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The Nurse went up to her ward, and put a screen around Claribel, and, with all her woman's art, tidied the immaculate white bed and loosened the uncompromising yellow braids, so that the soft hair fell across Claribel's bloodless forehead and softened the defiance in her blue eyes. She brought the pink hyacinth in its pot, too, and placed it on the bedside table.
It was broken by a sudden thundering of the griffin's head against the great front door. The girls' hearts seemed to leap up in their throats. They had not heard that sound since the June day of Mrs. Gorham's visit. "Tom!" ejaculated Wilma, in a terrified whisper, looking wildly into Claribel's startled eyes. "Oh, we can't let him in!
First of all, she opened a cupboard and took out a baby dress of lace and insertion, and everybody knows that such a dress is used only when a hospital infant is baptised, and she clothed Claribel's baby in linen and fine raiment, and because they are very, very red when they are so new, she dusted it with a bit of talcum to break the shock, as you may say.
The gift of the fairy, which had operated so much to Claribel's disadvantage in the opinion of her lover, secured her from sharing the keen mortification of her cousin at his loss. Some time after this had happened, an invitation was sent to the inhabitants of the castle to an entertainment, which was to consist of a trial of skill in archery in the morning, and a ball in the evening.
She went into the little room where eleven miracles lay in eleven cribs, and, although they all looked exactly alike, she selected Claribel's without hesitation, and carried it to the mysterious room down the hall which was no longer a torture-chamber, but a resplendently white place, all glass and tile and sunlight, and where she did certain things that are not prescribed in the hospital rules.
"You know that the designing alone would be worth four times that sum, madame," she said, quietly. "If that is the best you can do, we will not discuss the subject farther." Madame hastily retracted then. She knew it would never do to let this opportunity slip into the hands of a rival, and the names of Claribel's references were too prominent to overlook.
Gorham brought with her a breath from the outside world for which they longed. She entertained them with stories of her travels, of her daughter's experiences at boarding-school and her son Tom's escapades at college. She praised Claribel's embroidery and Wilma's little water-colour sketches, and she left without discovering all the ravages time had wrought in beautiful old Marchmont.
What was the good of going to school and coming back with Claribel's songs and Blumenthal's Deux Anges lying on the top of your box, with a social education, moreover, so advanced that the dancing mistress had invariably made you waltz alone round the room for the edification and instruction of the assembled company, if all you had to do at home was to dust and wash up, and die with envy of girls with reprobate fathers?
At first the woman named a salary so low that she would not have dared propose it, had she not thought that necessity had driven the girl to such a step. She was used to beating down her employees to absurdly low wages. Then it was that the pride of all her ancestors seemed to blaze out of Claribel's eyes, and she drew herself up haughtily.
So she rustled out to the baby-room, where the new baby had never batted an eye since her bath and was lying on her back with both fists clenched on her breast, and she did something that no trained nurse is ever supposed to do. She lifted the baby, asleep and all, and carried her to her mother. But Claribel's face only darkened when she saw her.
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