"For real emergencies," Doctor Ledyard once remarked to Helen Travers,
"give me the nervous, high-strung women. They come through shock and
danger better, they hold to a climax more steadily. Your phlegmatic woman
goes to pieces because she hasn't imagination and vision enough to carry
her over the present."
This reasoning caused him to select Priscilla Glenn for one of the most
critical operations he had ever performed. Among the blue and white
nurses of his knowledge this girl with the strange, uplifted expression
of face; this girl who was actually on the lookout for experience and
practice, and who seriously loved her profession, stood in a class by
herself. He had long had his eye upon her, had meant to single her out.
And now the opportunity had come.
Perhaps the most important man in business circles, certainly one of the
richest men in the city, had come to that period of his life's career
when he must pay toll for the things he had done and left undone in his
past. The broad, common gateway gaped wide for him, and only one chance
presented itself as a possible means of holding him back from the long
journey he so shudderingly contemplated.
"One chance in ten?" he questioned.
"One--in----" Ledyard had hesitated.
"A hundred?"
"A thousand."
A breathless pause followed. Then:
"And if I do not take it, how long?"
"A week, a month; not longer."
"I'll take it."
"I'll have my partner----Would you care for any one else?" Ledyard asked.
"No. Since it must be, I put myself in your hands. I trust you above any
one I know. Do your best for me, and in case I slip through your fingers
I thank you now, and--good-bye."
Before any great event, or operation, Ledyard was supersensitive, highly
wrought, and nervous. When he heard the announcement that day of the
operation: "All is ready, sir!" he stepped, gowned and masked, into the
operating-room, and was aware of a senseless inclination to ask some
one--he did not know whom--to make less noise and to lower the shades.
Then his eye fell, not on the dignified and serene head nurse, not on the
other ghostly young forms in their places near the table, not on the
anesthetist, nor young Travers, his partner, but on the nurse who stood
a little apart, the girl he had selected in order to test her on a really
great case. So radiant and inspired was Priscilla Glenn's face that it
fairly shone in that grim place and positively had the effect of bringing
Ledyard to the calmness that characterized his action once the necessity
demanded.
"How is your patient, Doctor Sloan?" he asked the anesthetist.
"Fine, Doctor Ledyard. I'm ready when you are."
Then tense silence followed, broken only by the click of instruments and
the curt, crisp commands. The minutes, weighted with concentration, ran
into the hour. Not a body in that room was aware of fatigue or anxiety. A
life was at stake, and every one knew it. It did not matter that the man
upon the table was important and useful: had he been the meanest of the
mean and in the same critical state, that steady hand, which guided the
knife so scientifically and powerfully, would have worked the same.
The sun beat down upon the glass roof of that high room; the perspiration
started to Ledyard's forehead and a nurse wiped it away.
From her place Priscilla Glenn watched breathlessly the scene before her.
It seemed to her that she had never seen an operation before; had never
comprehended what one could be. She realized the odds against which those
two great men were battling, and her gaze rested finally, not on the head
surgeon, but on his partner. Once, as if by some subtle attraction, he
raised his eyes and met hers. Above the mask his glance showed kindly and
encouragingly. He knew that some nurses lost their nerve when a thing
stretched on as this did; he never could quite overlook the fact that
nurses were women, as well, and he hated to see one go under. But this
young nurse was showing no weakness. Travers saw that, after a moment,
and dropped his eyes. But that glance had fixed Priscilla's face in his
memory, and when, after the great man had been carried to his room with
hope following him, when he could be left with safety to his private
nurse, Travers came upon the girl standing by a deep window in the upper
hall. He remembered her at once and stopped to say a pleasant word.
This was not the strictly proper thing to do, and Travers knew it.
Ledyard was always challenging his undignified tendencies.
"Unless doctors and nurses can leave their sex outside their profession,"
was a pet epigram of Ledyard's, "they had better choose another."
But Travers had never been able to fulfil his partner's ideal.
"It was a wonderful operation," he said. "I hope it did not overtire you.
You will get hardened after a while."
"I am not at all tired. Yes, it was--wonderful! I did not know any
operation could be like that--I mean in the way that it was done. I have
always been afraid of Doctor Ledyard before; all of us are; I shall never
be again."
"May I ask why?"
Travers, being young and vital, was forgetting, for the moment, his
professional air to a dangerous extent. He was noticing the strange
coloured hair under the snowy cap, the poise of the head, the deep
violet eyes in the richly tinted face.
"It was that--well, the look on his face after he had done all that he
could--done it so wonderfully. That look was--a prayer! I shall never
forget."
Travers gave a light laugh.
"It would be like Doctor Ledyard," he said with a peculiarly boyish ring
in his voice, "to do his part first and pray afterward."
"But no one could ever be afraid of him again having once seen that
look!"
"Miss Glynn," Travers replied; "they could! and yet the _look_ holds the
fear in check."
Priscilla went early to bed that night. She had planned a visit to
Boswell when her enthusiasm was at its height, but at the day's end she
found herself so exhausted that she sought her room in a state bordering
on collapse.
Sounds outside caught and held her attention; every sense was quiveringly
alert and receptive; she was at the mercy of her subconscious self.
"Extry! extry!" bellowed a boy just below her window; "turribul
accident on--de--extry! extry! Latest bulletin--Gordan Moffatt--big
fin--cier--extry! extry!"
Priscilla sat up in bed and listened. So intimate had the insistent boy
in the street become that she was drawn to him by a common bond of
sympathy.
Slowly a luxurious sense of weariness overcame her and again she leaned
back on her pillow and sank into a semiconscious sleep. Balanced between
life and the oblivion, into which reason enters blindfolded, she made no
resistance, but was swayed by every passing wave of thought, memory, and
vision.
The voice outside merged presently into Jerry-Jo McAlpin's. So naturally
did it do so that the girl upon the bed, rigid and pale, accepted the
change with no surprise.
Jerry-Jo was asking her the way out! He was lost--lost. He wanted to get
out of the darkness and the noise; he wanted to find his way back to the
In-Place.
Yes, she would show him! There was no fear of him; no repulsion. She was
very safe and strong, and she knew that it was wiser for Jerry-Jo to go
back home.
Then suddenly she and he were transported from the bewildering city,
talking in its sleep, to the sweet, fresh dimness of the Kenmore Green,
where the steamer had left them. It was early, very early morning, not
more than four o'clock, and the stars were bright and the hemlocks black,
and the red rocks looked soft in the shadows, like pillows. And over the
Green, loping and inquisitive, came Sandy McAdam's dog, Bounder. How
natural and restful the scene was! Then it was Jerry-Jo, not Priscilla,
who was leading. The half-breed with a gesture of friendliness was
beckoning her on toward the mossy wood path leading to Lonely Farm. There
was a definiteness about the slouching figure that forbade any pause at
the White Fish Lodge or the master's dark and silent house. Priscilla
longed to stop, but she hastened on, feeling a need for hurry.
Presently she saw the little house, her father's house, and there was a
light shining from the kitchen window. Jerry-Jo, still preceding her,
tapped on the outer door, but when the door fell open Jerry-Jo was gone!
Alone, Priscilla confronted her father, and saw with surprise that he
evidently expected her. While the look of hatred and doubt still rested
in his eyes, there was also a look of dumb pity. No word was spoken.
Nathaniel merely stepped aside and closed the door behind her. Then she
began a strange, breathless hunt for something which, at first, she could
not call by name; it evaded and eluded her. Something was missing;
something she wanted desperately; but the rooms were horribly dark and
lonely, and the stillness hurt her more and more.
At last she came back to her father and the warm, lighted kitchen.
"I cannot find--my mother," she said, and the reality set her trembling.
"Your--mother? I--I cannot find her, either. I thought she--followed
you!"
Cold and shivering, Priscilla sat up in bed. Her teeth chattered and
there were tears on her cheeks. They did not seem like her own tears. It
was as if some one, bending over her, had let them fall from eyes seeking
to find her in the dark.
"Mother!" moaned Priscilla, and with the word a yearning and craving for
her mother filled every sense. By a magic that the divine only controls,
poor Theodora Glenn in that moment was transformed and radiantly crowned
with the motherhood she had so impotently striven to achieve in her
narrowed, blighted life. The suffering of maternity, its denials and
relinquishings she had experienced, but never its joy of realization,
unless, as her spirit passed from the Place Beyond the Winds to its
Home, it paused beside the little, narrow, white bed upon which Priscilla
lay, and caught that name "Mother!" spoken with a sudden inspiration of
understanding.
And that night, with only her grim husband and Long Jean beside her,
Theodora escaped the bondage of life.
After the strange dream, Priscilla, awed and trembling, walked to the
wide open window of her room. For some moments she stood there breathing
fast and hard while the cruel clutch of superstition hurt and held her.
"Something has happened," she faltered, leaning upon the casement and
looking down into the silent street, for the restless city had at last
fallen to sleep. "Something in Kenmore!"
A red, pulsing planet, shining high over a nearby church tower, caught
her eye and brought a throb of comfort to her--a tender thought of home.
"To-morrow, perhaps, a letter will come from Master Farwell; if not, I
will write to him. I must know."