When St. Peter at last awoke, the room was pitch-black and full of gas. He was cold and numb, felt sick and rather dazed. The long-anticipated coincidence had happened, he realized. The storm had blown the stove out and the window shut. The thing to do was to get up and open the window. But suppose he did not get up—? How far was a man required to exert himself against accident? How would such a case be decided under English law? He hadn’t lifted his hand against himself—was he required to lift it for himself?
V
At midnight St. Peter was lying in his study, on his box-couch, covered up with blankets, a hot water bottle at his feet; he knew it was midnight, for the clock of Augusta’s church across the park was ringing the hour. Augusta herself was there in the room, sitting in her old sewing-chair by the kerosene lamp, wrapped up in a shawl. She was reading a little much-worn religious book that she always carried in her handbag. Presently he spoke to her.
“Just when did you come in, Augusta?”
She got up and came over to him.
“Are you feeling comfortable, Doctor St. Peter?”
“Oh, very, thank you. When did you happen in?”
“Not any too soon, sir,” she said gravely, with a touch of reproof. “You never would take my cautions about that old stove, and it very nearly asphyxiated you. I was barely in time to pull you out.”
“You pulled me out, literally? Where to?”
“Into the hall. I came over in the storm to ask you for the keys of the new house—I didn’t get Mrs. St. Peter’s letter until I got home from work this evening, and I came right over. When I opened the front door I smelled gas, and I knew that stove had been up to its old tricks. I supposed you’d gone out and forgot to turn it off. When I got to the second floor I heard a fall overhead, and it flashed across me that you were up here and had been overcome. I ran up and opened the two windows at the head of the stairs and dragged you out into the wind. You were lying on the floor.” She lowered her voice. “It was perfectly frightful in here.”
“I seem to remember Dudley’s being here.”
“Yes, after I’d turned off the stove and opened everything up, I went next door and telephoned for Doctor Dudley. I thought I’d better not say what the trouble was, but I asked him to come at once, as you’d been taken ill. You soon came round, but you were flighty.” Augusta hurried over her recital. She was evidently embarrassed by the behaviour of the stove and the condition in which she had found him. It was an ugly accident, and she didn’t want the neighbours to know of it.
“You must have great presence of mind, Augusta, and a strong arm as well. You say you found me on the floor? I thought I was lying here on the couch. I remember waking up and smelling gas.”
“You were stupefied, but you must have got up and tried to get to the door before you were overcome. I was on the second floor when I heard you fall. I’d never heard anyone fall before, that I can remember, but I seemed to know just what it was.”
“I’m sorry to have given you a fright. I hope the gas hasn’t made your head ache.”
“All’s well that ends well, as they say. But I doubt if you ought to be talking, sir. Could you go to sleep again? I can stay till morning, if you prefer.”
“I’d be greatly obliged if you would stay the night with me, Augusta. It would be a comfort. I seem to feel rather lonely—for the first time in months.”
“That’s because your family are coming home. Very well, sir.”
“You do a good deal of this sort of thing—watching and sitting up with people, don’t you?”
“Well, when I happen to be sewing in a house where there’s sickness, I am sometimes called upon.”
Augusta sat down by the table and again took up her little religious book. St. Peter, with half-closed eyes, lay watching her—regarding in her humankind, as if after a definite absence from the world of men and women. If he had thought of Augusta sooner, he would have got up from the couch sooner. Her image would have at once suggested the proper action.
Augusta, he reflected, had always been a corrective, a remedial influence. When she sewed for them, she breakfasted at the house—that was part of the arrangement. She came early, often directly from church, and had her breakfast with the Professor, before the rest of the family were up. Very often she gave him some wise observation or discreet comment to begin the day with. She wasn’t at all afraid to say things that were heavily, drearily true, and though he used to wince under them, he hurried off with the feeling that they were good for him, that he didn’t have to hear such sayings half often enough. Augusta was like the taste of bitter herbs; she was the bloomless side of life that he had always run away from—yet when he had to face it, he found that it wasn’t altogether repugnant. Sometimes she used to telephone
