第21章

"If there were such nurses as you, Miss Breen, there would be very little need of doctors," he said, with a sort of interogative fashion of laughing peculiar to him.

"I thought of being a nurse once;" she answered. "Perhaps I may still be one. The scientific training won't be lost."

"Oh, no? It's a pity that more of them have n't it. But I suppose they think nursing is rather too humble an ambition."

"I don't think it so," said Grace briefly.

"Then you did n't care for medical distinction."

"No."

He looked at her quizzically, as if this were much droller than if she had cared. "I don't understand why you should have gone into it.

You told me, I think, that it was repugnant to you; and it's hard work for a woman, and very uncertain work for anyone. You must have had a tremendous desire to benefit your race."

His characterization of her motive was so distasteful that she made no reply, and left him to his conjectures, in which he did not appear unhappy. "How do you find Mrs. Maynard to-day?" she asked.

He looked at her with an instant coldness, as if he did not like her asking, and were hesitating whether to answer. But he said at last, "She is no better. She will be worse before she is better. You see," he added, "that I haven't been able to arrest the disorder in its first stage. We must hope for what can be done now, in the second."

She had gathered from the half jocose ease with which he had listened to Mrs. Maynard's account of herself, and to her own report, an encouragement which now fell to the ground "Yes," she assented, in her despair, "that is the only hope."

He sat beside the table in the hotel parlor, where they found themselves alone for the moment, and drubbed upon it with an absent look. "Have you sent for her husband?" he inquired, returning to himself.

"Yes; Mr. Libby telegraphed the evening we saw you."

"That's good," said Dr. Mulbridge, with comfortable approval; and he rose to go away.

Grace impulsively detained him. "I--won't--ask you whether you consider Mrs. Maynard's case a serious one, if you object to my doing so."

"I don't know that I object," he said slowly, with a teasing smile, such as one might use with a persistent child whom one chose to baffle in that way.

She disdained to avail herself of the implied permission. "What I mean--what I wish to tell you is--that I feel myself responsible for her sickness, and that if she dies, I shall be guilty of her death."

"Ah?" said Dr. Mulbridge, with more interest, but the same smile.

"What do you mean?"

"She didn't wish to go that day when she was caught in the storm. But I insisted; I forced her to go." She stood panting with the intensity of the feeling which had impelled her utterance.

"What do you mean by forcing her to go?"

"I don't know. I--I--persuaded her."

Dr. Mulbridge smiled, as if he perceived her intention not to tell him something she wished to tell him. He looked down into his hat, which he carried in his hand.

"Did you believe the storm was coming?"

"No!"

"And you did n't make it come?"

"Of course not!"

He looked at her and laughed.

"Oh, you don't at all understand!" she cried.

"I'm not a doctor of divinity," he said. "Good morning."

"Wait, wait!" she implored, "I'm afraid--I don't know--Perhaps my being near her is injurious to her; perhaps I ought to let some one else nurse her. I wished to ask you this"-- She stopped breathlessly.

"I don't think you have done her any harm as yet," he answered lightly.

"However," he said, after a moment's consideration, "why don't you take a holiday? Some of the other ladies might look after her a while."

"Do you really think," she palpitated, "that I might? Do you think I ought? I'm afraid I ought n't"--"Not if your devotion is hurtful to her?" he asked. "Send some one else to her for a while. Any one can take care of her for a few hours."

"I couldn't leave her--feeling as I do about her."

"I don't know how you feel about her," said Dr. Mulbridge. "But you can't go on at this rate. I shall want your help by and by, and Mrs.

Maynard doesn't need you now. Don't go back to her."

"But if she should get worse while I am away"--"You think your staying and feeling bad would make her better? Don't go back," he repeated; and he went out to his ugly rawboned horse, and, mounting his shabby wagon, rattled away. She lingered, indescribably put to shame by the brutal common sense which she could not impeach, but which she still felt was no measure of the case. It was true that she had not told him everything, and she could not complain that he had mocked her appeal for sympathy if she had trifled with him by a partial confession. But she indignantly denied to herself that she had wished to appeal to him for sympathy.

She wandered out on the piazza, which she found empty, and stood gazing at the sea in a revery of passionate humiliation. She was in that mood, familiar to us all, when we long to be consoled and even flattered for having been silly. In a woman this mood is near to tears; at a touch of kindness the tears come, and momentous questions are decided. What was perhaps uppermost in the girl's heart was a detestation of the man to whom she had seemed a simpleton; her thoughts pursued him, and divined the contempt with which he must be thinking of her and her pretensions.

She heard steps on the sand, and Libby came round the corner of the house from the stable.