“Frankly, do you think my wife will recover?” asked Chicot, questioning Sir John Pelham to day as earnestly as he had questioned George Gerard last night.
“My dear sir, I hope for the best; but it is a bad case.”
“That must mean that it is hopeless,” thought Chicot, but he only bowed his head gently, and followed the surgeon to the door, where he tried to slip a fee into his hand.
“No, no, my dear sir, Mr. Smolendo will arrange that little matter,” said the surgeon, rejecting the money, “and very properly too, since your wife was injured in his service.”
“I would rather have paid her debts myself,” answered Chicot, “though Heaven knows how long I could have done it. We are never very much beforehand with the world. Oh, by the way, how about that young man upstairs, Mr. Gerard? Do you approve his treatment of the case?”
“Very much so; a remarkably clever young man—a man who ought to make rapid way in his profession.”
Sir John Pelham gave a compassionate sigh at the end of his speech, remembering how many young men he had known deserving of success, and how few of them had succeeded, and thinking what a clever and altogether commendable young man he must himself have been to be one of the few.
After this Jack Chicot allowed Mr. Gerard to prescribe for his wife with perfect confidence in the young man’s ability. Sir John Pelham came once a week, and gave his opinion, and sometimes made some slight change in the treatment. It was a lingering, wearying illness, hard work for the nurse, trying work for the watcher. The husband had taken upon himself the office of night nurse. He watched and ministered to the invalid every night, while Mrs. Mason enjoyed four or five hours’ sleep. Mr. Smolendo had suggested that they should have two nurses. He was willing to pay for anything that could ameliorate the sufferer’s condition, though La Chicot’s accident had almost ruined his season. It had not been easy to get a novelty strong enough to replace her.
“No,” said Jack Chicot, “I don’t want to take more of your money than I can help; and I may as well do something for my wife. I’m useless enough at best.”
So Jack went on drawing for the comic periodicals, and worked at night beside his wife’s bed. Her mind had never awakened since the accident. She was helpless and unconscious now as she had been when they brought her home from the theatre. Even George Gerard was beginning to lose heart, but he in no way relaxed his efforts to bring about a cure.
In the day Jack went for long walks, getting as far away from that close and smoky region of Leicester Square as his long legs would take him. He tramped northward to Hampstead and Hendon, to Highgate, Barnet, Harrow; southward to Dulwich, Streatham, Beckenham; to breezy commons where the gorse was still golden, to woods where the perfume of pine trees filled the warm, still air; to hills below which he saw London lying, a silent city, wrapped in a mantle of blue smoke.
The country had an inexpressible charm for him at this period of his life. He was not easy till he had shaken the dust of London off his feet. He who a year ago in Paris had wasted half his days playing billiards in the entresol of a café on the boulevard St. Michel, or sauntering the stony length of the boulevards from the Madeleine to the Château d’Eau—was now a solitary rambler in suburban lanes, choosing every path that led him furthest from the haunts of men.
“You are always out when I come in the daytime, Mr. Chicot,” said Gerard, one evening, when he had called later than usual and found Jack at home, dusty, tired after his day’s ramble. “Is not that rather hard on Madame Chicot?”
“What can it matter to her? She does not know when I am here; she is quite unconscious.”
“I am not so sure of that. She seems unconscious, but beneath that apathy there may be some struggling sense of outward things. It is my hope that the mind is there still, under a dense cloud.”
The struggle was long and weary. There came a day on which even George Gerard despaired. The wound in the leg had been slow to heal, and the pain had weakened the patient. Despite all that watchful nursing could do, she had sunk to the lowest ebb.
“She is very weak, is she not?” asked Jack, that summer afternoon—a sultry afternoon late in June, when the close London street was like a dusty oven, and faint odours from stale strawberries and half-rotten pineapples on the costermonger’s barrows tainted the air with a sickly sweetness.
“She is as weak as she can be and live,” answered Gerard.
“You begin to lose faith?”
“I begin to fear.”
As he spoke he saw a look of ineffable relief flash into Jack Chicot’s eyes. His own eyes caught and fixed that look, and the two men stood facing each other, one of them knowing that the secret of his heart was discovered.
“I fear,” said the surgeon, deliberately, “but I am not going to leave off trying to save her. I mean to save her life if it is in human power to save it. I have set my heart upon it.”
“Do your utmost,” answered Chicot. “Heaven is above us all. It must be as fate wills.”
“You loved her once, I suppose?” said Gerard, with searching eyes still on the other’s face.
“I loved her truly.”
“When and why did you leave off loving her?”
“How do you know that I have ever done so?” asked Chicot, startled by the audacity of the question.
“I know it as well as you know it yourself.
