"It's being a virtue at all," returned Elizabeth, "depends upon whether we submit to men or to God." If any other lips had spoken the Divine name, Edmonson would have sneered openly. As it was, he lay silent, looking out at the speaker through half-veiled eyes. This tantalizing woman always turned his words into impersonalities. Her power had roused his will to its utmost to make her feel his own. How far had he succeeded, that she would condescend to stay with him when there was no one else to do it and he needed attention? It was because the surgeon would soon be here to look after his wounds and would need help, that she was sitting now, fanning him gently and glancing toward the door of the tent.
"You are very impatient to have Waters come," he said.
"Yes, a great many others need me."
"Not half so much as I do," he began. "Your presence soothes me," he added hastily.
"It is the sort of effect that a nurse ought to have," she answered.
He was silent again. He would have given half the expected years of his life to know if ever so little of her indifference were feigned. He gave himself an impatient toss. Why had he come to this siege at all? He was not sure now that if he had accomplished his object, or should yet do it, the reward would come. He had known women that in Elizabeth's place would like to show their power of torture; but she scarcely deigned to glance at him, and tortured him a thousand times more. Why had Archdale thrown his arm about so clumsily and saved his life? So good an appointment was not likely to make itself again; he must have a hand in framing the next. And if worst came to worst as to absence of chance, he could still pick a quarrel over the clumsiness by challenging it as intention. Yet he was afraid that Archdale was too much of a Puritan to think of duelling.
"Don't tire yourself fanning me," he said. "Talk to me a little."
"I have nothing to say," answered Elizabeth. For it happened that she also was remembering that night in the boat as she had heard of it, and it seemed hard to her that she should be obliged to render Edmonson the smallest service, yet he had been brave in the attack, and had been wounded in fair fight against the enemy. Her first thought that night of the attack, on seeing him borne in, had been that Archdale had given the wound in self-defence. She was humiliated by feeling that her wealth had been played for like a stake by Edmonson. For she had not yet come to confessing to herself what flashed across her mind sometimes. Two years ago Edmonson's approval had seemed to her a desert beyond her talents; now his admiration displeased her,—there was an element of appropriation in it. Where Elizabeth prized regard she could not condescend to woo it; where she did not prize it, it seemed to her, if openly given, almost an impertinence. Stephen had been right when in the midst of his anger at her pride he had felt that love would awake new powers in her, that she could be magnificent in action and in devotion. He had been very human, too, in the breath of wild desire to see her at her best that had swept through him. But the desire slept again as suddenly as it had waked, and the mists of indifference settled about him once more.
Edmonson dared not speak. If he offended Elizabeth he should not see her again, except at a distance as real as the intangible space always between them now. And if he were silent, he might yet win, some day.
"At last!" she smiled, and rose to meet the doctor with an alacrity that made Edmonson bite his under lip hard. She thought that dressing the wound took a long time that evening, that the physician had never been so slow before, nor the patient so fractious. But to Edmonson it seemed as if she vanished like a vision.