NURSE AND PATIENT
When Dominick returned to consciousness he lay for a space looking
directly in front of him, then moved his head and let his eyes sweep
the walls. They were alien walls of white plaster, naked of all
adornment. The light from a shaded lamp lay across one of them in a
soft yet clear wash of yellow, so clear that he could see that the
plaster was coarse.
There were few pieces of furniture in the room, and all new to him. A
bureau of the old-fashioned marble-topped kind stood against the wall
opposite. The lamp that cast the yellow light was on this bureau; its
globe, a translucent gold reflection revealed in liquid clearness in
the mirror just behind. It was not his own room nor Berny’s. He turned
his head farther on the pillow very slowly, for he seemed sunk in an
abyss of suffering and feebleness. On the table by the bed’s head was
another lamp, a folded newspaper shutting its light from his face, and
here his eyes stopped.
A woman was sitting by the foot of the bed, her head bent as if
reading. He stared at her with even more intentness than he had at the
room. The glow of the lamp on the bureau was behind her--he saw her
against it without color or detail, like a shadow thrown on a sheet.
Her outlines were sharply defined against the illumined stretch of
plaster,--the arch of her head, which was broken by the coils of hair
on top, her rather short neck, with some sort of collar binding it,
the curve of her shoulders, rounded and broad, not the shoulders of a
thin woman. He did not think she was his wife, but she might be, and he
moved and said suddenly in a husky voice,
“What time is it?”
The woman started, laid her book down, and rose. She came forward and
stood beside him, looking down, the filaments of hair round her head
blurring the sharpness of its outline. He stared up at her, haggard
and intent, and saw it was not his wife. It was a strange woman with
a pleasant, smiling face. He felt immensely relieved and said with a
hoarse carefulness of utterance,
“What time did you say it is?”
“A few minutes past five,” she answered. “You’ve been asleep.”
“Have I?” he said, gazing immovably at her. “What day is it?”
“Thursday,” she replied. “You came here last night from Rocky Bar.
Perhaps you don’t remember.”
“Rocky Bar!” he repeated vaguely, groping through a haze of memory.
“Was it only yesterday? Was it only yesterday I left San Francisco?”
“I don’t know when you left San Francisco--” the newspaper shade
cracked and bent a little, letting a band of light fall across the
pillow. She leaned down, arranging it with careful hands, looking from
the light to him to see if it were correctly adjusted.
“Whenever you left San Francisco,” she said, “you got here last night.
They brought you here, Perley and some other men in the sleigh. They
found you in the road. You were half-frozen.”
He looked at her moving hands, then when they had satisfactorily
arranged the shade and dropped to her sides, he looked at her face. Her
eyes were soft and friendly and had a gentle, kind expression. He liked
to look at them. The only woman’s eyes he had looked into lately had
been full of wrathful lightenings. There seemed no need to be polite or
do the things that people did when they were well and sitting talking
in chairs, so he did not speak for what seemed to him a long time. Then
he said,
“What is this place?”
“Antelope,” said the woman. “Perley’s Hotel at Antelope.”
“Oh, yes,” he answered with an air of weary recollection, “I was going
to walk there from Rocky Bar, but the snow came down too hard, and
the wind--you could hardly stand against it! It was a terrible pull.
Perley’s Hotel at Antelope. Of course, I know all about it. I was here
last summer for two weeks fishing.”
She stretched out her hand for a glass, across the top of which a book
rested. He followed the movement with a mute fixity.
“This is your medicine,” she said, taking the book off the glass. “You
were to take it at five but I didn’t like to wake you.”
She dipped a spoon into the glass and held it out to him. But the young
man felt too ill to bother with medicine and, as the spoon touched his
lips, he gave his head a slight jerk and the liquid was spilt on the
counterpane. She looked at it for a rueful moment, then said, as if
with gathering determination,
“But you _must_ take it. I think perhaps I gave it wrong. I ought to
have lifted you up. It’s easier that way,” and before he could answer
she slipped her arm under his head and raised it, with the other
hand setting the rim of the glass against his lips. He swallowed a
mouthful and felt her arm sliding from behind his head. He had a hazy
consciousness that a perfume came from her dress, and for the first
time he wondered who she was. Wondering thus, his eyes again followed
her hand putting back the glass, and watched it, white in the gush of
lamplight, carefully replacing the book. Then she turned toward him
with the same slight, soft smile.
“Who are _you_?” he said, keeping his hollowed eyes hard on her.
“I’m Rose Cannon,” she answered. “Rose Cannon from San Francisco.”
“Oh, yes,” with a movement of comprehension, the name striking a chord
of memory. “Rose Cannon from San Francisco, daughter of Bill Cannon. Of
course I know.”
He was silent again, overwhelmed by indifference and lassitude. She
made a step backward from the bedside. Her dress rustled and the same
faint perfume he had noticed came delicately to him. He turned his head
away from her and said dryly and without interest,
“I thought it was some one else.”
The words seemed to arrest her. She came back and stood close beside
him. Looking up he could see her head against the light that ran up
from the shaded lamps along the ceiling. She bent down and said,
speaking slowly and clearly as though to a child,
“The storm has broken the wires but as soon as they are up, papa will
send your mother word, so you needn’t worry about that. But we don’t
either of us know your wife’s address. If you could tell us----”
She stopped. He had begun to frown and then shut his eyes with an
expression of weariness.
“That doesn’t matter,” he said. “Don’t bother about it. Let her alone.”
Again there was one of those pauses which seemed to him so long. He
gave a sigh and moved restlessly, and she said,
“Are your feet very painful?”
“Yes, pretty bad,” he answered. “What’s the matter with them?”
“They were frost-bitten, one partly frozen.”
“Oh--” he did not seem profoundly interested. It was as if they were
some one else’s feet, only they hurt violently enough to obtrude
themselves upon his attention. “Thank you very much,” he added. “I’ll
be all right to-morrow.”
He felt very tired and heard, as in a dream, the rustle of her dress
as she moved again. She said something about “supper” and “Mrs. Perley
coming,” and the dark, enveloping sense of stupor from which he had
come to life closed on him again.
Some time later on he emerged from it and saw another woman, stout and
matronly, with sleekly-parted hair, and an apron girt about her. He
asked her, too, who she was, for the fear that he might wake and find
his wife by his bedside mingled with the pain of his feet, to torment
him and break the vast, dead restfulness of the torpor in which he lay.
It broke into gleams of interest and returning consciousness during
the next two days. He experienced an acuter sense of illness and
pain, the burning anguish of his feet and fevered misery of his body,
bitten through with cold, brought him back to a realization of his own
identity. He heard the doctor murmuring in the corner of “threatened
pneumonia” and understood that he was the object threatened. He began
to know and separate the strange faces that seemed continually to be
bending over him, asking him how he felt. There was the doctor, Perley,
Bill Cannon, and the old judge and three different women, whom he had
some difficulty in keeping from merging into one composite being who
was sometimes “Miss Cannon,” and sometimes “Mrs. Perley,” and then
again “Cora.”
When on the fourth day the doctor told him that he thought he would
“pull through” with no worse ailment than a frozen foot, he had
regained enough of his original vigor and impatience under restraint
to express a determination to rise and “go on.” He was in pain, mental
and physical, and the ministrations and attentions of the satellites
that so persistently revolved round his bed rasped him into irritable
moodiness. He did not know that all Antelope was waiting for the latest
bulletins from Mrs. Perley or Cora. The glamour attaching to his
sensational entry into their midst had been intensified by the stories
of the wealth and position that had been his till he had married a poor
girl, contrary to his mother’s wishes. He was talked of in the bar,
discussed in the kitchen, and Cora dreamed of him at night. The very
name of Ryan carried its weight, and Antelope, a broken congeries of
white roofs and black smoke-stacks emerging from giant drifts, throbbed
with pride at the thought that the two greatest names of California
finance were snow-bound in Perley’s Hotel.
The doctor laughed at his desire to “move on.” The storm was still
raging and Antelope was as completely cut off from the rest of the
world as if it were an uncharted island in the unknown reaches of the
Pacific. Propping the invalid up among his pillows he drew back the
curtain and let him look out through a frost-painted pane on a world
all sweeping lines and skurrying eddies of white. The drifts curled
crisp edges over the angles of roofs, like the lips of breaking waves.
The glimpse of the little town that the window afforded showed it
cowering under a snow blanket, almost lost to sight in its folds.
“Even if your feet were all right, you’re tied here for two weeks
anyway,” said the doctor, dropping the curtain. “It’s the biggest storm
_I_ ever saw, and there’s an old timer that hangs round the bar who
says it’s as bad as the one that caught the Donner party in forty-six.”
The next day it stopped and the world lay gleaming and still under
a frosty crust. The sky was a cold, sullen gray, brooding and
cloud-hung, and the roofs and tree-tops stood out against it as
though executed in thick white enamel. The drifts lay in suave curves,
softly undulating like the outlines of a woman’s body, sometimes
sweeping smoothly up to second stories, here and there curdled into an
eddy, frozen as it twisted. A miner came in from an outlying camp on
skees and reported the cold as intense, the air clear as crystal and
perfectly still. On the path as he came numerous fir boughs had broken
under the weight of snow, with reports like pistol shots. There was
a rumor that men, short of provisions, were snowed up at the Yaller
Dog mine just beyond the shoulder of the mountain. This gave rise to
much consultation and loud talking in the bar, and the lower floor of
Perley’s was as full of people, noise and stir, as though a party were
in progress.
That afternoon Dominick, clothed in an old bath-robe of the doctor’s,
his swathed feet hidden under a red rug drawn from Mrs. Perley’s
stores, was promoted to an easy chair by the window. The doctor, who
had helped him dress, having disposed the rug over his knees and tucked
a pillow behind his back, stood off and looked critically at the effect.
“I’ve got to have you look your best,” he said, “and you’ve got to act
your prettiest this afternoon. The young lady’s coming in to take care
of you while I go my rounds.”
“Young lady!” exclaimed Dominick in a tone that indicated anything but
pleasurable anticipation. “What young lady?”
“_Our_ young lady,” answered the doctor. “Miss Cannon, the Young Lady
of Perley’s Hotel. Don’t you know that that’s the nicest girl in the
world? Maybe you don’t, but that’s because your powers of appreciation
have been dormant for the last few days. The people here were most
scared to death of her at first. They didn’t know how she was going to
get along, used to the finest, the way she’s always been. But, bless
your heart, she’s less trouble than anybody in the place. There’s
twelve extra people eating here, besides you to be looked after, and
Mrs. Perley and Cora are pretty near run to death trying to do it. Miss
Cannon wanted to turn in and help them. They wouldn’t have it, but they
had to let her do her turn here taking care of you.”
“It’s very kind of her,” said the invalid without enthusiasm. “I
noticed her here several times.”
“And as easy as an old shoe,” said the doctor. “Just as nice to
Perley’s boy, who’s a waif that the Perleys picked up in the streets
of Stockton, as if he was the Prince of Wales. I tell you heredity’s
a queer thing. How did Bill Cannon come to have a girl like that? Of
course there’s the mother to take into account, but--”
A knock on the door interrupted him. To his cry of “Come in,” Rose
entered, a white shawl over her shoulders, a book in her hand. While
she and Dominick were exchanging greetings, the doctor began thrusting
his medicines into his bag, alleging the necessity of an immediate
departure, as two cases of bronchitis and three of pneumonia awaited
him.
“You didn’t know there were that many people in Antelope,” he said as
he snapped the clasp of the bag and picked up his hat. “Well, I’ll
swear to it, even if it does seem the prejudiced estimate of an old
inhabitant. So long. I’ll be back by five and I hope to hear a good
report from the nurse.”
The door closed behind him and Dominick and the young girl were left
looking rather blankly at each other. It was the first time he had seen
her when he had not been presented to her observation as a prostrate
and fever-stricken sufferer of whom nothing was expected but a docile
attitude in the matter of medicines. Now he felt the subjugating power
of clothes. It did not seem possible that the doctor’s bath-robe and
Mrs. Perley’s red rug could cast such a blighting weight of constraint
and consciousness upon him. But with the donning of them his invalid
irresponsibility seemed gone for ever. He had a hunted, helpless
feeling that he ought to talk to this young woman as gentlemen did who
were not burdened by the pain of frozen feet and marital troubles.
Moreover, he felt the annoyance of being thus thrust upon the care of
a lady whom he hardly knew.
“I’m very sorry that they bothered you this way,” he said awkwardly.
“I--I--don’t think I need any one with me. I’m quite comfortable here
by myself,” and then he stopped, conscious of the ungraciousness of his
words, and reddening uncomfortably.
“I dare say you don’t want me here,” said Rose with an air of meekness
which had the effect of being assumed. “But you really have been too
sick to be left alone. Besides, there’s your medicine, you must take
that regularly.”
The invalid gave an indifferent cast of his eye toward the glass on the
bureau, guarded by the familiar book and spoon. Then he looked back at
her. She was regarding him deprecatingly.
“Couldn’t I take it myself?” he said.
“I don’t think I’d trust you,” she answered.
His sunken glance was held by hers, and he saw, under the deprecation
of her look, humor struggling to keep itself in seemly suppression. He
was faintly surprised. There did not seem to him anything comic in the
fact of her distrust. But as he looked at her he saw the humor rising
past control. She dropped her eyes to hide it and bit her under lip.
This did strike him as funny and a slow grin broke the melancholy of
his face. She stole a stealthy look at him, her gravity vanished at
the first glimpse of the grin, and she began to laugh, holding her
head down and making the stifled, chuckling sounds of controlled mirth
suddenly liberated. He was amused and a little puzzled and, with his
grin more pronounced than before, said,
“What are you laughing at?”
She lifted her head and looked at him with eyes narrowed to slits,
murmuring,
“You, trying to get rid of me and being so polite and helpless. It’s
too pathetic for words.”
“If it’s pathetic, why do you laugh?” he said, laughing himself, he did
not know why.
She made no immediate reply and he looked at her, languidly interested
and admiring. For the first time he realized that she was a pretty
girl, with her glistening coils of blond hair and a pearl-white skin,
just now suffused with pink.
“Why did you think I wanted to get rid of you?” he asked.
“You’ve almost said so,” she answered. “And then--well, I can see you
do.”
“How? What have I done that you’ve seen?”
“Not any especial thing, but--I _think_ you do.”
He felt too weak and indifferent to tell polite falsehoods. Leaning his
head on the pillow that stood up at his back, he said,
“Perhaps I did at first. But now I’m glad you came.”
She smiled indulgently at him as though he were a sick child.
“I should think you wouldn’t have wanted me. You must be so tired of
people coming in and out. Those days when you were so bad the doctor
had the greatest difficulty in keeping men out who didn’t know you and
had never seen you. Everybody in the hotel wanted to crowd in.”
“What did they want to do that for?”
“To see you. _We_ were the sensation of Antelope first. But then you
came and put us completely in the shade. Antelope hasn’t had such an
excitement as your appearance since the death of Jim Granger, whose
picture is down stairs in the parlor and who comes from here.”
“I don’t see why I should be an excitement. When I was up here fishing
last summer nobody was in the least excited.”
“It was the way you came--half-dead out of the night as if the sea had
thrown you up. Then everybody wanted to know why you did it, why you, a
Californian, attempted such a dangerous thing.”
“There wasn’t anything so desperately dangerous about it,” he said,
almost in a tone of sulky protest.
“The men down stairs seemed to think so. They say nobody could have got
up here in such a storm.”
“Oh, rubbish! Besides, it wasn’t storming when I left Rocky Bar. It was
gray and threatening, but there wasn’t a flake falling. The first snow
came down when I was passing the Silver Crescent. It came very fast
after that.”
“Why did you do it--attempt to walk such a distance in such uncertain
weather?”
Dominick smoothed the rug over his knees. His face, looking down, had a
curious expression of cold, enforced patience.
“I was tired,” he said slowly. “I’d worked too hard and I thought the
mountains would do me good. I can get time off at the bank when I want
and I thought I’d take a holiday and come up here where I was last
summer. I knew the place and liked the hotel. I wanted to get a good
way off, out of the city and away from my work. As for walking up here
that afternoon--I’m very strong and I never thought for a moment such a
blizzard was coming down.”
He lifted his head and turned toward the window, then raising one hand
rubbed it across his forehead and eyes. There was something in the
gesture that silenced the young girl. She thought he felt tired and had
been talking too much and she was guiltily conscious of her laughter
and loquacity.
They sat without speaking for some moments. Dominick made no attempt to
break the silence when she moved noiselessly to the stove and pushed in
more wood. His face was turned from her and she thought he had fallen
asleep when he suddenly moved and said,
“Isn’t it strange that I have never met you before?”
She was relieved. His tone showed neither feebleness nor fatigue, in
fact it had the fresh alertness of a return to congenial topics. She
determined, however, to be less talkative, less encouraging to the
weakening exertions of general conversation. So she spoke with demure
brevity.
“Yes, very. But you were at college for four years, and the year you
came back I was in Europe.”
He looked at her ruminatingly, and nodded.
“But I’ve seen you,” he said, “at the theater. I was too sick at first
to recognize you, but afterward I knew I’d seen you, with your father
and your brother Gene.”
It was her turn to nod. She thought it best to say nothing, and waited.
But his eyes bent inquiringly upon her, and the waiting silence seemed
to demand a comment. She made the first one that occurred to her:
“Whom were _you_ with?”
“My wife,” said the young man.
Rose felt that an indefinite silence would have been better than this.
All she knew of Dominick Ryan’s wife was that she was a person who had
not been respectable and whose union with Dominick had estranged him
from his people. Certainly, whatever else she was, young Mrs. Ryan
was not calculated to be an agreeable subject of converse with the man
who in marrying her had sacrificed wealth, family, and friends. The
doctor’s chief injunction to Rose had been to keep the invalid in a
state of tranquillity. Oppressed by a heavy sense of failure she felt
that nursing was not her forte.
She murmured a vague sentence of comment and this time determined not
to speak, no matter how embarrassing the pause became. She even thought
of taking up her book and was about to stretch her hand for it, when he
said,
“But it seems so queer when our parents have been friends for years,
and I know Gene, and you know my sister Cornelia so well.”
She drew her hand back and leaned forward, frowning and staring in
front of her, as she sent her memory backward groping for data.
“Well, you see a sort of series of events prevented it. When we were
little our parents lived in different places. Ages ago when we first
came down from Virginia City you were living somewhere else, in
Sacramento, wasn’t it? Then you were at school, and after that you went
East to college for four years, and when you got back from college I
was in Europe. And when I came back from Europe--that’s over two years
ago now--why then----”
She had again brought up against his marriage, this time with a shock
that was of a somewhat shattering nature.
“Why, then,” she repeated falteringly, realizing where she was--“why,
then--let’s see--?”
“Then I had married,” he said quietly.
“Oh, yes, of course,” she assented, trying to impart a suggestion of
sudden innocent remembrance to her tone. “You had married. Why, of
course.”
He vouchsafed no reply. She was distressed and mortified, her face
red with anger at her own stupidity. In her embarrassment she looked
down, smoothing her lace cuffs, and waiting for him to say something
as he had done before. But this time he made no attempt to resume the
conversation. Stealing a sidelong glance at him she saw that he had
turned to the window and was gazing out. There was an expression of
brooding gloom on his profile, his eyebrows drawn low, his lips close
set. She judged rightly that he did not intend to speak again, and she
took up her book and opened it.
Half an hour later, rising to give him his medicine, she saw that
he had fallen asleep. She was at his side before she discovered it,
thinking his eyes were drooped in thought. Standing with the glass
in her hand she looked at him with something of a child’s shrinking
curiosity and a woman’s pity for a strong creature weakened and brought
low. The light in the room was growing gray and in it she saw his
face, with the shadows in its hollows, looking thin and haggard in
the abandonment of sleep. For the first time, seeing him clothed and
upright, she realized that he was a personable man, a splendid man, and
also for the first time she thought of him outside this room and this
house, and a sort of proud resentment stirred in her at the memory of
the marriage he had made--the marriage with the woman who was not good.
An hour later when the doctor came back she was kneeling on the
floor by the open stove door, softly building up the fire. From the
orifice--a circle of brilliance in the dim room--a red glow painted
her serious, down-bent face with a hectic color, and touched with a
bright, palpitating glaze the curves of her figure. At the sound of the
opening door she looked up quickly, and, her hands being occupied, gave
a silencing jerk of her head toward the sleeping man.
The doctor looked at them both. The scene was like a picture of some
primitive domestic interior where youth and beauty had made a nest,
warmed by that symbol of life, a fire, which one replenished while the
other slept.