The Wizard's Daughter and Other Stories Part 17

"Oh, nothing, mother; he got a sliver in his finger; I just took it out."

"He's father's little soldier," said Robert huskily; "he ain't a-goin'

to cry about a little thing like that."

The little soldier sat on the doorstep, striving to get his sobs under military discipline and contemplating his tiny finger ruefully.

An old woman came through the room with a white cloth in her hand.

"Gramma'll tie it up for him," she said soothingly, sitting down on the step, and tearing off a bandage wide enough for a broken limb.

The patient heaved a deep sigh of content as the unwieldiness of the wounded member increased, and held his fat little fingers wide apart to accommodate the superfluity of rag.

"There, now," said the old woman, rubbing his soft little gingham back fondly; "gramma'll go and show him the turkeys."

The two disappeared around the corner of the house, and the man and woman came drearily back to their conference.

"If you go, Nancy," said Robert, essaying a wan smile, "I hope you'll be careful what you say to 'em; you must remember they don't _think_ they're to blame."

"I won't promise anything at all," a.s.serted Nancy, hitching her angular shoulders; "more'n likely, I'll tell 'em just what I think. I ain't afraid of hurtin' their feelin's, for they hain't got any. I think money's a good deal like your skin; it keeps you from feelin' things that make you smart dreadfully when you get it knocked off."

Robert smiled feebly, and rubbed his moist, yielding hand across his wife's misshapen knuckles.

"Well, then, you hadn't ought to be hard on 'em, Nancy; it's no more'n natural to want to save your skin," he said, closing his eyes wearily.

"Robert Watson?"

The teller of the Merchants' and Fruitgrowers' Bank looked through the bars of his gilded cage, and repeated the name reflectively. He did not notice the eager look of the woman who confronted him, but he did wonder a little that she had failed to brush the thick dust of travel from the shoulders of her rusty cape.

The teller was a slender, immaculate young man, whose hair arose in an alert brush from his forehead, which was high and seemed to have been polished by the same process that had given such a faultless and aggressive gloss to his linen. He turned on his spry little heel and stepped to the back of the inclosure, where he took a handful of long, narrow papers from a leather case, and ran over them hastily. Nancy did not think it possible that he could be reading them; the setting in his ring made a little streak of light as his fingers flew. She watched him with tense earnestness; it seemed to her that the beating of her heart shook the polished counter she leaned against. She hid her cotton-gloved hands under her cape for fear he would see how they trembled.

The teller returned the papers to their case, and consulted a stout, short-visaged man, whose lips and brows drew themselves together in an effort of recollection.

The two men stood near enough to hear Nancy's voice. She pressed her weather-beaten face close to the gilded bars.

"I am Mrs. Watson. I came down to see you about it; my husband's been poorly and couldn't come. We'd like to get a little more time; we've had bad luck with the barley so far, but we think we can make it another season."

The men gave her a bland, impersonal attention.

"Yes?" inquired the teller, with tentative sympathy, running his pencil through his upright hair, and tapping his forefinger with it nervously.

"I believe that's one of Bartlett's personal matters," he said in an undertone.

The older man nodded, slowly at first, and then with increasing affirmation.

"You're right," he said, untying the knot in his face, and turning away.

The teller came back to his place.

"Mr. Bartlett, the cashier, has charge of that matter, Mrs. Watson. He has not been down for two or three days: one of his children is very sick. I'll make a note of it, however, and draw his attention to it when he comes in." He wrote a few lines hurriedly on a bit of paper, and impaled it on an already overcrowded spindle.

"Can you tell me where he lives?" asked Nancy.

The young man hesitated.

"I don't believe I would go to the house; they say it's something contagious"--

"I'm not afraid," interrupted Nancy grimly.

The teller wrote an address, and slipped it toward her with a nimble motion, keeping his hand outstretched for the next comer, and smiling at him over Nancy's dusty shoulder.

The woman turned away, suddenly aware that she had been blocking the wheels of commerce, and made her way through the knot of men that had gathered behind her. Outside she could feel the sea in the air, and at the end of the street she caught a glimpse of a level blue plain with no purple mountains on its horizon.

Someway, the mortgage had grown smaller; no one seemed to care about it but herself. She had felt vaguely that they would be expecting her and have themselves steeled against her request. On the way from the station she had thought that people were looking at her curiously as the woman from "up toward Pinacate" who was about to lose her home on a mortgage.

She had even felt that some of them knew of the little wire-fenced grave on the edge of the barley-field.

She showed the card to a boy at the corner, who pointed out the street and told her to watch for the number over the door.

"It isn't very far; 'bout four blocks up on the right-hand side. Yuh kin take the street car fer a nickel, er yuh kin walk fi' cents cheaper," he volunteered, whereupon an older boy kicked him affectionately, and advised him in a nauseated tone to "come off."

Nancy walked along the smooth cement pavement, looking anxiously at the houses behind their sentinel palms. The vagaries of Western architecture conveyed no impression but that of splendor to her uncritical eye. The house whose number corresponded to the one on her card was less pretentious than some of the others, but the difference was lost upon her in the general sense of grandeur.

She went up the steps and rang the bell, with the same stifling clutch on her throat that she had felt in the bank. There was a little pause, and then the door opened, and Nancy saw a fragile, girl-like woman with a tear-stained face standing before her.

"Does Mr. Bartlett live here?" faltered the visitor, her chin trembling.

The young creature leaned forward like a flower wilting on its stem, and buried her face on Nancy's dusty shoulder.

"Oh, I'm so glad to see you," she sobbed; "I thought no one ever _would_ come. I didn't know before that people were so afraid of scarlet fever. They have taken my baby away for fear he would take it. Do you know anything about it? Please come right in where she is, and tell me what you think."

Nancy had put her gaunt arm around the girl's waist, and was patting her quivering shoulder with one cotton-gloved hand. Two red spots had come on her high cheek-bones, and her lips were working. She let herself be led across the hall into an adjoining room, where a yellow-haired child lay restless and fever stricken. A young man with a haggard face came forward and greeted her eagerly. "Now, Flora," he said, smoothing his wife's disordered hair, "you don't need to worry any more; we shall get on now. I'm sure she's a little better to-day; don't you think so?" He appealed to Nancy, wistfully.

"Yes; I think she is," said Nancy stoutly, moving her head in awkward defiance of her own words.

"There, Flora, that's just what the doctor said," pleaded the husband.

The young wife clung to the older woman desperately.

"Oh, do you think so?" she faltered. "You know, I never _could_ stand it. She's all--well, of course, there's the baby--but--oh--you see--you know--I never could bear it!" She broke down again, sobbing, with her arms about Nancy's neck.

"Yes, you can bear it," said Nancy. "You can bear it if you have to, but you ain't a-goin' to have to--she's a-goin' to get well. An' you've got your man--you ought to recollect that"--she stifled a sob--"he seems well an' hearty."

The young wife raised her head and looked at her husband with tearful scorn. He met her gaze meekly, with that ready self-effacement which husbands seem to feel in the presence of maternity.

"Have you two poor things been here all alone?" asked Nancy.

"Yes," sobbed the girl-wife, this time on her husband's shoulder; "everybody was afraid,--we couldn't get any one,--and I don't know anything. You're the first woman I've seen since--oh, it's been _so_ long!"

"Well, you're all nervous and worn out and half starved," announced Nancy, untying her bonnet-strings. "I've had sickness, but I've never been this bad off. Now, you just take care of the little girl, and I'll take care of you."

It was a caretaking like the sudden stilling of the tempest that came to the little household. The father and mother would not have said that the rest and order that pervaded the house, and finally crept into the room where the sick child lay, came from a homely woman with an ill-fitting dress and hard, knotted hands. To them she seemed the impersonation of beauty and peace on earth.