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Updated: June 25, 2025
What is your patient's name?" "Didn't you know?" "Ferriss! Dick Ferriss! Don't tell me it's Dick Ferriss." "I thought all the time you knew that you had heard. Yes, it is Mr. Ferriss." "Is he very sick? What is he doing out here? No, I had not heard; nobody told me. Pitts was to write to to wire. Will he pull through? What's the matter with him? Is it he who had typhoid?"
Trample it, stifle it, dash it from him as he would, each time it returned a little stronger, a little larger, a little more insistent. Perhaps, after all, he had made a mistake; perhaps, after all, Lloyd ran no great danger; perhaps, after all, Ferriss might now have been alive. All at once Bennett seemed to be sure of this. Then it became terrible.
Suppose he had not interfered, suppose he had stood aside, would Lloyd have run such danger, after all, and would Ferriss at this time have been alive, and perhaps recovering?
He had committed one of those offences which the law does not reach, but whose punishment is greater than any law can inflict. Retribution had been fearfully swift. His career, Ferriss, and Lloyd ambition, friendship, and the love of a woman had been a trinity of dominant impulses in his life. Abruptly, almost in a single instant, he had lost them all, had thrown them away.
"Where's Adler?" asked Ferriss. "He's away after shrimps," responded Bennett. Bennett's eyes returned to his journal and rested on the open page thoughtfully. "Do you know what I've just written here, Ferriss?" he asked, adding without waiting for an answer: "I've written 'It's the end of everything." "I suppose it is," admitted Ferriss, looking about the tent. "Yes, the end of everything.
It was pitiably worn, stained with sea-water, patched and repatched, its frayed edges sewed together again with ravellings of cloth and sea-grasses. Loosening with his teeth the thong of walrus-hide with which it was tied, Ferriss opened it and held it to the faint light of an aurora just paling in the northern sky. "So," he muttered after a while, "so Bennett, too "
Many was the hour, many was the moment, when a hair would have turned the balance, and yet the balance was preserved. At her abrupt recognition of Ferriss, in this patient whom she had been summoned to nurse, and whose hold upon life was so pitifully weak, Lloyd's heart gave a great leap and then sank ominously in her breast. Her first emotion was one of boundless self-reproach.
One incident alone detached itself vividly from the blur. "I have just come from the square," Ferriss had explained, "and they told me that you had left for a drive out here only the moment before, so there was nothing for it but to come after you." "Shan't we walk a little?" she remembered she had asked after a while. "We can have the carriages wait; or do you feel strong enough? I forgot "
At the foot of the steps of the veranda he paused, and as Bennett made a movement turned in his direction and said: "Is this Dr. Pitts's house?" Bennett's reply was drowned in the clamour of the dog, but the other seemed to understand, for he answered: "I'm looking for Mr. Ferriss Richard Ferriss, of the Freja; they told me he was brought here."
Ferriss had died, and Bennett's recognition and acknowledgment of the fact that he, Ward Bennett, who never failed, who never blundered, had made at last the great and terrible error of his life, had shaken his character to its very foundations.
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