Part 34 (1/2)
”Let me cook it for you,” he pleaded. ”You haven't eaten anything since morning.”
”I can't eat,” she said, and fell back to her fire-gazing, slipping away from him into the forbidding dumbness of her thoughts. He could only watch her, hoping for a word, an expressed wish. When it came it was, alas! outside his power to gratify:
”If there had only been a doctor here! That was what I was hoping for.”
And so when she asked for the help he yearned to give, it was his fate that he should meet her longing with a hopeless silence.
When Daddy John emerged from the tent she leaped to her feet.
”Well?” she said with low eagerness.
”Go back to him. He wants you,” answered the old man. ”I've got something to do for him.”
He made no attempt to touch her, his words and voice were brusque, yet David saw that she responded, softened, showed the ragged wound of her pain to him as she did to no one else. It was an understanding that went beneath all externals. Words were unnecessary between them, heart spoke to heart.
She returned to the tent and sunk on the skin beside her father. He smiled faintly and stretched a hand for hers, and her fingers slipped between his, cool and strong against the lifeless dryness of his palm.
She gave back his smile bravely, her eyes steadfast. She had no desire for tears, no acuteness of sensation. A weight as heavy as the world lay on her, crus.h.i.+ng out struggle and resistance. She knew that he was dying. When they told her there was no doctor in the camp her flickering hope had gone out. Now she was prepared to sit by him and wait with a lethargic patience beyond which was nothing.
He pressed her hand and said: ”I've sent Daddy John on a hunt. Do you guess what for?”
She shook her head feeling no curiosity.
”The time is short, Missy.”
The living's instinct to fight against the acquiescence of the dying prompted her to the utterance of a sharp ”No.”
”I want it all arranged and settled before it's too late. I sent him to see if there was a missionary here.”
She was leaning against the couch of robes, resting on the piled support of the skins. In the pause after his words she slowly drew herself upright, and with her mouth slightly open inhaled a deep breath. Her eyes remained fixed on him, gleaming from the shadow of her brows, and their expression, combined with the amaze of the dropped underlip, gave her a look of wild attention.
”Why?” she said. The word came obstructed and she repeated it.
”I want you to marry David here to-night.”
The doctor's watch on a box at the bed head ticked loudly in the silence. They looked at each other unconscious of the length of the pause. Death on the one hand, life pressing for its due on the other, were the only facts they recognized. Hostility, not to the man but to the idea, drove the amazement from her face and hardened its softness to stone.
”Here, to-night?” she said, her comprehension stimulated by an automatic repet.i.tion of his words.
”Yes. I may not be able to understand tomorrow.”
She moved her head, her glance touching the watch, the lantern, then dropping to the hand curled round her own. It seemed symbolic of the will against which hers was rising in combat. She made an involuntary effort to withdraw her fingers but his closed tighter on them.
”Why?” she whispered again.
”Some one must take care of you. I can't leave you alone.”
She answered with stiffened lips: ”There's Daddy John.”
”Some one closer than Daddy John. I want to leave you with David.”
Her antagonism rose higher, sweeping over her wretchedness. Worn and strained she had difficulty to keep her lips shut on it, to prevent herself from crying out her outraged protests. All her dormant womanhood, stirring to wakefulness in the last few weeks, broke into life, gathering itself in a pa.s.sion of revolt, abhorrent of the indignity, ready to flare into vehement refusal. To the dim eyes fastened on her she was merely the girl, reluctant still. He watched her down-drooped face and said: