"He did it! Yes, he is very clever—all that you say! But you cannot have him, for he is mine! I'll lend him to you—for a while! But I must have him back! He's mine! mine! mine!"
From breathing the rare atmosphere of these exalted heights, she had been precipitated by the strike into bottom deeps of despair, and while agonizing therein over additional rumors of Greer & Smythe's impending failure, a morning paper came to her breakfast-table with six-inch fire scareheads and a long tale of burns, bruises, breakages that would have been longer but for the softness of the morass. Carter, Bender, Brady, Carrots Smith, all who were on the trestle, had been more or less injured; and six bridges, five trestles, dozens of culverts had gone up in smoke, a maleficent memorial to Michigan Red, before the conflagration back-fired itself out among labyrinthian lakes. But she paused not at the tale. The injured were on the way to the hospital, and with that piece of news clutched to her bosom she ran all the way and broke, at one time, a rule that was as the law of the Medes and Persians and the privacy of the head doctor's study.
It will be easily seen that under such circumstances her hysterical gaspings were not exactly informing, but a man does not attain to headship of a hospital without ability to extract truth from obscure premises—what else is diagnosis?—and when, indicating the heading that told of Carter's injuries, she gasped, "My husband!" the Head grasped every detail of the situation.
"I must nurse him!" she pleaded. "Must! must!"
A man prodigiously dignified and very solemn behind imposing glasses, the Head offered a stereotyped objection; but it speaks for the feeling beneath his dessicated exterior that he eventually set rules and regulations at defiance, and outraged the discipline and morale maintained by the Scotch head nurse, by appointing her, a novitiate, to a capital case.
"But remember," he said. "Only if you can forget, for the present, that he is your husband?"
He did not believe she could, and had been astonished by her quiet, almost mechanical performance of duty during those two harrowing days. For he did not see her leaning over the inanimate form when alone in the ward; her strained watching, desperate listenings for the first flutter of the returning spirit. Now he did see her flushed delight, and muttered to himself as Carruthers, the under surgeon, hastened with her to Carter's bedside: "I suppose I ought to tell him! ... What's the use; he'll hear soon enough."
So her secret was kept, and being uninformed of the matrimonial complications in the case, the surgeon set her delighted flutterings to professional interest and so joined her felicitations. "'Twas touch and go," he whispered. "Few could stand such a crack on the head; must have made an omelet of his brains and his fever was hot enough to fry it. But he'll pull through, Mistress Morrill, and it is good that he will, for he's a gran' character, fine and useful to the province."
To indulge a pleasant conceit, that refreshing sleep may be regarded as an intimation of the fates that comedy was about to be substituted for impending tragedy upon the boards; and the opening of Carter's eyes may very well be considered as the rise of the curtain on the first, and what would also have been the last, act had he been in the enjoyment of his usual health and strength. Lacking these, he could only take things as he found them; chief over all, a demure nurse who administered bitter draughts or took his pulse without sign of recognition, compunction, or emotion.
As her shapely back always hid the pencil when she noted her observations on the chart, he could not see it tremble; and how was he to know that the pulse-taking was a sham? That she could feel only her own heart thudding five thousand thuds to the minute? That she had to guess the pulse by his temperature, which cardinal crime of the nurse's calendar was partly condoned, because if she had set down its vibrations at the moments she held his hand, every doctor in the hospital would have come running as to a lost cause.