Leerie Part 5

"Good morning!" It was the best compromise the house physician could make.

But ten minutes after his speedy exit Doctor Greer, the specialist, and Miss Maxwell were on the threshold, both looking unmistakably troubled.

The coal magnate winked at Sheila. "Here comes the peace delegates--or maybe it's from the labor union. Well, sir?" This was shot straight at the doctor.

"Mr. Brandle, you're mad. I refuse to take any responsibility."

"Don't have to. That's what's been the matter--too much responsibility. It got on my nerves. Now we want to be as--as noisy and as happy as we can, the boss and me. And if we can't do it in this little old medicated brick-pile of yours, why, we'll move. See? Or I'll buy it with a few tons of my coal and give it to the boss to run."

"When it's yours." The specialist was finding it hard to keep his temper.

The man had worn him out in the week he had been at the sanitarium. It had been harder to manage him than a spoiled child or a lunatic. He had had to humor him, cajole him, entreat him, in a way that galled his professional dignity, and now to have the man deliberately and publicly kill himself in this fashion was almost beyond endurance. He tried hard to make his voice sound agreeable as well as determined when he launched his ultimatum. "But in the mean time Miss O'Leary will have to be removed from the case."

"No, you don't!" With a sweep of the giant hand the bedclothes were jerked from their roots, and a pair of heliotrope legs projected floorward. It took the strength of all the three present to hold him back and replace the covering. The magnate sputtered and fumed. "First nurse you put on here after the boss goes--I'll die on her hands in ten minutes just to get even with you. That's what I'll do. And what's more--I'll come back to haunt the both of you. Take away my boss--just after we get things going pleasantly. Spoil a poor man's prospects of dying cheerful! Haven't you any heart, man? And you, ma'am?" this to the superintendent of nurses. "By the Lord Harry! you're a woman--you ought to have a little sympathy!" The aggressiveness died out of the voice, and it took on the old wail Sheila had first heard.

"But you forget my professional responsibility in the matter--my principles as an honorable member of my profession. I cannot allow a patient of mine wilfully to endanger his life--even shorten it. You must understand that, Mr. Brandle."

A look of amused toleration spread over the rubicund face. "Bless your heart, sonny, you're not allowing me to shorten it one minute. The boss and I are prolonging it first-rate. Shouldn't wonder if it would get to be so pleasant having her around I'd be working over union hours and forgetting to quit at all. I'm old enough to be your granddaddy, so take a bit of advice from me. When you can't cure a patient, let 'em die their own way. Now run along, sonny. Good morning, ma'am." And then to Sheila: "Get back to that locked door, the three bullet-holes, and the blood patch on the floor. I've got to know what's on the other side before I touch one mouthful of that finnan haddie you promised me for breakfast."

After that Old King Cole had his way. The doctors visited him as a matter of form, and Sheila improvised a chart, for he would not stand for having temperatures taken or pulses counted. "Cut it out, boss, cut it all out.

We're just going to have a good time, you and me." And he smiled seraphically as he drummed on the spread:

"Old King Cole--diddy-dum-diddy-dum, Was a merry old soul--diddy-dum-diddy-dum."

On the second day Sheila introduced Peter Brooks into the "Keeping-On-Going Syndicate," as the mammoth man termed their temporary partnership. Sheila had to take some hours off duty, and as the coal magnate absolutely refused to let another nurse cross his threshold, Peter seemed to be the only practical solution. She knew the two men would get on admirably. Peter could be counted on to understand and meet any emergency that might arise, while Old King Cole would be kept content. And Sheila was right.

"Say, we hit it off first-rate--ran together as smooth as a parcel o'

greased tubs," the magnate confided to Sheila when she returned. "He told me a whole lot about you--what you did for him--and the nickname they'd given you--'Leerie.' I like that, but I like my name for you better. Eh, boss?"

Once admitted, Peter often availed himself of his membership in the syndicate. He made a third at their games, turned an attentive ear to the thriller or added his bit to the enlightenment of the conversation. And there wasn't a topic from war to feminine-dress reform that they did not attack and thrash out among them with all the keenness and thoroughness of three alive and original minds.

"Puts me thinking of the days when I was switch boss at the Ca.s.sie Maguire Mine. Nothing but a shaver then, working up; nothing to do in the G.o.d-forsaken hole, after work, but talk. We just about settled the affairs of the world and gave the Lord Almighty advice into the bargain." The mammoth man laughed a mammoth laugh. "And when we'd talked ourselves inside out we'd have some fiddling--always a fiddle among some of the boys. Never hear one of those old tunes that it don't take me back to the Ca.s.sie Maguire and the way a fiddle would play the heart back into a lonely, homesick shaver." He turned with a suspicious sniff to Sheila.

"Come, boss, the chessboard. Peter'n'me are going to have another Verdun set-to. Only this time he's German. See? And if you don't mind, you might fill up our pipes and bring us our four-forty bowl."

At one time of the day only did the merriment flag--that was at dusk.

"Don't like it--never did like it," he confessed. "Something about it that gets onto my chest and turns me gloomy. Don't suppose you ever smelled the choke-damp, did you? Well, that's the feeling. Say, boss, wouldn't be a bad plan to shine up that old safety of yours and give us more light in the old pit. Mother quit about this time o' day, and it seems like I can't forget it."

The next day the coal magnate took a turn for the worse. The heart specialist and the house doctor glowered ominously at Sheila as they came to make their unwelcome rounds, and Sheila hurried them out of the room as speedily as she could. Then it was that she thought of the fiddlers three.

An out-of-town orchestra played biweekly at the sanitarium. They were young men, most of them, still apprentices at their art, and she knew they would be glad enough for extra earnings. They were due that evening, and she would engage the services of three violins for the dusk hour the old man dreaded. She did not accomplish this without a protest from the business office, warnings from the two physicians, and shocked comments from the habitual gossips of the sanitarium. But Sheila held her ground and fought for her way against their combined attacks. "Of course I know he's dying. Don't care if the whole San faints with mortification. I'm going to see he dies the way he wants to--keep it merry till the end."

To the Reverend Mr. Grumble, who requested--nay, demanded--admittance, she turned a deaf ear while she held the door firmly closed behind her. "Can't come in. Sorry, he doesn't want you. If you must say a last prayer to comfort yourself, say it in some other room. It will do Old King Cole just as much good and keep him much happier. Now, please go!"

So it happened that only Peter was present when the musicians arrived.

Sheila ushered them in with a flourish. "Old King Cole, your fiddlers three. Now what shall they play?"

Lucky for the indwellers of the sanitarium that the magnate's room was in the tower and therefore little sound escaped. It is improbable if the final ending would ever have been known to any but those present, whose discretion could have been relied upon, but for the fact that Miss Jacobs stood with her ear to the keyhole for fully ten minutes. It was surprising how quickly everybody knew about it after that. It created almost as much scandal as Sheila's own exodus had three years before. Many had the temerity to take the lift to the third floor and pace with attentive ears the corridor that led to the tower. These came back to fan the flame of shocked excitement below. The doctors and Mr. Grumble came to Miss Maxwell to interfere and put an end to this unG.o.dly and unprofessional humoring of one departing soul. But the superintendent of nurses refused. She had put the case in Sheila's hands, and she had absolute faith in her. So all that was left to the busybodies and the scandalmongers was to hear what they could and give free rein to their tongues.

There was, however, one mitigating fact: they could listen, and they could talk, but they could not look beyond the closed door of the tower room.

That vivid, appalling picture was mercifully denied them. With a heaping bowl of egg-nog beside him, and his brierwood between his lips, the coal magnate beat time on the bedspread with a fast-failing strength, while he grinned happily at Sheila. Beside him Peter lounged in a wheel-chair, smoking for company, while grouped about the foot of the bed in the att.i.tude of a small celestial choir stood the fiddlers three.

All the good old tunes, reminiscent of younger days of mining-camps and dance-halls, they played as fast as fingers could fly and bows could sc.r.a.pe. "Dan Tucker," "Money Musk," "The Irish Washerwoman," and "Pop Goes the Weasel" sifted in melodic molecules through the keyhole into the curious and receptive ears outside. And after them came "Captain Jinks"

and "The Blue Danube," "Yankee Doodle" and "Dixie."

"Some boss!" muttered the magnate, thickly, the brierwood dropping on the floor. "Just one solid streak of anthracite--clear through. Now give us something else--I don't care--you choose it, boss."

So Leerie chose "The Star-spangled Banner" and "Marching Through Georgia,"

and as dusk crept closer about them, "Suwanee River" and "The Old Kentucky Home."

"Nice, sleepy old tunes," mumbled the coal magnate. "Guess I've napped over-time." He opened one eye and looked at Sheila, half amused, half puzzled. "Say, boss, light up that little old lamp o' yours and take me down; the shaft's growing pretty black."

The fiddlers played a hymn as their own final contribution. Sheila smiled wistfully across the dusk to Peter. She knew it wouldn't matter now, for Old King Cole was pa.s.sing beyond the reach of hymns, prayers, or benedictions.

"It's over as far as you or I or he are concerned," she whispered, whimsically. "When I come down, by and by, would you very much mind taking me on one of those rides you promised? I want to forget that white-marble monument."

It was not until a week later that Sheila O'Leary met with one of the big surprises of her rather eventful existence. A lawyer came down from New York and asked for her. It seemed that the coal magnate had left her a considerable number of thousands to spend for him and ease her feelings about the monument. The codicil was quaintly worded and stated that inasmuch as "Mother" had gone first, he guessed she would do the next best by him.

Sheila took Peter Brooks into her immediate confidence. "Half of it goes for typhoid research and half for a nurses' home here. We've needed one dreadfully. What staggers me is when did he do it?"

Peter grinned. "When I happened to be on duty. We fixed it up, and I was to keep the secret. He had lots of fun over it--poor old soul!"

"Merry old soul," corrected Sheila.

And when the nurses' home was built Sheila flatly ignored all the suggestions of a memorial tablet with appropriate scriptural verses to grace the cornerstone or hang in the entrance-hall.

"Won't have it--never do in the world! Just going to have his picture over the living-room fireplace."

And there it hangs--a gigantic reproduction of Old King Cole, done by the greatest poster artist of America.

Chapter III

THE CHANGELING

He arrived in the arms of his mother, the mulatto nurse having in some inexplicable and inconsiderate fashion acquired measles on the ship coming from their small South American republic. Francisco Enrique Manuel Machado y Rodriguez--Pancho, for short--and his mother were allowed to disembark only because of his appalling lack of health and her promise to take harborage in a hospital instead of a hotel.

Having heard of the sanitarium from her sister-in-law's brother's wife's aunt, who had been there herself, and having traveled already over a thousand miles, the additional hundred or so seemed too trivial to bother about. So the senora kept her promise to the officials by buying her ticket thitherward, and Flanders, the bus-driver, arrived just in time to see three porters unload them and their luggage on the small station platform. The senora was weeping bitterly, the powder spattered and smeared all over her pretty, shallow little face; Pancho was clawing and scratching the air, while he shrieked at the top of his lungs--the only part of him that gave any evidence of strength.

Having disposed of the luggage, Flanders hurried back to the a.s.sistance of the senora, whereupon the brown atom clawed him instead of the air and fortissimoed his shrieking. Flanders promptly returned him to his mother, backing away to the bus and muttering something about "letting wildcat's cubs be."

"Wil'cat?" repeated the senora through her sobs. "I don't know what ees wil'cat. I theenk eet ees one leetle deevil. Tsa, Panchito! Ciera la boca." And she shook him.

During the drive to the sanitarium Flanders cast periodic glances within.

Each time he looked the atom appeared to be shrieking louder, while his mother was shaking harder and longer. By the time they had reached their destination the breath had been shaken quite out of him. He lay back panting in his mother's arms, with only strength enough for a feeble and occasional snarl. His bonnet of lace and cerise-pink ribbon had come untied and had slipped from his head, disclosing a ma.s.s of black hair curled by nature and matted by neglect. It gave the last uncanny touch to the brown atom's appearance and caused Hennessy, who was sweeping the crossing, to drop his broom and stare agape at the new arrivals.

"Faith, is it one o' them Brazilian monkeys?" he whispered, pulling Flanders by the sleeve. "I've heard the women are makin' pets o' them, although I never heard they were after fixin' them up wi' lace an' ribbons like that."

"It's a kid." Flanders stated the fact without any degree of positiveness as he rubbed three fingers cautiously down his cheek. He was feeling for scars. "Guess it's a kid all right, but it scratches like a cat, gosh durn it!"