Chapter II
OLD KING COLE
Hennessy was feeding the swans. Sheila O’Leary leaned over the sill of the diminutive rustic rest-house and watched him with a tired contentment. She had just come off a neurasthenic case—a week of twenty-four-hour duty—and she wanted to stretch her cramped sensibilities in the quiet peace of the little house and invite her soul with a glimpse of Hennessy and the swans.
All about her the grounds of the sanitarium were astir with its customary crowd of early-summer-afternoon patients. How those first warm days called the sick folks out-of-doors and held them there until the last beam of sunshine had disappeared behind the foremost hill! The tennis-courts were full; the golf-links were dotted about with spots of color like a cubist picture; pairs of probationers, arm in arm, were strolling about, enjoying a comparative leisure; old Madam Courot was at her customary place under the juniper, watching the sun go down. Three years! Nothing seemed changed in all that time but the patients—and not all of these, as Madame Courot silently testified. The pines shook themselves above the rest-house in the same lazy, vagabond fashion, the sun purpled the far hills and spun the same yellow haze over the links, the wind brought its habitual afternoon accompaniment of cow-bells from the sanitarium farm, and Hennessy threw the last crumb of bread to Brian Boru, the gray swan, as he had done for the fifteen years Sheila could remember.
She folded her arms across the sill and rested her chin on them. How good it was to be back at the old San, to settle down to its kindly, comfortable ways and the peace of its setting after the feverish restlessness of city hospitals! She remembered what Kipling had said, that the hill people who came down to the plains were always hungering to get back to the hills again. That was the way she had felt about it—always a hunger to come back. For months and months she had thought that she might forever have to stay in those hospitals, have to make up her mind to the eternal plains—and then had come her reprieve—she had been called back to the San and the work she loved best.
Had the place been any other than the sanitarium, and the person any other than Sheila O’Leary, this would never have happened. For she had left under a cloud, and in similar cases a cloud, once gathered, grows until it envelops, suffocates, and finally annihilates the person. As a graduate nurse she would have ceased to exist. But in spite of the most blighting circumstances, those who counted most believed in her and trusted her. They had only waited for time to forget and tongues to stop wagging, and then they had called her back. Perhaps the strangest thing about it was that Sheila did not look like a person who could have had even the smallest, fleeciest of clouds brushing her most distant horizon. In fact, so vital, warm, and glowing was her personality, so radiant her nature, that she seemed instead a permanent dispeller of clouds.
From across the pond Hennessy watched her with adoring eyes as he gave his habitual, final bang to the bread-platter and the hitch to his corduroys preparatory to leaving. To his way of thinking, there was no nurse enrolled on the books of the old San who could compare with her. In the beginning he had prophesied great things of her to Flanders, the bus-driver. “Ye mind what I’m tellin’ ye,” he had said. “Afore she’s finished her trainin’ she’ll have more lads a-dandtherin’ round her than if she’d been the King of Ireland’s only daughter. Ye can take my word for it, when she leaves here, ’twill be a grand home of her own she’ll be goin’ to an’ no dirty hospital.”
That had been three years ago, and Hennessy sighed now over the utter futility of his words. “Sure, who could have been seein’ that one o’ the lads would have turned blackguard? Hennessy knows. Just give the lass time for that hurt to heal, an’ she’ll be winnin’ a home of her own, after all.” This he muttered to himself as he took the path leading toward the rest-house.
Sheila saw him coming, his lips shirred to the closeness of some emotional strain. “Hello, Hennessy! What’s troubling?” she called down the path.
“Faith, it’s Mr. Peter Brooks that’s troublin’. ’Tis a week, now, that ye’ve been off that case—an’ he’s near cured. Another week now—”