A MAN AND A MAID AND ANOTHER MAN
“I’m just as glad Doris wasn’t here to listen to this,” commented Miss
Gregg, breaking the awed pause which followed Dr. Lawton’s recital.
“For a perfectly innocent and kindly girl she seems to have stirred up
no end of mischief. After the manner of perfectly innocent and kindly
girls. She’d be the first to grieve over it, of course. But a billion
Grief-Power never yet had the dynamic force to lift one ounce of any
bad situation one inch in one century.”
“Well,” said Lawton, reaching for his rusty black hat and his rustier
black bag, “I’ve wasted too much time already, gabbling here. I must
get to my miserable round of calls unless I want my patients to get
well before I arrive. Good-by. Clive will be all right now. He has had
the absolute rest he needed. He’ll be as good as new in another week or
so. It’s lucky all this has happened before Oz had a chance to squander
more than about $50,000 of the lad’s fortune. He’ll have enough left
to live on in comfort. To marry on, too.”
Off plodded the old gentleman, leaving Thaxton Vail scowling unhappily
after him.
“To marry on,” muttered Vail under his breath, not knowing he spoke
aloud.
“Yes,” chimed in Miss Gregg brightly. “Enough to marry on. Almost
enough to be engaged on. He’s a lucky man!”
“He is,” agreed Vail dully. “And a mighty white man, too. One of the
very best.”
“Yes,” assented Miss Gregg with fervor, smiling maliciously on her
victim. “One of the very best. Doris thinks so too.”
“I know she does,” sighed Vail.
He got up abruptly to leave the room. But Miss Gregg would not have it
so.
“Thax,” she said, “you remember that would-be smart thing Willis Chase
said, the evening of the burglary? He said that when a policeman blows
out his brains and survives they make him a detective. Well, here’s
something a hundred times truer: When Providence wishes to extract
a man’s few brains more or less painlessly and to make him several
thousand degrees worse than useless He makes him fall in love. That is
not an epigram. It is better. It’s a truth.... Thax, do you realize
you’ve been making my little girl very unhappy indeed?”
“_I?_” blithered Vail. “Making Doris unhappy? Why, Miss Gregg, I--!”
“Oh, don’t apologize. She enjoys it. A girl in love, without being
divinely unhappy, would feel she was defrauded of Heaven’s best gift.
Doris--”
“But I don’t understand!” protested the miserable Vail. “How on earth
have I made--?”
“Principally by being mooncalfishly and objectionably in love with
her,” said Miss Gregg, “and not taking the trouble to tell her so.”
“But how can I? In the first place, Clive loves her. He’s never loved
any one else. (Neither have I for that matter. I got into the habit
when I was a boy, and I can’t break it.) He’s lying sick and helpless
here under my roof. It wouldn’t be playing the game to--”
“Love is no more a ‘game’ than a train wreck is!” scoffed Miss Gregg.
“If you weren’t a lover, and therefore a moron, you’d know that. It--”
“Besides,” he blurted despairingly, “what would be the use? She loves
him. I can tell she does. Why, you just said yourself she--”
“I said she agrees with you in thinking he is ‘one of the very best,’”
corrected Miss Gregg impatiently. “And it’s true. But when you get to
my age you’ll know no woman ever loved a man because he was good or
even because he was ‘best.’ She may love him for his taste in ties or
because his hair grows prettily at the back of his neck or because his
voice has thrilly little organ notes in it. Or she may love him for no
visible reason at all. But you can take my word she won’t love him for
his goodness. She’ll only respect him for it. And if I were a man in
love I’d hate to have my sweetheart respect me.”
Vail was not listening. Instead he was staring moodily out of the
window. Turning in at the gates and progressing purringly up the drive
was an electric runabout. Doris Lane was its sole occupant. At sight of
her now, as always of late, Thaxton was aware of a queer little pain at
his heart.
“Thax,” said Miss Gregg, bringing the torture to an abrupt end, “last
evening Clive Creede asked Doris to marry him.”
Vail did not answer. But between him and the swiftly advancing runabout
sprang an annoying mist.
Miss Gregg surveyed his averted face as best she might. Then her tight
old lips softened.
“Doris was very nice to him, of course,” she added. “But she told
him she couldn’t marry him. She said she was in love with some one
else--that she had always been in love with this stupid some one
else.... Better go and help her out of the car, Thax.”
But with a tempestuous rush and with the glow of all the summer winds
in his face Thaxton Vail already had gone.
Miss Gregg looked after him, her hard old eyes curiously soft, her thin
lips moving. Then ashamed of her unwonted weakness, she drew herself
together with an apologetic half-smile.
To an invisible listener she said briskly:
“Thank Heaven, he’s outlived his uselessness!”
THE END
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
Archaic or alternate spelling has been retained from the original.