Dick, more frightened than hurt, was carried home that same night; but
wee Blanche was badly hurt, and the doctor would not allow them to move
her. The wound on her head was a bad one, her little arm was broken, one
baby leg crushed, and most of all the doctors, who came and went hourly,
feared internal injuries they could not gage and dare not probe yet. For
two weeks the child lay swathed and drugged in Sên King-lo’s bed. And
Ivy never left her. Even in her drugged stupor—she was too weak for
them to drug her heavily—she stirred and whimpered if her cousin went
from her. Two nurses were installed, but only from Ivy would the
stricken mite take mixture or suffer touch. She looked at her father
with hard, hurt eyes; she scarcely noticed her mother; she turned her
face from the kindly doctors; hated the nurses, and said so; and it must
have gone hard with Ivy for a snatch of food and rest, had Blanche not
taken a sudden fancy to Kow Li. She screamed if Ivy moved from her side,
unless Kow Li took the cousin’s place. She even fretted after a short
half-hour and called for Ivy; and when she did, the girl always came.
But, thanks to Kow Li, Miss Gilbert did get half-hour snatches of rest
in the next room: Sên King-lo’s living room, his Chinese books about it,
traces of him everywhere, and as much an atmosphere of China as if it
had been in Pekin. Why that was so would be hard to say, but it was.
Almost all the sparse furnishing was Western: easy-chairs and
chesterfield, many books, and water-colors mostly English. There were no
bamboos, pictured or real—not a dragon nor a joss-stick. But the room
breathed China, and a girl’s sensitiveness caught it, as only one
visitor had before: Sir Charles. And he had lived in China.
After the first frightened hour’s absorption she had realized poignantly
that these were Mr. Sên’s rooms—the intimate place of his being and
keeping, as true of him and as redolent of him as Rosehill was of Miss
Julia.
Miss Julia slept on a large and very elaborate bed; Sên King-lo slept on
one that could not comfortably have been narrower, so narrow that even
wee, ill Blanche was not lost in it, and so Spartan-plain that its new
occupant considered it “horrid shabby,” and said so the first day she
was well enough to take the slightest interest in anything but her own
aching body. Miss Julia’s bedroom walls were covered with portraits, all
but one of dead and gone Townsends, many as babies, two in their
coffins: daguerreotypes, pastels, oils, water-colors, photographs, plain
and colored; the one other, the largest and most handsomely framed, a
portrait of Robert E. Lee in Confederate uniform. Only one picture hung
on Sên King-lo’s bedroom walls—Kwan Yin-ko. And, under the doctors and
Ivy herself, that Chinese Holy Mother of Mercy wrought the loving
miracle of the English baby’s recovery. For Kwan Yin-ko caught the
child’s roving eye almost at once and riveted it. The nurses thought it
a horrible picture, and the night nurse, who had been scrupulously well
brought up in Bangor, Maine, disliked being in the room with the ugly
heathenish thing. But Blanche pronounced it a most beautiful lady, and
Kow Li owed half his firm place in the small invalid’s heart to the
skilful stories he told her of Kwan Yin-ko—and a weird jumble of
mythology, fairy-tales and pure lie he made them! But they gave the
English child infinite delight, and Ivy Gilbert many a refreshing
half-hour of sleep out in the next room on Sên King-lo’s sofa.
Sên himself slept now at his own Legation and at the Snows’. Sir Charles
and his wife came and went, and so did Sên King-lo; but Ivy lived in
Sên’s rooms—while Blanche stayed there. Emma Snow had begged to share
Ivy’s care of the child; but her grief and anxiety made her too tearful
for medical approval, and the doctors limited her comings, and the
nurses speeded her departures, while Blanche, with baby ruthlessness,
made it clear that it was “mine own Nivy” she wanted.
The nurses had a sinecure. Miss Gilbert and yellow Kow Li usurped their
office. In less than a week the night nurse and the Chinese Goddess
parted company, and the day nurse went out more and more and knew well
enough that she was there for a social reason, and as a fall-back-on,
should the need occur, but that Ivy was in charge. And being a sensible
girl, born and bred in New York and well paid, the day nurse did not
care in the least.
Their small encounter with half-tipsy Reginald Hamilton had marked an
advance in the comradeship of the Chinese man and the English girl. It
had so impelled Ivy more than it did Sên—naturally. The accident to the
children drew both to a stronger liking, and Sên to a new understanding.
He had saved the two little lives, there was no question of
that—Charles and Emma knew it and said it, and so did two physicians
and three policemen, and the newspapers underlined it. And Ivy had seen
him do it. He had had to wear his left arm in a sling for a day or two.
She had seen his strength again—no doubt now about those delicate hands
of his—but she had seen something of that before, and his courage and
cool-headed resource had not surprised her. To her it had seemed as much
a matter of course that he had proved brave and clear-witted as it had
to him to swing tipsy insolence down to the snowy roadway.
But _he_ had seen a new woman, a new womanliness. He had seen the love
as well as the pain on her face as she had bent down to the mangled baby
out there under his window, and had gathered it up into her arms.
They two had been alone with the injured children a long quarter of an
hour that had seemed longer, before the doctor had come, or even Kow Li,
who had gone on an errand. Both had some skill at “first aid”—he much
more than her—and he had seen the grit with which she had held the
broken arm in place while he did the little he could for the crushed
little leg; had seen the tenderness and strength with which she had
soothed and controlled the pain-and-fright-broken mite; and had known
that Ivy Gilbert’s “flaw” had been the unjust creation of his own crass
stupidity.
Chinese omniscience has its human limits. Sên King-lo had learned that a
woman is not necessarily unwomanly, or unloving of little children
because she has little flair for blindman’s-buff and leap-frog, and even
less for “I am, thou art, he is” and “three times three is nine.”