“You are in trouble, madam; may I help you?”
Briggs never knew how he survived the next shock. Slowly the hands were removed from the face and the moon gave a distinct view of the lovely features of the jubilee singer—Dianthe Lusk.
She did not seem to look at Briggs, but straight before her, as she said in a low, clear, passionless voice:
“You can help me, but not now; tomorrow.”
Reuel’s most prominent feeling was one of delight. The way was open to become fully acquainted with the woman who had haunted him sleeping and waking, for weeks past.
“Not now! Yet you are suffering. Shall I see you soon? Forgive me—but oh! tell me—”
He was interrupted. The lady moved or floated away from him, with her face toward him and gazing steadily at him.
He felt that his whole heart was in his eyes, yet hers did not drop, nor did her cheek color.
“The time is not yet,” she said in the same, clear, calm, measured tones, in which she had spoken before. Reuel made a quick movement toward her, but she raised her hand, and the gesture forbade him to follow her. He paused involuntarily, and she turned away, and disappeared among the gloomy hemlock trees.
He parried the questions of the merry crowd when he returned to the house, with indifferent replies. How they would have laughed at him—slave of a passion as sudden and romantic as that of Romeo for Juliet; with no more foundation than the “presentments” in books which treat of the “occult.” He dropped asleep at last, in the early morning hours, and lived over his experience in his dreams.
IV
Although not yet a practitioner, Reuel Briggs was a recognized power in the medical profession. In brain diseases he was an authority.
Early the next morning he was aroused from sleep by imperative knocking at his door. It was a messenger from the hospital. There had been a train accident on the Old Colony road, would he come immediately?
Scarcely giving himself time for a cup of coffee, he arrived at the hospital almost as soon as the messenger.
The usual silence of the hospital was broken; all was bustle and movement, without confusion. It was a great call upon the resources of the officials, but they were equal to it. The doctors passed from sufferer to sufferer, dressing their injuries; then they were borne to beds from which some would never rise again.
“Come with me to the women’s ward, Doctor Briggs,” said a nurse. “There is a woman there who was taken from the wreck. She shows no sign of injury, but the doctors cannot restore her to consciousness. Doctor Livingston pronounces her dead, but it doesn’t seem possible. So young, so beautiful. Do something for her, Doctor.”
The men about a cot made way for Reuel, as he entered the ward. “It’s no use Briggs,” said Livingston to him in reply to his question. “Your science won’t save her. The poor girl is already cold and stiff.”
He moved aside disclosing to Reuel’s gaze the lovely face of Dianthe Lusk!
The most marvellous thing to watch is the death of a person. At that moment the opposite takes place to that which took place when life entered the first unit, after nature had prepared it for the inception of life. How the vigorous life watches the passage of the liberated life out of its earthly environment! What a change is this! How important the knowledge of whither life tends! Here is shown the setting free of a disciplined spirit giving up its mortality for immortality—the condition necessary to know God. Death! There is no death. Life is everlasting, and from its reality can have no end. Life is real and never changes, but preserves its identity eternally as the angels, and the immortal spirit of man, which are the only realities and continuities in the universe, God being over all, Supreme Ruler and Divine Essence from whom comes all life. Somewhat in this train ran Reuel’s thoughts as he stood beside the seeming dead girl, the cynosure of all the medical faculty there assembled.
To the majority of those men, the case was an ordinary death, and that was all there was to it. What did this young upstart expect to make of it? Of his skill and wonderful theories they had heard strange tales, but they viewed him coldly as we are apt to view those who dare to leave the beaten track of conventionality.
Outwardly cool and stolid, showing no sign of recognition, he stood for some seconds gazing down on Dianthe: every nerve quivered, every pulse of his body throbbed. Her face held for him a wonderful charm, an extraordinary fascination. As he gazed he knew that once more he beheld what he had vaguely sought and yearned for all his forlorn life. His whole heart went out to her; destiny, not chance, had brought him to her. He saw, too, that no one knew her, none had a clue to her identity; he determined to remain silent for the present, and immediately he sought to impress Livingston to do likewise.
His keen glance swept the faces of the surrounding physicians. “No, not one,” he told himself, “holds the key to unlock this seeming sleep of death.” He alone could do it. Advancing far afield in the mysterious regions of science, he had stumbled upon the solution of one of life’s problems: the reanimation of the body after seeming death.
He had hesitated to tell of his discovery to anyone; not even to Livingston had he hinted of the daring possibility, fearing ridicule in case of a miscarriage in his calculations. But for the sake of this girl he would make what he felt to be a premature disclosure of the results of his experiments. Meantime, Livingston, from his
