CHAPTER II
Sanderson awoke with the sun streaming in through the high window and lying like a golden mantle flung across the floor and bed. Otherwise everything in the room seemed glaringly white. It was mid-afternoon, and the westering orb had full command of this side of the hospital wing.
He knew at once where he was. There was no wild start and "Where am I?" cry. He merely looked up at the rather sturdy figure in voluminous apron and cap standing within the range of his vision, and grinned.
"I say," he croaked, "that must have been some bump. How hot I am! Can I have a drink, Nurse?"
She seemed to have foreseen this first request. In a moment the glass and tube were at his lips. She would not allow him to raise his head from the pillow. As he drank slowly the refreshing contents of the glass he examined her face with deeper appreciation than Belinda Melnotte imagined.
"I say," he sighed finally, "that was great! When did they bring me in?"
"This morning."
"I—I can't remember it," he murmured. "But I must have come down before daylight."
"You were brought downtown at nine o'clock," she told him cheerfully. "They found you and your machine in Van Cortlandt Park."
"Isthatas far as I got?"
"And quite far enough, I should say," she quickly commented, and with disapproval. "Flying at night! What reckless creatures you airmen are!"
His face was suddenly twisted into a grimace of pain, but he managed to chuckle.
"Oh, some of us expect soon to be regular 'fly-by-nights.'" Then, quickly: "Ah, I remember. By jove, she slapped me!"
The nurse recalled his babblings when he was brought in, and laughed her low, delicious laugh.
"I suppose it was only a lover's quarrel," she suggested.
His eyes twinkled, too. "She's a cranky old thing. I ought to jilt her. And after this—well, she slapped me with that propeller good and plenty. How much will it set me back, Nurse? How long must I lie here? Is that shoulder seriously hurt?"
"Nothing is broken," she assured him cheerfully.
"Except my head," and he felt the bandage tenderly.
"Oh, that's nothing."
"Ow! I bet that hurt me," he grinned. "So complimentary——"
"Now I must take your temperature. You may talk no longer," she said severely.
He watched her with a rather quizzical gaze as she moved about the room while he "smoked the glass pipe." If she apprehended his scrutiny she was so careless of it—or so well balanced of mind—that she displayed not the slightest self-consciousness.
He found himself cataloging in his rather hazy thoughts the several attributes of person and manner that made Belinda Melnotte an attractive and most refreshing personality to him. Her calm was matronly; but her exquisite complexion, her ripe lips, the tendrils of hair that clustered about the edge of her cap, her full and brilliant eyes, were all virginal.
She moved with an air of perfect self-confidence. Her hand was not small, but was very soft, very beautifully formed, and had the firm clasp of a man's. Her bared forearm and wrist, tapering from the elbow, was worthy of being modeled. The shadows that lay in the curves of her neck lent the appearance of ivory to the flesh.
Sanderson was distinctly not given to worship of the feminine; but this very capable-looking and particularly beautiful nurse held his interest from his first conscious moment. It was not mere prettiness or sex-charm; she was, in truth, downright beautiful.
"Magnificent!" the patient told himself, and then wandered off into a feverish state of half-slumber in which the nurse was only one of many characters that flitted across the screen of his imagination.
He was conscious at one time of a grave-looking man standing at the foot of the bed and pulling his Vandyke beard while he talked in jerky sentences to the calm-faced nurse.
"Yes, it is malarial without doubt. I know what those aviation grounds are like. A swamp on one side—all undrained land thereabout. Full of malaria. He likely had a high temperature when he went up in his machine."
Sanderson thought he burst out laughing. He tried to tell the doctor that going up in a cranky aeroplane would give anybody a high temperature.
"With the complication of his wounds he is likely to have a siege of it," the physician said to the nurse. "Are you in charge?"
"Day duty for the present, Doctor Potter."
"Ah—yes. When you are relieved, impress upon the night nurse that she is to call the doctor on duty if there is the least change. I fancy he is quite out of his head."
He was out of his head. He next awoke in the night and a plain-featured nurse endeavored to give him his medicine.
"Say," he demanded, "where's the peach?"
"Still hanging on the tree, boy, as far as you are concerned, I fancy," she replied, and tried again to give him his medicine. He knocked the spoon and glass to the far side of Room A-a.
But Miss Trivett was a very capable nurse, if lacking in personal pulchritude. She patiently prepared the draught again and, seizing his nose suddenly between thumb and finger, forced the dose down his throat.
"What do you know about that?" sputtered Sanderson. "You—you are own sister to that cranky old machine of mine!Sheslapped me——" and he rambled off into a repetition of the story of his accident.
His temperature was high, and Miss Trivett reported this to the doctor. It was a fight then for the aviator's life; but he did not realize how ill he was until, after a week or more, he came out of the Vale of Delirium in which he had wandered and beheld Belinda Melnotte clearly again.
"Say!"
The weakness of his voice so startled him that he almost lost consciousness before he could express his desire. The nurse was quickly at his side and, stooping, placed a firm hand upon his breast. Later he realized that the gesture betrayed the fact that the strong, beautiful hand had often held him down on his pillow while he was delirious.
"Say! I—I——When do I eat, Nurse?"
She smiled upon him, and Sanderson thought her face fairly glorified thereby.
"You may eat now if you feel like it."
"Bully!" he whispered. "Porterhouse steak and a mug of musty——"
"In liquid and concentrated form," she interposed, and soon the glass of milk and Vichy water was at his lips.
It wearied him even to swallow that. He lay and watched her moving quietly about. When she laid a cool palm upon his brow to mark if the fever had subsided, he could have asked her to keep it there.
He had never experienced such a sense of weakness before—at least, within his adult remembrance. It was a curious thing—this sense of dependence upon a woman. And a woman so much stronger physically than himself.
Previous to this time many girls had seemed to Frank Sanderson soft little things—rather useless "play-toys"—were the truth to be told. He could not remember his mother. He was the youngest of a family of boys brought up in a somewhat haphazard fashion by a father who had loved their mother too well to bring another woman into his life.
The young man's social instincts were not well developed. He had been sent to a boys' school, and then to college. The athletic field had claimed his interest rather than fraternity life and social entertainments. And he had always looked with scorn upon those of his mates who allowed themselves to be lionized by silly women.
For two years now he had been devoted to aviation. With a moderate income at his disposal, and no expensive tastes to gratify, he was able to follow this bent. The elder Sanderson was dead. Frank's brothers were scattered—all in business in various cities. Aside from his fellow aviators, the members of the two or three clubs he belonged to, and a few boyhood friends, he was a man alone.
Now began for him a series of incidents that were both strange and delightful. He had never been so near, or so familiar with, such a girl as this before.
"So different from Stella!" he murmured to himself. "Vastly different from Stella!"
The wound in his shoulder was healing nicely; but as an aid to this improvement he had to be moved with extreme care. Belinda Melnotte's strength, as well as her unstinted attention, was of great assistance—greater than the mere medical skill expended upon the case.
The black-bearded, black-eyed surgeon came occasionally and examined the wound; but it was the nurse who always dressed it. The cut upon Sanderson's forehead was of course soon healed.
"We might graft a bit on this shoulder," the surgeon suggested, "and so leave a less puckered scar. But the wound heals nicely. Hum!"
"'Hum!' it is, Doc," quoted Sanderson with a grin. "That would keep me here longer, wouldn't it?"
"Yes."
"And I've been here too long already. It is now a month. The other boys must have sailed. I guess we'll let it go as it lies, Doc. I shall not dressdécolleté, so the scar won't show," and he grinned again.
He noted how this stern and rather sour-visaged surgeon treated the nurse. It was with a measure of familiarity that seemed to betray an association beyond daily intercourse in the wards of the hospital. The nurse seldom spoke to the Herr Doktor; but the latter watched her continually, and Sanderson was troubled in his mind.
Belinda Melnotte was the most companionable of nurses—bright, joyous, kind. When she was alone with him, or if the matron or other nurses or members of the medical staff were in the room, she was the life of the company. But upon the entrance of Doctor Herschall she changed. She seemed to droop, or close within herself. She listened to the Herr Doktor respectfully, and had nothing to say to the patient. The latter grew more and more puzzled.
"How came you to take up nursing, Miss Melnotte?" he asked her one day.
"Because I had nursed my father so long that, when he died, I was lonely with nothing in particular to do. Besides, one must have some occupation. Why did you take up aviation, Mr. Sanderson?"
"For somewhat the same reason," he said, smiling. "One must have some occupation, as you say. But going up in the air—and falling down again—seems to me a more exciting way of passing the time than this," and his gesture included the almost bare and rather cheerless room.
"Ah, but we nurses live the other side of it," and she laughed. "We do not suffer the pain, or live altogether within these sanitary and immaculate walls."
"You serve long enough hours, I fancy," Sanderson said, with appreciation. "And the draft upon your sympathies! Or am I exceptionally favored, Miss Melnotte? Do you treat all your patients so sweetly and generously as you do me?"
A warmer color flooded into her cheeks; but she still smiled.
"That is a part of our trade, Mr. Sanderson. Cheerfulness is more potent than drugs."
"Does Doctor Herschall say that?"
She had turned away so that he could not see her countenance. But he knew she resented the remark, for she changed the topic of conversation instantly.
"Tell me what it feels like to be up in the air, Mr. Sanderson."
"Just like that," he chuckled. "You know you're up in the air, and if you think of how far below the earth is, you won't think of much else, I assure you."
"Oh, it seems very dangerous."
"Not in every way. The driver of a racing auto is in much greater danger. Little chance of collision up yonder, unless two pilots allow their planes to draw so near to each other that the suction of the propellers causes a catastrophe."
"Just as the suction of a passing train may draw one under the wheels?"
"Exactly. But I feared all manner of things when I first went up as a passenger," he pursued. "The pilot was so matter-of-fact that I thought him reckless. I was scarcely seated and my belt hooked when we were off. I heard the wheels bounding along the ground. Then the noise stopped—we were in the air."
"Oh!"
"Yes. I thought I should feel vertigo, as I often did when at an altitude. I dared not look out of the machine until we were perhaps five hundred feet up. Then, to my surprise, I felt not the least sensation of height. The ground seemed merely moving slowly under and away from me. We kept climbing. I could see the country for miles and miles."
"How wonderful!"
As the days passed and Sanderson grew stronger, there was less danger of his exhausting himself by talking. Nurse Melnotte was really having an easy time.
"A soft snap," little Sue Blaine declared enviously. "And such an interesting patient, too! You alwaysdohave all the luck, Belinda."
"Do you think so?" came, with her quiet smile.
"He's an awfully nice fellow. Believeme—I'd set my cap for him if I'd had the luck to be detailed on the case. Think! An aviator!"
"It's a very pretty cap—and on a very pretty head, dear," laughed Belinda.
If she felt any interest in Sanderson other than interest in the young man out of the air as a patient, she did not betray it to either her fellow nurses or to the patient himself. But if she was out of the young man's sight in the daytime, he missed her. Nor did he succeed in hiding his admiration from other eyes. One evening when she left him in Miss Trivett's care, the night nurse remarked his gaze fixed upon Belinda as she departed.
Miss Trivett was a good nurse, but she was brusque. The patients never made love to her.
"I often wonder," she scoffed on this occasion, "if all the soft-headed men are brought to this hospital. Or does bringing them here make them soft-headed?"
"Why for the slam?" Sanderson asked chuckling. The night nurse and her caustic speeches amused him.
"Oh, I see you making sheep's-eyes," she declared. "You fall for a pretty face like the rest of them."
"Oh! Miss Melnotte? But she possesses more attractions than a pretty face," corrected the young man coolly.
"True. And do you suppose you are the first man to find it out?"
The thought had not before impressed him.
"I suppose if she is attractive in my sight, she must be in the sight of others," he said slowly.
"I should say! She's probably made desperate love to by an average of a patient a week.That'sthe meaning of my 'slam,' as you call it. It's just a bit of a warning, my boy," went on Miss Trivett cheerfully. "Beauty is more of a liability than an asset to a nurse—a nurse who is really in earnest, I mean. And Miss Melnotte does not scamp her work. Why, she is the most popular of us all with the surgical staff!"
Sanderson was quick to seize the opportunity to ask a question that had long been trembling on his lips. Yet he put it carelessly.
"That black-browed German seems to be mighty fond of her."
"The Herr Doktor? Now you've said something, boy. Anybody can see that."
"Are they engaged—or anything?"
"Shouldn't wonder," Miss Trivett said briskly. "She's almost through here at the hospital, you know. The Powers That Be frown upon anything sentimental between the doctors and members of the nursing force. So they're very whist about it. She's likely to remove her cap and apron for good in a few days—and become, perhaps, Frau Doktor."
Sanderson fell silent, and Miss Trivett shortly screened the night lamp from his eyes, thinking he had fallen asleep. Behind the young airman's closed lids a jumble of thoughts were beating in his brain. When Doctor Potter came to read the chart at the head of his bed in the morning he scrutinized it for a second time.
"Tut! tut!" he muttered. Then: "What is the meaning of this sudden rise in temperature? Didn't you sleep well last night, Mr. Sanderson?"