Tish Plays the Game (21 page)

“We could put the house in order, and so on,” she said. “I dare say Will will marry again, because the lonelier they are, the sooner they do it; but we could leave things tidy. And he would have to wait a year anyhow.”

“I should think he would,” said Emmie coldly. “And if you think I intend to have this house put in order for Will’s second wife you can think again. Anyhow, Will Hartford has never looked at another woman and never will.”

“Not even at that nurse of yours?” Tish inquired. “I was just thinking last night that I didn’t consider it exactly wise to leave these two together as much as you do. She’s a right nice-looking girl.”

“I can’t say I admire your taste!” she said. But when the nurse came back she gave her a long, hard look and then said she would take a rest so as to be ready for the doctor’s visit.

“I don’t know if Will has told you,” she remarked, “but I’m not supposed to have company. Excitement is my worst enemy.”

“Well, we’re not company, Emmie,” Tish told her. “You just go on and be as sick as you like. And don’t worry about us. Nobody with a heart would leave Will to go through the funeral by himself. And you might tell us where your grave clothes are while you’re still able to speak.”

“They’re in the lower bureau drawer,” she said in a hard voice. And we went out.

When the doctor came that day Tish waylaid him in the lower hall. And he said Emmie Hartford could get out of bed and do a day’s washing any minute she had a mind to. But he said also that if he told her so she would only shop around for another doctor, who would tell her she had something seriously wrong with her. He had not been paid for a long time, but he did not mind that as much as the way she made him lose his sleep.

“My wife says,” he stated, “that she seems to know the minute I’ve taken my trousers off. I don’t know when I’ve slept a night through. Why, if you’ll believe me, the alarm clock in the kitchen went off at two o’clock the other morning and I got up in my sleep and was out to the cemetery here before I wakened.”

Well, after he had gone we sent Emmie a nice lunch, and soon after, she began to call the dog. But Tish had fed him and shut him in a closet and once more she had to send her tray down untouched. She was in a villainous temper by that time and the nurse came down about four
P.M.
and said there was something queer about her. She just lay in bed and stared hard at her. And when she had told her she was going to put on a fresh uniform before Will got home, Emmie had called her something that sounded like a hussy.

But if Emmie’s condition was worse, Will’s was distinctly better. He ate a real meal that evening, and, instead of hurrying up to her afterward, he sat for a little while in the sitting room. We had brought along some blackberry cordial, and he sipped it with appreciation.

“I was making some right good moonshine myself a while back,” he said. “I bought a still, you know, and I gave the doctor some one night. He turned his car over on his way back into town and broke his arm. But the smell annoyed Emmie, so I had to give it up.”

Well, Miss Smith came in for a few minutes, too; she seemed glad to relax for once. But pretty soon Emmie’s bell began to ring and she had to go up. It was no time at all before she came running down the stairs with a thermometer in her hand and a sacred look on her face.

“You’d better come up at once, Mr. Hartford,” she said. “She’s got a terrible fever.”

“How high is it?” asked Will, beginning to tremble.

“About as high as it can be,” said Miss Smith, looking worried. “I’ve telephoned to the doctor, and he says to use a cold pack. But she won’t have it.”

But as usual, our dear Tish rose to the emergency at once.

“Certainly she will have it,” she said. “You crack the ice, Will, and you might mix some salt with it while you’re at it. There’s no use doing it unless we do it right. A high fever is not to be fooled with.”

Well, I don’t know when I remember such a fuss as Emmie made over that cold pack. She was strong, too, and it was all we could do to put her between sheets wrung out of ice water and then pour the ice and salt over her. She howled and screamed, but Tish worked calmly.

“You’re killing me!” she would yell. “I’m dying!”

“You will die if you don’t keep quiet,” Tish would say.

“But I’ll take cold; I’ll take pneumonia.”

“Not with a temperature like that,” Tish would assure her, and pour on more ice and salt.

They did not stop until her temperature was down to ninety-five. She would not speak to any of us by that time, but when it was all over, Tish came over to the room Aggie and I occupied together and closed the door.

“I fancy,” she said grimly, “that it will be some time before she holds the thermometer against her hot-water bottle again.”

As Tish says, the Emmies of this world never fool the women, although they always fool the men. But Emmie knew well enough that she had not fooled us for a minute. And the way she hated us after the affair of the cold pack was simply wicked. She would lie in bed and loathe the very ground we walked on, and when she found it would take at least a week to repair the car she had a convulsion and frothed at the mouth. Tish was quite certain the froth was merely lather from a cake of soap, but Will was almost out of his mind.

The strangest thing, however, was the way she had turned against Miss Smith. Possibly the fact that Tish found a picture of her in Will’s coat one day while she was repairing it in Emmie’s room had something to do with it. But both Will and Miss Smith were as puzzled as could be about it, and Miss Smith said it had been on her bureau when she went out.

Will went right down on his knees beside Emmie’s bed and swore he had always been true to her.

“There has never been any other woman in my life, Emmie,” he told her. “I’ve never had any time for that sort of thing, and you know it. Surely you can trust me!”

“I trust nobody,” said Emmie grimly. “If you haven’t the decency to wait until I am gone, which at the best is a matter of weeks, I can but lie here and await the end.”

But she couldn’t very well send the nurse away, for in ten years she had had most of the nurses thereabouts, and none of them would come back, and she knew it. She was very suspicious after that, however, and the very next day, Aggie happening to dust baking soda instead of powdered sugar over her cup custard—yes, she was eating a little by that time; she had to, or starve—she accused Miss Smith of trying to poison her.

Naturally, things were considerably strained from then on, although both Will and the dog were showing marked improvement. Will would come home to a clean house and a good dinner and smoke a couple of cigarettes up the chimney afterward. Then he would get up heavily and draw a long breath and say:

“Well, I suppose I’d better be getting on the job again,” and go slowly up the stairs.

But long after he should have been in his bed, getting the rest he needed, we could hear him reading aloud, on and on, until Emmie went to sleep.

How long this might have continued I cannot say. But one morning we missed the half of a coconut cake from the kitchen cupboard, and Tish promptly went to Will about it.

“None are so blind as those who will not see,” she said to him. “But if you think, Will Hartford, that a mouse ate that cake and then put the pan in the garbage can, I don’t.”

“But I don’t think anything of the kind, Letitia,” he protested, looking distressed. “Every now and then a tramp breaks into a house out here and eats what he can find.”

Tish gave him a terrible stare, and then she used an expression I had never before heard from her lips. “Some people are idiots,” she said, “and some are just plain fools,” and with that she stalked out of the room.

She called us together for a council of war, as she termed it, after he had gone to the train.

“Two courses are open before us,” she said. “We can leave the poor deluded imbecile to his fate, or we can take matters into our own hands. If the former, we must go; if the latter, that nurse must get out. I cannot be hampered.”

Well, after some argument we agreed to do whatever Tish suggested, although Aggie stipulated that Emmie, being her cousin by marriage, was to suffer no physical harm. Tish, on the other hand, demanded absolute freedom and no criticism. And this being satisfactorily arranged it remained only to get rid of Miss Smith.

As it happened, fate played into our hands that very morning.

The coconut cake had upset Emmie’s stomach, and the doctor sent some medicine for her. But Tish met the boy at the door, and, having instructed us to have the kettle boiling, was able to steam off the label and place it on the bottle of ipecac swiftly and neatly. Miss Smith gave her two doses before it began to act, but when it did it was thorough.

Well, Emmie was about as sick as any human could be and live for the next six hours. I suppose it was the first real sickness she had felt in ten years, and the fuss she made was dreadful. There was no use blaming a tramp for the coconut cake after it either. But what really matters is that she made them bring Will out from town. And between paroxysms she told him Miss Smith had poisoned her.

Miss Smith left that afternoon, but before she did she told Will that Emmie was as well as he was, or even better, and that the doctor knew it too. But if anyone thinks that Will believed her he does not know Will Hartford. All he did was to dismiss the doctor, too, and then come back to the kitchen and moan about the way people treated Emmie.

“Even that doctor never understood her,” he said despondently. “And I must owe him two hundred dollars or so this minute! Sometimes, Letitia, I think there is no compassion left in the world. Even the neighbors neglect her nowadays; I don’t believe there has been a bowl of calf’s-foot jelly sent to her in months.”

“Really?” said Tish. “It is surprising, when you think of the things folks might send her and don’t. Every now and then you read of somebody getting a bomb, or poisoned candy.”

He looked at her, but she went on fixing Emmie’s tray in her usual composed manner.

We had a day or two of peace after that. Tish brought Doctor Snodgrass, her own physician, out from town. And after a short talk with her, he put Emmie on a very light diet and went away again. As Tish had put a padlock on the kitchen cupboard the light diet was all Emmie got, too. She had a bowl of junket for breakfast, beef tea for lunch and in the evening she had some milk toast, and if ever I’ve seen a woman suffer she did. We did not run every time she rang her bell, either. She would jingle it for half a dozen times, and for a feeble woman the way she could fling it when nobody came was a marvel.

But, looking back, I can see that we underestimated her intelligence. She had a good bit of time, by and large, to think things out, and she was no fool, whatever else she might be. And I imagine it galled her, too, to see Will filling out and looking more cheerful every day. He was spending more time than ever downstairs and, instead of tiptoeing into the room when he came home at night, he would walk in briskly and say: “Well, how’s the old girl to-night?”

He still wandered across to the cemetery now and then, but we fancied there was more of speculation than of grief in his face when he picked the daisies off his lot. And one night, I remember, he came back and said it was a curious thing that Emmie’s mother had lived to be eighty, as frail as she had been, and that Emmie was like her in a lot of ways.

Tish eyed him.

“She certainly is,” she said. “I thought of that the night I found her in the pantry.”

And then one night there was a yell and a crash upstairs, and when we all ran up, with Will in the lead, we found Emmie stretched out on the floor, and she said she was paralyzed from the waist down!

It took the four of us to get her back into bed. She gave Tish a glance of triumph when she was finally installed and then grabbed Will’s hand and began to groan.

“It’s the last straw,” she moaned. “Until now I have not been entirely helpless, but this is too much. I am near the end, William.”

“My poor Emmie!” he wailed. “My poor afflicted girl!”

Things were not only no better, for all that we had done, but worse.

Well, Will carried on like a madman, of course. There were specialists from town and a woman to massage her legs, but not a muscle would she move. Except once, when Tish jabbed a pin into her and she jerked and yelled like a lunatic. But she had us beaten, of course, for she had worked it all out in her mind. If she had paralysis she didn’t have to have anything else, and the very first thing she asked for was a broiled beefsteak. After that she ate everything; she ate like a day laborer.

Tish tried skimping on her tray, but if she got one egg instead of two in the morning poor Will would come down looking troubled.

“We must build her up,” he would say. “She needs all the strength we can give her, Letitia.”

And that was the situation when our poor Tish finally took matters into her own hands, with results for which she has been so cruelly blamed.

I have now come to that series of mysterious events which led, with tragic inevitability, to the crisis on the night of our departure. And it may be well here to revert to the subject of spiritualism.

What with one thing and another Tish had apparently lost interest in it, hers being a mind which concentrates on one idea at a time, and having occupied itself almost entirely with Emmie since our arrival.

True, such reading aloud as she had been forced to do for Emmie while Will had laryngitis had been on such subjects, dealing largely with specters and apparitions. And both Aggie and I recalled later that she had told Emmie that the nearness of the graveyard would make such materialization comparatively simple.

But Emmie had shown more terror than interest in the subject, and finally Will had insisted that Tish abandon it for lighter and more cheerful material.

It had been seed sown in fruitful ground, however, as shall presently appear.

To go back then: Will came home very dejected one night and said he would have to go away for a business trip. Emmie was most disagreeable about it.