“If I’d seen her, would I be standing here blathering?” demanded Nora, and slammed the door in his face. He drove into the village. They remembered him there. When he stopped his car, twenty people suddenly materialised at the corner.
“There’s the real doctor,” they said. “How’s that Billy doing, doctor?”
“He’s going to have two good legs,” said Kildare. “Where can I find Archbold?”
“Maybe he’s taken wings,” someone said. “He’s not wanted here any longer—the rascal! But nobody seen him leave his place.”
Kildare went up to the office. He knocked at the Archbold door. He kept at it during ten minutes, at intervals. Presently a key turned and the door opened a mere crack.
“Friends?” said Kildare, when the long nose of Archbold appeared.
The door opened. Mr. Archbold waved the way into the room. He had a candle in it, shaded by a large book set up on end so that no ray would reach the window directly and betray him to the street. Mr. Archbold had induced in himself a spirit of high good humour.
“Enter, doctor. Enter, enter!” he said. “Here you will at least find the water of life. May I pour you a drink of it?”
He balanced himself unsteadily, his feet far apart, and proffered a bottle of rye and a glass.
“Good!” said Kildare. “The water of life is what I need.”
He took the drink, waited for the great Archbold to pour one for himself, and then toasted him silently.
“I came down to ask you a question,” said Kildare. “But maybe this is a better way of talking.”
“Undoubtedly,” said Archbold. He rubbed his hands together to get the warmth of the drink thoroughly through his system. “But what is the question?”
“Ordinarily,” answered Kildare, “I don’t think you do much harm. Maybe the world should have more faith-healers. But not for broken legs.”
“Exactly,” said Archbold. He was so pleased that he gave himself an immediate encore of rye. “If I had men of understanding around me, doctor, I would be able to take an assured place in this vale of tears, but as a matter of fact I’m a little tired of this damned town. I’ve been here two years and a half and I know their minds, so-called. I’m ready to move on. I have everything packed and no matter how watchful they wish to be, I’m sure that at about three or four they’ll fold their tents and steal away. Then I can be off. They took it very hard, their little discovery of today. But I don’t hate you because you revealed me, doctor. No malice in me whatever.”
“Thank you,” said Kildare. “After all, I knew that you couldn’t do the girl any harm.”
“Of course not,” said Archbold, laughing. “No harm and no good. Who can do any good for a malignant tumour of the brain?”
Kildare took a deep breath. He had at last the information he wanted.
“I wonder what convinced her that she had that?” he asked.
“Ah, the nurse told me enough about that,” explained Archbold. “Imagine her own mother dying of the same disease. And the house filled with doctors and nurses for years until the girl came to hate the whole medical profession. You see?”
“I begin to,” said Kildare.
“And once, before the end, the child heard her mother’s voice—babbling—making no sense—you understand? The mind of the poor woman had given way, I suppose. So the horror was born in Nancy. Very affecting, I’m sure. When her headaches began she inquired and learned the nature of her mother’s illness. Of course the headaches seemed proof that she had the same thing. And the other day when she told that fat-brained Irish nurse about her symptoms, of course Nora jumped to the conclusion that the end was upon her. The fool told the girl a few of the details about the mother’s death. Clear and simple, the whole thing, isn’t it?”
“Perfectly,” said Kildare.
He got down to the street and the car quickly.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
BUT when he was in the car, for all his haste he realised that he had no destination. Probably he already was too late and somewhere within the round of the hills Nancy lay dead. He took the first road, then another right, another left, and saw the lights of a village rising before him like a patch of ragged stars. The town he drove into was the same that he had left. He had driven in a blind circle.
He saw before him now the corner at which Billy had been injured, and at the sight of it his mind went forward to the picture of the lad stretched on the floor of Archbold’s office with Nancy sitting beside him. There had been such beauty in her then that he always would remember her, he knew, as she had been in that moment. He could remember every word that had passed between her and Billy about the old boathouse to which no one came throughout the year, a forgotten place lost in the woods beside a lagoon. Remembering that, a new light of hope flashed on in his brain. He pulled up the car at the kerb and asked a bystander the way to the old boathouse.
“Old boathouse? There’s the boathouse down at the pier. That’s the only one I know about,” said the man on the corner.
“Down by a lagoon, lost in the woods—the old boathouse. Doesn’t anyone remember it?” asked Kildare, anxiously scanning the faces as a group gathered on the pavement.
A farmer with a red face that glistened with whisky and his weekly shave now answered: “Ain’t that the place over there beyond the end of the Brighton Road? Sure it is. You’ll miss it if you don’t look sharp. Right down there—where the Road makes a right turn and an old lane runs on…”
Kildare found the Brighton Road and then the old lane at the turn.
Before he knew it, he was driving through a thick forest that shut out the light of the moon and left him in a dense winter blackness. The air turned cold and damp. Through the woods he came out upon a curving lake, silver under the moon, that blocked all forward progress unless he took, to the side, a narrow way that wound through the slums of tree roots and obscurity. Kildare put on the brakes and stared vaguely before him at a little boat, leaning crazily to one side, which swung at the end of an improvised pier. It was veering with the wind. Something like a reflection from the moon-brightened water was visible on her side, aft. Now it appeared clearly to his eyes, painted in ragged letters big enough to suit a craft of ten times her tonnage. The word it spelled was “JENNY.”
He remembered Billy then, though in fact Billy had said that his home-made boat was moored in front of the boathouse. That was why he looked about with more care and saw it at last. The roof was so fallen in ragged patches that it gave an upper outline like a portion of the woods; but now that he looked more closely, he could see the dark blink of the windows. When he tried to start, a rear wheel bit into the sand, hollowed a place for itself, and refused to climb out of the hole it had excavated.
Kildare got out of the car and set about looking for a fragment of wood with which he could clear the earth away and give the wheel a start. He was well at work when a chill came upon him from behind. He looked with fixed eyes over the bright face of the water, then jerked his head around and saw the figure moving straight toward him from the ruin of the boathouse. It came on with a hesitant step, both hands stretched forward, the head held high and the face tilted upward so that the moon shone full on the face of Nancy Messenger. As he watched, she came behind a ragged stump of a pine tree. She walked straight on like a creature without sight. Horror took him by the throat. It seemed as though the wretched little tree possessed life, malevolence, and will of its own to move and to strike. The girl walked full into it and the blow struck her to her knees.
He could not stir, but Nancy, gathering herself patiently, rose again. With her outstretched hands she found a way around the tree and came on toward the water. He could tell then why her eyes, helplessly wide, were fixed upon the moon. There was no sight in them. He had to try once or twice before her name would come past his lips.