"You said I was to come and wake you," said Minta, drawing up the blind; "but I don"t believe you"re a bit fit to be going about. Here"s some hot water, and there"s a letter just come."
Marcella woke with a start, Minta put the letter on her knee, and dream and reality flowed together as she saw her own name in Wharton"s handwriting.
She read the letter, then sat flushed and thinking for a while with her hands on her knees.
A little while later she opened the Hurds" front-door.
"Minta, I am going now. I shall be back early after supper, for I haven"t written my report."
"There--now you look something like!" said Minta, scanning her approvingly--the wide hat and pretty black dress. "Shall Daisy run out with that telegram?"
"No, thanks. I shall pa.s.s the post. Good-bye."
And she stooped and kissed the little withered woman. She wished, ardently wished, that Minta would be more truly friends with her!
After a brisk walk through the June evening she stopped--still within the same district--at the door of a house in a long, old-fashioned street, wherein the builder was busy on either hand, since most of the long leases had just fallen in. But the house she entered was still untouched. She climbed a last-century staircase, adorned with panels of stucco work--slender Italianate reliefs of wreaths, ribbons, and medallions on a pale green ground. The decoration was clean and cared for, the house in good order. Eighty years ago it was the home of a famous judge, who entertained in its rooms the legal and literary celebrities of his day. Now it was let out to professional people in lodgings or unfurnished rooms. Edward Hallin and his sister occupied the top floor.
Miss Hallin, a pleasant-looking, plain woman of about thirty-five, came at once in answer to Marcella"s knock, and greeted her affectionately.
Edward Hallin sprang up from a table at the further end of the room.
"You are so late! Alice and I had made up our minds you had forgotten us!"
"I didn"t get home till four, and then I had to have a sleep," she explained, half shyly.
"What! you haven"t been night-nursing?"
"Yes, for once."
"Alice, tell them to bring up supper, and let"s look after her."
He wheeled round a comfortable chair to the open window--the charming circular bow of last-century design, which filled up the end of the room and gave it character. The window looked out on a quiet line of back gardens, such as may still be seen in Bloomsbury, with fine plane trees here and there just coming into full leaf; and beyond them the backs of another line of houses in a distant square, with pleasant irregularities of old brickwork and tiled roof. The mottled trunks of the planes, their blackened twigs and branches, their thin, beautiful leaves, the forms of the houses beyond, rose in a charming medley of line against the blue and peaceful sky. No near sound was to be heard, only the distant murmur that no Londoner escapes; and some of the British Museum pigeons were sunning themselves on the garden-wall below.
Within, the Hallins" room was s.p.a.cious and barely furnished. The walls, indeed, were crowded with books, and broken, where the books ceased, by photographs of Italy and Greece; but of furniture proper there seemed to be little beside Hallin"s large writing-table facing the window, and a few chairs, placed on the blue drugget which brother and sister had chosen with a certain anxiety, dreading secretly lest it should be a piece of self-indulgence to buy what pleased them both so much. On one side of the fireplace was Miss Hallin"s particular corner; her chair, the table that held her few special books, her work-basket, with its knitting, her accounts. There, in the intervals of many activities, she sat and worked or read, always cheerful and busy, and always watching over her brother.
"I wish," said Hallin, with some discontent, when Marcella had settled herself, "that we were going to be alone to-night; that would have rested you more."
"Why, who is coming?" said Marcella, a little flatly. She had certainly hoped to find them alone.
"Your old friend, Frank Leven, is coming to supper. When he heard you were to be here he vowed that nothing could or should keep him away.
Then, after supper, one or two people asked if they might come in. There are some anxious things going on."
He leant his head on his hand for a moment with a sigh, then forcibly wrenched himself from what were evidently recurrent thoughts.
"Do tell me some more of what you are doing!" he said, bending forward to her. "You don"t know how much I have thought of what you have told me already."
"I"m doing just the same," she said, laughing. "Don"t take so much interest in it. It"s the fashion just now to admire nurses; but it"s ridiculous. We do our work like other people--sometimes badly, sometimes well. And some of us wouldn"t do it if we could help it."
She threw out the last words with a certain vehemence, as though eager to get away from any sentimentalism about herself. Hallin studied her kindly.
"Is this miscellaneous work a relief to you after hospital?" he asked.
"For the present. It is more exciting, and one sees more character. But there are drawbacks. In hospital everything was settled for you--every hour was full, and there were always orders to follow. And the "off"
times were no trouble--I never did anything else but walk up and down the Embankment if it was fine, or go to the National Gallery if it was wet."
"And it was the monotony you liked?"
She made a sign of a.s.sent.
"Strange!" said Hallin, "who could ever have foreseen it?"
She flushed.
"You might have foreseen it, I think," she said, not without a little impatience. "But I didn"t like it all at once. I hated a great deal of it. If they had let me alone all the time to scrub and polish and wash--the things they set me to at first--I thought I should have been quite happy. To see my table full of gla.s.ses without a spot, and my bra.s.s-taps shining, made me as proud as a peac.o.c.k! But then of course I had to learn the real work, and that was very odd at first."
"How? Morally?"
She nodded, laughing at her own remembrances. "Yes--it seemed to me all topsy-turvy. I thought the Sister at the head of the ward rather a stupid person. If I had seen her at Mellor I shouldn"t have spoken two words to her. And here she was ordering me about--rating me as I had never rated a house-maid--laughing at me for not knowing this or that, and generally making me feel that a raw probationer was one of the things of least account in the whole universe. I knew perfectly well that she had said to herself, "Now then I must take that proud girl down a peg, or she will be no use to anybody;" and I had somehow to put up with it."
"Drastic!" said Hallin, laughing; "did you comfort yourself by reflecting that it was everybody"s fate?"
Her lip twitched with amus.e.m.e.nt.
"Not for a long time. I used to have the most absurd ideas!--sometimes looking back I can hardly believe it--perhaps it was partly a queer state of nerves. When I was at school and got in a pa.s.sion I used to try and overawe the girls by shaking my Speaker great-uncle in their faces.
And so in hospital; it would flash across me sometimes in a plaintive sort of way that they _couldn"t_ know that I was Miss Boyce of Mellor, and had been mothering and ruling the whole of my father"s village--or they wouldn"t treat me so. Mercifully I held my tongue. But one day it came to a crisis. I had had to get things ready for an operation, and had done very well. Dr. Marshall had paid me even a little compliment all to myself. But then afterwards the patient was some time in coming to, and there had to be hot-water bottles. I had them ready of course; but they were too hot, and in my zeal and nervousness I burnt the patient"s elbow in two places. Oh! the _fuss_, and the scolding, and the humiliation! When I left the ward that evening I thought I would go home next day."
"But you didn"t?"
"If I could have sat down and thought it out, I should probably have gone. But I couldn"t think it out--I was too _dead_ tired. That is the chief feature of your first months in hospital--the utter helpless fatigue at night. You go to bed aching and you wake up aching. If you are healthy as I was, it doesn"t hurt you; but, when your time comes to sleep, sleep you _must_. Even that miserable night my head was no sooner on the pillow than I was asleep; and next morning there was all the routine as usual, and the dread of being a minute late on duty. Then when I got into the ward the Sister looked at me rather queerly and went out of her way to be kind to me. Oh! I was so grateful to her! I could have brushed her boots or done any other menial service for her with delight. And--then--somehow I pulled through. The enormous interest of the work seized me--I grew ambitious--they pushed me on rapidly--everybody seemed suddenly to become my friend instead of my enemy--and I ended by thinking the hospital the most fascinating and engrossing place in the whole world."
"A curious experience," said Hallin. "I suppose you had never obeyed any one in your life before?"
"Not since I was at school--and then--not much!"
Hallin glanced at her as she lay back in her chair. How richly human the face had grown! It was as forcible as ever in expression and colour, but that look which had often repelled him in his first acquaintance with her, as of a hard speculative eagerness more like the ardent boy than the woman, had very much disappeared. It seemed to him absorbed in something new--something sad and yet benignant, informed with all the pathos and the pain of growth.
"How long have you been at work to-day?" he asked her.
"I went at eleven last night. I came away at four this afternoon."
Hallin exclaimed, "You had food?"
"Do you think I should let myself starve with my work to do?" she asked him, with a shade of scorn and her most professional air. "And don"t suppose that such a case occurs often. It is a very rare thing for us to undertake night-nursing at all."
"Can you tell me what the case was?"
She told him vaguely, describing also in a few words her encounter with Dr. Blank.
"I suppose he will make a fuss," she said, with a restless look, "and that I shall be blamed."