This world without the valley grew widely vague to Blecker, as he lay there for weeks. These battles he read of every morning subserved no end: the cause stood motionless; only so many blue-coated machines rendered useless: but behind the machines--what? That was what touched him now: every hour some touch of Grey's, some word of the home-loving Kentuckians, even Pen's giant-stories, told as he sat perched on Blecker's bolster, made him think of this, when he read of a battle. So many thousand somethings dead, who pulled a trigger well or ill, for money or otherwise; so much brute force lost; behind that, a home somewhere, clinging little hands, a man's aspirations, millions of fears and hopes, religion, chances of a better foothold in the next life. It was that background, after all, the home-life, the notions of purity, honor, bravery absorbed there, that made the man a man in the battle-field.
So, lying on the straw mattress there, this man, who had been making himself from the first, got into the core of the matter at last, into his own soul-life, brought himself up face to face with God and the Devil, letting the outside world, the great war, drift out of sight for the time. His battle-field was here in this ruined plat of houses, prisoned by peaks that touched the sky. The issues of the great struggles without were not in his hands; this was. What should he do with this woman, with himself?
He gained strength day by day. They did not know it, he was so grave and still, not joining in the hearty, cheery life of the arsenal-room; for Mrs. Sheppard had swept the half-drunken Dutch nurses out of the hospital, and she and Grey took charge of the dozen wounded men (many dainty modiste-made ladies find that they are God-made women in this war). So the room had whitened and brightened every day; the red, unshaved faces slept sounder on their clean pillows; the men ate with a relish; and Grey, being the best of listeners, had carried from every bed a story of some home in Iowa or Georgia or the North. Only behind the yellow door yonder she never went. Blecker had ordered that, and she obeyed like a child in everything.
So like a child, that Mrs. Sheppard, very tender of her, yet treated her with as much deference as she might a mild kitten. That girl was just as anxious that Bill Sanders's broth should be properly salted, and Pen's pinafore white, as she was to know Banks's position. Pish! Yet Mrs. Sheppard told Pen pages of "Mother Goose" in the evenings, that the girl might have time to read to Doctor Blecker. She loved him as well as if he were her husband; and a good wife she would be to him! Paul, looking at the two, as they sat by his bedside, knew better than she; saw clearly in which woman lay the spring of steel, that he never could bend, if her sense of right touched it. He used to hold her freckled little hands, growing yellow and rough with the hard work, in his, wondering what God meant him to do. If they both could lie dead together in that great grave-pit behind the Virginia Heights, it would have been relief to him. If he should let her go blindfold into whatever hell lay beyond death, it would be more merciful to her than to give her to her husband yonder. For himself--No, he would think only of her, how she could be pure and happy. Yet bigamy? No theory, no creed could put that word out of his brain, when he looked into her eyes. Never were eyes so genial or so pure. The man Gurney, he learned from Sheppard and Nott, recovered but slowly; yet there was no time to lose; a trivial accident might reveal all to her. Whatever struggle was in Blecker's mind came to an end at last; he would go through with what he purposed; if there were crime in it, he took it to his own soul's reckoning, as he said before.