CHAPTER VIII
THE LITTLE LADY WHO FORGOT
Larry Holiday was a rather startlingly energetic person when he once got under way. The next morning he overruled the "Mystery Lady's" faint demurs, successfully argued the senior doctor into agreement with his somewhat surprising plan of procedure, wired his uncle, engaged train reservations for that evening, secured a nurse, preempted the services of a Red Cap who promised to be waiting with a chair at the station so that the little invalid would not have to set foot upon the ground, and finally carried the latter with his own strong young arms onto the train and into a large, cool stateroom where a fan was already whirring and the white-clad nurse waiting to minister to the needs of the frail traveler.
In a few moments the train was slipping smoothly out of the station and the girl who had forgotten most things else knew that she was being spirited off to a delightful sounding place called Holiday Hill in the charge of a gray-eyed young doctor who had made himself personally responsible for her from the moment he had extricated her, more dead than alive, from the wreckage. Somehow, for the moment she was quite content with the knowledge.
Leaving his charge in the nurse's care, Larry Holiday ensconced himself in his seat not far from the stateroom and pretended to read his paper. But it might just as well have been printed in ancient Sanscrit for all the meaning its words conveyed to his brain. His corporeal self occupied the green plush seat. His spiritual person was elsewhere.
After fifteen minutes of futile effort at concentration he flung down the paper and strode to the door of the stateroom. A white linen arm answered his gentle knock. There was a moment's consultation, then the nurse came out and Larry went in.
On the couch the girl lay very still with half-closed eyes. Her long blonde braids tied with blue ribbons lay on the pillow on either side of her sweet, pale little face, making it look more childlike than ever.
"I can't see why I can't remember," she said to Larry as he sat down on the edge of the other cot opposite her. "I try so hard."
"Don't try. You are just wearing yourself out doing it. It will be all right in time. Don't worry."
"I can't help worrying. It is—oh, it is horrible not to have any past—to be different from everybody in the world."
"I know. It is mighty tough and you have been wonderfully brave about it. But truly I do believe it will all come back. And in the meanwhile you are going to one of the best places in the world to get well in. Take my word for it."
"But I don't see why I should be going. It isn't as if I had any claim on you or your people. Why are you taking me to your home?" The blue eyes were wide open now, and looking straight up into Larry Holiday's gray ones.
Larry smiled and Larry's smile, coming out of the usual gravity and repose of his face, was irresistible. More than one young woman, case and non-case, had wished, seeing that smile, that its owner had eyes for girls as such.
"Because you are the most interesting patient I ever had. Don't begrudge it to me. I get measles and sore throats mostly. Do you wonder I snatched you as a dog grabs a bone?" Then he sobered. "Truly, Ruth—you don't mind my calling you that, do you, since we don't know your other name?—the Hill is the one place in the world for you just now. You will forgive my kidnapping you when you see it and my people. You can't help liking it and them."
"I am not afraid of not liking it or them if—" She had meant to say "if they are at all like you," but that seemed a little too personal to say to one's doctor, even a doctor who had saved your life and had the most wonderful smile that ever was, and the nicest eyes. "If they will let me," she substituted. "But it is such a queer, kind thing to do. The other doctors were interested in me, too, as a case. But it didn't occur to any of them to offer me the hospitality of their homes and family for an unlimited time. Are you Holidays all like that?"
"More or less," admitted Larry with another smile. "Maybe we are a bit vain-glorious about Holiday hospitality. It is rather a family tradition. The House on the Hill has had open doors ever since the first Holiday built it nearly two hundred years ago. You saw Uncle Phil's wire. He meant that 'welcome ready.' You'll see. But anyway it won't be very hard for them to open the door to you. They will all love you."
She shut her eyes again at that. Possibly the young doctor's expression was rather more un-professionally eloquent than he knew.
"Tired?" he asked.
"Not much—tired of wondering. Maybe my name isn't Ruth at all."
"Maybe it isn't. But it is a name anyway, and you may as well use it for the present until you can find your own. I think Ruth Annersley is a pretty name myself," added the young doctor seriously. "I like it."
"Mrs. Geoffrey Annersley," corrected the girl. "That is rather pretty too."
Larry agreed somewhat less enthusiastically.
Ruth lifted her hand and fell to twisting the wedding ring which was very loose on her thin little finger.
"Think of being married and not knowing what your husband looks like.
Poor Geoffrey Annersley! I wonder if he cares a great deal for me."
"It is quite possible," said Larry Holiday grimly.
He had taken an absurd dislike to the very name of Geoffrey Annersley. Why didn't the man appear and claim his wife? Practically every paper from the Atlantic to the Pacific had advertised for him. If he was any good and wanted to find his wife he would be half crazy looking for her by this time. He must have seen the newspaper notices. There was something queer about this Geoffrey Annersley. Larry Holiday detested him cordially.
"You don't suppose he was killed in the wreck, do you?" Ruth's mind worked on, trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together.
"You were traveling alone. Your chair was near mine. I noticed you because I thought—" He broke off abruptly.
"Thought what?"
"That you were the prettiest girl I ever saw in my life," he admitted. "I wanted to speak to you. Two or three times I was on the verge of it but I never could quite get up the courage. I'm not much good at starting conversations with girls. My kid brother, Ted, has the monopoly of that sort of thing in my family."
"Oh, if you only had," she sighed. "Maybe I would have told you something about myself and where I was going when I got to New York."
"I wish I had," regretted Larry. "Confound my shyness! I don't see why anybody ever let you travel alone from San Francisco to New York anyway," he added. "Your Geoffrey ought to have taken better care of you."
"Maybe I haven't a Geoffrey. The fact that there was an envelope in my bag addressed to Mrs. Geoffrey Annersley doesn't prove that I am Mrs. Geoffrey Annersley."
"No, still there is the ring." Larry frowned thoughtfully. "If you aren't Mrs. Geoffrey Annersley you must be Mrs. Somebody Else, I suppose. And the locket says Ruth from Geoffrey."
"Oh, yes, I suppose I am Mrs. Geoffrey Annersley. It seems as if I must be. But why can't I remember? It seems as if any one would remember the man she was married to—as if one couldn't forget that, no matter what happened. But if there is a Geoffrey Annersley why doesn't he come and get me and make me remember him?"
Larry shook his head.
"Don't worry, please. We'll keep on advertising. He is bound to come before long if he really is your husband. Some day he will be coming up our hill and run away with you, worse luck!"
Ruth's eyes were on the ring again.
"It is funny," she said. "But I can't make myself feel married. I can't make the ring mean anything to me. I don't want it to mean anything. I don't want to be married. Sometimes I dream that Geoffrey Annersley has come and I put my hand over my eyes because I don't want to see him. Isn't that dreadful?" she turned to Larry to ask.
"You can't help it." Larry tried manfully to push back his own wholly unreasonable satisfaction in her aversion to her presumptive husband. "It is the blow and the shock of the whole thing. It will be all right in time. You will fall on your Geoffrey's neck and call him blessed when the time comes."
"I don't believe he is coming," she announced suddenly with conviction.
Larry got up and walked over to her couch.
"What makes you say that?" he demanded.
"I don't know. It was just a feeling I had. Something inside me said right out loud: 'He isn't coming. He isn't your husband.' Maybe it is because I don't want him to come and don't want him to be my husband. Oh, dear! It is all so queer and mixed up and horrid. It is awful not to be anybody—just a ghost. I wish I'd been killed. Why didn't you leave me? Why did you dig me out? All the others said I was dead. Why didn't you let me be dead? It would have been better."
She turned her face away and buried it in the pillow, sobbing softly, suddenly like a child.
This was too much for Larry. He dropped on his knees beside her and put his arms around the quivering little figure.
"Don't, Ruth," he implored. "Don't cry and don't—don't wish you were dead. I—I can't stand it."
There was a tap at the door. Larry got to his feet in guilty haste and went to the door of the stateroom.
"It is time for Mrs. Annersley's medicine," announced the nurse impersonally, entering and going over to the wash stand for a glass.
The white linen back safely turned, Larry gave one swift look at Ruth and bolted, shutting the door behind him. The nurse turned to look at the patient whose face was still hidden in the pillow and then her gaze traveled meditatively toward the door out of which the young doctor had shot so precipitately. Larry had forgotten that there was a mirror over the wash stand and that nurses, however impersonal, are still women with eyes in their heads.
"H—m," reflected the onlooker. "I wouldn't have thought he was that kind. You never can tell about men, especially doctors. I wish him joy falling in love with a woman who doesn't know whether or not she has a husband. Your tablets, Mrs. Annersley," she added aloud.
* * * * *
"Larry, I think your Ruth is the dearest thing I ever laid eyes on," declared Tony next day to her brother. "Her name ought to be Titania. I'm not very big myself, but I feel like an Amazon beside her. And her laugh is the sweetest thing—so soft and silvery, like little bells. But she doesn't laugh much, does she? Poor little thing!"
"She is awfully up against it," said Larry with troubled eyes. "She can't stop trying to remember. It is a regular obsession with her. And she is very shy and sensitive and afraid of strangers."
"She doesn't look at you as if you were a stranger. She adores you."
"Nonsense!" said Larry sharply.
Tony opened her eyes at her brother's tone.
"Why, Larry! Of course, I didn't mean she was in love with you. She couldn't be when she is married. I just meant she adored you—well, the way Max adores me," she explained as the tawny-haired Irish setter came and rested his head on her knee, raising solemn worshipful brown eyes to her face. "Why shouldn't she? You saved her life and you have been wonderful to her every way."
"Nonsense!" said Larry again, though he said it in a different tone this time. "I haven't done much. It is Uncle Phil and Aunt Margery who are the wonderful ones. It is great the way they both said yes right away when I asked if I could bring her here. I tell you, Tony, it means something to have your own people the kind you can count on every time. And it is great to have a home like this to bring her to. She is going to love it as soon as she is able to get downstairs with us all."
Up in her cool, spacious north chamber, lying in the big bed with the smooth, fine linen, Ruth felt as if she loved it already, though she found these Holidays even more amazing than ever, now that she was actually in their midst. Were there any other people in the world like them she wondered—so kind and simple and unfeignedly glad to take a stranger into their home and a queer, mysterious, sick stranger at that!
"If I have to begin living all over just like a baby I think I am the luckiest girl that ever was to be able to start in a place like this with such dear, kind people all around me," she told Doctor Holiday, senior, to whom she had immediately lost her heart as soon as she saw his smile and felt the touch of his strong, magnetic, healing hand.
"We will get you out under the trees in a day or two," he said. "And then your business will be to get well and strong as soon as possible and not worry about anything any more than if you were the baby you were just talking about. Can you manage that, young lady?"
"I'll try. I would be horrid and ungrateful not to when you are all so good to me. I don't believe my own people are half as nice as you Holidays. I don't see how they could be."
The doctor laughed at that.
"We will let it go at that for the present. You will be singing another tune when your Geoffrey Annersley comes up the Hill to claim you."
The girl's expressive face clouded over at that. She did not quite dare to tell Doctor Holiday as she had his nephew that she did not want to see Geoffrey Annersley nor to have to know she was married to him. It sounded horrid, but it was true. Sometimes she hated the very thought of Geoffrey Annersley.
Later Doctor Holiday and his nephew went over the girl's case together from both the personal and professional angles. There was little enough to go on in untangling her mystery. The railway tickets which had been found in her purse were in an un-postmarked envelope bearing the name Mrs. Geoffrey Annersley, but no address. The baggage train had been destroyed by fire at the time of the accident, so there were no trunks to give evidence. The small traveling bag she had carried with her bore neither initial nor geographical designation, and contained nothing which gave any clew as to its owner's identity save that she was presumably a person of wealth, for her possessions were exquisite and obviously costly. A small jewel box contained various valuable rings, one or two pendants and a string of matched pearls which even to uninitiated eyes spelled a fortune. Also, oddly enough, among the rest was an absurd little childish gold locket inscribed "Ruth from Geoffrey."
She had worn no rings at all except for a single platinum-set, and very perfect, diamond and a plain gold band, obviously a wedding ring. The inference was that she was married and that her husband's name was Geoffrey Annersley, but where he was and why she was traveling across the United States alone and from whence she had come remained utterly unguessable. Larry had seen to it that advertisements for Geoffrey Annersley were inserted in every important paper from coast to coast but nothing had come of any of his efforts.
As for the strange lapse of memory, there seemed nothing to do but wait in the hope that recovered health and strength might bring it back.
"It may come bit by bit or by a sudden bound or never," was Doctor Holiday's opinion. "There is nothing that I know of that she or you or any one can do except let nature take her course. It is a case of time and patience. I am glad you brought her to us. Margery and I are very glad to have her."
"You are awfully good, Uncle Phil. I do appreciate it and it is great to have you behind me professionally. I haven't got a great deal of confidence in myself. Doctoring scares me sometimes. It is such a fearful responsibility."
"It is, but you are going to be equal to it. The confidence will come with experience. You need have no lack of faith in yourself; I haven't. There is no reason why I should have, when I get letters like this."
The senior doctor leaned over and extracted old Doctor Fenton's letter from a cubby hole in his desk and gave it to his nephew to read. The latter perused it in silence with slightly heightened color. Praise always embarrassed him.
"He is too kind," he observed as he handed back the letter. "I didn't do much out there, precious little in fact but what I was told to do. I figured it out that we young ones were the privates and it was up to us to take orders from the captains who knew their business better than we did and get busy. I worked on that basis."
"Sound basis. I am not afraid that a man who can obey well won't be able to command well when the time comes. It isn't a small thing to be recognized as a true Holiday, either. It is something to be proud of."
"I am proud, Uncle Phil. There is nothing I would rather hear—and deserve. But, if I am anywhere near the Holiday standard, it is you mostly that brought me up to it. I don't mean any dispraise of Dad. He was fine and I am proud to be his son. But he never understood me. I didn't have enough dash and go to me for him. Ted and Tony are both more his kind, though I don't believe either of them loved him as I did. But you seemed to understand always. You helped me to believe in myself. It was the best thing that could have happened to me, coming to you when I did."
Larry turned to the mantel and picked up a photograph of himself which stood there, a lad of fifteen or so, facing the world with grave, sensitive eyes, the Larry he had been when he came to the House on the Hill. He smiled at his uncle over the boy's picture.
"You burned out the plague spots, too, with a mighty hot iron, some of them," he added. "I'll never forget your sitting there in that very chair telling me I was a lazy, selfish snob and that, all things considered, I didn't measure up for a nickel with Dick. Jerusalem! I wonder if you knew how that hit. I had a fairly good opinion of Larry Holiday in some ways and you rather knocked the spots out of it, comparing me to my disadvantage with a circus runaway."
He replaced the picture, the smile still lingering on his face.
"It was the right medicine though. I needed it. I can see that now. Speaking of doses I wish you would make Ted tutor this summer. I don't know whether he has told you. I rather think not. But he flunked so many courses he will have to drop back a year unless he makes up the work and takes examinations in the fall."
The senior doctor drummed thoughtfully on the desk. So that was what the boy had on his mind.
"Why not speak to him yourself?" he asked after a minute.
"And be sent to warm regions as I was last spring when I ventured to give his lord highmightiness some advice. No good, Uncle Phil. He won't listen to me. He just gets mad and swings off in the other direction. I don't handle him right. Haven't your patience and tact. I wonder if he ever will get any sense into his head. He is the best hearted kid in the world, and I'm crazy over him, but he does rile me to the limit with his fifty-seven varieties of foolness."