Luck at the Diamond Fields

by Dalrymple J. Belgrave

Kitty was not much alarmed; she had seen a good deal of that sort of thing. She wondered whether it would be any good, if it were possible to persuade Jack to become a Good Templar. She felt afraid that it would not be very easy, and that he would shun the rejoicing there would be over him. He wanted some one to keep him straight, she thought, and woman-like, she began to believe that one of her sex could do it. After some time Jack came out of his room. He had a blank stare on his face and said nothing, but walked into the street without his hat on. He was evidently queer, very queer, Kitty thought, as she led him back to his room and then sent her boy for the doctor.

“He is in for a bad go of fever; rather a nasty case—typhoid symptoms; knocked his constitution to bits with drink,” said the doctor. “He will want a lot of looking after. He had better go to the hospital—the free ward—the paying wards are full; not that they would be much in his line if they were not,” he added.

“I think he had better stay here, doctor,” answered Kitty. “I will see after nursing him; you know, doctor, nursing is rather my forte.”

“No one can see after him better than you, my dear,” said the doctor, who knew Kitty well. “I fancy, however, he won’t be a very profitable boarder for you; but that’s your look out.”

“Oh, that is all right,” said Kitty. “Come and see him again soon, doctor; remember I sent for you.”

The doctor said he would come round again soon, and drove off—thinking what a good little woman Kitty was, and wondering whether there was anything more than pity in her feeling for that ne’er-do-weel Jack Douglas.

“I trust she don’t care for him, for I am afraid there would be only trouble in it for her, however it turned out,” he thought to himself.

The doctor was right; it turned out a very nasty case of fever, and for weeks it looked very black. For a time ‘The Frozen Bar’ lost its popularity. Kitty was always afraid that her customers were making too much noise, and in fact she showed that she would be more pleased if they had kept away from her establishment altogether. She was very seldom to be seen behind the bar, and when she was, there was none of her old brightness and fun about her. The old merry, almost reckless, look had left her, and there was a more tender and soft expression in her face. She spent most of her time in a room behind the house—the coolest and best bedroom she had. Its late tenant, one of her most solvent boarders, had been somewhat disturbed and a good deal affronted at being moved out of it, but Kitty was determined to have it for the sick man, who for weeks was tossing on the bed in delirium. For a long time he did not recognise her or know where he was; he was a boy at school or a cadet at Sandhurst again. Then the delirium left him and he knew her, though he hardly seemed to ask himself where he was or how she came to be looking after him. Perhaps the hours that poor little Kitty spent nursing him as he got better were some of the happiest in her life. Then he was never happy when she was away from him, and he used to watch her as a sick dog watches its master. He seemed so different, so much more like what he had been once, and so unlike what he had become on the Diamond Fields. When he grew stronger and able to talk about how he became ill, tears came into his eyes when he thanked her for her kindness. “If it had not been for you I should have gone up to old Sloeman’s place at the West End, and if I had not died there should have become one of his lot,” he said. “How good you have been to me!”

As he grew stronger she began to think that he knew her secret, and there was something in his face which seemed to tell her that he felt something more than gratitude for her. Then she hardly ever came near him. He did not want any more nursing, she thought. It was the first day he had got out of bed; she had been talking to him about himself in her old cheery manner, telling him that if he choose to pull himself together there was no reason why he should not succeed and do as well as any one else, when what she had been half expecting for some time came.

“Hers was the only influence,” he said, “which could keep him straight. He knew she cared for him. If she would marry him he would be able to keep away from drink.”