MARK TAPLEY'S KIND OF DAYS
Phyllis was finding her occupation trying. The children had not been
accustomed to obedience, and Muriel proved intractable; Phyllis could
neither win her affection nor subdue her by sternness. Lionel minded
her because he loved her; in a week's time the boy had become her
doglike adorer, and Phyllis loved him with pitying tenderness. The baby
was like a little garden patch with the sun shining upon it through the
tree branches, in alternate sunshine and shadow, and her obedience was
patchy, too; no child more properly deserved the insignia of "a little
curl right in the middle of her forehead." But she was only the baby;
no one could take very seriously the misdemeanors of a mite of three,
and Gladys was a dear mite when she was not the other sort.
It was hard to assume the charge of three children for six hours a
day; hard to bring them, and herself as well, into the discipline of
stated hours and tasks; not easy to take them out to walk, and feel
perfectly independent and indifferent to the possibility of meeting old
acquaintances when thus employed.
But the hardest thing about her new life to Phyllis was the insight it
gave her into a manner of living which shocked and tortured her, for
Phyllis was a conscientious girl, and the first actual contact with the
worldly side of the world is bitter to such as she. Mrs. Haines did
not love her children. Sometimes, when they were beautifully dressed,
she flattered them and devoured them with kisses; but more frequently
she repulsed them, scolded them petulantly and unjustly, and answered
their questions with a fretful "Don't bother me! I don't know; ask
Miss Wyndham." Sometimes she would say in their hearing that she
detested children; that they all ought to be fastened up in the barrel
Holmes suggested and fed through the bunghole; and that she would give
anything if she were free to have a good time like other young women.
And Phyllis could see Lionel's lips quiver and then set hard at these
speeches, and she knew the little lad understood that though he had a
mother, he had not her love, but was a burden to her.
It made her sick at heart; less experienced than her tiny charges, she
had never for a moment dreamed that a woman who had children could
do less than love them beyond all the world, holding no pleasure, no
admiration, worth a thought while her babies' little arms clung to her.
But Mrs. Haines boasted the flattery she received. Evidently husband,
as well as children, was nothing to her beside her idea of pleasure;
and honest Phyllis went home daily, heavy in mind and foot, weary with
loathing more than with work.
Tom saw that she was looking blue and ill, and he made it his
business to come home her way and meet her, and try to cheer her into
forgetfulness of the annoyances of which he was ignorant; for Phyllis
could not reconcile it with her standard of honor to talk to any one of
what she saw in the home to which she had been admitted. Yet she longed
to ask some one if all the world, but her own narrow one, was like this
new one; Jessamy and Bab knew no better than she, and her aunt was too
ill to be troubled.
Mrs. Haines soon discovered the handsome young fellow who came to meet
her governess, and rallied Phyllis on what she called "her conquest."
"I hear you have an admirer, my dear," she said.
Phyllis flushed scarlet with indignation. "Tom is a dear boy, like
a brother to all of us," she said. "There isn't the least silly
thing about him; we are only girls, and we don't want nor think of
flirtations."
Mrs. Haines laughed with contemptuous good nature. "Would it be silly
in him to admire you?" she asked. "As to the rest of it, girls you may
be, but children you are not; I was no older than you when I married,
and am only seven years older than you are now."
"My aunt has taught us that love and marriage are so sacred and solemn
that we must never think nor speak of them lightly, and, above all
things, never spoil our lives and hearts by flirting," said Phyllis,
trying to speak without excitement.
"Very good teaching; very poor practice, my dear," laughed Mrs. Haines.
"Do you want to be three little gray nuns? But I hoped this 'Tom' of
yours might prove something more serious than a flirtation--that is, if
he has any money; your business is to marry well, under your present
circumstances; don't go in for romance."
"I never think of marrying, Mrs. Haines; I am much too young and
girlish. But I would rather die than marry just for money," said
Phyllis.
"See here, Miss Wyndham; I was a poor girl too," said Mrs. Haines. "I
had just about enough money for gloves and hats, but not for gowns and
shoes. My husband is fourteen years older than I; do you think I cared
for him? Not a bit, but I married him at nineteen, and now I have a
fine house, carriage, everything I want, and more beaux to say I'm
pretty than most girls of my age. Don't you think I was sensible?"
In spite of herself, Phyllis shuddered; she thought of Mr. Haines's
solitary breakfasts, frequent dinners at the club, the unloved
children, and realized how blessed she had been in her bringing up.
"There are better things than money, Mrs. Haines," she said, almost
pitying the little creature before her, hardly, as she said, older than
herself, yet so frankly pagan and sordid. "I would rather work till I
died working than--"
She stopped, frightened at her own boldness. Mrs. Haines looked at
her, understanding what she did not say. "There will always be these
two kinds of people," she said, and Phyllis wondered, not quite
comprehending.
Phyllis met Tom with a sensation of relief, as well as pleasure; he
looked so manly, so reliable. "It's no use, Tom," she said. "I've been
trying not to tell you, but I must. Is it I or the world that's out of
joint?"
"On general principles, I can assure you that it's not you, Phyllis;
you're all right. But, if I might, I should like to have something more
explicit," said Tom, looking very kindly down on the flushed, earnest
face.
Phyllis began at the beginning, and poured forth to Tom all the matters
that had distressed her in the Haines household, ending with the
conversation of the afternoon, suppressing his part in the theme.
"Well, what do you want me to tell you, Phyllis?" asked Tom. "Surely
you don't have to question whether you or a heartless, flirting,
worldly woman is right? Or whether any woman worth the name will sell
herself for an establishment and clothes?"
"No, not that; right is right, and wrong is wrong--" began Phyllis.
"Always," broke in Tom.
"Yes, I know; but what makes me downright sick is the fear that dear
auntie has kept us shut away from a world that is full of this sort
of thing--that all the world is like this," cried Phyllis. "Are
we different from the rest of the world? These last months have
frightened me."
"Not much wonder," said Tom, heartily. "Poor little soul! Now, look
here, Phyllis; you're not different from all the world, but you're
different from lots of it. The best never gets run out, but it runs
low often. You've been given the highest standards in all things, and
they can never be common. It is much easier to be bad than good for
people who start crooked; you started straight, you and Jessamy and
Bab. All you've got to do is to be yourself and not worry. Keep your
own ideas, and steer by them, and let the rest go. Do you suppose I
don't see heaps and piles of things I hate? More than you ever will,
because a fellow runs up against the world as no girl does. I'd like
to be able to tell you I see none but sweet, modest, true girls; but,
honest, I see fewer of them than the other kind. Girls make me sick,
though I feel mean to say it; they wouldn't if I didn't think they are
so much better than we are when they are nice. You see, Phyllis, girls
don't understand that the whole world is in their hands; we're all what
women, young and old, make us. Now, you and I had good mothers and
sisters. When I went away my oldest sister--she's past thirty--talked
to me. 'Shut your eyes to the bold girls, Tom,' she said, 'and make
no woman friend you would not introduce to your sisters. Keep your
ideals, and be sure there will always be sweet, wholesome girls to
save the world.' So I have been shutting my eyes to the strong-minded
sisterhood, and the giddy ones too; and just when I needed you,
because I was getting too lonely, the Wyndhams turned up, thank heaven!
So you'll find it, Phyl; it's a queer, crooked old world, but there are
straight folk in it. Keep your ideals, miss, as my sister told me, and
'gang your ways,' And don't take it so hard that there is wrong and
injustice in the world. That's being morbid. You'll get used to it;
it's only your first plunge that costs; the world's like the ocean in
that. And there's heaps of good lying around, mixed up with bad too,
sometimes, and that's what no young person sees at first. You know I
am ever so much older than you because I've had my eyes opened longer.
Don't you get to thinking it's a bad world; it's a good one. The Lord
saw that, and said so, when it was first made. Thus endeth my first
lesson. I never talked so much in my life at a stretch. Come into this
drug-store for hot coffee; you look fagged."
"You're such a comfort, Tom," said Phyllis. "I feel much better. There
was no use in talking to Jessamy or Bab, because we all know no more
nor less than one another, but I wanted straightening out. And auntie
looks so ill of late, don't you think so?"
Tom looked very serious. "I think she is ill, Phyllis," he said. "There
is nothing the matter with her, except one of the worst things: she
is exhausted, worn out with fret and trouble. She doesn't get enough
nourishment; she needs nursing."
"Oh, I see it, Tom," cried Phyllis, as they left the soda-fountain.
"What can I do?"
"Take care of yourself, for one thing; you don't look right, either,"
said Tom.
"I feel dragging--that's the only word I know for it," said Phyllis.
"And Lionel is pale and languid. I wonder if the child and I are both
getting ready to be ill."
"Poor little beggar, I hope he isn't," said Tom; "but that would be
nothing to your coming down. I'm going to fix you up some quinine and
calisaya; I am not pleased with you of late, Miss Phyllis."
Four days later Phyllis trailed her weary way homeward. The end of
her first month of servitude had come; the twenty-five dollars she
had thus earned lay in her pocket-book in four new bills. Her head
ached, her knees felt strangely unreliable, her spine seemed to be some
one else's, so burning and painful it felt in its present place, and
her eyes played her tricks by showing her objects in false positions
and sizes and occasionally flaring up and darkening completely for a
dreadful few seconds.
Jessamy met her at the door with an anxious face. "Mama has given out
wholly, Phyl," she said. "She is in bed and frightens me, she looks so
weak, and her heart beats unevenly and feebly."
"That's bad," said Phyllis, so indifferently that Jessamy stared in
amazement, then saw with utter sinking of her heart that Phyllis looked
desperately ill herself; if Phyllis, the rock they all leaned on, gave
out now, what should she do?
"What is the matter, Phyl?" she cried, putting her arm around her
cousin.
"I have no idea. My head aches unbearably, and it seems to be a
headache that reaches to the soles of my feet," answered Phyllis,
miserably. "What does Tom say about auntie?"
"He thinks it is just complete giving out, as though that weren't bad
enough! And he made me send for Doctor Jerome; he says he wouldn't dare
take the responsibility of our resting on his opinion, so the doctor is
to come soon, I hope." said Jessamy.
"Yes, that's right. I have twenty-five dollars in my purse; that will
pay for several visits, won't it?" asked Phyllis, uncertainly; she
dropped her hat on the floor beside her and pushed the hair back from
her temples as she spoke, resting both elbows on her knees. "I shall
have only the little girls, I am afraid, for a time; Lionel is ill."
"What ails him?" demanded Jessamy, her breath shortening; suppose it
were something dreadful, and Phyllis had caught the infection!
"The doctor thought it might be typhoid; it was too soon to tell, he
said," replied Phyllis.
"Typhoid! Is that contagious?" demanded Jessamy.
"I don't know. Don't be afraid, Jessamy; I am too full of pain for
anything else to get in; I couldn't catch it," said Phyllis, with no
intention to be humorous.
Jessamy waited to hear no more. Running across to Tom's room, she
knocked impatiently. "Oh, Tom, dear Tom, do come into my room," she
cried. "Phyllis has come home so ill I am more frightened about her
than about mama now."
They found Phyllis exactly as Jessamy had left her. Tom felt her
pulse; her hands were burning, the pulses galloping. "She must lie
down and wait till the doctor comes," said Tom, looking grave. "I'll
give her something sedative that can't do any harm, but I'd rather
not do anything more. Doctor Jerome ought to prescribe. Help her into
bed, Jessamy, and don't look so hopeless, dear girl; all's not lost
save honor, even though that's a good deal to have left. Phyllis is
very likely going to have grip--the real thing, not a cold under that
name--and though that is bad to go through, it does not need such a
tragic face to meet it."
But Jessamy would not smile. "The Haines boy has a fever; the doctor
thinks it may be typhoid; is that contagious?"
For the life of him, Tom could not repress a slight start; then
he bethought himself, and answered cheerfully: "Not a bit--only
infectious. Get Phyllis quiet in bed, and try not to borrow trouble."
But as he crossed the hall he shook his head like an old practitioner.
"Not contagious--only infectious, is true; but Phyl has been in the
same atmosphere as the boy, and may have contracted it under the same
conditions," he said, rubbing Nixie's head absent-mindedly, as the
little dog poked it into his hand. "I don't like it, Nixie, old man;
I confess I don't like it."
Doctor Jerome came to find two patients instead of one. His verdict
as to Mrs. Wyndham corroborated Tom's; she needed nursing, constant
nourishing, utter rest, and cheer. And, to make sure of the latter
prescription, there was Phyllis! On her case the doctor said it was
much too early to pronounce; typhoid was misleading in its first
symptoms, sometimes; but--yes, it might be typhoid. He would do all he
could to break it up, but Phyllis was decidedly ill. Jessamy must have
a nurse, even though Barbara gave up her employment to help her; they
were both too inexperienced, not strong enough to undertake cases in
which everything depended on the nursing.
Phyllis did not resist the doctor's verdict that she should give
herself up to being ill, though Jessamy fully expected to have hard
work persuading her. She lay quite passive, her dark lashes sweeping
her crimsoned cheeks, and only lifted her eyes to say, "Tell Mrs.
Haines," and then sank into unnatural slumber again.
Barbara came home into the trouble very tired and discouraged over
her own uselessness; she who had felt so confident that she could do
anything had thus far been able to earn but three dollars and a half
for many hours' labor; in the old days she had spent that in a week at
Huyler's.
Jessamy and she had a consultation, at which Tom assisted, as to
their possibilities. By their prudence in living within their income
the Wyndhams had nearly four hundred dollars a year more than their
actual living expenses cost them. But this income came in quarterly; a
trained nurse would cost them twenty-five dollars a week, besides her
board, yet Tom and Doctor Jerome said it was of the utmost importance
to have the best of nurses. "I have an inspiration!" cried Tom.
"There's a fine woman I know of, disengaged now; she has nursed in our
family, and she's all right. If Doctor Jerome approves, I'll see if I
can get her, and I am nearly certain she would come for me for fifteen
dollars a week."
"Then I must see Mrs. Black as to her terms; and how about the
arrangement of the rooms?" asked Jessamy.
"The two patients must be separate; that goes without saying," said
Tom. "You and Bab will use my room, and the nurse will take her share
of rest where it suits her."
"And where will you sleep, you dear, generous boy?" cried Jessamy.
"I have a friend I can bunk with till you are through with the room,"
said Tom. "It won't trouble me a bit, so don't call me names, princess."
Jessamy interviewed their landlady, and had a tempestuous time. Mrs.
Black refused at first to allow her house to be turned into a hospital;
then she demanded an exorbitant sum for the nurse's board, although
the room was not to be included. At last, when Jessamy, calling up the
spirit which usually lay dormant under her quiet manner, threatened
removing both her charges to a hospital and leaving the house at once,
Mrs. Black compromised, with a mental reservation to get even in the
end, as the girls suspected from her subsequent behavior.
It would have been wiser to have taken Mrs. Wyndham and Phyllis to a
good hospital, where a private room would have been no heavier drain
on their purse than the present arrangement, and the accommodations
better; but Jessamy was so shocked at the proposition that Doctor
Jerome waived the point, and the nursing began at home. Tom's good
woman came; she was the kindest soul in the world, and no less
competent than kind. Barbara gave up her envelops to help Jessamy. With
two patients she was needed, and even then there were hardly hands
enough to render the service required. Tom ran in and out at all hours
of the day and night; Jessamy felt that if she lived ninety-nine years
she never could repay him for his help and cheer, though she devoted
her life to trying to do so.
Mrs. Wyndham lay in that wearying state of feebleness peculiar to
exhausted nerves; there was no actual danger, unless it were the danger
of continued prostration. But Phyllis grew more ill; twice a day the
old doctor came to watch her progress. The typhoid symptoms did not
develop positively, but she burned with a low fever, and no one could
foretell the end.
Out of the five hundred dollars coming to the Wyndhams quarterly from
their total income, there was an excess over necessary expenditures
amounting to something like ninety dollars. This was all the capital
Jessamy had in hand to meet the present emergency; and underlying
all her other anxieties was the dreadful fear that she should be
obliged to borrow of Aunt Henrietta to tide herself through the double
illness which had come upon them. For her mother required all sorts
of expensive food preparations, and Jessamy realized that her little
fund would not take them further on the hard road than three weeks'
distance, when out of it she had to pay a nurse, and that nurse's board.
Christmas was coming--the Christmas they had dreaded, at best, to meet
in a boarding-house, the first since they had become homeless; but now
what a Christmas it was! Barbara, sitting, as she did every moment that
the nurse would intrust Phyllis to her, close by her cousin's bed,
thought, with quietly falling tears, of what Phyllis had always said,
that nothing mattered while they had one another. What if they were not
always to have one another? What if Phyllis herself--dear, unselfish,
sweet Phyllis--was to be the one to go away, leaving forever a void
which no one could fill?
For Phyllis had become delirious, and raved ceaselessly of the horrible
faces grinning and mowing around her bed; of the recent troubles,
begging pitifully to be taken home and laid in her own big, pretty room
where her head would not ache so. And she did not know Barbara nor
Jessamy, but confounded them with Mrs. Haines, and implored them by
turns to love the children, for Lionel was ill, and his head was aching
inside of hers, which made him and "poor Phyllis" both worse, and they
might die, and then his mother would never forgive herself. She always
spoke of herself as "poor Phyllis," apparently with some dim idea that
she was unlike herself--another personality--and invariably ended every
burst of delirium with the same appeal for mercy, and to be taken home
again. Barbara had never seen delirium; these ravings nearly broke
her heart, and took every particle of hope out of her. In vain Doctor
Jerome and Tom, whom she trusted even more, told her it was nothing
unusual. Bab, the light-hearted, refused to fulfil her title, but sat
stonily, looking forward to Phyllis's death.
Jessamy, more equable, kept up a little courage; but she too was
utterly inexperienced, and it was very hard for her to hope for
Phyllis's recovery.
And so Christmas eve dawned grimly enough upon the two poor girls, and
on them alone, for Mrs. Wyndham was too weak to give more than a sick
woman's passing thought to the day, and to Phyllis there was neither
day nor night.
Doctor Jerome came that morning, and looked more anxious than ever.
"Your mother is doing fairly," he said; "but this little girl does not
mend. Nurse, if you will get your scissors, I think this heavy hair
must come off."
"Oh, don't--please don't cut off Phyllis's beautiful hair," cried Bab,
while Jessamy clasped her hands, mutely making the same appeal.
"Nonsense, Bab; it will relieve her more than you can imagine," said
Tom, sharply, who had followed the doctor into the room. "It would all
fall, anyway, after such an illness. It is better for the hair; but if
it weren't, it would still require doing. Pray, be sensible."
The nurse brought the scissors, and with a few strokes the long, warm,
dark masses of hair lay on the quilt. "That's better," said the doctor,
as Phyllis moved her head as though at once conscious of relief.
He left a few additional directions for the nurse, and went away.
Phyllis's hair lay on a paper on the table; the sunlight, resting on
it, brought out its rich reddish tint. Tom lifted a tress tenderly.
"Poor, sweet Phyllis," he said. Jessamy turned away to the window,
without a word. What a Christmas eve, indeed!