Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/405

Rh a nurse’s duties, steadily, expertly, unﬂinchingly, while every ﬁbre was torn with inward anguish?

She knew the horror of it now—and she knew also that her self-enforced exile from the sick-room was a hundred times worse. To stand there, knowing, with each tick of the clock, what was being said and done within—how the great luxurious room, with its pale draperies and scented cushions, and the hundred pretty triﬂes strewing the lace toilet-table and the delicate old furniture, was being swept bare, cleared for action like a ship’s deck, drearily garnished with rows of instruments, rolls of medicated cotton, oiled silk, bottles, bandages, water-pillows—all the grim paraphernalia of the awful rites of pain: to know this, and to be able to call up with torturing vividness that poor pale face on the pillows, vague—eyed, expressionless, perhaps, as she had last seen it, or—worse yet—stirred already with the ﬁrst creeping pangs of consciousness: to have these images slowly, deliberately burn themselves into her brain, and to be aware, at the same time, of that underlying moral disaster, of which the accident seemed the monstrous outward symbol—ah, this was worse than anything she had ever dreamed!

She knew that the ﬁnal verdict could not be pronounced till the operation which was about to take place should reveal the extent of injury to the spine. Bessy, in falling, must have struck on the back of her [ 389 ]