Quin
Copyright© 2025 by Alice Caldwell Hegan Rice
Chapter 12
From that time on Quin’s status in the family became less anomalous. To be sure, he was still Mr. Randolph’s private secretary, Madam’s top sergeant, Miss Isobel’s and Miss Enid’s body-guard, and the household’s general-utility man; but he was now something else in addition. Miss Isobel had discovered, quite by chance, that he was the grandson of Dr. Ezra Quinby, whose book “Christianizing China” had been one of the inspirations of her girlhood.
“And to think we considered asking him to eat in the pantry!” she exclaimed in horror to her sister.
“Well, I told you all along he was a gentleman by instinct,” said Miss Enid.
To be sure, they were constantly shocked by his manners and his frank method of speech, but they were also exhilarated. He was like a disturbing but refreshing breeze that swept through their quiet, ordered lives. He talked about things and places they had never heard of or seen, and recounted his experiences with an enthusiasm that was contagious.
As for Quin, he found, to his surprise, that he was enjoying his new quarters quite as much as he had the old ones. Madam was a never-ending source of amusement and interest to him, and Miss Isobel and Miss Enid soon had each her individual appeal. He liked the swish of their silk petticoats, and the play of their slim white hands about the coffee-tray. He liked their super-feminine delicacies of speech and motion, and the flattering interest they began to take in all his affairs.
Miss Isobel developed a palpitating concern for his spiritual welfare and invited him to go to church with her. She even introduced him to the minister with proud reference to his distinguished grandfather, and basked in the reflected glory.
Quin did not take kindly to church. He considered that he had done his full duty by it in the first fourteen years of his life, when he, along with the regenerate heathen, had been forced to attend five services every Sunday in the gloomy chapel in the compound at Nanking. But if Eleanor’s aunt had asked him to accompany her to the gates of hell instead of the portals of heaven, he would have acquiesced eagerly. So strenuously did he lift his voice in the familiar hymns of his youth that he was promptly urged to join the choir, an ordeal whose boredom was mitigated only during the few moments when the collection was taken up and he and the tenor could bet on which deacon would make his round first.
Not for years had Miss Isobel had such thrilling occupation as that of returning Ezra Quinby’s grandson to the spiritual fold. In spite of the fact that Quin was a fairly decent chap already, whose worst vices were poker and profanity, she persisted in regarding him as a brand which she had been privileged to snatch from the burning.
What gave him a yet more intimate claim upon her was the fact that his heart and lungs were still troublesome, and with any over-exertion on his part, or a sudden change in the weather, his chest became very sore and his racking cough returned. At such times Miss Isobel was in her glory. She would put him to bed with hot-water bottles and mustard plasters and feed him hot lemonade. Quin took kindly to the coddling. No one had fussed over him like that since his mother died, and he was touchingly grateful.
“Say, you’d be a wonder out at the hospital,” he said to her on one of these occasions. “I wish some of those fellows with the flu could have you to look after them.”
Miss Isobel’s long, sallow face with its dark-ringed eyes lit up for a moment.
“There is nothing I should like better,” she said. “But of course it’s out of the question.”
“Why?”
“Mother doesn’t approve of us doing any work at the camp. She did make an exception in the case of my niece, but Eleanor was so insistent. Sister and I try never to oppose mother’s wishes. It cuts us off from a great many things; but then, I contend that our first duty is to her.”
Miss Isobel’s attitude toward her mother was that of a monk to his haircloth shirt. She acquired so much merit in her friends’ eyes and in her own by her patient endurance that the penance was robbed of half its sting.
“Things are awful bad out at the hospital now,” went on Quin. “A fellow was telling me yesterday that in some of the wards they only have one nurse to two hundred patients. The epidemic is getting worse every day. You-all in town here don’t know what it’s like where there’s so many sick and so few to take care of ‘em.”
Miss Isobel, with morbid interest, insisted upon the details. When Quin had finished his grim recital, she turned to him with scared determination.
“Do you know,” she fluttered, “I almost feel as if I ought to go in spite of mother’s wishes.”
“Of course you ought,” Quin conceded, “especially when you are keeping a trained nurse here in the house who doesn’t do a thing but carry up trays and sit around and look at herself!”
“I know it,” Miss Isobel admitted miserably. “I’ve lain awake nights worrying over it. Sister and I are perfectly able to do what is to be done. But mother insists upon keeping the nurse.”
“Well, she can’t keep you, if you really want to go. I guess you got a right to do your duty.”
The word was like a bugle call to Miss Isobel. She went about all day in a tremor of uncertainty, and at last yielded to Quin’s insistence, and, donning Eleanor’s Red Cross uniform, accompanied him to the hospital.
Every afternoon after that, when Madam was taking her rest, Miss Isobel, feeling like Machiavelli one moment and Florence Nightingale the next, stepped into the carriage, already loaded with delicacies, and proceeded on her errand of mercy. She invariably returned in a twitter of subdued excitement, and recounted her experiences with breathless interest at the dinner-table.
“I’ve never seen sister like this before,” Miss Enid told Quin. “She talks more in an hour now than she used to talk in a week, and she seems so happy.”
The change wrought in Miss Isobel’s life by Quin’s advent into the family was mild, however, compared to the cataclysm effected in the life of her sister. Miss Enid, having had her own affections wrecked in early youth, spent her time acting as a sort of salvage corps following the devastation caused by her cyclonic mother. When Madam shattered things to bits, Miss Enid tried patiently to remold them nearer to the heart’s desire. She had acquired a habit of offsetting every disagreeable remark by an agreeable one, and she was apt to see incipient halos hovering above heads where less sympathetic observers saw horns. When the last chance of getting rid of the disturbing but helpful Quin vanished, she set herself to work to discover his possibilities with the view of undertaking his social reclamation.
One evening, as he was passing through the hall, she called him into the library. It was a small, high-ceilinged room, with bookcases reaching to the ceiling, and a massive mahogany table bearing a reading-lamp with two green shades. Lincoln and his Cabinet held session over one door, and Andrew Jackson, surrounded by his weeping family, died over the other. Miss Enid, with books piled up in front of her, was sitting at the table.
“Quinby,” she said, —it had been “Quinby” ever since the discovery of his grandfather, —”I wonder if you can help me? I have a club paper on the 14th, and I can’t find a thing about my subject. Can’t you tell me something about the position of women in China?”
Quin, who had come in expecting to be called upon to put up a window or fix the electric light, looked at her blankly. Under ordinary circumstances he would have laughingly disclaimed any knowledge of the subject; but with Miss Enid sitting there looking up at him with such flattering confidence, it was different. Out of the dusty pigeon holes of his brain he dragged odds and ends of information, memories of the native houses, the customs and manners of the people, stories he had heard from his Chinese nurses, street incidents he had seen, stray impressions picked up here and there by a lively active American boy in a foreign city.
“I ought to be able to tell you a lot more,” he said apologetically in conclusion. “I could if I wasn’t such a bonehead.”
“But you’ve given me just what I wanted!” cried Miss Enid. “And you’ve made it all so vivid. It takes a very good mind to register details like that and to be able to present them in such good order.”
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