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Page 36
"His pulse is very high," she said to the steward. "When did you take
his temperature?" She drew a little morocco case from her pocket and
from that took a clinical thermometer, which she shook up and down,
eying the patient meanwhile with a calm, impersonal scrutiny. The
Lieutenant raised his head and stared up at the white figure beside
his cot. His eyes opened and then shut quickly, with a startled look,
in which doubt struggled with wonderful happiness. His hand stole out
fearfully and warily until it touched her apron, and then, finding it
was real, he clutched it desperately, and twisting his face and body
toward her, pulled her down, clasping her hands in both of his, and
pressing them close to his face and eyes and lips. He put them from
him for an instant, and looked at her through his tears.
"Sweetheart," he whispered, "sweetheart, I knew you'd come."
As the nurse knelt on the deck beside him, her thermometer slipped
from her fingers and broke, and she gave an exclamation of annoyance.
The young Doctor picked up the pieces and tossed them overboard.
Neither of them spoke, but they smiled appreciatively. The Lieutenant
was looking at the nurse with the wonder and hope and hunger of soul
in his eyes with which a dying man looks at the cross the priest holds
up before him. What he saw where the German nurse was kneeling was a
tall, fair girl with great bands and masses of hair, with a head
rising like a lily from a firm, white throat, set on broad shoulders
above a straight back and sloping breast--a tall, beautiful creature,
half-girl, half-woman, who looked back at him shyly, but steadily.
"Listen," he said.
The voice of the sick man was so sure and so sane that the young
Doctor started, and moved nearer to the head of the cot. "Listen,
dearest," the Lieutenant whispered. "I wanted to tell you before I
came South. But I did not dare; and then I was afraid something might
happen to me, and I could never tell you, and you would never know. So
I wrote it to you in the will I made at Baiquiri, the night before the
landing. If you hadn't come now, you would have learned it in that
way. You would have read there that there never was any one but you;
the rest were all dream people, foolish, silly--mad. There is no one
else in the world but you; you have been the only thing in life that
has counted. I thought I might do something down here that would make
you care. But I got shot going up a hill, and after that I wasn't able
to do anything. It was very hot, and the hills were on fire; and they
took me prisoner, and kept me tied down here, burning on these coals.
I can't live much longer, but now that I have told you I can have
peace. They tried to kill me before you came; but they didn't know I
loved you, they didn't know that men who love you can't die. They
tried to starve my love for you, to burn it out of me; they tried to
reach it with their knives. But my love for you is my soul, and they
can't kill a man's soul. Dear heart, I have lived because you lived.
Now that you know--now that you understand--what does it matter?"
Miss Bergen shook her head with great vigor. "Nonsense," she said,
cheerfully. "You are not going to die. As soon as we move you out of
this rain, and some food cook--"
"Good God!" cried the young Doctor, savagely. "Do you want to kill
him?"
When she spoke, the patient had thrown his arms heavily across his
face, and had fallen back, lying rigid on the pillow.
The Doctor led the way across the prostrate bodies, apologizing as he
went. "I am sorry I spoke so quickly," he said, "but he thought you
were real. I mean he thought you were some one he really knew--"
"He was just delirious," said the German nurse, calmly.
The Doctor mixed himself a Scotch and soda and drank it with a single
gesture.
"Ugh!" he said to the ward-room. "I feel as though I'd been opening
another man's letters."
* * * * *
The transport drove through the empty seas with heavy, clumsy
upheavals, rolling like a buoy. Having been originally intended for
the freight-carrying trade, she had no sympathy with hearts that beat
for a sight of their native land, or for lives that counted their
remaining minutes by the throbbing of her engines. Occasionally,
without apparent reason, she was thrown violently from her course; but
it was invariably the case that when her stern went to starboard,
something splashed in the water on her port side and drifted past her,
until, when it had cleared the blades of her propeller, a voice cried
out, and she was swung back on her home-bound track again.
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