He looked at me with a shrewd twinkle in his eye, and for a moment said nothing.

"I just expected if there was anything possible to be done you'd think of it," he replied.

I thought for a moment, and then I told him I would write to Cousin Mehitable to send down a trained nurse from Boston.

"The Overseers won't pay her," he commented with a grin.

"Perhaps you will," I returned, knowing perfectly that he was trying to tease.

"It will take several days at least to get her here."

We considered for a little in silence. I do not know what pa.s.sed through his mind, but I thought with a positive sickening of soul of being under the same roof with that girl. I knew that it must be done, though; and, simply to be rid of the dread of it, I said as steadily as I could,--

"I will go down in the morning."

And so it has come about that I am to be nurse to the Brownrig girl and to Tom Webbe's baby.

April 6. The last four days have been so full and so exhausting that there has been no time for scribbling in diaries. Like Pepys I have now to write up the interval, although I cannot bring myself to his way of dating things as if he always wrote on the very day on which they happened. Father used to laugh at me because I always insisted that it was not honest of Pepys to put down one date when he really wrote on another.

Tuesday forenoon I went down to the Brownrig house. I had promised myself not to let the sick girl see how I shrank from her, but I had a sensation of sickening repugnance almost physical. When I got to the red house I was so ashamed of myself that I forgot everything else. The girl was so sick, the place so cheerless, so dirty, so poverty-stricken; she was so dreadful to look at, with her tangled black hair, her hot cheeks, her fierce eyes; everything was so miserable and dreadful, that I could have cried with pity. Julia was in a bed so dirty that it would have driven me to distraction; the pillow-slip was ragged, and the comforter torn in great places, as if a wild cat had clawed it. Marm Bagley was swaying back and forth in an old broken rocking-chair, smoking a black pipe, which perhaps she thought fumigated the foul air of the sick-room.

She had the appearance of paying very little attention to the patient and none at all to the baby, which wailed incessantly from a shabby clothes-basket in a corner. The whole scene was so sordid, so pitiful, so hopeless, that I could think only of the misery, and so forget my shrinking and dread.

A Munson boy, that the Overseers of the Poor had sent down, was chopping wood in the yard, and I dispatched him to the house for Hannah and clean linen, while I tried to get Marm Bagley to attend to the baby and to help me to put things to rights a little. She smelled of spirits like another Sairey Gamp, and her wits did not appear to be entirely steady.

After I found her holding the baby under her arm literally upside down, while she prepared its food, I decided that unless I wished to run the risk of being held as accessory to the murder of the infant, I had better look after it myself.

"Can't you pick up the room a little while I feed the baby?" I asked.

"Don't see no use of clearing up none," she said. "'Tain't time for the funeral yet."

This, I suppose, was some sort of an attempt at a rudimentary joke, but it was a most ghastly one. I looked at the sick girl to see if she heard and understood. It was evident that she had, but it seemed to me that she did not care. I went to the bedside.

"I ought to have spoken to you when I came in," I said, "but your eyes were shut, and I thought you might be asleep. I am Miss Privet, and I have come to help Mrs. Bagley take care of you till a regular nurse can get here from Boston."

She looked at me with a strange sparkle in her eyes.

"From Boston?" she repeated.

"Yes," I said. "I have sent to my cousin to get a regular trained nurse."

She stared at me with her piercing eyes opened to their fullest extent.

"Do they train 'em?" she asked.

"Yes," I told her. "A trained nurse is almost as good as a doctor."

"Then I shall get well?" she demanded eagerly. "She'll get me well?"

"I hope so," I said, with as much of a smile as I could muster when I wanted to cry. "And before she comes we must clear up a little."

I began to do what I could about the room without making too much bustle. The girl watched me with eager eyes, and at last, as I came near the bed, she asked suddenly,--

"Did he send you?"

I felt myself growing flushed, though there was no reason for it.

"Deacon Richards asked me to come," I answered.

"I don't know him," she commented, evidently confused. "Is he Overseer?"

I hushed her, and went on with my work, for I wanted to think what I had better tell her. Of course Marm Bagley was of no use, but when Hannah came things went better. Hannah was scandalized at my being there at all, and of course would not hear of my doing the rough work. She took possession of Mrs. Bagley, and ordered her about with a vigor which completely dazed that unsatisfactory person, and amused me so much that my disturbed spirits rose once more. This was all very well as long as it lasted, but Hannah had to go home for dinner, and when the restraint of her presence was removed Marm Bagley rea.s.serted herself. She tied a frowzy bonnet over a still more frowzy head, lighted her pipe, and departed for the woods behind the house.

"When that impudent old hired girl o' yours's got all through and got out," she remarked, "you can hang a towel out the shed winder, and I'll come back. I ain't got no occasion to stay here and git ordered round by no hired girl of anybody's."

My remonstrances were of no avail, since I would not promise not to let Hannah come into the house, and the fat old woman waddled away into the seclusion of the woods. I suppose she slept somewhere, though the woods must be so damp that the indulgence seems rather a dangerous one; but at nightfall she returned more odorous, and more like Sairey Gamp than ever.

Hannah came back, and we did what we could. When Dr. Wentworth came in the afternoon he allowed us to get Julia into clean linen, and she did seem grateful for the comfort of fresh sheets and pillow-slips. It amused me that Hannah had not only taken the servants' bedding, but had picked out the oldest.

"I took the wornest ones," she explained. "Of course we wouldn't any of us ever want to sleep in them again."

She was really shocked at my proposing to remain for the night.

"It ain't for you, Miss Ruth, to be taking care of such folks," she declared; "and as for that Bagley woman, I'd as soon have a bushel basket of c.o.c.kroaches in the house as her, any time."

Even this lively image did not do away with the necessity of my remaining. I could not propose to Hannah to take my place. The mere fact of being mistress often forces one to do things which servants would feel insulted if asked to undertake. Father used to say, "Remember that _n.o.blesse oblige_ does not exist in the kitchen;" though of course this is true only in a sense. Servants have their own ideas of what is due to position, I am sure; only that their ideas are so different, and often so funnily different, from ours. I could not leave the sick girl to the mercies of Mrs. Bagley, and so I had no choice but to stay.

All day long Julia watched me with a closeness most strangely disconcerting. She evidently could not make out why I was there. In the evening, as I sat by her, she said suddenly,--

"I dunno what you think yer'll get by it."

"Get by what?"

"Bein' here."

I smiled at her manner, and told her that at least I had already got the satisfaction of seeing her more comfortable. She made no reply for a time, but evidently was considering the matter. I did not think it well for her to talk, so I sat knitting quietly, while Mrs. Bagley loomed in the background, rocking creakingly.

"'Twon't please him none," she said at last. "He don't care a d.a.m.n for me."

I tried to take this without showing that I understood it.

"I'm not trying to please anybody," I responded. "When a neighbor is sick and needs help, of course anybody would come."

"Humph! Folks hain't been so awful anxious to help me."

"There is a good deal of sickness in town," I explained.

"'Tain't n.o.body's business to come, anyhow," commented Mrs. Bagley dispa.s.sionately.