"That won't make them any the less beautiful," she replied and then suddenly her whole face melted, her eyes shone with tears, with smiles, with happiness, regrets, with fair passions and bountiful pities and love without stain. "Oh, Ned! Ned!" she cried, holding out her hand to him again. "I have to beg your pardon for so much--I have to thank you for so much--which shall I do first?"
What could he do save take her hand as frankly as it was given and say "Neither." Since between them he knew there was no possibility of gratitude, no possibility of forgiveness.
So they began to talk, not of her illness or of these later days at all, but of Cwmfaernog, and Plas Afon, and how she had found the snake-stone under the old yew-tree.
"I always wear it, you know, at least I do nowadays," she said, and drawing up her loose sleeve showed it to him worn as an amulet, warm against the fair whiteness of her skin. His heart gave a throb. For all her courage then, she was not happy. Such trifles tell of a search for support.
Then Ted came in, breezy and full of life. It had been a success last night, had it not? The pink satin had not suited Aura quite so well as he had hoped; not so well as it had suited Miss Hirsch, who had looked ripping. Perhaps it ought to have been blue. Or perhaps it was the diamonds that did the trick. Had any one ever seen better diamonds than Miss Hirsch's?
Anyhow, it had been a great success, and they must give some more dinner-parties and get into the way of entertaining.
Aura might ask Mrs. Tressilian and Dr. Ramsay as a beginning.
"You won't get Ramsay," remarked Ned Blackborough; "he is away in Vienna. He has taken three months' leave, but he put in a very good man for the time."
In truth, St. Helena's Hospital was, as Peter Ramsay had declared it would, getting on quite as well without him as it did with him. The only person who was dissatisfied with the new state of affairs was Helen Tressilian, and she was frankly in a very bad temper both with him and with herself. It was so foolish of him. Had she not known it would be absolutely useless she would have sent in her own resignation, but what good would it have done? It would only have made matters worse, since he would never return if she went. All she could do was to hope very sincerely that the three months' change would effect its object, and that he would forget her.
And yet even this did not quite soothe her irritation, even this was not quite what she wanted.
What did she want? She was taking herself severely to task one afternoon when Sister Ann came in looking grave.
"I have just had a letter with some rather bad news in it," she said.
"I hope it isn't true, but it sounds serious. It is from my friend who I told you had gone to study at Vienna."
Helen's heart leapt to her mouth. "Well?" she said impatiently, wondering the while with a sudden feeling of dread why she should feel so disturbed.
"I'll read you what he says. 'We are all a bit downhearted just now because Ramsay, who is one of the nicest fellows who ever lived, is ill with pyaemia. It would be a thousand pities if he were to go out, for he is quite the best operator here. Of course he is being well looked after, but it must be awful away from all one's friends.'"
Helen went deadly white. "Do you think it is true?" she asked almost helplessly.
Sister Ann re-folded the letter methodically. "It must be _true_, of course, and it is not unlikely. You know he was always a trifle reckless when there was anything to be done even here. One can only hope he is not so very bad. You will send a wire, I suppose?"
"Yes," replied Helen. "Of course we will send a wire--and--yes. I will send a wire, I think."
"It is terribly sad," said Sister Ann, for all her invariable cheerfulness, quite mournfully. "Apart from his immense value to the world, he was such a dear soul in so many ways. I have often thought what an excellent husband and father he would have made."
After she had gone, to tell the news presumably in that even tone of voice, Helen thought with a rush of resentment, the latter sat in a perfect tumult of emotion. Anger, pity, regret all fought for first place. What right, for instance, had Sister Ann to use the past tense in speaking of Dr. Ramsay? He was not dead.
Dead?
Impossible, incredible! It could not, it must not be true!
But what good would a wire be to a man lying perhaps unconscious, at any rate alone?
She stood up pushing her hair back from her forehead. A great wave of pity for him, but more for herself, overcame her; she stared out of the room scarcely seeing what was before her.
Just on the opposite side of the room a long pier glass filled up the space between the two tall windows. It was growing dusk, and the mirror showed dark and empty looking against the light. No, not quite empty, there was a figure in it going away from her into the darkness.
It was the figure of a man making haste. It hurried on, its back towards her, down an interminable pathway that was lost in the shadows. It was going, oh, so fast! And she recognized it. It was Peter Ramsay as she had last seen him hurrying away to catch his train. It grew smaller and smaller, it overtook the shadows, they gathered it in.
"No! no!" she cried aloud. "Don't go--don t go!"
Was there a pause? She could not tell. The vision vanished, and she was left to the knowledge that she had once more almost over-stepped the bounds of the unseen, and to a dim sense of something unsuspected in herself.
One thing was certain. He must not go, thinking she cared not at all.
How many hours was it to Vienna? That mattered very little if she started as quickly as she could. She must get there sooner or later.
Half an hour afterwards she was at the station, and by midnight she was standing looking out at the stars from the deck of a Channel steamer with the lights of Calais ahead of her. She did not regret her impulse, all she thought of was that somehow that figure she had seen losing itself in the shadows must be stopped, must be brought back to the light.
It was a wearisome journey. She had left without due preparation, she was all unused to foreign travelling, and she did not care to forage for food for fear she might be left behind.
So it was rather a dejected Helen Tressilian who got out in the struggling daylight of a November day at the Haupt Bahnhof, and, after a while, found herself driving, she literally knew not whither, through wide streets and narrow streets to the public hospital. It was there, she knew, that Peter Ramsay was working, so there she hoped to have news of him at once. But she had reckoned without the formalism of German institutions. At first she could hardly elicit the fact that there was such a person as a Scotch physician by name Ramsay in Vienna, for she had called him English, and that error, a grave one to the foreigner, had seemed to discredit her altogether.
Then who was she? Sister or mother? If not, what claim had she to be admitted to the bedside of the "dangerously-sick un-friend-recognising patient?" She had better see the Chief-Head-Over-Superintendent, and if he consented, perhaps!
So she drove off again disheartened. The Chief-Head-Over-Superintendent was out, and after waiting for him till she grew sick and cold she determined to follow him to the Medical College. Here she was met by more formalities, to which was added a suggestion that, not being a relation, she should go to the British consulate and get a certificate that she was of the "due-respectable-and-to-be-admitted-friends."
And then, suddenly, to her despair at the delay, came the memory of Pagenheim. It was silly of her not to have thought of him before. Yes.
She would go to Pagenheim; he was her only hope.
She was shown into a room stuffed full of furniture, where a florid, bearded man had evidently just been smoking.
He sat looking with immense interest at the card she had sent in.
"Mein Gott!" he said, going on in fairly idiomatic English. "But your names! T r e s--s i l----"
"Tressilian," said Helen impatiently.
"Tres--silian! Now, Miss, what does that mean? Tre--three--sil-i-an.
Does it mean three fools? Wass fur ein--Gott in Himmel! you are crying--Gnadige Fraulein, pardon."
It was the truth. Helen, worn out by her long and hungry journey, disappointed, driven from pillar to post, had found it too much that her last hope should waste precious time in philological studies.
"I beg your pardon," she said, stifling her tears, "but I have come all the way from England to see Dr. Ramsay, and now I cannot get at him. Do help me if you can."
Dr. Pagenheim blew out his cheeks as if a pipe might have been a consolation to him. "Soh! You--you cannot be his mother--you--you are his sister, doubtless?"
Helen, behind her handkerchief, shook her head. "I--I am a nurse," she said faintly, "and I have come on purpose----"
"But, gnadige Fraulein," interposed the great man, becoming professional, "he is already nursed, nursed devotedly. There is no place for you I fear. It is against the rules. If you were a relation it were different."
Helen looked up at him, goaded to desperation.
"But--but I am more than that, Dr. Pagenheim," she said. "I--I am engaged to be married to him."
The blond, florid face melted into instant sentiment, the tongue into German.
"Soh! Oh Love! Love! What dost thou not? So he is betrothed and we knew it not? Stay! is your name Helen?"
"Yes. Helen Tressilian," she replied.