“Have I hurt you with it, Nancy dear?” asked the old nurse. “How am I ever to know about you? The one minute you’re as rough as a horse jumping fences and the next you’re as tender as a kitten a week old and its eyes still blue with blindness. Give me back the picture, dear.”
“No, Nora. I want it. Of course I want it,” said Nancy, and yet Kildare could have sworn that she did not mean what she said.
Nora, having laid the rounds of biscuit-dough in the big baking pan, slammed home the door of the oven upon it.
“In twenty minutes we’ll be at the table,” she said. “Will you have coffee now, child?”
Here it was that Kildare’s hand, abandoning the gingerly examination of the dog’s paw, rose and began to fumble at his shoulder. The hound suddenly cried out on an almost human note of pain. Nora, whirling from the stove, exclaimed, with an accusing finger pointed: “How did you find the pain was in the shoulder, young man? Are you a doctor, whatever?”
“Nora, don’t be silly,” said Nancy.
“I was only petting the poor old fellow,” lied Kildare.
“Petting? It didn’t have the look of petting. It had the look of questions you were asking with the tips of your fingers. You’ve found the seat of the pain and look if the poor old dog isn’t trembling still! Nancy, your young John Stevens is a doctor or I was born a liar.”
“You were born a liar then,” said Nancy serenely. “He’s more apt to need a doctor than to be one.”
“Have it your own way,” growled Nora. She made some amends by saying: “I’m sure there’s no insult in asking a man if he’s a doctor. Isn’t most of the world proud to be one, after all?”
But Kildare felt that an arrow had whizzed close to his ear, and he could tell by the angry look of the nurse that a suspicion was still harboured in her mind.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THEY got through the breakfast happily enough with reminiscences of the old days which gave Kildare not an inch of ground to stand on during the talk. However, he had a chance to see the picture of Nancy’s mother which Nora had just given to the girl. She looked as like Nancy as a sister, but she was made with a far greater refinement of feature. She lacked some of Nancy’s expanse of forehead, but there was no sulky weight around her mouth; she had, instead, that radiant sweetness of face which seems to have gone out, in the very young, with the introduction of the one-piece bathing suit. Today the face is only one part of the familiar features. No matter how Kildare considered the picture he could not see the slightest reason for the manner in which Nancy had winced from the sight of it. Once more he felt, keenly, that he had found an arrow pointing forward to his goal, no matter how far away it might be.
The bright slant of the sun into the room made Nancy remember how the day was running on at last. She said: “I’d almost forgotten that I have to talk to you alone, Nora…”
“If the doctor will wait for us here, then—” said Nora.
“I’ll go outside into the sun,” answered Kildare, and left the house for the open air.
The mildness of the preceding evening still hung in the air. There was warmth enough to draw up a ground mist like that of spring, filling the hollows with a blue ghost of water and turning the horizon pale. The need for sleep grew suddenly in him; an ache fastened on the base of his brain and would not be rubbed away; but still he was satisfied, for in this old house he felt that he had come almost in touching distance of the solution of his mystery. That great mind of Gillespie’s, looking with the inward and the outward eyes, already would have come to a definite conclusion perhaps; but the mind of Gillespie was lost to him for ever!
It seemed to Kildare, as that wretched aching extended through his heart, that he was shrinking almost physically into featureless obscurity. He had become a tiny object which the eye might lose entirely in a landscape like this. He had been growing like a tree. Now his tap-root was out. It was a sharp grief that left a pain in his throat, and the cry that he heard might almost have come from his own lips.
The sound of it made a great echo in his brain, therefore, before he realised that it had come from the house. That wailing cry, high-pitched on a note of sorrow and horror, might have come either from the girl or the nurse. His impulse was to rush into the house. Perhaps the mystery was being bared at this very moment. He had to hold himself hard. The outcry had ended. The quiet of the morning gradually advanced about him with a hypocritical gentleness, again, but still his nerves were shuddering with the memory of that outcry from the house. It was too ugly to be given credence. An animal, unendurable pain had been in it, and yet something of the girl’s voice was also in the sound.
He lighted a cigarette and began to walk up and down briskly. In spite of himself his step slowed and he found himself again standing beside the steps, looking at the brown grass, close-clipped between the stones of the old path. There had been almost too much life on this place, he was thinking, so that ancient trails and new were inextricably intermingled, the old patterns obscuring the fresh. After a moment his face grew cold with perspiration. He pulled out a handkerchief and scrubbed the moisture away. Then he heard the footfalls coming through the interior of the house.
The door, as it opened, showed him Nora on the threshold with her arm around the girl. He knew at once that it was Nancy who had felt the stroke of grief or of terror. She had been turned to a face of stone.
“I won’t come down with you to the car, darling,” said Nora, in a weeping voice.
“No, Nora,” said the girl quietly.
“Ah, God, that this should come to us!” whispered the nurse.
“Hush, Nora.”
“I’ll hush my mouth, but I can’t hush my poor heart,” said Nora faintly. “God keep you and bless you. Will you remember what I’ve said to you?”
“Yes,” said the girl, looking at the world with her empty eyes.
“You’ll come again tomorrow?”
“Yes, I’ll come.”
“Good-bye then, my sweet lamb.”
“Good-bye,” said Nancy. When she was half a step away, she turned again and kissed the wet face of Nora. Then she came smoothly down the steps with a smile prepared for Kildare. “After all, it’s pretty late,” she was saying. “I suppose we ought to hurry back, Johnny?”
It was this smiling, it seemed to Kildare, that proved the infinite distance she had receded from him since he last was with her. She had been close enough for him almost to touch her thoughts, but now he was removed, as though by a strange language, far from everything that was in her mind. She could not see her own white look and for that reason, of course, she tried to deceive him with her smile and her quiet voice.
To explain the scene at the doorway she said, as they settled into the coupé: “Poor Nora—some of them never learn control—at every little pain they break down. You’ve noticed that, Johnny, haven’t you?”
He said: “Don’t talk, Nancy. I know you’re sick to the heart. But don’t make yourself talk.”
He felt her startled, straining eyes fixed upon him almost suspiciously as the car started and he ran through the gears.
He added: “It’s all right. I’m not going to ask any questions.”
“God bless you, Johnny,” she said.
She lay back against the cushion utterly spent.
“Nobody else,” she whispered. “Nobody in the world would be like you about it—because none of the rest—none of them know what pain is, do they?”