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Place Beyond The Winds

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<h2>CHAPTER XVI</h2> "For real emergencies," Doctor Ledyard once remarked to Helen Travers, "give me the nervous, high-strung women. They come through shock and danger better, they hold to a climax more steadily. Your phlegmatic woman goes to pieces because she hasn't imagination and vision enough to carry her over the present." This reasoning caused him to select Priscilla Glenn for one of the most critical operations he had ever performed. Among the blue and white nurses of his knowledge this girl with the strange, uplifted expression of face; this girl who was actually on the lookout for experience and practice, and who seriously loved her profession, stood in a class by herself. He had long had his eye upon her, had meant to single her out. And now the opportunity had come. Perhaps the most important man in business circles, certainly one of the richest men in the city, had come to that period of his life's career when he must pay toll for the things he had done and left undone in his past. The broad, common gateway gaped wide for him, and only one chance presented itself as a possible means of holding him back from the long journey he so shudderingly contemplated. "One chance in ten?" he questioned. "One—in——" Ledyard had hesitated. "A hundred?" "A thousand." A breathless pause followed. Then: "And if I do not take it, how long?" "A week, a month; not longer." "I'll take it." "I'll have my partner——Would you care for any one else?" Ledyard asked. "No. Since it must be, I put myself in your hands. I trust you above any one I know. Do your best for me, and in case I slip through your fingers I thank you now, and—good-bye." Before any great event, or operation, Ledyard was supersensitive, highly wrought, and nervous. When he heard the announcement that day of the operation: "All is ready, sir!" he stepped, gowned and masked, into the operating-room, and was aware of a senseless inclination to ask some one—he did not know whom—to make less noise and to lower the shades. Then his eye fell, not on the dignified and serene head nurse, not on the other ghostly young forms in their places near the table, not on the anesthetist, nor young Travers, his partner, but on the nurse who stood a little apart, the girl he had selected in order to test her on a really great case. So radiant and inspired was Priscilla Glenn's face that it fairly shone in that grim place and positively had the effect of bringing Ledyard to the calmness that characterized his action once the necessity demanded. "How is your patient, Doctor Sloan?" he asked the anesthetist. "Fine, Doctor Ledyard. I'm ready when you are." Then tense silence followed, broken only by the click of instruments and the curt, crisp commands. The minutes, weighted with concentration, ran into the hour. Not a body in that room was aware of fatigue or anxiety. A life was at stake, and every one knew it. It did not matter that the man upon the table was important and useful: had he been the meanest of the mean and in the same critical state, that steady hand, which guided the knife so scientifically and powerfully, would have worked the same. The sun beat down upon the glass roof of that high room; the perspiration started to Ledyard's forehead and a nurse wiped it away. From her place Priscilla Glenn watched breathlessly the scene before her. It seemed to her that she had never seen an operation before; had never comprehended what one could be. She realized the odds against which those two great men were battling, and her gaze rested finally, not on the head surgeon, but on his partner. Once, as if by some subtle attraction, he raised his eyes and met hers. Above the mask his glance showed kindly and encouragingly. He knew that some nurses lost their nerve when a thing stretched on as this did; he never could quite overlook the fact that nurses were women, as well, and he hated to see one go under. But this young nurse was showing no weakness. Travers saw that, after a moment, and dropped his eyes. But that glance had fixed Priscilla's face in his memory, and when, after the great man had been carried to his room with hope following him, when he could be left with safety to his private nurse, Travers came upon the girl standing by a deep window in the upper hall. He remembered her at once and stopped to say a pleasant word. This was not the strictly proper thing to do, and Travers knew it. Ledyard was always challenging his undignified tendencies. "Unless doctors and nurses can leave their sex outside their profession," was a pet epigram of Ledyard's, "they had better choose another." But Travers had never been able to fulfil his partner's ideal. "It was a wonderful operation," he said. "I hope it did not overtire you. You will get hardened after a while." "I am not at all tired. Yes, it was—wonderful! I did not know any operation could be like that—I mean in the way that it was done. I have always been afraid of Doctor Ledyard before; all of us are; I shall never be again." "May I ask why?" Travers, being young and vital, was forgetting, for the moment, his professional air to a dangerous extent. He was noticing the strange coloured hair under the snowy cap, the poise of the head, the deep violet eyes in the richly tinted face. "It was that—well, the look on his face after he had done all that he could—done it so wonderfully. That look was—a prayer! I shall never forget." Travers gave a light laugh. "It would be like Doctor Ledyard," he said with a peculiarly boyish ring in his voice, "to do his part first and pray afterward." "But no one could ever be afraid of him again having once seen that look!" "Miss Glynn," Travers replied; "they could! and yet the look holds the fear in check." Priscilla went early to bed that night. She had planned a visit to Boswell when her enthusiasm was at its height, but at the day's end she found herself so exhausted that she sought her room in a state bordering on collapse. Sounds outside caught and held her attention; every sense was quiveringly alert and receptive; she was at the mercy of her subconscious self. "Extry! extry!" bellowed a boy just below her window; "turribul accident on—de—extry! extry! Latest bulletin—Gordan Moffatt—big fin—cier—extry! extry!" Priscilla sat up in bed and listened. So intimate had the insistent boy in the street become that she was drawn to him by a common bond of sympathy. Slowly a luxurious sense of weariness overcame her and again she leaned back on her pillow and sank into a semiconscious sleep. Balanced between life and the oblivion, into which reason enters blindfolded, she made no resistance, but was swayed by every passing wave of thought, memory, and vision. The voice outside merged presently into Jerry-Jo McAlpin's. So naturally did it do so that the girl upon the bed, rigid and pale, accepted the change with no surprise. Jerry-Jo was asking her the way out! He was lost—lost. He wanted to get out of the darkness and the noise; he wanted to find his way back to the In-Place. Yes, she would show him! There was no fear of him; no repulsion. She was very safe and strong, and she knew that it was wiser for Jerry-Jo to go back home. Then suddenly she and he were transported from the bewildering city, talking in its sleep, to the sweet, fresh dimness of the Kenmore Green, where the steamer had left them. It was early, very early morning, not more than four o'clock, and the stars were bright and the hemlocks black, and the red rocks looked soft in the shadows, like pillows. And over the Green, loping and inquisitive, came Sandy McAdam's dog, Bounder. How natural and restful the scene was! Then it was Jerry-Jo, not Priscilla, who was leading. The half-breed with a gesture of friendliness was beckoning her on toward the mossy wood path leading to Lonely Farm. There was a definiteness about the slouching figure that forbade any pause at the White Fish Lodge or the master's dark and silent house. Priscilla longed to stop, but she hastened on, feeling a need for hurry. Presently she saw the little house, her father's house, and there was a light shining from the kitchen window. Jerry-Jo, still preceding her, tapped on the outer door, but when the door fell open Jerry-Jo was gone! Alone, Priscilla confronted her father, and saw with surprise that he evidently expected her. While the look of hatred and doubt still rested in his eyes, there was also a look of dumb pity. No word was spoken. Nathaniel merely stepped aside and closed the door behind her. Then she began a strange, breathless hunt for something which, at first, she could not call by name; it evaded and eluded her. Something was missing; something she wanted desperately; but the rooms were horribly dark and lonely, and the stillness hurt her more and more. At last she came back to her father and the warm, lighted kitchen. "I cannot find—my mother," she said, and the reality set her trembling. "Your—mother? I—I cannot find her, either. I thought she—followed you!" Cold and shivering, Priscilla sat up in bed. Her teeth chattered and there were tears on her cheeks. They did not seem like her own tears. It was as if some one, bending over her, had let them fall from eyes seeking to find her in the dark. "Mother!" moaned Priscilla, and with the word a yearning and craving for her mother filled every sense. By a magic that the divine only controls, poor Theodora Glenn in that moment was transformed and radiantly crowned with the motherhood she had so impotently striven to achieve in her narrowed, blighted life. The suffering of maternity, its denials and relinquishings she had experienced, but never its joy of realization, unless, as her spirit passed from the Place Beyond the Winds to its Home, it paused beside the little, narrow, white bed upon which Priscilla lay, and caught that name "Mother!" spoken with a sudden inspiration of understanding. And that night, with only her grim husband and Long Jean beside her, Theodora escaped the bondage of life. After the strange dream, Priscilla, awed and trembling, walked to the wide open window of her room. For some moments she stood there breathing fast and hard while the cruel clutch of superstition hurt and held her. "Something has happened," she faltered, leaning upon the casement and looking down into the silent street, for the restless city had at last fallen to sleep. "Something in Kenmore!" A red, pulsing planet, shining high over a nearby church tower, caught her eye and brought a throb of comfort to her—a tender thought of home. "To-morrow, perhaps, a letter will come from Master Farwell; if not, I will write to him. I must know." <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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