“No,” said that unknown voice.
“It was a very bad case from the start. The doctor said he’d been terribly run
down. They’ve a trained nurse and everything’s been done. DON’T look like
that, Anne. While there’s life there’s hope.”
“Mr. Harrison was here this evening and he said they had no hope of him,”
reiterated Davy.
Marilla, looking old and worn and tired, got up and marched Davy grimly out
of the kitchen.
“Oh, DON’T look so, dear,” said Mrs. Rachel, putting her kind old arms about
the pallid girl. “I haven’t given up hope, indeed I haven’t. He’s got the Blythe
constitution in his favor, that’s what.”
Anne gently put Mrs. Lynde’s arms away from her, walked blindly across the
kitchen, through the hall, up the stairs to her old room. At its window she knelt
down, staring out unseeingly. It was very dark. The rain was beating down over
the shivering fields. The Haunted Woods was full of the groans of mighty trees
wrung in the tempest, and the air throbbed with the thunderous crash of billows
on the distant shore. And Gilbert was dying!
There is a book of Revelation in every one’s life, as there is in the Bible. Anne
read hers that bitter night, as she kept her agonized vigil through the hours of
storm and darkness. She loved Gilbert—had always loved him! She knew that
now. She knew that she could no more cast him out of her life without agony
than she could have cut off her right hand and cast it from her. And the
knowledge had come too late—too late even for the bitter solace of being with
him at the last. If she had not been so blind—so foolish—she would have had the
right to go to him now. But he would never know that she loved him—he would
go away from this life thinking that she did not care. Oh, the black years of
emptiness stretching before her! She could not live through them—she could
not! She cowered down by her window and wished, for the first time in her gay
young life, that she could die, too. If Gilbert went away from her, without one
word or sign or message, she could not live. Nothing was of any value without
him. She belonged to him and he to her. In her hour of supreme agony she had
no doubt of that. He did not love Christine Stuart—never had loved Christine
Stuart. Oh, what a fool she had been not to realize what the bond was that had
held her to Gilbert—to think that the flattered fancy she had felt for Roy Gardner
had been love. And now she must pay for her folly as for a crime.
Mrs. Lynde and Marilla crept to her door before they went to bed, shook their
heads doubtfully at each other over the silence, and went away. The storm raged