Part 9

“I sort of think he was a good looking little boy,” she said. “His nose is straight and nice and his mouth could have been real sweet if he hadn’t spoiled it. I shouldn’t wonder a bit if his mother’d been awfully proud of him when she got him all fixed up to go somewhere.”

Her face was wistful, sweet with pity for the little boy of the long ago, whom life had wrecked, and the picture her words had called up made Archibald look at the sick man with kinder eyes.

“Oh, Peg! Peg!” he murmured softly, “what a friend to sinners and weaklings you are!”

“They’ve got to have friends,” said Pegeen.

The doctor came back after a while. The Smiling Lady and Richard Meredith came too, and Mrs. Benderby, after her day of ironing and her three-mile walk home, toiled up the Back Road to see if there was anything she could do to help. Mr. Neal rode over and offered to spend the night, but, in the end, Archibald and the doctor stayed. Pegeen, protesting stoutly, was carried off home by Miss Moran.

“Nothing you could do to-night, Peggy,” said the doctor. “Save your ammunition.”

Life and Death stood beside the bed in the little house on the Back Road that night; but it was Death who turned and went away in the gray of the morning.

“He’ll do now,” said the doctor, “but it was touch and go for a while. The oxygen held him. Sometimes I wonder—”

His strong jaw set once more in fighting grimness— “But it isn’t up to me to wonder. Beating Death, in a catch-as-catch-can, is my end of the job, and I rather think I’ve downed him this time. What life will do with the man is another story.”

“I’d like to help tell the story,”—Archibald had never stood by in such a fight as the doctor had fought that night and the experience had left him with a humble consciousness of his own uselessness, a strong desire to play a manlier part.

Dr. Fullerton looked at him sharply from under heavy eyebrows that gave his face a misleading fierceness.

“Don’t sentimentalize, man,” he said bluntly. “It takes people that way sometimes—running up against Death and barely slamming the door in his face—but don’t imagine the close shave will change Ezra any more than his bath will. He’ll be as mean and as dirty as ever in a few weeks. We’ve done our damnedest for him to-night, but we’re the ones benefited by it. Life’s a doubtful blessing to Ezra. Help him if you want to, but do it with your eyes open and because you want to, not because you expect to reform him. He isn’t the reforming kind.”

Archibald thought his words over after he had gone. Probably they were true—but on their heels came other words. “I believe there’s a decent scrap of Soul hidden away somewhere in Ezra, hidden so deep that he himself doesn’t suspect it’s there,” Nora Moran had said.

“I shouldn’t wonder a bit if his mother had been awfully proud of him.” It was Pegeen who had said that.

Who could tell? One needn’t sentimentalize, but one might as well give a man the benefit of the doubt. That was neighboring.

The nurse from Albany came and ate up the case, according to prophecy, but in a few days she went away to meet direr needs, and then Pegeen’s turn came. She was in her element, and Ezra, a limp edition of his former self, showed a flattering satisfaction in the change from Miss Kirby’s ministrations to Peggy’s. Surliness was as natural to him as breathing and he was no angel patient; but it was quite useless to be surly with Peg. She ignored it, and went her cheerful, tolerant way, coddling, coaxing, encouraging, tyrannizing, amusing, unmoved by stubbornness or rudeness or anger or ingratitude, obeying the doctor’s orders and, where the orders ended, “seeing to” Ezra according to her own ideas of the way the thing should be done.

Archibald, and Miss Moran, and Mrs. Benderby, stayed with her in turn, but the case was hers, and Dr. Fullerton always addressed her as “Nurse O’Neill,” to her profound satisfaction.

Archibald missed her miserably at the shack. Mrs. Benderby was looking after him. She had called the doctor in as he drove by one evening during the first week of Ezra’s illness; and after an examination he had told her kindly but frankly that her days for hard work were over.

“You may live for many years,” he said; “live comfortably, too, but no more washing and ironing and scrubbing, Mrs. Benderby. We’ll have to find something easier for you to do.”

He spoke as though finding it would be the simplest matter imaginable and indeed it proved so; for Archibald, temporarily bereft of Peggy and robbed of self-reliance through many weeks of being “seen to” by that young person, was desperately in need of feminine ministrations.

“Just the thing for you,” the doctor said heartily, as he told Mrs. Benderby of Archibald’s forlorn plight “When Peg gets through with Ezra we’ll have something else for you.” So there were good meals and cleanliness at the shack, but oh, the loneliness of the place! Mrs. Benderby was devoted, she was kind, but she had her limitations. Pegeen, so it seemed to Archibald as he sighed for her, had none. He was lonely without her, infernally lonely, and he told her so. She was distressed about it, but Ezra needed her most and that settled the matter so far as she was concerned.

“I’m homesick. I’m most crazy to go home,” she confessed, “but I wouldn’t for anything. Sometimes I think he most likes me; but he’s dreadfully ashamed of it. He’s dreadfully ashamed of any nice feeling he has. Isn’t that funny? After he says anything pleasant, he swears right off quick for fear you’ll think he meant it. I do wish I could get him used to being nice so it wouldn’t hurt him the way it does.”

Even Pegeen could not quite achieve that—Ezra progressed to the point of being nice occasionally but it always hurt him, and only to Peggy did he even make the concession of being very intermittently “nice.”

For Archibald and the doctor and all the rest he wore as lowering a face and as ungracious a manner as though they had been cruelly abusing him instead of saving his life and paying his expenses. Archibald found the thing rather discouraging, but Dr. Fullerton laughed over it unconcernedly.

“Great Scott, man,” he said, when they talked of it one day after a visit to the rapidly convalescing invalid, “I don’t pull my patients through because I expect gratitude. I do it because it’s playing the game. That’s the only satisfaction that amounts to anything. Pick out a white man’s game and play it for all there is in you. Then life’s worth living.”

X

The day came when Ezra was well enough to shift for himself and he gave every one—including Pegeen—to understand that he was glad to be rid of intruders.

“It’ll seem mighty good to get back to living as I please,” he said, as Peg, calmly autocratic to the last, gave him a dose of medicine before joining the doctor who was waiting to drive her home.

“I’ll bet it doesn’t.” She was amiable but positive. “You’ll hate it and I’m sorry you’ve got to do it, but I think maybe you’ll take better care of yourself than you did. Don’t forget your medicine after meals. If you get into any trouble I’ll come over and see to you.”

Ezra grunted derision, but she held out her hand and smiled up at him so whole-heartedly that he was surprised into an answering smile.

“You’re a queer one,” he said, “but you’re better than most.” It was grudging, inadequate, but coming from Ezra it was glowing tribute, and Peggy went out to the car in high spirits.

“I’m going to miss Ezra,” she said as the doctor tucked her in. “Of course he isn’t like Mr. Archibald, but I’ve got real fond of him.”

“Holy Smoke!” commented Dr. Fullerton.

“I have,” she insisted, “and I’m sure now that he likes me. He said I was better than most. That’s a lot for Ezra to say.”

“It’s impassioned eulogy,” said the doctor,—“but, Peg, speaking in cold blood, as doctor to nurse and without any of Ezra’s overflowing sentiment, I’ll admit that you _are_ better than most. You really ought to be trained for a nurse, Peg.”

The small girl’s face flushed with happiness at the praise.

“It’d be lovely,” she said, “but I can’t, because I’m going to be married and I guess my own children will keep me pretty busy. I do hope they’ll have measles and whooping cough and all those things early. It’s so much better, isn’t it? And it’ll take a lot of time for eight of them to have everything.”

“That’s a fact. It will,” agreed the doctor. “You’re counting on eight?”

She nodded.

“Yes; I guess that’s enough unless you have perfect stacks of money. I want them all to go to school. School’s so lovely. I’d have liked awfully to go more, but there was always somebody to see to.”

Dr. Fullerton gave her arm an affectionate little squeeze.

“You know more than any of the rest of us as it is, Peg. Schooling you would have been ‘gilding refined gold and painting the lily.’ I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll undertake to see all eight of those children through whooping cough and measles and any blamed thing they choose to have and I won’t charge you a cent for it.”

Pegeen looked immeasurably relieved.

“That’ll be perfectly splendid,” she said happily. “Doctor’s bills do make lots of trouble.”

“They trouble the doctors.”

Dr. Fullerton grinned ruefully as he admitted it. A very large percentage of his patients showed absolutely no interest in his bills when he sent them.

Archibald and Wiggles were waiting for Pegeen at the meadow bars and each welcomed her after his own fashion. Wiggles was the more exuberant of the two. Only by sheer force was he kept from meeting a sudden and violent death in his wild effort to climb into the car before it stopped; and when the small girl finally stood by the roadside, he gave an exhibition of hysterical affection ill befitting one of his stern sex. Archibald merely took his pipe from his mouth and came forward to lift Peg from the car, with a quiet, “Well, here you are, Nurse O’Neill,” but the satisfaction in his face was good to see, and Dr. Fullerton chuckled over it as he went spinning on down the Valley.

“That youngster has lit on her feet,” he told himself contentedly. “Hanging over those bars watching for her, for an hour, I’ll bet. Wonder how much money the man has anyway.”

Meanwhile the three he had left behind on the roadside were going happily up the meadow slope to the shack. Archibald and Peg went hand in hand and, as usual, she accommodated her pace to his long easy stride by a system of two steps and a skip, while Wiggles gyrated excitedly about the two, yelping his joy.

“Glad to come home, child?” the man asked.

She squeezed his hand lovingly.

“I’m so glad I’d like to do what Wiggles is doing,” she said. “I feel as if I’d been away two months instead of two weeks.”

“Make it two years,” he amended. “That’s the length of time I’ve spent missing you. What did I do before you happened to me, Peg?”

“You needed seeing to. Gracious! You’ve been doing something to the house!”

He looked just a trifle embarrassed, doubtful.

“See here, Peg,” he said bluntly. “I never did like your trotting back and forth night and morning and looking after Mrs. Benderby at all sorts of unearthly hours.”

“That doesn’t hurt me,” she protested.

“Well, it hurt me and things are different now. I didn’t tell you about Mrs. Benderby because I thought it might worry you, but Dr. Fullerton says she has to stop going out by the day.—Not seriously ill, you know, but she’ll have to let up on very hard work.”

“Oh, dear, isn’t that dreadful.” Pegeen’s eyes were flooded with anxiety. “Isn’t it lucky I’ve got some money? The rent’s seven dollars and then meals—but I’ll have plenty this summer and then maybe she’ll be better, and—”

“Bless your dear heart,” Archibald interrupted. “You aren’t going to spend your money on her. I’ll look out for her—glad to—only it seemed to me—she’s got used to being up here now and seems to like it and she could relieve you of the cooking—and I don’t know how you feel about it, but I thought I’d like to have both of you stay here with me. I had the carpenter knock up a couple of rooms at the side of the shack.”

She stopped in the path and stared at him, shining eyed, wondering.

“Oh, my stars!” she said in a hushed little voice. “My stars!”

“Don’t you like the idea?” he asked anxiously.

“Like it!” The wonder in her face broke up into little ripples of delight. “Like it! Why it’s perfectly splendid! It’s the loveliest thing I ever heard of! I could sit down and cry the way I did when the larkspur happened—but think of you wanting us—Mrs. Benderby too! And everybody thought you didn’t like folks at all!”

“I thought so myself,” admitted Archibald; “but you see I hadn’t ever really known anyone.”

“Well, I’ve got to run. I’ve simply got to. Walking’s no good when you feel the way I do, and I can’t wait to see the new rooms.”

She scampered off up the path, with Wiggles barking joyously before her, and when Archibald reached the shack at a more leisurely gait she had inspected the new rooms and was sitting in the living-room, Wiggles at her feet, Boots in her lap, and Spunky on her shoulder, while Mrs. Benderby stood with her hands on her hips looking down adoringly at the Small Person in the chair.

“I’m home! I’m home! I’m home!” Pegeen was singing to the laughing baby.

“We’re all home now,” Archibald said, as he stood in the doorway and looked at her. “You _are_ the home, Peggy child.”

Supper that night was a party. The Smiling Lady had sent John over with a big bunch of glorious blue larkspur. “Peg’s ‘glad’ flower is the flower for you all, to-night,” said the word that came with it.

And Mrs. Benderby had made a cake with pink icing and an amazing design in little red candies around the edge of it, and there was ice cream, a contribution from Mrs. Neal.

“It’s like a birthday—only I never had this kind of a birthday,” said Pegeen, as she beamed across the blue flowers that, for all their gladness, were not so glad as her face, while Mrs. Benderby, torn between her ideal of the solemnity appropriate in waiting on a city gentleman and her sympathetic joy, hovered round the table with relays of hot biscuit and fried chicken, and Wiggles, having been surreptitiously presented with a chicken leg, by Peg—a thing entirely against her own rules—sat on his haunches and begged for more.

Boots was asleep in the hammock and Spunky, true to feline type, assumed a profound indifference and sat on the hearth with her front paws folded cozily under her and a bored look on her little gray face.

“You are going to have this kind of birthdays from now on—only more so,” Archibald announced. “This is just an unbirthday party. Wait till you see your birthday party. When _is_ your birthday, Peg?”

“September—the fifteenth. I’m glad I wasn’t born in winter. Spring would have been nicest. I’d have liked being born along with everything else.”

Archibald dissented.

“Wouldn’t have done at all,” he said firmly. “You were special—extra special. Autumn needed you to keep it from being sad.”

Mrs. Benderby wouldn’t allow Pegeen to help with the dishes.

“Other nights, maybe, if you want to, but not to-night,” she insisted. So, as the afterglow faded and the stars came out to look at a blithe new moon Archibald and Peg sat once more on their familiar doorstep. For a time they were both silent, listening to the night noises, watching the play of moonlight and starlight across the meadow and the clutching shadows on the wood’s edge.

“I wonder if Ezra took his medicine after supper,” Pegeen said suddenly. “I’d most forgotten about him. Being terribly happy’s sort of selfish, isn’t it?”

“Not when you are making other people happy by being happy, and you are doing that.”

She pressed her cheek against his shoulder for an instant.

“Well, being so happy was what made me remember Ezra. I suppose he doesn’t know what it feels like. You see, he can’t; because he doesn’t love anybody. You can’t have the real, soaked-in, choky kind of being happy unless you love somebody a whole lot and feel sure the somebody loves you. I tried awfully hard to love Ezra. I did honestly, and I did get real fond of him, but you can’t exactly love anybody that won’t be lovable. You can feel sorry and kind and everything like that, but loving’s different. I guess God’s the only one that can go right ahead and love everybody no matter what they’re like. It doesn’t make any difference about sinners. I could love sinners just as quick as scat, if they were nice sinners that would love back; but I’m afraid God will have to do the loving with Ezra. I can’t get any further than liking him, even if he does swear and act ugly. I do hope he’ll take his medicine and change the sheets.”

“Well, he won’t,” said Archibald encouragingly. “Ezra’s now engaged in going back to the blanket literally and figuratively, but don’t fret about him, Peg. We’ll do all we can for him, but you’re back on your old job now and you’ll have to give your whole time and attention to seeing to me.”

“And Mrs. Benderby and Boots and Wiggles and Spunky,” added Pegeen. “Isn’t it a lovely family!—and just think of my having you all right here together—not having to go away to see Mrs. Benderby or take Boots home nights or anything. I used to hate leaving you and sometimes I’d wake up in the night and worry for fear you’d get sick here all alone with nobody to see to you, and I’d always hurry as fast as I could, coming up in the morning for fear something had happened.”

“Bless you!” Archibald rumpled the thick black hair with an affectionate hand. “I hated being left alone myself, not because I was afraid of anything happening but because the place was forlorn without you. Peggy, Peggy! How you do creep into hearts and settle down to housekeeping in them!”

XI

Mrs. Benderby proved herself a most satisfactory addition to the family. Just at first there was a ripple on the surface because Pegeen jealously resented any infringement of her rights in the matter of seeing to Archibald, but the two had that out promptly and satisfactorily.

“It’s this way, Peg,” the man explained seriously. “Mrs. Benderby needs something to do. She’ll feel dependent and unhappy if she isn’t allowed to make herself useful, and the only way she can make herself useful is by cooking and washing dishes. It’s different with you. Cooking and dish washing were the least of the things you did for me. You did them mighty well. I can’t deny that, but you’ve fed my heart and washed the cobwebs out of my eyes, and you can afford to turn the cooking and dish washing over to somebody else. I want you free to go with me anywhere at any time. Your job is seeing to my heart and soul, Peggy O’Neill. As long as you can do that why should you give a hoot who sees to my meals and dishes?”

“I’m a pig! I’m a horrid little pig,” Peg always repented as enthusiastically as she did everything else. “I’ll go and tell Mrs. Benderby so right now. I was perfectly snippy to her about coddling your eggs this morning, but she can coddle away just as she wants to, as long as she gets them right. You’ve got to have them _right_ though, and, please, I’d so much rather plan what you’re going to have for meals. I can do it better. Honestly I can.”

“I haven’t a doubt of it,” said Archibald. “Plan away—only don’t grudge Mrs. Benderby the cook stove and the dish pan.”

All went smoothly after that. There was more time for the neighboring expeditions, for long walks and drives, for picnics, in which Jimmy Dawes was usually included. He was Pegeen’s humble slave, although he would have suffered tortures rather than admit it. He haunted the shack; but, ostensibly, his devotion was for Archibald and the offerings he laid at that amused young man’s feet were many. He brought Archibald pailfuls of red raspberries. Pegeen adored red raspberries. He presented Archibald with bunches of pink roses from Grandmother Dawes’ garden. Pegeen was daft about pink roses. He caught fish for Archibald’s breakfast. Fish was the thing Pegeen liked best for breakfast. But to Peg, herself, the boy was painstakingly off-hand and brusk, giving her plainly to understand that she was only a girl and must be kept in her place. She submitted meekly and wound him around her finger, after the immemorial fashion of girls, even of very small girls.

She wound Archibald around the same slim finger. He was what Peg would have called “lonesomey” round the heart, during these long summer days, and Pegeen was good for lonely hearts. A world in which she loved and petted and companioned and made merry couldn’t be such a very forlorn place; and making her happy was a consoling and satisfactory occupation.

The child’s thin little face had filled out. The old anxious look had gone from her eyes. The promise of beauty was fast finding fulfilment.

“Have you noticed how lovely Peggy is, now-a-days?” Nora Moran asked Archibald one afternoon, when he and she met in the Village store, while Peg waited outside on Zip.

“She was always lovely.”

The Smiling Lady laughed at his quick protest.

“Always,” she agreed, “but she’s getting lovelier by the minute. One of these days she will be wonderfully beautiful. There’s an exquisite delicacy about her.”

“But she’s perfectly strong and well.”

Archibald’s voice held a note of alarm.

“Absolutely. I didn’t mean that she looked frail—but she’ll never be the buxom, dashing kind. Her beauty won’t jump at you. It will haunt you. I think that Irish type is the loveliest in the world—the black hair and the deep blue eyes and the clear skin and the flush that comes and goes—and when you add the sweetness of Peg’s mouth and the love in her eyes and the freckles on her impertinent little nose—I rather think those freckles are fading, though. They’ll soon be gone.”

“I’d miss them,” Archibald said regretfully. “And I hope she won’t be a raving, tearing beauty. She’d break her heart because she couldn’t see to all the sighing swains. I’m afraid she _is_ headed that way, though. I’ve noticed it myself—and she’s better than good to look at. She has a way with her.”

He talked lightly; but he didn’t believe that the black-haired, blue-eyed type was the loveliest the world had to show. There was a certain reddish gold hair that was neither brown nor auburn; and there were eyes that were sometimes the color of sea water over sand and sometimes violet and sometimes darkly gray— Still, Pegeen _was_ blooming like a wild rose. There was no doubt about that.

Jimmy noticed it, too. He commented upon it one day when Pegeen and he had left Archibald smoking lazily, after a picnic lunch, and had gone off in search of berries for dessert.

“You’re better looking than you used to be, Peg,” he said, staring critically at her across a blueberry bush from which they were stripping the fruit.

“Uh-huh,” agreed Pegeen. Her mouth being full of berries, she was temporarily incapable of more eloquent assent.

Jimmy felt that he ought to snub her, for her soul’s good; but really—in that pink sun-bonnet— Oh, well girls were funny.

“What are you going to do when Mr. Archibald goes off and gets married?” he asked abruptly.

Pegeen choked over her mouthful of berries and looked at him, in wide-eyed dismay.

“Jimmy Dawes, it isn’t so,” she cried.

“Silly!” Jimmy’s tone was kindly contemptuous. Girls always went off half-cocked. “I didn’t say he was going right off now and get married. I just asked you what you’d do when he did.”

“Maybe he won’t.” She tried to feel hopeful; but Jimmy wouldn’t allow it.

“Maybe nothing! Of course he will.”

Peggy sat back on her heels and put her pail down. She had lost all interest in berrying.

“Oh, Jimmy,” she sighed. “Whatever’d you make me think about that for? Everything’s so nice just as it is.”

“Yes; but you’ll be getting married yourself some day. Then what’d he do?”

She thought it over.

“Well, if he’d wait till I grow up he could marry me and then I could go right on seeing him.”