Thus Hedvig went about prepared to close his eyes, to mourn for him and keep him as a beautiful memory which nobody in the world would know of, or could deprive her of.
Already she was depositing him, the secret treasure of the poor, with Death.
But now the unexpected happened, Percy Hill did not die. On the contrary he began to pick up a little in the spring. In the beginning it almost looked as if he himself had been a little embarrassed and ashamed at this turn of events.
“I have never done what was expected of me,” he said. “I never finished my pictures. And of course, I did not see this thing through either....”
But there was all the same something new in his tone. These phrases no longer rang true as formerly.
You may have been nearly run over by a tram and it is only afterwards when you are safe on the pavement that you begin to be frightened and feel the threat of death within you. As his temperature fell there rose a new restlessness in Percy Hill. He began anxiously to avoid talking of death. It seemed as if he had been ashamed of his weakness. He did all he could to appear as well as possible. It was only with difficulty that he was kept in bed. He grew impatient at the constant relapses of the early spring into cold and miserable weather. He insisted on going somewhere where there was plenty of sunshine. He had suddenly been seized by a violent zest for life.
Yes, and now Percy Hill felt for the first time a certain fear of death. A mysterious change had taken place in him. He had been inoculated with some of Sister Hedvig’s poisons in the same way as she had been with his.
How did she behave for her part now when he slowly began to slip out of the shadow of death under which they had come so near to each other? Did she draw back into her shell? Did she become the closed garden or the sealed spring once again? It might seem so. She had an expression which seemed to command him to forget what had passed between them. That furtive tenderness, whose shoots seemed only to thrive in darkness, ceased. But the seal was all the same broken. Her reserve and shyness could never be exactly the same again, they had no longer the true depth. There rather arose moments of a certain banal and everyday embarrassment between them. Percy clearly suffered in accepting her assistance. He shaved himself every day and became particular about his appearance. Certain situations galled him as being lowering to his masculine pride. It seemed as if he had to overcome a certain reluctance each time he had to call her “Sister Hedvig.” Without saying anything Hedvig acquired the habit of knocking at his door before she entered the room. She did this with a strange feeling half of bitterness and half of satisfaction. Her suspiciousness found the change in Percy’s manners wounding. But in her inmost heart she proudly understood what it really meant. Officially she was as much a stranger in his world as ever before. But it was a fact that she no longer walked through the picture galleries with lowered eyes. Though she did not admit it to herself, certain echoes of what he had said concerning pleasure and beauty being something self-evident would crop up in her thoughts. After a youth which had been haunted by the ghost of poverty, she sometimes felt a shiver run through her in the presence of this magnificent house and of all she had heard about his wealth. It was really something hitherto hidden and downtrodden in her Selamb soul that very cautiously raised its head.