"I"ll not keep you if you have an engagement."
"The engagement will have to wait. I"m sorry you"re ill. If you would like me to stay with you tonight--"
Carlotta shook her head on her pillow.
"Mercy, no!" she said irritably. "I"m only worn out. I need a rest. Are you going home to-night?"
"No," Sidney admitted, and flushed.
Nothing escaped Carlotta"s eyes--the younger girl"s radiance, her confusion, even her operating room uniform and what it signified. How she hated her, with her youth and freshness, her wide eyes, her soft red lips! And this engagement--she had the uncanny divination of fury.
"I was going to ask you to do something for me," she said shortly; "but I"ve changed my mind about it. Go on and keep your engagement."
To end the interview, she turned over and lay with her face to the wall.
Sidney stood waiting uncertainly. All her training had been to ignore the irritability of the sick, and Carlotta was very ill; she could see that.
"Just remember that I am ready to do anything I can, Carlotta," she said. "Nothing will--will be a trouble."
She waited a moment, but, receiving no acknowledgement of her offer, she turned slowly and went toward the door.
"Sidney!"
She went back to the bed.
"Yes. Don"t sit up, Carlotta. What is it?"
"I"m frightened!"
"You"re feverish and nervous. There"s nothing to be frightened about."
"If it"s typhoid, I"m gone."
"That"s childish. Of course you"re not gone, or anything like it.
Besides, it"s probably not typhoid."
"I"m afraid to sleep. I doze for a little, and when I waken there are people in the room. They stand around the bed and talk about me."
Sidney"s precious minutes were flying; but Carlotta had gone into a paroxysm of terror, holding to Sidney"s hand and begging not to be left alone.
"I"m too young to die," she would whimper. And in the next breath: "I want to die--I don"t want to live!"
The hands of the little watch pointed to eight-thirty when at last she lay quiet, with closed eyes. Sidney, tiptoeing to the door, was brought up short by her name again, this time in a more normal voice:--
"Sidney."
"Yes, dear."
"Perhaps you are right and I"m going to get over this."
"Certainly you are. Your nerves are playing tricks with you to-night."
"I"ll tell you now why I sent for you."
"I"m listening."
"If--if I get very bad,--you know what I mean,--will you promise to do exactly what I tell you?"
"I promise, absolutely."
"My trunk key is in my pocket-book. There is a letter in the tray--just a name, no address on it. Promise to see that it is not delivered; that it is destroyed without being read."
Sidney promised promptly; and, because it was too late now for her meeting with Wilson, for the next hour she devoted herself to making Carlotta comfortable. So long as she was busy, a sort of exaltation of service upheld her. But when at last the night a.s.sistant came to sit with the sick girl, and Sidney was free, all the life faded from her face. He had waited for her and she had not come. Would he understand?
Would he ask her to meet him again? Perhaps, after all, his question had not been what she had thought.
She went miserably to bed. K."s little watch ticked under her pillow.
Her stiff cap moved in the breeze as it swung from the corner of her mirror. Under her window pa.s.sed and repa.s.sed the night life of the city--taxicabs, stealthy painted women, tired office-cleaners trudging home at midnight, a city patrol-wagon which rolled in through the gates to the hospital"s always open door. When she could not sleep, she got up and padded to the window in bare feet. The light from a pa.s.sing machine showed a youthful figure that looked like Joe Drummond.
Life, that had always seemed so simple, was growing very complicated for Sidney: Joe and K., Palmer and Christine, Johnny Rosenfeld, Carlotta--either lonely or tragic, all of them, or both. Life in the raw.
Toward morning Carlotta wakened. The night a.s.sistant was still there. It had been a quiet night and she was asleep in her chair. To save her cap she had taken it off, and early streaks of silver showed in her hair.
Carlotta roused her ruthlessly.
"I want something from my trunk," she said.
The a.s.sistant wakened reluctantly, and looked at her watch. Almost morning. She yawned and pinned on her cap.
"For Heaven"s sake," she protested. "You don"t want me to go to the trunk-room at this hour!"
"I can go myself," said Carlotta, and put her feet out of bed.
"What is it you want?"
"A letter on the top tray. If I wait my temperature will go up and I can"t think."
"Shall I mail it for you?"
"Bring it here," said Carlotta shortly. "I want to destroy it."
The young woman went without haste, to show that a night a.s.sistant may do such things out of friendship, but not because she must. She stopped at the desk where the night nurse in charge of the rooms on that floor was filling out records.
"Give me twelve private patients to look after instead of one nurse like Carlotta Harrison!" she complained. "I"ve got to go to the trunk-room for her at this hour, and it next door to the mortuary!"
As the first rays of the summer sun came through the window, shadowing the fire-escape like a lattice on the wall of the little gray-walled room, Carlotta sat up in her bed and lighted the candle on the stand.
The night a.s.sistant, who dreamed sometimes of fire, stood nervously by.
"Why don"t you let me do it?" she asked irritably.