Mistress Anne Part 44

"Yes. But last night when you stayed on deck when I needed you and asked for you, Pip knew that you wouldn't come--and he was sorry for me."

"And he was sorry again this afternoon?"

"Yes."

"And he showed it by making love to you?"

"He thinks I won't be happy with you. He thinks that you don't care. He thinks----"

"I don't care what Meade thinks. I want to know what you think, Eve."

Their voices had come out of the darkness. She pulled the little chain of a wall bracket, and the room was enveloped in a warm wave of light. "I don't know what I think. But I hated to have you with Marie-Louise."

"She was very ill. You knew that. Eve, if we can't trust each other, what possible happiness can there be ahead?"

She had no answer ready.

"Of course I can't stay on Meade's boat after this," he went on; "I'll get them to run in here somewhere and drop me."

She sank back in the chair from which she had risen when Philip left them. His troubled eyes resting upon her saw a blur of pink and gold out of which emerged her white face.

"But I want you to stay."

"You shouldn't want me to stay, Eve. I can't accept his hospitality, after this, and call myself--a man."

"Oh, d.i.c.ky--I detest heroics."

She was startled by the tone in which he said, "If that is the way you feel about it, we might as well end it here."

"d.i.c.ky----"

"I mean it, Eve. The whole thing is based on the fact that I stayed with a patient when you wanted me. Well, I shall always be staying with patients after we are married, and if you are unable to see why I must do the thing I did last night, then you will never be able to see it. And a doctor's wife must see it."

She came up to him, and in the darkness laid her cheek against his arm.

"d.i.c.ky, don't joke about a thing like that. I can't stand it. And I'm sorry about--Pip. d.i.c.ky, I shall die if you don't forgive me."

He forgave her. He even made himself believe that Pip might be forgiven.

He exerted himself to seem at his ease at dinner. He said nothing more about leaving at the next landing.

But late that night he sat alone on deck in the darkness. He was a plain man, and he saw things straight. And this thing was crooked. The hot honor of his youth revolted against the situation in which he saw himself. He felt hurt and ashamed. It was as if the dreams of his boyhood had been dragged in the dust.

CHAPTER XVIII

_In Which We Hear Once More of a Sandalwood Fan._

IN the winter which followed Richard often wondered if he were the same man who had ridden his old Ben up over the hills, and had said his solemn grace at his own candle-lighted table.

It had been decided that he and Eve should wait until another year for their wedding. Richard wanted to get a good start. Eve was impatient, but acquiesced.

It was not Richard's engagement, however, which gave to his life the effect of strangeness. It was, rather, his work, which swept him into a maelstrom of new activities. Austin needed rest and he knew it. Richard was young and strong. The older man, using his a.s.sistant as a buffer between himself and a demanding public, felt no compunction. His own apprenticeship had been hard.

So Richard in Austin's imposing limousine was whirled through fashionable neighborhoods and up to exclusive doorways. He presided at operations where the fees were a year's income for a poor man. A certain percentage of these fees came to him. He found that he need have no fears for his financial future.

His letters from his mother were his only link with the old life. She wrote that she was well. That Anne Warfield was with her, and Cousin Sulie, and that the three of them and Cousin David played whist. That Anne was such a dear--that she didn't know what she would do without her.

Richard went as often as he could on Sundays to Crossroads. But at such times he saw little of Anne. She felt that no one should intrude on the reunions of mother and son. So she visited at Beulah's or Bower's and came back on Mondays.

Nancy persisted in her refusal to go back to New York. "I know I am silly," she told her son, "but I have a feeling that I shouldn't be able to breathe, and should die of suffocation."

Richard spoke to Dr. Austin of his mother's state of mind. "Queer thing, isn't it?"

"A natural thing, I should say. Your father's death was an awful blow. I often wonder how she lived out the years while she waited for you to finish school."

"But she did live them, so that I might be prepared to practice at Crossroads. As I think of it, it seems monstrous that I should disappoint her."

"Fledglings always leave the nest. Mothers have that to expect. The selfishness of the young makes for progress. It would have been equally monstrous if you had stayed in that dull place wasting your talents."

"Would it have been wasted, sir? There's no one taking my place in the old country. And there are many who could fill it here. There's a chance at Crossroads for big work for the right man. Community water supply--better housing, the health conditions of the ignorant foreign folk who work the small farms. A country doctor ought to have the missionary spirit."

"There are plenty of little men for such places."

"It takes big men. I could make our old countryside bloom like a rose if I could put into it half the effort that I am putting into my work with you. But it would be lean living--and I have chosen the flesh-pots."

"Don't despise yourself because you couldn't go on being poor in a big way. You are going to be rich in a big way, and that is better."

As the days went on, however, Richard wondered if it were really better to be rich in a big way. Sometimes the very bigness and richness oppressed him. He found himself burdened by the splendor of the mansions at which he made his morning calls. He hated the sleekness of the men in livery who preceded him up the stairs, the trimness of the maids waiting on the threshold of hushed boudoirs. Disease and death in these sumptuous palaces seemed divorced from reality as if the palaces were stage structures, and the people in them were actors who would presently walk out into the wings.

It was therefore with some of the feelings which had often a.s.sailed him when he had stepped from a dim theater out into the open air that Richard made his way one morning to a small apartment on a down-town side street to call on a little girl who had recently left the charity ward at Austin's hospital. Richard had operated for appendicitis, and had found himself much interested in the child. He had dismissed the limousine farther up. It had seemed out of place in the shabby street.

He stopped at the florist's for a pot of pink posies and at another shop for fruit. Laden with parcels he climbed the high stairs to the top floor of the tenement.

The little girl and her grandmother lived together. The grandmother had a small pension, and sewed by the day for several old customers. They thus managed to pay expenses, but poverty pinched. Richard had from the first, however, been impressed by their hopefulness. Neither the grandmother nor the child seemed to look upon their lot as hard. The grandmother made savory stews on a snug little stove and baked her own sweet loaves. Now and then she baked a cake. Things were spotlessly clean, and there were sunshine and fresh air. To have pitied those two would have been superfluous.

After he had walked briskly out into Fifth Avenue, he was thinking of another grandmother on whom he had called a few days before. She was a haughty old dame, but she was browbeaten by her maid. Her grandchildren were brought in now and then to kiss her hand. They were glad to get away. They had no real need of her. They had no hopes or fears to confide. So in spite of her magnificence and her millions, she was a lonely soul.

Snow had fallen the night before, and was now melting in the streets, but the sky was very blue above the tall buildings. Christmas was not far away, and as Richard went up-town the crowd surged with him, meeting the crowd that was coming down.

He had a fancy to lunch at a little place on Thirty-third Street, where they served a soup with noodles that was in itself a hearty meal. In the days when money had been scarce the little German cafe had furnished many a feast. Now and then he and his mother had come together, and had talked of how, when their ship came in, they would dine at the big hotel around the corner.

And now that his ship was in, and he could afford the big hotel, it had no charms. He hated the women dawdling in its alleys, the men smoking in its corridors, the whole idle crowd, lunching in acres of table-crowded s.p.a.ce.

So he set as his goal the clean little restaurant, and swung along toward it with something of his old boyish sense of elation.

And then a strange thing happened. For the first time in months he found his heart marking time to the tune of the song which old Ben's hoofs had beaten out of the roads as they made their way up into the hills--