In a quiet corner of the crowded hospital at Johannesburg, one narrow bed was screened away from its neighbors.Beside the bed sat Ethel Dent, and Weldon leaned against the wall beyond.Both of them were smiling bravely down into the dark-fringed blue eyes which met their eyes with a steady wishfulness.With the end so plain in sight, why keep up the pretence of being blind to its approach?
An operation had been the final chance, and the chance had failed.
Out from the stupor of ether, out from the hours of bewildering pain, Captain Frazer had come back to an interval of full consciousness, of fuller knowledge that, for him, this painless interval was but the prelude to the final painless sleep.
Nevertheless, the man who had helped other men to die unflinchingly was facing death with a grave, unflinching smile, albeit life to him was good and full of promise.The interval was short.He would pass through it in manlike fashion, and, meanwhile, give thanks that beside his bed sat the one woman in whom his whole future so long had centered.
The slow moments passed by, unheeded.It was an hour since the surgeons had gone away; it was nearly an hour since Alice Mellen had followed the surgeons.Instinctively she realized that her place was otherwhere.There was no need now for skilled nurses.Ethel could do all the little which would be required, and it was Ethel's right to stay.
Since Alice had left them, no word had been spoken.The Captain had little strength for words as yet.It was taking all his energy and courage to face the truth and to accept it.Only an hour before, his crippled career had seemed to him unbearable.Now, as he lay with his eyes fixed on the girl beside him, he realized how much of potential sweetness that dreary alternative had held.And yet, Fate had drawn him into the battle, and it was something that he had met Fate bravely and in the foremost rank.So far, he had never funked a fight; if it took his last bit of strength, he would go pluckily through this last, worse fight which he was destined to face.He stirred slightly, and shut his teeth on his lower lip; but his eyes never dropped from Ethel's face.From the farther side of the bed, Weldon, too, was watching Ethel.If he lived to full fivescore years, he could never forget her face as he had met her at the hospital door, that morning.Exhausted with the excitement of the battle, stiff with his half-dressed wounds, soiled and untidy and haggard, he had paused beside the ambulance while the attendants had lifted the stretcher and borne the Captain up the low flight of steps.Then, like a man in a dream, he had followed along behind them until, on the very threshold, he had raised his heavy eyes to see Ethel standing before him, a broad shaft of sunshine pouring down upon her to rest in the locks of sunshiny hair which straggled out from beneath her crisp white cap.
"Cooee!" he said huskily, as he took her hand.Then, for the first time in all those terrible hours since the battle, his lips had quivered, and two big, boyish tears had rolled out across his cheeks.
Already the fight seemed to him to be months old.From the first, it had been the Captain's wish that Weldon should go with him to the hospital, and Weldon would have allowed no other man to go in his place.Wounded and weak from loss of blood, nevertheless he forgot his own weakness as he saw the leg, shattered by two bullets, explosive bullets such as are denied to warfare of any but barbarous nations.Young though he was, Weldon had seen many a man wounded before now.He was not slow to realize the nature of the alternatives which lay before the man who was at once his hero and his friend.Mercifully, he had as yet no knowledge how soon the one alternative must be taken from him.
The case was too grave a one for the surgeons of the field hospital.
In after years, that ambulance journey into Kroonstad seemed branded upon Weldon's memory: the baking heat of the February sun, the interminable miles of dusty road stretching away between other interminable miles of grassy veldt, scarred and seamed here and there with ridges of naked rock.And at last the ambulance had jogged into Kroonstad, only to find that no help lay in the hospital there, that the journey must be dragged onward through a night ride to Johannesburg.
If the jolting, crawling ambulance had been bad, the jarring train was infinitely worse.The Captain made no complaints; he was grateful for every slight attention; he even forced himself to joke a little now and then.Nevertheless, Weldon, sitting beside him and occasionally laying his own fingers across the steady hand on the blanket, was maddened by the noise of the engine, by the ceaseless thud, thud as the wheels took every new rail, by the roar, and the rush, and the dust which filtered in upon them.There was nothing he could do.He merely sat there beside his friend, and thought.
Occasionally, he thought of Ethel; but, for the most part, his mind was on the man before him, the man whose active career all at once had been cut in two.Now and then he thought of the one who had chosen to fire those bullets, taboo of all but the most brutal warfare.At such times, he rose and fell to pacing restlessly up and down the car.Then he controlled himself and resumed his seat.
Moment by moment, almost second by second, the dreary night had worn away.It was full morning when the train had halted inside the familiar station.After his vigil, the healthy stir of the streets appeared to Weldon like the confused picture of a dream, and it had been like a man in a dream that he had been driven away to the hospital.Then, on the steps, he had seen Ethel, and the dream had been shattered, giving way, for the instant, to the perfect happiness of reality.
