Chapter Seven The Longest Night #2
Graham met his gaze honestly. "I'm afraid she has," he admitted, and felt, absurdly, as though the fault must somehow be entirely his own.
"Well, see that she has no more of it," the doctor said, not unkindly. "She's a fragile bit of womanhood, young man, and she'll need careful handling for a while yet. Make her happy. There's no medicine on this earth better than that, and no one ever went wrong giving too much of it."
"Thank you," Graham said, with a fervor that startled even himself, and wished with his whole heart that it lay within his actual power to obey.
?
The doctor and the conductor left at last, and Graham was alone with his sleeping charge, the berth curtains drawn nearly closed, one pale hand visible at the edge in the dim light, resting in the particular slack stillness of exhausted sleep.
Above her, on the untouched upper berth, lay her discarded hat and a scattering of lily-of-the-valley from her bouquet, and Graham stood looking at them both with the strange sensation of a trespasser in some private, sacred room.
He locked the door against interruption and retreated to the little dressing-room, where he stood a long while simply studying his own tired, marked-up face in the glass.
Is this really the same man who left Washington this morning?
He hardly recognized the fellow looking back at him — a man who had, in the space of twelve hours, lost a stray dog, half-killed a newsboy, stolen a government cipher out from under six watching men, and married a total stranger under a false name and a worse mustache.
He washed away the last traces of adhesive, then dug his razor from his suitcase and shaved properly, finding, once it was done, that he felt marginally more like himself again — though what "himself" even meant tonight, he could no longer say with any confidence.
He settled onto the made-up couch at last, pulled a blanket over himself, and lay listening to the steady drum of the wheels beneath him, each revolution seeming to hammer out the Director's old refrain — don't let anything hinder you, don't let anything hinder you — though he was, he reflected grimly, taking about the least direct route from New York to Washington that any sensible man could devise.
He tried to think it through clearly. They had cleared the city without incident, so far as he could tell, and were speeding now toward some destination he hadn't thought to confirm — Albany, perhaps, or some more westward line entirely; he had never troubled to check the tickets, and the light was too dim now to make it out.
One thing, though, he could count on with grim certainty: by morning, someone would be looking for him.
Halifax's people would not rest once they'd confirmed the theft — and confirmed it, he had no doubt, they already had.
As for the real bridegroom — Graham's stomach turned at the very thought of that reckoning, and he pushed it firmly aside.
That confrontation would have to wait until the cipher was safe in Washington, whatever it cost him afterward.
He thought, unbidden, of a verse from evening prayers long past — Psalm 121:4 — "Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.
" He was not at all sure he deserved such keeping, given the tangle he'd made of this single day, but he found himself grateful for it all the same, and murmured something that was not quite a prayer and not quite not one, before letting the thought settle and turning back to the practical problem at hand.
The obvious course was to leave the train at the first opportunity and strike out cross-country for another line entirely.
But how, with a sick woman on his hands?
He turned the ugly, sensible option over in his mind — leaving her money and some hastily written explanation, trusting she'd manage well enough to wire her own family for help — and rejected it almost as quickly as it occurred to him.
Every decent instinct in him recoiled from the very shape of the idea.
Whatever practical wisdom it carried, he simply could not do it.
She was as much a trust in his keeping as the cipher itself, and he would not abandon either one, whatever the cost turned out to be.
Toward the small hours, as his tired mind grew less orderly, it occurred to him that the truly wise course would have been to slip off the train at the first stop after she'd fainted, leaving her to be found and cared for by strangers who could summon her family properly.
But he could not now imagine having done it — could not imagine leaving her, not knowing even whether she'd lived, to whatever chance had been waiting for her.
It was, he thought, the strangest muddle he had ever found himself standing in — right and wrong so thoroughly tangled together that he could no longer tell, with any of his old easy confidence, which path was truly the honorable one.
He had always privately supposed that men who claimed not to know right from wrong were simply men who preferred not to see it clearly.
Tonight he understood, for the first time, how much less simple the whole business could become when duty pulled in two directions at once, both of them decent, both of them impossible to fully honor.
Perhaps, he thought, his eyelids growing heavy at last, I am simply too tired tonight to judge anything rightly at all. He would sleep, if only for a few minutes, and trust that morning would bring some clearer path than exhaustion could manage tonight.
The wheels hummed on beneath him, tireless and indifferent, chanting their old refrain down into the dark — don't let anything hinder you, don't let anything hinder — don't let — don't — until even that faded, and Graham slept.