CHAPTER LIV
Whilethe young farmer and the two hired men labored in the rain that came as a deluge upon the gale’s heels, Mrs. Laight saddled and bridled a horse and forced it through the world of storm and across the barriers of blown-down trees into Kensico Village for Doctor Brockholst.
By the time he arrived the broken body of RoBards was stretched upon the couch in the library. The master’s bedroom had been cracked open by the fallen tulip tree and the rain was thundering through it.
The doctor, seeing the state of his patient and all his red wounds and hearing the groans he could not stifle, first checked the outlets of his blood, then made ready to give him ease of pain.
Old RoBards was as eager for the anæsthetic as a starved infant for its mother’s milk, but he suddenly bethought him of his need of all his wits, and he gasped:
“If—if you make me sleep, I may—may nev-never wake up, eh?”
Doctor Brockholst tried to evade a direct answer, but RoBards panted:
“I won’t risk it—risk it. I’ve sent—I’ve sent Laight to tele-telegraph my son to come up from—from town. There’s things I must say to him—before—before——”
He was more afraid of unconsciousness than of pain, and he would not gamble with a palliation of his anguishes. He chattered to the doctor:
“Just stay here and let me talk. It helps to keep me from making an old fool of myself. And don’t let me die till Keith comes. Don’t let me die till—oh, oh!—Oh, God! oh, God!”
He gnawed his lips and twisted his face in all the fiercegrimaces of a desperate athlete trying to pry himself from a hammerlock.
He groaningly computed the hours it would take Keith to reach the farm if he got the message and came at once and caught a train. But those hours passed and Keith was not yet visible to Mrs. Laight watching from the porch in her wind-whipped skirts and her fluttering shawl.
The old man moaned, watching the inexorably deliberate clock with white eyes;
“The storm has torn down the telegraph poles, I suppose; or wrecked a bridge or two. But somehow, somebody will get the word to my boy and he’ll fight his way here. I know Keith!”
The doctor pleaded with him to accept the aid of a sedative and even made a show of force, but the old man grew so frantic with resistance that he gave over.
And after a time when Mrs. Laight had given up watching for Keith, there came upon his agonized mien a look almost of comfort. He smiled and murmured:
“Now I know a little of what Patty suffered. I thought I knew before; but nobody can imagine pain—or remember it. It’s a hideous thing—to hurt. But I ought to be able to stand it for a night when that little girl bore far worse—far worse for years.”
All the long evening, all the long night he babbled her name, and if at intervals he sobbed and the tears slid down his much-channeled features, it was for memory of the bitterness of her woe, and his belated understanding of it.
He would not take any quieting drug or let the needle be set against his skin, but he called for stimulants to lash his crippled heart to its task, putting the doctor on his honor not to cheat him.
The physician fell asleep at midnight and woke shuddering in the chill of dawn, ashamed to think that every moment of his hours of oblivion had been a torment to his client.
Soon after the dawn, Keith came, whipping a horse through the road, soggy with the nightlong rain. He ran across theruined porch into the wreck of the house and his father answered his searching call with a note of triumph:
“That’s my boy! I knew he’d come! I knew!”
Doctor Brockholst, who had never seen Keith, somehow expected a youth to dash into the room. He was surprised to find that the lad was a grizzled giant of fifty. But Colonel RoBards ran to the couchside and dropped to his knees, with a childish, “Daddy!”
The shock of the contact brought a shriek from the old man’s jolted bones but he wrung a laugh from it. Then he asked the doctor to leave him alone with his son.
Making sure that they were not spied upon, he whispered in a pellmell of hurry:
“I had to see you, Keithie, to get one more promise from you before I go. The city, that infernal New York, will be demanding our farm for the bottom of one of its lakes before long. But don’t let ’em have it! Fight ’em to the last ditch! And whatever you do, don’t let ’em open the cellar walls.
“There may be nothing there to see by now, but you remember about Jud Lasher. He’s there still and after all these years I can’t bear the thought of anybody finding out what we kept inviolate so long, especially after I’m gone and can’t fight back.
“Promise me you won’t let ’em tear down the house and the walls. I’ve seen ’em clear away so many old homes and stone fences and roads—for other lakes. I can’t abide the thought of them prying into our walls.
“And I want to lie by your mother’s side out there in the yard. You’ll put me there. And once I’m there, they’ll never dare disturb me! You can put up a sign like Shakespeare’s: ‘Good friend, for Jesu’s sake, forbear——’ or something like that. Promise.”
“I promise!” said Keith.
And his father, failing away beneath his eyes like Hamlet’s father’s spirit, spoke already from underground.
“Swear!”
“I swear!”
“Swear!”
“I swear it, father!”
There was a faint moan, almost of luxury, the luxury of one who sinks out of all pain and all anxiety into that perfect sleep which Socrates pronounced the richest pleasure even of the Persian kings.
Keith thought he saw his father smile; thought he read upon his lips the playful pet name he had seen and heard there, when as a child he saw his father praising his mother tenderly:
“Patty? Pattikins? pretty, pretty Pattikins?”
Then the lips ceased to beat together, and parted in the final yawn that ends the boredom of this life.