeared in the distance coming up the avenue. His head was bent; he looked neither to the right nor to the left; and he walked very slowly, like an old man, dragging his feet after him. He was crushed. It would not have been thus if he had lost his fortune, the work of all his years. Such a fate he would have looked in the eye, with raised head….
That night Vickers and Stacia Conry left for New York, and a few days later Mrs. Price read their names in a list of outgoing passengers for Genoa. She did not show the list to the Colonel, and their son's name was never mentioned in the house.
When the people who knew the Prices intimately began to whisper, then chatter, they said many hard things of Vickers, chiefly that he was a Fool, a judgment that could not be gainsaid. Nevertheless the heart of a Fool may be pure.
CHAPTER XVIII
Isabelle did not regain her strength after the birth of her child. She lay nerveless and white, so that her husband, her mother, the Colonel, all became alarmed. The celebrated accoucheur who had attended her alarmed them still more.
"Something's wrong,—she couldn't stand the strain. Oh, it's another case of American woman,—too finely organized for the plain animal duties. A lot of my women patients are the same way. They take child-bearing hard,—damned hard…. What's the matter with them? I don't know!" he concluded irritably. "She must just go slow until she gets back her strength."
She went "slow," but Nature refused to assert itself, to proclaim the will to live. For months the days crept by with hardly a sign of change in her condition, and then began the period of doctors. The family physician, who had a reputation for diagnosis, pronounced her case "anaemia and nervous debility." "She must be built up,—baths, massage, distraction." Of course she was not to nurse her child, and the little girl was handed over to a trained nurse. Then this doctor called in another, a specialist in nerves, who listened to all that the others said, tapped her here and there, and wished the opinion of an obstetrical surgeon. After his examination there was a discussion of the advisability of "surgical interference," and the conclusion "to wait."
"It may be a long time—years—before Mrs. Lane fully recovers her tone," the nerve specialist told the husband. "We must have patience. It would be a good thing to take her to Europe for a change."
This was the invariable suggestion that he made to his wealthy patients when he saw no immediate results from his treatment. It could do no harm, Europe, and most of his patients liked the prescription. They returned, to be sure, in many cases in about the same condition as when they left, or merely rested temporarily,—but of course that was the fault of the patient.
When Lane objected that it would be almost impossible for him to leave his duties for a trip abroad and that he did not like to have his wife go without him, the specialist advised California:—