Miss Sullivan and Miranda ran on to make preparations.
“I think,” said the latter, “that we’d better put him in your room, if you still mean to go, as you decided yesterday.”
“I must go,” replied the other, with a quick intaking of the breath, “unless I can be of some service to this gentleman.” Was it her fine instinct that had recognised the gentleman?
“I don’t see what you can do more than mother and I will—except that you have kinder, pleasanter ways,” Miranda assured her. “P’r’aps this man will turn out to be a sailor ’long shore, after all, and we’ll know how to nuss him better than you would.”
“Well,” said Miss Sullivan, “we shall see;” but it was evident that in her heart she was quite certain he was no sailor.
Mrs. Dempster flurried about and had everything ready in the invalid’s room by the time Uncle Jake arrived. The three men carried their burden into his hospital, while the women waited anxiously for a report. Life or Death?
Old Dempster and Dan’l at this moment returned from catching and feeding White Socks and preparing the buggy for Miss Sullivan’s journey. While they were hearing the history of the rescue, Uncle Jake came out with a cheerful look.
“He ain’t no sailor,” he announced. “Here’s his pocket-book with three hundred an’ fifty dollars in gold. You just take that, old woman, and don’t let Dan’l use any on ’em for buttons to his new swaller-tail. Wal, Miss Sullivan, I guess your man’ll git well. He’s breathin’ reg’lar, but don’t seem to know nothin’ yit.”
Miranda went to take her place as nurse by the bedside. By-and-by, her mother needing her for a few moments, she called Miss Sullivan.
The wrecked man was beginning to stir about uneasily. He murmured and muttered names, evidently those uppermost in his waking thought. Life was struggling to regain voluntary control. He was feverish. Miss Sullivan gave him from time to time spoonfuls of stimulant; his weakness and exhaustion needed this. It was a new position for her, and she managed rather awkwardly,—more awkwardly than one would have expected who knew her usual deftness. Once, when his eyes again half opened, she shrank away, and when he again became delirious and rejected his restorative and went on speaking wildly and incoherently, mingling names, words of hate and words of love and words of dreary despair, she burst into a sudden passion of excited tears and called Miranda to come immediately and relieve her. She evidently was not fit to be a calm nurse to the stranger: a fact sufficiently curious, since her temperament was quite the nursely one. But perhaps she was too much concerned for her protégé.