JORDAN IS A MAN
When King turned back again to face the front his heart was thumping prodigiously. Almost he was certain it had been Anne Linton; yet the explanation—if there were one—was not to be imagined. And if it had been Anne Linton, why should she have refused to know him? There could have been little difficulty for her in identifying him, even though she had seen him last lying flat on his back on a hospital bed. And if there had been a chance of her not knowing him—there was Red Pepper.
It was Anne. It could not be Anne. Between these two convictions King's head was whirling. Whoever it was, she had dared to look straight into his eyes in broad daylight at a distance of not more than four feet. He had seen into the very depths of her own bewildering beauty, and the encounter, always supposing her to be the person of whom he had thought continuously for four months, was a thing to keep him thinking about her whether he would or no.
"Anything wrong?" asked Burns's voice in its coolest tones. "I suspect I was something of an idiot to give you such a big dose of this at the first trial."
"I'm all right, thank you." And King sat up very straight in the car to prove it. Nevertheless, when he was at home again he was not sorry to be peremptorily ordered to lie supine on his back for at least three hours.
It was not long after this that King was able to bring about the thing he most desired—a talk with Mrs. Burns. She came to see him one July day, at his request, at an hour when he knew his mother must be away. With her he went straight to his point; the moment the first greetings were over and he had been congratulated on his ability to spend a few hours each day at his desk, he began upon the subject uppermost in his thoughts. He told her the story of his encounter with the girl in the car, and asked her if she thought it could have been Miss Linton.
She looked at him musingly. "Do you prefer to think it was or was not?" she asked.
"Are you going to answer accordingly?"
"Not at all. I was wondering which I wanted to think myself. I wish I had been with you. I should have known."
"Would you?" King spoke eagerly. "Would you mind telling me how?"
"I can't tell you how. Of course I came to know her looks much better than you; it really isn't strange that after seeing her only twice you couldn't be sure. I don't think any change of dress or environment could have hidden her from me. The question is, of course, why—if it was she—she should have chosen not to seem to know you—unless—"
"Yes—"
She looked straight at him. "Unless—she is not the poor girl she seemed to be. And that explanation doesn't appeal to me. I have known of poor girls pretending to be rich, but I have never, outside of a sensational novel, known a rich girl to pretend to be poor, unless for a visit to a poor quarter for charitable purposes. What possible object could there be in a girl's going about selling books unless she needed to do it? And she allowed me—" She stopped, shaking her head. "No, Jordan, that was not our little friend—or if it was, she was in that car by some curious chance, not because she belonged there."
"So you're going on trusting her?" was King's abstract of these reflections. He scanned her closely.
She nodded. "Until I have stronger proof to the contrary than your looking into a pair of beautiful eyes. Have you never observed, my friend, how many pairs of beautiful eyes there are in the world?"
He shook his head. "I haven't bothered much about them, except now and then for a bit of nonsense making."
"But this pair you, too, are going to go on trusting?"
"I am. If that girl was Miss Linton she had a reason for not speaking. If it wasn't"—he drew a deep breath—"well, I don't know exactly how to explain that!"
"I do," said Ellen Burns, smiling. "She thought she would never see you again, and she yielded to a girlish desire to look hard at—a real man."
It was this speech which, in spite of himself, lingered in King's mind after she was gone, for the balm there was in it—a balm she had perfectly understood and meant to put there. Well she guessed what his disablement meant to him—in spite of the hope of complete recovery—how little he seemed to himself like the man he was before.
Certainly it was nothing short of real manhood which prompted the talk he had with his mother one day not long after this. She brought him a letter, and she was scrutinizing it closely as she came toward him. He was fathoms deep in his work and did not observe her until she spoke.
"Whom can you possibly have as a correspondent in this town, my son?" she inquired, her eyes upon the postmark, which was that of a small city a hundred miles away. It was one in which lived an old school friend of whom she had never spoken, to her recollection, in King's hearing, for the reason that the family had since suffered deep disgrace in the eyes of the world, and she had been inexpressibly shocked thereby.
King looked up. He was always hoping for a word from Anne Linton, and now, suddenly, it had come, just a week after the encounter with the girl in the car—which had been going, as it happened, in the opposite direction from the city of the postmark. He recognized instantly the handwriting upon the plain, white business envelope—an interesting handwriting, clear and black, without a single feminine flourish. He took the letter in his hand and studied it.
"It is from Miss Linton," he said, "and I am very glad to hear from her. It is the first time she has written since she went away—over two months ago."
He spoke precisely as he would have spoken if it had been a letter from any friend he had. It was like him to do this, and the surer another man would have been to try to conceal his interest in the letter the surer was Jordan King to proclaim it. The very fact that this announcement was certain to rouse his mother's suspicion that the affair was of moment to him was enough to make him tell her frankly that she was quite right.
He laid the letter on the desk before him unopened, and went on with his work. Mrs. King stood still and looked at him a moment before moving quietly away, and disturbance was written upon her face. She knew her son's habit of finishing one thing before he took up another, but she understood also that he wished to be alone when he should read this letter. She left the room, but soon afterward she softly passed the open door, and she saw that the letter lay open before him and that his head was bent over it. The words before him were these:
Dear Mr. King:
I had not meant to write to you for much longer than this, but I find myself so anxious to know how you are that I am yielding to the temptation. I may as well confess that I am just a little lonely to-night, in spite of having had a pretty good day with the little book—rather better than usual. Sometimes I almost wish I hadn't spent that fortnight with Mrs. Burns, I find myself missing her so. And yet, how can one be sorry for any happy thing that comes to one? As I look back on them now, though I am well and strong again, those days of convalescence in the hospital stand out as among the happiest in my life. The pleasant people, the flowers, the notes, all the incidents of that time, not the least among them Franz's music, stay in my memory like a series of pictures.
Do you care to tell me how you come on? If so you may write to me, care of general delivery, in this town, at any time for the next five days. I shall be so glad to hear.
Anne Linton.
King looked up as his mother approached. He folded the letter and put it into his pocket.
"Mother," he said, "I may as well tell you something. You won't approve of it, and that is why I must tell you. From the hour I first saw Miss Linton I've been unable to forget her. I know, by every sign, that she is all she seems to be. I can't let her go out of my life without an effort to keep her. I'm going to keep her, if I can."
Two hours later R.P. Burns, M.D., was summoned to the bedside of Mrs. Alexander King. He sat down beside the limp form, felt the pulse, laid his hand upon the shaking shoulder of the prostrate lady, who had gone down before her son's decision, gentle though his manner with her had been. She had argued, prayed, entreated, wept, but she had not been able to shake his purpose. Now she was reaping the consequences of her agitation.
"My son, my only boy," she moaned as Burns asked her to tell him her trouble, "after all these years of his being such a man, to change suddenly into a willful boy again! It's inconceivable; it's not possible! Doctor, you must tell him, you must argue with him. He can't marry this girl, he can't! Why, he doesn't even know the place she comes from, to say nothing of who she is—her family, her position in life. She must be a common sort of creature to follow him up so; you know she must. I can't have it; I will not have it! You must tell him so!"
Burns considered. There was a curious light in his eyes. "My dear lady," he said gently at length, "Jordan is a man; you can't control him. He is a mighty manly man, too—as his frankly telling you his intention proves. Most sons would have kept their plans to themselves, and simply have brought the mother home her new daughter some day without any warning. As for Miss Linton, I assure you she is a lady—as it seems to me you must have seen for yourself."
"She is clever; she could act the part of a lady, no doubt," moaned the one who possessed a clear title to that form of address. "But she might be anything. Why didn't she tell you something of herself? Jordan could not say that you knew the least thing about her. People with fine family records are not so mysterious. There is something wrong about her—I know it—I know it! Oh, I can't have it so; I can't! You must stop it, Doctor; you must!"
"She spent two weeks in our home," Burns said. "During that time there was no test she did not stand. Come, Mrs. King, you know that it doesn't take long to discover the flaw in any metal. She rang true at every touch. She's a girl of education, of refinement—why, Ellen came to feel plenty of real affection for her before she left us, and you know that means a good deal. As for the mystery about her, what's that? Most people talk too much about their affairs. If, as we think, she has been brought up in circumstances very different from these we find her in, it isn't strange that she doesn't want to tell us all about the change."
But his patient continued to moan, and he could give her no consolation. For a time he sat quietly beside the couch where lay the long and slender form, and he was thinking things over. The room was veiled in a half twilight, partly the effect of closing day and partly that of drawn shades. The deep and sobbing breaths continued until suddenly Burns's hand was laid firmly upon the hand which clutched a handkerchief wet with many tears. He spoke now in a new tone, one she had never before heard from him addressed to herself:
"This," he said, "isn't worthy of you, my friend."
It was as if her breath were temporarily suspended while she listened. People were not accustomed to tell Mrs. Alexander King that her course of action was unworthy of her.
"No man or woman has a right to dictate to another what he shall do, provided the thing contemplated is not an offense against another. You have no right to set your will against your son's when it is a matter of his life's happiness."
She seized on this last phrase. "But that's why I do oppose him. I want him to be happy—heaven knows I do! He can't be happy—this way."
"How do you know that? You don't know it. You are just as likely to make him bitterly unhappy by opposing him as by letting him alone. And I can tell you one thing surely, Mrs. King: Jordan will do as he wishes in spite of you, and all you will gain by opposition will be not a gain, but a sacrifice—of his love."
She shivered. "How can you think he will be so selfish?"
Burns had some ado to keep his rising temper down. "Selfish—to marry the woman he wants instead of the woman you want? That's an old, old argument of selfish mothers."
The figure on the couch stiffened. "Doctor Burns! How can you speak so, when all I ask for is my son's best good?" The words ended in a wail.
"You think you do, dear lady. What you really want is—your own way."
Suddenly she sat up, staring at him. His clear gaze met her clouded one, his sane glance confronted her wild one. She lifted her shaking hand with a gesture of dismissal. But there was a new experience in store for Jordan King's mother.
Burns leaned forward, and took the delicate hand of his hysterical patient in his own.
"No, no," he said, smiling, "you don't mean that; you are not quite yourself. I am Jordan's friend and yours. I have said harsh things to you; it was the only way. I love your boy as I would a younger brother, and I want you to keep him because I can understand what the loss of him would mean to you. But you must know that you can't tie a man's heart to you with angry commands, nor with tears and reproaches. You can tie it—tight—by showing sympathy and understanding in this crisis of his life. Believe me, I know."
His tone was very winning; his manner—now that he had said his say—though firm, was gentle, and he held her hand in a way that did much toward quieting her. Many patients in danger of losing self-control had known the strengthening, soothing touch of that strong hand. Red Pepper was not accustomed to misuse this power of his, which came very near being hypnotic, but neither did he hesitate to use it when the occasion called as loudly as did this one.
And presently Mrs. King was lying quietly on her couch again, her eyes closed, the beating of her agitated pulses slowly quieting. And Burns, bending close, was saying before he left her: "That's a brave woman. Ladies are lovely things, but I respect women more. Only a mighty fine one could be the mother of my friend Jord, and I knew she would meet this issue like the Spartan she knows how to be."
If, as he stole away downstairs—leaving his patient in the hands of a somewhat long-suffering maid—he was saying to himself things of a quite different sort, let him not be blamed for insincerity. He had at the last used the one stimulant against which most of us are powerless: the call to be that which we believe another thinks us.