The Firing Line Part 67

Thank you."

With a confused idea that he was being ordered about too frequently of late Portlaw waddled off bedward; but sleep eluded him; he lay there watching through his window the light in the window of the sick-room where Hamil lay fighting for breath; and sometimes he quivered all over in scared foreboding, and sometimes the thought that Malcourt was returning seemed to ease for a moment the dread load of responsibility that was already playing the mischief with his digestion.

A curry had started it; a midnight golden-buck superimposed upon a miniature mince pie had, to his grief and indignation, continued an outrageous conspiracy against his liver begun by the shock of Hamil's illness. But what completed his exasperation was the indifference of the physicians attending Hamil who did not seem to appreciate the gravity of an impaired digestive system, or comprehend that a man who couldn't enjoy eating might as well be in Hamil's condition; and Portlaw angrily swallowed the calomel so indifferently shoved toward him and hunted up Wayward, to whom he aired his deeply injured feelings.

"What you need are 'Drover's Remedies,'" observed Wayward, peering at him through his spectacles; and Portlaw unsuspiciously made a memorandum of the famous live-stock and kennel panacea for future personal emergencies.

The weather was unfavourable for Hamil; a raw, wet wind rattled the windows; the east lowered thick and gray with hurrying clouds; volleys of chilly rain swept across the clearing from time to time.

Portlaw and Wayward sat most of the time in the big living-room playing "Canfield." There was nothing else to do except to linger somewhere within call, and wait. Constance Palliser remained near whichever nurse happened to be off duty, and close enough to the sick-room to shudder at what she heard from within, all day, all night, ceaselessly ominous, pitiable, heart-breaking.

At length Wayward took her away without ceremony into the open air.

"Look here, Constance, your sitting there and hearing such things isn't helping Garry. Lansdale is doing everything that can be done; Miss Race and Miss Clay are competent. You're simply frightening yourself sick--"

She protested, but he put her into a hooded ulster, buckled on her feet a pair of heavy carriage boots, and drew her arm under his, saying: "If there's a chance Garry is having it, and you've got to keep your strength.... I wish this mist would clear; Hooper telephoned to Pride's for the weather bulletin, but it is not encouraging."

They walked about for an hour and finally returned from the wet woodland paths to the bridge, leaning on the stone parapet together.

A swollen brook roared under the arches, carrying on its amber wave-crests tufts of green gra.s.s and young leaves and buds which the promise of summer had tenderly unfolded to the mercy of a ruthless flood.

"Like those young lives that go out too early," murmured Constance. "See that little wind-flower, Jim, uprooted, drowning--and that dead thing tumbling about half under water--"

Wayward laid a firm hand across hers.

"I don't mean to be morbid," she said with a pathetic upward glance, "but, Jim, it is too awful to hear him fighting for just--just a chance to breathe a little--"

"I think he's going to get well," said Wayward.

"Jim! Why do you think it? Has any--"

"No.... I just think it."

"Is there any reason--"

"None--except you."

His voice within the last month or two had almost entirely lost its indistinct and husky undertone; the clear resonant quality, which had always thrilled her a little as a young girl, seemed to be returning; and now she felt, faintly, the old response awaking within her.

"It is very sweet of you to believe he'll live because I love him," she said gently.

Wayward drew his hand from hers and, folding his arms, leaned on the parapet inspecting the turbid water through his spectacles.

"There are no fights too desperate to be won," he said. "The thing to do is to finish--still fighting!"

"Jim?"

"Yes."

This time her hand sought his, drew it toward her, and covered it with both of hers.

"Jim," she said tremulously, "there is something--I am horribly afraid--that--perhaps Garry is not fighting."

"Why?" he asked bluntly.

"There was an--an attachment--"

"A what?"

"An unfortunate affair; he was very deeply in love--"

"Not ridiculously, I hope!"

"I don't know what you mean.... He cared more than I have believed possible; I saw him in New York on his way here and, Jim, he must have known then, for he looked like death--"

"You mean he was in love with that Cardross girl?"

"Oh, yes, yes!... I do not understand the affair; but I tell you, Jim, the strangest part was that the girl loved him! If ever a woman was in love with a man, s.h.i.+ela Cardross was in love with Garry! I tell you I know it; I am not guessing, not hazarding an opinion; I _know_ it....

And she married Louis Malcourt!... And, Jim, I have been so frightened--so terrified--for Garry--so afraid that he might not care to fight--"

Wayward leaned there heavily and in silence. He was going to say that men do not do such things for women any longer, but he thought of the awful battle not yet ended which he had endured for the sake of the woman beside him; and he said nothing; because he knew that, without hope of her to help him, the battle had long since gone against him. But Garry had nothing to fight for, if what Constance said was true. And within him his latent distrust and contempt for Malcourt blazed up, tightening the stern lines of his sun-burnt visage.

"Portlaw says that Louis is coming to-night, and that young Mrs.

Malcourt is with him," he observed.

"I know it.... I was wondering if there was any way we could use her--make use of her--"

"To stir up Garry to fight?"

"Y-yes--something like that--I am vague about it myself--if it could be done without anybody suspecting the--O Jim!--I don't know; I am only a half-crazed woman willing to do anything for my boy--"

"Certainly. If there's anything that might benefit Garry you need not hesitate on account of that little beast Malcourt--"

She said in her gentle, earnest way: "Louis Malcourt is so very strange.

He has treated Virginia dreadfully; they were engaged--they must have been or she could not have gone all to pieces the way she has.... I cannot understand it, Jim--"

"What's Louis coming here for?"

"Mr. Portlaw begged him to come--"

"What for? Oh, well, I guess I can answer that for myself; it's to save Portlaw some trouble or other--"

"You are very hard on people--very intolerant, sometimes--"

"I have no illusions concerning the unselfishness of Billy Portlaw. Look at him tagging after the doctors and bawling for pills!--with Garry lying there! He hustled him into a cottage, too--"

"He was quite right, Jim, Garry is better off--"

"So's William. Don't tell _me_, Constance; he's always been the same; he never really cared for anybody in all his life except Louis Malcourt.