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Page 42
All the exuberance of battle grew big within her breast. She was
impatient to be there--there at hand--to face the Enemy again across the
sick-bed, where she had so often faced and outfought him before; and,
matching her force against his force, her obstinacy against his
strength--the strength that would pull the life from her grasp--her
sleepless vigilance against his stealth, her intelligence against his
cunning, her courage against his terrors, her resistance against his
attack, her skill against his strategy, her science against his
world-old, worldwide experience, win the fight, save the life, hold firm
against his slow, resistless pull and triumph again, if it was only for
the day.
Succeed she would and must. Her inborn obstinacy, her sturdy refusal to
yield her ground, whatever it should be, her stubborn power of
resistance, her tenacity of her chosen course, came to her aid as she
drew swiftly near to the spot whereon the battle would be fought.
Mentally she braced herself, holding back with all her fine,
hard-tempered, native strength. No, she would not yield the life to the
Enemy; no, she would not give up; no, she would not recede. Let the
Enemy do his worst--she was strong against his efforts.
At Medford, which she reached toward four in the afternoon, after an
hour's ride from the City, she found a conveyance waiting for her, and
was driven rapidly through streets bordered with villas and closely
shaven lawns to a fair-sized country seat on the outskirts of the town.
The housekeeper met her at the door with the information that the doctor
was, at the moment, in the sick-room, and had left orders that the nurse
should be brought to him the moment she arrived. The housekeeper showed
Lloyd the way to the second landing, knocking upon the half-open door at
the end of the hall, and ushering her in without waiting for an answer.
Lloyd took in the room at a glance--the closely drawn curtains, the
screen between the bed and the windows, the doctor standing on the
hearth-rug, and the fever-inflamed face of the patient on the pillow.
Then all her power of self-repression could not keep her from uttering a
smothered exclamation.
For she, the woman who, with all the savage energy of him, Bennett
loved, had, at peril of her life, come to nurse Bennett's nearest
friend, the man of all others dear to him--Richard Ferriss.
VI.
Two days after Dr. Pitts had brought Ferriss to his country house in the
outskirts of Medford he had been able to diagnose his sickness as
typhoid fever, and at once had set about telegraphing the fact to
Bennett. Then it had occurred to him that he did not know where Bennett
had gone. Bennett had omitted notifying him of his present whereabouts,
and, acting upon Dr. Pitts' advice, had hidden himself away from
everybody. Neither at his club nor at his hotel, where his mail
accumulated in extraordinary quantities, had any forwarding address been
left. Bennett would not even know that Ferriss had been moved to
Medford. So much the worse. It could not be helped. There was nothing
for the doctor to do but to leave Bennett in ignorance and go ahead and
fight for the life of Ferriss as best he could. Pitts arranged for a
brother physician to take over his practice, and devoted himself
entirely to Ferriss. And Ferriss sickened and sickened, and went
steadily from bad to worse. The fever advanced regularly to a certain
stage, a stage of imminent danger, and there paused. Rarely had Pitts
been called upon to fight a more virulent form of the disease.
What made matters worse was that Ferriss hung on for so long a time
without change one way or another. Pitts had long since been convinced
of ulceration in the membrane of the intestines, but it astonished him
that this symptom persisted so long without signs either of progressing
or diminishing. The course of the disease was unusually slow. The first
nurse had already had time to sicken and die; a second had been
infected, and yet Ferriss "hung on," neither sinking nor improving, yet
at every hour lying perilously near death. It was not often that death
and life locked horns for so long, not often that the chance was so
even. Many was the hour, many was the moment, when a hair would have
turned the balance, and yet the balance was preserved.
At her abrupt recognition of Ferriss, in this patient whom she had been
summoned to nurse, and whose hold upon life was so pitifully weak,
Lloyd's heart gave a great leap and then sank ominously in her breast.
Her first emotion was one of boundless self-reproach. Why had she not
known of this? Why had she not questioned Bennett more closely as to his
friend's sickness? Might she not have expected something like this? Was
not typhoid the one evil to be feared and foreseen after experiences
such as Ferriss had undergone--the fatigue and privations of the march
over the ice, and the subsequent months aboard the steam whaler, with
its bad food, its dirt, and its inevitable overcrowding?
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