Left alone, Margaret pressed her head into the cushions and tried to think. She could not shake off the real impression of that cry. “Ardee! Ardee!” It had come to her with such suddenness that every nerve had jumped and jerked. Could she have dreamed it? Was the sound of that old intimate name of hers, breathed in that peculiar voice, only a trick of the imagination? Surely it must have been! Her nerves were overwrought and frayed. She was hysterical. It was only the muttering of some fever patient! And yet, she had felt that she must see. An indefinable impulse had urged her to beg Lois to take her with her. And now the same horror would seize her again, the same sickening repulsion, and she would have the same fight over.
When Lois came for her, Margaret prepared herself quickly and they passed down. At the door of the surgical ward they met the house surgeon, who nodded to Margaret at Lois’s introduction. “Just going in to see Faulkner’s trephine case,” he said. “It’s a funny sort.”
“Is he coming through all right?” asked Lois. “That’s the one that was brought in on your train the other night, Margaret,” she added.
“I’m afraid it’s going to be the very devil. He took a nasty temperature this afternoon, and the nurse got worried and called me up. I found we had a good old-fashioned case of sepsis—wound full of pus and all that. What makes it bad is that he has hemiplegia. The whole left side seems to be paralyzed. The operation didn’t relieve the brain pressure, and with his temperature where it is now, we’ll have to simply take care of that and let any further examination go. I’ve just telephoned to Faulkner. It won’t be a satisfactory case, anyway. There is possibly some deeper brain injury in the motor area, and if we beat the poison out, he stands to turn out a helpless cripple. Some people are never satisfied,” he continued, irritably. “When they start out to break themselves up, they have to do it in some confounded combination that’s the very devil to patch up. Coming in?”
He held the door open, and they followed him quickly to a nest of screens at the upper end of the ward, passing in with him.
Margaret forced her unwilling eyes to regard the patient as the doctor laid a finger upon his pulse, attentively examined the temperature chart, and departed. He lay with his left side toward them. The head was partly shaven, hideous with bandages, and in an ice-pack. The side-face was drawn, distorted and expressionless. His left hand lay quiet, but the fingers of the right picked and tumbled and drummed on the coverlid unceasingly. He was muttering to himself in peculiar, excitable monotone. On a sudden his voice rose to audible pitch:
“Now, then! you’ll come. Don’t say you won’t! Why—you can’t help it! You will! Do you hear? * * * * Take the straight pike to the crossroads, and then two miles further on. The Drennen place—yes, I know!”
At the tone Margaret started in uncontrollable excitement. An inarticulate cry broke from her. She ran to the foot of the bed, and, her fingers straining on the bars, gazed with fearful questioning into the features of the sick man. As she gazed, his head rolled feebly on the pillow, displaying the right side of the face. Then a low, terrible, choking, sobbing cry rose to her lips—a cry of pain, of remonstrance, of desolation. “Why, it’s—it’s my—my—it’s Richard Daunt!”
Lois reached her in a single step and held her, trembling. But after that one bitter sob she was absolutely silent. She hardly breathed; all her soul seemed to be looking out of her deep eyes. The uncouth mumbling went on, uncertain but incessant.