The Love-Story of Aliette Brunton

through"; and after a pause, "Is that Mr. Cavendish? Mr. Ronald Cavendish? This is Mrs. Sanderson speaking. I rang up Embankment House, but the porter said you weren't back yet." Already Ronnie's ears, acute, apprehensive, knew the worst. "Can you get through to Dr. Baynet? Can you bring him down at once? Your mother has had another hemorrhage." "A bad one?" Ronnie tried to smooth the fear from his voice. "I'm afraid so. Your wife's upstairs with Dr. Thompson. Would you like to speak to her?" "No. Tell her that I'll get on to Sir Heron at once. Tell her, please," the words snapped decision, "that I'll bring him down to Daffadillies to-night. Do you understand? To-night! Tell the lodge-keeper to wait up for us, to have the gates open. Is that quite clear?" "Quite clear." The automaton's answer sounded irritatingly calm. "Quite clear, thank you." "Then good night." With a click of decision, Ronnie replaced the receiver. Danger, ousting fear, galvanized him to action. He looked at the clock. The hands pointed to 9:15. The last train for West Water left at nine! He snatched up the telephone-book; found the doctor's number; called it. A man-servant answered. "Sir Heron's engaged. Can I take any message?" "No. I want to speak to him personally." "Sir Heron is giving a dinner-party, sir." "Tell him the matter is urgent ... Yes ... Cavendish ... Ronald Cavendish." The man left the instrument. Waiting, Ronnie grew apprehensive. Suppose Sir Heron refused to come.... Then he heard, "Is that you, Cavendish? No bad news, I hope?" "Very bad, I'm afraid. I've just spoken to Daffadillies on the telephone. My mother's had another hemorrhage. Can you come down to-night?" "To-night?" "Yes. With me. The last train's gone. I'm going down by taxi." Silence ... and again Ronnie grew apprehensive. Sir Heron was a specialist--a great man. Absurd to ask such a favor of him! Interrupted Sir Heron's decisive, "Very well. No need for a taxi. You can come down in my car. Where are you telephoning from?" "The Temple." "Then be here in twenty minutes." 3 Snatching his hat and his coat, clicking off the light, and slamming his oak behind him, Ronnie darted downstairs into Pump Court, through Pump Court and up Middle Temple Lane toward the barred gate which gives on to Fleet Street. In seconds he was at the side door of the gate--through it--and into a taxi. In seconds he was whirling away from the deserted law courts, past the gleaming front of the Gaiety Theater, down the Strand. He wanted speed--speed. Not till they were out of the Strand and through Trafalgar Square did thought oust action from his mind. And then thought was fearful--terrifying. Again, as on that night when he and Aliette had taxied from Embankment House to Bruton Street, he saw his mother dying. But now he saw himself guilty of her death. Harley Street reached, a long blue car purred past his taxi and pulled up a hundred yards ahead. Reaching the car, the taxi stopped. Ronnie leaped out; flung a couple of half-crowns to his driver; leaped up the steps of the Georgian house; and rang. The door opened instantaneously; revealing--behind the portly form of the butler--a long tessellated hall. Down the staircase into the hall--his dinner-party abandoned--came the punctual specialist. "That you, Cavendish? I sha'n't be a moment." Sir Heron, already in his fur coat, his slouch hat pulled on anyhow, disappeared round the newel post of the staircase toward his consulting room; and reëmerged, with a battered black medicine-case in his hand. "Come along. We can talk in the car. In you go----" The butler closed the door of the limousine behind them; and the doctor's chauffeur, obviously preinstructed as to their destination, turned the long Rolls-Royce bonnet south. "Another hemorrhage, you say?" Sir Heron lit himself a cigarette; and in the red spurt of the match, Ronnie could see that his face was troubled. "I'm glad you telephoned." "It's very good of you to come down at such short notice, Sir Heron.'' "Only my duty." The great car swept down Portland Place, down Regent Street. At the Circus, Heron Baynet picked up the speaking-tube, and called, "Take the Bromley road, please." "Wonderful woman, your mother," he said suddenly. "I wish I could have done more for her." "There's no chance, then?" "None now, I'm afraid." The car purred on out of London, and after a long time the specialist said: "Not that there ever was more than the ghost of a chance." "There was a chance then--once?" Ronnie's face, seen in the intermittent light of the passing street-lamps, showed white with misery. Again he was remembering that other night--the night when he had waited with Smithers outside Julia's door. "Meaning?" prevaricated the specialist. "This." Bonnie's teeth clenched on the Bullet. "Suppose that my mother had gone away to Switzerland or the south of France a year ago, she might have been saved?" "I doubt it." "But you advised Switzerland, didn't you?" "Admitted." Sir Heron looked shrewdly at his cross-examiner. "Blaming yourself?" he asked bruskly. "Yes." "You needn't. Even if she had done what I told her, we couldn't have cured the diabetes." He plunged into medical details. "Nobody's to blame then?" The voice of Julia Cavendish's son embodied a whole army of questions. "No, nobody. Not even herself. If you blame any one, blame nature." And Sir Heron, who knew more of Ronnie's story than Ronnie guessed, added quietly: "Your wife has been a wonderful nurse, Cavendish." "Thank you, Sir Heron." The men's thoughts, meeting, understood one another. "You've taken rather a weight off my mind. Tell me one thing more. This work she's been doing: has it been harmful?" "Not as harmful as trying to prevent her from doing it." "I see." Consoled, Ronnie fell silent. But the consolation was short-lived. All said and done, what did it matter at whose hand--his own or nature's--his mother lay stricken? Remained always the bitter unescapable knowledge that the surest consultant in England spoke of her as one already doomed. In a little while there would be no Julia. Even now--impossible as it seemed, driving thus down the living breathing streets into the living breathing country--she might be already dead. 4 "We've done it in well under two hours." Sir Heron, who had been dozing, opened his eyes as the car-lights climbed West Water Hill and began to thread their illuminated path through the woods which surround Daffadillies. The Rolls-Royce made the lodge-gates; found them swung back from their stone pillars; swept through; and, rounding the drive, pulled up noiselessly at the open door of the great house. In the glow of the doorway stood Aliette. Ronnie hardly saw, as she came down the steps to meet him, how lined and drawn was her face, how wide with anxiety her brown eyes. "Sir Heron"--her voice sounded calm, controlled; the hand on her lover's arm did not tremble--"you'll go to her at once, won't you? I made the local doctor give her morphia. That was right, wasn't it?" "Quite right." Kate, appearing through the baize door at the end of the hall, led the doctor upstairs. "I did what I could, dear," said Aliette hurriedly. "Nurse has been splendid. Dr. Thompson came at once. But I'm afraid it isn't much good. It was all so terribly sudden. She'd gone to bed quite comfortably. Neither nurse nor I had the least idea. She only just managed to ring her bell in time. Smithers said it was just the same that first time at Bruton Street. She asked for you--twice." "Is she in any pain?" "No, darling, not now." "You're sure?" "Quite sure." "But--that's all we can do for her?" "I--I'm afraid so. Unless Sir Heron----" They spoke in whispers, like people already in the presence of death. Kate, running downstairs, disturbed them. Kate's eyes were swollen. Tears choked her voice. "The doctor says, will you please come up, Mr. Ronnie." Swiftly Ronnie passed up that gloomy balustered staircase. He couldn't think. He couldn't feel. Pain numbed his limbs, numbed his brain. Just outside his mother's room stood Smithers. She, too--he could see--had been crying. He wanted to console her--but his lips found no word. His mother's door was ajar. Pushing it open, he knew fear. In that room waited Death--an impalpable figure--a figure of mist--icy-cold. Entering the room, he was just aware of the local doctor's tweeded figure stooped over his mother's bed, and of Sir Heron--hand on his arm--whispering, "It's the end, I'm afraid, Cavendish." Dr. Thompson made way; and, still incapable of thought, Ronnie moved toward the bed. A light burned by the bed. In the ring of the light he saw a face. The face, he knew, had been in pain, in terror. But now both the terror and the pain were gone from it. Morphia--eons ago some one must have told him about the morphia--had driven the terror and the pain away. Could this gray countenance--this mask of shrunken cheek-bones, of closed eyes, and open mouth--be Julia's? If Julia, surely Julia was already dead. Surely the last breath had already left that wasted body, motionless under its bedclothes. He became aware that his mother was not yet dead. Every now and then, breath gurgled in her throat. The gurgle of her breath terrified him. She was still in pain--in pain. But she could not be in pain. No agony twitched that wasted body. The fingers of that hand which lay, white and shrunken on the eiderdown, did not move. Surely he had been standing by his mother's bedside since the dawn of time. Fatigue rocked his limbs. His eyelids smarted with unshed tears. He wanted to kneel down, to press his lips in homage on those shrunken fingers. Surely, the fingers moved. Surely, even at the gates of death, his mother was aware of him. Her eyes opened. The gurgling of her breath ceased. And suddenly, desperately, he wanted to hear her voice, to hear one last word from those bluing lips. Then, in fear, Ronnie knew that the soul was passing. Then, in fear, he saw the flutter of it at his mother's mouth; saw the hover of it--palest tenuous flame--above her head. Despairingly, his soul called to hers: "Mater! Mater!" But the soul might not speak with him. The tenuous flame fled upwards; and he knew that the body which had born his body was dead. 5 Both doctors were gone. Already nurse busied herself in the death-chamber. But to Ronnie and Aliette, sitting side by side in the empty drawing-room, it seemed as though Julia's spirit still haunted the house, as though at any moment they might hear her fine courageous voice and see her come in to them. Outside--weeping for her--rain fell. The drip of it among the shrubberies, heard through closed curtains, was like the patter of little unhappy feet. If only, like the voice of the rain, their voices could weep for her! If only, like the feet of the rain, their feet could busy themselves about some task in her service! A faint diffident knocking startled them. Mrs. Sanderson came in. The automaton's cheeks were swollen. The eyes under her tortoise-shell spectacles showed red and heavy-lidded. "I'm sorry to disturb you," said Mrs. Sanderson, "but it was her wish." She moved toward them across the carpet; and Ronnie saw that she carried under her arm a thick wad of papers. "_She_ told me"--they hardly recognized the woman's voice--"to give you this as soon as she died. She told me to telephone Mr. Wilberforce, Mr. James Wilberforce. There's a letter for him, you know. I'm going to telephone Mr. Wilberforce in the morning. But this--this is for you, Mr.