Aurora felt her heart turn cold, and such agitation seize her as made her reckless of all but one thing.

"I shall have to see for myself," she thought.

With the haste of fear, she flew before Giovanna down the long hallway, around the dark corner, to the door of Gerald's room. It was half open.

Checking herself on the threshold, she thrust in her head.

He was so lying in his bed that beyond the outlined shape under the covers she could see of him only a dark spot of hair. And she felt she must see his face, whether asleep or awake, to get some idea.... She tiptoed in with the least possible noise. At once, without turning, he asked something in Italian, and speaking forced him to cough; and after he had finished coughing, Aurora, who was near, could hear his breathing rustle within him like wind among dead leaves.

Giovanna had gone to the head of his bed and whispered a communication.

Upon which he twisted sharply around, and Aurora, moved by an overpowering impulse, rushed to his side.

"Hush!" she said at once. "Don't try to talk; it makes you cough. I just wanted to know how you were. It would be funny, now don't you think so yourself, if, such friends as we've been, I should stop caring anything about you because you were cross the other day? I had to come and see if there wasn't something we could do for you."

The attempt to speak choked him again; he had to lift himself finally quite up from his pillow to get breath. Quicker than Giovanna, Aurora s.n.a.t.c.hed up a gray shawl from a chair to put over his shoulders. The room felt to her stagnantly cold. He stopped her hand in the act of folding him in, and she knew that it was not the Gerald of last time, this one who, with an afflictive little moan, clasped and pressed her hand.

She hushed him, every time he tried to speak, until his breathing had quieted down, when he came out despite her forbidding with a ragged, interrupted, but obstinate eagerness:

"How can I ever thank you enough for coming, dear, dear Aurora? I have lived in one prolonged nightmare ever since I saw you, knowing I had behaved like a blackguard, and fearing I should never have a chance to beg your pardon. I thought I should never see you again. And here you are, so generous, so kind!"

"Hush, Gerald! Don't make anything of it. Of course I came. Keep quiet now; you mustn't try to talk."

"Dearest woman," he insisted, with his voice full of tears, "I don't even know what I said to you, but I know that the whole thing was atrocious. You standing there like a big angel, with your innocent arms full of flowers, and I barking at you like a cur!"

"Nothing of the sort. You were sick. Who lays up anything against a sick man?"

"Excuse it in me like this, Aurora, if you can: that having such regard for you, I had pride before you and could not endure that you should see me when I felt myself to be a disgusting object. So, mortified to the point of torture, I lost my temper,--I've got that bad habit, you know,--and insanely railed to keep you off."

"And didn't succeed. Come, come; what nonsense all this is! Put it out of your mind and think of nothing but getting well. Now you--"

"It is not nearly so important that I should get well," he testily persisted, "as that I should ask your forgiveness. It has been weighing upon me and burning like bedclothes of hot iron, the horror of having so meanly and ungratefully offended you."

"Why should you feel so bad about it as long as I don't? Put it all out of your mind, just as I do out of mine. There, it's all right. Now keep still except to answer my questions. You've had the doctor?"

"Yes, dear."

"What's he giving you?"

"You can see--there on the stand--those bottles."

"And hot things on your chest?"

"Yes; _semedilino_. I don't know what you call it in English."

"Flaxseed, I guess. How can poor old Giovanna do everything for you?"

"I don't know," he answered vaguely. "She does."

Perceiving that by a reaction from his excitement he was suddenly fatigued to the point of no longer being able to speak at all or even keep his eyes open, she asked nothing more, but with a practised hand straightened his bolster, smoothed his pillow and drew the covers evenly and snugly up to his chin.

"Don't you be afraid," he heard her say above him, as it seemed to him a long time after, at the same moment that he felt her give his shoulder a little squeeze to impress her saying: "I won't let anything happen to you."

He entered a state which was neither quite sleep nor quite waking. He was not dreaming, yet the world within his eyelids was peopled with creatures and varied by incidents departing from the known and foreseen.

Something malevolent pertained to the personalities, something disquieting to the actions; suffering and oppression resulted from his inability to get away from them. They came and went, one scene melted into another, sometimes beautiful, sometimes repulsive, a sickly disagreeableness being common to all, and the fatigue involved with watching the spectacle of them weighing like a physical burden.

But yet beneath the unrest of fever dreams there was in Gerald, after Aurora's visit, as if a substratum of quiet and content. As a good Catholic, having confessed and received absolution, would be less troubled by either his symptoms or any visions that might come of Satan and his imps, so Gerald, with the weight of his sins of brutality and ingrat.i.tude lifted off him, could feel almost pa.s.sive with regard to the rest.

He had moments through the night of recognizing the deceptiveness of his senses. He knew, for instance, that the solemn clerical gentleman in a long black coat and tall hat whom he saw most tiresomely coming toward him down the street every time he opened his eyes was only a medicine bottle full of dark fluid, outlined against the dim candle-shine. And he knew that the tower of ice, solitary amid snows, lighthouse or tower of defense on some arctic coast, was nothing but a gla.s.s of water. And when it seemed to him, late, late in the night, that Aurora was in the room, he knew off and on that it was Giovanna, who through one of those metamorphoses common in fever had taken the likeness of Aurora. She lifted him to make him drink, and supported him while she held the gla.s.s to his lips, then laid him easily back. The delusions of fever had the sweet and foolish impossibility of fairy-stories: Aurora, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, placing upon his stiff and lacerated breast balsamic bandages of a.s.suaging and beneficient warmth!...

The night was full of torrid heat and fiery light, in which everything looked unnatural, shifting, uncertain, but daylight, when it finally came, was of a crude coldness; under it everything returned to be itself, meager and stationary, and he knew that it was no phantasmagorical Aurora making preparations to wash his face.

He spoke no word to signify either pleasure or displeasure. He let it be, like a destiny too strong to withstand. With this acceptance there took place in him, body and spirit, a relaxing, as when supporting arms are felt by one who had been fearing a fall.

In his not very clear-headed reflections upon himself and his state, he had pa.s.sed into a different category of men, where what he did, particularly as regarded worldly proprieties, had little importance, because, ill as he felt, there seemed to him such a strong probability of his actions having no result. If, on the other hand, he could manage to pull through--and he found he cared to do this, cared so much more than he had supposed he ever could care, on such desperate days as those which had sometimes seen him re-examining his revolver--if he should recover, the gladness of his good fortune would outweigh any inconvenience created by his weakness now. Life is, and should be, dearer to man than anything else, except honor. He found it difficult to separate the idea of honor from life, and make it oppose letting this robust guardian angel fulfil her promise not to "let anything happen to him."

Gerald had too often heard those well-meaning lies which friends and nurses tell the sick, to place faith altogether in Aurora's cheerful a.s.severations from day to day that he was getting better.

Yet Aurora was not feigning. She entertained no doubt that with proper care he would get well. And she was providing the care. Hence a confidence which she did not allow any of those chilly creepy fears which come at about three o'clock in the morning to undermine. She was so strongly resolved to get him well, and felt so capable of doing it, that it would not seem unlikely her very hands in touching him had virtue and imparted health.

He said very little, even when the exertion of talking had ceased to make him cough. The fact that talk fatigued him was reinforced by his old fancy that talk was superfluous. One lived, one looked, one felt....

She was glad he so willingly kept quiet, because as long as he had fever it was so much the best thing he could do. He did not have to tell her that he took comfort in having her there, that everything she did for him was exactly right, that her touch was blessed and had no more strangeness for him than that of a sister--nay, than his own. She too understood those wordless things which are shed from one person, like a radiance, and inhaled by another, like a scent.

In the long silences, she sometimes read a little by the shaded candle--she had chosen the night watch for her share and let his devoted old Giovanna wait on her master during the day. But very often she sat in her easy-chair near the bed doing nothing, just thinking her thoughts, marveling at the queerness, the surprises of life. Who could have dreamed that first time she entered this big brick-floored, white-washed room, and nearly cried because she found it so dreary, that she would come to feel at home in it; that by her doing the brown earthenware stove in the corner, cold since Mrs. Fane's day, would again glow and purr; that over and over she would watch the row of flower-pots out on the terrace, with the stiff straw-colored remains in them of last year's carnations, grow slowly visible in the dawn; that from their pastel portrait the eyes of the mother would watch her placing compresses on the brow of the son!

[Ill.u.s.tration: Aurora's eyes, fixed and starry, rested upon the little flame]

Before going for her rest, she always waited to see the doctor, who made an early visit. After they had reissued together from the sickroom, he was interviewed by her with the help of an interpreter, Clotilde, who was in and out of the house during all that period, making herself useful. Estelle instead came only for a moment daily, having a case of her own to nurse, who was down, poor crumb, with those measles-mumps-whooping cough of puppyhood, distemper.

On the day when Doctor Batoni had agreed that with prudence there would be nothing more to fear, the patient might be regarded as having entered convalescence, Aurora covered him with a wide and warming smile.

"_Je suis son bonne amie_," thus she translated the explanation of her unconcealed happiness, "I'm a good friend of his," nodding at the old man with the full sweetness of her dimples; blushing a little, too, with the pride of addressing him directly in French.

That morning Aurora was so happy she could not hurry; humming an old psalm tune she dawdled about her room, the longer to enjoy her thoughts.

When she finally slept it was more deeply than usual, and she woke with a start of fear that it was past the time. The line of sky showing between the curtains retained no remembrance of the day. It must be late, certainly. Then she heard a faint stirring just outside her door, the thing probably which had drawn her out of a sound sleep. It was the rustle of some person listening at the crack.

She bounced from bed and went to open. It was as she expected, Giovanna; come, she supposed, to see if she were ready to go on duty. At Giovanna's first words, though she did not entirely understand them, she became uneasy, because Giovanna interspersed them with sighs. Her voice sounded as if she might have been crying.

Aurora had grown accustomed to the fact that those hard old eyes of Giovanna's took easily to tears, and that she sighed by the thousand the moment she was in anxiety over her _signorino_. She knew she must not take Giovanna's fears at her own valuation. She gathered from her gestures now, combined with her talk, that Gerald, so quiet until to-day, had become restless. Giovanna impersonated him tossing and throwing his arms out of the bed-covers. Aurora, though not permitting herself to be alarmed, hurried with her dressing.

"Ain't it always so," she questioned her own image in the gla.s.s, "that the moment you feel safe something goes wrong?"

When she tiptoed into the big dim room where Gerald lay, she could not at first make out what it was that had troubled Giovanna to the point of tears. He seemed quiet enough. After she had taken his pulse and temperature, her heart subsided with a blessed relief.