Claimed (Sci-Fi Classic). Francis Stevens
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Название: Claimed (Sci-Fi Classic)
Автор: Francis Stevens
Издательство: Bookwire
Жанр: Языкознание
isbn: 9788027248193
isbn:
The hawk brows pinched together, and the steely eyes narrowed.
“Well, then! What of it? If I’m willing to pay a doctor’s price for a male nurse, is there anything to get het up over? There’s reasons — right good reasons why I want just you and nobody else to stay by me a while. Treatment’s a different pair of shoes. I’ve had Bruce for my little ailments a long time. I’m reckoning to go right on having Bruce, but I want you for something different. Ye see this here box?”
“Of course.”
“Well, then! This here box is mine. Understand? When I first seen it in Lutz’s shop I wanted it, partly because it’s sech a purty thing, and partly because Lutz acted kinda queer about it. Didn’t seem to rightly know what it was, nor where it come from, nor even that he was right sure he wanted to sell it to me. I figgered then that somebody else had been dickerin’ with him for it, and he was aimin’ to run up the price between me and the other feller.
“I found out different since. I know right well now why Lutz wanted me to take it off his hands, and yet was kinda skeered to let it go.”
The old man paused to laugh. His was at all times a rather frightful laugh, a mere widening of the oblong mouth aperture, a showing of yellow fangs, and a silent writhing of the cords in his stringy neck.
Now, however, his mirth had an added ghastliness, for in it there was a kind of half-horrified, half-delighted defiance. His mouth closed suddenly and the lips drew inward.
“Well, then!” he snarled. “What I want I get, and what I get I keep! Understand? That’s old Jesse J. Robinson’s motto from A to Izzard. I wanted this here box, I got this box, and” — he glanced around the room with a strange, chilled-steel daring in his keen old eyes. “I mean to keep this box! Last night, young man, ye helped me keep it! Now do ye understand?”
“No, I don’t,” said Vanaman, and glanced at Miss Robinson.
Her eyes were large and dark, and in her lap the clasped fingers of her slim hands twined nervously together. What did she so desperately fear: That her uncle’s mind was going?
“Well, then, ye don’t have to understand,” announced Robinson impatiently. “Jest take it that I want somebody by me I can trust. I can trust Leilah, but I won’t hev her wearin’ herself all out and ugly watching by me. And I learnt last night that I can trust you. Now will ye stay by me, or won’t ye? If the terms I offered don’t suit, come right out and say so. Ye’ll find old Jesse Robinson can afford to pay-”
“The terms are fair enough,” interposed Vanaman. “It isn’t that.”
With pointblank refusal on his tongue, he looked again at Miss Robinson, and wavered. Unspeaking, the silent, desperate appeal in her eyes was unmistakable.
Vanaman was no vain fool to fancy that the young woman had succumbed on such short acquaintance to his personal attractions and wished him in the house for that reason. No; she was, for some cause, suffering torments of fear, all the more pitiable because of the tense self-control that allowed only a glimpse of her inward terror to look forth ever and again.
Wordlessly she claimed protection from — exactly what he knew not. But he did know that she claimed it of him, Vanaman, and that he had been hesitating on a point of personal pride!
“If ye have to do it, ye could attend to your practice from this house daytimes,” began the old man grudgingly, “but nights —”
“My practice is not in existence as yet,” in the doctor, and smiled. No one, looking at his frank, suddenly cheerful face, would have dreamed that he that moment decided to offer up a heroic sacrifice, let all his ambitious hopes go a-glimmering for a time, and accept a service that would humiliate him in the eyes of every other physician in town who might learn of it.
“I only opened my office in Tremont three days ago,” he explained. “When do you wish my — ah — attendance to begin, Mr. Robinson?”
“To-night — now. Can’t tell what minute I might need ye.”
“Very well. And I can assure you,” said Vanaman, speaking rather slowly, like a man who wishes to give full weight to each word, “that for whatever reason I am needed here, you can rely on me to the full extent of my ability and power to help.”
“Think I’d be wanting ye if I didn’t know that?” grumbled Robinson, snarling and testy.
But — the doctor in speaking had looked toward Leilah, not him, and the silent gratitude and relief in a pair of slate-gray eyes had already made of his offered sacrifice a holy and a beautiful thing.
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