Chapter XXVII: "high Failure."

"We are like soldiers in a vast, widely-extended battlefield (wrapped in obscurity) of which we know not the phases, of which we seem utterly powerless to control the issues; but we are responsible for our own part--whatever goes on elsewhere, let us not fail in that. The changes of the world, which men think they are bringing about, are in the hands of God. With Him, when we have done our duty, let us leave them."--DEAN CHURCH.

Clare was much concerned when she heard the bad news which Mr. Britton and Harry brought home that evening.

"You didn't wait to hear the doctor's verdict?" she asked, when the bare outline of the story had been given her.

"No, it was so late, and I thought I should only have been in the way; but I fear there's not the least doubt the poor fellow is in for pleurisy."

"It was awful to see him towards the end," said Harry. "Leaning up against the woodwork when he had to be on the stage with nothing actually to sing or do, and every now and then, when he was singing, suddenly folding his arms--so--as if the pain was almost unbearable."

"What do you think, Miss Claremont--if we had one of the St. John's nurses down, could we manage to look after him all right here?" said Mr. Britton.

Clare was delighted at the proposal, for she had always been fond of Carlo. She did not understand all Mr. Britton's reasons for taking an interest in the young Italian, but his kindness and hospitality did not at all surprise her, because he was a man who was forever going out of his way to help other people, and Kate, who was housekeeper, used sometimes to protest that really Merlebank might as well call itself what it was in fact--a sanatorium for his friends and acquaintances.

"There is no doubt he must be moved from his present quarters," said Mr. Britton. "I never saw such a room,--the little child sleeping in a portmanteau, a miserable truckle-bed, a sloping skylight through which you could see the stars--such a room as no servant of mine should sleep in."

So the plans for Carlo's reception at Merlebank were discussed, and the next morning Mr. Britton drove in to the Royal Hotel to see what sort of a night the Italian had passed. At the entrance he encountered the doctor.

"How is your patient to-day, Kavanagh?" he asked.

"Very bad, poor fellow,--must be moved at once to the hospital."

"Nonsense, he is a friend of mine; I want him brought to Merlebank. You'll give leave for that, I hope?"

"Oh, certainly, if you really want to have him, but I must warn you that he is likely to be laid up for some time,--acute pleurisy, and we shall do well if we ward off complications."

"Poor fellow! I thought he was in for it last night. He is an old family friend of ours, and I shall be particularly glad to help him if I can. How about a nurse? Shall I telegraph for one?"

"I can see to that, if you like," said the doctor. "His sister seems a most empty-headed creature, and the sooner he is away from her the better."

Mr. Britton was just wondering whether he had better ask to see Sardoni, when he caught sight of Gigi strolling listlessly down the passage.

"How is your uncle, little man?" he asked. "Can I see him?"

"He's ill," said Gigi, mournfully, and without further remark he slipped his little brown hand into Mr. Britton's, and led the way to No. 62. The door was open, and a babel of Italian could be heard--four people all talking at once.

Mr. Britton half hesitated, but the child led him on. The next moment a curious scene met his gaze. In the dismal little attic, which by daylight looked even more forlorn and comfortless, a stormy discussion was being carried on. The Impresario, who was evidently in the worst of tempers, held in his hand an open telegram; Gomez, with a sarcastic smile on his usually grave face, stood playing the part of general irritant _con amore_; Madame Merlino and Sardoni seemed to be having a battle-royal; and the sick man lay in the midst of the strife of tongues evidently in great pain, but listening with strained anxiety to all that passed. Mr. Britton heard an impatient, "Can't you see how bad this is for him?" from Sardoni, and disconnected remarks about "Comerio's coming," which gave him the clue to the matter which was being discussed.

He waited at the door, for Donati was far too much absorbed in what was going on to notice him, and indeed had to concentrate all his faculties on the effort to meet this crisis. That which he had feared had come to pass: Comerio had telegraphed to offer his services, and all through the weary night Carlo had been trying to solve the difficult problem whether, should this happen, it was his duty to explain all to Merlino or not. Superficial people are fond of saying that the right is always clear. Carlo did not find it so. It was only after hours of mental struggle and suffering that he at length arrived at the conclusion that, all things considered, he was not justified in arousing Merlino's suspicion. He went so far, however, as to propose another alternative.

"Look," he said, speaking with difficulty, "Paul Cremer's English Opera Company might very possibly have a spare baritone. Telegraph and see, and I will defray the expenses of any one they can send."

He broke off to cough--the effort had cost him hideous pain, and Mr. Britton could see that great drops of perspiration stood on his brow.

"_Accidente_! It only shows how little you know of such things," said Merlino, angrily. "We are secure of Comerio, and had far better have him than some stranger. I should have thought you were above such petty jealousy as that, Donati."

"Then will you reply to the telegram?" asked Gomez.

"I suppose I must," said Merlino, in his grumbling way. "It's a confounded nuisance."

And with muttered imprecations he left the room, evidently regarding Carlo's illness as a wilful injury and a personal insult.

Gomez having gained his object, followed the Impresario, and Mr. Britton drew near to the bed, and spoke to Sardoni, but Carlo lay with closed eyes, and took no notice of what was passing until he heard Nita get up from her chair beside him, and move towards the door. Then he started up with sudden energy.

"Nita," he exclaimed, "do not go yet--I want to speak to you!"

She turned back reluctantly, and at the same moment he became aware of Mr. Britton's presence.

"How kind of you to come!" he said. "Will you excuse me just for a minute?--I want to speak to my sister--there is not much time left."

"We will wait in the next room," said Sardoni, "if Madame Merlino will tell us when she leaves you."

Nita assented, and, still reluctantly, sat down again beside the bed. When they were alone, he turned towards her.

"I had hoped to tide over this time in England," he said, striving with all his might not to let the physical pain overmaster him. "It is hard to feel that, after all, I have perhaps only made your danger greater. You must forgive me for failing you like this, Nita!"

"Don't distress yourself--I know of no danger!" she replied, crushingly, and with an expressive motion of her small, shapely head. There had been a time when she had told him a very different story, but he bore the set-down patiently and caught at the ray of hope.

"That is, indeed, true? Then God be thanked! I can go content!"

She laughed--the most heartless little laugh conceivable.

"Perhaps we do not mean precisely the same thing by the word 'danger.' There is no danger that my husband will ill-treat me, because one who loves me better will be here as my protector."

"Nita!" he groaned.

"Now, listen to common-sense!" she said, with angry gesticulation. "Merlino and I are not happy together: Comerio and his wife are not happy together. Why are four people to live in misery because of a conventional law?"

"Because they have vowed to be true to each other through everything,--because the only hope of their leading pure, noble lives is destroyed when they shirk their duty, and give up trying to love each other,--because it is not a conventional law, but God's command!"

She laughed again.

"Bravo!" she exclaimed. "My confessor himself could not have read me a more correct little homily. As far as the marriage laws are concerned, _mio caro_, you are quite curiously orthodox. As a matter of fact, though, I always find these little homilies are propounded by the unmarried. Strange, isn't it?"

"You'll break my heart if you talk like that!" he exclaimed.

"Nonsense! Hearts don't break so easily, I assure you, You will go back to Francesca Britton and be happy; Comerio and I, too, shall be happy; while as for Merlino, he will merely lose a valuable soprano and baritone whom he never deserved."

She had rattled on, paying no attention whatever to his suffering. He was now so much exhausted that it was physically impossible for him to speak more than two words.

"Our mother!" he faltered.

"Is in Paradise, and will be ready to pray for me when I am in purgatory!"

His next words were hardly audible.

"_Il Cristo!_" he gasped.

"My confessor does not allow me to talk of religion with heretics," she replied, triumphantly.

He turned away, and lay so absolutely still that Nita became frightened; however, it was an excellent opportunity to escape, and she availed herself of it, glancing in for a moment at the next room where Sardoni and Mr. Britton had waited.

"He has done with me now," she said cheerfully, though all the time her conscience was pricking her.

Mr. Britton had seldom seen so pretty a woman for whom it was so difficult to get up any sort of regard. Without knowing why, he heartily disliked Nita.

"She does not seem particularly anxious about her brother," he remarked.

Sardoni gnashed his teeth.

"He has given up everything to help her, and she--little vixen--won't do the slightest thing to please him. Let us come back to him."

Mr. Britton was horrified to see the change that had come over Carlo. It was not merely that the bodily pain seemed to have increased so much, but that he was in such terrible distress. Sardoni, however, seemed to understand all, and Mr. Britton walked to the window and left the two friends together, though he could not avoid hearing, every now and then, a sentence or two.

"Failed--hopelessly!" were the only words that escaped Carlo, and Sardoni seemed to be cheering him, and denying that all was lost, promising his help, talking of letters, and speaking hopefully of the future. Some mention of the hospital brought Mr. Britton to the bedside.

"The doctor says you may be nursed at my house," he said, kindly. "I couldn't think of allowing you to go to the hospital,--Miss Claremont is longing to have you at Merlebank." And then, to silence the Italian's thanks, and doubts, and evident wavering, he bent down and whispered a few words in his ear: "For Francesca's sake you must not refuse me."

They were interrupted by a suppressed sobbing from the other side of the bed, and found that Gigi was sitting in a disconsolate little heap on the floor, crying as though his heart would break.

"Put him up here, Jack, by me," said Carlo. "What is it, Gigi? are you hurt?"

"Oh, don't go away from me!" sobbed the child. "Don't leave me so all alone."

"Let him come to Merlebank, too," said Mr. Britton, who was apt to make kind-hearted offers without at all consulting Kate or the household arrangements.

"You are very good, but he ought to be with his mother," said Carlo, after a minute's thought. It cost him much to send away the little fellow, but he knew that Anita had really begun to care for him, and hoped that the child might prove her greatest safeguard. Mr. Britton guessed as much, but of course there could be no explanation to Gigi himself to whom the refusal must have seemed barbarous. He sobbed pitifully.

"Look, _mio caro_, I love you dearly, and would like you to have this time in the country," said Carlo, drawing the child close to him; "but in some ways it is better not. Say, do you, too, love me a little bit?"

"Yes, yes," sobbed Gigi, clinging to him.

"Then, will you stay here to please me, and help the mother, and run errands for them all when you can, and write me long letters----" He broke off, unable to say another word.

"_Carino!_" said the child with a depth of love and tenderness in his tone. Then, as Sardoni told him how ill Carlo was, "I will be good--good," and choking back his tears he slid down from the bed and sat like a sorrowful little statue on the edge of his portmanteau.

Mr. Britton, anxious that no more time should be lost, hurried to his office to telephone to Merlebank for the landau, and in an hour's time he was back again to help in all the arrangements.

The patient seemed a little easier, both in mind and body, though apparently no one but Sardoni had seen him, and there was no change as to his substitute.

At the last moment Madame Merlino came to say good-bye to him, expressing very prettily her thanks to Mr. Britton for saving her brother from the hospital; but she seemed particularly anxious not to be left alone with the invalid, and apparently no words passed between them. When they parted, however, he drew her face down to his and gave her a lingering kiss, and Mr. Britton noticed that as she raised her head her eyes were full of tears. What was the meaning of it all, he wondered? Had she, after all, a heart? Did Carlo's silence appeal to her when his words had failed? or was it that his manner had somehow conveyed a confidence and trust in her higher nature which had wakened it from long sleep?

There was not much time for reflection, for just then the doctor arrived to superintend the removal of the patient, and before long Mr. Britton had taken leave of the various members of Merlino's troupe, who had become known to him during this little episode, and was driving home with his new guest.

People seem to have a notion that to be ill means to be more or less free from temptation; that with physical weakness comes spiritual strength; and that if the sick are in some ways to be pitied, they are in other respects to be very much envied. As a matter of fact, however, this idea is cruelly false. No healthy-minded, active man ever found it easy to be laid aside--ever submitted without a fierce struggle to the humiliation of dependence and bodily weakness. Far from necessarily becoming saints during illness, the bravest and best of men often find it as much as they can do to be even decently patient, and know only too well the mental misery of the time--

"When the sensuous frame
Is rack'd with pangs that conquer trust."

The faith which had come to Carlo's help when he parted with Anita was not proof against the severe physical strain of the removal to Merlebank; his mind seemed incapable of hope, capable only of dwelling on the one horrible fear that Comerio's evil influence would prevail. Sleepless nights, and wearing anxiety, and severe bodily pain had made it almost impossible for him to see things in due proportion, and his artistic power of calling up before him graphic pictures of any subject that arrested his attention, became a torture almost unendurable.

The doctor and kind-hearted Mr. Britton had no idea of what was passing in the sick man's mind as they drove along the road between Ashborough and Merlebank, and when once he opened his eyes for a minute and they could not help seeing the look of grievous distress in them, they only thought of the bodily suffering, and said to him reassuringly, "It will soon be over." He could have smiled at the incongruity of the words had he not been down in the black depths where smiles can by no means come.

The carriage rumbled along with a dull, hollow, monotonous sound, and presently drew up at the great door at Merlebank; he caught a vision of Clare standing in the porch with two or three servants, but it was far less distinct than the mental picture from which he could not escape. Then the doctor half smothered him with wraps, and since to breathe was agony, he found himself resenting almost childishly the infliction of great shawls, which necessitated two breaths where one might have sufficed. Was he losing his self-control, he wondered? It was clearly impossible for him to govern his thoughts,--was it also impossible to regulate his feelings? He prayed in a sort of blind, wretched despair; but in that state of blank depression nothing in heaven or earth seemed real to him but his own failure and that indelible mind-picture of Nita and Comerio. Dimly he felt his misery increased by the beauty and luxury of the room to which he was borne, and even by the kindness of his attendants. What did he in his misery want with outer comfort? "I have miserably failed," he thought to himself; "and now, I suppose, am going to die. I wish they had let me die in the hotel room! I wish they would let me alone!"

To turn from this haunting picture was now an effort to which he was wholly unequal; it exercised a deadly fascination over him, and when Clare spoke to him he grudged the interruption. Every one seemed intent on relieving his physical pain; and it was not that which absorbed him: it was the far worse mental torture caused in great measure by the bodily suffering,--the torture of the conviction that all his efforts had been vain, and that evil would triumph. Without one ray of comfort he tossed through that weary day and night; sleep was out of the question, he became less and less capable of thinking rationally, and the doctor, on visiting him the next morning, looked very grave. Clare and Mr. Britton waited anxiously for his verdict.

"There is evidently something weighing on his mind," said Mr. Kavanagh, as he walked downstairs. "The local symptoms are subsiding, but I fear he is in a critical state. These southern temperaments are always hard to deal with--it is touch and go with them. Keep him as quiet as possible, and I will look in again this evening."

Clare felt sad at heart as she kept watch while the nurse rested after her night's work; she could guess pretty accurately what it was that was weighing upon Carlo's mind, but how to comfort him she did not know. He lay quite still with closed eyes, his lips just parted that he might breathe with less effort; but the hand which lay outside the bed-clothes was tightly clenched, and the face bore an expression of silent misery, which was almost more than Clare could endure.

"Is the pain still so bad?" she asked at length.

He opened his eyes; they were so hopeless, so full of dumb distress, that it seemed to her they must be the eyes of some other man. She could not have believed that Carlo could ever have gone down to such depths of wretchedness.

"Much better, thank you," he answered, just above his breath: and Clare was thankful that his eyelids fell once more, for she could not keep back her tears. And so the hours passed on, and she knew that she was close to a man who was passing through the worst suffering that can be borne, and yet felt as powerless to reach him as if he had been a thousand miles away. At last, early in the afternoon, he seemed to make an effort to break the rigid quiet in which he had so long lain. She stood up to arrange his pillows afresh, and he took her hand in his and held it fast in a fevered grasp.

"If I could only sleep, Clare! if I could only sleep!" he exclaimed. They were the first words he had voluntarily spoken, and she took them as a good sign; clearly he began to see that he must do all that he could to free himself from absorption in this one painful idea; even in his illness the duty of self-mastery lingered vaguely with him, spite of his failing powers.

"There is one sovereign remedy for sleeplessness," said Clare. "Let us see whether it will have any effect on you;" and taking a Bible from the shelf she began to read in a low, soft, slightly monotonous voice from the Book of Job. Whether it was the musical rhythm of the words, or the continuous sound, or the graphic picture set forth in that grand old poem, it would be hard to say; but for some reason the mental picture of Anita and Comerio gradually faded, the perception of his own pain passed away, he seemed to be living quite out of the nineteenth century--to be Job and not himself,--though it was, in fact, the personal perception of the truth of the poem which made its effect on him so powerful.

"'For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me,'" read Clare; "'and that which I was afraid of is come unto me. I was not in safety, neither had I rest, neither was I quiet, yet trouble came.'"

When Eliphaz the Temanite began to argue, Carlo felt himself sliding away into blissful drowsiness, and soon Clare perceived that the old charm had worked well and that he was sound asleep. He slept for some hours; when he opened his eyes the level rays of the setting sun were streaming through a window which was hidden from him by the bed-curtains, and casting a vivid light on a picture just opposite to him. Now Carlo was one of those who respond more easily to that which appeals to the artistic side of them than to that which appeals to the intellect. The deepest philosophical treatise, the most eloquent sermon, could not possibly have conveyed to him all that was conveyed by that well-known picture of the thorn-crowned Shepherd bearing through the wilderness the sheep that had gone astray. "FINCHÈ _l' abbia trovata!_" urged a voice in his heart: "UNTIL he find it!" It seemed to him that he had never till that minute realized the eternal constancy of the Good Shepherd, never taken in the truth that while men strive, and fail, and faint by the way, the work they have tried to do does not fail, but is eternally carried on in ways unknown to them. He saw that for the present all he could do was to suffer patiently; but the picture of Nita and Comerio, though it did its best to rise again in his mind, had lost its power of torture; he could always efface it almost instantly with this other picture of the tireless and persistent Shepherd, who in the end must inevitably win back His own, spite of false hirelings, and ravening wolves, and horrors of the wilderness. One glance into his eyes showed Clare that he was himself again, and the doctor, too, on his second visit, was surprised and pleased to find what a favorable turn his patient had taken. The alarming prostration had passed: that terrible depression which seems incapable of wishing to live or of making any effort to recover had given place to a strong desire for health. Though speaking was still an effort to him he asked two or three eager questions.

"Shall I get better, do you think?"

"Oh, there is not a doubt of it, if you go on as well as you have begun," said the doctor.

"Will my voice be injured?"

"There is no reason that it should not be as good as ever when you recover your strength."

"How soon could I possibly be fit to sing in public again?"

The doctor liked his spirit, and answered with a smile, "This day nine weeks, if you have no relapse. But don't excite yourself about it, and don't talk too much. What you want now is perfect rest of mind and body."

"One word more," broke in Carlo. "Is there anything I can do to get well sooner?"

"You can help me very materially by obedience to orders, and by keeping yourself quiet. All anxiety and excitement will retard your recovery. This attack of pleurisy is the best thing that could have happened to you, for you are altogether overworked and overstrained, and you must have rest. In these hurrying days people seem to have forgotten how to rest, that's the worst of it. If you'll only go on as you have begun this afternoon though, I shall be quite satisfied with you."

As Sardoni had once remarked, however, Carlo was in some respects "old-fashioned," and the doctor found that he had not forgotten even in his overstrained, nineteenth-century life the secret of rest; that he was fast learning what Thomas à Kempis deemed the work of a perfect man, "To pass through many cares, as it were without care; not with the indifference of a sluggard, but with that privilege of a mind at liberty."