A good deal of the time she was in delirium and talked ramblingly, but sometimes her mind cleared for a few moments and she would beg him to look after himself and try not to take the disease from her. She often said: “Oh, I’m so sorry just at the end of our journey—I do feel I ought to be ashamed…”
He comforted her by relating how Denikin’s army was advancing, thus lessening the distance between themselves and safety even while she lay in bed.
Often, in her delirium, she called his name, appealing to him to protect her from shadowy terrors, but sometimes even her delirium was calm and she would talk serenely about all kinds of things. She constantly mentioned the girl, calling her ‘our little princess’ in the way they had joked about her during the barge journey.
About a week after the onset of the fever she appeared to become very much better, and A.J. began to hope that the crisis was passing. She talked to him that day quite lucidly about their plans for escape; the Whites, he told her, were now only forty or fifty miles to the south, so that they might count themselves fortunate, even in the delay. Then she asked suddenly: “Where can we be married, do you think?”
He answered: “In Odessa, perhaps or Constantinople, at any rate.”
She smiled, and seemed very happy in contemplation of it. After a pause she went on to ask if he had yet told Stapen that he did not intend to take the child with them.
He answered that he hadn’t, but that he would do so whenever the matter became urgent.
She said: “I suppose we can’t possibly take her with us?”
“Do you want to?” he asked; and she replied: “I would like to, if we could, but of course it’s for you to decide. It’s you who’d have all the bother of both of us, isn’t it?”
“It isn’t bother I’d mind. It’s danger—to you.”
“Do you think there would he much danger?”
“More than I’d care to risk.”
“I know. I agree. We won’t have her.”
“I wish we could, for your sake.”
“Oh no, it doesn’t matter. I don’t quite know why I’m worrying you so much about it.”
“You’re really keen on having her, then, if we could?”
She answered then, almost sobbing: “Terribly, darling—terribly. And I don’t know why.”
A few hours later the sudden improvement in her condition disappeared with equal suddenness, and the fever, after its respite, seemed to attack her with renewed venom. To A.J. the change was the bitterest of blows, and all the old iron rage stalked through his veins again. He could not look at the rapidly recovering child downstairs without a clench of dislike; but for her, he worked it out, they would never have called at Stapen’s house, and Daly would never have been ill. (Yet that, he knew in his heart, was far from certain; the whole district was typhus-ridden, and it was impossible to establish how and from whom contagion had been passed.)
On the tenth day he knew that the crisis was approaching; if she survived it, she would almost certainly recover. He was at her bedside hour after hour, helping in ail the details of nursing; Stapen’s wife and himself, though they rarely exchanged more than sharp question and answer, were grimly together in the struggle. And it was not only a struggle against disease, for every day the search for the barest essentials of food was a battle in itself. Only rarely could milk be obtained, while nourishing soups and other invalid delicacies were quite beyond possibility. The last of the food that he had brought with him from Novarodar had long since been consumed, so that now he too was relying on the acquisitive efforts of Stapen’s wife. Sometimes she went out early in the morning, with the temperature far below freezing- point, and came back at dusk, after tramping many miles—with nothing. A.J. never offered her copious sympathy, as Stapen did, yet there was between them always a secret comprehension of the agonies of the day. When he looked up from Daly’s flushed and twitching face it was often to sec Stapen’s wife gazing from the other side of the bed with queer, companionable grimness.
Once while Daly was sleeping they held a curious whispered conversation across the bed. She asked him how he intended to proceed when Daly was better, and then, after he had explained to her his plans, she said: “You’ll find the child a nuisance—perhaps a danger, too. There’s a very strict watch on all the frontiers.”
“I know that.”
“I wonder you bother to take her with you at all.”
“Oh?” He was surprised, and waited for her to continue. She said, after a pause: “Look after your own affairs—that would be my advice, if you asked for it.”
“And the child?”
“She can stay here.”
“For how long?”
“For always, if necessary. I don’t see that it matters whether she’s here or in a king’s palace, so long as she’s happy. And the way the world is just now, princesses haven’t much chance of happiness.”
“What would your husband say to that, I wonder?”
“Oh, him?”
She uttered the monosyllable with such overwhelming emphasis that it was not even contemptuous.
Neither of them pursued the argument farther. Yet it was strange how the problem of the child was growing in importance; hardly an hour passed now without some delirious mention of it by Daly. It seemed to be on her mind to the exclusion of all other problems. On the twelfth day she suddenly became clear-headed and told A.J. that she was going to get better. Then, with her next breath, she said: “But if I don’t, you will take the girl with you alone, won’t you?”
That word ’alone’—his first glimpse into another world—sank on his heart till he could scarcely reason out an answer of any kind.
She went on: “will you promise that—to take her with you alone—if—if I don’t—”
“But You are—oh, you are going to get better!”
“Darling, yes, of course I am. But still, I want your promise.”
He could do nothing but assent. But a moment later he said: “She would be all right, you know, left here—the Stapens would give her a good home.”
“But she’s ours—the only thing we can call ours, anyway. I’m pretending she belongs to us—I want somebody to belong to us. Do you understand?”
He nodded desperately.
“And so you do promise, then?”
“Yes, yes. You can trust me.”
She seemed to be suddenly calmed. In a few moments she went to sleep, and slept so peacefully that A.J.’s hopes surged again as he watched her. Then about midnight she woke up and touched his hand. “Dear,” she whispered, “I am quite happy. It has all been wonderful, hasn’t it?” He laid his cheek against her arm, and when he looked up she had closed her eyes. She never opened them to consciousness again. She died at a few minutes to one on that morning of the fourth of December nineteen hundred and eighteen.
A.J. took the child with him and set out from Saratof. There was a look of nothingness in his eyes and the sound of nothingness in his voice. Bitter weather had put a stop to Denikin’s advance, and the fugitives who passed him by along the roads were freezing as well as starving. He neither feared nor hoped; he pushed on, mile after mile over the snowbound, famine-stricken country; he was an automaton merely, and when he reached the Bolshevik lines the same automatism functioned to plan the necessary details of the final adventure. But it was no adventure, after all; he crossed over without a thrill, and was soon heading for the coast through a country harried by White Cossacks as well as by universal foes that knew and cared for no frontiers.