his soul, and he thought of her; and he thought, and thought of her! He
held the dream picture up between him and the light of the dying day,
and once he put out his hand slowly and it rested lightly in the air,
but in his dream it rested on Cary’s head. Once he raised his head
suddenly and sharply, and he breathed quicker than his wont. The night
shadows crept up and peered into his thin, lined face with the
dark-circled eyes; and though he was alone with only the air touching
him, in his dream his face was close to hers.
And back of the dreams was the echo of the ocean on the crags. But the
dreams and the echo faded as he came within sight of the military
hospital, and the thoughts receded back and back into the darkness
before the new necessity of the hour; but the truant children were not
lost, only hiding from him, and peering at him from the shadows and
waiting for him to come and look for them and take them home.
He dismounted, hardly conscious of the greetings the men gave him as
they crowded around him, and he went at once to Mackenzie, as an officer
reporting for duty.
Mackenzie looked at him sharply as he entered. The full beard he had
grown had changed him, and would have hidden the loss of flesh and the
haggard lines to any other than Mackenzie.
"You don’t look fit to go on with the job, boy," he said concisely.
Trevelyan laughed.
"That’s absurd, don’t you know? I’m all right."
"It’s more than you look—you’re all pulled down!"
"You’re dreaming! Tell me about the barracks!"
And Mackenzie told him—briefly.
All night he and Mackenzie and Clarke worked over the new cases, resting
by turns, and in the morning two other men were brought in. One was the
trooper who had borne the summons to Trevelyan.
The cases developed slowly, and with an effort that had in it something
of the supernatural, they kept it from spreading into the mow down of an
epidemic. But the men were sick—sicker than any had yet been, and out
of the proportion stricken, the mortality was frightful, and Death’s
twin brother, Fear, laid his heavy hand upon the district.
The men were good, on the whole, as to precautionary measures, for they
held Mackenzie and even Clarke in wholesome awe, but they regarded
Trevelyan with something greater still. They were ashamed before
him—ashamed to mention their fear, or even think it, as he came and went
among them, silent, commanding, and unmoved by fear.
Mackenzie or Clarke could not have spoken so to them—silently. They
were at their own business. They were supposed and expected to meet
disease and death, daily, hourly if necessary, and not be afraid. But
Trevelyan was not a surgeon; he had come out to them to serve them in
their extremity—voluntarily—without military command, and they grew to
think of the scourge after a while as they would have looked upon a
hostile tribe to be conquered—as an enemy to be vanquished for the
Queen.
And as though the lessening of their panic was the sign for the dying
out of the scourge, the cholera cases decreased as the days wore
themselves away.
It was toward the end of the desperate fight that they had made that
Mackenzie came in one day at dawn, to relieve Trevelyan’s watch over the
half dozen cases in his wing of the hospital. He noticed that Trevelyan
looked oddly white, and that there was a drawn expression about his
mouth and face.
"What is it," he asked. "Aren’t you feeling well?"
"Why, yes; what made you ask?"
"You look——"
"It’s the daylight and the sickly candle," Trevelyan answered shortly as
he rose to leave. "McHennessy, here, has put in a night of it. See you
later."
Once outside in the narrow passage Trevelyan leaned up stupidly against
the wall. His head was hurting him violently and was colder than the
hand he pressed against it, and a sudden deadly nausea seized him. He
stared hard at the wall opposite and made a movement as though to call
Mackenzie. Then he drew back and waited. A numbness crept into his
legs, and it seemed to him to deaden all his power. After awhile the
seizure passed and he stumbled over to the apothecary’s room, and he
began to measure out the old prescription of the morphia and calomel and
white sugar. What was the good of calling Mackenzie when Mackenzie could
do nothing more for him than he could do for himself? Then he went into
an empty room kept for emergency cases at the end of the building, and
flung himself down.
After awhile the deadly nausea returned and he sat up and crawled to his
feet, and went back to the apothecary’s room and measured out the
prescription again—three hours was the limit between doses, and his
watch said that the three hours had passed. He believed the watch had
lied, and that it was thirty hours instead.
Mackenzie opened the door and stood transfixed on the threshold.
Trevelyan conscious of the movement turned and started violently.
"What are you doing?" Mackenzie’s voice was terrible in its hardness.
Trevelyan held up the scales with a trembling hand, and he made an odd
sound in his throat that was intended for a laugh.
"Measuring morphia! What do you suppose?"
Mackenzie came up close to him, and his horror-stricken eyes looked
straight into Trevelyan’s sunken ones.
"Who for?"
Trevelyan was silent.
"Answer me!"
Trevelyan shook his head piteously, and a ghastly pallor crept slowly up
over his face and into the hollows of his temples and his cheeks.
"You’re ill, and you didn’t call me!"
"What was the good——"
Trevelyan swayed forward. When he spoke again there was an apology in
his hoarse voice because he was ill.
"It’s the nausea," he said simply.
*XVI.*
Mackenzie went in search of Clarke.
"Drop everything and come with me," he said. "It’s
Trevelyan—Trevelyan’s got the cholera."
Clarke took a long breath. Then he called to two passing orderlies.
Mackenzie led the three of them back to the apothecary’s shop, as a
soldier would have led a squad of men forward to meet an enemy, his face
hard with the control he had put upon it, but it changed suddenly as
they reached Trevelyan and picked him up and bore him down the hall. He
allowed them to do so unresistingly, falling back into their arms a dead
weight. They staggered under it. He made no comment until they reached
the door of the surgeons’ room. Then he shook his head.
"Not there," he said. "Take me in with the men."
"But you’ll be ever so much more comfortable here," said Clarke, still
breathing quickly under the weight of his portion of the burden.
"You’d better let us take you in here, lad," said Mackenzie, bending
over him. "You’ll get well twice as quick and it’s quieter, and the
nausea will pass——"
"It’s the cholera," said Trevelyan, in a clear calm voice. "Take me in
with the men."
*XVII.*
All day Mackenzie sat by Trevelyan, scarcely leaving him, except to make
his rounds; Clarke and the orderlies taking charge of the two small
wards and the needs of those there. And all day Mackenzie sat stoically
looking off into space or turning to feel Trevelyan’s pulse or watch the
change of his face. There was not a shadow of a change he did not watch
and note. Trevelyan’s great form lay motionless—deadened by morphia,
the occasional twitching of the limbs and the heavy breathing, the only
signs of life. Now and then, as the effect of the morphia lifted, he
would turn his head restlessly and murmur incoherent things, or call for
water, and Mackenzie would force a teaspoonful at a time of the cool
liquid between the rigid lips.
Once Trevelyan’s hand went up with a spasmodic motion to his throat, and
the movement pulled and tore aside the covering across his chest, and
exposed to view the white scar on his shoulder. Mackenzie leaning over
him to replace the covering, was attracted by the sight of the old
wound, and he hesitated and leaned a little nearer, examining it.
A sudden death-like quiet brooded over the ward, and the minutes
lengthened and still Mackenzie leaned over the unconscious figure, his
eyes fixed on the scar. By and by he looked at Trevelyan’s gray and
sunken and unconscious face, and a swift change passed over his own
impenetrable features, and he drew the covering quickly over the scar,
as though he were ashamed.
Clarke came in and Mackenzie straightened himself and turned to meet
him, his hand upon the covering that hid the scar. There was something
defiant in the attitude.
Clarke came up and stood on the other side of the bed.
"What do you think of it?" he asked.
"I don’t want to think anything about it," Mackenzie answered shortly.
"But his chances?" asked Clarke after a little. "Has he got any show?"
"He’s got a damned bad case," said Mackenzie, "and no strength to fight
it with. I knew it would be just this way if he ever got it—he’d have
it _bad_! There’s nothing half way about him!"
Clarke tapped his foot against the floor and looked down at it..
"How he could have loved some woman," he said.
Mackenzie turned his head slowly and looked at Trevelyan. Once he had
seen a look in Trevelyan’s eyes— When he spoke it was as if he were
thinking aloud. "How he loved some woman!"
Trevelyan moved restlessly and opened his eyes, and looked at Mackenzie
and Clarke and then back to Mackenzie. There was nothing in his face
that led them to suppose he had heard.
Mackenzie leaned over him.
"How are you?"
"Deuced bad," Trevelyan said slowly, and then the nausea returned.
The man in the next bed began to moan a little. Trevelyan turned to
Mackenzie, a frown upon his face, as though he was trying to place the
sound.
"What is it?" he asked. "What’s that noise?"
"It’s McHennessy—you’d better let us move you into our room."
Trevelyan shook his head.
"I suppose it’s a blamed silly notion, but I’d rather be with the men."
And then he stretched out his cold hands suddenly and grasped
Mackenzie’s convulsively, "The pain," he said.
Mackenzie looked up at Clarke and nodded to the question in the other’s
eyes.
Mackenzie took out his handkerchief and wiped the great beads off
Trevelyan’s forehead. When Clarke returned with the morphia, the nausea
had come again.
Trevelyan waved Clarke aside.
"I don’t want it," he whispered hoarsely. "I couldn’t keep it down
anyway, and—I—don’t—want it!"
And when he was not to be persuaded Mackenzie let him back slowly on the
pillow.
All night the nausea lasted, but in the early morning there came
cessation for a time, and Mackenzie left Clarke with him, and went to
snatch a bit of sleep.
Clarke watched by him in silence—dumb with the terribleness of it all;
dumb with his own powerlessness to help—and Trevelyan was grateful for
the cessation and the silence.
When the cessation came his thoughts went out to Cary, and they drew the
memory of her face to him. It was in truth a dream of heaven—and real,
untouched by the thralldom of the morphia.
He was growing weaker—he could feel the ebbing of his strength—and he
did not care. In the morning he had fought against it, as he had fought
everything all his life—passionately, but now with the cessation and the
coming of the dream face, he did not care.
He clung to the vision of the dream though, fiercely, as though fearing
it would escape him and be lost forever. He had loved her, and he loved
her still!
His love for her had been as a mountain that has been stripped in a
storm of its fairest foliage; that has been wrecked by a great fire
which has swept it of all its rarest beauty, leaving only the bareness
of the boulders, but withstanding the wreck of the storm and the fire.
So his love had stood and endured as a sample of the Eternal Handiwork—a
basis of his life, as is love the basis of the life of the Everlasting.
He was conscious of the clasp of Clarke’s fingers on his wrist, and the
sudden appearance of a frightened orderly with the intelligence that
Burns, in the next ward, was worse, and would he come at once; and he
was dimly conscious of Clarke’s bending over him and of his telling him
to go to Burns, but he still clung to the vision of the dream face.
Desperately he clung to it, even when the blessed cessation suddenly
ceased, and it seemed as though he was being engulfed in a great abyss
of unspeakable agony, and he kept his thoughts upon it as a crusader
would have kept his dying thoughts upon the unattainable quest.
And then he became dimly conscious of a low moaning sound and he lay
still trying, to place it, because Mackenzie was not there to tell him
what it was, and he had forgotten what Mackenzie had said it was, but he
still tried to concentrate his thoughts on the dream face that was
growing faint and fainter. The effort was a complete failure, and the
low moaning increased. He fixed it slowly as coming from the next bed.
He turned his head toward it weakly. The incoherent ravings became a
piteous and conscious cry for water.
The gray dawn crept in slowly and up to the trooper’s bed, and by its
light Trevelyan could see him turning his head restlessly from side to
side. Still the cry for water reached him.
It did not seem to affect him much at first, or pierce the consciousness
of pity, but it annoyed him, and it kept coming between him and the
dream face he was struggling so desperately to hold. And then it struck
on him suddenly like a blow and he awoke to the man’s anguish and the
man’s need—how often he had answered to that need and cry before! He
looked toward the farthest corner of the room where an orderly lay
sleeping from exhaustion. The man was half sick anyway, from a recent
attack of the scourge. He did not want to call him; but if he would
only awaken—if he only would.
He waited. There was no sound from the corner; there was no movement in
the hall that would tell of Clarke’s return, and the low cry went on.
Since the day he had joined Mackenzie he had followed and responded to
that cry as the soldier follows and responds to the first low notes of
the bugle. He pushed himself over to the edge of the bed and tried to
sit up but the motion increased his agony and he lay still. He wondered
blindly if he could do it. Then he let himself roll over the side of
the bed and his big frame fell with a dull thud on the rough boards of
the floor. He lay there a second, but there was no movement from the
corner. He pulled himself up, took half a dozen steps toward the water
bucket in the near corner, and then the cramp came back again in his
legs, and he fell forward, and began to creep toward it on his hands and
knees. The dream face was fading and being swallowed up in a breaking
crest of white sea foam, and there seemed to be nothing in the world but
the man’s cry and his own pain.
He reached the bucket and he dipped in the glass that stood near and
filled it, and then began his slow journey to the man’s bed. By the
deepening light in the east the man could see the great creeping figure
approaching, and he drew back, afraid.
"It’s only I, McHennessy. I’ve got some water—" the voice trailed off,
but the trooper caught the word "water" and he struggled to a reclining
position and waited. The figure moved so slowly and his throat was a
burning sheet of flame! Why didn’t he come faster—what was the matter
that he didn’t come faster; and McHennessy’s blood-shot eyes were
riveted on the slowly moving figure.
Trevelyan reached him at length and pulled himself up with a supreme
effort, with the glass balanced very carefully in his hand. He was
striving—striving too—after that elusive dream face.
He leaned over McHennessy with the water, and McHennessy with a sigh of
ecstasy struggled up in his bed and leaned forward to touch his parched
lips to the glass.
Trevelyan brought it up nearer and his hand wavered. He controlled it
with a great effort of will for a moment, and then the glass trembled
and its contents were spilt over McHennessy, and the glass crashed into
shivers as it fell to the floor beside the bed. Trevelyan flung out his
arms suddenly, groping for the dream face that had gone.
The orderly, awakened by the crash, started up and ran over to where
Trevelyan lay on the floor by the side of McHennessy, who was swearing
over the unexpected bath, and as he staggered beneath Trevelyan’s
weight, Mackenzie came quickly forward from the threshold of the door.
Together they carried Trevelyan back to bed and Mackenzie silently drew
the coverings over his rigid body and stood looking down at the livid
lips and listening to the slow, feeble breathing. Once he picked up the
hand that lay on the outside of the covering and examined it, and then
laid it back in its resting place.
[Illustration: "_Trevelyan lay on the floor._"]
Clarke who had heard the glass break, hurried in from the adjoining
ward. Mackenzie looked up as he entered.
"_Collapse?_" asked Clarke briefly.
Mackenzie did not seem to hear him.
"Bring the salt—it’s just a chance," he said.
*XVIII.*
The light deepened in the east and the sunrise crept into the ward of
the hospital and turned its search light curiously on the group in the
furthest corner of the ward, and on the still figure on the bed. All
morning the sunlight lingered around there as though it wanted to help
Mackenzie in his fight, and impart into the chill of the rigid figure,
some of its own warmth, and when the afternoon shadows came and drew it
off, it retreated lingeringly, loath to say "good-night."
The shadows deepened and the quietness of midnight fell over the weary
Station and the outlying cholera hospital. Mackenzie continued to sit
by the bed.
The quietness outside crept in to meet the silence of the ward, and the
night lamp cast strange shadows on the wall, at which Mackenzie stared.
Once or twice he got up and visited the other beds and leaned over the
men. Most were pulling through and were sleeping. McHennessy was drowsy
with the morphia. Then Mackenzie would go back and sit down again by
Trevelyan’s bed. At midnight, Clarke, with eyes heavy with sleep, came
in. He did not speak but he looked down at Trevelyan and then up
questionally to Mackenzie, and at the syringe and the salt lying near
by.
"It didn’t work," said Mackenzie. "If you’ll listen to the lungs you’ll
know why—pneumonia."
"You’d better go and rest a bit. I’ll stay—I won’t leave him," said
Clarke, blinking at the light and wondering at the quietness of his own
voice.
Mackenzie looked hard at the flickering night lamp.
"No," he said slowly. "I guess not."
After Clarke had gone back to their room, the surgeon riveted his eyes
on Trevelyan’s sunken face, and once he put his hand out quickly and
pressed it over the bloodshot eyes, but the lids opened again and would
not remain closed. The slow labor of the feeble breathing went on. The
almost imperceptible rise and fall of the great chest fascinated
Mackenzie, and he found himself watching for it feverishly, hoping and
yet dreading for it to cease.
While it was still dark he rose and went over to the window and looked
out fixedly at the impenetrable pall of blackness that lay over the
Station and the hospital. It seemed as though the heaviness of the
blackness was over all the world.
By and by the night pall lifted a little, and a dull grayness crept into
the heavens and rested on the station. He could dimly distinguish the
outline of some of the military buildings. He turned away and went over
to the lamp that was smoking and lowered it. From the trooper’s bed came
a low moaning.
He paused to speak to him and then he went back to Trevelyan, and looked
down at him, his eyes fixed on the great chest, watching for its slow
rise and fall. Somehow he could not see the rise and fall—they did not
seem to be there. He bent over him quickly.
"Trevelyan!" he called sharply.
The trooper in the next bed ceased moaning and raised himself on his arm
painfully, and looked over to where Mackenzie was standing.
Mackenzie knelt down suddenly on one knee, and his hand passed rapidly
from Trevelyan’s forehead to his pulse. The trooper in the next bed
began to moan again.
Mackenzie laid his ear down quickly to the heart, an expectant look upon
his face. Then he raised it slowly and bit his lip and stared hard
through the window to where the barracks were defined against the paling
grayness of the sky.
*XIX.*
The sunshine of the early summer lay heavy like a cloth of gold across
the rolling Scottish country, and Stewart turned away abruptly from its
brightness and stared down at the floor of the railway carriage.
All night he had lain awake, grasping fiercely at the bit of paper that
had summoned him to the office of the Secretary for India, while his
brain with equal fierceness refused to accept the tidings which had met
him there.
He was dumbly grateful, however, for the friendship and the kindly
interest that had led the Secretary, for his father’s sake, to send for
him, and for the time that busy man had taken, and the consideration
that had shielded him from seeing the latest cholera reports pasted up
at the Office or in the columns of the press.
Some day he would thank the Secretary as he should. Just now it seemed
to him his brain had become a burning blank, and that the fire was as
unquenchable as it was mighty, forbidding thought. Once, twice, a dozen
times he tried to picture Trevelyan as he had known him, but Trevelyan’s
face would not come. He could not recall one line of it—he could not
recall his voice—his slightest gesture; and he vaguely wondered if he
were going mad, and when the rumble of the iron wheels would cease.
He was conscious of being grateful for the stopping of the noise, when
he descended from the carriage, in the early light of the new day, to
make his last connection with the local.
The local was late some two hours—it seemed to him twenty—and a feverish
impatience came upon him to reach home and have it over with. The new
faces around him were strange and looked at him curiously. There was a
lean Scotch collie that sniffed at his heels and tried to make friends
with him, and a small Scotch laddie, rosy-cheeked and freckled, who
regarded him wonderingly from a safe distance, his forefinger in his
mouth. Stewart noticed it was clean; he supposed it was too early for
it to be covered with the conventional coat of dirt. The boy looked a
little sleepy too. He wondered why he felt so wide awake himself. The
collie licked at his boot. He neither encouraged nor rejected the
familiarity. He simply ignored it. The morning sun was growing warm,
and a bright patch of it touched the dress of the child. * * *
The local came around the curve and he got into the carriage,
mechanically picking out his usual seat near the window. Force of habit
is strong. There was a bit of rolling hillside and an old kirk down by
a little stream he always looked out for.
He was alone and he was glad. The train jerked and backed a little and
then fairly started on its run. It passed the hillside and the old kirk
at the foot of the slope, and the bit of water that for a moment flashed
the brightness of its sunlit surface upon his vision, and was gone. For
the first time the landscape failed to please. Beyond the old kirk was
another slope—a slope of heather, just putting forth its early pink; and
though he could not see it he knew that just where the old road curved
up to the kirk, the bracken grew.
Then the reaction came and his inertia broke and the burning blank
became a sheet of memory. Trevelyan had loved the bracken and the
heather so. As a laddie he had played among them and hidden
himself—short kilts and all—beneath their bloom. Once he had gotten
lost, and they had vainly searched for him, but Stewart slipping away
unnoticed, and led by unerring instinct, had found him fast asleep down
there—his head pillowed on the bracken and a faded scrap of heather in
his small moist hand. And now the bracken might bloom on, and the sun
might shine upon it by day and the stars smile down upon the heather
slope by night, and the mist rest upon it, turning it to a mystical
sheet of grayness and of silver—but Trevelyan would never walk across
the slope again, and Stewart leaned his head against the window and
closed his eyes.
All night the train had moved so slowly and he had dumbly longed that
the iron wheels would hasten that he might reach home soon; and now that
the home station in Aberdeen was nearly in sight, a sudden sickness
seized him and he prayed for a delay.
He had wired ahead for Sandy to meet him with the trap instead of the
cart in which he usually came for the mail. He had sent the message to
Sandy instead of the family, and had bidden the Scotchman be silent
about his unexpected return from London.