The Salamander Part 56

Dore went to Lindaberry, without a thought of fear, crying his name:

"Garry, it's I--Dodo!"

He turned, striving to recognize her through the blurred phantasmagoria of the week.

"Who?"

He drew his hand across his face, bending down a little, staring at her.

At the moment she despaired of his recognizing her, suddenly he stiffened up, made an attempt to readjust his clothes, and doffed his hat. She gave a cry of horror: across his forehead was a seam of blood.

"You're hurt!"

"'S nothing," he said, drawing a long breath, and his jaw growing rigid with the attempt to recover his control. He relaxed his grip on the collar of the inert policeman, who flattened out against the trampled snow. "This little misunshtanding--gen'lman spoke rather rude.

Sorry--little mussed. 'Scuse me."

The fear that others might arrive and find him thus, the dread of an arrest--a trial and publicity--gave her a new will; for, strangely enough, even before his wild demeanor she had no fear.

"I've come, as I promised," she said quickly. "I'm going to take you home. Come, Garry!"

"Any one else?" he asked, shrinking back.

"My maid," she said quickly.

He bowed and gave her his arm to the automobile. At the door he placed her inside, saying, with careful courtesy:

"Sit outside. Thank you. Not fit. All right!"

Aware of his condition, by some tremendous exertion of his will, he had flung back the lethargy that held his senses, and recovered his dignity.

Dodo, in the car, was thinking rapidly. The first glance at his eyes and quivering lips had told her how serious was the crisis. Everything else disappeared before this insistent need of her--romance, intrigues, calculation, or care of what others might think.

"Ida, it's not true what I said," she said rapidly. "He's not my cousin, but some one whom I would give my life to save. I'm taking him to his house. You must come in with me--until we can get a doctor. I can't leave him. If you get a chance, tell Brennon it's my brother; he mustn't know."

She had antic.i.p.ated a struggle to get Lindaberry to his rooms; but, to her surprise, he walked from the car without wavering, and up the flight of stairs to his apartment. The two girls, leaving Brennon below with orders to wait, followed quickly. In a few moments his valet, hastily awakened, had let them in. He was a young fellow, strong and intelligent, and he gave a cry of relief at the sight of the master thus returned.

"Dodo!"

[Ill.u.s.tration: She gave a cry of horror]

"Here I am!" she said quickly, touching Lindaberry's arm.

"Oh!" He looked at her, and then, as if suddenly recollecting himself, imbued with the need of taking command, said: "Pretty bad; can't tell what happened. Doctor--Lampson--quick!"

She turned calmly to the valet, feeling a deep delight in her control of the situation.

"You know Doctor Lampson? Good! My car's down-stairs. Go and bring him immediately!"

She returned to Lindaberry.

"Garry, lie on the couch! You've got a scratch; I want to bind it up.

Ida, bring me a couple of towels, sponge, water."

He obeyed her, but his glance started nervously at the sight of Ida Summers.

"Who's that?"

She comprehended his humiliation that another should see him thus, and replied again, with a warning look at Ida, who came in:

"My maid, Garry; that's all!"

"Tell her--wait--outside."

"Very well!"

Ida, at a nod, went into the library, not without wonder at the quiet authority of voice and action in her b.u.t.terfly friend.

She made him stretch out on the sofa, and with sponge and towel quickly bathed and bound up the gash across his temple. The application of cold water seemed to calm him. He relaxed and closed his eyes as she remained at his side, applying the healing sponge. She studied the racked body and disordered head with a tightening of her heart. The weak and quivering lips, the sunken cheeks, the dark circles under the punished eyes, everything cried out to her:

"You could have prevented this!"

She accused herself with a thousand reproaches in the presence of this wreck she had made, and before his abject weakness her sense of possession awoke. He was hers, as Betty was hers--by right of the unanswered famine in her maternal heart. Come what might, she would not leave him until she had seen him back into strength and courage again.

She called him but he had gone off into an unseeing delirium, wandering through what black and sunken ways! She drew off his shoes, disengaged the stained tie and collar, and by patient effort slipped the torn coat from him, covering him with a clean dressing-gown.

Once or twice he sought to start up, but each time, at her hand across his forehead and her clear voice in his ear, he relaxed. This docile obedience, this willing trust in her little strength, one word of hers stilling the storm in his brain and bringing peace instead of fury, moved her almost to tears. She closed her eyes, her hand over his throbbing lids, and gave herself up to an impulsive prayer--another Dodo, back again in the quiet soul reaches of that unfathomable night when, reckless and defiant, ready to renounce the faith of a Salamander, she had suddenly found herself gliding into unforeseen deeps, miraculously inspired.

After a long half-hour Doctor Lampson came--a powerful man of quick eye, hearty laugh and abounding vitality.

"h.e.l.lo, Garry! Been wrestling with skysc.r.a.pers?" he cried with a rumbling laugh, sitting down on the sofa. "Trying to drink up the Hudson River, eh?"

"h.e.l.lo, Alex!" said Garry gratefully. He shook his head despondently.

"Bad start!"

"Rats, man! Bad start? What are you talking about? Remember the first half of that Princeton game, eleven to nothing? That was a bad start, wasn't it? Didn't prevent you going through like a runaway engine for a couple of touchdowns, did it? Well, then! Don't talk to me! I've seen you start!"

"Good old Alex!" said Lindaberry, with a smile. "Oh, I'm in the fight!"

"Yes; you look as if you'd been fighting, all right!" said Lampson with a roar. "Now, just you shut up! What you want, man, is sleep! We'll fix you up in a jiffy!".

"Stay; get me quiet, will you, Alex?"

"Don't you tell me what to do!" said Doctor Lampson, with a.s.sumed fierceness. "Here, Rogers, get him undressed and into bed. Back in a moment!"

He nodded to Dore, and they pa.s.sed into the next room.

"Pretty close to D. T's. I'll quiet him down, but we've got to get a trained nurse in here, Christmas Eve--bad time!" He began to whistle.

"But I'm here!" Dore said eagerly.

"You? My dear child, he may go quietly, and then he may take to chewing up chairs and walking on the ceiling. No, no! Who the devil could I get at this hour?" he said, studying Dore, at a loss where to place her.