The bustle of the arrival was over. The doctors had given their orders, the nurses were at their posts for the night, and, under morphia, Desmond was sleeping. In the shaded library there were only hushed voices and movements. By the light of the one lamp, which was screened from the bed, one saw dimly the fantastic shapes in the glass cases which lined the walls--the little Tanagra figures with their sun-hats and flowing dress--bronzes of Apollo or Hermes--a bronze bull--an ibex--a cup wreathed with acanthus. And in the shadow at the far end rose the great Nikê. She seemed to be asking what the white bed and the shrouded figure upon it might mean--protesting that these were not her symbols, or a language that she knew.
Yet at times, as the light varied, she seemed to take another aspect. To Aubrey, sitting beside his brother, the Nikê more than once suggested the recollection of a broken Virgin hanging from a fragment of a ruined church which he remembered on a bit of road near Mametz, at which he had seen passing soldiers look stealthily and long. Her piteous arms, empty of the babe, suggested motherhood to boys fresh from home; and there were moments when this hovering Nikê seemed to breathe a mysterious tenderness like hers--became a proud and splendid angel of consolation--only, indeed, to resume, with some fresh change in the shadows, its pagan indifference, its exultant loneliness.
The Squire sat by the fire, staring into the redness of the logs. Occasionally nurse or doctor would come and whisper to him. He scarcely seemed to hear them. What was the good of talking? He knew that Desmond was doomed--that his boy's noble body was shattered--and the end could only be a question of days--possibly a week. During the first nights of Desmond's sufferings, the Squire had lived through what had seemed an eternity of torment. Now there was no more agony. Morphia could be freely given--and would be given till all was over. The boy's young strength was resisting splendidly, a vitality so superb was hard to beat; but beaten it would be, by the brutality of the bullet which had inflicted an internal injury past repair, against which the energy of the boy's youth might hold out for a few days--not more. That was why he had been allowed to bring his son home--to die. If there had been a ray, a possibility of hope, every resource of science would have been brought to bear on saving him, there in that casualty clearing-station, itself a large hospital, where the Squire had found him.