Chapter 8

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.

For she, the woman who, with all the savage energy of him, Bennett loved, had, at peril of her life, come to nurse Bennett's nearest friend, the man of all others dear to him--Richard Ferriss.

VI.

Two days after Dr. Pitts had brought Ferriss to his country house in the outskirts of Medford he had been able to diagnose his sickness as typhoid fever, and at once had set about telegraphing the fact to Bennett. Then it had occurred to him that he did not know where Bennett had gone. Bennett had omitted notifying him of his present whereabouts, and, acting upon Dr. Pitts' advice, had hidden himself away from everybody. Neither at his club nor at his hotel, where his mail accumulated in extraordinary quantities, had any forwarding address been left. Bennett would not even know that Ferriss had been moved to Medford. So much the worse. It could not be helped. There was nothing for the doctor to do but to leave Bennett in ignorance and go ahead and fight for the life of Ferriss as best he could. Pitts arranged for a brother physician to take over his practice, and devoted himself entirely to Ferriss. And Ferriss sickened and sickened, and went steadily from bad to worse. The fever advanced regularly to a certain stage, a stage of imminent danger, and there paused. Rarely had Pitts been called upon to fight a more virulent form of the disease.

What made matters worse was that Ferriss hung on for so long a time without change one way or another. Pitts had long since been convinced of ulceration in the membrane of the intestines, but it astonished him that this symptom persisted so long without signs either of progressing or diminishing. The course of the disease was unusually slow. The first nurse had already had time to sicken and die; a second had been infected, and yet Ferriss "hung on," neither sinking nor improving, yet at every hour lying perilously near death. It was not often that death and life locked horns for so long, not often that the chance was so even. Many was the hour, many was the moment, when a hair would have turned the balance, and yet the balance was preserved.

At her abrupt recognition of Ferriss, in this patient whom she had been summoned to nurse, and whose hold upon life was so pitifully weak, Lloyd's heart gave a great leap and then sank ominously in her breast. Her first emotion was one of boundless self-reproach. Why had she not known of this? Why had she not questioned Bennett more closely as to his friend's sickness? Might she not have expected something like this? Was not typhoid the one evil to be feared and foreseen after experiences such as Ferriss had undergone--the fatigue and privations of the march over the ice, and the subsequent months aboard the steam whaler, with its bad food, its dirt, and its inevitable overcrowding?

And while she had been idling in the country, this man, whom she had known since her girlhood better and longer than any of her few acquaintances, had been struck down, and day by day had weakened and sickened and wasted, until now, at any hour, at any moment, the life might be snuffed out like the fight of a spent candle. What a miserable incompetent had she been! That day in the park when she had come upon him, so weak and broken and far spent, why had she not, with all her training and experience, known that even then the flame was flickering down to the socket, that a link in the silver chain was weakening? Now, perhaps, it was too late. But quick her original obstinacy rose up in protest. No! she would not yield the life. No, no, no; again and a thousand times no! He belonged to her. Others she had saved, others far less dear to her than Ferriss. Her last patient--the little girl--she had caught back from death at the eleventh hour, and of all men would she not save Ferriss? In such sickness as this it was the nurse and not the doctor who must be depended upon. And, once again, never so strong, never so fine, never so glorious, her splendid independence, her pride in her own strength, her indomitable self-reliance leaped in her breast, leaped and stood firm, hard as tempered steel, head to the Enemy, daring the assault, defiant, immovable, unshaken in its resolve, unconquerable in the steadfast tenacity of its purpose.

The story that Ferriss had told to Bennett, that uncalled-for and inexplicable falsehood, was a thing forgotten. Death stood at the bed-head, and in that room the little things of life had no place. The king was holding court, and the swarm of small, everyday issues, like a crowd of petty courtiers, were not admitted to his presence. Ferriss' life was in danger. Lloyd saw no more than that. At once she set about the work.

In a few rapid sentences exchanged in low voices between her and the doctor Lloyd made herself acquainted with the case.

"We've been using the ice-pack and wet-pack to bring down the temperature in place of the cold bath," the doctor explained. "I'm afraid of pericarditis."

"Quinine?" inquired Lloyd.

"From twenty to forty grains in the morning and evening. Here's the temperature chart for the last week. If we reach this point in axilla again--" he indicated one hundred and two degrees with a thumb-nail--"we'll have to risk the cold bath, but only in that case."

"And the tympanites?"

Dr. Pitts put his chin in the air.

"Grave--there's an intestinal ulcer, no doubt of it, and if it perforates--well, we can send for the undertaker then."

"Has he had hemorrhages?"

"Two in the first week, but not profuse--he seemed to rally fairly well afterward. We have been injecting ether in case of anemia. Really, Miss Searight, the case is interesting, but wicked, wicked as original sin. Killed off my first nurse out of hand--good little boy, conscientious enough; took no care of himself; ate his meals in the sick-room against my wishes; off he went--dicrotic pulse, diarrhea, vomiting, hospital, thrombosis of pulmonary artery, _pouf_, requiescat."

"And Miss Wakeley?"

"Knocked under yesterday, and she was fairly saturated with creolin night and morning. I don't know how it happened.... Well, God for us all. Here he is--that's the point for us." He glanced toward the bed, and for the third time Lloyd looked at the patient.

Ferriss was in a quiet delirium, and, at intervals, from behind his lips, dry and brown and fissured, there came the sounds of low and indistinct muttering. Barring a certain prominence of the cheek-bones, his face was not very wasted, but its skin was a strange, dusky pallor. The cold pack was about his head like a sort of caricatured crown.

"Well," repeated Pitts in a moment, "I've been waiting for you to come to get a little rest. Was up all last night. Suppose you take over charge."