Judge Tiffany turned from a consideration of the hillside to a closer
consideration of Eleanor, who rode beside him in the Goodyear trap.
She sat very straight, her hands folded in her lap, her grave, grey
eyes staring not at hillsides nor spring skies, but into the far
horizons.
Since he recovered from that purely human rage against this youth who
had betrayed him to his dearest enemy, the Judge had been watching,
with all his old interest, the surface indications of Eleanor's moods.
Last night, it had been a kind of gaiety; to-day the mood was quiet,
but not at all despondent; there was life in it. Judge Tiffany held
his own views on the relations between his niece and Bertram Chester,
and on the right or convenience of interfering. Twice he had been on
the point of telling her that his feeling toward Bertram Chester
should not color hers; that his house was still open to the young
man. But the curiosity of philosophical age to see how things will
turn out had prevented him.
It was just as well. They were on the eve of their summer flight to
the ranch, where she would have other things to think about than young
men. That was his half-expressed theme when he spoke:
"Well, girl, will you be glad to get back to work again? You missed
last summer."
Eleanor started as out of sleep.
"I think I am glad of everything!" she said cryptically. As though to
turn the subject, she indicated a buckboard which was coming down an
intersecting by-road at crazy speed.
"Why are they driving so fast?"
The Goodyear driver turned with the familiarity of a country
henchman.
"That's the doctor's rig from Las Olivas," he said, "and he's sure
going some!" Followed a monologue on the doctor and his habits.
About the next bend of the road, a little boy rushed from a wayside
camp which looked strangely deserted for supper-time of Sunday
afternoon. He waved both arms before his face.
"Hey, mister, take me to the wreck!"
"What wreck, kid?"
"The five-ten is over the trestle, and they went off and left me!"
Judge Tiffany took the information calmly, even selfishly. "I wonder
if we'd better turn back and give it up to-night, or go on?"
Eleanor spoke with a catch of the breath, a drawn-in tone.
"Go on! Oh, tell him to go on!"
The Judge peered at her. She was pale, but, as always in her crises,
the curtain of inscrutability made her face a mask. "Oh, do go on!"
she repeated. Then, as though it all needed explanation, she added:
"We might be able to help!"
"Drive on, then--fast!"
Absolutely passive, Eleanor swayed a little with the trap, but made no
motion of her own. Indeed, there was little motion within. The train
had gone over the trestle, that was all. Bertram Chester was on that
train. She must not try to think it out--must only hold tight to
herself until she found how God had decided for her. Once it did occur
that she had fretted her heart away over shadowy ills, toy troubles,
while Bertram walked the earth free and healthy. How trivial those
troubles seemed beside this real apprehension! Once again, she
wondered how she had been cruel enough to hold him at arm's length so
long. Was this to be the punishment for her folly?
A buckboard, driven furiously, came over the hill-rise before
them--the doctor's rig.
"Ask him--ask him!" she called to her driver. As they drew up
alongside, the doctor's driver began talking without need for
inquiries.
"Spread rail! The rear car just bucked over the trestle--"
"Anybody dead?"
"Two that I saw--and everybody in the rear car hurt. They're loading
'em on the front car to take 'em to town. Good bye--I've got to bring
back medicine before they start!"
The chances were even--the chances were even. If he had been in the
front car--relief. If he had been in the rear car--
The thing opened before them like a panorama as they topped the hill.
The engine puffing regularly, normally, the baggage car and one coach
on the rails behind it; a little crowd buzzing and rushing up and down
the trestle; a black, distorted mass of iron and splinters at the
edge of the water below. Three or four heads appeared above the
trestle, and the people swarmed in that direction. The heads grew to
four men, carrying between them a bundle covered by a red blanket.
Judge Tiffany spoke for the first time.
"You'd better not see it, Nell!"
His words seemed to draw the curtain away from her self-control.
"Oh, go on--for God's sake, go on!"
As they drew up beside the undamaged coach, the bearers had just
arrived with another body. Eleanor jumped down, rushed to the
platform. The thing under the blanket was a woman. She turned into the
coach, apprehension growing into certainty. She had not seen him in
the crowd. If he were unhurt, he must be first and foremost among the
workers.
The coach was a hospital--limp, bandaged people propped up on every
seat; in a little space by the further door, a row of quiet figures
which lay as though sleeping. Above them bent two men. Their
business-like calm showed that they were physicians. The half of her
which stood aloof, observing all things, wondering at all things, the
half whose influence kept her now so calm and sane, marvelled that she
heard no moaning, tormented sounds. They were in the second stage of
injury; the blessed anæsthesia of nature was upon them. For human
speech, she heard only the low, quick voices of those who healed and
nursed.
She saw a bare arm lifted from the press of huddled forms, saw that a
physician had pressed a black bulb to it. The hand--the inevitable
configuration of that arm which she had never seen bare--and she knew
him.
Bertram lay on his side. His eyes were closed, his whole figure
huddled; yet something more than the quiver of his body at the prick
of the syringe told her that he was alive. His color had changed but
little; hovering death showed mainly by a sharpening of all the lines
of his face. Yet it did not seem to be Bertram, but rather some
statue, some ghastly replica of him.
The physician stood up and stretched his back. She came close.
"Will he live?"
He turned impatiently, but he caught her eyes.
"He has a chance. He's young and strong--Is he--yours?"
"Yes--yes! What shall I do for him?"
"Are you sure you're strong enough--you won't faint nor carry on?"
"No--no! I'm sure of that. What may I do?" Judge Tiffany was beside
her now. He looked, understood, and said nothing.
"Thank God for you, then! With all the crowd we haven't sane people
enough to nurse one baby! Everything's the matter with him--broken
arm, broken collar-bone, shock, and maybe he's injured internally. We
can't be sure about that yet. I'm trying to make him comfortable,
but"--here the agitated man broke through the calm physician for a
moment--"No braces, no slings, no anything! We're going to town as
soon as this company will let us. And he must be held. It's the only
way to keep him comfortable. Come!"
Judge Tiffany touched the doctor's arm, but he spoke to Eleanor.
"Nell--you'd better let a man do that."
"No. You may help. How shall I hold him?"
All her will concentrated on obedience to direction, she followed the
doctor while he drew Bertram's bare arm over her shoulder, set a
cushion at his back, showed her how she must support his neck with her
right hand.
"Hold him as long as you can, then have your friend relieve you. But
change no more often than you find necessary. He'll get jostled enough
before we reach town."
The Judge seated himself calmly. She was alone with the care of her
dying. The necessity for comforting and reassuring him came into her
mind.
"It's all right, Bertram; it's all right!" she whispered. He returned
no answer, even of a flickering eyelash. He lay still, inert, a great
bulk that tugged at the muscles of her arms.
After a time, her frame adjusted itself to the position. Her
perceptions, still keenly alive, told her that her doctor was working
over a woman in the corner. Just as the train started, she saw him
rise, wipe his hands on his handkerchief, and motion calmly to two of
the men. They lifted the woman. Eleanor realized all at once what the
motion signified. They had taken her to join the dead in the baggage
car.
Next to Bertram lay an old man, his head so wrapped in bandages that
she could see only the tip of his grey beard. A middle-aged
woman--Eleanor recognized her as a camper whom they had passed on the
road but yesterday--knelt beside him, talking into his ear about his
soul. "Do you lean on your Savior?" she whispered. A kind of passing
impatience touched Eleanor. So much had her sympathetic spirit
absorbed the feelings of these dying ones, that she resented this as
an intrusion, an unwelcome distraction from the business of sloughing
off the flesh.
A little sag of Bertram's body, which alarmed her for a moment until
she saw that the movement came from relaxation of her own arms, called
her back to responsibility. The realization that it _had_ called her
back brought with it the amazing, shameful realization that it had
ever wandered away.
Why--
From the moment when she took him into her arms, she had never thought
of him as her dying lover--never as her lover at all!
A man in extremis, a thing so beaten and suffering that she called for
it on her Christ--he was all that, in common with the other beaten and
battered and senseless wrecks about them. But the feeling that he was
her own, about to go from her, had never entered her heart. She was
ashamed while she thought of it; but it persisted. Not hers? Why, she
had suffered him to kiss her only yesterday! Must she think of such
things with a life to save?
Now, her body was giving way with weariness; it seemed that she could
hold him no longer. She nodded to Judge Tiffany, therefore; the old
man rose and gently took her burden from her. She sank back on the
empty seat. When the faintness of fatigue had passed, she fixed her
eyes on the still face of him who had been her lover.
Why was it? The clear-cut profile, so refined and beautiful since
suffering gave it the final touch, had thrilled her only yesterday and
through a succession of yesterdays. It had no power to thrill her now.
She tried to put back this unworthy thought, but it persisted. In
spite of pity and all decency of the heart, that outer self of hers
kept saying it to her like an audible voice. Were he to die now, in
her arms, she should work and weep and pray over his passing--but only
as she would work and weep and pray over that alien old man who lay
beside him, that woman whom they had just carried away.
The Judge was flagging. He glanced wearily over his shoulder, as
though he hesitated to ask for relief. She rose; and without a word
she took his place. And now, as she knelt with Bertram's slight yet
heavy breathing in her ear, her thoughts became uncontrollable
nightmare--scattered visions and memories of old horrors, as when she
saw her father drunk on the pavement; a multitude of those little
shames which linger so long. One incident which was not quite a shame
thrust itself forward most insistently of all. It was that episode
under the bay tree, when she was only a little girl. Why did that
memory start to the surface those tears which had been falling so long
within? Her weeping seemed to lift her to a tremendous height of
perception, as though that outer self had flowed in upon her.
That which had lured her and dragged her to him in the end, was the
life in him, the strong, vigorous body, the gestures, the smiles. That
which had held her away from him was the soul within him--high and
clean enough as souls go, but not one which she could ever know, and
not one which could ever know hers. In this struggle of passing, he
was all soul; the body was not in it.
She held the plan of her puzzle; it was necessary only to set the
scattered blocks into place.
She found herself whispering to him; she checked herself until she
remembered that he could not hear:
"O Bertram, you are not mine! O Bertram, you could never be mine!"
Now she could look straight at the possibility of his death or
recovery. And she could weigh and choose, in case it was life, between
telling him what she felt, or going on with him to the end--walking
with a soul apart, yet choosing paths for it, too. That last might be
the road of honor. That fine and heroic course, indeed, came to her
with a high appeal. She had made her one resolve of duty. Perhaps it
was her destiny to immolate herself for duty to the end.
The train bowled on, stopping for no stations. The old man in the
corner was unconscious or asleep; the woman who tended him had stopped
her spiritual ministrations. A child, propped up in one of the rear
seats, had awakened to cry, fallen asleep, awakened and wept again.
She had in her voice a thick, mucous note, which became to Eleanor the
motif in that symphony of misery. Otherwise, no one seemed to be
making sound except the two physicians. Her own doctor came up once,
pressed a syringe again into the bare arm, whispered that it was all
going well.
A whistle came muffled through the fog; they were slowing down. It was
a station; the lights, the clamor of human voices, proved it. Eleanor
looked out of the window. A knot of young men had broken for the
platform; and she could distinguish the black boxes of cameras. There
arose a sharp parley at the rear door; her doctor muttered
"reporters--damn!" and hurried back. Judge Tiffany rose and followed
him. Over her shoulder Eleanor caught the white, intent face of Mark
Heath. "He knows; they have told him," she thought.
Judge Tiffany, his mind on the practical necessities of the case,
still had it in him to admire the control of that good soldier, the
modern reporter. When he told simply what had happened, how the issue
lay balanced between life and death, Mark only said:
"My God!--and me with the story to do!" Then his eye caught Eleanor.
"Did she--has she been nursing him?"
Judge Tiffany glanced at the other reporters, clustered about the
conductor, at the photographers, holding animated wrangle with the
physicians about flashlights.
"Keep her out of your story--you can do that. Say I found him on the
train--put me in--that's a good story enough. Keep my niece out. Keep
the others off. Keep those flashlights muffled!"
Mark hurried forward. One look, a look which contorted his face, he
bent on Bertram. Then he spoke puzzles to Eleanor.
"You're Miss Brown, a camper at Santa Eliza, if anyone asks you--and
when we leave this train you stay by me and do everything I tell
you."
"Very well."
Mark touched Bertram's face with a tenderness almost feminine. "Poor
old man!" he whispered; and he hurried back.
A shock-headed youth accosted him.
"What's up there?" he asked.
"Good story," answered Mark. "I've got it all--don't you fellows
bother. Bertram Chester, old California Varsity tackle, real estate
manager for Northrup and Co., seriously injured, may not recover. Get
his injuries from the doctor. His late employer, Judge Edward C.
Tiffany, reached this train at Santa Eliza and has been taking care of
him."
A voice came from the group of reporters:
"Why, he's your roommate!"
"I know it--damn it! Keep on. Judge Tiffany has been caring for him,
holding him up so he could bear it, assisted by Miss Sadie Brown, a
camper at Santa Eliza. She's the one I was talking to."
"Who is she? Any chance for a photograph?"
"I braced her for a picture. She wouldn't stand for it."
"Let me try! I'll get it."
"See here, you fellows, I'll attend to that. I'll let you all in if
she gives up. I'll play you square. He's my roommate--can't you trust
me to handle it? Keep on. Miss Sadie Brown, works at the Emporium,
lives 2196 Valencia--" Mark was reading from a perfectly blank sheet
of copy paper--"Judge Tiffany will take him home. He wired ahead for a
private ambulance from Havens. That's all of that. Now what have you
fellows got? Help me out; it's none too easy for me."
As he took notes, asked questions, formed his "story" in his mind,
Mark never took his eyes off that group in the corner.
Now they were racing down the last stage of the trip, with full
freeway. Now they were drawing into the ferry station. Under the
lights stood a buzzing crowd, its blacks shot with the white coats of
hospital orderlies. A dozen ambulances, their doors open, stood backed
to the platform. Eleanor sagged down on the floor with a sigh as two
orderlies lifted Bertram's arms from her shoulders, made shift to get
him upon their stretcher.
But the doctor stopped them.
"Get this old man first," he said, "and be careful. That young fellow
ought to pull through."