Calvary Alley

Chapter XXX. Her First Case

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!" said Mr. 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 tete-a-tetes 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.