AVERY.

by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps.

PART I.

"Oh, Pink! Mother can't lift you.... I would if I could.... Yes, I know I used to-- "Molly, take the baby. Couldn't you amuse him, somehow? Perhaps, if you tried hard, you could keep him still. When he screams so, it seems to hit me--here. It makes it harder to breathe. He cried 'most all night. And if you could contrive to keep Pink, too-- "What is it, Kate? You'll have to manage without me this morning. Pick up anything for luncheon--I don't care. I couldn't eat. You can warm over that mutton for yourselves. We must keep the bills down. They were too large last month. Order a grouse for Mr. Avery. He says he will dine at home to-night-- "There 's the telephone! Somebody answer it. I can't get down, myself.... Is it Mr. Avery? ... Wants me? ... I don't see how I can.... Yes. Hold the wire. I 'll try-- "Did you speak to me, Molly? ... No, I 'm not feeling any worse. It's only getting up the stairs, and ... something that tired me a little. I don't want Dr. Thorne. I can't call the doctor so often. I 'm no worse than ... I sometimes ... am. It's only that I cannot breathe.... Molly! Molly! Quick, Molly! The window! Air!"

As Molly dashed the window up, Mrs. Avery's head fell back upon the pillows of the lounge. They were blue pillows, and her blanching cheek took a little reflection from the color. But she was not ghastly; she never was. At the lowest limit of her strength she seemed to challenge death with an indomitable vitality.

There was a certain surprise in the discovery that so blond a being could have so much of it. She was very fair--blue of eye, yellow of hair, pearly of skin; but all her coloring was warm and rich; when she was well, it was an occupation to admire her ear, her cheek, her throat; and when she was ill her eye conquered. Every delicate trait and feature of her defied her fate, except her mouth; this had begun to take on a pitiful expression. The doctor's blazing eye flashed on it when he was summoned hastily. It had become a symptom to him, and was usually the first one of which he took note.

Dr. Esmerald Thorne had the preoccupations of his eminence, and his patients waited their turns with that undiscouraged endurance which is the jest and the despair of less-distinguished physicians. Women took their crochet work to his office, and men bided their time with gnawed mustache and an unnatural interest in the back-number magazines upon his table. Indifferent ailments received his belated attention, and to certain patients he came when he got ready. Mrs. Avery's was not one of these cases.

When Molly's tumultuous telephone call reached him that dav, it found him at the hospital, sewing up an accident. He drew the thread through the st.i.tch, handed the needle to the house surgeon, who was standing by, and ran downstairs. The hospital was two miles from Marshall Avery's house. Dr. Thorne's horse took the distance on a gallop, and Dr. Thorne took Avery's stairs two at a time.

He came into her room, however, with the theatrical calm and the preposterous smile which men of his profession and his kind a.s.sume in the presence of danger that unconsciousness has not blotted from the patient's intelligence. Through the wide window the late October air bit in. She was lying full in the surly breeze on the lounge pillow, as Molly had left her. Her blue morning gown was clutched and torn open at the throat. No one had thought to cover her. Her hands were as purple as her lips. She was not gasping now: she had no longer the strength to fight for her breath.

Dr. Thorne's professional smile went out like a Christmas candle in a hurricane. He opened his mouth and began to swear.

The corners of her lips twitched when she heard him--for she was altogether conscious, which was rather the worst of it, as she sometimes said; and, in point of fact, she laughed outright, if one could call it laughing.

She tried to say, "I should know that was you if I were in my grave," but found the words too many for her, and so said nothing at all, nor even seemed to listen while he rated Molly, and condemned Kate, and commanded both, and poured stimulants angrily and swiftly. The very blankets and hot-water bags seemed to obey him, like sentient things--as people did; and the tablet in his fingers quivered as if it were afraid of him.

As soon as she began to breathe naturally again, she said, "I 've made you a great deal of trouble! How is Helen's cold, doctor?"

"I shall tell my wife that," replied the doctor, in a tone that was a mongrel between anger and admiration. This puzzled her, and her fine eyes gently questioned him of his irritation. For she and the doctor's wife were schoolmates and old friends. She had been quite troubled about Helen's cold.

"Oh, never mind," said Dr. Thorne; "only it is n't natural, that's all--when patients come out of attacks like yours. Their minds are not concentrated on other people's colds. Helen is quite well, thank you. Now, Mrs. Avery, I want to ask you"-- "Don't," interrupted Jean Avery.

"But I find it necessary," growled Dr. Thorne.

She shook her head, and turned her face, which shrank against the blue pillow. Pink and the baby began to quarrel in the nursery, and then both cried belligerently.

"The baby kept me awake," faintly suggested Mrs. Avery.

"It is an excellent explanation,--but you've just thought of it," observed Dr. Thorne. He spoke in a much louder tone than was necessary; his voice rose with the kind of instinctive, elemental rage under which he fled to covert with a sympathy that he found troublesome. "What I wish to know--what I insist on knowing--is, what caused this attack? It is something which happened since breakfast. I demand the nature of it--physical? mental? emotional?"

"You may call it electric," answered Jean Avery, with her own lovable smile--half mischief, half pathos.

"I see. The telephone." Dr. Thorne leaned back in his chair and scrutinized the patient. Quite incidentally he took her pulse. It was sinking again, and the tempo had lapsed into unexpected irregularity.

"Helen shall come to see you," said Dr. Thorne with sudden gentleness. "I 'll send her this afternoon. You will keep perfectly still till then.... Mr. Avery is in town?" carelessly. "Coming home to lunch?"

"He has gone to court."

"To dinner, then?"

"It depends on the verdict. If he wins the case"-- "Oh, I see. And if he loses?"

"He might go gunning, if he lost it," answered the wife, smiling quite steadily. "He might go gunning with Mr. Romer. He is very tired. He takes it hard when he does not win things--cases, I mean. He might--you see"-- She faltered into a pathetic silence.

"I will send Helen at once," replied the physician. He felt that he had offered his subtlest and most artistic prescription. More than most wives are valued, Dr. Thorne loved his.

But as he went downstairs a black frown caught him between the brows.

In the course of an hour he managed to dispatch a messenger to the court-house. Sixty patients clamored for him, but he wrote the note twice over, sitting in his buggy, before he sent the third copy:-- DEAR AVERY,--Your wife has suffered one of the attacks whose nature I explained to you some time ago. I found her condition serious, indicating a marked weakness of the heart. I consider that she had a narrow escape. You would not forgive me if I did not tell you, that you may govern your movements accordingly.

Yours as ever, ESMERALD THORNE.

Jean Avery lay with closed eyes, quite still, and smiling tranquilly. Only the invalid mistress of a home knows how to value the presence of another lady in a household where children and servants fill the foreground, and where, as Dr. Thorne once put it, "every care as fast as it arises is taken to the bedside of the patient." The ever-womanly arrived with Mrs. Thorne. In the repose which came with her coming, and did not go with her going, the sick woman lay sheltered for the remainder of the day. Her face, her voice, her motions, expressed the touching grat.i.tude of one who has long since learned not to look beyond the bounty of temporary relief. Mrs. Thorne noted this; she noticed everything.

The telephone called towards noon, ringing rapidly and impatiently--operators, like horses, were always nervous under Marshall Avery's driving; and when an anxious message from the court-house reached the wife, she said, "Dear Helen!" as if it had been Helen's doing. And when they told her that Mr. Avery asked how she was, and would get home by mid-afternoon, and at any moment if she needed him, and would not leave her again that day, and that he sent his love to her and begged her to be careful for his sake, her breath fell so short with pleasure that they took fright for her.

"My husband is so kind to me!" she panted. Then her color came--a tidal wave, and her pulse, which had been staggering, fell into step and began to march strongly.

"But this is a miracle!" cried the doctor's wife.

"Love is always a miracle," Jean Avery said. Then she asked to have her hair arranged, and wanted an afternoon dress, and lace, and would have a bracelet that her husband gave her, and the turquoise pin he liked, and begged to be told that she looked quite well again, for "Marshall hates to see me ill!"

And the children--see that the children are dressed; and his slippers--they must be put beside the library table in that place he likes; not anywhere else, please, but just where he is used to finding them. And Kate will have dinner early; and about the soup--and the salad--and not to overdo the grouse; and to light the library fire--and were they sure she could n't go down herself to see to things, and get as far as the library sofa?

"Mr. Avery does n't like me not to meet him.... My husband is so good to me!" she urged, in the plaintive staccato that her short breath cut, till Helen's eyes blazed and then brimmed to hear her. And now Helen was gone, and the children; and Jean lay quite still and alone, smiling tranquilly, as we said.

Her thoughts were long-distance wires, as the thoughts of the sick are, and they covered the s.p.a.ces of ether and of earth that afternoon--the unexplored wastes into which the soul invites no fellow-traveler. Her heart fled to the rose-red star of their early dream. They had loved as the young and the well, the brave and the bright, may love; pa.s.sionately, as the brown and the blond do; and reasonably, as the well-mated and the fortunate can. They were of the same age, the same cla.s.s, the same traditions; they knew the same people, who congratulated them in the same words; they had inherited the same ideals of life, and went buoyantly into it. Not so much as a fad had inserted itself between their tastes, and in their convictions they were mercifully not divided. At first their only hardship had been the strenuous denial of the professional life; but she never wished him to make money--she was quite happy to put up muslin curtains at twelve and a half cents a yard, while her friends hung lace at twenty dollars a window--and had flung herself into the political economy of their household with a merry and ingenious enthusiasm, which she wore as charmingly as she did the blond colors, the blue, the lavender, the rose, the corn, over which she strained her honest eyes and bent her straight shoulders to save dressmakers' bills. Since she had been ill she had tried--how hard no man could ever understand--not to grow careless about her dress. "The daintiest invalid I ever knew," Dr. Thorne used to say.

Marshall cared a good deal about such matters, was fastidious over a wrinkle, was sure to observe a spot or a blemish, while the immaculate might pa.s.s unnoticed for weeks; disliked old dresses; when she had a new one on he admired her as if she were a new wife, for a day or two. She was full of pretty little womanly theories about retaining her husband's devotion.... When had it begun to flag? She had made a science of wifehood, and applied it with a delicate art.... Why had it failed? ... No, no, no! Not that! Not that word, yet! Say rather, why had it faltered? With a tremulous modesty characteristic of her sweet nature, she scored herself for the disillusions of her married life, as if somehow the fault were hers.

How had it all come about? Was she fretful with the first baby? It seemed to have begun (if she thought very hard about it) with the first baby. She knew she had faded a little then. Pink was a crying baby. "I lost so much sleep! And it makes one look so, about the eyes. And then, as Marshall says, maternity affects the complexion."

Her thoughts came down from the rose-red star like aeronauts on parachutes, landing in fog and swamp. Oh, the weariness, the waste of it! For the more she thought, the more she felt herself like one hanging in mid-s.p.a.ce--heaven above her, earth below, and no place for her in either. She could not fly. She would not fall. "And I 'm not very strong to be clinging and holding on, like this. One might let go ... and not mean to."

And yet she had held on pretty well, till the second baby came. She had never felt this moral dizziness till then, this something which might be called life-vertigo, that made it seem in mad, black moments easier to drop than to cling. For after the boy was born she was not well. She had never been strong since. And Marshall hated sickness. He was such a big, strong, splendid fellow! It had been very hard on Marshall.

He hated it so, that she hated it too. She had scorned the scouts of her true condition, and when the trouble at the heart set in, and he called it "only nervous," she said, "No doubt you are quite right, dear," and blamed herself for feeling somehow hurt. She did not speak of it to any one for a long time, after that. But when, one easterly afternoon, the air being as heavy as the clods of the grave, she lay gasping for life for three hours alone, not able to reach a bell or call for help, she sent for Dr. Thorne.

And he told her, for she insisted--and he knew his patient; not a woman to be wheedled by a professional lie--he told her the truth.

"Poor Marshall!" said Jean Avery. "It will be so hard on my husband! ... Don't tell him, doctor. I forbid you, doctor. I think he 'd take it easier if I told him myself, poor fellow!"

She did not tell him that day, for he did not come home; nor the next, for he had a headache; nor the third, for he was in excellent spirits, and she could not bear to. In fact, she waited a week before she gathered her courage to speak. One Sat.u.r.day evening he did not go to the club, but was at home, and he had been very kind to her that day, and loving, and in fact he noticed her appearance, and asked her what was the matter, and why she breathed so short.

Then she drew his hand over her eyes, so that she might not see how he would look, and the beautiful curve of her lip broke a little, for she felt so sorry for her husband; but her firm voice carried itself with courage (Jean never had the invalid's whine), and she told him what the doctor said.

Marshall Avery listened in a silence which might have meant the utmost of distress or the innermost of skepticism. He walked to the window and stood for a while looking out into the lighted street. Perhaps he had a blundering, masculine notion of doing the best thing for her. She would be the first to believe that.

"I 'll see Thorne about this," he said presently. "I can't have him putting you in a panic. You 've grown very nervous lately.

"Cheer up, Jean," he added, coming over to her sofa. "Don't grow hysteric, whatever happens."

He sat down and put his arm around her. Five minutes ago she would have clung to him and poured her soul out on his breast--would have put up her hand to his cheek and blessed him and worshiped him, as a wife does--and would have spared him the worst of everything, and given him the best; refrained from complaint, and lavished hope; made little of her own suffering, and much of his distress for her sake, as this wife could.... Now, she lay quite still and irresponsive. She did not speak, but tried to smile gently upon him. Then he saw her color change, and he flung the window up--for he was startled--and held her to the air.

"Poor girl!" he said. "Poor Jean! My poor Jean!"

"Oh, don't!" cried Jean. For the tenderness, coming after that other, well-nigh slew her. She began to sob,--the cruel sobs that wreck a weakened heart,--and the man fought for her life for an hour.

When Dr. Thorne came the danger was quite over; as it usually is in such cases before the physician can arrive; but he said roughly,-- "What have you been doing to her?"

"He has been saving my life," panted Jean.

"Well," replied Esmerald Thorne, "he can."

When the two men went downstairs, the doctor said,-- "Your pardon,--if I wronged you, Avery?" for he was generous in apology for so imperious a man.

"Why, yes, doctor," returned the husband, with a puzzled face, "I think you did."

Jean lay quietly on the blue lounge. Pink and the baby were taken over to Helen's. The house was unnaturally still. Marshall was coming home in the middle of the afternoon to see her--to see her! The sick woman seemed to herself for that span of peace like a bride again, cherished and happy. Care and illness had never occurred. Life had not dulled the eyes of love. Use had never threatened joy with indifference. This word, that deed, such a scene, all were phantasms of the fog into which she had fallen. She must have grown morbid, as the sick do. Oh, the rose-red star hung in the heavens yet!

His key clicked in the lock, and he came running up the stairs; dashed in, and knelt beside the lounge; then put his arm about her quietly, for he was shocked when he saw how she looked. His dark, fine face was broken with his feeling. Hers quivered as she lifted it to his kiss.

"Did you lose the case, poor dear?" she said.

"Curse the case!" cried Avery. "What's a case? ... I 'm not going gunning, Jean. I 'm going to stay with you."

Color brushed all over her wan cheek, her brow, her lips.

"I was so afraid of guns!" she pleaded. "I always have been!"

"It is one of your weaknesses," replied the husband, a shade less tenderly.

"I know, dear. I have so many! Guns--and boats--I am ashamed of myself. They 're like snakes. The terror is born in me. I don't know how to help it. You are very patient with me, Marshall. Perhaps, if I were stronger--but when one is ill, one can't--always--help things." ...

"Never mind," he said, in a magnanimous tone. "When you get well, you will feel differently. We must get you well, now. That is all I care for. It is all I care for in the world," he added, warmly and earnestly.

She stirred towards him with an expression that would have moved a far more unworthy man than he. It was quite unconscious with her, and as instinctive as a law of nature. So a flower pleads for light. So life asks for nutrition.

"Could n't you sit up--if I held you? Try!" he commanded, shaking his head in a boyish way he had: she could not have told how she loved to see it. He took her in his arms, and carried her across the room to the easy-chair. There he gathered her like a child, and put his cheek to hers, murmuring little words and phrases that both loved--language of their honeymoon, and joyous years. She drank them down as if they had been the breath of life.

"Doctors don't know!" he cried. "I believe you could get well."

"I know I could," said Jean.

"You will! I say you must. You shall!" insisted Marshall Avery, in his pa.s.sionate, peremptory voice. Jean did not reply. But she smiled divinely into his bending face. Swiftly she saw the room flooded with roselight. A star swam in mid-ether. Two floated in it, with bridal eyes. Earth was far and forgotten. Heaven was close.

He was quite devoted to her for a week or two after this; came home early, took her sometimes to drive, made much of little family jokes and merriment, admired everything she wore, gave her a white silk Spanish shawl, and brought her the latest novels; sent her flowers like a lover, and spent his evenings with her. He talked of another maid to take care of the children, so that Molly could give her time to the invalid. But Mrs. Avery shook her head. They could not afford that.

"You are so generous to me, Marshall! ... I am sorry it is so expensive to be sick. But I 'm getting better, dear--don't you see I am? I have n't felt so well for a year," she added.

"Oh, we 'll have you round again pretty soon," he said, with that hearty optimism which, one could not have told exactly why, seemed just to miss of the nature of sympathy. But Jean's drafts on sympathy had always been scanty. It was very much as it was about the lace curtains. She could get along without what other women demanded. At least, she had always thought she could. It used to be so. She was troubled sometimes to find that sickness creates new heavens and a new earth, and that the very virtues of health may turn again and rend one. It was as if one had acquired citizenship in a strange planet, where character and nature change places.

It was with a kind of fear that she received her husband's acceleration of tenderness. How was she to forego it, when the time came that it might--she omitted to acknowledge to herself that it would--overlook her again? She tried feverishly to get better in a hurry, as if she had been in some Southern climate where she was but a transient tourist. She tried so hard, in fact, as sometimes to check the real and remarkable improvement which had now befallen her.

One day Mr. Avery announced that he had the toothache, and if he were not so driven he would go and see Armstrong; he meant to give Armstrong all his work after this; Armstrong was a good fellow, and they often met Sat.u.r.days at the club. But the great Electric case was up just then, and necessary dentistry was an impossible luxury to the young lawyer. Endurance was a novelty, and Avery grew nervous under it. He bore pain neither better nor worse than most men; and he was really suffering. Any wife but Jean would have called him cross. Jean called him her poor boy. She dragged herself from her lounge--she had been a little less well the last few days--and lavished herself, as women like Jean do, pouring out her own tenderness--a rare wine. After all, there are not too many tender women; Jean was a genius in sympathy. She spent more sweetness and strength on that toothache than the other kind of woman has to give her husband if he meets a mortal hurt. Avery received this calmly. He was used to it. To do him justice, he did not know how cross he was. He was used to that, too. And so was she. The baby was ailing, besides, and things went hard. The sick woman's breath began to shorten again; and the coy color which had been so hard to win to her lips fled from them un.o.bserved. The doctor was not called; Helen Thorne was out of town; and so it happened that no one noticed--for, as we say, Marshall Avery had the toothache.

One night he came home late, and as irritable as better men than he may be, and be forgiven for it, for the sake of that species of modern toothache in which your dentist neither extracts nor relieves, but devotes his highly developed and unhappy ingenuity to the demonic process which is known as "saving a tooth."

"He calls it killing a nerve," sputtered Avery. "I should call it killing a patient. This performance is the Mauser bullet of up-to-date dentistry. It explodes all over you-- Oh, do let me alone, Jean! You can't do anything for me. A man does n't want to be bothered. Go and lie down, and look after yourself. Where is that hot water? I asked for alcohol--laudanum--some confounded thing. Can't anybody in this house do anything for me? I don't trouble them very often."

"It's Molly's evening out," said Mrs. Avery patiently. "I 'll get everything as fast as I can, dear." She was up and down stairs a good deal; she did not notice, herself, how often. And when she got to bed at last, she cried--she could not help it. It was something he had said. Oh, no matter what! But she did not know how to bear it, for she was so exhausted, and sobs, which were her mortal enemy, overcame her as soon as she was alone.

He did not hear her, for the door was shut between their rooms, and he was quite occupied with his Mauser bullet. He had fallen into the habit of shutting the door when the second baby was born; he maintained that the boy was worse than Pink. Pink cried like a lady, but the boy bellowed like a megatherium.

A little before half-past ten she heard him get up and dress and stir about. He opened the door, and said, without coming in:-- "I 'm going to have this blank thing out. I 'm going to Armstrong's house. I won't stand it another hour. I 'll be home presently."

She tried to tell him how sorry she was, and to say some one of the little loving, wifely things with whose warm, sun-penetrated atmosphere she so enveloped his life that he took them as a matter of course. It is doubtful if he heard her altogether, for her voice was fainter than usual.

"Won't you come in a minute?" she pleaded. He did hear that. But he did not come.

"Oh, I can't stop now," he returned petulantly. "I 'm in such blank torment. I 'll be back; I may go to the club afterwards, and play it off at something, but I'll be back before midnight."

"Dear?" she called then, in an agitated voice; it was not like hers, and not like her; if he had perceived this--but he perceived nothing. "I don't feel quite well"--she tried to say. But he was halfway downstairs. These five words wandered after him like the effort of a dumb spirit to communicate with deaf life.

He thrust himself savagely into his overcoat, turned up the collar over his toothache, slammed the front door, and went.

Jean listened to his footfall on the steps, on the sidewalk; the nervous, irritable, uneven sound softened and ceased. She was quite awake, and her mind moved with feverish vitality. She was usually a good sleeper for a sick person; but that night she found herself too ill for any form of rest. The difficulty that she had in breathing increased with an insidious slowness which she had learned to fear as the most obstinate form of her malady. The room grew empty of air. The candle burned blue to her eyes. The shutting of the front door seemed like the shutting of that to which she would not give a name, for terror's sake. As her husband's footsteps pa.s.sed from the power of her strained ears to overtake them, she found herself wondering how they would sound when they pa.s.sed for the last time from her presence, she lying under a load of flowers, with the final look of the sky turned compa.s.sionately upon her. Then she scorned herself--she was the most healthy-minded invalid who ever surmounted the morbidness of physical suffering--and thrust out her hands from her face, as if she were thrusting a camera which was using defective plates away from her brain.

"If he had only come in a minute!" she said, sobbing a little. "If he had only come in and kissed me good-night"-- She did not add: "He would have seen that I was too ill. He would not have left me."

The candle burned faintly, and grew more faint. There seemed to be smoke in the room. The baby stirred in his crib, and Pink, from the nursery, called, "Mummer dee!" in her sleep. The air grew so dense that it seemed to Jean to be packed about her like smothering wool. She rang the electric bell for Molly, or she thought she did. But Molly did not answer, and the nursery door was shut.

There was nothing morbid in Jean's thoughts by this time; no more gruesome vision; no touching situation whatever presented itself; she did not see herself as a pathetic object; even her husband vanished from her consciousness. Kind or harsh--retreating footsteps or returning arms--light laughter on his lips or true love in his eyes--she thought of him not at all. He disappeared from her emergency like some diminishing figure that had fled from the field of a great battle. For the lonely woman knew now, at last, that she was wrestling with mortal peril. She had always wondered if she would know it from its counterfeits when it really came--there were so many counterfeits! She had asked, as all men ask, what it would be like. A long contention? A short, sharp thrust? Agony? Stupor? Struggle, or calm? Now she wondered not at all. There was nothing dramatic or exciting, or even solemn, in her condition. All her being resolved itself into the simple effort to get her breath.

Suddenly this effort ceased. She had struggled up against the pillows to call "Molly! Molly!" when she found that she could not call Molly. As if her head had been under water, the function of breathing battled, and surrendered. Then there befell her swiftly the most beatific instant that she had ever known.

"I am tired out," she thought; "and I am going to sleep. I did not die, after all." She was aware of turning her face, as her head dropped back on her pillows, before she sank into ecstasy.

The night was fair and cool. There was some wind, and the trees in the Park winced under a glittering frost. Avery noticed this as he hurried to Dr. Armstrong's. The leaves seemed to curl in a sensitive, womanish fashion, as if their feelings had been hurt before they received their death-stroke.

"It is the third of November," he thought. His feet rang on the sidewalk sharply, and he ran up the long steps with his gloved hand held to his cheek.

Physical pain always made him angry. He was irritable with Armstrong, who had none too good a temper himself; and the two men sparred a little before the dentist consented to remove the tooth.

Avery was surprised to find how short and simple an affair this was.