Part 18 (1/2)

CHAPTER XII

HICKORY HILL

Pneumonia, for all it is characterized by what is called a crisis, has no single stride to recovery, no critical moment when one who has been in peril pa.s.ses to safety. Steinmetz and Darby were determined that Mary and all the household should understand this fully. She had waylaid them in the hall as they were leaving the house together--this was seventy-two hours or so after Anthony March's call--and demanded the good news she was sure they had for her. There was a look about them and a tone in their voices that were perfectly new.

They would not be persuaded to say that her father was out of danger.

There was very little left of him. His heart had been over-strained and this abnormal effect was now, in due course, transferred to the kidneys.

All sorts of deadly sequellae were lying in ambush.

But the more discouraging they were, the more she beamed upon them. She walked along with them to the door, slipping her arm inside Doctor Darby's as she did so. ”If you only knew,” she said, ”what a wonderful thing it is to have the doctors stop being encouraging and try to frighten you, instead. Because that means you really do think he's getting well.”

”The balance of probability has swung to that side,” Steinmetz admitted in his rather affected staccato. ”At all events he's out of my beat.” His beat was the respiratory tract and his treatment the last word in vaccines and serums.

She held Darby back a little. ”Must we go on feeling,” she asked, ”that anything could happen any minute? Or--well, could Rush go back to the farm? Graham Stannard has gone to New York, I think, they're partners, you know, so he must be rather badly wanted. And this waiting is hard for him.”

Rush could go, of course, Darby a.s.sured her. ”For that matter,” he went on with a quick glance at her, ”why don't you go with him? Take your aunt along, too. For a few days, at least. You couldn't do better.”

She demurred to this on the ground that it didn't seem fair to Paula. If there was a period of Arcadian retirement down on the books for anybody, it was Paula who was ent.i.tled to it.

But Paula, as Darby pointed out, wouldn't take it in the first place, and, surprisingly, didn't need it in the second. ”She told me just now that she'd slept eighteen hours out of the last twenty-four and was ready for anything. She looked it, too.”

He understood very well her irrepressible shrug of exasperation at that and interrupted her attempt to explain it. ”It's another breed of animal altogether,” he said. ”And at that, I'd rather have had her job than yours. You're looking first rate, anyhow. But your aunt, if she isn't to break up badly, had better be carried off somewhere.” He glanced around toward Steinmetz who had withdrawn out of ear-shot. ”There are some toxins, you know,” he added, ”that are even beyond him and his microscopes.”

Mary had meant to broach this project at dinner but changed her mind and waited until Aunt Lucile had withdrawn and she and Rush were left alone over their coffee cups for a smoke.

”Poor Aunt Lucile! She has aged years in the last three weeks. And it shows more, now the nightmare is over, than it did before.”

”Is it over? Really?” he asked.

”Well, we don't need miracles any more for him. Just ordinary good care and good luck. Yes, I'd say the nightmare was over.”

”Leaving us free,” he commented, ”to go back to our own.”

”You can go back to the farm, anyhow,” she said. ”I asked Doctor Darby, especially, and he said so. He wants me to go along with you and take Aunt Lucile. Just for a week or so. Is there any sort of place with a roof over it where we could stay?”

He said, ”I guess that could be managed.” But his tone was so absent and somber that she looked at him in sharp concern.

”You didn't mean that the farm was your nightmare, did you?” she asked.

”Has something gone terribly wrong out there?”

”Things have gone just the way I suppose anybody but a fool would have known they would. Not worse than that, I guess.”

He got up then and went over to the sideboard, coming back with a decanter of old brandy and a pair of big English gla.s.ses. She declined hers as un.o.btrusively as possible, just with a word and a faint shake of the head. But it was enough to make him look at her.

”You didn't drink anything at dinner, either, did you?” he asked.

She flushed as she said, ”I don't think I'm drinking, at all, just now.”

”Being an example to anybody?” he asked suspiciously.