Life and Gabriella: The Story of a Woman's CourageGlasgow, Ellen Anderson Gholson
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Life and Gabriella: The Story of a Woman's Courage
Glasgow, Ellen Anderson Gholson
Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Virginia -- Fiction
"No. Morphine is the only thing. We are going to try camphorated oil,
but there is hardly a chance--not a chance." He turned to go back into
the room, then stopped, and added in the same tone of professional
stoicism: "The nurse will be here in half an hour, and I shall wait till
she comes."
When Gabriella went back to the sitting-room, Miss Polly was weeping. "I
followed you and heard what he said. Oh, Gabriella, ain't life too
awful!"
"I'll be glad when the nurse comes," answered Gabriella with impatience.
Emotionally she felt as if she had turned to stone, and she had little
inclination to explore the trite and tangled paths of Miss Polly's
philosophy.
The nurse, a stout, blond woman in spectacles, arrived on the stroke of
the half-hour, and after talking with her a few minutes, the doctor took
up his bag and came to tell Gabriella that he would return about
daybreak. "I've given instructions to the nurse, and Mr. O'Hara will sit
up in case he is needed, but there is nothing to do except keep the
patient perfectly quiet and give the hypodermics. It is too late to try
anything else."
"May I go in there?"
"Well, you can't do any good, but you may go in if you'd rather."
Then he went, as if glad of his release, and after Gabriella had
prevailed upon Miss Folly to go to bed, she changed her street dress for
a tea-gown, and threw herself on a couch before the fire in the
sitting-room. An overpowering fatigue weighed her down; the yellow
firelight had become an anodyne to her nerves; and after a few minutes
in which she thought confusedly of O'Hara and Cousin Jimmy, she let
herself fall asleep.
When she awoke a man was replenishing the fire, and as she struggled
drowsily back into consciousness, she realized that he was not Cousin
Jimmy, but O'Hara, and that he was placing the lumps of coal very softly
in the fear of awaking her.
"Hallo, there!" he exclaimed when he turned with the scuttle still in
his hand; "so you're awake, are you?"
She started up. "I've been asleep!" she exclaimed in surprise.
"You looked like a kid when I came in," he responded cheerfully, and she
reflected that even the presence of death could not shadow his jubilant
spirit. "I went back to the kitchen to make some coffee for the nurse
and myself, and I thought you might like a cup. It's first-rate coffee,
if I do say it. Two lumps and a little cream, I guess that's the way. I
rummaged in the icebox, and found a bottle of cream hidden away at the
back. That was right, wasn't it?"
A strange, an almost uncanny feeling of reminiscence, of vague yet
profound familiarity, was stealing over her. It all seemed to have
happened before, somewhere, somehow--the slow awakening to the large
dark form in the yellow firelight, O'Hara's sudden turning to look at
her, his exuberance, his sanguine magnetism, and even the cup of coffee
he made and brought to her side. She felt that it was the most natural
thing in the world to awake and find him there and to drink his coffee.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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