V
Barbara was lying in the tiny room with the eye-shaped window that would not open. The stove had gone out in the studio, and the air was heavy with cold and dampness. On the piano lay some remnants of manuscript music torn up on the previous evening by Jamie.
Barbara opened her eyes: “Is that you, my bairn?”
They had never heard Barbara call her that before—the great, lumbering, big-boned, long-legged Jamie.
“Yes, it’s me.”
“Come here close …” The voice drifted away.
“I’m here—oh, I’m here! I’ve got hold of your hand. Look at me, open your eyes again—Barbara, listen, I’m here—don’t you feel me?”
Stephen tried to restrain the shrill, agonized voice: “Don’t speak so loud, Jamie, perhaps she’s sleeping;” but she knew very well that this was not so; the girl was not sleeping now, but unconscious.
Mary found some fuel and lighted the stove, then she started to tidy the disordered studio. Flakes of flue lay here and there on the floor; thick dust was filming the top of the piano. Barbara had been waging a losing fight—strange that so mean a thing as this dust should, in the end, have been able to conquer. Food there was none, and putting on her coat Mary finally went forth in quest of milk and other things likely to come in useful. At the foot of the stairs she was met by the concierge; the woman looked glum, as though deeply aggrieved by this sudden and very unreasonable illness. Mary thrust some money into her hand, then hurried away intent on her shopping.
When she returned the doctor was there; he was talking very gravely to Stephen: “It’s double pneumonia, a pretty bad case—the girl’s heart’s so weak. I’ll send in a nurse. What about the friend, will she be any good?”
“I’ll help with the nursing if she isn’t,” said Mary.
Stephen said: “You do understand about the bills—the nurse and all that?”
The doctor nodded.
They forced Jamie to eat: “For Barbara’s sake … Jamie, we’re with you, you’re not alone, Jamie.”
She peered with her red-rimmed, shortsighted eyes, only half understanding, but she did as they told her. Then she got up without so much as a word, and went back to the room with the eye-shaped window. Still in silence she squatted on the floor by the bed, like a dumb, faithful dog who endured without speaking. And they let her alone, let her have her poor way, for this was not their Calvary but Jamie’s.
The nurse arrived, a calm, practical woman: “You’d better lie down for a bit,” she told Jamie, and in silence Jamie lay down on the floor.
“No, my dear—please go and lie down in the studio.”
She got up slowly to obey this new voice, lying down, with her face to the wall, on the divan.
The nurse turned to Stephen: “Is she a relation?”
Stephen hesitated, then she shook her head.
“That’s a pity, in a serious case like this I’d like to be in touch with some relation, someone who has a right to decide things. You know what I mean—it’s double pneumonia.”
Stephen said dully: “No—she’s not a relation.”
“Just a friend?” the nurse queried.
“Just a friend,” muttered Stephen.
VI
They went back that evening and stayed the night. Mary helped with the nursing; Stephen looked after Jamie.
“Is she a little—I mean the friend—is she mental at all, do you know?” The nurse whispered, “I can’t get her to speak—she’s anxious, of course; still, all the same, it doesn’t seem natural.”
Stephen said: “No—it doesn’t seem natural to you.” And she suddenly flushed to the roots of her hair. Dear God, the outrage of this for Jamie!
But Jamie seemed quite unconscious of outrage. From time to time she stood in the doorway peering over at Barbara’s wasted face, listening to Barbara’s painful breathing, and then she would turn her bewildered eyes on the nurse, on Mary, but above all on Stephen.
“Jamie—come back and sit down by the stove; Mary’s there, it’s all right.”
Came a queer, halting voice that spoke with an effort: “But … Stephen … we quarrelled.”
“Come and sit by the stove—Mary’s with her, my dear.”
“Hush, please,” said the nurse, “you’re disturbing my patient.”
VII
Barbara’s fight against death was so brief that it hardly seemed in the nature of a struggle. Life had left her no strength to repel this last foe—or perhaps it was that to her he seemed friendly. Just before her death she kissed Jamie’s hand and tried to speak, but the words would not come—those words of forgiveness and love for Jamie.
Then Jamie flung herself down by the bed, and she clung there, still in that uncanny silence. Stephen never knew how they got her away while the nurse performed the last merciful duties.
But when flowers had been placed in Barbara’s hands, and Mary had lighted a couple of candles, then Jamie went back and stared quietly down at the small, waxen face that lay on the pillow; and she turned to the nurse:
“Thank you so much,” she said, “I think you’ve done all that there is to do—and now I suppose you’ll want to be going?”
The nurse glanced at Stephen.
“It’s all right, we’ll stay. I think perhaps—if you don’t mind, nurse …”
“Very well, it must be as you wish, Miss Gordon.”
When she had gone Jamie veered round abruptly and walked back into the empty studio. Then all in a moment the floodgates gave way and she wept and she wept like a creature demented. Bewailing the life of hardship and exile that had sapped Barbara’s strength and weakened her spirit; bewailing the cruel dispensation of fate that had forced them to leave their home in the Highlands; bewailing the terrible thing that is death to those who, still loving, must look upon it. Yet all the exquisite pain of this parting seemed as nothing to an anguish that was far more subtle: “I can’t mourn her without bringing shame on her name—I can’t go
