Oakley Hall - Warlock

Panting a little, he mounted the plank steps to the porch, opened the door, and set his bag down inside the dense block of darkness of the entryway.

“Jessie!” he called, but before her name was spoken the darkness paled and she was standing in the doorway of her room.

“I haven’t heard anything,” she said quietly.

“There was no shooting.”

She smiled a flickering, tentative smile. He followed her into her room and sat down in the red plush chair just inside the door. Jessie stood facing him, slight and straight in her best black dress with its lace collar and cuffs. Her hands were clasped at her waist. Her hair, parted neatly in the middle, fell almost to her shoulders in cylindrical brown ringlets that slid forward along her cheeks when she inclined her head toward him. Her triangular face was strained with anxiety. It was a face that some thought plain; they did not see the light behind it.

“Tell me,” she said pleadingly.

“I didn’t see it, Jessie. I had gone to get my bag. But from what I heard, the marshal got the drop on Curley Burne, and took the occasion to announce to McQuown his intentions here. There was no trouble, and McQuown and his people have gone.”

The tip of her tongue appeared, to touch her upper lip. When she smiled, tiny muscles pulled at the corners of her mouth. “Oh, that’s good,” she said, in a curiously flat voice. She turned half away from him, and laid a hand on the edge of the table. “Was he—” She paused, and then she said, “Did he look very fine, David?”

“I’m sure he did,” he said. “Although I didn’t see him, as I have said.”

“Oh, that’s good,” she said again.

He glanced away from her, at the bookcase with the set of Scott gleaming with gold titling; at the lithographs and mezzotints upon the walls — Bonnie Prince Charlie in heroic pose, Cuchulain battling the waves, The Grave at St. Helena; at the curved-fronted bureau next to the bed, on top of which were two daguerreotypes, one of Jessie as a girl, with the same ringleted hair and her eyes cast demurely down at a little book held lovingly in her hands. The other was of her father, sad-faced with his neat triangle of mustache and beard, seated against a manufactured backdrop that spread away behind him to dreamy distance.

“Are you angry, David?” Jessie asked.

“Why would I be angry?”

She sat down on the black horsehair sofa, her hands still clasped at her lap. He was, he thought, only angry that she should have seen so easily that he was jealous. “Don’t be angry with me, David,” she said, and he was moved despite himself, by the girlishness that was her manner whenever she was alone with him; by her sympathy and her sweet guilelessness that were her stock in trade, and, at the same time, her armor against rough men. She smiled at him, with the incisive understanding that always surprised him. Then her eyes wandered from his face, and, though she smiled still, he knew that she was thinking about Clay Blaisedell, who had come riding to her one day out of the half-calf and gilt-titled set of Waverley Novels.

She cocked her head a little, to something he could not hear. “Cassady is coughing again,” she said.

“There is nothing more I can do for him, Jessie. There never was anything. I don’t know how he is still alive.”

Her face saddened. He knew that sympathy was as real as anything about her, and the tears when Cassady died would be real, and yet he wondered if any of it really touched her. He had always the feeling that death could not touch her, as rough men could not. He himself had always hated disease and death, and all the other outrages of nature upon man. But he himself became always less removed; hating them, he had, slowly, come intensely to hate Warlock, where death was so commonplace as to be a sort of rude joke, and especially to hate the mines that were the real destroyers of men. Most of all he hated the Medusa, the worst destroyer; and so he had come to hate its superintendent, MacDonald.

Yet Jessie, too, had seen much of death. She had spent her girlhood nursing her father to his slow demise, and now she had nursed more dying men in Warlock than he could count any more, holding their hands as they departed quietly and bravely — as they usually did if she was with them, for they knew it was what she wanted, though others wept, or fought and cursed death, as though they could drive death off or shout it down. And now in the last week or so he had come to see that she was in love with Clay Blaisedell, had fallen in love with him immediately, was in love as obviously and unaffectedly as she was Angel of Warlock. He wondered if that could touch her, either.

Maybe it depended upon Clay Blaisedell, he thought, and felt a stricture knot his throat.

She was listening again. This time he heard it too, the heavy, helpless, muffled coughing. Footsteps came hurrying down the hall, and Jessie lifted the brass lamp from the bright-colored yarn lamp mat on the table.

“Miss Jessie!” Ben Tittle cried, from the doorway. “He has gone and started it again!”

“Yes, I’m coming, Ben. And Doctor Wagner’s here now.” She hurried out with the lamp, and he retrieved his bag and followed her down the hall, reluctantly; Cassady only made him feel his helplessness the more. Shadows swung and tilted in the hallway as Jessie hurried along it with the lamp, toward the room at the back that she had converted into a hospital. Tittle hobbled after her on the crippled, twisted foot. They had not taken him back on at the Medusa because of that foot, and now he worked for Jessie as an errand boy and orderly.

When he entered the hospital, Jessie was already bending over Cassady’s cot. Tittle was holding the lamp for her. Rows of cots extended into the shadows, and men were sitting up watching as Jessie poured water from an olla into a glass, and tipped the glass to Cassady’s lips. The coughing continued, fleshy-sounding and murderous in the man’s crushed chest.

“He sounds like a goner, Doc,” Buell said softly from his cot nearest the door. “We sure thought he was going about three times to night, and a blessed relief it would be, God help me for saying it.”

The doctor nodded, watching Jessie lay her hand on Cassady’s chest; he had never known another woman who would have done that, except a hardened professional nurse. “Drink it!” Jessie said. “Drink it, please, Tom. Drink as much as you can!” She spoke urgently, she sounded almost angry; and Cassady drank, and choked. Beneath a fringe of curly beard his face was drawn tight over the bone, and freckles stood out on the clean, gray flesh like bee stings on an apple. Water streamed down his beard.

“You can stop, Tom,” Jessie said. “Try now. David! ” she called, as Cassady began to gasp, horribly. The water might choke and kill him as easily as the coughing fit, the doctor thought, but he did not move. Cassady would not die simply because Jessie commanded him not to.

The gasping ceased, and the coughing. Jessie straightened. “There, Tom!” she said, as though she had merely talked a child out of a willful pet. “Now, that’s better, isn’t it?”

The doctor picked up Cassady’s limp wrist. The pulse was almost imperceptible. Cassady was staring up at Jessie with worship in his eyes. The man could not possibly live for more than a day or two, and, heaven knew, there would be another along soon to need his cot. The cots were always needed, for the men were continually being broken and crushed in rock falls, in the collapse of a stope or the failure of a lift, or were poisoned at the stamp mill, or knife-slashed or shot, or got broken jaws or heads in saloon fights.

It would be merciful to let Cassady die, but Jessie adhered to a sterner philosophy than his. It was not that she considered death a sin, as he had once; she considered it a failure, and could not believe that there were wills less strong than her own. He knew her persuasion to duty, too, and he wondered if she did not also refuse to let Cassady die because her duty as the Miners’ Angel, the Angel of Warlock, was to be just that, to the limit of her powers, and of her will. Perhaps, he thought, almost guiltily, in this singlemindedness she was incapable of any interest in Cassady, or any other, as a person at all, but saw them only as objects for her ministrations and as proofs of her office.