The woman looked sulky. “How much it costs to keep in the Hospital?” she asked. She was told that the usual charge was seventeen dollars and a half for a week, but that if she could not afford so much, the Superintendent would probably arrange to let her pay what she could.
“I can’t to pay anything for sick child!” exclaimed the woman. “I can just to pay rent and get some food. Two years ago my man goes off. I don’ know. Maybe he’s fighting; but I don’ get nothing.”
“That’s all right,” said the Doctor. “You go see the Superintendent. We’ll look after Stephanie anyway.—By the way, will you sign this paper giving us permission to fix her adenoids and tonsils while she is here? I daresay you don’t care?”
“No; I don’ care,” said the woman casually, with the air of one conferring a favor.
Of course she did not realize how great a privilege Stephanie was getting. Few citizens know that the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary is the only Hospital in the city where a child with a trouble like Stephanie’s would be so taken in and cared for. All such cases are referred to the Infirmary. How should Mrs. Rogazrovitch guess that the kind hands which were to care for the child and the kind faces surrounding her belonged to the best specialists and the best nurses anywhere to be found? She only knew that for the time being a burden was lifted. And this was Stephanie’s advantage over Paolo, whose mother loved him too fatuously to give him his only chance.
“Eighty-seven!” called the attendant, after Stephanie and her mother had passed on. It was Paolo’s turn.
“She says,—she could not spare me; she loves me too much. And besides, my father would not let her,” the boy answered a question in a hollow voice. “He was very sick, and last week he died. He would not let me be in a Hospital.” Helplessly he raised to the doctor eyes which should have been very beautiful; the eyes of a poet or painter.
“But why then did not your mother bring you back for treatment, as I told her?” asked the doctor again. The woman began to weep. “She says she could not leave my father,” interpreted the boy. “She loved him very much. Once she did try to come here with me, after the Visitor called. But she could not find the way. She says her head is sick. And she lost her ring. That made her very sad indeed.”
“Did she give you the medicine regularly?”
The boy hesitated. “Sometimes,” he said; “when the Visitor came. I think my mother forgot; she was so sad about my father. She sat in a chair and rocked all day. She is very kind and loving. She held me on her lap and cried, and cried.”