“I’d like to help tell the story,”—Archibald had never stood by in such a fight as the doctor had fought that night and the experience had left him with a humble consciousness of his own uselessness, a strong desire to play a manlier part.
Dr. Fullerton looked at him sharply from under heavy eyebrows that gave his face a misleading fierceness.
“Don’t sentimentalize, man,” he said bluntly. “It takes people that way sometimes—running up against Death and barely slamming the door in his face—but don’t imagine the close shave will change Ezra any more than his bath will. He’ll be as mean and as dirty as ever in a few weeks. We’ve done our damnedest for him to-night, but we’re the ones benefited by it. Life’s a doubtful blessing to Ezra. Help him if you want to, but do it with your eyes open and because you want to, not because you expect to reform him. He isn’t the reforming kind.”
Archibald thought his words over after he had gone. Probably they were true—but on their heels came other words. “I believe there’s a decent scrap of Soul hidden away somewhere in Ezra, hidden so deep that he himself doesn’t suspect it’s there,” Nora Moran had said.
“I shouldn’t wonder a bit if his mother had been awfully proud of him.” It was Pegeen who had said that.
Who could tell? One needn’t sentimentalize, but one might as well give a man the benefit of the doubt. That was neighboring.
The nurse from Albany came and ate up the case, according to prophecy, but in a few days she went away to meet direr needs, and then Pegeen’s turn came. She was in her element, and Ezra, a limp edition of his former self, showed a flattering satisfaction in the change from Miss Kirby’s ministrations to Peggy’s. Surliness was as natural to him as breathing and he was no angel patient; but it was quite useless to be surly with Peg. She ignored it, and went her cheerful, tolerant way, coddling, coaxing, encouraging, tyrannizing, amusing, unmoved by stubbornness or rudeness or anger or ingratitude, obeying the doctor’s orders and, where the orders ended, “seeing to” Ezra according to her own ideas of the way the thing should be done.
Archibald, and Miss Moran, and Mrs. Benderby, stayed with her in turn, but the case was hers, and Dr. Fullerton always addressed her as “Nurse O’Neill,” to her profound satisfaction.
Archibald missed her miserably at the shack. Mrs. Benderby was looking after him. She had called the doctor in as he drove by one evening during the first week of Ezra’s illness; and after an examination he had told her kindly but frankly that her days for hard work were over.
“You may live for many years,” he said; “live comfortably, too, but no more washing and ironing and scrubbing, Mrs. Benderby. We’ll have to find something easier for you to do.”