This time, when he returned to the house, Alan did not feel in the least
guilty, although he was now coming deliberately in Hunter’s absence, and
to collect evidence against him. On the contrary, he felt like a knight
sallying forth to rescue a lady from duress.
He rang the bell without hesitation, and the girl opened the door. He
had a plan. He explained to her that the doctor had invited him to make
use of his medical library whenever he wished--which was true--and that
he needed to look up fractures for a plaintiff in a damage suit--which
was not true. He made his explanation long and markedly polite, and he
was pleased to notice that she forgot all that nonsense about saying
“sir.” Instead, she preceded him into the library as if it were her own,
lighted a lamp, and, going to the bookshelves, brought out two volumes.
“These are on fractures,” she said.
This did not surprise him. She looked like a girl who would know all
sorts of things.
“I’ll sit here and make a few notes, if you don’t mind,” Alan said, for
this was part of his plan.
He waited until he heard a door close after her somewhere. He waited a
little longer; then he rose. He intended to be awkward, and to pull down
a lot of books, making a great deal of noise. Then she would come back
and help him to pick them up, and it would be easy enough, in such
circumstances, to start a conversation. But--well, if his intention was
to make a noise, he did that, certainly, and the girl did come back, in
great haste; but it is not possible to believe that it was part of his
plan to pull the bookcase over entirely, or that a bronze bust should
fall and hit him on the side of the face.
“I’m very sorry,” he said earnestly. “I don’t know how I came to be so
clumsy. I--really I’m very sorry.”
“So am I,” said she. “Let’s see!”
To his amazement, she took his chin in fingers surprisingly strong, and
turned his face toward the light.
“You’d better come into the office,” she said.
“It’s nothing, thanks,” he began, but she had already vanished through
the door, and he felt obliged to follow.
He said nothing at all while she washed and dressed the trifling wound,
but he watched her moving about the bright, glittering little room, he
noted her precision, her deftness, her familiarity--and he tried to draw
conclusions.
“You’re a trained nurse!” he suddenly exclaimed.
She turned toward him, and for the first time he saw her smile.
“No, Mr. Lorrimer, I’m not,” she said. “Now I think you’ll do very
nicely.”
It was a tone of polite dismissal, but he did not intend to go.
“I’ll help you first to repair the damage I did,” he said.
She replied that he needn’t.
He said that he wanted to, and must; and because he was just the sort of
young man he was, and because she had the intelligence to see it, she
admitted him then and there to a sort of friendship. After the bookcase
was set upright again, and all the books restored to order, they sat
down, one on either side of the library table, in the most natural way
in the world.
“You’d make a wonderfully good nurse,” he observed.
“I’m afraid not,” she answered, smiling again. “I shouldn’t like it at
all!”
“But you seem to know a good deal about that sort of thing,” he went on.
“It must interest you.”
She made no reply, and for a moment he feared she had thought him unduly
curious--impertinent, perhaps; but there was no sign of displeasure in
her face. She was looking thoughtfully before her, grave, serene, almost
as if she had not heard him. Suddenly he fancied he understood.
“Of course!” he said to himself. “She’s in love with Hunter, and
naturally she takes an interest in his work. That’s why she’s here,
filling a servant’s place, simply so that she can be near him!”
There was no reason why this should make him indignant, yet, instead of
being touched by the idea of such devotion, he was angry and
disappointed.
“I wonder what Mrs. Carew thinks of it!” he pursued. “She probably
thinks that this girl isn’t good enough for her precious Noel. She would
object to such a marriage; or perhaps she doesn’t know what the girl is.
Perhaps he doesn’t know, either. I may be the only one who has guessed
her secret.”
Then it occurred to him that he was drawing conclusions from very
insubstantial premises, also that he was forgetting the object for which
he had come, and that his silence might not be impressing her favorably.
Looking at her again, he was forced to the unwelcome conclusion that she
didn’t care whether he spoke or not. It was presumptuous nonsense to
feel sorry for a girl like this. Whatever she did, she intended to do;
there was no helplessness or futility in those fine features.
Alan felt ashamed of himself for trying to find out about her in any
indirect way. She deserved to be treated with absolute honesty and
candor. He knew she would not misunderstand anything else.
“I came back here to see you,” he said bluntly.
She accepted that tranquilly.
“As soon as I saw you, I felt a very great interest in you,” he went on.
“I don’t mean that as an impertinence, or as a compliment. It’s simply
the truth. There are some human beings who make that sort of impression
on others, and it seems to me a foolish and a wrong thing to stifle that
interest because it doesn’t happen to be conventional.”
“As a human being, I welcome your interest,” said she, with her quiet
smile. “I’ve heard of you from Noel, and I’m sure I should enjoy talking
to you.”
“Of course I knew at once that you weren’t what you--you pretended to
be,” he went on rather clumsily.
She stopped him.
“It wasn’t pretending, Mr. Lorrimer. I am here as a servant.”
“You shouldn’t be.”
“It suits me. After all, there’s nothing better in life than really
serving the people who need you, is there?”
“Sometimes there is,” he answered promptly. “It may mean the sacrifice
of a fine life to a much less valuable one.”
A faint color rose in her cheeks.
“Well, you see,” she said, “I don’t feel wise and perfect enough to
judge which lives are the most valuable.”
He was silent, because he could not well say that her life was a hundred
times more valuable than all the Mrs. Carews and Dr. Hunters ever
born--that in her grave youth, and her fine and dignified simplicity,
she seemed to him absolutely invaluable.
“I dare say you’re right,” he answered seriously. “I’m sure your way is
a good way. If you think you really would care to talk to me, when may I
come again?”
“I have Sunday afternoons off,” she answered, and he believed there was
a hint of a laugh in her voice.
“Then I’ll come at--”
“Oh, no! That’s not the way it’s done. I’ll meet you somewhere and we’ll
take a walk,” she said, and this time she could not suppress a smile.
Alan refused to smile, however. He didn’t care if she came in an apron.
He was willing to sit on the back steps, or in the kitchen, so long as
he could be with her. It wasn’t a joke--it was serious, the most serious
thing he had ever known.
He proposed a convenient meeting place, and she agreed to it.
“But I’d rather you didn’t mention me to any one, please,” she added. “I
like a--a very quiet life, just now.”
V
This day was going to be the day. Nothing was going to put him off--not
the fact that the mirror showed him a face he hated to think was his
own, not the inner voice which warned him that it might be better to
remain in doubt and still have hope. He didn’t want hope, if it was a
false one.
He went downstairs, aware of all sorts of new defects in himself. He
felt that he was the most commonplace, uninteresting fellow imaginable,
and that there was nothing about him that could possibly please or
interest any one.
Mrs. Lorrimer and a group of friends were on the veranda. He saluted
them with a strange sort of severity, and went off down the road, in an
odd state of despair and determination.
“Yes,” said his mother proudly. “It’s very unusual to see a man as
serious as Alan is, at _his_ age!”
She was wrong. She had herself seen any number of young fellows of
twenty-seven overtaken by exactly the same sort of seriousness, only, in
the case of her son, she didn’t recognize it. Alan himself, however, had
known what it was for weeks--it was Judith.
She had told him to call her Judith, and he did, hundreds of times, but
not once in her hearing. Indeed, there was an astounding difference
between the things he said to her when she was not there and the words
she actually heard from him. If she could only have heard those other
things, or guessed them! He knew that what he was going to say would be
so inferior to what he felt and thought.
He turned into the lane where they always met, and sat upon the stone
wall to wait. He was thinking about her, in a curious way, half
wretched, half blissful. He didn’t care two straws about her very humble
position, nor did she. He _had_ sat on the back steps and talked to her
when the others were out, he _had_ seen her in an apron, peeling
potatoes, and she was more than ever exalted in his eyes by her quiet
acceptance of such things. There was to him a sort of nobility in
everything she did, in all her words and gestures, in her smile, even in
her little transient moments of gayety.
Nor did he care two straws for the mystery that surrounded her. Wherever
she came from, whatever her name or her history or her reason for living
as she did, he knew that she was right, and could never be anything
else.
No--the things that troubled him were those things which so often
trouble people in his condition--all sorts of doubts and alarms and
hopes and determinations mixed together. He wasn’t good enough, but he
was obliged to convince her that he was. She couldn’t care for him, and
yet she must.
At last he saw her coming, and went forward to meet her. She was walking
unusually fast, as if, he thought with a fast beating heart, she were
hurrying to him. Whatever joy he had felt in that thought vanished at
the sight of her face.
“Judith!” he said. “Tell me, what has happened?”
She had all her usual fine composure, but she was very pale, and, in
some subtle way apparent more to his heart than to his eyes, there was
grief upon her face. She did not answer him, but she held out her hand,
and he fancied that she clung to him.
“Let’s walk a little,” she said, after a moment.
They went on side by side along the lane, thick with cool, white dust
under the old trees. So dense was the foliage on the branches meeting
overhead that the light came through it greenish and wavering, like
water. The dust might have been the sandy floor of the sea, and the
church bells that rang seemed mournful and distant, as they must sound
to the mermaids.
A painful sense of unreality oppressed Alan. He didn’t know her; she was
terribly remote, a stranger, indifferent to him. Not once in all the
time they had spent together had she talked freely about herself, about
her life. She might have any number of anxieties and griefs of which he
had no suspicion. She had been friendly, but in such an impersonal,
untroubled way!
At last they reached the fence at the foot of the lane, where the fields
began, and she spoke.
“Noel has gone,” she said.
“Gone?” he echoed.
“He left a letter,” she continued. “Perhaps I had better read you a part
of it.” She took a letter out of her pocket, and turned as he noticed,
past the first page to the second. She read:
“So I’ve taken this job in the airplane factory. It’s a remarkably
good job, and I expect to do rather more than well. I’m sorry, my
dearest girl, to disappoint you so after all you’ve done for me,
but, to be frank, I _can’t_ be a doctor. I always hated the whole
thing. I’d never have been any good at it. Now I’ve found the one
thing I am good at. I think you know how I felt about Nesta
Lorrimer, and now I see some faint chance of being able to speak to
her some day.
“Try to forgive me, Judith. It is really the best and kindest thing
I can do for you--to clear out and leave you free.
“That’s all that matters,” she ended. “So you see--”
Her look amazed and angered him terribly. She seemed so sure that he
would understand and sympathize. She wasn’t a child, she was very far
from slow-witted, and she must have seen how it was with him. And now
this!
Try to forgive me, Judith. It is the best and kindest thing I can
do for you--to clear out and leave you free.
Such bitterness and pain overwhelmed him that he could scarcely speak.
“I’d rather--go now,” he said. “Another time--I can’t--”
“But--” she began.
“Not now!” he said vehemently. “It was cruel of you to do this. Why
didn’t you tell me before that you weren’t free? Why did you let me go
on? I trusted you so! And all this time you’ve been thinking of him! No,
please don’t speak to me! Let me go!”
She was looking at him with a curious sort of inquiry, her dark brows
drawn together in a faint frown.
“You don’t understand,” she said. “I thought you had guessed long ago. I
didn’t think you’d have--gone on like this, if you hadn’t guessed!”
She was not by nature impulsive, but it was impulse alone that moved her
now. She came nearer to him, laid her hand on his shoulder, and looked
into his face, with bright tears in her eyes.
“Oh, Alan!” she cried. “It was a beautiful thing to do--to accept me on
faith, like that! Not to know, or to care! Oh, Alan, my dear!”
“Judith!” he said. “Don’t you see what you’ve done? Nothing else could
have mattered to me, except your caring for him--”
“For Noel?” she asked. “I’m afraid I cared for him a little too
much--more than was good for him. But, you see, he’s my only brother.”
“Brother!” shouted Alan. “Then why--”
“Walk home with me, and I’ll explain,” said she. “I thought you had
found out long ago.”
Alan went on by her side, willing to wait forever for any further
explanation. There were a few questions he wanted to ask, and Judith
answered them to his satisfaction, but they had nothing to do with Noel.
“Now look!” said she.
He did look, but he saw nothing but the front of Dr. Hunter’s neat
little house.
“I don’t see anything,” he said.
She opened the gate, and he followed her along the path and up on the
veranda.
“Look at _that_!” she said.
It was nothing but the usual sign in the window. “Noel”--but it wasn’t!
In blue letters on a white ground was printed: