The Rose-Garden Husband Part 6

He did not look like a statue now. His cheeks were burning with evident pain, and his yellow-brown eyes, wide-open, and dilated to darkness, stared straight out. His hands were clenching and unclenching, and his head moved restlessly from side to side. Every nerve and muscle, she could see, was taut.

"They're all dead," he muttered. "Father and Mother and Louise--and I--only I'm not dead enough to bury. Oh, G.o.d, I wish I was!"

That wasn't delirium; it was something more like heart-break. Phyllis moved closer to him, and dropped one of her sleep-warm hands on his cold, clenched one.

"Oh, poor boy!" she said. "I'm so sorry--so sorry!" She closed her hands tight over both his.

Some of her strong young vitality must have pa.s.sed between them and helped him, for almost immediately his tenseness relaxed a little, and he looked at her.

"You--you're not a nurse," he said. "They go around--like--like a--vault----"

She had caught his attention! That was a good deal, she felt. She forgot everything about him, except that he was some one to be comforted, and her charge. She sat down on the bed by him, still holding tight to his hands.

"No, indeed," she said, bending nearer him, her long loose hair falling forward about her resolutely-smiling young face. "Don't you remember seeing me? I never was a nurse."

"What--are you?" he asked feebly.

"I'm--why, the children call me the Liberry Teacher," she answered. It occurred to her that it would be better to talk on brightly at random than to risk speaking of his mother to him, as she must if she reminded him of their marriage. "I spend my days in a bas.e.m.e.nt, making bad little boys get so interested in the Higher Culture that they'll forget to shoot c.r.a.p and smash windows."

One of the things which had aided Phyllis to rise from desk-a.s.sistant to one of the Children's Room librarians was a very sweet and carrying voice--a voice which arrested even a child's attention, and held his interest. It held Allan now; merely the sound of it, seemingly.

"Go on--talking," he murmured. Phyllis smiled and obeyed.

"Sometimes the Higher Culture doesn't work," she said. "Yesterday one of my imps got hold of a volume of Shaw, and in half an hour his aunt marched in on me and threatened I don't know what to a library that 'taught chilren to disrespect their lawful guardeens.'"

"I remember now," said Allan. "You are the girl in the blue dress. The girl mother had me marry. I remember."

"Yes," said Phyllis soothingly, and a little apologetically. "I know.

But that--oh, please, it needn't make a bit of difference. It was only so I could see that you were looked after properly, you know. I'll never be in the way, unless you want me to do something for you."

"I don't mind," he said listlessly, as he had before.... "_Oh, this dreadful darkness, and mother dead in it somewhere!_"

"Wallis," called Phyllis swiftly, "turn up the lights!"

The man slipped the close green silk shades from the electric bulbs.

Allan shrank as if he had been hurt.

"I can't stand the glare," he cried.

"Yes, you can for a moment," she said firmly. "It's better than the ghastly green glow."

It was probably the first time Allan Harrington had been contradicted since his accident. He said nothing more for a minute, and Phyllis directed Wallis to bring a sheet of pink tissue paper from her suit-case, where she remembered it lay in the folds of some new muslin thing. Under her direction still, he wrapped the globes in it and secured it with string.

"There!" she told Allan triumphantly when Wallis was done. "See, there is no glare now; only a pretty rose-colored glow. Better than the green, isn't it?"

Allan looked at her again. "You are--kind," he said. "Mother said--you would be kind. Oh, mother--mother!" He tried uselessly to lift one arm to cover his convulsed face, and could only turn his head a little aside.

"You can go, Wallis," said Phyllis softly, with her lips only. "Be in the next room." The man stole out and shut the door softly. Phyllis herself rose and went toward the window, and busied herself in braiding up her hair. There was almost silence in the room for a few minutes.

"Thank--you," said Allan brokenly. "Will you--come back, please?"

She returned swiftly, and sat by him as she had before.

"Would you mind--holding my wrists again?" he asked. "I feel quieter, somehow, when you do--not so--lost." There was a pathetic boyishness in his tone that the sad, clear lines of his face would never prepare you for.

Phyllis took his wrists in her warm, strong hands obediently.

"Are you in pain, Allan?" she asked. "Do you mind if I call you Allan?

It's the easiest way."

He smiled at her a little, faintly. It occurred to her that perhaps the novelty of her was taking his mind a little from his own feelings.

"No--no pain. I haven't had any for a very long time now. Only this dreadful blackness dragging at my mind, a blackness the light hurts."

"_Why!_" said Phyllis to herself, being on known ground here--"why, it's nervous depression! I believe cheering-up _would_ help. I know," she said aloud; "I've had it."

"You?" he said. "But you seem so--happy!"

"I suppose I am," said Phyllis shyly. She felt a little afraid of "poor Allan" still, now that there was nothing to do for him, and they were talking together. And he had not answered her question, either; doubtless he wanted her to say "Mr. Allan" or even "Mr. Harrington!" He replied to her thought in the uncanny way invalids sometimes do.

"You said something about what we were to call each other," he murmured.

"It would be foolish, of course, not to use first names. Yours is Alice, isn't it?"

Phyllis laughed. "Oh, worse than that!" she said. "I was named out of a poetrybook, I believe--Phyllis Narcissa. But I always conceal the Narcissa."

"Phyllis. Thank you," he said wearily. ... "_Phyllis, don't let go!

Talk_ to me!" His eyes were those of a man in torment.

"What shall I talk about?" she asked soothingly, keeping the two cold, clutching hands in her warm grasp. "Shall I tell you a story? I know a great many stories by heart, and I will say them for you if you like. It was part of my work."

"Yes," he said. "Anything."

Phyllis arranged herself more comfortably on the bed, for it looked as if she had some time to stay, and began the story she knew best, because her children liked it best, Kipling's "How the Elephant Got His Trunk."

"A long, long time ago, O Best Beloved...."

Allan listened, and, she thought, at times paid attention to the words.

He almost smiled once or twice, she was nearly sure. She went straight on to another story when the first was done. Never had she worked so hard to keep the interest of any restless circle of children as she worked now, sitting up in the pink light in her crepe wrappings, with her school-girl braids hanging down over her bosom, and Allan Harrington's agonized golden-brown eyes fixed on her pitying ones.

"You must be tired," he said more connectedly and quietly when she had ended the second story. "Can't you sit up here by me, propped on the pillows? And you need a quilt or something, too."

This from an invalid who had been given nothing but himself to think of this seven years back! Phyllis's opinion of Allan went up very much. She had supposed he would be very selfish. But she made herself a bank of pillows, and arranged herself by Allan's side so that she could keep fast to his hands without any strain, something as skaters hold. She wrapped a down quilt from the foot of the bed around her mummy-fas.h.i.+on and went on to her third story. Allan's eyes, as she talked on, grew less intent--drooped. She felt the relaxation of his hands. She went monotonously on, closing her own eyes--just for a minute, as she finished her story.

VIII

"I've overslept the alarm!" was Phyllis's first thought next morning when she woke. "It must be--" Where was she? So tired, so very tired, she remembered being, and telling some one an interminable story.... She held her sleepy eyes wide open by will-power, and found that a silent but evidently going clock hung in sight. Six-thirty. Then she hadn't overslept the alarm. But ... she hadn't set any alarm. And she had been sleeping propped up in a sitting position, half on--why, it was a shoulder. And she was rolled tight in a terra-cotta down quilt. She sat up with a jerk--fortunately a noiseless one--and turned to look. Then suddenly she remembered all about it, that jumbled, excited, hard-working yesterday which had held change and death and marriage for her, and which she had ended by perching on "poor Allan Harrington's"