CHAPTER 33

Two weeks later, when Quin struggled back to consciousness, he labored under the delusion that he was still in the army and back in the camp hospital. Eleanor, who scarcely left his bedside, was once more Miss Bartlett, the ward visitor, and he was Patient Number 7. He tried to explain to all those dim figures moving about the darkened room that he was making her a bead chain, and unless they got him more beads he could not finish it in time. When they rea.s.sured him and tried to get him to take food, he invariably wanted to know if Miss Bartlett had brought it, and which was her day to come again. Then the doctor and the nurse would argue with him, and try to make him remember things he was sure had never happened, and his mental distress would become acute. At such times somebody, who of course could not be Miss Bartlett, but who had her voice and eyes, would take his hand and tell him to go to sleep, then the tangles would all come straight.

One day he was startled out of a stupor by the sound of a querulous old voice saying:

"I guess if he could get out of bed to come across the city to me, I can come across the hall to him. Wheel me closer!"

Quin was drifting off again, when a hand gripped his wrist.

"Open your eyes, boy! Look at me. Do you know who this is?"

He lifted his heavy lids, and wondered dully what Madam was doing at the camp hospital.

"Put the blinds up," she commanded to some one back of her. "Let him see the wall-paper, the furniture. Move that fool screen away."

For the first time, Quin brought his confused attention to bear on his surroundings, and even glanced at the s.p.a.ce over the mantel to see if a certain picture was at its old place.

"You are in my house," said Madam, with a finality that was not to be disputed. "Do you remember the first time you came here?"

He shook his head.

"Yes, you do. I fell down the steps and broke my leg, and you came in off the street to tie me up with an umbrella and the best table napkins. What are you smiling about?"

"Smelling salts," Quin murmured, as if to himself.

"You don't need any smelling salts!" cried Madam, missing his allusion.

"All you need is to rouse yourself and put your mind on what I am saying.

Do you remember living in this house?"

He could not truthfully say that he did, though familiar objects and sounds seemed to be all around him.

"Well, I'll make you," said Madam, nothing daunted. "You stayed in this very room for three months to keep the burglars from stealing Isobel and Enid, and every night you walked me up and down the hall on my crutches."

She paused and looked at him expectantly; but things were still a blur to him.

"You surely remember the Easter party?" she persisted. "If you can forget the way your shirt kept popping open that night, and the way your jaw swelled up, it's more than I can!"

Quin winced. Even concussion of the brain had failed to deaden the memory of that awful night.

"I sort of remember," he admitted.

"Good! That will do for to-day. As for the rest, I'll tell you what happened. You came here one night two weeks ago, when everybody had me dead and buried, and you deviled me into having an operation that saved my life. You stood right by me while they did it. Then you collapsed and knocked your head on the banister, and, as if that wasn't enough, developed pneumonia on top of it. Now all you've got to think about is getting well."

"But--but--Miss Eleanor?" Quin queried weakly, fearing that the blessed presence that had hovered over him was but a figment of his dreams.

"She came home to help bury me," said Madam. "Failing to get the job, she took to nursing you. Now stop talking and go to sleep. If I hear any more of this stuff and nonsense about your being in a hospital and making bead chains, I'll forbid Eleanor crossing the threshold; do you hear?"

From that time on Quin's convalescence was rapid--almost too rapid, in fact, for his peace of mind. Never in his life had he been so watched over and so tenderly cared for. Mr. Ranny kept him supplied with fresh eggs and cream from Valley Mead; Mr. Chester and Miss Enid deluged him with magazines and flowers; Miss Isobel gave him his medicine and fixed his tray herself; Madam chaperoned his thoughts and allowed no intruding fancies or vagaries.

But all these attentions were as nothing to him, compared with the miracle of Eleanor's presence. Just why she was remaining at home he dared not ask, for fear he should be told the date of her departure. The fact that she flitted in and out of his room, flirting with the doctor, teasing the aunties, a.s.suming a divine proprietorship over him, was heaven enough in itself.

Sometimes, when they were alone and she thought he was asleep he would see the dancing, restless light die out of her eyes, and a beautiful exalted look come into them as if she were listening to the music of the spheres.

He attributed this to the fact that she was happy in being once more reconciled to the family. Even she and Madam seemed to be on terms of the closest intimacy, and he spent hours in trying to understand what had effected the change.

As he grew stronger and was allowed to sit up in bed, he realized, with a shock, what a fool's paradise he was living in. A few more days and he must go back to that dark, damp room in Chestnut Street. He must find work--and work, however menial, for which he had the strength. Eleanor would return to New York, and he would probably never see her again.

During his illness she had been heavenly kind to him, but that was no reason for thinking she had changed her mind. She had given him his final answer there in New York, and he was grimly determined never to open the subject again.

But one day, when they were alone together, his resolution sustained a compound fracture. Eleanor was reading aloud to him, and in the midst of a sentence she put down the book and looked at him queerly.

"Quin," she said, "did you know I am not going back?"

"Why not? Did the play fail?"

"No. It's a big success. Papa Claude will probably make a small fortune out of it."

"But you? What's the trouble?"

"I've had enough. I had made up my mind to leave the company even before I was sent for."

Quin's eyes searched her face, but for once he held his tongue.

She was evidently finding it hard to continue. She twisted the fringe of the counterpane in her slender, white fingers, and she did not look at him.

"It all turned out as you said it would," she admitted at last. "I--I simply couldn't stand Harold Phipps."

Quin's heart performed an athletic feat. It leaped into his throat and remained there.

"But you'll be joining some other company, I suppose?" He tried to make his voice formal and detached.

"That depends," she said; and she looked at him again in that queer, tremulous, mysterious way that he did not in the least understand.

Her small hands were fluttering so close to his that he could have captured them both in one big palm; but he heroically refrained. He kept saying over and over to himself that it was just Miss Nell's way of being good to a fellow, and that, whatever happened, he must not make her unhappy and sorry--he must not lose his head.

"Quin,"--her voice dropped so low he could scarcely hear it,--"have you ever forgiven me for the way I behaved in New York?"

"Sure!"

He was trembling now, and he wondered how much longer he could hold out.

"Do you--do you--still feel about me the way you--you did--that night on the bus?" she whispered.

Quin looked at her as a Christian martyr might have looked at his persecutor.

"I think about you the way I've always thought about you," he said hopelessly--"the way I shall go on thinking about you as long as I live."

"Well," said Eleanor, with a sigh of relief, "I guess that settles it"; and, to his unspeakable amazement, she laid her head on his pillow and her cheek on his.