CHAPTER XXVII
Dick, more frightened than hurt, was carried home that same night; but wee Blanche was badly hurt, and the doctor would not allow them to move her. The wound on her head was a bad one, her little arm was broken, one baby leg crushed, and most of all the doctors, who came and went hourly, feared internal injuries they could not gage and dare not probe yet. For two weeks the child lay swathed and drugged in Sên King-lo’s bed. And Ivy never left her. Even in her drugged stupor—she was too weak for them to drug her heavily—she stirred and whimpered if her cousin went from her. Two nurses were installed, but only from Ivy would the stricken mite take mixture or suffer touch. She looked at her father with hard, hurt eyes; she scarcely noticed her mother; she turned her face from the kindly doctors; hated the nurses, and said so; and it must have gone hard with Ivy for a snatch of food and rest, had Blanche not taken a sudden fancy to Kow Li. She screamed if Ivy moved from her side, unless Kow Li took the cousin’s place. She even fretted after a short half-hour and called for Ivy; and when she did, the girl always came. But, thanks to Kow Li, Miss Gilbert did get half-hour snatches of rest in the next room: Sên King-lo’s living room, his Chinese books about it, traces of him everywhere, and as much an atmosphere of China as if it had been in Pekin. Why that was so would be hard to say, but it was. Almost all the sparse furnishing was Western: easy-chairs and chesterfield, many books, and water-colors mostly English. There were no bamboos, pictured or real—not a dragon nor a joss-stick. But the room breathed China, and a girl’s sensitiveness caught it, as only one visitor had before: Sir Charles. And he had lived in China.
After the first frightened hour’s absorption she had realized poignantly that these were Mr. Sên’s rooms—the intimate place of his being and keeping, as true of him and as redolent of him as Rosehill was of Miss Julia.
Miss Julia slept on a large and very elaborate bed; Sên King-lo slept on one that could not comfortably have been narrower, so narrow that even wee, ill Blanche was not lost in it, and so Spartan-plain that its new occupant considered it “horrid shabby,” and said so the first day she was well enough to take the slightest interest in anything but her own aching body. Miss Julia’s bedroom walls were covered with portraits, all but one of dead and gone Townsends, many as babies, two in their coffins: daguerreotypes, pastels, oils, water-colors, photographs, plain and colored; the one other, the largest and most handsomely framed, a portrait of Robert E. Lee in Confederate uniform. Only one picture hung on Sên King-lo’s bedroom walls—Kwan Yin-ko. And, under the doctors and Ivy herself, that Chinese Holy Mother of Mercy wrought the loving miracle of the English baby’s recovery. For Kwan Yin-ko caught the child’s roving eye almost at once and riveted it. The nurses thought it a horrible picture, and the night nurse, who had been scrupulously well brought up in Bangor, Maine, disliked being in the room with the ugly heathenish thing. But Blanche pronounced it a most beautiful lady, and Kow Li owed half his firm place in the small invalid’s heart to the skilful stories he told her of Kwan Yin-ko—and a weird jumble of mythology, fairy-tales and pure lie he made them! But they gave the English child infinite delight, and Ivy Gilbert many a refreshing half-hour of sleep out in the next room on Sên King-lo’s sofa.
Sên himself slept now at his own Legation and at the Snows’. Sir Charles and his wife came and went, and so did Sên King-lo; but Ivy lived in Sên’s rooms—while Blanche stayed there. Emma Snow had begged to share Ivy’s care of the child; but her grief and anxiety made her too tearful for medical approval, and the doctors limited her comings, and the nurses speeded her departures, while Blanche, with baby ruthlessness, made it clear that it was “mine own Nivy” she wanted.
The nurses had a sinecure. Miss Gilbert and yellow Kow Li usurped their office. In less than a week the night nurse and the Chinese Goddess parted company, and the day nurse went out more and more and knew well enough that she was there for a social reason, and as a fall-back-on, should the need occur, but that Ivy was in charge. And being a sensible girl, born and bred in New York and well paid, the day nurse did not care in the least.
Their small encounter with half-tipsy Reginald Hamilton had marked an advance in the comradeship of the Chinese man and the English girl. It had so impelled Ivy more than it did Sên—naturally. The accident to the children drew both to a stronger liking, and Sên to a new understanding.
He had saved the two little lives, there was no question of that—Charles and Emma knew it and said it, and so did two physicians and three policemen, and the newspapers underlined it. And Ivy had seen him do it. He had had to wear his left arm in a sling for a day or two.
She had seen his strength again—no doubt now about those delicate hands of his—but she had seen something of that before, and his courage and cool-headed resource had not surprised her. To her it had seemed as much a matter of course that he had proved brave and clear-witted as it had to him to swing tipsy insolence down to the snowy roadway.
But he had seen a new woman, a new womanliness. He had seen the love as well as the pain on her face as she had bent down to the mangled baby out there under his window, and had gathered it up into her arms.
They two had been alone with the injured children a long quarter of an hour that had seemed longer, before the doctor had come, or even Kow Li, who had gone on an errand. Both had some skill at “first aid”—he much more than her—and he had seen the grit with which she had held the broken arm in place while he did the little he could for the crushed little leg; had seen the tenderness and strength with which she had soothed and controlled the pain-and-fright-broken mite; and had known that Ivy Gilbert’s “flaw” had been the unjust creation of his own crass stupidity.
Chinese omniscience has its human limits. Sên King-lo had learned that a woman is not necessarily unwomanly, or unloving of little children because she has little flair for blindman’s-buff and leap-frog, and even less for “I am, thou art, he is” and “three times three is nine.”