Leerie. Ruth Sawyer
Peter colored crimson. He reached quickly for the hand Sheila had pulled away. “What an ungrateful cur you must think I am! And I’ve never said a word—never thanked you.”
“There was nothing to thank for. I was only undoing what another woman had done long ago. That’s one of the glad things about nursing; we so often have a chance at just that sort of thing—the chance to make up for some of the blind mistakes in life. Good-by. I’m late now.”
“But—but—” Peter held frantically to the hand. “ ’Pon my soul, I can’t let you go until—until—” He broke off, crimsoning again. “Promise a time when you will come back—just a minute I can count on and look forward to. Please!”
“All right—I’ll be back at four—just for a minute.”
It happened, however, that Miss Jacobs—pink-cheeked, auburn-haired, green-eyed little Miss Jacobs, the first nurse on Peter’s case, blew into No. 3 a few minutes before four. She had developed the habit of blowing in at least once in the day and telling Peter how perfectly splendid it was to see him getting along so well. But as he did not happen to look quite so well this time, she condoled and wormed the reason out of Peter.
“Leerie off duty! Don’t you think it’s rather remarkable they let her stay so long? Of course the management, as a rule, doesn’t let her have cases of—of this kind. A girl who’s been sent away on account of—of—questionable conduct isn’t exactly safe to trust. Don’t you think so? And the San can’t afford to risk its reputation.” For an instant the green eyes shimmered and glistened balefully, while she tossed her auburn curls coyly at Peter. “It’s really too bad, for she’s a wonderful surgical nurse. All the best surgeons want her on their cases. That’s why they put her on with you; that’s really why they let her come back at all.”
A look in Peter’s eyes stopped her and made her look back over her shoulder. Sheila O’Leary stood in the open doorway. For an instant the perpetual assurance of Miss Jacobs was shaken, but only for an instant. She smiled tolerantly. “Hello, Leerie! I’ve been telling Mr. Brooks what a wonderful surgical nurse you are.”
The gray eyes of the girl in the doorway looked steadily into the green eyes of the girl by the bed. “Thank you, Coppy, I heard you.” And she stepped aside to let the other pass out.
“Well?” she asked when the two were alone.
“Well!” answered Peter, emphatically. “Everything is very, very well. Do you know,” and he smiled up at her like a happy small boy—“do you know that all the while you were building that dam I was building something else?”
“Were you?”
“I was building my life over again—building it fresh, with the fear gone and everything sound and strong and fine. And into the chinks where all the miserable empty places had been—the places where loneliness and heartache eternally leaked through—I was fitting love, the love I never dared dream of.”
“Yes?”
The girl’s lips looked strangely hard—almost bitter, Peter thought; and this time he reached out both arms to her.
“Hang it all! It’s tough on a man who’s never dared dream of love to have it take him, bandaged and tied to his bed. Leerie—Leerie! You wouldn’t have the heart to blow out the lamp now, would you?”
The lips softened, she gave a sad little shake of her head. “No, but you’ve got to keep it burning yourself. You’re a man; you can do it. Sorry—can’t help it. And please don’t say anything more. Don’t spoil it all, and make me say things I wish I hadn’t and send you off to pay your bill and leave the San to-night.” She smiled wistfully. “Dear, grown-up boy! Don’t you know that it’s the customary thing for a man to think he’s fallen in love with his nurse when he’s convalescing? Just get well and forget it—as all the others do.” She turned toward the door.
“I’m not going to pay my bill to-night, and I’m not going to forget it. I guess all those chinks haven’t been filled up yet. I’m going to stay until they are. Good plan, don’t you think?” And Peter Brooks smiled like a man who had never been given up—nor ever intended giving up, now that life had given him back the things for which he had a right to fight.
Chapter II
OLD KING COLE
Hennessy was feeding the swans. Sheila O’Leary leaned over the sill of the diminutive rustic rest-house and watched him with a tired contentment. She had just come off a neurasthenic case—a week of twenty-four-hour duty—and she wanted to stretch her cramped sensibilities in the quiet peace of the little house and invite her soul with a glimpse of Hennessy and the swans.
All about her the grounds of the sanitarium were astir with its customary crowd of early-summer-afternoon patients. How those first warm days called the sick folks out-of-doors and held them there until the last beam of sunshine had disappeared behind the foremost hill! The tennis-courts were full; the golf-links were dotted about with spots of color like a cubist picture; pairs of probationers, arm in arm, were strolling about, enjoying a comparative leisure; old Madam Courot was at her customary place under the juniper, watching the sun go down. Three years! Nothing seemed changed in all that time but the patients—and not all of these, as Madame Courot silently testified. The pines shook themselves above the rest-house in the same lazy, vagabond fashion, the sun purpled the far hills and spun the same yellow haze over the links, the wind brought its habitual afternoon accompaniment of cow-bells from the sanitarium farm, and Hennessy threw the last crumb of bread to Brian Boru, the gray swan, as he had done for the fifteen years Sheila could remember.
She folded her arms across the sill and rested her chin on them. How good it was to be back at the old San, to settle down to its kindly, comfortable ways and the peace of its setting after the feverish restlessness of city hospitals! She remembered what Kipling had said, that the hill people who came down to the plains were always hungering to get back to the hills again. That was the way she had felt about it—always a hunger to come back. For months and months she had thought that she might forever have to stay in those hospitals, have to make up her mind to the eternal plains—and then had come her reprieve—she had been called back to the San and the work she loved best.
Had the place been any other than the sanitarium, and the person any other than Sheila O’Leary, this would never have happened. For she had left under a cloud, and in similar cases a cloud, once gathered, grows until it envelops, suffocates, and finally annihilates the person. As a graduate nurse she would have ceased to exist. But in spite of the most blighting circumstances, those who counted most believed in her and trusted her. They had only waited for time to forget and tongues to stop wagging, and then they had called her back. Perhaps the strangest thing about it was that Sheila did not look like a person who could have had even the smallest, fleeciest of clouds brushing her most distant horizon. In fact, so vital, warm, and glowing was her personality, so radiant her nature, that she seemed instead a permanent dispeller of clouds.
From across the pond Hennessy watched her with adoring eyes as he gave his habitual, final bang to the bread-platter and the hitch to his corduroys preparatory to leaving. To his way of thinking, there was no nurse enrolled on the books of the old San who could compare with her. In the beginning he had prophesied great things of her to Flanders, the bus-driver. “Ye mind what I’m tellin’ ye,” he had said. “Afore she’s finished her trainin’ she’ll have more lads a-dandtherin’ round her than if she’d been the King of Ireland’s only daughter. Ye can take my word for it, when she leaves here, ’twill be a grand home of her own she’ll be goin’ to an’ no dirty hospital.”
That