The Fruit of the Tree

They can’t do much now—they’ve got to leave the game to us. It’s a question of incessant vigilance…of utilizing every hour, every moment…. Time’s all I ask, and you can give it to me, if any one can!”

Under the challenge of his tone Justine rose to her feet with a low murmur of fear. “Ah, don’t ask me!”

“Don’t ask you–-?”

“I can’t—I can’t.”

Wyant stood up also, turning on her an astonished glance.

“You can’t what—?”

Their eyes met, and she thought she read in his a sudden divination of her inmost thoughts. The discovery electrified her flagging strength, restoring her to immediate clearness of brain. She saw the gulf of self-betrayal over which she had hung, and the nearness of the peril nerved her to a last effort of dissimulation.

“I can’t…talk of it…any longer,” she faltered, letting her tears flow, and turning on him a face of pure womanly weakness.

Wyant looked at her without answering. Did he distrust even these plain physical evidences of exhaustion, or was he merely disappointed in her, as in one whom he had believed to be above the emotional failings of her sex?

“You’re over-tired,” he said coldly. “Take tonight to rest. Miss Mace can replace you for the next few hours— and I may need you more tomorrow.”

XXIX

FOUR more days had passed. Bessy seldom spoke when Justine was with her. She was wrapped in a thickening cloud of opiates—morphia by day, bromides, sulphonal, chloral hydrate at night. When the cloud broke and consciousness emerged, it was centred in the one acute point of bodily anguish. Darting throes of neuralgia, agonized oppression of the breath, the diffused misery of the whole helpless body—these were reducing their victim to a mere instrument on which pain played its incessant deadly variations. Once or twice she turned her dull eyes on Justine, breathing out: “I want to die,” as some inevitable lifting or readjusting thrilled her body with fresh pangs; but there were no signs of contact with the outer world—she had ceased even to ask for Cicely….

And yet, according to the doctors, the patient held her own. Certain alarming symptoms had diminished, and while others persisted, the strength to fight them persisted too. With such strength to call on, what fresh agonies were reserved for the poor body when the narcotics had lost their power?

That was the question always before Justine. She never again betrayed her fears to Wyant—she carried out his orders with morbid precision, trembling lest any failure in efficiency should revive his suspicions. She hardly knew what she feared his suspecting—she only had a confused sense that they were enemies, and that she was the weaker of the two.

And then the an?sthetics began to fail. It was the sixteenth day since the accident, and the resources of alleviation were almost exhausted. It was not sure, even now, that Bessy was going to die—and she was certainly going to suffer a long time. Wyant seemed hardly conscious of the increase of pain—his whole mind was fixed on the prognosis. What matter if the patient suffered, as long as he proved his case? That, of course, was not his way of putting it. In reality, he did all he could to allay the pain, surpassed himself in new devices and experiments. But death confronted him implacably, claiming his due: so many hours robbed from him, so much tribute to pay; and Wyant, setting his teeth, fought on—and Bessy paid.

 

Justine had begun to notice that it was hard for her to get a word alone with Dr. Garford. The other nurses were not in the way—it was Wyant who always contrived to be there. Perhaps she was unreasonable in seeing a special intention in his presence: it was natural enough that the two persons in charge of the case should confer together with their chief. But his persistence annoyed her, and she was glad when, one afternoon, the surgeon asked him to telephone an important message to town.

As soon as the door had closed, Justine said to Dr. Garford: “She is beginning to suffer terribly.”

He answered with the large impersonal gesture of the man to whom physical suffering has become a painful general fact of life, no longer divisible into individual cases. “We are doing all we can.”

“Yes.” She paused, and then raised her eyes to his dry kind face. “Is there any hope?”

Another gesture—the fatalistic sweep of the lifted palms. “The next ten days will tell—the fight is on, as Wyant says. And if any one can do it, that young fellow can. There’s stuff in him—and infernal ambition.”

“Yes: but do you believe she can live—?”

Dr. Garford smiled indulgently on such unprofessional insistence; but she was past wondering what they must all think of her.

“My dear Miss Brent,” he said, “I have reached the age when one always leaves a door open to the unexpected.”

As he spoke, a slight sound at her back made her turn. Wyant was behind her—he must have entered as she put her question. And he certainly could not have had time to descend the stairs, walk the length of the house, ring up New York, and deliver Dr Garford’s message…. The same thought seemed to strike the surgeon. “Hello, Wyant?” he said.