JINGLES BRINGS A MESSAGE
JOEY did not get his wish concerning the departure of the big man, for
the next morning the big man was in no condition to go anywhere. He
was still lying in his bunk when I went through the room to build the
kitchen fire; and when breakfast was ready, he had not roused even to
the strains of “Bell Brandon” played on Joey’s flute.
I stood over him, and he looked up at me with lack-lustre eyes,
attempted to rise and rolled back on his pillow like a log.
“Morning, stranger,” he muttered. He winked at me slyly. His face was
puffy and red, his eyes swollen, his breathing irregular and labored.
“What’s matter?” he protested thickly, then he smiled, with a painful
contortion of his fever-seared lips, “I seem to be _hors de combat_.
Terrible pain here.” He touched his chest.
“I’ll get a doctor at once,” I said.
He thanked me, gave me a keen look, and asked wheezingly: “Not
married? No wife about?”
I shook my head. “Unfortunately, no.”
He winked at me a second time. “_Lascia la moglie e tienti donzello_,”
he cackled.
I went from the room pondering on the strange personality of this man,
who was unquestionably a scholar, and who, no doubt, considered himself
a gentleman. I dispatched Joey for a doctor.
“Take Buttons and ride to Roselake as fast as you can,” I bade him.
“Where’s the collie? He may go along.”
Joey, basking in the sun on the back steps, laid aside his flute. His
lips drew down, and his eyes bulged widely.
“The big man’s going to stay, then, Mr. David?”
“Run along,” I said sharply.
As I let down the meadow bars, Joey turned in his saddle and gave his
clear boyish whistle. But no Jingles answered the call, and a moment
later the lad rode away with a clouded face.
A few moments later, as I plied my ax at the rear of the cabin, the
cold muzzle of the collie was thrust against my hand. I stooped to
caress him, and as he leaped up to greet me, I smiled as my eyes
caught the color and the sheen of a silken ribbon threaded through
his collar. Well, I knew that bit of adornment--that azure fillet that
Haidee had worn in her hair.
I touched the inanimate thing with tender fingers, and started suddenly
to find a jeweled pendant hanging there, glowing like a dewdrop
against the dog’s soft fur. I stood agape, feeling my face soften as
my fingers stroked the bauble; and then I straightened up with a swift
presentiment. It was in no playful mood that Haidee had placed that
costly gewgaw about the collie’s neck.
I turned toward the stable, and then remembered that Joey had taken the
horse. My only recourse was the canoe. I ran to the willows where the
craft was secreted. I had it afloat in a twinkling, and was paddling
away down the river, the collie barking furiously on the shore.
Poor pale, beautiful Haidee! She lay like a crumpled white rose in
the bracken beside the spring. The white fir-tree that, in falling,
had crushed the lean-to of the frail cabin had swept her beneath its
branches as she bent for water at the spring. This was the story I read
for myself as I bent above my prostrate girl. But it was many days
before I learned the whole truth. How, close onto midnight, she had
heard a man hallooing from the lake shore; how she had stolen out from
the cabin in the storm, fearing an intrusion from some drunken reveler
from the village tavern; how, after the tree had fallen and pinned her
fast with its cruel branches, she had lain unconscious until with the
first streak of light she had felt the touch of the collie’s muzzle
against her face; how she had roused, and, her hands being free, had
torn the ribbon from her hair and bound it about the collie’s neck,
and, as an afterthought, attached the pendant from her throat, thinking
the ribbon alone might not occasion surprise.
She told me all this, days afterward; but when I reached her side, she
was incapable of speech, and only a flutter of her white lids denoted
that she was conscious.
I had a bad half hour alone there in the bracken, watching her face
grow grayer and grayer as I worked to dislodge the branches that were
pinning her down. And, at last, as I lifted her in my arms, I saw the
last particle of color drain from her lips, and realized that she had
fainted. But I had her in my arms, and her heart was beating faintly.
And, someway, hope leaped up and I felt courageous and strong, as I
bore her to the river and placed her in the canoe.
Joey was kneeling among the willows with his arms clasping Jingles as I
beached my canoe near the workshop.
“I knew something had happened to Bell Brandon,” he declared, in
big-eyed misery. “I knew it! I knew it!” He took the crumpled bit of
ribbon from the dog’s neck with hands that trembled, and came forward
slowly. I was unprepared for the look of abject misery on his small
face. “Oh, Mr. David,” he quavered, “don’t tell me she is dead!”
“No, no, lad,” I said hastily, “she has only fainted.”
He looked at me uncertainly, tried to smile, and a tear dropped on the
ribbon in his hands. Then a look of joy made his face luminous. “The
doctor’s here, Mr. David. I didn’t know I was abringing him for Bell
Brandon. I thought it was just for the big man.”
So Joey had a name for my wonder woman, too. I could not but feel that
his name was the sweeter of the two.
I bore Haidee through the room where the doctor was in attendance
on the big man, who was by this time raving and incoherent in his
delirium, passed swiftly through the small hallway that separated the
cedar room from the main one, and laid Haidee on Joey’s bed. Then I
brought the doctor. I left Haidee in his hands, and Joey and I passed
outside to the Dingle, and stood there silently, side by side, by the
pool.
I saw the green mirror flecked with the white petals of the syringa,
and I heard a squirrel chattering in the hemlock above my head, and
was conscious of a calliope humming-bird that pecked at the wool of my
sweater. But my whole soul was in that cedar room, where Haidee lay
white and suffering, and I was repeating a prayer that had been on my
mother’s lips often when I was a child as she had bent over me in my
small bed:
“Oh, Lord, keep my dear one! Deliver us from murder and from sudden
death--Good Lord, deliver us!”
But Haidee’s condition was not serious. The doctor came out to us, Joey
and me, with the assurance, and at once the world began to wag evenly
with me. “All she needs now is rest,” he said suavely. “She will now
be able to rest for some time. You’d better get a woman here, Dale, to
help out. Mrs. Batterly mentioned it. There’ll have to be a trained
nurse for the man.”
In the workshop Joey and I considered the situation in all its phases,
and Joey sagely counseled: “Send for Wanza.”
The suggestion seemed a wise one, so I penned a careful note, and Joey
rode away to the village for the second time that day.
In my note I said:
_Dear Wanza_:
I am in trouble. Mrs. Batterly has met with an accident, and is here
at my cabin, unable to be moved. I have also a very sick man--a
stranger--on my hands. Joey and I need you--will you come?
Your old friend,
DAVID DALE.
Wanza responded gallantly to my call for aid. In a couple of hours I
heard the rattle of her cart and the jingle of harness, and the sound
of Buttons’ hoof-beats on the river road, and emerged from my workshop
to greet her.
She stepped down from the shelter of the pink-lined umbrella, and
answered my greeting with great circumspection. I lifted down her bag
and a big bundle, Joey carried her sweater and a white-covered basket,
and together we escorted her to the cabin and made an imposing entrance.
The big man, tossing about in his bunk in the front room, ceased his
confused mutterings as we crossed the threshold, struggled up to his
elbow, stared, and pointed his finger at Wanza. “_La beauté sans vertu
est une fleur sans parfum_,” he said indistinctly.
Wanza stared back at him, ignorant of the import of his words; and as
I frowned at him, he threw up both hands and drifted into dribbling
incoherence. I pointed to the door at the end of the room, and Wanza
went to it swiftly, opened it quietly, and passed through to Haidee.
When I went to the kitchen, after giving the big man a spoonful of the
medicine the doctor had left, I found Joey on the floor, with his arms
about the collie’s neck.
“I can trust you,” he was saying, “I can trust those eyes, those
marble-est eyes! Why, if it hadn’t been for you, Jingles, Bell Brandon
could never a let Mr. David know.”
The stage stopped at Cedar Dale late that afternoon, and set down the
trained nurse. And our curious ménage was complete.
The nurse proved to be a sandy-haired, long-nosed pessimist, a woman
of fifty, capable, but so sunk in pessimism that Joey’s blandishments
failed to win her, and Jingles stood on his hind legs, and pawed his
face in vain.
All through supper she discoursed of microbes and the dangerous
minerals in spring water. She read us a lesson on cleanliness,
repudiated the soda in the biscuits, and looked askance at the liberal
amount of cream I took in my coffee.
“Cream has a deleterious effect on the liver,” she informed me, looking
down her nose sourly, while Joey wrinkled his small face, appeared
distressed at the turn the conversation was taking, and gasped forth:
“Why, Mr. David, do people have livers same as chickens?”
Mrs. Olds sniffed, Wanza looked out of the window and bit her lips, and
I shook my head at Joey.
“My dear Mrs. Olds,” I said cheerfully, “there is nothing the matter
with my liver, I assure you.”
She looked me over critically, inquired my age, and when I told her
thirty-two, remarked darkly that I was young yet.
When Wanza and I were left alone in the kitchen, I had time to observe
Wanza’s hair. It made me think of the flaxen curls on the heads of the
French dolls I had seen displayed in the shop-windows at Christmas
time. Each curl was crisp and glossy, and hung in orderly, beauteous
exactness, and the little part in the centre of her head was even, and
white as milk. Palely as her hair was wont to gleam, it shone still
paler now, until in some lights it was almost of silvery fairness and
indescribable sheen. Beneath it, her blue eyes looked almost black, her
complexion had the rare whiteness of alabaster. There could be no two
opinions on the subject--Wanza had washed her hair.
I knocked together a crude cot covered with a bit of canvas, on which
Mrs. Olds and Wanza were to take turns sleeping in the kitchen, and I
soldered an old canteen to be used as a hot-water bottle at the big
man’s feet. And I did sundry small errands that Mrs. Olds required of
me before I was dismissed for the night. But when Joey and I closed the
kitchen door behind us and stole away in the darkness beneath the yews
to our new sleeping quarters in the workshop, I went with an effulgent
glow and rapture at my heart. She was beneath my roof. She was eating
my bread. The room on which I had labored through many an arduous day
out of love and compassion for Joey had become a haven of refuge for my
wonder woman.