“Do you think me incapable?” I asked rather sharply.
“No, but you couldn’t hold out to do all there is to be done. Your aunt is going to be worse, Miss Allison, and I doubt if we can pull her through. You’ll want somebody for night work.”
Mrs. Smith, the village nurse, is the dreariest of her kind, and brings an atmosphere of melancholy with her. My services were needed as cheerer-up from this time on, for poor Aunt Abby grew visibly weaker, and finally one stormy night the end seemed near, so I did not go home. Dr. Richmond came in about nine o’clock and found me in the cold, lofty parlor with its straight backed furniture and grim family portraits.
“See here,” he remarked as he returned from the sick-room, “mightn’t you be a little more comfortable somehow? You can’t sit up all night on the edge of a slippery sofa like that. Why don’t you doze, and let the nurse call if she wants you?”
I had unconsciously taken the attitude of my childhood’s years, when sent to call on Aunt Abby and charged not to let my feet touch the furniture, my hands crossed in my lap, and spine rigid. But I couldn’t have slept at any rate, I told him, and should manage all right.
He opened the front door to depart, then came back. A West Indian tornado was tearing at the house and lashing the trees with howls of fury, the chimneys moaning and blinds rattling. He looked at me irresolutely, I sitting motionless. What did a mere storm matter,—a tumult of nature which would be over by morning? He might object to it, with nothing worse to worry about; it made no difference to me.
“I must be on hand every hour, anyway,” he said slowly, “to watch your aunt’s pulse. Neither you nor the nurse would understand it. If you don’t mind, I’ll stay here, instead of coming back and forth across the common in such a gale as this. And meanwhile let me show you a better way to rest.”
Poor Aunt Abby! It was fortunate that she could not see her plush sofa moved around cornerwise and its end filled with pillows, nor the logs which the doctor brought from the cellar piled across her beautifully polished, unused andirons. Had I any business to sink back luxuriously and enjoy the sparkle and warmth of a fire, with that unconscious figure in the next room? I sprang up again and tiptoed in to ask the nurse if I might not take her place.
“No,” said Mrs. Smith dolorously but firmly, “you ain’t experienced enough to watch out her last hours. Miss Abby’s been good to me in ways I sha’n’t say nothin’ about, and I’m a-goin’ to see her through. All I want you for is to call if I need you, and so long as I ain’t all alone I shall stay up till the last.”
I crept back, feeling incompetent and useless, and with some of the diminished nerve which results from the nearness and certainty of death—that hour we are never ready for.