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Page 38
"You will recover," it was saying. "A good rest is all you need.
Sometimes there is nothing so beneficial and speedy as the
old-fashioned treatment of bleeding a patient."
Some warm ashes dropped across the wrist of the Meanest Trustee and
scattered on the floor; his cigar had gone out.
The Executive Trustee dozed at his study table. For months he had been
working his brain overtime; he had still more to demand of it, and he
was deliberately detaching it from immediate executive consciousness
for a few minutes that he might set it to work again all the harder.
The Executive Trustee knew that he was dozing; but for all that it was
unbearable--this feeling of being bound by coil after coil of rope
until he could not stir a finger. A terrifying numbness began to creep
over him--as if his body had died. The thought came to him like a
shock that he had an active, commanding intelligence, still alive, and
nothing for it to command. What did people do who had to live with
dead, paralyzed bodies, dependent upon others to execute the dictates
of their brains? Did not their brains go in the end, too, and leave
just a breathing husk behind? The thought became a horror to him.
And yet people did live, just so. Yes, even children.
Somewhere--somewhere--he knew of hundreds of them--or were there only a
few? He tried to remember, but he could not. He did remember,
however, that he had once heard them laughing; and he found himself
wondering now at the strangeness of it. He hoped there was some one
who would always keep them laughing--they deserved that much out of
life, anyway; and some one who could understand and could administer to
them lovingly--yes, that was the word--lovingly! As for himself, there
was no one who could supply for him that strength and power for action
that he had always worshiped; he must exist for the rest of his life
simply as a thinking, ineffective intelligence. The Executive Trustee
forgot that he was dozing. He wrestled with the ropes that bound him
like a crazed man; he called for help again and again, until his lips
could make no sound. For the first time in his remembrance he tasted
the bitterness of despair. Then it was that the door opened
noiselessly and Margaret MacLean entered, her finger to her lips. Coil
after coil she unwound until he was free once more and could feel the
marvelous response of muscle and nerve impulse. With a cry--half sob,
half thankfulness--he flung his arms across the table and buried his
face in them.
The Executive Trustee slept heavily, after the fashion of a man
exhausted from hard labor.
In the house left by the Richest Trustee a little gray wisp of a woman
sat huddled in a great carved chair close to the hearth, thinking and
thinking and thinking. The fire was blazing high, trying its best to
burn away the heart-cold and loneliness that clung about everything
like a Dover fog. For years she had ceased to exist apart from her
husband--her thoughts, her wishes, her interests were of his creating;
she had drawn her very nourishment of life from his strong, dominant,
genial personality. It was parasitic--oh yes, but it had been
something rarely beautiful to them both--her great need of him. The
need had grown all the greater because no children had come to fill her
life; and the need of something to take care of had grown with him.
Their love, and her dependence, had become the greatest factors in his
life; in hers they were the only ones. Therefore, it was hardly
strange, now that he had died, that she should find it hard to take up
an individual existence again; to be truthful, she had found it
impossible--she had not even existed.
The habit of individual, separate thinking had grown rusty, and as she
sat before the hearth ideas came slowly. The room was dim--lighted
only by the firelight; and in that dimness her mind began to stir and
stretch and yawn itself awake, like a creature that had been
hibernating through a long, dark winter. Suddenly the widow of the
Richest Trustee broke out into a feeble little laugh--a convalescing
laugh that acted as if it was just getting about for the first time.
"I haven't the least idea what is the matter with me," she said,
addressing the fire, "but I think--I think--I'm becoming alive again."
The fire gave an appreciative chuckle--it even slapped one of the logs
on the back; then it sputtered and blazed the harder, just as if it
were ashamed of showing any emotion.
"It is funny," agreed the little gray wisp of a woman, "but I actually
feel as I used to when I was a little girl and Christmas Eve had come,
or Hallowe'en, and--and-- What other night in the year was it that I
used to feel creepy and expectant--as if something wonderful was going
to happen?"
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