CHAPTER X
JINGLES BRINGS A MESSAGE
JOEY did not get his wish concerning the departure of the big man, for the next morning the big man was in no condition to go anywhere. He was still lying in his bunk when I went through the room to build the kitchen fire; and when breakfast was ready, he had not roused even to the strains of “Bell Brandon” played on Joey’s flute.
I stood over him, and he looked up at me with lack-lustre eyes, attempted to rise and rolled back on his pillow like a log.
“Morning, stranger,” he muttered. He winked at me slyly. His face was puffy and red, his eyes swollen, his breathing irregular and labored. “What’s matter?” he protested thickly, then he smiled, with a painful contortion of his fever-seared lips, “I seem to be hors de combat. Terrible pain here.” He touched his chest.
“I’ll get a doctor at once,” I said.
He thanked me, gave me a keen look, and asked wheezingly: “Not married? No wife about?”
I shook my head. “Unfortunately, no.”
He winked at me a second time. “Lascia la moglie e tienti donzello,” he cackled.
I went from the room pondering on the strange personality of this man, who was unquestionably a scholar, and who, no doubt, considered himself a gentleman. I dispatched Joey for a doctor.
“Take Buttons and ride to Roselake as fast as you can,” I bade him. “Where’s the collie? He may go along.”
Joey, basking in the sun on the back steps, laid aside his flute. His lips drew down, and his eyes bulged widely.
“The big man’s going to stay, then, Mr. David?”
“Run along,” I said sharply.
As I let down the meadow bars, Joey turned in his saddle and gave his clear boyish whistle. But no Jingles answered the call, and a moment later the lad rode away with a clouded face.
A few moments later, as I plied my ax at the rear of the cabin, the cold muzzle of the collie was thrust against my hand. I stooped to caress him, and as he leaped up to greet me, I smiled as my eyes caught the color and the sheen of a silken ribbon threaded through his collar. Well, I knew that bit of adornment—that azure fillet that Haidee had worn in her hair.
I touched the inanimate thing with tender fingers, and started suddenly to find a jeweled pendant hanging there, glowing like a dewdrop against the dog’s soft fur. I stood agape, feeling my face soften as my fingers stroked the bauble; and then I straightened up with a swift presentiment. It was in no playful mood that Haidee had placed that costly gewgaw about the collie’s neck.
I turned toward the stable, and then remembered that Joey had taken the horse. My only recourse was the canoe. I ran to the willows where the craft was secreted. I had it afloat in a twinkling, and was paddling away down the river, the collie barking furiously on the shore.
Poor pale, beautiful Haidee! She lay like a crumpled white rose in the bracken beside the spring. The white fir-tree that, in falling, had crushed the lean-to of the frail cabin had swept her beneath its branches as she bent for water at the spring. This was the story I read for myself as I bent above my prostrate girl. But it was many days before I learned the whole truth. How, close onto midnight, she had heard a man hallooing from the lake shore; how she had stolen out from the cabin in the storm, fearing an intrusion from some drunken reveler from the village tavern; how, after the tree had fallen and pinned her fast with its cruel branches, she had lain unconscious until with the first streak of light she had felt the touch of the collie’s muzzle against her face; how she had roused, and, her hands being free, had torn the ribbon from her hair and bound it about the collie’s neck, and, as an afterthought, attached the pendant from her throat, thinking the ribbon alone might not occasion surprise.
She told me all this, days afterward; but when I reached her side, she was incapable of speech, and only a flutter of her white lids denoted that she was conscious.
I had a bad half hour alone there in the bracken, watching her face grow grayer and grayer as I worked to dislodge the branches that were pinning her down. And, at last, as I lifted her in my arms, I saw the last particle of color drain from her lips, and realized that she had fainted. But I had her in my arms, and her heart was beating faintly. And, someway, hope leaped up and I felt courageous and strong, as I bore her to the river and placed her in the canoe.
Joey was kneeling among the willows with his arms clasping Jingles as I beached my canoe near the workshop.
“I knew something had happened to Bell Brandon,” he declared, in big-eyed misery. “I knew it! I knew it!” He took the crumpled bit of ribbon from the dog’s neck with hands that trembled, and came forward slowly. I was unprepared for the look of abject misery on his small face. “Oh, Mr. David,” he quavered, “don’t tell me she is dead!”
“No, no, lad,” I said hastily, “she has only fainted.”
He looked at me uncertainly, tried to smile, and a tear dropped on the ribbon in his hands. Then a look of joy made his face luminous. “The doctor’s here, Mr. David. I didn’t know I was abringing him for Bell Brandon. I thought it was just for the big man.”
So Joey had a name for my wonder woman, too. I could not but feel that his name was the sweeter of the two.
I bore Haidee through the room where the doctor was in attendance on the big man, who was by this time raving and incoherent in his delirium, passed swiftly through the small hallway that separated the cedar room from the main one, and laid Haidee on Joey’s bed. Then I brought the doctor. I left Haidee in his hands, and Joey and I passed outside to the Dingle, and stood there silently, side by side, by the pool.
I saw the green mirror flecked with the white petals of the syringa, and I heard a squirrel chattering in the hemlock above my head, and was conscious of a calliope humming-bird that pecked at the wool of my sweater. But my whole soul was in that cedar room, where Haidee lay white and suffering, and I was repeating a prayer that had been on my mother’s lips often when I was a child as she had bent over me in my small bed:
“Oh, Lord, keep my dear one! Deliver us from murder and from sudden death—Good Lord, deliver us!”
But Haidee’s condition was not serious. The doctor came out to us, Joey and me, with the assurance, and at once the world began to wag evenly with me. “All she needs now is rest,” he said suavely. “She will now be able to rest for some time. You’d better get a woman here, Dale, to help out. Mrs. Batterly mentioned it. There’ll have to be a trained nurse for the man.”
In the workshop Joey and I considered the situation in all its phases, and Joey sagely counseled: “Send for Wanza.”
The suggestion seemed a wise one, so I penned a careful note, and Joey rode away to the village for the second time that day.
In my note I said:
Dear Wanza:
I am in trouble. Mrs. Batterly has met with an accident, and is here at my cabin, unable to be moved. I have also a very sick man—a stranger—on my hands. Joey and I need you—will you come?
Your old friend,
DAVID DALE.
Wanza responded gallantly to my call for aid. In a couple of hours I heard the rattle of her cart and the jingle of harness, and the sound of Buttons’ hoof-beats on the river road, and emerged from my workshop to greet her.
She stepped down from the shelter of the pink-lined umbrella, and answered my greeting with great circumspection. I lifted down her bag and a big bundle, Joey carried her sweater and a white-covered basket, and together we escorted her to the cabin and made an imposing entrance.
The big man, tossing about in his bunk in the front room, ceased his confused mutterings as we crossed the threshold, struggled up to his elbow, stared, and pointed his finger at Wanza. “La beauté sans vertu est une fleur sans parfum,” he said indistinctly.
Wanza stared back at him, ignorant of the import of his words; and as I frowned at him, he threw up both hands and drifted into dribbling incoherence. I pointed to the door at the end of the room, and Wanza went to it swiftly, opened it quietly, and passed through to Haidee.
When I went to the kitchen, after giving the big man a spoonful of the medicine the doctor had left, I found Joey on the floor, with his arms about the collie’s neck.
“I can trust you,” he was saying, “I can trust those eyes, those marble-est eyes! Why, if it hadn’t been for you, Jingles, Bell Brandon could never a let Mr. David know.”
The stage stopped at Cedar Dale late that afternoon, and set down the trained nurse. And our curious ménage was complete.
The nurse proved to be a sandy-haired, long-nosed pessimist, a woman of fifty, capable, but so sunk in pessimism that Joey’s blandishments failed to win her, and Jingles stood on his hind legs, and pawed his face in vain.
All through supper she discoursed of microbes and the dangerous minerals in spring water. She read us a lesson on cleanliness, repudiated the soda in the biscuits, and looked askance at the liberal amount of cream I took in my coffee.
“Cream has a deleterious effect on the liver,” she informed me, looking down her nose sourly, while Joey wrinkled his small face, appeared distressed at the turn the conversation was taking, and gasped forth:
“Why, Mr. David, do people have livers same as chickens?”
Mrs. Olds sniffed, Wanza looked out of the window and bit her lips, and I shook my head at Joey.
“My dear Mrs. Olds,” I said cheerfully, “there is nothing the matter with my liver, I assure you.”
She looked me over critically, inquired my age, and when I told her thirty-two, remarked darkly that I was young yet.
When Wanza and I were left alone in the kitchen, I had time to observe Wanza’s hair. It made me think of the flaxen curls on the heads of the French dolls I had seen displayed in the shop-windows at Christmas time. Each curl was crisp and glossy, and hung in orderly, beauteous exactness, and the little part in the centre of her head was even, and white as milk. Palely as her hair was wont to gleam, it shone still paler now, until in some lights it was almost of silvery fairness and indescribable sheen. Beneath it, her blue eyes looked almost black, her complexion had the rare whiteness of alabaster. There could be no two opinions on the subject—Wanza had washed her hair.
I knocked together a crude cot covered with a bit of canvas, on which Mrs. Olds and Wanza were to take turns sleeping in the kitchen, and I soldered an old canteen to be used as a hot-water bottle at the big man’s feet. And I did sundry small errands that Mrs. Olds required of me before I was dismissed for the night. But when Joey and I closed the kitchen door behind us and stole away in the darkness beneath the yews to our new sleeping quarters in the workshop, I went with an effulgent glow and rapture at my heart. She was beneath my roof. She was eating my bread. The room on which I had labored through many an arduous day out of love and compassion for Joey had become a haven of refuge for my wonder woman.