Part 17 (1/2)
David looked about for the stones. The ”we” consoled him a little, but he felt as if he were excluded into outer darkness, and at a moment when she should have turned to him for the aid he yearned to give. He could not get over the suddenness of it, and watched them forlornly, gazing enviously at their conferences over the medicine chest, once straightening himself from his search for stones to call longingly:
”Can't I do something for you over there?”
”Have you the stones?” she answered without raising her head, and he went back to his task.
In distress she had turned from the outside world, broken every lien of interest with it, and gone back to her own. The little circle in which her life had always moved snapped tight upon her, leaving the lover outside, as completely shut out from her and her concerns as if he had been a stranger camped by her fire.
CHAPTER VIII
The doctor was ill. The next day he lay in the wagon, his chest oppressed, fever burning him to the dryness of an autumn leaf. To the heads that looked upon him through the circular opening with a succession of queries as to his ailment, he invariably answered that it was nothing, a bronchial cold, sent to him as a punishment for disobeying his daughter. But the young men remembered that the journey had been undertaken for his health, and Daddy John, in the confidential hour of the evening smoke, told them that the year before an attack of congestion of the lungs had been almost fatal.
Even if they had not known this, Susan's demeanor would have told them it was a serious matter. She was evidently wracked by anxiety which transformed her into a being so distant, and at times so cross, that only Daddy John had the temerity to maintain his usual att.i.tude toward her. She would hardly speak to Leff, and to David, the slighting coldness that she had shown in the beginning continued, holding him at arm's length, freezing him into stammering confusion. When he tried to offer her help or cheer her she made him feel like a foolish and tactless intruder, forcing his way into the place that was hers alone.
He did not know whether she was prompted by a cruel perversity, or held in an absorption so intense she had no warmth of interest left for anybody. He tried to explain her conduct, but he could only feel its effect, wonder if she had grown to dislike him, review the last week in a search for a cause. In the daytime he hung about the doctor's wagon, miserably anxious for a word from her. He was grateful if she asked him to hunt for medicine in the small, wooden chest, or to spread the blankets to air on the tops of the lupine bushes.
And while she thus relegated him to the outer places where strangers hovered, a sweetness, so gentle, so caressing, so all pervading that it made of her a new and lovely creature, marked her manner to the sick man. There had always been love in her bearing to her father, but this new tenderness was as though some hidden well of it, sunk deep in the recesses of her being, had suddenly overflowed. David saw the hardness of the face she turned toward him trans.m.u.te into a brooding pa.s.sion of affection as she bent over the doctor's bed. The fingers he did not dare to touch lifted the sick man's hand to her cheek and held it there while she smiled down at him, her eyes softening with a light that stirred the lover's soul. The mystery of this feminine complexity awed him. Would she ever look at him like that? What could he do to make her? He knew of no other way than by serving her, trying un.o.btrusively to lighten her burden, effacing himself, as that seemed to be what she wanted. And in the night as he lay near the wagon, ready to start at her call, he thought with exalted hope that some day he might win such a look for himself.
The doctor was for going on. There was no necessity to stay in camp because one man happened to wheeze and cough, he said, and anyway, he could do that just as well when they were moving. So they started out and crossed the plateau to where the road dropped into the cleft of Ash Hollow. Here they stopped and held a conference. The doctor was worse. The interior of the wagon, the sun beating on the canvas roof, was like a furnace, where he lay sweltering, tossed this way and that by the jolting wheels. Their dust moved with them, breezes lifting it and carrying it careening back to them where it mingled with new dust, hanging dense like a segment of fog in the scene's raw brilliancy.
Ash Hollow looked a darkling descent, the thin pulsations of the little leaves of ash trees flickering along its sides. The road bent downward in sharp zigzags, and somewhere below the North Fork ran. The plain was free, blue clothed and blue vaulted, with ”the wonderful winds of G.o.d” flowing between. The conference resulted in a unanimous decision to halt where they were, and stay in camp till the doctor improved, moving him from the wagon to a tent.
For four days he lay parched with fever, each breath drawn with a stifled inner rustling, numerous fine wrinkles traced in a network on his dried cheeks. Then good care, the open air, and the medicine chest prevailed. He improved, and Susan turned her face again to the world and smiled. Such was the changefulness of her mood that her smiles were as radiant and generously bestowed as her previous demeanor had been repelling. Even Leff got some of them, and they fell on David prodigal and warming as the suns.h.i.+ne. Words to match went with them.
On the morning of the day when the doctor's temperature fell and he could breathe with ease, she said to her betrothed:
”Oh, David, you've been so good, you've made me so fond of you.”
It was the nearest she had yet come to the language of lovers. It made him dizzy; the wonderful look was in his mind.
”You wouldn't let me be good,” was all he could stammer. ”You didn't seem as if you wanted me at all.”
”Stupid!” she retorted with a glance of beaming reproach, ”I'm always like that when my father's sick.”
It was noon of the fifth day that a white spot on the plain told them the New York Company was in sight. The afternoon was yet young when the dust of the moving column tarnished the blue-streaked distance.
Then the first wagons came into view, creeping along the winding ribbon of road. As soon as the advance guard of hors.e.m.e.n saw the camp, pieces of it broke away and were deflected toward the little group of tents from which a tiny spiral of smoke went up in an uncoiling, milky skein.
Susan had many questions to answer, and had some ado to keep the inquirers away from the doctor, who was still too weak to be disturbed.
She was sharp and not very friendly in her efforts to preserve him from their sympathizing curiosity.
Part of the train had gone by when she heard from a woman who rode up on a foot-sore nag that the McMurdo's were some distance behind. A bull boat in which the children were crossing the river had upset, and Mrs. McMurdo had been frightened and ”took faint.” The children were all right--only a wetting--but it was a bad time for their mother to get such a scare.
”I'm not with the women who think it's all right to take such risks.
Stay at home _then_,” she said, giving Susan a sage nod out of the depths of her sunbonnet.
The news made the young girl uneasy. A new reticence, the ”grown-up”
sense of the wisdom of silence that she had learned on the trail, made her keep her own council. Also, there was no one to tell but her father, and he was the last person who ought to know. The call of unaided suffering would have brought him as quickly from his buffalo skins in the tent as from his bed in the old home in Rochester. Susan resolved to keep it from him, if she had to stand guard over him and fight them off. Her philosophy was primitive--her own first, and if, to save her own, others must be sacrificed, then she would aid in the sacrifice and weep over its victims, weep, but not yield.
When the train had disappeared into the shadows of Ash Hollow, curses, shouts, and the cracking of whips rising stormily over its descent, the white dot of the McMurdo's wagon was moving over the blue and green distance. As it drew near they could see that Glen walked beside the oxen, and the small figure of Bob ran by the wheel. Neither of the women were to be seen. ”Lazy and riding,” Daddy John commented, spying at them with his far-sighted old eyes. ”Tired out and gone to sleep,”
David suggested. Susan's heart sank and she said nothing. It looked as if something was the matter, and she nerved herself for a struggle.