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Page 108
"Mr. O'Neill," barked Don, "Dr. Barrington particularly said you--you
were not to go up there. He said that Brian's got to have the--the
quiet kind around--"
Joan's quick stare of reproach brought the color to his face.
"I--I beg your pardon, Mr. O'Neill," he blurted. "He said--he said he
must have quiet."
"It's all right," said Kenny ruefully. "Quite all right. You've been
up?" he added quietly.
Don dug his toe into the floor and a hot flush suffused his forehead.
"To tell you the truth," he said with some annoyance, "Doctor
Barrington wouldn't let me in. He seems to be able to manage a good
many things at once."
"Ah!" said Kenny.
"We must find still another cot," said Joan, pouring coffee at the
stove.
So in the dark hours of nervous unrestraint that marked for Don and
Kenny that lagging period of terror and suspense, Joan stepped to the
helm and steered. And there was need of steering.
Chaos would have reigned without it.
CHAPTER XXXIV
A FACE
Vagueness lay for Brian in that shack room where the noise of forest
trees mourned always at the window. Only pain was sharp . . .
colossal, rearing misshapen out of the blur induced by an awful
weakness. Sleep wrenched him for horrible dreaming minutes from his
world of pain. Pain wrenched him back. At times a mammoth terror lay
in his soul, undefined yet grotesquely positive, as if, pushing back,
his consciousness foresaw that horrific catastrophe of noise and
belching terror, and waited, unable to sense any of its details save
the single one of personal tragedy and pain. There were cramped
minutes when the rafters of the peaked roof seemed pressing down upon
him . . . and minutes of a diffused reaching out when the world, torn
by internal explosion, seemed flying away from him in fragments, even
walls receding from his cot which stayed, by a miracle, alone upon a
wind-swept moor.
Intervals were an eternity. Familiarity with the detail of the room
engendered frantic loathing. His brain conned over the faded colors in
the rag rug and encountered the unchangeable, bayonet-like crack in the
mirror with nervous fury. No peace came with the darkness. Each
familiar thing persisted, looming clearer to his tired mind by the very
effort his straining eyes made to reach it. There was the table
clogged with doctors' litter . . . and there the other cot where Frank
pretended to sleep and kept his vigil . . . there the chair . . . and
there the dab of yellow in the rug that the sun struck into faded
gayety in the morning . . . and there the crack across the mirror, the
wriggling, distorted, foolish crack that seemed alive for all its
sameness. And there was always the noise of wind which became a
corollary of his pain, pulsing with it, never quiet, an overtone that
tragically would not yield.
Into the blur of wind and weakness and pain came two miracles--a red
geranium peering out of the dusk of the room like a glowing coal,
unfamiliar and therefore a delight--a bit of velvet laughter in the
drab that caught his whole attention . . . the other a face. The face
came first in a cloud of flower-spotted purple that he knew clearly was
in some way related to the hypodermic needle Frank had plunged into his
arm while the sunset still lay painted on the window. . . . It took
form in the purple like a pansy--that face--grew sweet and vivid and
very real. Mercifully its loveliness was changeable, losing its pansy
purples and gaining glints of gold . . . becoming less a pansy . . .
more a face flower-like with compassion.
"And now?" wondered Brian when the face came again.
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