Kitabı oku: «A Man's Woman», sayfa 6

"Quick, Miss Searight!" he shouted. "Jump! We can't hold him. Quick, do as I tell you, jump!"

But even as he spoke Rox dragged him from his feet, his hoofs trampling the hollow road till it reverberated like the roll of drums. Bracing himself against every unevenness of the ground, his teeth set, his face scarlet, the veins in his neck swelling, suddenly blue-black, Bennett wrenched at the bit till the horse's mouth went bloody. But all to no purpose; faster and faster Rox was escaping from his control.

"Jump, I tell you!" he shouted again, looking over his shoulder; "another second and he's away."

Lloyd dropped the reins and turned to jump. But the lap-robe had slipped down to the bottom of the cart when she had risen, and was in a tangle about her feet. The cart was rocking like a ship in a storm. Twice she tried to free herself, holding to the dashboard with one hand. Then the cart suddenly lurched forward and she fell to her knees. Rox was off; it was all over.

Not quite. In one brief second of time—a hideous vision come and gone between two breaths—Lloyd saw the fearful thing done there in the road, almost within reach of her hand. She saw the man and horse at grapples, the yellow reach of road that lay between her and the canal, the canal itself, and the narrow bridge. Then she saw the short-handled geologist's hammer gripped in Bennett's fist heave high in the air. Down it came, swift, resistless, terrible—one blow. The cart tipped forward as Rox, his knees bowing from under him, slowly collapsed. Then he rolled upon the shaft that snapped under him, and the cart vibrated from end to end as a long, shuddering tremble ran through him with his last deep breath.

V

When Lloyd at length managed to free herself and jump to the ground Bennett came quickly toward her and drew her away to the side of the road.

"Are you hurt?" he demanded. "Tell me, are you hurt?"

"No, no; not in the least."

"Why in the world did you want to drive such a horse? Don't ever take such chances again. I won't have it."

For a few moments Lloyd was too excited to trust herself to talk, and could only stand helplessly to one side, watching Bennett as he stripped off the harness from the dead horse, stowed it away under the seat of the cart, and rolled the cart itself to the edge of the road. Then at length she said, trying to smile and to steady her voice:

"It—it seems to me, Mr. Bennett, you do about—about as you like with my sta-bub-ble."

"Sit down!" he commanded, "you are trembling all over. Sit down on that rock there."

"—and with me," she added, sinking down upon the boulder he had indicated with a movement of his head, his hands busy with the harness.

"I'm sorry I had to do that," he explained; "but there was no help for it—nothing else to do. He would have had you in the canal in another second, if he did not kill you on the way there."

"Poor old Rox," murmured Lloyd; "I was very fond of Rox."

Bennett put himself in her way as she stepped forward. He had the lap-robe over his arm and the whip in his hand.

"No, don't look at him. He's not a pretty sight. Come, shall I take you home? Don't worry about the cart; I will see that it is sent back."

"And that Rox is buried—somewhere? I don't want him left out there for the crows." In spite of Bennett's injunction she looked over her shoulder for a moment as they started off down the road. "I only hope you were sure there was nothing else to do, Mr. Bennett," she said.

"There was no time to think," he answered, "and I wasn't taking any chances."

But the savagery of the whole affair stuck in Lloyd's imagination. There was a primitiveness, a certain hideous simplicity in the way Bennett had met the situation that filled her with wonder and with even a little terror and mistrust of him. The vast, brutal directness of the deed was out of place and incongruous at this end-of-the-century time. It ignored two thousand years of civilisation. It was a harsh, clanging, brazen note, powerful, uncomplicated, which came jangling in, discordant and inharmonious with the tune of the age. It savoured of the days when men fought the brutes with their hands or with their clubs. But also it was an indication of a force and a power of mind that stopped at nothing to attain its ends, that chose the shortest cut, the most direct means, disdainful of hesitation, holding delicacy and finessing in measureless contempt, rushing straight to its object, driving in, breaking down resistance, smashing through obstacles with a boundless, crude, blind Brobdignag power, to oppose which was to be trampled under foot upon the instant.

It was long before their talk turned from the incident of the morning, but when it did its subject was Richard Ferriss. Bennett was sounding his praises and commending upon his pluck and endurance during the retreat from the ship, when Lloyd, after hesitating once or twice, asked:

"How is Mr. Ferriss? In your note you said he was ill."

"So he is," he told her, "and I could not have left him if I was not sure I was doing him harm by staying. But the doctor is to wire me if he gets any worse, and only if he does. I am to believe that no news is good news."

But this meeting with Lloyd and the intense excitement of those few moments by the canal had quite driven from Bennett's mind the fact that he had not forwarded his present address either to Ferriss or to his doctor. He had so intended that morning, but all the faculties of his mind were suddenly concentrated upon another issue. For the moment he believed that he had actually written to Dr. Pitts, as he had planned, and when he thought of his intended message at all, thought of it as an accomplished fact. The matter did not occur to him again.

As he walked by Lloyd's side, listening to her and talking to her, snapping the whip the while, or flicking the heads from the mullein stalks by the roadside with its lash, he was thinking how best he might say to her what he had come from the City to say. To lead up to his subject, to guide the conversation, to prepare the right psychological moment skilfully and without apparent effort, were maneuvers in the game that Bennett ignored and despised. He knew only that he loved her, that she was there at his side, that the object of all his desires and hopes was within his reach. Straight as a homing pigeon he went to his goal.

"Miss Searight," he began, his harsh, bass voice pitched even lower than usual, "what do you think I am down here for? This is not the only part of the world where I could recuperate, I suppose, and as for spending God's day in chipping at stones, like a professor of a young ladies' seminary"—he hurled the hammer from him into the bushes—"that for geology! Now we can talk. You know very well that I love you, and I believe that you love me. I have come down here to ask you to marry me."

Lloyd might have done any one of a dozen things—might have answered in any one of a dozen ways. But what she did do, what she did say, took Bennett completely by surprise. A little coldly and very calmly she answered:

"You believe—you say you believe that I—" she broke off, then began again: "It is not right for you to say that to me. I have never led you to believe that I cared for you. Whatever our relations are to be, let us have that understood at once."

Bennett uttered an impatient exclamation "I am not good at fencing and quibbling," he declared. "I tell you that I love you with all my heart. I tell you that I want you to be my wife, and I tell you that I know you do love me. You are not like other women; why should you coquette with me? Good God! Are you not big enough to be above such things? I know you are. Of all the people in the world we two ought to be above pretence, ought to understand each other. If I did not know you cared for me I would not have spoken."

"I don't understand you," she answered. "I think we had better talk of other things this morning."

"I came down here to talk of just this and nothing else," he declared.

"Very well, then," she said, squaring her shoulders with a quick, brisk movement, "we will talk of it. You say we two should understand each other. Let us come to the bottom of things at once. I despise quibbling and fencing as much, perhaps, as you. Tell me how have I ever led you to believe that I cared for you?"

"At a time when our last hope was gone," answered Bennett, meeting her eyes, "when I was very near to death and thought that I should go to my God within the day, I was made happier than I think I ever was in my life before by finding out that I was dear to you—that you loved me."

Lloyd searched his face with a look of surprise and bewilderment.

"I do not understand you," she repeated.

"Oh!" exclaimed Bennett with sudden vehemence, "you could say it to Ferriss; why can't you say it to me?"

"To Mr. Ferriss?"

"You could tell him that you cared."

"I—tell Mr. Ferriss—that I cared for you?" She began to smile. "You are a little absurd, Mr. Bennett."

"And I cannot see why you should deny it now. Or if anything has caused you to change your mind—to be sorry for what you said, why should I not know it? Even a petty thief may be heard in his own defence. I loved you because I believed you to be a woman, a great, strong, noble, man's woman, above little things, above the little, niggling, contemptible devices of the drawing-room. I loved you because the great things of the world interested you, because you had no place in your life for petty graces, petty affectations, petty deceits and shams and insincerities. If you did not love me, why did you say so? If you do love me now, why should you not admit it? Do you think you can play with me? Do you think you can coquette with me? If you were small enough to stoop to such means, do you think I am small enough to submit to them? I have known Ferriss too well. I know him to be incapable of such falsity as you would charge him with. To have told such a lie, such an uncalled-for, useless, gratuitous lie, is a thing he could not have done. You must have told him that you cared. Why aren't you—you of all women—brave enough, strong enough, big enough to stand by your words?"

"Because I never said them. What do you think of me? Even if I did care, do you suppose I would say as much—and to another man? Oh!" she exclaimed with sudden indignation, "let's talk of something else. This is too—preposterous."

"You never told Ferriss that you cared for me?"

"No."

Bennett took off his cap. "Very well, then. That is enough. Good-bye, Miss Searight."

"Do you believe I told Mr. Ferriss I loved you?"

"I do not believe that the man who has been more to me than a brother is a liar and a rascal."

"Good-morning, Mr. Bennett."

They had come rather near to the farmhouse by this time. Without another word Bennett gave the whip and the lap-robe into her hands, and, turning upon his heel, walked away down the road.

Lloyd told Lewis as much of the morning's accident by the canal as was necessary, and gave orders about the dog-cart and the burying of Rox. Then slowly, her eyes fixed and wide, she went up to her own room and, without removing either her hat or her gloves, sat down upon the edge of the bed, letting her hands fall limply into her lap, gazing abstractedly at the white curtain just stirring at the open window.

She could not say which hurt her most—that Ferriss had told the lie or that Bennett believed it. But why, in heaven's name why, had Ferriss so spoken to Bennett; what object had he in view; what had he to gain by it? Why had Ferriss, the man who loved her, chosen so to humiliate her, to put her in a position so galling to her pride, her dignity? Bennett, too, loved her. How could he believe that she had so demeaned herself?

She had been hurt and to the heart, at a point where she believed herself most unassailable, and he who held the weapon was the man that with all the heart of her and soul of her she loved.

Much of the situation was all beyond her. Try as she would she could not understand. One thing, however, she saw clearly, unmistakably: Bennett believed that she loved him, believed that she had told as much to Ferriss, and that when she had denied all knowledge of Ferriss's lie she was only coquetting with him. She knew Bennett and his character well enough to realise that an idea once rooted in his mind was all but ineradicable. Bennett was not a man of easy changes; nothing mobile about him.

The thought of this belief of Bennett's was intolerable. As she sat there alone in her white room the dull crimson of her cheeks flamed suddenly scarlet, and with a quick, involuntary gesture she threw her hand, palm outward, across her face to hide it from the sunlight. She went quickly from one mood to another. Now her anger grew suddenly hot against Ferriss. How had he dared? How had he dared to put this indignity, this outrageous insult, upon her? Now her wrath turned upon Bennett. What audacity had been his to believe that she would so forget herself? She set her teeth in her impotent anger, rising to her feet, her hands clenching, tears of sheer passion starting to her eyes.

For the greater part of the afternoon she kept to her room, pacing the floor from wall to wall, trying to think clearly, to resolve upon something that would readjust the situation, that would give her back her peace of mind, her dignity, and her happiness of the early morning. For now the great joy that had come to her in his safe return was all but gone. For one moment she even told herself she could not love him, but the next was willing to admit that it was only because of her love of him, as strong and deep as ever, that the humiliation cut so deeply and cruelly now. Ferriss had lied about her, and Bennett had believed the lie. To meet Bennett again under such circumstances was not to be thought of for one moment. Her vacation was spoiled; the charm of the country had vanished. Lloyd returned to the City the next day.

She found that she was glad to get back to her work. The subdued murmur of the City that hourly assaulted her windows was a relief to her ears after the profound and numbing silence of the country. The square was never so beautiful as at this time of summer, and even the restless shadow pictures, that after dark were thrown upon the ceiling of her room by the electrics shining through the great elms in the square below, were a pleasure.

On the morning after her arrival and as she was unpacking her trunk Miss Douglass came into her room and seated herself, according to her custom, on the couch. After some half-hour's give-and-take talk, the fever nurse said:

"Do you remember, Lloyd, what I told you about typhoid in the spring—that it was almost epidemic?"

Lloyd nodded, turning about from her trunk, her arms full of dresses.

"It's worse than ever now," continued Miss Douglass; "three of our people have been on cases only in the short time you have been away. And there's a case out in Medford that has killed one nurse."

"Well!" exclaimed Lloyd in some astonishment, "it seems to me that one should confine typhoid easily enough."

"Not always, not always," answered the other; "a virulent case would be quite as bad as yellow fever or smallpox. You remember when we were at the hospital Miss Helmuth, that little Polish nurse, contracted it from her case and died even before her patient did. Then there was Eva Blayne. She very nearly died. I did like the way Miss Wakeley took this case out at Medford even when the other nurse had died. She never hesitated for—"

"Has one of our people got this case?" inquired Lloyd.

"Of course. Didn't I tell you?"

"I hope we cure it," said Lloyd, her trunk-tray in her hands. "I don't think we have ever lost a case yet when good nursing could pull it through, and in typhoid the whole treatment really is the nursing."

"Lloyd," said Miss Douglass decisively, "I would give anything I can think of now to have been on that hip disease case of yours and have brought my patient through as you did. You should hear what Dr. Street says of you—and the little girl's father. By the way, I had nearly forgotten. Hattie Campbell—that's her name, isn't it?—telephoned to know if you had come back from the country yet. That was yesterday. I said we expected you to-day, and she told me to say she was coming to see you."

The next afternoon toward three o'clock Hattie and her father drove to the square in an open carriage, Hattie carrying a great bunch of violets for Lloyd. The little invalid was well on the way to complete recovery by now. Sometimes she was allowed to walk a little, but as often as not her maid wheeled her about in an invalid's chair. She drove out in the carriage frequently by way of exercise. She would, no doubt, always limp a little, but in the end it was certain she would be sound and strong. For Hattie and her father Lloyd had become a sort of tutelary semi-deity. In what was left of the family she had her place, hardly less revered than even the dead wife. Campbell himself, who had made a fortune in Bessemer steel, a well-looking, well-groomed gentleman, smooth-shaven and with hair that was none too gray, more than once caught himself standing before Lloyd's picture that stood on the mantelpiece in Hattie's room, looking at it vaguely as he clipped the nib from his cigar.

But on this occasion as the carriage stopped in front of the ample pile of the house Hattie called out, "Oh, there she is now," and Lloyd came down the steps, carrying her nurse's bag in her hand.

"Are we too late?" began Hattie; "are you going out; are you on a case? Is that why you've got your bag? We thought you were on a vacation."

Campbell, yielding to a certain feeling of uneasiness that Lloyd should stand on the curb while he remained seated, got out of the carriage and stood at her side, gravely listening to the talk between the nurse and her one-time patient. Lloyd was obliged to explain, turning now to Hattie, now to her father. She told them that she was in something of a hurry. She had just been specially called to take a very bad case of typhoid fever in a little suburb of the City, called Medford. It was not her turn to go, but the physicians in charge of the case, as sometimes happened, had asked especially for her.

"One of our people, a young woman named Miss Wakeley, has been on this case," she continued, "but it seems she has allowed herself to contract the disease herself. She went to the hospital this noon."

Campbell, his gravity suddenly broken up, exclaimed:

"Surely, Miss Searight, this is not the same case I read of in yesterday's paper—it must be, too—Medford was the name of the place. That case has killed one nurse already, and now the second one is down. Don't tell me you are going to take the same case."

"It is the same case," answered Lloyd, "and, of course, I am going to take it. Did you ever hear of a nurse doing otherwise? Why, it would seem—seem so—funny—"

There was no dissuading her, and Campbell and Hattie soon ceased even to try. She was impatient to be gone. The station was close at hand, and she would not hear of taking the carriage thither. However, before she left them she recurred again to the subject of her letter to Mr. Campbell, and then and there it was decided that Hattie and her maid should spend the following ten days at Lloyd's place in Bannister. The still country air, now that Hattie was able to take the short journey, would be more to her than many medicines, and the ponies and Lloyd's phaeton would be left there with Lewis for her use.

"And write often, won't you, Miss Searight?" exclaimed Hattie as Lloyd was saying good-bye. Lloyd shook her head.

"Not that of all things," she answered. "If I did that we might have you, too, down with typhoid. But you may write to me, and I hope you will," and she gave Hattie her new address.

"Harriet," said Campbell as the carriage drove back across the square, the father and daughter waving their hands to Lloyd, briskly on her way to the railroad station, "Harriet."

"Yes, papa."

"There goes a noble woman. Pluck, intelligence, strong will—she has them all—and a great big heart that—heart that—" He clipped the end of a cigar thoughtfully and fell silent.

A day or two later, as Hattie was sitting in her little wheel-chair on the veranda of Mrs. Applegate's house watching Charley-Joe hunting grasshoppers underneath the currant bushes, she was surprised by the sharp closing of the front gate. A huge man with one squint eye and a heavy, square-cut jaw was coming up the walk, followed by a strange-looking dog. Charley-Joe withdrew, swiftly to his particular hole under the veranda, moving rapidly, his body low to the ground, and taking an unnecessary number of very short steps.

The little city-bred girl distinguished the visitor from a country man at once. Hattie had ideas of her own as to propriety, and so rose to her feet as Bennett came up, and after a moment's hesitation made him a little bow. Bennett at once gravely took off his cap.

"Excuse me," he said as though Hattie were twenty-five instead of twelve. "Is Miss Searight at home?"

"Oh," exclaimed Hattie, delighted, "do you know Miss Searight? She was my nurse when I was so sick—because you know I had hip disease and there was an operation. No, she's not here any more. She's gone away, gone back to the City."

"Gone back to the City?"

"Yes, three or four days ago. But I'm going to write to her this afternoon. Shall I say who called?" Then, without waiting for a reply, she added, "I guess I had better introduce myself. My name is Harriet Campbell, and my papa is Craig V. Campbell, of the Hercules Wrought Steel Company in the City. Won't you have a chair?"

The little convalescent and the arctic explorer shook hands with great solemnity.

"I'm so pleased to meet you," said Bennett. "I haven't a card, but my name is Ward Bennett—of the Freja expedition," he added. But, to his relief, the little girl had not heard of him.

"Very well," she said, "I'll tell Miss Searight Mr. Bennett called."

"No," he replied, hesitatingly, "no, you needn't do that."

"Why, she won't answer my letter, you know," explained Hattie, "because she is afraid her letters would give me typhoid fever, that they might"—she continued carefully, hazarding a remembered phrase—"carry the contagion. You see she has gone to nurse a dreadful case of typhoid fever out at Medford, near the City, and we're so worried and anxious about her—papa and I. One nurse that had this case has died already and another one has caught the disease and is very sick, and Miss Searight, though she knew just how dangerous it was, would go, just like—like—" Hattie hesitated, then confused memories of her school reader coming to her, finished with "like Casabianca."

"Oh," said Bennett, turning his head so as to fix her with his own good eye. "She has gone to nurse a typhoid fever patient, has she?"

"Yes, and papa told me—" and Hattie became suddenly very grave, "that we might—might—oh, dear—never see her again."

"Hum! Whereabouts is this place in Medford? She gave you her address; what is it?" Hattie told him, and he took himself abruptly away.

Bennett had gone some little distance down the road before the real shock came upon him. Lloyd was in a position of imminent peril; her life was in the issue. With blind, unreasoned directness he leaped at once to this conclusion, and as he strode along with teeth and fists tight shut he kept muttering to himself: "She may die, she may die—we—we may never see her again." Then suddenly came the fear, the sickening sink of heart, the choke at the throat, first the tightening and then the sudden relaxing of all the nerves. Lashed and harried by the sense of a fearful calamity, an unspeakable grief that was pursuing after him, Bennett did not stop to think, to reflect. He chose instantly to believe that Lloyd was near her death, and once the idea was fixed in his brain it was not thereafter to be reasoned away. Suddenly, at a turn in the road, he stopped, his hands deep in his pockets, his bootheel digging into the ground. "Now, then," he exclaimed, "what's to be done?"

Just one thing: Lloyd must leave the case at once, that very day if it were possible. He must save her; must turn her back from this destruction toward which she was rushing, impelled by such a foolish, mistaken notion of duty.

"Yes," he said, "there's just that to be done, and, by God! it shall be done."

But would Lloyd be turned back from a course she had chosen for herself? Could he persuade her? Then with this thought of possible opposition Bennett's resolve all at once tightened to the sticking point. Never in the darkest hours of his struggle with the arctic ice had his determination grown so fierce; never had his resolution so girded itself, so nerved itself to crush down resistance. The force of his will seemed brusquely to be quadrupled and decupled. He would do as he desired; come what might he would gain his end. He would stop at nothing, hesitate at nothing. It would probably be difficult to get her from her post, but with all his giant's strength Bennett set himself to gain her safety.

A great point that he believed was in his favour, a consideration that influenced him to adopt so irrevocable a resolution, was his belief that Lloyd loved him. Bennett was not a woman's man. Men he could understand and handle like so many manikins, but the nature of his life and work did not conduce to a knowledge of women. Bennett did not understand them. In his interview with Lloyd when she had so strenuously denied Ferriss' story Bennett could not catch the ring of truth. It had gotten into his mind that Lloyd loved him. He believed easily what he wanted to believe, and his faith in Lloyd's love for him had become a part and parcel of his fundamental idea of things, not readily to be driven out even by Lloyd herself.

Bennett's resolution was taken. Never had he failed in accomplishing that upon which he set his mind. He would not fail now. Beyond a certain limit—a limit which now he swiftly reached and passed—Bennett's determination to carry his point became, as it were, a sort of obsession; the sweep of the tremendous power he unchained carried his own self along with it in its resistless onrush. At such, times there was no light of reason in his actions. He saw only his point, beheld only his goal; deaf to all voices that would call him back, blind to all consideration that would lead him to swerve, reckless of everything that he trampled under foot, he stuck to his aim until that aim was an accomplished fact. When the grip of the Ice had threatened to close upon him and crush him, he had hurled himself against its barriers with an energy and resolve to conquer that was little short of directed frenzy. So it was with him now.

When Lloyd had parted from the Campbells in the square before the house, she had gone directly to the railway station of a suburban line, and, within the hour, was on her way to Medford. As always happened when an interesting case was to be treated, her mind became gradually filled with it to the exclusion of everything else. The Campbells, and Bennett's ready acceptance of a story that put her in so humiliating a light, were forgotten as the train swept her from the heat and dust of the City out into the green reaches of country to the southward. What had been done upon the case she had no means of telling. She only knew that the case was of unusual virulence and well advanced. It had killed one nurse already and seriously endangered the life of another, but so far from reflecting on the danger to herself, Lloyd felt a certain exhilaration in the thought that she was expected to succeed where others had succumbed. Another battle with the Enemy was at hand, the Enemy who, though conquered on a hundred fields, must inevitably triumph in the end. Once again this Enemy had stooped and caught a human being in his cold grip. Once again Life and Death were at grapples, and Death was strong, and from out the struggle a cry had come—had come to her—a cry for help.

All the exuberance of battle grew big within her breast. She was impatient to be there—there at hand—to face the Enemy again across the sick-bed, where she had so often faced and outfought him before; and, matching her force against his force, her obstinacy against his strength—the strength that would pull the life from her grasp—her sleepless vigilance against his stealth, her intelligence against his cunning, her courage against his terrors, her resistance against his attack, her skill against his strategy, her science against his world-old, worldwide experience, win the fight, save the life, hold firm against his slow, resistless pull and triumph again, if it was only for the day.

Succeed she would and must. Her inborn obstinacy, her sturdy refusal to yield her ground, whatever it should be, her stubborn power of resistance, her tenacity of her chosen course, came to her aid as she drew swiftly near to the spot whereon the battle would be fought. Mentally she braced herself, holding back with all her fine, hard-tempered, native strength. No, she would not yield the life to the Enemy; no, she would not give up; no, she would not recede. Let the Enemy do his worst—she was strong against his efforts.

At Medford, which she reached toward four in the afternoon, after an hour's ride from the City, she found a conveyance waiting for her, and was driven rapidly through streets bordered with villas and closely shaven lawns to a fair-sized country seat on the outskirts of the town. The housekeeper met her at the door with the information that the doctor was, at the moment, in the sick-room, and had left orders that the nurse should be brought to him the moment she arrived. The housekeeper showed Lloyd the way to the second landing, knocking upon the half-open door at the end of the hall, and ushering her in without waiting for an answer.

Lloyd took in the room at a glance—the closely drawn curtains, the screen between the bed and the windows, the doctor standing on the hearth-rug, and the fever-inflamed face of the patient on the pillow. Then all her power of self-repression could not keep her from uttering a smothered exclamation.