Part 39 (1/2)
Savine before he rose shakily to his feet.
”I would sooner have heard anything than that Geoffrey was badly hurt,”
he exclaimed with a quaver in his voice. To the Chinaman, who brought the stranger in, he gave the order, ”Get him some supper and tell Fontaine I want him at once.”
”Poor Geoffrey! We must hope it is not serious,” cried Mrs. Savine with visible distress. ”But sit down. You can't help him, and may bring on a seizure by exciting yourself, Julius.”
Savine, who did not answer her, remained standing until the hired hand whom he had summoned, entered. ”Ride your hardest to the camp and tell Foreman Tom I'm coming over to take charge until Mr. Thurston, who has met with an accident, recovers,” he said. ”He's to send a spare horse and a couple of men to help the sleigh over the washed-out trail. Come back at your best pace. I must reach the canon before morning.”
”Are you mad, Julius?” asked his sister-in-law when the men retired.
”It's even chances the excitement or the journey will kill you.”
”Then I must take the chances,” declared Savine. ”While there was a man I could trust to handle things, I let this weakness master me. Now the poor fellow's helpless, somebody must take hold before chaos ensues, and I haven't quite forgotten everything. You'll have to nurse Geoffrey, and it's no use trying to scare me. Fill my big flask with the old brandy and get my furs out.”
Mrs. Savine saw further remonstrance would be useless. She considered her brother-in-law more fit for his grave than to complete a great undertaking, but he was clearly bent on having his way. When she hinted something of her thoughts, he answered that even so he would rather die at work in the canon than tamely in his bed. So s.h.i.+vering under a load of furs he departed in the sleigh, and after several narrow escapes of an upset, reached the camp in the dusk of a nipping morning.
”Help me out. Mr. Thurston, I am sorry to say, has met with a bad accident, and you and I have got to finish this work without him,” he said to the anxious foreman. ”From what he told me I can count upon your doing the best that's in you, Tom.”
”I won't go back on nothing Mr. Thurston said,” was the quiet answer; but when Tom from Mattawa left Savine, whose nerveless fingers spilled half the contents of the silver cup he strove to fill, gasping beside the stove in Thurston's quarters, he gravely shook his head.
Several days elapsed after Helen's departure for Vancouver before Mrs.
Savine, who had gone at once to the scene of the accident, considered it judicious to inform her of Geoffrey's condition, and so it happened that one evening Helen accompanied her hostess to witness the performance of a Western dramatic company. Despite second-rate acting the play was a pretty one, and each time the curtain went down Helen found the combination of bright light, pretty dresses, laughter and merry voices strangely pleasant after her isolation. At times her thoughts would wander back to the ice-bound canon and the man who had pitted himself against the thundering river in its gloomy depths.
Perhaps the very contrast between this scene of brightness and luxury and the savage wilderness emphasized the self-abnegation he had shown.
She knew now that he had toiled beyond most men's strength, when he might have rested, and casting away what would have insured him a life of ease, had voluntarily chosen an almost hopeless struggle for her sake. Few women had been wooed so, she reflected, and then she endeavored to confine her attention to the play, for as yet, though both proud and grateful, she could not admit that she had been won.
Presently the son of her hostess, who joined the party between the acts, handed her a note. ”I am sorry I could not get here before, but found this waiting, and thought I'd better bring it along. I hope it's not a summons of recall,” he said.
Helen opened the envelope, and the hurriedly-written lines grew blurred before her eyes as she read, ”I am grieved to say that Geoffrey has been seriously injured by an accident. The doctor has, however, some hopes of his recovery, though he won't speak definitely yet. If you can find an intelligent woman in Vancouver you could trust to help me nurse him, send her along. Didn't write before because----”
”What is it? No bad news of your father, I hope,” her hostess asked, and the son, a fine type of the young Western citizen, noticed the dismay in Helen's face as she answered:
”Nothing has happened to my father. His partner has been badly hurt.
I must return to-morrow, and, as it is a tiresome journey, if you will excuse me, I would rather not sit out the play.”
The young man noticed that Helen seemed to s.h.i.+ver, while her voice was strained. He discreetly turned away his head, though he had seen sufficient to show him that certain lately-renewed hopes were vain.
”Miss Savine has not been used to gayety of late, and I warned her she must take it quietly, especially with that ride through the ranges before her. This place is unsufferably hot, and you can trust me to see her safe home, mother,” he said.
Helen's grateful, ”Thank you!” was reward enough, but it was in an unenviable humor that the young man returned to the theater when she sought refuge in her own room.
Solitude appeared a vital necessity, for at last Helen understood.
Ever since Thurston first limped, footsore and hungry, into her life she had been alternately attracted and repelled by him. His steadfast patience and generosity had almost melted her at times, but from the beginning, circ.u.mstances had seemed to conspire against the man, shadowing him with suspicion, and forcing him into opposition to her will. Mrs. Savine's story had made his unswerving loyalty plain, and Helen had begun to see that she would with all confidence trust her life to him; but she was proud, and knowing how she had misjudged him, hesitated still. As long as a word or a smile could bring him to her feet she could postpone the day of reckoning at least until his task was finished, and thus allow him to prove his devotion to the uttermost test.
Now, however, fate had intervened, tearing away all disguise, and her eyes were opened. She knew that without him the future would be empty, and the revelation stirred every fiber of her being. Growing suddenly cold with a shock of fear she remembered that she had perhaps already lost him forever. It might be that another more solemn summons had preceded her own, and that she might call and Geoffrey Thurston would not hear! He had won his right to rest by work well done, but she--it now seemed that a lifetime would be too short to mourn him. Helen s.h.i.+vered at the thought, then she felt as if she were suffocating.
Turning the light low, she flung the long window open. Beyond the electric glare of the city, with its shapeless pile of roofs and towering poles, the mountains rose, serenely majestic, in robes of awful purity. They were beckoning her she felt. The man whom she had learned to love too late lay among them, perhaps with the strong hands that had toiled for her folded in peace at last, and, living or dead, she must go to him. She remembered that the message said,--”Hire a capable woman in Vancouver,” and it brought her a ray of comfort. If the time was not already past she would ask nothing better than to wait on him herself. Presently, when there was a hum of voices below, Helen, white of face but steady in nerves, descended to meet her hostess.
”I must go back to-morrow, and as it is a fatiguing journey you will not mind my retiring early,” she said to excuse her absence from the supper party that was a.s.sembled after the play.
On reaching the railroad settlement Helen found the doctor in charge of Thurston willing to avail himself of her a.s.sistance. The physician had barely held his own in several encounters with her aunt, whom he suspected of endeavoring to administer unauthorized preparations to his patient, while on her part Mrs. Savine freely admitted that at her age she could not sit up all night forever. So Helen was installed, and it was midnight when she commenced her first watch.