In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim. Frances Hodgson Burnett
gentleman!” he said, half aloud. “That’s it, by Jupiter, a gentleman!”
He remembered it afterwards as a curious coincidence that he should have busied his mind so actively with his subject in a manner so unusual with him.
His imagination not being sufficiently vivid to help him out of his difficulty to his own satisfaction, he laboured with it patiently, recurring to it again and again, and turning it over until it assumed a greater interest than at first. He only relinquished it with an effort when, going to bed later than usual, he made up his mind to compose himself to sleep.
“Good Lord!” he said, turning on his side and addressing some unseen presence representing the vexed question. “Don’t keep a man awake: settle it yourself.” And finally sank into unconsciousness in the midst of his mental struggle.
About the middle of the night he awakened. He felt that something had startled him from his sleep, but could not tell what it was. A few seconds he lay without moving, listening, and as he listened there came to his ear the sound of a horse’s feet, treading the earth restlessly outside the door, the animal itself breathing heavily as if it had been ridden hard; and almost as soon as he aroused to recognition of this fact, there came a sharp tap on the door and a man’s voice crying “Hallo!”
He knew the voice at once, and unexpected as the summons was, felt he was not altogether unprepared for it, though he could not have offered even the weakest explanation for the feeling.
“He’s in trouble,” he said, as he sat up quickly in bed. “Something’s gone wrong.” He rose and in a few seconds opened the door.
He had guessed rightly; it was the stranger. The moonlight fell full upon the side of the house and the road, and the panting horse stood revealed in a bright light which gave the man’s face a ghostly look added to his natural pallor. As he leaned forward, Tom saw that he was as much exhausted as was the animal he had ridden.
“I want to find a doctor, or a woman who can give help to another,” he said.
“There ain’t a doctor within fifteen miles from here,” began Tom. He stopped short. What he saw in the man’s face checked him.
“Look here,” he said, “is it your wife?”
The man made a sharp gesture of despair.
“She’s dying, I think,” he said, hoarsely, “and there’s not a human being near her.”
“Good Lord!” cried Tom, “Good Lord!” The sweat started out on his forehead. He remembered what Stamps had said of her youth and her pale face, and he thought of Delia Vanuxem, and from this thought sprang a sudden recollection of the deserted medical career in which he had been regarded as so ignominious a failure. He had never mentioned it since he had cut himself off from the old life, and the women for whose children he had prescribed with some success now and then had considered the ends achieved only the natural results of his multitudinous gifts. But the thought of the desolate young creature lying there alone struck deep. He listened one moment, then made his resolve.
“Go to the stable,” he said, “and throw a saddle over the horse you will find there. I know something of such matters myself, and I shall be better than nothing, with a woman’s help. I have a woman here who will follow us.”
He went into the back room and awakened Aunt Mornin.
“Get up,” he said, “and saddle the mule and follow me as soon as you can to the cabin in Blair’s Hollow. The wife of a man who lives there needs a woman with her. Come quickly.”
When he returned to the door his horse stood there saddled, the stranger sitting on his own and holding the bridle.
Tom mounted in silence, but once finally seated, he turned to his companion.
“Now strike out,” he said.
There were four miles of road before them, but they scarcely slackened rein until they were within sight of the Hollow, and the few words they exchanged were the barest questions and answers.
The cabin was built away from the road on the side of the hill, and leaving their horses tethered at the foot of the slope, they climbed it together.
When they reached the door, the stranger stopped and turned to Tom.
“There is no sound inside,” he faltered; “I dare not go in.”
Tom strode by him and pushed the door open.
In one corner of the room was a roughly made bedstead, and upon it lay a girl, her deathly pale face turned sideways upon the pillow. It was as if she lay prostrated by some wave of agony which had just passed over her; her breath was faint and rapid, and great drops of sweat stood out upon her young drawn face.
Tom drew a chair forward and sat down beside her. He lifted one of her hands, touching it gently, but save for a slight quiver of the eyelids she did not stir. A sense of awe fell upon him.
“It’s Death,” he said to himself. He had experience enough to teach him that. He turned to the man.
“You had better go out of the room; I will do my best.”
In a little over an hour Aunt Mornin dismounted from her mule and tethered it to a sapling at the side of the road below. She looked up at the light gleaming faintly through the pines on the hillside.
“I cum ’s fas’ ’s I could,” she said, “but I reckon I’d orter been here afore. De Lord knows dis is a curi’s ’casion.”
When she crossed the threshold of the cabin, her master pointed to a small faintly moving bundle lying at the foot of the bed over which he was bending.
“Take it into the other room and tell the man to come here,” he said. “There’s no time to lose.”
He still held the weak hand; but the girl’s eyes were no longer closed; they were open and fixed on his face. The great fellow was trembling like a leaf. The past hour had been almost more than he could bear. He was entirely unstrung.
“I wasn’t cut out for this kind of thing,” he had groaned more than once, and for the first time in his life thanked Fate for making him a failure.
As he looked down at his patient, a mist rose before his eyes, blurring his sight, and he hurriedly brushed it away.
She was perhaps nineteen years old, and had the very young look a simple trusting nature and innocent untried life bring. She was small, fragile, and fair, with the pure fairness born of a cold climate. Her large blue-gray eyes had in them the piteous appeal sometimes to be seen in the eyes of a timid child.
Tom had laid his big hand on her forehead and stroked it, scarcely knowing what he did.
“Don’t be frightened,” he said, with a tremor in his voice. “Close your eyes and try to be quiet for a few moments, and then——”
He stooped to bend his ear to her lips which were moving faintly.
“He’ll come directly,” he answered, though he did not hear her; “—directly. It’s all right.”
And then he stroked her hair again because he knew not what else to do, seeing, as he did, that the end was so very near, and that no earthly power, however far beyond his own poor efforts, could ward it off.
Just at that moment the door opened and the man came in.
That he too read the awful truth at his first glance, Tom saw. All attempts at disguise had dropped away. His thin, scholarly face was as colourless as the fairer one on the pillow, his brows were knit into rigid lines and his lips were working. He approached the bed, and for a few moments stood looking down as if trying to give himself time to gain self-control. Tom saw the girl’s soft eyes fixed in anguished entreaty; there was a struggle, and from the slowly moving lips came a few faint and broken words.
“Death!—They—never know.”