The House of Mystery | Page 3

to the porter. "Tell them outside that it is a simple fainting-spell and we shall need no assistance." 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 assuring his fellow passengers 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 reassure 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 attitude 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 class, 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