“Oh, they’re used to it,” said Captain Hap.
Bayard turned wearily on his hard bed. He did not answer. He looked out and towards the sea. The engraved Guido over the study-table between the little windows regarded him. St. Michael was fighting with his dragon still.
“He never got wounded,” thought the sick man.
“Captain,” he said presently, “these rooms seem to be full of—pleasant things. Who sent them all?”
“Them geraniums and other greens? Oh, the ladies of the mission, every mother’s daughter of ’em, married and single, young an’ old. Jellies? Lord! Yes. Jellies enough to stock a branch grocery. What there is in the female mind, come to sickness, that takes it out in jellies”—mused the captain.
“I’ve taken solid comfort out of this screen,” said Bayard gratefully. “I did suffer with the light before. Who sent that?”
“That’s Jane Granite’s idee,” replied the captain. “She seems to be a clever girl. Took an old clo’es-horse and some rolls of wall paper they had in the house. They give fifteen cents a roll for that paper. It’s kinder tasty, don’t you think? ’Specially that cherubim with blue wings settin’ on a basket of grapes.”
“That reminds me. I see—some Hamburg grapes,” said Bayard, with the indifferent air of a man who purposely puts his vital question last. He pointed to a heaping dish of hothouse fruit and other delicacies never grown in Windover.
The captain replied that those come from the Boston gentleman; they’d kept coming all along. He thought she said there was a card to ’em by the name of—