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_ There are a number of things that are pleasanter than
being sick in a New York boarding-house when one's
nearest dearest is a married sister up in far-away
Michigan.
Some one must have been very kind, for there were
doctors, and a blue-and-white striped nurse, and bottles
and things. There was even a vase of perky carnations--
scarlet ones. I discovered that they had a trick of
nodding their heads, saucily. The discovery did not
appear to surprise me.
"Howdy-do!" said I aloud to the fattest and reddest
carnation that overtopped all the rest. "How in the
world did you get in here?"
The striped nurse (I hadn't noticed her before) rose
from some corner and came swiftly over to my bedside,
taking my wrist between her fingers.
"I'm very well, thank you," she said, smiling, "and
I came in at the door, of course."
"I wasn't talking to you," I snapped, crossly, "I was
speaking to the carnations; particularly to that elderly
one at the top--the fat one who keeps bowing and wagging
his head at me."
"Oh, yes," answered the striped nurse, politely, "of
course. That one is very lively, isn't he? But suppose
we take them out for a little while now."
She picked up the vase and carried it into the
corridor, and the carnations nodded their heads more
vigorously than ever over her shoulder.
I heard her call softly to some one. The some one
answered with a sharp little cry that sounded like,
"Conscious!"
The next moment my own sister Norah came quietly into
the room, and knelt at the side of my bed and took me in
her arms. It did not seem at all surprising that she
should be there, patting me with reassuring little love
pats, murmuring over me with her lips against my check,
calling me a hundred half-forgotten pet names that I had
not heard for years. But then, nothing seemed to
surprise me that surprising day. Not even the sight of
a great, red-haired, red-faced, scrubbed looking man who
strolled into the room just as Norah was in the midst of
denouncing newspapers in general, and my newspaper in
particular, and calling the city editor a slave-driver and
a beast. The big, red-haired man stood regarding us tolerantly.
"Better, eh?" said he, not as one who asks a
question, but as though in confirmation of a thought.
Then he too took my wrist between his fingers. His touch
was very firm and cool. After that he pulled down my
eyelids and said, "H'm." Then he patted my cheek smartly
once or twice. "You'll do," he pronounced. He picked up
a sheet of paper from the table and looked it over,
keen-eyed. There followed a clinking of bottles and
glasses, a few low-spoken words to the nurse, and then,
as she left the room the big red-haired man seated
himself heavily in the chair near the bedside and rested
his great hands on his fat knees. He stared down at me
in much the same way that a huge mastiff looks at a
terrier. Finally his glance rested on my limp left hand.
"Married, h'm?"
For a moment the word would not come. I could hear
Norah catch her breath quickly. Then--"Yes," answered I.
"Husband living?" I could see suspicion dawning in
his cold gray eye.
Again the catch in Norah's throat and a little half
warning, half supplicating gesture. And again, "Yes,"
said I.
The dawn of suspicion burst into full glow.
"Where is he?" growled the red-haired doctor. "At a
time like this?"
I shut my eyes for a moment, too sick at heart to
resent his manner. I could feel, more than see, that Sis
was signaling him frantically. I moistened my lips and
answered him, bitterly.
"He is in the Starkweather Hospital for the insane."
When the red-haired man spoke again the growl was
quite gone from his voice.
"And your home is--where?"
"Nowhere," I replied meekly, from my pillow. But at
that Sis put her hand out quickly, as though she had been
struck, and said:
"My home is her home."
"Well then, take her there," he ordered, frowning,
"and keep her there as long as you can. Newspaper
reporting, h'm? In New York? That's a devil of a job
for a woman. And a husband who . . . Well, you'll have
to take a six months' course in loafing, young woman.
And at the end of that time, if you are still determined
to work, can't you pick out something easier--like taking
in scrubbing, for instance?"
I managed a feeble smile, wishing that he would go
away quickly, so that I might sleep. He seemed to divine
my thoughts, for he disappeared into the corridor, taking
Norah with him. Their voices, low-pitched and carefully
guarded, could be heard as they conversed outside my
door.
Norah was telling him the whole miserable business.
I wished, savagely, that she would let me tell it, if it
must be told. How could she paint the fascination of the
man who was my husband? She had never known the charm of
him as I had known it in those few brief months before
our marriage. She had never felt the caress of his
voice, or the magnetism of his strange, smoldering eyes
glowing across the smoke-dimmed city room as I had felt
them fixed on me. No one had ever known what he had
meant to the girl of twenty, with her brain full of
unspoken dreams--dreams which were all to become glorious
realities in that wonder-place, New York.
How he had fired my country-girl imagination! He had
been the most brilliant writer on the big, brilliant
sheet--and the most dissolute. How my heart had pounded
on that first lonely day when this Wonder-Being looked up
from his desk, saw me, and strolled over to where I sat
before my typewriter! He smiled down at me, companionably.
I'm quite sure that my mouth must have been wide open with
surprise. He had been smoking a cigarette an
expensive-looking, gold-tipped one. Now he removed it
from between his lips with that hand that always shook a
little, and dropped it to the floor, crushing it lightly
with the toe of his boot. He threw back his handsome
head and sent out the last mouthful of smoke in a thin,
lazy spiral. I remember thinking what a pity it was that
he should have crushed that costly-looking cigarette,
just for me.
"My name's Orme," he said, gravely. "Peter Orme.
And if yours isn't Shaughnessy or Burke at least, then
I'm no judge of what black hair and gray eyes stand for."
"Then you're not," retorted I, laughing up at him,
"for it happens to be O'Hara--Dawn O'Hara, if ye plaze."
He picked up a trifle that lay on my desk--a pencil,
perhaps, or a bit of paper--and toyed with it, absently,
as though I had not spoken. I thought he had not heard,
and I was conscious of feeling a bit embarrassed, and
very young. Suddenly he raised his smoldering eyes to
mine, and I saw that they had taken on a deeper glow.
His white, even teeth showed in a half smile.
"Dawn O'Hara," said he, slowly, and the name had
never sounded in the least like music before, "Dawn
O'Hara. It sounds like a rose--a pink blush rose that is
deeper pink at its heart, and very sweet."
He picked up the trifle with which he had been toying
and eyed it intently for a moment, as though his whole
mind were absorbed in it. Then he put it down, turned,
and walked slowly away. I sat staring after him like a
little simpleton, puzzled, bewildered, stunned. That had
been the beginning of it all.
He had what we Irish call "a way wid him." I wonder
now why I did not go mad with the joy, and the pain, and
the uncertainty of it all. Never was a girl so dazzled,
so humbled, so worshiped, so neglected, so courted. He
was a creature of a thousand moods to torture one. What
guise would he wear to-day? Would he be gay, or dour, or
sullen, or teasing or passionate, or cold, or tender or
scintillating? I know that my hands were always cold,
and my cheeks were always hot, those days.
He wrote like a modern Demosthenes, with
all political New York to quiver under his philippics.
The managing editor used to send him out on wonderful
assignments, and they used to hold the paper for his
stuff when it was late. Sometimes he would be gone for
days at a time, and when he returned the men would look
at him with a sort of admiring awe. And the city editor
would glance up from beneath his green eye-shade and call
out:
"Say, Orme, for a man who has just wired in about a
million dollars' worth of stuff seems to me you don't
look very crisp and jaunty."
"Haven't slept for a week," Peter Orme would growl,
and then he would brush past the men who were crowded
around him, and turn in my direction. And the old
hot-and-cold, happy, frightened, laughing, sobbing
sensation would have me by the throat again.
Well, we were married. Love cast a glamour over his
very vices. His love of drink? A weakness which I would
transform into strength. His white hot flashes of
uncontrollable temper? Surely they would die down at my
cool, tender touch. His fits of abstraction and
irritability? Mere evidences of the genius within. Oh,
my worshiping soul was always alert with an excuse.
And so we were married. He had quite tired
of me in less than a year, and the hand that had always
shaken a little shook a great deal now, and the fits of
abstraction and temper could be counted upon to appear
oftener than any other moods. I used to laugh,
sometimes, when I was alone, at the bitter humor of it
all. It was like a Duchess novel come to life.
His work began to show slipshod in spots. They
talked to him about it and he laughed at them. Then, one
day, he left them in the ditch on the big story of the
McManus indictment, and the whole town scooped him, and
the managing editor told him that he must go. His lapses
had become too frequent. They would have to replace him
with a man not so brilliant, perhaps, but more reliable.
I daren't think of his face as it looked when he came
home to the little apartment and told me. The smoldering
eyes were flaming now. His lips were flecked with a sort
of foam. I stared at him in horror. He strode over to
me, clasped his fingers about my throat and shook me as
a dog shakes a mouse.
"Why don't you cry, eh?" he snarled. Why don't you
cry!"
And then I did cry out at what I saw in his eyes. I
wrenched myself free, fled to my room, and locked the
door and stood against it with my hand pressed over my
heart until I heard the outer door slam and the echo of
his footsteps die away.
Divorce! That was my only salvation. No, that would
be cowardly now. I would wait until he was on his feet
again, and then I would demand my old free life back once
more. This existence that was dragging me into the
gutter--this was not life! Life was a glorious,
beautiful thing, and I would have it yet. I laid my
plans, feverishly, and waited. He did not come back that
night, or the next, or the next, or the next. In
desperation I went to see the men at the office. No,
they had not seen him. Was there anything that they
could do? they asked. I smiled, and thanked them, and
said, oh, Peter was so absent-minded! No doubt he had
misdirected his letters, or something of the sort. And
then I went back to the flat to resume the horrible
waiting.
One week later he turned up at the old office which
had cast him off. He sat down at his former desk and
began to write, breathlessly, as he used to in the days
when all the big stories fell to him. One of the men
reporters strolled up to him and touched him on the
shoulder, man-fashion. Peter Orme raised his head and
stared at him, and the man sprang back in terror.
The smoldering eyes had burned down to an ash.
Peter Orme was quite bereft of all reason. They took him
away that night, and I kept telling myself that it wasn't
true; that it was all a nasty dream, and I would wake up
pretty soon, and laugh about it, and tell it at the
breakfast table.
Well, one does not seek a divorce from a husband who
is insane. The busy men on the great paper were very
kind. They would take me back on the staff. Did I think
that I still could write those amusing little human
interest stories? Funny ones, you know, with a punch in
'em.
Oh, plenty of good stories left in me yet, I assured
them. They must remember that I was only twenty-one,
after all, and at twenty-one one does not lose the sense
of humor.
And so I went back to my old desk, and wrote bright,
chatty letters home to Norah, and ground out very funny
stories with a punch in 'em, that the husband in the
insane asylum might be kept in comforts. With both hands
I hung on like grim death to that saving sense of humor,
resolved to make something of that miserable mess which
was my life--to make something of it yet. And now--
At this point in my musings there was an end
of the low-voiced conversation in the hall. Sis tiptoed
in and looked her disapproval at finding me sleepless.
"Dawn, old girlie, this will never do. Shut your
eyes now, like a good child, and go to sleep. Guess what
that great brute of a doctor said! I may take you home
with me next week! Dawn dear, you will come, won't you?
You must! This is killing you. Don't make me go away
leaving you here. I couldn't stand it."
She leaned over my pillow and closed my eyelids
gently with her sweet, cool fingers. "You are coming
home with me, and you shall sleep and eat, and sleep and
eat, until you are as lively as the Widow Malone, ohone,
and twice as fat. Home, Dawnie dear, where we'll forget
all about New York. Home, with me."
I reached up uncertainly, and brought her hand down
to my lips and a great peace descended upon my sick soul.
"Home--with you," I said, like a child, and fell asleep. _
Read next: CHAPTER II - MOSTLY EGGS
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