"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 b.u.t.termilk--the b.u.t.termilk 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 ap.r.o.n 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; pa.s.sion 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 circ.u.mstances?"
"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!