Georgie and Joe came to Mrs. Lancaster"s house for an afternoon visit on Thanksgiving Day, arriving in mid-afternoon with the two babies, and taking Myra and Helen home again before the day grew too cold. Virginia arrived, using her own eyes for the first time in years, and the sisters and their mother laughed and cried together over the miracle of the cure. When Alfie and Freda came there was more hilarity. Freda very prettily presented her mother-in-law, whose birthday chanced to fall on the day, with a bureau scarf. Alfred, urged, Susan had no doubt, by his wife, gave his mother ten dollars, and asked her with a grin to buy herself some flowers. Virginia had a lace collar for Ma, and the white-coated O"Connor babies, with much pushing and urging, bashfully gave dear Grandma a tissue-wrapped bundle that proved to be a silk gown. Mary Lou unexpectedly brought down from her room a box containing six heavy silver tea-spoons.
Where Mary Lou ever got the money to buy this gift was rather a mystery to everyone except Susan, who had chanced to see the farewells that took place between her oldest cousin and Mr. Ferd Eastman, when the gentleman, who had been making a ten-days visit to the city, left a day or two earlier for Virginia City.
"Pretty soon after his wife"s death!" Susan had accused Mary Lou, vivaciously.
"Ferd has often kissed me--like a brother---" stammered Mary Lou, coloring painfully, and with tears in her kind eyes. And, to Susan"s amazement, her aunt, evidently informed of the event by Mary Lou, had asked her not to tease her cousin about Ferd. Susan felt certain that the spoons were from Ferd.
She took great pains to make the holiday dinner unusually festive, decorated the table, and put on her prettiest evening gown. There were very few boarders left in the house on this day, and the group that gathered about the big turkey was like one large family. Billy carved, and Susan with two paper candle-shades pinned above her ears, like enormous rosettes, was more like her old silly merry self than these people who loved her had seen her for years.
It was nearly eight o"clock when Mrs. Lancaster, pushing back an untasted piece of mince pie, turned to Susan a strangely flushed and swollen face, and said thickly:
"Air--I think I must--air!"
She went out of the dining-room, and they heard her open the street door, in the hall. A moment later Virginia said "Mama!" in so sharp a tone that the others were instantly silenced, and vaguely alarmed.
"Hark!" said Virginia, "I thought Mama called!" Susan, after a half-minute of nervous silence, suddenly jumped up and ran after her aunt.
She never forgot the dark hall, and the sensation when her foot struck something soft and inert that lay in the doorway. Susan gave a great cry of fright as she knelt down, and discovered it to be her aunt.
Confusion followed. There was a great uprising of voices in the dining-room, chairs grated on the floor. Someone lighted the hall gas, and Susan found a dozen hands ready to help her raise Mrs. Lancaster from the floor.
"She"s just fainted!" Susan said, but already with a premonition that it was no mere faint.
"We"d better have a doctor though---" she heard Billy say, as they carried her aunt in to the dining-room couch. Mrs. Lancaster"s breath was coming short and heavy, her eyes were shut, her face dark with blood.
"Oh, why did we let Joe go home!" Mary Lou burst out hysterically.
Her mother evidently caught the word, for she opened her eyes and whispered to Susan, with an effort:
"Georgia--good, good man--my love---"
"You feel better, don"t you, darling?" Susan asked, in a voice rich with love and tenderness.
"Oh, yes!" her aunt whispered, earnestly, watching her with the unwavering gaze of a child.
"Of course she"s better--You"re all right, aren"t you?" said a dozen voices. "She fainted away!--Didn"t you hear her fall?--I didn"t hear a thing!--Well, you fainted, didn"t you?--You felt faint, didn"t you?"
"Air---" said Mrs. Lancaster, in a thickened, deep voice. Her eyes moved distressedly from one face to another, and as Virginia began to unfasten the pin at her throat, she added tenderly, "Don"t p.r.i.c.k yourself, Bootsy!"
"Oh, she"s very sick--she"s very sick!" Susan whispered, with white lips, to Billy who was at the telephone.
"What do you think of sponging her face off with ice-water?" he asked in a low tone. Susan fled to the kitchen. Mary Lou, seated by the table where the great roast stood in a confusion of unwashed plates and criss-crossed silver, was sobbing violently.
"Oh, Sue--she"s dying!" whispered Mary Lou, "I know it! Oh, my G.o.d, what will we do!"
Susan plunged her hand in a tall pitcher for a lump of ice and wrapped it in a napkin. A moment later she knelt by her aunt"s side. The sufferer gave a groan at the touch of ice, but a moment later she caught Susan"s wrist feverishly and muttered "Good!"
"Make all these fools go upstairs!" said Alfie"s wife in a fierce whisper. She was carrying out plates and clearing a s.p.a.ce about the couch. Virginia, kneeling by her mother, repeated over and over again, in an even and toneless voice, "Oh G.o.d, spare her--Oh G.o.d, spare her!"
The doctor was presently among them, dragged, Susan thought, from the faint odor of wine about him, from his own dinner. He helped Billy carry the now unconscious woman upstairs, and gave Susan brisk orders.
"There has undoubtedly been a slight stroke," said he.
"Oh, doctor!" sobbed Mary Lou, "will she get well?"
"I don"t antic.i.p.ate any immediate change," said the doctor to Susan, after a dispa.s.sionate look at Mary Lou, "and I think you had better have a nurse."
"Yes, doctor," said Susan, very efficient and calm.
"Had you a nurse in mind?" asked the doctor.
"Well, no," Susan answered, feeling as if she had failed him.
"I can get one," said the doctor thoughtfully.
"Oh, doctor, you don"t know what she"s BEEN to us!" wailed Mary Lou.
"Don"t, darling!" Susan implored her.
And now, for the first time in her life, she found herself really busy, and, under all sorrow and pain, there was in these sad hours for Susan a genuine satisfaction and pleasure. Capable, tender, quiet, she went about tirelessly, answering the telephone, seeing to the nurse"s comfort, brewing coffee for Mary Lou, carrying a cup of hot soup to Virginia. Susan, slim, sympathetic, was always on hand,--with clean sheets on her arm or with hot water for the nurse or with a message for the doctor. She penciled a little list for Billy to carry to the drugstore, she made Miss Foster"s bed in the room adjoining Auntie"s, she hunted up the fresh nightgown that was slipped over her aunt"s head, put the room in order; hanging up the limp garments with a strange sense that it would be long before Auntie"s hand touched them again.
"And now, why don"t you go to bed, Jinny darling?" she asked, coming in at midnight to the room where her cousins were grouped in mournful silence. But Billy"s foot touched hers with a significant pressure, and Susan sat down, rather frightened, and said no more of anyone"s going to bed.
Two long hours followed. They were sitting in a large front bedroom that had been made ready for boarders, but looked inexpressibly grim and cheerless, with its empty mantel and blank, marble-topped bureau.
Georgie cried constantly and silently, Virginia"s lips moved, Mary Lou alone persisted that Ma would be herself again in three days.
Susan, sitting and staring at the flaring gas-lights, began to feel that in the midst of life was death, indeed, and that the term of human existence is as brief as a dream. "We will all have to die too," she said, awesomely to herself, her eyes traveling about the circle of faces.
At two o"clock Miss Foster summoned them and they went into the invalid"s room; to Susan it was all unreal and unconvincing. The figure in the bed, the purple face, the group of sobbing watchers. No word was said: the moments slipped by. Her eyes were wandering when Miss Foster suddenly touched her aunt"s hand.
A heavy, grating breath--a silence--Susan"s eyes met Billy"s in terror--but there was another breath--and another--and another silence.
Silence.
Miss Foster, who had been bending over her patient, straightened up, lowered the gray head gently into the pillow.
"Gone," said Dr. O"Connor, very low, and at the word a wild protest of grief broke out. Susan neither cried nor spoke; it was all too unreal for tears, for emotion of any kind.
"You stay," said Miss Foster when she presently banished the others.
Susan, surprised, complied.
"Sorry to ask you to help me," said Miss Foster then briskly, "but I can"t do this alone. They"ll want to be coming back here, and we must be ready for them. I wonder if you could fix her hair like she wore it, and I"ll have to get her teeth---"
"Her what?" asked Susan.
"Her teeth, dear. Do you know where she kept them?"
Appalled, sickened, Susan watched the other woman"s easy manipulation of what had been a loving, breathing woman only a few hours before. But she presently did her own share bravely and steadily, brushing and coiling the gray-brown locks as she had often seen her aunt coil them.