Billy Grant, of course, did not die. This was perhaps because only
the good die young. And Billy Grant's creed had been the honour of a
gentleman rather than the Mosaic Law. There was, therefore, no
particular violence done to his code when his last thoughts--or what
appeared to be his last thoughts--were revenge instead of salvation.
The fact was, Billy Grant had a real reason for hating the Lindley
Grants. When a fellow like that has all the Van Kleek money and a
hereditary thirst, he is bound to drink. The Lindley Grants did not
understand this and made themselves obnoxious by calling him "Poor
Billy!" and not having wine when he came to dinner. That, however,
was not his reason for hating them.
Billy Grant fell in love. To give the devil his due, he promptly set
about reforming himself. He took about half as many whisky-and-sodas
as he had been in the habit of doing, and cut out champagne
altogether. He took up golf to fill in the time, too, but gave it up
when he found it made him thirstier than ever. And then, with
things so shaping up that he could rise in the morning without
having a drink to get up on, the Lindley Grants thought it best to
warn the girl's family before it was too late.
"He is a nice boy in some ways," Mrs. Lindley Grant had said on the
occasion of the warning; "but, like all drinking men, he is a broken
reed, eccentric and irresponsible. No daughter of mine could marry
him. I'd rather bury her. And if you want facts Lindley will give
them to you."
So the girl had sent back her ring and a cold little letter, and
Billy Grant had got roaring full at a club that night and presented
the ring to a cabman--all of which is exceedingly sordid, but rather
human after all.
The Nurse, having had no sleep for forty-eight hours, slept for
quite thirty minutes. She wakened at the end of that time and
started up with a horrible fear that the thing she was waiting for
had come. But Billy Grant was still alive, sleeping naturally, and
the thermometer, having been in place forty minutes, registered a
hundred and three.
At eight o'clock the interne, hurrying over in fresh ducks, with a
laudable desire to make the rounds before the Staff began to drop
in, found Billy Grant very still and with his eyes closed, and the
Nurse standing beside the bed, pale and tremulous.
"Why didn't you let me know?" he demanded, aggrieved. "I ought to
have been called. I told you----"
"He isn't dead," said the Nurse breathlessly. "He--I think he is
better."
Whereon she stumbled out of the room into her own little room across
the hall, locking the door behind her, and leaving the interne to
hunt the symptom record for himself--a thing not to be lightly
overlooked; though of course internes are not the Staff.
The interne looked over the record and whistled.
"Wouldn't that paralyse you!" he said under his breath. "'Pulse very
weak.' 'Pulse almost obliterated.' 'Very talkative.' 'Breathing hard
at four A.M. Cannot swallow.' And then: 'Sleeping calmly from five
o'clock.' 'Pulse stronger.' Temperature one hundred and three.' By
gad, that last prescription of mine was a hit!"
So now began a curious drama of convalescence in the little
isolation pavilion across the courtyard. Not for a minute did the
two people most concerned forget their strange relationship; not for
worlds would either have allowed the other to know that he or she
remembered. Now and then the Nurse caught Billy Grant's eyes fixed
on her as she moved about the room, with a curious wistful
expression in them. And sometimes, waking from a doze, he would find
her in her chair by the window, with her book dropped into her lap
and a frightened look in her eyes, staring at him.
He gained strength rapidly and the day came when, with the orderly's
assistance, he was lifted to a chair. There was one brief moment in
which he stood tottering on his feet. In that instant he had
realised what a little thing she was, after all, and what a cruel
advantage he had used for his own purpose.
When he was settled in the chair and the orderly had gone she
brought an extra pillow to put behind him, and he dared the first
personality of their new relationship.
"What a little girl you are, after all!" he said. "Lying there in
the bed shaking at your frown, you were so formidable."
"I am not small," she said, straightening herself. She had always
hoped that her cap gave her height. "It is you who are so tall.
You--you are a giant!"
"A wicked giant, seeking whom I may devour and carrying off lovely
girls for dinner under pretence of marriage----" He stopped his
nonsense abruptly, having got so far, and both of them coloured.
Thrashing about desperately for something to break the wretched
silence, he seized on the one thing that in those days of his
convalescence was always pertinent--food. "Speaking of dinner," he
said hastily, "isn't it time for some buttermilk?"
She was quite calm when she came back--cool, even smiling; but
Billy Grant had not had the safety valve of action. As she placed
the glass on the table at his elbow he reached out and took her
hand.
"Can you ever forgive me?" he asked. Not an original speech; the
usual question of the marauding male, a query after the fact and too
late for anything but forgiveness.
"Forgive you? For not dying?"
She was pale; but no more subterfuge now, no more turning aside from
dangerous subjects. The matter was up before the house.
"For marrying you!" said Billy Grant, and upset the buttermilk. It
took a little time to wipe up the floor and to put a clean cover on
the stand, and after that to bring a fresh glass and place it on the
table. But these were merely parliamentary preliminaries while each
side got its forces in line.
"Do you hate me very much?" opened Billy Grant. This was, to change
the figure, a blow below the belt.
"Why should I hate you?" countered the other side.
"I should think you would. I forced the thing on you."
"I need not have done it."
"But being you, and always thinking about making some one else happy
and comfortable----"
"Oh, if only they don't find it out over there!" she burst out. "If
they do and I have to leave, with Jim----"
Here, realising that she was going to cry and not caring to screw up
her face before any one, she put her arms on the stand and buried
her face in them. Her stiff tulle cap almost touched Billy Grant's
arm.
Billy Grant had a shocked second.
"Jim?"
"My little brother," from the table.
Billy Grant drew a long breath of relief. For a moment he had
thought----
"I wonder--whether I dare to say something to you." Silence from the
table and presumably consent. "Isn't he--don't you think that--I
might be allowed to--to help Jim? It would help me to like myself
again. Just now I'm not standing very high with myself."
"Won't you tell me why you did it?" she said, suddenly sitting up,
her arms still out before her on the table. "Why did you coax so?
You said it was because of a little property you had, but--that
wasn't it--was it?"
"No."
"Or because you cared a snap for me." This was affirmation, not
question.
"No, not that, though I----"
She gave a hopeless little gesture of despair.
"Then--why? Why?"
"For one of the meanest reasons I know--to be even with some people
who had treated me badly."
The thing was easier now. His flat denial of any sentimental reason
had helped to make it so.
"A girl that you cared about?"
"Partly that. The girl was a poor thing. She didn't care enough to
be hurt by anything I did. But the people who made the trouble----"
Now a curious thing happened. Billy Grant found at this moment that
he no longer hated the Lindley Grants. The discovery left him
speechless--that he who had taken his hate into the very valley of
death with him should now find himself thinking of both Lindley and
his wife with nothing more bitter than contempt shocked him. A state
of affairs existed for which his hatred of the Lindley Grants was
alone responsible; now the hate was gone and the state of affairs
persisted.
"I should like," said Billy Grant presently, "to tell you a
little--if it will not bore you--about myself and the things I have
done that I shouldn't, and about the girl. And of course, you know,
I'm--I'm not going to hold you to--to the thing I forced you into.
There are ways to fix that."
Before she would listen, however, she must take his temperature and
give him his medicine, and see that he drank his buttermilk--the
buttermilk last, so as not to chill his mouth for the thermometer.
The tired lines had gone from under her eyes and she was very lovely
that day. She had always been lovely, even when the Staff Doctor
had slapped her between the shoulders long ago--you know about
that--only Billy Grant had never noticed it; but to-day, sitting
there with the thermometer in his mouth while she counted his
respirations, pretending to be looking out the window while she did
it, Billy Grant saw how sweet and lovely and in every way adorable
she was, in spite of the sad droop of her lips--and found it hard to
say the thing he felt he must.
"After all," he remarked round the thermometer, "the thing is not
irrevocable. I can fix it up so that----"
"Keep your lips closed about the thermometer!" she said sternly, and
snapped her watch shut.
The pulse and so on having been recorded, and "Very hungry" put down
under Symptoms, she came back to her chair by the window, facing
him. She sat down primly and smoothed her white apron in her lap.
"Now!" she said.
"I am to go on?"
"Yes, please."
"If you are going to change the pillows or the screen, or give me
any other diabolical truck to swallow," he said somewhat peevishly,
"will you get it over now, so we can have five unprofessional
minutes?"
"Certainly," she said; and bringing an extra blanket she spread it,
to his disgust, over his knees.
This time, when she sat down, one of her hands lay on the table near
him and he reached over and covered it with his.
"Please!" he begged. "For company! And it will help me to tell you
some of the things I have to tell."
She left it there, after an uneasy stirring. So, sitting there,
looking out into the dusty courtyard with its bandaged figures in
wheeled chairs, its cripples sunning on a bench--their crutches
beside them--its waterless fountain and its dingy birds, he told her
about the girl and the Lindley Grants, and even about the cabman and
the ring. And feeling, perhaps in some current from the small hand
under his, that she was knowing and understanding and not turning
away, he told her a great deal he had not meant to tell--ugly
things, many of them--for that was his creed.
And, because in a hospital one lives many lives vicariously with
many people, what the girl back home would never have understood
this girl did and faced unabashed. Life, as she knew it, was not all
good and not all bad; passion and tenderness, violence and peace,
joy and wretchedness, birth and death--these she had looked on, all
of them, with clear eyes and hands ready to help.
So Billy Grant laid the good and the bad of his life before her,
knowing that he was burying it with her. When he finished, her hand
on the table had turned and was clasping his. He bent over and
kissed her fingers softly.
After that she read to him, and their talk, if any, was impersonal.
When the orderly had put him back to bed he lay watching her moving
about, rejoicing in her quiet strength, her repose. How well she was
taking it all! If only--but there was no hope of that. She could go
to Reno, and in a few months she would be free again and the thing
would be as if it had never been.
At nine o'clock that night the isolation pavilion was ready for the
night. The lights in the sickroom were out. In the hall a nightlight
burned low, Billy Grant was not asleep. He tried counting the
lighted windows of the hospital and grew only more wakeful.
The Nurse was sleeping now in her own room across, with the doors
open between. The slightest movement and she was up, tiptoeing in,
with her hair in a long braid down her back and her wrapper sleeves
falling away loosely from her white, young arms. So, aching with
inaction, Billy Grant lay still until the silence across indicated
that she was sleeping.
Then he got up. This is a matter of difficulty when one is still
very weak, and is achieved by rising first into a sitting posture by
pulling oneself up by the bars of the bed, and then by slipping
first one leg, then the other, over the side. Properly done, even
the weakest thus find themselves in a position that by the aid of a
chairback may become, however shaky, a standing one.
He got to his feet better than he expected, but not well enough to
relinquish the chair. He had made no sound. That was good. He would
tell her in the morning and rally her on her powers as a sleeper. He
took a step--if only his knees----
He had advanced into line with the doorway and stood looking through
the open door of the room across.
The Nurse was on her knees beside the bed, in her nightgown, crying.
Her whole young body was shaken with silent sobs; her arms, in their
short white sleeves, stretched across the bed, her fingers clutching
the counterpane.
Billy Grant stumbled back to his bed and fell in with a sort of
groan. Almost instantly she was at the door, her flannel wrapper
held about her, peering into the darkness.
"I thought I heard--are you worse?" she asked anxiously.
"I'm all right," he said, hating himself; "just not sleepy. How
about you?"
"Not asleep yet, but--resting," she replied.
She stood in the doorway, dimly outlined, with her long braid over
her shoulder and her voice still a little strained from crying. In
the darkness Billy Grant half stretched out his arms, then dropped
them, ashamed.
"Would you like another blanket?"
"If there is one near."
She came in a moment later with the blanket and spread it over the
bed. He lay very still while she patted and smoothed it into place.
He was mustering up his courage to ask for something--a curious
state of mind for Billy Grant, who had always taken what he wanted
without asking.
"I wish you would kiss me--just once!" he said wistfully. And then,
seeing her draw back, he took an unfair advantage: "I think that's
the reason I'm not sleeping."
"Don't be absurd!"
"Is it so absurd--under the circumstances?"
"You can sleep quite well if you only try."
She went out into the hall again, her chin well up. Then she
hesitated, turned and came swiftly back into the room.
"If I do," she said rather breathlessly, "will you go to sleep? And
will you promise to hold your arms up over your head?"
"But my arms----"
"Over your head!"
He obeyed at that, and the next moment she had bent over him in the
darkness; and quickly, lightly, deliciously, she kissed--the tip of
his nose!