Strain and fear, said the new psychology. Fear? He had never found
himself lacking in courage. Certainly he would have fought a man who
called him a coward. But there was cowardice behind all such conditions
as his; a refusal of the mind to face reality. It was weak. Weak. He
hated himself for that past failure of his to face reality.
But that night, sitting by David's bed, he faced reality with a
vengeance. He was in love, and he wanted the things that love should
bring to a normal man. He felt normal. He felt, strengthened by love,
that he could face whatever life had to bring, so long as also it
brought Elizabeth.
Painfully he went back over his talk with David the preceding Sunday
night.
"Don't be a fool," David had said. "Go ahead and take her, if she'll
have you. And don't be too long about it. I'm not as young as I used to
be."
"What I feel," he had replied, "is this: I don't know, of course, if she
cares." David had grunted. "I do know I'm going to try to make her care,
if it--if it's humanly possible. But I'd like to go back to the ranch
again, David, before things go any further."
"Why?"
"I'd like to fill the gap. Attempt it anyhow."
What he was thinking about, as he sat by David's bedside, was David's
attitude toward that threatened return of his. For David had opposed it,
offering a dozen trivial, almost puerile reasons. Had shown indeed, a
dogged obstinacy and an irritability that were somehow oddly like fear.
David afraid! David, whose life and heart were open books! David, whose
eyes never wavered, nor his courage!
"You let well enough alone, Dick," he had finished. "You've got
everything you want. And a medical man can't afford to go gadding about.
When people want him they want him."
But he had noticed that David had been different, since. He had taken to
following him with his faded old eyes, had even spoken once of retiring
and turning all the work over to him. Was it possible that David did not
want him to go back to Norada?
He bent over and felt the sick man's pulse. It was stronger, not so
rapid. The mechanical act took him back to his first memory of David.
He had been lying in a rough bunk in the mountain cabin, and David,
beside him on a wooden box, had been bending forward and feeling his
pulse. He had felt weak and utterly inert, and he knew now that he
had been very ill. The cabin had been a small and lonely one, with
snow-peaks not far above it, and it had been very cold. During the day
a woman kept up the fire. Her name was Maggie, and she moved about the
cabin like a thin ghost. At night she slept in a lean-to shed and David
kept the fire going. A man who seemed to know him well--John Donaldson,
he learned, was his name--was Maggie's husband, and every so often he
came, about dawn, and brought food and supplies.