Part 24 (1/2)

The doctor's kind eyes, however, drove the thought away; for they were eyes which seemed to see the nightmare, hidden under all the care and the comfort, more clearly than Sister Mary's; though hers were kind to the uttermost also--kind and quick--so that, as she pa.s.sed down the row of beds with the visitors, she left the other sisters and the orderlies busy. And more than once her eyes and the doctor's--the woman's and the man's--met, after looking at a boy's face, with regret or relief in them. But no one said a word of better or worse, except now and again a wistful voice from the beds that stood so close together.

'What young faces!' said Grace in an undertone; there was a constriction in her throat which might have prevented her speaking loud had she wished to do so.

'I doubt if there is a case over two-and-twenty in the ward,' replied Dr. Sullivan, 'except'--he paused beside a cot in the far corner, where a nurse sate at the head and an orderly waited at the foot--'except this one.'

He spoke without any attempt at an aside, for the face staring up with open eyes at the ceiling was unmistakably unconscious; yet, even so, curiously haggard, weary, anxious.

'He is a hospital orderly,' went on the doctor, 'the best nurse I ever came across. I wonder how many fellows he's pulled through in his fifteen years of it. But it has got him at last, though he was careful.

In a hurry possibly, and didn't disinfect; there's been a terrible rush lately, and very little will do it. Poor old Steady Normal!' He laid his hand regretfully on the anxious forehead for an instant, and the expression on his face was mirrored in those around him. 'They called him that, Lady Arbuthnot,' he explained, 'because he used to beam all over when he could echo that report. Well, if anybody pulls through, he ought to, in justice; but it's a bad case. You see, he is saturated with the poison.'

So on and on they pa.s.sed, down one side and up the other, pausing by each bed to look at what lay there, and compare it with the chart which Sister Mary unhooked from the wall and handed to the doctor.

It got on Grace Arbuthnot's nerves at last--the methodical calm of it all, the smiles that were so cheerfully sympathetic or so wistfully impatient, the studious speech, the still more studious silence. Until at last, when the end was near, and Dr. Sullivan's finger, travelling over a chart, pointed out a level after a series of peaks and pa.s.ses, she could not help seeking relief in the remark that 'some one was out of the wood!'

A contented smile came to the face she was leaving, but a look showed on the one she was approaching which struck her like a blow, which she felt she could never forget, so full was it of something akin to anger in its hopeless, helpless blame.

'He is in the thick of it, poor chap,' said the doctor in a low voice; 'only came in yesterday.'

And Grace's eyes, dim with tears, could scarcely see the jagged notches rising higher and higher in the fresh unfingered chart that was being shown her.

'Can nothing be done?' she asked abruptly, when the doctor was driving her over to the mess in his dogcart. The others were walking, and he had just pointed out the temporary hospital they had had to open.

He shook his head. 'G.o.d knows! Sometimes I think I could, with a free hand. We do what we can, as it is, but what can you expect when the men get sitting about the bazaars, and eating and drinking filth. There is only one way out of it now, Lady Arbuthnot, as I hope you'll tell Sir George. Get 'em away into the desert, _not_ to be tempted of the devil, but to--what shall we say?--to--to get back the sinews of war!' he finished, proud of his quotation.

It was apt enough to recur more than once to Grace Arbuthnot's mind as she watched the sports; once, especially, when a tug-of-war began, and a team of boys, big enough, but soft-looking, stood up against the Artillery.

'They haven't a chance against us!' said Nevill Lloyd, with pardonable pride. 'To begin with, we are accustomed to handle ropes; and then!--of course, if the Highlanders had been here still, there'd have been a fight, but these new fellows haven't the sinew--as yet.'

They pulled pluckily, though, for all they were worth, encouraged thereat, amongst other supporters, by a number of big upstanding sepoys from the native lines. They were in _mufti_, which, however, was no disguise to their martial swagger and palpable pride of strength.

'Don't pull, brotherlings!' they advised; 'put the weight on the rope and stand steady. So! Oh, 'tis G.o.d's will! He has not given the weight yet. It will come, brothers! Meanwhile it is fate, not defeat.'

But as they turned carelessly from the end, one said to his neighbour, '_Ari bhai!_ We could have taught the _tope khana-wallahs_ a lesson.'

And the neighbour laughed.

'Yea, if they gave us the chance, but they will not. They know we of the _pultans_ are bigger and stronger than they of the _rigiments_, but they would not have the world know it; as if it could not see!'

As he stood aside cheerfully, almost respectfully, to let a smooth-faced fresh-coloured boy in a red coat pa.s.s, he proved his words, for he towered a good head above him, and could have covered two of him in breadth.

Nevill Lloyd, standing beside the Arbuthnots' carriage, overheard the remark and frowned.

'I should like to challenge those fellows,' he said vexedly. 'I know we could pull 'em over and knock the conceit out of 'em.'

'Then why don't you?' asked Lesley, smiling; she and the aide-de-camp had become fast friends, chiefly over their mutual devotion to Grace Arbuthnot.

'They won't let us. They say it is likely to rouse ill-feeling and all that. And then,' he went on frankly, 'of course it wouldn't do to get licked too often, you know, and one can't expect our boys to collar men who do dumb-bells all day like those fellows do.'

Grace, sitting beside Lesley, thought they might do worse.