Within was no soul akin to hers, not one whose words or presence, in any sense mitigated the deep solitude and loneliness of spirit in which she lived.
With it all she was physically wretched. A climate that was ungenial, a sunless room and a daily diet of anxiety combined had made deep inroads on a physique elastic but never rugged. Overstrained nature was giving way. For weeks her body had been racked with pain. Fevers came, tarried awhile and went away to come again, and languor had taken entire possession of her.
One day the culmination came. A neighbor passing her open door saw Cartice lying helpless on the floor where she had fallen. Assistance was called and she was lifted to the bed, rigid as in death. “A congestive chill,” said the doctor. Then science and humanity united their efforts to save her from death and succeeded. When her husband came back in the evening, she was lying powerless to speak and only faintly conscious of being alive.
The doctor—may it be a star of great radiance on his breast in the unseen world in which he now dwells—was attentive and kind to a point far beyond the ordinary. He had seen much of life and its inevitable suffering. Experience and a heart of exceptional goodness enabled him to read the signs of the sick soul as well as the sick body at a glance.
A few days later as he sat by her bedside, Cartice edged herself nearer, and laying one of her slender hands on his, said, “I am grateful to you, doctor, very grateful for helping me so much.”
The words were commonplace enough, but there were the eyes, the wonderful eyes, with their strange power to melt the heart, gazing into his. The doctor’s soul was shaken, he knew not why.
“I don’t understand it,” he mused as he left the house. “What was it that came out of her eyes and unnerved me in a flash, making me want to cry like a baby.” At the memory of that look, in which the mask of pride fell off and the suffering spirit revealed its anguish, the tears rushed anew to his eyes.
“No, I don’t understand it,” he repeated, “but if I had been performing a surgical operation of the most delicate and dangerous kind, and she had looked at me that way, I am afraid I should have dropped the knife. What was that indefinable thing I saw in her eyes? What was it? If anguish can accumulate for ages and ages and then look out through a pair of eyes, it was that.”
Days of convalescence came, bringing the despondency, gloom and sometimes despair that attack those who have retreated from the edge of the grave before they are quite out of sight of it.
Cartice sat by her window with the breeze blowing over her, and it seemed that a thousand years had passed since last she saw the spring. Watching the people on the street, hurrying hither and yon, she envied them their strength, their activity, aims and interests. Idle and purposeless, weary and hopeless, she sat wondering what she was to do with the rest of her life. By nature she was an outdoor child, who loved field and forest and brook and hill. The hateful brick walls that stared at her now fatigued her eyes and depressed her spirit. When funeral processions went by she wondered what mystery the narrow black box represented. Sable and solemn and dreadful as it all was she envied those who rode in the long black wagon of death. “At least they are out of this horror,” she said. “If there be another life its conditions cannot be worse than they are here. If there be nothing on the other side of death’s silence, then the problem is very simple.”