by Frank Norris
“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 w
ent 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.