I found Miss Peters there, sitting in the patient’s room and the gathering gloom of dusk, her muscular hands flattened upon her knees in the position of a red granite Rameses from the Nile, looking out the window at the waving treetops of the park and the clouds of falling leaves which were being driven by the dismal October wind across the white radiance of the arc lamps. I thought that I detected upon her metallic face a faint gleam of pleasure.
“It has been a good day,” she said, without rising and with her characteristic brusqueness. “Mrs. Marbury is glad that you have not suggested a hospital, and desired me to say so.” Indicating the bed with its inert little human body she added, “Peaceful.”
“The wall?” said I.
She smiled insultingly.
“You are interested?” she asked.
I scowled, I think.
“Oh, well,” she said, moving her shoulders, “she has been talking to it,—whatever is behind there,—and, do you know, I believe it has been talking to her!”
With those deliberate movements which characterized, I suppose, the movements of her mind itself, she lit the light; under its yellow rays lay the girl Virginia, her long lashes fringing her translucent eyelids, her delicately turned mouth with lips parted, and an expression of peace about the whole of her body.
“At twelve to-day,” said the nurse with her finger on the chart, “she went through apparent distress. Something seemed to give her the greatest anxiety. She even spoke to me twice. She pointed. She said, ‘It is bad! It is bad!’ with great vehemence. It was like that for more than an hour. Then suddenly she became peaceful. She went to sleep. I have not wakened her since.”
Maybe I shuddered. I remember I merely said in answer, “Yes, yes, that’s all right!” and bent over the sleeping child. In the next moment I was lost in wonder at the improvement which had taken place in twenty-four hours. The tension and retraction of the neck and head had relaxed, respiration had diminished, the lips were pink and moist, the spasmodic nerve reaction and muscular twitching had almost ceased. I felt that exultation which comes when instinct as much as specific observation assures me that the tide has turned, that the arrow of fate has swung about, and the odds have changed. Strange as it may seem to many persons, these turns are felt by the doctor at times when the patient is wholly unconscious of them, and often enough I have wondered if, after all, this does not show that the crises of life are not determined within ourselves, but by some watching eye and mind and hand outside of us. As I bent over the little Virginia some such reflection was in my mind.