When Mrs. Quinn’s trial came on, Dil’s life was still hanging in a doubtful balance. She was sent to the Island for ninety days, for drunkenness and assaulting the policeman, and would there await the final result.
But Mrs. MacBride went on adding to her bank account and her real estate, to the wreck of youth and womanhood, to the prisons and paupers’ graves. She kept such a very respectable place, the law never meddled with her.
Dilsey Quinn lay on her hospital pallet delirious, but never violent, and lapsing into unconsciousness. She had a dislocated shoulder, two broken ribs, and sundry bruises; but it was the years of hard work, foul air, dark rooms, and unsanitary conditions that the doctors had to fight against blindly. Her bruised and swollen face, her stubby, red-brown hair that had been cut short, her wide mouth and short nose, made no appeal in the name of beauty. She was merely a “case.”
Her nurse was a youngish, kindly woman, used to such incidents. Beaten wives and children were often sent to her ward. In the early part of her experience she had suffered with them. Now she had grown—not unsympathetic, but wiser; tender she would always be.
Now and then there was something so wistful in the child’s eyes that it touched her heart. She lay so patient and uncomplaining, she made so little trouble.
But sometimes the woman wondered why they were brought into the world to suffer, starve, and die. What wise purpose was served?
XI—WHEN HE AND SUMMER COMES
One morning Dilsey Quinn looked slowly and curiously around the ward, and then asked the nurse how she came there.
She lay a long while, piecing out the story, remembering what was back of it.
“As you did not die, your mother will come out of the Island early in June. I suppose it was a sort of accident. Was she used to beating you?”