While the young farmer and the two hired men labored in the rain
that came as a deluge upon the gale’s heels, Mrs. Laight saddled and
bridled a horse and forced it through the world of storm and across the
barriers of blown-down trees into Kensico Village for Doctor Brockholst.
By the time he arrived the broken body of RoBards was stretched upon
the couch in the library. The master’s bedroom had been cracked open by
the fallen tulip tree and the rain was thundering through it.
The doctor, seeing the state of his patient and all his red wounds and
hearing the groans he could not stifle, first checked the outlets of
his blood, then made ready to give him ease of pain.
Old RoBards was as eager for the anæsthetic as a starved infant for its
mother’s milk, but he suddenly bethought him of his need of all his
wits, and he gasped:
“If—if you make me sleep, I may—may nev-never wake up, eh?”
Doctor Brockholst tried to evade a direct answer, but RoBards panted:
“I won’t risk it—risk it. I’ve sent—I’ve sent Laight to tele-telegraph
my son to come up from—from town. There’s things I must say to
him—before—before——”
He was more afraid of unconsciousness than of pain, and he would not
gamble with a palliation of his anguishes. He chattered to the doctor:
“Just stay here and let me talk. It helps to keep me from making an old
fool of myself. And don’t let me die till Keith comes. Don’t let me die
till—oh, oh!—Oh, God! oh, God!”
He gnawed his lips and twisted his face in all the fierce grimaces of
a desperate athlete trying to pry himself from a hammerlock.
He groaningly computed the hours it would take Keith to reach the farm
if he got the message and came at once and caught a train. But those
hours passed and Keith was not yet visible to Mrs. Laight watching from
the porch in her wind-whipped skirts and her fluttering shawl.
The old man moaned, watching the inexorably deliberate clock with white
eyes;
“The storm has torn down the telegraph poles, I suppose; or wrecked a
bridge or two. But somehow, somebody will get the word to my boy and
he’ll fight his way here. I know Keith!”
The doctor pleaded with him to accept the aid of a sedative and even
made a show of force, but the old man grew so frantic with resistance
that he gave over.
And after a time when Mrs. Laight had given up watching for Keith,
there came upon his agonized mien a look almost of comfort. He smiled
and murmured:
“Now I know a little of what Patty suffered. I thought I knew before;
but nobody can imagine pain—or remember it. It’s a hideous thing—to
hurt. But I ought to be able to stand it for a night when that little
girl bore far worse—far worse for years.”
All the long evening, all the long night he babbled her name, and if
at intervals he sobbed and the tears slid down his much-channeled
features, it was for memory of the bitterness of her woe, and his
belated understanding of it.
He would not take any quieting drug or let the needle be set against
his skin, but he called for stimulants to lash his crippled heart to
its task, putting the doctor on his honor not to cheat him.
The physician fell asleep at midnight and woke shuddering in the chill
of dawn, ashamed to think that every moment of his hours of oblivion
had been a torment to his client.
Soon after the dawn, Keith came, whipping a horse through the road,
soggy with the nightlong rain. He ran across the ruined porch into the
wreck of the house and his father answered his searching call with a
note of triumph:
“That’s my boy! I knew he’d come! I knew!”
Doctor Brockholst, who had never seen Keith, somehow expected a youth
to dash into the room. He was surprised to find that the lad was a
grizzled giant of fifty. But Colonel RoBards ran to the couchside and
dropped to his knees, with a childish, “Daddy!”
The shock of the contact brought a shriek from the old man’s jolted
bones but he wrung a laugh from it. Then he asked the doctor to leave
him alone with his son.
Making sure that they were not spied upon, he whispered in a pellmell
of hurry:
“I had to see you, Keithie, to get one more promise from you before I
go. The city, that infernal New York, will be demanding our farm for
the bottom of one of its lakes before long. But don’t let ’em have it!
Fight ’em to the last ditch! And whatever you do, don’t let ’em open
the cellar walls.
“There may be nothing there to see by now, but you remember about
Jud Lasher. He’s there still and after all these years I can’t bear
the thought of anybody finding out what we kept inviolate so long,
especially after I’m gone and can’t fight back.
“Promise me you won’t let ’em tear down the house and the walls. I’ve
seen ’em clear away so many old homes and stone fences and roads—for
other lakes. I can’t abide the thought of them prying into our walls.
“And I want to lie by your mother’s side out there in the yard. You’ll
put me there. And once I’m there, they’ll never dare disturb me! You
can put up a sign like Shakespeare’s: ‘Good friend, for Jesu’s sake,
forbear——’ or something like that. Promise.”
“I promise!” said Keith.
And his father, failing away beneath his eyes like Hamlet’s father’s
spirit, spoke already from underground.
“Swear!”
“I swear!”
“Swear!”
“I swear it, father!”
There was a faint moan, almost of luxury, the luxury of one who sinks
out of all pain and all anxiety into that perfect sleep which Socrates
pronounced the richest pleasure even of the Persian kings.
Keith thought he saw his father smile; thought he read upon his lips
the playful pet name he had seen and heard there, when as a child he
saw his father praising his mother tenderly:
“Patty? Pattikins? pretty, pretty Pattikins?”
Then the lips ceased to beat together, and parted in the final yawn
that ends the boredom of this life.