K

CHAPTER XVIII

K. saw Sidney for only a moment on Christmas Day. This was when the gay little sleigh had stopped in front of the house.

Sidney had hurried radiantly in for a moment. Christine's parlor was gay with firelight and noisy with chatter and with the clatter of her tea-cups.

K., lounging indolently in front of the fire, had turned to see Sidney in the doorway, and leaped to his feet.

“I can't come in,” she cried. “I am only here for a moment. I am out sleigh-riding with Dr. Wilson. It's perfectly delightful.”

“Ask him in for a cup of tea,” Christine called out. “Here's Aunt Harriet and mother and even Palmer!”

Christine had aged during the last weeks, but she was putting up a brave front.

“I'll ask him.”

Sidney ran to the front door and called: “Will you come in for a cup of tea?”

“Tea! Good Heavens, no. Hurry.”

As Sidney turned back into the house, she met Palmer. He had come out in the hall, and had closed the door into the parlor behind him. His arm was still in splints, and swung suspended in a gay silk sling.

The sound of laughter came through the door faintly.

“How is he to-day?” He meant Johnny, of course. The boy's face was always with him.

“Better in some ways, but of course—”

“When are they going to operate?”

“When he is a little stronger. Why don't you come into see him?”

“I can't. That's the truth. I can't face the poor youngster.”

“He doesn't seem to blame you; he says it's all in the game.”

“Sidney, does Christine know that I was not alone that night?”

“If she guesses, it is not because of anything the boy has said. He has told nothing.”

Out of the firelight, away from the chatter and the laughter, Palmer's face showed worn and haggard. He put his free hand on Sidney's shoulder.

“I was thinking that perhaps if I went away—”

“That would be cowardly, wouldn't it?”

“If Christine would only say something and get it over with! She doesn't sulk; I think she's really trying to be kind. But she hates me, Sidney. She turns pale every time I touch her hand.”

All the light had died out of Sidney's face. Life was terrible, after all—overwhelming. One did wrong things, and other people suffered; or one was good, as her mother had been, and was left lonely, a widow, or like Aunt Harriet. Life was a sham, too. Things were so different from what they seemed to be: Christine beyond the door, pouring tea and laughing with her heart in ashes; Palmer beside her, faultlessly dressed and wretched. The only one she thought really contented was K. He seemed to move so calmly in his little orbit. He was always so steady, so balanced. If life held no heights for him, at least it held no depths.

So Sidney thought, in her ignorance!

“There's only one thing, Palmer,” she said gravely. “Johnny Rosenfeld is going to have his chance. If anybody in the world can save him, Max Wilson can.”

The light of that speech was in her eyes when she went out to the sleigh again. K. followed her out and tucked the robes in carefully about her.

“Warm enough?”

“All right, thank you.”

“Don't go too far. Is there any chance of having you home for supper?”

“I think not. I am to go on duty at six again.”

If there was a shadow in K.'s eyes, she did not see it. He waved them off smilingly from the pavement, and went rather heavily back into the house.

“Just how many men are in love with you, Sidney?” asked Max, as Peggy started up the Street.

“No one that I know of, unless—”

“Exactly. Unless—”

“What I meant,” she said with dignity, “is that unless one counts very young men, and that isn't really love.”

“We'll leave out Joe Drummond and myself—for, of course, I am very young. Who is in love with you besides Le Moyne? Any of the internes at the hospital?”

“Me! Le Moyne is not in love with me.”

There was such sincerity in her voice that Wilson was relieved.

K., older than himself and more grave, had always had an odd attraction for women. He had been frankly bored by them, but the fact had remained. And Max more than suspected that now, at last, he had been caught.

“Don't you really mean that you are in love with Le Moyne?”

“Please don't be absurd. I am not in love with anybody; I haven't time to be in love. I have my profession now.”

“Bah! A woman's real profession is love.”

Sidney differed from this hotly. So warm did the argument become that they passed without seeing a middle-aged gentleman, short and rather heavy set, struggling through a snowdrift on foot, and carrying in his hand a dilapidated leather bag.

Dr. Ed hailed them. But the cutter slipped by and left him knee-deep, looking ruefully after them.

“The young scamp!” he said. “So that's where Peggy is!”

Nevertheless, there was no anger in Dr. Ed's mind, only a vague and inarticulate regret. These things that came so easily to Max, the affection of women, gay little irresponsibilities like the stealing of Peggy and the sleigh, had never been his. If there was any faint resentment, it was at himself. He had raised the boy wrong—he had taught him to be selfish. Holding the bag high out of the drifts, he made his slow progress up the Street.

At something after two o'clock that night, K. put down his pipe and listened. He had not been able to sleep since midnight. In his dressing-gown he had sat by the small fire, thinking. The content of his first few months on the Street was rapidly giving way to unrest. He who had meant to cut himself off from life found himself again in close touch with it; his eddy was deep with it.

For the first time, he had begun to question the wisdom of what he had done. Had it been cowardice, after all? It had taken courage, God knew, to give up everything and come away. In a way, it would have taken more courage to have stayed. Had he been right or wrong?

And there was a new element. He had thought, at first, that he could fight down this love for Sidney. But it was increasingly hard. The innocent touch of her hand on his arm, the moment when he had held her in his arms after her mother's death, the thousand small contacts of her returns to the little house—all these set his blood on fire. And it was fighting blood.

Under his quiet exterior K. fought many conflicts those winter days—over his desk and ledger at the office, in his room alone, with Harriet planning fresh triumphs beyond the partition, even by Christine's fire, with Christine just across, sitting in silence and watching his grave profile and steady eyes.

He had a little picture of Sidney—a snap-shot that he had taken himself. It showed Sidney minus a hand, which had been out of range when the camera had been snapped, and standing on a steep declivity which would have been quite a level had he held the camera straight. Nevertheless it was Sidney, her hair blowing about her, eyes looking out, tender lips smiling. When she was not at home, it sat on K.'s dresser, propped against his collar-box. When she was in the house, it lay under the pin-cushion.

Two o'clock in the morning, then, and K. in his dressing-gown, with the picture propped, not against the collar-box, but against his lamp, where he could see it.

He sat forward in his chair, his hands folded around his knee, and looked at it. He was trying to picture the Sidney of the photograph in his old life—trying to find a place for her. But it was difficult. There had been few women in his old life. His mother had died many years before. There had been women who had cared for him, but he put them impatiently out of his mind.

Then the bell rang.

Christine was moving about below. He could hear her quick steps. Almost before he had heaved his long legs out of the chair, she was tapping at his door outside.

“It's Mrs. Rosenfeld. She says she wants to see you.”

He went down the stairs. Mrs. Rosenfeld was standing in the lower hall, a shawl about her shoulders. Her face was white and drawn above it.

“I've had word to go to the hospital,” she said. “I thought maybe you'd go with me. It seems as if I can't stand it alone. Oh, Johnny, Johnny!”

“Where's Palmer?” K. demanded of Christine.

“He's not in yet.”

“Are you afraid to stay in the house alone?”

“No; please go.”

He ran up the staircase to his room and flung on some clothing. In the lower hall, Mrs. Rosenfeld's sobs had become low moans; Christine stood helplessly over her.

“I am terribly sorry,” she said—“terribly sorry! When I think whose fault all this is!”

Mrs. Rosenfeld put out a work-hardened hand and caught Christine's fingers.

“Never mind that,” she said. “You didn't do it. I guess you and I understand each other. Only pray God you never have a child.”

K. never forgot the scene in the small emergency ward to which Johnny had been taken. Under the white lights his boyish figure looked strangely long. There was a group around the bed—Max Wilson, two or three internes, the night nurse on duty, and the Head.

Sitting just inside the door on a straight chair was Sidney—such a Sidney as he never had seen before, her face colorless, her eyes wide and unseeing, her hands clenched in her lap. When he stood beside her, she did not move or look up. The group around the bed had parted to admit Mrs. Rosenfeld, and closed again. Only Sidney and K. remained by the door, isolated, alone.

“You must not take it like that, dear. It's sad, of course. But, after all, in that condition—”

It was her first knowledge that he was there. But she did not turn.

“They say I poisoned him.” Her voice was dreary, inflectionless.

“You—what?”

“They say I gave him the wrong medicine; that he's dying; that I murdered him.” She shivered.

K. touched her hands. They were ice-cold.

“Tell me about it.”

“There is nothing to tell. I came on duty at six o'clock and gave the medicines. When the night nurse came on at seven, everything was all right. The medicine-tray was just as it should be. Johnny was asleep. I went to say good-night to him and he—he was asleep. I didn't give him anything but what was on the tray,” she finished piteously. “I looked at the label; I always look.”

By a shifting of the group around the bed, K.'s eyes looked for a moment directly into Carlotta's. Just for a moment; then the crowd closed up again. It was well for Carlotta that it did. She looked as if she had seen a ghost—closed her eyes, even reeled.

“Miss Harrison is worn out,” Dr. Wilson said brusquely. “Get some one to take her place.”

But Carlotta rallied. After all, the presence of this man in this room at such a time meant nothing. He was Sidney's friend, that was all.

But her nerve was shaken. The thing had gone beyond her. She had not meant to kill. It was the boy's weakened condition that was turning her revenge into tragedy.

“I am all right,” she pleaded across the bed to the Head. “Let me stay, please. He's from my ward. I—I am responsible.”

Wilson was at his wits' end. He had done everything he knew without result. The boy, rousing for an instant, would lapse again into stupor. With a healthy man they could have tried more vigorous measures—could have forced him to his feet and walked him about, could have beaten him with knotted towels dipped in ice-water. But the wrecked body on the bed could stand no such heroic treatment.

It was Le Moyne, after all, who saved Johnny Rosenfeld's life. For, when staff and nurses had exhausted all their resources, he stepped forward with a quiet word that brought the internes to their feet astonished.

There was a new treatment for such cases—it had been tried abroad. He looked at Max.

Max had never heard of it. He threw out his hands.

“Try it, for Heaven's sake,” he said. “I'm all in.”

The apparatus was not in the house—must be extemporized, indeed, at last, of odds and ends from the operating-room. K. did the work, his long fingers deft and skillful—while Mrs. Rosenfeld knelt by the bed with her face buried; while Sidney sat, dazed and bewildered, on her little chair inside the door; while night nurses tiptoed along the corridor, and the night watchman stared incredulous from outside the door.

When the two great rectangles that were the emergency ward windows had turned from mirrors reflecting the room to gray rectangles in the morning light; Johnny Rosenfeld opened his eyes and spoke the first words that marked his return from the dark valley.

“Gee, this is the life!” he said, and smiled into K.'s watchful face.

When it was clear that the boy would live, K. rose stiffly from the bedside and went over to Sidney's chair.

“He's all right now,” he said—“as all right as he can be, poor lad!”

“You did it—you! How strange that you should know such a thing. How am I to thank you?”

The internes, talking among themselves, had wandered down to their dining-room for early coffee. Wilson was giving a few last instructions as to the boy's care. Quite unexpectedly, Sidney caught K.'s hand and held it to her lips. The iron repression of the night, of months indeed, fell away before her simple caress.

“My dear, my dear,” he said huskily. “Anything that I can do—for you—at any time—”

It was after Sidney had crept like a broken thing to her room that Carlotta Harrison and K. came face to face. Johnny was quite conscious by that time, a little blue around the lips, but valiantly cheerful.

“More things can happen to a fellow than I ever knew there was!” he said to his mother, and submitted rather sheepishly to her tears and caresses.

“You were always a good boy, Johnny,” she said. “Just you get well enough to come home. I'll take care of you the rest of my life. We will get you a wheel-chair when you can be about, and I can take you out in the park when I come from work.”

“I'll be passenger and you'll be chauffeur, ma.”

“Mr. Le Moyne is going to get your father sent up again. With sixty-five cents a day and what I make, we'll get along.”

“You bet we will!”

“Oh, Johnny, if I could see you coming in the door again and yelling 'mother' and 'supper' in one breath!”

The meeting between Carlotta and Le Moyne was very quiet. She had been making a sort of subconscious impression on the retina of his mind during all the night. It would be difficult to tell when he actually knew her.

When the preparations for moving Johnny back to the big ward had been made, the other nurses left the room, and Carlotta and the boy were together. K. stopped her on her way to the door.

“Miss Harrison!”

“Yes, Dr. Edwardes.”

“I am not Dr. Edwardes here; my name is Le Moyne.”

“Ah!”

“I have not seen you since you left St. John's.”

“No; I—I rested for a few months.”

“I suppose they do not know that you were—that you have had any previous hospital experience.”

“No. Are you going to tell them?”

“I shall not tell them, of course.”

And thus, by simple mutual consent, it was arranged that each should respect the other's confidence.

Carlotta staggered to her room. There had been a time, just before dawn, when she had had one of those swift revelations that sometimes come at the end of a long night. She had seen herself as she was. The boy was very low, hardly breathing. Her past stretched behind her, a series of small revenges and passionate outbursts, swift yieldings, slow remorse. She dared not look ahead. She would have given every hope she had in the world, just then, for Sidney's stainless past.

She hated herself with that deadliest loathing that comes of complete self-revelation.

And she carried to her room the knowledge that the night's struggle had been in vain—that, although Johnny Rosenfeld would live, she had gained nothing by what he had suffered. The whole night had shown her the hopelessness of any stratagem to win Wilson from his new allegiance. She had surprised him in the hallway, watching Sidney's slender figure as she made her way up the stairs to her room. Never, in all his past overtures to her, had she seen that look in his eyes.