Chapter XII: Connie’s Illness

It was a heavy, dreamless sleep which came to Connie that night, and when she woke at a late hour the next morning the storm was over, the sun was shining into the room, while Kenneth stood by her, counting her pulse. She tried to lift her head, but it fell back upon the pillow, as, with an effort to smile, she asked, “Am I going to be ill?”

“Not going to be. You are; but we will soon have you well,” Kenneth replied, holding her hot hand a moment.

“Well, I’m glad I’m here. So glad!” Connie said, closing her eyes and falling asleep again, while Kenneth watched her anxiously.

It was past the middle of March when Connie came in the storm, and the early daffodils and crocuses were in bloom when she at last sat up and looked around her at a world which seemed so new. For weeks she had lain between life and death, stricken with fever which scorched her blood and stained her face a purple tint, so high it ran at times. From Rocky Point, Dr. Catherin came in consultation, and a specialist from Albany, while Kenneth kept his tireless watch at her side. At first she talked constantly,—sometimes of Count Costello and the dreary house in Genoa, and again of something Kenneth could not understand, except that there was a _he_ who must at some time have been closely mixed up in Connie’s life. She never spoke his name, and Kenneth would not ask it, or question her, as she babbled on of the Jungfrau and the mountains and the bowlder by the brook and the moonlight nights among the Alps, in all of which he played a prominent part. Once he did say to her, “Where is he now?” and she answered, “Gone, gone.”

In the very first of her illness she had kept repeating, “Glad, so glad,” and they knew her gladness was because she was there. Then she forgot it, and now she took up the word “Gone,” and rang change after change upon it, till Kenneth wanted to stop his ears to shut out the sound. After a little her mood changed, and she talked of the time she came to the farmhouse a little girl and played with the cats and Chance.

“Where are they?” she asked, with something like consciousness, and Kenneth told her that only six cats now ate in the wooden trough, and that Chance died long ago and was buried in the inclosure where they had their Christmas tree.

“Oh, yes, the tree!” she exclaimed, going over it with every detail, calling her own name and Chance’s and Harry’s, and finally Kenneth, who had nothing but herself.

“The best gift of all,” Kenneth said, putting his cool hand on her hot forehead.

For a moment Connie looked at him with her great bright eyes, in which the tears slowly gathered.

“Brush them away,” she said. “I haven’t the strength.”

He brushed them away, stooping so close to her that he took her tainted breath, hot and fetid, but felt no fear. At last she began to talk again, and this time of the sled and the rides she had upon it, and of the prayers Kenneth had heard and the “Stir-up Collect” that he did not know.

“Do you know it now?” she asked, rather sharply.

Kenneth nodded, and she continued:

“Say it.”

He said it, and she went on:

“Do you know ‘I believe’?”

He nodded again, and to her command, “Say it,” he repeated the Creed, which she tried to say with him, but the words died on her lips.

“You are a good boy,” she said in a whisper, “and I am tired. Let us say, ‘Now I lay me,’ and then I’ll go to sleep.”

He said it with her, her voice growing weaker as she added, very slowly, the old, familiar “God bless Auntie and Connie and make her a good girl, and bless Kenneth and make him a good boy. Amen!”

She raised her hand as if in benediction; then it fell helplessly at her side, her eyes closed, and she seemed to be asleep. For days she lay in this state, neither speaking nor moving, while the battle between life and death went on, and in Kenneth’s heart hope died out as he watched her day and night, never leaving her except for the rest and food he must take, or give out. Many inquiries were made for her, and prayers were said in the church on the Corners, at St. Jude’s in Rocky Point and at the churches in Millville, while Kenneth prayed unceasingly that she might be given back to him, even though the _he_ of whom she had raved should come to claim her.

One morning Dr. Catherin came and looked at her as she lay white as a corpse and as motionless. “I think the end is near,” he said, taking his stand on one side of the bed, while Kenneth was on the other, his eyes fixed on the face where the death shadows were gathering. Only a faint fluttering of the heart told that she breathed, and this might stop at any moment. And while they sat watching here there came to the door a middle-aged woman, whose face would command attention at once, it was so calm and sweet and kind. Addressing herself to Mrs. Stannard, she said:

“How is she? I was passing, and stopped to inquire.”

“Dying,” was Mrs. Stannard’s reply, while over the stranger’s face there came an expression betokening some inward conflict.

“Dying,” she repeated. “Have the doctors given her up?”

“Yes; they can do no more for her,” was the tearful answer, while the woman stood a moment, wrapt in thought or prayer. Then she said: “May I see the doctor?”

“Which one? Two are with her,” Mrs. Stannard said, and the woman replied:

“Both, if you please.”

They came,—Dr. Catherin and Kenneth,—the former looking curiously at the woman, who, very respectfully, and with no cringing in her manner, said to them: “I hear you have done all you can for the young lady,—that you have given her up. Is that so?”

“Yes, madam,” Kenneth answered, wondering who this stranger was intruding thus upon them, but still attracted by the sweetness of her face.

“Then, may I try?” she said. “It is not often that we offer our services, but in this case I feel that I must. May I see her? I am Mrs. Foster, from Boston.”

The deacon had been a silent looker-on up to this point; when he started up, every hair on his head bristling with wrath. He knew now who the woman was. He had heard of her visiting at a neighbor’s, and that she belonged to a sect which he esteemed little better than heathen.

“Ken,” he exclaimed, “Ken, listen to me!” but before Kenneth could reply, Dr. Catherin, who guessed who the woman was, and while not believing in her at all was less prejudiced than the deacon, said in reply to Kenneth’s questioning look at him: “Let her go up. She can do no harm. She is a Scientist.”

“Oh-h!” and Kenneth shuddered. If all medicine had failed, what could she do? Nothing. And still her face pleaded with him until he said, “Come with me,” while his father, completely unstrung, exclaimed: “Ken, Ken, don’t you know it is all a delusion,—a device of the devil,—and right here in my house!”

But Kenneth was half way up the stairs, and did not hear the distracted man, who, not willing to stay where such things were going on, seized his hat, and going out to the steps of the old church, sat there with the feeling that the sanctity of the place would in a measure atone for the enormity of the wickedness being practiced under his roof. And while he sat there his clergyman, the Rev. Mr. Stone, came up from the village on a calling tour. Seeing the deacon, he alighted from his buggy and came and sat down by him, asking how Miss Elliott was.

“Dying,” the deacon replied. “Ken says so, and Dr. Catherin says so; and I guess they know, but,—oh,—don’t blame me who has been a deacon in good and regular standing in the orthodox church for thirty years. ’Tain’t my doings. They’ve a limb of Satan in there to see what she can do!”

“Wha-at?” Mr. Stone asked, thinking the deacon crazy. “What do you mean? Who is in there?”

“A Science woman! You’ve heard of ’em,” the deacon replied, expecting an explosion from his minister, but none came.

Mr. Stone was the most charitable of men, with broad views, which could take in more than the tenets of his own church.

“I’ve heard of them, yes,” he said, “and believe them to be good Christian people,—fanatical and cranky, perhaps,—but conscientious, and living what they profess.”

The deacon looked aghast at this high-handed heresy in his minister, but just then Mrs. Foster was seen leaving the farmhouse, and he only said: “There she is. Let’s go and see if Connie is up and dressed and combin’ her hair, as they pretend they can do.”

They found Mrs. Stannard and Dr. Catherin and Kenneth in the sitting-room, speaking together in low tones.

“How is Connie?” the deacon asked, and Kenneth replied:

“No change.”

“I told you so when you let her in. What did she do?” was the deacon’s next remark, to which no one answered till he repeated it to his wife. “What did she do?”

“For the land’s sake, I don’t know. I wasn’t in there. Nobody was there but Kenneth, and he was just outside the door. Ask him,” Mrs. Stannard said.

Kenneth, when appealed to as to what Mrs. Foster did during the twenty minutes she was in the sick room, said: “Nothing that I saw, but I think she prayed. I know I did.”

“And so did I,” “and I,” came from Mrs. Stannard and Dr. Catherin, while the clergyman responded: “We know that the prayers of the righteous availeth much, so let us hope for the best.”

“No, sir,” the deacon chimed in; “if Connie lives, which she won’t,—but if she does, it won’t be that woman sittin’ there twenty minutes with her hand over her eyes. George of Uxbridge! No! It’ll be them drops Ken gave her at the last.”

“Which she didn’t swallow,” Dr. Catherin suggested, while the deacon gave him a look the meaning of which was, “_et tu, Brute?_”

He was a good deal excited for a man of his mild temper, and fancying his family had all gone over to the enemy, he went again to the steps of the church and sat down, to wonder if the world was turning upside down. If so, he should stick to the old side through thick and thin, and never give in to that woman. When he was somewhat cooled off he returned to the house, and going upstairs, sat down near the door of the room where Connie still lay in a stupor so near resembling death that once Kenneth whispered, “She is dead,” knowing by the bitter pang of pain in his heart that in spite of his disbelief in the Scientist, he had taken hope from the assuring words, “She will live,” as she left him. Half an hour went by, seeming to Kenneth like an age, and then Dr. Catherin, who was watching with him, put his hand under Connie’s hair, and withdrawing it quickly, exclaimed:

“She is beginning to perspire; the crisis is past; she will live!”

“Thank God!” came faintly from Kenneth, while his father, who was still sitting at the head of the stairs and heard the doctor, came into the room and said:

“Yes, thank God, but not that woman; you needn’t tell me. It don’t stand to reason. Twenty minutes, and did nothing! The fever had reached the top and had to turn!”

The fever certainly had reached the top and turned, and so rapid was Connie’s improvement that in a few days she was sitting up for a short time and looking upon the daffodils and crocuses and the Morris house across the road, where a great many men were at work.

“What are they doing?” she asked Mrs. Stannard, who replied:

“Building the house over, as you may say. It belongs to my nephew Harry, you know.”

Connie nodded, and Mrs. Stannard continued: “He has been abroad a long time. I wonder you never met him. He was married in London, a year ago last January, to a Miss Haynes, from Kentucky.”

“Oh, yes,” and Connie roused to something like interest. “Some one sent me a paper. I never knew who it was. And are they coming here to live?”

“Bimeby, when the house is ready,” Mrs. Stannard replied. “Hal had a drawing made of what he wanted done and sent it to Mr. Green, the head carpenter in Millville, and he is seeing to it with a raft of men who dawdle half the time. I’ve watched ’em. Hal ought to be here to see it.”

“And isn’t he here?” Connie asked, by way of saying something rather than because she was greatly interested.

“No; he’s in Europe still, ordering furniture and carpets,” Mrs. Stannard said. “A pretty sum he’ll have to pay, and his wife’s father failed not long ago. Isn’t worth a cent, I hear. I am sure Hal depended a great deal on his wife’s money, and she hasn’t any.”

“When are they coming?” Connie asked, and Mrs. Stannard replied:

“Not till June or July, when everything is done. Harry hates a muss; he wants it all fair sailing. That’s the Morris of him. But he is a handsome fellow. I think you will like him.”

To this Connie did not answer. She was getting tired, and said she would lie down and rest a while; then get up again and surprise Kenneth when he came home.