That night Christopher again spoke to Ridgeley. "Anne's in a bad way." He told of the walk to the top of the hill.
Ridgeley listened this time, and the next day he took Anne down into his office, and did things to her. "But I don't see why you are doing all this," she complained, as he stuck queer instruments in his ears, and made her draw long breaths while he listened.
"Christopher says you get tired when you walk."
"Well, I do. But there's nothing really the matter, is there?"
There was a great deal the matter, but there was no hint of it in his manner. If she had not been his wife, he would probably have told her the truth--that she had a few months, perhaps a few years ahead of her. He was apt to be frank with his patients. But he was not frank with Anne. He had intended to tell Christopher at once. But Christopher was away for a week.
In the week that he was separated from her, Christopher learned that he loved Anne; that he had been in love with her from the moment that she had stood among the birches--like one of them in her white slenderness--and had talked to him of guardian angels;--"_Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John_!"
He did not believe in saints, nor in the angels whose wings seemed to enfold Anne, but he believed in beauty--and Anne's seemed lighted from within, like an alabaster lamp.
Yet she was very human--and the girl in her and the boy in him had met in the weeks that he had spent with her. They had found a lot of things to do--they had fished in shallow brown streams, they had ridden through miles of lovely country. They had gone forth in search of adventure, and they had found it; in cherries on a tree by the road, and he had climbed the tree and had dropped them down to her, and she had hung them over her ears--He had milked a cow in a pasture as they passed, and they had drunk it with their sandwiches, and had tied up a bill in Anne's fine handkerchief and had knotted it to the halter of the gentle, golden-eared Guernsey.
But they had found more than adventure--they had found romance--shining upon them everywhere. "If I were a gipsy to follow the road, and she could follow it with me," Christopher meditated as he sat in the train on his way back to Anne.
But there was Anne's husband, and Christopher's friend--and more than all there were all the specters of modern life--all the hideous wheels which must turn if Anne were ever to be his--treachery to Ridgeley--the divorce court--and then, himself and Anne, living the aftermath, of it all, facing, perhaps, disillusion--
"Oh, not _that_," Christopher told himself, "she'd never grow less--never anything less than she is--if she could once--care--"
For he did not know whether Anne cared or not. He might guess as he pleased--but there had not been a word between them.
Once more the thought flashed, "If I were a gipsy to follow the road--"
As his train sped through the countryside, he became aware of flaming bill-boards--a circus was showing in the towns--the fences fairly blazed with golden chariots, wild beasts, cheap gods and goddesses, clowns in frilled collars and peaked hats. He remembered a glorious day that he had spent as a boy!
"I'll take Anne," was his sudden decision.
He laughed to himself, and spent the rest of the way in seeing her at it. They would drink pink lemonade, and there would be pop-corn balls--the entrancing smell of sawdust--the beat of the band. He hoped there would be a tom-tom, and some of the dark people from the Far East.
He reached his destination at seven o'clock. Dunbar met him at the station. Anne sat with her husband, and Jeanette was in the back seat. Christopher had, therefore, a side view of Anne as she turned a little that she might talk to him. The glint of her bright hair under her gray sports hat, the light of welcome in her eyes--!
"I am going to take you to the circus to-morrow. Ridgeley, you'll go too?"
Dunbar shook his head. "I've got to get back to town in the morning. And I'm not sure that the excitement will be good for Anne."
"Why not?" quickly. "Aren't you well, Anne?"
She shrugged her shoulders. "Ridgeley seems to think I'm not. But the circus can't hurt me."
Nothing more was said about it. Christopher decided to ask Ridgeley later. But the opportunity did not come until Anne had gone up-stairs, and Dunbar and Christopher were smoking a final cigar on the porch.
"What's the matter with her?" Christopher asked.
Dunbar told him, "She can't get well."
III
Anne, getting ready for bed, on the evening of Christopher's arrival, felt unaccountably tired. His presence had been, perhaps, a bit over-stimulating. It was good to have him back. She scarcely dared admit to herself how good. After dinner she and Ridgeley and Christopher had walked down to the grove of birches. There had been a new moon, and she and Ridgeley had sat on the stone bench with Christopher at their feet. She had leaned her head against her husband's shoulder, and he had put his arm about her in the dark and had drawn her to him. He was rarely demonstrative, and his tenderness had to-night for some reason hurt her. She had learned to do without it.
She had talked very little, but Christopher had talked a great deal. She had been content to listen. He really told such wonderful things--he gave her to-night the full story of her silver beads, and how they had been filched from an ancient temple--and he had bought them from the thief. "Until I saw you wear them, I always had a feeling that they ought to go back to the temple--to the god who had perhaps worn them for a thousand years. If I had known which god, I might have carried them back. But the thief wouldn't tell me."
"It would have done no good to carry them back," Ridgeley had said, "and they are nice for Anne." His big hand had patted his wife's shoulder.
"Oh," Christopher had been eager, "I want you to hear those temple bells some day, Anne. Why won't you take her, Dunbar? Next winter--drop your work, and we'll all go--"
"I've a fat chance of going."
"Haven't you made money enough?"
"It isn't money. You know that. But my patients would set up a howl--"
"Let 'em howl. You've got a life of your own to live, and so has Anne."
Dunbar had hesitated for a moment--then, "Anne's better off here."
Anne, thinking of these things as she got out of her dinner dress and into a sheer negligee of lace and faint blue, wondered why Ridgeley should think she was better off. She wanted to see the things of which Christopher had told her--to hear the temple bells in the dusk--the beat of the tom-tom on white nights.
She stood at the window looking out at the moon. She decided that she could not sleep. She would go down and get a book that she had left on the table. The men were out-of-doors, on the porch; she heard the murmur of their voices.
The voices were distinct as she stood in the library, and Christopher's words came to her, "What's the matter with Anne?"
Then her husband's technical explanation, the scientific name which meant nothing to her, then the crashing climax, "She can't get well."
She gave a quick cry, and when the men got into the room, she was crumpled up on the floor.
Her husband reached her first. "My dear," he said, "you heard?"
"Yes. Do you mean that I am--going to die, Ridgeley?"
There was, of course, no way out of it. "It means, my dear, that I've got to take awfully good care of you. Your heart is bad."
Christopher interposed. "People live for years with a heart like that."
But her eyes sought her husband's. "How long do they live?"
"Many months--perhaps years--without excitement--"
This then had been the reason for his tenderness. He had known that she was going to die, and was sorry. But for ten years she had wanted what he might have given her--what he couldn't give her now--life as she had dreamed of it.
She drew a quivering breath--"It isn't quite fair--is it?"
It didn't seem fair. The two doctors had faced much unfairness of the kind of which she complained. But it was the first time that, for either of them, it had come so close.
They had little comfort to give her, although they attempted certain platitudes, and presently Ridgeley carried her to her room.
IV
She insisted the next morning on going to the circus with Christopher. She had not slept well, and there were shadows under her eyes. The physician in Christopher warred with the man. "You ought to rest," he said at breakfast. Dunbar had gone to New York in accordance with his usual schedule. There were other lives to think of; and Anne, when he had looked in upon her that morning, had seemed almost shockingly callous.
"No, I don't want to stay in bed, Ridgeley. I am going to the circus. I shall follow your prescription--to eat and drink and be merry--"
"I don't think I have put it quite that way, Anne."
"You have. Quite. 'Death is death and life is life--so make the most of it.'"
Perhaps she was cruel. But he knew, too, that she was afraid. "My dear," he said gently, "if you can get any comfort out of your own ideas, it might be better."
"But you believe they are just my own ideas--you don't believe they are true?"