The House of Mystery.
by William Henry Irwin.
I
THE UNKNOWN GIRL
In a Boston and Albany parlor-car, east bound through the Berkshires, sat a young man respectfully, but intently studying a young woman. Now and then, from the newspapers heaped in mannish confusion about his chair, he selected another sheet. Always, he took advantage of this opportunity to face the chair across the aisle and to sweep a glance over a piquant little profile, intent on a sober-looking book. Again, he would gaze out of the window; and he gazed oftenest when a freight train hid the beauties of outside nature. The dun sides of freight cars make out of a window a pa.s.sable mirror. Twice, in those dim and confused glimpses, he caught just a flicker of her eye across her book, as though, she, on her part, were studying him.
It was her back hair which had first entangled Dr. Blake"s thoughts; it was the graceful nape of her neck which had served to hold them fast.
When the hair and the neck below dawned on him, he identified her as that blonde girl whom he had noted at the train gate, waving farewell to some receding friend--and noted with approval. As a traveler on many seas and much land, he knew the lonely longing to address the woman in the next seat. He knew also, as all seasoned travelers in America know, that such desire is sometimes gratified, and without any surrender of decency, in the frank and easy West--but never east of Chicago. This girl, however, exercised somehow, a special pull upon his attention and his imagination. And he found himself playing a game by which he had mitigated many a journey of old. He divided his personality into two parts--man and physician--and tried, by each separate power, to find as much as he could from surface indications about this travel-mate of his.
Mr. Walter Huntington Blake perceived, besides the hair like dripping honey, deep blue eyes--the blue not of a turquoise but of a sapphire--and an oval face a little too narrow in the jaw, so that the chin pointed a delicate Gothic arch. He noted a good forehead, which inclined him to the belief that she "did" something--some subtle addition which he could not formulate confirmed that observation. He saw that her hands were long and tipped with nails no larger than a grain of maize, that when they rested for a moment on her face, in the shifting att.i.tudes of her reading, they fell as gently as flower-stalks swaying together in a breeze. He saw that her shoulders had a slight slope, which combined with hands and eyes to express a being all feminine--the kind made for a lodestone to a man who has known the hard spots of the world, like Mr. Walter Huntington Blake.
"A pippin!" p.r.o.nounced Mr. Blake, the man.
Dr. Blake, the physician, on the other hand, caught a certain languor in her movements, a physical tenuity which, in a patient, he would have considered diagnostic. So transparent was her skin that when her profile dipped forward across a bar of sunshine the light shone through the bridge of her nose--a little observation charming to Blake, the man, but a guide to Blake, the physician. She had the look, Dr. Blake told himself, which old-fashioned country nurses of the herb-doctor school refer to as "called." He knew that, in about one case out of three, that look does in fact amount to a real "call"--the outward expression of an obscure disease.
"Her heart?" queried Blake, the physician. The transparent, porcelain quality of her skin would indicate that. But he found, as he watched, no nervous twitching, no look as of an incipient sack under her eyes; nor did the transparent quality seem waxy. There was, too, a certain pinkness in the porcelain which showed that her blood ran red and pure.
Then Mr. Blake and Dr. Blake re-fused into one psychology and decided that her appearance of delicacy was subtly psychological. It haunted him with an irritating effect of familiarity--as of a symptom which he ought to recognize. In all ways was it intertwined with the expression of her mouth. She had never smiled enough; therein lay all the trouble.
She presented a very pretty problem to his imagination. Here she was, still so very young that little was written on her face, yet the little, something unusual, baffling. The mouth, too tightly set, too drooping--that expressed it all. To educate such a one in the ways of innocent frivolity!
When the porter"s "last call for luncheon" brought that flutter of satisfaction by which a bored parlor-car welcomes even such a trivial diversion as food, Dr. Blake waited a fair interval for her toilet preparations, and followed toward the dining-car. He smiled a little at himself as he realized that he was craftily scheming to find a seat, if not opposite her, at least within seeing distance. On a long and lonely day-journey, he told himself, travelers are like invalids--the smallest incident rolls up into a mountain of adventure. Here he was, playing for sight of an interesting girl, as another traveler timed the train-speed by the mile-posts, or counted the telegraph poles along the way.
So he came out suddenly into the Pullman car ahead--and almost stumbled over the nucleus of his meditations. She was half-kneeling beside a seat, clasping in her arms the figure of a little, old woman. He hesitated, stock still. The blonde girl shifted her position as though to take better hold of her burden, and glanced backward with a look of appeal. The doctor came forward on that; and his sight caught the face of the old woman. Her eyes were closed, her head had dropped to one side and lay supine upon the girl"s shoulder. It appeared to be a plain case of faint.
[Ill.u.s.tration: ANNETTE]
"I am a physician," he said simply, "Get the porter, will you?" Without an instant"s question or hesitation, the girl permitted him to relieve her, and turned to the front of the car. Other women and one fussy, noisy man were coming up now. Dr. Blake waved them aside. "We need air most of all--open that window, will you?" The girl was back with the porter. "Is the compartment occupied? Then open it. We must put her on her back." The porter fumbled for his keys. Dr. Blake gathered up the little old woman in his arms, and spoke over his shoulder to the blonde girl:
"You will come with us?" She nodded. Somehow, he felt that he would have picked her from the whole car to a.s.sist in this emergency. She was like one of those born trained nurses who ask no questions, need no special directions, and are as reliable as one"s instruments.
The old woman was stirring by the time he laid her out on the sofa of the compartment. He wet a towel in the pitcher at the washstand, wrung it out, pressed it on her forehead. It needed no more than that to bring her round.
"Only a faint," said Dr. Blake; "the day"s hot and she"s not accustomed to train travel, I suppose. Is she--does she belong to your party?"
The girl spoke for the first time in his hearing. Even before he seized the meaning of her speech, he noted with a thrill the manner of it.
Such a physique as this should go with the high, silvery tone of a flute; so one always imagines it. This girl spoke in the voice of a violin--soft, deep, deliciously resonant. In his mind flashed a picture for which he was a long time accounting--last winter"s ballet of the New York Hippodrome. Afterward, he found the key to that train of thought. It, had been a ballet of light, shimmering colors, until suddenly a troop of birds in royal purple had slashed their way down the center of the stage. They brought the same glorified thrill of contrast as this soft but strong contralto voice proceeding from that delicate blondness.
"Oh, no!" she said, "I never saw her before. She was swaying as I came down the aisle, and I caught her. She"s--she"s awake." The old woman had stirred again.
"Get my bag from seat 12, parlor-car," said Dr. Blake to the porter.
"Tell them outside that it is a simple fainting-spell and we shall need no a.s.sistance." Now his charity patient had recovered voice; she was moaning and whimpering. The girl, obeying again Dr. Blake"s unspoken thought, took a quick step toward the door. He understood without further word from her.
"All right," he said; "she may want to discuss symptoms. You"re on the way to the dining-car aren"t you? I"ll be along in five minutes, and I"ll let you know how she is. Tell them outside that it is nothing serious and have the porter stand by--please." That last word of politeness came out on an afterthought--he had been addressing her in the capacity of a trained nurse. He recognized this with confusion, and he apologized by a smile which illuminated his rather heavy, dark face.
She answered with the ghost of a smile--it moved her eyes rather than her mouth--and the door closed.
After five minutes of perfunctory examination and courteous attention to symptoms, he tore himself away from his patient upon the pretext that she needed quiet. He wasted three more golden minutes in a.s.suring his fellow pa.s.sengers that it was nothing. He escaped to the dining car, to find that the delay had favored him. Her honey-colored back hair gleamed from one of the narrow tables to left of the aisle. The unconsidered man opposite her had just laid a bill on the waiter"s check, and dipped his hands in the fingerbowl. Dr. Blake invented a short colloquy with the conductor and slipped up just as the waiter returned with the change. He bent over the girl.
"I have to report," said he, "that the patient is doing nicely; doctor and nurse are both discharged!"
She returned a grave smile and answered conventionally, "I am very glad."
At that precise moment, the man across the table, as though recognizing friendship or familiarity between these two, pocketed his change and rose. Feeling that he was doing the thing awkwardly, that he would give a year for a light word to cover up his boldness, Dr. Blake took the seat. He looked slowly up as he settled himself, and he could feel the heat of a blush on his temples. He perceived--and for a moment it did not rea.s.sure him--that she on her part neither blushed nor bristled.
Her skin kept its transparent whiteness, and her eyes looked into his with intent gravity. Indeed, he felt through her whole att.i.tude the perfect frankness of good breeding--a frankness which discouraged familiarity while accepting with human simplicity an accidental contact of the highway. She was the better gentleman of the two. His renewed confusion set him to talking fast.
"If it weren"t that you failed to come in with any superfluous advice, I should say that you had been a nurse--you seem to have the instinct.
You take hold, somehow, and make no fuss."
"Why should I?" she asked, "with a doctor at hand? I was thinking all the time how you lean on a doctor. I should never have known what to do. How is she? What was the matter?"
"She"s resting. It isn"t every elderly lady who can get a compartment from the Pullman Company for the price of a seat. She was put on at Albany by one set of grandchildren and she"s to be taken off at Boston by another set. And she"s old and her heart"s a little sluggish--self-sacrifice goes downward not upward, through the generations, I observe--though I"m a young physician at that!"
Her next words, simply spoken as they were, threw him again into confusion.
"I don"t know your name, I think--mine is Annette Markham."
Dr. Blake drew out a card.
"Dr. W.H. Blake, sometime contract surgeon to the Philippine Army of Occupation," he supplemented, "now looking for a practice in these United States!"
"The Philippines--oh, you"ve been in the East? When we were in the Orient, I used to hear of them ever so dimly--I didn"t think we"d all be talking of them so soon--"
"Oh, you"ve been in the Orient--do you know the China Coast--and Nikko and--"
"No, only India."
"I"ve never been there--and I"ve heard it"s the kernel of the East," he said with his lips. But his mind was puzzling something out and finding a solution. The accent of that deep, resonant voice was neither Eastern nor Western, Yankee nor Southern--nor yet quite British. It was rather cosmopolitan--he had dimly placed her as a Californienne. Perhaps this fragment explained it. She must be a daughter of the English official cla.s.s, reared in America. The theory would explain her complexion and her simple, natural balance between frankness and reserve. He formed that conclusion, but, "How do you like America after India?" was all he said.
"How do you like it after the Philippines?" she responded.
"That is a Yankee trick--answering one question with another," he said, still following his line of conjecture; "it was invented by the original Yankee philosopher, a person named Socrates. I like it after everything--I"m an American. I"m one of those rare birds in the Eastern United States, a native of New York City."
"Well, then,"--her manner had, for the first time, the brightness which goes with youth, plus the romantic adventure--"I like it not only after anything but before anything--I"m an American, too."
A sense of irritation rose in him. He had let conjecture grow to conclusion in the most reckless fashion. And why should he care so much that he had risked offending a mere pa.s.sing acquaintance of the road?
"Somehow, I had taken it for granted--your reference to India I suppose--that you were English."
"Oh, no! Though an English governess made me fond of the English. I"m another of the rare birds. I was hardly out of New York in my life until five years ago, when my aunt took me for a stay of two years in the Orient--in India at least. I"ve been very happy to be back."
The current of talk drifted then from the coast of confidences to the open sea of general conversation. He pulled himself up once or twice by the reflection that he was talking too much about himself. Once--and he remembered it with blushes afterward--he went so far as to say, "I didn"t really need to be a doctor, any more than I needed to go to the Philippines--the family income takes care of that. But a man should do something." Nevertheless, she seemed disposed to encourage him in this course, seemed most to encourage him when he told his stories about the Philippine Army of Occupation.
"Oh, tell me another!" she would cry. And once she said, "If there were a piano here, I venture you"d sing Mandelay." "That would I," he answered with a half sigh. And at last, when he was running down, she said, "Oh, please don"t stop! It makes me crazy for the Orient!" "And me!" he confessed. Before luncheon was over, he had dragged out the two or three best stories in his wanderer"s pack, and especially that one, which he saved for late firesides and the high moments of anecdotal exchange, about the charge at Caloocon. She drank down these tales of hike and jungle and firing-line like a seminary girl listening to her first grownup caller. For his part, youth and the need of male youth to spread its bright feathers before the female of its species, drove him on to more tales. He contrived his luncheon so that they finished and paid simultaneously--and in the middle of his story about Sergeant Jones, the dynamite and the pack mule. So, when they returned to the parlor-car, nothing was more simple, natural and necessary than that he should drop into the vacant chair beside her, and continue where he left off. He felt, when he had finished, the polite necessity of leading the talk back to her; besides, he had not finished his Study of the Unknown Girl. He returned, then, to the last thread which she had left hanging.
"So you too are glad to be at home!" he said. "I"m so glad that I don"t want to lose sight either of a skysc.r.a.per or of apple trees for years and years. I can"t remember when I"ve ever wanted to stay in one place before."