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“Not
think!” She raised herself on a weak elbow. “I want to think every minute—every
second. I want to relive everything, day by day, to the last atom of time—”

 
          
“Time?
But there’ll be plenty of time!”

 
          
She
continued to lean on her elbow, fixing her illumined eyes on him. She did not
seem to hear what he said; her attention was concentrated on some secret vision
of which he felt himself the mere transparent mask.

 
          
“Well,”
she exclaimed, with a sudden passionate energy, “it was worth it! I always
knew—”

 
          
Dorrance
bent toward her. “What was worth—?” But she had sunk back with closed eyes, and
lay there reabsorbed into the cleft of the pillows, merged in the inanimate, a
mere part of the furniture of the sick room. Dorrance waited for a moment,
hardly understanding the change; then he started up, rang, called, and in a few
moments the professionals were in possession, the air was full of ether and
camphor, the telephone ringing, the disarray of death in the room. Dorrance
knew that he would never know what she had found worth it…….

 
          
  

 

 
VI.
 
 

 
          
He
sat in his library, waiting. Waiting for what? Life was over for him now that
she was dead. Until after the funeral a sort of factitious excitement had kept
him on his feet. Now there was nothing left but to go over and over those last
days. Every detail of them stood out before him in unbearable relief; and one
of the most salient had been the unexpected appearance in the sick room of
Dorrance’s former doctor—the very doctor who, with the cancer specialist, had
signed the diagnosis of Dorrance’s case. Dorrance, since that day, had
naturally never consulted him professionally; and it chanced that they had
never met. But Eleanor’s physician, summoned at the moment of her last heart
attack, without even stopping to notify Dorrance, had called in his colleague.
The latter had a high standing as a consultant (the idea made Dorrance smile);
and besides, what did it matter? By that time they all knew—nurses, doctors,
and most of all Dorrance himself—that nothing was possible but to ease the
pangs of Eleanor’s last hours. And Dorrance had met his former doctor without
resentment; hardly even with surprise.

 
          
But
the doctor had not forgotten that he and his former patient had been old
friends; and the day after the funeral, late in the evening, had thought it
proper to ring the widower’s doorbell and present his condolences. Dorrance, at
his entrance, looked up in surprise, at first resenting the intrusion, then
secretly relieved at the momentary release from the fiery wheel of his own
thoughts. “The man is a fool—but perhaps,” Dorrance reflected, “he’ll give me
something that will make me sleep…….”

 
          
The
two men sat down, and the doctor began to talk gently of Eleanor. He had known
her for many years, though not professionally. He spoke of her goodness, her
charity,
the
many instances he had come across among
his poor patients of her discreet and untiring ministrations. Dorrance, who had
dreaded hearing
her
spoken of, and by this man above
all others, found himself listening with a curious avidity to these
reminiscences. He needed no one to tell him of Eleanor’s kindness, her
devotion—yet at the moment such praise was sweet to him. And he took up the
theme; but not without a secret stir of vindictiveness, a vague desire to make
the doctor suffer for the results of his now-distant blunder. “She always gave
too much of herself—that was the trouble. No one knows that better than I do.
She was never really the same after those months of incessant anxiety about me
that you doctors made her undergo.” He had not intended to say anything of the
sort; but as he spoke the resentment he had thought extinct was fanned into
flame by his words. He had forgiven the two doctors for himself, but he
suddenly found he could not forgive them for Eleanor, and he had an angry wish
to let them know it. “That diagnosis of yours nearly killed her, though it
didn’t kill
me”
he concluded
sardonically.

 
          
The
doctor had followed this outburst with a look of visible perplexity. In the
crowded life of a fashionable physician, what room was there to remember a
mistaken diagnosis? The sight of his forgetfulness made Dorrance continue with
rising irritation: “The shock of it
did
kill
her—I see that now.”

 
          
“Diagnosis—what
diagnosis?” echoed the doctor blankly.

 
          
“I
see you don’t remember,” said Dorrance.

 
          
“Well,
no; I don’t, for the moment.”

 
          
“I’ll
remind you, then. When you came to see me with that cancer specialist four or
five years ago, one of you dropped your diagnosis by mistake in going out—”

 
          
“Oh,
that
?” The doctor’s face lit up with
sudden recollection.
“Of course!
The diagnosis of the
other poor fellow we’d been to see before coming to you. I remember it all now.
Your wife—Mrs. Welwood then, wasn’t she?—brought the paper back to me a few
hours later—before I’d even missed it. I think she said you’d picked it up
after we left, and thought it was meant for
you.”
The doctor gave an easy retrospective laugh. “Luckily I was able to reassure
her at once.” He leaned back comfortably in his armchair and shifted his voice
to the pitch of condolence. “A beautiful life, your wife’s was. I only wish it
had been in our power to prolong it. But these cases of heart failure… you must
tell yourself that at least you had a few happy years; and so many of us
haven’t even that.” The doctor stood up and held out his hand.

 
          
“Wait
a moment, please,” Dorrance said hurriedly. “There’s something I want to ask
you.” His brain was whirling so that he could not remember what he had started
to say. “I can’t sleep—” he began.

 
          
“Yes?”
said the doctor, assuming a professional look, but with a furtive glance at his
wrist watch.

 
          
Dorrance’s
throat felt dry and his head empty. He struggled with the difficulty of
ordering his thoughts, and fitting rational words to them.

 
          
“Yes—but
no matter about my sleeping. What I meant was: do I understand you to say that
the diagnosis you dropped in leaving was not intended for me?”

 
          
The
doctor stared. “Good Lord, no—of course it wasn’t. You never had a symptom.
Didn’t we both tell you so at the time?”

 
          
“Yes,”
Dorrance slowly acquiesced.

 
          
“Well,
if you didn’t believe us, your scare was a short one, anyhow,” the doctor
continued with a mild jocularity; and he put his hand out again.

 
          
“Oh,
wait,” Dorrance repeated. “What I really wanted to ask was what day you said my
wife returned the diagnosis to you? But I suppose you don’t remember.”

 
          
The
doctor reflected. “Yes, I do; it all comes back to me now. It was the very same
day. We called on you in the morning, didn’t we?”

 
          
“Yes;
at
nine
o’clock
,” said
Dorrance, the dryness returning to his throat.

 
          
“Well,
Mrs. Welwood brought the diagnosis back to me directly afterward.”

 
          
“You
think it was the very same day?” (Dorrance wondered to himself why he continued
to insist on this particular point.)

 
          
The
doctor took another stolen glance at his watch. “I’m sure it was. I remember
now that it was my consultation day, and that she caught me at
two o’clock
, before I saw my first patient. We had a
good laugh over the scare you’d had.”

 
          
“I
see,” said Dorrance.

 
          
“Your
wife had one of the sweetest laughs I ever heard,” continued the doctor, with
an expression of melancholy reminiscence.

 
          
There
was a silence, and Dorrance was conscious that his vistor was looking at him
with growing perplexity. He too gave a slight laugh. “I thought perhaps it was
the day after,” he mumbled vaguely. “Anyhow, you did give me a good scare.”

 
          
“Yes,”
said the doctor. “But it didn’t last long,
did
it? I
asked your wife to make my peace with you. You know such things will happen to
hurried doctors. I hope she persuaded you to forgive me?”

 
          
“Oh,
yes,” said Dorrance, as he followed the doctor to the door to let him out.

 
          
“Well,
now about that sleeping—” the doctor checked himself on the threshold to ask.

 
          
“Sleeping?”
Dorrance stared. “Oh, I shall sleep all right tonight,” he said with sudden
decision, as he closed the door on his visitor.

 
          
(
Ladies’ Home Journal 47
, November 1930)

 

 

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