"Not very long, I'm afraid," said Sylvia. "Hardly any time at all, in fact."

They left the hotel with that sense of mechanical action which sometimes relieves a strain of acc.u.mulated emotion. Sylvia had the notion of finding a Serbian doctor whom she knew slightly, and was successful in bringing him along to the house where Michael was lying. It was dark when they arrived in the deserted side-street now strewn with the rubbish of many families' flight.

Michael was lying on a camp bed in the middle of the room. On the floor a Serbian peasant wearing a Red Cross bra.s.sard was squatting by his head and from time to time moistening his forehead with a damp sponge. In a corner two other Serbians armed with fantastic weapons sat cross-legged upon the floor, a winking candle and strewn playing-cards between them.

Sylvia felt a sudden awe of looking at him directly, and she waited in the doorway while the doctor went forward with his sister to make his examination. After a short time the doctor turned away with a shrug; he and Mrs. Merivale rejoined Sylvia in the doorway and together they went in another room, where the doctor in sibilant French confirmed the impossibility of moving him if his life was to be saved. He added that the Bulgarians would be in Nish within a few days and that the town would be empty long before that. Then, after giving a few conventional directions for the care of the patient, he saluted the two women and went away.

Sylvia and Mrs. Merivale looked at each other across a bare table on which was set a lantern covered with cobwebs; it was the only piece of furniture left, and Sylvia had a sense of dramatic unreality about their conversation: standing up in this dim room, she was conscious of a make-believe intensity that tore the emotions more completely into rags than any normal procedure or expression of pa.s.sionate feeling. Yet it was only because she divined an approach to the climax of her life that she felt thus; it was so important that she should have her way in what she intended to do that it was impossible for her to avoid regarding Michael's sister not merely as a partner in the scene, but also as the audience on whose approval success ultimately depended. The bareness of the room was like a stage, and the standing up like this was like a scene; it seemed right to exaggerate the gestures to keep pace with the emotional will to achieve her desire.

"Mrs. Merivale," she began, "I beg you to let me stay behind in Nish and look after Michael so far as anything can be done--and of course it will be better for him that a woman should oversee the devotion of his orderly. Nothing will induce me to leave Nish. Nothing. You must understand that now. There is nothing to prevent me from staying here; you must take Captain Hazlewood's horse and go to-morrow."

"Leave my brother? Why, the idea is absurd. I tell you I almost dragged that cart through the mud from Kragujevatz. Besides, I'm a more or less qualified nurse. You're not."

"I'm qualified to nurse him through this fever because I know exactly what is wanted. If any new complication arose, you could do no more than I could do until the Bulgarian doctors arrived. If you stay here, you will be taken to Bulgaria."

"And why not?" demanded the other. "I'd much rather be taken prisoner with Michael than go riding off on my own and leave him here. No, no, the idea's impossible."

"You have your mother--his mother--to think of. You have your son,"

Sylvia argued.

"Neither mother nor son could be any excuse for leaving Michael at such a moment."

"Certainly not, if you could not find a subst.i.tute. But I shall stay here in any case, and you've no right to desert other obligations,"

Sylvia affirmed.

"You're talking to me in a ridiculous way. There is only one obligation, which is to him."

"Do you think you can do more for him than I can do?" Sylvia challenged.

"You can do less. You have already had the fearful strain of getting him here from the north. You are worn out. You are not fit to nurse him as he must be nursed. You are not fit to deal with the Bulgarians when they come. You are already breaking down. Why, there is no force in your arguments! They are as tame and conventional as if you were inventing an excuse to break a social engagement."

"But by what right do you make this--this violent demand?" asked the other.

There suddenly came over Sylvia the futility of discussing the question in this fashion: this flickering room, echoing faintly to the shouts of the affrighted fugitives in the distance, lacked any atmosphere to hide the truth, for which in its bareness and misery it seemed to cry aloud.

The question that his sister had put demanded an answer that would evade nothing in the explanation of her request; and if that answer should leave her soul stripped and desolate for the contemptuous regard of a woman who could not comprehend, why then thus was her destiny written and she should stand humiliated while the life that she had not been great enough to seize pa.s.sed out of her reach.

"If my demand is violent, my need is violent," she cried. "Once, in my dressing-room--the only time we met--you told me that you half regretted your rejection of art; you envied me my happiness in success. Your envy seemed to me then the bitterest irony, for I could not find in art that which I demanded. I have never found it until now in the chance to save your brother's life. That is exaggerating, you'll say. Yet I do believe--and if you could know my history you would believe it, too--I do believe that my will can save him now not merely from death, but from the captivity that will follow. I know what it feels like to recover from this fever; and I know that he will not wish to see you and himself prisoners. He will fret himself ill again about your position. I am nothing to him. He will never know that we changed places deliberately.

He will accept me as a companion in misfortune, and I will give all that love can give, love that feeds upon and inflames itself without demanding fuel except from the heart of the one who loves. You cannot refuse me now, my dear--so dear to me because you are his sister. You cannot refuse me when I ask you to let me stay because I love him."

"Do you love Michael?" asked the other, wonderingly.

"I love him, I love him, and one does not speak lightly of love at a moment like this. Do you remember when you asked me to come and stay with you in the country to meet him? It was eighteen months ago. Your letter arrived when I had just been jilted by the man I was going to marry in a desperate effort to persuade myself that domesticity was the cure for my discontent. My discontent was love for your brother. It has never been anything else since the moment we met, though I cried out 'Never' when I read your invitation. I abandoned everything. I have lived ever since as a mountebank, driven always by a single instinct that sustained me. That instinct was merely a superst.i.tion to travel south. Whenever I traveled on, I had always the sense of an object. I have found that object at last, and I know absolutely that fate stood at your elbow and dragged with you at those weary bullocks in the mud to bring Michael here in time. I know that fate chained me to my balcony at Nish, where for nearly a month I have been watching for your arrival.

You are wise; you have suffered; you have loved: I beseech you that, just for the sake of your pride, you will not rob me of this moment to which my whole life has been the mad overture."

"What you say about my being a worry to him when he recovers consciousness is true," said the sister. "It's the only good argument you've brought forward. Ah, but I won't be so ungenerous. Stay then.

To-night I will wait here and to-morrow you shall take my place."

The flickering bareness of the room flashed upon Sylvia with unimaginable glory; the dark night of her soul was become day.

"I think you can hear the joy in my heart," she whispered. "I can't say any more."

Sylvia fell upon her knees; bowing her head upon the table, she wept tears that seemed to gush like melodious fountains in a new world.

"You have made me believe that he will not die," the sister murmured. "I did not think that I should be able to believe that; but I do now, Sylvia."

An a.s.surance that positively seemed to contain life came over both of them. Sylvia rose from her knees and abruptly they began to talk practically of what should be done that night and of what it would be wise to provide to-morrow. Presently Sylvia left the house, and slept in her hotel one of those rare sleeps whence waking is a descent upon airy plumes from heights where action and aspiration are fused in a ravishing, unutterable affirmative, of which, somehow, a remembered consciousness is accorded to the favored soul.

The next morning Michael's sister mounted her horse. The guns of the desperate army of Stephanovitch confronting the Bulgarian advance were now audible; their booming gave power of flight to the weakest that remained in Nish; and the coil of fugitives writhed over the muddy plain toward the mountains.

"I think he seemed a little better this morning," she said, wistfully.

"Don't be jealous of leaving me," Sylvia begged. "You shall never regret that impulse. Will you take this golden bag with you? I don't want it to adorn a Bulgarian; it was a token to me of love, and it has been a true token. At the end of your journey sell it and give the money to poor Serbians. Will you? And this letter for Captain Hazlewood. Please post it in England. Good-by, my dear, my dear."

Michael's sister took the bag and the letter. In the light of this gray morning her gray eyes were profound lakes of grief.

"I am envying you for the second time," she said. Then she waved her crop and rode quickly away. Sylvia watched her out of sight, thinking what it must have cost that proud sister to make this sacrifice. Her heart ached with a weight of unexpressed grat.i.tude, and yet she could not keep it from beating with a fierce and triumphant gladness when she went up to where Michael was lying and found him alone. The orderly and servants had fled from the fear that clung to Nish like the clouds of this heavy day, and Sylvia, taking his hand, bathed his forehead with a tenderness that she half dreaded to use, so much did it seem a flame that would fan the fever in whose embrace he tossed unconscious of all but a world of shadows.

For a week she stayed beside him, sleeping sometimes with her head against his arm, listening to the somber colloquies of delirium, striving to keep the soul that often in the long trances seemed to flutter disconsolately away from the exhausted body. There was no longer any sound of people in Nish: there was nothing but the guns coming nearer and nearer every hour. Then suddenly the firing ceased: there was a clatter and a splash of cavalry upon the muddy paving-stones. The noise pa.s.sed. Michael sat up and said:

"Listen!"

She thought he was away upon some adventure of delirium and told him not to worry, but to lie still. He was so emaciated that she asked herself if he could really be living: it was like brushing a cobweb from one's path to make him lie down again. A woman's scream, the thin scream of an old woman, shuddered upon the silence outside; but the noise did not disturb him, and he lay perfectly still with his eyes fixed upon the ceiling. A few minutes later he again sat up in bed.

"Am I mad, or is it Sylvia Scarlett?" he asked.

"Yes, it's Sylvia. You're very ill. You must keep still."

"What an extraordinary thing!" he murmured, seriously, to himself. "I suppose I shall hear all about it to-morrow."

He lay back again without seeming to worry about the problem of her presence; nor did he ask where his sister was. Sylvia remembered her own divine content in the hospital when the fever left her, and she wanted him to lie as long as possible thus. Presently, however, he sat up again and said:

"Listen, Sylvia, I thought I wasn't wrong. Do you hear a kind of whisper in the air?"

She listened to please him, and then upon the silence she heard the sound. From a whisper it grew to a sigh, from a sigh it rose to a rustling of many leaves: it was the Bulgarian army marching into Nish, a procession of silent-footed devils, mysterious, remorseless, innumerable.

CHAPTER VII

TO Sylvia's surprise and relief, the conquerors paid no attention to the house that night. Michael, after he had listened for a while to the dampered progress of that soft-shod army, fell back upon his pillow without comment and slept very tranquilly. Sylvia, who had now not the least doubt of his recovery, busied herself with choosing what she conceived to be absolute necessities for the immediate future and packing them into her valise. In the course of her preparations she put on one side for destruction or abandonment the contents of the golden shawl. Daguerreotypes and photographs; a rambling declaration of the circ.u.mstances in which her alleged grandfather had married that ghostly Adele her grandmother, and a variety of letters that ill.u.s.trated her mother's early life: all these might as well be burned. She lay down upon her bed of overcoats and skirts piled upon the floor and found the shawl a pleasant addition to the rubber hot-water-bottle she had been using as a pillow. Michael was still sleeping; it seemed wise to blow out the candle and, although it was scarcely seven o'clock, to try to sleep herself. It was the first time for a week that she had been able to feel the delicious and inviting freedom of untrammeled sleep. What did the occupation of a Bulgarian army signify in comparison with the a.s.surance she felt of her patient's convalescence? The brazier glowed before her path toward a divine oblivion.

When Sylvia woke up and heard Michael's voice calling to her, it was six o'clock in the morning. She blew up the dull brazier to renewed warmth, set water to boil, and in a real exultation lighted four candles to celebrate with as much gaiety as possible the new atmosphere of joy and hope in the stark room.

"It's all very mysterious," Michael was saying. "It's all so delightfully mysterious that I can hardly bear to ask any questions lest I destroy the mystery. I've been lying awake, exquisitely and self-admiringly awake for an hour, trying to work out where I am, why I'm where I am, why you're where you are, and where Stella is."

Sylvia told him of the immediate occasion of his sister's departure, and when she had done so had a moment of dismay lest his affection or his pride should be hurt by her willingness to leave him in the care of one who was practically a stranger.

"How very kind of you!" he said. "My mother would have been distracted by having to look after her grandson in the whirlpool of war-work upon which she is engaged. So you had typhus, too? It's a rotten business, isn't it? Did you feel very weak after it?"