"Yes, dear."

"Why isn't she with me then? Is her cold worse?"

"Rather, I'm afraid. I've sent a doctor to her, with instructions to keep her in bed if possible. We'll go right down when you're ready and feel up to it."

"Why didn't I stay with her, Ambo? I should have. If I had, all this wouldn't have happened. It was pure selfishness, my coming here to see Mrs. Arthur. I simply wanted the cheap satisfaction of telling her--oh, no matter! I'll be ready in five minutes or less."

"Ah," laughed Doctor Askew, "then we know just what to expect! I'll order my car round for you in half an hour."

Phil and Jimmy arrived in town that afternoon and I met them at the Brevoort, where the three of us took rooms, with a sitting-room, for the night. I told them everything that had occurred as fully as I could, with one exception: I did not speak of those first three pages automatically scribbled by Susan's hand. Nor did I mention my impression--which was rapidly becoming a fixed idea--that my love for her had darkened her life. This was my private problem, my private desolation. It would be my private duty to free Susan's spirit from this intolerable strain. No one could help me here, not even Susan. In all that most mattered to me, my isolation must from now on be complete.

All else I told them, not omitting my vision--the whole wild story. And, finally, I had now to add to my devil's list a new misfortune. We had found poor Miss Goucher's condition much more serious than I had supposed. Doctor Askew had taken us down in his car, and we were met in the nondescript lower hall of the boarding-house by his friend, Doctor Carl--the doctor whom I had sent to Miss Goucher on his advice. Miss Goucher's heavy chest cold, he at once informed us, had taken a graver turn; double pneumonia had declared itself. Her fever was high and she had lately grown delirious; he had put a trained nurse in charge. The crisis of the disease would probably be pa.s.sed during the next twelve hours; he was doing everything possible; he hoped for the best.

Susan, very white, motionless, had heard him out. "If Sister dies," she had said quietly when he ended, "I shall have killed her." Then she had run swiftly up the stairs and the two doctors had followed her. I had remained below and had not again seen her; but Doctor Askew had returned within ten minutes, shaking his head.

"No one can say what will happen," I had finally wrested from him. "One way or the other now, it's the flip of a coin. Carl's doing his best--that is, nothing, since there's nothing to do. I've warned him to keep an eye on the little lady. I'll look in again after dinner.

Good-by. Better find a room and get some sleep if you can."

There was little doubt that Miss Goucher's turn for the worse had come as the result of Susan's disturbing all-night absence. Susan had made her comfortable and left her in bed, promising to be home before twelve.

Miss Goucher had fallen asleep about eleven and had not waked until two.

The light she had left for Susan had not been switched off, and Susan's bed, which stood beside her own, was unoccupied. Feverish from her bronchial cold, she was at once greatly alarmed, and sprang from her bed to go into the sitting-room, half hoping to find Susan there and scold her a little for remaining up so late over her work. She did not even stop to put on a dressing-gown or find her slippers. All this Susan later learned from her red-eyed landlady, Miss O'Neill, whose own bedroom, as it happened, was just beside their own. Miss O'Neill, a meritorious if tiresome spinster of no particular age, had at last been waked from heavy and well-earned sleep by persistent knocking at her door. She had found Miss Goucher standing in the unheated, draughty hall, bare-footed, in her nightgown, her cheeks flushed with mounting fever while her teeth chattered with cold.

Like a sensible woman she had hurried her instantly back to bed, and would have gone at once for a hot-water bottle, if Miss Goucher had not insisted upon a hearing. Miss O'Neill was abjectly fond of Miss Goucher, who had the rare gift of listening to voluble commonplace without impatience--a form of sympathy so rare and so flattering to Miss O'Neill's so often bruised self-esteem that she would gladly--had there been any necessity--have carried Miss Goucher rent-free for the mere spiritual solace of pouring out her not very romantic troubles to her.

She had taken, Susan felt, an almost voluptuous pleasure in this, her one opportunity to do something for Miss Goucher. She had telephoned Gertrude's apartment for her: "no matter if it is late! I won't have you upset like this for n.o.body! They've got to answer!" And she had talked with some man--"and I didn't like his tone, neither"--who had asked her some rather odd questions, and had then told her Miss Blake was O. K., not to worry about Miss Blake; she'd had a fainting-spell and been put to bed; she'd be all right in the morning; sure; well, he was the doctor, he guessed he ought to know! "Queer kind of doctor for a lady,"

Miss O'Neill had opined; "he sounded more like a mick!" A shrewd guess, for he was, no doubt, one of Conlon's trusties.

Miss Goucher had then insisted that she was going to dress and go up at once to Susan, and had even begun her preparations in spite of every protest, when she was seized with so stabbing a pain in her chest that she could only collapse groaning on the bed and let Miss O'Neill minister to her as best she might with water bottles and a mustard plaster borrowed from Number Twelve....

By the time I had tardily remembered to telephone Miss Goucher it was almost nine A. M., and it was Miss O'Neill who had answered the call, receiving my a.s.surances of Susan's well-being, and informing me in turn that poor Miss Goucher was good and sick and no mistake, let alone worrying, and should she send for a doctor? She was a Scientist herself, though she'd tried a mustard plaster, anyway, always liking to be on the safe side; but Miss Goucher wasn't, and so maybe she ought. At this point I had naturally taken charge.

And it was at this point in my long, often interrupted relation to Phil and Jimmy that Phil took charge.

"You're going to bed, Hunt--and you're going now! There's absolutely nothing further you can do this evening, and if anything turns up Jimmy or I can attend to it. You've been living on your nerves all day and you show it, too plainly. We don't want another patient to-morrow. Run out and get some veronal powders, Jimmy. Thanks. No protests, old man.

You're going to bed!"

I went; and, drugged with veronal, I slept--slept dreamlessly--for fourteen hours. When I woke, a little past ten, Jimmy was standing beside me.

"Good morning, Mr. Hunt. You look rested up some! How about breakfast?"

His greeting went through all the sounds and motions of cheerfulness, but it was counterfeit coin. There was something too obviously wrong with Jimmy's ordinarily fresh healthy-boy face; it had gone sallow and looked pincushiony round the eyes. I stared at him dully, but could not recall anything that might account for this alteration. Only very gradually a faint sense of discomfort began to pervade my consciousness.

Hadn't something happened--once--something rather sad--and rather horrible? When was it? Where was I? And then the full gust of recollection came like a stiff physical blow over my heart. I sat up with a sharp gasp for breath....

"Well!" I demanded. "Miss Goucher! How is she?"

"She's dead, sir," answered Jimmy, turning away.

"And----"

"She's wonderful!" answered Jimmy.

He had not needed Susan's name.

Yes, in a sense, Jimmy was right. He was not a boy to look far beneath the surface effects of life, and throughout the following weeks Susan's surface effect was indeed wonderful. Apparently she stood up to her grief and mastered it, developing an outer stillness, a quietude strangely disquieting to Phil and to me. Gentleness itself in word and deed, for the first time since we had known her she became spiritually reticent, holding from us her deeper thoughts. It was as if she had secretly determined--G.o.d knows from what pressure of lonely sorrow--to conventionalize her life, to present the world hereafter nothing but an even surface of un.o.btrusive conformity. This, we feared, was hereafter to be her wounded soul's protection, her Chinese Wall. It had not somehow the feel of a pa.s.sing mood; it had rather the feel of a permanent decision or renunciation. And it troubled our hearts....

I spare you Gertrude's funeral, and Miss Goucher's. The latter, held in a small, depressingly official mortuary chapel, provided--at a price--by the undertaker, was attended only by Phil, Jimmy, Susan, Sonia, Miss O'Neill and me. Oh--there was also the Episcopal clergyman, whom I provided. He read the burial service professionally, but well; it is difficult to read it badly. There are a few sequences of words that really are foolproof, carrying their own atmosphere and dignity with them.

Phil and I, at Susan's request, had examined Miss Goucher's effects and had made certain inquiries. She had been for many years, we found, entirely alone in the world--a phrase often, but seldom accurately, used. It is a rare thing, happily, to discover a human being who is absolutely the last member of his or her family line; in Miss Goucher's case this aloneness was complete. But so far as her nonexistent ancestors were concerned, Miss Goucher, we ascertained, had every qualification necessary for a D. A. R.; forebears of hers had lived for generations in an old homestead near Poughkeepsie, and the original Ithiel Goucher had fought as a young officer under Washington. From soldiering, the Gouchers had pa.s.sed on to farming, to saving souls, to school-teaching, to patent-medicine peddling, and finally to drink and drugs and general desuetude. Miss Goucher herself had been a last flare-up of the primitive family virtues, and with her they were now extinct.

All this we learned from her papers, and from an old lady in Poughkeepsie who remembered her grandfather, and so presumably her mother and father as well--though in reply to my letter of inquiry she forbore to mention them. They were mentioned several times in letters and legal doc.u.ments preserved by Miss Goucher, but--except to say that they both died before she was sixteen--I shall follow the example of the old lady in Poughkeepsie. She, I feel, and the Roman poet long before her, had what Jimmy calls the "right idea."...

Miss Goucher, always methodical, left a brief and characteristic will: "To Susan Blake, ward of Ambrose Hunt, Esq., of New Haven, Conn., and to her heirs and a.s.signs forever, I leave what little personal property I possess. She has been to me more than a daughter. I desire to be cremated, believing that to be the cleanest and least troublesome method of disposing of the dead."

That, with the proper legal additions, was all. Her desire was of course respected, and I had a small earthenware jar containing her ashes placed in my own family vault. On this jar Susan had had the following words inscribed:

MALVINA GOUCHER A GENTLE WOMAN

VII

On one point Susan was from the first determined: Miss Goucher's death should make no difference in her struggle for independence; she would go on as she had begun, and fight things through to a finish alone. Neither Phil nor I could persuade her to take even a few days for a complete change of scene, a period of rest and recuperation. Simply, she would not. She settled down at once to work harder than ever, turning out quotable paragraphs for _Whim_, as daring as they were sprightly; and she resolutely kept her black hours of loneliness to herself. That she had many such hours I then suspected and now know, but on my frequent visits to New York--I had been appointed administrator of Miss Goucher's more than modest estate--she ignored them, and skillfully turned all my inquiries aside. These weeks following on Miss Goucher's death were for many reasons the unhappiest of my life.

Never since I had known Susan, never until now, had our minds met otherwise than candidly and freely. Now, through no crying fault on either side--unless through a lack of imagination on mine--barriers were getting piled up between us, barriers composed of the subtlest, yet stubbornest misunderstandings. Our occasional hours together soon became a drab tissue of evasions and cross purposes and suppressed desires.

Only frankness can serve me here or make plain all that was secretly at work to deform the natural development of our lives.

There are plays--we have all attended them to our indignation--in which some unhappy train of events seems to have been irrationally forced upon his puppets by the author; if he would only let them speak out freely and sensibly, all their needless difficulties would vanish! Such plays infuriate the public and are never successful.

"Good Lord!" we exclaim. "Why didn't she _say_ she loved him in the first place!"--or, "If he had only told her his reasons for leaving home that night!"

We, the enlightened public, feel that in the shoes of either the hero or the heroine we must have acted more wisely, and we refuse our sympathy to misfortunes that need never have occurred. Our reaction is perhaps inevitable and aesthetically justified; but I am wondering--I am wondering whether two-thirds of the unhappiness of most mortals is not due to their failure clearly to read another's thoughts or clearly to reveal their own? Is not half, at least, of the misery in our hearts born of futile misunderstandings, misunderstandings with which any sane onlooker in full possession of the facts on both sides, can have little patience, since he instinctively feels they ought never to have taken place? But it is only in the theater that we find such an onlooker, the audience, miraculously in possession of the facts on both sides. In active life, we are doing pretty well if we can partly understand our own motives; we are supermen if we divine the concealed, genuine motives of another. Certainly at this period Susan, with all her insight, did not seize my motives, nor was I able to interpret hers. Hence, we could not speak out! What needed to be said between us could not be said. And the best proof that it could not is, after all, that it was not....

The conversation that ought to have taken place between us might not unreasonably have run something like this:

SUSAN: Ambo dear--what _is_ the matter? Heaven knows there's enough!--but I mean between _us_?

You've never been more wonderful to me than these past weeks--and never so remote. I can feel you edging farther and farther away. Why, dear?

I: I've been a nuisance to you too long, Susan.

Whatever I am from now on, I won't be that.

SUSAN: As if you could be; or ever had been!

I: Don't try to spare my feelings because you like me--because you're grateful to me and sorry for me! I've had a glimpse of fact, you see. It's the great moral antiseptic. My illusions are done for.

SUSAN: What illusions?

I: The illusion that you ever have really loved me. The illusion that you might some day grow to love me. The illusion that you might some day be my wife.

SUSAN: Only the last is illusion, Ambo. I do love you. I'm growing more in love with you every day.

But I can't be your wife, ever. If I've seemed changed and sad--apart from Sister's death, and everything else that's happened--it's _that_, dear. It's killing me by half-inches to know I can never be completely part of your life--yours!