XXII
WHEN Emily got out of the frowzy day coach in which she had made the last stage of her long journey from Washington and glanced along the station platform, a sense of her loneliness, made more acute because the ugly scene was otherwise homelike and familiar, rolled over her. She had wired Doctor Larkin from Olney, where she had left the St. Louis sleeper, but no one was there to meet her, not even old Jasper. She gasped at this last of all the evil portents of the twenty-four hours that had dragged by like so many weeks since she bade Jerome good by in Washington—her father must be worse, they could not leave him.
The night was cold, with a dampness that pierced her marrow, after the foul atmosphere of the overheated car. It had been snowing; some of the heavy saturated flakes lay in patches, but now a fine mist was falling, and the greasy boards of the station platform shone in all the reflected lights of the tired and panting train. With the weary nurse and the healthy baby that slept through all these trials in which it was not as yet his lot to share, she clambered into the old hack that always stood there, and there was something of a welcome in the face of the driver as he held the door a moment to inquire:
“To Mr. Harkness’s, ma’am?”
He slammed the door and they rattled away. She was glad that he had spoken of her father as one still alive, and all the way home, as they went lurching and splashing through the December mud that mired the streets, she built her hopes upon this little omen.
The old house was dark, and the trees in the yard stirred mournfully in the winds that were creeping up from the west. One dim light shone normally in the hall, but another, unusual and sinister, shone in the room above—her father’s room. The window was closed—she was glad of that. Both of the lights were so dim that they seemed only to point the gloom that had settled stilly on the whole place.
The doctor, coming forward with the soft tread and monitory finger of the sick room, met her in the hall. She rushed to him, and seized his hand.
“He’s alive?”
The doctor smiled with professional reassurance.
“Yes, he’s better this evening. I’ve told him you were coming.”
Tears came into her eyes and moistened the veil she hurriedly unwound. She tore off her wraps, and laid her hat on the hall tree. She rubbed her palms briskly together, pressed her fingers to her hair and her temples, and then:
“I’ll go to him at once.”
She started for the stairs, but paused there, leaning wearily on the baluster.
“What is it, Doctor, tell me?”
“Well,” the medical man said, “a general collapse. He was out Wednesday, and it rained, and he caught cold. Thursday he developed a bad attack of the grippe—and his heart action is weak, you know. He would not give up.”
“No, that was like him,” said Emily, as people always say of their loved ones at such a time, in the effort to recognize their strong qualities ere it be too late.
“He would not give up until Friday, but I made him go to bed then. The next day I feared his lungs were involved—he did not wish me to send for you.”
Emily was blinking back her tears.
“But I thought it best. He will improve now, I am confident, and if we can control the pulmonary difficulty, I am sure of it.”
She had turned and hastily gathering her skirts, ran up the stairs. She hesitated a moment in the doorway of his room, and by the dim light of the tiny star of gas saw the outlines of the form under the white counterpane. She fluttered across to the bed, and sank softly beside him. She laid her hand on his hot dry brow.
“Father—I’ve come.”
The old man stirred and tried to turn his head.
“I’m glad,” he said. “It was a long ways.”
“I’m going to nurse you, and make you well,” she said with a cheer in her voice of which her heart was void.
The doctor pleaded for a trained nurse, but Emily, with the old-fashioned prejudice of women,indignantly refused, as though the mere idea involved some reflection upon her own powers, and her own constancy. For a week she watched by his side, and waited on him, taking his temperature hourly, and keeping a clinical chart like those she had seen in the hospitals, in the old days of her charities, determined that the lack of a trained nurse should not be felt. And then the congestion in his lungs passed, he breathed easily once more, his fever broke, and he lay, weak and faint, but smiling at her.