One sultry July night four years later Dr. Isaac Lavinski, now an arrogant member of the staff at the Adair Hospital, paused on his last round of the wards and cocked an inquiring ear above the steps that led to the basement. Something that sounded very much like suppressed laughter came up to him, and in order to confirm his suspicions, he tiptoed down to the landing and, making an undignified syphon of himself, peered down into the rear passage. In a circle on the floor, four nurses in their nightgowns softly beat time, while a fifth, arrayed in pink pajamas, with her hair flying, gave a song and dance with an abandon that ignored the fact that the big thermometer in the entry registered ninety-nine.
The giggles that had so disturbed Dr. Lavinski's peace of mind increased in volume, as the dancer executed a particularly daringpasseuland, turning a double somersault, landed deftly on her bare toes.
"Go on, do it again!" "Show us how Sheeny Ike dances the tango." "SingBarney McKane," came in an enthusiastic chorus.
But before the encore could be responded to, a familiar sound in the court without, sent the girls scampering to their respective rooms.
Dr. Isaac, reluctantly relinquishing his chance for administering prompt and dramatic chastisement, came down the stairs and out to the entry.
An ambulance had just arrived, and behind it was a big private car, and behind that Dr. Adair's own neat runabout.
Dr. Adair met Dr. Isaac at the door.
"It's an emergency case," he explained hastily. "I may have to operate to-night. Prepare number sixteen, and see if Miss Molloy is off duty."
"She is, sir," said Isaac, grimly, "and the sooner she's put on a case the better."
"Tell her to report at once. And send an orderly down to lend a hand with the stretcher."
Five minutes later an immaculate nurse, every button fastened, every fold in place, presented herself on the third floor for duty. You would have had to look twice to make certain that that slim, trim figure in its white uniform was actually Nance Molloy. To be sure her eyes sparkled with the old fire under her becoming cap, and her chin was still carried at an angle that hinted the possession of a secret gold mine, but she had changed amazingly for all that. Life had evidently been busy chiseling away her rough edges, and from a certain poise of body and a professional control of voice and gesture, it was apparent that Nance had done a little chiseling on her own account.
As she stood in the dim corridor awaiting orders, she could not help overhearing a conversation between Dr. Adair and the agitated lady who stood with her hand on the door-knob of number sixteen.
"My dear madam," the doctor was saying in a tone that betokened the limit of patience, "you really must leave the matter to my judgment, if we operate—"
"But you won't unless it's the last resort?" pleaded the lady. "You know how frightfully sensitive to pain he is. But if you find out that you must, then I want you to promise me not to let him suffer afterward. You must keep him under the influence of opiates, and you will wait until his father can get here, won't you?"
"But that's the trouble. You've waited too long already. Appendicitis is not a thing to take liberties with."
"You don't mean it's too late? You don't think—"
"We don't think anything at present. We hope everything." Then spying Nance, he turned toward her with relief. "This is the nurse who will take charge of the case."
The perturbed lady uncovered one eye.
"You are sure she is one of your very best?"
"One of our best," said the doctor, as he and Nance exchanged a quizzical smile.
"Let her go in to him now. I can't bear for him to be alone a second. AsI was telling you—"
Nance passed into the darkened room and closed the door softly. The patient was evidently asleep; so she tiptoed over to the window and slipped into a chair. On each side of the open space without stretched the vine-clad wings of the hospital, gray now under the starlight. Nance's eyes traveled reminiscently from floor to floor, from window to window. How many memories the old building held for her! Memories of heartaches and happiness, of bad times and good times, of bitter defeats and dearly won triumphs.
It had been no easy task for a girl of her limited education and undisciplined nature to take the training course. But she had gallantly stood to her guns and out of seeming defeat, won a victory. For the first time in her diversified career she had worked in a congenial environment toward a fixed goal, and in a few weeks now she would be launching her own little boat on the professional main.
Her eyes grew tender as she thought of leaving these protecting gray walls that had sheltered her for four long years; yet the adventure of the future was already calling. Where would her first case lead her?
A cough from the bed brought her sharply back to the present. She went forward and stooped to adjust a pillow, and the patient opened his eyes, stared at her in bewilderment, then pulled himself up on his elbow.
"Nance!" he cried incredulously. "Nance Molloy!"
She started back in dismay.
"Why, it's Mr. Mac! I didn't know! I thought I'd seen the lady before—no, please! Stop, they're coming! Please, Mr. Mac!"
For the patient, heretofore too absorbed in his own affliction to note anything, was covering her imprisoned hands with kisses and calling on Heaven to witness that he was willing to undergo any number of operations if she would nurse him through them.
Nance escaped from the room as Mrs. Clarke entered. With burning cheeks she rushed to Dr. Adair's office.
"You'll have to get somebody else on that case, Doctor," she declared impulsively. "I used to work for Mr. Clarke up at the bottle factory, and—and there are reasons why I don't want to take it."
Dr. Adair looked at her over his glasses and frowned.
"It is a nurse's duty," he said sternly, "to take the cases as they come, irrespective of likes or dislikes. Mr. Clarke is an old friend of mine, a man I admire and respect."
"Yes, sir, I know, but if you'll just excuse me this once—"
"Is Miss Rand off duty?"
"No, sir. She's in number seven."
"Miss Foster?"
"No, sir."
"Then I shall have to insist upon your taking the case. I must have somebody I can depend upon to look after young Clarke for the next twenty-four hours. It's not only the complication with his appendix; it's his lungs."
"You mean he's tubercular?"
"Yes."
Nance's eyes widened.
"Does he know it?"
"No. I shall wait and tell his father. I wouldn't undertake to break the news to that mother of his for a house and lot! You take the case to-night, and I'll operate in the morning—"
"No, no, please, Doctor! Mr. Clarke wouldn't want me."
"Mr. Clarke will be satisfied with whatever arrangement I see fit to make. Besides another nurse will be in charge by the time he arrives."
"But, Doctor—"
A stern glance silenced her, and she went out, closing the door as hard as she dared behind her. During her four years at the hospital the memory of Mac Clarke had grown fainter and fainter like the perfume of a fading flower. But the memory of Dan was like a thorn in her flesh, buried deep, but never forgotten.
To herself, her fellow-nurses, the young internes who invariably fell in love with her, she declared gaily that she was "through with men forever." The subject that excited her fiercest scorn was matrimony, and she ridiculed sentiment with the superior attitude of one who has weighed it in the balance and found it wanting.
Nevertheless something vaguely disturbing woke in her that night when she watched with Mrs. Clarke at Mac's bedside. Despite the havoc five years had wrought in him, there was the old appealing charm in his voice and manner, the old audacity in his whispered words when she bent over him, the old eager want in his eyes as they followed her about the room.
Toward morning he dropped into a restless sleep, and Mrs. Clarke, who had been watching his every breath, tiptoed over to the table and sat down by Nance.
"My son tells me you are the Miss Molloy who used to be in the office," she whispered. "He is so happy to find some one here he knows. He loathes trained nurses as a rule. They make him nervous. But he has been wonderfully good about letting you do things for him. It's a tremendous relief to me."
Nance made a mistake on the chart that was going to call for an explanation later.
"He's been losing ground ever since last winter," the doting mother went on. "He was really quite well at Divonne-les-Bains, but he lost all he gained when we reached Paris. You see he doesn't know how to take care of himself; that's the trouble."
Mac groaned and she hurried to him.
"He wants a cigarette, Miss Molloy. I don't believe it would hurt him," she said.
"His throat's already irritated," said Nance, in her most professional tone. "I am sure Dr. Adair wouldn't want him to smoke."
"But we can't refuse him anything to-night," said Mrs. Clarke, with an apologetic smile as she reached for the matches.
Nance looking at her straight, delicate profile thrown into sudden relief by the flare of the match, had the same disturbing sense of familiarity that she had experienced long ago in the cathedral.
But during the next twenty-four hours there was no time to analyze subtle impressions or to indulge in sentimental reminiscence. From the moment Mac's unconscious form was borne down from the operating room and handed over to her care, he ceased to be a man and became a critically ill patient.
"We haven't much to work on," said Dr. Adair, shaking his head. "He has no resisting power. He has burned himself out."
But Mac's powers of resistance were stronger than he thought, and by the time Mr. Clarke arrived the crisis was passed. Slowly and painfully he struggled back to consciousness, and his first demand was for Nance.
"It's the nurse he had when he first came," Mrs. Clarke explained to her husband. "You must make Dr. Adair give her back to us. She's the only nurse I've ever seen who could get Mac to do things. By the way, she used to be in your office, a rather pretty, graceful girl, named Molloy."
"I remember her," said Mr. Clarke, grimly. "You better leave things as they are. Miss Hanna seems to know her business."
"But Mac hates Miss Hanna! He says her hands make him think of bedsprings. Miss Molloy makes him laugh and helps him to forget the pain. He's taken a tremendous fancy to her."
"Yes, he had quite a fancy for her once before."
"Now, Macpherson, how can you?" cried Mrs. Clarke on the verge of tears. "Just because the boy made one slip when he was little more than achild, you suspect his every motive. I don't see how you can be so cruel! If you had seen his agony, if you had been through what I have—"
Thus it happened that instead of keeping Nance out of Mac's sight, Mrs. Clarke left no stone unturned to get her back, and Mr. Clarke was even persuaded to take it up personally with Dr. Adair.
Nance might have held out to the end, had her sympathies not been profoundly stirred by the crushing effect the news of Mac's serious tubercular condition had upon his parents. On the day they were told Mr. Clarke paced the corridor for hours with slow steps and bent head, refusing to see people or to answer the numerous inquiries over the telephone. As for Mrs. Clarke, all the fragile prettiness and girlish grace she had carried over into maturity, seemed to fall away from her within the hour, leaving her figure stooped and her face settled into lines of permanent anxiety.
The mother's chief concern now was to break the news of his condition to Mac, who was already impatiently straining at the leash, eager to get back to his old joyous pursuits and increasingly intolerant of restrictions.
"He refuses to listen to me or to his father," she confided to Nance, who had coaxed her down to the yard for a breath of fresh air. "I'm afraid we've lost our influence over him. And yet I can't bear for Dr. Adair to tell him. He's so stern and says such dreadful things. Do you know he actually was heartless enough to tell Mac that he had brought a great deal of this trouble on himself!"
Nance slipped her hand through Mrs. Clarke's arm, and patted it reassuringly. She had come to have a sort of pitying regard for this terror-stricken mother during these days of anxious waiting.
"I wonder if you would be willing to tell him?" Mrs. Clarke asked, looking at her appealingly. "Maybe you could make him understand without frightening him."
"I'll try," said Nance, with ready sympathy.
The opportunity came one day in the following week when the regular day nurse was off duty. She found Mac alone, propped up in bed, and tremendously glad to see her. To a less experienced person the brilliancy of his eyes and the color in his cheeks would have meant returning health, but to Nance they were danger signals that nerved her to her task.
"I hear you are going home next week," she said, resting her crossed arms on the foot of his bed. "Going to be good and take care of yourself?"
"Not on your life!" cried Mac, gaily, searching under his pillow for his cigarette case. "The lid's been on for a month, and it's coming off with a bang. I intend to shoot the first person that mentions health to me."
"Fire away then," said Nance. "I'm it. I've come to hand you out a nice little bunch of advice."
"You needn't. I've got twice as much now as I intend to use. Come on around here and be sociable. I want to make love to you."
Nance declined the invitation.
"Has Dr. Adair put you wise on what he's letting you in for?"
"Rather! Raw eggs, rest, and rust. Mother put him up to it. It's perfect rot. I'll be feeling fit as a fiddle inside of two weeks. All I need is to get out of this hole. They couldn't have kept me here this long if it hadn't been for you."
"And I reckon you're counting on going back and speeding up just as you did before?"
"Sure, why not?"
"Because you can't. The sooner you soak that in, the better."
He blew a succession of smoke rings in her direction and laughed.
"So they've taken you into the conspiracy, have they? Going to frighten me into the straight and narrow, eh? Suppose I tell them that I'm lovesick? That there's only one cure for me in the world, and that's you?"
The ready retort with which she had learned to parry these personalities was not forthcoming. She felt as she had that day five years ago in his father's office, when she told him what she thought of him. He smiled up at her with the same irresponsible light in his brown eyes, the same eager desire to sidestep the disagreeable, the old refusal to accept life seriously. He was such a boy despite his twenty-six years. Such a spoiled, selfish lovable boy!
With a sudden rush of pity, she went to him and took his hand:
"See here, Mr. Mac," she said very gravely, "I got to tell you something. Dr. Adair wanted to tell you from the first, but your mother headed him off."
He shot a swift glance at her.
"What do you mean, Nance?"
Then Nance sat on the side of his bed and explained to him, as gently and as firmly as she could, the very serious nature of his illness, emphasizing the fact that his one chance for recovery lay in complete surrender to a long and rigorous regime of treatment.
From scoffing incredulity, he passed to anxious skepticism and then to agonized conviction. It was the first time he had ever faced any disagreeable fact in life from which there was no appeal, and he cried out in passionate protest. If he was a "lunger" he wanted to die as soon as possible. He hated those wheezy chaps that went coughing through life, avoiding draughts, and trying to keep their feet dry. If he was going to die, he wanted to do it with a rush. He'd be hanged if he'd cut out smoking, drinking, and running with the boys, just to lie on his back for a year and perhaps die at the end of it!
Nance faced the bitter crisis with him, whipping up his courage, strengthening his weak will, nerving him for combat. When she left him an hour later, with his face buried in the pillow and his hands locked above his head, he had promised to submit to the doctor's advice on the one condition that she would go home with him and start him on that fight for life that was to tax all his strength and patience and self-control.
October hovered over Kentucky that year in a golden halo of enchantment. The beech-trees ran the gamut of glory, and every shrub and weed had its hour of transient splendor. A soft haze from burning brush lent the world a sense of mystery and immensity. Day after day on the south porch at Hillcrest Mac Clarke lay propped with cushions on a wicker couch, while Nance Molloy sat beside him, and all about them was a stir of whispering, dancing, falling leaves. The hillside was carpeted with them, the brook below the pergola was strewn with bits of color, while overhead the warm sunshine filtered through canopies of russet and crimson and green.
"I tell you the boy is infatuated with that girl," Mr. Clarke warned his wife from time to time.
"What nonsense!" Mrs. Clarke answered. "He is just amusing himself a bit.He will forget her as soon as he gets out and about."
"But the girl?"
"Oh, she's too sensible to have any hopes of that kind. She really is an exceptionally nice girl. Rather too frank in her speech, and frequently ungrammatical and slangy, but I don't know what we should do without her."
But even Mrs. Clarke's complacence was a bit shaken as the weeks slipped away, and Mac's obsession became the gossip of the household. To be sure, so long as Nance continued to regard the whole matter as a joke and refused to take Mac seriously, no harm would be done. But that very indifference that assured his adoring mother, at the same time piqued her pride. That an ordinary trained nurse, born and brought up, Heaven knew where, should be insensible to Mac's even transient attention almost amounted to an impertinence. Quite unconsciously she began to break down Nance's defenses.
"You must be very good to my boy, dear," she said one day in her gentle, coaxing way. "I know he's a bit capricious and exacting at times. But we can't afford to cross him now when he is just beginning to improve. He was terribly upset last night when you teased him about leaving."
"But I ought to go, Mrs. Clarke. He'd get along just as well now with another nurse. Besides I only promised—"
"Not another word!" implored Mrs. Clarke in instant alarm. "I wouldn't answer for the consequences if you left us now. Mac goes all to pieces when it is suggested. He has always been so used to having his own way, you know."
Yes, Nance knew. Between her unceasing efforts to get him well, and her grim determination to keep the situation well in hand, she had unlimited opportunity of finding out. The physicians agreed that his chances for recovery were one to three. It was only by the most persistent observance of certain regulations pertaining to rest, diet, and fresh air, that they held out any hope of arresting the malady that had already made such alarming headway. Nance realized from the first that it was to be a fight against heavy odds, and she gallantly rose to the emergency. Aside from the keen personal interest she took in Mac, and the sympathy she felt for his stricken parents, she had an immense pride in her first private case, on which she was determined to win her spurs.
For three months now she had controlled the situation. With undaunted perseverance she had made Mac submit to authority and succeeded in successfully combatting his mother's inclination to yield to his every whim. The gratifying result was that Mac was gradually putting on flesh and, with the exception of a continued low fever, was showing decided improvement. Already talk of a western flight was in the air.
The whole matter hinged at present on Mac's refusal to go unless Nance could be induced to accompany them. The question had been argued from every conceivable angle, and gradually a conspiracy had been formed between Mac and his mother to overcome her apparently absurd resistance.
"It isn't as if she had any good reason," Mrs. Clarke complained to her husband, with tears in her eyes. "She has no immediate family, and she might just as well be on duty in California as in Kentucky. I don't see how she can refuse to go when she sees how weak Mac is, and how he depends on her."
"The girl's got more sense than all the rest of you put together!" saidMr. Clarke. "She sees the way things are going."
"Well, what if Mac is in love with her?" asked Mrs. Clarke, for the first time frankly facing the situation. "Of course it's just his sick fancy, but he is in no condition to be argued with. The one absolutely necessary thing is to get her to go with us. Suppose you ask her. Perhaps that's what she is waiting for."
"And you are willing to take the consequences?"
"I am willing for anything on earth that will help me keep my boy," sobbed Mrs. Clarke, resorting to a woman's surest weapon.
So Mr. Clarke turned his ponderous batteries upon the situation, using money as the ammunition with which he was most familiar.
The climax was reached one night toward the end of October when the first heavy hoar-frost of the season gave premonitory threat of coming winter. The family was still at dinner, and Mac was having his from a tray before the library fire. The heavy curtains had been drawn against the chill world without, and the long room was a soft harmony of dull reds and browns, lit up here and there by rose-shaded lamps.
It was a luxurious room, full of trophies of foreign travel. The long walls were hung with excellent pictures; the floors were covered with rare rugs; the furniture was selected with perfect taste. Every detail had been elaborately and skilfully worked out by an eminent decorator. Only one insignificant item had been omitted. In the length and breadth of the library, not a book was to be seen.
Mac, letting his soup cool while he read the letter Nance had just brought him, gave an exclamation of surprise.
"By George! Monte Pearce is going to get married!"
Nance laughed.
"I've got a tintype of Mr. Monte settling down. Who's the girl?"
"A cousin of his in Honolulu. Her father is a sugar king; no end of cash.Think of old Monte landing a big fish like that!"
"That's what you'll be doing when you get out to your ranch."
"I intend to take my girl along."
"You'll have to get her first."
Mac turned on her with an invalid's fretfulness. "See here, Nance," he cried, "cut that out, will you? Either you go, or I stay, do you see? I know I'm a fool about you, but I can't help it. Nance, why don't you love me?"
Nance looked down at him helplessly. She had been refusing him on an average of twice a day for the past week, and her powers of resistance were weakening. The hardest granite yields in the end to the persistent dropping of water. However much the clear-headed, independent side of her might refuse him, to another side of her he was strangely appealing. Often when she was near him, the swift remembrance of other days filled her with sudden desire to yield, if only for a moment, to his insatiable demands. Despite her most heroic resolution, she sometimes relaxed her vigilance as she did to-night, and allowed her hand to rest in his.
Mac made the most of the moment.
"I don't ask you to promise me anything, Nance. I just ask you to come with me!" he pleaded, with eloquent eyes, "we can get a couple of ponies and scour the trails all over those old mountains. At Coronada there's bully sea bathing. And the motoring—why you can go for a hundred miles straight along the coast!"
Nance's eyes kindled, but she shook her head. "You can do all that without me. All I do is to jack you up and make you take care of yourself. I should think you 'd hate me, Mr. Mac."
"Well, I don't. Sometimes I wish I did. I love you even when you come down on me hardest. A chap gets sick of being mollycoddled. When you fire up and put your saucy little chin in the air, and tell me I sha'n't have a cocktail, and call me a fool for stealing a smoke, it bucks me up more than anything. By George, I believe I'd amount to something if you'd take me permanently in hand."
Nance laughed, and he pulled her down on the arm of his chair.
"Say you'll marry me, Nance," he implored. "You'll learn to care for me all right. You want to get out and see the world. I'll take you. We'll go out to Honolulu and see Monte. Mother will talk the governor over; she's promised. They'll give me anything I want, and I want you. Oh, Nance darling, don't leave me to fight through this beastly business alone!"
There was a haunted look of fear in his eyes as he clung to her that appealed to her more than his former demands had ever done. Instinctively her strong, tender hands closed over his thin, weak ones.
"Nobody expects you to fight it through alone," she reassured him, "but you come on down off this high horse! We'll be having another bad night the first thing you know."
"They'll all be bad if you don't come with me, Nance. I won't ask you to say yes to-night, but for God's sake don't say no!"
Nance observed the brilliancy of his eyes and the flush on his thin cheeks, and knew that his fever was rising.
"All right," she promised lightly. "I won't say no to-night, if you'll stop worrying. I'm going to fix you nice and comfy on the couch and not let you say another word."
But when she had got him down on the couch, nothing would do but she must sit on the hassock beside him and soothe his aching head. Sometimes he stopped her stroking hand to kiss it, but for the most part he lay with eyes half-closed and elaborated his latest whim.
"We could stay awhile in Honolulu and then go on to Japan and China. I want to see India, too, and Mandalay,
… somewhere east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,And there aren't no Ten Commandments
—you remember Kipling's Mandalay?"
Nance couldn't remember what she had never known, but she did not say so. Since her advent at Hillcrest she had learned to observe and listen without comment. This was not her world, and her shrewd common-sense told her so again and again. Even the servants who moved with such easy familiarity about their talks were more at home than she. It had kept her wits busy to meet the situation. But now that she had got over her first awkwardness, she found the new order of things greatly to her liking. For the first time in her life she was moving in a world of beautiful objects, agreeable sounds, untroubled relations, and that starved side of her that from the first had cried out for order and beauty and harmony fed ravenously upon the luxury around her.
And this was what Mac was offering her,—her, Nance Molloy of Calvary Alley,—who up to four years ago had never known anything but bare floors, flickering gas-jets, noise, dirt, confusion. He wanted her to marry him; he needed her.
She ceased to listen to his rambling talk, her eyes rested dreamily on the glowing back-log. After all didn't every woman want to marry and have a home of her own, and later perhaps—Twenty-four at Christmas! Almost an old maid! And to think Mr. Mac had gone on caring for her all these years, that he still wanted her when he had all those girls in his own world to choose from. Not many men were constant like that, she thought, as an old memory stabbed her.
Then she was aware that her hand was held fast to a hot cheek, and that a pair of burning eyes were watching her.
"Nance!" Mac whispered eagerly, "you're giving in! You're going with me!"
A step in the hall made Nance scramble to her feet just before Mrs.Clarke came in from the dining-room.
"I thought we should never get through dinner!" said that lady, with an impatient sigh. "The bishop can talk of nothing else but his new hobby, and do you know he's actually persuaded your father to give one of the tenements back of the cathedral for the free clinic!"
Nance who was starting out with the tray, put it down suddenly.
"How splendid!" she cried. "Which house is it?"
"I don't know, I am sure. But they are going to put a lot of money into doing it over, and Dr. Adair has offered to take entire charge of it. For my part I think it is a great mistake. Just think what that money would mean to our poor mission out in Mukden! These shiftless people here at home have every chance to live decently. It's not our fault if they refuse to take advantage of their opportunities."
"But they don't know how, Mrs. Clarke! If Dr. Adair could teach the mothers—"
Mrs. Clarke lifted her hands in laughing protest.
"My dear girl, don't you know that mothers can't be taught? The most ignorant mother alive has more instinctive knowledge of what is good for her child than any man that ever lived! Mac, dearest, why didn't you eat your grapes?"
"Because I loathe grapes. Nance is going to work them off on an old sick man she knows."
"Some one at the hospital?" Mrs. Clarke asked idly.
"No," said Nance, "it's an old gentleman who lives down in the very place we're talking about. He's been sick for weeks. It's all right about the grapes?"
"Why, of course. Take some oranges, too, and tell the gardener to give you some flowers. The dahlias are going to waste this year. Mac, you look tired!"
He shook off her hand impatiently.
"No, I'm not. I feel like a two-year old. Nance thinks perhaps she may go with us after all."
"Of course she will!" said Mrs. Clarke, with a confident smile at the girl. "We are going to be so good to her that she will not have the heart to refuse."
Mrs. Clarke with her talent for self-deception had almost convinced herself that Nance was a fairy princess who had languished in a nether world of obscurity until Mac's magic smile had restored her to her own.
Nance evaded an answer by fleeing to the white and red breakfast-room where the butler was laying the cloth for her dinner. As a rule she enjoyed these tête-à-têtes with the butler. He was a solemn and pretentious Englishman whom she delighted in shocking by acting and talking in a manner that was all too natural to her. But to-night she submitted quite meekly to his lordly condescension.
She ate her dinner in dreamy abstraction, her thoughts on Mac and the enticing prospects he had held out. After all what was the use in fighting against all the kindness and affection? If they were willing to take the risk of her going with them, why should she hesitate? They knew she was poor and uneducated and not of their world, and they couldn't help seeing that Mac was in love with her. And still they wanted her.
California! Honolulu! Queer far-off lands full of queer people! Big ships that would carry her out of the sight and sound of Calvary Alley forever! And Mac, well and happy, making a man of himself, giving her everything in the world she wanted.
Across her soaring thoughts struck the voices from the adjoining dining-room, Mr. Clarke's sharp and incisive, the bishop's suave and unctious. Suddenly a stray sentence arrested her attention and she listened with her glass half-way to her lips.
"It is the labor question that concerns us more than the war," Mr. Clarke was saying. "I have just succeeded in signing up with a man I have been after for four years. He is a chap named Lewis, the only man in this part of the country who seems to be able to cope with the problem of union labor."
"A son of General Lewis?"
"No, no. Just a common workman who got his training at our factory. He left me five or six years ago without rhyme or reason, and went over to the Ohio Glass Works, where he has made quite a name for himself. I had a tussle to get him back, but he comes to take charge next month. He is one of those rare men you read about, but seldom find, a practical idealist."
Nance left her ice untouched, and slipped through the back entry and up to the dainty blue bedroom that had been hers now for three months. All the delicious languor of the past hour was gone, and in its place was a turmoil of hope and fear and doubt. Dan was coming back. The words beat on her brain. He cared nothing for her, and he was married, and she would never see him, but he was coming back.
She opened the drawer of her dressing table and took out a small faded photograph which she held to the silk-shaded lamp. It was a cheap likeness of an awkward-looking working-boy in his Sunday clothes, a stiff lock of unruly hair across his temple, and a pair of fine earnest eyes looking out from slightly scowling brows.
Nance looked at it long and earnestly; then she flung it back in the drawer with a sigh and, putting out the light, went down again to her patient.
The next afternoon, armed with her flowers and fruit, Nance was setting forth for Calvary Alley, when Mrs. Clarke called to her from an upper window.
"If you will wait ten minutes, I will take you down in the machine."
"But I want the walk," Nance insisted. "I need the exercise."
"Nonsense, you are on your feet nearly all the time. I won't be long."
Nance made a wry face at an unoffending sparrow and glanced regretfully at the long white road that wound invitingly in and out of the woods until it dropped sharply to the little station in the valley a mile below. She had been looking forward to that walk all morning. She wanted to get away from the hot-house atmosphere of the Clarke establishment, away from Mac's incessant appeals and his mother's increasing dependence. Aside from amusing her patient and seeing that he obeyed Dr. Adair's orders, her duties for the past few weeks had been too light to be interesting. The luxury that at first had so thrilled her was already beginning to pall. She wanted to be out in the open alone, to feel the sharp wind of reality in her face, while she thought things out.
"I am going to the cathedral," said Mrs. Clarke, emerging from the door, followed by a maid carrying coats and rugs. "But I can drop you wherever you say."
"I'll go there, too," said Nance as she took her seat in the car. "The old gentleman I'm taking the things to lives just back of there, in the very house Dr. Adair is trying to get for the clinic."
"Poor soul!" said Mrs. Clarke idly, as she viewed with approval Nance's small brown hat that so admirably set off the lights in her hair and the warm red tints of her skin.
"He's been up against it something fierce for over a year now," Nance went on. "We've helped him all he'd let us since he stopped playing at the theater."
"Playing?" Mrs. Clarke repeated the one word that had caught her wandering attention. "Is he an actor?"
"No; he is a musician. He used to play in big orchestras in New York andBoston. He plays the fiddle."
For the rest of the way into town Mrs. Clarke was strangely preoccupied. She sat very straight, with eyes slightly contracted, and looked absently out of the window. Once or twice she began a sentence without finishing it. At the cathedral steps she laid a detaining hand on Nance's arm.
"By the way, what did you say was the name of the old man you are going to see?"
"I never said. It's Demry."
"Demry—Never mind, I just missed the step. I'm quite all right. I thinkI will go with you to see this—this—house they are talking about."
"But it's in the alley. Mrs. Clarke; it's awfully dirty."
"Yes, yes, but I'm coming. Can we go through here?"
So impatient was she that she did not wait for Nance to lead the way, but hurried around the bishop's study and down the concrete walk to the gate that opened into the alley.
"Look out for your skirt against the garbage barrel," warned Nance. It embarrassed her profoundly to have Mrs. Clarke in these surroundings; she hated the mud that soiled her dainty boots, the odors that must offend her nostrils, the inevitable sights that awaited her in Number One. She only prayed that Mrs. Snawdor's curl-papered head might not appear on the upper landing.
"Which way?" demanded Mrs. Clarke, impatiently.
Nance led the way into the dark hall where a half-dozen ragged, dirty-faced children were trying to drag a still dirtier pup up the stairs by means of a twine string.
"In here, Mrs. Clarke," said Nance, pushing open the door at the left
The outside shutters of the big cold room were partly closed, but the light from between them fell with startling effect on the white, marble-like face of the old man who lay asleep on a cot in front of the empty fireplace. For a moment Mrs. Clarke stood looking at him; then with a smothered cry she bent over him.
"Father!" she cried sharply, "Oh, God! It's my father!"
Nance caught her breath in amazement; then her bewildered gaze fell upon a familiar object. There, in its old place on the mantel stood the miniature of a pink and white maiden in the pink and white dress, with the golden curl across her shoulder. In the delicate, beautiful profile Nance read the amazing truth.
Mr. Demry sighed heavily, opened his eyes with an effort and, looking past the bowed head beside him, held out a feeble hand for the flowers.
"Listen, Mr. Demry," said Nance, breathlessly. "Here's a lady says she knows you. Somebody you haven't seen for a long, long time. Will you look at her and try to remember?"
His eyes rested for the fraction of a minute on the agonized face lifted to his, then closed wearily.
"Can you not get the lady a chair, Nancy?" he asked feebly. "You can borrow one from the room across the hall."
"Father!" demanded Mrs. Clarke, "don't you know me? It is Elise. Your daughter, Elise Demorest!"
"Demorest," he repeated, and smiled. "How unnatural it sounds now!Demorest!"
"It's no use," said Nance. "His mind wanders most of the time. Let me take you back to the cathedral, Mrs. Clarke, until we decide what's got to be done."
"I am going to take him home," said Mrs. Clarke, wildly. "He shall have every comfort and luxury I can give him. Poor Father, don't you want to come home with Elise?"
"I live at Number One, Calvary Alley," said Mr. Demry, clinging to the one fact he had trained his mind to remember. "If you will kindly get me to the corner, the children will—"
"It's too late to do anything!" cried Mrs. Clarke, wringing her hands. "I knew something terrible would happen to him. I pleaded with them to help me find him, but they put me off. Then I got so absorbed in Mac that he drove everything else out of my mind. How long has he been in this awful place? How long has he been ill? Who takes care of him?"
Nance, with her arms about Mrs. Clarke, told her as gently as she could of Mr. Demry's advent into the alley fourteen years before, of his friendship with the children, his occasional lapses from grace, and the steady decline of his fortune.
"We must get him away from here!" cried Mrs. Clarke when she had gained control of herself. "Go somewhere and telephone Mr. Clarke. Telephone Dr. Adair. Tell him to bring an ambulance and another nurse and—and plenty of blankets. Telephone to the house for them to get a room ready. But wait—there's Mac—he mustn't know—"
It was the old, old mother-cry! Keep it from Mac, spare Mac, don't letMac suffer. Nance seized on it now to further her designs.
"You go back to Mr. Mac, Mrs. Clarke. I'll stay here and attend to everything. You go ahead and get things ready for us."
And Mrs. Clarke, used to taking the easiest way, allowed herself to be persuaded, and after one agonized look at the tranquil face on the pillow, hurried away.
Nance, shivering with the cold, got together the few articles that constituted Mr. Demry's worldly possessions. A few shabby garments in the old wardrobe, the miniature on the shelf, a stack of well-worn books, and the violin in its rose-wood case. Everything else had been sold to keep the feeble flame alive in that wasted old form.
Nance looked about her with swimming eyes. She recalled the one happy Christmas that her childhood had known. The gay garlands of tissue paper, the swinging lanterns, the shelf full of oranges and doughnuts, and the beaming old face smiling over the swaying fiddle bow! And to think that Mrs. Clarke's own father had hidden away here all these years, utterly friendless except for the children, poor to the point of starvation, sick to the point of death, grappling with his great weakness in heroic silence, and going down to utter oblivion rather than obtrude his misfortune upon the one he loved best.
As the old man's fairy tales had long ago stirred Nance's imagination and wakened her to the beauty of invisible things, so now his broken, futile life, with its one great glory of renunciation, called out to the soul of her and roused in her a strange, new sense of spiritual beauty.
For one week he lived among the luxurious surroundings of his daughter's home. Everything that skill and money could do, was done to restore him to health and sanity. But he saw only the sordid sights he had been seeing for the past fourteen years; he heard only the sounds to which his old ears had become accustomed.
"You would better move my cot, Nancy," he would say, plucking at the silken coverlid. "They are scrubbing the floor up in the Lavinski flat. The water always comes through." And again he would say: "It is nice and warm in here, but I am afraid you are burning too much coal, dear. I cannot get another bucket until Saturday."
One day Mrs. Clarke saw him take from his tray, covered with delicacies, a half-eaten roll and slip it under his pillow.
"We must save it," he whispered confidentially, "save it for to-morrow." In vain they tried to reassure him; the haunting poverty that had stalked beside him in life refused to be banished by death.
Mrs. Clarke remained "the lady" to him to the end. When he spoke to her, his manner assumed a faint dignity, with a slight touch of gallantry, the unmistakable air of a gentleman of the old school towards an attractive stranger of the opposite sex.
His happiest hours were those when he fancied the children were with him.
"Gently! gently!" he would say; "there is room for everybody. This knee is for Gussie Gorman, this one for Joe, because they are the smallest, you know. Now are you ready?" And then he would whisper fairy stories, smiling at the ceiling, and making feeble gestures with his wasted old hands.
The end came one day after he had lain for hours in a stupor. He stirred suddenly and asked for his violin.
"I must go—to the—theater, Nancy," he murmured. "I—do not want—to be—a—burden."
They laid the instrument in his arms, and his fingers groped feebly over the strings; then his chin sank into its old accustomed place, and a great light dawned in his eyes. Mr. Demry, who was used to seeing invisible things, had evidently caught the final vision.
That night, worn with nursing and full of grief for the passing of her old friend, Nance threw a coat about her and slipped out on the terrace. Above her, nebulous stars were already appearing, and their twinkling was answered by responsive gleams in the city below. Against the velvety dusk two tall objects towered in the distance, the beautiful Gothic spire of the cathedral, and the tall, unseemly gas pipe of Clarke's Bottle Factory. Between them, under a haze of smoke and grime, lay Calvary Alley.
"I don't know which is worse," thought Nance fiercely, "to be down there in the mess, fighting and struggling and suffering to get the things you want, or up here with the mummies who haven't got anything left to wish for. I wish life wasn't just a choice between a little hard green apple and a rotten big one!"
She leaned her elbows on the railing and watched the new moon dodging behind the tree trunks and, as she watched, she grappled with the problem of life, at first bitterly and rebelliously, then with a dawning comprehension of its meaning. After all was the bishop, with his conspicuous virtues and his well-known dislike of children, any better than old Mr. Demry, with his besetting sin and his beautiful influence on every child with whom he came in contact? Was Mr. Clarke, working children under age in the factory to build up a great fortune for his son, very different from Mr. Lavinski, with his sweat-shop, hoarding pennies for the ambitious Ikey? Was Mrs. Clarke, shirking her duty to her father, any happier or any better than Mrs. Snawdor, shirking hers to her children? Was Mac, adored and petted and protected, any better than Birdie, now in the state asylum paying the penalty of their joint misdeed? Was the tragedy in the great house back of her any more poignant than the tragedy of Dan Lewis bound by law to an insane wife and burdened with a child that was not his own? She seemed to see for the first time the great illuminating truth that the things that make men alike in the world are stronger than the things that make them different. And in this realization an overwhelming ambition seized her. Some hidden spiritual force rose to lift her out of the contemplation of her own interests into something of ultimate value to her fellowmen.
After all, those people down there in Calvary Alley were her people, and she meant to stand by them. It had been the dream of her life to get out and away, but in that moment she knew that wherever she went, she would always come back. Others might help from the top, but she could help understandingly from the bottom. With the magnificent egotism of youth, she outlined gigantic schemes on the curtain of the night. Some day, somehow, she would make people like the Clarkes see the life of the poor as it really was, she would speak for the girls in the factories, in the sweatshops, on the stage. She would be an interpreter between the rich and the poor and make them serve each other.
"Nance!" called an injured voice from the music room behind her, "what in the mischief are you doing out there in the cold? Come on in here and amuse me. I'm half dead with the dumps!"
"All right, Mr. Mac. I'm coming," she said cheerfully, as she stepped in through the French window and closed it against her night of dreams.
The Dan Lewis who came back to Clarke's Bottle Factory was a very different man from the one who had walked out of it five years before. He had gone out a stern, unforgiving, young ascetic, accepting no compromise, demanding perfection of himself and of his fellow-men. The very sublimity of his dream doomed it to failure. Out of the crumbling ideals of his boyhood he had struggled to a foothold on life that had never been his in the old days. His marriage to Birdie Smelts had been the fiery furnace in which his soul had been softened to receive the final stamp of manhood.
For his hour of indiscretion he had paid to the last ounce of his strength and courage. After that night in the lodging-house, there seemed to him but one right course, and he took it with unflinching promptness. Even when Birdie, secure in the protection of his name and his support, lapsed into her old vain, querulous self, he valiantly bore his burden, taking any menial work that he could find to do, and getting a sort of grim satisfaction out of what he regarded as expiation for his sin.
But when he became aware of Birdie's condition and realized the use she had made of him, the tragedy broke upon him in all of its horror. Then he, too, lost sight of the shore lights, and went plunging desperately into the stream of life with no visible and sustaining ideal to guide his course, but only the fighting necessity to get across as decently as possible.
After a long struggle he secured a place in the Ohio Glass Works, where his abilities soon began to be recognized. Instead of working now with tingling enthusiasm for Nance and the honeysuckle cottage, he worked doggedly and furiously to meet the increasing expense of Birdie's wastefulness and the maintenance of her child.
Year by year he forged ahead, gaining a reputation for sound judgment and fair dealing that made him an invaluable spokesman between the employer and the employed. He set himself seriously to work to get at the real conditions that were causing the ferment of unrest among the working classes. He made himself familiar with socialistic and labor newspapers; he attended mass meetings; he laid awake nights reading and wrestling with the problems of organized industrialism. His honest resentment against the injustice shown the laboring man was always nicely balanced by his intolerance of the haste and ignorance and misrepresentation of the labor agitators. He was one of the few men who could be called upon to arbitrate differences, whom both factions invariably pronounced "square." When pressure was brought to bear upon him to return to Clarke's, he was in a position to dictate his own terms.
It was the second week after his reinstatement that he came up to the office one day and unexpectedly encountered Nance Molloy. At first he did not recognize the tall young lady in the well-cut brown suit with the bit of fur at the neck and wrists and the jaunty brown hat with its dash of gold. Then she looked up, and it was Nance's old smile that flashed out at him, and Nance's old impulsive self that turned to greet him.
For one radiant moment all that had happened since they last stood there was swept out of the memory of each; then it came back; and they shook hands awkwardly and could find little to say to each other in the presence of the strange stenographer who occupied Nance's old place at the desk by the window.
"They told me you weren't working here," said Dan at length.
"I'm not. I've just come on an errand for Mrs. Clarke."
Dan's eyes searched hers in swift inquiry.
"I'm a trained nurse now," she said, determined to take the situation lightly. "You remember how crazy I used to be about doping people?"
He did not answer, and she hurried on as if afraid of any silence that might fall between them.
"It all started with the smallpox in Calvary Alley. Been back there, Dan?"
"Not yet."
"Lots of changes since the old days. Mr. Snawdor and Fidy and Mrs. Smelts and Mr. Demry all gone. Have you heard about Mr. Demry?"
Dan shook his head. He was not listening to her, but he was looking at her searchingly, broodingly, with growing insistence.
The hammering of the type-writer was the only sound that broke the ensuing pause.
"Tell me your news, Dan," said Nance in desperation. "Where you living now?"
"At Mrs. Purdy's. She's going to take care of Ted for me."
"Ted? Oh! I forgot. How old is he now?"
For the first time Dan's face lit up with his fine, rare smile.
"He's four, Nance, and the smartest kid that ever lived! You'd be crazy about him, I know. I wonder if you couldn't go out there some day and see him?"
Nance showed no enthusiasm over the suggestion; instead she gathered up her muff and gloves and, leaving a message for Mr. Clarke with the stenographer, prepared to depart.
"I am thinking about going away," she said. "I may go out to California next week."
The brief enthusiasm died out of Dan's face.
"What's taking you to California?" he asked dully, as he followed her into the hall.
"I may go with a patient. Have you heard of the trouble they're in at theClarkes'?"
"No."
"It's Mr. Mac. He's got tuberculosis, and they are taking him out to the coast for a year. They want me to go along."
Dan's face hardened.
"So it's Mac Clarke still?" he asked bitterly.
His tone stung Nance to the quick, and she wheeled on him indignantly.
"See here, Dan! I've got to put you straight on a thing or two. Where can we go to have this business out?"
He led her across the hall to his own small office and closed the door.
"I'm going to tell you something," she said, facing him with blazing eyes, "and I don't care a hang whether you believe it or not. I never was in love with Mac Clarke. From the day you left this factory I never saw or wrote to him until he was brought to the hospital last July, and I was put on the case. I didn't have anything more to do with him than I did with you. I guess you know how much that was!"
"What about now? Are you going west with him?"
Dan confronted her with the same stern inquiry in his eyes that had shone there the day they parted, in this very place, five years ago.
"I don't know whether I am or not!" cried Nance, firing up. "They've done everything for me, the Clarkes have. They think his getting well depends on me. Of course that's rot, but that's what they think. As for Mr. Mac himself—"
"Is he still in love with you?"
At this moment a boy thrust his head in the door to say that Dr. Adair had telephoned for Miss Molloy to come by the hospital before she returned to Hillcrest.
Nance pulled on her gloves and, with chin in the air, was departing without a word, when Dan stopped her.
"I'm sorry I spoke to you like that, Nance," he said, scowling at the floor. "I've got no right to be asking you questions, or criticizing what you do, or where you go. I hope you'll excuse me."
"Youhavegot the right!" declared Nance, with one of her quick changes of mood. "You can ask me anything you like. I guess we can always be friends, can't we?"
"No," said Dan, slowly, "I don't think we can. I didn't count on seeing you like this, just us two together, alone. I thought you'd be married maybe or moved away some place."
It was Nance's time to be silent, and she listened with wide eyes and parted lips.
"I mustn't see you—alone—any more, Nance," Dan went on haltingly. "But while we are here I want to tell you about it. Just this once, Nance, if you don't mind."
He crossed over and stood before her, his hands gripping a chair back.
"When I went away from here," he began, "I thought you had passed me up for Mac Clarke. It just put me out of business, Nance. I didn't care where I went or what I did. Then one night in Cincinnati I met Birdie, and she was up against it, too—and—"
After all he couldn't make a clean breast of it! Whatever he might say would reflect on Birdie, and he gave the explanation up in despair. But Nance came to his rescue.
"I know, Dan," she said. "Mrs. Smelts told me everything. I don't know another fellow in the world that would have stood by a girl like you did Birdie. She oughtn't have let you marry her without telling you."
"I think she meant to give me my freedom when the baby came," said Dan. "At least that was what she promised. I couldn't have lived through those first months of hell if I hadn't thought there was some way out. But when the baby came, it was too late. Her mind was affected, and by the law of the State I'm bound to her for the rest of her life."
"Do you know—who—who the baby's father is, Dan?"
"No. She refused from the first to tell me, and now I'm glad I don't know. She said the baby was like him, and that made her hate it. That was the way her trouble started. She wouldn't wash the little chap, or feed him, or look after him when he was sick. I had to do everything. For a year she kept getting worse and worse, until one night I caught her trying to set fire to his crib. Of course after that she had to be sent to the asylum, and from that time on, Ted and I fought it out together. One of the neighbors took charge of him in the day, and I wrestled with him at night."
"Couldn't you put him in an orphan asylum?"
Dan shook his head.
"No, I couldn't go back on him when he was up against a deal like that. I made up my mind that I'd never let him get lonesome like I used to be, with nobody to care a hang what became of him. He's got my name now, and he'll never know the difference if I can help it."
"And Birdie? Does she know you when you go to see her?"
"Not for two years now. It's easier than when she did."
There was silence between them; then Nance said:
"I'm glad you told me all this, Dan. I—I wish I could help you."
"You can't," said Dan, sharply. "Don't you see I've got no right to be with you? Do you suppose there's been a week, or a day in all these years that I haven't wanted you with every breath I drew? The rest was just a nightmare I was living through in order to wake up and find you. Nance—I love you! With my heart and soul and body! You've been the one beautiful thing in my whole life, and I wasn't worthy of you. I can't let you go! I—Oh, God! what am I saying? What right have I—Don't let me see you again like this, Nance, don't let me talk to you—"
He stumbled to a chair by the desk and buried his head in his arms. His breath came in short, hard gasps, with a long agonizing quiver between, and his broad shoulders heaved. It was the first time he had wept since that night, so long ago, when he had sat in the gutter in front of Slap Jack's saloon and broken his heart over an erring mother.
For one tremulous second Nance hovered over him, her face aflame with sympathy and almost maternal pity; then she pulled herself together and said brusquely:
"It's all right, Danny. I understand. I'm going. Good-by."
And without looking back, she fled into the hall and down the steps to the waiting motor.