Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/570

524 him or blanch. She stood close as before, her eyes full of tears, her face full of emotion.

"Delevan told you—you know?"

"Yes," she whispered, "he told me, but it wasn't really news. I felt all along some horror was in the air—your face has haunted me with its anxiety. I have been bearing your cares, too, I think, for days, Amory. When I left to come North and the train was delayed by the storm, I felt as if I must get out and walk to New York! "

The first look of life came across his deathly face. He turned brusquely and walked away from her.

"If you had waited a little longer—you would have been free."

She followed him and put her hand on his arm. He kept his head from her to conceal his working features.

"Amory, I can't talk to you now like this, while you are running the risk of an illness. You have done so much for me, dear—everything. Won't you do one thing now? Go into your dressing-room, take a hot bath and put on dry things. I will get them ready for you, and be here waiting."

Her first solicitude for him smote him softly; against his bruised heart, his aching nerves, a healing touch was laid. The riot of the Exchange, cries of profit and loss, concentrating for long on his own ruin, despair which had penetrated his brain to its partial derangement, were being silenced and calmed. A spell fell over him. He turned obediently to do what she asked.

Mrs. Callender waited, standing in the little window of his third-story back room. She scarcely knew this room. Once she had seen curtains put up here; once she had come to order the placing of the shower-douche in the dressing-room. This was all. Yet it was where Amory had lived, anguished and suffered—hour by hour, it was as real to him as unaccustomed to her. Here he had paced the floor in sleepless watches; where alone he had endured, and nearly fallen alone.

Before her ran the straight line of the backs of the opposite houses, then a clear sweep to the right over extension roofs, and in the near distance rose the cathedral towers. Between all swept the tearing, driving storm. But her own eyes were already clouded by a greater tempest: born first of passionate revolt, then melting to contrition and pity, and fast to pure sorrow. For the first time in her life she was a burden-bearer. Some one to-night was leaning hard upon her; needing her with almighty need. She recognized at length the dignity of life-giver—the mission woman is created to fulfil. A sense of responsibility stirred within her, together with a great compassion and a great remorse. Of herself—of the intense bewildering emotion that had swayed her like a ship in a storm near to destruction—she would not think now. Of her own need of strength and support, of her loss and renunciation, she could not let herself reflect. She had been too near sudden death to be other than awed to reverence and stillness; the things of sense were frozen in her by the chill of the grave. She stood weeping quietly. Toward her husband her heart was tender as a mother's for a child. She had controlled her tears by the time Amory, more nearly in his normal state, returned to her. She went to him, and leading him to the bed, forced him to lie down on it, then she knelt by his side.

He had done what she asked docilely. He could not believe his senses that he was being soothed, taken care of as one beloved and cherished! He regarded her with stupefaction. If this were compassion only, it seemed a holy thing to him; if it were tenderness, he did not want to see it any longer and be robbed of it at the end.

"I think you don't understand," he said, slowly; "you don't take it in, Edith. I have lost everything in the world."

She smiled faintly. "I don't believe I do—I don't believe I have tried to take it in; I can only think of how you must have suffered, to be like this."

The kindly, chivalrous man, so long denied his rightful bread, found it too strange to accept that at the moment of his downfall, when he had nothing but poverty to offer, she should suddenly bring him to her heart. He said with an effort:

"Delevan came to my office to-day; I refused to see him."

She waited, and as he did not speak again she felt she must say something.