The darkness swayed but did not lift. There was a strange rhythm in its movement, as though it were the sea, but there was no sound. Black shadows crept upon him, then slowly ebbed away. At times he was part of the darkness, at others, separate from it, yet lying upon it and wholly sustained by it.
At intervals, the swaying movement changed. His feet sank slowly in distinct pulsations until he stood almost upright, then his head began to sink and his feet to rise. When his head was far down and his feet almost directly above him, the motion changed again and he came back gradually to the horizontal, sinking back with one heart-beat and rising with the next—always a little higher.
How still it was! The silence of eternity was in that all compassing dark, which reached to the uttermost boundaries of space. It was hollow and empty, save for him, rising and falling, rising and falling, in a series of regular movements corresponding almost exactly to the ticking of a watch.
A faint, sickening odour crept through the darkness, followed by a black overwhelming shadow which threatened to engulf him in its depths. Still swaying, he waited for it calmly. All at once it was upon him, but swiftly receded. He seemed to sway backward out of it, and as he looked back upon it, gathering its forces for another attack, he saw that it was different from the darkness upon which he lay—that, instead of black, it was a deep purple.
The odour persisted and almost nauseated him. It was vaguely familiar, though he had never before come into intimate contact with it. Was it the purple shadow, that ebbed and flowed so strangely upon his dark horizon, growing to a brighter purple with each movement?
The purple grew very bright, then deepened to blue—almost black. Dancing tongues of flame shot through the darkness, as he swung through it, up and down, like a ship moved by a heavy ground swell. The flames took colour and increased in number. Violet, orange, blue, green, and yellow flickered for an instant, then disappeared.
The darkness was not quite so heavy, but it still swayed. The javelins of flame shot through it continually, making a web of iridescence. Then the purple shadow approached majestically and put them out. When it retreated, they came again, but the colour was fainter.
The yellow flames darted toward him from every conceivable direction, stabbing him like needles. In this light, the purple shadow changed to blue and began to grow brighter. The sickening odour was so strong now that he could scarcely breathe. The blue shadow warred with the yellow flames, but could not put them out. He saw now that the shadow was his friend and the flames were a host of enemies.
All the little stabbing lights suddenly merged into one. He was surrounded by fire that burned him as he swayed back and forth, and the cool shadows were gone. The light grew intense and terrible, but he could not lift his hand to shade his eyes. Slowly the orange deepened to scarlet in which he spun around giddily among myriads of blood-red disks. The scarlet grew brighter and brighter until it became a white, streaming light. All at once the swaying stopped.
The intensity of the white light was agreeably tempered by a grey mist. Through the vapour, he saw the outlines of his own chiffonier, across the room. A woman in spotless white moved noiselessly about. Even though she did not look at him, he felt a certain friendliness toward her. She seemed to have been with him while he swayed through the shadow and it was pleasant to know that he had not been alone.
On the table near the window, his violin lay as he had left it. The case was standing in a corner and his music stand had toppled over. The torn sheets of music rustled idly on the floor, and he wondered, fretfully, why the woman in white did not pick them up.
As if in answer to his thought, she stooped, and gathered them together, quietly sorting the pages and putting them into the open drawer that held his music. She closed the drawer and folded up his music stand without making a sound. She seemed far removed from him, like someone from another world.
Cloud surrounded her, but he caught glimpses of her through it occasionally. She took up his violin, very carefully, put it into its case, and carried it out of the room. He did not care very much, but it seemed rather an impolite thing to do. He knew that he would not have stolen a violin when the owner was in the same room.
Soon she came back and he was reassured. She had not stolen it after all. She might have broken it, for she seemed to feel very sorry about something. She was wiping her eyes with a bit of white, as women always did when they cried.
It was not necessary for her to cry, on account of one broken violin, for he had thousands of them—Stradivarius, Amati, Cremona; everything. Some of them were highly coloured and very rare on that account. He had only to go to his storehouse, present a ticket, and choose whatever he liked—red, green, yellow, or even striped.
Everybody who played the violin needed a great many of them, for the different moods of music. It was obvious that the dark brown violin with which he played slow, sad music could not be used for the Hungarian Dances. He had a special violin for those, striped with barbaric colour.
The woman who had broken one of his violins stood at the window with her back toward him. Her shoulders shook and from time to time she lifted the bit of white to her eyes. It was annoying, he thought; even worse than the shadows and the fire. He was about to call to her and suggest, ironically, that she had cried enough and that the flowers would be spoiled if they got too wet, when someone called, from the next room: "Miss Rose!"
She turned quickly, wiped her eyes once more, and, without making a sound, went out on the white cloud that surrounded her half way to her waist.
He tried to change his position a little and felt his own bed under him. His body was stiff and sore, but he had the use of it, except his left arm. Try as he might, he could not move it, for it was weighted down and it hurt terribly.
"Miss Rose, Miss Rose, Miss Rose, Miss Rose." The words beat hard in his ears like a clock ticking loudly. The accent was on the "Miss"—the last word was much fainter. "Rose Miss" was wrong, so the other must be right, except for the misplaced accent. Did the accent always come on the first beat of a measure? He had forgotten, but he would ask the man at the storehouse when he went to get the striped violin for the Hungarian Dances.
His left hand throbbed with unbearable agony. The room began to spin slowly on its axis. There was no mist now, or even a shadow, and every sense was abnormally acute. The objects in the whirling room were phenomenally clear; even a scratch on the front of his chiffonier stood out distinctly.
He could hear a clock ticking, though there was no clock in his room. Afar was the sound of women sobbing—two of them. Above it a strange voice said, distinctly: "There is not one chance in a thousand of saving his hand. If I had nurses, I would amputate now, before he recovers consciousness."
The words struck him with the force of a blow, though he did not fully realise what they meant. The pain in his left arm and the sickening odour nauseated him. The cool black shadow drowned the objects in the room and crept upon him stealthily. Presently he was swaying again, up and down, up and down, in the all-encompassing, all-hiding dark.
So it happened that he did not hear Colonel Kent's ringing answer: "You shall not amputate until every great surgeon in the United States has said that it is absolutely necessary. I leave on the next train, and shall send them and keep on sending until there are no more to send. Until a man comes who thinks there is a chance of saving it, you are in charge—after that, it is his case."
Day by day, a continuous procession came to the big Colonial house. Allison became accustomed to the weary round of darkness, pain, sickening odours, strange faces, darkness, and so on, endlessly, without pity or pause.
The woman in white had mysteriously vanished. In her place were two, in blue and white, with queer, unbecoming caps. They were there one at a time, always; never for more than a few minutes were they together. When the fierce, hot agony became unendurable for even a moment longer, one of them would lean over him with a bit of shining silver in her hand, and stab him sharply for an instant. Then, with incredible quickness, came peace.
Once, when two strange men had come together, and had gone into the adjoining room, he caught disconnected fragments of conversation. "Hypersensitive-impossible—not much longer—interesting case." He wondered, as he began to sway in the darkness again, what "hypersensitive" meant. Surely, he used to know.
Still, it did not matter—nothing mattered now. In the brief intervals of consciousness, he began to wonder what he had been doing just before this happened, whatever it was. It took him days to piece out the disconnected memories past the whirling room, the woman in white and the creeping shadows, to the red touring car and Isabel.
His heart throbbed painfully, held though it was by some iron hand, icy cold, in a pitiless clutch. Weakly, he summoned the blue and white woman who sat in a low chair across his room. She came quickly, and put her ear very close to his lips that she might hear what he said.
"No," said the blue and white woman, very kindly. "Only slightly bruised."
The next day he summoned her again. As before, she bent very low to catch the gasping words: "Where is-my—father?"
"He had to go to town on business. He will come back just as soon as he can."
"He-is—dead," said Allison, with difficulty. "Nothing else—could take- him-away—now."
"No," she assured him, "you must believe me. He's all right. Everybody else is all right and we hope you soon will be."
"No use—talking of—it," he breathed, hoarsely. "I know."
Singly, by twos and even threes, the strange men continued to come from the City. Allison submitted wearily to the painful examinations that seemed so unnecessary. Some of the men seemed kind, even sympathetic. Others were cold and impassive, like so many machines. Still others, and these were in the majority, were almost brutal.
It was one of the latter sort who one day drew a chair up to the side of the bed with a scraping noise that made the recumbent figure quiver from head to foot. The man's face was almost colourless, his bulging blue eyes were cold and fish-like, distorted even more by the strong lenses of his spectacles.
"Better have it over with," he suggested. "I can do it now."
"Do what?" asked Allison, with difficulty.
"Amputate your hand. There's no chance."
The blue and white young woman then on duty came forward. "I beg your pardon, Doctor, but Colonel Kent left strict orders not to operate without his consent."
The strange man disdained to answer the nurse, but turned to Allison again. "Do you know where your father can be reached by wire?"
"My father—is dead," Allison insisted. He closed his eyes and would answer no more questions. In the next room, he heard the nurse and the doctor talking in low tones that did not carry. Only one word rose above the murmur: "delusion."
Allison repeated it to himself as he sank into the darkness again, wondering what it meant and of whom they were speaking.
Slowly he recovered from the profound shock, but his hand did not improve. He had an idea that the ceaseless bandaging and unbandaging were dangerous as well as painful, but said nothing. He knew that his career had come to its end before it had really begun, but it did not seem to affect him in any way. He considered it unemotionally and impersonally, when he thought of it at all.
Two more men came together. One was brutal, the other merely cold. They shook their heads and went away. A few days later, a man of the rare sort came; a gentle, kindly, sympathetic soul, who seemed human and real.
After the examination was finished, Allison asked, briefly: "Any chance?"
The kindly man hesitated for an instant, then told the truth. "I'm afraid not."
The nurse happened to be out of the room, none the less, Allison motioned to him to come closer. Almost in a whisper he said: "Can you give me anything that will make me strong enough to write half a dozen lines?"
"Could no one else write it for you?"
"Couldn't I take the message?"
"Could anyone take a message for me to the girl I was going to marry— now?"
"I understand," said the other, gently. "We'll see. You must make it very brief."
When the nurse came back, they gave him a pencil, propped a book up before him, and fastened a sheet of paper to it by a rubber band. After the powerful stimulant the doctor administered had begun to take effect, Allison managed to write, in a very shaky, almost illegible hand:
"My left hand will have to come off. As I can't ask you to marry a cripple, the only honourable thing for me to do is to release you from our engagement. Don't think I blame you. Good-bye, darling, and may God bless you.
The effort exhausted him greatly, but the thing was done. The nurse folded it, put it into an envelope, sealed it, and took the pencil from him.
"You'll let me address it, won't you?" she asked.
"Yes. Miss Isabel Ross. Anyone in the house can tell you where—anyone will take it to her. Thank you," he added, speaking to the doctor.
That night, for the first time, the situation began to affect him personally. In the hours after midnight, as the forces of the physical body ebbed toward the lowest point, those of the mind seemed to increase. Staring at the low night light, that by its feeble flicker exorcised the thousand phantoms that beset him, he could think clearly. In a rocking chair, across the room, the night nurse dozed, with a white shawl wrapped around her. He could hear her deep, regular breathing as she slept.
His father was dead—he knew that for an absolute fact, and wondered why the two kind women and the endless, varying procession of men should so persistently lie to him about this when they were willing to tell him the truth about everything else.
He also knew that, sooner or later, his left hand would be amputated and that his career would come to an inglorious end—indeed, the end had already come. The ordeal painfully shadowed upon his horizon was only the final seal. Fortunately there was money enough for everything—he would want pitifully little for the rest of his life.
His life stretched out before him in a waste of empty years. He was thirty, now, and his father had lived until well past seventy; might have lived many years more had he not died when his heart broke over the misfortunes of his idolised son. He could remember the rumble of the carriage wheels the night of the funeral. The nurse had dozed in her chair just as she was dozing now, while downstairs they carried his father out of the house in a black casket and buried him. It was all as clear as though it had happened yesterday, instead of ages ago.
A clock, somewhere near by, chimed three quick, silvery strokes. With the last stroke, the clock in the kitchen struck three, also, in a different tone and with an annoying briskness of manner. As the echo died away, the old grandfather's clock on the landing boomed out three portentously solemn chimes. It was followed almost immediately by a cheery, impertinent little clock, insisting that it was four and almost time for sunrise.
The nurse stirred in her chair, yawned, and came over to the bed. She straightened the blankets with a practised hand, changed his hot pillow for a fresh one, brought him a drink of cool water, and went back to her chair without having said a word. The gentle ministry comforted him insensibly. What magic there was in the touch of a woman's hand! But, in the long grey years ahead, there would be no woman, unless—Isabel—
Sometime that afternoon, or early in the evening, she had received his note. It was not strange that they had not allowed her to come to see him, because no one had seen him but the doctors and nurses. Even Aunt Francesca, whom he had known all his life, had not darkened his open door.
But now, Isabel would come—she could not help but come. With the passing of the fateful hour, strength began to return slowly. She would come to-morrow, and every tick of the clock brought to-morrow a second nearer.
A steadily increasing warmth came into his veins and thawed the ice around his heart. The cold hand that had held it so long mercifully loosened its fingers. He turned his face toward the Eastern window, that he might watch for the first faint glow.
A single long, deepening shadow struck across the far horizon like the turning out of a light. Almost immediately, the distant East brightened. Day was coming—the sun, and Isabel.
With the first hint of colour, hope dawned in his soul, changing to certainty as the light increased. It was not in the way of things that he, who had always had everything, should at one fell stroke be left desolate. Out of the wreckage there was one thing he might keep—Isabel.
He laughed at the thought that she would accept her release. What would he have done he asked himself, were it she instead of him? Could mutilation, or even death, change his love for her? He was equally sure that hers could not be changed.
It was fortunate that she was saved—that it was he instead of Isabel. She had pretty hands—such dear hands as men have loved and kissed since, back in the garden, the First Woman gave hers to the First Man, that he might lead her wheresoever he would.
In the midst of the wreckage, he perceived a divine compensation, for Isabel would not fail him—she could not fail him now. Transfigured by tenderness, her coldness changed to the utmost yielding, to-morrow would bring him his goddess, a deeply-loving woman at last.
"How she will come to me," he said to himself, feeling, in fancy, her soft arms around him, and her warm lips on his, while the life-current flowed steadily from her to him and made him a man again, not a weakling. His heart beat with a joy that was almost pain, for he could feel her intoxicating nearness even now. Perhaps her sweet eyes would overflow with the greatness of her love and her tears would fall upon his face when she knelt beside him, to lay her head upon his breast.
"How she will come to me!" he breathed, in ecstasy. "Ah, how she will come!"
And so, smiling, he slept, as the first shaft of sun that brought his dear To-Morrow fell full upon his face.