“‘Bring in the 23rd Psalm,’” she read in one suggestion. “That’s good. I know that much and I can make them repeat it the whole hour, if nothing else comes into my head. How is she, Dr. Helen?”
Dr. Helen smiled ruefully. “She will be all right after a while, but it is a pity, isn’t it? You were a good girl to relieve her mind about that class. She cares so much about it. Good morning, Frieda! Hast du gut geschlafen?”
The Three Gables household was a church-going one. Hannah, in her white gown with sweet-peas scattered over it, met the doctors in the hall.
“Is Frieda late?” she asked, putting on her gloves. “It isn’t like her.”
“No, but she begged so hard to stay with Catherine whose state seems to waken deeps of pity in her, that I couldn’t refuse. She said she would do anything for her, even to reading poetry!”
They all laughed, for Frieda’s English reading 191 was distinctly lacking in smoothness, and her rendering of poetry would doubtless be harrowing.
“That would hurt Catherine more than the toothache,” said Hannah, “but they will find something better to do,” and she walked sedately down the path between the doctors, her Bible and Quarterly in her hands, wondering if martyrs on the way to the stake chatted on indifferent topics, and noticed birds and bees and grasshoppers.
Meanwhile Catherine and Frieda up stairs were surprising themselves and each other. The first glimpse of Catherine’s swollen cheek had roused Frieda’s sense of mirth, but compassion for physical pain followed quickly.
“Ach weh! Weh! Schade! Schade!” she had murmured in a deep sympathetic tone, which Catherine found unexpectedly soothing. Accustomed as she had always been to brisk remedial measures, and beyond those, to wordless pity and a deliberate ignoring of the evil, she was interested and touched by this demonstration. She had felt shy with Frieda from the first, wishing so earnestly to know her well and win her love that she could not be perfectly simple and natural with her. This shyness had combined with the little aloofness, which every one felt in Catherine, to shut Frieda’s heart. But this morning the barriers were down. Catherine, instead of being perfect, exquisite, was nothing short of hideous. The agent had proved 192 that she could look absurd. Here she was shown mortal to the point of needing help from Frieda. What made Hannah feel awkward and useless, caused Frieda to come to the front, competent and tender. She made Catherine cozy with pillows, and sat beside her, speaking, in tones which carried healing and comfort, of all sorts of interesting and delightful things and places. She told stories of her school in Germany, of her home and Hannah’s visit, of her little friend who had been to a birthday party at the palace, of the strange “church social” to which Hannah had taken her in Berlin, of her rides with Herr Karl in the Tiergarten, rapturous descriptions of the Tiergarten itself, dropping unconsciously into German phrases, her eyes shining and her cheeks taking on an unwontedly charming color, while Catherine lay and listened, entranced, as though she were in a world where pain had no power.
It was not so pleasant at the little gray church. Hannah, all through the sermon, wrestled mentally with the parable. It seemed to her it was a very slippery parable! She would no sooner highly resolve to hold it till she had wrenched its moral from it, and reduced that moral to terms which the youngest babe could surely comprehend, than she would find that the elusive subject had slipped from her grasp, and her whole mind would be fixed upon the problem of how long it would take a fly to 193 crawl all the way across the expansive back of Mrs. Graham, who sat in the pew in front.