“Go on,” said the Lady.
“We’d been talking about it in the library, just the afternoon before,
and she seemed interested, asked about my accident and my nurse and all.
Really, we were just beginning to get on capitally, when she had to go.
I thought the best thing to do would be to begin where we left off; but
she turned very cross, wouldn’t say a word to me and finally picked up
her books and walked out of the room. I don’t see what I could have done
to displease her.” And, putting on his glasses, Barth stared at the Lady
with disconsolate, questioning blue eyes.
The Lady laughed a little. Nevertheless, she felt a deep longing to
scold Nancy, to give Fate a sound box on the ear and to take Mr. Cecil
Barth into her motherly embrace. She liked his frankness, liked the
under note of respect which mingled in his outspoken admiration for
Nancy. She could picture the whole scene: Barth’s nervous assumption of
ease confronted with the nonchalant assurance of Brock, Nancy’s hidden
amusement at the tentative request for polite conversation, and her open
consternation at the subject which Barth had proposed for discussion. It
was funny. She looked upon the scene with the eyes of Nancy and Brock,
yet her whole womanly sympathy lay with the Englishman, an open-hearted,
tongue-tied alien in a land of easy speech. Barth’s hand rested on the
corner of her desk. Bending forward, she laid her own hand across his
fingers.
“Don’t worry, Mr. Barth,” she said kindly. “You and Miss Howard will be
good friends in time. It is an odd position, your meeting here on
neutral soil. Your whole ways of life are so different that you find it
hard to understand each other. I am half-way between you, and I know you
both. What is more, I like you both, and I’d like to see you good
friends. Leave something to time, and a great deal to Miss Howard.
And—forgive me, my dear boy, but I am quite old enough to be your
mother—I would let the American ways take care of themselves, and just
be my own English self. If Miss Howard is going to like you at all, it
will be for yourself, not for any misfit manners you may choose to put
on.”
“But, the question is, is she going to like me at all?” Barth said
despondingly.
The Lady’s eyes roved over him from the parting of his yellow hair to
the toes of his unmistakably British shoes.
“Forgive my bluntness,” she said, with a smile; “if I say that I don’t
see how she can very well help it.”
Half an hour later, she knocked at Nancy’s door.
“May I come in?” she asked blithely. “All the evening, I have been
talking to a most downcast young Englishman, and now I have come up to
administer justice to you. The justice will be tempered with mercy;
nevertheless, I think you deserve a lecture.”
“Your Englishman is an idiot,” Nancy observed dispassionately; “and I
don’t deserve any lecture at all. However, go on.”
Crossing the room, the Lady turned on the electric light.
“Nancy Howard,” she said sternly; “your voice was suspicious enough; but
your eyes betray you. You’ve been crying.”
“What if I have?” the girl asked defiantly.
The Lady’s quick eye caught the glitter of a gold coin on the
dressing-table. Then she turned back to Nancy.
“Girls like you don’t cry for nothing,” she remarked. “May I sit down on
the bed?”
Nancy nodded. Then she replied to the first remark.
“I wasn’t crying for nothing. I was crying over my conscience.”
“What has your conscience been doing?”
“Pricking,” the girl answered frankly. “I hate to be nasty to people;
but now and then I am driven into it.”
“Mr. Barth?”
“Yes, Mr. Barth,” Nancy assented, with an accent of finality. “Now go on
with your lecture.”
The Lady laughed.
“Really, Nancy, you sometimes take away even my Canadian breath. I can
imagine that you leave Mr. Barth gasping.”
“Mr. Barth would gasp in a stilly vacuum,” Nancy replied tranquilly.
“Very likely. It is possible that you might do likewise. But to my
point. Was it quite fair, Nancy, to encourage the boy to talk about the
Sainte Anne-de-Beaupré episode, and then snub him, the next time he
alluded to it?”
“Did he tell you any such tale as that?” Nancy demanded, in hot wrath.
“He—he implied it.”
“And you believed him?”
“I—I couldn’t understand your doing it.” The Lady began to wonder
whether the promised lecture were to be given or received.
Nancy sprang up and walked the length of the room.
“Oh, the horrid little cad!” she said explosively.
The Lady turned champion of the absent Englishman.
“He’s not a cad, Nancy; he is a thoroughbred little Englishman. I have
seen his type before, though never so extreme a case. He is frank and
honest as a boy can be. He’s born to his British ways, as we are born to
ours. It is only that you’re not used to him, and don’t understand him.”
“He doesn’t leave much to the imagination,” Nancy observed scathingly.
Then she dropped down beside the Lady, and looked her straight in the
eyes. “I don’t want you to be thinking horrid things of me,” she said
slowly. “I don’t want you to think I have been two-sided with Mr. Barth.
After what happened at Sainte Anne-de-Beaupré, I have tried to keep out
of his way as much as possible. It has been a miserable chance that has
brought us into such close quarters; a recognition wasn’t going to be
pleasant for either of us. But, every time I meet the man, he seems
possessed with an insane desire to babble to me about his ankle. I could
tell more about it than he can, for I was in league with the doctor, and
heard all the professional details. A dozen times, I have been on the
very verge of betraying myself. Last night, it reached a climax. He
found me alone in the library, and he began to talk. Really, he was more
agreeable than I ever knew him before. But you know how it is: the
presence of a grass widow always moves you to rake up all the divorce
scandals of your experience. Before we had talked for ten minutes, the
man was calmly informing me that he was really very fond of his nurse,
that, in the secret recesses of his heart, he called her his Good Sainte
Anne, that he wished he could meet her again, and finally that he was
very sorry he had tipped her.”
“Indeed!”
“No; I don’t mean that,” Nancy protested hastily. “You are the disloyal
one now. He didn’t imply that she had not deserved the tip. His regrets
were for sentimental reasons, not frugal. He was very nice and honest
about it, and I never liked him half so well.”
“And showed it,” the Lady added gently.
“Very likely I did. I don’t see why not. But, to-day!” Nancy paused.
“What happened?”
“Didn’t he tell you?”
“Only his side of it. Still, I could imagine the rest.”
“No; you couldn’t. No one could, without having seen it. He came
dashing, fairly splashing, into the parlor where Mr. Brock and I were
squabbling over politics. Only a little while before, I had been
defending him to Mr. Brock, telling him that Mr. Barth was really a
gentleman and clever, that I liked him extremely. And then, on the heels
of that statement, the man came whacking into the room, interrupted our
talk without a shadow of an apology and then, after acting like a crazy
being, he capped the climax of his sins by specifically inviting me to
talk to him some more about Sainte Anne.”
“Well?”
“Well.”
The rising cadence was met by the falling one. Then silence followed.
“Well,” Nancy resumed at length; “you see my predicament. Mr. Brock
knows the whole story; I let it out to him, the day we met. I had no
idea I should ever meet Mr. Barth again, and I used no names. Mr. Brock
patched together the two ends of the story, and told M. St. Jacques; and
it has been all I could do to keep them from using it as an instrument
of torture on poor Mr. Barth. To-day, I knew Mr. Brock was furious at
him; I knew he was longing to say something, and, worst of all, I knew
he thought, as you did, that I had been coaxing Mr. Barth to make an
idiot of himself.”
“Well?” the Lady said again.
“And he does it, without being coaxed,” Nancy responded mutinously. Then
she relented. “But he was so pitifully bent on making a fool of himself,
just when I had been pleading his cause to the very best of my ability!
He babbled at us till I was on the very verge of frenzy. Stop him I
could not. He absolutely refused to know when he was snubbed. At last, I
fled from the scene and took Mr. Brock with me, and, for all I know to
the contrary, the man may be sitting there in the parlor, babbling
still.”
Nancy laughed; but the tears were near the surface.
“And then?” the Lady asked gently.
“Then I came up here and bemoaned my sins,” Nancy answered, with utter
frankness. “I hate to be hateful; but I lost my head, and couldn’t help
it. Now I am sorry, for I truly like Mr. Barth, and I know I scratched
him till he felt it clear down through his veneering. He has not only
spoiled my whole evening; but, worse than that, I have an apology on my
hands, and I really don’t see how I am going to make it, without being
too specific.”