The Sick a Bed Lady Part 28

Andrews--very--specially--much," she kept repeating aimlessly. Then halfway to her room her body stiffened suddenly.

"Mr. Donas Guthrie," she asked. "Do you think I'm probably going to die?"

"N-a-w!" said Guthrie, his nose fairly crinkling with positiveness.

"But they don't give you much of anything to eat in typhoid, do they?"

she persisted hectically.

"I suppose not," acknowledged Guthrie.

With disconcerting unexpectedness she began to cry--a soft, low, whimpery cry like a sleepy child's.

"If any day should come when--they think--that I am going to die," she moaned, "who will there be to see that I do get--something awfully good to eat?"

"I'll see to it," said Guthrie, "if you'll only put me in authority."

As though altogether indifferent to anything that he might say, her tension relaxed again and without further parleying she let Guthrie carry her across the threshold of her room and set her down cautiously in the creaky rocking chair. The eyes that lifted to his were as vague and turbid as brown velvet.

"There's one good thing about typhoid," she moaned. "It doesn't seem to hurt any, does it? In fact, I think I rather like it. It feels as warm and snug and don't-care as a hot lemonade at bed time. But what?"

brightening suddenly, "but what was it you asked me to think about? I feel sort of confused--but it was something, I remember, that I was going to argue with you about."

"It was what I said about marrying me," prompted Guthrie.

"Oh, y-e-s," smiled the Little Psychology Teacher. Hazily for a moment she continued staring at him with her fingers prodded deep into her temples. Then suddenly, like a flower blasted with heat, she wilted down into her chair, groping blindly out with one hand toward the sleeve of his coat.

"Whatever you think best to do about it," she faltered, "I guess you'd better arrange pretty quickly--'cause I think--I'm--going--out."

This is how it happened that Mr. and Mrs. Donas Guthrie and Dr. Andrews stayed behind at the ranch house with Hanlon and Hanlon's Mary, and a piebald pony or two, and a herd of Angora goats, and a pink geranium plant, and the strange intermittent smell of a New England farmhouse which lurked in Hanlon's goods and chattels even after thirty years, and three or four stale, tattered magazines--and typhoid fever.

It was typhoid fever that proved essentially the most incalculable companion of them all. Hanlon's austerity certainly never varied from day to day, nor the inherent sullenness of Hanlon's Mary.

The meager sick-room, stripped to its bare pine skin of every tawdry colored print and fluttering cheese-cloth curtain, faced bluntly toward the west--a vital little laboratory in which the unknown quant.i.ty of a woman's endurance and the fallible skill of one man, the stubborn bravery of another, and the quite inestimable will of G.o.d were to be fused together in a desperate experiment to precipitate Life rather than Death.

So October waxed into November, and so waxed misgiving into apprehension, and apprehension into actual fear. In any more cheerful situation it would have been at least interesting to have watched the infuriated expletives issue from Andrew's perennially smiling lips.

"Oh, hang not having anything to work with!" he kept reiterating and reiterating. "Hang being shut off like this on a ranch where there aren't anything but sheep and goats and one old stingy cow that Hanlon's Mary guards with her life 'cause the lady's only a school teacher, but a baby is a baby.' Hang Hanlon's Mary! And hang not being altogether able to blame her! And hang not knowing, anyway, just what nanny-goat's milk would do for a typhoid patient! And hang--"

But before the expletives, and through the expletives, and after the expletives, Andrews was all hero, working, watching, experimenting, retrenching, humanly comprehensive, more than humanly vigilant.

So, with the brain of a doctor and the heart of a lover, the two men worked and watched and waited through the tortuous autumn days and nights, blind to the young dawn stealing out like a luminous mist from the night-smothered mountains; deaf to the flutter of sun-dried leaves in the radiant noon-time; dull to the fruit-scented fragrance of the early twilight, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, sensing nothing, except the flicker of a pulse or the rise of a temperature.

And then at last there came a harsh, wintry feeling day, when Andrews, stepping out into the hall, called Guthrie softly to him and said, still smiling:

"Guthrie, old man, I don't think we're going to win this game!"

"W-h-a-t?" gasped Guthrie.

With his mouth still curling amiably around his words, Andrews repeated the phrase. "I said, I don't think we're going to win this game. No, nothing new's happened. She's simply burning out. Can't you understand?

I mean she's probably--going to die!"

Out of the jumble of words that hurtled through Guthrie's mind only four slipped his lips.

"But--she's--my--wife!" he protested.

"Other men's wives have died before this," said Andrews still smiling.

"Man," cried Guthrie, "if you smile again, I'll break your head!"

With his tears running down like rain into the broadening trough of his smile, Andrews kept right on smiling. "You needn't be so cross about it," he said. "You're not the only one who likes her! I wanted her myself! You're nothing but a tramp on the face of the earth--and I could have given her the snuggest home in Yonkers!"

With their arms across each other's shoulders they went back into the sick room.

Rousing from her lethargy, the young woman opened her eyes upon them with the first understanding that she had shown for some days.

Inquisitively she stared from Guthrie's somber eyes to Andrews'

distorted cheerfulness.

Taking instant advantage of her unwonted rationality, Andrews blurted out the question that was uppermost in his professional responsibility.

"Don't you think, maybe, your people ought to know about your being sick?" he said. "Now, if you could give us any addresses."

For a second it really seemed as though the question would merely safely ignite her common sense.

"Why yes, of course," she acquiesced. "My brother."

Then suddenly, without any warning, her most dangerous imagination caught fire.

"You mean," she faltered, "that--I--am--not--going to get well?"

Before either man was quick enough to contradict her, the shock had done its work. Piteously she turned her face to the pillow.

"Never--never--to--go--to--Oxford?" she whispered in mournful astonishment. "Never--even--to--see my--Bay of Naples?--Never to--have a--a--perfectly happy Christmas?" A little petulantly then her brain began to clog. "I think I--might at least have had--the pink sash!" she complained. Then, equally suddenly her strength rallied for an instant and the eyes that she lifted to Guthrie's were filled with a desperate effort at raillery. "Bring on your--anchovies and caviar," she reminded him, "and the stuffed green peppers--and remember I don't like my fillet too well done--and--"

Five minutes later in the hallway Andrews caught Guthrie just as he was chasing downstairs after Hanlon.

"What are you going to do?" he asked curiously.

"I am going to send Hanlon out to the telegraph station," said Guthrie.

"I'm going to wire to Denver for a pink sash!"

"What she was raving about?" quizzed Andrews. "Are you raving too?"

"It's the only blamed thing in the whole world that she's asked for that I can get her," said Guthrie.

"It'll take five days," growled Andrews.

"I know it!"

"It won't do her any good."