Nan did not remain at the hospital more than fifteen minutes. She was
ill at ease there; it was no comfort to her to gaze upon the pallid,
wasted face of the man she loved when she realized that, by her
presence here, she was constituting herself a party to a
heart-breaking swindle, and must deny herself the joy of gazing upon
that same beloved countenance when, later, it should be glowing with
health and youth and high hopes. He was too weak to speak more than a
few words to her. The faintest imaginable pressure of his hand
answered the pressure of hers. It appeared to be a tremendous effort
for him to open his eyes and look up at her. When, however, he had
satisfied his swimming senses that she was really there in the flesh,
he murmured:
"You'll not--run away--again? Promise?"
"I promise, dear. The next time I leave Port Agnew, I'll say good-by."
"You must not--leave--again. Promise?"
She knew his life might be the reward of a kindly lie; so she told it,
bravely and without hesitation. Was she not there for that purpose?
"Good--news! If I get--well, will you--marry me, Nan?" She choked up
then; nevertheless, she nodded.
"More good--news! Wait for me--Sawdust Pile--sweetheart."
She interpreted this as a dismissal, and gratefully made her exit.
From the hospital office she telephoned orders to the butcher, the
baker, the grocer, and the milkman, forcibly separated little Don from
the nurse, and walked down through Port Agnew to the Sawdust Pile.
The old-fashioned garden welcomed her with its fragrance; her cat,
which she had been unable to give away and had not the heart to
destroy at the time of her departure, came to the little white gate to
meet her and rubbed against her, purring contentedly--apparently none
the worse for a month of vagabondage and richer by a litter of kittens
that blinked at Nan from under the kitchen stoop. From across the
Bight of Tyee, the morning breeze brought her the grateful odor of the
sea, while the white sea-gulls, prinking themselves on the pile-butts
at the outer edge of the Sawdust Pile, raised raucous cries at her
approach and hopped toward her in anticipation of the scraps she had
been wont to toss them. She resurrected the key from its hiding-place
under the eaves, and her hot tears fell so fast that it was with
difficulty she could insert it in the door. Poor derelict on the sea
of life, she had gone out with the ebb and had been swept back on the
flood, to bob around for a little while in the cross-currents of human
destinies before going out again with the ebb.
The air in the little house was hot and fetid; so she threw open the
doors and windows. Dust had accumulated everywhere and, with a certain
detachment, she noted, even in her distress, that she had gone away
without closing the great square piano. She ran her fingers over the
dusty keys and brought forth a few, sonorous chords; then she observed
that the little, ancient, half-portion grandfather's clock had died of
inanition; so she made a mental note to listen for the twelve-o'clock
whistle on the Tyee mill and set the clock by it. The spigot over the
kitchen sink was leaking a little, and it occurred to her, in the same
curious detached way, that it needed a new gasket.
She sighed. Once more, in this silent little house so fraught with
happy memories, the old burden of existence was bearing upon her--the
feeling that she was in jail. For a month she had been free--free to
walk the streets, to look in shop windows, to seek a livelihood and
talk to other human beings without that terrible feeling that, no
matter how pleasant they might appear to be, their eyes were secretly
appraising her--that they were _thinking_. And now to be forced to
abandon that freedom--
"Oh, well! It can't last forever," she soliloquized, and, blinking
away her tears, she proceeded to change into a house dress and put her
little home in order. Presently, the local expressman arrived with her
baggage and was followed by sundry youths bearing sundry provisions;
at twelve-thirty, when she and young Don sat down to the luncheon she
had prepared, her flight to New York and return appeared singularly
unreal, like the memory of a dream.
She visited the hospital next day, choosing an hour when Port Agnew
was at its evening meal and too preoccupied with that important detail
to note her coming and going. She returned to her home under cover of
darkness.
At the hospital, she had received a favorable report of the patient's
progress. His physicians were distinctly encouraged. Nan looked in on
her lover for a minute, and then hurried away on the plea that her
baby was locked in at the Sawdust Pile, in the absence of some one to
care for him; she had the usual maternal presentiment that he was
playing with matches.
As she was going out she met The Laird and Mrs. McKaye coming in. Old
Hector lifted his hat and said quite heartily:
"How do you do, my dear girl. The news this evening is most
encouraging--thanks to you, I'm told--so we are permitted to see
Donald for five minutes. Nellie, my dear, you remember little Nan
Brent, do you not?"
Mrs. McKaye's handsome mouth contracted in a small, automatic smile
that did not extend to her eyes. She acknowledged Nan's "Good-evening,
Mrs. McKaye," with a brief nod, and again favored the girl with
another property smile, between the coming and going of which her
teeth flashed with the swiftness of the opening and closing of a
camera shutter.
"We are _so_ grateful to you, Miss Brent," she murmured. And then,
womanlike, her alert brown eyes, starting their appraisal at Nan's
shoes, roved swiftly and calmly upward, noting every item of her
dress, every soft seductive curve of her healthy young body. Her
glance came to a rest on the girl's face, and for the space of several
seconds they looked at each other frankly while old Hector was saying:
"Aye, grateful indeed, Nan. We shall never be out of your debt. There
are times when a kindness and a sacrifice are all the more welcome
because unexpected, and we had no right to expect this of you. God
bless you, my dear, and remember--I am always your friend."
"Yes, indeed," his wife murmured, in a voice that, lacking his
enthusiasm, conveyed to Nan the information that The Laird spoke for
himself. She tugged gently at her husband's arm; again the automatic
smile; with a cool: "Good-night, Miss Brent. Thank you again--_so_
much," she propelled The Laird toward the hospital entrance. He obeyed
promptly, glad to escape a situation that was painful to him, for he
had realized that which his wife did not credit him with having
sufficiently acute perception to realize--to-wit, that his wife's
camouflage was somewhat frayed and poorly manufactured. _She had not
played the game with him_. It would have cost her nothing to have been
as kindly and sincere as he had been toward this unfortunate girl;
nevertheless, while he had sensed her deficiency, his wife had carried
the affair off so well that he could not advance a sound argument to
convince her of it. So he merely remarked dryly as the hospital door
closed behind them:
"Nellie, I'm going to propound a conundrum for you. Why did your
greeting of the Brent girl remind me of that Louis Quinze tapestry for
which you paid sixty thousand francs the last time you were abroad?"
"I loathe conundrums, Hector," she replied coldly. "I do not care to
guess the answer."
"The answer is: Not quite genuine," he retorted mildly, and said no
more about it.
After that visit, Nan went no more to the hospital. She had met
Donald's mother for the first time in four years and had been greeted
as "Miss Brent," although in an elder day when, as a child, Donald had
brought her to The Dreamerie to visit his mother and sisters, and
later when she had sung in the local Presbyterian choir, Mrs. McKaye
and her daughters had been wont to greet her as "Nan." The girl did
not relish the prospect of facing again that camera-shutter smile and
she shrank with the utmost distress from a chance meeting at the
hospital with Elizabeth or Jane McKaye. As for The Laird, while she
never felt ill at ease in his presence, still she preferred to meet
him as infrequently as possible. As a result of this decision, she
wrote Andrew Daney, and after explaining to him what she intended
doing and why, asked him if he would not send some trustworthy person
to her every evening with a report of Donald's progress.
Accordingly, Dirty Dan O'Leary, hat in hand and greatly embarrassed,
presented himself at the Sawdust Pile the following evening under
cover of darkness, and handed her a note from Daney. Donald's
condition was continuing to improve. For his services, Mr. O'Leary was
duly thanked and given a bouquet from Nan's old-fashioned garden for
presentation to the invalid. Tucked away in the heart of it was a tiny
envelop that enclosed a message of love and cheer.
Dirty Dan was thrilled to think that he had been selected as the
intermediary in this secret romance. Clasping the bouquet in his grimy
left hand, he bowed low and placed his equally grimy right in the
region of his umbilicus.
"Me hearrt's wit' ye, agra," he declared. "Sure 'tis to the divil an'
back agin I'd be the proud man to go, if 'twould be a favor to ye,
Miss Brint."
"I know you would, Dan," she agreed, tactfully setting the wild rascal
at his ease when addressing him by his Christian name. "I know what
you did for Mr. Donald that night. I think you're very, very
wonderful. I haven't had an opportunity heretofore to tell you how
grateful I am to you for saving him."
Here was a mystery! Mr. O'Leary in his Sunday clothes bound for
Ireland resembled Dirty Dan O'Leary in the raiment of a lumberjack,
his wild hair no longer controlled by judicious applications of pomade
and his mustache now--alas--returned to its original state of neglect,
as a butterfly resembles a caterpillar. Without pausing to consider
this, Dirty Dan, taking the license of a more or less privileged
character, queried impudently:
"An' are ye glad they sint for ye to come back?"
She decided that Mr. O'Leary was inclined to be familiar; so she
merely looked at him and her cool glance chilled him.
"Becuz if ye are," he continued, embarrassed, "ye have me to thank for
it. 'Tis meself that knows a thing or two wit'out bein' told. Have ye
not been surprised that they knew so well where to find ye whin they
wanted ye?"
She stared at him in frank amazement.
"Yes, I have been tremendously interested in learning the secret of
their marvelous perspicacity."
"I supplied Misther Daney wit' your address, allanah."
"How did you know it? Did The Laird--"
"He did not. I did it all be mesel'. Ah, 'tis the romantic divil I am,
Miss Brint. Sure I got a notion ye were runnin' away an' says I to
meself, says I: 'I don't like this idjee at all, at all. These
mysterious disappearances are always leadin' to throuble.' Sure, what
if somebody should die an' lave ye a fortun'? What good would it be to
ye if nobody could find ye? An' in back o' that agin," he assured her
cunningly, "I realized what a popular laddy buck I'd be wit' Misther
Donald if I knew what he didn't know but was wishful o' knowin'?"
"But how did you procure my address in New York?" she demanded.
"Now, I'm a wise man, but if I towld ye that, ye'd be as wise as I am.
An' since 'twould break me heart to think anybody in Port Agnew could
be as wise as mesel', ye'll have to excuse me from blatherin' all I
know."
"Oh, but you must tell me, Dan. There are reasons why I should know,
and you wouldn't refuse to set my mind at ease, would you?"
Dirty Dan grinned and played his ace.
"If ye'll sing 'The Low-backed Car' an' 'She Moved Through the Fair'
I'll tell ye," he promised. "Sure I listened to ye the night o' the
battle, an' so close to death was I, sure I fought 'twas an angel from
glory singing'. Troth, I did."
She sat down, laughing, at the antiquated piano, and sang him the
songs he loved; then, because she owed him a great debt she sang for
him "Kathleen Mavourneen," "Pretty Molly Brannigan," "The Harp That
Once Thro' Tara's Halls," and "Killarney." Dan stood just outside the
kitchen door, not presuming to enter, and when the last song was
finished, he had tears in his piggy little eyes; so he fled with the
posies, nor tarried to thank her and wish her a pleasant good-night.
Neither did he keep his promise by telling her how he came to know her
New York address.
"Let me hear anny blackguard mintion that one's name wit' a lack o'
respect," Mr. O'Leary breathed, as he crossed the vacant lots, "an'
I'll break the back o' him in two halves! Whirro-o-o! Sure I'd make a
mummy out o' him!"