This was the first time she had ever been in room--with its poverty, its
bareness. She must have cast about it a look of delicate inquiry--as a woman
is apt to do in a singleman's abode; for when she came again, in addition to
pieces of soft old linen for bandages brought fresh cool fragrant
sheets--the work of her own looms; a better pillow with a pillow-case on it
that was delicious to his cheek; for he had his weakness about clean, white
linen. She put a curtain over the pitiless window. He saw a wild rose in a
glass beside his Testament. He discovered moccasin slippers beside his bed.
"And here," she had said just before leaving, with her hand on a pile of
things and with an embarrassed laugh--keeping her face turned away--"here
are some towels."
Under the towels he found two night shirts--new ones.
When she was gone, he lay thinking of her again.
He had gratefully slipped on one of the shirts. He was feeling the new sense
of luxury that is imparted by a bed enriched with snow-white, sweet-smelling
pillows and sheets. The curtain over his window strained into his room a
light shadowy, restful. The flower on his table,--the transforming touch in
his room--her noble brooding tenderness--everything went into his gratitude,
his remembrance of her. But all this--he argued with a sudden taste for fine
discrimination--had not been done out of mere anxiety for his life: it was
not the barren solicitude of a nurse but the deliberate, luxurious regard of
a mother for his comfort: no doubt it represented the ungovernable overflow
of the maternal, long pent-up in her ungratified. And by this route he came
at last to a thought of her that novel for him--the pitying recollection of
her childlessness.
"What a mother she would have been!" he said rebelliously. "The mother of
sons who would have become great through her--and greater through the memory
of her after she was gone."
When she came again, seeing him out of danger and seeing him comfortable,
she seated herself beside his table and opened her work."It isn't good for
you to talk much," she soon said reprovingly, "and I have to work--and to
think."
And so he lay watching her--watching her beautiful fingers which never
seemed to rest in life--watching her quiet brow with its ripple of lustrous
hair forever suggesting to him how her lovely neck and shoulders would be
buried by it if its long light waves were but loosened. To have a woman
sitting by his table with her sewing--it turned his room into something
vaguely dreamed of heretofore: a home. She finished a sock for Major
Falconer and began on one of his shirts. He counted the stitches as they
went into a sleeve. They made him angry. And her face!--over it had come a
look of settled weariness; for perhaps if there is ever a time when a woman
forgets and the inward sorrow steals outward to the surface as an unwatched
shadow along a wall, it is when she sews.