The Love-Story of Aliette Brunton

gardens. On three sides of it--east, west, and north--great oaks baffled the winds; southward were no trees, only slope on slope of field and farm-land, ramparted in middle distance by the bosoming downs. Day-long, the wise brown southward-gazing face of Daffadillies trapped the sunshine in its high gabled windows; day-long, whiffs of the sparkling sea blew tempered across twenty miles of kindly earth into that vast oak-floored room, with the four-poster bed and the Jacobean furniture, which Aliette at her very first visit had mentally chosen for the invalid. In that Sussex home quiet reigned like a sleeping princess. The balustered staircases gave back scarcely a sound to the sedulous feet of Julia'a serving-women. Neither from the brown-paneled dining-room nor from the book-lined library could any whisper of voice arise to where, had she so willed it, the invalid might have dreamed away her summer in country peace, hearing only the swish and click of the mower on the tennis-lawn, the snap and cut of gardeners' shears among the shrubberies. But it was not for dreams, rather for their accomplishment, that Julia had taken Daffadillies. Aliette, bringing Ponto on the evening train, found her in the highest fettle, curiously awake. "My dear," she smiled, "this place is ideal. Ideal! You've done wonders." "Then the journey didn't tire you?" "Not a bit. I feel quite well. So well, in fact, that I've told nurse she needn't sleep in my room to-night." "But suppose you were taken ill?" "I sha'n't be taken ill." Something of the old mastery was back in Julia's voice. "If I am, I can always ring for Smithers." And she touched the two electric pushes, one for the light and the other for the bell, which nurse had arranged under her pillow; smiling at her own astuteness when--her morphia refused--the watchers withdrew for the night. Then she waited, ears tense, eyes wide open, heart throbbing in anticipation of its deed. Smithers, acting on instructions, had set out her writing-things on the desk under the vast curtained window. A night-light burned on the bed-table. Across the glow of the night-light she saw her traveling ink-pot, the gold pen which Ronnie had given her for Christmas, the leather manuscript-box with its store of foolscap and sharpened pencils. "Was it safe to begin?" If only she could be certain that nurse and Smithers were in bed. At last she heard the pair of them whispering to one another in the corridor; at last she heard them separate, heard their doors close; and after yet another interminable quarter of an hour the house grew utterly quiet. "Now," she said to herself, "now"; and very carefully, very quietly, very fearful of waking the woman in the next room, her wasted hands untucked the bedclothes. Very quietly her wasted limbs released themselves from the sheets; very quietly her feet touched the carpet. Then, surreptitious as a schoolboy breaking bounds--a tottering figure of courage in her cambric nightgown,--she stole toward her desk. She could never reach that desk! She felt her legs, weak after their unaccustomed effort, wobble under her like loose springs. The dim room spun. A breeze rustled the cretonne curtains, chilling her to the bone, terrifying her for her own frailty. Quivering, she reached the desk; clung to it. The dim room ceased its spinning. Quivering still, she took two blocks of manuscript-paper from the leather-lined basket; and tottered back to the bed. Pencils! She had forgotten to bring pencils. She must go back--all those miles from her bed to her desk, from her desk to her bed. She tottered to the desk. It seemed as though she would never win her way back to the safety of those distant sheets, those distant pillows. Somehow, the pencils clutched in her trembling fingers, she had reached the bed. Faintness overwhelmed her. The weak wire springs that were her limbs sank under the weight of her body. Her body was a flaccid torment, sinking down by the bed. Her heart yearned to give up its struggle. Her brain told her to ring for Smithers. Smithers would lift her gently, so gently, put her to rest between those waiting sheets. Somehow she had climbed into bed; somehow she had covered her aching body. On the eiderdown, two oblong patches of white, lay the paper. For a full five minutes, exhausted, fearful with a thousand fears, Julia Cavendish watched those two white oblongs. But gradually her fears subsided. Gradually her brain conquered the exhaustion of her body. She began to think, as literary craftsfolk think, in words. "'Man's Law,'" she thought; "'The story of a great wrong.' I wonder if I need that second title." The night-light sputtered, expired. Sleep began to beat, soft-winged, on her eyelids. Her brain fought with sleep in the darkness, fought sleep away from her. Wide-eyed in the silent darkness she thought, "I must have light--light for the forging of my weapon." Her hands groped for the two electric pushes under her pillow; found them. Her hands panicked lest they should press the bell-push in mistake, and so waken Smithers. Her hands remembered the light-switch pear-shaped. She drew the light-switch from under the pillow; pressed it. Light glinted on Julia Cavendish's wasted hands, on the virgin manuscript-blocks and the sharpened pencils, on the runkled bed and the wadded jacket at bed-foot. Painfully she reached for the jacket; painfully, afraid for her lung, she managed to drape it about her shoulders; painfully she arranged a pillow to prop her back; painfully she took paper, a pencil; and, drawing up her knees to support the manuscript-block, began. "God," she prayed, "give me strength for the forging of this last weapon." * * * * * It seemed to Julia Cavendish that she had scarcely set pencil to paper when the first bird-twitter from dewy lawns warned her to abandon work; to make, once again, that supreme effort from bed to desk, from desk to bed; to smooth away with trembling fingers all signs of her surreptitious task, and lay herself down to get what sleep she might before Smithers brought her morning medicine. CHAPTER XXVI 1 Only those who have tended their loved ones through long illnesses know how at such times hour slides into hour, eventless save for the notches on the temperature-chart, for the slight recoveries or the slight relapses of the patient, for the doctor's cautious warnings or the nurse's hopeful cheeriness; how wary nights are but the interludes between weary days. But night after night at Daffadillies, while her watchers slept, unwearied and warier than they, Julia's brain clocked away its eventful hours; and dawn after wakeful dawn her weary hands added their carefully-hidden sheets to the pile of penciled manuscript in the leather-lined basket. "Nurse," she used to say of a morning, "I haven't slept quite as well as usual. After I've had my breakfast I think a little doze would do me good." After lunch, too, she liked to doze, and sometimes even after tea. "It's the best thing for her," said nurse. "She's getting better. Quite soon she'll be able to get up." And indeed to all of them, not only to nurse, but to Smithers and Mrs. Sanderson, to Aliette and to Ronnie, who came down every week-end with better and better news of the work for which John Cartwright had briefed him, it seemed as though eventually she must get well. Already she talked of returning to Bruton Street for the autumn, of wintering on the Riviera. "That hemorrhage," she pronounced, "was a blessing in disguise. This rest is doing me the good in the world. I feel like a two-year-old." Her assumed high spirits deceived everybody. Even Sir Heron Baynet, who motored down one evening, felt the slender chance possible. "Let her get up," he told Aliette over dinner. "Let her come downstairs if she feels like it." But Julia, on that first visit, refused to get up. She and she alone at Daffadillies knew, with that mysterious prescience of the doomed, that death had only consented to stand off for a period; that only by husbanding every ounce of her strength could she hope to run the full race with him. So far, in that race, she was well ahead. But inevitably there would be setbacks, stumbles and faintings, when death would close up his distance. It was a fascinating race, yet terrible--this secret course which she and her pencil ran nightly, for her son's sake, against the ultimate doom. Times came when she tasted the very foreknowledge of victory; times when despondency took her by the shrunken throat, when it seemed as though not even the supremest effort of her pencil could outrun those cellules of consumption, those tiny implacable burrowers into the shrinking lung-tissue, which spored with every breath she drew. Once for twenty-four whole hours she relapsed into black despair. "Man's Law"--so alive through so many wonderful nights--was dead in her brain. Her body, too, was dying. She would perish, leaving her sword unforged, Ronnie's Gordian knot unsevered. Then, and then only, did Julia Cavendish decide to get up. "I feel I need some distraction," she told Sir Heron on his next visit. "A little literary work. It'll take my mind off things. Just a few rough notes for a new book." The physician, after much protest, yielded; and next afternoon Julia, duly dressed by the adoring Smithers and helped to a cushioned chair at the window by a proud nurse, sent for Aliette, who came bringing a great armful of flowers from the garden, and--Aliette gone--for Mrs. Sanderson, to whom, under pledge of secrecy and with the threat of instant dismissal should the secret be revealed, she confided the penciled contents of her manuscript-box. 2 May drifted into June. Forty miles away London seethed with strikes, with rumors of a general election, and with Hector Brunton's viciously victorious prosecution of three fraudulent bank directors. At Daffadillies brooded peace. Once more, typed, "Man's Law" grew alive. Once more, by daylight now, Julia ran her race with death. From half-past ten to half-past one she would sit at her desk by the open window--resentful of the faintest noise, of the slightest interruption, resentful even of the medicines which kept those tiny cellules at bay. At half-past one would come Mrs. Sanderson, her face an unhappy mask; then lunch; and, lunch over, sleep. Every afternoon nurse and Smithers would carry the invalid down the wide staircase to take tea with Aliette and Ponto, either in the book-shelved morning-room, or under the big cedar, whose branches just shadowed the base-line of the tennis-court. At those tea-parties Julia was curiously inquisitive. Habitually she would steer conversation into personal channels, putting question after question to Aliette--about her marriage with Hector, about her family, about her elopement; till it seemed to the younger woman, shrinking from the frankness of those questions, as though the elder were striving to probe every secret of her life. But the probing was never unkindly; and after Julia had retired to her room, Aliette, lonely in the hush of Sussex sunsets that splashed warm gold on the gabled brown of the great house, mused much for love of this marvelously valiant old lady whose very valiance had beaten down death. For actually, listening to the courage in Julia's voice, it was impossible to imagine that voice forever silent. Even the second hemorrhage, so slight that only the patient divined its full significance, failed to dissipate Aliette's confidence. Those nights, Hector's wife dreamed no more of Hector. Her dreams were