And that cry did not go unheard. Ned had given up but a few moments before Bess had come, and her full voice carried clearly into the strange, misty realm of semi-consciousness into which he had drifted. And this manhood that had lately grown upon him would not let him shut his ears to this sobbing appeal. His own voice, sounding weird and hollow as the voice of the dead in that immeasurable abyss, came back in answer.
“Here I am, Bess,” he said. “You’ll have to work quick.”
XXVI
It was bitter hard for Ned to fight his way back through death’s twilight. The cold had hold of him, its triumph was near, and it would not let him go without a savage battle that seemed to wrack the man in twain. So far as his own wishes went, he only wanted to drift on, farther and farther into the twilight ocean, and never return to the cursed island again. But Bess was calling him, and he couldn’t deny her. Perhaps in a distant cabin Lenore called him too.
Indeed, the call upon him was more urgent than ever before. Before, his thought had always been for Lenore, but Bess too was a factor now. In that utter darkness Ned saw more clearly than ever before in his life, and while his eyes searched only for Lenore, he kept seeing Bess too. Bess with her never-failing smile of encouragement, her soft beauty that had held him, in spite of himself, on their nights at Forks cabin. Her need of him was real, threatened by Doomsdorf as she was, and he mustn’t leave her sobbing so forlornly on the ice above. Lenore was first, of course,—his duty to her reason enough for making a mighty fight. But Bess’s pleading moved him deeply.
He summoned every ounce of courage and determination that he had and tried to shake the frost from his brain. “You’ll have to work quick,” he warned again. His voice was stronger now, but softened with a tenderness beyond her most reckless dreams. “Don’t be too hopeful—I haven’t much left in me. What can you do?”
The girl who answered him was in no way the lost and hopeless mortal that had lain sobbing on the ice. Her scattered, weakened faculties had swept back to her in all their strength, at the first sound of his voice. He was alive, and it is the code of the North, learned in these dreadful months, that so long as a spark still glows the battle must not be given over. There was something to fight for now. The fighting side of her that Ned had seen so often swept swiftly into dominance. At once she was a cold blade, true and sure; brain and body in perfect discipline.
“How far are you?” she asked. “I can’t see——”
“About ten feet—but I can’t get up without help.”
“Can you stand up?”