“That’s funny. Hardly any one does. They mostly say Cantyre—or just
doctor.” He added, after a minute or two, “You call me Stephen, and I’ll
call you Frank.”
Once more the swift march of happenings gave me a slight shock.
“Oh, but we hardly know each other.”
“That would be true if there weren’t friendships that outdistance
acquaintanceships.”
“Oh, if you look at it that way—”
“That’s the way it strikes me.”
“But, good Heavens! man, think of what—of what I am!”
His gaze was fixed on the stretch of road ahead of him.
“What’s that got to do with it? It wouldn’t make any difference to me if
you were a murderer or a thief.”
“How do you know I’m not?” I couldn’t help asking.
“I don’t know that you’re not; but I say it wouldn’t make any difference
to me if you were.”
The word I am tempted to use of myself at this unexpected offer of
good-will is flabbergasted. I am not emotional; still less am I
sentimental; both in sentiment and emotion my tendency is to go slow.
After a brief silence I said: “Look here! Do you go round making friends
among the riffraff of mankind?”
“I don’t go round making friends among people of any sort. I’m not the
friendly type. I know lots of people, of course; but—but I don’t get
beyond just knowing them.”
“Is that because you don’t want to?”
“Not altogether. I’m a—I’m a lonesome sort of bloke. I never was a good
mixer; and when you’re not that, other fellows instinctively close up
their ranks against you and shut you out. Not that that matters to me. I
hardly ever see a lot with whom I should want to get in. You’re—you’re an
exception.”
“And for Heaven’s sake, why?”
“Oh, for two or three reasons—which I’m not going to tell you. One of
these days you may find out.”
We left the subject there and sped along in silence.
This, then, was the man Regina Barry had turned down; and,
notwithstanding his kindness to myself, I could understand her doing it.
For a high-spirited girl such as she evidently was he would have been
too melancholy. “Very nice” was what she had called him, and very nice
he was; but he lacked the something thoroughly masculine that means more
to women than to men. Men are used to the eternal-feminine streak in
themselves and one another; but women put up with it only when it is like
a flaw in an emerald, noticeable to the expert, but to no one else.
I asked him how he came to be what Coningsby called physician in ordinary
to the club.
“By accident. Rufus Legrand asked me to go over and see what I could do
for a bad case of D. T.”
“He’s the rector of the church opposite, isn’t he?”
“Yes, and an awfully good sort. Only parson I know who thinks more of God
than he does of a church. I shouldn’t be surprised if one of these days
he got the true spirit of religion.”
“What’s that?”
“What they’re doing at the Down and Out.”
“Oh, but they skip religion there altogether.”
“They don’t skip religion; they only skip the word—and for a reason.”
“What reason?”
“The reason that it’s been so misapplied as to have become nearly
unintelligible. If you told the men at the club that such and such a
thing was religion they’d most of ’em kick like the deuce; but when they
get the thing without explanation they take to it every time. But you
were asking me about my connection with the club. It began four years
ago, when they first got into Miss Smedley’s house. Fellow had the
old-fashioned horrors—bad. As I’d been making dipsomania a specialty
Legrand railroaded me in, and there I’ve stayed.”
When we drew up at the gate of an old yellow mansion standing in large
grounds Cantyre left me in the machine while he went in to visit his
patient. The blue-green hills were just beginning to veil themselves in
the diaphanous mauve of afternoon, and between them the river with its
varied life flowed silently and rapidly. It was strange to me to remember
that a short time ago I had been wishing myself under it, and that this
very water would be washing the oozy, moss-grown piles of Greeley’s Slip.
_CHAPTER VII_
No later than that evening my life took still another step.
A little before nine, just as I was about to go to bed—our hours at the
club were early—Ralph Coningsby dropped in for a word with me. I happened
to be at the foot of the stairs in the hall when Spender admitted him,
and he refused to come farther inside.
“Been dining with my wife’s father and mother over the way,” he said, in
explanation of his dinner jacket and black tie, “and just ran across to
say something while I was in the neighborhood. You said last night you’d
come and see the Grace Memorial with me.”
“If you say so,” I smiled, “I suppose I must have; but it’s the first
time to my knowledge that I ever heard of it.”
“Oh, that’s the bit of work I told you about—the thing I’m doing on my
own. It’s over here at St. David’s. You see, when Charlie Grace died he
left a sum of money to build and endow this institution in memory of his
father.”