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Page 41
"Oh," said Bennett, turning his head so as to fix her with his own good
eye. "She has gone to nurse a typhoid fever patient, has she?"
"Yes, and papa told me--" and Hattie became suddenly very grave, "that
we might--might--oh, dear--never see her again."
"Hum! Whereabouts is this place in Medford? She gave you her address;
what is it?" Hattie told him, and he took himself abruptly away.
Bennett had gone some little distance down the road before the real
shock came upon him. Lloyd was in a position of imminent peril; her life
was in the issue. With blind, unreasoned directness he leaped at once to
this conclusion, and as he strode along with teeth and fists tight shut
he kept muttering to himself: "She may die, she may die--we--we may
never see her again." Then suddenly came the fear, the sickening sink of
heart, the choke at the throat, first the tightening and then the sudden
relaxing of all the nerves. Lashed and harried by the sense of a fearful
calamity, an unspeakable grief that was pursuing after him, Bennett did
not stop to think, to reflect. He chose instantly to believe that Lloyd
was near her death, and once the idea was fixed in his brain it was not
thereafter to be reasoned away. Suddenly, at a turn in the road, he
stopped, his hands deep in his pockets, his bootheel digging into the
ground. "Now, then," he exclaimed, "what's to be done?"
Just one thing: Lloyd must leave the case at once, that very day if it
were possible. He must save her; must turn her back from this
destruction toward which she was rushing, impelled by such a foolish,
mistaken notion of duty.
"Yes," he said, "there's just that to be done, and, by God! it shall be
done."
But would Lloyd be turned back from a course she had chosen for herself?
Could he persuade her? Then with this thought of possible opposition
Bennett's resolve all at once tightened to the sticking point. Never in
the darkest hours of his struggle with the arctic ice had his
determination grown so fierce; never had his resolution so girded
itself, so nerved itself to crush down resistance. The force of his will
seemed brusquely to be quadrupled and decupled. He would do as he
desired; come what might he would gain his end. He would stop at
nothing, hesitate at nothing. It would probably be difficult to get her
from her post, but with all his giant's strength Bennett set himself to
gain her safety.
A great point that he believed was in his favour, a consideration that
influenced him to adopt so irrevocable a resolution, was his belief that
Lloyd loved him. Bennett was not a woman's man. Men he could understand
and handle like so many manikins, but the nature of his life and work
did not conduce to a knowledge of women. Bennett did not understand
them. In his interview with Lloyd when she had so strenuously denied
Ferriss' story Bennett could not catch the ring of truth. It had gotten
into his mind that Lloyd loved him. He believed easily what he wanted to
believe, and his faith in Lloyd's love for him had become a part and
parcel of his fundamental idea of things, not readily to be driven out
even by Lloyd herself.
Bennett's resolution was taken. Never had he failed in accomplishing
that upon which he set his mind. He would not fail now. Beyond a certain
limit--a limit which now he swiftly reached and passed--Bennett's
determination to carry his point became, as it were, a sort of
obsession; the sweep of the tremendous power he unchained carried his
own self along with it in its resistless onrush. At such, times there
was no light of reason in his actions. He saw only his point, beheld
only his goal; deaf to all voices that would call him back, blind to all
consideration that would lead him to swerve, reckless of everything that
he trampled under foot, he stuck to his aim until that aim was an
accomplished fact. When the grip of the Ice had threatened to close upon
him and crush him, he had hurled himself against its barriers with an
energy and resolve to conquer that was little short of directed frenzy.
So it was with him now.
* * * * *
When Lloyd had parted from the Campbells in the square before the house,
she had gone directly to the railway station of a suburban line, and,
within the hour, was on her way to Medford. As always happened when an
interesting case was to be treated, her mind became gradually filled
with it to the exclusion of everything else. The Campbells, and
Bennett's ready acceptance of a story that put her in so humiliating a
light, were forgotten as the train swept her from the heat and dust of
the City out into the green reaches of country to the southward. What
had been done upon the case she had no means of telling. She only knew
that the case was of unusual virulence and well advanced. It had killed
one nurse already and seriously endangered the life of another, but so
far from reflecting on the danger to herself, Lloyd felt a certain
exhilaration in the thought that she was expected to succeed where
others had succumbed. Another battle with the Enemy was at hand, the
Enemy who, though conquered on a hundred fields, must inevitably triumph
in the end. Once again this Enemy had stooped and caught a human being
in his cold grip. Once again Life and Death were at grapples, and Death
was strong, and from out the struggle a cry had come--had come to her--a
cry for help.
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