Read CHAPTER X of Mount Music, free online book, by E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross, on ReadCentral.com.

The “touch of pneumonia,” prophesied by Dr. Mangan, had proved to be a sufficiently emphatic one. Larry’s recovery was slow, and during his languid convalescence, he found himself becoming sincerely attached to the Big Doctor and Mrs. Mangan, and their high place in his affections was shared by the nurse provided by Miss Coppinger. The bond of a common faith was one that, at this stage of his development, had but little appeal to Larry, but he was, at all events, spared any possibility of suffering from the feelings of sub-friction, if not of antagonism, that inevitably stirred in his aunt’s breast, if she found herself brought into relation closer than that of employer and employed with those of the older creed.

His sense of beauty, now beginning to acquire consciousness, and sorely afflicted by the decorative scheme that had been adopted in Barty’s bedroom, found solace in the faces of these two women. Even the lazy consideration of the contrast between their types, was a comfort to Larry, and distracted his mind from the wall-paper (which suggested the contents of Dr. Mangan’s surgery, rhubarb, and mustard-leaves predominating), and from Barty’s taste in art, which in its sacred and profane aspects was alike deplorable.

Nurse Brennan, slight and fair, with the clearest of blue eyes, and a Dresden china complexion Larry was already artist enough to study and adore the shadow of her white coif, with its subtle, reflected lights, on her pink, rose-leaf cheek and Mrs. Mangan, just a little over-blown, but heavily, darkly handsome, with deep-lidded shadowy eyes, and as Master Coppinger pleased himself by discovering a slight suggestion of a luxurious Chesterfield sofa, upholstered in rich cream velvet. When he was getting better, and the rigours of the sick room were relaxing, these two provided him with interest and entertainment of which they were delightfully unaware.

“Well, and what will I give him for his dinner to-day, Norrse?” (impossible to persuade the English alphabet to disclose Mrs. Mangan’s pronunciation of this word) his hostess would say, drifting largely into Larry’s room, and seating herself on the side of his bed.

“Don’t be making an invalid of him at all, Mrs. Mangan!” Nurse Brennan would rejoin briskly; “I’m just telling him I’d be sorry to get a thump from that old wrist of his, he and the Doctor think so much about! And he hasn’t as much as a point of temperature those three days!”

“Oh, I say, Nurse!” Larry would protest, “then why won’t you let me get up?”

“Be quite now” (in Ireland the “e” in “quiet” is not infrequently thus transposed) “and don’t be bothering me, like a good child!” Nurse would reply, with a sidelong flash of her charming eyes, a recognition of Larry’s age and sex that atoned for the opprobrious epithet.

“Would he like a bit of fish now? I’m going down the town, and I might meet one of the women in from Broadhaven.” Thus Mrs. Mangan, coaxingly.

“Oh, Mrs. Mangan, please don’t bother!” says Larry.

“Ah, no bother at all! Sure I was going down anyway to the chapel to get a sup of holy water. I declare the house is bone dry! Not a drop in it!”

After dreary winter mornings spent in reading, by the light of a misplaced window, or age-long afternoons, drowsed through in that torpor, mental as well as physical, that overwhelms the victim of a prolonged sojourn in bed, Larry used to find himself looking forward to the conversations between Nurse Brennan and Mrs. Mangan that arose at tea-time, and followed, stimulated by the early darkness of January, in the firelight; the southern voices rising and falling like the flickering flames, becoming soon self-engrossed, and forgetful of the silent listener in the bed. Sometimes sleep would lap him in slow, stealthy peace, and the voices would die away, or come intermittently, as the sound of a band marching through a town fades and recurs at the end of a street. But without being aware of it, he was absorbing knowledge, learning a new point of view, breathing a new atmosphere that was to influence him more deeply than he could have any conception was possible.

One evening the talk fell on the congenial topic of illness, doctors and patients, nurses and nuns, all spinning in the many-coloured whirlpool of talk, now one and now another cresting the changing wave. The fact that Larry was of their own religion, counterbalanced his belonging to an alien class, and if their consciences sometimes hinted at a lack of discretion, they quieted them with the assurance that “the poor child was asleep!”

“Ah, the nuns are wonderful!” said Mrs. Mangan, languishingly. “Look how lovely they have the Workhouse Infirmary! I was taking some flowers to Reverend Mother, and she was telling me what a beautiful death old Catherine Macsweeny made. Reverend Mother rained tears when she told me.”

Nurse Brennan sniffed.

“Reverend Mother’s a sweet woman, and the nuns are very attentive when a person’d be dying, but indeed Mrs. Mangan, if you ask me, I’d say ’twas the only time they were much use to their patients! Up at that infirmary what have patients at night to look after them only an old inmate, and she ‘wanting’ maybe!”

Larry began to giggle, and was moved to try his wit.

“Nurse! What’s the difference between a stale mate and an old inmate? And what does it want?”

“It wants the very same as yourself brains!” returned Nurse, swiftly. “Now may be!” She wagged her head at him triumphantly, turning aside to hide the smile of victory, and Larry thought how lovely was her profile, as the firelight etched it in incandescent lines on the smoky background.

“Well, indeed, the Poor have a deal to put up with!” said Mrs. Mangan, lazily, leaning back in her basket-chair, with her big grey cat purring like an aeroplane engine on her knee. “The Doctor says no one but himself knows the way he’s dragged all over the country, patching up after some of them young fellows that get dispensaries before they’re fit to doctor the cat!”

The reformer, that underlay the artist in Larry, awoke.

“But, Mrs. Mangan,” he said, hotly, sitting up in bed, and glaring into the gloom at Mrs. Mangan’s half-seen face, “why do they give dispensaries to chaps that can’t doctor a cat?”

“Because their fathers can spend four or five hundred pounds to buy votes!” returned Mrs. Mangan, laughing at him. “Is that news to you? Lie down child, and don’t be looking at me like that! I haven’t a vote to sell!”

Larry subsided with vague splutterings. Nurse came to his bedside and smoothed the clothes.

“Listen to me now,” she said impressively, “and I’ll tell you something to make you angry, if you like!”

She leaned against the foot of the bed, with her hands in the pockets of her apron, looking down at him. “I was in charge of th’ infirmary at Mellifont one time, and late one evening a young farm-boy was brought in to me with a dislocated foot and a ’Pott’s Fracture’

“In the name o’ God, what’s that?” enquired Mrs. Mangan.

“Fracture of the fibula, but the case I’m speaking of had the two bones broken at the ankle,” explained Nurse Brennan, in her most professional manner; “sure I thought anyone’d know that! And I can tell you,” she leaned towards Larry, striking the palm of her left hand with her little clenched right fist, as if to hammer the words into him, “I can assure you, that as bad as you thought you were, you don’t know what pain is beside what that boy suffered! Well, I sent for the doctor a young brat of a fella that hadn’t but just left college. ‘He’ll want an anæsthetic,’ says he, ‘I’ll send down for Doctor ’ (I’ll not tell you his name Smith, I’ll call him!) ‘Do you give him some brandy, nurse,’ says he, ’Dr. Smith’ll be here soon.’ Sure enough he was, and glad I was to see him, for the patient was suffering greatly, and the leg swelling every minyute. It was a long ward he was in, and no one at all in it but himself. At the far end there was a table and a lamp, and down at the table me gentlemen sat, and commenced to talk.”

Nurse Brennan paused, and Mrs. Mangan gave the fire a well-directed poke, that set the flames branching upwards. The tale was resumed, in those cool and equable tones that express a more perfected indignation than any heat or haste could convey.

“Well, that was nine o’clock, and they talked there for two hours, and I giving the patient brandy, and expecting every minyute he’d collapse. And what do you suppose they were talking about? Fighting they were! Disputing which of them would perform the operation, and which would administer the chloroform!”

Mrs. Mangan laughed lightly, and said: “I wouldn’t at all doubt it!”

“Impossible!” exclaimed Larry.

“Not a bit impossible!” said Nurse Brennan, “and how d’ye think they settled it in the end? They arranged one of them would begin th’ operation and go on for five minutes, and then he should stop and give the anæsthetic, and the other would go on with the leg! Oh, it’s the case, I assure you! It was twelve o’clock at night before they were done!”

She paused, laughing a little at the hot questions with which Larry assailed her, but he could see the unshed tears gleaming in her eyes. “I was summoned to a private case next day; I don’t know what happened to the unfortunate poor creature of a patient.”

“A stiff leg he has, I’ll be bound!” said Mrs. Mangan.

Larry lay silent. He saw it all. The long, dark ward, the white angel figure (he thought, romantically) bending over the tortured creature on the bed, and, far away, the pool of yellow light and in it those two he sought in vain for adjectives to express what he thought of Dr. I’ll-not-tell-you-his-name, and his young colleague.