Zaidos’ method of punishing Velo for the yarn he had told the doctor took the form of an exaggerated gratitude. Being perfectly independent of praise himself, Zaidos could not understand why on earth Velo should have taken the trouble to misrepresent things so. As far as Zaidos could see, there was nothing to be gained by it. The incident was past and did not concern the doctor in any way. Zaidos, who did not know his cousin at all, had yet to learn that his was one of the natures that are incapable of any noble effort, yet which feed on praise. With Velo everything was personal. If he passed a beautiful woman driving in the park, he thought instantly, “Now if that horse should run away, and I should leap out and grasp the animal by the head, wouldn’t that be fine? I would doubtless be dashed to the pavement a few times, but what of that?” He could almost hear the lovely lady, pale and shaken, as she thanked her noble preserver and pressed into his hand a ring of immense value. The lovely lady was always a Countess at least, and frequently a Princess.
Velo imagined drowning accidents, and fires where he dashed the firemen aside, and made thrilling rescues of other lovely ladies who were seen hanging out of high windows. Velo himself always came out unhurt and with his clothes nicely brushed and in order. Sometimes he imagined a slight, very slight cut on his forehead, which had to be becomingly bandaged, but that was always the extent of his injuries. Velo liked to imagine bandits, too; big, ferocious fellows whom he outwitted, or choked into insensibility in single combat. At a moving-picture show, he always sat in a delicious dream, admiring his own exploits as the pictures flashed on the screen.
Thus it was perfectly natural and simple for him to take the adventure of the previous day, and twist it to his own glorification.
To Zaidos this would have been such an impossibility that he simply could not have understood it at all, even if someone had explained Velo’s way of looking at things.
To Zaidos the only possible or natural way to look at things was to do whatever came up for a fellow to do, and to do it as soon and as well as he possibly could. Not knowing Velo, he did not dream that he was in the habit of glorifying himself on every possible occasion. If he had, he would have pressed a little harder. As it was, he drove Velo into a cold fury by his sweet, humble gratitude.
“Oh, Velo,” he would say, “whenever I think how you wrenched my hands from the rail, and forced me into the water, and swam with me to safety, I don’t see how I will ever thank you!”
Then he would get out the square of antiseptic gauze the nurse had given him for a handkerchief and cry into its folds as loudly as he dared.
Zaidos had to take medicine to keep down fever, so there were two bottles on the tiny table beside him. He had to take a dose every hour. Once he woke up, and took the bottle in his hand and started to pour it out just as the nurse came past. She gave a look at the bottle, smothered a cry, and snatched it from Zaidos’ hand. She was pale.
“How—where—when did you get that?” she stammered.
“What’s the matter with it?” asked Zaidos. “Isn’t it my medicine? I’ve been taking it all the time, haven’t I?”
The nurse had regained her self-control and even smiled.
“Have you been asleep this morning?” she asked, as though the medicine no longer interested her.
“Just woke up,” said Zaidos. “I had a fine nap.”
“That’s good,” said the nurse and walked away, taking the bottle in her hand.
But five minutes later, when she reported to the doctor, her manner was not so calm.
“What do you think?” she cried, closing the door of the tiny laboratory where he was working with an assistant. “What can this mean? This bottle was on young Zaidos’ table instead of the medicine I left there!”
The doctor scanned the label.
“Bichloride of mercury,” he said. “Why, that’s queer!” He pondered. “What do you make of it?”
“I can’t make a guess even,” said the nurse. “There is no one out there who is delirious, and Zaidos could not get up on that broken leg in his sleep, if he wanted to. If it was not such a crazy idea, I should say someone had a reason for getting rid of Zaidos, but he is very popular, and his cousin thinks the world of him.”
The incident was mysterious as well as serious. They discussed it and made guesses which flew wide of the mark. The doctor quietly ordered a change of medicine for Zaidos, and removing the bottles on his table, gave the nurse instructions to give him the doses herself. She did so, without rousing any suspicion in Zaidos’ open and confident mind, but Velo Kupenol noticed the change.
He was more attentive to his cousin than ever.
Only in the rare moments when he was alone and secure from observation did he allow himself to take off the mask of good nature and kindliness, and let those thin features of his twist into the wicked leer that well fitted them. He no longer saw himself in the part of hero. He was too eager to remove from his way the boy who stood between him and all the luxury he craved. But his common sense told him that at the present, at least, there was nothing to be done. He would have to await further developments. In the meantime he would gain his cousin’s confidence. That ought to be easy. Zaidos was the most friendly fellow he had ever seen. Velo resolved that if ever he came in for the Zaidos name and title, he would show them just how haughty and overbearing a young nobleman could be. But in the meantime, he thought it better to do as Zaidos commanded and say nothing about the family. Zaidos had elected to be known as a common soldier, and he would keep to his word. Velo realized that he himself could make no pretentions while Zaidos was about; he would not stand for that. So Velo acted in his best and oiliest manner, and waited on the nurse, and urged his services on the doctors, and wondered why they never acted at ease and friendly with him, as they all did with the laughing boy on the cot.
When they were sent ashore it dawned on Velo that now they would be separated. Zaidos would have to go to a hospital to wait for his leg to heal; but he was well, and would be set at some duty which would separate him from Zaidos. That would never do. He worried over it as they approached land, and finally took the matter to the doctor. He put the matter strongly. He had promised Zaidos’ dying father that he would not be separated from the boy. They were almost of an age, but he had always been the one to look out for Zaidos, and surely now if ever was the time to be true to his trust. He explained the manner of their enlistment, and reminded the doctor they were both listed among the drowned.
“You see I must remain near him,” he urged. “Just help me find a way.”
“The hospitals are all short handed,” mused the good-natured physician. “I think they would be glad to get you. There is lots of heavy lifting that tells on the nurses, and all that sort of thing, you know. It will be two weeks before Zaidos can be discharged. That bone is not knitting right. It was splintered, you see. I’ll do all I can for you, Velo, and I think it will work out nicely.”
So it came about that when the patients on the Red Cross ship were transferred to the land hospital within the English lines, Velo was there in full force, carrying one end of Zaidos’ stretcher. Of course it was the light end; Velo saw to that instinctively, but then it was Velo’s attention to just such little details that made life easy for him.
Zaidos soon improved so that he was allowed to hop about on crutches. The second day he used them, however, a brass pin somehow worked into the arm pad and scratched him badly before he knew that it was just where his weight would press it into his shoulder. It was very sore, and that same night, when he sat carefully on the edge of his narrow bed, waiting for Velo to come and help him undress, the bed went down and Zaidos was thrown to the floor. It hurt his leg again. Velo picked him up and was so sorry that for once Zaidos felt a twinge of remorse when he thought of the way he had guyed him.
But the nurse, who had been transferred to the land hospital also, pressed her lips tight together and thought hard. Zaidos was almost too unlucky. She took him under her own special care, although Velo protested and assured her that she must not burden herself while he was there to look out for his cousin.
“I don’t see why so many things keep happening to you,” she said to Zaidos while she dressed the place on his arm where the brass pin had made a bad sore.
“I am playing in hard luck, at that,” said Zaidos, smiling. “Every time I turn around I seem to bump myself somehow. I was on the football team, and had won my letter for running. Do you suppose I will ever get to run again?”
“I don’t know,” said the nurse. “I don’t see why this leg should make much difference. It was only one bone, you know, and you could bandage that leg if it felt weak. But you can’t keep falling off cots and sticking infected pins into you.”
“Funny thing about that cot,” said Zaidos. “The bolt that held the spring and headboard together was gone—completely gone. I wonder if it ever was in. Perhaps when they put it together, they forgot that corner, and it stuck together until I happened to sit down on it just right. I’ve known things like that. I’m glad it didn’t go down with some poor fellow who was badly wounded. It gave my leg an awful jolt. And it certainly gets me where I got that pin in the crutch pad. It must have been in the lining, and just worked out. I don’t believe it will make a bad sore. My blood is pretty good. It’s funny, though.”
“A lot of queer things happen to you, Zaidos,” said the nurse. “Tell me, have you no other name? Are you just Zaidos and nothing else?”
“Oh, yes, I have five or six other names,” said Zaidos, smiling. “But you know in Greece it is the custom to call the—”
He glanced into the face before him with a queer embarrassed look, and stopped.
“Just so,” said the nurse. “I understand. You are the head of your house, whatever that is, and you have very sensibly decided to keep it all to yourself while you are mixed up in this war. Well, Zaidos, in England, too, we sometimes call the head of a noble house by his family name. For my part, however, I prefer to think of you simply as a particularly nice, agreeable boy, who has made his illness a very pleasant time for the people who have been near him; and so I think I will call you something simpler than Zaidos. Is John one of your five or six names?”
“Nothing so easy as that,” said Zaidos, smiling. “Why, I will tell you what they are.”
“I don’t want to know,” said the nurse. “I, too, have a name that we will forget for the time, but you may call me Nurse Helen. And I have the dearest father in the world whose name is John; so I will call you John. Do you mind?”
“I should say not!” said Zaidos.
“You see, John,” said Nurse Helen, “every time I say that name I feel closer to my home and all the dear ones there. Some day I will tell you about them all.”
“I wish you would,” said Zaidos. “I have often wondered how your people could let a dandy girl like you get into this sort of thing.” He wanted to say such a pretty girl, but did not quite have the courage to do it. “You know you might even get hurt.”
“It’s quite likely,” said Helen simply. “One has to accept that chance. And there is a chance about everything. A lot of the people in this war, dreadful as it is, will go home when it is over, and get run over by London busses, or fall down stairs, or things like that.”
“Or slip on banana peels,” added Zaidos. “You are right about it. I wonder I never thought of it before.”
“Who is Velo Kupenol?” asked Helen. “Is he really your cousin?”
“My second cousin, to be exact,” said Zaidos. “He has lived at our house ever since he was a boy eight years old. I don’t exactly understand Velo lots of the time.”
“I wouldn’t think he was too awfully hard to understand,” said Helen.
“Well, he is,” said Zaidos. “He has been just nice to me ever since I was hurt, but he has done some of the queerest things. And what he told the doctor about what happened the day we were in the water—Oh well, I can’t explain it very well!”
Zaidos was too modest to tell Helen that the account had simply been twisted around to Velo’s advantage.
“Don’t try,” commented Helen. “There is one thing I feel as though I ought to tell you. That is that I want you to watch that cousin of yours. If we are doing him an injustice, we will find it out just so much sooner. Otherwise it pays to be on guard. Just tell me one thing, John. If anything happened to you, would there be anything for Velo to gain by your death?”
Zaidos looked uncomfortable.
“Oh, I suppose so,” he said. “Why, yes, to be honest with you, he would gain a lot. But I can’t—Oh, he wouldn’t be such a sneak! Perhaps I had better tell you all about everything, now you have sort of adopted me.”
“Not if you think best not to,” said Helen; “but of course I would love to know all about you.”
“And I had better tell you,” said Zaidos. “You see, I have no relatives at all except Velo, and we aren’t too sure of him yet, are we?”
He rapidly recounted the happenings of the past from the time the telegram reached him in far America. Several times Helen interrupted with a keen question.
When Zaidos finished, she sighed.
“Well, John,” she said, “as far as I can see, there is not a thing you can take as a real clue. But it all looks queer, just the same. Sometimes everything will happen so things look black. That is why circumstantial evidence is always so dangerous. But all the same, I worry over you.”
“Don’t do that,” said Zaidos. “I ought to be old enough to look out for myself.”
“What are you going to do when your leg heals?” asked Helen.
“I’m going to join the Red Cross,” said Zaidos.
“How perfectly fine!” exclaimed Helen. “We will be posted together for awhile if you do, because the field hospitals at the front where I am going are very short handed. Don’t you suppose we could persuade Velo that his duty lies in some other sphere of action?”
“I don’t believe so,” said Zaidos.
“No, I know we couldn’t,” said Helen. “He has repeatedly told me that he would never leave you. Here he comes now. Let’s try it!”
She smiled as Velo approached and drew himself up. Nurse Helen was undeniably beautiful, even in her severe uniform.
No, Velo had no intention of deserting his dear cousin. If Zaidos joined the Red Cross, so would Velo. It made no difference to him at all. If Zaidos was stationed in the trench hospitals at the front, that was where he would be found.
And two weeks later he actually did find himself there. It was in one of the lulls between engagements, and they arrived with no more excitement or danger than might attend any summer trip.