“I feel so bad about it all,” Toby said. “They have no right to say those things about you. It makes me sick. Stay with us, Beebo. Leo will take care of you.”
His faith in Leo moved her. She wished she could risk the truth with him, without destroying him. She wished he could know somehow what she was, and that the knowledge would not make him loathe her.
Beebo stood beside him, silent in the night, letting him rant against the cruel accusations in the papers with youthful outrage, protesting his trust and affection, and she felt a terrible sob coming up in her throat.
Leo had forbidden her to tell him she was his mother’s lover. But it was the meanest sort of cowardice to let him stand there and thank her, and beg her to stay on, when all the while she was betraying his gratitude.
“Nobody in this world ever did so much for Mom and me,” he was saying. “Honest, Beebo. If you go now, it would ruin everything. I don’t see—”
“Toby, stop it! Please! Oh, God,” Beebo cried. The sob broke and her voice went hoarse. “Stop it, stop it, stop it!” She covered her face with her hands for a few agonized moments. Toby stared at her as if she had taken leave of her senses, very much distressed at her sudden explosion. He tried clumsily to calm her.
“Did I say something wrong?” he asked apologetically.
“It’s no use, Toby,” Beebo cried, so brokenhearted that he was stunned. “I have to go.”
“Go where?”
“New York.”
“You said there were people back there who want to hurt you,” he objected, turning white again. “Beebo, if that’s true, you can’t go. I won’t let you.”
“Anything would be better than here,” she said, looking at him in torment. “They’ll flay me alive out here—if not tomorrow, then the next day. Oh, Toby, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” The sobs silenced her for a minute. “Please believe me. I wouldn’t do this to you for the world, only—”
Toby turned and walked away.
She pursued him, calling anxiously, “Toby! Toby, wait!” She caught up as he was letting himself down gingerly on a stone bench, moving for all the world like an old man with bursitis. Beebo joined him, reaching out to touch him, then pulling back when he turned away.
“I don’t understand,” she heard him murmur. “I told you—Leo—don’t you believe me? He can help—if it were true, but it’s not—”
He frightened her. The words were so breathless and disjointed, the voice so small and hurt. He was rocking back and forth, as if shaken with sobs, but there was not the slightest sound audible now from his throat. “Toby? Are you all right?” Beebo said.
He moved around, again with that strange parody of crippled age, and seemed about to answer her, when all of a sudden he startled her by springing straight into the air with a weird howl. In the elapsed time of less than a second, Beebo realized he hadn’t sprung at all; he had been thrown upright by the abruptly powerful tensing of his entire muscular system. He was having an epileptic seizure.
And before she could move to help, he had fallen forward, rigid as a cigar store Indian. He struck his head on a decorative rock across the path when he hit the ground. Beebo cried out, horrified, and then dashed to his side, lifting him carefully off the gravel and onto the soft grass.
Her years of experienced with sick animals and illness steadied her a little. She knew he mustn’t swallow his tongue but it was too late to put anything between his teeth. His jaws were locked shut. She rolled him gently on his side, thinking that he could breathe better and would be less likely to choke on his own saliva, which came foaming out of his clenched jaws. He was quivering like a vibrator machine and groaning uncontrollably while the white suds oozed from his mouth. It was a ghostly wail that made Beebo shiver. And yet she knew that a seizure—even one as alarming to see as this one—shouldn’t be a cause for panic. Aside from his contortions, it was the blow on his head that worried her, but she couldn’t get a look at it.
Toby’s feet were pointed downward, tight and hard as a toe dancer’s, and his arms were glued to his sides. Beebo was relieved when finally she felt him go limp. But it was then that she saw his forehead and gasped. There was a gash in it, deep and ragged. She began to tremble with alarm. Now that Toby was relaxed, the wound opened like a fountain. Such quantities of blood flowed over his face and onto Beebo and the ground beneath them that she felt almost sick.
She tried to pick him up, but her legs failed her momentarily and she collapsed beside him, sweating frantically.
“This won’t help him, idiot!” she berated himself. “Get up!” She tried again and made it, desperate to get him in the house and clean the wound. She wanted help, anybody, a doctor—Mrs. Sack. “Mrs. Sack!” she shouted suddenly, but there was no sound from the house. Mrs. Sack’s room was on the other side on the top floor and she would never hear Beebo calling from the lawn below.
Beebo lifted Toby and carried him into the house. She put him down on a satin-upholstered sofa, watching with pity and fear as the red blood soaked into the pink silk. She pressed her bare hand down hard on the wound and the flow abated slightly. Nearby was one of the house intercom phones, and Beebo reached it with her free hand.
“Mrs. Sack,” she said breathlessly. “I’m in the living room with Toby. He had an attack and hit his head. Call the doctor and then get down here—fast!”
Mrs. Sack rushed into the living room moments later, armed with rolls of gauze and tape and disinfectants. She stopped at the sight
