“I’m going to take your temperature,” she said briskly, and stuck the thermometer into his unresisting mouth. Somehow it was wonderfully sweet to be fussed over this way, almost like having a mother. He hadn’t had such care since he was a little fellow in the hospital at prep school.
“I thought so!” said Miss Marilla, casting a practised eye at the thermometer a moment later. “You’ve got quite a fever; and you’ve got to lie right still, and do as I say, or you’ll have a time of it. I hate to think what would have happened to you if I’d been weak enough to let you go off into the cold without any overcoat to-night.”
“Oh, I’d have walked it off likely,” faintly spoke the old Adam in the sleepy, sick soldier; but he knew as he spoke that he was lying, and he knew Miss Marilla knew it also. He would have laughed if it hadn’t been too much trouble. It was wonderful to be in a bed like this, and be warm, and that ache in his back against the hot-water bag! It almost made his head stop aching.
In almost no time at all he was asleep. He never realized when Miss Marilla brought a glass, and fed him medicine. He opened his mouth obediently when she told him, and went right on sleeping.
“Bless his heart!” she said. “He must have been all worn out;” and she turned the light low, and gathering up his chairful of clothes, slipped away to the bathroom, where presently they were all, except the shoes, soaking in strong, hot soap-suds, and Miss Marilla had gone down-stairs to stir up the fire and put on irons. But she took the precaution to close all the blinds on the Amber side of the house, and pull down the shades. Mary had no need ever to find out what she was doing.
The night wore on, and Miss Marilla wrought with happy heart and willing hands. She was doing something for somebody who really needed it, and who for the time being had no one else to do for him. He was hers exclusively to be served this night. It was years since she had had anybody of her own to care for, and she luxuriated in the service.
Every hour she slipped up to feel his forehead, listen to his breathing, and give him his medicine, and then slipped down to the kitchen again to her ironing. Garment by garment the soldier’s meagre outfit came from the steaming suds, was conveyed to the kitchen, where it hung on an improvised line over the range, and got itself dry enough to be ironed and patched. It was a work of love, and therefore it was done perfectly. When morning dawned the soldier’s outfit, thoroughly renovated and pressed almost beyond recognition, lay on a chair by the spare-room window, and Miss Marilla in her dark-blue serge morning-dress lay tidily down on the outside of her bed to take “forty winks.” But even then she could hardly get to sleep, she was so excited thinking about her guest and wondering whether he would feel better when he awoke or whether she ought to send for a doctor.
A hoarse cough roused her an hour later, and she went with speed to her patient, and found him tossing and battling in his sleep with some imaginary foe.
“I don’t owe you a cent any longer!” he declared fiercely. “I’ve paid it all, even to the interest while I was in France; and there’s no reason why I shouldn’t tell you just what I think of you. You can go to thunder with your kind offers. I’m off you for life!” And then the big fellow turned with a groan of anguish, and buried his face in his pillow.
Miss Marilla paused in horror, thinking she had intruded upon some secret meditation; but, as she waited on tiptoe and breathless in the hall, she heard the steady hoarse breathing keep on, and knew that he was still asleep. He did not rouse, more than to open bloodshot, unseeing eyes and close them again when she loudly stirred his medicine in the glass and held the spoon to his lips. As before, he obediently opened his mouth and swallowed, and went on sleeping.