“A little less quality and a little more constancy,” Harvey suggested grimly, “wouldn’t do her any harm.”
“Even so,” said Trevor satirically, “you would love her to-morrow if you thought she loved you, and constancy be damned. It’s the function of women like her to remind men of their littleness and impotence. I’ve been reminded once or twice. But men like you, old man, hate to be reminded of their littleness and impotence. You’ve got an idea that you are worth loving, and Magdalen Gray is in the world to teach you that there isn’t as much foundation for that idea as there might be.”
“You wait till you have pneumonia ...” Harvey whispered viciously across the still figure of Ivor.
CHAPTER X
1
The days of crisis passed. Dr. Harvey confided to Trevor that it was touch-and-go, but Ivor, in that occasional clarity of intense fever, had no thought of death. One morning, at last, he really did wake up. Weakly, he noticed the room. There was a nurse nearby, and she smiled at him cheerfully, making encouraging noises. He remembered the nurse quite well, she had been about his bed all the time, doing things, and he had asked her for things, too. Yes, she had been there all the time, that nice nurse. And he saw the hot-water bottle hanging from a bed-post at his feet.... He tried to link his memory of a vague face in that room to another memory. What did it remind him of? something so vague and dim, and so long ago.... He remembered Ann Marlay’s face—he never thought of her as his mother, she was Ann Marlay to him—bending over his childhood, and sad, gentle eyes. Of course, yes. And now this other face, so clouded and familiar, hovering about, wide eyes mocking him tenderly—oh, how divine she was, to mock so sadly and tenderly, so unlike every one else! And he spent a long time in trying to compare the two memories, Ann and Magdalen, wondering if they were at all alike, wondering if they would have liked one another....
But she didn’t come that day. He slept, but when he woke up he felt that he had been really watching the door all the time, and that she hadn’t come. He did not ask the nurse about her, he waited. But she did not come. Trevor came in later, and grinned happily to see him better, and said things. Ivor didn’t ask him either, he just waited. But Magdalen never came again.
2
All the time of his getting gradually better he never asked about Magdalen. It was an effort. Gerald Trevor came every day, but he said nothing about her. Gerald was gay of an idea that he and Ivor should go to South America as soon as he was better. Gerald, it seemed, knew a chap who had a ranch there. “Sun and open spaces and horses and gauchos, Señor Ivor,” Gerald cried to him, and Ivor said he would love to go. It was a divine idea, of course he would go, Ivor said.
And Rodney West came once or twice; he had heard he was ill, West cheerfully said, and so thought to have one more look at him before he died. He asked Ivor why he had never gone to see him, and he wondered if Ivor was thinking of selling his car, but Ivor said he was not. So calm and friendly and practical he was. What a good friend for any man, Ivor thought—and straightway made him one! Which was Ivor’s naïve way with the few people he liked, to claim them quickly—and then quietly wait for them to realise that he had claimed their friendship.