The gears ground them to a halt before the door. Inside, the wide hall milled about with young people filling the hungry wait for dinner with excited talk. The boys had spread the news about Selina and the girls poured upon her with terror and rapture. Selina was at home again, in her native element. Captain Gilkie had somehow put a damper upon her glory. She tore herself away reluctantly and was dressed and back again before Thankful was out of her bath.
It was Saturday night and Selina danced indefatigably. As she danced, the story grew. Thankful could hear snatches of it passing her, drowsy in an armchair. She had been in bed an hour when Selina woke her with the snap of the light. By now she had learned to defend herself from it, and she rolled to the dark wall. But Selina would have none of it.
“Wake up.” She sat down hard on the bed. “Wake up while I tell you.”
Thankful held a moment to a Bright Island dream, it escaped her, and she blinked up at Selina.
“Evelyn’s in such a stew that she made the nurse give her a sleeping powder. Said she couldn’t sleep a wink all night thinking about it.”
Thankful tried to follow her. “Must be she’s really fond of you.”
Selina snorted. “I’ll never keep Evelyn awake. The matter with her is that she just can’t bear it because Robert so nearly lost his life trying to save me!”
Thankful sat up in bed. “Yelling?” she asked. “Or heaving the life preserver at your head?”
The girls doubled up.
“He’s good.” Selina stopped laughing to admire. “He’s better than I am. And I’m not bad at stretching a story, now am I? Funny thing, too”—she looked puzzled—“not one of those boys gave him away. And neither did I.”
And neither did I tell about his Christmas radio, Thankful thought.
“You know Robert’s going to get somewhere before he’s through. I shouldn’t wonder if he got to be the president.” Selina yawned and Thankful yawned.
PART IV
Back to Bright Island
Scudding Before Heavy Weather
Mary Curtis was dying. Unbelievably dying. The telegram in her hand said those words to Thankful but they were not to be believed. Her mother could not die. She liked life too much to leave it. She was too strong and busy to die. There was some mistake. The boy couldn’t have meant the telegram for her. She turned it over. Thankful Curtis. That was her name.
The messenger on his bicycle had called it out to her. “Where’ll I find her?” he shouted. “School’s closed for Easter, ain’t it?”
“I’m here,” she said in a small foreboding voice. “I’m Thankful Curtis.”
The boy had tossed her the yellow envelope. “Saves me riding up to the office,” and wheeled away.
She stood under the lilac bush, a moment ago sweet with its tight buds, a moment ago startling with the robin’s first song, and forgot that spring had ever stirred her. It said—it said—what did it say about come at once? Oh, yes, she must come at once. Her mother was dying.
She tried to move, staggered a little. I’ll have to sit down a moment, she thought, I feel queer. She bent her dizzy head on her knees. A car chugged to a stop beside her.
“Wake up, Thankful! I’ve got the lunch. Old Dinkle’s not going to wait for you to take a nap.” She lifted her head. “Why, Thankful, what’s the matter?” Orin was out of the car. “What is the matter?”
He took the telegram from her limp fingers and read it. “My poor darling,” he murmured. Then very business-like, “Get into the car.” He moved a huge basket for her and she knew vaguely that it held their lunch. Then she was back at school and Miss Haynes was helping her to get ready. She was conscious of relief that Selina was not underfoot. And that she, herself, had refused the house party.
“I should have gone home anyway,” she said dully. “I should have gone anyway.”
“Of course you shouldn’t!” Miss Haynes packed briskly. “If she had flu your father was quite right to tell you to stay here. One’s enough to have on his hands. He couldn’t know it was going to turn into pneumonia, could he?”
“I should have gone anyway,” Thankful repeated. She may have needed me. I could have helped, she thought. She would want to see me before she—but she couldn’t die! You had to be sick to die and she was strong. You couldn’t get pneumonia on the island, you couldn’t. “How do you suppose I’ll get back?” she asked.
“Thank the Lord Mr. Fletcher was around.” Miss Haynes handed her her bag. “He’s down at the door waiting. He’ll get you over somehow. Your poor father was probably too distracted to make any arrangements.”
Thankful hardly knew that Miss Haynes kissed her gently or that she was talking in low tones to Orin Fletcher. She huddled into the seat and stared at the dusty hood. Should have cleaned it for him, she thought.
As they tore over the crest of the shore road they saw old man Dinkle’s boat putting around the point. Out into an incredibly blue bay where people rode the waves happily, and hauled the lobsters, and laughed because spring was here. She could almost see herself, splashed, gripping the wet slats, pulling, pulling—yet this was herself, her only load the weight of grief upon her. How could you be two such different people in so short a time!
“I’ve done some telephoning,” Orin Fletcher told her. “Will you trust yourself to me, Thankful?”
She nodded without even wondering why he drove up to the entrance of the City Hospital. He disappeared inside and came back at once with a little deformed man who had deep kind eyes. Behind them two men carried a great tank which they lifted into the rumble seat.
“Dr. Dean,” Orin said abruptly, “he’s going out with us. He’s good with pneumonia.”
Thankful wanted to tell him that it was too late, that they wouldn’t have sent for her if—but there were no words to tell him. She listened absently to their talk together about their class at college, about their work, about—they were suddenly at the dock.
“Any way to get the cutter?” she heard the doctor ask, and hope lifted her heart faintly. That would mean Dave. Dave would help.
“Nothing doing,” the agent said. “Off for a couple of days down east.”
“Then get us the next fastest boat you can hire.” Dr. Dean, so small, so crooked, reached up and laid a magic card on the shelf of the window which held the agent’s indifferent face. The man clambered from his stool and stood in the office door. “Where to?” he said, and Dr. Dean was little and crooked no longer, in his eyes.
“Bright Island. And I’ll need two men to load the oxygen tank.”
In five minutes they were slipping smoothly, competently, through the crowded harbor, down past the lighthouse at its entrance, straight out to sea. Thankful could dimly remember the lift of spirit which the cutter’s swift flight had given her. Now each muscle in her body pushed invisibly with the engines of this boat, urging it on. It was so slow! It was so slow!
Yet suddenly, as if she had pushed harder than she meant, the great white boulders of Bright Island gleamed at her. She turned, frightened, distraught, toward the two men still talking together in the stern. The deep eyes of the doctor met her and gave her their quiet. She looked back at her island. So it had always stood when she came, invincible, unchanging; so it would always stand. They belonged to it for a little while and then they left it. Gramp had left it, and now her mother—but shaking fear had taken itself away and left her with grief which could somehow be borne.
Jed’s boat, her father’s boat, swung at their moorings in the cove. The house looked empty and still except for white curtains blowing at her mother’s windows. Did that room still hold her? Or was she gone, gone like Gramp? Her father stumbled down the beach like an old man and pushed out toward them in his peapod. She was shocked when she saw his face, hollow-cheeked, hollow-eyed, almost as if he had died too. She knew when he looked at her that hope had left him.
He accepted the two men with her, mechanically explaining in dull apology that Jed’s boat was needed for the doctor, and h
e, himself, could not leave his wife. He did not even ask what was in the great tank when he helped to lift it.
“You are willing that I should consult with your doctor?” Dr. Dean asked him gently. Thankful’s heart was wrung at his hopeless consent. But at least her mother was still alive.
They left the tank in the peapod. “I’d like to talk with your doctor first,” Dr. Dean said. Old Dr. Black, fussing around the kitchen, was inclined to be testy with the crooked-shouldered invader. Ethel, swollen-eyed, large with dignity, stood by him.
“We got no right to trouble her anymore,” she quavered. “She’s asleep now and when she wakes—” She ended with a loud sob.
Thankful shut the kitchen door and gripped the knob hard. “This isn’t for you to decide, Ethel.” Her eyes smoldered under black brows like her grandfather, and Ethel shuddered. “My father has given his consent.”
“Tut, tut.” Dr. Dean touched her arm. “Where could we consult together, Dr. Black?” and the old doctor led the way to Mary Curtis’s room.
After a few minutes Jed and his father went down to the shore for the oxygen tank. The murmur of voices ceased. The two men returned and sat down in the kitchen where Ethel sobbed over a pan of frying fish. Thankful felt sick. The terror was coming back again. She looked desperately at Orin Fletcher, drawn into his corner as if he felt himself alien. He rose and with a gentle arm drew her out of the smoky kitchen.
“We’ll not go out of hearing,” he reassured her.
They sat down on a silver smooth log rolled up by the tide, and waited. Orin kept his arm about her and she rested in its comfort. The day seemed to be waiting for the turn of the tide, as she was. She quieted with it. Here on the island it was still winter bare. Yet there was warmth on the dead brown grass, and down at the tide edge the sandpipers were talking sweetly together. The high sun felt warm on her hands.
By and by a little deformed man sat there beside them and talked gently to them. He could not tell yet how things would go. Her mother was conscious. She had responded well. If they could keep her another twelve hours—he rose to go back to the house. “I will stay until then,” he said, and Thankful thought she had never seen anything so beautiful as the smile in his deep eyes.
Somehow the day went by. The boys coming and going and finally staying, tiptoeing clumsily, talking in gruff whispers. Dr. Black said that he felt he could leave the case safely with Dr. Dean, and Jed took him back to the mainland. The little deformed man stayed with Mary Curtis. She put her hand in his, and they fought together.
At midnight they won. Her skin was moist and cool, her lungs breathed gratefully, she slept. And in her dreams she had once more toiled that rocky slope of Scotland, and once more could look down upon that fair country from its height, and realize its name, Rest-And-Be-Thankful.
She sighed in her sleep, opened her eyes and said, “I want to see my baby,” and looked faintly surprised when Thankful knelt beside her. Then she smiled as if she saw a joke on herself, and slept again.
At dawn the doctor left, and all the boys, and Ethel. “She must be quiet with her home in its usual order.” By now they trusted the crooked little man. He held them all in the palm of his strong-fingered hand. “I’ll take Fletcher with me to bring back some things for her. He may stay on a few days? I’d feel safer. I’ll come for him Sunday and look the patient over.”
They were gone, all of them. Thankful turned from the departing boats and saw her island brightening in the dawn. Quiet, unchanging, patient as eternity. Her body felt light and her heart sang while tears rained down her uplifted face.
All day she moved about the house wondering at the ease with which she did her mother’s tasks. I don’t know how I know, she thought, but I do. Her mother’s eyes, wasted, sunken, followed her, and once Thankful thought she heard a faint chuckle. Mostly she slept. Jonathan, wrecked like a mighty ship on the shoals of suffering, could not be persuaded to leave her to Thankful. But he lay on the couch with the old gray shawl across his tired hands and slept, too. Thankful gave him food as she would give it to a child, persuasively. When he ate irritably she was satisfied.
She pieced together the broken bits of things he told her into some sort of understanding of what had happened to her mother. Ethel had persuaded her to come over for the night. The children were getting over influenza and she didn’t like to leave them for a church social she had promised to run. “Your mother’d been meaning to go over anyway to get me some new shirts”—from his haggard look she knew that in some obscure way he blamed himself. They had been hung up in a fog on the way back while he tinkered with dirt in the feed pipe which he should have cleaned out long ago. He noticed her teeth were chattering but thought she’d warm up as soon as they got home. And then he’d forgotten to put wood on the fire and the house was cold as the grave. Cold as the grave, he shuddered.
Thankful comforted him. “We islanders are tough,” she said, “but we’re not used to germs. They got her but they couldn’t keep her down. Not with the care you took of her.”
Jonathan eased gratefully back on the couch and slept again.
Late in the afternoon the big boat slowed into the cove, dropped Orin with his parcels, and moved smoothly away. Thankful rowed out to meet him, exulting in the hard pull of her muscles, flinging herself at the oars. How could she make him know what he had done for her? How could she make tangible this gratitude which flooded all her thoughts? She had no words to tell him or Dr. Dean. She felt that if she could catch handfuls of the lovely sunset light and hold them out to him, he would know how her life seemed to her now. She faced the radiant sky rowing him in, a dark figure in the stern.
“Are you,” he said, “the same person I left this morning?” And even in the shadow she could see that the day had left its ravages upon him, and felt guilty at her own high heart.
“You shall have a good hot supper,” she said because she could think of practical words only, “and then go to bed. I have your room all ready.”
Thankful did not undress that night. She settled in the deep chair by her mother’s bed, winding the alarm for a faint click when it was time for medicine. The night light shone dimly through her fair hair nodding over a book when Orin stole in at midnight to relieve her. They whispered together, conspirators for the quiet figure asleep. Thankful was to come again for him at four. Turnabout was only fair. He made her believe it in her weariness.
At four o’clock the household was plunged in deep sleep. All except Orin Fletcher who dared not trust the click of a clock and paced softly, plunging his sleep-numbed face under the icy pump, until the dark house grayed before the still distant morning. Then he knew that he could let Thankful sleep no longer. He stood a moment over the old couch watching her, lashes dark against her cheek, breathing softly under the old patchwork quilt. She looked so pale, so young, in the thin light of dawn. His fingers touched the shimmer of her hair on the cushion and she was instantly awake.
“Is she worse?”
He shook his head and held her frightened hands. It was hard to talk. Then she saw the windows squaring themselves against the sky. She flung off the comforter and was on her feet all in one swift motion.
“You let me sleep! Oh, Orin, and you so tired!” She caught a frightened breath. “She is all right? She isn’t worse?”
“Slept like a baby. Better than most.” Her relief dazzled him. “Tell you what,” he said, “let’s have a cup of coffee and a snack before I turn in. I have a hunch I’m going to stay asleep once I get started.”
On tiptoe they crept into the kitchen and shut themselves off with closed doors. The fire had kept well under Orin’s stoking, and with open drafts the kettle began its tune. The smell of the coffee made them realize how inadequate toast would be. Thankful brought up eggs and a ham which swung in the cellar. Orin pared off thin slices which he would not allow Thankful to cook. He had a high opinion of his own skill. They ate at the kitchen table by the window in the first golden gleams of the sun. Outside an
island robin sang, ecstatic over his return. Orin’s eyes grew heavier over his last cup of coffee and Thankful sent him off to bed.
Mary Curtis opened her eyes when Thankful bent over her. “A bit of that ham I smell,” she said, “and an egg. I’d like it fine!” She made a face at the cup of gruel which Thankful brought her and asked who the young man was who walked the floor all night. She seemed satisfied with Thankful’s account, grinned when Jonathan poked his sleep-ridden face into the room, and slept again. Mary Curtis was on the mend.
Thankful carried the household as if it were a feather on her shoulder. The life which had poured back into Mary Curtis seemed in its abundance to have overflowed into her daughter. Its zest drove her, light-footed, over the beach like a sandpiper. It brought her back to her mother’s room with gifts of sun and air. It filled her to the brim until her cup overflowed.
And Orin, when he found her after his long sleep, gathering sea moss for her mother, shared her heady wine. She had not meant to move him so deeply. She had not thought about him at all. Only of her own fullness of sweet new life, which could breathe and laugh and run swiftly.
He pulled her down beside him on the silver gray log where they had waited to know if death was victor. She was fragrant with the freshness of island air and Easter sunshine. Her lips which had been so tense in the grim wait, relaxed into warm curves. She was love, and laughter, and beauty, and all the glory which Orin Fletcher desired.
“Thankful,” he said, “I love you,” and his saturnine mouth worked as if like a child he realized how inadequate his words might be. “Wait,” he said, “don’t speak. I’ll never manage to tell you again. You and I, we are one when we are together. We would always be. Think of the days in old Dinkle’s boat. And deeper down, the way you are with me in my work, in our books together. Yes, I know that is all fun,” he put in hastily, “but this hasn’t been. Oh, Thankful, we’ve stood together these days. I’ve known your every breath.”
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