Chapter X: The Velvet Prayer-Book and Its Contents

After the doctor had gone, Jane Kelly was putting fresh straw into the bed on which that young mother had died only a few hours before. She found a prayer-book bound in purple velvet, such as fanciful young girls carry to church, hid away in the loose straw she was throwing out. Jane instantly seized upon the book and began searching it leaf by leaf, in hopes of finding some secret hoard of money concealed in its pages. She was disappointed in this, but she found a sealed letter which keenly excited her curiosity, for it was directed to a name that she recognized. A slip of paper was folded around this letter, on which was written a wild and blotted request that it should be forwarded at once, whatever the writer’s fate may be. The name on this slip of paper was that which had been placed on the wooden tablet at the head of that young mother’s cot. More than this, while searching further among the blank leaves, the woman found a name written that startled her a little, and suggested a train of thought which held her inactive for some minutes.

This name belonged to a lady, well known and of high standing in all the charitable circles of the city. Jane Kelly had seen it many a time, heading committees for calico balls, charity concerts, and all those religious and philanthropic devices by which money is lured into mercenary or merciful channels, as the case may be, by a union of fashion and philanthropy.

Jane Kelly found this lady’s name in a blank leaf of the prayer-book, which from its date must have been a Christmas present. Mrs. Cordelia Judson to ——. The name written here was not that printed on the wooden tablet, but that did not disturb the train of Kelly’s conjectures; nothing was more likely than that the real name should be in the book, and a false one given to the tablet.

These shrewd calculations occupied the woman all the time she was filling the bed. When the last wisp of straw was crowded into the tick, she sat down upon it, carefully opened the imperfectly sealed letter, and read it from beginning to end. When she folded it again, it was slowly, and that hard face had softened with a touch of womanly pity.

“Yes, it shall go to him,” she muttered, folding the slip of paper around the letter; “such men deserve stabbing to the heart. It shall go, but I must have a copy if I have to sit up till morning to write it. If that lady is what I think, it will bring in money. Oh, yes! I will keep a copy of this letter; poor thing! poor thing! I wish it had been the other. After all, shall I give the copy to that old Frenchwoman? No, no; she haggles;—I will take it to the other.” After this, Kelly gave herself up to such deep thought that she remained full half an hour sitting upon that straw bed, gathering up her knees with both hands, and ruminating on the things she had found; over and over again, she counted the probabilities of making this discovery valuable to herself. How came that book there, hid away in the straw bed of a hospital? Had Mrs. Judson given it to the girl, or had she stolen it from the person to whom it had been presented by this proud lady? It was no uncommon thing for the inmates of that institution to have prayer-books given by ladies as lofty in position as Mrs. Judson, but those books were cheap things from the Bible-House, printed on paltry paper, and bound in spotted leather that made the fingers shrink from touching it.

Plenty of such poverty-stricken books were lying about in the wards all the time; but this was a very different affair. The book was almost new, the velvet fresh and bright as the sunny side of a plum. The clasp seemed to be of pure gold, and the paper was thick, smooth, and of a rich creamy white that met the touch like satin. These ladies did not write their names, and call the paupers “dear friends” when they distributed their pious offerings to the inmates of the hospital.

Such was the burden of Jane Kelly’s thoughts, as she sat with her eyes on the ground, and her feet half buried in the refuse straw just emptied from the bed.

She got up at last, folded the book and letter in an old pocket-handkerchief, and went to work again, still thoughtful, and revolving something in her mind.

“If the girl stole it,” she said, talking to herself, as she sometimes did when no one was by to listen,—“if she stole it, why, then, the lady will be glad to get it back again, and no harm done, or good, either, except it may be a dollar-bill or so on my side of the reckoning. If it really belonged to the poor creature, and, after all, she looked and talked like a lady, this rich madam must have known her well, and there is something at the bottom of it all which may bring lots of dollar-bills. At any rate, there’s no harm in trying. That letter gives me courage. I’ll try it, anyhow.”

Jane Kelly now fell to her work with vigor, and directly where the death-couch of that young girl had been, a cot, piled high and evened down under a coarse white counterpane, stood ghostly and cold, like an enormous grave just sheeted with snow; and all the ward took that air of chill cleanliness which, in a large room full of human beings, is necessary and admirable, but bleak as a desert.

It was a little remarkable that Jane was constantly going to and fro from the spot where she happened to be at work to Mrs. Dillon’s bed; that she sometimes felt her pulse, and once or twice, during the morning, took up young Ireland, and fed him from a bottle with her own hands.

It was also singular that she never went near the younger woman, and seemed shy of even looking at her. People are sometimes seized with repulsion against persons about whom they have meditated great injury. Was this the case with Jane Kelly?

It was deep in the day before Mary Margaret was aroused; but the lusty cries of her child at last broke the leaden sleep that was upon her, and she sat up in bed, dazed and bewildered, wondering what it was that made her eyes so heavy, and had left that throbbing pain in her temples.

She took up the child, with a dreary sense of weight, and once or twice almost dropped him from her arms from the heavy dulness that would not be shaken off.

“I’ve been draimin’ sure,” she said, looking about for the child. “Arrah, here he is, wide-awake, wid his fist doubled under his cheek, and his eyes smothered wid the tears, bad luck to me!”

All at once she seemed to remember something; for, dropping the child on the bed, she got off at the side, and, with her limbs trembling and her head reeling, went to the bed occupied by Catharine Lacy and the infant that had been lent to her. When she saw Catharine lying there, with a smile on her lips, and the babe sound asleep in her arms, the good woman gave a little shout, and fell down on her knees by the cot, exclaiming, “Glory to God! there she is to the fore; I’ve been draiming. Glory! amin!”

“What is it—what makes you so glad?” said a sweet voice from the bed. “Oh, Mrs. Dillon, I have been sleeping so sweetly.”

Mary Margaret did not seem to hear this. The sting of some sharp anxiety had aroused her for a moment; but when that was removed, the heavy, slumberous feeling came back. Lifting herself from the bed, she moved toward her own cot, swaying heavily to and fro as she walked; but all the while she was muttering thanksgiving for some great mercy received or danger escaped. Directly she reached her own bed, Mary Margaret fell asleep again, taking care of her child dreamily, and with her eyes now and then unclosing when he grew absolutely impatient.

It was the sudden appearance of Jane Kelly that thoroughly aroused her. Had a rattlesnake forced itself across her bed, it is doubtful if she would have shrunk from it more nervously. The sight of that face brought all the transactions of the night before to her mind, and she called out, “Don’t come near me! Don’t touch me!”

“Who wants to touch you, woman, after a drunken sleep like that? Be quiet now, or I’ll have you turned out of the hospital.”

Mary Margaret gazed on the woman in speechless astonishment. “Drunken!—me! me!”

Here the poor woman burst into a passion of angry, fierce crying, for the insult of that insinuation stung her like a wasp.

“Yes, woman, you, you! The doctor saw you; all the women in the ward saw you, lying there dead in for it. If it hadn’t been for me, you would have overlaid that cub of yours and smothered him. Don’t look at me in that way. You ought to hide your head.”

Mary Margaret’s eyes were wide open now. She charged with drinking—she, who never touched a drop year in and year out, not even when Dillon brought his friends to their home, or took her out to a wake. The charge was abominable.

“Jane Kelly,” she said, rubbing the tears from her eyes; “you know that there isn’t a word of truth in what you say. It wasn’t brandy, but something worse, ten thousand times worse, that I took.”

“And what was that?” inquired Jane, placing her arms akimbo and taking altogether a fighting attitude, which rather terrified Mary Margaret, for she was not strong enough for a combat, had any idea of the kind been in her thought.

“I don’t know what it was, but there was morphine in it and it put me into a sleep that was like dying.”

Jane Kelly laughed violently, holding her sides and appealing to the women around her with repeated nods of the head.

“Morphine, was it? ha! ha! and where did you get it? there now, where did you get it?”

“I got it from the vial you put by that young crathur there, and told me to give her a taespoonful every once in a while. White it was, and I have the taste of it in my mouth this minute.”

Jane Kelly darted down to the young woman’s bed and brought back a vial half full of some red liquid.

“White, is it?” she cried, holding the vial up to the general gaze, “and morphine? ha! ha!—just a taste of innocent paregoric, that wouldn’t hurt the baby in her arms, if she fed it to him by the teaspoonful. Why there isn’t an hour’s sleep in the whole of it. No, no, I’ll show you where she got her morphine.”

Here Jane made a dive under Mrs. Dillon’s bed, and came forth with a junk bottle, which she shook triumphantly in sight of all the curious eyes drawn upon her by this discussion. “Empty!” she exclaimed, “not a drop left. This woman drinks morphine by the bottleful! ha-ha! by the bottleful!”

Here the young patient sat up in her bed and gazed upon the scene with disturbed eyes,—Jane Kelly with the bottle in her hand and a sneering laugh on her lips, Mrs. Dillon sitting on the side of her bed, crimson with anger, her face wet with tears, and her cap-borders drooping like dahlias after a two days’ rain; half the patients in the ward leaning upon their elbows and listening with eager curiosity. This was what the young creature saw.

“No, no,” she cried, and her sweet voice ran through the discord like the chime of a silver bell stealing through a clash of iron. “She did drink something from the vial; I saw her. I know it was from the vial, and I know that it was white; you took that vial away, Kelly, and put the other in its place; my eyes were almost shut, but I saw you.”

Mary Margaret clasped her hands in an outbreak of gratitude, and holding them up called out,—“Do ye hear that now? Hasn’t the holy Virgin sent down one of her angels to confound yer wid yer own lies, Jane Kelly. Now just put that bottle away and niver show the likes again—taking away a respectable married woman’s character. Put it away, put it away, an’ maybe the holy Mother may give me grace ter forgive yez entirely, but don’t let the old mon know what yez been at, or he’d break ivery bone in yer body and think it a pleasure.”

With this, Mary Margaret, satisfied that her vindication was complete, curled herself into the bed, took young Ireland to her motherly bosom, and told the rest of her griefs to him in sobs and whispers, which he was far too busy to care much about—the spalpeen!

The exertion the young patient had made, left her panting for breath, while drops of weakness gathered upon her forehead like rain upon a lily.

Jane Kelly meantime left the ward, swinging the empty bottle by the neck.