Leerie. Ruth Sawyer

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СКАЧАТЬ dear; only nervous old ladies or the bad surgical cases.”

      “Very well. Only—if you could change your mind, let me know. In the mean time I’ll put Miss Saunders on,” and the superintendent turned away, troubled and unsatisfied.

      An hour later Sheila O’Leary came upon Miss Saunders with her new patient, and the patient was the man of the omnibus—the man with the haunting, deep-set eyes. Unnoticed, she watched them sitting on a bench by the pond, the nurse droning aloud from a book, the man sagging listlessly, plainly hearing nothing and seeing nothing. The picture set Sheila O’Leary shuddering. If it was a case of ’phobia, God help the poor man with Saunders coupled to his nerves! Cumbersome, big-hearted, and hopelessly dull, Saunders was incapable of nursing with tactful insight a nerve-racked man. In the whole wide realm of disease there seemed nothing more tragic to Sheila than a victim of ’phobia. It turned normal men and women into pitiful children, afraid of the dark, groping out for the hand to reassure them, to put heart and courage back in them again—the hand that nine cases out of ten never reaches them in time.

      With an impulsive toss of her head, Sheila O’Leary swung about in her tracks. She would break her own bargain for this once. She would go to Miss Max and ask to be put on the case. Here was a soul sick unto death with a fear of something, and Saunders was nursing it! What did it matter if it was a man or a dog, as long as she could get into the dark after him and show him the way out! Her resolve held to the point of branching paths, and there she stopped to consider again.

      Peter’s eyes were on the swans; there was nothing to the general droop of the shoulders, the thrust-forward bend of the neck, the hollowing of the smooth-shaven cheeks, and the graying of the hair above the temples to write him other than an average overworked or habitually harassed business man here for rest and treatment. If Sheila was mistaken—if there was no abnormal mental condition back of it all, no legitimate reason for not holding fast to the compact she had made three years before with herself to leave men—young, old, or middle-aged—out of her profession, what a fool she would feel! She balanced the paths and her judgment for a second, then decided in favor of the bargain. So Peter was left to the ministrations of Saunders.

      That night the unexpected happened, unexpected as far as the sanitarium, the superintendent of nurses, and Sheila O’Leary were concerned. How unexpected it was to Peter depends largely on whether it was the result of a decision on his part to stop coaxing existence—or a desire to escape permanently from Saunders—or merely an accident. However, Sheila O’Leary was called in the middle of the night, when she was sleeping so soundly that it took the combined efforts of the superintendent and the head night nurse to shake her awake. As she hurried into her uniform they gave her the bare details. Somehow the doors of the sun-parlor had not been fastened as usual, and a patient had stayed up there after lights were out. He had tried to find his way to the lift, had slipped the fastenings of the door in his effort to locate the bell, and had fallen four stories, to the top of the lift itself. The whole accident was unbelievable, unprecedented. They might find some plausible explanation in the morning—but in the mean time the patient was in the operating-room and Sheila O’Leary was to report at once for night duty.

      As the girl pinned on her cap the superintendent whispered the last instructions: “You’ll find him in Number Three, Surgical. It’s one of your fighting cases, Leerie, and it’s Doctor Dempsy’s patient. Remember, your best work this time, girl, for all our sakes!”

      And it was a fighting case. Innumerable nights followed, all alike. The temperature rose and fell a little, only to rise again; the pulse strengthened and weakened by turns; delirium continued unbroken. As night after night wore on and no fresh sign of internal injury developed, the girl found herself forgetting the immediate condition of the patient and going back to the thing that had brought him here. If she was right and he was possessed by a fixed idea, the dread of some concrete thing or experience, his delirium showed no evidence. It seemed more the delirium of exhaustion than fever, and there was no raving. Consciousness, however, might reveal what delirium hid, so, as the nights slipped monotonously by, the girl found herself waiting with a growing eagerness for the man to come back to himself.

      The waiting seemed interminable, but a time came at last when Sheila slipped through the door of No. 3 and found a pair of deep-set, haunting eyes turned full upon her.

      “It’s—it’s Leerie.” The words came with some difficulty, but there was an untold relief in Peter’s voice.

      For a moment the girl was taken aback, but only for a moment. She laughed him a friendly little laugh while she put her hand down to the hand that was still too weak to reach out in greeting. “Yes. Oh yes, it’s Leerie. Been getting pretty well acquainted with you these weeks, but rather a surprise to find it so—so mutual.”

      “I got acquainted with you—beforehand,” announced Peter.

      “I see—omnibus, Hennessy, and the swans.” She laughed again softly. “You’ve been away a long time; hope you’re glad to get back.”

      Peter reflected. “I’m afraid I’m not. But I’ll not say it if it sounds too much like a quitter.”

      “No, say it and get it out of your system. Getting well always seems a terrible undertaking; and the stronger you’ve been the harder it seems.” Sheila turned to her chart and preparations for the night.

      Lights out, she sat down by the open window to wait for Peter to sleep. An hour passed, two hours, and sleep did not come. She fed him hot milk and he still lay open-eyed, almost rigid, staring straight at the ceiling. At midnight she stole out for her own supper in the diet-kitchen and found him still awake when she returned, the haunting eyes looking more child’s than man’s in the dimness of the night lamp. Had she been free to follow her most vagrant impulse, she would have climbed on the head of the bed, taken the bandaged head on her lap, and plunged into the most enthralling tale of boy adventure her imagination could compass. But she hounded off the impulse, after the fashion of treating all vagrants, and went back to the window to wait and wonder. Peter was still awake when the gray of the morning crept down the corridors of the Surgical.

      Sheila questioned Tyler, the day nurse, as she came off duty the next evening, “Number Three sleep any to boast of?”

      “Why, no! Didn’t he sleep well last night?”

      She gave a non-committal shrug and passed into the room. He was watching for her coming, and a ghost of a smile flickered at the corners of his mouth. She couldn’t remember having seen even so much of a smile before.

      “It’s—it’s Leerie.” He said it just as he had the night before. But there was a strange, wistful appeal in the voice which set Sheila wondering afresh.

      “Gorgeous night, full of stars, and air like wine. Smell the verbena and thyme from the San gardens?” Sheila threw back her head and sniffed the air like a wild thing. “Took me a month to trail that smell—be sure of it. You only get it at night after a light rain. Take some long breaths of it and you’ll be asleep before lights are out.”

      But he was not. He lay rigid as the night before, his eyes staring straight before him. Sheila remembered a description she had read once of a mountain guide who had been caught on the edge of a landslide and hung for hours over the abyss, clutching a half-felled tree and trying to keep awake until help came. The man she was nursing might almost be living through such an agony of mind and body, afraid to yield up his consciousness lest he should go plunging off into some horrible abyss. What did he fear? Was it sleep? Was somnophobia what lay behind the wrecking of this fine, clean manhood? The thing seemed incredible, and yet—and yet—

      Before dawn crept again into the Surgical, the mind of СКАЧАТЬ