"YOU ARE SO GENEROUS TO ME" (page 24)

AVERY

By Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1902

COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY HARPER & BROS.
COPYRIGHT, 1902, BY ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS WARD
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Published October, 1902

Avery originally appeared as a serial in Harper's Magazine under the title of His Wife.

AVERY

PART I

"Oh, Pink! Mother can't lift you.... I would if I could.... Yes, I know I used to—

"Molly, take the baby. Couldn't you amuse him, somehow? Perhaps, if you tried hard, you could keep him still. When he screams so, it seems to hit me—here. It makes it harder to breathe. He cried 'most all night. And if you could contrive to keep Pink, too—

"What is it, Kate? You'll have to manage without me this morning. Pick up anything for luncheon—I don't care. I couldn't eat. You can warm over that mutton for yourselves. We must keep the bills down. They were too large last month. Order a grouse for Mr. Avery. He says he will dine at home to-night—

"There 's the telephone! Somebody answer it. I can't get down, myself.... Is it Mr. Avery? ... Wants me? ... I don't see how I can.... Yes. Hold the wire. I 'll try—

"Did you speak to me, Molly? ... No, I 'm not feeling any worse. It's only getting up the stairs, and ... something that tired me a little. I don't want Dr. Thorne. I can't call the doctor so often. I 'm no worse than ... I sometimes ... am. It's only that I cannot breathe.... Molly! Molly! Quick, Molly! The window! Air!"

As Molly dashed the window up, Mrs. Avery's head fell back upon the pillows of the lounge. They were blue pillows, and her blanching cheek took a little reflection from the color. But she was not ghastly; she never was. At the lowest limit of her strength she seemed to challenge death with an indomitable vitality.

There was a certain surprise in the discovery that so blond a being could have so much of it. She was very fair—blue of eye, yellow of hair, pearly of skin; but all her coloring was warm and rich; when she was well, it was an occupation to admire her ear, her cheek, her throat; and when she was ill her eye conquered. Every delicate trait and feature of her defied her fate, except her mouth; this had begun to take on a pitiful expression. The doctor's blazing eye flashed on it when he was summoned hastily. It had become a symptom to him, and was usually the first one of which he took note.

Dr. Esmerald Thorne had the preoccupations of his eminence, and his patients waited their turns with that undiscouraged endurance which is the jest and the despair of less-distinguished physicians. Women took their crochet work to his office, and men bided their time with gnawed mustache and an unnatural interest in the back-number magazines upon his table. Indifferent ailments received his belated attention, and to certain patients he came when he got ready. Mrs. Avery's was not one of these cases.

When Molly's tumultuous telephone call reached him that dav, it found him at the hospital, sewing up an accident. He drew the thread through the stitch, handed the needle to the house surgeon, who was standing by, and ran downstairs. The hospital was two miles from Marshall Avery's house. Dr. Thorne's horse took the distance on a gallop, and Dr. Thorne took Avery's stairs two at a time.

He came into her room, however, with the theatrical calm and the preposterous smile which men of his profession and his kind assume in the presence of danger that unconsciousness has not blotted from the patient's intelligence. Through the wide window the late October air bit in. She was lying full in the surly breeze on the lounge pillow, as Molly had left her. Her blue morning gown was clutched and torn open at the throat. No one had thought to cover her. Her hands were as purple as her lips. She was not gasping now: she had no longer the strength to fight for her breath.

Dr. Thorne's professional smile went out like a Christmas candle in a hurricane. He opened his mouth and began to swear.

The corners of her lips twitched when she heard him—for she was altogether conscious, which was rather the worst of it, as she sometimes said; and, in point of fact, she laughed outright, if one could call it laughing.

She tried to say, "I should know that was you if I were in my grave," but found the words too many for her, and so said nothing at all, nor even seemed to listen while he rated Molly, and condemned Kate, and commanded both, and poured stimulants angrily and swiftly. The very blankets and hot-water bags seemed to obey him, like sentient things—as people did; and the tablet in his fingers quivered as if it were afraid of him.

As soon as she began to breathe naturally again, she said, "I 've made you a great deal of trouble! How is Helen's cold, doctor?"

"I shall tell my wife that," replied the doctor, in a tone that was a mongrel between anger and admiration. This puzzled her, and her fine eyes gently questioned him of his irritation. For she and the doctor's wife were schoolmates and old friends. She had been quite troubled about Helen's cold.

"Oh, never mind," said Dr. Thorne; "only it is n't natural, that's all—when patients come out of attacks like yours. Their minds are not concentrated on other people's colds. Helen is quite well, thank you. Now, Mrs. Avery, I want to ask you"—

"Don't," interrupted Jean Avery.

"But I find it necessary," growled Dr. Thorne.

She shook her head, and turned her face, which shrank against the blue pillow. Pink and the baby began to quarrel in the nursery, and then both cried belligerently.

"The baby kept me awake," faintly suggested Mrs. Avery.

"It is an excellent explanation,—but you've just thought of it," observed Dr. Thorne. He spoke in a much louder tone than was necessary; his voice rose with the kind of instinctive, elemental rage under which he fled to covert with a sympathy that he found troublesome. "What I wish to know—what I insist on knowing—is, what caused this attack? It is something which happened since breakfast. I demand the nature of it—physical? mental? emotional?"

"You may call it electric," answered Jean Avery, with her own lovable smile—half mischief, half pathos.

"I see. The telephone." Dr. Thorne leaned back in his chair and scrutinized the patient. Quite incidentally he took her pulse. It was sinking again, and the tempo had lapsed into unexpected irregularity.

"Helen shall come to see you," said Dr. Thorne with sudden gentleness. "I 'll send her this afternoon. You will keep perfectly still till then.... Mr. Avery is in town?" carelessly. "Coming home to lunch?"

"He has gone to court."

"To dinner, then?"

"It depends on the verdict. If he wins the case"—

"Oh, I see. And if he loses?"

"He might go gunning, if he lost it," answered the wife, smiling quite steadily. "He might go gunning with Mr. Romer. He is very tired. He takes it hard when he does not win things—cases, I mean. He might—you see"— She faltered into a pathetic silence.

"I will send Helen at