The Shuttle Part 70

One morning the matron with the sharp temper found out the truth, though the outburst of grat.i.tude to Mount Dunstan which resulted in her enlightenment, was entirely spontaneous and without intention. Her doubt of his Mount Dunstan blood had grown into a st.u.r.dy liking even for his short speech and his often drawn-down brows.

"We've got more to thank your lordship for than common help," she said.

"G.o.d Almighty knows where we'd all ha' been but for what you've done.

Those poor souls you've nursed and fed----"

"I've not done it," he broke in promptly. "You're mistaken; I could not have done it. How could I?"

"Well," exclaimed the matron frankly, "we WAS wondering where things came from."

"You might well wonder. Have any of you seen Lady Anstruthers' sister, Miss Vanderpoel, ride through the village? She used sometimes to ride this way. If you saw her you will remember it.'

"The 'Merican young lady!" in ejaculatory delight. "My word, yes! A fine young woman with black hair? That rich, they say, as millions won't cover it."

"They won't," grimly. "Lord Dunholm and Lady Alanby of Dole kindly sent cheques to help us, but the American young lady was first on the field.

She sent both doctors and nurses, and has supplied us with food and medicine every day. As you say, Mrs. Brown, G.o.d Almighty knows what would have become of us, but for what she has done."

Mrs. Brown had listened with rather open mouth. She caught her breath heartily, as a sort of approving exclamation.

"G.o.d bless her!" she broke out. "Girls isn't generally like that. Their heads is too full of finery. G.o.d bless her, 'Merican or no 'Merican!

That's what I say."

Mount Dunstan's red-brown eyes looked as if she had pleased him.

"That's what I say, too," he answered. "G.o.d bless her!"

There was not a day which pa.s.sed in which he did not involuntarily say the words to himself again and again. She had been wrong when she had said in her musings that they were as far apart as if worlds rolled between them. Something stronger than sight or speech drew them together. The thread which wove itself through his thoughts grew stronger and stronger. The first day her gifts arrived and he walked about the ballroom ward directing the placing of hospital cots and hospital aids and comforts, the spirit of her thought and intelligence, the individuality and cleverness of all her methods, brought her so vividly before him that it was almost as if she walked by his side, as if they spoke together, as if she said, "I have tried to think of everything. I want you to miss nothing. Have I helped you? Tell me if there is anything more." The thing which moved and stirred him was his knowledge that when he had thought of her she had also been thinking of him, or of what deeply concerned him. When he had said to himself, tossing on his pillow, "What would she DO?" she had been planning in such a way as answered his question. Each morning, when the day's supplies arrived, it was as if he had received a message from her.

As the people in the cottages felt the power of his temperament and depended upon him, so, also, did the patients in the ballroom ward. The feeling had existed from the outset and increased daily. The doctors and nurses told one another that his pa.s.sing through the room was like the administering of a tonic. Patients who were weak and making no effort, were lifted upon the strong wave of his will and carried onward towards the sh.o.r.e of greater courage and strength.

Young Doctor Thwaite met him when he came in one morning, and spoke in a low voice:

"There is a young man behind the screen there who is very low," he said.

"He had an internal haemorrhage towards morning, and has lost his pluck.

He has a wife and three children. We have been doing our best for him with hot-water bottles and stimulants, but he has not the courage to help us. You have an extraordinary effect on them all, Lord Mount Dunstan. When they are depressed, they always ask when you are coming in, and this man--Patton, his name is--has asked for you several times.

Upon my word, I believe you might set him going again."

Mount Dunstan walked to the bed, and, going behind the screen, stood looking down at the young fellow lying breathing pantingly. His eyes were closed as he laboured, and his pinched white nostrils drew themselves in and puffed out at each breath. A nurse on the other side of the cot had just surrounded him with fresh hot-water bottles.

Suddenly the sunken eyelids flew open, and the eyes met Mount Dunstan's in imploring anxiousness.

"Here I am, Patton," Mount Dunstan said. "You need not speak."

But he must speak. Here was the strength his sinking soul had longed for.

"Cruel bad--goin' fast--m' lord," he panted.

Mount Dunstan made a sign to the nurse, who gave him a chair. He sat down close to the bed, and took the bloodless hand in his own.

"No," he said, "you are not going. You'll stay here. I will see to that."

The poor fellow smiled wanly. Vague yearnings had led him sometimes, in the past, to wander into chapels or stop and listen to street preachers, and orthodox plat.i.tudes came back to him.

"G.o.d's--will," he trailed out.

"It's nothing of the sort. It's G.o.d's will that you pull yourself together. A man with a wife and three children has no right to slip out."

A yearning look flickered in the lad's eyes--he was scarcely more than a lad, having married at seventeen, and had a child each year.

"She's--a good--girl."

"Keep that in your mind while you fight this out," said Mount Dunstan.

"Say it over to yourself each time you feel yourself letting go. Hold on to it. I am going to fight it out with you. I shall sit here and take care of you all day--all night, if necessary. The doctor and the nurse will tell me what to do. Your hand is warmer already. Shut your eyes."

He did not leave the bedside until the middle of the night.

By that time the worst was over. He had acted throughout the hours under the direction of nurse and doctor. No one but himself had touched the patient. When Patton's eyes were open, they rested on him with a weird growing belief. He begged his lordship to hold his hand, and was uneasy when he laid it down.

"Keeps--me--up," he whispered.

"He pours something into them--vigour--magnetic power--life. He's like a charged battery," Dr. Thwaite said to his co-workers. "He sat down by Patton just in time. It sets one to thinking."

Having saved Patton, he must save others. When a man or woman sank, or had increased fever, they believed that he alone could give them help.

In delirium patients cried out for him. He found himself doing hard work, but he did not flinch from it. The adoration for him became a sort of pa.s.sion. Haggard faces lighted up into life at the sound of his footstep, and heavy heads turned longingly on their pillows as he pa.s.sed by. In the winter days to come there would be many an hour's talk in East End courts and alleys of the queer time when a score or more of them had lain in the great room with the dancing and floating G.o.ddesses looking down at them from the high, painted ceiling, and the swell, who was a lord, walking about among them, working for them as the nurses did, and sitting by some of them through awful hours, sometimes holding burning or slackening and chilling hands with a grip whose steadiness seemed to hold them back from the brink of the abyss they were slipping into. The mere ignorantly childish desire to do his prowess credit and to play him fair saved more than one man and woman from going out with the tide.

"It is the first time in my life that I have fairly counted among men.

It's the first time I have known human affection, other than yours, Penzance. They want me, these people; they are better for the sight of me. It is a new experience, and it is good for a man's soul," he said.

CHAPTER XLIII

HIS CHANCE

Betty walked much alone upon the marshes with Roland at her side. At intervals she heard from Mr. Penzance, but his notes were necessarily brief, and at other times she could only rely upon report for news of what was occurring at Mount Dunstan. Lord Mount Dunstan's almost military supervision of and command over his villagers had certainly saved them from the horrors of an uncontrollable epidemic; his decision and energy had filled the alarmed Guardians with respect and this respect had begun to be shared by many other persons. A man as prompt in action, and as faithful to such responsibilities as many men might have found plausible reasons enough for shirking, inevitably a.s.sumed a certain dignity of aspect, when all was said and done. Lord Dunholm was most clear in his expressions of opinion concerning him. Lady Alanby of Dole made a practice of speaking of him in public frequently, always with admiring approval, and in that final manner of hers, to whose authority her neighbours had so long submitted. It began to be accepted as a fact that he was a new development of his race--as her ladyship had put it, "A new order of Mount Dunstan."

The story of his power over the stricken people, and of their pa.s.sionate affection and admiration for him, was one likely to spread far, and be immensely popular. The drama of certain incidents appealed greatly to the rustic mind, and by cottage firesides he was represented with rapturous awe, as raising men, women, and children from the dead, by the mere miracle of touch. Mrs. Welden and old Doby revelled in thrilling, almost Biblical, versions of current anecdotes, when Betty paid her visits to them.

"It's like the Scripture, wot he done for that young man as the last breath had gone out of him, an' him lyin' stiffening fast. 'Young man, arise,' he says. 'The Lord Almighty calls. You've got a young wife an'

three children to take care of. Take up your bed an' walk.' Not as he wanted him to carry his bed anywheres, but it was a manner of speaking.

An' up the young man got. An' a sensible way," said old Mrs. Welden frankly, "for the Lord to look at it--for I must say, miss, if I was struck down for it, though I s'pose it's only my sinful ignorance--that there's times when the Lord seems to think no more of sweepin' away a steady eighteen-shillin' a week, and p'raps seven in family, an' one at the breast, an' another on the way--than if it was nothin'. But likely enough, eighteen shillin' a week an' confinements does seem paltry to the Maker of 'eaven an' earth."

But, to the girl walking over the marshland, the humanness of the things she heard gave to her the sense of nearness--of being almost within sight and sound--which Mount Dunstan himself had felt, when each day was filled with the result of her thought of the needs of the poor souls thrown by fate into his hands. In these days, after listening to old Mrs. Welden's anecdotes, through which she gathered the simpler truth of things, Betty was able to construct for herself a less Scriptural version of what she had heard. She was glad--glad in his sitting by a bedside and holding a hand which lay in his hot or cold, but always trusting to something which his strong body and strong soul gave without stint. There would be no restraint there. Yes, he was kind--kind--kind --with the kindness a woman loves, and which she, of all women, loved most. Sometimes she would sit upon some mound, and, while her eyes seemed to rest on the yellowing marsh and its birds and pools, they saw other things, and their colour grew deep and dark as the marsh water between the rushes.

The time was pressing when a change in her life must come. She frequently asked herself if what she saw in Nigel Anstruthers' face was the normal thinking of a sane man, which he himself could control. There had been moments when she had seriously doubted it. He was haggard, aging and restless. Sometimes he--always as if by chance--followed her as she went from one room to another, and would seat himself and fix his miserable eyes upon her for so long a time that it seemed he must be unconscious of what he was doing. Then he would appear suddenly to recollect himself and would start up with a muttered exclamation, and stalk out of the room. He spent long hours riding or driving alone about the country or wandering wretchedly through the Park and gardens. Once he went up to town, and, after a few days' absence, came back looking more haggard than before, and wearing a hunted look in his eyes. He had gone to see a physician, and, after having seen him, he had tried to lose himself in a plunge into deep and turbid enough waters; but he found that he had even lost the taste of high flavours, for which he had once had an epicurean palate. The effort had ended in his being overpowered again by his horrors--the horrors in which he found himself staring at that end of things when no pleasure had spice, no debauchery the sting of life, and men, such as he, stood upon the sh.o.r.e of time shuddering and naked souls, watching the great tide, bearing its treasures, recede forever, and leave them to the cold and hideous dark.

During one day of his stay in town he had seen Teresita, who had at first stared half frightened by the change she saw in him, and then had told him truths he could have wrung her neck for putting into words.

"You look an old man," she said, with the foreign accent he had once found deliciously amusing, but which now seemed to add a sting. "And somesing is eating you op. You are mad in lofe with some beautiful one who will not look at you. I haf seen it in mans before. It is she who eats you op--your evil thinkings of her. It serve you right. Your eyes look mad."