K. saw Sidney for only a moment on Christmas Day. This was when the gay
little sleigh had stopped in front of the house.
Sidney had hurried radiantly in for a moment. Christine's parlor was
gay with firelight and noisy with chatter and with the clatter of her
tea-cups.
K., lounging indolently in front of the fire, had turned to see Sidney
in the doorway, and leaped to his feet.
“I can't come in,” she cried. “I am only here for a moment. I am out
sleigh-riding with Dr. Wilson. It's perfectly delightful.”
“Ask him in for a cup of tea,” Christine called out. “Here's Aunt
Harriet and mother and even Palmer!”
Christine had aged during the last weeks, but she was putting up a brave
front.
“I'll ask him.”
Sidney ran to the front door and called: “Will you come in for a cup of
tea?”
“Tea! Good Heavens, no. Hurry.”
As Sidney turned back into the house, she met Palmer. He had come out
in the hall, and had closed the door into the parlor behind him. His arm
was still in splints, and swung suspended in a gay silk sling.
The sound of laughter came through the door faintly.
“How is he to-day?” He meant Johnny, of course. The boy's face was
always with him.
“Better in some ways, but of course--”
“When are they going to operate?”
“When he is a little stronger. Why don't you come into see him?”
“I can't. That's the truth. I can't face the poor youngster.”
“He doesn't seem to blame you; he says it's all in the game.”
“Sidney, does Christine know that I was not alone that night?”
“If she guesses, it is not because of anything the boy has said. He has
told nothing.”
Out of the firelight, away from the chatter and the laughter, Palmer's
face showed worn and haggard. He put his free hand on Sidney's shoulder.
“I was thinking that perhaps if I went away--”
“That would be cowardly, wouldn't it?”
“If Christine would only say something and get it over with! She doesn't
sulk; I think she's really trying to be kind. But she hates me, Sidney.
She turns pale every time I touch her hand.”
All the light had died out of Sidney's face. Life was terrible, after
all--overwhelming. One did wrong things, and other people suffered; or
one was good, as her mother had been, and was left lonely, a widow, or
like Aunt Harriet. Life was a sham, too. Things were so different from
what they seemed to be: Christine beyond the door, pouring tea and
laughing with her heart in ashes; Palmer beside her, faultlessly dressed
and wretched. The only one she thought really contented was K. He seemed
to move so calmly in his little orbit. He was always so steady, so
balanced. If life held no heights for him, at least it held no depths.
So Sidney thought, in her ignorance!
“There's only one thing, Palmer,” she said gravely. “Johnny Rosenfeld
is going to have his chance. If anybody in the world can save him, Max
Wilson can.”
The light of that speech was in her eyes when she went out to the sleigh
again. K. followed her out and tucked the robes in carefully about her.
“Warm enough?”
“All right, thank you.”
“Don't go too far. Is there any chance of having you home for supper?”
“I think not. I am to go on duty at six again.”
If there was a shadow in K.'s eyes, she did not see it. He waved them
off smilingly from the pavement, and went rather heavily back into the
house.
“Just how many men are in love with you, Sidney?” asked Max, as Peggy
started up the Street.
“No one that I know of, unless--”
“Exactly. Unless--”
“What I meant,” she said with dignity, “is that unless one counts very
young men, and that isn't really love.”
“We'll leave out Joe Drummond and myself--for, of course, I am very
young. Who is in love with you besides Le Moyne? Any of the internes at
the hospital?”
“Me! Le Moyne is not in love with me.”
There was such sincerity in her voice that Wilson was relieved.
K., older than himself and more grave, had always had an odd attraction
for women. He had been frankly bored by them, but the fact had remained.
And Max more than suspected that now, at last, he had been caught.
“Don't you really mean that you are in love with Le Moyne?”
“Please don't be absurd. I am not in love with anybody; I haven't time
to be in love. I have my profession now.”
“Bah! A woman's real profession is love.”
Sidney differed from this hotly. So warm did the argument become that
they passed without seeing a middle-aged gentleman, short and rather
heavy set, struggling through a snowdrift on foot, and carrying in his
hand a dilapidated leather bag.
Dr. Ed hailed them. But the cutter slipped by and left him knee-deep,
looking ruefully after them.
“The young scamp!” he said. “So that's where Peggy is!”
Nevertheless, there was no anger in Dr. Ed's mind, only a vague and
inarticulate regret. These things that came so easily to Max, the
affection of women, gay little irresponsibilities like the stealing
of Peggy and the sleigh, had never been his. If there was any faint
resentment, it was at himself. He had raised the boy wrong--he had
taught him to be selfish. Holding the bag high out of the drifts, he
made his slow progress up the Street.
At something after two o'clock that night, K. put down his pipe
and listened. He had not been able to sleep since midnight. In his
dressing-gown he had sat by the small fire, thinking. The content of his
first few months on the Street was rapidly giving way to unrest. He
who had meant to cut himself off from life found himself again in close
touch with it; his eddy was deep with it.
For the first time, he had begun to question the wisdom of what he had
done. Had it been cowardice, after all? It had taken courage, God knew,
to give up everything and come away. In a way, it would have taken more
courage to have stayed. Had he been right or wrong?
And there was a new element. He had thought, at first, that he could
fight down this love for Sidney. But it was increasingly hard. The
innocent touch of her hand on his arm, the moment when he had held her
in his arms after her mother's death, the thousand small contacts of her
returns to the little house--all these set his blood on fire. And it was
fighting blood.
Under his quiet exterior K. fought many conflicts those winter
days--over his desk and ledger at the office, in his room alone,
with Harriet planning fresh triumphs beyond the partition, even by
Christine's fire, with Christine just across, sitting in silence and
watching his grave profile and steady eyes.
He had a little picture of Sidney--a snap-shot that he had taken
himself. It showed Sidney minus a hand, which had been out of range when
the camera had been snapped, and standing on a steep declivity
which would have been quite a level had he held the camera straight.
Nevertheless it was Sidney, her hair blowing about her, eyes looking
out, tender lips smiling. When she was not at home, it sat on K.'s
dresser, propped against his collar-box. When she was in the house, it
lay under the pin-cushion.
Two o'clock in the morning, then, and K. in his dressing-gown, with the
picture propped, not against the collar-box, but against his lamp, where
he could see it.
He sat forward in his chair, his hands folded around his knee, and
looked at it. He was trying to picture the Sidney of the photograph
in his old life--trying to find a place for her. But it was difficult.
There had been few women in his old life. His mother had died many years
before. There had been women who had cared for him, but he put them
impatiently out of his mind.
Then the bell rang.
Christine was moving about below. He could hear her quick steps. Almost
before he had heaved his long legs out of the chair, she was tapping at
his door outside.
“It's Mrs. Rosenfeld. She says she wants to see you.”
He went down the stairs. Mrs. Rosenfeld was standing in the lower hall,
a shawl about her shoulders. Her face was white and drawn above it.
“I've had word to go to the hospital,” she said. “I thought maybe you'd
go with me. It seems as if I can't stand it alone. Oh, Johnny, Johnny!”
“Where's Palmer?” K. demanded of Christine.
“He's not in yet.”
“Are you afraid to stay in the house alone?”
“No; please go.”
He ran up the staircase to his room and flung on some clothing. In the
lower hall, Mrs. Rosenfeld's sobs had become low moans; Christine stood
helplessly over her.
“I am terribly sorry,” she said--“terribly sorry! When I think whose
fault all this is!”
Mrs. Rosenfeld put out a work-hardened hand and caught Christine's
fingers.
“Never mind that,” she said. “You didn't do it. I guess you and I
understand each other. Only pray God you never have a child.”
K. never forgot the scene in the small emergency ward to which Johnny
had been taken. Under the white lights his boyish figure looked
strangely long. There was a group around the bed--Max Wilson, two or
three internes, the night nurse on duty, and the Head.
Sitting just inside the door on a straight chair was Sidney--such a
Sidney as he never had seen before, her face colorless, her eyes wide
and unseeing, her hands clenched in her lap. When he stood beside her,
she did not move or look up. The group around the bed had parted to
admit Mrs. Rosenfeld, and closed again. Only Sidney and K. remained by
the door, isolated, alone.
“You must not take it like that, dear. It's sad, of course. But, after
all, in that condition--”
It was her first knowledge that he was there. But she did not turn.
“They say I poisoned him.” Her voice was dreary, inflectionless.
“You--what?”
“They say I gave him the wrong medicine; that he's dying; that I
murdered him.” She shivered.
K. touched her hands. They were ice-cold.
“Tell me about it.”
“There is nothing to tell. I came on duty at six o'clock and gave the
medicines. When the night nurse came on at seven, everything was all
right. The medicine-tray was just as it should be. Johnny was asleep. I
went to say good-night to him and he--he was asleep. I didn't give him
anything but what was on the tray,” she finished piteously. “I looked at
the label; I always look.”
By a shifting of the group around the bed, K.'s eyes looked for a moment
directly into Carlotta's. Just for a moment; then the crowd closed up
again. It was well for Carlotta that it did. She looked as if she had
seen a ghost--closed her eyes, even reeled.
“Miss Harrison is worn out,” Dr. Wilson said brusquely. “Get some one to
take her place.”
But Carlotta rallied. After all, the presence of this man in this room
at such a time meant nothing. He was Sidney's friend, that was all.
But her nerve was shaken. The thing had gone beyond her. She had not
meant to kill. It was the boy's weakened condition that was turning her
revenge into tragedy.
“I am all right,” she pleaded across the bed to the Head. “Let me stay,
please. He's from my ward. I--I am responsible.”
Wilson was at his wits' end. He had done everything he knew without
result. The boy, rousing for an instant, would lapse again into stupor.
With a healthy man they could have tried more vigorous measures--could
have forced him to his feet and walked him about, could have beaten him
with knotted towels dipped in ice-water. But the wrecked body on the bed
could stand no such heroic treatment.
It was Le Moyne, after all, who saved Johnny Rosenfeld's life. For, when
staff and nurses had exhausted all their resources, he stepped forward
with a quiet word that brought the internes to their feet astonished.
There was a new treatment for such cases--it had been tried abroad. He
looked at Max.
Max had never heard of it. He threw out his hands.
“Try it, for Heaven's sake,” he said. “I'm all in.”
The apparatus was not in the house--must be extemporized, indeed, at
last, of odds and ends from the operating-room. K. did the work, his
long fingers deft and skillful--while Mrs. Rosenfeld knelt by the bed
with her face buried; while Sidney sat, dazed and bewildered, on her
little chair inside the door; while night nurses tiptoed along the
corridor, and the night watchman stared incredulous from outside the
door.
When the two great rectangles that were the emergency ward windows
had turned from mirrors reflecting the room to gray rectangles in the
morning light; Johnny Rosenfeld opened his eyes and spoke the first
words that marked his return from the dark valley.
“Gee, this is the life!” he said, and smiled into K.'s watchful face.
When it was clear that the boy would live, K. rose stiffly from the
bedside and went over to Sidney's chair.
“He's all right now,” he said--“as all right as he can be, poor lad!”
“You did it--you! How strange that you should know such a thing. How am
I to thank you?”
The internes, talking among themselves, had wandered down to their
dining-room for early coffee. Wilson was giving a few last instructions
as to the boy's care. Quite unexpectedly, Sidney caught K.'s hand and
held it to her lips. The iron repression of the night, of months indeed,
fell away before her simple caress.
“My dear, my dear,” he said huskily. “Anything that I can do--for
you--at any time--”
It was after Sidney had crept like a broken thing to her room that
Carlotta Harrison and K. came face to face. Johnny was quite conscious
by that time, a little blue around the lips, but valiantly cheerful.
“More things can happen to a fellow than I ever knew there was!” he
said to his mother, and submitted rather sheepishly to her tears and
caresses.
“You were always a good boy, Johnny,” she said. “Just you get well
enough to come home. I'll take care of you the rest of my life. We will
get you a wheel-chair when you can be about, and I can take you out in
the park when I come from work.”
“I'll be passenger and you'll be chauffeur, ma.”
“Mr. Le Moyne is going to get your father sent up again. With sixty-five
cents a day and what I make, we'll get along.”
“You bet we will!”
“Oh, Johnny, if I could see you coming in the door again and yelling
'mother' and 'supper' in one breath!”
The meeting between Carlotta and Le Moyne was very quiet. She had been
making a sort of subconscious impression on the retina of his mind
during all the night. It would be difficult to tell when he actually
knew her.
When the preparations for moving Johnny back to the big ward had been
made, the other nurses left the room, and Carlotta and the boy were
together. K. stopped her on her way to the door.
“Miss Harrison!”
“Yes, Dr. Edwardes.”
“I am not Dr. Edwardes here; my name is Le Moyne.”
“Ah!”
“I have not seen you since you left St. John's.”
“No; I--I rested for a few months.”
“I suppose they do not know that you were--that you have had any
previous hospital experience.”
“No. Are you going to tell them?”
“I shall not tell them, of course.”
And thus, by simple mutual consent, it was arranged that each should
respect the other's confidence.
Carlotta staggered to her room. There had been a time, just before dawn,
when she had had one of those swift revelations that sometimes come at
the end of a long night. She had seen herself as she was. The boy was
very low, hardly breathing. Her past stretched behind her, a series of
small revenges and passionate outbursts, swift yieldings, slow remorse.
She dared not look ahead. She would have given every hope she had in the
world, just then, for Sidney's stainless past.
She hated herself with that deadliest loathing that comes of complete
self-revelation.
And she carried to her room the knowledge that the night's struggle had
been in vain--that, although Johnny Rosenfeld would live, she had gained
nothing by what he had suffered. The whole night had shown her the
hopelessness of any stratagem to win Wilson from his new allegiance. She
had surprised him in the hallway, watching Sidney's slender figure
as she made her way up the stairs to her room. Never, in all his past
overtures to her, had she seen that look in his eyes.