This Side of Glory (34 page)

“Yes, please!” she exclaimed.

“I just wanted you to know I understood that,” said Kester. “Good night.”

“Good night.”

He left her. As the door closed Eleanor crumpled up on the bed and put her arms around the pillow, trembling with weariness and an overwhelming sense of defeat, and wondering if behind Kester’s gentle courtesy there lay a loneliness like hers.

5

During the weeks that followed Kester never made an attempt to cross the barrier between them. He was helpful, sympathetic, considerate, but his whole manner made it plain that he was not going to ask any expression of intimacy unless she showed him that she desired it. Their hours of soothing Cornelia and devising amusement for her left them little time for clarifying their own situation even if Eleanor had felt equal to it, and she had to acknowledge to herself that she was not equal to it. Her anxiety regarding Cornelia made her feel bankrupt of courage.

But when she went to her room at night Eleanor sometimes sat for a long time with her head in her hands, wondering whether Kester would tell her the truth if she asked him if he detested her as much as Isabel Valcour had said he did, and deciding again and again that he would not. He was himself too distressed, and had too much knowledge of how she felt. “When this is over,” she told herself. “It can’t be much longer.” But she trembled with a suspense that had nothing to do with Cornelia, for now that she was seeing Kester again every day she knew more surely than ever that if she had destroyed his love for her it would be the most dreadful knowledge she would ever have had to face.

At first Dr. Renshaw seemed to be optimistic. Then one evening in January Eleanor came in from a visit to her parents to find that Kester had been summoned to the doctor’s office downtown for a conference that had already lasted more than two hours.

She tried to find Miss Crouzet to ask the reason, but was told Miss Crouzet was with Cornelia, and she herself was not allowed to enter. Eleanor went into the waiting-room and walked up and down in an agony of impatience until Kester appeared.

She spoke to him in alarm as he came in. Kester’s face had a grayish whiteness. He hardly seemed to hear her, or even to notice that she was there. Eleanor rushed to him and gripped his arm with both hands.

“Kester! What’s happened?”

He looked at her vaguely, brushing his hand across his eyes as though any sort of reply was difficult. “They say we can see her in a few minutes,” he said.

“But what’s the trouble?”

Kester drew a quick breath. “The doctor is scared. They—” He stopped as though not knowing how to say it.

“Tell me, Kester, for heaven’s sake!”

“Did you ever hear of a thing called sympathetic ophthalmia?” he asked.

Eleanor shook her head. She cried, “Does that mean—
both
eyes?”

“Yes.” He began to speak with resolute calmness. “It seems that the two eyes aren’t independent units. When one of them has been injured, sometimes the other eye becomes affected. Nobody in the world knows how to foresee it.”

“What does it mean? Not—” She could not go any further. Her throat seemed to have closed over an impossible word.

“Unless they can stop it,” said Kester.

Eleanor’s hands dropped. For a moment there was a blank silence between them. Then she demanded,

“Isn’t there anybody in the world—Kester, there must be somebody!”

“That’s what he wanted to ask me. Dr. Renshaw is one of the finest ophthalmologists in America. But there are others who might be able to help him if they could get here immediately—”

“Why hasn’t he sent for them? If there’s even a chance anybody will do any good—why hasn’t he sent for them?”

“I’m trying to tell you. He’s on the telephone now, long-distancing a man in Chicago and one in Baltimore. What he wanted to ask me was whether we could afford it.”

“Was that all?” Eleanor exclaimed. “Did you tell him it didn’t matter what the consultation would cost? That we could afford anything she needed?”

“Yes,” said Kester, “I told him that.” He put his hand on her shoulder. She looked up at him. “I’m sorry, Eleanor,” he said earnestly.

Too dazed to comprehend at once, she echoed, “Sorry? For what?”

“Don’t you know for what?” he returned sharply. “For calling you nigger-rich.”

He released her. Eleanor shook her head slowly, for a moment surprised that he should have recalled anything so trivial in such a crisis. Then she said,

“Oh, that. It’s not important. I suppose,” she added hesitantly, “we could work it back—to where I’d say what I’ve been thinking since—that you were right—I did get money mad—and I didn’t foresee this.”

Kester was looking at her intently. What he might have said had there been time enough she could not tell, for Cornelia’s nurse came into the room. They wheeled abruptly to face her. She told them they could see Cornelia now.

Cornelia was evidently not in pain. They took their places on either side of the bed, and with the eager gesture so familiar to them now she reached to hold their hands. She told them she had been listening to her phonograph.

Eleanor forced herself to emulate the cheerful manner with which Kester was listening to her and answering. But Cornelia’s grasp on her own hand gave her tremors of fear. She could almost hear the tap of sticks in the street and see fingers groping across pages of raised dots. In the days when she and Kester were still making plans together they had talked of so much they wanted Cornelia to have, so many innocent, happy things; school, parties, beautiful dresses, and she was going to come down the spiral staircase in a bridal veil.

“Mother, you’re hurting me,” said Cornelia. “Don’t squeeze my hand so tight.”

“I’m sorry, darling.”

They stayed with her until she had fallen asleep. When they tiptoed out into the corridor they saw Miss Crouzet waiting for them. She spoke to Kester.

“Dr. Stanley is chartering a special plane to bring him down from Chicago, as you suggested,” she said. “He and Dr. Field should both be here by tomorrow.”

“Thank you,” said Kester. “There’s nothing more you can tell us?”

“Not yet, Mr. Larne.”

Eleanor turned around abruptly and almost ran across the corridor into her own room. She dropped into a chair and pressed her fist over her mouth to hold back what she had suddenly been afraid was going to be an outburst of terror. When she had forced herself to be calmer, she thought she could at least be thankful that she had not flung herself upon Kester, making him offer any pretense of an affection he might not feel.

It was not until halfway through the night, when exhaustion was finally putting her to sleep, that she remembered Kester’s making his first reference to their quarrel the night he had left Ardeith and saying he was sorry. “But that might have been only his native generosity,” she thought. “He’s sorry for me.”

The next day she did not remind him of it, and they met the doctors with such a barricade of silence between them that Miss Crouzet praised them for their self-control, saying, “I’ve never seen parents face danger to a child as bravely as you two are facing it.”

Eleanor felt astonished that even a stranger could not see that behind their frozen faces she and Kester were half frantic with apprehension and did not dare ask each other for sympathy.

6

The doctors came and went, grave, low-voiced specialists who held long conferences and reappeared to say only, “We are doing the best we can.” Eleanor could hardly have told how she passed the days. She sat with Cornelia, she tried to find escape in the books her father brought her, she received bills and made out checks, she wrote notes of thanks for the flowers that continued to come. None of it made sufficient impression on her consciousness to blot even for a little while the suspense that tortured her, nor a new growing feeling of guilt as she began to realize that though she had been married to Kester eight years she had never appreciated what reserves of courage he possessed.

She was almost reverent as she observed his fortitude. She watched him: Kester standing by with Cornelia’s hand in his while the doctors made all sorts of terrible examinations, getting little mists of cold sweat on his forehead at the sight of them but never flinching; Kester holding Cornelia asleep in his arms till his muscles were dead from exhaustion but not willing to move lest she wake up; and then Kester bending over Eleanor herself when she doubled up into knots and felt unable to endure it one more day, speaking to her quietly and simply, and making her pretend a valor she did not have. Though she and Kester were rarely alone together, and when they were they spoke of almost nothing but Cornelia, Eleanor had never realized it was possible for her to feel such a sense of dependence as she felt now. The difference between her power and his was that between the strength to make an onslaught and that required to withstand a siege. She began to understand how ignorant she had been when she assumed that only the aggressors were of much value in the world, and she began also to know how it was that for all their mannerisms Kester’s people had survived and maintained their way of life through so many hazardous years.

As she came to understand this, her memory began to hand back to her with relentless accusation phrases that she did not even know she had heard because she had been too angry to give them conscious attention. “Don’t you know Kester wants to be needed?… You never gave him anything he wanted. The little triumphs, the little applauding whispers… . No matter what the Larne men were like, the women who loved them made them feel like heroes… . Kester is coming to me because I can give him back his faith in himself.” A hundred times she was on the verge of crying out, “Kester, forgive me! Can’t I have a chance to prove to you I’ve learned something?” But she did not, because she had no way of being sure Kester would want to hear it.

Kester did not know it then, but Eleanor always believed it was his strength and not her own that saved her from collapse through the period that ended one February morning when she heard a knock at her door, and before she could answer it Kester burst in, exclaiming,

“Eleanor! They say she’s better!”

For an instant Eleanor was as though stunned. Her joy was too great for her to comprehend it at once. She gasped, “They say—?”

“Dr. Renshaw. He’s just told me they believe they’ve arrested the ophthalmia.” He waited a moment, then persisted, pushing the knowledge into her mind, “Don’t you understand? She can see!”

Eleanor started toward the door, with an impulse to rush into Cornelia’s room, but as she took a step her knees buckled under her and she found that she was kneeling on the floor, her face hidden on the seat of a chair, and she was shaking with a storm of sobs that told her, even more than she had realized, what these weeks of tension had cost.

Kester was too wise to try to quiet her. He stood with his hand on her head, waiting until her reaction had spent itself. When at last she could look up his first gesture was the homely one of giving her his handkerchief to replace her own, soaked to worthlessness by her tears.

Eleanor caught her breath and tried to dry her eyes. Kester helped her to her feet.

“Can’t I go to her?” she urged breathlessly. “Can’t I speak to her?”

“Not like that,” said Kester. He shook his head. “Eleanor, try to listen. She doesn’t see as well as we do. She never will. But she can see. And she doesn’t know she’s been in danger of not seeing at all. It might be disastrous to get her excited now.”

Eleanor hesitated unwillingly, then she sat down. “How can you be so reasonable?” she murmured.

“I’m not. I feel the same way you do.” He smiled faintly. “I’m just repeating what the doctor had to say to me.”

Eleanor was nervously making little creases in the fabric of her skirt. She saw herself doing it, and resolutely quieted her hands. “How soon can we go to her?” she asked.

“In about an hour. They’ve been making some tests. Miss Crouzet will call us.” He put his hand on her shoulder. “Try to relax, won’t you?”

She promised that she would, and that she would say nothing to let Cornelia guess that this day was anything but one more in the process of an orderly recovery, and Kester left her. But she found relaxation impossible. Her sudden relief had brought with it a flood of energy. For the sake of giving it release while she waited to see Cornelia she telephoned the news to her parents, wrote Wyatt a letter about the plantation, and finally, her hands still trembling with happiness, she looked up an address in the telephone book and sent a check to the Braille Institute, a thank-offering that Cornelia would not need the books it would buy.

7

Day by day Cornelia reported her progress. “This morning I told a red ball from a green one. The doctor said that was good.”

When they attempted to express their gratitude, Dr. Renshaw talked to them candidly. Cornelia could see, but her eyesight was not and never would be faultless. Though the ophthalmia had been arrested in time to provide that she could lead a normal life, she would have to wear strong glasses for reading and they would be wise to turn her attention as much as possible to music and other interests that put no strain on the eyes.

Hearing him, Eleanor rested her chin on her hand and looked past him to the regular buttons down the front of Miss Crouzet’s white dress. She was letting Kester carry their side of the conversation, because her own conscience was returning an accusing echo to every one of the doctor’s crisp advisory sentences.

“It isn’t really tragic. But she’s hurt. To the end of her life she’ll carry a scar of our battle. I wonder if Kester knows it’s our fault. Unless he does we’ll never have a chance to start again. Oh God in heaven, the doctor says we should teach her music! Music won’t save her from what I’m bearing now. Help me to teach her understanding of people who aren’t like herself. Help me to save my children from pride in their own virtues. Blessed are the meek—blessed are the poor in spirit—blessed are the merciful. I never believed that until now.”

To her astonishment she heard Kester asking, “Dr. Renshaw, will it hurt her appearance?”