At the gangplank, the Orient traveler said, with a touch of briskness, “No. I’ll need no help going down. Watch!”
And he strode down the plank. And even as the children had been tonic for his color, height, and vocal cords, so the closer he came to England, pacing, the firmer his stride, and when he actually touched the dock, a small happy burst of sound erupted from his thin lips and the nurse, behind him, stopped frowning, and let him run toward the train.
And seeing him dash like a child before her, she could only stand, riven with delight and something more than delight. And he ran and her heart ran with him and suddenly knew a stab of amazing pain, and a lid of darkness struck her and she swooned.
Hurrying, the ghastly passenger did not notice that the old nurse was not beside or behind him, so eagerly did he go.
At the train he gasped, “There!” safely grasping the compartment handle. Only then did he sense a loss, and turned.
Minerva Halliday was not there.
And yet, an instant later, she arrived, looking paler than before, but with an incredibly radiant smile. She wavered and almost fell. This time it was he who reached out.
“Dear lady,” he said, “you have been so kind.”
“But,” she said, quietly, looking at him, waiting for him to truly see her, “I am not leaving.”
“You … ?”
“I am going with you,” she said.
“But your plans?”
“Have changed. Now, I have nowhere else to go.”
She half turned to look over her shoulder.
At the dock, a swiftly gathering crowd peered down at someone lying on the planks. Voices murmured and cried out. The word “doctor” was called several times.
The ghastly passenger looked at Minerva Halliday.
Then he looked at the crowd and the object of the crowd’s alarm lying on the dock: a medical thermometer lay broken under their feet. He looked back at Minerva Halliday, who still stared at the broken thermometer.
“Oh, my dear kind lady,” he said, at last. “Come.”
She looked into his face. “Larks?” she said.
He nodded. “Larks!”
And he helped her up into the train, which soon jolted and then dinned and whistled away along the tracks toward London and Edinburgh and moors and castles and dark nights and long years.
“I wonder who she was?” said the ghastly passenger, looking back at the crowd on the dock.
“Oh, Lord,” said the old nurse. “I never really knew.”
And the train was gone.
It took a full twenty seconds for the tracks to stop trembling.
The End
