Part 20

After this, he couldn’t very well go on with the subject; but he felt no hesitation in approaching Hunter in a more direct fashion when they were alone.

“That’s a very remarkable young woman who opened the door for me,” he said. His eyes were on the other man’s face, and he saw him turn red.

“Yes,” said Hunter. “She--she is.”

But Alan’s eyes were still on him, and he was obliged to continue.

“She’s--not exactly a servant, you know,” he said. “In fact, she’s a sort of--relation. Helps my aunt, you know. She--she is remarkable, Lorrimer, very.”

Alan gave serious attention to this problem. His legal training did not make him disposed to believe everything he heard, though he was too intelligent to go to the other extreme and believe nothing.

What was the explanation? Had Hunter made a misalliance, which he was ashamed of, and wanted to conceal? No--marriage with that girl wouldn’t be a misalliance for any one, and she wasn’t the sort who would consent to being concealed.

His sister? There was no possible reason for keeping a sister like that hidden. If it was the case that she really was a poor relation kept as a servant to help Mrs. Carew, then it was a very bad case, and the aunt and the nephew might well be ashamed of themselves. Alan believed that they were ashamed, too.

Hunter had mentioned that he was going to take Mrs. Carew to the moving pictures that evening, and Alan decided then and there that he would use that time for further investigations.

“Because, if they’re capable of making a drudge of a girl like that,” he said to himself, “Nesta’s going to be told. It’s the most beastly piece of snobbishness I’ve ever come across! Evidently she eats with them. No doubt she’s one of the family until an outsider appears, and then she’s nobody.”

He was a little surprised at the vigor of his indignation. As a rule, he didn’t easily become indignant.

“But she’s such a remarkable girl,” he explained to himself. “I’ve never seen any one like her.”

IV

This time, when he returned to the house, Alan did not feel in the least guilty, although he was now coming deliberately in Hunter’s absence, and to collect evidence against him. On the contrary, he felt like a knight sallying forth to rescue a lady from duress.

He rang the bell without hesitation, and the girl opened the door. He had a plan. He explained to her that the doctor had invited him to make use of his medical library whenever he wished--which was true--and that he needed to look up fractures for a plaintiff in a damage suit--which was not true. He made his explanation long and markedly polite, and he was pleased to notice that she forgot all that nonsense about saying “sir.” Instead, she preceded him into the library as if it were her own, lighted a lamp, and, going to the bookshelves, brought out two volumes.

“These are on fractures,” she said.

This did not surprise him. She looked like a girl who would know all sorts of things.

“I’ll sit here and make a few notes, if you don’t mind,” Alan said, for this was part of his plan.

He waited until he heard a door close after her somewhere. He waited a little longer; then he rose. He intended to be awkward, and to pull down a lot of books, making a great deal of noise. Then she would come back and help him to pick them up, and it would be easy enough, in such circumstances, to start a conversation. But--well, if his intention was to make a noise, he did that, certainly, and the girl did come back, in great haste; but it is not possible to believe that it was part of his plan to pull the bookcase over entirely, or that a bronze bust should fall and hit him on the side of the face.

“I’m very sorry,” he said earnestly. “I don’t know how I came to be so clumsy. I--really I’m very sorry.”

“So am I,” said she. “Let’s see!”

To his amazement, she took his chin in fingers surprisingly strong, and turned his face toward the light.

“You’d better come into the office,” she said.

“It’s nothing, thanks,” he began, but she had already vanished through the door, and he felt obliged to follow.

He said nothing at all while she washed and dressed the trifling wound, but he watched her moving about the bright, glittering little room, he noted her precision, her deftness, her familiarity--and he tried to draw conclusions.

“You’re a trained nurse!” he suddenly exclaimed.

She turned toward him, and for the first time he saw her smile.

“No, Mr. Lorrimer, I’m not,” she said. “Now I think you’ll do very nicely.”

It was a tone of polite dismissal, but he did not intend to go.

“I’ll help you first to repair the damage I did,” he said.

She replied that he needn’t.

He said that he wanted to, and must; and because he was just the sort of young man he was, and because she had the intelligence to see it, she admitted him then and there to a sort of friendship. After the bookcase was set upright again, and all the books restored to order, they sat down, one on either side of the library table, in the most natural way in the world.

“You’d make a wonderfully good nurse,” he observed.

“I’m afraid not,” she answered, smiling again. “I shouldn’t like it at all!”

“But you seem to know a good deal about that sort of thing,” he went on. “It must interest you.”

She made no reply, and for a moment he feared she had thought him unduly curious--impertinent, perhaps; but there was no sign of displeasure in her face. She was looking thoughtfully before her, grave, serene, almost as if she had not heard him. Suddenly he fancied he understood.

“Of course!” he said to himself. “She’s in love with Hunter, and naturally she takes an interest in his work. That’s why she’s here, filling a servant’s place, simply so that she can be near him!”

There was no reason why this should make him indignant, yet, instead of being touched by the idea of such devotion, he was angry and disappointed.

“I wonder what Mrs. Carew thinks of it!” he pursued. “She probably thinks that this girl isn’t good enough for her precious Noel. She would object to such a marriage; or perhaps she doesn’t know what the girl is. Perhaps he doesn’t know, either. I may be the only one who has guessed her secret.”

Then it occurred to him that he was drawing conclusions from very insubstantial premises, also that he was forgetting the object for which he had come, and that his silence might not be impressing her favorably. Looking at her again, he was forced to the unwelcome conclusion that she didn’t care whether he spoke or not. It was presumptuous nonsense to feel sorry for a girl like this. Whatever she did, she intended to do; there was no helplessness or futility in those fine features.

Alan felt ashamed of himself for trying to find out about her in any indirect way. She deserved to be treated with absolute honesty and candor. He knew she would not misunderstand anything else.

“I came back here to see you,” he said bluntly.

She accepted that tranquilly.

“As soon as I saw you, I felt a very great interest in you,” he went on. “I don’t mean that as an impertinence, or as a compliment. It’s simply the truth. There are some human beings who make that sort of impression on others, and it seems to me a foolish and a wrong thing to stifle that interest because it doesn’t happen to be conventional.”

“As a human being, I welcome your interest,” said she, with her quiet smile. “I’ve heard of you from Noel, and I’m sure I should enjoy talking to you.”

“Of course I knew at once that you weren’t what you--you pretended to be,” he went on rather clumsily.

She stopped him.

“It wasn’t pretending, Mr. Lorrimer. I am here as a servant.”

“You shouldn’t be.”

“It suits me. After all, there’s nothing better in life than really serving the people who need you, is there?”

“Sometimes there is,” he answered promptly. “It may mean the sacrifice of a fine life to a much less valuable one.”

A faint color rose in her cheeks.

“Well, you see,” she said, “I don’t feel wise and perfect enough to judge which lives are the most valuable.”

He was silent, because he could not well say that her life was a hundred times more valuable than all the Mrs. Carews and Dr. Hunters ever born--that in her grave youth, and her fine and dignified simplicity, she seemed to him absolutely invaluable.

“I dare say you’re right,” he answered seriously. “I’m sure your way is a good way. If you think you really would care to talk to me, when may I come again?”

“I have Sunday afternoons off,” she answered, and he believed there was a hint of a laugh in her voice.

“Then I’ll come at--”

“Oh, no! That’s not the way it’s done. I’ll meet you somewhere and we’ll take a walk,” she said, and this time she could not suppress a smile.

Alan refused to smile, however. He didn’t care if she came in an apron. He was willing to sit on the back steps, or in the kitchen, so long as he could be with her. It wasn’t a joke--it was serious, the most serious thing he had ever known.

He proposed a convenient meeting place, and she agreed to it.

“But I’d rather you didn’t mention me to any one, please,” she added. “I like a--a very quiet life, just now.”

V

This day was going to be the day. Nothing was going to put him off--not the fact that the mirror showed him a face he hated to think was his own, not the inner voice which warned him that it might be better to remain in doubt and still have hope. He didn’t want hope, if it was a false one.

He went downstairs, aware of all sorts of new defects in himself. He felt that he was the most commonplace, uninteresting fellow imaginable, and that there was nothing about him that could possibly please or interest any one.

Mrs. Lorrimer and a group of friends were on the veranda. He saluted them with a strange sort of severity, and went off down the road, in an odd state of despair and determination.

“Yes,” said his mother proudly. “It’s very unusual to see a man as serious as Alan is, at _his_ age!”

She was wrong. She had herself seen any number of young fellows of twenty-seven overtaken by exactly the same sort of seriousness, only, in the case of her son, she didn’t recognize it. Alan himself, however, had known what it was for weeks--it was Judith.

She had told him to call her Judith, and he did, hundreds of times, but not once in her hearing. Indeed, there was an astounding difference between the things he said to her when she was not there and the words she actually heard from him. If she could only have heard those other things, or guessed them! He knew that what he was going to say would be so inferior to what he felt and thought.

He turned into the lane where they always met, and sat upon the stone wall to wait. He was thinking about her, in a curious way, half wretched, half blissful. He didn’t care two straws about her very humble position, nor did she. He _had_ sat on the back steps and talked to her when the others were out, he _had_ seen her in an apron, peeling potatoes, and she was more than ever exalted in his eyes by her quiet acceptance of such things. There was to him a sort of nobility in everything she did, in all her words and gestures, in her smile, even in her little transient moments of gayety.

Nor did he care two straws for the mystery that surrounded her. Wherever she came from, whatever her name or her history or her reason for living as she did, he knew that she was right, and could never be anything else.

No--the things that troubled him were those things which so often trouble people in his condition--all sorts of doubts and alarms and hopes and determinations mixed together. He wasn’t good enough, but he was obliged to convince her that he was. She couldn’t care for him, and yet she must.

At last he saw her coming, and went forward to meet her. She was walking unusually fast, as if, he thought with a fast beating heart, she were hurrying to him. Whatever joy he had felt in that thought vanished at the sight of her face.

“Judith!” he said. “Tell me, what has happened?”

She had all her usual fine composure, but she was very pale, and, in some subtle way apparent more to his heart than to his eyes, there was grief upon her face. She did not answer him, but she held out her hand, and he fancied that she clung to him.

“Let’s walk a little,” she said, after a moment.

They went on side by side along the lane, thick with cool, white dust under the old trees. So dense was the foliage on the branches meeting overhead that the light came through it greenish and wavering, like water. The dust might have been the sandy floor of the sea, and the church bells that rang seemed mournful and distant, as they must sound to the mermaids.

A painful sense of unreality oppressed Alan. He didn’t know her; she was terribly remote, a stranger, indifferent to him. Not once in all the time they had spent together had she talked freely about herself, about her life. She might have any number of anxieties and griefs of which he had no suspicion. She had been friendly, but in such an impersonal, untroubled way!

At last they reached the fence at the foot of the lane, where the fields began, and she spoke.

“Noel has gone,” she said.

“Gone?” he echoed.

“He left a letter,” she continued. “Perhaps I had better read you a part of it.” She took a letter out of her pocket, and turned as he noticed, past the first page to the second. She read:

“So I’ve taken this job in the airplane factory. It’s a remarkably good job, and I expect to do rather more than well. I’m sorry, my dearest girl, to disappoint you so after all you’ve done for me, but, to be frank, I _can’t_ be a doctor. I always hated the whole thing. I’d never have been any good at it. Now I’ve found the one thing I am good at. I think you know how I felt about Nesta Lorrimer, and now I see some faint chance of being able to speak to her some day.

“Try to forgive me, Judith. It is really the best and kindest thing I can do for you--to clear out and leave you free.

“That’s all that matters,” she ended. “So you see--”

Her look amazed and angered him terribly. She seemed so sure that he would understand and sympathize. She wasn’t a child, she was very far from slow-witted, and she must have seen how it was with him. And now this!

Try to forgive me, Judith. It is the best and kindest thing I can do for you--to clear out and leave you free.

Such bitterness and pain overwhelmed him that he could scarcely speak.

“I’d rather--go now,” he said. “Another time--I can’t--”

“But--” she began.

“Not now!” he said vehemently. “It was cruel of you to do this. Why didn’t you tell me before that you weren’t free? Why did you let me go on? I trusted you so! And all this time you’ve been thinking of him! No, please don’t speak to me! Let me go!”

She was looking at him with a curious sort of inquiry, her dark brows drawn together in a faint frown.

“You don’t understand,” she said. “I thought you had guessed long ago. I didn’t think you’d have--gone on like this, if you hadn’t guessed!”

She was not by nature impulsive, but it was impulse alone that moved her now. She came nearer to him, laid her hand on his shoulder, and looked into his face, with bright tears in her eyes.

“Oh, Alan!” she cried. “It was a beautiful thing to do--to accept me on faith, like that! Not to know, or to care! Oh, Alan, my dear!”

“Judith!” he said. “Don’t you see what you’ve done? Nothing else could have mattered to me, except your caring for him--”

“For Noel?” she asked. “I’m afraid I cared for him a little too much--more than was good for him. But, you see, he’s my only brother.”

“Brother!” shouted Alan. “Then why--”

“Walk home with me, and I’ll explain,” said she. “I thought you had found out long ago.”

Alan went on by her side, willing to wait forever for any further explanation. There were a few questions he wanted to ask, and Judith answered them to his satisfaction, but they had nothing to do with Noel.

“Now look!” said she.

He did look, but he saw nothing but the front of Dr. Hunter’s neat little house.

“I don’t see anything,” he said.

She opened the gate, and he followed her along the path and up on the veranda.

“Look at _that_!” she said.

It was nothing but the usual sign in the window. “Noel”--but it wasn’t! In blue letters on a white ground was printed:

JUDITH HUNTER, M.D.

VI

“You see,” she said, a little later, when they were in the library, “Noel and I were left orphans when we were very young, and Aunt Katherine Carew took care of us. I couldn’t begin to tell you all she did, all the sacrifices she made. Naturally, it was Noel, the boy, that she hoped and expected most from. I wanted to study medicine, and poor Noel couldn’t make up his mind exactly what he wanted to do; so he chose that, too, and we studied together. It was a terrible strain for Aunt Katherine. It took almost all she had, and after we’d both left the hospital, she couldn’t possibly set up two young doctors. We talked it over, and it was my idea to give him his chance first. He’s two years older, and--well, I thought I could wait. Poor Aunt Katherine couldn’t manage everything herself, and we couldn’t afford a servant, and yet she felt that it was very important to keep up appearances; so I decided that I would be the servant. I intended to be invisible until I was ready to appear as a full-fledged M.D. myself.” She paused, and smiled a little. “We both worked very hard to make a doctor of Noel,” she went on. “I think now that we tried a little too hard. If he hadn’t felt that so much was expected of him, he might have gone through with it.”

“He may do better where he is,” said Alan.

“I can’t think that,” said she, “even if he makes a great deal of money; because, for me, our profession is by far the noblest one in the world. There’s nothing else so fine and so--”

“Absolutely nothing else?” asked Alan. “Nothing to compare with it?”

He thought that the slight confusion she betrayed was infinitely more becoming to her than her usual composure.

“Well, of course,” said she, “there’s--there’s _you_!”

MUNSEY’S MAGAZINE

OCTOBER, 1923 Vol. LXXX NUMBER 1

Out of the Woods

THE STORY OF AN ARTLESS GIRL, A HUNGRY WOLF, AND A WONDERFUL GRANDMOTHER

By Elisabeth Sanxay Holding

When you learn that this story begins with the heroine setting off through the woods to visit her grandmother, who was ill, you may guess that it is the familiar tale of _Little Red Riding Hood_. I must admit that that is what it is, and I warn you that you may count upon a very artless little heroine and a wolf of insinuating manners and glib tongue; but _this_ grandmother will not be eaten up.

Nor did Ethel carry a basket containing a little pat of butter and a cake. She had, instead, a large and luxurious box of candied fruit under her arm; and instead of singing through the woods, she wore a sulky and miserable expression. Unfortunately red hoods are not in vogue, for such a thing would have been notably becoming to her little gypsy face. However, she was young enough and lovely enough to look well in anything, even a sulky expression.

She was not without some excuse for her discontented air. Ethel was one of those unfortunate little bones of contention so often to be found in divided families, and she had been so much disputed over and argued about, and so rarely consulted or even questioned, that she had grown to think of herself as a helpless pawn in an incomprehensible game, where she could never win anything.

The disputes had begun long before she was born. Her father’s family had that pride of newly acquired wealth beside which pride of ancestry shrinks to nothing. Indeed, to spring from splendid ancestors may often make one feel a little humble, but to feel that one is vastly more important than any of one’s forbears makes for arrogance.

The Taylors had objected very much to the marriage of their only son. Even when the marriage was made, and there was no earthly use in objecting, they kept on, in a very unpleasant way. All the misfortunes which the young man brought upon his wife and child by his recklessness and folly only increased their anger against the victims; and when he died, they all came forward with helpful suggestions as to what he should have done when he was alive.

Ethel had been a small girl of nine then, and not yet looked upon as guilty; but when she refused to leave her mother and take advantage of the offers made by several of the Taylors, she lost their sympathy. Her mother, with criminal selfishness, hadn’t made the least attempt to persuade her child to leave her. On the contrary, she had gone back to her own people, and had lived with them in quiet contentment.

It was to these people of hers that the Taylors so strongly objected. She herself was a quiet and inoffensive creature who gave little trouble, but her parents were Italians, and poor, and not ashamed of either of the two things.

Dr. Mazetti had been professor of romance languages in a small Western college, but he had become so absorbed in the enormous commentary upon Dante which he was writing that he found his teaching very much in the way; so he gave up his chair. Mrs. Taylor, the paternal grandmother, had spoken about this.

“Of course,” she had said, not very pleasantly, “it’s a good thing to have faith in your husband’s work; but suppose it’s _not_ a financial success?”

“We don’t expect it to be,” replied Mrs. Mazetti, in her excellent English. “Such work as that is not undertaken for money.”

“Do you mean to say that you’ll permit your husband to give up his--” began Mrs. Taylor, but the other interrupted her.