Miss Frederica drove home again in a seriously perturbed frame of mind, and with indignation against the decrees of Providence hot within her.
"I wired for a nurse for him!" she said to Lady Isabel, "I could not plant myself upon them! It's all most uncomfortable and unavoidable. Of course they've been extremely kind——"
At the back of Miss Coppinger's mind was the wish, that she trampled on whenever it stirred, that the Mangans had been less unexceptionally kind and Good Samaritan-like. "Such an obligation!" she groaned; "they've turned their own son out of the house to make room for Larry! But oh, my dear Isabel, if you could imagine what the house is like! The untidiness! The dirt! Of course they're unspeakably kind, and Dr. Mangan is certainly very clever, and has managed Larry wonderfully," went on Frederica, repenting her of her evil speaking, "and I must say I can't help liking Mrs. Mangan, but the girl——!" Miss Coppinger shut her mouth so tightly that her lips became thin, white lines. "Keep the door of your lips" was a text which she had in her youth illuminated for herself. She often found that nothing save a sudden and violent slam would keep that door shut, and, to do her justice, the slams, when the conversation turned on the Mangan household, were both frequent and violent.
This was later, when Larry was getting better, and when his aunt had begun to find the daily drive to Cluhir something of a strain. It was not until he was practically convalescent that he was permitted to receive other visitors. Even the daughter of the house, and that unknown son, into whose bedroom he had been thrust, were, for him, beneath the surface, and their presence only inferential. Barty was domiciled at a friend's, and Miss Tishy held aloof, the hushed voices, and general restraint imposed by illness, being not at all to her taste. Lady Isabel came once, with his aunt, and Christian crept shyly in behind them. Christian was wont to be silent in the presence of her elders. That great and admirable maxim, once widely instilled into the young, whose purport is that children should seldom be seen and never heard, had early been accepted by Christian, without resentment, even, as she grew older, with gratitude. Having diffidently taken Larry's listless and pallid paw, she had slipped into the background, and waited silently, while her eager brain absorbed and stored every detail for future meditation. Long after Larry had lightly forgotten all save the large facts of his illness and incarceration, Christian could describe the Pope, whose highly-coloured presentment beatified (rather than beautified) the wall over Larry's bed, and could imitate, with the accuracy of a phonograph, the voice of Mrs. Mangan, as she issued her opinions on the state of the weather to her distinguished visitors.
The "touch of pneumonia," prophesied by Dr. Mangan, had proved to be a sufficiently emphatic one. Larry's recovery was slow, and during his languid convalescence, he found himself becoming sincerely attached to the Big Doctor and Mrs. Mangan, and their high place in his affections was shared by the nurse provided by Miss Coppinger. The bond of a common faith was one that, at this stage of his development, had but little appeal to Larry, but he was, at all events, spared any possibility of suffering from the feelings of sub-friction, if not of antagonism, that inevitably stirred in his aunt's breast, if she found herself brought into relation closer than that of employer and employed with those of the older creed.
His sense of beauty, now beginning to acquire consciousness, and sorely afflicted by the decorative scheme that had been adopted in Barty's bedroom, found solace in the faces of these two women. Even the lazy consideration of the contrast between their types, was a comfort to Larry, and distracted his mind from the wall-paper (which suggested the contents of Dr. Mangan's surgery, rhubarb, and mustard-leaves predominating), and from Barty's taste in art, which in its sacred and profane aspects was alike deplorable.
Nurse Brennan, slight and fair, with the clearest of blue eyes, and a Dresden china complexion—Larry was already artist enough to study and adore the shadow of her white coif, with its subtle, reflected lights, on her pink, rose-leaf cheek—and Mrs. Mangan, just a little over-blown, but heavily, darkly handsome, with deep-lidded shadowy eyes, and—as Master Coppinger pleased himself by discovering—a slight suggestion of a luxurious Chesterfield sofa, upholstered in rich cream velvet. When he was getting better, and the rigours of the sick room were relaxing, these two provided him with interest and entertainment of which they were delightfully unaware.
"Well, and what will I give him for his dinner to-day, Norrse?"—(impossible to persuade the English alphabet to disclose Mrs. Mangan's pronunciation of this word)—his hostess would say, drifting largely into Larry's room, and seating herself on the side of his bed.
"Don't be making an invalid of him at all, Mrs. Mangan!" Nurse Brennan would rejoin briskly; "I'm just telling him I'd be sorry to get a thump from that old wrist of his, he and the Doctor think so much about! And he hasn't as much as a point of temperature those three days!"