And always, as the weeks went on, each was more gentle to the other. Often their eyes met questioning and fell doubting, afraid; more eagerly did they meet, more reluctantly part. Even Mary Sabins, who before the war had harbored an idea that Patsy and Ralph were “interested,” but who, since Young Tom had gone, rarely noticed anybody’s relations—even Mary Sabins said to Tom:
“Do you know, I believe Patsy and Ralph are falling in love, and the sillies don’t know it.”
Dick was satisfied with his interference. He watched them with almost a paternal feeling. It was only now and then that a jealous pang seized him, and he said, “Why, why is there no one for me? If Annie had lived.”
But Annie, after all, was a dream, more and more shadowy. The Reverend Richard Ingraham was not in love with a dream. He did not know it—he who had so often commented privately on the stupidity of his friend Ralph—but he was following Ralph’s course, only he, less reasonable, was falling in love with a woman he had never seen. It would not have been so, I am convinced, if there had been in Sabinsport a single girl known to Dick that had the mingling of charm and spirit that was needed to win him. Surely he would have followed her as the needle the pole; but she was not there. The girl that did draw him was a girl overseas, a girl at whose name Sabinsport raised its eyebrows, a girl whose father had described her as “slight and fine and free moving,” and whose life, as he had been learning it from her father since their first talk, showed her brave and sweet and unselfish. If I know anything of the ways of the heart, the Reverend Richard Ingraham was falling in love with Nancy Cowder—the horse-racing daughter of Sabinsport’s chief pirate.
CHAPTER VIII
A real and sweet intimacy with Nancy Cowder had been going on in Dick’s heart almost unconsciously to himself. It was natural that this should have been so. Curiosity over the girl had been awakened when Patsy McCullon came back from Europe in 1914 and gave an account of her charm, activity and associations—a picture very different from what Sabinsport had quite unconsciously drawn for him. This curiosity had become sympathetic interest when Reuben Cowder had first unburdened himself about his daughter, and this interest had grown warmer and warmer as week after week he read the letters that Nancy was writing her father from Serbia. The nature which revealed itself so frankly in these letters was, Dick realized, something rarely sweet and strong. He grew as the weeks went on to watch for the coming of the letters with scarcely less eagerness than Reuben Cowder himself, and he dreamed much more over them. The girl was taking possession of him without his knowing it. The thought of her was the most fragrant, penetrating and beautiful that came to him.
When the great tragedy came, and she was driven with the host over the mountains, Dick suffered keenly. Here again his old habit of creating a picture of the physical surroundings tormented him. The pictures of what was happening to the girl in that bleak and distracted land came before his eyes as he went about his daily work, stinging him as an unexpected shot might have done, or wakened him, shivering, from his sleep by their horrible realism. His anxiety became so great in the early part of the year that he had almost persuaded himself to join Reuben Cowder in his distracted search, when the cablegram came that Nancy was found. Dick had a vain hope that they might come home soon, but the first letters destroyed that. It was only by long and careful nursing that the exhausted vitality would be brought back, and the girl probably would never again be able to support long strains. Reuben Cowder was ready and glad, so he wrote, to give up everything else to the care of his precious girl, even to never coming back again to America if that were necessary.
Dick had a great sense of loss—one that he did not attempt to analyze or justify—over these intimations that it might be possible that Nancy would never again see Sabinsport. When Nikola came, however, a different face was put on the matter, for he was all confidence that Miss Nancy would never consent to live away from Sabinsport, that she loved it above all places, and that the thing that was sustaining her now was the thought of coming back with her father. They had many rare talks, these two, and little by little Dick was able to piece together, down to the last and commonest detail, the weeks of danger and hardship that the little party had endured. It was a brave, brave tale, and the more he talked it over with Nikola the prouder he became of Nancy Cowder, and the quicker his heart beat at the thought of her.
Throughout the months when Sabinsport was full of anxiety over Verdun, of sorrow over Mikey’s death, of more or less irritated activity over the Border troubles, Dick was daily going about her streets, sharing in her sorrows and in her perplexities, always deep in his mind and in his heart the thought of this girl over the seas.
And the girl herself—the last thing that Dick dreamed was that she was beginning to establish an intimacy with him. It could hardly have been otherwise. Reuben Cowder had a profound sense of obligation to the young man. For the first time in many years he had had a confidant. Not indeed since his wife died had Reuben Cowder talked freely to any living being. He told this to his daughter. “He is a man,” he said, “that you open your heart to. I don’t know why it is, but I knew that I could go to him and say what I could say to no other man in Sabinsport, however long I had known him. You get something from him—I don’t know what it is. I suppose it’s sympathy and understanding. It is not what he says, but it’s a very real thing, and everybody gets it, everybody in Sabinsport. When he dropped down there among us at the time of the accident at the ‘Emma,’ it was to him that all those poor souls turned, not to us. Jake Mulligan feels just as I do about it, and so does Tom Sabins, and so does Nikola and so does John Starrett, and even the Rev. Mr. Pepper. He’s a man—a man that seems to touch everybody. I suppose he is what you call human—I don’t know, but I do know that Sabinsport is a vastly better place to live in because of Dick Ingraham. Why, Nancy,” he said, “I could never have found you in the world if it had not been for him. I would not have had the courage. My tongue would have been tied in my search. I don’t know but that’s the greatest thing that Dick Ingraham has done for me—he has loosened my tongue. Nobody ever did that before for me but your mother.”