“Have you reason to think that either one of these girls would wish you harm?”
“None whatever,” began Sidney vehemently; and then, checking herself,—“unless—but that’s rather ridiculous.”
“What is ridiculous?”
“I’ve sometimes thought that Carlotta—but I am sure she is perfectly fair with me. Even if she—if she—”
“Yes?”
“Even if she likes Dr. Wilson, I don’t believe—Why, K., she wouldn’t! It would be murder.”
“Murder, of course,” said K., “in intention, anyhow. Of course she didn’t do it. I’m only trying to find out whose mistake it was.”
Soon after that she said good-night and went out. She turned in the doorway and smiled tremulously back at him.
“You have done me a lot of good. You almost make me believe in myself.”
“That’s because I believe in you.”
With a quick movement that was one of her charms, Sidney suddenly closed the door and slipped back into the room. K., hearing the door close, thought she had gone, and dropped heavily into a chair.
“My best friend in all the world!” said Sidney suddenly from behind him, and, bending over, she kissed him on the cheek.
The next instant the door had closed behind her, and K. was left alone to such wretchedness and bliss as the evening had brought him.
On toward morning, Harriet, who slept but restlessly in her towel, wakened to the glare of his light over the transom.
“K.!” she called pettishly from her door. “I wish you wouldn’t go to sleep and let your light burn!”
K., surmising the towel and cold cream, had the tact not to open his door.
“I am not asleep, Harriet, and I am sorry about the light. It’s going out now.”
Before he extinguished the light, he walked over to the old dresser and surveyed himself in the glass. Two nights without sleep and much anxiety had told on him. He looked old, haggard; infinitely tired. Mentally he compared himself with Wilson, flushed with success, erect, triumphant, almost insolent. Nothing had more certainly told him the hopelessness of his love for Sidney than her good-night kiss. He was her brother, her friend. He would never be her lover. He drew a long breath and proceeded to undress in the dark.
Joe Drummond came to see Sidney the next day. She would have avoided him if she could, but Mimi had ushered him up to the sewing-room boudoir before she had time to escape. She had not seen the boy for two months, and the change in him startled her. He was thinner, rather hectic, scrupulously well dressed.
“Why, Joe!” she said, and then: “Won’t you sit down?”
He was still rather theatrical. He dramatized himself, as he had that night the June before when he had asked Sidney to marry him. He stood just inside the doorway. He offered no conventional greeting whatever; but, after surveying her briefly, her black gown, the lines around her eyes:—
“You’re not going back to that place, of course?”
“I—I haven’t decided.”
“Then somebody’s got to decide for you. The thing for you to do is to stay right here, Sidney. People know you on the Street. Nobody here would ever accuse you of trying to murder anybody.”
In spite of herself, Sidney smiled a little.
“Nobody thinks I tried to murder him. It was a mistake about the medicines. I didn’t do it, Joe.”
His love was purely selfish, for he brushed aside her protest as if she had not spoken.
“You give me the word and I’ll go and get your things; I’ve got a car of my own now.”
“But, Joe, they have only done what they thought was right. Whoever made it, there was a mistake.”
He stared at her incredulously.
“You don’t mean that you are going to stand for this sort of thing? Every time some fool makes a mistake, are they going to blame it on you?”
“Please don’t be theatrical. Come in and sit down. I can’t talk to you if you explode like a rocket all the time.”
Her matter-of-fact tone had its effect. He advanced into the room, but he still scorned a chair.
“I guess you’ve been wondering why you haven’t heard from me,” he said. “I’ve seen you more than you’ve seen me.”
Sidney looked uneasy. The idea of espionage is always repugnant, and to have a rejected lover always in the offing, as it were, was disconcerting.
“I wish you would be just a little bit sensible, Joe. It’s so silly of you, really. It’s not because you care for me; it’s really because you care for yourself.”
“You can’t look at me and say that, Sid.”
He ran his finger around his collar—an old gesture; but the collar was very loose. He was thin; his neck showed it.
“I’m just eating my heart out for you, and that’s the truth. And it isn’t only that. Everywhere I go, people say, ‘There’s the fellow Sidney Page turned down when she went to the hospital.’ I’ve got so I keep off the Street as much as I can.”
Sidney was half alarmed, half irritated. This wild, excited boy was not the doggedly faithful youth she had always known. It seemed to her that he was hardly sane—that underneath his quiet manner and carefully repressed voice there lurked something irrational, something she could not cope with. She looked up at him helplessly.
“But what do you want me to do? You—you almost frighten me. If you’d only sit down—”
“I want you to come home. I’m not asking anything else now. I just want you to come back, so that things will be the way they used to be. Now that they have turned you out—”
“They’ve done nothing of the sort. I’ve told you that.”
“You’re going back?”
“Absolutely.”
“Because you love the hospital, or because you love somebody connected with the hospital?”
Sidney was thoroughly angry by this time, angry and reckless. She had come through so much that every nerve was crying in passionate protest.
“If it will make you understand things any better,” she cried, “I am going back for both reasons!”
She was sorry the next moment. But her words seemed, surprisingly enough, to steady him. For the first time, he sat down.
“Then, as far as I am concerned, it’s all over, is it?”
“Yes, Joe. I told you that long ago.”
He seemed hardly to be listening. His thoughts had ranged far ahead. Suddenly:—
“You think Christine has her hands full with Palmer, don’t you? Well, if you take Max Wilson, you’re going to have more trouble than Christine ever dreamed of. I can tell you some things about him now that will make you think twice.”
But Sidney had reached her limit. She went over and flung open the door.
“Every word that you say shows me how right I am in not marrying you, Joe,” she said. “Real men do not say those things about each other under any circumstances. You’re behaving like a bad boy. I don’t want you to come back until you have grown up.”
He was very white, but he picked up his hat and went to the door.
“I guess I AM crazy,” he said. “I’ve been wanting to go away, but mother raises such a fuss—I’ll not annoy you any more.”
He reached in his pocket and, pulling out a small box, held it toward her. The lid was punched full of holes.
“Reginald,” he said solemnly. “I’ve had him all winter. Some boys caught him in the park, and I brought him home.”
He left her standing there speechless with surprise, with the box in her hand, and ran down the stairs and out into the Street. At the foot of the steps he almost collided with Dr. Ed.
“Back to see Sidney?” said Dr. Ed genially. “That’s fine, Joe. I’m glad you’ve made it up.”
The boy went blindly down the Street.
CHAPTER XX
Winter relaxed its clutch slowly that year. March was bitterly cold; even April found the roads still frozen and the hedgerows clustered with ice. But at mid-day there was spring in the air. In the courtyard of the hospital, convalescents sat on the benches and watched for robins. The fountain, which had frozen out, was being repaired. Here and there on ward windowsills tulips opened their gaudy petals to the sun.