Lloyd took in the room at a glance—the
closely drawn curtains, the screen between the bed
and the windows, the doctor standing on the hearth-rug,
and the fever-inflamed face of the patient on the pillow.
Then all her power of self-repression could not keep
her from uttering a smothered exclamation.
For she, the woman who, with all the savage energy
of him, Bennett loved, had, at peril of her life,
come to nurse Bennett’s nearest friend, the
man of all others dear to him—Richard Ferriss.
Two days after Dr. Pitts had brought Ferriss to his
country house in the outskirts of Medford he had been
able to diagnose his sickness as typhoid fever, and
at once had set about telegraphing the fact to Bennett.
Then it had occurred to him that he did not know where
Bennett had gone. Bennett had omitted notifying
him of his present whereabouts, and, acting upon Dr.
Pitts’ advice, had hidden himself away from
everybody. Neither at his club nor at his hotel,
where his mail accumulated in extraordinary quantities,
had any forwarding address been left. Bennett
would not even know that Ferriss had been moved to
Medford. So much the worse. It could not
be helped. There was nothing for the doctor to
do but to leave Bennett in ignorance and go ahead and
fight for the life of Ferriss as best he could.
Pitts arranged for a brother physician to take over
his practice, and devoted himself entirely to Ferriss.
And Ferriss sickened and sickened, and went steadily
from bad to worse. The fever advanced regularly
to a certain stage, a stage of imminent danger, and
there paused. Rarely had Pitts been called upon
to fight a more virulent form of the disease.
What made matters worse was that Ferriss hung on for
so long a time without change one way or another.
Pitts had long since been convinced of ulceration
in the membrane of the intestines, but it astonished
him that this symptom persisted so long without signs
either of progressing or diminishing. The course
of the disease was unusually slow. The first
nurse had already had time to sicken and die; a second
had been infected, and yet Ferriss “hung on,”
neither sinking nor improving, yet at every hour lying
perilously near death. It was not often that death
and life locked horns for so long, not often that the
chance was so even. Many was the hour, many was
the moment, when a hair would have turned the balance,
and yet the balance was preserved.
At her abrupt recognition of Ferriss, in this patient
whom she had been summoned to nurse, and whose hold
upon life was so pitifully weak, Lloyd’s heart
gave a great leap and then sank ominously in her breast.
Her first emotion was one of boundless self-reproach.
Why had she not known of this? Why had she not
questioned Bennett more closely as to his friend’s
sickness? Might she not have expected something
like this? Was not typhoid the one evil to be
feared and foreseen after experiences such as Ferriss
had undergone—the fatigue and privations
of the march over the ice, and the subsequent months
aboard the steam whaler, with its bad food, its dirt,
and its inevitable overcrowding?
