“I’d like to accommodate you,” faltered the soldier, “but you know I really ought—“ Suddenly the big fellow was seized with a fit of sneezing, and the sick, sore thrills danced all down his back and slapped him in the face and pricked him in the throat and banged against his head. He dropped weakly down in a chair and got out the discouragedest-looking handkerchief that ever a soldier carried. It looked as if it might have washed the decks on the way over or wiped off shoes, as doubtless it had. And it left a dull streak of olive-drab dust on his cheek and chin when he had finished polishing off the last sneeze and lifted his suffering eyes to his hostess.
“You’re sick!” declared Miss Marilla, with a kind of satisfaction, as if now she had got something she could really take hold of. “I’ve thought it all the evening. I first laid it to the wind in your face, for I knew you weren’t the drinking kind; and then I thought maybe you’d had to be up all night last night or something—lack of sleep makes eyes look that way. But I believe you’ve got the grippe, and I’m going to put you to bed and give you some homeopathic medicine. Come, tell me the truth. Aren’t you chilly?”
With a half-sheepish smile, the soldier admitted that he was, and a big involuntary shudder ran over his tall frame with the admission.
“Well, it’s high time we got to work. There’s plenty of hot water, and you go up to the bathroom and take a hot bath. I’ll put a hot-water bag in the bed and get it good and warm; and I’ve got a long, warm flannel nightgown I guess you can get on. It was made for grandmother, and she was a big woman. Come, we’ll go right upstairs. I can come down and shut up the house while you’re taking your bath.”
The soldier protested, but Miss Marilla swept all before her. She locked the front door resolutely and put the chain on. She turned out the parlor light and shoved the young man before her to the stairs.
“But I oughtn’t to,” he protested again, with one foot on the first step. “I’m an utter stranger.”
“Well, what’s that?” said Miss Marilla crisply. “ ‘I was a stranger, and ye took me in.’ When it comes to that, we’re all strangers. Come, hurry up; you ought to be in bed. You’ll feel like a new man when I get you tucked up.”
“You’re awfully good,” he murmured, stumbling up the stairs with a sick realization that he was giving way to the little imps of chills and thrills that were dancing over him, that he was all in, and in a few minutes more, he would be a contemptible coward, letting a lone, old woman fuss over him this way.
Miss Marilla turned up the light and threw back the covers of the spare bed, sending a whiff of lavender through the room. The Franklin heater glowed cheerfully, and the place was warm as toast. There was something sweet and homelike in the old-fashioned room with its strange, ancient framed photographs of people long gone and its plain but fine old mahogany. The soldier raised his bloodshot eyes and looked about with a thankful wish that he felt well enough to appreciate it all.
Miss Marilla had pulled open a drawer and produced a long, fine flannel garment of nondescript fashion; and from a closet, she drew out a long pink bathrobe and a pair of felt slippers.
“There! I guess you can get those on.”
She bustled into the bathroom, turned on the hot water, and heaped big white bath towels and sweet-scented soap upon him. In a kind of daze of thankfulness, he stumbled into the bathroom and began his bath. He hadn’t had a bath like that in—was it two years? Somehow, the hot water held down the nasty little sick thrills and cut out the chills for the time. It was wonderful to feel clean and warm, and smell the freshness of the towels and soap. He climbed into the big nightgown, which also smelled of lavender, and came out presently with the felt slippers on his feet and the pink bathrobe trailing around his shoulders. There was a meek, conquered expression on his face; and he crept gratefully into the warm bed according to directions, and snuggled down with that sick, sore thrill of thankfulness that everybody who has ever had flu knows.
Miss Marilla bustled up from downstairs with a second hot-water bag in one hand and a thermometer in the other.
“I’m going to take your temperature,” she said briskly and stuck the thermometer into his unresisting mouth. Somehow, it was wonderfully sweet to be fussed over this way, almost like having a mother. He hadn’t had such care since he was a little fellow in the hospital at prep school.
“I thought so,” said Miss Marilla, casting a practiced eye at the thermometer a moment later. “You’ve got quite a fever. And you’ve got to lie right still and do as I say, or you’ll have a time of it. I hate to think what would have happened to you if I’d been weak enough to let you go off into the cold without any overcoat tonight.”
“Oh, I’d have walked it off likely,” faintly spoke the old Adam in the sleepy, sick soldier. But he knew, as he spoke, that he was lying, and he knew Miss Marilla knew it also. He would have laughed if it hadn’t been too much trouble. It was wonderful to be in a bed like this and be warm, and that ache in his back against the hot-water bag. It almost made his head stop aching.
In almost no time at all, he was asleep. He never realized when Miss Marilla brought a glass and fed him medicine. He opened his mouth obediently when she told him and went right on sleeping.
“Bless his heart,” she said. “He must have been all worn out.” And she turned the light low and, gathering up his chair full of clothes, slipped away to the bathroom, where presently they were all, except the shoes, soaking in strong, hot soapsuds. Miss Marilla had gone downstairs to stir up the fire and put on irons. But she took the precaution to close all the blinds on the Amber side of the house and pull down the shades. Mary had no need ever to find out what she was doing.
The night wore on, and Miss Marilla wrought with happy heart and willing hands. She was doing something for somebody who really needed it, and who, for the time being, had no one else to do it for him. He was hers, exclusively, to be served this night. It was years since she had had anybody of her own to care for, and she luxuriated in the service.
Every hour she slipped up to feel his forehead, listen to his breathing, and give him his medicine, and then slipped down to the kitchen again to her ironing. Garment by garment the soldier’s meager outfit came from the steaming suds, then was conveyed to the kitchen, where it hung on an improvised line over the range and got itself dry enough to be ironed and patched. It was a work of love, and therefore, it was done perfectly. When morning dawned, the soldier’s outfit, thoroughly renovated and pressed almost beyond recognition, lay on a chair by the spare room window, and Miss Marilla, in her dark blue serge morning dress, lay tidily down on the outside of her bed to take “forty winks.” But even then she could hardly get to sleep, she was so excited thinking about her guest and wondering whether he would feel better when he awoke or whether she ought to send for a doctor.
A hoarse cough roused her an hour later, and she went with speed to her patient and found him tossing and battling in his sleep with some imaginary foe.
“I don’t owe you a cent any longer!” he declared fiercely. “I’ve paid it all, even to the interest while I was in France. And there’s no reason why I shouldn’t tell you just what I think of you. You can go to thunder with your kind offers. I’m off you for life!” And then the big fellow turned with a groan of anguish and buried his face in his pillow.
Miss Marilla paused in horror, thinking she had intruded upon some secret meditation. But as she waited on tiptoe and breathless in the hall, she heard the steady hoarse breathing keep on and knew he was still asleep. He did not rouse more than to open bloodshot, unseeing eyes and close them again when she loudly stirred his medicine in the glass and held the spoon to his lips. As before, he obediently opened his mouth and swallowed, and went on sleeping.
She stood a moment anxiously watching him. She did not know just what she ought to do. Perhaps he was going to have pneumonia. Perhaps she ought to send for the doctor, and yet there were complications about that. She would be obliged to explain a lot—or else lie t
o the neighborhood. And he might not like it for her to call a doctor while he was asleep. If she only had someone with whom to advise! On ordinary questions she always consulted Mary Amber, but by the very nature of the case, Mary Amber was out of this. Besides, in half an hour Mary Amber very discreetly put herself beyond a question, outside of any touch with Miss Marilla’s visitor, by taking herself off in her little car for a short visit to a college friend over in the next county. It was plain that Mary Amber did not care to subject herself to further contact with the young soldier. He might be Dick, or he might not be Dick. It was none of her business while she was visiting Jeannette Clark; so she went away quite hurriedly. Miss Marilla heard the purr of the engine as the little brown car started down the hedged driveway, and watched the flight with a sense of satisfaction. She had an intuition that Mary Amber was not in favor of her soldier, and she had a guilty sense of hiding the truth from her dear, young friend that made her breathe more freely as she watched Mary Amber’s flight. Moreover, it was with a certain self-reproachful relief that she noted the little brown suitcase that lay at Mary Amber’s feet as she slid past Miss Marilla’s house without looking up. Mary Amber was going away for the day at least, probably overnight. And by that time, the question of the soldier would be settled one way or the other, without Mary Amber’s having to worry about it.
Miss Marilla ordered a piece of beef and brewed a cup of the most delicious broth, which she took upstairs. She managed to get her soldier awake enough to swallow it. But it was plain that he did not in the least realize where he was and seemed well content to close his eyes and drowse away once more. Miss Marilla was deeply troubled. Some pricks from the old, timeworn adage beginning, “O what a tangled web we weave,” began to stab her conscience. If only she had not allowed those paragraphs to go into the county paper. No, that was not the real trouble at all. If only she had not dragged in another soldier and made Mary Amber believe he was her nephew! Such an old fool! Just because she couldn’t bear the mortification of having people know her nephew hadn’t cared enough for her to come and see her when he was close at hand. But she was well punished. Here she had a strange sick man on her hands and no end of responsibility. Oh, if only she hadn’t asked him in!
Yet, as she stood watching the quick little throb in his neck above the old flannel nightgown and the long, curly sweep of the dark lashes on his hot cheek as he slept, her heart cried out against that wish. No, a thousand times no. If she had not asked him in, he might have been in some hospital by this time, cared for by strangers. And she would have been alone, with empty hands, getting her own solitary dinner or sewing on the aprons for the orphanage, with nothing in the world to do that really mattered for anybody. Somehow her heart went out to this stranger boy with a great yearning, and he had come to mean what her own—or what her own ought to have been to her. She wouldn’t have him elsewhere for anything. She wanted him right where he was for her to care for, something at last that needed her, something she could love and tend, even if it were only for a few days.
And she was sure she could care for him. She knew a lot about sickness. People sent for her to help them out, and her wonderful nursing had often saved a life where the doctor’s remedies had failed. She felt sure this was only a severe case of flu that had taken fierce hold on the system. Thorough rest, careful nursing, nourishing broth, and some of her homeopathic remedies would work the charm. She would try it a little longer and see. If his temperature wasn’t higher than the last time, it would be perfectly safe to get along without a doctor.
She put the thermometer between his relaxed lips and held them firmly round it until she was sure it had been there long enough. Then she carried it softly over to the front window and studied it. No, it had not risen. In fact, it might be a fifth of a degree lower.
Well, she would venture it a little while longer.
For two days, Miss Marilla cared for her stranger soldier as only a born nurse like herself could care, and on the third morning, he rewarded her by opening his eyes and looking about. Then meeting her own anxious gaze, he gave her a weak smile.
“I’ve been sick,” he said, as if stating an astonishing fact to himself. “I must have given you a lot of trouble.”
“Not a bit of it, you dear child,” said Miss Marilla, and then stooped and brushed his forehead with her lips in a motherly kiss. “I’m so glad you’re better!”
She passed her hand like soft, old fallen roseleaves over his forehead, and it was moist. She felt of his hands, and they were moist, too. She took his temperature, and it had gone down almost to normal. Her eyes were shining with more than professional joy and relief. He had become to her, in these hours of nursing and anxiety, as her own child.
But at the kiss, the boy’s eyelashes had swept down upon his cheek; and when she looked up from reading the thermometer, she saw a tear glisten unwillingly beneath the lashes.
The next two days were a time of untold joy to Miss Marilla while she pampered and nursed her soldier boy back to some degree of his normal strength. She treated him just as if he were a little child who had dropped from the skies to her loving ministrations. She bathed his face and puffed up his pillows and took his temperature and fed him and read him to sleep—Miss Marilla could read well, too. She was always asked to read the chapter at the Fortnightly Club whenever the regular reader, whose turn it was, failed. And while he was asleep, she cooked dainty, appetizing little dishes for him. They had a wonderful time together, and he enjoyed it as much as she did. The fact was he was too weak to object, for the little red devils that get into the blood and kick up the fight commonly titled grippe had done a thorough work with him, and he was, as he put it, “all in, and then some.”
He seemed to have gone back to the days of his childhood since the fever began to abate, and he lay in a sweet daze of comfort and rest. His troubles and perplexities and loneliness had dropped away from him, and he felt no desire to think of them. He was having the time of his life.
Then suddenly, wholly unannounced and not altogether desired at the present stage of the game, Mary Amber arrived on the scene.
Chapter 5
Mary was radiant as the sunny morning in a little red tam, and her cheeks as red as her hat from the drive across country. She appeared at the kitchen door, quite in her accustomed way, just as Miss Marilla was lifting the dainty tray to carry her boy’s breakfast upstairs, and she almost dropped it in her dismay.
“I’ve had the grandest time!” breezed Mary. “You don’t know how beautiful the country is, all wonderful bronze and brown with a purple haze and a frost like silver lace this morning when I started. You’ve simply got to put on your wraps and come with me for a little while. I know a place where the shadows melt slowly, and the frost will not be gone yet. Come quick! I want you to see it before it’s too late. You’re not just eating your breakfast, Auntie Rill! And on a tray, too! Are you sick?”
Miss Marilla glanced guiltily down at the tray, too transparent even to evade the question.
“No, why—I—he—my neph—” Then she stopped in hopeless confusion, remembering her resolve not to tell a lie about the matter, whatever came.
Mary Amber stood up and looked at her, her keen young eyes searching and finding the truth.
“You don’t mean to tell me that man is here yet? And you, waiting on him!”
There was both sorrow and scorn in the fine young voice.
In the upper hall, the sick soldier in a bathrobe was hanging over the banisters in a panic, wishing some kind of fairy would arrive and waft him away on a breath. All his perfidy in getting sick on a strange gentlewoman’s hands and lying lazily in bed, letting her wait on him, was shown up in Mary Amber’s voice. It found its echo in his own strong soul. He had known all along that he had no business there, that he ought to have gone out on the road to die rather than betray the sweet hospitality of Miss Marilla by allowing himself to be a selfish, lazy slob—that was what he called himself as he hung over the banisters.
“Mary! Why, he has been very sick!”
“Sick?” There was a covert sneer in Mary Amber’s incredulous young voice. And then the conversation was suddenly blanketed by the closing of the hall door, and the sick soldier padded disconsolately back to bed, weak and dizzy, but determined. This was as good a time as any. He ought to have gone before.
He trailed across the room in the big flannel nightgown, which hung out from him with the outlines of a fat, old auntie and dragged down from one bronzed shoulder rakishly. His hair was sticking up wildly; he felt of his chin fiercely and realized that he was wearing a growth of several days.
In a neat pile on a chair, he found his few clean garments and struggled into them. His carefully ironed uniform hung in the closet. He braced himself and struggled into the trousers. It seemed a tremendous effort. He longed to drop back on the pillows, but wouldn’t. He sat with his head in his hands, his elbows on his knees, trying to get courage to totter to the bathroom and subdue his hair and beard, when he heard Miss Marilla coming hastily up the stairs, the little coffeepot sending on a delicious odor and the glass of milk tinkling against the silver spoons as she came.
He had managed his leggings by this time and looked up with an attempt at a smile, trying to pass it off in a jocular way.
“I thought it was high time I was getting about,” he said, and broke down coughing.
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