Part 8 (1/2)
”I've no idea.”
”Lift me up.”
”But you might open your wound,” protested Joan.
”Lift me up!” The force of the man spoke even in his low whisper.
”But why--why?” asked Joan.
”I want to see--if I can sit up. If I can't--give me my gun.”
”I won't let you have it,” replied Joan. Then she slipped her arms under his and, carefully raising him to a sitting posture, released her hold.
”I'm--a--rank coward--about pain,” he gasped, with thick drops standing out on his white face. ”I can't--stand it.”
But tortured or not, he sat up alone, and even had the will to bend his back. Then with a groan he fainted and fell into Joan's arms. She laid him down and worked over him for some time before she could bring him to. Then he was wan, suffering, speechless. But she believed he would live and told him so. He received that with a strange smile. Later, when she came to him with broth, he drank it gratefully.
”I'll beat this out,” he said, weakly. ”I'll recover. My back's not broken. I'll get well. Now you bring water and food in here--then go.”
”Go?” she echoed.
”Yes. Don't go down the canon. You'd be worse off.... Take the back trail. You've got a chance to get out.... Go!”
”Leave you here? So weak you can't lift a cup! I won't.”
”I'd rather you did.”
”Why?”
”Because in a few days I'll begin to mend. Then I'll grow like--myself.... I think--I'm afraid I loved you.... It could only be h.e.l.l for you. Go now, before it's too late!... If you stay--till I'm well--I'll never let you go!”
”Kells, I believe it would be cowardly for me to leave you here alone,”
she replied, earnestly. ”You can't help yourself. You'd die.”
”All the better. But I won't die. I'm hard to kill. Go, I tell you.”
She shook her head. ”This is bad for you--arguing. You're excited.
Please be quiet.”
”Joan Randle, if you stay--I'll halter you--keep you naked in a cave--curse you--beat you--murder you! Oh, it's in me!... Go, I tell you!”
”You're out of your head. Once for all--no!” she replied, firmly.
”You--you--” His voice failed in a terrible whisper....
In the succeeding days Kells did not often speak. His recovery was slow--a matter of doubt. Nothing was any plainer than the fact that if Joan had left him he would not have lived long. She knew it. And he knew it. When he was awake, and she came to him, a mournful and beautiful smile lit his eyes. The sight of her apparently hurt him and uplifted him. But he slept twenty hours out of every day, and while he slept he did not need Joan.
She came to know the meaning of solitude. There were days when she did not hear the sound of her own voice. A habit of silence, one of the significant forces of solitude, had grown upon her. Daily she thought less and felt more. For hours she did nothing. When she roused herself, compelled herself to think of these encompa.s.sing peaks of the lonely canon walls, the stately trees, all those eternally silent and changless features of her solitude, she hated them with a blind and unreasoning pa.s.sion. She hated them because she was losing her love for them, because they were becoming a part of her, because they were fixed and content and pa.s.sionless. She liked to sit in the sun, feel its warmth, see its brightness; and sometimes she almost forgot to go back to her patient. She fought at times against an insidious change--a growing older--a going backward; at other times she drifted through hours that seemed quiet and golden, in which nothing happened. And by and by when she realized that the drifting hours were gradually swallowing up the restless and active hours, then strangely, she remembered Jim Cleve.
Memory of him came to save her. She dreamed of him during the long, lonely, solemn days, and in the dark, silent climax of unbearable solitude--the night. She remembered his kisses, forgot her anger and shame, accepted the sweetness of their meaning, and so in the interminable hours of her solitude she dreamed herself into love for him.