With masculine obtuseness, Barth regarded it as a matter of pure chance
that he found Nancy standing alone in the hall, that night.
“Please go away and take M. St. Jacques with you,” she had begged Brock,
as he had left the table. “I must have it out with him sometime, and I’d
rather have it over.”
Brock looked at his watch.
“Will an hour be long enough?” he asked.
“I can’t tell. Please bid me good night now,” she urged him.
He smiled reassuringly down into her anxious eyes.
“Don’t take the situation too tragically, Miss Howard,” he said, with a
brotherly kindness she was quick to feel as a relief to her strained
nerves. “You weren’t to blame in the first place, and I can bear witness
that you have been the most loyal friend he has had. If he is a bit
unpleasant about it, send him to me, and I’ll knock him down.” He rose;
but he lingered long enough to add, “I’ll look in on you, about nine
o’clock, and see if I can help pick up the pieces.” And, with a nod of
farewell, he was gone.
“Are you busy?” Barth asked, as he joined her, a little later.
“Am I ever busy in this indolent atmosphere?” she questioned in return,
with a futile effort for her usual careless manner.
“Sometimes, as far as I am concerned. But what if we come into the
drawing-room? It is quieter there.”
He spoke gently, yet withal there was something masterful in his manner,
and Nancy felt that her hour was come. Nervously she tried to anticipate
it.
“And you need a quiet place for the scene of the fray?” she asked
flippantly.
“Fray?” His accent was interrogative.
“For the discussion, then.”
He was moving a chair forward. Then he looked up sharply, as he stood
aside for her to take it.
“I can’t see that there is reason for any discussion, Miss Howard.”
“But you know you think I have been playing a double game with you,”
Nancy broke out, in sudden irritation at his quiet.
His hands in his pockets, he walked across to the window and stood
looking out. Then he turned to face Nancy.
“No. I am not sure that I do.”
“You feel that I ought to have told you before?”
“It would have been a little fairer to me,” he assented.
“I don’t see why,” she said defensively.
Barth raised his blue eyes to her face, and she repented her untruth.
“At least,” she amended; “I don’t see what difference it would have
made.”
“Perhaps not. Still, it isn’t pleasant to be a stranger, and the one
person outside a secret which concerns one’s self most of all.”
“No.”
“I wish you had told me,” he said thoughtfully. “It might have prevented
some things that now I should like to forget.”
“For instance?”
“For instance, the way I have told you details with which you were
already familiar.”
Nancy laughed nervously.
“And some with which I wasn’t familiar at all,” she added.
Barth’s color rose to the roots of his hair, and he bit his lip. Then he
answered, with the same level accent,—
“Yes. But even you must admit that my error was unintentional.”
Nancy sat up straight in her deep chair.
“Even me!” she echoed stormily. “What do you mean, Mr. Barth?”
He met her angry eyes fearlessly, yet with perfect respect.
“Even you who were willing to take all the advantage of a complete
stranger.”
“But I took no advantage,” she protested.
“No,” he admitted, after a pause. “Perhaps it was forced upon you.
However, you accepted it. Miss Howard,” he paused again; “we Englishmen
dislike to make ourselves needlessly ridiculous.”
She started to interrupt him; but he gave her no opportunity.
“I was ridiculous. I can fancy how funny it all must have seemed to you:
my meeting you here without recognizing you, my telling you over all my
regard for my former nurse. Of course, I must have seemed an ass to you,
and to Mr. Brock and Mr. St. Jacques, too, after you had told them.”
This time, Nancy did interrupt him.
“Stop, Mr. Barth!” she said angrily. “Now you are the one who is unfair.
I did tell Mr. Brock about our adventure at Sainte Anne-de-Beaupré; but
it was when I first met him, when I had no idea that either of us would
ever see you again. I told the adventure; but I used no names. You had
been in the house for several days before Mr. Brock found out that you
were my former patient, and he found it out then from your own lips.
When he told M. St. Jacques, or whether he told him at all, I am unable
to say. I do know that M. St. Jacques knew it; but, upon my honor, I
have told no one but the Lady and Mr. Reginald Brock.”
Bravely, angrily, she raised her eyes to his. Notwithstanding his former
doubts, Barth believed her implicitly.
“Forgive my misunderstanding you, then,” he said simply. “But why
couldn’t you have told me?”
“How could I?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“I am sorry,” she said briefly. “It seemed to me out of the question.”
“Even when we were introduced?” he urged.
“It was before that that you had refused to recognize me.”
“When was that?”
“At the table, the first time you reappeared here,” she said
vindictively. “I did my best to speak to you then; but you tried to give
me the impression that you had never seen me before.”
Barth bowed in assent.
“I never had. You forget that my glasses were lost. You should be
generous to a near-sighted man, Miss Howard, as you once were kind to a
cripple. You might have given me another chance, when we were
introduced.”
“There was nothing to show you cared for it,” Nancy returned curtly.
“And, even at Sainte Anne, you might have told me you were coming to
Quebec,” he went on. “You knew I was coming here; you might have given
me the opportunity to call and thank you.”
Impatiently Nancy clasped her hands and unclasped them.
“What is the use of arguing about it all?” she demanded restlessly. “You
never could see the truth of it; no man could. I don’t want to beg off
and make excuses. I have been in a false position from the start. I
never made it, nor even sought it. It all came from chance. Still, it
has been impossible for me to get myself out of it; but truly, Mr.
Barth,” she looked up at him appealingly; “from the first hour I met you
at Sainte Anne until to-day, I have never meant to be disloyal to you.”
“Then why couldn’t you have told me you had met me before?” he asked,
returning to his first question with a curious persistency.
Nancy fenced with the question.
“But, strictly speaking, I had not met you.”
Barth’s eyes opened to their widest limit.
“Oh, really,” he said blankly.
“No; not in any social sense. Nobody introduced us. I was just your
nurse.”
Suddenly, for the first time since the discovery of Nancy’s identity,
there flashed upon Barth’s mind the thought of the guinea. He turned
scarlet. Then he rallied.
“Miss Howard,” he said slowly, as he took the chair at her side; “I am
not sure you were the only one who has been placed in a false position.”
The girl’s irritation vanished, and she laughed.
“About the guinea? Perhaps we can cry quits, Mr. Barth. Still, your
mistake was justifiable. You took me for a nurse.”
“Yes. And so you were.”
“Thank you for the implied compliment. But, I mean, for a hired nurse.”
“Certainly. I did hire you. At least, I paid you wa—”
In mercy to his later reflections, Nancy cut him off in the midst of his
phrase.
“Perhaps. We knew you wouldn’t let me do it out of charity, so my father
collected his usual fee in two ways.”
Barth’s glasses had fallen from his nose. Now, his eyes still on Nancy’s
face, he felt vaguely for the string.
“And you never received your money?”
Again the frosty accent came into Nancy’s tone.
“Certainly not.”
“Oh, what a beastly shame!” And, seizing his glasses, Barth stared at
her in commiserating surprise.
For a short instant, Nancy longed to tweak the glasses from his nose.
Then she laughed.
“As a rule, I don’t nurse people for money, Mr. Barth,” she said
lightly.
“No? How generous you must be, Miss Howard!”
Was there ever a more maddening combination of manly simplicity and
British bigotry, Nancy reflected impatiently. More and more she began to
despair of making her position clear. Nevertheless, she went on
steadily,—
“And, in fact, you were my one and only patient.”
“That you have ever had, in all your professional life?”
“I never had any professional life,” Nancy replied shortly.
Barth’s face showed his increasing perplexity.
“But you are a nurse.”
“No,” Nancy answered in flat negation.
“You nursed me.”
“After a fashion.”
“What for?”
Again Nancy’s impatience gave place to mirth.
“To cure you, of course.”
“Rather! But I didn’t mean that. We all know it, in fact; and you did it
awfully well. But what made you—er—pick me out in the first place?”
“Pick you out?” This time, Nancy was the one to show perplexity.
“Yes. How did you happen to choose me for a patient?”
Nancy gasped at the new phase of the situation opened by Barth’s words.
In his British ignorance of American customs, did he think that she
habitually wandered about the country, selecting attractive strangers to
be the objects of her feminine ministrations?
“I didn’t choose you,” she said indignantly.
“Then, by George, how did you get me?” Mr. Cecil Barth queried, by this
time too tangled in the web of mystery to select his words with care.
Nancy blushed; then she frowned; then she laughed outright.
“Mr. Barth,” she said at last; “we are talking in two different
languages. If we keep on, we shall end by needing an interpreter. This
is the whole of my side of the story, so please listen. I am not a
nurse. I am not anything but just a commonplace American girl who dances
and who eats fish in Lent. My father is a doctor, and, even in New York,
one knows his name. He came up here to rest and to gather materials for
a monograph on the miracles of Sainte Anne-de-Beaupré, and I came with
him. I always do go with him. We had been at Sainte Anne a little more
than a week, when there was a pilgrimage. I had never seen a pilgrimage,
so I went down to the church. As I was coming out afterwards, I saw some
one fall. No one was near, except the pilgrim people; and they all lost
their heads and fell to crowding and gesticulating. I was afraid you
would be trodden on; and my father has always trained me what to do in
emergencies, so I told the people to stand back. By the time I could get
to you, you had fainted; but I saw you were no pilgrim. In fact,” Nancy
added, with sudden malice; “I took you for an American.”
Barth winced.
“Oh, I am sure you were very kind,” he protested hastily.
“I am glad you think so. Well, you know the rest of the story.”
Barth rose and stood facing her.
“No,” he objected. “That is exactly what I do not know.”
“How you were taken to the Gagnier farm?”
“How you became my nurse,” he persisted quietly. “Please don’t leave
that out of your story, Miss Howard.”
She smiled.
“It was sheer necessity, Mr. Barth. You said you spoke no French;
neither did I. You were suffering and in need of a doctor at once. I
knew of no doctor there but my father, and you assented to my suggestion
of him. He will tell you that your ankle was in a bad condition and
needed constant care. I knew he was not strong enough to give it, and I
telegraphed all over Quebec in a vain search for a nurse. I couldn’t get
one; neither, for the sake of a few conventions, could I let you end
your days with a stiff ankle. There was only one thing to be done, and I
did it.” She stopped for a moment. Then she added, “I only hope I may
not have done it too clumsily. It was new work for me, Mr. Barth; but I
did the very best I could.”
In her earnest self-justification, she sat looking up at Barth with the
unconscious eyes of a child. Barth held out his hand.
“Miss Howard, you must have thought me an awful cad,” he said
contritely.
“I did, at first; but now I know better,” she answered honestly. “There
was no real reason you should have known I was not an hireling. At
first, I resented it, though. I resented it again, when you came here
and didn’t recognize me. It seemed to me impossible that you could have
spent ten days with me, and forgotten me so completely. It wasn’t
flattering to my vanity, Mr. Barth; and I only gained my lost
self-respect when you informed me, the other day, that you were still
hoping to meet me again.”