The voice was a woman's. It was not raised to any high pitch; its accent was the accent of prayer, and the words it uttered were these:
'Christ, have mercy on me!'
There was silence again. A nameless fear crept over me, as I looked out on the bridge.
She was standing on the parapet. Before I could move, before I could cry out, before I could even breathe again freely, she leaped into the river.
The current ran my way. I could see her, as she rose to the surface, floating by in the light on the mid-stream. I ran headlong down the bank. She sank again, in the moment when I stopped to throw aside my hat and coat and to kick off my shoes. I was a practiced swimmer. The instant I was in the water my composure came back to me—I felt like myself again.
The current swept me out into the mid-stream, and greatly increased the speed at which I swam. I was close behind her when she rose for the second time—a shadowy thing, just visible a few inches below the surface of the river. One more stroke, and my left arm was round her; I had her face out of the water. She was insensible. I could hold her in the right way to leave me master of all my movements; I could devote myself, without flurry or fatigue, to the exertion of taking her back to the shore.
My first attempt satisfied me that there was no reasonable hope, burdened as I now was, of breasting the strong current running toward the mid-river from either bank. I tried it on one side, and I tried it on the other, and gave it up. The one choice left was to let myself drift with her down the stream. Some fifty yards lower, the river took a turn round a promontory of land, on which stood a little inn much frequented by anglers in the season. As we approached the place, I made another attempt (again an attempt in vain) to reach the shore. Our last chance now was to be heard by the people of the inn. I shouted at the full pitch of my voice as we drifted past. The cry was answered. A man put off in a boat. In five minutes more I had her safe on the bank again; and the man and I were carrying her to the inn by the river-side.
The landlady and her servant-girl were equally willing to be of service, and equally ignorant of what they were to do. Fortunately, my medical education made me competent to direct them. A good fire, warm blankets, hot water in bottles, were all at my disposal. I showed the women myself how to ply the work of revival. They persevered, and I persevered; and still there she lay, in her perfect beauty of form, without a sign of life perceptible; there she lay, to all outward appearance, dead by drowning.
A last hope was left—the hope of restoring her (if I could construct the apparatus in time) by the process called 'artificial respiration.' I was just endeavoring to tell the landlady what I wanted and was just conscious o f a strange difficulty in expressing myself, when the good woman started back, and looked at me with a scream of terror.
'Good God, sir, you're bleeding!' she cried. 'What's the matter? Where are you hurt?'
In the moment when she spoke to me I knew what had happened. The old Indian wound (irritated, doubtless, by the violent exertion that I had imposed on myself) had opened again. I struggled against the sudden sense of faintness that seized on me; I tried to tell the people of the inn what to do. It was useless. I dropped to my knees; my head sunk on the bosom of the woman stretched senseless upon the low couch beneath me. The death-in-life that had got
Where were our spirits at that moment? Were they together and conscious of each other? United by a spiritual bond, undiscovered and unsuspected by us in the flesh, did we two, who had met as strangers on the fatal bridge, know each other again in the trance? You who have loved and lost—you whose one consolation it has been to believe in other worlds than this—can you turn from my questions in contempt? Can you honestly say that they have never been
CHAPTER VIII. THE KINDRED SPIRITS
THE morning sunlight shining in at a badly curtained window; a clumsy wooden bed, with big twisted posts that reached to the ceiling; on one side of the bed, my mother's welcome face; on the other side, an elderly gentleman unremembered by me at that moment—such were the objects that presented themselves to my view, when I first consciously returned to the world that we live in.
'Look, doctor, look! He has come to his senses at last.'
'Open your mouth, sir, and take a sup of this.' My mother was rejoicing over me on one side of the bed; and the unknown gentleman, addressed as 'doctor,' was offering me a spoonful of whisky-and-water on the other. He called it the 'elixir of life'; and he bid me remark (speaking in a strong Scotch accent) that he tasted it himself to show he was in earnest.
The stimulant did its good work. My head felt less giddy, my mind became clearer. I could speak collectedly to my mother; I could vaguely recall the more marked events of the previous evening. A minute or two more, and the image of the person in whom those events had all centered became a living image in my memory. I tried to raise myself in the bed; I asked, impatiently, 'Where is she?'
The doctor produced another spoonful of the elixir of life, and gravely repeated his first address to me.
'Open your mouth, sir, and take a sup of this.'
I persisted in repeating my question:
'Where is she?'
The doctor persisted in repeating his formula:
'Take a sup of this.'
I was too weak to contest the matter; I obeyed. My medical attendant nodded across the bed to my mother, and said, 'Now, he'll do.' My mother had some compassion on me. She relieved my anxiety in these plain words:
'The lady has quite recovered, George, thanks to the doctor here.'
I looked at my professional colleague with a new interest. He was the legitimate fountainhead of the information that I was dying to have poured into my mind.
