Leerie. Ruth Sawyer

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СКАЧАТЬ were astir with its customary crowd of early-summer-afternoon patients. How those first warm days called the sick folks out-of-doors and held them there until the last beam of sunshine had disappeared behind the foremost hill! The tennis-courts were full; the golf-links were dotted about with spots of color like a cubist picture; pairs of probationers, arm in arm, were strolling about, enjoying a comparative leisure; old Madam Courot was at her customary place under the juniper, watching the sun go down. Three years! Nothing seemed changed in all that time but the patients—and not all of these, as Madame Courot silently testified. The pines shook themselves above the rest-house in the same lazy, vagabond fashion, the sun purpled the far hills and spun the same yellow haze over the links, the wind brought its habitual afternoon accompaniment of cow-bells from the sanitarium farm, and Hennessy threw the last crumb of bread to Brian Boru, the gray swan, as he had done for the fifteen years Sheila could remember.

      She folded her arms across the sill and rested her chin on them. How good it was to be back at the old San, to settle down to its kindly, comfortable ways and the peace of its setting after the feverish restlessness of city hospitals! She remembered what Kipling had said, that the hill people who came down to the plains were always hungering to get back to the hills again. That was the way she had felt about it—always a hunger to come back. For months and months she had thought that she might forever have to stay in those hospitals, have to make up her mind to the eternal plains—and then had come her reprieve—she had been called back to the San and the work she loved best.

      Had the place been any other than the sanitarium, and the person any other than Sheila O’Leary, this would never have happened. For she had left under a cloud, and in similar cases a cloud, once gathered, grows until it envelops, suffocates, and finally annihilates the person. As a graduate nurse she would have ceased to exist. But in spite of the most blighting circumstances, those who counted most believed in her and trusted her. They had only waited for time to forget and tongues to stop wagging, and then they had called her back. Perhaps the strangest thing about it was that Sheila did not look like a person who could have had even the smallest, fleeciest of clouds brushing her most distant horizon. In fact, so vital, warm, and glowing was her personality, so radiant her nature, that she seemed instead a permanent dispeller of clouds.

      From across the pond Hennessy watched her with adoring eyes as he gave his habitual, final bang to the bread-platter and the hitch to his corduroys preparatory to leaving. To his way of thinking, there was no nurse enrolled on the books of the old San who could compare with her. In the beginning he had prophesied great things of her to Flanders, the bus-driver. “Ye mind what I’m tellin’ ye,” he had said. “Afore she’s finished her trainin’ she’ll have more lads a-dandtherin’ round her than if she’d been the King of Ireland’s only daughter. Ye can take my word for it, when she leaves here, ’twill be a grand home of her own she’ll be goin’ to an’ no dirty hospital.”

      That had been three years ago, and Hennessy sighed now over the utter futility of his words. “Sure, who could have been seein’ that one o’ the lads would have turned blackguard? Hennessy knows. Just give the lass time for that hurt to heal, an’ she’ll be winnin’ a home of her own, after all.” This he muttered to himself as he took the path leading toward the rest-house.

      Sheila saw him coming, his lips shirred to the closeness of some emotional strain. “Hello, Hennessy! What’s troubling?” she called down the path.

      “Faith, it’s Mr. Peter Brooks that’s troublin’. ’Tis a week, now, that ye’ve been off that case—an’ he’s near cured. Another week now—”

      “In another week he’ll be going back to his work—and I’ll be very glad.”

      Hennessy eyed the girl narrowly. “Will ye, then? Why did ye cure him up so fast for, Miss Leerie? Why didn’t ye give the poor man a chance?”

      No one but Hennessy would have had sufficient temerity for such a question, but had any one dared to ask it, upon their heads would have fallen the combined anger and bitterness of Sheila’s tongue. For having had occasion once for bitterness, it was not over-hard to waken it when men served as topics. But at Hennessy she smiled tolerantly. “Didn’t I give him a chance to get well? That was all he needed or wanted. And, now he’s well, he’ll go about his business.”

      “Faith,” and Hennessy closed a suggestive eye, “that depends on what he takes to be his business. In my young days the choosin’ an’ courtin’ of a wife was the big part of a man’s business. Now if he comes round askin’ my opinion—”

      “Tell him, Hennessy”—and Sheila fixed him firmly with a glance—“that the sanitarium does not encourage its cured patients to hang about bothering its nurses. It is apt to make trouble for the nurses. Understand?”

      Again Hennessy closed one eye; then he laughed. “When ye talk of devils ye’re sure to smell brimstone. There comes Mr. Brooks now, an’ he has his head back like a dog trailin’ the wind.”

      The girl turned and followed Hennessy’s jerking thumb with her eyes. Across the pine grove, coming toward them, was a young man above medium height, square-shouldered and erect. There was nothing startlingly handsome nor remarkable about his appearance; he was just nice, strong, clean-looking. He waved to the two by the rest-house.

      “And do ye mind his looks when he came!” Hennessy’s tone denoted wonder and admiration.

      “A human wreck—haunted at that.” There was a good deal more than mere professional interest in Sheila’s tone; there was pride and something else. It was past Hennessy’s perceptive powers to define what, but he noticed it, nevertheless, and looked sharply up at the girl.

      “For the love o’ Mike, Miss Leerie! Why can’t ye stop ticketin’ each man as a case an’ begin thinkin’ about them human-like? Ye might begin practisin’ wi’ Mr. Brooks.”

      The line of Sheila’s lips became fixed; the chin that could look so demure, the eyes that could look so soft and gentle, both backed up the lips in an expression of inscrutable hardness.

      “In the name of your patron saint, Hennessy, what have you said to Miss Leerie to turn her into that sphinx again?” The voice of Peter Brooks was as nice as his appearance.

      Hennessy looked foolish. “I was tellin’ her, then,” he moistened his lips to allow a safer emigration of words—“I was tellin’ her—that the gray swan had the rheumatism in his left leg, an’ I was askin’ her, did she think Doctor Willum would prescribe a thermo bath for him. I’d best be askin’ him meself, maybe,” and with a sudden pull at his forelock Hennessy backed away down the path.

      Peter Brooks watched him depart with an admiration equal to that with which Hennessy had welcomed him. “That man has a wonderful insight into human nature. Now I was just wishing I could have you all alone for about—”

      Sheila interrupted him. “I hope you weren’t counting on too many minutes. I can see Miss Maxwell coming down the San steps, and I have a substantial feeling that she’s looking for me to put me on another case.”

      “Couldn’t we escape? Couldn’t we skip round by the farm to the garage and get my car? You look fagged out. A couple of hours’ ride would do wonders for you, and—Good Lord! The San can run that long without your services. What do you say? Shall we beat it?”

      With a telltale, pent-up eagerness he noticed the girl’s indecision and flung himself with all his persuasive powers to turn the balance in his favor. “Do come. You can work better and harder for a little time off now and then. All the other nurses take it. Why under the heavens can’t a man ever persuade you to have a СКАЧАТЬ