It would have been wiser to have taken Mrs. Wyndham and Phyllis to a good hospital, where a private room would have been no heavier drain on their purse than the present arrangement, and the accommodations better; but Jessamy was so shocked at the proposition that Doctor Jerome waived the point, and the nursing began at home. Tom's good woman came; she was the kindest soul in the world, and no less competent than kind. Barbara gave up her envelops to help Jessamy. With two patients she was needed, and even then there were hardly hands enough to render the service required. Tom ran in and out at all hours of the day and night; Jessamy felt that if she lived ninety-nine years she never could repay him for his help and cheer, though she devoted her life to trying to do so.
Mrs. Wyndham lay in that wearying state of feebleness peculiar to exhausted nerves; there was no actual danger, unless it were the danger of continued prostration. But Phyllis grew more ill; twice a day the old doctor came to watch her progress. The typhoid symptoms did not develop positively, but she burned with a low fever, and no one could foretell the end.
Out of the five hundred dollars coming to the Wyndhams quarterly from their total income, there was an excess over necessary expenditures amounting to something like ninety dollars. This was all the capital Jessamy had in hand to meet the present emergency; and underlying all her other anxieties was the dreadful fear that she should be obliged to borrow of Aunt Henrietta to tide herself through the double illness which had come upon them. For her mother required all sorts of expensive food preparations, and Jessamy realized that her little fund would not take them further on the hard road than three weeks' distance, when out of it she had to pay a nurse, and that nurse's board.
Christmas was coming—the Christmas they had dreaded, at best, to meet in a boarding-house, the first since they had become homeless; but now what a Christmas it was! Barbara, sitting, as she did every moment that the nurse would intrust Phyllis to her, close by her cousin's bed, thought, with quietly falling tears, of what Phyllis had always said, that nothing mattered while they had one another. What if they were not always to have one another? What if Phyllis herself—dear, unselfish, sweet Phyllis—was to be the one to go away, leaving forever a void which no one could fill?
For Phyllis had become delirious, and raved ceaselessly of the horrible faces grinning and mowing around her bed; of the recent troubles, begging pitifully to be taken home and laid in her own big, pretty room where her head would not ache so. And she did not know Barbara nor Jessamy, but confounded them with Mrs. Haines, and implored them by turns to love the children, for Lionel was ill, and his head was aching inside of hers, which made him and "poor Phyllis" both worse, and they might die, and then his mother would never forgive herself. She always spoke of herself as "poor Phyllis," apparently with some dim idea that she was unlike herself—another personality—and invariably ended every burst of delirium with the same appeal for mercy, and to be taken home again. Barbara had never seen delirium; these ravings nearly broke her heart, and took every particle of hope out of her. In vain Doctor Jerome and Tom, whom she trusted even more, told her it was nothing unusual. Bab, the light-hearted, refused to fulfil her title, but sat stonily, looking forward to Phyllis's death.
Jessamy, more equable, kept up a little courage; but she too was utterly inexperienced, and it was very hard for her to hope for Phyllis's recovery.
And so Christmas eve dawned grimly enough upon the two poor girls, and on them alone, for Mrs. Wyndham was too weak to give more than a sick woman's passing thought to the day, and to Phyllis there was neither day nor night.
Doctor Jerome came that morning, and looked more anxious than ever. "Your mother is doing fairly," he said; "but this little girl does not mend. Nurse, if you will get your scissors, I think this heavy hair must come off."
"Oh, don't—please don't cut off Phyllis's beautiful hair," cried Bab, while Jessamy clasped her hands, mutely making the same appeal.
"Nonsense, Bab; it will relieve her more than you can imagine," said Tom, sharply, who had followed the doctor into the room. "It would all fall, anyway, after such an illness. It is better for the hair; but if it weren't, it would still require doing. Pray, be sensible."