Grand Canary (28 page)

The sun had drawn to another setting beyond the Peak leaving Los Cisnes confronted by the night. Within the sick-room, shadows pressed insistently. Already the corners were obscure, cloaked by soft darkness that hung like arras. Closer, gently came these insatiable shadows, enclosing the dwindling light as though it were a life that must be crushed and finally extinguished.

Only the shadows moved; all else sustained a fearful immobility. The window stood half open, but no breath stirred to clear the taint of drugs and sickness that was in the air. Outside, beneath the brassy twilight, a thunder heat lay brooding on the land. Within, this same moist heat made breathing stifling.

Beside the bed, Harvey sat with his chin upon one palm, his haggard face quite hidden, his body upright, rigid. Before him, on a small sidetable, were ranged a chart, some basins, a bowl of sterile water, thermometer and hypodermic syringe, a row of medicines – the whole set out with scrupulous exactitude by Susan. At the outset she had stripped and scrubbed the room, and for those last three days had kept it to the stern precision of a hospital ward. Seen dimly in that tenebrous light, she was on his right, resting an arm upon the high caoba-chest as though she were unutterably fatigued. But her eyes, like Harvey's eyes, were fixed upon the bed.

Only the bed was illumined, bathed in the fading yellow glare that slanted down, retreating, it seemed, before the dusk. And on the pillow, caught and circled in that glow as by a halo, was Mary's face, pallid as ivory and thin as bone, the meagre shadow of a face that once had smiled and quickened to the joy of life. Now no smile touched the dry lips. Now in the sunken eyes there was no joy; and but a drain of life.

Suddenly Susan raised herself and spoke.

‘Is it time to light the candles?' Her voice was measured; yet strangely hollow and distraught.

Harvey did not answer. Detached by dreadful apprehension he heard her voice; but it conveyed no meaning. Fragments of thought alone pierced through the desperation of his mind. How long he had been seated thus! And yet how short! The measure of a second; the measure of a life. Sands falling – each grain a second, a tear, a life. They ran, these sifted sands, with such incredible rapidity; and then the glass was empty, the tear fallen, the life consumed. It was dreadful to desire so passionately to save a human life. His whole soul was molten with that desire. He had always regarded the emotion centred around the crisis of grave illness with hostility, suspicion, even with disgust. He had seen in the swing of the balance – one way or the other – merely the success or failure of scientific research. But he was changed – completely changed – his purpose burning now where it had been cold.

Mary! – he thought dully only of her name; but it conveyed minutely everything he felt.

She had been ill only three days; incredible the change these days had wrought. But from the first he had known the form of her fever to be acute, racing with malignant intensity towards that inevitable exigency when either she would live or die. He had painfully faced that fact, sustained by his expectation of an early crisis. But that crisis would not come. Remission only had come bringing its blight of transient false hope. And then the temperature had started up again, climbing, climbing towards that burning zenith where life must shrivel and drop back as ashes into the illimitable void. Climbing fever and falling pulse. He knew with perfect certainty what these must bring unless the crisis came. And all his soul was stifled by the anguish of the thought.

Again Susan spoke, spanning a deep abyss:

‘I must light the candles.'

She lit a candle and then another, brought them silently to the table. The flames rose straight, unwavering, like spears, causing the shadows to draw back and stand arrested, waiting like mourners banded and weeping by the candles of a catafalque. A big white moth came sailing inwards like a ship; a hum of circling insects rose, importunate as whispered prayers.

Watching that circling flight, she said:

‘I ought to shut the window,' and, after a pause: ‘The night air.'

He lifted his head and looked at her; the words fell into his consciousness like drops of water from an enormous height. As though returning from a long way off, he said slowly:

‘Let me do it for you.'

Rising, he went to the window, closed it. All his movements were sluggish – he was terribly tired.

He leaned his forehead against the pane. Darkness had swiftly fallen; the very trees so burdened by its weight they drooped quite slackly in the stifling air. Away to the east a rift of brassy light still lingered, like a streak of molten metal, predicative of storm. Somehow the glare was sinister, charging the hot night with fateful imminence. He turned to find her sad, calm eyes upon him.

‘There's going to be a storm,' she said. ‘You can feel it in the air.'

‘Yes – there is thunder – behind those mountains.' But no sooner were the words spoken than they were forgotten. He was staring at her, studying, apparently, her pale and tired face, her untidy hair, her rolled-up sleeves, the bandage on her thumb – which she had burned with acid disinfectant. ‘You are completely worn out,' he said at length.

Though his voice was perfectly impassive she flushed instantly and her mouth made a nervous grimace that was meant to be a smile.

‘I am not in the least worn out. Not a mite. It's you – you who have done so much. You couldn't have done more. I guess you're– you're killing yourself.'

His attention was not upon her words; looking at his wrist-watch, he said:

‘Go down and get some food. Then you must go to bed and rest.'

‘But I don't need rest,' she protested in a low, uneven tone. ‘It's you. Please, please, listen to me.'

‘Go down now,' he said considerately, as though he had not heard.

She made an involuntary gesture of dissent, then checked herself. She looked at him beseechingly.

‘Just one night off,' she whispered. ‘You simply cannot stand it other ways. You've worked that hard – you're dead beat. You must take tonight – yes – must take tonight off.'

He approached the head of the bed slowly; it was impossible for her to see his face; then he said:

‘You know there cannot be another night.'

Leaning forward, she tried to make him look at her; but he did not. His hand fell upon the pillow; he sat down again beside the bed.

She stood watching him, her expression oddly furtive. No use – no use! Her words had no power to move him. So, with a stifled sigh, she turned opened the door, limped wearily along the corridor and down the stairs.

In the refectory, supper was set; the candles lit; Corcoran and the marquesa already at table, waiting. The sight of the little prinked-out figure, fantastic as a marionette, caused her a queer unreasonable irritation. She dropped into a chair and began hopelessly to stir the coffee that Jimmy placed before her. For a long time no one spoke. Then Jimmy wiped his brow; solely for the sake of easing the oppressive silence, he remarked:

‘Faith, I wisht this storm would break. It's hangin' over us too long for my likin!'

The marquesa, primly upright in her regalia at the table, declared:

‘It will not come yet. Tomorrow, yes. But not tonight.'

‘It can't come too quick for me,' said Corcoran. ‘Sure, the waitin' is like sitting on a keg of gunpowther.'

Susan moved restlessly.

Overcome by her fatigue, her nerves were quivering on edge:

‘Don't let's moan about the thunder,' she jerked out. ‘ I guess things are bad enough without that. Reckon we ought to be praying, not complaining about the weather.'

The marquesa lifted her eyes gently towards the ceiling. She did not like Susan – whom she named Americana. Rodgers, the American, had filched the water of her irrigation stream and her enmity in consequence was national. As her own naïve phrase had it: The Americana had used her ill.

‘“A saint's words and a cat's claws,” she murmured, and smiled remotely. ‘ It is an old proverb I remember. But for all the proverbs and the prayers, assuredly the thunder will come.'

A hot colour ran into Susan's wan cheeks. She wanted to let herself go, to shout out a really abusive answer at this absurd old woman. But no, she didn't. She looked down at her plate; then she apologised:

‘I guess I am sorry for speaking that way. I didn't think. And I'm all to pieces. I guess that's – that's why. I'm sorry.'

‘It is not need now to be sorry, Americana,' said the marquesa nodding her head queerly. ‘When the thunder comes – the thunder that must not be spoken of – then there will be greater need for sorrow.'

Susan stared at her in apprehension, and she stammered:

‘What do you mean?'

The marquesa took a delicate sip of water:

‘Some things are not fitted to shape in words. It is best to meditate upon them – to leave them quite unspoken. I might speak much about this gathering beneath my roof. It has, perhaps, a meaning beyond our human understanding. We – who feel so much and know so little.'

‘Don't talk that way,' whispered Susan. ‘You make me queer. Oh, this whole house makes me scared.'

‘Strange things have happened in this house,' the marquesa answered calmly. ‘And stranger things may happen. Why should one deceive herself? Without doubt there is calamity so near. Truly I can perceive. Like the thunder, it is in the air. Is it for me? No, no. My time is not yet. And you? You are so strong, so much with spirit. There is one clear solution you will say. For the English senora – this calamity! Ay, ay, ay, you may judge according to your desire.' And she made a movement with her tiny, ringed hand, vague, yet somehow infinitely suggestive.

Susan drew back as though cold fingers had torn aside the veil of her inner consciousness. The room, overhung by the enormous flapping swan, enclosed by its brooding walls, taut with the sultry air, became suddenly terrifying, macabre. She shuddered. It gave to her, all at once, a fearful precognition of disaster which made her want to scream. She felt that Mary was going to die. Yes, she thought quite wildly, I knew it, yes, I knew it from the first.

Even Jimmy stirred uneasily. He threw out his chest.

‘It doesn't do to be talkin' like that,' he declared with an entirely factitious cheerfulness. ‘ You never can tell. I'm not denyin' but what she's powerful ill. But sure, while there's life, there's always hope.' He had proclaimed the platitude with the same resilient fortitude a dozen times before.

Again the marquesa smiled gently.

‘Speech is easy. And often it is misunderstood,' she murmured. ‘Now I am silent. Only remember that misfortune comes by the yard and goes by the inch.'

A short silence fell; then Jimmy suddenly remarked:

‘Misfortune or not, there's one thing I can't for the life of me get hold of. And faith, it makes me none too easy in me mind. Why, will ye tell me, have we heard no more of that Cyarr fella? He went out of this room with lightnin' in his eye, swearin' he'd burn up the cable wires. What he wasn't goin' to do wouldn't bear the tellin'. And here we are with never the sign of a step from anny of them.'

‘What step could they take?' answered Susan sharply; she paused, added in a lower voice: ‘It is impossible to move her until – until the crisis comes. And only her husband has authority for that.'

He rubbed his chin, sure indication of his speculation, and persisted.

‘For all that, something's behind it I'll be bound. And I'm tellin' ye, I'm not easy in me mind about the endin' of it, for Harvey.'

‘What do you mean?' she interposed with a nervous quiver of her cheek. ‘No one could have managed this case better than – than he.' She could not speak his name; but, leaning forward, she went on hurriedly, defensively: ‘He has been marvellous. Don't I know that. Haven't I seen it. And I'll swear to it as well. I'll swear that no one on earth could have done more to save her.'

‘And if she doesn't be saved, poor thing,' said Jimmy in a low voice, ‘how with one thing and another is that goin' to affect Harvey?'

His question laid bare the very heart of that fear which was worrying her to death. If Mary Fielding died? – and she was going to die! – how would Harvey endure the blame? They would blame him – she knew it – this awful catastrophe following so swiftly upon the other! The responsibility entirely was his – he had made it so deliberately – oh, the thought was dreadful, it terrified her!

She tried to eat the fruit that lay upon her plate. But she couldn't swallow. Torn again by that emotion in her breast, she whispered to herself: ‘Oh, help us all, dear God. Please help us now.'

Suddenly, in her unpremeditated manner, the marquesa rose from her chair. Fastidiously, she laved her fingers and her lips with water. Then she crossed herself, murmured a grace of thanksgiving, signed herself again. Finally, she declared:

‘She eats quickly who eats little. And it is time now for Isabel de Luego to retire. Si, si – she must go now to her room.' She retreated slowly, with extended elbows and floating mantilla; but at the door she paused, levelled across the ghostly room that elusive, almost sightless stare.

‘Al gran arroyo pasar postrero' she said very distinctly; and then: ‘Adios.'

It was her valediction.

Susan threw a scared look at Corcoran.

‘What did she mean?' she whispered.

He got up, brushing the crumbs from his vest.

‘Ah, nothin' at all,' he mumbled. ‘I don't rightly understand the lingo.'

She gripped his arm and persisted:

‘What did she say?'

‘A kind of queer thing ye may be sure,' he answered awkwardly. ‘Somethin' about the great stream, and bein' the last to think of crossin' it. But don't be mindin' what she says. She's a powerful decent little cratur when you know her. Faith, she's give me the chance of a lifetime annyway.' He took snuff, and hung about the table for a moment. Then, with a covert glance at her, he moved to the door. ‘I'll be goin' into the kitchen now. I've a job of work that wants lookin' afther before mornin'.'