“Nothing except that you are wearing out under my eyes,” complained Jim.
But a worse complication came and after it had come, Horatia felt that all had been easy before. Jackie, with the astonishing suddenness of children, had been well when she started for her office in the morning and when she came home at night he was sick and feverish and refused to eat his supper. She put him to bed and consulting Maud’s lists found the name of the baby doctor and summoned him. He was a gentle-voiced, pleasant young man who after one look at the boy developed a frightening air of seriousness and told Horatia to send for a nurse. She asked him if she should telegraph Maud but he shook his head.
“It’s not much use. He’s poisoned somehow—eaten something or some things that he shouldn’t have eaten. The chances are that he will come out all right by tomorrow, but if he doesn’t she couldn’t get here anyhow. You can wait until morning. He will probably be all right. But it will mean prompt work now. Try to get a nurse from the children’s hospital.”
A tangled night. Horatia remembered the coming of the nurse and her own quick confidence that the uniform would help somehow in bringing Jackie through. So much skill surely—— She remembered Jim’s coming and her amazement that his arms could not comfort her—that nothing could help her except the assurances that the poor, tossing, wailing little boy would probably be all right. She heard him cry as they did things to his little body which hurt before they relieved it. She had constant pictures of the way he had looked two days before and she could hear his jolly little laugh. She had an agonized sense of the terrible waste of life there must be when children died. And once she turned to Jim with a frightened cry:
“I can’t bear it, Jim! I tell you I can’t bear it. And what if it were my child? Could it be worse? Dare we risk all that?”
She had a memory of Jim’s great strength and of all the things he did—and how the doctor turned to him and asked things and of Jim’s calmness and readiness, and of one moment when he took a wailing Anna by the shoulders and sent her out of the room. Horatia did not wail. But her face was so white and so full of suffering that Jim kept close beside her ready for a collapse if it should come.
A fight for life is always terrible, but with a child, when the odds are so unequal, it is especially terrible. The doctor and nurse, quiet and coöperative, worked steadily together—hours passed—the cries from the tortured little body became fewer and at last the doctor, coming out into the upper hallway where Jim and Horatia sat together, said those words which have brought such floods of happiness to so many watchers, “He’ll get through all right. In a week he’ll be as fit as ever. Great bit of luck that we caught it in time. In half an hour more he would have had convulsions and it’s hard to get a baby well under those conditions.”
Horatia was weeping silently.
“You’ve had a big strain, Miss Grant. Better get to bed. The nurse will be here all night and tomorrow I’ll send someone to relieve her. In a day or two he won’t need any watching; but while he is so weak it is just as well to give him expert nursing.”
He was gone.