“That’s what I used to know when I was a youngster,” said Nancy, sitting up. “I mean, I used to be a part of all that. It was inside my skin and I was inside it. You know the way children can be?”
“I know,” said Kildare. “When they’re happy, you mean?”
“I was the happiest girl in the world until I was—Well, it doesn’t matter. But down in that inlet I learned to swim and sail and paddle a canoe and all that. The centre of life was an old boathouse that’s never used any more, I think. And we used to ride cross-country across those fields. And that white scar on the hill—you see?—every morning when I woke up, I looked at that through my window, over the tips of the trees on the edge of our place. From my window I saw this road also. It was the one that led toward the outside; it was the road to the city, where everything would be wonderful and life would be frightfully crowded and happy some day. You know?”
“Wouldn’t you like to go back to those days?”
“And fall into this same trap? No, no, no!” said Nancy. And he felt her shuddering. “I wouldn’t want to live through a single day of it all if I knew what was coming in the end. Let’s drive on. Nora will be awake by this time.”
He felt once more that he had come to the very verge of the mystery and again the door had been shut in his face, but a hope was quickening in him now. He was as guilty as a spy, but he guessed that he was on the verge of the great discovery.
Considering the almost fantastic wealth of Paul Messenger, the country place was extremely modest. It was high-shouldered, square-faced, and probably had plenty of room inside, but there was no show of elegance about it whatever. A profusion of the naked branches of climbing vines sprayed up its sides, and it needed freshening with white paint. In the near distance, an old red barn attended it. In fact, it looked more like a Southern farm than a suburban residence.
“There’s smoke from the kitchen stove,” said Nancy, pointing, as the car rolled up the drive. “Nora’s up. John, for a while she was mother and father to me. She’s ignorant and bad-tempered and positive and complacent, but she’s also a dear. Will you try to remember that when we go in?”
It was hardly necessary for him to remember a thing, however, for no attention came to him, not even a glance. After Nora had seen her girl, she was too blinded by that vision to pay any heed to lesser things. She would not even let the guests stay in the living-room, but carried Nancy straight out into the kitchen while she prepared breakfast. Kildare dawdled in the background with a smile of assumed sympathy but every sense on the alert to discover what he could. It was a foreign language of old association that the two women exchanged, but out of it he had to try to find some significant thread. If there were a secret in the air, he had high hopes that Nora never could conceal it. She was a big woman with a young, rosy face and white hair pulled back from her forehead so snugly that the horizontal wrinkles arched up into a constant query. She kept about her person, as about her kitchen, an atmosphere of hearty good nature. The danger signal was in her pale blue eyes, which flashed every moment with variable lights. Perhaps she was fifty, but all her strength still was with her. When Kildare tried to help her carry into the kitchen a more comfortable chair for Nancy, she brushed him vigorously aside, using the chair for the gesture.
Nancy, leaning back in the comfort of her chair with her hands turned palm up on the broad arms of it, looked about her with half-closed eyes of contentment.
“Why do I see you so seldom, Nora?” she asked. “Why are there such long times between?”
“Because I’m the only living thing in a dead house,” said Nora, adding fresh coffee and cold water to the big pot, “and because youngsters are the great ones for forgetting.”
“Oh, but I never forget you; only it’s a long way out here,” explained Nancy.
“Don’t answer me back, but be still and let me look at you, darling,” said Nora.
“Ah, see there!” said Nancy, pointing. “You’ve brought company into the old house at last.”
An old fox hound with his eyes abased by sorrowful wisdom and his ribs lean with age came limping into the kitchen through the porch door, trailing a forepaw. He begged permission with humble head and slowly wagging tail, then slunk to a pad by the stove and curled up on it. His attention followed Nora wherever she moved.
“It’s not that I think any more of dogs than I ever did,” said Nora. “The dirty things make a waste of cleaning in the house and a waste of time all through the lives of their masters.”
“You’re forgetting Champion,” said Nancy.
“I’m forgetting nothing.”
“But you loved him.”
“I never did once, at all. But I loved the silly look of you when you were with him, was all. The great lout scattering his hair through the house and his stomach as uneasy as a weather-vane! But when I saw this poor devil skulking in the yard with his lame foot a week ago, I took him in, not because I wanted him here on my hands, but because I couldn’t bear driving him away. I despise a beaten dog or a begging man, but I can’t help putting my hand in my purse, Nancy, the more shame to me.”
She changed the subject by pointing suddenly to Kildare, as though she were inclined to include him among the beggars.
“What is this one now?” she demanded. “You haven’t been the grand young fool and thrown out big Charlie Herron, have you?”
“Hush, Nora. Of course not. But Johnny Stevens is a very dear friend of mine.”
“And that’s all? Driving about with you in the middle of the night to the ends of the world? Oh, hush yourself, Nancy, and don’t try to be hushing me. There are two kinds of girls in the world: the one kind are the careful and the others are the fools. I’m going to roll out some biscuits for you, sweet.”
“I could eat them, Nora.”
“There was never a day when you couldn’t and wouldn’t,” said Nora. “Ah, God, I remember the old times! You climbed and ran and fought—and lied—like a boy. And you were as hungry as your own mischief day and night.”
Kildare, entirely out of the conversation by this time, crossed the kitchen to the dog and began to examine the forepaw on which it would put no weight. The pad was soft and contracted as a sure sign that the limping had continued for some time. Nora, in the meantime, was mixing biscuit dough with the strong sure hands which make speedy work of every task. She was in the midst of chopping out the well-rolled layer into convenient circles for the baking pan when another thought made her dust her hands and rush out of the room, exclaiming: “I almost clean forgot what I’ve been saving for you, darling. Wait here this minute.”
“She’s a sweet old thing, isn’t she?” asked Nancy.
“She needs a lot of knowing,” answered Kildare.
“Oh, but she’d die for the people she loves.”
“Maybe she would,” agreed Kildare, “or kill them with kindness.”
“Now what do you mean by that?” asked Nancy, puzzled. But here Nora returned, beaming, and holding something with both hands against her breast.
“What do you think I have here?” she asked.
“An envelope full of old lavender.”
“Oh, it’s something just twice as sweet.”
“I can’t guess, Nora.”
“Where’s your brain gone, then, if you can’t guess more than once? Sweetheart, it’s her picture when she was your own age and as like you as ever was—before even Paul Messenger came into her life, the poor lamb—before ever she was taken in by the dirty doctors that were the death of her in the end…”
Kildare looked sharply up at this. What he had just heard might open a thousand doors of his riddle. Nancy had taken the picture into her hands, but Kildare made sure that she gave it only the briefest glance. It seemed that whatever Nora found of beauty in it was all a blank for the girl. There must even have been something sharply distasteful, for she lowered the picture at once to her lap.