“It’s pretty clear that Nancy would agree to that,” commented Herron. “Well, I’ll have to get back to the office. I want to talk with you, though.”
“Of course. Any time,” said Messenger. “Nancy, Charles has to go along.”
“Does he?” she asked indifferently, but then as though realisation came to her at second hand, she rose from her chair and went across the room to her fiancé. “I’ll go down to the door with you, Charles,” she said. And at the door she turned to call over her shoulder, “But I’m coming straight back, John!”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“SHE likes you—an amazing lot, considering she’s known you such a short time. One would have thought when she went out with Herron just now, that she was leaving the best part of her thoughts behind her, with you,” commented Messenger. “You know, you haven’t told me how you managed to grow so close to Nancy.”
“I let her think that I have her own trouble—the same insomnia and the fear of the night. So now she wants to help me.”
“Ah, you have the devising mind that breaks down barriers and seems to make the whole world kin,” commented Messenger, “but I suppose that you know women. All the young fellows today do.”
Kildare looked steadily at him.
“You’re a little troubled,” he said at last, with his own peculiar species of frankness, “because I’m to spend a good deal of time with Nancy.”
“Not at all,” said Messenger, making a gesture that dismissed the suggestion.
Kildare shook his head. He insisted: “You feel that manners come out of breeding, and breeding must be old and good. You’re an old family. I suppose that there was a Messenger with the Conqueror. Herron is an old family too, so he’s all right with Nancy, but you’d like to know more about me, wouldn’t you?”
“There’s a hint of truth in what you say,” answered Messenger, “but not enough to make me say it. All of us are filled with prejudices, you’ll admit, but as long as we know they’re prejudices, they don’t poison us. As for you, Kildare, I’ve heard enough from the Chanlers…”
“I’m the son of a poor country doctor,” said Kildare. “Somewhere our name goes back to a village in Limerick County in Ireland. We’re not predominantly Irish, though. If we were, I’d be enough proud of it, but we’re a hodge-podge of Irish and English and German and Scotch; there was an Italian great-grandmother somewhere; a French strain is in the blood too; and I think there was a dash of Russian not so far back. So you see, I’m nothing in particular. My father is a very simple fellow; my mother is just the same sort. We’re lower middle class. We don’t know any fine people. Most of our friends don’t keep a servant. None of us has travelled a step. People with big names embarrass us a little. They make us feel all thumbs and stupid, as though they were laughing at us. I’m so far from the things you put a lot of value on that I don’t even feel the worth of them. I wouldn’t ask for a famous old name because I wouldn’t know how to wear one.”
He finished this long, quiet speech with a smile, but Messenger was very solemn in his answer. He said: “Most of us have scrambled blood lines. Once that would have been considered a pity perhaps. But today we say people have cold blood or are thoroughbred, according to their performance. Shall we let it go at that?”
There was nothing to do but let it go at that, yet Kildare was left with a strange sense of having stepped out and found no floor beneath his feet. He had extemporised a diagnosis of Paul Messenger’s state of mind and found with something of a shock that he actually had struck the bedrock of truth. So far as the rich man was concerned, Kildare was a sort of scientific servant of the house, an annoying necessity, and to be trusted perforce because there was no other way to use him. He could understand now the magnificent insouciance of Messenger and the calmness of his trust that, granted good blood to begin with, money would solve all the problems of life. It was simply that he considered the rest of the world an infinite step beneath him and his peers. To Kildare a man was what he seemed to be, and a good fellow until he was proved otherwise by the course of events; to Messenger, the study of several vanished generations was necessary first, and without that information about a man’s background he never would be able to know him with satisfactory surety. It sickened Kildare a little and gave him a preoccupation that remained in his mind until that night. Then he rang the hospital. He tried the nurses’ home for Mary Lamont and her pleasant voice came back to him over the wire.
“I feel as though I’d been a long time away,” said Kildare. “Will you tell me what’s going on?”
“Doctor Gillespie is gone!” she said. “He’s gone away. He’s left us.”
“Wait a minute,” said Kildare. “Gone? Gone where?”
“Somewhere in Staten Island to be alone—and forget the hospital.”
“And given up the experiment?”
“He couldn’t carry it on alone,” she said.
He felt a melancholy sense of triumph in that; for if he had sacrificed himself and thrown away the thing that was nearest his heart, at least he had accomplished his purpose. Gillespie would rest and come back refreshed.
“And you?” asked Kildare.
“I’m back on general duty,” she answered.
“I’m sorry about that.”
“Oh, don’t think of me. It’s Doctor Gillespie…”
“He was furious with me, wasn’t he—a shouting fury, I suppose?”
“He was as still as a stone.”
“That’s not possible,” said Kildare.
“I think his heart is broken,” she said, her voice trembling. “And good-bye, Doctor Kildare.”
She rang off on him suddenly and left him in a continuing daze. If Mary Lamont treated him in this manner, he could guess the general state of mind in the hospital. In their eyes, no doubt, he had sold his soul for a mess of pottage. As he thought of that, he wished that he never had laid eyes on Nancy Messenger or heard a syllable of her problem, but the malice went out of him when they were face to face again, for she looked to him with a confident, disarming eagerness.
“Let’s not go near the sort of people we were with last night,” she said. “They kill time, but they leave it dead. Let’s go out and just ramble until we find a place to eat—and then follow our noses.”
She seemed to take it for granted that every night would be theirs together.
So they went out, not with a chauffeur, but in Nancy’s two-seater convertible coupé. She preferred to drive it herself, and tooled it swiftly and smoothly through the traffic.
“I like to drive in a crowd like this,” said Nancy, “because you can take a few corners and twist through the traffic so that unhappiness gets in a tangle and loses sight of you and then never catches up for hours and hours. Isn’t that true?”
“Of course it’s true,” said Kildare. “We may leave it behind so far that it’ll never catch up at all.”
“You could leave it that far behind,” she agreed. “There’s nothing that forces it back on you, Johnny.”
He thought it might be the best of all opportunities to put the crucial question to her at a moment like this, when the driving of the car took most of her mind.
So he said: “What is it that forces the unhappiness on you, Nancy?”
The car swerved a bit as her nerves jumped.
“Don’t ask me; never ask me!” she said.
“I mean, it’s not something that you can sleep away?”
“Never!”
“And it can come over you night or day?”
“Oh, Johnny, only a thought of it and I’m ready to die! Don’t let me talk about it.”