“Where’s your mistress, my girl?”
“She’s talking to the doctor on the landing, sir.”
“You see,” the doctor was saying in a low voice to Violet, “it may be cancer at the cardiac end of the stomach. I don’t say it is. But it may be. That would account for the absence of appetite—and for other symptoms.” In the moonlight he saw Violet wiping her eyes. “Come, come, Mrs. Earlforward, you mustn’t give way.”
“It’s not that,” Violet spluttered, who was crying at the thought that she had consistently misjudged Henry for many months past. Not from miserliness, but from illness, had he been refusing to eat. He could not eat normally. He was a stricken man, and to herself she had been accusing him of the meanest avarice and the lowest stupidity. She now in a flash acquitted him on every charge, and made him perfect. His astounding secretiveness as to his condition she tried to attribute to a regard for her feelings.
“What are we to do? What am I to do?”
“Oh!” said Dr. Raste. “Don’t let that worry you. We’ll get him away all right tomorrow morning. I’ll come myself and fetch him.”
At the same moment they both saw the bedroom door open and the lank figure of the patient in his blue-grey nightshirt emerge. The light was behind him, and threw his shadow across them. Elsie stood scared in the background.
“It’s not the slightest use you two standing chattering there,” Henry murmured bitterly. “I’m not going into a hospital, so you may as well know it.”
“Oh, Henry!”
“Better get back to bed, Mr. Earlforward,” said the doctor rather grimly and coldly.
“I’m going back to bed. I don’t need you or anybody else to tell me I oughtn’t to be out here. I’m going back to bed.” And he limped back to bed triumphant.
Dr. Raste, who thought that he had nothing to learn about the strange possibilities of human behaviour, discovered that he had been mistaken. He could not hide that he was somewhat impressed. He again assured Violet that it would be all right in the morning, but he was not very convincing. As for Violet, since Dr. Raste was a little man, she did not consider that he had much chance, morally, against her husband, who was unlike all other men, and, indeed, the most formidable man on earth.
IX
Violet’s Victory
“How do you feel, my girl?” Henry asked.
They lay again in bed together. Before leaving the doctor had given, with casualness, certain instructions, not apparently important, which Violet had carried out, having understood that there was no immediate danger to her husband and also that there was nothing immediately to be done. Dr. Raste’s final remarks, as he departed, had had a sardonic tone, almost cynical, which had at first abraded Violet’s sensitiveness; but later she had said to herself: “After all, with a patient like Henry, what can you expect a doctor to do?” And she had accepted, and begun to share, the doctor’s attitude. A patient might be very seriously ill, he might be dying of cancer, and yet by his callous and stupid obstinacy alienate your sympathies from him. Human sympathies were as precarious as that! She admitted it. A few minutes earlier she had lifted Henry to a pedestal of perfection. Now she dashed him down from it. “I know I oughtn’t to feel as I do, but I do feel as I do.” And she even confirmed herself in harshness. She had sent Elsie to bed for the few remaining hours of the night. She had undressed once more and got into bed herself.
The light of the fire played faintly at intervals on the astonished ceiling, and sometimes shafts of moonlight could be discerned through an aperture in the thick, drawn curtains. Behind the curtains the blind could be heard now and then answering restlessly to the north breeze. The room was so warm that the necessity to keep the bedclothes over the shoulders and up to the chin had disappeared. Violet had a strange sense of luxury. “And why shouldn’t we have a fire every night?” she thought, and added, somewhat afraid of the extravagance of the proposition: “Well, anyhow, some nights—when it’s very cold.” She gave no reply to Henry’s question about her health.
Henry felt much better. He had scarcely any pain at the spot which the doctor had indicated; he was as sure as ever that he had done right in refusing to enter a hospital, and as determined as ever that he never would enter a hospital. None the less, he was disturbed; he was a bit frightened of trouble in the bed. He had noted his wife’s face before she turned the light out, and seen rare and unmistakable signs in it. His illness was not now the important matter, nor her illness either. The important matter was their sentimental relations. He knew that he had estranged her. Convinced of the justice of his own cause and of the folly of doctors and wives, he was yet apprehensive and had somehow a quite illogical conviction of guilt. Violet had wanted to act against his best interests, and yet he must try to appease her! It was more important to appease her than to get well!
Dr. Raste, or anybody else, looking at the couple lying beneath Violet’s splendid eiderdown (which still by contrast intensified the dowdiness and shabbiness of the rest of the room) would have seen merely a middle-aged man and a middle-aged woman with haggard faces worn by illness, fatigue, privations and fear. But Henry did not picture himself and Violet thus; nor Violet herself and Henry. Henry did not feel middle-aged. He did not feel himself to be any particular age. His interest in life and in his own existence had not diminished during the enormous length of time which had elapsed since he first came into Riceyman
