The White Linen Nurse by Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
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Eleanor Hallowell Abbott >> The White Linen Nurse
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Thriftily the Little Girl bent down to lap a bubble of cream from the
broken pitcher.
"Oh, she's out in the summer house with the Wall Paper Man," she mumbled
indifferently.
CHAPTER IX
Altogether jerkily the Senior Surgeon started up the walk for his own
perfectly formal and respectable brown stone mansion. Deep down in his
lurching heart he felt a sudden most inordinate desire to reach that
brown stone mansion just as quickly as possible. But abruptly even to
himself he swerved off instead at the yellow sassafras tree and plunged
quite wildly through a mass of broken sods towards the rickety,
no-account cedar summer house.
Startled by the crackle and thud of his approach the two young figures
in the summer house jumped precipitously to their feet, and limply
untwining their arms from each other's necks stood surveying the Senior
Surgeon in unspeakable consternation,--the White Linen Nurse and a blue
overalled lad most unconscionably mated in radiant youth and agonized
confusion.
"Oh, my Lord, Sir!" gasped the White Linen Nurse. "Oh, my Lord, Sir! I
wasn't looking for _you_--for another week!"
"Evidently not!" said the Senior Surgeon incisively. "This is the second
time this evening that I've been led to infer that my home-coming was
distinctly inopportune!"
Very slowly, very methodically, he put down first his precious rod-case
and then his grip. His brain seemed fairly foaming with blood and
confusion. Along the swelling veins of his arms a dozen primitive
instincts went surging to his fists.
Then quite brazenly before his eyes the White Linen Nurse reached out
and took the lad's hand again.
"Oh, forgive me, Dr. Faber!" she faltered. "This is my brother!"
"Your _brother?--what?--eh?_" choked the Senior Surgeon. Bluntly he
reached out and crushed the young fellow's fingers in his own. "Glad to
see you, Son!" he muttered with a sickish sort of grin, and turning
abruptly, picked up his baggage again and started for the big house.
Half a step behind him his White Linen Bride followed softly.
At the edge of the piazza he turned for an instant and eyed her a bit
quizzically. With her big credulous blue eyes, and her great mop of
yellow hair braided childishly down her back, she looked inestimably
more juvenile and innocent than his own little shrewd-faced six-year-old
whom he had just left domestically ensconced in the middle of the broad
gravel path.
"For Heaven's sake, Miss Malgregor," he asked. "For Heaven's sake--why
didn't you tell me that the Wall Paper Man was your--brother?"
Very contritely the White Linen Nurse's chin went burrowing down into
the soft collar of her dress and as bashfully as a child one finger
came stealing up to the edge of her red, red lips.
"I was afraid you'd think I was--cheeky--having any of my family come
and live with us--so soon," she murmured almost inaudibly.
"Well, what did you think I'd think you were--if he wasn't your
brother?" asked the Senior Surgeon sardonically.
"Very--economical, I hoped!" beamed the White Linen Nurse.
"All the same!" snapped the Senior Surgeon, with an irrelevance
surprising even to himself. "All the same do you think it sounds quite
right and proper for a child to call her--step-mother--'Peach'?"
Again the White Linen Nurse's chin went burrowing down into the
soft collar of her dress. "I don't suppose it is--usual," she
admitted reluctantly. "The children next door, I notice, call
theirs--'Cross-Patch.'"
With a gesture of impatience the Senior Surgeon proceeded up the
steps,--yanked open the old-fashioned shuttered door, and burst quite
breathlessly and unprepared upon his most amazingly reconstructed
house. All in one single second chintzes,--muslins,--pale blonde
maples,--riotous canary birds,--stormed revolutionary upon his outraged
eyes. Reeling back utterly aghast before the sight, he stood there
staring dumbly for an instant at what he considered,--and rightly
too,--the absolute wreck of his black walnut home.
"It looks like--Hell!" he muttered feebly.
"Yes, _isn't_ it sweet?" conceded the White Linen Nurse with
unmistakable joyousness. "And your library--" Triumphantly she threw
back the door to his grim work-shop.
"Good God!" stammered the Senior Surgeon. "You've made it--pink!"
Rapturously the White Linen Nurse began to clasp and unclasp her hands.
"I knew you'd love it!" she said.
Half dazed with bewilderment the Senior Surgeon started to brush an
imaginary haze from his eyes but paused mid-way in the gesture and
pointed back instead to a dapper little hall-table that seemed to be
exhausting its entire blonde strength in holding up a slender green vase
with a single pink rose in it. Like a caged animal buffeting for escape
against each successive bar that incased it, the man's frenzied
irritation hurled itself hopefully against this one more chance for
explosive exit.
"What--have--you--done--with the big--black--escritoire that
stood--there?" he demanded accusingly.
"Escritoire?--Escritoire?" worried the White Linen Nurse. "Why--why--I'm
afraid I must have mislaid it."
"Mislaid it?" thundered the Senior Surgeon. "Mislaid it? It weighed
three hundred pounds!"
"Oh, it did?" questioned the White Linen Nurse with great, blue-eyed
interest. Still mulling apparently over the fascinating weight of the
escritoire she climbed up suddenly into a chair and with the fluffy
broom-shaped end of her extraordinarily long braid of hair went angling
wildy off into space after an illusive cobweb.
Faster and faster the Senior Surgeon's temper began to search for a new
point of exit.
"What do you suppose the--servants think of you?" he stormed. "Running
round like that with your hair in a pig-tail like a--kid?"
"Servants?" cooed the White Linen Nurse. "Servants?" Very quietly she
jumped down from the chair and came and stood looking up into the Senior
Surgeon's hectic face. "Why, there aren't any servants," she explained
patiently. "I've dismissed every one of them. We're doing our own work
now!"
"Doing 'our own work'?" gasped the Senior Surgeon.
Quite worriedly the White Linen Nurse stepped back a little. "Why,
wasn't that right?" she pleaded. "Wasn't it right? Why, I thought people
always did their own work when they were first married!" With sudden
apprehensiveness she glanced round over her shoulder at the hall clock,
and darting out through a side door, returned almost instantly with a
fierce-looking knife.
"I'm so late now and everything," she confided. "Could you peel the
potatoes for me?"
"No, I couldn't!" said the Senior Surgeon shortly. Equally shortly he
turned on his heel, and reaching out once more for his rod-case and grip
went on up the stairs to his own room.
One of the pleasantest things about arriving home very late in the
afternoon is the excuse it gives you for loafing in your own room while
other people are getting supper. No existent domestic sound in the whole
twenty-four hours is as soothing at the end of a long journey as the
sound of other people getting supper.
Stretched out full length in a big easy chair by his bed-room window,
with his favorite pipe bubbling rhythmically between his gleaming
white teeth, the Senior Surgeon studied his new "solid gold bed" and
his new sage green wall-paper and his new dust-colored rug, to the
faint, far-away accompaniment of soft thudding feet, and a girl's
laugh, and a child's prattle, and the tink-tink-tinkle of
glass,--china,--silver,--all scurrying consciously to the service
of one man,--and that man,--_himself_.
Very, very slowly, in that special half hour an inscrutable little smile
printed itself experimentally across the right hand corner of the
Senior Surgeon's upper lip.
While that smile was still in its infancy he jumped up suddenly and
forced his way across the hall to his dead wife's room,--the one
ghost-room of his house and his life,--and there with his hand on the
turning door knob,--tense with reluctance,--goose-fleshed with
strain,--his breath gasped out of him whether or no with the one
word--"Alice!"
And behold! There was no room there!
Lurching back from the threshold, as from the brink of an elevator well,
the Senior Surgeon found himself staring foolishly into a most sumptuous
linen closet, tiered like an Aztec cliff with home after home for
pleasant prosy blankets, and gaily fringed towels, and cheerful white
sheets reeking most conscientiously of cedar and lavender. Tiptoeing
cautiously into the mystery he sensed at one astonished, grateful glance
how the change of a partition, the re-adjustment of a proportion, had
purged like a draft of fresh air the stale gloom of an ill-favored
memory. Yet so inevitable did it suddenly seem for a linen closet to be
built right there,--so inevitable did it suddenly seem for the child's
meager play-room to be enlarged just there, that to save his soul he
could not estimate whether the happy plan had originated in a purely
practical brain or a purely compassionate heart.
Half proud of the brain, half touched by the heart, he passed on
exploringly through the new play-room out into the hall again.
Quite distinctly now through the aperture of the back stairs the kitchen
voices came wafting up to him.
"Oh, dear! Oh, dear!" wailed his Little Girl's peevish voice. "Now
that--that Man's come back again--I suppose we'll have to eat in the
dining-room--all the time!"
"'That Man' happens to be your darling father!" admonished the White
Linen Nurse's laughing voice.
"Even so," wailed the Little Girl, "I love you best."
"Even so," laughed the White Linen Nurse, "I love _you_ best!"
"Just the same," cried the Little Girl shrilly, "just the same--let's
put the cream pitcher way up high somewhere--so he can't step in it!"
As though from a head tilted suddenly backward the White Linen Nurse's
laugh rang out in joyous abandon.
Impulsively the Senior Surgeon started to grin. Then equally impulsively
the grin soured on his lips. So they thought he was clumsy? Eh?
Resentfully he stared down at his hands,--those wonderfully
dexterous,--yes, ambidexterous hands that were the aching envy of all
his colleagues. Interruptingly as he stared the voice of the young Wall
Paper Man rose buoyantly from the lower hallway.
"Supper's all ready, sir!" called the cordial voice.
For some inexplainable reason, at that particular moment, almost nothing
in the world could have irritated the Senior Surgeon more keenly than to
be invited to his own supper,--in his own house,--by a stranger. Fuming
with a new sense of injury and injustice he started heavily down the
stairs to the dining-room.
Standing patiently behind the Senior Surgeon's chair with a laudable
desire to assist his carving in any possible emergency that might occur,
the White Linen Nurse experienced her first direct marital rebuff.
"What do you think this is? An autopsy?" demanded the Senior Surgeon
tartly. "For Heaven's sake--sit down!"
Quite meekly the White Linen Nurse subsided into her place.
The meal that ensued could hardly have been called a success though the
room was entrancing,--the cloth, snow-white--the silver, radiant,--the
guinea chicken beyond reproach.
Swept and garnished to an alarming degree the young Wall Paper Man
presided over the gravy and did his uttermost, innocent country-best to
make the Senior Surgeon feel perfectly at home.
Conscientiously, as in the presence of a distinguished stranger, the
Little Crippled Girl most palpably from time to time repressed her
insatiable desire to build a towering pyramid out of all the salt and
pepper shakers she could reach.
Once when the young Wall Paper Man forgot himself to the extent of
putting his knife in his mouth, the White Linen Nurse jarred the whole
table with the violence of her warning kick.
Once when the Little Crippled Girl piped out impulsively, "Say,
Peach,--what was the name of that bantam your father used to fight
against the minister's bantam?" the White Linen Nurse choked piteously
over her food.
Twice some one spoke about this year's weather.
Twice some one volunteered an illuminating remark about last year's
weather.
Except for these four diversions restraint indescribable hung like a
horrid pall over the feast.
Next to feeling unwelcome in your friend's house, nothing certainly is
more wretchedly disconcerting than to feel unwelcome in your own house!
Grimly the Senior Surgeon longed to grab up all the knives within reach
and ram them successively into his own mouth just to prove to the young
Wall Paper Man what a--what a devil of a good fellow he was himself!
Grimly the Senior Surgeon longed to tell the White Linen Nurse about the
pet bantam of his own boyhood days--that he bet a dollar could lick any
bantam her father ever dreamed of owning! Grimly the Senior Surgeon
longed to talk dolls,--dishes,--kittens,--yes, even cream pitchers, to
his Little Daughter, to talk anything in fact--to _any one_,--to
talk--sing--shout _anything_--that should make him, at least for the
time being, one at heart, one at head, one at table, with this
astonishingly offish bunch of youngsters!
But grimly instead,--out of his frazzled nerves,--out of his innate
spiritual bashfulness, he merely roared forth, "Where are the potatoes?"
"Potatoes?" gasped the White Linen Nurse. "Potatoes? Oh, potatoes?" she
finished more blithely. "Why, yes, of course! Don't you remember--you
didn't have time to peel them for me? I was so disappointed!"
"You were so disappointed?" snapped the Senior Surgeon. "You?--you?"
Janglingly the Little Crippled Girl knelt right up in her chair and
shook her tiny fist right in her father's face.
"Now, Lendicott Paber!" she screamed. "Don't you start in--sassing--my
darling little Peach!"
"_Peach?_" snorted the Senior Surgeon. With almost supernatural calm he
put down his knife and fork and eyed his offspring with an expression of
absolutely inflexible purpose. "Don't you--ever," he warned her,
"ever--ever--let me hear you call--this woman 'Peach' again!"
A trifle faint-heartedly the Little Crippled Girl reached up and
straightened her absurdly diminutive little white cap, and pursed her
little mouth as nearly as possible into an expression of ineffable
peace.
"Why--Lendicott Faber!" she persisted heroically.
"_Lendicott?_" jumped the Senior Surgeon. "What are
_you_--'Lendicotting' _me_ for?"
Hilariously with her own knife and fork the Little Crippled Girl began
to beat upon the table.
"Why, you dear Silly!" she cried. "Why, if I'm the new Marma, I've got
to call you 'Lendicott'! And Peach has got to call you 'Fat Father'!"
Frenziedly the Senior Surgeon pushed back his chair, and jumped to his
feet. The expression on his face was neither smile nor frown, nor war
nor peace, nor any other human expression that had ever puckered there
before.
"God!" he said. "This gives me the _willies_!" and strode tempestuously
from the room.
Out in his own work-shop fortunately,--whatever the grotesque new
pinkness,--whatever the grotesque new perkiness--his great free
walking-spaces had not been interfered with. Slamming his door
triumphantly behind him, he resumed once more the monotonous
pace-pace-pace that had characterized for eighteen years his first
night's return to--the obligations of civilization.
Sharply around the corner of his old battered desk the little path
started,--wanly along the edge of his dingy book-shelves the little path
furrowed,--wistfully at the deep bay-window where his favorite lilac
bush budded whitely for his departure, and rusted brownly for his
return, the little path faltered,--and went on again,--on and on and
on,--into the alcove where his instruments glistened,--up to the
fireplace where his college trophy-cups tarnished! Listlessly the Senior
Surgeon re-commenced his yearly vigil. Up and down,--up and down,--round
and round,--on and on and on,--through interminable dusks to
unattainable dawns,--a glutted, bacchanalian Soul sweating its own way
back to sanctity and leanness! Nerves always were in that vigil,--raw,
rattling nerves clamoring vociferously to be repacked in their
sedatives. Thirst also was in that vigil,--no mere whimpering tickle of
the palate, but a drought of the tissues,--a consuming fire of the
bones! Hurt pride was also there, and festering humiliation!
But more rasping, this particular night, than nerves, more poignant than
thirst, more dangerously excitative even than remorse, hunger rioted in
him,--hunger, the one worst enemy of the Senior Surgeon's cause,--the
simple, silly, no-account,--gnawing,--drink-provocative hunger of an
empty stomach. And 'one other hunger was also there,--a sudden fierce
new lust for Life and Living,--a passion bare of love yet pure of
wantonness,--a passion primitive,--protective,--inexorably
proprietary,--engendered strangely in that one mad, suspicious moment at
the edge of the summer house when every outraged male instinct in him
had leaped to prove that--love or no love--the woman was--_his_. Up and
down,--up and down,--round and round,--eight o'clock found the Senior
Surgeon still pacing.
At half past eight the young Wall Paper Man came to say good-by to him.
"As long as Sister won't be alone any more, I guess I'll be moving on,"
beamed the Wall Paper Man. "There's a dance at home Saturday night. And
I've got a girl of my own!" he confided genially.
"Come again," urged the Senior Surgeon. "Come again when you can stay
longer!"
With one honest prayer in stock, and at least two purely automatic
social speeches of this sort, no man needs to flounder altogether
hopelessly for words in any ordinary emergency of life. Thus with no
more mental interruption than the two-minute break in time, the Senior
Surgeon then resumed his bitter-thoughted pacing.
At nine o'clock, however,--patroling his long rangy book-shelves, he
sensed with a very different feeling through his heavy oak door, the
soft whirring swish of skirts and the breathy twitter of muffled voices.
Faintly to his acute ears came the sound of his little daughter's
temperish protest, "I won't! I won't!" and the White Linen Nurse's
fervid pleading, "Oh, you must,--you must!" and the Little Girl's
mumbled ultimatum, "Well, I won't unless _you_ do!"
Irascibly he crossed the room and yanked the door open abruptly upon
their surprise and confusion. His nerves were very sore.
"What in thunder do you want?" he snarled.
Nervously for an instant the White Linen Nurse tugged at the Little
Girl's hand. Nervously for an instant the Little Girl tugged at the
White Linen Nurse's hand. Then with a swallow like a sob the White Linen
Nurse lifted her glowing face to his.
"K--kiss us good night!" said the White Linen Nurse.
Telescopically all in that startling second, vision after vision beat
down like blows upon the Senior Surgeon's senses! The pink, pink flush
of the girl! The lure of her! The amazing sweetness! The physical
docility! Oh ye gods,--the docility! Every trend of her birth,--of her
youth,--of her training,--forcing her now--if he chose it--to
unquestioning submission to his will and his judgment! Faster and faster
the temptation surged through his pulses! The path from her lips to her
ear was such a little path,--the plea so quick to make, so short,--"I
want you _now!_"
"K--kiss us good night!" urged the Big Girl's unsuspecting lips. "Kiss
us good night!" mocked the Little Girl's tremulous echo.
Then explosively with the noblest rudeness of his life, "No, I _won't!_"
said the Senior Surgeon, and slammed the door in their faces.
Falteringly up the stairs he heard the two ascending,--speechless with
surprise, perhaps,--stunned by his roughness,--still hand in hand,
probably,--still climbing slowly bed-ward,--the soft, smooth, patient
footfall of the White Linen Nurse and the jerky, laborious
clang-clang-clang of a little dragging iron-braced leg.
Up and down,--round and round,--on and on and on,--the Senior Surgeon
resumed his pacing. Under his eyes great shadows darkened. Along the
corners of his mouth the lines furrowed like gray scars. Up and
down,--round and round,--on and on and on--and on!
At ten o'clock, sitting bolt upright in her bed with her worried eyes
straining bluely out across the Little Girl's somnolent form into
unfathomable darkness, the White Linen Nurse in the throb of her own
heart began to keep pace with that faint, horrid thud-thud-thud in the
room below. Was he passing the book-case now? Had he reached the
bay-window? Was he dawdling over those glistening scalpels? Would his
nerves remember the flask in that upper desk drawer? Up and down,--round
and round,--on and on,--the harrowing sound continued.
Resolutely at last she scrambled out of her snug nest, and hurrying into
her great warm, pussy-gray wrapper began at once very practically, very
unemotionally, with matches and alcohol and a shiny glass jar to prepare
a huge steaming cup of malted milk. Beef-steak was infinitely better,
she knew, or eggs, of course, but if she should venture forth to the
kitchen for real substantiate the Senior Surgeon, she felt quite
positive, would almost certainly hear her and stop her. So very
stealthily thus like the proverbial assassin she crept down the front
stairs with the innocent malted milk cup in her hand, and then with her
knuckles just on the verge of rapping against the grimly inhospitable
door, went suddenly paralyzed with uncertainty whether to advance or
retreat.
Once again through the sombre inert wainscoting, exactly as if a soul
had creaked, the Senior Surgeon sensed the threatening, intrusive
presence of an unseen personality. Once again he strode across the room
and jerked the door open with terrifying anger and resentment.
As though frozen there on his threshold by Her own little bare feet,--as
though strangled there in his doorway by her own great mop of golden
hair,--stolid and dumb as a pink-cheeked graven image the White Linen
Nurse thrust the cup out awkwardly at him.
Absolutely without comment, as though she trotted on purely professional
business and the case involved was of mutual concern to them both, the
Senior Surgeon took the cup from her hand and closed the door again in
her face.
At eleven o'clock she came again,--just as pink,--just as blue,--just as
gray,--just as golden. And the cup of malted milk she brought with her
was just as huge,--just as hot,--just as steaming,--only this time she
had smuggled two raw eggs into it.
Once more the Senior Surgeon took the cup without comment and shut the
door in her face.
At twelve o'clock she came again. The Senior Surgeon was unusually
loquacious this time.
"Have you any more malted milk?" he asked tersely.
"Oh, yes, sir!" beamed the White Linen Nurse.
"Go and get it!" said the Senior Surgeon.
Obediently the White Linen Nurse pattered up the stairs and returned
with the half depleted bottle. Frankly interested she recrossed the
threshold of the room and delivered her glass treasure into the hands of
the Senior Surgeon as he stood by his desk. Raising herself to her
tiptoes she noted with eminent satisfaction that the three big cups on
the other side of the desk had all been drained to their dregs.
Then very bluntly before her eyes the Senior Surgeon took the malted
milk bottle and poured its remaining contents out quite wantonly into
his waste basket. Then equally bluntly he took the White Linen Nurse by
the shoulders and marched her out of the room.
"For God's sake!" he said, "get out of this room! And stay out!"
_Bang_! the big door slammed behind her. Like a snarling fang the lock
bit into its catch.
"Yes, sir," said the White Linen Nurse. Even just to herself--all alone
there in the big black hall, she was perfectly polite. "Y-e-s, sir," she
repeated softly.
With a slightly sardonic grin on his face the Senior Surgeon resumed his
pacing. Up and down,--round and round,--on and on and on!
At one o'clock in the dull, clammy chill of earliest morning he stopped
long enough to light his hearthfire.
At two o'clock he stopped again to pile on a trifle more wood.
At three o'clock he dallied for an instant to close a window. The new
day seemed strangely cold.
At four o'clock, dawn the wonder,--the miracle,--the long despaired
of,--quickened wanly across the East. Then suddenly,--more like a
phosphorescent breeze than a glow, the pale, pale yellow sunshine came
wafting through the green gloom of the garden. The vigil was over!
Stumbling out into the shadowy hall to greet the new day and the new
beginning, the Senior Surgeon almost tripped and fell over the White
Linen Nurse sitting all huddled up and drowsy-eyed in a little gray heap
on his outer threshold. The sensation of stepping upon a human body is
not a pleasant one. It smote the Senior Surgeon nauseously through the
nerves of his stomach.
"What are you doing here?" he fairly screamed at her.
"Just keeping you company, sir," yawned the White Linen Nurse. Before
her hand could reach her mouth again another great childish yawn
overwhelmed her. "Just--watching with you, sir," she finished more or
less inarticulately.
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