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[Pg 118] 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[Pg 119] 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.