LOHENGRIN AND WHITE SATIN
Dick, having la grippe, and doing his bewildered best to get pneumonia
and gastritis by creeping out of bed when his temperature was highest,
and indulging in untrammelled orgies of food and drink and exposure to
draughts, had finally succeeded in making himself physically very
miserable indeed. His mind had been out of joint for weeks. He reached
the phase presently of refusing all nourishment and spiritual
consolation, indiscriminately, and finding himself unbenefited by
these heroic methods, decided in his own mind that all was over with
him.
He knew nothing about sickness, having led a charmed life in that
respect since the measles period, and the persistent misery in his
interior, attacking lung and liver impartially,--to say nothing of the
top of his head and the back of his neck, and as his weakness
increased, his cardiac region where there was a perpetual palpitation,
and the calves of his legs which set up an ache like that of a
recalcitrant tooth,--persuaded him that such suffering as his must be
a certain indication of the approaching end. He had dismissed his
doctor after the first visit, and denying himself to visitors, found
himself alone and apparently in a desperate condition, with no one to
minister to him but paid dependents. It was then that the loss of
Nancy began to assume spectral proportions. He had been so long
accustomed to think of himself as the strong silent lover, equipped
with the patience and understanding that would outlast all the
vagaries of Nancy's adventurous tendencies, that it was difficult to
readjust himself to a new conception of her as a woman that another
and even less worthy man had so nearly won,--under his nose.
He had never thought much of his money until it began to acquire the
virtue of an alkahest in his mind, an universal solvent that would
transmute all the baser metals in Nancy's life and the lives of the
people in whom Nancy was interested, into the pure gold of luxury and
ease. He knew that the conventional fairy gifts would mean very little
to her, but he had dreamed, when she was ready, of working out with
her some practicable and gracious scheme of beneficence. There was one
power she coveted that he could put in her hands,--one way that he
could befriend and relieve her even before she conceded him that
prerogative. When he learned that she had a fortune of her own his
hopes came tumbling about his head, and he lay disconsolate among the
ruins. His creeping physical disability seemed significant of the
cataclysmic overthrow of all his dreams and desires. From having
secretly and in some terror arrived at the conclusion that death was
imminent, he began to look upon such a solution of his misery with
some favor.
It was a very gaunt and hollow-eyed caricature of the Dick she had
known that confronted Nancy, when instigated by Betty, who had his
illness heavily on her mind, she forced her way unannounced into the
curious Georgian living-room of the suite wherein he was incarcerated.
He had been stretched in an attitude of abandon on the couch when she
opened the oak paneled door, but he jumped to his feet in a spasm of
rage and alarm when he discovered that he had a visitor.
"Go away," he said, "I am not able to see anybody. There's a mistake.
I gave strict orders that nobody at all was to be admitted."
"I know, Dick," Nancy said gently, "don't blame your faithful
servitors. I thought I should have to use a gun on them, but I
explained to them that you must be looked after."
"I don't want to be looked after. I'm all right, thank you. Are you
alone?"
"No, Hitty's outside. Betty simply insisted on my bringing her,--I
don't know why, but she said you'd be kinder to me if I did. I don't
think you're very kind."
A flicker of a smile crossed Dick's face, which seemed to say that if
anything could bring back a momentary relish of existence the mention
of Betty's name would be that thing. Nancy saw the expression and
misinterpreted it.
"I don't want to see anybody," Dick repeated firmly. "Will you be good
enough to go away and leave me to my misery?"
"No, I won't," Nancy said, "I never left anybody to their misery yet,
and I'm not going to begin on you. Of course, if you'd rather see
Betty, I'll send for her. She seems to know a good deal about your
habits and customs. You look like a monk in that bathrobe. I'm glad
you're not a fat man, Dick. It's so very hard to calculate just how
much to cut down on starches and sweets without injury to the health.
What are you feeding up on?"
"You know very well that I'm not feeding up on anything, but if you
think you can come around here, and dope out one of your darned health
menus for me, and sit around watching me eat it, you are jolly well
mistaken. I wish you'd go home, Nancy. I don't like you to-day. I
don't like myself or anybody in this whole universe. I'm not fit for
human society--don't you see I'm not?"
"You're awful cross, dear."
"Don't call me dear. I'm not Sheila or one of your sick waitresses,
you know."
"Sheila's back."
"Is she?"
"Don't you care?"
"Oh, I suppose so."
"She loves you."
"She's unique."
"You told me once there were other girls, Dick."
"They're all over it by now."
"Dick, can't I do something for you?"
"Yes, leave me alone."
"I've never seen you like this before."
"No, thank God."
"I didn't know you were ever anything but sort of smug and superior."
"Grand description."
"You ought to be in bed, dear--I didn't mean to call you dear, it
slipped out, Dicky,--and taking nourishment every hour or so. What
does the doctor say?"
"Nothing, he's given me up as a bad job."
"Given you up?"
"Yes, there's nothing he can do for me."
"Why, Dick, my dear, what is it?"
"Oh! lungs or liver or something. I don't know."
"What are you taking, Dick?"
"I tell you I can't take anything," he said, misunderstanding her. "It
makes me sick to eat. Every time I try to eat anything I feel a lot
worse for it."
"When did you try last?"
"Oh, yesterday some time. Now what in the name of sense makes a woman
shed tears at a simple statement like that? I'm not in shape to stand
this. Once and for all, Nancy, will you get out and leave me? I tell
you I never wanted to see you less in my life. I'll write you a letter
and apologize if you'll only go, now."
"Oh, I'll go," Nancy said. "I couldn't really believe that you wanted
me to,--that's all."
She started for the door--but Dick, weakened by lack of food, tortured
beyond his endurance by the sudden assault on his nerves made by
Nancy's appearance, gave way to his relief at her going an instant too
soon. Like a small boy in pain he crooked his elbow and covered his
face with his arm.
Nancy ran to him and knelt at his side, taking his head on her
breast.
"Dear," she said, "you do want me. We want each other. You love me,
Dicky, and I am going to love you--if you'll only let me look after
you and nurse you back to health again."
"I don't want to be nursed," Dick blubbered, his head buried in her
bosom, "I want to look out for you, and take care of you, and--and now
look at me. You'll never love me after this, Nancy."
"Yes, I shall, dear," Nancy said. "I've always loved you somehow.
It'll--it'll be the saving of me, Dick."
"Well, then I do want to be nursed. I--I haven't cried before since I
had the measles, Nancy."
"I'm glad you cried, now, then," Nancy said.
* * * * *
"I suppose you'll want to be married in the courtyard of the Inn,"
Dick said some weeks later, when they were conventionally ensconced in
Nancy's own drawing-room; Hitty happily rattling silverware in the
butler's pantry in the rear, "with old Triton blowing his wreathed
horn above us, and all the nymphs and gargoyles and Hercules as
interested spectators. Well, go as far as you like. I haven't any
objection. I'll be married in a Roman bath if you want me to, and eat
bran biscuit and hygienic apple sauce for my wedding breakfast."
"Betty and Preston are going to be married at the Inn," Nancy said;
"you know her mother's an invalid, and they can't have it at home. Do
you know what I'd like to give them as a wedding present?"
"I don't."
"Well, you know, Preston's firm has gone out of existence. The war
simply killed it. They haven't much money ahead, and he may have a
harder time than he thinks getting located again."
"Yes?"
"I thought I'd like to give them Outside Inn for a wedding present.
Besides, I don't see what else there is to do with it. It's making
several hundred a month, now, and promises to make more."
"Good idea," Dick said.
"You don't seem exceedingly interested."
"Oh, I am," Dick said, "I'm more interested in our wedding than
Betty's wedding present, but that doesn't imply a lack of merit in
your idea. _You'll_ want to be married at the Inn, I take it?"
"You'd let me, wouldn't you?"
"Sure I'd let you. When a man marries a modern girl with all the
trappings and the suits of modernity, he ought to be prepared to take
the consequences cheerfully."
"Then I'm going to surprise you. I don't want anything modern at all
about my wedding. I want it in church with a huge bridal bouquet and
_Lohengrin_ and white satin; Caroline for my matron of honor and Betty
for my bridesmaid, and Sheila for flower girl. I want a wedding
breakfast at the Ritz and rice and old shoes--just all the old
traditional things."
"Gee whiz," Dick ejaculated, "is this straight, or are you only making
it up to sound good to me? You can have it anyway you like it, you
know."
"That's the way I like it," Nancy said. "It's good to be a modern
girl, but I really prefer to be an old-fashioned wife--with
reservations," she added hastily.
"That's what we all come to in the end," Dick said, "no matter how we
feel or think we feel about it--being modern with reservations."
"I saw Collier Pratt to-day," Nancy said suddenly, as she watched a
log split apart in the fireplace and scatter its tiny shower of
sparks, "on the avenue."
Dick carefully stamped out two smoldering places on the rug before he
answered.
"Did you?" he said.
"He had a cheap little creature with him, dark haired in messy
cerise."
"It may have been his wife. I hear that she's living with him again."
"Is she?"
"Nancy," Dick said with an effort, after a few minutes of silence,
"are you all over that? Is it really fair and right of me to take you?
I've been puzzling over that lately. I want you on any terms, you
know, as far as I am concerned, but I'm a sort of monogamist. If a
woman has once cared for a person, no matter who or what that person
is, can she ever care again in the same way for any one? Isn't it pity
you feel for me, after all?"
"No it isn't pity," Nancy said slowly. "I cared for that man until I
found that he was the shadow and not the substance. He isn't fit to
black your shoes, Dick.--Besides--if--if it was pity," she added
irrelevantly, "that's the way to get me started, you know."
"If I only have got you started--really."
Nancy crossed the two feet of space between them and sank at his feet,
leaning her head back against his knee while he stroked her hair
silently.
"There's one way of proving," she said presently, "if--if you've made
a woman really care for you. I should think you'd know that. I told
you how you'd made me feel about the bridal bouquet and _Lohengrin_."
"Does that prove something?"
"Doesn't it?"
"I suppose it does. You mean it proves that a woman truly loves a man
if he's made her feel that she wants to be an old-fashioned wife--"
"And mother, Dick," Nancy finished for him bravely.
THE END