There was an odd look on the face of the superintendent as she watched her go—a look of amused, loving pride. She might hide it from their little world, but she could not deny it to herself, that of all the girls she had helped to train, none had come so close to her heart as this girl with her wonderful insight, her honesty, her plain speaking, and her heart of gold. A hundred times she had defied the rules of the sanitarium, had swept the superintendent’s dignity to the four winds. And she would continue to do so, and they would continue to overlook it. Such petty offenses are forgiven the Leeries the world over. And now, watching the gray, alive figure climbing into the omnibus, Miss Maxwell had no mind to resent her breach of discipline. She knew the girl had asked nothing for herself; she had gone to do something for somebody who needed it, and she would report for duty again when that was accomplished.
And two days later, accordingly, she came, a luminous, ecstatic figure that flew into the office with arms outstretched to swing the superintendent almost off her feet in joyful triumph. “It was just what I thought! Found the girl—only she is an old woman now—got the whole miserable story from her, and—and—I think—I think—Good heart alive! I think I can pull him out of the beastly old hole!”
“Meaning—? Remember, my dear, I haven’t the grain of an idea why you went, or where you went, or what the miserable story is about. Please shine your lantern this way and light up my intelligence.” Miss Maxwell was beaming.
Sheila O’Leary laughed. “I began by jumping at conclusions—same as I always do—jumped at ’phobia in Number Three. Almost came and asked to be put on the case after you told me. But he isn’t Number Three any more—he’s a little boy named Peter—a little boy, almost a baby, frightened night after night for years and years into lying still in the dark under the eaves in a little attic room, deliberately frightened by a hired girl who wanted to be free to go off gadding with her young man. I got the place and her name from Peter—coaxed it out of him—and I made her tell me the story. The father paid her extra wages to stay at night so the little boy wouldn’t be lonely and miss his mother too much, and she didn’t want him to find out she had gone. So she’d put Peter to bed and tell him that if he stirred or cried out the walls would close in on him—or the floor would swallow him up—or the ghosts would come out of the corners and eat him up or carry him off. Can’t you see him there, a little quivering heap of a boy, awake in the dark, afraid to move? Can’t you feel how he would lie and listen to all the sounds about him—the squealing mice, the creaking rafters, the wind moaning in the eaves—too terrified to go to sleep? And when he did sleep—worn out—can’t you imagine what his dreams would be like? Oh, women like that—women who could frighten little sensitive children—ought to be burned as they burned the witches!” The girl’s eyes blazed and she shook a pair of clenched fists into the air. “And can you see the rest of it? How the fear grew and grew even as the memory of the tales faded, grew into a nameless, unexplainable fear of sleep? And because he was a boy he hid it; and because he was a man he fought it; but the thing nailed him at last. He fought sleep until he lost the habit of sleep. He couldn’t get along without it, and here he is!”
“Well, what are you going to do?” The superintendent eyed her narrowly; her cheeks were as flushed as the girl’s.
A little enigmatical smile curved up the corners of the usually demure mouth. “Going to play Leerie—going to play it harder than I ever did in my life before.”
And that night as Peter turned his head wearily toward the door to greet the kindly, cumbersome Saunders, he found, to his surprise, the owner of the shining eyes come back. He felt so ridiculously glad about it that he couldn’t even trust himself to tell her so. Instead he repeated foolishly the same old thing, “Why, it’s—it’s Leerie!”
When everything was ready for the night, Sheila turned the night-light out and lowered the curtain until it was quite dark. Then she drew her chair close to the bed and slipped her hand into the lean, clenched one on the coverlid. “Don’t think of me as a girl—a nurse—a person—at all, to-night,” she said, softly. “I’m just a piece of Stevenson’s poem come to life—a lamplighter for a little boy going to sleep all alone in a farm-house attic. It’s very dark. You can hear the mice squeal and the rafters creak, if you listen, and the window’s so small the stars can’t creep in. In the daytime the attic doesn’t seem far away or very strange, but at night it’s miles—miles away from the rest of the house, and it’s full of things that may happen. That’s why I’m here with my lamp.”
Sheila stopped a moment. She could hear the man’s breath coming quick, with a catch in it—a child breathes that way when it is fighting down a cry or a sob. Then she went on: “Of course it’s a magical lamp I carry, and with the first sputter and spark it lights up and turns the attic inside out—and there we are, the little boy and I, hand in hand, running straight for the brook back of the house. The lamp burns as bright as the sun now, so it seems like day—a spring day. It isn’t the mice squealing at all that you hear, but the birds singing and the brook running. There are cowslips down by the brook, and ‘Jacks.’ Here by the big stone is a chance to build a bully good dam and sailboats made out of the shingles blown off from the barn roof. Want to stop and build it now?”
“All right.” There was almost a suppressed laugh in the voice; it certainly sounded glad. And the hand on the coverlid was as relaxed as that of a child being led somewhere it wants to go.
Sheila smiled happily in the dark: “You must get stones, then—lots and lots of them—and we’ll pile them together. There’s one stone—and two stones—and three stones. Another stone here—another here—another here—a big one there where the current runs swiftest, and little stones for the chinks.”
According to Sheila O’Leary’s best reckoning the dam was only half built when the little boy fell fast asleep over his work. And when the gray of the morning stole down the corridors of the Surgical, No. 3 was sleeping, with one arm thrown over his head as little boys sleep, and the other holding fast to the nurse on night duty.
But it takes a long while to break down an old habit and build up a new one, as it takes a long while to build a dam. No less than tons of stones must have gone to the building of Peter’s before the time came when he could drop asleep alone and unguided. In all that time neither he nor the girl ever spoke of what lay between the putting out of the night lamp and the waking fresh and rested to a welcomed day.
With sleep came speedy recovery, and Peter was the most popular convalescent in the Surgical. His laugh had suddenly grown contagious, his humor irresistible, his outlook on life so optimistically bubbling that less cheery patients turned their wheel-chairs to No. 3 for revitalizing. The chief came up with Doctor Dempsy from town, and both went away wearing the look of men who have seen miracles. Life in its fullness had come to Peter, the life he had dreamed of, as a lost crosser of the desert dreams of water. Efficient work was to be his again, and companionship, and—yes, for the first time he hoped for the third and best of life’s ingredients—he hoped for love.
And then, just as everything looked best and brightest, he was told that he no longer needed a night nurse. Sheila O’Leary was put on the case of an old lady with chronic dyspepsia. She told him herself, as she went off duty in the Surgical for the last time.
“You’ve had the best sleep of all.” She smiled at his efforts to pull himself awake. “I’ll drop in when I’m passing, to see how you’re getting on, but otherwise this is good-by and good luck.” She held out her hand.
“Why—but—Hang it all! I can’t get along without a night nurse. And if I don’t need one, why can’t you take Miss Tyler’s place in the day?”
“Orders.” Sheila announced it as an unshakable fact.
“I’ll see Miss Maxwell.”
“No use. She wouldn’t listen.”