“sister ursula.”
There can be few points of sympathy between a man born, bred, trained, and sold for and to the world and a good nun made for the service of other things. Sister Ursula’s voice was very sweet, but the matter of her speech did not interest. The invalid lay still, looking out of the window upon the street all dressed in its Sunday afternoon emptiness. Then he shut his eyes. The doctor’s boy rang at the door. Sister Ursula stepped out into the hall, not to disturb the sleeper, and took the medicine from the boy’s hand. Then the lift shot down again, and even as she turned the wind of its descent puffed up and blew to the spring-lock door of the rooms with a click only a little more loud than the leap of her terrified heart.
Sister Ursula tried the door softly, but rich men with many hundred pounds worth of bric-à-brac buy themselves very well made doors that fasten with singularly cunning locks. Then the lift returned with the boy in charge, and, so soon as his Sunday and rather distracted attention was drawn to the state of affairs, he suggested that Sister Ursula should go down to the basement and speak to the caretaker, who doubtless had a duplicate key. To the basement, therefore, Sister Ursula went with the medicine-bottle clasped to her breast, and there, among mops and brooms and sinks and heating pipes, and the termini of all the electric communications of that many-storied warren, she found, not the caretaker, but his wife, reading a paper, with her feet on a box of soap. The caretaker’s wife was Irish, and a Catholic, reverencing the Church in all its manifestations. She was not only sympathetic, but polite. Her husband had gone out, and, being a prudent guardian of the interests confided to him, had locked up all the duplicate keys.
“reading a paper, with her feet on a box of soap.”
“An’ the saints only know whin Mike’ll be back av a Sunday,” she concluded cheerfully, after a history of Mike’s peculiarities. “He’ll be afther havin’ supper wid friends.”
“The medicine!” said Sister Ursula, looking at the inscription on the bottle. “It must begin at twenty minutes past five. There are only ten minutes now. There must—oh! there must be a way!”
“Give him a double dose next time. The docthor won’t know the differ.” The convent of Sister Ursula is not modelled after Irish ideals, and the present duty before its nun was to return to the locked room with the medicine. Meantime the minutes flew bridleless, and Sister Ursula’s eyes were full of tears.
“I must get to the room,” she insisted. “Oh, surely, there is a way, any way!”