In a large ward of a London hospital, nurses have not much time to devote to the sick fancies of patients. More than enough for them were their physical needs. The crumb of kindly commonplace was all that the nurse could give to the man’s hungering soul. He passed the day, staring up at the mile-high ceiling, incurious as to what vista of misery lay beyond the still remaining American-cloth covered screen.
From the shaft of fierce sunshine on the wall to his right, he gathered that spring had passed into early summer. The outside world was a-riot in the new life of wild flowers and trees and birds and human hopes and loves. Outside that prison of his—a whitewashed wall, a screen, a window behind his head reaching sky-high—spread this world with whose pulsations his heart had ever throbbed in unison. God! How he had loved it! Every leaf, every crested wave, every patch of sand, every stretch of heat, every rusty horse grazing on a common, every child before a cottage door, every vibrating sound or sight of great cities, every waste in regions of grand desolation, every man with sinews or with purpose in his eyes, every woman parading the mystery of her sex, from the tow-haired, dirt-encrusted goose-girl of a Russian village to the wonder of ever inscrutable wonders that was Olivia.
In all his dreams he inevitably came back to Olivia. Indeed she was the centripetal force of his longings. All that earth held of the rustle of leaves and the murmur of waters, the magic of dawn and the roar of town multitudes and the laughter of green forests and the silence of frozen steppes, were incorporated in the woman of his adoration. Through her spoke the voices of the infinite universe. And all that was visible of it, the patch of sunlight on the whitewashed wall, said:
“She lives and I, a reflected glory of her, live too; but even if you go hence I shall only appear mockingly before you, on prison walls, until you are dead. And you will never find me on the blue seas or the joyous roads or the stone-bounded, clattering haunts of mankind, other than a meaningless mirage, because the inspired meaning of it all which is Olivia, has passed from you for evermore.”
“Damn you,” said he, and turned away his head, for he could not turn his plaster of Paris encased body, and shut out the white line from his burning eyes.
The next morning Myra came. He had been prepared for her visit. She sat on the cane-bottomed chair by his bedside. As soon as the nurse left them together:
“I’m glad you are better, Sir,” she said.
“Have you brought me any message from Mrs. Triona?” he asked.
She looked at him steadily. “You don’t suppose Mrs. Triona knows you are here?”
It was some time before he could appreciate the meaning of her words.