Life and Gabriella Part 44

CHAPTER VIII

THE TEST

"I knew something was wrong," he said, emerging, big and efficient, from the firelight, "and I was just coming up." Before she could answer she felt his warm grasp on her hands, and it seemed to her suddenly that it was not only her hands he enfolded, but her agonized and suffering mind.

"There's a man up there--" she faltered helplessly. "I was once married to him long ago--oh, long ago. Just now I found him in the street and he seems to be out of his mind. We are frightened."

But he seemed not to hear her, not to demand an explanation, not even to wait to discover what she wanted. Already his long stride was outstripping her on the staircase, and while she followed more slowly, pausing now and then to take breath, she realized thankfully that the situation had pa.s.sed completely away from her power of command. As Miss Polly's strength to hers, so was her strength to O'Hara's.

Faint, despairing moans issued from Archibald's room as she reached the landing; and going inside, she saw George wrestling feebly with O'Hara, who held him with one hand while with the other he waved authoritative directions to Miss Polly.

"Get the bed ready for him, with plenty of hot blankets. He's about at the end of his rope now. It's a jag, but it's more than a jag, too. If I'm not mistaken he's in for a case of pneumonia."

Miss Polly, hovering timidly at a safe distance, held out the blankets and the hot water bottles, while O'Hara carried George across the room to the bed, and then covered him warmly. When he turned to glance about his gaze fell on Gabriella, and he remarked bluntly: "You'd better get out. You aren't wanted."

"But I am obliged to be here. It is my business, not yours," she replied, while a sensation of sickness pa.s.sed over her.

For a moment he regarded her stubbornly, "Well, I don't know whose business it was a minute ago," he rejoined, "but it's mine now. I am boss of this particular h.e.l.l, and you're going to keep out of it. I guess I know more about D.T. than you and Miss Polly put together would know in a thousand years."

She was very humble. In the sweetness of her relief, of her security, she would have submitted cheerfully not only to slang, but to downright profanity. It was one of those unforgettable instants when character, she understood, was more effective than culture. Even Arthur would have appeared at a disadvantage beside O'Hara at that moment.

"I think I ought to help you," she insisted.

"Well, I think you oughtn't. Out you go! I guess I know what I'm up against."

Before she could protest, before she could even resist, he had pushed her out into the hail, and while she still hesitated there at the head of the staircase, the door opened far enough to allow the huddled figure of Miss Polly to creep through the crack. Then the key turned in the lock; and O'Hara's voice was heard pacifying George as he might have pacified a child or a lunatic. After a few minutes the shrieks stopped suddenly; the door was unlocked again for a minute, and there floated out the rea.s.suring words:

"Don't stand out there any longer. It's as right as right. I've got him buffaloed!"

"What does he mean?" inquired Gabriella helplessly of the seamstress.

"I don't know, but I reckon it's all right," responded Miss Polly. "He seems to know just what to do, and anyhow the doctor'll be here in a minute. It seems funny to give him whiskey, don't it, but that was the first thing Mr. O'Hara thought of."

"I suppose his heart was weak. He looked as if he were dying," answered Gabriella. "He asked for more whiskey, didn't he?"

"Yes; I'm goin' right straight to get it. Oh, Gabriella, ain't a man a real solid comfort sometimes?"

Without replying to this e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n, Gabriella went after the whiskey, and when she came back with the bottle in her hand, she found the doctor on the landing outside the locked door. He was a stranger to her, and she had scarcely begun her explanation when O'Hara called him into the room.

"The sooner you take a look at him the better." Everything was taken out of her hands--everything, even her explanation of George's presence in her apartment.

As there was nothing more for her to do, she went back to the sitting-room, where a fire burned brightly, and began to talk to Miss Polly.

"I don't know what I should have done if he hadn't been here," she said.

"Who? Mr. O'Hara? Well, it certainly was providential, honey, when you come to think of it."

The door of Archibald's room opened and shut, and the doctor came down the hall to the telephone. They heard him order medicines from a chemist near-by; and then, after a minute, he took up the receiver, and spoke to a nurse at the hospital. At first he gave merely the ordinary directions, but at the end of the conversation he said sharply in answer to a question: "No, there's no need of a restraining sheet. He's too far gone to be violent. It is only a matter of hours."

His voice stopped, and Gabriella went out to him. "Will you tell me what you think, Doctor?" she asked.

"Is he your husband?" He had a blank, secretive face, with light eyes, and a hard mouth--so different, she thought from the poetic face of Dr.

French.

"I divorced him ten years ago."

He looked at her searchingly. "Well, he may last until morning, but it is doubtful. His heart has given out."

"Is there anything I can do?"

"No. Morphine is the only thing. We are going to try camphorated oil, but there is hardly a chance--not a chance." He turned to go back into the room, then stopped, and added in the same tone of professional stoicism: "The nurse will be here in half an hour, and I shall wait till she comes."

When Gabriella went back to the sitting-room, Miss Polly was weeping. "I followed you and heard what he said. Oh, Gabriella, ain't life too awful!"

"I'll be glad when the nurse comes," answered Gabriella with impatience.

Emotionally she felt as if she had turned to stone, and she had little inclination to explore the trite and tangled paths of Miss Polly's philosophy.

The nurse, a stout, blond woman in spectacles, arrived on the stroke of the half-hour, and after talking with her a few minutes, the doctor took up his bag and came to tell Gabriella that he would return about daybreak. "I've given instructions to the nurse, and Mr. O'Hara will sit up in case he is needed, but there is nothing to do except keep the patient perfectly quiet and give the hypodermics. It is too late to try anything else."

"May I go in there?"

"Well, you can't do any good, but you may go in if you'd rather."

Then he went, as if glad of his release, and after Gabriella had prevailed upon Miss Folly to go to bed, she changed her street dress for a tea-gown, and threw herself on a couch before the fire in the sitting-room. An overpowering fatigue weighed her down; the yellow firelight had become an anodyne to her nerves; and after a few minutes in which she thought confusedly of O'Hara and Cousin Jimmy, she let herself fall asleep.

When she awoke a man was replenishing the fire, and as she struggled drowsily back into consciousness, she realized that he was not Cousin Jimmy, but O'Hara, and that he was placing the lumps of coal very softly in the fear of awaking her.

"Hallo, there!" he exclaimed when he turned with the scuttle still in his hand; "so you're awake, are you?"

She started up. "I've been asleep!" she exclaimed in surprise.

"You looked like a kid when I came in," he responded cheerfully, and she reflected that even the presence of death could not shadow his jubilant spirit. "I went back to the kitchen to make some coffee for the nurse and myself, and I thought you might like a cup. It's first-rate coffee, if I do say it. Two lumps and a little cream, I guess that's the way. I rummaged in the icebox, and found a bottle of cream hidden away at the back. That was right, wasn't it?"

A strange, an almost uncanny feeling of reminiscence, of vague yet profound familiarity, was stealing over her. It all seemed to have happened before, somewhere, somehow--the slow awakening to the large dark form in the yellow firelight, O'Hara's sudden turning to look at her, his exuberance, his sanguine magnetism, and even the cup of coffee he made and brought to her side. She felt that it was the most natural thing in the world to awake and find him there and to drink his coffee.

"It's good," she answered; "I had no dinner, and I am very hungry."

"I thought you'd be. That's why I brought a snack with it." He was cutting a chicken sandwich on the tray he had placed under the green shaded light, and after a minute he brought it to her and held the cup while she ate. A nurse could not have been gentler about the little things she needed; yet she knew that he was rough, off-hand, careless--she could imagine that he might become almost brutal if he were crossed in his purpose. She had believed him to be so simple; but he was in reality, she saw, a ma.s.s of complexities, of actions and reactions, of intricacies and involutions of character.

"I don't know what I should have done if you hadn't been here," she said gratefully while she ate the sandwich and he sat beside her holding her cup. "But I'm so unused to being taken care of," she added with a trembling little laugh, "that I don't quite know how to behave."

"Oh, you would have got on all right," he rejoined carelessly; "but I'm glad all the same that I was here."

She motioned toward the hall. "Has there been any change?"

"No, there won't be until morning. He'll last that long, I think. We're giving him a hypodermic every four hours, but it really ain't any good, you know. It is merely professional." For a minute he was silent, watching her gravely; then recovering his casual manner, he added: "I shouldn't let it upset me if I were you. Things happen that way, and we've got to take them standing."