Mary Cary | Page 5

many have relations in Yorkburg, and if I'd eaten all the fruit they sent me I'd been a tutti-frutti; but I couldn't eat it. And then one day I began to talk so queer they were frightened, and told Miss Bray, and she sent for the doctor quick. That afternoon they took me to the hospital, and the last thing I saw was little Josie White crying like her heart would break with her arms around a tree.
"Please don't die, Mary Cary, please don't die!" she kept saying over and over, and when they tried to make her go in she bawled worse than ever. I tried to wave my hand.
"I'm not going to die, I'm coming back," I said, and that's all I remember.
I knew they put me in something and drove off, and then I was in a little white bed in a big room with a lot of other little beds in it; and after that I didn't know I was living for three weeks. But I talked just the same. They told me I made speeches by the hour, and read books out loud, and recited poems that had never been printed. But when I stopped and lay like the dead, just breathing, the girls say they heard there were no hopes, and a lot of them just cried and cried. It was awful nice of them, and if they hadn't cut my hair off I would have made a real pretty corpse.
The day I first saw Miss Katherine really good she was standing by my bed, holding my wrist in one hand and her watch in another, and I thought she was an angel and I was in heaven. She was in white, and I took her little white cap for a crown, and I said:
"Are you my Mother?"
She nodded and smiled, but she didn't speak, and I asked again:
"Are you my Mother?"
"Your right-now Mother," she said, and she smiled so delicious I thought of course I was in heaven, and I spoke once more.
"Where's God?"
Then she stooped down and kissed me.
"In your heart and mine," she answered. "But you mustn't talk, not yet. Shut your eyes, and I will sing you to sleep." And I shut them. And I knew I was in heaven, for heaven isn't a place; it's a feeling, and I had it.
And that's how I met Miss Katherine.
Her father and mother are dead, just like mine. Her father was Judge Trent, and his father once owned half the houses in Yorkburg, but lost them some way, and what he didn't lose Judge Trent did after the war.
When her father died Miss Katherine wouldn't live with either of her brothers, or any of her relations, but went to Baltimore to study to be a nurse. After she graduated she didn't come back for three or four years, and she hadn't been back six months when I was taken sick. And now I sing:
"Praise God from whom that sickness flew."
Sing it inside almost all the time.
Miss Katherine don't have to be a nurse. She has a little money. I don't know how much, she never mentioning money before me; but she has some, for I heard Miss Bray and Mrs. Blamire talking one night when they thought I was asleep; and for once I didn't interrupt or let them know I was awake.
I had been punished so often for speaking when I shouldn't that this time I kept quiet, and when they were through I couldn't sleep. I was so excited I stayed awake all night. And from joy--pure joy.
I had only been back from the hospital a week, and was in the room next to Mrs. Blamire's, where the children who are sick stay, when I heard Miss Bray talking to Mrs. Blamire, and at something she said I sat up in bed. Right or wrong, I tried to hear. I did.
They were sitting in front of the fire, and Miss Bray leaned over and cracked the coals.
"Have you heard that Miss Katherine Trent is coming here as a trained nurse?" she said, and she put down the poker, and, folding her arms, began to rock.
"You don't mean it!" said Mrs. Blamire, and her little voice just cackled. "Coming here? To this place? I do declare!" And she drew her chair up closer, being a little deaf.
"That's what she's going to do." Miss Bray took off her spectacles. "The Board can't afford to pay her a salary, but she's offered to come without one, and next week she'll start in."
"Katherine Trent always was queer," she went on, still rocking with all her might. "She can get big prices as a nurse, though she doesn't have to nurse at all, having money enough to live on without working. And why she wants