Chapter 8

"A wicked giant, seeking whom I may devour and carrying off lovely girls for dinner under pretence of marriage----" He stopped his nonsense abruptly, having got so far, and both of them coloured. Thrashing about desperately for something to break the wretched silence, he seized on the one thing that in those days of his convalescence was always pertinent--food. "Speaking of dinner," he said hastily, "isn't it time for some buttermilk?"

She was quite calm when she came back--cool, even smiling; but Billy Grant had not had the safety valve of action. As she placed the glass on the table at his elbow he reached out and took her hand.

"Can you ever forgive me?" he asked. Not an original speech; the usual question of the marauding male, a query after the fact and too late for anything but forgiveness.

"Forgive you? For not dying?"

She was pale; but no more subterfuge now, no more turning aside from dangerous subjects. The matter was up before the house.

"For marrying you!" said Billy Grant, and upset the buttermilk. It took a little time to wipe up the floor and to put a clean cover on the stand, and after that to bring a fresh glass and place it on the table. But these were merely parliamentary preliminaries while each side got its forces in line.

"Do you hate me very much?" opened Billy Grant. This was, to change the figure, a blow below the belt.

"Why should I hate you?" countered the other side.

"I should think you would. I forced the thing on you."

"I need not have done it."

"But being you, and always thinking about making some one else happy and comfortable----"

"Oh, if only they don't find it out over there!" she burst out. "If they do and I have to leave, with Jim----"

Here, realising that she was going to cry and not caring to screw up her face before any one, she put her arms on the stand and buried her face in them. Her stiff tulle cap almost touched Billy Grant's arm.

Billy Grant had a shocked second.

"Jim?"

"My little brother," from the table.

Billy Grant drew a long breath of relief. For a moment he had thought----

"I wonder--whether I dare to say something to you." Silence from the table and presumably consent. "Isn't he--don't you think that--I might be allowed to--to help Jim? It would help me to like myself again. Just now I'm not standing very high with myself."

"Won't you tell me why you did it?" she said, suddenly sitting up, her arms still out before her on the table. "Why did you coax so? You said it was because of a little property you had, but--that wasn't it--was it?"

"No."

"Or because you cared a snap for me." This was affirmation, not question.

"No, not that, though I----"

She gave a hopeless little gesture of despair.

"Then--why? Why?"

"For one of the meanest reasons I know--to be even with some people who had treated me badly."

The thing was easier now. His flat denial of any sentimental reason had helped to make it so.

"A girl that you cared about?"

"Partly that. The girl was a poor thing. She didn't care enough to be hurt by anything I did. But the people who made the trouble----"

Now a curious thing happened. Billy Grant found at this moment that he no longer hated the Lindley Grants. The discovery left him speechless--that he who had taken his hate into the very valley of death with him should now find himself thinking of both Lindley and his wife with nothing more bitter than contempt shocked him. A state of affairs existed for which his hatred of the Lindley Grants was alone responsible; now the hate was gone and the state of affairs persisted.

"I should like," said Billy Grant presently, "to tell you a little--if it will not bore you--about myself and the things I have done that I shouldn't, and about the girl. And of course, you know, I'm--I'm not going to hold you to--to the thing I forced you into. There are ways to fix that."

Before she would listen, however, she must take his temperature and give him his medicine, and see that he drank his buttermilk--the buttermilk last, so as not to chill his mouth for the thermometer. The tired lines had gone from under her eyes and she was very lovely that day. She had always been lovely, even when the Staff Doctor had slapped her between the shoulders long ago--you know about that--only Billy Grant had never noticed it; but to-day, sitting there with the thermometer in his mouth while she counted his respirations, pretending to be looking out the window while she did it, Billy Grant saw how sweet and lovely and in every way adorable she was, in spite of the sad droop of her lips--and found it hard to say the thing he felt he must.

"After all," he remarked round the thermometer, "the thing is not irrevocable. I can fix it up so that----"

"Keep your lips closed about the thermometer!" she said sternly, and snapped her watch shut.

The pulse and so on having been recorded, and "Very hungry" put down under Symptoms, she came back to her chair by the window, facing him. She sat down primly and smoothed her white apron in her lap.

"Now!" she said.

"I am to go on?"

"Yes, please."

"If you are going to change the pillows or the screen, or give me any other diabolical truck to swallow," he said somewhat peevishly, "will you get it over now, so we can have five unprofessional minutes?"

"Certainly," she said; and bringing an extra blanket she spread it, to his disgust, over his knees.

This time, when she sat down, one of her hands lay on the table near him and he reached over and covered it with his.

"Please!" he begged. "For company! And it will help me to tell you some of the things I have to tell."

She left it there, after an uneasy stirring. So, sitting there, looking out into the dusty courtyard with its bandaged figures in wheeled chairs, its cripples sunning on a bench--their crutches beside them--its waterless fountain and its dingy birds, he told her about the girl and the Lindley Grants, and even about the cabman and the ring. And feeling, perhaps in some current from the small hand under his, that she was knowing and understanding and not turning away, he told her a great deal he had not meant to tell--ugly things, many of them--for that was his creed.

And, because in a hospital one lives many lives vicariously with many people, what the girl back home would never have understood this girl did and faced unabashed. Life, as she knew it, was not all good and not all bad; passion and tenderness, violence and peace, joy and wretchedness, birth and death--these she had looked on, all of them, with clear eyes and hands ready to help.

So Billy Grant laid the good and the bad of his life before her, knowing that he was burying it with her. When he finished, her hand on the table had turned and was clasping his. He bent over and kissed her fingers softly.

After that she read to him, and their talk, if any, was impersonal. When the orderly had put him back to bed he lay watching her moving about, rejoicing in her quiet strength, her repose. How well she was taking it all! If only--but there was no hope of that. She could go to Reno, and in a few months she would be free again and the thing would be as if it had never been.

At nine o'clock that night the isolation pavilion was ready for the night. The lights in the sickroom were out. In the hall a nightlight burned low, Billy Grant was not asleep. He tried counting the lighted windows of the hospital and grew only more wakeful.

The Nurse was sleeping now in her own room across, with the doors open between. The slightest movement and she was up, tiptoeing in, with her hair in a long braid down her back and her wrapper sleeves falling away loosely from her white, young arms. So, aching with inaction, Billy Grant lay still until the silence across indicated that she was sleeping.

Then he got up. This is a matter of difficulty when one is still very weak, and is achieved by rising first into a sitting posture by pulling oneself up by the bars of the bed, and then by slipping first one leg, then the other, over the side. Properly done, even the weakest thus find themselves in a position that by the aid of a chairback may become, however shaky, a standing one.

He got to his feet better than he expected, but not well enough to relinquish the chair. He had made no sound. That was good. He would tell her in the morning and rally her on her powers as a sleeper. He took a step--if only his knees----

He had advanced into line with the doorway and stood looking through the open door of the room across.

The Nurse was on her knees beside the bed, in her nightgown, crying. Her whole young body was shaken with silent sobs; her arms, in their short white sleeves, stretched across the bed, her fingers clutching the counterpane.

Billy Grant stumbled back to his bed and fell in with a sort of groan. Almost instantly she was at the door, her flannel wrapper held about her, peering into the darkness.

"I thought I heard--are you worse?" she asked anxiously.

"I'm all right," he said, hating himself; "just not sleepy. How about you?"

"Not asleep yet, but--resting," she replied.

She stood in the doorway, dimly outlined, with her long braid over her shoulder and her voice still a little strained from crying. In the darkness Billy Grant half stretched out his arms, then dropped them, ashamed.

"Would you like another blanket?"

"If there is one near."

She came in a moment later with the blanket and spread it over the bed. He lay very still while she patted and smoothed it into place. He was mustering up his courage to ask for something--a curious state of mind for Billy Grant, who had always taken what he wanted without asking.

"I wish you would kiss me--just once!" he said wistfully. And then, seeing her draw back, he took an unfair advantage: "I think that's the reason I'm not sleeping."

"Don't be absurd!"

"Is it so absurd--under the circumstances?"

"You can sleep quite well if you only try."

She went out into the hall again, her chin well up. Then she hesitated, turned and came swiftly back into the room.

"If I do," she said rather breathlessly, "will you go to sleep? And will you promise to hold your arms up over your head?"

"But my arms----"

"Over your head!"

He obeyed at that, and the next moment she had bent over him in the darkness; and quickly, lightly, deliciously, she kissed--the tip of his nose!

IV

She was quite cheerful the next day and entirely composed. Neither of them referred to the episode of the night before, but Billy Grant thought of little else. Early in the morning he asked her to bring him a hand mirror and, surveying his face, tortured and disfigured by the orderly's shaving, suffered an acute wound in his vanity. He was glad it had been dark or she probably would not have---- He borrowed a razor from the interne and proceeded to enjoy himself.

Propped up in his chair, he rioted in lather, sliced a piece out of his right ear, and shaved the back of his neck by touch, in lieu of better treatment. This done, and the ragged and unkempt hair over his ears having been trimmed in scallops, due to the work being done with curved surgical scissors, he was his own man again.

That afternoon, however, he was nervous and restless. The Nurse was troubled. He avoided the subject that had so obsessed him the day before, was absent and irritable, could not eat, and sat in his chair by the window, nervously clasping and unclasping his hands.

The Nurse was puzzled, but the Staff Doctor, making rounds that day, enlightened her.

"He has pulled through--God and you alone know how," he said. "But as soon as he begins to get his strength he's going to yell for liquor again. When a man has been soaking up alcohol for years---- Drat this hospital cooking anyhow! Have you got any essence of pepsin?"

The Nurse brought the pepsin and a medicine glass and the Staff Doctor swallowed and grimaced.

"You were saying," said the Nurse timidly--for, the stress being over, he was Staff again and she was a Junior and not even entitled to a Senior's privileges, such as returning occasional badinage.

"Every atom of him is going to crave it. He's wanting it now. He has been used to it for years." The Nurse was white to the lips, but steady. "He is not to have it?"

"Not a drop while he is here. When he gets out it is his own affair again, but while he's here--by-the-way, you'll have to watch the orderly. He'll bribe him."

"I don't think so, doctor. He is a gentleman."

"Pooh! Of course he is. I dare say he's a gentleman when he's drunk too; but he's a drinker--a habitual drinker."

The Nurse went back into the room and found Billy Grant sitting in a chair, with the book he had been reading on the floor and his face buried in his hands.

"I'm awfuly sorry!" he said, not looking up. "I heard what he said. He's right, you know."

"I'm sorry. And I'm afraid this is a place where I cannot help."

She put her hand on his head, and he brought it down and held it between his.

"Two or three times," he said, "when things were very bad with me, you let me hold your hand, and we got past somehow--didn't we?"

She closed her eyes, remembering the dawn when, to soothe a dying man, in the presence of the mission preacher, she had put her hand in his. Billy Grant thought of it too.

"Now you know what you've married," he said bitterly. The bitterness was at himself of course. "If--if you'll sit tight I have a fighting chance to make a man of myself; and after it's over we'll fix this thing for you so you will forget it ever happened. And I---- Don't take your hand away. Please!"

"I was feeling for my handkerchief," she explained.

"Have I made you cry again?"

"Again?'

"I saw you last night in your room. I didn't intend to; but I was trying to stand, and----"

She was very dignified at this, with her eyes still wet, and tried unsuccessfully to take her hand away.

"If you are going to get up when it is forbidden I shall ask to be relieved."

"You wouldn't do that!"

"Let go of my hand."

"You wouldn't do that!!"

"Please! The head nurse is coming."

He freed her hand then and she wiped her eyes, remembering the "perfect, silent, reliable, fearless, emotionless machine."

The head of the training school came to the door of the pavilion, but did not enter. The reason for this was twofold: first, she had confidence in the Nurse; second, she was afraid of contagion--this latter, of course, quite _sub rosa_, in view of the above quotation.

The Head Nurse was a tall woman in white, and was so starchy that she rattled like a newspaper when she walked.

"Good morning," she said briskly. "Have you sent over the soiled clothes?" Head nurses are always bothering about soiled clothes; and what becomes of all the nailbrushes, and how can they use so many bandages.

"Yes, Miss Smith."

"Meals come over promptly?"

"Yes, Miss Smith."

"Getting any sleep?"

"Oh, yes, plenty--now."

Miss Smith peered into the hallway, which seemed tidy, looked at the Nurse with approval, and then from the doorstep into the patient's room, where Billy Grant sat. At the sight of him her eyebrows rose.

"Good gracious!" she exclaimed. "I thought he was older than that!"

"Twenty-nine," said the Nurse; "twenty-nine last Fourth of July."

"H'm!" commented the Head Nurse. "You evidently know! I had no idea you were taking care of a boy. It won't do. I'll send over Miss Hart."

The Nurse tried to visualise Billy Grant in his times of stress clutching at Miss Hart's hand, and failed.

"Jenks is here, of course," she said, Jenks being the orderly.

The idea of Jenks as a chaperon, however, did not appeal to the head nurse. She took another glance through the window at Billy Grant, looking uncommonly handsome and quite ten years younger since the shave, and she set her lips.

"I am astonished beyond measure," she said. "Miss Hart will relieve you at two o'clock. Take your antiseptic bath and you may have the afternoon to yourself. Report in L Ward in the morning."

Miss Smith rattled back across the courtyard and the Nurse stood watching her; then turned slowly and went into the house to tell Billy Grant.

Now the stories about what followed differ. They agree on one point: that Billy Grant had a heart-to-heart talk with the substitute at two o'clock that afternoon and told her politely but firmly that he would none of her. Here the divergence begins. Some say he got the superintendent over the house telephone and said he had intended to make a large gift to the hospital, but if his comfort was so little considered as to change nurses just when he had got used to one, he would have to alter his plans. Another and more likely story, because it sounds more like Billy Grant, is that at five o'clock a florist's boy delivered to Miss Smith a box of orchids such as never had been seen before in the house, and a card inside which said: "Please, dear Miss Smith, take back the Hart that thou gavest."

Whatever really happened--and only Billy Grant and the lady in question ever really knew--that night at eight o'clock, with Billy Grant sitting glumly in his room and Miss Hart studying typhoid fever in the hall, the Nurse came back again to the pavilion with her soft hair flying from its afternoon washing and her eyes shining. And things went on as before--not quite as before; for with the nurse question settled the craving got in its work again, and the next week was a bad one. There were good days, when he taught her double-dummy auction bridge, followed by terrible nights, when he walked the floor for hours and she sat by, unable to help. Then at dawn he would send her to bed remorsefully and take up the fight alone. And there were quiet nights when both slept and when he would waken to the craving again and fight all day.

"I'm afraid I'm about killing her," he said to the Staff Doctor one day; "but it's my chance to make a man of myself--now or never."

The Staff Doctor was no fool and he had heard about the orchids.

"Fight it out, boy!" he said. "Pretty soon you'll quit peeling and cease being a menace to the public health, and you'd better get it over before you are free again."

So, after a time, it grew a little easier. Grant was pretty much himself again--had put on a little flesh and could feel his biceps rise under his fingers. He took to cold plunges when he felt the craving coming on, and there were days when the little pavilion was full of the sound of running water. He shaved himself daily, too, and sent out for some collars.

Between the two of them, since her return, there had been much of good fellowship, nothing of sentiment. He wanted her near, but he did not put a hand on her. In the strain of those few days the strange, grey dawn seemed to have faded into its own mists. Only once, when she had brought his breakfast tray and was arranging the dishes for him--against his protest, for he disliked being waited on--he reached over and touched a plain band ring she wore. She coloured.

"My mother's," she said; "her wedding ring."

Their eyes met across the tray, but he only said, after a moment: "Eggs like a rock, of course! Couldn't we get 'em raw and boil them over here?"

It was that morning, also, that he suggested a thing which had been in his mind for some time.

"Wouldn't it be possible," he asked, "to bring your tray in here and to eat together? It would be more sociable."

She smiled.

"It isn't permitted."

"Do you think--would another box of orchids----"

She shook her head as she poured out his coffee. "I should probably be expelled."

He was greatly aggrieved.

"That's all foolishness," he said. "How is that any worse--any more unconventional--than your bringing me your extra blanket on a cold night? Oh, I heard you last night!"

"Then why didn't you leave it on?"

"And let you freeze?"

"I was quite warm. As it was, it lay in the hallway all night and did no one any good."

Having got thus far from wedding rings, he did not try to get back. He ate alone, and after breakfast, while she took her half-hour of exercise outside the window, he sat inside reading--only apparently reading, however.

Once she went quite as far as the gate and stood looking out.

"Jenks!" called Billy Grant.

Jenks has not entered into the story much. He was a little man, rather fat, who occupied a tiny room in the pavilion, carried meals and soiled clothes, had sat on Billy Grant's chest once or twice during a delirium, and kept a bottle locked in the dish closet.

"Yes, sir," said Jenks, coming behind a strong odour of _spiritus frumenti_.

"Jenks," said Billy Grant with an eye on the figure at the gate, "is that bottle of yours empty?"

"What bottle?"

"The one in the closet."

Jenks eyed Billy Grant, and Billy eyed Jenks--a look of man to man, brother to brother.

"Not quite, sir--a nip or two."

"At," suggested Billy Grant, "say--five dollars a nip?"

Jenks smiled.

"About that," he said. "Filled?"

Billy Grant debated. The Nurse was turning at the gate.

"No," he said. "As it is, Jenks. Bring it here."

Jenks brought the bottle and a glass, but the glass was motioned away. Billy Grant took the bottle in his hand and looked at it with a curious expression. Then he went over and put it in the upper bureau drawer, under a pile of handkerchiefs. Jenks watched him, bewildered.

"Just a little experiment, Jenks," said Billy Grant.

Jenks understood then and stopped smiling.

"I wouldn't, Mr. Grant," he said; "it will only make you lose confidence in yourself when it doesn't work out."

"But it's going to work out," said Billy Grant. "Would you mind turning on the cold water?"

Now the next twenty-four hours puzzled the Nurse. When Billy Grant's eyes were not on her with an unfathomable expression in them, they were fixed on something in the neighbourhood of the dresser, and at these times they had a curious, fixed look not unmixed with triumph. She tried a new arrangement of combs and brushes and tilted the mirror at a different angle, without effect.

That day Billy Grant took only one cold plunge. As the hours wore on he grew more cheerful; the look of triumph was unmistakable. He stared less at the dresser and more at the Nurse. At last it grew unendurable. She stopped in front of him and looked down at him severely. She could only be severe when he was sitting--when he was standing she had to look so far up at him, even when she stood on her tiptoes.

"What is wrong with me?" she demanded. "You look so queer! Is my cap crooked?"

"It is a wonderful cap."

"Is my face dirty?"

"It is a won---- No, certainly not."

"Then would you mind not staring so? You--upset me."

"I shall have to shut my eyes," he replied meekly, and worried her into a state of frenzy by sitting for fifty minutes with his head back and his eyes shut.

So--the evening and the morning were another day, and the bottle lay undisturbed under the handkerchiefs, and the cold shower ceased running, and Billy Grant assumed the air of triumph permanently. That morning when the breakfast trays came he walked over into the Nurse's room and picked hers up, table and all, carrying it across the hall. In his own room he arranged the two trays side by side, and two chairs opposite each other. When the Nurse, who had been putting breadcrumbs on the window-sill, turned round Billy Grant was waiting to draw out one of the chairs, and there was something in his face she had not seen there before.

"Shall we breakfast?" he said.

"I told you yesterday----"

"Think a minute," he said softly. "Is there any reason why we should not breakfast together?" She pressed her hands close together, but she did not speak. "Unless--you do not wish to."

"You remember you promised, as soon as you got away, to--fix that----"

"So I will if you say the word."

"And--to forget all about it."

"That," said Billy Grant solemnly, "I shall never do so long as I live. Do you say the word?"

"What else can I do?"

"Then there is somebody else?"

"Oh, no!"

He took a step toward her, but still he did not touch her.