The Collected Works of Susan Coolidge: 7 Novels, 35+ Short Stories, Essays & Poems (Illustrated). Susan Coolidge
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as soon as I could get my leave extended. It was a most unlucky absence. I shall always regret it.”
“Oh, it is all right now that you have come,” his sister said, leaning her head on his arm with a look of relief and rest which was good to see. “Everything will go better now, I am sure.”
“Katy Carr has behaved like a perfect angel,” she told her brother when they were alone.
“She is a trump of a girl. I came in time for part of that scene with the landlady, and upon my word she was glorious! I didn’t suppose she could look so handsome.”
“Have the Pages left Nice yet?” asked his sister, rather irrelevantly.
“No,—at least they were there on Thursday, but I think that they were to start to-day.”
Mr. Worthington answered carelessly, but his face darkened as he spoke. There had been a little scene in Nice which he could not forget. He was sitting in the English garden with Lilly and her mother when his sister’s telegrams were brought to him; and he had read them aloud, partly as an explanation for the immediate departure which they made necessary and which broke up an excursion just arranged with the ladies for the afternoon. It is not pleasant to have plans interfered with; and as neither Mrs. Page nor her daughter cared personally for little Amy, it is not strange that disappointment at the interruption of their pleasure should have been the first impulse with them. Still, this did not excuse Lilly’s unstudied exclamation of “Oh, bother!” and though she speedily repented it as an indiscretion, and was properly sympathetic, and “hoped the poor little thing would soon be better,” Amy’s uncle could not forget the jarring impression. It completed a process of disenchantment which had long been going on; and as hearts are sometimes caught at the rebound, Mrs. Ashe was not so far astray when she built certain little dim sisterly hopes on his evident admiration for Katy’s courage and this sudden awakening to a sense of her good looks.
But no space was left for sentiment or match-making while still Amy’s fate hung in the balance, and all three of them found plenty to do during the next fortnight. The fever did not turn on the twenty-first day, and another weary week of suspense set in, each day bringing a decrease of the dangerous symptoms, but each day as well marking a lessening in the childish strength which had been so long and severely tested. Amy was quite conscious now, and lay quietly, sleeping a great deal and speaking seldom. There was not much to do but to wait and hope; but the flame of hope burned low at times, as the little life flickered in its socket, and seemed likely to go out like a wind-blown torch.
Now and then Lieutenant Worthington would persuade his sister to go with him for a few minutes’ drive or walk in the fresh air, from which she had so long been debarred, and once or twice he prevailed on Katy to do the same; but neither of them could bear to be away long from Amy’s bedside.
Intimacy grows fast when people are thus united by a common anxiety, sharing the same hopes and fears day after day, speaking and thinking of the same thing. The gay young officer at Nice, who had counted so little in Katy’s world, seemed to have disappeared, and the gentle, considerate, tender-hearted fellow who now filled his place was quite a different person in her eyes. Katy began to count on Ned Worthington as a friend who could be trusted for help and sympathy and comprehension, and appealed to and relied upon in all emergencies. She was quite at ease with him now, and asked him to do this and that, to come and help her, or to absent himself, as freely as if he had been Dorry or Phil.
He, on his part, found this easy intimacy charming. In the reaction of his temporary glamour for the pretty Lilly, Katy’s very difference from her was an added attraction. This difference consisted, as much as anything else, in the fact that she was so truly in earnest in what she said and did. Had Lilly been in Katy’s place, she would probably have been helpful to Mrs. Ashe and kind to Amy so far as in her lay; but the thought of self would have tinctured all that she did and said, and the need of keeping to what was tasteful and becoming would have influenced her in every emergency, and never have been absent from her mind.
Katy, on the contrary, absorbed in the needs of the moment, gave little heed to how she looked or what any one was thinking about her. Her habit of neatness made her take time for the one thorough daily dressing,—the brushing of hair and freshening of clothes, which were customary with her; but, this tax paid to personal comfort, she gave little further heed to appearances. She wore an old gray gown, day in and day out, which Lilly would not have put on for half an hour without a large bribe, so unbecoming was it; but somehow Lieutenant Worthington grew to like the gray gown as a part of Katy herself. And if by chance he brought a rose in to cheer the dim stillness of the sick-room, and she tucked it into her buttonhole, immediately it was as though she were decked for conquest. Pretty dresses are very pretty on pretty people,—they certainly play an important part in this queer little world of ours; but depend upon it, dear girls, no woman ever has established so distinct and clear a claim on the regard of her lover as when he has ceased to notice or analyze what she wears, and just accepts it unquestioningly, whatever it is, as a bit of the dear human life which has grown or is growing to be the best and most delightful thing in the world to him.
The gray gown played its part during the long anxious night when they all sat watching breathlessly to see which way the tide would turn with dear little Amy. The doctor came at midnight, and went away to come again at dawn. Mrs. Swift sat grim and watchful beside the pillow of her charge, rising now and then to feel pulse and skin, or to put a spoonful of something between Amy’s lips. The doors and windows stood open to admit the air. In the outer room all was hushed. A dim Roman lamp, fed with olive oil, burned in one corner behind a screen. Mrs. Ashe lay on the sofa with her eyes closed, bearing the strain of suspense in absolute silence. Her brother sat beside her, holding in his one of the hot hands whose nervous twitches alone told of the surgings of hope and fear within. Katy was resting in a big chair near by, her wistful eyes fixed on Amy’s little figure seen in the dim distance, her ears alert for every sound from the sick-room.
So they watched and waited. Now and then Ned Worthington or Katy would rise softly, steal on tiptoe to the bedside, and come back to whisper to Mrs. Ashe that Amy had stirred or that she seemed to be asleep. It was one of the nights which do not come often in a lifetime, and which people never forget. The darkness seems full of meaning; the hush, of sound. God is beyond, holding the sunrise in his right hand, holding the sun of our earthly hopes as well,—will it dawn in sorrow or in joy? We dare not ask, we can only wait.
A faint stir of wind and a little broadening of the light roused Katy from a trance of half-understood thoughts. She crept once more into Amy’s room. Mrs. Swift laid a warning finger on her lips; Amy was sleeping, she said with a gesture. Katy whispered the news to the still figure on the sofa, then she went noiselessly out of the room. The great hotel was fast asleep; not a sound stirred the profound silence of the dark halls. A longing for fresh air led her to the roof.
There was the dawn just tingeing the east. The sky, even thus early, wore the deep mysterious blue of Italy. A fresh tramontana was blowing, and made Katy glad to draw her shawl about her.
Far away in the distance rose the Alban Hills above the dim Campagna, with the more lofty Sabines beyond, and Soracte, clear cut against the sky like a wave frozen in the moment of breaking. Below lay the ancient city, with its strange mingling of the old and the new, of past things embedded in the present; or is it the present thinly veiling the rich and mighty past,—who shall say?
Faint rumblings of wheels and here and there a curl of smoke showed that Rome was waking up. The light insensibly grew upon the darkness. A pink flush lit up the horizon. Florio stirred in his lair, stretched his dappled limbs, and as the first sun-ray glinted on the roof, raised himself, crossed the gravelled tiles with soundless feet, and ran his soft nose into Katy’s hand. She fondled him for Amy’s sake as she stood bent over the flower-boxes, inhaling the scent of the mignonette and gilly-flowers, with her eyes fixed on the distance; but her heart was at home with the sleepers there, and a rush of strong desire stirred her. Would this dreary time come to an end presently, and should they be set at liberty to go their ways with no heavy sorrow to press them down, to be care-free and happy again in their own land?
A footstep startled her. Ned Worthington was