"I had a hard time between the two of them, for, with the help of her sister, I was nursing them both. It was an unprofessional thing to do, but I could see they were not well off, and I assured the doctor that I could manage. To me it was worth while going through the double work just to breathe the atmosphere of unselfishness that sweetened those two sick-rooms. The average invalid is not the patient sufferer people imagine. It is a fretful, querulous, self-pitying little world that we live in as a rule, and that we grow hard in. It gave me a new heart, nursing these young people.
"The man pulled through, and began steadily to recover, but the wife was a wee slip of a girl, and her strength―what there was of it―ebbed day by day. As he got stronger he would call out more and more cheerfully to her through the open door, and ask her how she was getting on, and she would struggle to call back laughing answers. It had been a mistake to put them next to each other, and I blamed myself for having done so, but it was too late to change then. All we could do was to beg her not to exhaust herself, and to let us, when he called out, tell him she was asleep. But the thought of not answering him or calling to him made her so wretched that it seemed safer to let her have her way.
"Her one anxiety was that he should not know how weak she was. 'It will worry him so,' she would say; 'he is such an old fidget over me. And I AM getting stronger, slowly; ain't I, nurse?'
"One morning he called out to her, as usual, asking her how she was, and she answered, though she had to wait for a few seconds to gather strength to do so. He seemed to detect the effort, for he called back anxiously, 'Are you SURE you're all right, dear?'
"'Yes,' she replied, 'getting on famously. Why?'
"'I thought your voice sounded a little weak, dear,' he answered; 'don't call out if it tries you.'
"Then for the first time she began to worry about herself―not for her own sake, but because of him.
"'Do you think I AM getting weaker, nurse?' she asked me, fixing her great eyes on me with a frightened look.
"'You're making yourself weak by calling out,' I answered, a little sharply. 'I shall have to keep that door shut.'
"'Oh, don't tell him'―that was all her thought―'don't let him know it. Tell him I'm strong, won't you, nurse? It will kill him if he thinks I'm not getting well.'
"I was glad when her sister came up, and I could get out of the room, for you're not much good at nursing when you feel, as I felt then, as though you had swallowed a tablespoon and it was sticking in your throat.
"Later on, when I went in to him, he drew me to the bedside, and whispered me to tell him truly how she was. If you are telling a lie at all, you may just as well make it a good one, so I told him she was really wonderfully well, only a little exhausted after the illness, as was natural, and that I expected to have her up before him.
"Poor lad! that lie did him more good than a week's doctoring and nursing; and next morning he called out more cheerily than ever to her, and offered to bet her a new bonnet against a new hat that he would race her, and be up first.
"She laughed back quite merrily (I was in his room at the time). 'All right,' she said, 'you'll lose. I shall be well first, and I shall come and visit you.'
"Her laugh was so bright, and her voice sounded so much stronger, that I really began to think she had taken a turn for the better, so that when on going in to her I found her pillow wet with tears, I could not understand it.
"'Why, we were so cheerful just a minute ago,' I said; 'what's the matter?'
"'Oh, poor Jack!' she moaned, as her little, wasted fingers opened and closed upon the counterpane. 'Poor Jack, it will break his heart.'
"It was no good my saying anything. There comes a moment when something tells your patient all that is to be known about the case, and the doctor and the nurse can keep their hopeful assurances for where they will be of more use. The only thing that would have brought comfort to her then would have been to convince her that he would soon forget her and be happy without her. I thought it at the time, and I tried to say something of the kind to her, but I couldn't get it out, and she wouldn't have believed me if I had.
"So all I could do was to go back to the other room, and tell him that I wanted her to go to sleep, and that he must not call out to her until I told him.
"She lay very still all day. The doctor came at his usual hour and looked at her. He patted her hand, and just glanced at the untouched food beside her.
"'Yes,' he said, quietly. 'I shouldn't worry her, nurse.' And I understood.
"Towards evening she opened her eyes, and beckoned to her sister, who was standing by the bedside, to bend down.
"'Jeanie,' she whispered, 'do you think it wrong to deceive any one when it's for their own good?'
"'I don't know,' said the girl, in a dry voice; 'I shouldn't think so. Why do you ask?'
"'Jeanie, your voice was always very much like mine―do you remember, they used to mistake us at home. Jeanie, call out for me―just till―till he's a bit better; promise me.'
"They had loved each other, those two, more than is common among sisters. Jeanie could not answer, but she pressed her sister closer in her arms, and the other was satisfied.
"Then, drawing all her little stock of life together for one final effort, the child raised herself in her sister's arms.
"'Good-night, Jack,' she called out, loud and clear enough to be heard through the closed door.
"'Good-night, little wife,' he cried back, cheerily; 'are you all right?'
"'Yes, dear. Good-night.'
"Her little, worn-out frame dropped back upon the bed, and the next thing I remember is snatching up a pillow, and holding it tight-pressed against Jeanie's face for fear the sound of her sobs should penetrate into the next room; and afterwards we both got out, somehow, by the other door, and rushed downstairs, and clung to each other in the back kitchen.
"How we two women managed to keep up the deceit, as, for three whole days, we did, I shall never myself know. Jeanie sat in the room where her dead sister, from its head to its sticking-up feet, lay outlined under the white sheet; and I stayed beside the living man, and told lies and acted lies, till I took a joy in them, and had to guard against the danger of over-elaborating them.
"He wondered at what he thought my 'new merry mood,' and I told him it was because of my delight that his wife was out of danger; and then I went on for the pure devilment of the thing, and told him that a week ago, when we had let him think his wife was growing stronger, we had been deceiving him; that, as a matter of fact, she was at that time in great peril, and I had been in hourly alarm concerning her, but that now the strain was over, and she was safe; and I dropped down by the foot of the bed, and burst into a fit of laughter, and had to clutch hold of the bedstead to keep myself from rolling on the floor.
"He had started up in bed with a wild white face when Jeanie had first answered him from the other room, though the sisters' voices had been so uncannily alike that I had never been able to distinguish one from the other at any time. I told him the slight change was the result of the fever, that his own voice also was changed a little, and that such was always the case with a person recovering from a long illness. To guide his thoughts away from the real clue, I told him Jeanie had broken down with the long work, and that, the need for her being past, I had packed her off into the country for a short rest. That afternoon we concocted a letter to him, and I watched Jeanie's eyes with a towel in my hand while she wrote it, so that no tears should fall on it, and that night she travelled twenty miles down the Great Western line to post it, returning by the next up-train.
"No suspicion of the truth ever occurred to him, and the doctor helped us out with our deception; yet his pulse, which day by day had been getting stronger, now beat feebler every hour. In that part of the country where I was born and grew up, the folks say that wherever the dead lie, there round about them, whether the time be summer or winter, the air grows cold and colder, and that no fire, though you pile the logs half-way up the chimney, will ever make it warm. A few months' hospital training generally cures one of all fanciful notions about death, but this idea I have never been able to get rid of. My thermometer may show me sixty, and I may try to believe that the temperature IS sixty, but if the dead are beside me I feel cold to the marrow of my bones. I could SEE the chill from the dead room crawling underneath the door, and creeping up about his bed, and reaching out its hand to touch his heart.