Miss Barry did not stop until she had finished her paragraph. The cessation of her voice brought the roving eyes to a standstill; then they flew straight to Miss Maxwell in abject appeal. “Take it away, ma’am. Don’t hurt it—but take it away!” The articulation was thick, but it did not mask the wail in the voice, and a gigantic thumb jerked indicatively toward the patient, asserting figure of Miss Barry.
“All right, Mr. Brandle.” Miss Maxwell’s tone showed neither conciliation nor pity; it was plainly matter-of-fact. “As it happens, I’ve brought you a new nurse. Suppose you try Miss O’Leary for the next day or two.”
The wail broke out afresh: “How can I tell if I can stand her? They all look alike—all of ’em. You’re the fourth, ain’t you?” He turned to the nurse at his bedside for corroboration.
“Then I’m the fifth,” announced Sheila, “and there’s luck in odd numbers.”
“Five’s my number.” The mammothman looked a fraction less distracted as he stated this important fact. “Born fifth day of the fifth month, struck it rich when I was twenty-five, married in ’seventy-five, formed the American Coal Trust December fifth, eighteen ninety-five. How’s that for a number?”
“And I’m twenty-five, and this is June fifth.” Sheila smiled.
“Say, honest?” A glimmer of cheerfulness filtered through. The man beckoned the superintendent of nurses closer and whispered in a perfectly audible voice: “Can’t you take it away now? I’d like to ask the other some questions before you leave her for keeps.”
Miss Maxwell nodded a dismissal to the nurse who had been, and called Sheila to the bedside. “Look her over well, Mr. Brandle. Miss O’Leary isn’t a bit sensitive.”
“O’Leary? That’s not a bad name. Had a shaft boss up at my first anthracite-mine by that name—got on with him first-class. Say”—this direct to Sheila—“can you pray?”
“Not unless I have to.”
“Not a bad answer. Now what—er—form of—literatoore do you prefer?”
“Things with pep—punch—go!”
“Say, shake.” The mammoth man smiled as he held out a giant fist. Sheila had the feeling she was shaking hands with some prehistoric animal. It was almost repellent, and she had to summon all her sympathy and control to be able to return the shake with any degree of cordiality.
“All right, ma’am. You can leave us now to thrash it out man to man. You’d better get back to managing your little white angels,” and he swept a dismissing hand toward Miss Maxwell and the door.
Oddly enough, there was nothing rude nor affronting in the man’s words. There was too much of underlying good nature to permit it. With the closing of the door behind the superintendent he turned to Sheila. “Now, boss, we might as well understand each other—it’ll save strikes or hurt feelings. Eh?”
Sheila nodded.
“All right. I’m dying, and I know it. May burst like a paper bag or go up like a penny balloon any minute. Now praying won’t keep me from bursting a second sooner, or send me up a foot higher, so cut it out.”
Again Sheila nodded.
“That isn’t all. Had two nurses who agreed, kept their word, but they hadn’t the nerve to keep the parson from praying, and when he was off duty they just sat—twiddled their thumbs and waited for me to quit. Couldn’t stand that—got on my nerves something fearful.”
“Wanted to murder them, didn’t you?” Sheila laughed. “Well, Mr. Brandle, suppose we begin with supper and the baseball news. After that we’ll hunt up a thriller—biggest thriller they’ve got in the book-store.”
“You’re boss,” was the answer, but a look of relief—almost of contentment—spread over the rubicund face.
As Sheila was leaving for the supper-tray she paused. “How would you like company for supper?”
“Company? Good Lord, not the parson!”
“No, me. If you are willing to sign for two, I could bring my supper up with yours.”
“And not eat alone! By Jehoshaphat! Give me that slip quick.”
They had not only a good supper, they had a noisy one. The coal magnate roared over Sheila’s descriptions of some of the bath treatments and their victims. In the midstof one particularly noisy explosion he suddenly stopped and looked accusingly at her. “Why don’t you stop me? Don’t you know doctor’s orders? Had ’em dinged into my head until I could say ’em backwards: no exertion, no excitement, avoid all undue movement, keep quiet. Darn it all! As if I won’t have to keep quiet long enough! Well—why don’t you repeat those fool orders and keep me quiet?”
Sheila looked at him with a pair of steady gray eyes. “Do you know, Mr. Brandle, it isn’t a half-bad way to go out of this world—to go laughing.”
The mammoth man beamed. He looked for all the world like the full moon suddenly grown beatific. “And I’d just about made up my mind that I’d never find a blamed soul who would feel that way about it. Shake again, boss.”
After the baseball news and a fair start in the thriller, he indulged further in past grievances. “Hadn’t any more’n settled it for sure I was done for than the parson came and the nurse took to looking mournful. Lord Almighty! ain’t it bad enough to be carted off in a hearse once without folksputting you in beforehand? That’s not my notion of dying. I lived pleasant and cheerful, and by the Lord Harry, I don’t see why I can’t die that way! And look-a-here, boss, I don’t want any of that repenting stuff. I don’t need no puling parson to tell me I’m a sinner. Any idiot couldn’t look at me without guessing that much. Say!” He leaned forward with sudden earnestness. “Take a good look at me yourself. See any halo or angel trappings about me?”
Sheila laughed. “I’m afraid not. What you really ought to have—what I miss about you—is the pipe, and the bowl, and the fiddlers three.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Don’t you remember? It’s an old nursery rhyme; probably you heard it hundreds of times when you were a little boy:
“Old King Cole was a merry old soulAnd a merry old soul was he.He called for his pipe and he called for his bowl,And he called for his fiddlers three.”
The coal magnate threw back his head on the pillows and laughed long and loud. He laughed until he grew purple and gasped forbreath, and he laughed while he choked, and Sheila flew about for stimulants. For a few breathless moments Sheila thought she had whipped up the hearse—to use the mammoth man’s own metaphor—but after a panting half-hour the heart subsided and the breath came easier.
“You nearly did for me that time, boss. But it fits; Jehoshaphat, it fits me like a B. V. D.! The only difference you might put down to simplified spelling. Eh?” And he cautiously chuckled at his joke.
While Sheila was making ready for the night he chuckled and lapsed into florid, heliotrope studies by turns. “It’s straight, what I told you about being a sinner,” he gave verbal expression to his thoughts at last. “That’s why I don’t leave a cent to charity—not a cent. Ain’t going to have any peaked-faced, oily-tongued jackasses saying over my coffin that I tried to buy my entrance ticket into the Lord Almighty’s kingdom. No, sirree! I know I’ve lived high, eaten well, and drunk some. I’ve made the best of every good bargain that came within eyeshot. I treated my own handsome—and I let the rest of the world gohang. Went to church Easter Sunday every year and put a bill in the plate; you can figure for yourself about how much I’ve given to charity. Never had any time to think of it, anyway—probably wouldn’t have given if I had. Always thought Mother’d live longer’n me and she’d take care of that end of it. But she didn’t.”
For a moment Sheila thought the man was going to cry; his lower lip quivered like a baby’s, and his eyes grew red and watery. There was no denying it, the man was a caricature; even his grief was ludicrous. He wiped his eyes with the back of his heliotrope sleeve and finished what he had to say. “Don’t it beat all how the pious vultures croak over you the minute you’re done for—reminding you you can’t take your money away with you? Didn’t the parson—first time he came—sit in that chair and open up and begin about the rich man’s squeezing through a needle’s eye and a lot about putting away temporal stuff? I don’t aim to do any squeezing into heaven, I can tell you. And I fixed him all right. Ha, ha! I told him as long as the money wouldn’t do me and Mother any more good I’d settle it so’s itcouldn’t benefit any one else. And that’s exactly what I’ve done. Left it all for a monument for us, fancy marble, carved statues, and the whole outfit. It’ll beat that toadstool-looking tomb of that prince somewhere in Asia all hollow. Ha, ha!”
He leaned back to enjoy to the full this humorous legacy to himself, but the expression of Sheila’s face checked it. “Say, boss, you don’t like what I’ve done, do you? Run it out and dump it; I can stand for straight talk from you.”
Sheila felt repelled even more than she had at first. To have a man at the point of death throw his money into a heap of marble just to keep it from doing good to any one seemed horrible. And yet the man spoke so consistently for himself. He had lived in the flesh and for the flesh all his days; it was not strange that there was no spirit to interpret now for him or to give him the courage to be generous in the face of what the world would think.
“It’s yours to spend as you like—only—I hate monuments. Rather have the plain green grass over me. And don’t you think it’s queer yourself that a man who had thegrit to make himself and a pile of money hasn’t the grit to leave it invested after he goes, instead of burying it? Supposing you can’t live and use it yourself! That’s no reason for not letting your money live after you. I’d want to keep my money alive.”
“Alive? Say, what do you mean?”
“Just what I say—alive. Charity isn’t the only way to dispose of it. Leave it to science to discover something new with; give it to the laboratories to study up typhoid or cancer. Ever think how little we know about them?”
“Why should I? I don’t owe anything to science.”
“Yes, you do. What developed the need of coal—what gave you the facilities for removing it from your mines? Don’t tell me you or anybody else doesn’t owe something to science.”
“Bosh!” And the argument ended there.
The old man had a good night. He dozed as peacefully as if he had not required propping up and occasional hypodermics to keep his lungs and heart going properly, and when the house doctor made his early rounds this sad and shocking spectacle met his eye: thedying coal magnate, arrayed in a fresh and more vivid suit of heliotrope pajamas, smoking a brierwood and keeping a violent emotional pace with the hero in the thrillingest part of the thriller. Even Sheila’s cheeks were tinged with excitement.
“Miss O’Leary!” All the outraged sensibilities of an orthodox, conscientious young house physician were plainly manifested in those two words.
Out shot the brierwood like a projectile, and a giant finger wagged at the intruder. “Look-a-here, young man, the boss and I are running this—er—quitting game to suit ourselves, and we don’t need no suggestions from the walking delegate, or the board of directors, or the gang. See? Now if you can’t say something pleasant and cheerful, get out!”
“Good morning!” It was the best compromise the house physician could make. But ten minutes after his speedy exit Doctor Greer, the specialist, and Miss Maxwell were on the threshold, both looking unmistakably troubled.
The coal magnate winked at Sheila. “Here comes the peace delegates—or maybe it’sfrom the labor union. Well, sir?” This was shot straight at the doctor.
“Mr. Brandle, you’re mad. I refuse to take any responsibility.”
“Don’t have to. That’s what’s been the matter—too much responsibility. It got on my nerves. Now we want to be as—as noisy and as happy as we can, the boss and me. And if we can’t do it in this little old medicated brick-pile of yours, why, we’ll move. See? Or I’ll buy it with a few tons of my coal and give it to the boss to run.”
“When it’s yours.” The specialist was finding it hard to keep his temper. The man had worn him out in the week he had been at the sanitarium. It had been harder to manage him than a spoiled child or a lunatic. He had had to humor him, cajole him, entreat him, in a way that galled his professional dignity, and now to have the man deliberately and publicly kill himself in this fashion was almost beyond endurance. He tried hard to make his voice sound agreeable as well as determined when he launched his ultimatum. “But in the mean time Miss O’Leary will have to be removed from the case.”
“No, you don’t!” With a sweep of the giant hand the bedclothes were jerked from their roots, and a pair of heliotrope legs projected floorward. It took the strength of all the three present to hold him back and replace the covering. The magnate sputtered and fumed. “First nurse you put on here after the boss goes—I’ll die on her hands in ten minutes just to get even with you. That’s what I’ll do. And what’s more—I’ll come back to haunt the both of you. Take away my boss—just after we get things going pleasantly. Spoil a poor man’s prospects of dying cheerful! Haven’t you any heart, man? And you, ma’am?” this to the superintendent of nurses. “By the Lord Harry! you’re a woman—you ought to have a little sympathy!” The aggressiveness died out of the voice, and it took on the old wail Sheila had first heard.
“But you forget my professional responsibility in the matter—my principles as an honorable member of my profession. I cannot allow a patient of mine wilfully to endanger his life—even shorten it. You must understand that, Mr. Brandle.”
A look of amused toleration spread overthe rubicund face. “Bless your heart, sonny, you’re not allowing me to shorten it one minute. The boss and I are prolonging it first-rate. Shouldn’t wonder if it would get to be so pleasant having her around I’d be working over union hours and forgetting to quit at all. I’m old enough to be your granddaddy, so take a bit of advice from me. When you can’t cure a patient, let ’em die their own way. Now run along, sonny. Good morning, ma’am.” And then to Sheila: “Get back to that locked door, the three bullet-holes, and the blood patch on the floor. I’ve got to know what’s on the other side before I touch one mouthful of that finnan haddie you promised me for breakfast.”
After that Old King Cole had his way. The doctors visited him as a matter of form, and Sheila improvised a chart, for he would not stand for having temperatures taken or pulses counted. “Cut it out, boss, cut it all out. We’re just going to have a good time, you and me.” And he smiled seraphically as he drummed on the spread:
“Old King Cole—diddy-dum-diddy-dum,Was a merry old soul—diddy-dum-diddy-dum.”
On the second day Sheila introduced Peter Brooks into the “Keeping-On-Going Syndicate,” as the mammoth man termed their temporary partnership. Sheila had to take some hours off duty, and as the coal magnate absolutely refused to let another nurse cross his threshold, Peter seemed to be the only practical solution. She knew the two men would get on admirably. Peter could be counted on to understand and meet any emergency that might arise, while Old King Cole would be kept content. And Sheila was right.
“Say, we hit it off first-rate—ran together as smooth as a parcel o’ greased tubs,” the magnate confided to Sheila when she returned. “He told me a whole lot about you—what you did for him—and the nickname they’d given you—‘Leerie.’ I like that, but I like my name for you better. Eh, boss?”
Once admitted, Peter often availed himself of his membership in the syndicate. He made a third at their games, turned an attentive ear to the thriller or added his bit to the enlightenment of the conversation. And there wasn’t a topic from war to feminine-dress reform that they did not attack andthrash out among them with all the keenness and thoroughness of three alive and original minds.
“Puts me thinking of the days when I was switch boss at the Cassie Maguire Mine. Nothing but a shaver then, working up; nothing to do in the God-forsaken hole, after work, but talk. We just about settled the affairs of the world and gave the Lord Almighty advice into the bargain.” The mammoth man laughed a mammoth laugh. “And when we’d talked ourselves inside out we’d have some fiddling—always a fiddle among some of the boys. Never hear one of those old tunes that it don’t take me back to the Cassie Maguire and the way a fiddle would play the heart back into a lonely, homesick shaver.” He turned with a suspicious sniff to Sheila. “Come, boss, the chessboard. Peter’n’me are going to have another Verdun set-to. Only this time he’s German. See? And if you don’t mind, you might fill up our pipes and bring us our four-forty bowl.”
At one time of the day only did the merriment flag—that was at dusk. “Don’t like it—never did like it,” he confessed. “Something about it that gets onto my chest andturns me gloomy. Don’t suppose you ever smelled the choke-damp, did you? Well, that’s the feeling. Say, boss, wouldn’t be a bad plan to shine up that old safety of yours and give us more light in the old pit. Mother quit about this time o’ day, and it seems like I can’t forget it.”
The next day the coal magnate took a turn for the worse. The heart specialist and the house doctor glowered ominously at Sheila as they came to make their unwelcome rounds, and Sheila hurried them out of the room as speedily as she could. Then it was that she thought of the fiddlers three. An out-of-town orchestra played biweekly at the sanitarium. They were young men, most of them, still apprentices at their art, and she knew they would be glad enough for extra earnings. They were due that evening, and she would engage the services of three violins for the dusk hour the old man dreaded. She did not accomplish this without a protest from the business office, warnings from the two physicians, and shocked comments from the habitual gossips of the sanitarium. But Sheila held her ground and fought for her way against their combinedattacks. “Of course I know he’s dying. Don’t care if the whole San faints with mortification. I’m going to see he dies the way he wants to—keep it merry till the end.”
To the Reverend Mr. Grumble, who requested—nay, demanded—admittance, she turned a deaf ear while she held the door firmly closed behind her. “Can’t come in. Sorry, he doesn’t want you. If you must say a last prayer to comfort yourself, say it in some other room. It will do Old King Cole just as much good and keep him much happier. Now, please go!”
So it happened that only Peter was present when the musicians arrived. Sheila ushered them in with a flourish. “Old King Cole, your fiddlers three. Now what shall they play?”
Lucky for the indwellers of the sanitarium that the magnate’s room was in the tower and therefore little sound escaped. It is improbable if the final ending would ever have been known to any but those present, whose discretion could have been relied upon, but for the fact that Miss Jacobs stood with her ear to the keyhole for fully ten minutes. It was surprising how quickly everybodyknew about it after that. It created almost as much scandal as Sheila’s own exodus had three years before. Many had the temerity to take the lift to the third floor and pace with attentive ears the corridor that led to the tower. These came back to fan the flame of shocked excitement below. The doctors and Mr. Grumble came to Miss Maxwell to interfere and put an end to this ungodly and unprofessional humoring of one departing soul. But the superintendent of nurses refused. She had put the case in Sheila’s hands, and she had absolute faith in her. So all that was left to the busybodies and the scandalmongers was to hear what they could and give free rein to their tongues.
There was, however, one mitigating fact: they could listen, and they could talk, but they could not look beyond the closed door of the tower room. That vivid, appalling picture was mercifully denied them. With a heaping bowl of egg-nog beside him, and his brierwood between his lips, the coal magnate beat time on the bedspread with a fast-failing strength, while he grinned happily at Sheila. Beside him Peter lounged in a wheel-chair, smoking for company, while groupedabout the foot of the bed in the attitude of a small celestial choir stood the fiddlers three.
All the good old tunes, reminiscent of younger days of mining-camps and dance-halls, they played as fast as fingers could fly and bows could scrape. “Dan Tucker,” “Money Musk,” “The Irish Washerwoman,” and “Pop Goes the Weasel” sifted in melodic molecules through the keyhole into the curious and receptive ears outside. And after them came “Captain Jinks” and “The Blue Danube,” “Yankee Doodle” and “Dixie.”
“Some boss!” muttered the magnate, thickly, the brierwood dropping on the floor. “Just one solid streak of anthracite—clear through. Now give us something else—I don’t care—you choose it, boss.”
So Leerie chose “The Star-spangled Banner” and “Marching Through Georgia,” and as dusk crept closer about them, “Suwanee River” and “The Old Kentucky Home.”
“Nice, sleepy old tunes,” mumbled the coal magnate. “Guess I’ve napped over-time.” He opened one eye and looked at Sheila, half amused, half puzzled. “Say, boss, light up that little old lamp o’ yours andtake me down; the shaft’s growing pretty black.”
The fiddlers played a hymn as their own final contribution. Sheila smiled wistfully across the dusk to Peter. She knew it wouldn’t matter now, for Old King Cole was passing beyond the reach of hymns, prayers, or benedictions.
“It’s over as far as you or I or he are concerned,” she whispered, whimsically. “When I come down, by and by, would you very much mind taking me on one of those rides you promised? I want to forget that white-marble monument.”
It was not until a week later that Sheila O’Leary met with one of the big surprises of her rather eventful existence. A lawyer came down from New York and asked for her. It seemed that the coal magnate had left her a considerable number of thousands to spend for him and ease her feelings about the monument. The codicil was quaintly worded and stated that inasmuch as “Mother” had gone first, he guessed she would do the next best by him.
Sheila took Peter Brooks into her immediate confidence. “Half of it goes for typhoidresearch and half for a nurses’ home here. We’ve needed one dreadfully. What staggers me is when did he do it?”
Peter grinned. “When I happened to be on duty. We fixed it up, and I was to keep the secret. He had lots of fun over it—poor old soul!”
“Merry old soul,” corrected Sheila.
And when the nurses’ home was built Sheila flatly ignored all the suggestions of a memorial tablet with appropriate scriptural verses to grace the cornerstone or hang in the entrance-hall.
“Won’t have it—never do in the world! Just going to have his picture over the living-room fireplace.”
And there it hangs—a gigantic reproduction of Old King Cole, done by the greatest poster artist of America.
Hearrived in the arms of his mother, the mulatto nurse having in some inexplicable and inconsiderate fashion acquired measles on the ship coming from their small South American republic. Francisco Enrique Manuel Machado y Rodriguez—Pancho, for short—and his mother were allowed to disembark only because of his appalling lack of health and her promise to take harborage in a hospital instead of a hotel.
Having heard of the sanitarium from her sister-in-law’s brother’s wife’s aunt, who had been there herself, and having traveled already over a thousand miles, the additional hundred or so seemed too trivial to bother about. So the señora kept her promise to the officials by buying her ticket thitherward, and Flanders, the bus-driver, arrived just in time to see three porters unload them and their luggage on the small station platform.The señora was weeping bitterly, the powder spattered and smeared all over her pretty, shallow little face; Pancho was clawing and scratching the air, while he shrieked at the top of his lungs—the only part of him that gave any evidence of strength.
Having disposed of the luggage, Flanders hurried back to the assistance of the señora, whereupon the brown atom clawed him instead of the air and fortissimoed his shrieking. Flanders promptly returned him to his mother, backing away to the bus and muttering something about “letting wildcat’s cubs be.”
“Wil’cat?” repeated the señora through her sobs. “I don’t know what ees wil’cat. I theenk eet ees one leetle deevil. Tsa, Panchito! Ciera la boca.” And she shook him.
During the drive to the sanitarium Flanders cast periodic glances within. Each time he looked the atom appeared to be shrieking louder, while his mother was shaking harder and longer. By the time they had reached their destination the breath had been shaken quite out of him. He lay back panting in his mother’s arms, with onlystrength enough for a feeble and occasional snarl. His bonnet of lace and cerise-pink ribbon had come untied and had slipped from his head, disclosing a mass of black hair curled by nature and matted by neglect. It gave the last uncanny touch to the brown atom’s appearance and caused Hennessy, who was sweeping the crossing, to drop his broom and stare agape at the new arrivals.
“Faith, is it one o’ them Brazilian monkeys?” he whispered, pulling Flanders by the sleeve. “I’ve heard the women are makin’ pets o’ them, although I never heard they were after fixin’ them up wi’ lace an’ ribbons like that.”
“It’s a kid.” Flanders stated the fact without any degree of positiveness as he rubbed three fingers cautiously down his cheek. He was feeling for scars. “Guess it’s a kid all right, but it scratches like a cat, gosh durn it!”
Hennessy, however, shook a positive head. “That’s no kid. Can’t ye see for yourself it’s noways human? Accordin’ to the Sunday papers it’s all the style for blond dancers an’ society belles to be fetchin’ one o’ them little apes about. They’re thinkin’ if theyhang a bit o’ live ugliness furninst, their beauty will look all the more ravishin’.”
“Live ugliness,” repeated Flanders; then he laughed. “You’ve struck it, Hennessy.”
Meanwhile Francisco Enrique Manuel Machado y Rodriguez—Pancho, for short—and his mother had passed into the hands of the sanitarium porter. He had handed them on to the business office, which in turn had handed them over to the superintendent. The superintendent had shared the pleasure with the house staff, the staff had retired in favor of the baby specialist, and at half past seven o’clock that night neither he nor the superintendent of nurses had been able to coax, argue, command, or threaten a nurse into taking the case.
“I’m afraid you will have to do with an undergraduate and make the best of it.” Miss Maxwell acknowledged her helplessness with a faint smile.
But Doctor Fuller shook his head. “Won’t do. It means skilled care and watching for days. A nurse without experience would be about as much good as an incubator. Think if you dismissed the four who’ve refused, you could frighten a fifth into taking it?”
This time the superintendent of nurses shook her head. “Not this case. They all feel about it the same way. Miss Jacobs tells me she didn’t take her training to nurse monkeys.”
The old doctor chuckled. “Don’t know as I blame her; thought it was a new species myself when I first clapped eyes on it. But shucks! I’ve seen some of our North American babies look like Lincoln Imps when they were down with marasmus. Give me a few weeks and a good nurse and his own mother wouldn’t recognize—” He interrupted himself with a pounding fist on the desk. “Where’s Leerie?”
“You can’t have her—not this time.” Miss Maxwell’s lips became a fraction more firm, while her eyes sharpened into what her training girls had come to call her “forceps expression.”
“Why not?”
“The girl’s just off that case for Doctor Fritz; she’s tired out. Remember she’s been through three unbroken years of hospitals, and we’ve worked her on every hard case we’ve had since she came back. I’m going to see that she gets forty-eight hours of rest now.”
“Let her have them next time.” Doctor Fuller put all his persuasive charm into the words. “I need Leerie—some one who can roll up her sleeves and pitch in. Let me have her just this once.”
But Miss Maxwell was obdurate. “She’s asleep now, and she’s going to sleep as long as she needs to. I’ll give you Miss Grant—she’s had a month at the Maternity at Rochester.”
“A month!” Scorn curled up the ends of the doctor’s mustache. The next instant they were almost touching in a broad grin. “Leerie likes cases like this—just eats them up. I’m going after her.” And before the superintendent of nurses could hold him he was down the corridor on his way to the nurses’ dormitory.
Ten minutes later he was back, grinning harder than ever. He had only time to thrust his head in the door and wave a triumphant arm. “She’s dressing—as big a fool about babies as I am! Said she’d slept a whole hour and felt fresh as a daisy. How’s that for spunk?”
“I call it nerve.” Miss Maxwell smiled a hopeless smile. “What am I going to dowith you doctors? You wear out all my best nurses and you won’t take—” But Doctor Fuller had fled.
In spite of his boast of her, the baby specialist saw Sheila O’Leary visibly cringe when she took her first look at Pancho. He lay sprawling on his mother’s bed in a room littered with hastily opened bags and trunks out of which had been pulled clothing of all kinds and hues. He had been relieved of the lace and pink ribbons and was swathed only in shirt and roundabout, his arms and legs projected like licorice sticks; being of the same color and very nearly the same thickness. He was dozing, tired out with the combination of much travel, screaming, shaking, and loss of breath. So wasted was he that the skin seemed drawn tight over temple and cheek-bones; the eyes were pitifully sunken, and colorless lips fell back over toothless gums.
“How old is—it?” Sheila whispered at last.
“About nine months.”
Sheila shuddered. “Just the adorable age. Ought to be all pink cheeks, dimples, and creases—and look at it!”
“I know, but wait. Give us time and we’ll get some of those things started.” Doctor Fuller wagged his head by way of encouragement.
Sheila answered with a deprecatory shake. “This time I don’t believe you. That would be a miracle, and you can do about everything but miracles. Honestly, it doesn’t seem as if I could touch it; looks about a thousand years old and just human enough to be horrible.”
The old doctor eyed her askance. “Not going back on me, are you?”
“Of course I’m not, but there’s no use in making believe it will be any joy-game. I’ll be hating it every minute I’m on the case.”
“Hate it as much as you like, only stick to it. Hello there, bub!” This to the brown atom, who was opening his eyes.
The eyes were large and brown and as soft and appealing as a baby seal’s. For a moment they looked with strange, wondering intensity at the two figures bending over it, then with sudden doubling and undoubling of fists, a frantic upheaval of brown legs, the atom opened volcanically and poured forth scream after scream. It writhed, it clawedthe air, it looked every whit as horrible as Sheila had claimed.
“Going to run?” the old doctor asked, anxiously.
For answer Sheila bent down lower and picked up the writhing mass. With a firm hand she braced it against her shoulder, patting it gently and swaying her body rhythmically to the patting. “Some eyes and some temper!” laughed Sheila. “Where’s the mother?”
The screaming brought the corridor nurse to the door. “Where’s the mother?” Sheila repeated.
The corridor nurse pointed to the strewn luggage and gave a contemptuous shrug. “Gone down to dinner looking like a bird of paradise. She said if the baby cried I was to stir up some of that milk from that can, mix it with water from that faucet, put it in that bottle, and feed it to him.” Words failed to convey the outraged disgust in her voice.
The milk indicated was condensed milk in a half-emptied can; the bottle was the regulation kind for babies and as filthy as dirty glass could look. Sheila and Doctor Fuller exchanged glances.
“Plenty of fight in the little beggar or he wouldn’t be outlasting—” The doctor swallowed the remainder of the sentence, cut short by a startled look on Sheila’s face.
The screams had stopped a minute before, and Sheila believed the atom had dropped asleep. But instead of feeling the tiny body relax as a sleeping baby’s will, it was growing slowly rigid. With this realization she strode to the bed and put the atom down. Before their eyes the body stiffened, while the head rolled slowly from side to side and under the half-closed lids the eyeballs rolled with it.
“Convulsions!” announced the corridor nurse, with an anxious look toward the door. Then, as a bell tinkled, she voiced her relief in a quick breath. “That’s sixty-one. I’m hiking—”
“No, you don’t!” The doctor jerked her back; he wanted to shake her. “You’ll hustle some hot water for us, and then you’ll stand by to hustle some more. See?” He was shedding all unnecessary clothing as he spoke, and Sheila was peeling the atom free of shirt and roundabout as fast as skilled fingers could move.
It is a wonderful thing to watch the fightbetween human skill and death for the life of a baby. So little it takes to swing the victory either way, so close does it border on the miraculous, that few can stand and see without feeling the silent, invisible presence of the Nazarene. A life thus saved seems to gather unto itself a special significance and value for those who have fought for it and those who receive it again. It creates new feelings and a clearer vision in blind, unthinking motherhood; it awakens to a vital response hitherto dormant fatherhood. And even the callous outsider becomes exalted with the wonder and closeness of that unseen presence.
As the brown atom writhed from one convulsion into another, Sheila and the old doctor worked with compressed lips and almost suspended breath; they worked like a single mind supplied with twice the usual amount of auxiliaries. They saw, without acknowledging it, the gorgeous, tropical figure that came and stood half-way between the door and the bed; lips carmined, throat and cheeks heavy with powder, jewels covering ears, neck, fingers, and wrists, she looked absurdly unreal beside the nurse in her uniform andthe doctor in his shirt-sleeves. Occasionally Sheila glanced at her. If they won, would the mother care? The question came back to her consciousness again and again. In her own experience she knew how often the thing one called motherhood would come into actual existence after a struggle like this when birth itself had failed to accomplish anything but a physical obligation. Believing this, Sheila fought the harder.
After an hour the convulsions subsided. A few more drops of brandy were poured down the tiny throat, and slowly the heart took up its regulation work. Sheila wrapped the atom in a blanket, put it back on the bed, and beckoned to the mother.
Curiosity seemed to be the one governing emotion of the señora. She looked without any trace of grief, and, having looked, she spoke impassively: “I theenk eet dead. Yes?”
Doctor Fuller, with perspiration pouring from him, transfixed her with a stare. “No! That baby’s going to get well now, and you’re going to let Miss O’Leary teach you how to take proper care of it. Understand?” Then clapping his fellow-fighter onthe back, he beamed down upon her. “Leerie, you’re one grand soldier!”
The monotone of the gorgeous señora broke up any response Sheila might have given. “I theenk eet die, all the same,” came the impassive voice. “Thepadreon the ship make it all ready for die—I theenk yes pret’ soon.”
“No!” The doctor fairly thundered it forth.
She stooped and pulled away a fold of the blanket with the tips of her fingers. “Eet look ver’ ugly—like eet die. I theenk—all the same.”
The doctor caught up his cast-off clothing and flung himself out of the room. Sheila watched him go, a faint smile pulling at the corners of her mouth. Strange! He had so evidently reached the end of his self-control, optimism, and patience, while she was just beginning to find hers. In the sweep of a second things looked wonderfully clear and hopeful. She thought she could understand what was in the mind and heart of the señora; what was more significant, she thought she could understand the reason for it. And what you can understand you can cope with.
She watched the señora searching in this trunk and that; she saw her jerk forth a diminutive dress of embroidery and fluted lace; while she thought the whole thing through to the finish and smiled one of her old inscrutable smiles.
“Pret’ dress,” said the señora. “Plent’ lace and reebon. You put on for bury eet—I go findpadre.”
“No,” said Sheila, emphatically, “you stay here. I’ll go and find thepadre.”
She left them both in the charge of the corridor nurse and flew for the telephone. It took her less than a minute to get Father O’Friel; it took but a trifle more for her to outline her plan and bind him to it. And Father O’Friel, with a comprehension to match his conscientiousness, and a sense of humor to match them both, hardly knew whether to be shocked or amused.
“Why not appeal to the baby’s father?”
“Realize it takes a month for a letter to reach that little South American ant-hill? Write now if you want to, but let me be trying my way while the letter is traveling.”
“All right. But if it doesn’t work—”
“It will. When my feelings aboutanything run all to the good this way, I’d bank anything on them. Now please hurry.”
So it came about that instead of a burial service that night Father O’Friel conducted an original and unprecedented adoption ceremony. Without even a witness the señora signed a paper which she showed no inclination to read and which she would hardly have understood had she attempted it. It was enough for her that she could give away Francisco Enrique Manuel Machado y Rodriguez to a foolish nurse who was plainly anxious to be bothered with him. Death had seemed the only release from an obligation that exhausted and frightened her, and from which neither pleasure nor personal pride could be obtained. But this was another way mercifully held out to her, and she accepted it with gratitude and absolute belief. Eagerly she agreed to the conditions Sheila laid down; the father was to be notified and forced to make a life settlement on the atom; in the mean time she was to remain at the sanitarium, pay all expenses, and interfere in no way with the nurse or the baby. So desirous was she to display her gratitude that she heaped the atom’s wardrobe—lace,ribbons, and embroidery—upon Sheila, and kissed the hem of Father O’Friel’s cassock.
“Qué gracioso—qué magnifico!” Then she yawned behind her tinted nails. “I have ver’ much the sleep. I find anothaire room and make what you call—la cama.” At the door she turned and cast a farewell look upon the blanketed bundle. “Eet look ver’ ugly—all the same I theenk eet die.”
It took barely ten minutes for word of the adoption to reach Doctor Fuller, and it brought him running. “Good Lord! Leerie, are you crazy? Did you think I pulled you out of bed to-night to start an orphan-asylum? What do you mean, girl?”
Sheila looked down at her newly acquired possession, and for the first time that night the strange, luminous look that was all her own, that had won for her her nickname of Leerie, crept into her eyes; they fairly dazzled the old doctor with their shining. “Honestly, don’t know myself. Still testing out my feelings in my think laboratory.”
“You can’t raise that baby and keep on with your nursing. Too much responsibility, anyway, for a young person. What’s more,the mother shouldn’t be allowed to dodge it. She can be made fit.”
“How are you going to do it? Train her with harness and braces? Or moral suasion—or the courts?”
“And I thought you hated it, couldn’t bear to touch it,” growled the baby specialist.
“Did. But that’s past tense. Since I fought for it, it’s suddenly become remarkably precious. And that’s the precise feeling I’m testing up in the lab.”
“In the name of common sense what do you mean, Leerie?”
She patted his arm soothingly. “There, there. Go to bed; you’re tuckered out. Leave me alone for two months, and I’ll tell you. And suppose you write down that milk formula before you go; he’s going to wake up as fighting hungry as a little tiger-cat.”
How the sanitarium took the news of the arrivals and the rumor of the adoption, what they thought of the gorgeous and irresponsible señora and Leerie’s latest exploit, does not concern the story. It is enough to say that tongues wagged abundantly; and when Sheila appeared some ten days later in the pine grove wheeling a perambulator everyone who was out and could manufacture the flimsiest excuse for her curiosity hurried to the carriage and thrust an inquisitive head under the hood. It seemed as if hundreds blocked the walk from the pond to the rest-house.
“Bad as a circus parade,” thought Sheila. “Can’t stay here, or they’ll put us in a tent and ask admission.” Then she spied Hennessy coming with his platter of bread for the swans, and called to him. Somehow he managed to scatter the crowd, and Sheila clung to the sleeve of his blue jumper as if it had been so much cork to a man overboard. “Listen, Hennessy, I want to take Pancho away from the San. You and Marm have a cozy place, and it’s far enough away. There’s only the two of you. Can’t you take us in?”
But Hennessy was likewise thrusting a head under the hood. “Honest to God, Miss Leerie, is it human?”
“Hennessy, don’t be an idiot!”
“But I saw the face on it—an’ the scratchin’ it did the day it was fetched in. Does it still be scratchin’?”
“Sometimes.” Sheila smiled faintly. “Hehasn’t had time yet to forget all those shakings. Well, can we come?”
Hennessy eyed the perambulator fearsomely. “Have to ask Marm. Faith, do ye think, now, if it had been human, its mother would have given it away same as if it had been a young cat or dog too many in the litter?”
“Mothers don’t have to love their babies; there’s no birth license to sign, you know, with a love-and-cherish clause in it. Just come, wanted or not, and afterward—”
But Hennessy was deep in speculations of his own. “Now if it was Ireland, Miss Leerie, do ye know what I would be thinkin’?”
“What?”
He lowered his voice and looked furtively over his shoulder. “A changeling! Sure as you’re born, Miss Leerie, I’m thinkin’ it’s one o’ them little black imps the fairies leave in place o’ the real child they’re after stealin’. I disremember if they have the likes o’ that in South America, but that’s my notion, just the same.”
Sheila O’Leary laughed inside and out. “Hennessy, you’re wonderful. And who but an Irishman would have thought of it!A changeling—a most changeable changeling! What’s the treatment?”
“A good brewin’ of egg-shells—goose egg-shells if ye have ’em, hens’ if ye haven’t. But don’t ye be laughin’; ’tis a sign o’ black doin’s, an’ laughin’ might bring bad luck on ye.”
Sheila sobered. “We’ll brew egg-shells. Now hurry home to Marm and coax her hard, Hennessy.”
Because Sheila O’Leary invariably had her way among the many who loved and believed in her, and because Hennessy and Marm Hennessy were numbered conspicuously among these, Sheila and her adopted moved early the following morning into the diminutive and immaculate house of Hennessy, with a vine-covered porch in front and a hen-yard in the rear. And that night there was a plentiful brew of egg-shells on the kitchen stove, done in the most approved Irish fashion, with the atom near by to inhale the fumes.
“Maybe ’twill work, an’ then again maybe ’twon’t.” Hennessy looked anxious. “Magic, like anything else, often spoils in transportatin’.”
“Oh, it will work!” Sheila spoke with conviction. “And we’ll hope the señora’s letter won’t travel too fast.”
So the names of Sheila O’Leary and Francisco Enrique Manuel Machado y Rodriguez were crossed off the books of the sanitarium, and the gossips saw them no more. Only Doctor Fuller and Peter Brooks sought them out in their new quarters, the doctor to attend professionally, Peter to attend to the dictates of a persistent heart. Never a day went by that he did not find his feet trailing the dust on the road to the house of Hennessy, and Sheila dropped into the habit of watching for him from the vine-covered porch at a certain time every afternoon. The picture of the best nurse at the sanitarium sitting in a little old rocker with the brown atom kicking and crowing on her lap, and looking down the steps with eyes that seemed to grow daily more luminous, came to be an accepted reality to both Peter and the doctor—as much of a reality as the reaching out of the atom’s small tendril-like fingers to curl about one’s thumb or to cling to one’s watch-charm.
“Loving little cuss,” muttered Peter one afternoon. “Can you tell me how anymother under the sun could resist those eyes or the clutch of those brown paws?”
“Don’t forget one point,” Sheila spoke quietly; “he wasn’t a loving little cuss then.”
“He’ll go down on the books as my pet case,” chuckled the doctor. “Four pounds in four weeks! Think of it, on a whole-milk formula!”
Hennessy wagged his head knowingly at Sheila, and when they had gone he snorted forth his contempt for professional ignorance. “Milk! Fiddlesticks! Sure a docthor don’t know everything. ’Twas the egg-shells that done it, an’ Marm an’ me can bear witness he quit the scratchin’ an’ began the smilin’ from that very hour. Look at him now! Can ye deny it, Miss Leerie?”
“I’m not wanting to, Hennessy.” Whereupon Sheila proved the matter by reducing the atom to squeals of joy while she retold the old history of the pigs with the aid of five little brown toes.
Between Peter and Hennessy, Sheila came into possession of many facts concerning the señora. Her dresses and her jewels were the talk of the sanitarium. She applied herself diligently to all beautifying treatments andthe charming of susceptible young men. Presumably life to her meant only a continuous process of adorning herself and receiving admiration. So she spent her days dressing and basking in the company of a dozen different swains, and the atom cast no annoying shadow on her pathway.
August came, and the atom discovered his legs. Sheila disregarded the lace and ribbons with a sigh of relief and took to making rompers. They were adorable rompers with smocking and the palest of pink collars and belts. The licorice sticks had changed to a rich olive brown and had assumed sufficient rotundity to allow of pink-and-white socks and white ankle-ties. In all the busy years of her nursing Sheila had never had time for anything like this; she had never had a baby for longer than a week or two at a time. Just as she was beginning to feel her individual share in them they had all gone the way of properly parented offspring, and never had she sewed a single baby dress. She gloried in the lengths of dimity and poplin, in the intricacies of new stitches and embroidery. And Peter, watching from a step on the porch, gloried in the picture she made.
When a romper was finished it had to be tried on that very minute. She would whisk up the atom from the hammock where he lay kicking, and slip him into it, holding him high for Peter to admire.
“He’s a cherub done in bronze,” said Peter, one day. “Here, give him to me.” And later, as he perched him on his shoulder and tickled his ribs until he squirmed with glee he announced, “If I wasn’t a homeless bachelor I’d take him off your hands in about two minutes.”
“What’s that?” shouted Doctor Fuller, coming down the street. “Did you say anything about re-adoption? Well, you might as well know now that Mrs. Fuller and I intend taking Pancho off Leerie’s hands as soon as she’s ready to go back to work again. Aren’t you getting lazy, Leerie?”
For once Sheila failed to respond in kind to the doctor’s chaffing. All the shine faded out of her eyes. “Can’t believe two months have gone—a month for a letter to go, a month for an answer to come. I’m afraid none of us will keep him very much longer.”
“Don’t worry, they won’t want him back.Besides, they’ve forfeited their right to him,” the old doctor snorted, indignantly.