School was to have re-opened on Monday; but the trustees postponed it a week, for it was hardly possible to hold the older classes without Mr. Haley. Miss ’Rill offered her services; but she admitted that the new methods were quite beyond her and that probably many of Nelson’s older pupils knew more than she did herself.
On Sunday night, however, Nelson’s condition changed. Dr. Poole had “staved off” pneumonia, as he expressed it, and the young man began to gain. That gain was manifested on Monday morning, to Mrs. Beasely’s delight, by the patient’s consumption of a bowl of chicken broth.
“If he kin eat he’ll live,” she declared, with conviction. “That’s all he needs now—good food and plenty of it. If I’d ha’ got my Charles to see it that way an’ put forth an effort to eat, I jest know he’d got well,” and she went over to stand before the enlarged crayon portrait of her husband in the dining-room, and wipe away the tears that gushed over her faded cheeks.
Old Mrs. Scattergood often said that, “Miz’ Beasely worshiped at the tomb of an idee. Charles Beasely was as mean an’ meachin’ a man as ever stepped in socks, and ’twas a marcy to Miz’ Beasely when he was taken; but you couldn’t make her believe it now to save your soul!”
“But why should you want to take the woman’s comfort from her, Ma?” queried Miss ’Rill. “It makes her more tender-hearted and sweeter, to believe that her husband was a saint.”
“Humph! like other fules I might mention, she’d ruther cling to a false idee than know the trewth,” said the birdlike old lady, shaking her head. “Some wimmen air plumb crazy abeout men. Me? humph! I wouldn’t worry my head over the best one that ever lived.”
Mrs. Scattergood could not content herself with the prospect of her daughter’s marriage. The closer the event approached the more she nagged. Her opinion of Hopewell Drugg was freely expressed throughout the length and breadth of Polktown. She had got so that she couldn’t even be nice to little Lottie, and Miss ’Rill had to make the little girl understand that she mustn’t visit around the corner on High Street any more.
That gave Lottie more time to go over to Mrs. Beasely’s and listen for news of Nelson Haley, in whose illness she was deeply interested. When she was allowed to enter the room to see him, she was almost afraid of the school teacher, his face was so white and his hands so thin.
“I—I feel like I’d ought to be introduced to you again,” she stammered, coming close to the bed. “Oh! you poor, poor thing! Let me feel if you’re the same.”
For little Lottie had never got over that trick of “seeing with her fingers,” and often preferred to examine an article that way, to sense its shape, texture and colorings, rather than by visual means. Now she ran her sensitive finger-tips over Nelson’s face.