The Tides of Barnegat Part 5

With these thoughts filling his mind, he settled deeper in his chair.

These were the times in which he loved to think of her--when, with pipe in mouth, he could sit alone by his fire and build castles in the coals, every rosy mountain-top aglow with the love he bore her; with no watchful mother's face trying to fathom his thoughts; only his faithful dog stretched at his feet.

Picking up his brierwood, lying on a pile of books on his desk, and within reach of his hand, he started to fill the bowl, when a sc.r.a.p of paper covered with a scrawl written in pencil came into view. He turned it to the light and sprang to his feet.

"Tod worse," he said to himself. "I wonder how long this has been here."

The dog was now beside him looking up into the doctor's eyes. It was not the first time that he had seen his master's face grow suddenly serious as he had read the tell-tale slate or had opened some note awaiting his arrival.

Doctor John lowered the lamp, stepped noiselessly to the foot of the winding stairs that led to the sleeping rooms above--the dog close at his heels, watching his every movement--and called gently:

"Mother! mother, dear!" He never left his office when she was at home and awake without telling her where he was going.

No one answered.

"She is asleep. I will slip out without waking her. Stay where you are, Rex--I will be back some time before daylight," and throwing his night-cloak about his shoulders, he started for his gig.

The dog stopped with his paws resting on the outer edge of the top step of the porch, the line he was not to pa.s.s, and looked wistfully after the doctor. His loneliness was to continue, and his poor master to go out into the night alone. His tail ceased to wag, only his eyes moved.

Once outside Doctor John patted the mare's neck as if in apology and loosened the reins. "Come, old girl," he said; "I'm sorry, but it can't be helped," and springing into the gig, he walked the mare clear of the gravel beyond the gate, so as not to rouse his mother, touched her lightly with the whip, and sent her spinning along the road on the way to Fogarty's.

The route led toward the sea, branching off within the sight of the cottage porch, past the low, conical ice-houses used by the fishermen in which to cool their fish during the hot weather, along the sand-dunes, and down a steep grade to the sh.o.r.e. The tide was making flood, and the crawling surf spent itself in long shelving reaches of foam. These so packed the sand that the wheels of the gig hardly made an impression upon it. Along this smooth surface the mare trotted briskly, her nimble feet wet with the farthest reaches of the incoming wash.

As he approached the old House of Refuge, black in the moonlight and looking twice its size in the stretch of the endless beach, he noticed for the hundredth time how like a crouching woman it appeared, with its hipped roof hunched up like a shoulder close propped against the dune and its overhanging eaves but a draped hood shading its thoughtful brow; an illusion which vanished when its square form, with its wide door and long platform pointing to the sea, came into view.

More than once in its brief history the doctor had seen the volunteer crew, aroused from their cabins along the sh.o.r.e by the boom of a gun from some stranded vessel, throw wide its door and with a wild cheer whirl the life-boat housed beneath its roof into the boiling surf, and many a time had he helped to bring back to life the benumbed bodies drawn from the merciless sea by their strong arms.

There were other houses like it up and down the coast. Some had remained unused for years, desolate and forlorn, no unhappy s.h.i.+p having foundered or struck the breakers within their reach; others had been in constant use. The crews were gathered from the immediate neighborhood by the custodian, who was the only man to receive pay from the Government. If he lived near by he kept the key; if not, the nearest fisherman held it. Fogarty, the father of the sick child, and whose cabin was within gunshot of this house, kept the key this year. No other protection was given these isolated houses and none was needed.

These black-hooded Sisters of the Coast, keeping their lonely vigils, were as safe from beach-combers and sea-prowlers as their white-capped namesakes would have been threading the lonely suburbs of some city.

The sound of the mare's feet on the oyster-sh.e.l.l path outside his cabin brought Fogarty, a tall, thin, weather-beaten fisherman, to the door.

He was still wearing his hip-boots and sou'wester--he was just in from the surf--and stood outside the low doorway with a lantern. Its light streamed over the sand and made wavering patterns about the mare's feet.

"Thought ye'd never come, Doc," he whispered, as he threw the blanket over the mare. "Wife's nigh crazy. Tod's fightin' for all he's worth, but there ain't much breath left in him. I was off the inlet when it come on."

The wife, a thick-set woman in a close-fitting cap, her arms bared to the elbow, her petticoats above the tops of her shoes, met him inside the door. She had been crying and her eyelids were still wet and her cheeks swollen. The light of the s.h.i.+p's lantern fastened to the wall fell upon a crib in the corner, on which lay the child, his short curls, tangled with much tossing, smoothed back from his face. The doctor's ears had caught the sound of the child's breathing before he entered the room.

"When did this come on?" Doctor John asked, settling down beside the crib upon a stool that the wife had brushed off with her ap.r.o.n.

"'Bout sundown, sir," she answered, her tear-soaked eyes fixed on little Tod's face. Her teeth chattered as she spoke and her arms were tight pressed against her sides, her fingers opening and shutting in her agony. Now and then in her nervousness she would wipe her forehead with the back of her wrist as if it were wet, or press her two fingers deep into her swollen cheek.

Fogarty had followed close behind the doctor and now stood looking down at the crib with fixed eyes, his thin lips close shut, his square jaw sunk in the collar of his s.h.i.+rt. There were no dangers that the sea could unfold which this silent surfman had not met and conquered, and would again. Every fisherman on the coast knew Fogarty's pluck and skill, and many of them owed their lives to him. To-night, before this invisible power slowly closing about his child he was as powerless as a skiff without oars caught in the swirl of a Barnegat tide.

"Why didn't you let me know sooner, Fogarty? You understood my directions?" Doctor John asked in a surprised tone. "You shouldn't have left him without letting me know." It was only when his orders were disobeyed and life endangered that he spoke thus.

The fisherman turned his head and was about to reply when the wife stepped in front of him.

"My husband got ketched in the inlet, sir," she said in an apologetic tone, as if to excuse his absence. "The tide set ag'in him and he had hard pullin' makin' the p'int. It cuts in turrible there, you know, doctor. Tod seemed to be all right when he left him this mornin'. I had husband's mate take the note I wrote ye. Mate said n.o.body was at home and he laid it under your pipe. He thought ye'd sure find it there when ye come in."

Doctor John was not listening to her explanations; he was leaning over the rude crib, his ear to the child's breast. Regaining his position, he smoothed the curls tenderly from the forehead of the little fellow, who still lay with eyes closed, one stout brown hand and arm clear of the coverlet, and stood watching his breathing. Every now and then a spasm of pain would cross the child's face; the chubby hand would open convulsively and a m.u.f.fled cry escape him. Doctor John watched his breathing for some minutes, laid his hand again on the child's forehead, and rose from the stool.

"Start up that fire, Fogarty," he said in a crisp tone, turning up his s.h.i.+rt-cuffs, slipping off his evening coat, and handing the garment to the wife, who hung it mechanically over a chair, her eyes all the time searching Doctor John's face for some gleam of hope.

"Now get a pan," he continued, "fill it with water and some corn-meal, and get me some cotton cloth--half an ap.r.o.n, piece of an old petticoat, anything, but be quick about it."

The woman, glad of something to do, hastened to obey. Somehow, the tones of his voice had put new courage into her heart. Fogarty threw a heap of driftwood on the smouldering fire and filled the kettle; the dry splinters crackled into a blaze.

The noise aroused the child.

The doctor held up his finger for silence and again caressed the boy's forehead. Fogarty, with a fresh look of alarm in his face, tiptoed back of the crib and stood behind the restless sufferer. Under the doctor's touch the child once more became quiet.

"Is he bad off?" the wife murmured when the doctor moved to the fire and began stirring the mush she was preparing. "The other one went this way; we can't lose him. You won't lose him, will ye, doctor, dear? I don't want to live if this one goes. Please, doctor--"

The doctor looked into the wife's eyes, blurred with tears, and laid his hand tenderly on her shoulder.

"Keep a good heart, wife," he said; "we'll pull him through. Tod is a tough little chap with plenty of fight in him yet. I've seen them much worse. It will soon be over; don't worry."

Mrs. Fogarty's eyes brightened and even the fisherman's grim face relaxed. Silent men in grave crises suffer most; the habit of their lives precludes the giving out of words that soothe and heal; when others speak them, they sink into their thirsty souls like drops of rain after a long drought. It was just such timely expressions as these that helped Doctor John's patients most--often their only hope hung on some word uttered with a buoyancy of spirit that for a moment stifled all their anxieties.

The effect of the treatment began to tell upon the little sufferer--his breathing became less difficult, the spasms less frequent. The doctor whispered the change to the wife, sitting close at his elbow, his impa.s.sive face brightening as he spoke; there was an oven chance now for the boy's life.

The vigil continued.

No one moved except Fogarty, who would now and then tiptoe quickly to the hearth, add a fresh log to the embers, and as quickly move back to his position behind the child's crib. The rising and falling of the blaze, keeping rhythm, as it were, to the hopes and fears of the group, lighted up in turn each figure in the room. First the doctor sitting with hands resting on his knees, his aquiline nose and brow clearly outlined against the shadowy background in the gold chalk of the dancing flames, his black evening clothes in strong contrast to the high white of the coverlet, framing the child's face like a nimbus.

Next the bent body of the wife, her face in half-tones, her stout shoulders in high relief, and behind, swallowed up in the gloom, out of reach of the fire-. gleam, the straight, motionless form of the fisherman, standing with folded arms, grim and silent, his unseen eyes fixed on his child.

Far into the night, and until the gray dawn streaked the sky, this vigil continued; the doctor, a.s.sisted by Fogarty and the wife, changing the poultices, filling the child's lungs with hot steam by means of a paper funnel, and encouraging the mother by his talk. At one time he would tell her in half-whispered tones of a child who had recovered and who had been much weaker than this one. Again he would turn to Fogarty and talk of the sea, of the fis.h.i.+ng outside the inlet, of the big three-masted schooner which had been built by the men at Tom's River, of the new light they thought of building at Barnegat to take the place of the old one--anything to divert their minds and lessen their anxieties, stopping only to note the sound of every cough the boy gave or to change the treatment as the little sufferer struggled on fighting for his life.

When the child dozed no one moved, no word was spoken. Then in the silence there would come to their ears above the labored breathing of the boy the long swinging tick of the clock, dull and ominous, as if tolling the minutes of a pa.s.sing life; the ceaseless crunch of the sea, chewing its cud on the beach outside or the low moan of the outer bar turning restlessly on its bed of sand.

Suddenly, and without warning, and out of an apparent sleep, the child started up from his pillow with staring eyes and began beating the air for breath.

The doctor leaned quickly forward, listened for a moment, his ear to the boy's chest, and said in a quiet, restrained voice:

"Go into the other room, Mrs. Fogarty, and stay there till I call you."

The woman raised her eyes to his and obeyed mechanically. She was worn out, mind and body, and had lost her power of resistance.

As the door shut upon her Doctor John sprang from the stool, caught the lamp from the wall, handed it to Fogarty, and picking the child up from the crib, laid it flat upon his knees.

He now slipped his hand into his pocket and took from it a leather case filled with instruments.

"Hold the light, Fogarty," he said in a firm, decided tone, "and keep your nerve. I thought he'd pull through without it, but he'll strangle if I don't."

"What ye goin' to do--not cut him?" whispered the fisherman in a trembling voice.

"Yes. It's his only chance. I've seen it coming on for the last hour--no nonsense now. Steady, old fellow. It'll be over in a minute.

... There, my boy, that'll help you. Now, Fogarty, hand me that cloth.

... All right, little man; don't cry; it's all over. Now open the door and let your wife in," and he laid the child back on the pillow.