The Amateur Inn by Albert Payson Terhune - HTML preview

CHAPTER XIX
 A MAN AND A MAID AND ANOTHER MAN

“I ’M just as glad Doris wasn’t here to listen to this,” commented Miss Gregg, breaking the awed pause which followed Dr. Lawton’s recital. “For a perfectly innocent and kindly girl she seems to have stirred up no end of mischief. After the manner of perfectly innocent and kindly girls. She’d be the first to grieve over it, of course. But a billion Grief-Power never yet had the dynamic force to lift one ounce of any bad situation one inch in one century.”

“Well,” said Lawton, reaching for his rusty black hat and his rustier black bag, “I’ve wasted too much time already, gabbling here. I must get to my miserable round of calls unless I want my patients to get well before I arrive. Good-by. Clive will be all right now. He has had the absolute rest he needed. He’ll be as good as new in another week or so. It’s lucky all this has happened before Oz had a chance to squander more than about $50,000 of the lad’s fortune. He’ll have enough left to live on in comfort. To marry on, too.”

Off plodded the old gentleman, leaving Thaxton Vail scowling unhappily after him.

“To marry on,” muttered Vail under his breath, not knowing he spoke aloud.

“Yes,” chimed in Miss Gregg brightly. “Enough to marry on. Almost enough to be engaged on. He’s a lucky man!”

“He is,” agreed Vail dully. “And a mighty white man, too. One of the very best.”

“Yes,” assented Miss Gregg with fervor, smiling maliciously on her victim. “One of the very best. Doris thinks so too.”

“I know she does,” sighed Vail.

He got up abruptly to leave the room. But Miss Gregg would not have it so.

“Thax,” she said, “you remember that would-be smart thing Willis Chase said, the evening of the burglary? He said that when a policeman blows out his brains and survives they make him a detective. Well, here’s something a hundred times truer: When Providence wishes to extract a man’s few brains more or less painlessly and to make him several thousand degrees worse than useless He makes him fall in love. That is not an epigram. It is better. It’s a truth.... Thax, do you realize you’ve been making my little girl very unhappy indeed?”

“I?” blithered Vail. “Making Doris unhappy? Why, Miss Gregg, I—!”

“Oh, don’t apologize. She enjoys it. A girl in love, without being divinely unhappy, would feel she was defrauded of Heaven’s best gift. Doris—”

“But I don’t understand!” protested the miserable Vail. “How on earth have I made—?”

“Principally by being mooncalfishly and objectionably in love with her,” said Miss Gregg, “and not taking the trouble to tell her so.”

“But how can I? In the first place, Clive loves her. He’s never loved any one else. (Neither have I for that matter. I got into the habit when I was a boy, and I can’t break it.) He’s lying sick and helpless here under my roof. It wouldn’t be playing the game to—”

“Love is no more a ‘game’ than a train wreck is!” scoffed Miss Gregg. “If you weren’t a lover, and therefore a moron, you’d know that. It—”

“Besides,” he blurted despairingly, “what would be the use? She loves him. I can tell she does. Why, you just said yourself she—”

“I said she agrees with you in thinking he is ‘one of the very best,’” corrected Miss Gregg impatiently. “And it’s true. But when you get to my age you’ll know no woman ever loved a man because he was good or even because he was ‘best.’ She may love him for his taste in ties or because his hair grows prettily at the back of his neck or because his voice has thrilly little organ notes in it. Or she may love him for no visible reason at all. But you can take my word she won’t love him for his goodness. She’ll only respect him for it. And if I were a man in love I’d hate to have my sweetheart respect me.”

Vail was not listening. Instead he was staring moodily out of the window. Turning in at the gates and progressing purringly up the drive was an electric runabout. Doris Lane was its sole occupant. At sight of her now, as always of late, Thaxton was aware of a queer little pain at his heart.

“Thax,” said Miss Gregg, bringing the torture to an abrupt end, “last evening Clive Creede asked Doris to marry him.”

Vail did not answer. But between him and the swiftly advancing runabout sprang an annoying mist.

Miss Gregg surveyed his averted face as best she might. Then her tight old lips softened.

“Doris was very nice to him, of course,” she added. “But she told him she couldn’t marry him. She said she was in love with some one else—that she had always been in love with this stupid some one else.... Better go and help her out of the car, Thax.”

But with a tempestuous rush and with the glow of all the summer winds in his face Thaxton Vail already had gone.

Miss Gregg looked after him, her hard old eyes curiously soft, her thin lips moving. Then ashamed of her unwonted weakness, she drew herself together with an apologetic half-smile.

To an invisible listener she said briskly:

“Thank Heaven, he’s outlived his uselessness!”

THE END