Marcella Part 64

Marcella laughed.

"Clever Benny," she said, patting his head; "but why aren't you at school, sir?"

Benjamin grinned.

"'Ow d'yer s'pose my ma's goin' to git along without me to do for 'er and the babby?" he replied slily.

"Well, Benny, you'll have the Board officer down on you."

At this the urchin laughed out.

"Why, 'e wor here last week! Ee can't be troublin' 'isself about this 'ere bloomin' street _ev_ery day in the week."

There was a sharp knock at the door.

"The doctor," she said, as her face dismissed the frolic brightness which had stolen upon it for a moment. "Run away, Benny."

Benny opened the door, looked the doctor coolly up and down, and then withdrew to the landing, where his sisters were waiting to play with him.

The doctor, a tall man of thirty, with a red, blurred face and a fair moustache, walked in hurriedly, and stared at the nurse standing by the fire.

"You come from the St. Martin's a.s.sociation?"

Marcella stiffly replied. He took her temperature-chart from her hand and asked her some questions about the night, staring at her from time to time with eyes that displeased her. Presently she came to an account of the condition in which she had found her patient. The edge on the words, for all their professional quiet, was unmistakable. She saw him flush.

He moved towards the bed, and she went with him. The woman moaned as he approached her. He set about his business with hands that shook.

Marcella decided at once that he was not sober, and watched his proceedings with increasing disgust and amazement. Presently she could bear it no longer.

"I think," she said, touching his arm, "that you had better leave it to me--and--go away!"

He drew himself up with a start which sent the things he held flying, and faced her fiercely.

"What do you mean?" he said, "don't you know your place?"

The girl was very white, but her eyes were scornfully steady.

"Yes--I know my place!"

Then with a composure as fearless as it was scathing she said what she had to say. She knew--and he could not deny--that he had endangered his patient's life. She pointed out that he was in a fair way to endanger it again. Every word she said lay absolutely within her sphere as a nurse.

His cloudy brain cleared under the stress of it.

Then his eyes flamed, his cheeks became purple, and Marcella thought for an instant he would have struck her. Finally he turned down his s.h.i.+rt-cuffs and walked away.

"You understand," he said thickly, turning upon her, with his hat in his hand, "that I shall not attend this case again till your a.s.sociation can send me a nurse that will do as she is told without insolence to the doctor. I shall now write a report to your superintendent."

"As you please," said Marcella, quietly. And she went to the door and opened it.

He pa.s.sed her sneering:

"A precious superior lot you lady-nurses think yourselves, I dare say.

I'd sooner have one old gamp than the whole boiling of you!"

Marcella eyed him sternly, her nostrils tightening. "Will you go?" she said.

He gave her a furious glance, and plunged down the stairs outside, breathing threats.

Marcella put her hand to her head a moment, and drew a long breath.

There was a certain piteousness in the action, a consciousness of youth and strain.

Then she saw that the landing and the stairs above were beginning to fill with dark-haired Jewesses, eagerly peering and talking. In another minute or two she would be besieged by them. She called sharply, "Benny!"

Instantly Benny appeared from the landing above, elbowing the Jewesses to right and left.

"What is it you want, Nuss? No, she don't want none o' _you_--_there_!"

And Benjamin darted into the room, and would have slammed the door in all their faces, but that Marcella said to him--

"Let in Mrs. Levi, please."

The kind neighbour, who had been taking care of the children, was admitted, and then the key was turned. Marcella scribbled a line on a half-sheet of paper, and, with careful directions, despatched Benny with it.

"I have sent for a new doctor," she explained, still frowning and white, to Mrs. Levi. "That one was not fit."

The woman's olive-skinned face lightened all over. "Thanks to the Lord!"

she said, throwing up her hands. "But how in the world did you do 't, miss? There isn't a single soul in this house that doesn't go all of a tremble at the sight of 'im. Yet all the women has 'im when they're ill--bound to. They thinks he must be clever, 'cos he's such a brute. I do believe sometimes it's that. He _is_ a brute!"

Marcella was bending over her patient, trying so far as she could to set her straight and comfortable again. But the woman had begun to mutter once more words in a strange dialect that Marcella did not understand, and could no longer be kept still. The temperature was rising again, and another fit of delirium was imminent. Marcella could only hope that she and Mrs. Levi between them would be able to hold her till the doctor came. When she had done all that was in her power, she sat beside the poor tossing creature, controlling and calming her as best she could, while Mrs. Levi poured into her shrinking ear the story of the woman's illness and of Dr. Blank's conduct of it. Marcella's feeling, as she listened, was made up of that old agony of rage and pity! The sufferings of the poor, _because_ they were poor--these things often, still, darkened earth and heaven for her. That wretch would have been quite capable, no doubt, of conducting himself decently and even competently, if he had been called to some supposed lady in one of the well-to-do squares which made the centre of this poor and crowded district.

"Hullo, nurse!" said a cheery voice; "you seem to have got a bad case."

The sound was as music in Marcella's ears. The woman she held was fast becoming unmanageable--had just shrieked, first for "poison," then for a "knife," to kill herself with, and could hardly be prevented by the combined strength of her nurse and Mrs. Levi, now from throwing herself madly out of bed, and now from tearing out her black hair in handfuls.

The doctor--a young Scotchman with spectacles, and stubbly red beard--came quickly up to the bed, asked Marcella a few short questions, shrugged his shoulders over her dry report of Dr. Blank's proceedings, then took out a black case from his pocket, and put his morphia syringe together.

For a long time no result whatever could be obtained by any treatment.

The husband was sent for, and came trembling, imploring doctor and nurse, in the intervals of his wife's paroxysms, not to leave him alone.

Marcella, absorbed in the tragic horror of the case, took no note of the pa.s.sage of time. Everything that the doctor suggested she carried out with a deftness, a tenderness, a power of mind, which keenly affected his professional sense. Once, the poor mother, left unguarded for an instant, struck out with a wild right hand. The blow caught Marcella on the cheek, and she drew back with a slight involuntary cry.

"You are hurt," said Dr. Angus, running up to her.

"No, no," she said, smiling through the tears that the shock had called into her eyes, and putting him rather impatiently aside; "it is nothing.

You said you wanted some fresh ice."

And she went into the back room to get it.

The doctor stood with his hands in his pockets, studying the patient.

"You will have to send her to the infirmary," he said to the husband; "there is nothing else for it."