Georgina's Service Stars
"That boy doesn't know whether he's in the body or out of the body. Somebody ought to tell him about Esther Gilfred. It's a shame to let him go on that way making a goose of himself."
"Tell him what about her?" I demanded.
"Oh, that it's all a bluff about her brushing up her French. She doesn't know enough French to brush. All she does is to hold the dictionary while he reads. She can't even find the words by herself half the time. Besides she's years older than he is, although she passes for the same age. And worse yet —she's engaged."
I was so furious that I contradicted her hotly, but she just looked at me over the apple she was biting into, with the calm, unruffled gaze of an old Aztec. Babe can be the most provoking person at times that ever lived. She prides herself on having a mathematical mind, and being exact about facts and figures. The worst of it is she usually is, and will go any length to prove she's right. Although I know in this case she must be mistaken, it worries me in spite of myself.
She said that one day at the Gilfreds' they were laughing over some old photographs of Esther and Judith, taken when they were babies. On the back of one was written: "This is our little Esther at the age of six months and six days." It was signed with her father's name and the date. Esther snatched it away and tore it up before anyone else saw it, but, Babe says, counting up from that date to this, Esther is all of three years older than Richard. She is twenty and a half.
And she said that twice while she and Viola were visiting in Yarmouth, their Aunt Rachel took them to a hop in Barnstable. Both times Esther, who was visiting in Barnstable then, was there with the man she's engaged to. He's a doctor. They met at a house-party when he was a medical student at Harvard and she was at a finishing school near Boston. Her aunt told Babe's aunt all about it. They've been engaged nearly a year, but Esther won't have it announced because she says it would spoil her good times wherever she goes. She'd never make any more conquests. He's so busy establishing his practice that he can't pay her the attention and give her the things that the other men do.
When Babe told me that I felt as if the solid ground were giving away under my feet. She seemed perfectly sure that what she was telling was the straight, unvarnished truth. And yet, I cannot, I will not believe that Esther would stoop to deceit in the smallest matter. She is the soul of honor. She couldn't be sacredly betrothed to one man and then go on acting exactly as if she wasn't, with another. Besides, I heard her say one day that she is just Judith's age, which is seventeen, and another time that she was "heart whole and fancy free."
When I triumphantly quoted that last to Babe to prove she was wrong she swallowed another bite of apple and then said, "Well, a coquette might be all that and at the same time engaged. And she is engaged, and I can prove it."
All I could trust myself to say was, "Babe Nolan, your remarks are perfectly insulting. I'll thank you to remember you're talking about my very best friend and the very finest and sweetest girl I've ever known in my whole life."
With that I drew myself up in my most freezing manner and walked off and left her. I've wished since that I'd thought in time to hurl that quotation from Shakespeare over my shoulder at her, but I didn't think of it till I was nearly home:
"Be thou chaste as ice, as pure as snow,Thou shalt not escape calumny."Those statements of Babe's were nothing but out and out calumny.
CHAPTER VII
A MODERN SIR GARETH
Yesterday morning, just to oblige me, Miss Crewes put on her Red Cross uniform and went out in the garden with me to let me take some snapshots of her. Barby came out to watch us, sitting on the stone bench under the apple tree, with her knitting. I was using my last film, posing Miss Crewes among the hollyhocks by the garden wall, when we heard a machine drive up and stop out in front. The next minute Richard came dashing around the corner of the house, bareheaded, and calling Barby in such a breathless way that I knew he had exciting news from the front.
Then he caught sight of her under the apple-tree, and came striding across the grass to her, his head up and his face fairly shining. As we walked over towards them we caught parts of his sentences, "It's Dad – all banged up and in the hospital. One of the bravest things – so proud of him – it chokes me."
He didn't even see us when we joined them, for he had pulled a handful of letters out of his pocket, and was shuffling them over to find the one that brought the news. A comrade of Mr. Moreland's had written it and his nurse added a postscript. No one thought to introduce Miss Crewes and he never seemed to notice a stranger was present till he finished reading. And then there didn't seem to be any need of an introduction. She just held out her hand with tears in her eyes and that wonderful light in her face which comes when she talks of sacrifice and heroism, and he gripped it as if they were old friends.
That's what they've seemed to be ever since. I think the sight of that red cross blazing on her uniform waked him up to the fact that she is connected in a way with the same cause his father is suffering for now in the hospital, and that she would be in sympathy with his desire to get into the service, and possibly might be able to help him. He couldn't stay then, because his Cousin James was in the machine out in front, waiting for him. But he promised to come back later, said there were a hundred questions he wanted to ask her.
It seems strange that, in the midst of hearing such a big vital piece of news about a real hero, I should notice a trifle like the following. When Richard took the handful of letters from his pocket and began shuffling through them to find the one from France, I saw without being conscious that I was staring at them, that they were all strangely familiar – square and pale blue. In his excitement he dropped one, and there on the flap of the envelope were the two long slim silver initials that I know so well, "E. G." I had several notes written on that same silver and blue stationery before Esther went to Boston, though none since.
I wasn't conscious of counting them as he passed them from hand to hand, but I must have done so automatically, for I seem to remember as far as five, and that it was the sixth one he dropped. He was so absorbed in the news that he didn't realize he was making a public display of Esther's letters, though of course nobody could recognize them but me. I think maybe for the moment she was so far in the background of his thoughts that she lost her importance for him.
But not so with me. Mingled with a thrill of happiness over Richard's news, was a feeling that my faith in Esther had been vindicated. She couldn't have written to him six times in seven days if she had been sacredly pledged to another. Babe Nolan is wrong for once in her life, and I shall have the joy of telling her so before this week is out. I know I am not putting a rainbow around Esther. It is simply that love gives me a clearer vision than the others have – the power to see the halo of charm which encircles her.
This has been such a wonderful day that I can't close my eyes until I have made a record of it. First, I have seen Doctor John Wynne! And second, I've found out something about him which makes me honor and admire him more than any man I know except Father.
Miss Crewes told us the story, but she didn't intend to tell us his name, nurses being bound to respect a confidence. It came out quite by accident. She was dreadfully distressed at the slip and made us promise we'd never repeat it to a soul. It happened this way:
Richard had the machine to do as he pleased with today, Mr. Milford being out of town, and he and Barby arranged a little picnic for Miss Crewes. He's taken the greatest fancy to her. We started out soon after breakfast and drove for hours through the perfectly heavenly summer morning, stopping at each little village along the Cape as we came to it, to tack up some posters. They were posters different artists had painted for that French Relief entertainment, which has been postponed so many times.
At lunch time we stopped by the side of the road in the shade of a pine grove, so close to the water that we could see the blue shining through the trees. It was such a fascinating, restful spot that we sat there a long time after we finished our lunch.
Richard stretched out full length on the pine needles with his hat over his eyes, and the rest of us took out our knitting. I knew he was thinking of Esther, for presently he brought up a subject which we have discussed several times at the Gilfreds', which she was particularly interested in. It's whether the days of chivalry are dead or not, and if men were not nobler in the days of King Arthur, when they rode forth to deeds of prowess and to redress wrongs, than they are now when their highest thought is making money or playing golf.
Esther always took the side that nobody nowadays measures up to the knights of the Round Table, and that she wished she could have lived when life was picturesque and romantic instead of in these prosaic times. I think what she said rather rankled in Richard's mind, because I've heard him refer to it several times. Naturally I sided with Esther, for her arguments seemed unanswerable. Today I quoted some of them.
That is what led to Miss Crewes telling one of her experiences. She was red-hot for the other side, and said I might name any deed of chivalry mentioned in the "Idylls of the King," and she could match it by something equally fine, done in this day of the world, by some man she was personally acquainted with.
Instantly I thought of the story of "Gareth and Lynette," for that is one that Esther and George Woodson had the biggest argument over. The part where Gareth saves the baron's life, and when asked what reward he would have – "What guerdon will ye?" – answers, "None! For the deed's sake have I done the deed."
Esther once said she thought that was one of the noblest sentences in all literature. As soon as I quoted it Richard raised himself on one elbow and then sat up straight. He could see by Miss Crewes' face that she had a story worth telling.
"For the deed's sake have I done the deed," she repeated to herself as if searching through her memory. Then after a moment she said triumphantly, "Yes, I have a Sir Gareth to more than match yours. He is a young physician just beginning to make good in his practise, and he's had a far harder apprenticeship to win his professional spurs than ever Gareth served, as scullion in the King's kitchen."
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