The Star in the Window (Stokes)/Chapter 30
CHAPTER XXX
AUGUSTA sent for the doctor, in the morning. But he gave her little satisfaction. For ten days he visited the sickroom, the frown between his eyes deepening as the little silver thread of mercury within the slender glass tube climbed gradually higher and higher. And when he finally did arrive at a conclusion it was not a reassuring one—not to Augusta Morgan. It had been typhoid fever that had robbed her, in her early womanhood, of the one person in all the world to whom she knew how to show tenderness. Her lover-soldier, who had said good-by to her so long ago, had fallen by neither bullet nor shell. It had been a microscopic typhoid germ, in a training-camp, that had claimed him as its victim, and before he had fired a single shot, too, or won a single spur. Ever since that day when Augusta had seen wriggling before her blurred vision, half-way down in the list of deaths at the camp where the fever was working its futile havoc, the one name precious to her, the very word "typhoid" had spelled terror. But no one must guess it—not now! She had simply grunted when Reba's doctor had pronounced the dread disease—solemnly, in lowered tones downstairs in the tightly curtained parlor.
All her old traits of generalship returned to Augusta Morgan when the occasion required. She prepared herself for the combat before her with martial determination. Grim-visaged, and steady-voiced, straight of carriage, and firm of step, she moved about the suddenly fear-ridden house, head up and unflinching. She was stubbornly optimistic. She was persistently cheerful. She met Emma's and Syringa's gloomy forebodings with a brusque unsentimentality that defied defeat.
"Oh, she'll get well all right," she'd fling out in scorn to David's furtive inquiries, and Eunice's tears. "She ain't the first who's picked up a typhoid germ in their lives, and got well of it, too!"
But the typhoid germ that Reba had picked up, probably at one of the attractive summer restaurants in or about Boston, was not mild-natured. For weeks and weeks she lay its passive victim, unconscious of the big fight that others waged for her night and day, indifferent to their tireless administrations, long night-watches, and combined efforts to spin out unbroken her frailing thread of life across the long chasm of the fever.
These efforts were successful. Reba emerged at last from the dark valley and shadow—a white thin little creature, all eyes it seemed at first to her faithful nurses—all spirit, held in a vessel so fragile that they feared it could not bear even the weight of returning strength. For after the long fever had burned itself out in Reba's body she seemed as ephemeral as the ashes of tissue paper after fire has spent its heat upon it.
As merciless as the fever was, however, with rounded chin and glowing cheek, it was not without its compensations. The transfer of Reba's torment from her mind to her body was a relief. The fever, too, proved a miraculous short-cut back into the affections of women whose hearts hadn't many avenues of approach. But for Reba's great need of being taken care of, her aunts and Cousin Syringa would never have been given the opportunity of love-begetting service. This was especially significant with the inarticulate Augusta, clumsy and awkward in the use of every form of expression except service. There were moments during the anxious watching-time of Reba's long sickness when the tenderness in Augusta Morgan's heart amounted almost to pain. For early in the siege, Reba showed a preference for the older woman's services. Time and again she would push aside Aunt Emma's helping hand, likewise Cousin Syringa's, whispering weakly, "Not you—not you."
"It's Augusta she wants," they soon comprehended. They were right. It was the tall, taut woman with the skillful hands and masterful voice whom Reba desired. She was unaware of the actual identity of the personality that acted upon her, like a steadying potion of medicine, but she would moan and moan for Augusta Morgan for hours, as for a drug, never calling her name but restless and unsatisfied, till she came.
"Pshaw! What nonsense!" Augusta would retort to Eunice or Syringa, sent to fetch her, but she never failed to respond to the summons. She would hurry to Reba's bedside whatever the time of day or night; and when the sick girl's searching eyes rested upon her satisfied and her voice implored, "Don't leave me again, please," Augusta Morgan was obliged to clench her teeth together tight to keep her under jaw from jerking with emotion. Why, she couldn't love a child of her own more than she loved Reba, she believed. She had done all a mother could for Reba, except bear her.
It was the typhoid fever, too, that cast a shroud of mystery upon Reba, and gradually transformed her in the eyes of those whose lives contained nothing secret or concealed, into a romantic figure—enigmatical to them. For the watchers naturally enough had concluded that the name of Chadwick Booth so frequently upon Reba's lips during her delirium must be that of the husband she had mentioned the night she came home, whose ring they had had to wind with a bit of tape to keep it from slipping off her wasting finger. Therefore, when the delirium left her and the name was heard no more, they were convinced of a complexity in Reba's past that forbade questions and prosaic inquiries.
Such had been the freakish nature of Reba's delirium that not once during the run of the fever had she made a single reference to the sailor and her marriage. The indelibly imprinted details of the preceding summer excluded everything else from her brain for a while. So when, on the afternoon of the day she woke up from her illusions, she made her quiet announcement to Aunt Emma, who chanced to be on duty at the time, it created no little excitement in the camp around the green lamp-shade downstairs that evening, when it was repeated for Eunice's benefit.
Emma, in a kindly attempt to break Reba's long scrutiny of the ceiling, had shown her that afternoon a card bearing the name of Louise Bartholomew. The card, she explained to Reba's mildly interested gaze, had accompanied flowers which had long since faded. They had come soon after Aunt Augusta had written to Miss Ellsworth in answer to her inquiry, and told her about Reba's illness. Reba made no reply to Aunt Emma's recital.
It wasn't until Aunt Emma was slipping the card back into its small envelope that the girl spoke. Then, "That isn't my name any more," she said quietly, her eyes indicating the tiny envelope, where Louise had written boldly in ink Miss Rebecca Jerome.
"No, I suppose not," Aunt Emma acquiesced, nervously. Reba had made no reference to her marriage since her brain had cleared.
"My name is Mrs. Nathaniel Cawthorne now," she announced.
"Mrs. what?" exclaimed Aunt Emma. "I didn't quite get it. Mrs. what, did you say?"
"Mrs. Nathaniel Cawthorne," repeated Reba distinctly, and back went her gaze to the ceiling.
Mrs. Nathaniel Cawthorne! They all repeated the unexpected name in awe-struck whispers downstairs that night around Eunice's wheel-chair. Mrs. Nathaniel Cawthorne! "Who's Chadwick Booth then?" That was what Aunt Emma ought to have demanded immediately, as if without forethought. It was difficult to introduce the subject the next day.
It was more difficult still as time went on, and Reba sank deeper into mysterious silence, as she lay so quiet upon her pillow, gazing sometimes out of the window with those big eyes of hers, at the tell-tale limbs of bare elm and maple (their leaves had not even begun to turn in September); sometimes at the wide gold band upon the third finger of her left hand; sometimes, most often, at the cracks upon the ceiling—climbing their difficult ascents slowly, painstakingly, plunging down their precipitous cliffs softly, without hurt—picking herself up and monotonously going on and on.
Reba did not fight for strength, struggle for peace of mind during the long convalescing days. Passive and inert, she lay and let nature do with her what it wanted to, looking on a little curiously at the queer workings of its ways, surprised as the days wore on that time was actually working on her its magic cure—making her body a little stronger every week (and with no help from her), her mind a little better able to face the truth without the old stab of pain.
But instead of the pain, Reba observed that there was nothing in her heart to take its place—nothing, that is, but a queer numbness. There was no desire there any more—no desire for anybody, for anything, she thought. She felt a strange indifference toward the pile of letters waiting for her perusal—one from Louise, one from Miss Ellsworth, two from Mamie, and two with a foreign stamp and a censor label on the back from Katherine Park. She felt a strange indifference, too, about getting well, or, once well, about how she should spend the hours of the long days.
When finally she was strong enough to be propped up in bed, and use pen and paper, so indifferent had she become that she was without a qualm of fear as to the consequences of the note she wrote. It was to Nathan. It was a brief note—all she had strength for.
She told him she was living at home again, and asked him, the next time he wrote, to address his letter to Mrs. Nathaniel Cawthorne, please. "For I am wearing your ring now," it said, "as I ought. It's about time I did a few things I ought. And I am using your name. I hope you don't mind that. It seemed to me the only right thing to do, considering how we are bound by promises, and by law. My duty, whatever it may be, is the only thing that interests me much just now. I don't know when this will reach you, but I thought you ought to know, as soon as possible, what I've done." The note ended with the usual "Good-by. Rebecca." And in a postscript at the bottom, it added: "Any time you want to come back, I'm ready for you now."
Reba knew that the note would be in San Francisco within a week after it was mailed, but it well might be months before Nathan received it. The "Ellen T. Robinson" was a very uncertain sort of boat. It was always conjecture with Reba when the bark was due in any port. Nathan had always been non-committal about its sailings and arrivals, in his letters; non-committal, too, it seemed to Reba, about his life upon it, his associates and his exact duties. That the "Ellen T. Robinson" had proved a financial success Reba did know. Nathan had proudly assured her of that, and as proof had once sent her a sixty-dollar check, the first returns, he had explained, from the little pile of earnings he had invested in the boat. That had been long ago—eight or ten months after he had left Boston. Reba had returned that check, of course. Hadn't she made it clear to him that she had more money already than she knew what to do with?
Reba fell to wondering about Nathan a little, after her note to him was on its way. Desultory wondering it was. What exactly did he look like, after all? His features had grown very dim. When she tried to recall him now it was chiefly his loose-fitting clothes she saw, and his stoop. They didn't trouble her, however. Even the thought of him sleeping in that dark hole with the greasy Portuguese didn't trouble her. Did he wear her ring still about his neck, she wondered? Queer to be married to a man like that. Queerer still not to be afraid of it any more.
It was this amazing callousness, Reba supposed, that made it possible for women whose spirits have been broken, to enter convents. Reba's marriage was her convent. What difference to her what particular hardships awaited her inside its walls? She wouldn't suffer from them. She was beyond suffering. She was insensible, as if she had been soaked in cocain. Why, by the time she mailed her note, she was able to march her thoughts straight up to Chadwick Booth, or Nathaniel Cawthorne, either one, and feel neither hurt nor fear.