“No, Doc, no,” Vance cried. “Sidney can’t do that kind of work.”
“Why in thunder can’t he?” the Doc exploded. “He can and he must.”
“An orderly? A male nurse? Never.”
“Then what is he to do?”
Vance’s deep silence was the first step toward assent.
When they parted a few minutes later, the Doctor put his arm around Vance and held him to him for a long time. They had never been so close as then, Vance knew, and he had never needed closeness that bad before.
“I learned yesterday of a job that is open, Sid.” Vance managed to broach the subject the next morning as he was clearing the breakfast dishes (it was five o’clock in the morning, and outside the fog from the mountains had, if anything, grown more pronounced than at nightfall). “It’s thought, I guess, to be a real opportunity for whoever is interested.”
“A job I could fill?” Sidney wondered, his feelings still raw from the distance that would always he supposed exist between him and Vance.
“Yes, who else?” Vance’s voice took on a real edge. “There’s a position vacant at the Vaisey household . . . Taking care of the young man there who was in that unusual train wreck some time back. . . . You remember him, of course.”
Sidney blushed beet-red under his prison pallor, and looked down at his toast and eggs.
But Vance himself was so uneasy over bringing up the offer of the “opportunity” for his brother that he did not observe the confusion which the mention of the Vaisey boy’s name brought to the job-seeker.
“I thought, matter of fact,” Sidney tried to recover his composure, “that maybe Gareth might have . . . died also by now, and that perhaps you had neglected to tell me . . .”
“I guess I should have kept you abreast of his condition,” Vance unbent a little, “since you used to inquire about him so often when I came to see you, I recall . . .”
“I guess I hated to keep asking you about him when the subject . . . well, seemed to displease you when I brought it up.”
“I’m sorry if I gave you that impression, Sid . . . I should have offered you the news about him more willingly, I reckon. . . . Anyhow, the job there is going begging!” He finished this with a kind of exhausted fury and impatience.
“But, Vance,” Sid rose from his breakfast, and with good humor and encouragement in his voice, “you ain’t told me what the job is to be . . .”
Turning away from Sid slightly, Vance responded: “The offer comes as a matter of fact from Dr. Ulric, and I was sort of cool to it myself at first . . . But I thought . . .”
“But just tell me what’s expected, Vance.”