He gnawed his lips and twisted his face in all the fierce grimaces 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.