FullReads

The next chapter in the sequence of chapters leading to our climax is short but essential. Returning home Sunday evening, Judge Priest is informed that twice that day a strange young white lady has stopped at the house urgently requesting that immediately upon his arrival he be so good as to call on Mrs. Dallam Wybrant on a matter of pressing moment. Bidden to describe the messenger, Jeff Poindexter can only say that she ‘uz a powerful masterful-lookin’ Yankee-talkin’ lady, all dressed up lak she mout belong to some kind of a new secret s’ciety lodge, which is Jeff’s way of summing up his impressions of the first professional trained nurse ever imported, capped, caped and white shod, to our town.

It was this same professional, a cool and starchy vision, who led the way up the wide stairs of the Chickasaw Drive house, the old judge, much mystified, following close behind her. She ushered him into a bedroom, bigger and more gorgeous than any bedroom he had ever seen, and leaving him standing, hat in hand, at the bedside of her chief charge, she went out and closed the door behind her.

From the pillows there looked up at him a face that was paler than when he had last seen it, a face still drawn from pangs of agony recently endured, but a face transfigured and radiant. The Madonna look was in it now. Outside, the dusk of an August evening was thickening; and inside, the curtains were half drawn and the electrics not yet turned on, but even so, in that half light, the judge could mark the change here revealed to him. He could sense, too, that the change was more spiritual than physical, and he could feel his animosity for this woman softening into something distantly akin to sympathy. At her left side, harbored in the crook of her elbow, lay a cuddling bundle; a tiny head, all red and bare, as though offering to Judge Priest’s own bald, pinkish pate the sincere flattery of imitation, was exposed; and the tip of a very small ear, curled and crinkled like a sea shell. You take the combination of a young mother cradling her first-born within the hollow of her arm and you have the combination which has tautened the heartstrings of man since the first man child came from the womb. The old man made a silent obeisance of reverence; then waited for her to speak and expose the purpose behind this totally unexpected summons.

“Judge Priest,” she said, “I have been lying here all day hoping you would come before night. I have been wishing for you to come ever since I came out from under the ether. Thank you for coming.”

“Ma’am, I started fur here ez soon ez I got your word,” he said. “In whut way kin I be of service to you? I’m at your command.”

She slid her free hand beneath the pillow on which her head rested and brought forth a crinkled sheet of paper and held it out to him.

“Didn’t you write this?” she asked.

He took it and looked at it, and a great astonishment and a great chagrin screwed his eyes and slackened his lower jaw.

“Yes, ma’am,” he admitted, “I wrote it. But it wuzn’t meant fur you to see. It wuzn’t meant fur anybody a-tall to see–ever. And I’m wonderin’, ma’am, and waitin’ fur you to tell me how come it to reach you.”

“I’ll tell you,” she answered. “But first, before we get to that, would you mind telling me how you came to write it, and when, and all? I think I can guess. I think I have already pieced the thing together for myself. Women can’t reason much, you know; but they have intuition.” She smiled a little at this conceit. “And I want to know if my deductions and my conclusions are correct.”

“Well, ma’am,” he said, “ez I wuz sayin’, no human eye wuz to have read this here. But since you have read it, I feel it’s my bounden duty, in common justice to another, to tell you the straight of it, even though in doin’ so I’m breakin’ a solemn pledge.”