On the day that Lloyd returned to the house on Calumet
Square (Hattie’s recovery being long since assured),
and while she was unpacking her valise and settling
herself again in her room, a messenger boy brought
her a note.
“Have just arrived in the City. When may
I see you? Bennett.”
News of Ward Bennett and of Richard Ferriss had not
been wanting during the past fortnight or so.
Their names and that of the ship herself, even the
names of Adler, Hansen, Clarke, and Dennison, even
Muck Tu, even that of Kamiska, the one surviving dog,
filled the mouths and minds of men to the exclusion
of everything else.
The return of the expedition after its long imprisonment
in the ice and at a time when all hope of its safety
had been abandoned was one of the great events of
that year. The fact that the expedition had failed
to reach the Pole, or to attain any unusual high latitude,
was forgotten or ignored. Nothing was remembered
but the masterly retreat toward Kolyuchin Bay, the
wonderful march over the ice, the indomitable courage,
unshaken by hardship, perils, obstacles, and privations
almost beyond imagination. All this, together
with a multitude of details, some of them palpably
fictitious, the press of the City where Bennett and
Ferriss both had their homes published and republished
and published again and again. News of the men,
their whereabouts and intentions, invaded the sick-room—where
Lloyd watched over the convalescence of her little
patient—by the very chinks of the windows.
Lloyd learned how the ship had been “nipped;”
how, after inconceivable toil, the members of the
expedition had gained the land; how they had marched
southward toward the Chuckch settlements; how, at the
eleventh hour, the survivors, exhausted and starving,
had been rescued by the steam whalers; how these whalers
themselves had been caught in the ice, and how the
survivors of the Freja had been obliged to spend another
winter in the Arctic. She learned the details
of their final return. In the quiet, darkened
room where Hattie lay she heard from without the echo
of the thunder of the nations; she saw how the figure
of Bennett towered suddenly magnificent in the world;
how that the people were brusquely made aware of a
new hero. She learned that honours came thronging
about him unsought; that the King of the Belgians had
conferred a decoration upon him; that the geographical
societies of continental Europe had elected him to
honourary membership; that the President and the Secretary
of War had sent telegrams of congratulations.
“And what does he do,” she murmured, “the
first of all upon his return? Asks to see me—me!”
She sent an answer to his note by the same boy who
brought it, naming the following afternoon, explaining
that two days later she expected to go into the country
to a little town called Bannister to take her annual
fortnight’s vacation.
