How unreasonable! Since by all the laws of average, when millions of men are wearing a uniform, there must be some rogues in it. But it was Alec’s way to hold himself responsible for the whole of His Majesty’s Forces. Their honor was his; for their misdeeds he must in his own person make reparation. “That fellow Beaumaroy may have lost his conscience, but my boy seems to have acquired five million,” the old man grumbled to himself—a grumble full of pride.
The father might analyze; with Alec it was all impulse, the impulse to soothe, to obliterate, to atone. The girl had been sorely hurt; with the acuteness of sympathy he divined that she felt herself in a way soiled and stained by contact with unworthiness and by a too easy acceptance of it. All that must be swept out of her heart, out of her memory, if it could be.
Doctor Mary saw what was happening, and with a little pang to which she would not have liked to own. She had set love affairs, and all the notions connected therewith, behind her; but she had idealized Alec Naylor a little; and she thought Cynthia, in homely phrase, “hardly good enough.” Was it not rather perverse that the very fact of having been a little goose should help her to win so rare a swan?
“You’re taking my patient out of my hands, Captain Alec!” she said to him jokingly. “And you’re devoting great attention to the case.”
He flushed. “She seems to like to talk to me,” he answered simply. “She seems to me to have rather a remarkable mind, Doctor Mary.” (She was “Doctor Mary” to all the Old Place party now, in affection, with a touch of chaff.)
O sancta simplicitas! Mary longed to say; that Cynthia was a very ordinary child. Like to talk to him, indeed! Of course she did; and to use her girl’s weapons on him; and to wonder, in an almost awestruck delight, at their effect on this dazzling hero. Well, the guilelessness of heroes!
So mused Mary, on the unprofessional side of her mind, as she watched, that Christmastide, Captain Alec’s delicate, sensitively indirect, and delayed approach toward the ripe fruit that hung so ready to his hand. “Part of his chivalry to assume she can’t think of him yet!” Mary was half-impatient, half-reluctantly admiring; not an uncommon mixture of feeling for the extreme forms of virtue to produce. In the net result, however, her marked image of Alec lost something of its heroic proportions.
But professionally (the distinction must not be pushed too far, she was not built in watertight compartments) Tower Cottage remained obstinately in the center of her thoughts; and, connected with it, there arose a puzzle over Dr. Irechester’s demeanor. She had taken advantage of Beaumaroy’s permission, though rather doubtful whether she was doing right, for she was still inexperienced in niceties of etiquette, and sent on the letter, with a frank note explaining her own feelings and the reason which had caused her to pay her visit to Mr. Saffron. But though Irechester was quite friendly when they met at Old Place before dinner, and talked freely to her during a rather prolonged period of waiting (Captain Alec and Cynthia, Gertie and two subalterns were very late, having apparently forgotten dinner in more refined delights), he made no reference to the letters, nor to Tower Cottage or its inmates. Mary herself was too shy to break the ice, but wondered at his silence, and the more because the matter evidently had not gone out of his mind. For after dinner, when the port had gone round once and the proper healths been honored, he said across the table to Mr. Penrose:
“We were talking the other day of the Tower, on the heath, you know, by old Saffron’s cottage, and none of us knew its history. You know all about Inkston from time out o’ mind. Have you got any story about it?”
Mr. Penrose practiced as a solicitor in London, but lived in a little old house near the Irechesters’ in the village street, and devoted his leisure to the antiquities and topography of the neighborhood; his lore was plentiful and curious, if not important. He was a small, neat old fellow, with white whiskers of the antique cut, a thin voice, and a dry cackling laugh.