An elderly woman with a checked apron brought him soup in a bowl. She was quite silent and soon went out.
“It's pretty slick,” he thought, looking around. “I could n't have done better if I'd been a widow.”
The drifting quiet of the days that Sandy lay there pleased him for the time. It felt like a cool poultice on a wound. The purity and fragility of objects was interesting to look at, so long as he lay still and did not move about among them. But he wondered how people could live there right along. They must keep everything at a distance, with a feather-duster between. He had an impression that china things always broke, and white things became dirty. Then it occurred to him that there might be some whose nature, without any worry to themselves, was to keep things clean and not to knock them over, to touch things in a feathery manner, so that they did not have to stay behind a duster. This subject of speculation lasted him a day or two, and Miss Elizabeth and Gracia began to interest him as beings with that special gift. He admired any kind of capability. Miss Elizabeth he saw often, the woman in the checked apron till he was tired of her. But Gracia was only now and then a desirable and fleeting appearance in the doorway, saying:
“Good morning, Saint George.”
She never stayed to tell him why “Saint George.” It came to the point that the notion of her yellow hair would stay by him an hour or more afterward. He began to wake from his dozes, fancying he heard “Good morning, Saint George,” and finally to watch the doorway and fidget.
“This lying abed,” he concluded, “is played out.” He got up and hunted about for his clothes. His knees and fingers trembled. The clothes hung in the closet, cleaned and pressed, in the extraordinary neighborhood of a white muslin dress. Sandy sat down heavily on the bed. Things seemed to be whizzing and whimpering all about him. He waited for them to settle, and pulled on his clothes gradually. At the end of an hour he thought he might pass on parade, and crept out into the hall and down the stairs. The sunlight was warm in the garden and on the porch, and pale green among the leaves. Gracia sat against a pillar, clasping one knee. Miss Elizabeth sewed; her work-basket was fitted up inside on an intricate system. Gracia hailed him with enthusiasm, and Miss Elizabeth remonstrated. He looked past Miss Elizabeth to find the yellow hair.
“This lying abed,” he said feebly, “is played out.”
Sitting in the sunlight, Sandy told his story gradually from day to day. It was all his story, being made up of selections. He was skilful from practice on the squire, but he saw the need of a new principle of selection and combination. His style of narrative was his own. It possessed gravity, candor, simplicity, an assumption that nothing could be unreasonable or surprising which came in the course of events, that all things and all men were acceptable. Gracia thought that simplicity beautiful, that his speech was like the speech of Tanneguy du Bois, and that he looked like Saint George in the picture which hung in her room—a pale young warrior, such as painters once loved to draw, putting in those keen faces a peculiar manhood, tempered and edged like a sword. Sandy looked oddly like him, in the straight lines of brow and mouth. Saint George is taking a swift easy stride over the dead dragon, a kind of level-eyed daring and grave inquiry in his face, as if it were Sandy himself, about to say, “You don't happen to have another dragon? This one wasn't real gamy. I'd rather have an average alligator.” She laughed with ripples and coos, and struggled with lumps in her throat, when Sandy through simplicity fell into pathos. It bewildered her that the funny things and pathetic things were so mixed up and run together, and that he seemed to take no notice of either of them. But she grew stern and indignant when Bill Smith, it was but probable, robbed the unsuspecting sleep of his comrade.
“You see,” said Sandy, apologetically, “Bill was restless, that was the reason. It was his enterprise kept bothering him. Likely he wanted it for something, and he could n't tell how much I might need without waking me up to ask. And he couldn't do that, because that'd have been ridiculous, would n't it? Of course, if he'd waked me up to ask how much I wanted, because he was going to take the rest with him, why, of course, I'd been obliged to get up and hit him, to show how ridiculous it was. Of course Bill saw that, and what could he do? Because there wasn't any way he could tell, don't you see? So he left the pipe and tobacco, and a dollar for luck, and lit out, being—a—restless.”
And Gracia wondered at and gloried in the width of that charity, that impersonal and untamed tolerance.