A Man's Woman

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."

Lloyd nodded her head, removing her hat and gloves, making herself ready. Pitts gave her some final directions, and left her alone in the sick-room. For the moment there was nothing to do for the patient. Lloyd put on her hospital slippers and moved silently about the room, preparing for the night, and making some few changes in the matter of light and ventilation. Then for a while the medicine occupied her attention, and she was at some pains to carefully sort out the antiseptic and disinfectants from the drugs themselves. These latter she arranged on a table by themselves—studying the labels—assuring herself of their uses. Quinine for the regular morning and evening doses, sulphonal and trional for insomnia, ether for injections in case of anemia after hemorrhage, morphine for delirium, citrite of caffeine for weakness of the heart, tincture of valerian for the tympanites, bismuth to relieve nausea and vomiting, and the crushed ice wrapped in flannel cloths for the cold pack in the event of hyperpyrexia.

Later in the evening she took the temperature in the armpit, noted the condition of the pulse, and managed to get Ferriss—still in his quiet, muttering delirium—to drink a glass of peptonised milk. She administered the quinine, reading the label, as was her custom, three times, once as she took it up, again as she measured the dose, and a last time as she returned the bottle to its place. Everything she did, every minute change in Ferriss's condition, she entered upon a chart, so that in the morning when Dr. Pitts should relieve her he could grasp the situation at a glance.

The night passed without any but the expected variations of the pulse and temperature, though toward daylight Lloyd could fancy that Ferriss, for a few moments, came out of his delirium and was conscious of his surroundings. For a few seconds his eyes seemed to regain something of their intelligence, and his glance moved curiously about the room. But Lloyd, sitting near the foot-board of the bed, turned her head from him. It was not expedient that Ferriss should recognise her now.

Lloyd could not but commend the wisdom of bringing Ferriss to Dr. Pitts's own house in so quiet a place as Medford. The doctor risked nothing. He was without a family, the only other occupants of the house being the housekeeper and cook. On more than one occasion, when an interesting case needed constant watching, Pitts had used his house as a sanatorium. Quiet as the little village itself was, the house was removed some little distance from its outskirts. The air was fine and pure. The stillness, the calm, the unbroken repose, was almost Sabbath-like. In the early watches of the night, just at the turn of the dawn, Lloyd heard the faint rumble of a passing train at the station nearly five miles away. For hours that and the prolonged stridulating of the crickets were the only sounds. Then at last, while it was yet dark, a faint chittering of waking birds began from under the eaves and from the apple-trees in the yard about the house. Lloyd went to the window, and, drawing aside the curtains, stood there for a moment looking out. She could see part of the road leading to the town, and, in the distance, the edge of the town itself, a few well-kept country residences of suburban dwellers of the City, and, farther on, a large, rectangular, brick building with cupola and flagstaff, perhaps the public school or the bank or the Odd Fellows' Hall. Nearer by were fields and corners of pasture land, with here and there the formless shapes of drowsing cows. One of these, as Lloyd watched, changed position, and she could almost hear the long, deep breath that accompanied the motion. Far off, miles upon miles, so it seemed, a rooster was crowing at exact intervals. All at once, and close at hand, another answered—a gay, brisk carillon that woke the echoes in an instant. For the first time Lloyd noticed a pale, dim belt of light low in the east.

Toward eight o'clock in the morning the doctor came to relieve her, and while he was examining the charts and she was making her report for the night the housekeeper announced breakfast.

"Go down to your breakfast, Miss Searight," said the doctor. "I'll stay here the while. The housekeeper will show you to your room."

But before breakfasting Lloyd went to the room the housekeeper had set apart for her—a different one than had been occupied by either of the previous nurses—changed her dress, and bathed her face and hands in a disinfecting solution. When she came out of her room the doctor met her in the hall; his hat and stick were in his hand. "He has gone to sleep," he informed her, "and is resting quietly. I am going to get a mouthful of fresh air along the road. The housekeeper is with him. If he wakes she'll call you. I will not be gone fifteen minutes. I've not been out of the house for five days, and there's no danger."

Breakfast had been laid in what the doctor spoke of as the glass-room. This was an enclosed veranda, one side being of glass and opening by French windows directly upon a little lawn that sloped away under the apple-trees to the road. It was a charming apartment, an idea of a sister of Dr. Pitts, who at one time had spent two years at Medford. Lloyd breakfasted here alone, and it was here that Bennett found her.

The one public carriage of Medford, a sort of four-seated carryall, that met all the trains at the depot, had driven to the gate at the foot of the yard, and had pulled up, the horses reeking and blowing. Even before it had stopped, a tall, square-shouldered man had alighted, but it was not until he was half-way up the gravel walk that Lloyd had recognised him. Bennett caught sight of her at the same moment, and strode swiftly across the lawn and came into the breakfast-room by one of the open French windows. At once the room seemed to shrink in size; his first step upon the floor—a step that was almost a stamp, so eager it was, so masterful and resolute—set the panes of glass jarring in their frames. Never had Bennett seemed more out of place than in this almost dainty breakfast-room, with its small, feminine appurtenances, its fragile glassware, its pots of flowers and growing plants. The incongruous surroundings emphasized his every roughness, his every angularity. Against its background of delicate, mild tints his figure loomed suddenly colossal; the great span of his chest and shoulders seemed never so huge. His face; the great, brutal jaw, with its aggressive, bullying, forward thrust; the close-gripped lips, the contracted forehead, the small eyes, marred with the sharply defined cast, appeared never so harsh, never so massive, never so significant of the resistless, crude force of the man, his energy, his overpowering determination. As he towered there before her, one hand gripped upon a chair-back, it seemed to her that the hand had but to close to crush the little varnished woodwork to a splinter, and when he spoke Lloyd could imagine that the fine, frail china of the table vibrated to the deep-pitched bass of his voice.

Lloyd had only to look at him once to know that Bennett was at the moment aroused and agitated to an extraordinary degree. His face was congested and flaming. Under his frown his eyes seemed flashing veritable sparks; his teeth were set; in his temple a vein stood prominent and throbbing. But Lloyd was not surprised. Bennett had, no doubt, heard of Ferriss's desperate illness. Small wonder he was excited when the life of his dearest friend was threatened. Lloyd could ignore her own quarrel with Bennett at such a moment.

"I am so sorry," she began, "that you could not have known sooner. But you remember you left no address. There was—"

"What are you doing here?" he broke in abruptly. "What is the use—why—" he paused for a moment to steady his voice—"you can't stay here," he went on. "Don't you know the risk you are running? You can't stay here another moment."

"That," answered Lloyd, smiling, "is a matter that is interesting chiefly to me. I suppose you know that, Mr. Bennett."

"I know that you are risking your life and—"

"And that, too, is my affair."

"I have made it mine," he responded quickly. "Oh," he exclaimed sharply, striking the back of the chair with his open palm, "why must we always be at cross-purposes with each other? I'm not good at talking. What is the use of tangling ourselves with phrases? I love you, and I've come out here to ask you, to beg you, you understand, to leave this house, where you are foolishly risking your life. You must do it," he went on rapidly. "I love you too well. Your life is too much to me to allow you to hazard it senselessly, foolishly. There are other women, other nurses, who can take your place. But you are not going to stay here."

Lloyd felt her indignation rising.

"This is my profession," she answered, trying to keep back her anger. "I am here because it is my duty to be here." Then suddenly, as his extraordinary effrontery dawned upon her, she exclaimed, rising to her feet: "Do I need to explain to you what I do? I am here because I choose to be here. That is enough. I don't care to go any further with such a discussion as this."

"You will not leave here, then?"

"No."

Bennett hesitated an instant, searching for his words, then:

"I do not know how to ask favours. I've had little experience in that sort of thing. You must know how hard it is for me, and you must understand to what lengths I am driven then, when I entreat you, when I beg of you, as humbly as it is possible for me to do so, to leave this house, now—at once. There is a train to the City within the hour; some one else can take your place before noon. We can telegraph; will you go?"

"You are absurd."

"Lloyd, can't you see; don't you understand? It's as though I saw you rushing toward a precipice with your eyes shut."

"My place is here. I shall not leave."

But Bennett's next move surprised her. His eagerness, his agitation left him upon the instant He took out his watch.

"I was wrong," he said quietly. "The next train will not go for an hour and a quarter. There is more time than I supposed." Then, with as much gentleness as he could command, he added: "Lloyd, you are going to take that train?"

"Now, you are becoming a little more than absurd," she answered. "I don't know, Mr. Bennett, whether or not you intend to be offensive, but I think you are succeeding rather well. You came to this house uninvited; you invade a gentleman's private residence, and you attempt to meddle and to interfere with me in the practice of my profession. If you think you can impress me with heroics and declamation, please correct yourself at once. You have only succeeded in making yourself a little vulgar."

"That may be true or not," he answered with an indifferent movement of his shoulders. "It is all one to me. I have made up my mind that you shall leave this house this morning, and believe me, Miss Searight, I shall carry my point."

For the moment Lloyd caught her breath. For the moment she saw clearly with just what sort of man she had to deal. There was a conviction in his manner—now that he had quieted himself—that suddenly appeared unanswerable. It was like the slow, still moving of a piston.

But the next moment her own character reasserted itself. She remembered what she was herself. If he was determined, she was obstinate; if he was resolved, she was stubborn; if he was powerful, she was unyielding. Never had she conceded her point before; never had she allowed herself to be thwarted in the pursuance of a course she believed to be right. Was she, of all women, to yield now? The consciousness of her own power of resistance came suddenly to her aid. Bennett was strong, but was she not strong herself? Where under the blue sky was the power that could break down her will? When death itself could not prevail against her, what in life could shake her resolution?

Suddenly the tremendous import of the moment, the magnitude of the situation, flashed upon Lloyd. Both of them had staked everything upon this issue. Two characters of extraordinary power clashed violently together. There was to be no compromise, no half-measures. Either she or Bennett must in the end be beaten. One of them was to be broken and humbled beyond all retrieving. There in that commonplace little room, with its trivial accessories, its inadequate background, a battle royal swiftly prepared itself. With the abruptness of an explosion the crisis developed.

"Do I need to tell you," remarked Bennett, "that your life is rather more to me than any other consideration in the world? Do you suppose when the lives of every member of my command depended upon me I was any less resolved to succeed than I am now? I succeeded then, and I shall succeed now, now when there is much more at stake. I am not accustomed to failure, and I shall not fail now. I assure you that I shall stop at nothing."

It was beyond Lloyd to retain her calmness under such aggression. It seemed as though her self-respect demanded that she should lose her temper.

"And you think you can drive me as you drove your deck-hands?" she exclaimed. "What have you to do with me? Am I your subordinate? Do you think you can bully me? We are not in Kolyuchin Bay, Mr. Bennett."

"You're the woman I love," he answered with an abrupt return of vehemence, "and, by God! I shall stop at nothing to save your life."

"And my love for you, that you pretend is so much to you, I suppose that this is the means you take to awaken it. Admitting, for the moment, that you could induce me to shirk my duty, how should I love you for it? Ask yourself that."

But Bennett had but one answer to all her words. He struck his fist into the palm of his hand as he answered:

"Your life is more to me than any other consideration."

"But my life—how do you know it is a question of my life? Come, if we are to quarrel, let us quarrel upon reasonable grounds. It does not follow that I risk my life by staying—"

"Leave the house first; we can talk of that afterward."

"I have allowed you to talk too much already," she exclaimed angrily. "Let us come to the bottom of things at once. I will not be influenced nor cajoled nor bullied into leaving my post. Now, do you understand? That is my final answer. You who were a commander, who were a leader of men, what would you have done if one of your party had left his post at a time of danger? I can tell you what you would have done—you would have shot him, after first disgracing him, and now you would disgrace me. Is it reasonable? Is it consistent?"

Bennett snapped his fingers.

"That for consistency!"

"And you would be willing to disgrace me—to have me disgrace myself?"

"Your life—" began Bennett again.

But suddenly Lloyd flashed out upon him with: "My life! My life! Are there not some things better than life? You, above all men, should understand that much. Oh, be yourself, be the man I thought you were. You have your code; let me have mine. You could not be what you are, you could not have done what you did, if you had not set so many things above merely your life. Admit that you could not have loved me unless you believed that I could do the same. How could you still love me if you knew I had failed in my duty? How could you still love me if you knew that you had broken down my will? I know you better than you know yourself. You loved me because you knew me to be strong and brave and to be above petty deceptions and shams and subterfuges. And now you ask me to fail, to give up, to shirk, and you tell me you do so because you love me."

"That is all so many words to me. I cannot argue with you, and there is no time for it. I did not come here to—converse."

Never in her life before had Lloyd been so angry as at that moment. The sombre crimson of her cheeks had suddenly given place to an unwonted paleness; even her dull-blue eyes, that so rarely sparkled, were all alight. She straightened herself.

"Very well, then," she answered quietly, "our conversation can stop where it is. You will excuse me, Mr. Bennett, if I leave you. I have my work to do."

Bennett was standing between her and the door. He did not move. Very gravely he said:

"Don't. Please don't bring it—to that."

Lloyd flashed a look at him, her eyes wide, exclaiming:

"You don't mean—you don't dare—"

"I tell you again that I mean to carry my point."

"And I tell you that I shall not leave my patient."

Bennett met her glance for an instant, and, holding her gaze with his, answered but two words. Speaking in a low voice and with measured slowness, he said:

"You—shall."

There was a silence. The two stood there, looking straight into one another's eyes, their mutual opposition at its climax. The seconds began to pass. The conflict between the man's aggression and the woman's resistance reached its turning point. Before another word should be spoken, before the minute should pass, one of the two must give ground.

And then it was that Lloyd felt something breakdown within her, something to which she could not put a name. A mysterious element of her character, hitherto rigid and intact, was beginning at last to crumble. Somewhere a breach had been opened; somewhere the barrier had been undermined. The fine steadfastness that was hers, and that she had so dearly prized, her strength in which she had gloried, her independence, her splendid arrogant self-confidence and conscious power seemed all at once to weaken before this iron resolve that shut its ears and eyes, this colossal, untutored, savage intensity of purpose.

And abruptly her eyes were opened, and the inherent weakness of her sex became apparent to her. Was it a mistake, then? Could not a woman be strong? Was her strength grafted upon elemental weakness—not her individual weakness, but the weakness of her sex, the intended natural weakness of the woman? Had she built her fancied impregnable fortress upon sand?

But habit was too strong. For an instant, brief as the opening and shutting of an eye, a vision was vouchsafed to her, one of those swift glimpses into unplumbed depths that come sometimes to the human mind in the moments of its exaltation, but that are gone with such rapidity that they may not be trusted. For an instant Lloyd saw deep down into the black, mysterious gulf of sex—down, down, down where, immeasurably below the world of little things, the changeless, dreadful machinery of Life itself worked, clashing and resistless in its grooves. It was a glimpse fortunately brief, a vision that does not come too often, lest reason, brought to the edge of the abyss, grow giddy at the sight and, reeling, topple headlong. But quick the vision passed, the gulf closed, and she felt the firm ground again beneath her feet.

"I shall not," she cried.

Was it the same woman who had spoken but one moment before? Did her voice ring with the same undaunted defiance? Was there not a note of despair in her tones, a barely perceptible quaver, the symbol of her wavering resolve? Was not the very fact that she must question her strength proof positive that her strength was waning?

But her courage was unshaken, even if her strength was breaking. To the last she would strive, to the end she would hold her forehead high. Not till the last hope had been tried would she acknowledge her defeat.

"But in any case," she said, "risk is better than certainty. If I risk my life by staying, it is certain that he will die if I leave him at this critical moment."

"So much the worse, then—you cannot stay."

Lloyd stared at him in amazement.

"It isn't possible; I don't believe you can understand. Do you know how sick he is? Do you know that he is lying at the point of death at this very moment, and that the longer I stay away from him the more his life is in peril? Has he not rights as well as I; has he not a right to live? It is not only my own humiliation that is at stake, it is the life of your dearest friend, the man who stood by you, and helped you, and who suffered the same hardships and privations as yourself."

"What's that?" demanded Bennett with a sudden frown.

"If I leave Mr. Ferriss now, if he is left alone here for so much as half an hour, I will not answer—"

"Ferriss! What are you talking about? What is your patient's name?"

"Didn't you know?"

"Ferriss! Dick Ferriss! Don't tell me it's Dick Ferriss."

"I thought all the time you knew—that you had heard. Yes, it is Mr. Ferriss."

"Is he very sick? What is he doing out here? No, I had not heard; nobody told me. Pitts was to write—to—to wire. Will he pull through? What's the matter with him? Is it he who had typhoid?"

"He is very dangerously ill. Dr. Pitts brought him here. This is his house. We do not know if he will get well. It is only by watching him every instant that we can hope for anything. At this moment there is no one with him but a servant. Now, Mr. Bennett, am I to go to my patient?"

"But—but—we can get some one else."

"Not before three hours, and it's only the truth when I tell you he may die at any minute. Am I to go?"

In a second of time the hideous situation leaped up before Bennett's eyes. Right or wrong, the conviction that Lloyd was terribly imperilling her life by remaining at her patient's bedside had sunk into his mind and was not to be eradicated. It was a terror that had gripped him close and that could not be reasoned away. But Ferriss? What of him? Now it had brusquely transpired that his life, too, hung in the balance. How to decide? How to meet this abominable complication wherein he must sacrifice the woman he so dearly loved or the man who was the Damon to his Pythias, the Jonathan to his David?

"Am I to go?" repeated Lloyd for the third time.

Bennett closed his eyes, clasping his head with both hands.

"Great God, wait—wait—I can't think—I—I, oh, this is terrible!"

Lloyd drove home her advantage mercilessly.

"Wait? I tell you we can't wait."

Then Bennett realised with a great spasm of horror that for him there was no going back. All his life, accustomed to quick decisions in moments of supreme peril, he took his decision now, facing, with such courage as he could muster, its unspeakable consequences, consequences that he knew must harry and hound him all the rest of his life. Whichever way he decided, he opened his heart to the beak and talons of a pitiless remorse. He could no longer see, in the dreadful confusion of his mind, the right of things or the wrong of things, could not accurately weigh chances or possibilities. For him only two alternatives presented themselves, the death of Ferriss or the death of Lloyd. He could see no compromise, could imagine no escape. It was as though a headsman with ready axe stood at his elbow, awaiting his commands. And, besides all this, he had long since passed the limit—though perhaps he did not know it himself—where he could see anything but the point he had determined to gain, the goal he had determined to reach. His mind was made up. His furious energy, his resolve to conquer at all costs, had become at last a sort of directed frenzy. The engine he had set in motion was now beyond his control. He could not now—whether he would or no—reverse its action, swerve it from its iron path, call it back from the monstrous catastrophe toward which it was speeding him.

"God help us all!" he muttered.

"Well," said Lloyd expectantly.

Bennett drew a deep breath, his hands falling helplessly at his sides. In a way he appeared suddenly bowed; the great frame of bone and sinew seemed in some strange, indefinable manner to shrink, to stagger under the sudden assumption of an intolerable burden—a burden that was never to be lifted.