True Tilda | Page 2

take 'im to--'OLMNESS--"
She had been watching, expecting some effect. But it scared her when, after a moment, the woman raised herself slowly, steadily, until half-erect from the waist. A ray of the afternoon sun fell slantwise from one of the high windows, and, crossed by it, her eyes blazed like lamps in their sockets.
"--And feed 'im on 'am!" concluded Tilda hurriedly, slipping down within her bedclothes and drawing them tight about her. For the apparition was stretching out a hand. The hand drew nearer.
"It's--it's a name came into my 'ead," quavered the child.
"Who . . . told . . . you?" The fingers of the hand had hooked themselves like a bird's claw.
"Told me yerself. I 'eard you, night before last, when you was talkin' wild. . . . If you try to do me any 'arm, I'll call the Sister."
"Holmness?"
"You said it. Strike me dead if you didn'!" Tilda fetched a grip on herself; but the hand, its fingers closing on air, drew back and dropped, as though cut off from the galvanising current. She had even presence of mind to note that the other hand--the hand on which the body propped itself, still half-erect, wore a plain ring of gold. "You talked a lot about 'Olmness--and Arthur. 'Oo's Arthur?"
But the patient had fallen back, and lay breathing hard. When she spoke again all the vibration had gone out of her voice.
"Tell them . . . Arthur . . . fetch Arthur . . . ." The words tailed off into a whisper. Still the lips moved as though speech fluttered upon them; but no speech came.
"You just tell me where he is, and maybe we'll fetch 'im," said Tilda encouragingly.
The eyes, which had been fixed on the child's, and with just that look you may note in a dog's eyes when he waits for his master's word, wandered to the table by the bedside, and grew troubled, distressful.
"Which of 'em?" asked Tilda, touching the medicine bottles and glasses there one by one.
But the patient seemed to shake her head, though with a motion scarcely perceptible.
She could talk no more.
Tilda lay back thinking.
"Sister!" she said, twenty minutes later, when the Second Nurse entered the ward. The Second Nurse had charge just now, the matron being away on her August holiday.
"Well, dear?"
"She wants something." Tilda nodded towards the next bed.
"To be sure she does, and I'm going to give it to her." The Second Nurse, composed in all her movements, bent over the medicine table.
"Garn!" retorted Tilda. "It's easy seen you wasn' brought up along with animals. Look at the eyes of her."
"Well?" The Second Nurse, after a long look at the patient, turned to Tilda again.
"You mind my tellin' you about Black Sultan?"
"Of course I do. He was the one with the bearing rein and the white martingale. Miss Montagu rode him."
"Right-O!" Tilda nodded. "Well, they used to come on next turn to mine, which was the Zambra Fambly, as before the Crowned 'eads--only there wasn' no fambly about it, nor yet no 'eads. Me bein' 'andy an' dressed up, with frizzy 'air, they stood me on a tub with a 'oop, makin' believe 'twas for Miss Montagu to jump through; but of course she didn', reely. When she came round to me she'd only smile and touch me playful under the chin; and that made the sixpenny seats say, ''Ow womanly!' or, 'Only think! able to ride like that and so fond of children!' Matter of fact, she 'ad none; and her 'usband, Mike O'Halloran, used to beat her for it sometimes, when he'd had a drop of What-killed-Aunty. He was an Irishman."
"You didn't start to tell me about Mr. O'Halloran."
"No. He wasn' your sort at all; and besides, he's dead. But about Black Sultan--Miss Montagu used to rest 'im, 'alf-way in his turn, while the clown they called Bimbo--but his real name was Ernest Stanley--as't a riddle about a policeman and a red 'errin' in a newspaper. She always rested alongside o' me; and I always stood in the same place, right over a ring-bolt where they made fast one of the stays for the trapeze; and regular as Black Sultan rested, he'd up with his off hind foot and rub the pastern-bone, very soft, on the ring-bolt. So one day I unscrewed an' sneaked it, jus' to see what he'd do. When he felt for it an' missed it, he gave me a look. That's all. An' that's what's the matter with 'er."
"But what can she be missing?" asked the Second Nurse. "She had nothing about her but an old purse, and nothing in the purse but a penny-ha'penny."
"It don't sound much, but we might try it."
"Nonsense!" said the Second Nurse; but later in the evening she brought the purse, and set it on the table