Doris sat bolt upright, her black eyes snapping. “Did you ever hear anything like the way Oliver Harrison spoke to him? ‘The Company expects orders to be carried out.’ I’d like him to be carried out. For a moment I honestly hoped your father would tell him what he thought of him. But he—” Her voice trailed off and she did not look at Leslie.
The latter kept her eyes on the armature. She, too, had hoped that her father would reprimand Oliver in some way for his discourtesy, although, for a reason she could not understand, he usually gave Oliver his own way without protest. His attitude toward his head chemist obscurely troubled Leslie.
For a moment she was tempted to tell Doris about that curious scene between Oliver and Felice Allen, which she had accidentally witnessed. Something very queer there. They knew each other, seemed to know each other well, but they were pretending to be strangers.
Leslie checked her confidence. Doris was staunch and loyal but she was still the Babbling Brooke. Everything she knew or heard came pouring out, sooner or later, though it was never done in malice.
“Speaking of Mr. Shaw,” Doris went on, “that man has gone off the deep end about Jane. Brother! Did you notice the way he was right beside her every chance he got all evening long?”
For a moment Doris’s volatile gaiety was dampened. “You know, Leslie, I can’t help wondering if Jane is right about him. When she said that something was wrong, I mean. She has always attracted men but I never knew one to go down for the count that way. First sight and everything. Especially without a scrap of encouragement from Jane. I got to thinking about it last night. Of course, Jane is not only beautiful; she’s a darned wealthy widow and he doesn’t seem to have a penny of his own.”
Leslie packed more clay on the armature, working as though her life depended on it. Without looking up, she asked, “How does Jane feel about him now?”
“That’s just the point, the reason I came over here this morning. I wanted to get away from Jane, away from Web Rock. Honestly, I’ve never seen her like this. Like a wild woman.”
“Jane!”
“Last night she went home in a regular daze and when I asked her what was wrong she snapped, ‘Oh, stop talking!’ and she was pacing her floor till all hours. And that’s not the worst.”
Doris jumped up and began to wander restlessly around the studio. “This morning she was up before eight, and you know how she hates early hours. I heard the most terrible racket going on and found her in that big storage room going through old trunks and barrels and boxes. She had stuff scattered all over the floor.”
Leslie lifted a puzzled face. “Why on earth?”
“That’s what I wanted to know. She said she was looking for those old pictures of Douglas Clayton. She said something about this man Shaw driving her crazy; he’s so much like Doug, so much unlike him. She has a wild idea in her head, a kind of double cross he may be working at the Company. Then when she finally had all the pictures spread out, we looked them over together. I think she was awfully relieved when she saw for herself that the resemblance was in manners and voice and carriage and not in his features, except that his eyes are the same, of course.”
She handed Leslie a snapshot. “Jane said I could give you this one if you still want it. Really it’s the best of Doug, better than the big cabinet photographs, but Jane doesn’t like it because it’s poor of her. The camera caught her with her mouth open and she looks sort of stupid.”
For a long time Leslie studied the snapshot. A young man and a girl were sitting on the ground with a picnic basket in front of them. Jane was easily recognizable, a younger Jane with clothes that were ten years out of date, her hair curled and fluffed around her head. She was looking at Douglas Clayton and, as Doris had said, she appeared rather stupid with her mouth open.
Douglas Clayton. It was hard to believe this was the same man who, only a few months later, had clawed his way up a mountain, gaunt, with somber eyes. He was looking at the camera, a laughing, carefree, happy young man, little more than a boy, with a boy’s sensitive mouth and the open trusting friendliness of a person who has encountered little if any cruelty or injustice in his life.
“You can see for yourself,” Doris pointed out, “there’s no real resemblance to Mr. Shaw, except height and coloring, and his mannerisms, of course. That’s what made Jane so suspicious.”
“Suspicious? But why? Of what?”
“Well, you remember that article about fake heirs she was reading. She’s got a crazy theory that our mysterious stranger has come here to try to establish himself as Doug. She thinks he might have known Doug somewhere, perhaps in the service, studied his ways and all that. And ten years makes a lot of difference in the way people look.”
“I think Jane is as mad as a hatter,” Leslie said flatly. She smoothed the clay with a rotary motion of her thumb.
“I kind of hope so,” Doris admitted. “Mr. Shaw is a real charmer but, for his own sake, the sooner he gets over this infatuation for Jane, the better for all concerned. She—it sounds silly but I think she’s afraid of him and yet attracted at the same time. Or maybe,” Doris commented with the shrewdness that always surprised Leslie, “that’s why Jane is afraid. Just because she is attracted. Jane hasn’t ever let herself be emotionally involved, whatever she may say about Doug now that he is gone. What I think is, if you love a man you’d jump at the chance to go to the Sahara Desert or any hell hole with him.”
Leslie turned the armature, reached for more clay, and began to press it into place.
“Do you think Rosie would make us some iced coffee?” Doris asked.
Leslie started to get up. “Of course. I’ll ask her.”
“No, you go on working. I’ll do it.” Doris ran down the stairs.
Leslie sat looking at the snapshot. Something wrong. A very wealthy widow. Afraid but attracted. Fake heirs. What had Donald Shaw said to her? That if he really had been Douglas Clayton she and her father would be in an awkward position.
Doris was back again and handed her a tall cold glass. In the interim she had apparently forgotten her distrust of Donald Shaw and her volatile mind had seized on another subject.
“Leslie, are you really interested in Oliver Harrison?”
“Not for one single minute,” Leslie assured her in a tone that impelled belief.
Doris breathed a long sigh of satisfaction. “Jeepers, I’m glad! I’d hate to have anything come between us. You’re my very best friend and I never could replace you. But if you were to marry The Great Profile—”
“You got that from Paul,” Leslie accused her.
“Talking about me behind my back,” Paul said from the doorway. He stood grinning at them. “Accusing me of—what exactly? I warn you in advance I’m going to deny it. Hey, my need is greater than yours. Women and children last.” Coolly he took Doris’s glass of iced coffee and began to drink it.
“I called Oliver Harrison The Great Profile,” Doris explained.
“That was just a minor effort,” Paul said modestly. “Now if I really let myself go about the Viking god—”
“Well, don’t,” Leslie warned him.
“Hey, you haven’t really fallen for the guy, have you?”
“He’s part of the Company,” Leslie reminded him. “Dad made it a family rule long ago: no gossip about the personnel.”
“Gossip?” Paul tried to sound shocked and injured, in spite of his broad smile. “Does it hurt that guy if I say he enters a room like Caesar stalking to the Forum? A fair tribute, that’s all.”
Leslie tried not to laugh, failed. “Stop it, Paul.”
“Whatever you say,” he agreed with suspicious humility. He looked at the armature with its padding of clay. “Now if that were Harrison, you’d have to give him a toga and a wreath of vine leaves for his head.”
Doris laughed in delight.
“You are impossible, both of you,” Leslie said firmly.
“It’s the heat and not my intentions. What a day to stay cooped up in an at
tic.”
Leslie, working busily, made no comment. Paul lounged against the door.
“There’s shade from the willows down by the river,” he said musingly. “The water is cool. That barge is dandy to dive from. And—guess what?—my bathing trunks just happen to be in the car.”
Leslie laughed. “You win. Paul, you can change in the small guest room. Doris, you’ll find suits in my room. I’ll just get some wet towels to wrap around the armature and then I’ll join you.”
When she had changed to a white bathing suit, she ran across the lawn, down to the river. Paul was already in the water. Doris, sitting on the barge, let her legs dangle over the side. She waved her arm and called something. Leslie pulled off her cap so she could hear.
“What?”
“We’ve got company. How did you get here, you little monster?”
Jack Williams was sitting on the grass. His face was flushed and his manner defiant. “I walked.”
“Does your mother know where you are?”
“She never minds my coming to see Leslie. It’s all right, isn’t it, Leslie?”
“Just fine,” she assured him. She looked at his bathing trunks. “But so far you’ve just been practicing,” she warned him. “You can’t swim yet and the river is much deeper than the pools you’ve been in.”
“He can’t go in the water,” Doris protested. “He’s supposed to be home in bed. He had a fever this morning.”
“Aw, Aunt Doris, don’t be mean!”
Paul had come up on the lawn. “Hi, Sheriff,” he said, “have you caught any cattle thieves this morning?”
“I’m not a sheriff today. I’m a pirate.” Jack looked wistfully from face to face. “Can’t I swim atall? I’m so hot.”
Leslie touched his cheek lightly. “So you are. I’ll tell you what. We’ll all sit on the barge for a while and play pirate.”
“Jeepers!”
“And then,” Leslie went on, “Aunt Doris will drive you home and you’ll go back to bed so you can get over the fever and come swimming with us. Promise?”
“Cross my heart,” Jack said solemnly.
So for an hour they played pirate with a small boy. Or rather, they told pirate stories and he was content to sit quietly, curled up at Leslie’s feet, listening in wide-eyed delight. It was at moments like these that Leslie realized how very much she liked Paul. He treated Jack as though he were his contemporary, without any of the condescension by which grown-ups so often insult children, entering the imaginary game unselfconsciously and with zest.
“I betcha,” Jack said, “if we had grappling irons we could fasten this old barge to an enemy ship and board her in about two minutes. I betcha we could.”
“Would you make the prisoners walk the plank, Captain Blood?” Doris asked.
He considered the problem with the seriousness it merited. “No. Long as we haven’t any motor, I’d get oars and make ’em all galley slaves.”
“How you going to divide the loot, Captain?” Paul asked.
“Half for me, ’cause I’m the Captain. The rest equally among my crew, except maybe Leslie would get a little bit more.”
“I like that,” Doris said in pretended indignation. “You should never play favorites, Captain. First thing you know, you’ll have a mutiny on your hands.”
“Well, just a teeny bit more. Because, after all, she’s Leslie.” He tipped back his head to look at her with adoration in his eyes.
Leslie fought back her temptation to bend over and kiss the small face, so flushed with fever, but she knew it would be an insult to the dignity and the prestige of Captain Blood.
“Aye, aye, Captain. How shall we dispose of our loot?”
“The usial way.”
“Usual,” Doris corrected.
“That’s what I said. Usial. The usial thing is to bury it somewhere, I guess. Paul, could you be a pirate in a canoe?”
“I never heard of one,” Paul admitted.
“I just wondered. Lots of nights, just before it’s quite dark, a canoe goes up and down the river. I just wondered if it was a real pirate, spying out the land, sort of.”
Paul grinned at Leslie. “That sounds like our intrepid friend Mason. No, Captain Blood, I doubt if he is a pirate.”
Jack relinquished the idea with a sigh of disappointment. “It would of been sort of interesting. A pirate in a canoe is not usial. You know what I betcha? I betcha if real pirates had this barge they’d fill it with pine knots and tar and ram it against a ship so’s it would burn right down.”
Leslie touched Jack’s cheek lightly, looked at Doris in alarm. The latter scrambled to her feet. “I’ll change right away and take you home, little monster. Time you were back in bed.”
“Aw, Aunt Doris!”
“You promised,” Leslie reminded him softly.
He got up without further protest, leaned dizzily against her. “Awful hot, isn’t it?”
Paul scooped him up in his arms. “It sure is. Much too hot. With your permission, Captain Blood, the crew will go off duty.”
“Awright,” Jack said thickly. His head rested against Paul’s shoulder. He closed his eyes.
9
By that night, Jack’s fever had rocketed sky-high. The doctor diagnosed his trouble as a severe attack of influenza. In spite of his efforts and Jane’s frantic telephone calls, there was no nurse to be had, and Jack proved to be a restless patient who had to be watched constantly to keep him in bed.
In an emergency it never occurred to anyone to look to Jane Williams for help. That, indeed, was the time when she required the most attention and consideration for herself. She simply couldn’t watch Jack night and day, she complained fretfully. Her nerves wouldn’t stand it. Why did things like this have to happen to her?
It never occurred to anyone to make the obvious answer: “Why not? They happen to everyone else.”
Doris and Leslie took over the nursing, Doris during the day and Leslie at night. Rather than go back and forth, Leslie packed a bag and moved to Web Rock. The ten days she spent there seemed, in retrospect, to have a dreamlike quality: the silent night duty in the dim room with its shaded lamp; the restlessness of the sick child and, worse, the time when he lay in a stupor and did not stir at all. In the course of those long hours Leslie’s devotion to the child grew in proportion to his need of her and the help and comfort she was able to give him. For the first time, too, she began to realize how much she wanted children of her own.
Those silent vigils, when she was the only person awake in the house, perhaps in the whole dark village, became a time for searching her own heart, coming to terms with herself as a human being, knowing and accepting both her strength and her weakness.
At eight in the morning, Doris would come up to take her place and Leslie would go down to the terrace, where her breakfast tray had been prepared. Jane, of course, rarely appeared before ten. Leslie would eat chilled melon and hot flaky muffins and sip scalding hot coffee. Then she would stretch out on a long wicker chair, looking up at the green leaves of the trees, out on the bright flower beds, down at the oval pool where Jane’s pink water lilies floated. After that, in a darkened guestroom she slept deeply until mid-afternoon.
Every day Agatha sent over her mail and relayed her telephone messages. Except for that, Leslie was completely out of touch with her home. The dangerous illness of a small boy had crowded everything else out of sight. Now and then she thought of her sculpture, realizing that she probably would not have time to finish it and have it cast before the Clayton Festival.
On a Saturday, ten days after she had taken up her nursing duties, Leslie awakened in the afternoon to find Doris beaming down at her.
“Dr. Fletcher is here. He says Jack is out of the woods. He’s going to be just fine. Tomorrow he can sit up and the next day he can go out of doors for a little while. We nurses are discharged.” She leaned over to kiss Leslie’s cheek, still flushed from sleep. “We owe it to you. I’ll never forget it, Les. Never in this world
.”
“You needn’t thank me, Doris. Honestly, I really love Jack and I wanted to do it. He’s such a little darling.” She stretched like a cat. “I’ll take a bath and pack and go home right away.”
“Why don’t you get into a swim suit and come down to the pool? You haven’t had a single scrap of fun all the time you’ve been here.” Doris grinned. “I suppose I should not think of urging you, because Paul is down there. Unfair competition.”
“Idiot! But I would enjoy a swim.”
The two girls, Doris in a red swim suit, Leslie in pale green, found half a dozen people congregated at the pool, some swimming, some sprawled lazily on chairs on the lawn. Jane, in a black suit that set off her fair hair, was dividing her attention between Donald Shaw and Dr. Fletcher, the attractive young child specialist, a widower, who had recently set up practice in Claytonville. The two men were the only ones who were not dressed for swimming.
Paul waved from the pool as he caught sight of Leslie. “Hi, there, Florence Nightingale.”
Dr. Fletcher and Donald Shaw had risen as the girls came out. The doctor smiled at Leslie. “I haven’t thanked my faithful night nurse yet. You’ve done a splendid job, Miss Blake.”
“I’m so happy to know that Jack is recuperating nicely,” she said.
“Oh, you won’t be able to hold him down in another few days,” the doctor laughed.
Jane sighed. “That’s just what I’m afraid of. He is the most exhausting child. These past ten days have been so restful. I can’t remember such a peaceful time since he was born.” She saw Donald Shaw’s appraising expression and broke off in confusion. “Of course,” she added belatedly, “I’ve been worried sick about him.”
“Of course you have,” the doctor said. “You’ve been very brave about it, too.”
Jane summoned up a brave smile while Doris caught Leslie’s eye and winked.
A Candle in Her Heart Page 8