The address she gave was that of a small private hospital, and she explained that she would have to receive him in the public parlour, which at that hour was open to other visitors. As the time approached, the thought that they might not be alone when they met became insufferable; and he determined, if he found any one else, in possession of the parlour, to wait in the hall, and meet her as she came down the stairs.
He continued to elaborate this plan as he walked back slowly through the Park, He had timed himself to reach the hospital a little before three; but though it lacked five minutes to the hour when he entered the parlour, two women were already seated in one of its windows. They looked around as he came in, evidently as much annoyed by his appearance as he had been to find them there. The older of the two showed a sallow middle-aged face beneath her limp crape veil; the other was a slight tawdry creature, with nodding feathers, and innumerable chains and bracelets which she fingered ceaselessly as she talked.
They eyed Amherst with resentment, and then turned away, continuing their talk in low murmurs, while he seated himself at the marble-topped table littered with torn magazines. Now and then the younger woman’s voice rose in a shrill staccato, and a phrase or two floated over to him. “She’d simply worked herself to death—the nurse told me so…. She expects to go home in another week, though how she’s going to stand the fatigue–-” and then, after an inaudible answer: “It’s all his fault, and if I was her I wouldn’t go back to him for anything!”
“Oh, Cora, he’s real sorry now,” the older woman protestingly murmured; but the other, unappeased, rejoined with ominously nodding plumes: ”You see—if they do make it up, it’ll never be the same between them!”
Amherst started up nervously, and as he did so the clock struck three, and he opened the door and passed out into the hall. It was paved with black and white marble; the walls were washed in a dull yellowish tint, and the prevalent odour of antiseptics was mingled with a stale smell of cooking. At the back rose a straight staircase carpeted with brass-bound India-rubber, like a ship’s companion-way; and down that staircase she would come in a moment—he fancied he heard her step now….
But the step was that of an elderly black-gowned woman in a cap—the matron probably.
She glanced at Amherst in surprise, and asked: “Are you waiting for some one?”
He made a motion of assent, and she opened the parlour door, saying: “Please walk in.”
“May I not wait out here?” he urged.
She looked at him more attentively. “Why, no, I’m afraid not. You’ll find the papers and magazines in here.”
Mildly but firmly she drove him in before her, and closing the door, advanced to the two women in the window. Amherst’s hopes leapt up: perhaps she had come to fetch the visitors upstairs! He strained his ears to catch what was being said, and while he was thus absorbed the door opened, and turning at the sound he found himself face to face with his wife.
He had not reflected that Justine would be in her nurse’s dress; and the sight of the dark blue uniform and small white cap, in which he had never seen her since their first meeting in the Hope Hospital, obliterated all bitter and unhappy memories, and gave him the illusion of passing back at once into the clear air of their early friendship. Then he looked at her and remembered.
He noticed that she had grown thinner than ever, or rather that her thinness, which had formerly had a healthy reed-like strength, now suggested fatigue and languor. And her face was spent, extinguished—the very eyes were lifeless. All her vitality seemed to have withdrawn itself into the arch of dense black hair which still clasped her forehead like the noble metal of some antique bust.
The sight stirred him with a deeper pity, a more vehement compunction; but the impulse to snatch her to him, and seek his pardon on her lips, was paralyzed by the sense that the three women in the window had stopped talking and turned their heads toward the door.
He held his hand out, and Justine’s touched it for a moment; then he said in a low voice: “Is there no other place where I can see you?”
She made a negative gesture. “I am afraid not to-day.”
Ah, her deep sweet voice—how completely his ear had lost the sound of it!
She looked doubtfully about the room, and pointed to a sofa at the end farthest from the windows.
“Shall we sit there?” she said.
He followed her in silence, and they sat down side by side. The matron had drawn up a chair and resumed her whispered conference with the women in the window. Between the two groups stretched the bare length of the room, broken only by a few armchairs of stained wood, and the marble-topped table covered with magazines.
The impossibility of giving free rein to his feelings developed in Amherst an unwonted intensity of perception, as though a sixth sense had suddenly emerged to take the place of those he could not use. And with this new-made faculty he seemed to gather up, and absorb into himself, as he had never done in their hours of closest communion, every detail of his wife’s person, of her face and hands and gestures. He noticed how her full upper lids, of the tint of yellowish ivory, had a slight bluish discolouration, and how little thread-like blue veins ran across her temples to the roots of her hair. The emaciation of her face, and the hollow shades beneath her cheek-bones, made her mouth seem redder and fuller, though a little line on each side, where it joined the cheek, gave it a tragic droop. And her hands! When her fingers met his he recalled having once picked up, in the winter woods, the little feather-light skeleton of a frozen bird—and that was what her touch was like.
And it was he who had brought her to this by his cruelty, his obtuseness, his base readiness to believe the worst of her! He did not want to pour himself out in self-accusation—that seemed too easy a way of escape. He wanted simply to take her in his arms, to ask her to give him one more chance—and then to show her! And all the while he was paralyzed by the group in the window.
“Can’t we go out? I must speak to you,” he began again nervously.
“Not this afternoon—the doctor is coming. Tomorrow–-“
“I can’t wait for tomorrow!”
She made a faint, imperceptible gesture, which read to his eyes: “You’ve waited a whole year.”
“Yes, I know,” he returned, still constrained by the necessity of muffling his voice, of perpetually measuring the distance between themselves and the window. “I know what you might say—don’t you suppose I’ve said it to myself a million times? But I didn’t know—I couldn’t imagine–-“
She interrupted him with a rapid movement. “What do you know now?”
“What you promised Langhope–-“
She turned her startled eyes on him, and he saw the blood run flame-like under her skin. “But he promised not to speak!” she cried.
“He hasn’t—to me. But such things make themselves known. Should you have been content to go on in that way forever?”
She raised her head and her eyes rested in his. “If you were,” she answered simply.
“Justine!”
Again she checked him with a silencing motion. “Please tell me just what has happened.”
“Not now—there’s too much else to say. And nothing matters except that I’m with you.”
“But Mr. Langhope–-“
“He asks you to come. You’re to see Cicely tomorrow.”
Her lower lip trembled a little, and a tear flowed over and hung on her lashes.
“But what does all that matter now? We’re together after this horrible year,” he insisted.
She looked at him again. “But what is really changed?”
“Everything—everything! Not changed, I mean—just gone back.”
“To where…we were…before?” she whispered; and he whispered back: “To where we were before.”