XXVI THE RESCUE

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER I

AT THE SIGN OF THE GOOD SAMARITAN

"_That it may please Thee to preserve all that travel by land or by
water . . . all sick persons, and young children._"--THE LITANY.

"I love my love with a H'aitch, because he's 'andsome--"

Tilda turned over on her right side--she could do so now without pain--
and lifting herself a little, eyed the occupant of the next bed.
The other six beds in the ward were empty.

"I 'ate 'im, because--look 'ere, I don't believe you're listenin'?"

The figure in the next bed stirred feebly; the figure of a woman,
straight and gaunt under the hospital bedclothes. A tress of her hair
had come uncoiled and looped itself across the pillow--reddish auburn
hair, streaked with grey. She had been brought in, three nights ago,
drenched, bedraggled, chattering in a high fever; a case of acute
pneumonia. Her delirium had kept Tilda--who was preternaturally sharp
for her nine years--awake and curious during the better part of two
night-watches. Thereafter, for a day and a night and half a day, the
patient had lain somnolent, breathing hard, at intervals feebly
conscious. In one of these intervals her eyes had wandered and found
the child; and since then had painfully sought her a dozen times, and
found her again and rested on her.

Tilda, meeting that look, had done her best. The code of the show-folk,
to whom she belonged, ruled that persons in trouble were to be helped.
Moreover, the long whitewashed ward, with its seven oblong windows set
high in the wall--the smell of it, the solitude, the silence--bored her
inexpressibly. She had lain here three weeks with a hurt thigh-bone
bruised, but luckily not splintered, by the kick of a performing pony.

The ward reeked of yellow soap and iodoform. She would have exchanged
these odours at the price of her soul--but souls are not vendible, and
besides she did not know she possessed one--for the familiar redolences
of naphtha and horse-dung and trodden turf. These were far away: they
had quite forsaken her, or at best floated idly across her dreams.
What held her to fortitude had been the drone and intermittent hoot of a
steam-organ many streets away. It belonged to a roundabout, and
regularly tuned up towards evening; so distant that Tilda could not
distinguish one tune from another; only the thud of its bass mingled
with the buzz of a fly on the window and with the hard breat