"Yes," answered Paul.
"Well, come and help me with the sacks. Your mother an' her friend
wants to talk, an' we don't want to listen to them talking."
Boy Bailey watched them depart.
"What 's he mean by that?" he asked of Mrs. du Preez.
"Never mind what he means," she answered. "He can't have his own way in
everything. Sit down an' tell me about the others an' what happened to
them after I left. There was Kitty Cassel--what did she do? Go home?"
Boy Bailey pursed his lips. "No," he answered slowly. "She and I went
down to Capetown together. She did n't come to any good, Kitty did n't.
Ask me about some one else; I don't want to offend your ears."
But Mrs. du Preez was in error in one particular: Christian had seen Boy
Bailey "that time we were married," and remembered him very clearly.
Those were days when he, too, lived vividly and the petty incidents and
personalities of the moment wrote themselves deep on his boyish mind.
As he worked at the empty sacks, telling them over by the stencils upon
them, while Paul waded among them to his knees and flung them towards
him, he returned in the spirit to those poignant years when a thin girl
walking across a little makeshift stage could shake him to his
foundations.
He remembered the little town to which the commando had returned to be
paid off and disbanded, a single street straggling under a rampart of a
gray-green mountain, with the crude beginnings of other streets budding
from it on either side, and the big brown, native location like a
tuberous root at its lower end. Along its length, beetle-browed shops,
with shaded stoeps and hitching-rails for horses, showed interior
recesses of shade and gave an illusion of dignified prosperous commerce,
and at the edge of it all there was a string of still pools, linked by a
dribble of water, which went by the name of a river and nurtured along
its banks gums and willows, the only trees of greater stature than a
mimosa-bush that Christian had ever seen.
It was a small, stagnant veld dorp, in fact, one of hundreds that are
littered over the face of the Colony, and have for their districts a
more than metropolitan importance. Christian knew it as a focus of
life, the center of incomprehensible issues and concerns and when his
corps returned to it, flavored in its single street the pungencies of
life about town. The little war in the neighborhood had drawn to it the
usual riff-raff of the country that follows on the heels of troops,
wherever armed men are gathered together, predatory women too wise in
their generation, a sample or two of the nearly extinct species of
professional card-sharper, a host of the sons of Lazarus intent upon
crumbs that should fall from the pay-table, and a fair collection of
ordinary thieves. These gave the single street a vivacity beyond
anything it had known, and the armed burgher, carrying his rifle slung
on his back from mere habit, would be greeted by the name of "Piet" and
invited to drink once for every ten steps he took upon it.
Hither came Christian--twenty-two years of age, six-foot in his bare
soles of slender thew and muscle, not yet bearded and hungry with many
appetites after a campaign against Kafirs. The restless town was a bait
for him.
At that time, there was much in him of that solemn-eyed quality which
came to be Paul's. The steely women laughed harshly as he passed them
by, with all the sweetness of his youth in his still face, his lips
parted, his look resting on them and beyond them to the virtues and the
delicacy they had thrown off to walk the faster on their chosen road.
His ears softened their laughter, his eyes redeemed their bitterness;
everything was transfigured for him by the dynamic power of his mere
innocence and his potent belief in his own inferiority to the splendor
of all that offered itself to his vision. He saw his comrades, fine
shots and hard men on the trek, lapse into drunkenness and evil
communications, and it was in no way incompatible with his own ascetic
cleanliness of apprehension that he excused them on the grounds of the
hardships they had undergone. He could idealize even a sot puking in a
gutter.
It was here that he saw a stage-play for the first time in his life,
sitting in a back-seat in the town hall among young shop-assistants and
workmen, not a little distracted between the strange things upon the
stage which he had paid to witness and the jocular detachment from them
by the young men about him. The play at first was incomprehensible; the
chambermaid and the footman, conversing explanatorily, with which it
opened, were figures he was unable to recognize, and he could not share
the impression that seemed to prevail among the characters in general
that the fat, whitish heroine was beautiful. The villain, too, was
murderous in such a crude fashion; not once did he make a clean job of
an assassination. Christian felt himself competent to criticize, since
it was only a week or so since he had pulled a trigger and risen on his
elbow to see his man halt in mid-stride and pitch face forward to the
earth. He was confirmed in his dissatisfaction by the demeanor of his
neighbors; they, men about town, broken to the drama and its surprises,
were certainly not taking the thing seriously. After a while,
therefore, he made no effort to keep sight of the thread of the play; he
sat in an idle content, watching the women on the stage, curious to
discover what it was in each one of them that was wrong and vaguely
repellent.
His neighbors had no doubts about it. "There 's not a leg in the whole
caboodle," one remarked. "It 's all mouth and murder, this is."
Christian did not clearly understand the first phrase, but the second
was plain and he smiled in agreement. He looked up to take stock of
another character, a girl who made her entrance at that moment, and
ceased to smile. Her share in the scene was unimportant enough, and she
had but a few words to speak and nothing to do but to walk forward and
back again. She was thin and girlish and carried herself well, moving
with a graceful deliberation and speaking in an appealing little tinkle
to which the room lent a certain ring and resonance; she accosted the
villain who replied with brutality; she smiled and turned from him, made
a face and passed out again. And that was all.
The young man who had deplored the absence of legs nudged his neighbor
to look at the tall young Boer and made a joke in a cautious whisper.
His precaution was unnecessary; he might have shouted and Christian
would not have heard. He was like a man stunned by a great revelation,
sitting bolt upright and staring at the stage and its lighted activity
with eyes dazzled by a discovery. For the first time in his life he had
seen a woman, little enough to break like a stick across his knee, brave
and gay at once, delicate and tender, touching him with the sense of her
strength and courage while her femininity made all the male in him surge
into power. Gone was his late attitude of humorous judgment, that could
detach the actress from her work and assess her like a cow; the smile,
the little contemptuous grimace had blown it all away. He was aghast,
incapable of reducing his impression to thoughts. For a while, it did
not occur to him that it would be possible to see her again. When it
did, he leaned across the two playgoers who were next to him and lifted
a program from the lap of the third, who gaped at him but found nothing
to say.
"That _meisjie_, the one in a red dress--is her name in this?" he
inquired of his neighbor, and surprised him into assistance. Together
they found it; the unknown was Miss Vivie Sinclair.
"Skinny, wasn't she?" commented the helpful neighbor sociably.
But Christian was already on his feet and making his way out, and the
conversational one got nothing but a slow glare for an answer across
intervening heads.
And yet the truth of it was, a connoisseur in girls could have matched
Miss Vivie Sinclair a hundred times over, so little was there in her
that was peculiar or rare. The connoisseur would have put her down
without hesitation for a product of that busy manufactory which melts
down the material of so many good housemaids to make it into so many bad
actresses. Her sex and a grimace--these were the total of her assets,
and yet she was as good a peg as another for a cloudy youth to drape
with the splendors of his inexperienced fancy and glorify with the hues
of his secret longings. Probably she had no very clear idea of herself
in those days; she was neither happy nor sad, as a general thing; and
her aspirations aimed much more definitely at the symptoms of
success--frocks, bills lettered large with her name, comely young men in
hot pursuit of her, gifts of jewelry--than at success itself. As she
passed down the main street next morning, on her way to the telegraph
office in the town hall, she offered to the slow, appraising looks from
the stoeps a sketchy impression of a rather strained modernity, an
effect of deftly managed skirts and unabashed ankles which in themselves
were sufficient to set Fereira thinking. It was as she emerged from the
telegraph office that she came face to face with Christian.
"Well, where d'you think you 're comin' to?"
This was her greeting as he pulled up all standing to avert a collision.
Clothes to fit both his stature and his esthetic sense had not been
procurable, and he had been only able to wash himself to a state of
levitical cleanliness. But his youthful bigness and his obvious
reverence of her served his purpose. She stood looking at him with a
smile.
"I saw you," he said, "in the play."
"Did you? What d' you think of it?"
"_Allemachtag,_" he answered. "I have been thinking of it all night."
To his eye, she was all she had promised to be. The fragility of her
was most wonderful to him, accustomed to the honest motherly brawn of
the girls of his own race. The rather aggressive perkiness of her
address was the smiling courage that had thrilled and touched him. He
stood staring, unable to carry the talk further.
But it was for this kind of thing that Miss Vivie Sinclair had "gone on
the stage," and she was not at all at a loss.
"I 'm going this way," she said, and in her hands, Christian was
wax--willing wax. He found himself walking at her side under the eyes
of the town. She waited before she spoke again till they were by the
stoep of Pagan's store, where a dozen loungers became rigid and watchful
as they passed.
"You 've heard about the smash-up?" she inquired then.
"Smash-up?"
"Our smash-up? Oh, a regular mess we 're in, the whole lot of us. You
had n't heard?"
"No," he answered.
"Padden 's cleared out. He was our manager, you know, and now he 's run
away with the treasury and left us high and dry. Went last night, it
seems, after the show."
"Left you?" repeated Christian. The old story was a new one to him and
he did not understand. Miss Sinclair thought him dense, but proceeded
to enlighten him in words of one syllable, as it were.
"That 's why I was telegraphing," she concluded. "There was a feller in
Capetown I used to know; I want to strike him for my fare out of this."
So she was in trouble; there was a call upon her courage, an attack on
her defenselessness. Miss Sinclair, glancing sidelong at his face, saw
it redden quickly and was confirmed in her hope that the "feller" in
Capetown was but an alternative string to her bow.
"That telegram took all I 'd got but a couple of shillings," she added.
"Padden had been keeping us short for a long time."
The long street straggled under the sun, bare to its harsh illumination,
a wide tract of parched dust hemmed between walls and roofs of gray
corrugated iron. The one thing that survived that merciless ordeal of
light without loss or depreciation was the girl. They halted at the
door of the one-storied hotel where her room was and here again the
shaded stoep was full of ears and eyes and Christian had to struggle
with words to make his meaning clear to her and keep it obscure to every
one else.
"It 'll be all right," he assured her stammeringly. "I 'll see that it
's all right. I 'll come here an' see you."
"When?" she asked, and helped him with a suggestion. "This evening?
There 'll be no show to-night."
"This evening," he agreed.
Miss Sinclair gave him her best smile, all the better for the mirth that
helped it out. She was as much amused as she was relieved. As she
passed the bar on her way indoors, she winked guardedly to a florid
youth within who stood in an attitude of listening.
If Christian had celebrated the occasion with libations in the local
fashion, if he had talked about it and put his achievement to the test
of words--if, even, he had been capable of thinking about it in any
clear and sober manner instead of merely relishing it with every fiber
of his body--the evening's interview might have resolved itself into an
act of charity, involving the sacrifice of nothing more than a few
sovereigns. As it was, he spent the day in germinating hopes and
educating his mind to entertain them. Under the stimulating heat of his
sanguine youth, they burgeoned superbly.
As he walked away from the hotel, the florid youth spoke confidentially
to the fat shirt-sleeved barman.
"Hear that?" he asked. "_She_ 'll do all right, she will. That 's
where a girl 's better off than a man. Who 's the feller, d'you know?"
The barman heaved himself up to look through the window, and laughed
wheezily. He was a married man and adored his children, but it was his
business to be knowing and worldly.
"It 's young Du Preez," he answered, as Christian stalked away. "One of
them Boers, y'know. Got a farm out on the Karoo."
"Rich?" queried the other.
"Not bad," said the barman. "Most of those Dutch could buy you an' me
an' use us for mantel ornaments, if they had the good taste."
"So--ho," exclaimed the florid youth. "But they don't carry it about
with 'em, worse luck."
He sighed and grew thoughtful. He was thoughtful at intervals for the
rest of the morning, and by the afternoon was melancholy and uncertain
of step. But he was on hand and watchful when Christian arrived.
Christian was vaguely annoyed when a young man of suave countenance and
an expression of deep solemnity thrust up to him at the hotel door and
stood swaying and swallowing and making signs as though to command his
attention.
"What d'you want?" he demanded.
"Word with you," requested the other. "Word with you."
He was sufficiently unlike anything that was native to Fereira to be
recognizable as an actor and Christian suffered himself to be beckoned
into the bar.
"Shall I do it or you?" asked the other. "I shtood so many to-day,
sheems to me it 's your turn. Mine 's a whisky. Now, 'bout this li'l
girl upshtairs."
"Eh?" Christian was startled.
"I 'm man of the world," the other went on, with the seriousness of the
thoroughly drunken. "Know more 'bout the world then ever you knew in
yer bally life. An' I don't blame you--norra bit. Now what I want shay
is this: I can fix it for you if you 're good for a fiver. Jush a
fiver--shave trouble and time, eh? Nice li'l girl, too. Worth it."
Christian watched him lift his glass and drink. He was perplexed; these
folk seemed to have a language of their own and to be incomprehensible
to ordinary folk.
"Worth it?" he repeated. "Fix _what_?" he demanded.
"Nod 's good 's wink," answered the other. "Don't want to shout it.
Bend your long ear down to me--tell you."
They had a corner by the bar to themselves. Near the window the barman
had a customer after his own heart and was repeating to him an oracular
saying by his youngest daughter but two, glancing sideways while he
spoke to see if Christian and the other were listening.
Christian bent, and the hot breath of the other, reeking of the day's
drinking, beat on his neck and the side of his head. The hoarse
whisper, with its infernal suggestion, seemed to come warm from a pit of
vileness within the man's body.
"Is that plain 'nough?"
Christian stood upright again, trembling from head to foot with some
cold emotion far transcending any rage he had ever felt. For some
instant he could not lift his hand; he had seen the last foul depths of
evil and was paralyzed. The other lifted his glass again. His movement
released the Boer from the spell.
He took the man by the wrist that held the glass with so deadly a
deliberation that the barman missed his hostile purpose and continued to
talk, leaning with his fat, mottled arms folded on the bar.
"What you doin', y' fool?" The cry was from the florid youth.
"Ah!" Christian put out his strength with a maniac fury, and the
youth's hand and the glass in it were dashed back into that person's
face. No hand but his own struck him, and the countenance Christian saw
as a blurred white disk broke under the blow and showed red cracks. He
struck again and again; the barman shouted and men came running in from
outside. Christian dropped the wrist he held and turned away. Those in
the doorway gave him passage. On the floor in the corner the florid
youth bled and vomited.
Christian knew him later as a bold and serene face in a plush photograph
frame, signed across the lower right corner: "Yours blithely, Boy
Bailey."
How he made inquiries for the girl's room and came at last to the door
of it was never a clear memory to him. But he could always recall that
small austere interior of whitewash and heat-warped furniture to which
he entered at her call, to find her sitting on the narrow bed. He came
to her bereft of the few faculties she had left him, grave, almost
stern, gripping himself by force of instinct to save himself from the
outburst of emotion to which the scene in the bar had made him prone.
Everything tender and protective in his nature was awake and crying out;
he saw her as the victim of a sacrilegious outrage, threatened by
unnamable dangers.
She looked at him under the lids of her eyes, quickly alive to the
change in him. It is necessary to record that she, too, had made
inquiries since the morning, and learned of the farm that stood at his
back to guarantee him solid.
"I wondered if you 'd come," she said. "That feller in Capetown has n't
answered."
"I said I 'd come," he replied gravely.
"Yes, I know. All the same, I thought--you know, when a person 's in
hard luck, nothing goes right, an' a girl, when she 's in a mess, is
anybody's fool. Is n't that right?"
She knew her peril then; she lived open-eyed in face of it.
"You shall not be anybody's fool," he answered. "If anybody tries to be
bad to you, I 'll kill him."
He was still standing just within the closed door, no nearer to her than
the size of the little chamber compelled.
"Won't you sit down?" she invited.
"Eh?" His contemplation of her seemed to absorb him and make him
absent-minded. "No," he replied, when she repeated her invitation.
"As you like," she conceded, wondering whether after all he was going to
be amenable to the treatment she proposed for him. It crossed her mind
that he was thinking of getting something for his money and her silly
mouth tightened. If her sex was one of her assets, her virtue--the
fanatic virtue which is a matter of prejudice rather than of
principle,--was one of her liabilities. She had nothing to sell him.
"You know," she said, "the worst of it is, none of us have n't had any
salary for weeks. That's what puts us in the cart. We 're all broke.
If Padden had let us have a bit, we would n't be stranded like this.
And the queer thing is, Gus Padden 's the last man you 'd have picked
for a wrong 'un. Fat, you know, and beaming; a sort of fatherly way, he
had. He used to remind me of Santa Claus. An' now he 's thrown us down
this way, and how I 'm going to get up again I can't say." She gave him
one of her shrewd upward glances; "tell me," she added.
"I can tell you," he replied.
"How, then?" she asked.
"Marry me," said Christian. "This acting--it's no good. There 's men
that is bad all around you. One of them--I broke his face like a
window-glass downstairs just now--he said you was--bad, like him. And
it was time to see what he was worth. Unless you can you are
ach--so--so little, so weak. Marry me, my _kleintje_ and you shall be
nobody's fool."
The girl on the bed stared at him dumbly: this was what she had never
expected. Salvation had come to her with both hands full of gifts. She
began to laugh foolishly.
"Marry me," repeated Christian. "Will you?"
She jumped up from her seat, still laughing and took two steps to him.
"Will I?" she cried. "Will a duck swim? Yes, I will; yes, yes, yes!"
Christian looked at her dazed; events were sweeping him off his feet.
He took one of her hands and dropped it again and turned from her
abruptly. With his arm before his face he leaned against the door and
burst into weeping. The girl patted him on the back soothingly.
"Take it easy," she said kindly. "You'll be all right, never fear."
"That 's all the Port Elizabeth ones," said Paul. "How many do you make
them?"
Christian du Preez looked up uncertainly. "_Allemachtag,_" he said. "I
forgot to count. I was thinking."
"Oh. About the tramp?"
"Yes. Paul, what did you bring him in for? Couldn't you see he was a
_skellum_?"
Paul nodded. "Yes, I could see that. But--_skellums_ are hungry and
tired, too, sometimes."
His father smiled in a worried manner. He and Paul never talked
intimately with each other, but an intimacy existed of feeling and
thought. They took many of the same things for granted.
"Like us," he agreed. "Come on to supper, Paul."
*CHAPTER X*
It was nearing the lunch hour when Margaret walked down from the
Sanatorium to the farm, leaving Ford and Mr. Samson to their unsociable
preoccupations on the stoep, and found Paul among the kraals. He had
some small matter of work in hand, involving a wagon-chain and a number
of yokes; these were littered about his feet in a liberal disorder and
he was standing among them contemplating them earnestly and seemingly
lost in meditation. He turned slowly as Margaret called his name, and
woke to the presence of his visitor with a lightening of his whole
countenance.
"Were you dreaming about models?" inquired Margaret. "You were very deep
in something."
Paul shook his head. "It was about wagons," he answered seriously. "I
was just thinking how they are always going away from places and coming
to more places. That's all."
"Wishing you had wheels instead of feet? I see," smiled the girl.
"What a traveler you are, Paul."
He smiled back. In their casual meetings they had talked of this before
and Paul had found it possible to tell her of his dreams and yearnings
for what lay at the other end of the railway and beyond the sun mist
that stood like a visible frontier about his world.
"I shall travel some day," he answered. "Kamis says that a man is
different from a vegetable because he hasn't got roots. He says that
the best way to see the world is to go on foot."
"I expect he 's right," said Margaret. "It's jolly for you, Paul,
having him to talk to. Do you know where he is now?"
"Yes," answered the boy.
"Well, then, when can I see him? He told me you could always let him
know."
"This afternoon?" suggested Paul. "If you could come down to the dam
wall then, he can be there. There is a signal I make for him in my
window and he always sees it."
"I 'll come then," promised Margaret. "Thank you, Paul. But that
signal--that 's rather an idea. Did you think of it or did he?"
"He did," answered Paul. "He said it wouldn't trouble him to look every
day at a house that held a friend. And he does, every day. There was
only once he didn't come, and then he had twisted his ankle a long way
off on the veld, walking among ant-bear holes in the dark."
"Which window is it?" asked Margaret.
Paul pointed. "That end one," he showed her.
Margaret looked, and a figure lounging against one of the doorposts of
the house took her look for himself and bowed.
"That's nobody," said Paul quickly. "Don't look that way. It 's--it 's
a tramp that came to me--and I gave him a shilling to keep still and be
modeled--and he knows my mother--and he 's staying in the house. He 's
beastly; don't look that way."
His solicitude and his jealousy made Margaret smile.
"I shouldn't see him if I did," she said. "Don't you worry, Paul.
Then--this afternoon?"
"Under the dam," replied Paul. "Good-by. He's waiting for a chance to
come and speak to you."
"Let him wait," replied Margaret, and turned homewards, scrupulously
averting her face from the ingratiating figure of Boy Bailey.
That pensioner of fortune watched her pass along the trodden path to the
Sanatorium till she was clear of the farm, and then put himself into
easy movement to go across to Paul. The uncanny combination of
Christian's clothes and his own personality drifted through the arrogant
sunlight and over the sober earth, a monstrous affront to the temperate
eye. He was like a dangerous clown or a comical Mephistopheles. Paul,
pondering as he came, thought of a pig equipped with the venom of the
puff-adder of the Karoo. As he drew near, the boy fell to work on the
chain and yokes.
"Well, my dear boy." The man's shadow and his voice reached Paul
together. He did not look up, but went on loosening the cross bar of a
yoke from its link.
"There 's more in this place of yours than meets the eye at a first
glance," said Boy Bailey. "You 're well off, my lad. Not only milk and
honey for the trouble of lifting 'em to your mouth, but dalliance,
silken dalliance in broad daylight. What would your dear mother say if
she knew?"
"I don't know," said the boy. "Ask her?"
"And spoil sport? Laddie, you 'll know me better some day. Not for
worlds would I give a chap's game away. It's not my style. Poor I may
be, but not that. No. I admire your taste, my boy. You 've an eye in
your head. But you forgot to introduce the lady to your mother's old
friend. However, you 'll be seeing her again, no doubt, an' then--"
"I didn't forget," said Paul. Still he did not look up. The iron links
shook in his hands, and he detached the stout crosspiece and laid it
across his knees.
"Eh?" Boy Bailey's face darkened a little, and his wary eyes narrowed.
He looked down on the boy's bent back unpleasantly.
"You didn't?" he said. "I see. Well, well. A chap that 's poor must
put up with these slights." His slightly hoarse voice became bland
again. "But have it your own way; Heaven knows, _I_ don't mind. She 's
a saucy little piece, all the same, an' p'r'aps you 're right not to
risk her with me. If I got her by herself, there 's no saying--"
He stopped; the boy had looked up and was rising. His face stirred
memories in Boy Bailey; it roused images that were fogged by years, but
terrible yet. In the instant's grace that was accorded him, he felt his
wrist gripped once more and saw the livid clenched face, tense with the
spirit of murder, that burned above his ere his own hand and the glass
it held were dashed athwart his eyes. The boy was rising and he held
the cross-bar of the yoke like a weapon.
Boy Bailey made to speak but failed. With a sort of squeak he turned
and set off running towards the house, pounding in panic over the ground
with his grotesque clothes flapping about him like abortive wings.
Paul, on his feet amid the tangled chains, watched him with the heavy
cross-bar in his hand.
If he had any clear feeling at all, it was disappointment at the waste
of a rare energy. He could have killed the man in the heat of it, and
now it was wasted. Boy Bailey was whole, his pulpy face not beaten in,
his bones functioning adequately as he ran instead of creaking in
fractures to each squirm of his broken body. It was an occasion
squandered, lost, thrown away. It had the unsatisfying quality of mere
prevention when it might have been a complete cure.
Margaret returned to the Sanatorium in time to meet Mrs. Jakes in the
hall as she led the way to lunch and to receive the unsmiling movement
of recognition which had been her lot ever since the night of Dr. Jakes'
adventure. Contrary to Margaret's expectation, Mrs. Jakes had not come
round; no treatment availed to convince her that she had not been made a
victim of black treachery and the doctor wantonly exposed and
humiliated. When she was cornered and had to listen to explanations, she
heard them with her eyes on the ground and her face composed to an
irreconcilable woodenness. When Margaret had done--she tried the line of
humorous breeziness, and it was a mistake--Mrs. Jakes sniffed.
"If you please," she said frigidly, "we won't talk about it. The
subject is very painful. No doubt all you say is very true, but I have
my feelings."
"So have I," said Margaret. "And mine are being hurt."
"I am extremely sorry," replied the little wan woman, with stiff
dignity. "If you wish it, I will ask the doctor to recommend you a
Sanatorium elsewhere, where you may be more comfortable."
"You know that is n't what I want," protested Margaret. "This is all
very silly. I only want you to understand that I have n't done you any
harm and that I did the best I could and let's stop acting as if one of
us had copied the other's last hat."
"No doubt I am slow of understanding, Miss Harding," retorted Mrs. Jakes
formidably. "However--if you have quite finished, I 'm in rather a
hurry and I won't detain you."
And she made her escape in good order, marching unhurried down the
matted corridor and showing to Margaret a retreating view of a rigid
black alpaca back.
Dr. Jakes was equally effective in his treatment of the incident. He
went to work upon her lungs quite frankly, sending her to bed for a
couple of days and gathering all his powers to undo the harm of which he
had been the cause. On the third day, there was a further interview in
the study, a businesslike affair, conducted without unnecessary
conversation, with monosyllabic question and reply framed on the most
formal models. At the close of it, he leaned back in his chair and
faced her across the corner of his desk. He was irresistibly plump and
crumpled in that attitude, with his sad, uncertain eyes expressing an
infinite apprehension and all the resignation of a man who has lost
faith in mercy.
"That is all, then, Miss Harding. Unless--?"
The last word was breathed hoarsely. Margaret waited. He gazed at her
owlishly, one nervous hand fumbling on the blotting-pad before him.
"There is nothing else you want to say to me?" he asked.
"I can't think of anything," said Margaret.
He continued to look at her, torpidly, helplessly. It was impossible to
divine what fervencies of inarticulate emotion burned and quickened
behind his mask of immobile flesh. The rumpled hair, short and blond,
lay in disorder upon his forehead and his lips were parted impotently.
He had to blink and swallow before he could speak again, visibly
recalling his wits.
"If you don't tell me, I can't answer," he said, and sighed heavily. He
raised himself in his big chair irritably.
"Nothing more, then?" he asked. "Well--take care of yourself, Miss
Harding. That 's all you have to do. Whatever happens, your business is
to take care of yourself; it's what you came here for."
"I will," answered Margaret. She wished she could find a plane on which
it would be possible to talk to him frankly, without evasions and free
from the assumptions which his wife wove about him. But the resignation
of his eyes, the readiness they expressed to accept blows and penalties,
left her powerless. The gulf that separated them could not be bridged.
"Then--" he rose, and in another pair of moments Margaret was outside
the study door in the hall, where Mrs. Jakes, affecting to be concerned
in the arrangement of the furniture, examined her in sidelong glances,
to know whether she had used the weapon which the doctor's adventure had
put into her hand. Apparently there was no convincing her that the
girl's intentions were not hostile.
It did not simplify life for Margaret, this enmity of Mrs. Jakes. Lunch
and breakfast under her pale, implacable eye, that glided upon
everything but skipped Margaret with a noticeable avoidance, had become
ordeals to be approached with trepidation. Talk, when there was
anything to talk about, died still-born in that atmosphere of lofty
displeasure. It was done with a certain deftness; Mrs. Jakes was
incapable of anything crude or downright; and when it was necessary, in
order that the state of affairs should not be conspicuous, she could
smile towards the wall at the girl's back and spare her an empty word or
so, in a way that was sometimes as galling as much more dexterous snubs
that Margaret had seen administered. One can "field" a snub that
conveys its purpose in its phrasing and return it with effect to the
wicket; but there is nothing to be done with the bare word that just
stops a gap from becoming noticeable.
Ford was waiting outside the front door when Margaret came out after
exercising the virtue of forbearance throughout a meal for which she had
had no appetite.
"What 's the row with Mrs. Jakes?" he asked, without wasting words on
preamble.
"Oh, nothing," answered Margaret crossly. "You 'd better ask her if you
want to know. I 'm not going to tell you anything."
"Well, don't, then. But you couldn't arrange a truce for meal-times,
could you? It turns things sour--the way you two avoid looking at each
other."
"I don't care," said Margaret. "It 's not my fault. I 've been as loyal
as anybody--more loyal, I think, and certainly more helpful. I 've done
simply everything she asked of me, and now she 's like this."
Ford gave her a whimsical look of question.
"Sure you haven't at some time done more than she asked you?" he
inquired.
"Why?" Margaret was surprised. She laughed unwillingly. "Is it
shrewdness or have you heard something?"
"I haven't heard a word," he assured her. "But is that it?"
"It 's just your natural cleverness, then? Wonderful," said Margaret.
"You ought to go on the stage, really. Yes, that 's what it is--I
suppose. And now d'you think she 'll see the reasonable view of it?
Not she! I 'm a villain in skirts and if I won't stand it, she 'll ask
the doctor to recommend a Sanatorium where I can be more comfortable.
And just at this moment, I don't think I can stand much more of it."
"Eh?" Ford scowled disapprovingly. "That 's a rotten thing to say.
You don't feel inclined to tell me about it?"
"I can't; I mustn't. That 's the worst of it," answered Margaret. "I
can't tell you anything."
"At any rate," said Ford, "don't take it into your head to go away.
This won't do you any harm in the end. You weren't thinking of it
seriously, were you?"
"Wasn't I? I was, though. I hate all this."
Ford took a couple of steps toward the door and a couple back.
"It won't weigh with you," he said, "but I 'd be sorry if you went. _I_
would, personally--awfully sorry. But if you must go, you must. It 's a
thing you can judge for yourself. Still, I 'd be sorry."
Margaret shrugged impatiently.
"Oh, I 'd be sorry, too. It 's been jolly, in a way, with you here, and
all that. I 'd miss you, if you want to know. But--"
She stopped. Ford was looking at her very gravely.
"Don't go," he said, and put his thin, sun-browned hand upon her
shoulder. "It 'll make things simpler for me if you say you won't.
Things will arrange themselves, but even if they don't--don't go away."
"Simpler? How do you mean?"
"Just that," he answered. "If you stay, here we are--friends. We help
each other out and talk and see each other and have time before us and
there 's no need to say anything. And it's because a lunger like me
must n't say anything till he sees whether he 's going to get well
or--or stay here forever, that it 'll be simpler if you don't go. Do
you see?"
His hand upon her shoulder was pleasant to feel; she liked the freedom
he took--and gave--in resting it there; and his young, serious face,
touched to delicacy by the disease that governed him, was patient and
wise.
"It 's not because of that _that_ you mustn't say anything," she
answered. "I did n't know--you 've given me no warning. What can I
say?"
"Say you won't go," he begged. "Say you won't act on any decision you
've made at present. And then we can go on--me lecturing you, and you
flouting me, till--till I can say things--till I 'm free to say what I
like to anybody."
She smiled rather nervously. "If I agree now," she answered, "it will
look as if--" she paused; the thing was difficult to put in its nicety.
But he was quick in the uptake.
"It won't," he said. "I 'm not such a bounder as that."
"But I 'd rather be here than take my chance among other people," she
went on. "I suppose I can stand Mrs. Jakes if I give my mind to it,
particularly if you 'll see me through."
"I 'll do what I can," he promised. "You 'll do it, then? You'll
stay?"
"I suppose so," said Margaret. His hand for a moment was heavier on her
shoulder; she felt as though she had been slapped on the back, with the
unceremoniousness of a good friend; and then he loosed her.
"Good of you," he answered shortly.
Both were weighted by the handicap of their race; they had been, as it
were, trapped into a certain depth of emotion and self-revelation, and
both found a difficulty in stepping down again to the safe levels of
commonplace intercourse. Ford shoved both hands into his pockets and
half-turned from her.
"Well--doing anything this afternoon?" he inquired in his tersest
manner.
"Yes," said Margaret, whom the position could amuse.
"What?"
"Oh--going yachting," she retorted.