The local hospital of the village of Harmonville, which was ten miles from Harmon proper, where the famous boarding-school for young ladies was located, presented an aspect so far from inst.i.tutional that but for the sign board tacked modestly to an elm tree just beyond the break in the hedge that const.i.tuted the main entrance, the gracious, old colonial structure might have been taken for the private residence for which it had served so many years.

It was a crisp day in late September, and a pale yellow sun was spread thin over the carpet of yellow leaves with which the wide lawn was covered. In the upper corridor of the west wing, grouped about the window-seat with their embroidery or knitting, the young nurses were talking together in low tones during the hour of the patients'

siestas. The two graduates, dark-eyed efficient girls, with skilled delicate fingers taking precise st.i.tches in the needlework before them, were in full uniform, but the younger girls cl.u.s.tered about them, beginners for the most part, but a few months in training, were dressed in the simple blue print, and little white caps and ap.r.o.ns, of the probationary period.

The atmosphere was very quiet and peaceful. A light breeze blew in at the window and stirred a straying lock or two that escaped the starched band of a confining cap. Outside the stinging whistle of the insect world was interrupted now and then by the cough of a pa.s.sing motor. From the doors opening on the corridor an occasional restless moan indicated the inability of some sufferer to take his dose of oblivion according to schedule. Presently a bell tinkled a summons to the patient in the first room on the right--a gentle little old lady who had just had her appendix removed.

"Will you take that, Miss Hamlin?" the nurse in charge of the case asked the tallest and fairest of the young a.s.sistants.

"Certainly." Eleanor, demure in cap and kerchief as the most ravishing of young Priscillas, rose obediently at the request. "May I read to her a little if she wants me to?"

"Yes, if you keep the door closed. I think most of the others are sleeping."

The little old lady who had just had her appendix out, smiled weakly up at Eleanor.

"I hoped 'twould be you," she said, "and then after I'd rung I lay in fear and trembling lest one o' them young flipperti-gibbets should come, and get me all worked up while she was trying to shift me. I want to be turned the least little mite on my left side."

"That's better, isn't it?" Eleanor asked, as she made the adjustment.

"I dunno whether that's better, or whether it just seems better to me, because 'twas you that fixed me," the little old lady said. "You certainly have got a soothin' and comfortin' way with you."

"I used to take care of my grandmother years ago, and the more hospital work I do, the more it comes back to me,--and the better I remember the things that she liked to have done for her."

"There's n.o.body like your own kith and kin," the little old lady sighed. "There's none left of mine. That other nurse--that black haired one--she said you was an orphan, alone in the world. Well, I pity a young girl alone in the world."

"It's all right to be alone in the world--if you just keep busy enough," Eleanor said. "But you mustn't talk any more. I'm going to give you your medicine and then sit here and read to you."

On the morning of her flight from the inn, after a night spent staring motionless into the darkness, Eleanor took the train to the town some dozen miles beyond Harmonville, where her old friend Bertha Stephens lived. To "Stevie," to whom the duplicity of Maggie Lou had served to draw her very close in the ensuing year, she told a part of her story.

It was through the influence of Mrs. Stephens, whose husband was on the board of directors of the Harmonville hospital, that Eleanor had been admitted there. She had resolutely put all her old life behind her. The plan to take up a course in stenography and enter an editorial office was to have been, as a matter of course, a part of her life closely a.s.sociated with Peter. Losing him, there was nothing left of her dream of high adventure and conquest. There was merely the hurt desire to hide herself where she need never trouble him again, and where she could be independent and useful. Having no idea of her own value to her guardians, or the integral tenderness in which she was held, she sincerely believed that her disappearance must have relieved them of much chagrin and embarra.s.sment.

Her hospital training kept her mercifully busy. She had the temperament that finds a virtue in the day's work, and a balm in its mere iterative quality. Her sympathy and intelligence made her a good nurse and her adaptability, combined with her loveliness, a general favorite.

She spent her days off at the Stephens' home. Bertha Stephens had been the one girl that Peter had failed to write to, when he began to circulate his letters of inquiry. Her name had been set down in the little red book, but he remembered the trouble that Maggie Lou had precipitated, and arrived at the conclusion that the intimacy existing between Eleanor and Bertha had not survived it. Except that Carlo Stephens persisted in trying to make love to her, and Mrs. Stephens covertly encouraged his doing so, Eleanor found the Stephens' home a very comforting haven. Bertha had developed into a full breasted, motherly looking girl, pa.s.sionately interested in all vicarious love-affairs, though quickly intimidated at the thought of having any of her own. She was devoted to Eleanor, and mothered her clumsily.

It was still to her diary that Eleanor turned for the relief and solace of self-expression.

"It is five months to-day," she wrote, "since I came to the hospital.

It seems like five years. I like it, but I feel like the little old woman on the King's Highway. I doubt more every minute if this can be I. Sometimes I wonder what 'being I' consists of, anyway. I used to feel as if I were divided up into six parts as separate as protoplasmic cells, and that each one was looked out for by a different cooperative parent. I thought that I would truly be I when I got them all together, and looked out for them myself, but I find I am no more of an ent.i.ty than I ever was. The puzzling question of 'what am I?' still persists, and I am farther away from the right answer than ever. Would a sound be a sound if there were no one to hear it?

If the waves of vibration struck no human ear, would the sound be in existence at all? This is the problem propounded by one of the nurses yesterday.

"How much of us lives when we are entirely shut out of the consciousness of those whom we love? If there is no one to _realize_ us day by day,--if all that love has made of us is taken away, what is left? Is there anything? I don't know. I look in the gla.s.s, and see the same face,--Eleanor Hamlin, almost nineteen, with the same bow shaped eyebrows, and the same double ridge leading up from her nose to her mouth, making her look still very babyish. I pinch myself, and find that it hurts just the same as it used to six months ago, but there the resemblance to what I used to be, stops. I'm a young nurse now in hospital training, and very good at it, too, if I do say it as shouldn't; but that's all I am. Otherwise, I'm not anybody _to_ anybody,--except a figure of romance to good old Stevie, who doesn't count in this kind of reckoning. I take naturally to nursing they tell me. A nurse is a kind of maternal automaton. I'm glad I'm that, but there used to be a lot more of me than that. There ought to be some heart and brain and soul left over, but there doesn't seem to be.

Perhaps I am like the Princess in the fairy story whose heart was an auk's egg. n.o.body had power to make her feel unless they reached it and squeezed it.

"I feel sometimes as if I were dead. I wish I could know whether Uncle Peter and Aunt Beulah were married yet. I wish I could know that.

There is a woman in this hospital whose suitor married some one else, and she has nervous prostration, and melancholia. All she does all day is to moan and wring her hands and call out his name. The nurses are not very sympathetic. They seem to think that it is disgraceful to love a man so much that your whole life stops as soon as he goes out of it. What of Juliet and Ophelia and Francesca de Rimini? They loved so they could not tear their love out of their hearts without lacerating them forever. There is that kind of love in the world,--bigger than life itself. All the big tragedies of literature were made from it,--why haven't people more sympathy for it? Why isn't there more dignity about it in the eyes of the world?

"It is very unlucky to love, and to lose that which you cherish, but it is unluckier still never to know the meaning of love, or to find 'Him whom your soul loveth.' I try to be kind to that poor forsaken woman. I am sorry for his sake that she calls out his name, but she seems to be in such torture of mind and body that she is unable to help it.

"They are trying to cut down expenses here, so they have no regular cook, the housekeeper and her helper are supposed to do it all. I said I would make the desserts, so now I have got to go down-stairs and make some fruit gelatin. It is best that I should not write any more to-day, anyway."

Later, after the Thanksgiving holiday, she wrote:

"I saw a little boy butchered to-day, and I shall never forget it. It is wicked to speak of Doctor Blake's clean cut work as butchery, but when you actually see a child's leg severed from its body, what else can you call it?

"The reason that I am able to go through operations without fainting or crying is just this: _other people do_. The first time I stood by the operating table to pa.s.s the sterilized instruments to the a.s.sisting nurse, and saw the half naked doctors hung in rubber standing there preparing to carve their way through the naked flesh of the unconscious creature before them, I felt the kind of pang pa.s.s through my heart that seems to kill as it comes. I thought I died, or was dying,--and then I looked up and saw that every one else was ready for their work. So I drew a deep breath and became ready too. I don't think there is anything in the world too hard to do if you look at it that way.

"The little boy loved me and I loved him. We had hoped against hope that we would be able to save his poor little leg, but it had to go. I held his hand while they gave him the chloroform. At his head sat Doctor Hathaway with his Christlike face, draped in the robe of the anesthetist. 'Take long breaths, Benny,' I said, and he breathed in bravely. It was over quickly. To-morrow, when he is really out of the ether, I have got to tell him what was done to him. Something happened to me while that operation was going on. He hasn't any mother. I think the spirit of the one who was his mother pa.s.sed into me, and I knew what it would be like to be the mother of a son. Benny was not without what his mother would have felt for him if she had been at his side.

I can't explain it, but that is what I felt.

"To-night it is as black as ink outside. There are no stars. I feel as if there should be no stars. If there were, there might be some strange little bit of comfort in them that I could cling to. I do not want any comfort from outside to shine upon me to-night. I have got to draw all my strength from a source within, and I feel it welling up within me even now.

"I wonder if I have been selfish to leave the people I love so long without any word of me. I think Aunt Gertrude and Aunt Beulah and Aunt Margaret all had a mother feeling for me. I am remembering to-night how anxious they used to be for me to have warm clothing, and to keep my feet dry, and not to work too hard at school. All those things that I took as a matter of course, I realize now were very significant and beautiful. If I had a child and did not know to-night where it would lie down to sleep, or on what pillow it would put its head, I know my own rest would be troubled. I wonder if I have caused any one of my dear mothers to feel like that. If I have, it has been very wicked and cruel of me."

CHAPTER XXIV

CHRISTMAS AGAIN

The ten Hutchinsons having left the library entirely alone in the hour before dinner, David and Margaret had appropriated it and were sitting companionably together on the big couch drawn up before the fireplace, where a log was trying to consume itself unscientifically head first.

"I would stay to dinner if urged," David suggested.

"You stay," Margaret agreed laconically.

She moved away from him, relaxing rather limply in the corner of the couch, with a hand dangling over the farther edge of it.

"You're an inconsistent being," David said. "You buoy all the rest of us up with your faith in the well-being of our child, and then you pine yourself sick over her absence."

"It's Christmas coming on. We always had such a beautiful time on Christmas. It was so much fun buying her presents. It isn't like Christmas at all with her gone from us."

"Do you remember how crazy she was over the ivory set?"

"And the bracelet watch?"

"Do you remember the Juliet costume?" David's eyes kindled at the reminiscence. "How wonderful she was in it."

Margaret drew her feet up on the couch suddenly, and clasped her hands about her knees. David laughed.