No, they would not alter. Her efforts only served to brand them more deeply on her mind. She looked up, at last, with a kind of wonder that the earth was still firm under her feet, and the sky's arch entire above her head. It would have seemed more in keeping to have beheld the universe crashing backward into chaos.
Not that she suffered very keenly yet. She was too much stunned to realize the extent of her wounds and bruises. She picked herself up, as it were, after the fall and the shock, and walked mechanically homeward. Her strength did not give way until she found herself in her room, shutting her door behind her, and felt what a different being had gone out of it only a little while before.
An hour after, Mrs. Bergan found her lying on her bed, white and still, more like a corpse than a living, suffering girl.
"Carice!" she cried, appalled, but not without an intuitive perception of the truth,—"Carice, my child! what is the matter?"
"I don't know—don't ask me," replied Carice, turning her face to the wall.
Mrs. Bergan burst into tears, and stole softly away. Here was a grief in which even she could only intermeddle as a stranger. She could simply commend her child to tenderer, wiser hands than hers.
A day or two went by, and Carice was down-stairs again, white; still, patient; filling her old place, and doing her old tasks, with a sad composure that was more affecting than any abandonment of sorrow. Her woe seemed to take the form of torpor, rather than of anguish. It was that chill and heavy misery, that dismal realization of the actual presence and power of evil in the world, which never comes to us except through the sin of some cherished, trusted friend; standing hitherto as the representative of all that is good and true, the earthly type of the Divine perfection. Falling, he falls not alone, but drags down with him the supports of every earthly confidence, and even makes the foundation of our heavenly faith to tremble. Such grief is dumb and tearless; it coils itself round the heart in cold, serpent-like folds, chilling the blood, and oppressing the breath; but it makes no single, special wound, to call forth cries and sobs of pain.
Meanwhile, the yellow fever, as foreseen long ago by Doctor Remy, made its silent entry into Berganton. One day a single case was reported in the outskirts of the town; another week, and there was scarcely a threshold which it had not crossed, either to strike or slay. The town put on sackcloth and ashes; business was suspended, except the business of nursing the sick and burying the dead; the streets were deserted, except by hearses and doctors. Or, it would be truer to say, a doctor; for Doctor Gerrish, being unacclimated, was one of the earliest patients; and Doctor Harris, being old and infirm, quickly sank exhausted; so Doctor Remy was soon left to face the pestilence alone, and multiply himself as best he could, to meet the demands of a whole people.
Let us do him ample justice. All that an iron frame, a steady courage, admirable executive ability, profound medical skill, and deep scientific interest, could prompt or do, he did. He organized and instructed a corps of nurses, and made them do effective work; he scattered printed suggestions and directions broadcast over the town, for the behoof of sick and well; he was himself constantly in the thickest of the fight, animating the workers, cheering the sick, wellnigh raising the dead,—doing everything but comfort the mourners, for that he had neither time nor talent. The town rang with praises of his energy and skill; his presence had brought back hope to many a house whence it seemed to have flown forever, joy into many a heart that had only made itself ready for sorrow. Even Carice, as her private grief half-sank, for the time, under the great wave of public calamity, was moved to a degree of respect and admiration for the doctor, of which, two or three weeks before, she could not have believed herself capable. There was still a hero, and room for heroism, in the world!
By and by, Mr. Bergan fell ill, not of the fever, but of one of the sympathetic diseases, which often go hand in hand with it. There were a few days of intense anxiety, during which the wife and daughter lived, as it were, on the words of Doctor Remy's mouth, and the look of his eyes. After these came slow weeks of convalescence, of exacting feebleness and irritable complaint.