CHAPTER X.

LEARNING LIFE.

Jessica opened her eyes from a strangely pleasant dream. Angels had been hovering around her, as it seemed; but, oddly enough, they had not worn the traditional feathers and wings. Some of them were all in white, with white caps on their heads, and some were clad in blue like the sky from which they must have come. Presently, one of the white angels bade a blue one:

“Hold that cup to her lips. She is reviving.”

When the cup was held, “Little Captain” obediently drank its contents, which proved to be something warm and soothing. Then she drifted away again into a sleep that was dreamless, this time; and from which she again awoke to realize completely what had happened and in what sort of place she was.

The “white angel” was a “head-nurse.” The blue one an undergraduate. She recognized the hospital uniforms from those she had seen in Los Angeles, while Ephraim lay recovering from his broken limb. She was in the children’s ward. Rows of white beds lined each side of the long room, and on each bed rested a child. On the very next cot to her own, with some doctors and more nurses fussing about it, was Sophy Nestor. She heard one of these saying:

“That is quite curable. It would be a most interesting case. After she recovers from this shock I’ll investigate.”

Then that doctor went away and the rest soon followed him, leaving only a sweet-faced woman in blue hovering between the two cots, whereon lay these last “emergency” cases. To her Jessica spoke:

“Is Sophy awake?”

“She is waking. Try not to frighten nor disturb her. How are you feeling?”

“All right. I want to get up and go home. Oh! I forgot! I haven’t any now, but go to my Cousin Margaret, wherever she is. She must be somewhere!”

“Don’t excite yourself, dear. You shall go soon, for you’ve had a wonderful escape. Do you suffer at all?”

“Some. My hands, my face are smarty and queer. But--did Sophy get burned instead? Oh! she was so good! So strong I couldn’t make her stop hiding me with her own self, though I tried and tried. Until it got so hot and I--I couldn’t think right. The darling girl! She--Why! What makes her lie that way on her face?” demanded Jessica, rising on her elbow and staring across to the other limp little figure whose hump protruded under the light bed-covering.

The nurse knew it was better to appease one patient’s curiosity than to arouse the other, more badly injured one.

“Lie still and I will tell you. She is a heroine. Her back is rather badly scorched and burned, but not fatally so. It has been carefully dressed and it is more comfortable for her to rest as she is doing now than to lie in a more natural position. She was a brave little creature and, practically, saved your life. Try to help her get well by keeping very quiet.”

In ordinary, Jessica was not a crying girl, but the tears chased themselves now down her own cheeks, white with applications to relieve that “smarting” to which she had acknowledged but that already, in view of Sophy’s greater hurt, seemed absurdly trivial.

Nor did the wise attendant try to stop this flood, a sure relief to startled nerves and grieving heart. But after a brief time Jessica ceased weeping and whispered:

“Do you know where my folks are?”

“There’s an old man in the waiting-room who came with you. He is almost wild with anxiety and, if the head-nurse allows, I will bring him in to see you for a moment. On condition that you will not excite yourself nor the other child.”

“Oh! I will be as quiet as quiet! It’s Ephy! I’m sure it’s my darling ‘Forty-niner!’ Fetch him, please, right quick! I’ll be as good as you want, only let him come.”

He came, half-blinded by his grateful tears, as he bent above this darling of his old age, too thankful toward Heaven for speech, and only able to clasp and unclasp her small hands in his own trembling ones, till she asked in a whisper:

“Where is my Cousin Margaret?”

“I--I don’t exactly know. Some hotel, Tipkins was taking her. I’ll seek her now and tell her the good news. Oh! my lamb, my lamb!”

“There, Ephy, dear! Be good. Now go and tell her I’m all right and tell her, too, how splendid Sophy Nestor was. She covered me with her own self so that I should not be burned,--she would rather be herself! Go tell her, tell her quick! She thought Sophy wasn’t--a Waldron, but, Ephy dear! She is more Waldron-y than any of us! Go tell her, and come back soon. I guess I can be ‘discharged,’ maybe right away. I’m not the hurt one, only Sophy. And I’ll stay just long enough to make her feel how splendid a place a hospital really is and not that dreadful one she used to think.”

Indeed, he had to go. He had stayed as long as the nurse thought wise, but it was a far different old man who left that house of mercy from him who had entered it, believing his darling done to death.

By the very next morning Jessica was up and dressed; her scorched clothing replaced by an outfit Madam had promptly sent, with the request that the little girl be taken to her at her hotel as soon as the authorities deemed it safe. That, they decided, might be almost at once. The hospital was overcrowded, there was no room for those who did not really need attention, and Jessica’s healthy frame had promptly recovered from the shock of her frightful experience. There remained only the bit of talk that was to be allowed between her and her rescuer. Sitting with her own blistered hands resting on that part of Sophy’s body which was least covered by bandages, Jessica said:

“I’ve got to go away now, darling, but I shall come back. You’re going to get well right soon, the doctors say, and oh! Sophy, I heard one of them say, too, that your back could be made as straight as mine! Think of that! Never to have to be afraid of people looking at you, never to be weak and tired there, any more! Oh! aren’t you glad you came? It isn’t a real hunchback, you know; only you were let to fall when you were little and got twisted somehow. I think it’s like a fairy story. Anyhow, it’s just what my darling mother says: ‘Life is a chain.’ One thing after another form the links of it and none of them happen except God wills. I don’t see why He willed that my Cousin Margaret should lose her beautiful old home that seemed more to her than anything in this world. All her pretty clothes and old, old ‘antiques,’ and just had her life saved. Why, it seems as if all those hunting people on that carpet in the back drawing-room must have felt the flames and suffered!

“Never mind. That’s past. What she will do next I don’t know; only this I’m sure of, she’ll let me come to see you every day; and maybe--maybe, she’ll come, too. Now, I’m going. Ephraim is here with the carriage and I must. If you’d like it better, maybe my Cousin Margaret will let me pay for having you in a ‘private’ room away from----”

“No, no, no! I don’t want to be private! I want to feel there are heaps and slathers of folks all around me, just as there used to be in Aveny A. I’d die to be alone with nobody but them doctors waitin’ to cut me up.”

“Now, Sophy Nestor, you quit that! I’ve told you before that you didn’t know a thing about hospitals. I do. I’ve lived in one once, away home in California. They’re the blessedest places are. Your Granny Briggs is coming to see you this morning. Ephraim is to fetch her in the carriage, after he takes me to my old lady first. Isn’t that funny? Each of us has our own old lady that we think is the nicest in the world! Now, I’m going. Hear me say! Before you’ve been in this pleasant place even another day you’ll think it’s just as nice as I do. See if you don’t. Now, good-by. I can’t begin to thank you. Words couldn’t do it. Maybe deeds can, and I’ll try _them_. Good-by. Try to be happy and you’ll get well quick. Good-by, good-by!”

Jessica found her Cousin Margaret deep in consultation with Madam Melanie and that other dressmaker from the side street. But the Madam instantly ceased speaking to these waiting modistes, to clasp the girl in her arms and to hold her close, close. In that one firm embrace was a world of meaning, from this undemonstrative old dame. Then she released the child, merely retaining one small hand in her own, while she continued her conference concerning the replenishing of the wardrobes so completely destroyed by fire. Neither she nor Jessica had anything left save what they had escaped in; and the simple ready-made suit purchased to leave the hospital in that morning.

The discussion was short. Both these women who had charge of Mrs. Dalrymple’s attire knew readily what she would require and undertook that part of the order should be put into the “hurry” department, and be forthcoming almost immediately. That business over, they departed and the two descendants of the race of Waldron were left to themselves, the younger of them scarcely daring to look at the elder, dreading her distress. She need not have feared, in the least.

“Well, my dear, this is unexpected, indeed. But we are very comfortable here until we can get away out of town. We will go as soon as possible. As soon as we have clothes fit to go in. It’s early for Newport but I think we’d better settle there at once. I’ve been looking over an agent’s list of furnished ‘cottages’ and fancy one of them will do. I must send for my man of business first. I think it rather strange he has not already called upon me.”

Madam had taken one of the prettiest suites in the hotel, with its comfortable privacy, and already seemed so much at home and so outwardly content that Jessica wondered. Only for a moment, when a servant came to announce a caller, did a spasm of pain cross the fine old features, and give a touch of sharpness to the quiet voice, as she repeated:

“I have already given orders that I can receive no visitors at present. Kindly see that these orders are attended to.”

Then Jessica was bidden to relate again the story Madam had already learned from other lips and the girl was delighted to hear her kinswoman announce:

“I will make my first call upon that child, Sophy. We must befriend her. Mr. Hale has been here and has telegraphed your mother of--of everything. Now, my dear, hand me the morning paper; and make your own self comfortable. If you wish to write to your mother, there are the materials on that desk in the corner.”

So Jessica wrote:

“MY DEAREST MOTHER:

“I am alive. That’s about the first thing I can think to say. So is our Cousin Margaret. So is everybody else. It was all Barnes’s fault. She said so herself. She used benzine, that seems to be a catchy sort of stuff, and a match near it and first she knew the flames were so big she couldn’t stop them. She tried. Ephraim told me. She hasn’t been near since and never will, but he saw her on the street outside the hospital where they took Sophy and me, ’cause she was afraid that her carelessness had made her a murderer as well as a house-burner. She said she would have been a murderer if I had died, or Sophy, but we didn’t and she isn’t. I hope I will never see her again, now, because she would always make me feel angry for my Cousin Margaret.

“O mother dear! I think she is the wonderfullest woman ever could be! I know and you know that she loved the home in Washington Square beyond words, ’cause though it was all tumbling to pieces in spots and the things inside were getting so worn-out, she wouldn’t sell it even for heaps and heaps of money. I know her heart is just broken inside of her but the break doesn’t show on the outside, in her face, not the least littlest bit. She sits just as proud in her old ‘comfy’ wrapper as she used to in her beautifullest silk gown. Once I tried to say something nice to her, to sort of comfort her if I could, and she just looked at me so queer. ‘My dear, spare me. A Waldron never whines, but accepts what comes of either good or ill, as it is meant and sent.’ I’m so glad she doesn’t whine, nor complain. Granny Briggs does. Granny isn’t a bit Waldron-y, though Sophy is--even more than anybody I know. I think it must be the highest kind of aristocracy to be willing to give up one’s life to save another’s, and that’s what Sophy was. Oh! I love her, I love her!

“My Cousin Margaret is going to the hospital to visit Sophy the very first place she does go after her clothes come. Till then she stays in her rooms, there are several of them, and denies herself to everybody who comes. She’s had lots and lots of calls and offers of a temporary home but she doesn’t accept. She doesn’t need, she says; yet if she did she _would_ accept very gratefully. Hasn’t she the realest, best kind of pride? Oh! I should like to be just like her, when I am old, only not so fond of putting on new clothes all the time. I heard one the bell-boys tell another that she was: ‘The great Madam Dalrymple, the highest-up there was in the world of fashion. That it was a prestige for this hotel to have her live here so soon after the accident, and would bring other patrons.’

“Cousin Margaret is going to take a cottage at Newport. That is a place by the sea, if you don’t know. She says it will be a big house with every ‘convenience’ in it, so I don’t see why they call it a ‘cottage.’ Cottages in California are so small and haven’t many rooms in them. Never mind. I’m learning things all the time that astonish me. I guess my education has begun already. I remember that Mr. Ninian said that ‘Education meant learning how to live, to get the best out of life.’ Seems if our Cousin Margaret has got a good deal of the best, since she can stand such an awful sorrow as losing her home and not ‘whine’ once.

“She seems more disturbed because her ‘man of business’ hasn’t called than by anything else. She hasn’t any money, course, just getting out of a burning house that way, not until he comes and brings her some. She has lots of what she calls ‘credit’ and the hotel folks are terrible polite to her, but she’d rather have the ‘cash in hand’ to pay in advance. She has never run in debt in her life. She says that is very ‘plebeian’ and she dislikes plebeian-y things. She sent Tipkins after that ‘man of business’ and he couldn’t get in. He said the bank-office was closed and nobody answered. There were a lot of folks standing around outside the office and he said maybe they had scared the man of business by a ‘run’ on the bank. He must be a funny kind of a man that would be scared by a few folks just running!

“Now I must stop for a few minutes. If there’s anything more to tell, after we’ve had the dinner the waiter is bringing, I’ll write it then. I’m so glad Mr. Hale telegraphed you, so you wouldn’t worry, after reading about the fire in the telegraphic column of the paper. Mr. Hale said that bad news traveled so fast that good news had to hurry up and catch it. He is such a nice man. He is going to bring his daughters to see me, soon as they are out of school for the year.

“Good-by, for a little while, “JESSICA.”

The letter was to be resumed and a most important postscript added. As the girl left the desk, eager for the tempting dinner being brought into the room and feeling her blistered fingers sadly painful from her writing, she was startled by the expression of Madam Dalrymple’s face.

The lady’s eyes were closed, she was very pale, the newspaper she had been reading had fallen from her nerveless fingers to the floor, and she looked as if, at last, the full force of the calamity that had befallen had crushed her beneath its weight. She neither saw nor heard the entrance of the waiter with his tray nor when Jessica anxiously demanded: “Oh! what is the matter?” did she answer.