“Got your hands full, what? They do seem to put it over on you, don’t
they? Ah, well, we won’t see you licked. We’ll keep out of the war as
war; but you’ve got our sympathy. Watchful waiting—that’s the new ticket,
you know. Can do a lot with that.”
With his light, dancing step he was waltzing away again when he suddenly
returned.
“Mrs. Barry’ll have something to tell you,” he said, with a gleam in his
eye curiously like that in Regina’s. “Perhaps you know it already. Regina
may have given you the tip, what? People get confidential on board ship.
Nothing else to do. No fuss and feathers about it. They don’t want that.
War-time spirit, you know. Just telling a few of our friends. Don’t mind
saying that Mrs. Barry and I are mighty delighted. Been like our own son
for years. Sorry when it came to nothing last time; but look at ’em now!”
He pointed to Section B, where Cantyre was bending over Regina as I had
bent over her last night. “Can see from here what it means. Get your
congratulations by and by.”
Of all this the point is that I couldn’t say a word. I couldn’t tell him
there on the dock that I didn’t mean to let it go any farther, nor did he
suspect for a second that I had more than an outsider’s interest in the
romance. I felt awkward and cowardly at remaining dumb, but neither time
nor place admitted of a protest.
So, too, when a few minutes later Cantyre came over to give me his
welcome. It was the welcome of old, with a shocked pity in it.
“Didn’t expect to see you so badly mauled,” was his sorrowful comment
after the first demonstrations. “I knew you were wounded, of course, and
that you had been blind. Regina wrote me that from Taplow. But I didn’t
look for your being so—”
“Oh, it’s nothing,” I interposed, in the effort to shut off his sympathy.
Having asked me a few professional questions in reference to the ways in
which I had been wounded, he said: “Well, now that we’ve got hold of you
again we mean to feed you up and take care of you. You’re going to be my
patient, Frank. For the present, at any rate, we’ll be living in the same
old house, and I shall be able to keep a daily eye on you. Lovey here
has your apartment as clean as an operating-room. See you there later.
Just now I’ve got to go back to—to Regina. And by the way”—his habitually
mournful expression brightened as a lowering day lights up when the sun
bursts through the masses of drifting cloud—“by the way, I shall have
something to tell you by and by. The most wonderful thing has happened,
Frank—something you and I used to talk about before you went abroad.”
He wrung my hand with that way he had of pulling it downward and pulling
it hard, which betrayed all sorts of raptures breaking in on a spirit
that had never known common, every-day happiness. His whole face asked
me to rejoice with him, and, though I couldn’t do that, I couldn’t do
the other thing.
It was on my lips to say, “You can’t have her because I’m going to take
her away from you.” But the words died before they were formed. The very
thought died in my mind. Whatever I did, I shouldn’t be able to do it
that way; and so I let him go.
“Do you know what he meant, Slim—when he said them things—the doctor?”
This was Lovey’s question as he sat beside me in the taxicab and we drove
up-town.
As I made no answer, he mumbled, mysteriously: “I do. I ’aven’t valeted
’im for nothink.”