The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel, by
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
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Title: The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel
Author: Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Posting Date: June 5, 2012 [EBook #5705]
Release Date: May, 2004
First Posted: August 12, 2002
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE QUEEN OF SHEBA ***
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Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
THE WRITINGS OF THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
THE QUEEN OF SHEBA, AND MY COUSIN THE COLONEL
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
1907
CONTENTS
I. MARY
II. IN WHICH THERE IS A FAMILY JAR
III. IN WHICH MARY TAKES A NEW DEPARTURE
IV. THE ODD ADVENTURE WHICH BEFELL YOUNG LYNDE IN THE HILL COUNTRY
V. CINDERELLA'S SLIPPER
VI. BEYOND THE SEA
VII. THE DENHAMS
VIII. FROM GENEVA TO CHAMOUNI
IX. MONTANVERT
X. IN THE SHADOW OF MONT BLANC
XI. FROM CHAMOUNI TO GENEVA
MY COUSIN THE COLONEL
"FOR BRAVERY ON THE FIELD OF BATTLE"
THE QUEEN OF SHEBA
I
MARY
In the month of June, 1872, Mr. Edward Lynde, the assistant cashier and
bookkeeper of the Nautilus Bank at Rivermouth, found himself in a
position to execute a plan which he had long meditated in secret.
A statement like this at the present time, when integrity in a place of
trust has become almost an anomaly, immediately suggests a defalcation;
but Mr. Lynde's plan involved nothing more criminal than a horseback
excursion through the northern part of the State of New Hampshire. A
leave of absence of three weeks, which had been accorded him in
recognition of several years' conscientious service, offered young
Lynde the opportunity he had desired. These three weeks, as already
hinted, fell in the month of June, when Nature in New Hampshire is in
her most ravishing toilet; she has put away her winter ermine, which
sometimes serves her quite into spring; she has thrown a green mantle
over her brown shoulders, and is not above the coquetry of wearing a
great variety of wild flowers on her bosom. With her sassafras and her
sweet-brier she is in her best mood, as a woman in a fresh and becoming
costume is apt to be, and almost any one might mistake her laugh for
the music of falling water, and the agreeable rustle of her garments
for the wind blowing through the pine forests.
As Edward Lynde rode out of Rivermouth one morning, an hour or two
before anybody worth mention was moving, he was very well contented
with this world, though he had his grievances, too, if he had chosen to
think of them.
Masses of dark cloud still crowded the zenith, but along the eastern
horizon, against the increasing blue, lay a city of golden spires and
mosques and minarets--an Oriental city, indeed, such as is inhabited by
poets and dreamers and other speculative persons fond of investing
their small capital in such unreal estate. Young Lynde, in spite of his
prosaic profession of bookkeeper, had an opulent though as yet unworked
vein of romance running through his composition, and he said to himself
as he gave a slight twitch to the reins, "I'll put up there to-night at
the sign of the Golden Fleece, or may be I'll quarter myself on one of
those rich old merchants who used to do business with the bank in the
colonial days." Before he had finished speaking the city was destroyed
by a general conflagration; the round red sun rose slowly above the
pearl-gray ruins, and it was morning.
In his three years' residence at Rivermouth, Edward Lynde had never
chanced to see the town at so early an hour. The cobble-paved street
through which he was riding was a commercial street; but now the shops
had their wooden eyelids shut tight, and were snoozing away as
comfortably and innocently as if they were not at all alive to a sharp
stroke of business in their wakeful hours. There was a charm to Lynde
in this novel phase of a thoroughfare so familiar to him, and then the
morning was perfect. The street ran parallel with the river, the
glittering harebell-blue of which could be seen across a vacant lot
here and there, or now and then at the end of a narrow lane running up
from the wharves. The atmosphere had that indescribable sparkle and
bloom which last only an hour or so after daybreak, and was charged
with fine sea-flavors and the delicate breath of dewy meadow-land.
Everything appeared to exhale a fragrance; even the weather-beaten sign
of "J. Tibbets & Son, West India Goods & Groceries," it seemed to
Lynde, emitted an elusive spicy odor.
Edward Lynde soon passed beyond the limits of the town, and was
ascending a steep hill, on the crest of which he proposed to take a
farewell survey of the picturesque port throwing off its gauzy
counterpane of sea-fog. The wind blew blithely on this hilltop; it
filled his lungs and exhilarated him like champagne; he set spur to the
gaunt, bony mare, and, with a flourish of his hand to the peaked roof
of the Nautilus Bank, dashed off at a speed of not less than four miles
an hour--for it was anything but an Arabian courser which Lynde had
hired of honest Deacon Twombly. She was not a handsome animal
either--yellow in tint and of the texture of an ancestral hair-trunk,
with a plebeian head, and mysterious developments of muscle on the hind
legs. She was not a horse for fancy riding; but she had her good
points--she had a great many points of one kind and another--among
which was her perfect adaptability to rough country roads and the sort
of work now required of her.
"Mary ain't what you'd call a racer," Deacon Twombly had remarked while
the negotiations were pending; "I don't say she is, but she's easy on
the back."
This statement was speedily verified. At the end of two miles Mary
stopped short and began backing, deliberately and systematically, as if
to slow music in a circus. Recovering from the surprise of the halt,
which had taken him wholly unawares, Lynde gathered the slackened reins
firmly in his hand and pressed his spurs to the mare's flanks, with no
other effect than slightly to accelerate the backward movement.
Perhaps nothing gives you so acute a sense of helplessness as to have a
horse back with you, under the saddle or between shafts. The reins lie
limp in your hands, as if detached from the animal; it is impossible to
check him or force him forward; to turn him around is to confess
yourself conquered; to descend and take him by the head is an act of
pusillanimity. Of course there is only one thing to be done; but if you
know what that is you possess a singular advantage over your
fellow-creatures.
Finding spur and whip of no avail, Lynde tried the effect of moral
suasion: he stroked Mary on the neck, and addressed her in terms that
would have melted the heart of almost any other Mary; but she continued
to back, slowly and with a certain grace that could have come only of
confirmed habit. Now Lynde had no desire to return to Rivermouth, above
all to back into it in that mortifying fashion and make himself a
spectacle for the townsfolk; but if this thing went on forty or fifty
minutes longer, that would be the result.
"If I cannot stop her," he reflected, "I'll desert the brute just
before we get to the toll-gate. I can't think what possessed Twombly to
let me have such a ridiculous animal!"
Mary showed no sign that she was conscious of anything unconventional
or unlooked for in her conduct.
"Mary, my dear," said Lynde at last, with dangerous calmness, "you
would be all right, or, at least, your proceeding would not be quite so
flagrant a breach of promise, if you were only aimed in the opposite
direction."
With this he gave a vigorous jerk at the left-hand rein, which caused
the mare to wheel about and face Rivermouth. She hesitated an instant,
and then resumed backing.
"Now, Mary," said the young man dryly, "I will let you have your head,
so to speak, as long as you go the way I want you to."
This manoeuvre on the side of Lynde proved that he possessed qualities
which, if skilfully developed, would have assured him success in the
higher regions of domestic diplomacy. The ability to secure your own
way and impress others with the idea that they are having THEIR own way
is rare among men; among women it is as common as eyebrows.
"I wonder how long she will keep this up," mused Lynde, fixing his eye
speculatively on Mary's pull-back ears. "If it is to be a permanent
arrangement I shall have to reverse the saddle. Certainly, the creature
is a lusus naturae--her head is on the wrong end! Easy on the back," he
added, with a hollow laugh, recalling Deacon Twombly's recommendation.
"I should say she was! I never saw an easier."
Presently Mary ceased her retrograde movement, righted herself of her
own accord, and trotted off with as much submissiveness as could be
demanded of her. Lynde subsequently learned that this propensity to
back was an unaccountable whim which seized Mary at odd intervals and
lasted from five to fifteen minutes. The peculiarity once understood
not only ceased to be an annoyance to him, but became an agreeable
break in the ride. Whenever her mood approached, he turned the mare
round and let her back to her soul's content. He also ascertained that
the maximum of Mary's speed was five miles an hour.
"I didn't want a fast horse, anyway," said Lynde philosophically. "As I
am not going anywhere in particular, I need be in no hurry to get
there."
The most delightful feature of Lynde's plan was that it was not a plan.
He had simply ridden off into the rosy June weather, with no settled
destination, no care for to-morrow, and as independent as a bird of the
tourist's ordinary requirements. At the crupper of his saddle--an old
cavalry saddle that had seen service in long-forgotten
training-days--was attached a cylindrical valise of cowhide, containing
a change of linen, a few toilet articles, a vulcanized cloth cape for
rainy days, and the first volume of The Earthly Paradise. The two
warlike holsters in front (in which Colonel Eliphalet Bangs used to
carry a brace of flintlock pistols now reposing in the Historical
Museum at Rivermouth) became the receptacle respectively of a slender
flask of brandy and a Bologna sausage; for young Lynde had determined
to sell his life dearly if by any chance of travel he came to close
quarters with famine.
A broad-brimmed Panama hat, a suit of navy-blue flannel, and a pair of
riding-boots completed his equipment. A field-glass in a leather case
was swung by a strap over his shoulder, and in the breast pocket of his
blouse he carried a small compass to guide him on his journey due north.
The young man's costume went very well with his frank, refined face,
and twenty-three years. A dead-gold mustache, pointed at the ends and
sweeping at a level right and left, like a swallow's wings, gave him
something of a military air; there was a martial directness, too, in
the glance of his clear gray eyes, undimmed as yet with looking too
long on the world. There could not have been a better figure for the
saddle than Lynde's--slightly above the average height, straight as a
poplar, and neither too spare nor too heavy. Now and then, as he passed
a farm-house, a young girl hanging out clothes in the front yard--for
it was on a Monday--would pause with a shapeless snowdrift in her hand
to gaze curiously at the apparition of a gallant young horseman riding
by. It often happened that when he had passed, she would slyly steal to
the red gate in the lichen-covered stone wall, and follow him with her
palm-shaded eyes down the lonely road; and it as frequently happened
that he would glance back over his shoulder at the nut-brown maid,
whose closely clinging, scant drapery gave her a sculpturesque grace to
which her unconsciousness of it was a charm the more.
These flashes of subtile recognition between youth and youth--these
sudden mute greetings and farewells--reached almost the dimension of
incidents in that first day's eventless ride. Once Lynde halted at the
porch of a hip-roofed, unpainted house with green paper shades at the
windows, and asked for a cup of milk, which was brought him by the
nut-brown maid, who never took her flattering innocent eyes off the
young man's face while he drank--sipping him as he sipped the milk; and
young Lynde rode away feeling as if something had really happened.
More than once that morning he drew up by the roadside to listen to
some lyrical robin on an apple-bough, or to make friends with the
black-belted Durham cows and the cream-colored Alderneys, who came
solemnly to the pasture wall and stared at him with big, good-natured
faces. A row of them, with their lazy eyes and pink tongues and moist
india-rubber noses, was as good as a play.
At noon that day our adventureless adventurer had reached Bayley's
Four-Corners, where he found provender for himself and Mary at what had
formerly been a tavern, in the naive stage-coach epoch. It was the sole
house in the neighborhood, and was occupied by the ex-landlord, one
Tobias Sewell, who had turned farmer. On finishing his cigar after
dinner, Lynde put the saddle on Mary, and started forward again. It is
hardly correct to say forward, for Mary took it into her head to back
out of Bayley's Four-Corners, a feat which she performed to the
unspeakable amusement of Mr. Sewell and a quaint old gentleman, named
Jaffrey, who boarded in the house.
"I guess that must be a suck-cuss hoss," remarked Mr. Sewell, resting
his loosely jointed figure against the rail fence as he watched his
departing guest.
Mary backed to the ridge of the hill up which the turnpike stretched
from the ancient tavern, then recovered herself and went on.
"I never saw such an out-and-out wilful old girl as you are, Mary!"
ejaculated Lynde, scarlet with mortification. "I begin to admire you."
Perhaps the covert reproach touched some finer chord of Mary's nature,
or perhaps Mary had done her day's allowance of backing; whatever the
case was, she indulged no further caprice that afternoon beyond shying
vigorously at a heavily loaded tin-pedler's wagon, a proceeding which
may be palliated by the statement of the fact that many of Mary's
earlier years were passed in connection with a similar establishment.
The afterglow of sunset had faded out behind the serrated line of
hills, and black shadows were assembling, like conspirators, in the
orchards and under the spreading elms by the roadside, when Edward
Lynde came in sight of a large manufacturing town, which presented a
sufficiently bizarre appearance at that hour.
Grouped together in a valley were five or six high, irregular
buildings, illuminated from basement to roof, each with a monstrous
chimney from which issued a fan of party-colored flame. On one long low
structure, with a double row of windows gleaming like the port-holes of
a man-of-war at night, was a squat round tower that now and then threw
open a vast valve at the top, and belched forth a volume of amber
smoke, which curled upward to a dizzy height and spread itself out
against the sky. Lying in the weird light of these chimneys, with here
and there a gable or a spire suddenly outlined in vivid purple, the
huddled town beneath seemed like an outpost of the infernal regions.
Lynde, however, resolved to spend the night there instead of riding on
farther and trusting for shelter to some farm-house or barn. Ten or
twelve hours in the saddle had given him a keen appetite for rest.
Presently the roar of flues and furnaces, and the resonant din of
mighty hammers beating against plates of iron, fell upon his ear; a few
minutes later he rode into the town, not knowing and not caring in the
least what town it was.
All this had quite the flavor of foreign travel to Lynde, who began
pondering on which hotel he should bestow his patronage--a question
that sometimes perplexes the tourist on arriving at a strange city. In
Lynde's case the matter was considerably simplified by the circumstance
that there was but a single aristocratic hotel in the place. He
extracted this information from a small boy, begrimed with iron-dust,
and looking as if he had just been cast at a neighboring foundry, who
kindly acted as cicerone, and conducted the tired wayfarer to the
doorstep of The Spread Eagle, under one of whose wings--to be at once
figurative and literal--he was glad to nestle for the night.
II
IN WHICH THERE IS A FAMILY JAR
While Lynde is enjoying the refreshing sleep that easily overtook him
after supper, we will reveal to the reader so much of the young man's
private history as may be necessary to the narrative. In order to do
this, the author, like Deacon Twombly's mare, feels it indispensable to
back a little.
One morning, about three years previous to the day when Edward Lynde
set forth on his aimless pilgrimage, Mr. Jenness Bowlsby, the president
of the Nautilus Bank at Rivermouth, received the following letter from
his wife's nephew, Mr. John Flemming, a young merchant in New York--
NEW YORK, May 28,1869.
MY DEAR UNCLE: In the course of a few days a friend of mine, Mr. Edward
Lynde of this city, will call upon you and hand you a note of
introduction from myself. I write this to secure for him in advance the
liking and interest which I am persuaded you will not be able to
withhold on closer acquaintance. I have been intimate with Edward Lynde
for twelve years or more, first at the boarding-school at Flatbush, and
afterwards at college. Though several years my junior, he was in the
same classes with me, and, if the truth must be told, generally carried
off all the honors. He is not only the most accomplished young fellow I
know, but a fellow of inexhaustible modesty and amiability, and I think
it was singularly malicious of destiny to pick him out as a victim,
when there are so many worthless young men (the name of John Flemming
will instantly occur to you) who deserve nothing better than rough
treatment. You see, I am taking point-blank aim at your sympathy.
When Lynde was seven or eight years old he had the misfortune to lose
his mother; his father was already dead. The child's nearest relative
was an uncle, David Lynde, a rich merchant of New York, a bachelor, and
a character. Old Lynde--I call him old Lynde not out of disrespect, but
to distinguish him from young Lynde--was at that period in his sixtieth
year, a gentleman of unsullied commercial reputation, and of regular if
somewhat peculiar habits. He was at his counting-room precisely at
eight in the morning, and was the last to leave in the evening, working
as many hours each day as he had done in those first years when he
entered as office-boy into the employment of Briggs & Livingstone--the
firm at the time of which I am now writing was Lynde, Livingstone & Co.
Mr. David Lynde lived in a set of chambers up town, and dined at his
club, where he usually passed the evenings at chess with some brother
antediluvian. A visit to the theatre, when some old English comedy or
some new English ballet happened to be on the boards, was the periphery
of his dissipation. What is called society saw nothing of him. He was a
rough, breezy, thickset old gentleman, betrothed from his birth to
apoplexy, enjoying life in his own secluded manner, and insisting on
having everybody about him happy. He would strangle an old friend
rather than not have him happy. A characteristic story is told of a
quarrel he had with a chum of thirty or forty years' standing, Ripley
Sturdevant Sen. Sturdevant came to grief in the financial panic of
1857. Lynde held a mortgage on Sturdevant's house, and insisted on
cancelling it. Sturdevant refused to accept the sacrifice. They both
were fiery old gentlemen, arcades ambo. High words ensued. What
happened never definitely transpired; but Sturdevant was found lying
across the office lounge, with a slight bruise over one eyebrow and the
torn mortgage thrust into his shirt-bosom. It was conjectured that
Lynde had actually knocked him down and forced the cancelled mortgage
upon him!
In short, David Lynde was warm-hearted and generous to the verge of
violence, but a man in every way unfitted by temperament, experience,
and mode of life to undertake the guardianship of a child. To have an
infant dropped into his arms was as excellent an imitation of a
calamity as could well happen to him. I am told that no one could have
been more sensible of this than David Lynde himself, and that there was
something extremely touching in the alacrity and cheerfulness with
which he assumed the novel responsibility.
Immediately after the funeral--Mrs. Lynde had resided in
Philadelphia--the uncle brought the boy to New York. It was impossible
to make a permanent home for young Lynde in bachelor chambers, or to
dine him at the club. After a week of inconvenience and wretchedness,
complicated by the sinister suspicions of his landlady, David Lynde
concluded to send the orphan to boarding-school.
It was at Flatbush, Long Island, that I made the acquaintance of the
forlorn little fellow. His cot was next to mine in the dormitory; we
became close friends. We passed our examinations, left Flatbush at the
same time, and entered college together. In the meanwhile the boy's
relations with his guardian were limited to a weekly exchange of
letters, those of the uncle invariably beginning with "Yours of
Saturday duly at hand," and ending with "Enclosed please find." In
respect to pocket-money young Lynde was a prince. My friend spent the
long vacations with me at Newburgh, running down to New York
occasionally to pass a day or so with the uncle. In these visits their
intimacy ripened. Old Lynde was now become very proud of his bright
young charge, giving him astonishing dinners at Delmonico's, taking him
to Wallack's, and introducing him to the old fossils at the club as "my
boy Ned."
It was at the beginning of Lynde's last term at college that his uncle
retired from business, bought a house in Madison Avenue, and turned it
into a sort of palace with frescoes and upholstery. There was a library
for my boy Ned, a smoking-room in cherry-wood, a billiard-room in black
walnut, a dining-room in oak and crimson--in brief, the beau-ideal of a
den for a couple of bachelors. By Jove! it was like a club-house--the
only model for a home of which poor old Lynde had any conception. Six
months before Ned was graduated, the establishment was in systematic
running order under the supervision of the pearl of housekeepers. Here
David Lynde proposed to spend the rest of his days with his nephew, who
might, for form's sake, adopt some genteel profession; if not, well and
good, the boy would have money.
Now just as Ned was carrying off the first prizes in Greek and
mathematics, and dreaming of the pleasant life he was to lead with his
amiable old benefactor, what does that amiable old benefactor go and do
but marry the housekeeper!
David Lynde knew very little of women: he had not spoken to above a
dozen in his whole life; did not like them, in fact; had a mild sort of
contempt for them, as persons devoid of business ability. It was in the
course of nature that the first woman who thought it worth her while
should twist him around her finger like a remnant of ribbon. When Ned
came out of college he found himself in the arms of an unlooked-for
aunt who naturally hated him at sight.
I have not the time or space, my dear uncle, to give you even a
catalogue of the miseries that followed on the heels of this deplorable
marriage; besides, you can imagine them. Old Lynde, loving both his
wife and his nephew, was by turns violent and feeble; the wife cool,
cunning, and insidious--a Vivien of forty leading Merlin by the beard.
I am not prepared to contend that the nephew was always in the right,
but I know he always got the worst of it, which amounts to about the
same thing. At the end of eight or ten months he saw that the position
was untenable, packed his trunk one night, and quitted the MENAGE--the
menagerie, as he calls it.
This was three weeks ago. Having a small property of his own, some
fifteen hundred dollars a year, I believe, Lynde at first thought to go
abroad. It was always his dream to go abroad. But I persuaded him out
of that, seeing how perilous it would be for a young fellow of his
inexperience and impressible disposition to go rambling alone over the
Continent. Paris was his idea. Paris would not make a mouthful of him.
I have talked him out of that, I repeat, and have succeeded in
convincing him that the wisest course for him to pursue is to go to
some pleasant town or village within hailing distance of one of our
larger cities, and spend the summer quietly. I even suggested he should
make the personal acquaintance of some light employment, to help him
forget the gorgeous castle of cards which has just tumbled down about
his ears. In six words, I have sent him to Rivermouth.
Now, my dear uncle, I have wasted eight pages of paper and probably a
hundred dollars' worth of your time, if you do not see that I am
begging you to find a position for Lynde in the Nautilus Bank. After a
little practice he would make a skilful accountant, and the question of
salary is, as you see, of secondary importance. Manage to retain him at
Rivermouth if you possibly can. David Lynde has the strongest affection
for the lad, and if Vivien, whose name is Elizabeth, is not careful how
she drags Merlin around by the beard, he will reassert himself in some
unexpected manner. If he were to serve her as he is supposed to have
served old Sturdevant, his conduct would be charitably criticised. If
he lives a year he will be in a frame of mind to leave the bulk of his
fortune to Ned. THEY have not quarrelled, you understand; on the
contrary, Mr. Lynde was anxious to settle an allowance of five thousand
a year on Ned, but Ned would not accept it. "I want uncle David's
love," says Ned, "and I have it; the devil take his money."
Here you have all the points. I could not state them more succinctly
and do justice to each of the parties interested. The most unfortunate
party, I take it, is David Lynde. I am not sure, after all, that young
Lynde is so much to be pitied. Perhaps that club-house would not have
worked well for him if it had worked differently. At any rate he now
has his own way to make, and I commend him to your kindness, if I have
not exhausted it.
Your affectionate nephew, J. FLEMMING.
Five or six days after this letter reached Mr. Bowlsby, Mr. Edward
Lynde presented himself in the directors' room of the Nautilus Bank.
The young man's bearing confirmed the favorable impression which Mr.
Bowlsby had derived from his nephew's letter, and though there was
really no vacancy in the bank at the moment, Mr. Bowlsby lent himself
to the illusion that he required a private secretary. A few weeks later
a vacancy occurred unexpectedly, that of paying-teller--a position in
which Lynde acquitted himself with so much quickness and accuracy, that
when Mr. Trefethen, the assistant cashier, died in the December
following, Lynde was promoted to his desk.
The unruffled existence into which Edward Lynde had drifted was almost
the reverse of the career he had mapped out for himself, and it was a
matter of mild astonishment to him at intervals that he was not
discontented. He thought Rivermouth one of the most charming old spots
he had ever seen or heard of, and the people the most hospitable. The
story of his little family jar, taking deeper colors and richer
ornamentation as it passed from hand to hand, made him at once a social
success. Mr. Goldstone, one of the leading directors of the bank,
invited Lynde to dinner--few persons were ever overburdened with
invitations to dine at the Goldstones'--and the door of many a refined
home turned willingly on its hinges for the young man. At the evening
parties, that winter, Edward Lynde was considered almost as good a card
as a naval officer. Miss Mildred Bowlsby, then the reigning belle, was
ready to flirt with him to the brink of the Episcopal marriage service,
and beyond; but the phenomenal honeymoon which had recently quartered
in Lynde's family left him indisposed to take any lunar observations on
his own account.
With his salary as cashier, Lynde's income was Vanderbiltish for a
young man in Rivermouth. Unlike his great contemporary, he did not let
it accumulate. Once a month he wrote a dutiful letter to his uncle
David, who never failed to answer by telegraph, "Yours received. God
bless you, Edward." This whimsical fashion of reply puzzled young Lynde
quite as much as it diverted him until he learned (through his friend,
John Flemming) that his aunt Vivien had extorted from the old gentleman
a solemn promise not to write to his nephew.
Lynde's duties at the bank left him free every afternoon at four
o'clock; his work and his leisure were equally pleasant. In summer he
kept a sail-boat on the river, and in winter he had the range of a rich
collection of books connected with an antiquated public reading-room.
Thus very happily, if very quietly, and almost imperceptibly the months
rolled round to that period when the Nautilus Bank gave Edward Lynde a
three weeks' vacation, and he set forth, as we have seen, on Deacon
Twombly's mare, in search of the picturesque and the peculiar, if they
were to be found in the northern part of New Hampshire.
III
IN WHICH MARY TAKES A NEW DEPARTURE
It was still dark enough the next morning to allow the great chimneys
to show off their colored fires effectively, when Lynde passed through
the dingy main street of K---and struck into a road which led to the
hill country. A short distance beyond the town, while he was turning in
the saddle to observe the singular effect of the lurid light upon the
landscape, a freight-train shot obliquely across the road within five
rods of his horse's head, the engine flinging great flakes of fiery
spume from its nostrils, and shrieking like a maniac as it plunged into
a tunnel through a spur of the hills. Mary went sideways, like a crab,
for the next three quarters of a mile.
To most young men the expedition which Edward Lynde had undertaken
would have seemed unattractive and monotonous to the last degree; but
Lynde's somewhat sedentary habits had made him familiar with his own
company. When one is young and well read and amiable, there is really
no better company than one's self--as a steady thing. We are in a
desperate strait indeed if we chance at any age to tire of this
invisible but ever-present comrade; for he is not to be thrown over
during life. Before now, men have become so weary of him, so bored by
him, that they have attempted to escape, by suicide; but it is a
question if death itself altogether rids us of him.
In no minute of the twenty-four hours since Lynde left Rivermouth had
he felt the want of other companionship. Mary, with her peculiarities,
the roadside sights and sounds, the chubby children with shining
morning face, on the way to school, the woodland solitudes, the farmers
at work in the fields, the blue jays and the robins in the orchards,
the blonde and brown girls at the cottage doors, his own buoyant,
unreproachful thoughts--what need had he of company? If anything could
have added to his enjoyment it would have been the possibility of being
waylaid by bandits, or set upon in some desolate pass by wild animals.
But, alas, the nearest approximation to a bandit that fell in his way
was some shabby, spiritless tramp who passed by on the further side
without lifting an eyelid; and as for savage animals, he saw nothing
more savage than a monkish chipmunk here and there, who disappeared
into his stonewall convent the instant he laid eyes on Lynde.
Riding along those lonely New England roads, he was more secure than if
he had been lounging in the thronged avenues of a great city. Certainly
he had dropped on an age and into a region sterile of adventure. He
felt this, but not so sensitively as to let it detract from the serene
pleasure he found in it all. From the happy glow of his mind every
outward object took a rosy light; even a rustic funeral, which he came
upon at a cross-road that fore-noon, softened itself into something not
unpicturesque.
For three days after quitting K---Lynde pushed steadily forward. The
first two nights he secured lodgings at a farm-house; on the third
night he was regarded as a suspicious character, and obtained reluctant
permission to stow himself in a hay-loft, where he was so happy at
roughing it and being uncomfortable that he could scarcely close an
eye. The amateur outcast lay dreamily watching the silver spears of
moonlight thrust through the roof of the barn, and extracting such
satisfaction from his cheerless surroundings as would have astonished a
professional tramp. "Poverty and hardship are merely ideas after all,"
said Lynde to himself softly, as he drifted off in a doze. Ah, Master
Lynde, playing at poverty and hardship is one thing; but if the reality
is merely an idea, it is one of the very worst ideas in the world.
The young man awoke before sunrise the next morning, and started onward
without attempting to negotiate for breakfast with his surly host. He
had faith that some sunburnt young woman, with bowl of brown-bread and
milk, would turn up farther on; if she did not, and no tavern presented
itself, there were the sausage and the flask of eau-de-vie still
untouched in the holsters.
The mountain air had not wholly agreed with Mary, who at this stage of
the journey inaugurated a series of abnormal coughs, each one of which
went near to flinging Lynde out of the saddle.
"Mary," he said, after a particularly narrow escape, "there are few
fine accomplishments you haven't got except a spavin. Perhaps you've
got that, concealed somewhere about your person."
He said this in a tone of airy badinage which Mary seemed to
appreciate; but he gravely wondered what he could do with her, and how
he should replace her, if she fell seriously ill.
For the last two days farm-houses and cultivated fields had been
growing rarer and rarer, and the road rougher and wilder. At times it
made a sudden detour, to avoid the outcropping of a monster stratum of
granite, and in places became so narrow that the rank
huckleberry-bushes swept the mare's flanks. Lynde found it advisable on
the morning in question to pick his way carefully. A range of arid
hills rose darkly before him, stretching east and west further than his
eye could follow--rugged, forlorn hills covered with a thick prickly
undergrowth, and sentinelled by phantom-like pines. There were gloomy,
rocky gorges on each hand, and high-hanging crags, and where the vapor
was drawn aside like a veil, in one place, he saw two or three peaks
with what appeared to be patches of snow on them. Perhaps they were
merely patches of bleached rock.
Long afterwards, when Edward Lynde was passing through the valley of
the Arve, on the way from Geneva to Chamouni, he recollected this bit
of Switzerland in America, and it brought an odd, perplexed smile to
his lips.
The thousand ghostly shapes of mist which had thronged the heights,
shutting in the prospect on every side, had now vanished, discovering
as wild and melancholy a spot as a romantic heart could desire. There
was something sinister and ironical even in the sunshine that lighted
up these bleak hills. The silver waters of a spring--whose source was
hidden somewhere high up among the mossy boulders--dripping silently
from ledge to ledge, had the pathos of tears. The deathly stillness was
broken only by the dismal caw of a crow taking abrupt flight from a
blasted pine. Here and there a birch with its white satin skin
glimmered spectrally among the sombre foliage.
The inarticulate sadness of the place brought a momentary feeling of
depression to Lynde, who was not usually given to moods except of the
lighter sort. He touched Mary sharply with the spurs and cantered up
the steep.
He had nearly gained the summit of the hill when he felt the saddle
slipping; the girth had unbuckled or broken. As he dismounted, the
saddle came off with him, his foot still in the stirrup. The mare
shied, and the rein slipped from his fingers; he clutched at it, but
Mary gave a vicious toss of the head, wheeled about, and began trotting
down the declivity. Her trot at once broke into a gallop, and the
gallop into a full run--a full run for Mary. At the foot of the hill
she stumbled, fell, rolled over, gathered herself up, and started off
again at increased speed. The road was perfectly straight for a mile or
two. The horse was already a small yellow patch in the distance. She
was evidently on her way back to Rivermouth! Lynde watched her until
she was nothing but a speck against the gray road, then he turned and
cast a rueful glance on the saddle, which suddenly took to itself a
satirical aspect, as it lay sprawling on the ground at his feet.
He had been wanting something to happen, and something had happened. He
was unhorsed and alone in the heart of the hill country--alone in a
strange and, it seemed to Lynde as he looked about him, uninhabited
region.
IV
THE ODD ADVENTURE WHICH BEFELL YOUNG LYNDE IN THE HILL COUNTRY
It had all happened so suddenly that one or two minutes passed before
Edward Lynde took in the full enormity of Mary's desertion. A dim smile
was still hovering about his lips when the yellow speck that was Mary
faded into the gray distance; then his countenance fell. There was no
sign of mortal habitation visible from the hillside where he stood; the
farm at which he had spent the night was five miles away; his stiff
riding-boots were ill-adapted to pedestrianism. The idea of lugging
that heavy saddle five miles over a mountain road caused him to knit
his brows and look very serious indeed. As he gave the saddle an
impatient kick, his eyes rested on the Bologna sausage, one end of
which protruded from the holster; then there came over him a poignant
recollection of his Lenten supper of the night before and his no
breakfast at all of that morning. He seated himself on the saddle,
unwrapped the sausage, and proceeded to cut from it two or three thin
slices.
"It might have been much worse," he reflected, as he picked off with
his penknife the bits of silver foil which adhered to the skin of the
sausage; "if Mary had decamped with the commissary stores, that would
have been awkward." Lynde devoured the small pieces of pressed meat
with an appetite born of his long fast and the bracing upland air.
"Talk about pate de foie gras!" he exclaimed, with a sweep of his arm,
as if he were disdainfully waving back a menial bearing a tray of
Strasbourg pates; "if I live to return to Rivermouth I will have
Bologna sausage three times a day for the rest of my life."
A cup of the ice-cold water which bubbled up from a boss of cresses by
the roadside completed his Spartan breakfast. His next step was to
examine his surroundings. "From the top of this hill," said Lynde, "I
shall probably be able to see where I am, if that will be any comfort
to me."
It was only fifty or sixty rods to the crown of the hill, where the
road, viewed from below, seemed abruptly to come to an end against the
sky. On gaining the summit, Lynde gave an involuntary exclamation of
surprise and delight. At his feet in the valley below, in a fertile
plain walled in on all sides by the emerald slopes, lay the loveliest
village that ever was seen. Though the road by which he had approached
the eminence had been narrow and steep, here it widened and descended
by gentle gradations into the valley, where it became the main street
of the village--a congregation of two or possibly three hundred houses,
mostly cottages with gambrel and lean-to roofs. At the left of the
village, and about an eighth of a mile distant, was an imposing red
brick building with wings and a pair of octagon towers. It stood in a
forest of pines and maples, and appeared to be enclosed by a high wall
of masonry. It was too pretentious for an almshouse, too elegant for a
prison; it was as evidently not a school-house, and it could not be an
arsenal. Lynde puzzled over it a moment, and then returned for his
saddle, which he slung across his back, holding it by a stirrup-strap
brought over either shoulder.
"If Mary has got a conscience," muttered Lynde, "it would prick her if
she could see me now. I must be an affecting spectacle. In the village
they won't know whether I am the upper or the lower half of a centaur.
They won't know whether to rub me down and give me a measure of oats,
or to ask me in to breakfast."
The saddle with its trappings probably weighed forty pounds, and Lynde
was glad before he had accomplished a third of the way to the village
to set down his burden and rest awhile. On each side of him now were
cornfields, and sloping orchards peopled with those grotesque,
human-like apple-trees which seem twisted and cramped by a pain
possibly caught from their own acidulous fruit. The cultivated land
terminated only where the village began. It was not so much a village
as a garden--a garden crowded with flowers of that bright metallic tint
which distinguishes the flora of northern climes. Through the centre of
this Eden ran the wide main street, fringed with poplars and elms and
chestnuts. No polluting brewery or smoky factory, with its hideous
architecture, marred the idyllic beauty of the miniature town--for
everything which is not a city is a town in New England. The population
obviously consisted of well-to-do persons, with outlying stock-farms or
cranberry meadows, and funds snugly invested in ships and railroads.
In out-of-the-way places like this is preserved the greater part of
what we have left of the hard shrewd sense and the simpler manner of
those homespun old worthies who planted the seed of the Republic. In
our great cities we are cosmopolitans; but here we are Americans of the
primitive type, or as nearly as may be. It was unimportant settlements
like the one we are describing that sent their quota of stout hearts
and flintlock muskets to the trenches on Bunker Hill. Here, too, the
valorous spirit which had been slumbering on its arm for half a century
started up at the first shot fired against Fort Sumter. Over the
chimney-place of more than one cottage in such secluded villages hangs
an infantry or a cavalry sword in its dinted sheath, looked at to-day
by wife or mother with the tenderly proud smile that has mercifully
taken the place of tears.
Beyond the town, on the hillside which Edward Lynde had just got within
the focus of his field-glass, was the inevitable cemetery. On a grave
here and there a tiny flag waved in the indolent June breeze. If Lynde
had been standing by the head-stones, he could have read among the
inscriptions such unlocal words as Malvern Hill, Andersonville, Ball's
Bluff, and Gettysburg, and might have seen the withered Decoration Day
wreaths which had been fresh the month before.
Lynde brought his glass to bear on the red brick edifice mentioned, and
fell to pondering it again.
"I'll be hanged if I don't think it's a nunnery," he said. By and by he
let his gaze wander back to the town, in which he detected an
appearance of liveliness and bustle not usual in New England villages,
large or small. The main street was dotted with groups of men and
women; and isolated figures, to which perhaps the distance lent a kind
of uncanny aspect, were to be seen hurrying hither and thither.
"It must be some local celebration," thought Lynde. "Rural oratory and
all that sort of thing. That will be capital!"
He had returned the glass to its leather case, and was settling it well
on his hip, when he saw a man approaching. It was a heavily built old
gentleman in a suit of black alpaca, somewhat frayed and baggy at the
knees, but still respectable. He carried his hat in his hand, fanning
himself with it from time to time, as if overcome by heat and the
fatigue of walking. A profusion of snow-white hair, parted in the
middle, swept down on either side of a face remarkable--if it was
remarkable for anything--for its benign and simple expression. There
was a far-off, indescribable something about this person, as though he
had existed long ago and once had a meaning, but was now become an
obsolete word in the human dictionary. His wide placid brows and the
double chin which asserted itself above his high neckcloth gave him a
curious resemblance to portraits of Dr. Franklin.
"The country parson," said Lynde to himself. "Venerable and lovely old
character. I'll speak to him."
The old gentleman, with his head slightly thrown back, had his eyes
fixed intently on some object in the sky, and was on the point of
passing Lynde without observing him, when the young man politely lifted
his hat, and said, "I beg your pardon, sir, but will you be kind enough
to tell me the name of the town yonder?"
The old gentleman slowly brought his eyes down from the sky, fixed them
vacantly upon Lynde, and made no response. Presuming him to be deaf,
Lynde repeated his question in a key adapted to the exigency. Without a
change in his mild, benevolent expression, and in a voice whose
modulations were singularly musical, the old gentleman exclaimed, "Go
to the devil!" and passed on.
The rejoinder was so unexpected, the words themselves were so brusque,
while the utterance was so gentle and melodious, that Lynde refused to
credit his ears. Could he have heard aright? Before he recovered from
his surprise the gentleman in black was far up the slope, his gaze
again riveted on some remote point in the zenith.
"It wasn't the country parson after all," said Lynde, with a laugh; "it
was the village toper. He's an early bird--I'll say that for him--to
have secured his intoxicating worm at this hour of the morning."
Lynde picked up the saddle and resumed his march on the town in the
happy valley. He had proceeded only a little way when he perceived
another figure advancing towards him--a figure not less striking than
that of the archaic gentleman, but quite different. This was a young
girl, of perhaps seventeen, in a flowing dress of some soft white
stuff, gathered at the waist by a broad red ribbon. She was without hat
or shawl, and wore her hair, which was very long and very black,
hanging loosely down her shoulders, in exaggeration of a style of
coiffure that afterwards came into fashion. She was moving slowly and
in the manner of a person not accustomed to walking. She was a
lady--Lynde saw that at a glance--probably some city-bred bird of
passage, resting for the summer in this vale of health. His youthful
vanity took alarm as he reflected what a comical picture he must
present with that old saddle on his back. He would have dumped it into
the barberry-bushes if he could have done so unobserved; but it was now
too late.
On perceiving Lynde, the girl arrested her steps a moment irresolutely,
and then came directly towards him. As she drew nearer Lynde was
conscious of being dazzled by a pair of heavily fringed black eyes,
large and lustrous, set in an oval face of exquisite pallor. The girl
held a dandelion in one hand, twirling it by the end of its long,
snake-like stem as she approached. She was close upon him now; for an
instant he caught the wind of the flower as it swiftly described a
circle within an inch of his cheek. The girl paused in front of him,
and drawing herself up to her full height said haughtily--
"I am the Queen of Sheba."
Then she glided by him with a quickened pace and a suddenly timid air.
Lynde was longer recovering himself, this time. He stood rooted to the
ground, stupidly watching the retreating gracious form of the girl, who
half turned once and looked back at him. Then she vanished over the
ridge of the hill, as the old gentleman had done. Was she following
him? Was there any connection between those two? Perhaps he was the
village clergyman. Could this be his daughter? What an unconventional
costume for a young lady to promenade in--for she was a lady down to
her finger-nails! And what an odd salutation!
"The Queen of Sheba!" he repeated wonderingly. "What could she mean by
that? She took me for some country bumpkin, with this confounded
saddle, and was laughing at me. I never saw a girl at once so--so
audacious and modest, or so lovely. I didn't know there was anything on
earth so lovely as that girl."
He had caught only an instantaneous glimpse of her face, but he had
seen it with strange distinctness, as one sees an object by a flash of
lightning; and he still saw it, as one seems still to see the object in
the after-darkness. Every line of the features lived in his eyes, even
an almost indistinguishable scar there was on the girl's right cheek
near the temple. It was not a flaw, that faint scar; it seemed somehow
to heighten her loveliness, as an accent over a word sometimes gives it
one knows not what of piquancy.
"Evidently she lives in the town or in the neighborhood. Shall I meet
her again, I wonder? I will stay here a week or a month if--What
nonsense! I must have distinguished myself, staring at her like a gawk.
When she said she was the Queen of Sheba, I ought instantly to have
replied--what in the deuce is it I ought to have replied? How can a man
be witty with a ton of sole-leather pressing on his spine!"
Edward Lynde, with the girl and her mocking words in his mind, and
busying himself with all the clever things he might have said and did
not say, mechanically traversed the remaining distance to the village.
The street which had seemed thronged when he viewed it from the slope
of the hill was deserted; at the farther end he saw two or three
persons hurrying along, but there were no indications whatever of the
festival he had conjectured. Indeed, the town presented the appearance
of a place smitten by a pestilence. The blinds of the lower casements
of all the houses were closed; he would have supposed them unoccupied
if he had not caught sight of a face pressed against the glass of an
upper window here and there. He thought it singular that these faces
instantly withdrew when he looked up. Once or twice he fancied he heard
a distant laugh, and the sound of voices singing drunkenly somewhere in
the open air.
Some distance up the street a tall liberty-pole sustaining a swinging
sign announced a tavern. Lynde hastened thither; but the tavern, like
the private houses, appeared tenantless; the massive pine
window-shutters were barred and bolted. Lynde mounted the three or four
low steps leading to the piazza, and tried the front door, which was
locked. With the saddle still on his shoulders, he stepped into the
middle of the street to reconnoitre the premises. A man and two women
suddenly showed themselves at an open window in the second story. Lynde
was about to address them when the man cried out--
"Oh, you're a horse, I suppose. Well, there isn't any oats for you
here. You had better trot on!"
Lynde did not relish this pleasantry; it struck him as rather insolent;
but he curbed his irritation, and inquired as politely as he could if a
horse or any kind of vehicle could be hired in the village.
The three persons in the window nodded to one another significantly,
and began smiling in a constrained manner, as if there were something
quite preposterous in the inquiry. The man, a corpulent, red-faced
person, seemed on the point of suffocating with merriment.
"Is this a public house?" demanded Lynde severely.
"That's as may be," answered the man, recovering his breath, and
becoming grave.
"Are you the proprietor?"
"That's jest what I am."
"Then I require of you the accommodation which is the right of every
traveller. Your license does not permit you to turn any respectable
stranger from your door."
"Now, my advice to you," said the man, stepping back from the window,
"my advice to you is to trot. You can't get in here. If you try to,
I'll pepper you as sure as you live, though I wouldn't like to do it.
So trot right along!"
The man had a gun in his hands; he clutched it nervously by the stock;
his countenance worked strangely, and his small, greenish eyes had a
terrified, defiant expression. Indisputably, the tavern-keeper looked
upon Lynde as a dangerous person, and was ready to fire upon him if he
persisted in his demands.
"My friend," said Lynde through his set teeth, "if I had you down here
I'd give you a short lesson in manners."
"I dare say! I dare say!" cried the man, flourishing the shot-gun
excitedly.
Lynde turned away disgusted and indignant; but his indignation was
neutralized by his astonishment at this incomprehensible brutality. He
had no resource but to apply to some private house and state his
predicament. As that luckless saddle had excited the derision of the
girl, and drawn down on him the contumely of the tavern-keeper, he
looked around for some safe spot in which to deposit it before it
brought him into further disgrace. His linen and all his worldly
possessions, except his money, which he carried on his person, were in
the valise; he could not afford to lose that.
The sun was high by this time, and the heat would have been intolerable
if it had not been for a merciful breeze which swept down from the
cooler atmosphere of the hills. Lynde wasted half an hour or more
seeking a hiding-place for the saddle. It had grown a grievous burden
to him; at every step it added a pound to its dead weight. He saw no
way of relieving himself of it. There it was perched upon his
shoulders, like the Old Man of the Sea on the back of Sindbad the
Sailor. In sheer despair Lynde flung down his load on the curb-stone at
a corner formed by a narrow street diagonally crossing the main
thoroughfare, which he had not quitted. He drew out his handkerchief
and wiped the heavy drops of perspiration from his brows. At that
moment he was aware of the presence of a tall, cadaverous man of about
forty, who was so painfully pinched and emaciated that a sympathetic
shiver ran over Lynde as he glanced at him. He was as thin as an
exclamation point. It seemed to Lynde that the man must be perishing
with cold even in that burning June sunshine. It was not a man, but a
skeleton.
"Good heavens, sir!" cried Lynde. "Tell me where I am! What is the name
of this town?"
"Constantinople."
"Constan"--
"--tinople," added the man briskly. "A stranger here?"
"Yes," said Lynde abstractedly. He was busy running over an imaginary
map of the State of New Hampshire in search of Constantinople.
"Good!" exclaimed the anatomy, rustling his dry palms together, "I'll
employ you."
"You'll employ me? I like that!"
"Certainly. I'm a ship-builder."
"I didn't know they built vessels a hundred miles from the coast," said
Lynde.
"I am building a ship--don't say I'm not!"
"Of course I know nothing about it."
"A marble ship."
"A ship to carry marble?"
"No, a ship made of marble; a passenger ship. We have ships of iron,
why not of marble?" he asked fiercely.
"Oh, the fellow is mad!" said Lynde to himself, "as mad as a loon;
everybody here is mad, or I've lost my senses. So you are building a
marble ship?" he added aloud, good-naturedly. "When it is finished I
trust you will get all the inhabitants of this town into it, and put to
sea at once."
"Then you'll help me!" cried the man enthusiastically, with his eyes
gleaming in their sunken sockets. More than ever he looked like a
specimen escaped from some anatomical museum.
"I do not believe I can be of much assistance," answered Lynde,
laughing. "I have had so little experience in constructing marble
vessels, you see. I fear my early education has been fearfully
neglected. By the bye," continued the young man, who was vaguely
diverted by his growing interest in the monomaniac, "how do you propose
to move your ship to the seaboard?"
"In the simplest manner--a double railroad track--twenty-four
engines--twelve engines on each side to support the hull."
"That WOULD be a simple way."
Edward Lynde laughed again, but not heartily. He felt that this marble
ship was a conception of high humor and was not without its pathetic
element. The whimsicality of the idea amused him, but the sad
earnestness of the nervous, unstrung visionary at his side moved his
compassion.
"Dear me," he mused, "may be all of us are more or less engaged in
planning a marble ship, and perhaps the happiest are those who, like
this poor soul, never awake from their delusion. Matrimony was uncle
David's marble ship--he launched his! Have I one on the ways, I wonder?"
Lynde broke with a shock from his brief abstraction. His companion had
disappeared, and with him the saddle and valise. Lynde threw a hasty
glance up the street, and started in pursuit of the naval-architect,
who was running with incredible swiftness and bearing the saddle on his
head with as much ease as if it had been a feather.
The distance between the two men, some sixty or seventy yards, was not
the disadvantage that made pursuit seem hopeless. Lynde had eaten
almost nothing since the previous noon; he had been carrying that
cumbersome saddle for the last two or three hours; he was out of
breath, and it was impossible to do much running in his heavy
riding-boots. The other man, on the contrary, appeared perfectly fresh;
he wore light shoes, and had not a superfluous ounce of flesh to carry.
He was all bone and sinew; the saddle resting upon his head was hardly
an impediment to him. Lynde, however, was not going to be vanquished
without a struggle; though he recognized the futility of pursuit, he
pushed on doggedly. A certain tenacious quality in the young man
imperatively demanded this of him.
"The rascal has made off with my dinner," he muttered between his
clinched teeth. "That completes the ruin Mary began. If I should happen
to catch up with him, I trust I shall have the moral strength not to
knock his head off--his skull off; it isn't a head."
Lynde's sole hope of overtaking him, and it was a very slender hope,
was based on the possibility that the man might fall and disable
himself; but he seemed to have the sure-footedness as well as the
lightness of a deer. When Lynde reached the outskirts of the village,
on the road by which he had entered, the agile ship-builder was more
than halfway up the hill. Lynde made a fresh spurt here, and lost his
hat; but he had no time to turn back for it. Every instant widened the
space between the two runners, as one of them noticed with disgust. At
the top of the ascent the man halted a moment to take breath, and then
disappeared behind the ridge. He was on the down grade now, and of
course gaining at each stride on his pursuer, who was still toiling
upward. Lynde did not slacken his pace, however; he had got what
runners call their second wind. With lips set, elbows pressed against
his sides, and head thrown forward, he made excellent time to the brow
of the hill, where he suddenly discovered himself in the midst of a
crowd of men and horses.
For several seconds Lynde was so dazed and embarrassed that he saw
nothing; then his eyes fell upon the girl with the long hair and the
white gown. She was seated sidewise on a horse without saddle, and the
horse was Mary. A strapping fellow was holding the animal by the
head-stall.
"By Jove!" cried Lynde, springing forward joyfully, "that's my mare!"
He was immediately seized by two men who attempted to pass a cord over
his wrists. Lynde resisted so desperately that a third man was called
into requisition, and the three succeeded in tying his hands and
placing him upon a saddle vacated by one of the riders. All this
occupied hardly a minute.
"Will you go along quietly," said one of the men roughly, "or will you
be carried?"
"What is the meaning of this?" demanded Lynde, with the veins standing
out on his forehead.
He received no reply from any of the group, which seemed to be composed
of farmers and laboring-hands, with two or three persons whose social
status did not betray itself. Directly behind the girl and, like her,
mounted on a horse led by a couple of rustics, was the white-haired old
gentleman who had repulsed Lynde so rudely. Lynde noticed that his
hands were also secured by cords, an indignity which in no wise altered
the benevolent and satisfied expression of his face. Lynde's saddle and
valise were attached to the old gentleman's horse. Lynde instinctively
looked around for the ship-builder. There he was, flushed and sullen,
sitting on a black nag as bony and woe-begone as himself, guarded by
two ill-favored fellows. Not only were the ship-builder's arms
pinioned, but his feet were bound by a rope fastened to each ankle and
passed under the nag's belly. It was clear to Lynde that he himself,
the old clergyman, and the girl were the victims of some dreadful
misconception, possibly brought about by the wretch who had purloined
the saddle.
"Gentlemen!" cried Lynde, as the party began to advance, "I protest
against this outrage so far as I am concerned, and I venture to protest
on the part of the lady. I am convinced that she is incapable of any
act to warrant such treatment. I--I know her slightly," he added,
hesitating.
"Oh, yes," said the girl, folding her hands demurely in her lap, "and I
know you, too, very well. You are my husband."
This announcement struck Lynde speechless. The rough men exchanged
amused glances, and the ship-builder gave vent to a curious dry laugh.
Lynde could have killed him. The party moved on. Up to this moment the
young man had been boiling with rage; his rage now yielded place to
amazement. What motive had prompted the girl to claim that
relationship? Was it a desperate appeal to him for protection? But
brother, or cousin, or friend would have served as well. Her impulsive
declaration, which would be at once disproved, might result in serious
complications for him and her. But it had not been an impulsive
declaration; she had said it very calmly, and, he fancied, with just
the lightest touch of coquetry, "You are my husband!" For several
minutes Lynde did not dare to let his eyes wander in her direction. She
was a pace or so in the rear at his right. To see her he would be
obliged to turn slightly; this he presently did, with a movement as if
settling himself more easily in the saddle. The girl's loose hair was
blown like a black veil over her face, putting her into mourning; she
was steadying herself with one hand resting on Mary's mane; her feet
were crossed, and a diminutive slipper had fallen from one of them.
There was something so helpless and appealing in the girl's attitude
that Lynde was touched.
"May I speak with you, sir?" he said, addressing himself to a man whom
somebody had called Morton, and who appeared to issue the orders for
the party. The man came to Lynde's side.
"For Heaven's sake, sir, explain this! Who is that young woman?"
"You said you knew her," returned the man, not unpleasantly.
"Indeed I said so," replied Lynde, reddening. "What has happened? What
has she done, what have I done, what has the old clergyman done, that
we should be seized like murderers on the public highway?"
"Be quiet now," said the man, laying his hand soothingly on Lynde's
arm, and looking at him steadily. "Everything will be satisfactorily
explained by and by."
Lynde's indignation blazed up again.
"I can assure you, sir," he cried, as the man returned to his former
position, "that the result of the explanation will be far from
satisfactory to you. I shall hold to strict account every man who has
had a hand in this business. I demand to be brought before a
magistrate, or a justice of the peace, if there is one in this
God-forsaken country."
No attention was paid to Lynde's fresh outbreak. Some one picked up his
hat and set it on the back of his head, giving him quite a rakish air.
His dignity suffered until the wind took the hat again. The party
proceeded in silence, halting once to tighten a girth, and another time
to wait for a straggler. If the men spoke to one another it was in
subdued tones or whispers. Two of the horsemen trotted on a hundred
yards in advance, like skirmishers thrown out in front of an attacking
force. There was something in all this mysterious precaution and
reticence which bewildered and exasperated Lynde, who noted every
detail. Mary, in a transient spasm of backing, had fallen to the rear;
the young man could no longer see the girl, but ever before his eyes
was the piteous, unslippered little foot with its arched instep.
The party was now at the base of the declivity. Instead of following
the road to the village, the horses turned abruptly into a bridle-path
branching off to the left, and in the course of a few minutes passed
through an iron-spiked gateway in a high brick wall surrounding the
large red structure which had puzzled Lynde on first discovering the
town. The double gates stood wide open and were untended; they went to,
however, with a clang, and the massive bolts were shot as soon as the
party had entered. In the courtyard Lynde was hastily assisted from the
horse; he did not have an opportunity to observe what became of the
other three prisoners. When his hands were freed he docilely allowed
himself to be conducted up a flight of stone steps and into the
vestibule of the building, and thence, through a long corridor, to a
small room in which his guard left him. The door closed with a spring
not practicable from the inside, as Lynde ascertained on inspection.
The chamber was not exactly a cell; it resembled rather the
waiting-room of a penitentiary. The carpet, of a tasteless, gaudy
pattern, was well worn, and the few pieces of hair-cloth furniture, a
sofa, a table, and chairs, had a stiff, official air. A strongly barred
window gave upon a contracted garden--one of those gardens sometimes
attached to prisons, with mathematically cut box borders, and squares
of unhealthy, party-colored flowers looking like gangs of convicts
going to meals. On his arrival at the place Edward Lynde had offered no
resistance, trusting that some sort of judicial examination would
promptly set him at liberty. Faint from want of food, jaded by his
exertions, and chafing at the delay, he threw himself upon the sofa,
and waited.
There was a great deal of confusion in the building. Hurried footsteps
came and went up and down the passages; now and then he heard
approaching voices, which tantalizingly passed on, or died away before
reaching his door. Once a shrill shriek--a woman's shriek--rang through
the corridor and caused him to spring to his feet.
After the lapse of an hour that had given Lynde some general idea of
eternity, the door was hastily thrown open, and a small, elderly,
blue-eyed gentleman, followed by a man of gigantic stature, entered the
chamber.
"My dear sir," cried the gentleman, making a courteous, deprecatory
gesture with his palms spread outward, "we owe you a million apologies.
There has been a most lamentable mistake!"
"A mistake!" said Lynde haughtily. "Mistake is a mild term to apply to
an outrage."
"Your indignation is just; still it was a mistake, and one I would not
have had happen for the world. I am Dr. Pendegrast, the superintendent
of this asylum."
"This is an asylum!"
"An asylum for the insane," returned Dr. Pendegrast. "I do not know how
to express my regret at what has occurred. I can only account for the
unfortunate affair, and throw myself upon your generosity. Will you
allow me to explain?"
Lynde passed his hand over his forehead in a bewildered way. Then he
looked at the doctor suspiciously; Lynde's late experience had shaken
his faith in the general sanity of his species. "Certainly," he said,
"I would like to have this matter explained to me; for I'll be hanged
if I understand it. This is an asylum?"
"Yes, sir."
"And you are the superintendent?"
"Yes, sir."
"Then--naturally--you are not a lunatic?"
"Certainly not!" said the doctor, starting.
"Very well; I didn't know. I am listening to you, sir."
"Early this morning," said Dr. Pendegrast, somewhat embarrassed by
Lynde's singular manner, "a number of patients whom we had always
considered tractable seized the attendants one by one at breakfast,
and, before a general alarm could be given, locked them in the cells.
Some of us were still in our bedrooms when the assault began and were
there overpowered. We chanced to be short-handed at the time, two of
the attendants being ill, and another absent. As I say, we were all
seized--the women attendants and nurses as well--and locked up. Higgins
here, my head-man, they put into a strait-jacket."
"Yes, sir," spoke up Higgins for himself, "they did so!"
"Me," continued Dr. Pendegrast, smiling, "they confined in the padded
chamber."
Lynde looked at him blankly.
"A chamber with walls thickly cushioned, to prevent violent patients
from inflicting injury on themselves," explained the doctor. "_I_, you
see, was considered a very bad case indeed! Meanwhile, Morton, the
under-keeper, was in the garden, and escaped; but unfortunately, in his
excitement, he neglected to lock the main gate after him. Morton gave
the alarm to the people in the village, who, I am constrained to say,
did not behave handsomely. Instead of coming to our relief and
assisting to restore order, which might easily have been done even
then, they barricaded themselves in their houses, in a panic. Morton
managed to get a horse, and started for G--In the meantime the patients
who had made the attack liberated the patients still in confinement,
and the whole rushed in a body out of the asylum and spread themselves
over the village."
"That must have been the crowd I saw in the streets when I sighted the
town," said Lynde, thinking aloud.
"If you saw persons in the street," returned the doctor, "they were not
the townsfolk. They kept very snug, I assure you. But permit me to
finish, Mr."--
"My name is Lynde."
"Morton," continued the doctor, bowing, "having secured several
volunteers before reaching G--, decided to return with what force he
had, knowing that every instant was precious. On his way back he picked
up three of the poor wanderers, and, unluckily, picked up you."
"He should not have committed such a stupid error," said Lynde,
clinging stoutly to his grievance. "He ought to have seen that I was
not an inmate of the asylum."
"An attendant, my dear Mr. Lynde, is not necessarily familiar with all
the patients; he may know only those in his special ward. Besides, you
were bare-headed and running, and seemed in a state of great cerebral
excitement."
"I was chasing a man who had stolen my property."
"Morton and the others report that you behaved with great violence."
"Of course I did. I naturally resented being seized and bound."
"Your natural violence confirmed them in their natural suspicion, you
see. Assuredly they were to blame; but the peculiar circumstances must
plead for them."
"But when I spoke to them calmly and rationally"--
"My good sir," interrupted the doctor, "if sane people always talked as
rationally and sensibly as some of the very maddest of my poor friends
sometimes do, there would be fewer foolish things said in the world.
What remark is that the great poet puts into the mouth of Polonius,
speaking of Hamlet? 'How pregnant sometimes his replies are! a
happiness that often madness hits on, which reason and sanity could not
so prosperously be delivered of.' My dear Mr. Lynde, it was your
excellent good sense that convicted you! By the way, I believe you
claimed the horse which Morton found adrift on the road."
"Yes, sir, it was mine; at least I was riding it this morning when the
saddle-girth broke, and the mare got away from me."
"Then of course that was your saddle Blaisdell was running off with."
"Blaisdell?"
"One of our most dangerous patients, in fact, the only really dangerous
patient at present in the establishment. Yet you should hear HIM talk
sometimes! To-day, thank God, he happened to be in his ship-building
mood. Otherwise--I dare not think what he might have done. I should be
in despair if he had not been immediately retaken. Oddly enough, all
the poor creatures, except three, returned to the asylum of their own
will, after a brief ramble through the village."
"And the white-haired old gentleman who looked like a clergyman, is he
mad?"
"Mackenzie? Merely idiotic," replied the doctor, with the cool
professional air.
"And the young girl," asked Lynde hesitatingly, "is she"--
"A very sad case," interrupted Dr. Pendegrast, with a tenderer
expression settling upon his countenance. "The saddest thing in the
world."
"Insane?"
"Hopelessly so, I fear."
A nameless heaviness fell upon Lynde's heart. He longed to ask other
questions, but he did not know how to shape them. He regretted that
subsequently.
"And now, Mr. Lynde," said the doctor, "in your general pardon I wish
you to include my unavoidable delay in coming or sending to you. When
you were brought here I was still in durance vile, and Higgins was in
his strait-jacket. On being released, my hands were full, as you can
suppose. Moreover, I did not learn at once of your detention. The
saddle and the valise caused me to suspect that a blunder had been
committed. I cannot adequately express my regrets. In ten minutes,"
continued Dr. Pendegrast, turning a fat gold watch over on its back in
the palm of his hand, where it looked like a little yellow turtle, "in
ten minutes dinner will be served. Unless you do me the honor to dine
with me, I shall not believe in the sincerity of your forgiveness."
"Thanks," said Lynde dejectedly. "I fully appreciate your
thoughtfulness; I am nearly famished, but I do not think I could eat a
mouthful here. Excuse me for saying it, but I should have to remain
here permanently if I were to stay another hour. I quite forgive Mr.
Morton and the others," Lynde went on, rising and giving the doctor his
hand; "and I forgive you also, since you insist upon being forgiven,
though I do not know for what. If my horse, and my traps, and my
hat--really, I don't see how they could have helped taking me for a
lunatic--can be brought together, I will go and dine at the tavern."
Half an hour afterward Edward Lynde dismounted at the steps of the
rustic hotel. The wooden shutters were down now, and the front door
stood hospitably open. A change had come over the entire village. There
were knots of persons at the street corners and at garden gates,
discussing the event of the day. There was also a knot of gossips in
the hotel barroom to whom the landlord, Mr. Zeno Dodge, was giving a
thrilling account of an attack made on the tavern by a maniac who had
fancied himself a horse!
"The critter," cried Mr. Dodge dramatically, "was on the p'int of
springin' up the piazzy, when Martha handed me the shot-gun."
Mr. Dodge was still in a heroic attitude, with one arm stretched out to
receive the weapon and his eye following every movement of a maniac
obligingly personated by the cuspidor between the windows, when Lynde
entered. Mr. Dodge's arm slowly descended to his side, his jaw fell,
and the narrative broke off short.
Lynde requested dinner in a private room, and Mr. Dodge deposed the
maid in order to bring in the dishes himself and scrutinize his
enigmatical guest. In serving the meal the landlord invented countless
pretexts to remain in the room. After a while Lynde began to feel it
uncomfortable to have those sharp green eyes continually boring into
the back of his head.
"Yes," he exclaimed wearily, "I am the man."
"I thought you was. Glad to see you, sir," said Mr. Dodge politely.
"This morning you took me for an escaped lunatic?"
"I did so--fust-off."
"A madman who imagined himself a horse?"
"That's what I done," said Mr. Dodge contritely, "an' no wonder, with
that there saddle. They're a very queer lot, them crazy chaps. There's
one on 'em up there who calls himself Abraham Lincoln, an' then there's
another who thinks he's a telegraph wire an' hes messages runnin' up
an' down him continally. These is new potatoes, sir--early rosers.
There's no end to their cussed kinks. When I see you prancin' round
under the winder with that there saddle, I says at once to Martha,
'Martha, here's a luny!'"
"A very natural conclusion," said Lynde meekly.
"Wasn't it now?"
"And if you had shot me to death," said Lynde, helping himself to
another chop, "I should have been very much obliged to you."
Mr. Dodge eyed the young man dubiously for a dozen seconds or so.
"Comin'! comin'!" cried Mr. Dodge, in response to a seemingly
vociferous call which had failed to reach Lynde's ear.
When Edward Lynde had finished dinner, Mary was brought to the door.
Under the supervision of a group of spectators assembled on the piazza,
Lynde mounted, and turned the mare's head directly for Rivermouth. He
had no heart to go any farther due north. The joyousness had dropped
out of the idle summer journey. He had gone in search of the
picturesque and the peculiar; he had found them--and he wished he had
not.
V
CINDERELLA'S SLIPPER
On the comb of the hill where his adventure had begun and
culminated--it seemed to him now like historic ground--Edward Lynde
reined in Mary, to take a parting look at the village nestled in the
plain below. Already the afternoon light was withdrawing from the
glossy chestnuts and drooping elms, and the twilight--it crept into the
valley earlier than elsewhere--was weaving its half invisible webs
under the eaves and about the gables of the houses. But the two red
towers of the asylum reached up into the mellow radiance of the waning
sun, and stood forth boldly. They were the last objects his gaze rested
upon, and to them alone his eyes sent a farewell.
"Poor little thing! poor little Queen of Sheba!" he said softly. Then
the ridge rose between him and the village, and shut him out forever.
Nearly a mile beyond the spot where Mary had escaped from him that
morning, Edward Lynde drew up the mare so sharply that she sunk back on
her haunches. He dismounted in haste, and stooping down, with the rein
thrown over one arm, picked up an object lying in the middle of the
road under the horse's very hoofs.
It was on a Tuesday morning that Lynde reentered Rivermouth, after an
absence of just eight days. He had started out fresh and crisp as a new
bank-note, and came back rumpled and soiled and tattered, like that
same note in a state to be withdrawn from circulation. The shutters
were up at all the shop-windows in the cobble-paved street, and had the
appearance of not having been taken down since he left. Everything was
unchanged, yet it seemed to Lynde that he had been gone a year.
On Wednesday morning when Mr. Bowlsby came down to the bank he was
slightly surprised at seeing the young cashier at his accustomed desk.
To Mr. Bowlsby's brief interrogations then, and to Miss Mildred
Bowlsby's more categorical questions in the evening, Lynde offered no
very lucid reason for curtailing his vacation. Travelling alone had not
been as pleasant as he anticipated; the horse was a nuisance to look
after; and then the country taverns were snuffy and unendurable. As to
where he had been and what he had seen--he must have seen something and
been somewhere in eight days--his answers were so evasive that Miss
Mildred was positive something distractingly romantic had befallen the
young man.
"If you must know," he said, one evening, "I will tell you where I
went."
"Tell me, then!"
"I went to Constantinople."
Miss Mildred found that nearly impertinent.
There was, too, an alteration in Lynde's manner which cruelly helped to
pique her curiosity. His frank, half satirical, but wholly amiable
way--an armor that had hitherto rendered him invulnerable to Miss
Mildred's coquettish shafts--was wanting; he was less ready to laugh
than formerly, and sometimes in the midst of company he fell into
absent-minded moods. Instead of being the instigator and leader of
picnics up the river, he frequently pleaded bank duties as an excuse
for not joining such parties. "He is not at all as nice as he used to
be," was Miss Mildred's mental summing up of Lynde a fortnight after
his return.
He was, in fact, unaccountably depressed by his adventure in the hill
country; he could not get it out of his mind. The recollection of
details which he had not especially remarked at the time came to him in
the midst of his work at the bank. Sometimes when he turned off the gas
at night, or just as he was falling asleep, the sharp, attenuated
figure of the ship-builder limned itself against the blackness of the
chamber, or the old gentleman's vacuous countenance in its frame of
silver hair peered in through the hangings of the bed. But more
frequently it was the young girl's face that haunted Lynde. He saw her
as she came up the sunny road, swinging the flower in her hand, and
looking like one of Fra Angelico's seraphs or some saint out of an
illuminated mediaeval missal; then he saw her seated on the horse,
helpless and piteous with the rude, staring men about her. If he
dreamed, it was of her drawing herself up haughtily and saying, "I am
the Queen of Sheba." On two or three nights, when he had not been
dreaming, he was startled out of his slumber by a voice whispering
close to his ear: "I know you, too, very well. You are my husband."
Mr. Bowlsby and his daughter were the only persons in Rivermouth to
whom Lynde could have told the story of his journey. He decided not to
confide it to either, since he felt it would be vain to attempt to
explain the sombre effect which the whole affair had had on him.
"I do not understand what makes me think of that poor girl all the
time," mused Lynde one day, as he stood by the writing-table in his
sitting-room. "It can't be this that keeps her in my mind."
He took up a slipper which was lying on the table in the midst of
carved pipes and paper-weights and odds and ends. It was a very small
slipper, nearly new, with high pointed heel and a square jet buckle at
the instep: evidently of foreign make, and cut after the arch pattern
of the slippers we see peeping from the flowered brocade skirts of Sir
Peter Lely's full-length ladies. It was such an absurd shoe, a toy
shoe, a child might have worn it!
"It cannot be this," said Lynde.
And yet it was that, more or less. Lynde had taken the slipper from his
valise the evening he got home, and set it on the corner of the desk,
where it straightway made itself into a cunning ornament. The next
morning he put it into one of the drawers; but the table looked so
barren and commonplace without it that presently the thing was back
again. There it had remained ever since.
It met his eye every morning when he opened the door of his bedroom; it
was there when he came home late at night, and seemed to be sitting up
for him, in the reproachful, feminine fashion. When he was writing his
letters, there it was, with a prim, furtive air of looking on. It was
not like a mere slipper; it had traits and an individuality of its own;
there were moments when the jet beads in the buckle sparkled with a
sort of intelligence. Sitting at night, reading under the drop-light,
Lynde often had an odd sensation as if the little shoe would presently
come tripping across the green table-cloth towards him. He had a
hundred fanciful humors growing out of that slipper. Sometimes he was
tempted to lock it up or throw it away. Sometimes he would say to
himself, half mockingly and half sadly, "That is your wife's slipper;"
then he would turn wholly sad, thinking how tragic that would be if it
were really so.
It was a part of the girl's self; it had borne her lovely weight; it
still held the impress of her foot; it would not let Lynde entirely
forget her while it was under his eyes.
The slipper had stood on the writing-table four or five months--an
object of consuming curiosity and speculation to the young woman who
dusted Lynde's chambers--when an incident occurred which finally led to
its banishment.
Lynde never had visitors; there were few men of his age in the town,
and none was sufficiently intimate with him to come to his rooms; but
it chanced one evening that a young man named Preston dropped in to
smoke a cigar with Lynde. Preston had recently returned from abroad,
where he had been an attache of the American Legation at London, and
was now generally regarded as the prospective proprietor of Miss
Mildred. He was an entertaining, mercurial young fellow, into whose
acquaintanceship Lynde had fallen at the Bowlsbys'.
"Ah, you rogue!" cried Preston gayly, picking up the slipper. "Did she
give it you?"
"Who?" asked Lynde, with a start.
"Devilish snug little foot! Was it a danseuse?"
"No," returned Lynde freezingly.
"An actress?"
"No," said Lynde, taking the slipper from Preston's hand and gently
setting it back on the writing-table. "It was not an actress; and yet
she played a role--in a blacker tragedy than any you ever saw on the
stage."
"Lynde, I beg your pardon. I spoke thoughtlessly, supposing it a light
matter, don't you see?"
"There was no offence," said Lynde, hiding his subtile hurt.
"It was stupid in me," said Preston the next night, relating the
incident to Miss Bowlsby. "I never once thought it might be a thing
connected with the memory of his mother or sister, don't you see? I
took it for a half sentimental souvenir of some flirtation."
"Mr. Lynde's mother died when he was a child, and he never had a
sister," said Miss Bowlsby thoughtfully. "I shouldn't wonder," she
added irrelevantly, after a pause.
"At what, Miss Mildred?"
"At anything!"
One of those womanly intuitions which set mere man-logic at defiance
was come to whisper in Miss Bowlsby's ear that that slipper had
performed some part in Edward Lynde's untold summer experience.
"He was laughing at you, Mr. Preston; he was grossly imposing on your
unsophisticated innocence."
"Really? Is he as deep as that?"
"He is very deep," said Miss Bowlsby solemnly.
On his way home from the bank, one afternoon in that same week, Lynde
overtook Miss Mildred walking, and accompanied her a piece down the
street.
"Mr. Lynde, shall you go on another horseback excursion next summer?"
she asked, without prelude.
"I haven't decided; but I think not."
"Of course you ought to go."
"Why of course, Miss Mildred?"
"Why? Because--because--don't ask me!"
"But I do ask you."
"You insist?"
"Positively."
"Well, then, how will you ever return Cinderella her slipper if you
don't go in search of her?"
Lynde bit his lip, and felt that the blackest criminals of antiquity
were as white as driven snow compared with Preston.
"The prince in the story, you know," continued Miss Bowlsby, with her
smile of ingenue, "hunted high and low until he found her again."
"That prince was a very energetic fellow," said Lynde, hastily putting
on his old light armor. "Possibly I should not have to travel so far
from home," he added, with a bow. "I know at least one lady in
Rivermouth who has a Cinderella foot."
"She has two of them, Mr. Lynde," responded Miss Mildred, dropping him
a courtesy.
The poor little slipper's doom was sealed. The edict for its banishment
had gone forth. If it were going to be the town's talk he could not
keep it on his writing-desk. As soon as Lynde got back to his chambers,
he locked up Cinderella's slipper in an old trunk in a closet seldom or
never opened.
The enchantment, whatever it was, was broken. Although he missed the
slipper from among the trifles scattered over his table, its absence
brought him a kind of relief. He less frequently caught himself falling
into brown studies. The details of his adventure daily grew more
indistinct; the picture was becoming a mere outline; it was fading
away. He might have been able in the course of time to set the whole
occurrence down as a grotesque dream, if he had not now and then beheld
Deacon Twombly driving by the bank with Mary attached to the battered
family carry-all. Mary was a fact not easily disposed of.
Insensibly Lynde lapsed into his old habits. The latter part of this
winter at Rivermouth was unusually gay; the series of evening parties
and lectures and private theatricals extended into the spring, whose
advent was signalized by the marriage of Miss Bowlsby and Preston. In
June Lynde ran on to New York for a week, where he had a clandestine
dinner with his uncle at Delmonico's, and bade good-by to Flemming, who
was on the eve of starting on a protracted tour through the East. "I
shall make it a point to visit the land of the Sabaeans," said
Flemming, with his great cheery laugh, "and discover, if possible, the
unknown site of the ancient capital of Sheba." Lynde had confided the
story to his friend one night, coming home from the theatre.
Once more at Rivermouth, Edward Lynde took up the golden threads of his
easy existence. But this life of ideal tranquillity and contentment was
not to be permitted him. One morning in the latter part of August he
received a letter advising him that his uncle had had an alarming
stroke of apoplexy. The letter was followed within the hour by a
telegram announcing the death of David Lynde.
VI
BEYOND THE SEA
In the early twilight of a July evening in the year 1875, two young
Americans, neither dreaming of the other's presence, came face to face
on the steps of a hotel on the Quai du Montblanc at Geneva. The two
men, one of whom was so bronzed by Eastern suns that his friend looked
pallid beside him, exchanged a long, incredulous stare; then their
hands met, and the elder cried out, "Of all men in the world!"
"Flemming!" exclaimed the other eagerly; "I thought you were in Egypt."
"So I was, a month ago. What are you doing over here, Ned?"
"I don't know, to tell the truth."
"You don't know!" laughed Flemming. "Enjoying yourself, I suppose."
"The supposition is a little rash," said Edward Lynde. "I have been
over nearly a year--quite a year, in fact. After uncle David's death"--
"Poor old fellow! I got the news at Smyrna."
"After he was gone, and the business of the estate was settled, I
turned restless at Rivermouth. It was cursedly lonesome. I hung on
there awhile, and then I came abroad."
"A rich man--my father wrote me. I have had no letter's from you. Your
uncle treated you generously, Ned."
"Did he not always treat me generously?" said Lynde, with a light
coming into his face and instantly dying out again. "Yes, he left me a
pile of money and a heart-ache. I can hardly bear to talk of it even
now, and it will be two years this August. But come up to my room. By
Jove, I am glad to see you! How is it you are in Geneva? I was thinking
about you yesterday, and wondering whether you were drifting down the
Nile in a dahabeeah, or crossing the desert on a dromedary. Of course
you have hunted tigers and elephants: did you kill anything?"
"I haven't killed anything but time. I was always a dead shot at that."
Lynde passed his arm through Flemming's, and the two friends mounted
the staircase of the hotel.
"How is it you are in Geneva?" repeated Lynde.
"By luck," answered Flemming. "I am going home--in a zigzag way. I've
been obliged to take a reef in my Eastern itinerary. The fact is, I
have had a letter from the old gentleman rather suggesting it. I
believe he has availed himself of my absence to fall into financial
difficulties."
"Why, I thought he was rolling in wealth."
"No, he is rolling in poverty, as nearly as I can make out. Well, not
so bad as that. Nothing is ever as bad as it pretends to be. But he has
met with heavy losses. I shall find letters in London and learn all
about it. He wrote me not to hurry, that a month or two would make no
difference. When I got to Munich I thought I would take a peep at
Switzerland while I had the opportunity. I have done a good piece--from
Lindau to Lucerne, from Lucerne to Martigny by way of the Furca;
through the Tete Noire Pass to Chamouni, and from Chamouni, here."
While Flemming was speaking, Lynde unlocked a door at the end of the
hall and ushered him into a sitting-room with three windows, each
opening upon a narrow balcony of its own.
"Sit there, old fellow," said Lynde, wheeling an easy-chair to the
middle window, "and look through my glass at the view before it takes
itself off. It is not often as fine as it is this evening."
In front of the hotel the blue waters of the Rhone swept under the
arches of the Pont des Bergues, to lose themselves in the turbid,
glacier-born Arve, a mile below the town. Between the Pont des Bergues
and the Pont du Montblanc lay the island of Jean Jacques Rousseau,
linked to the quay by a tiny chain bridge. Opposite, upon the right
bank of the Rhone, stretched the handsome facades of tile-roofed
buildings, giving one an idea of the ancient quarter which a closer
inspection dispels; for the streets are crooked and steep, and the
houses, except those lining the quays, squalid. It was not there,
however, that the eye would have lingered. Far away, seen an incredible
distance in the transparent evening atmosphere, Mont Blanc and its
massed group of snowy satellites lifted themselves into the clouds. All
those luminous battlements and turrets and pyramids--the Mole, the
Grandes Jorasses, the Aiguilles du Midi, the Dent du Geant, the
Aiguilles d'Argentiere--were now suffused with a glow so magically
delicate that the softest tint of the blush rose would have seemed
harsh and crude in comparison.
"You have to come away from Mont Blanc to see it," said Flemming,
lowering the glass. "When I had my nose against it at Chamouni I didn't
see it at all. It overhung me and smothered me. Old boy"--reaching up
his hand to Lynde who was leaning on the back of the chair--"who would
ever have thought that we two"--Flemming stopped short and looked
earnestly into his comrade's face. "Why, Ned, I didn't notice how thin
and pale you are. Are you ill?"
The color which had mantled Lynde's cheeks in the first surprise and
pleasure of meeting his friend had passed away, leaving, indeed, a
somewhat haggard expression on the young man's countenance.
"Ill? Not that I know."
"Is anything wrong?"
"There is nothing wrong," replied Lynde, with some constraint. "That is
to say, nothing very wrong. For a month or six weeks I have been
occupied with a matter that has rather unsettled me--more, perhaps,
than I ought to have allowed."
"What is that?"
"It doesn't signify. Don't let's speak of it."
"But it does signify. You are keeping something serious from me. Out
with it."
"Well, the truth is," said Lynde after a moment's hesitation, "it IS
something serious and nothing very positive: that's the perplexing part
of it."
"You are not making it clear to me."
"I don't know that I can, Flemming."
"Try, then."
Lynde reflected a few seconds, with his eyes fixed on the remote
mountain lines imperceptibly melting into the twilight. "Do you
remember our walk home from the theatre, one night, two or three days
before you sailed from New York?"
"Perfectly," replied Flemming.
"Do you recollect my telling you of a queer thing that happened to me
up in the New Hampshire hills?"
"Your encounter with the little lunatic? Perfectly."
"Don't!" said Lynde, shrinking as if some sharp instrument had pierced
him. "She is here!"
"Here!" exclaimed Flemming, half rising from the chair, and glancing
towards a draped door which connected the suite of apartments.
"Not in these rooms," said Lynde, with a short laugh, "but in
Geneva--in this hotel."
"You do not mean it."
"When I say it is she, I'm not sure of it."
"Of course it isn't."
"That's what I say, and the next moment I know it is."
"And is THIS your trouble?"
"Yes," answered Lynde, knitting his brows. "I felt that I shouldn't
make it clear to you."
"I am afraid you haven't, Ned. What earthly difference does it make to
you whether or not it's the same girl?"
"What difference!" cried Lynde impetuously; "what difference--when I
love the very ground she walks on!"
"Oh, you love her! Which one?"
"Don't laugh at me, Flemming."
"I am not laughing," said Flemming, looking puzzled and anxious. "It is
not possible, Ned, you have allowed yourself to go and get interested
in a--a person not right in her mind!"
"Miss Denham is as sane as you are."
"Then Miss--Denham, is it?--cannot be the girl you told me about."
"That's the point."
"I don't see why there should be any confusion on that point."
"Don't you?"
"Come, let us go to the bottom of this. You have fallen in with a woman
in Switzerland, and you suspect her of being a girl you met years ago
in New Hampshire under circumstances which render her appearance here
nearly an impossibility. As I am not a man of vivid imagination, that
floors me. What makes you think them identical?"
"A startling personal resemblance, age, inflection of voice, manner,
even a certain physical peculiarity--a scar."
"Then what makes you doubt?"
"Everything."
"Well, that's comprehensive, at all events."
"The very fact of her being here. The physician at the asylum said that
that girl's malady was hopeless. Miss Denham has one of the clearest
intellects I ever knew; she is a linguist, an accomplished musician,
and, what is more rare, a girl who has moved a great deal in society,
or, at least, has travelled a great deal, and has not ceased to be an
unaffected, fresh, candid girl."
"An American?"
"Of course; didn't I say so?"
"The other may have been a sister, then, or a cousin," suggested
Flemming. "That would account for the likeness, which possibly you
exaggerate. It was in 1872, wasn't it?"
"I have been all over that. Miss Denham is an only child; she never had
a cousin. To-day she is precisely what the other would have been, with
restored health and three years added to her seventeen or eighteen."
"Upon my word, Ned, this is one of the oddest things I ever heard. I
feel, though, that you have got yourself into an unnecessary snarl.
Where does Miss Denham come from? She is not travelling alone? How did
you meet her? Tell me the entire story."
"There is nothing to tell, or next to nothing. I met the Denhams here,
six weeks ago. It was at the table d'hote. Two ladies came in and took
places opposite me--a middle-aged lady and a young one. I did not
notice them until they were seated; it was the voice of the younger
lady that attracted me; I looked up,--and there was the Queen of Sheba.
The same eyes, the same hair, the same face, though not so pale, and
fuller; the same form, only the contours filled out. I put down my
knife and fork and stared at her. She flushed, for I fancy I stared at
her rather rudely, and a faint mark, like a star, came into her cheek
and faded. I saw it as distinctly as I saw it the day she passed me on
the country road, swinging the flower in her hand."
"By Jove! it's a regular romance--strawberry mark and all."
"If you don't take this seriously," said Lynde, frowning, "I am done."
"Go on."
"I shall never know how I got through the endless courses of that
dinner; it was an empty pantomime on my part. As soon as it was over I
rushed to the hotel register. The only entry among the new arrivals
which pointed to the two ladies was that of Mrs. William Denham and
Niece, United States. You can understand, Flemming, how I was seized
with a desire to know those two women. I had come to Geneva for a day
or so; but I resolved to stay here a month if they stayed, or to leave
the next hour if they left. In short, I meant to follow them
discreetly; it was an occupation for me. They remained. In the course
of a week I knew the Denhams to speak to them when we met of a morning
in the English Garden. A fortnight later it seemed to me that I had
known them half my life. They had come across the previous November,
they had wintered in Italy, and were going to Chamouni some time in
July, where Mr. Denham was to join them; then they were to make an
extended tour of Switzerland, accompanied by an old friend of the
family, a professor, or a doctor, or something, who was in the south of
France for his health. Miss Denham--her name is Ruth--is an orphan, and
was educated mostly over here. When the Denhams are at home they live
somewhere in the neighborhood of Orange, New Jersey. There are all the
simple, exasperating facts. I can add nothing to them. If I were to
tell you how this girl has perplexed and distressed me, by seeming to
be and seeming not to be that other person--how my doubts and hopes
have risen and fallen from day to day, even from hour to hour--it would
be as uninteresting to you as a barometrical record. But this is
certain: when Miss Denham and I part at Chamouni, as I suppose we
shall, this world will have come to an end so far as I am concerned."
"The world doesn't come to an end that way--when one is twenty-six.
Does she like you, Ned?"
"How can I say? She does not dislike me. We have seen very much of each
other. We have been together some portion of each day for more than a
month. But I've never had her a moment alone; the aunt is always
present. We are like old friends--with a difference."
"I see; the aunt makes the difference! No flirting allowed on the
premises."
"Miss Denham is not a girl to flirt with; she is very self-possessed,
with just a suspicion of haughtiness; personally, tall, slight, a sort
of dusky Eastern beauty, with the clear warm colors of a New England
September twilight--not like the brunettes on this side, who are apt to
have thick complexions, saving their presence. I say she is not a girl
to flirt with, and yet, with that sensitive-cut mouth and those deep
eyes, she could do awful things in the way of tenderness if she had a
mind to. She's a puzzle, with her dove's innocence and her serpent's
wisdom. All women are problems. I suppose every married man of us goes
down to his grave with his particular problem not quite solved."
Flemming gave a loud laugh. The "every married man of us" tickled him.
"Yes," said he; "they are all daughters of the Sphinx, and past finding
out. Is Miss Denham an invalid?" he asked, after a pause.
"No; she is not strong--delicate, rather; of the pure type of American
young-womanhood--more spirit than physique; but not an
invalid--unless"--
"You have let a morbid fancy run away with you, Ned. This lady and the
other one are two different persons."
"If I could only believe it!" said Lynde. "I do believe it at times;
then some gesture, some fleeting expression, a turn of the head, the
timbre of her voice--and there she is again! The next moment I am ready
to laugh at myself."
"Couldn't you question the aunt?"
"How could I?"
"You couldn't!"
"I have thought of that doctor at the asylum--what in the devil was his
name? I might write to him; but I shrink from doing it. I have been
brutal enough in other ways. I am ashamed to confess to what
unforgivable expedients I have resorted to solve my uncertainty. Once
we were speaking of Genoa, where the Denhams had spent a week; I turned
the conversation on the church of St. Lorenzo and the relic in the
treasury there--the Sacra Catino, a supposed gift to Solomon from the
Queen of Sheba. Miss Denham listened with the calmest interest; she had
not seen it the day she visited the church; she was sorry to have
missed that. Then the aunt changed the subject, but whether by accident
or design I was unable for the soul of me to conjecture. Good God,
Flemming! could this girl have had some terrible, swift malady which
touched her and passed, and still hangs over her--an hereditary doom?"
"Then she's the most artful actress that ever lived, I should say. The
leading lady of the Theatre Francais might go and take lessons of her.
But if that were so, Ned?"
"If that were so," said Lynde slowly, "a great pity would be added to
my love."
"You would not marry her!"
Lynde made no reply.
The night had settled down upon Geneva while the friends were talking.
The room was so dark they could not distinguish each other; but
Flemming was conscious of a pale, set face turned towards him in the
obscurity, in the same way that he was conscious of the forlorn
whiteness of Mont Blanc looming up out yonder, unseen. It was dark in
the chamber, but the streets were gay now with the life of a midsummer
night. Interminable lines of lamps twinkled on the bridges and along
the quays; the windows of the cafes on the opposite bank of the Rhone
were brilliant with gas jets; boats, bearing merry cargoes to and from
the lake, passed up and down the river; the street running under the
hotel balcony was crowded with loungers, and a band was playing in the
English Garden. From time to time a strain of music floated up to the
window where the two men were sitting. Neither had spoken for some
minutes, when Lynde asked his friend where he was staying.
"At the Schweizerhof," replied Flemming. "I always take the hotel
nearest the station. Few Americans go there, I fancy. It is wonderfully
and fearfully Swiss. I was strolling in here to look through the
register for some American autographs when I ran against you."
"You had better bring your traps over here."
"It would not be worth while. I am booked for Paris to-morrow night.
Ned--come with me!"
"I can't, Flemming; I have agreed to go to Chamouni with the Denhams."
"Don't!"
"That is like advising a famishing man not to eat his last morsel of
food. I have a presentiment it will all end there. I never had a
presentiment before."
"I had a presentiment once," said Flemming impressively. "I had a
presentiment that a certain number--it was number twenty-seven--would
draw the prize in a certain lottery. I went to the office, and number
twenty-seven was one of the two numbers unsold! I bought it as quick as
lightning, I dreamed of number twenty-seven three successive nights,
and the next day it drew a blank."
"That has the ring of the old Flemming!" cried Lynde, with an unforced
laugh. "I am glad that I have not succeeded in turning all your joyous
gold into lead. I'm not always such dull company as I have been
to-night, with my moods and my presentiments. I owe them partly,
perhaps, to not seeing Miss Denham to-day, the aunt having a headache."
"You were not in a rollicking humor when I picked you up."
"I had been cruising about town all the morning alone, making assaults
on the Musee Fol, the Botanic Garden, and the Jewish Synagogue. In the
afternoon I had wrecked myself on Rousseau's Island, where I sat on a
bench staring at Pradier's poor statue of Jean Jacques until I fancied
that the ugly bronze cannibal was making mouths at me. When the aunt
has a headache, _I_ suffer. Flemming, you must see Miss Denham, if only
for a moment."
"Of course I should like to see her, Ned."
"You do not leave until evening," Lynde said, reflecting. "I think I
can manage a little dinner for to-morrow. Now let us take a breath of
fresh air. I know the queerest old nook, in the Rue de Chantpoulet,
where the Bavarian beer is excellent and all the company smoke the most
enormous porcelain pipes. Haven't I hit one of your weaknesses?"
"You have hit a brace!"
VII
THE DENHAMS
When Edward Lynde returned to the hotel that night, after parting with
Flemming at the head of a crooked, gable-hung street leading to the
Schweizerhof, the young man regretted that he had said anything on the
subject of the Denhams, or rather, that he had spoken of the painful
likeness which had haunted him so persistently. The friends had spent
the gayest of evenings together at a small green-topped table in one
corner of the smoky cafe. Over their beer and cheese they had chatted
of old days at boarding-school and college, and this contact with the
large, healthy nature of Flemming, which threw off depression as
sunshine dissipates mist, had sent Lynde's vapors flying. Nothing was
changed in the circumstances that had distressed him, yet some way a
load had removed itself from his bosom. He was sorry he had mentioned
that dark business at all. As he threaded the deserted streets--it was
long after midnight--he planned a dinner to be given in his rooms the
next day, and formulated a note of invitation to the ladies, which he
would write when he got back to the hotel, and have in readiness for
early delivery in the morning.
Lynde was in one of those lightsome moods which, in that varying month,
had not unfrequently followed a day of doubt and restless despondency.
As he turned into the Quai des Bergues he actually hummed a bar or two
of opera. He had not done that before in six weeks. They had been weeks
of inconceivable torment and pleasure to Lynde.
He had left home while still afflicted by David Lynde's death. Since
the uncle's ill-advised marriage the intercourse between them, as the
reader knows, had all but ceased; they had met only once, and then as
if to bid each other farewell; but the ties had been very close, after
all. In the weeks immediately following his guardian's death, the young
man, occupied with settling the estate, of which he was one of the
executors, scarcely realized his loss; but when he returned to
Rivermouth a heavy sense of loneliness came over him. The crowded,
happy firesides to which he was free seemed to reproach him for his
lack of kinship; he stood alone in the world; there was no more reason
why he should stay in one place than in another. His connection with
the bank, unnecessary now from a money point of view, grew irksome; the
quietude of the town oppressed him; he determined to cut adrift from
all and go abroad. An educated American with no deeper sorrow than
Lynde's cannot travel through Europe, for the first time at least, with
indifference. Three months in Germany and France began in Lynde a cure
which was completed by a winter in Southern Italy. He had regained his
former elasticity of spirits and was taking life with a relish, when he
went to Geneva; there he fell in with the Denhams in the manner he
described to Flemming. An habitual shyness, and perhaps a doubt of
Flemming's sympathetic capacity, had prevented Lynde from giving his
friend more than an outline of the situation. In his statement Lynde
had omitted several matters which may properly be set down here.
That first day at the table d'hote and the next day, when he was able
more deliberately to study the young woman, Edward Lynde had made no
question to himself as to her being the same person he had seen in so
different and so pathetic surroundings. It was unmistakably the same.
He had even had a vague apprehension she might recognize him, and had
been greatly relieved to observe that there was no glimmer of
recognition in the well-bred, careless glance which swept him once or
twice. No, he had passed out of her memory--with the other shapes and
shadows! How strange they should meet again, thousands of miles from
New England; how strange that he alone, of all the crowded city, should
know there had been a dark episode in this girl's history! What words
she had spoken to him and forgotten, she who now sat there robed in the
beauty of her reason!
It was a natural interest, and a deep interest, certainly, that
impelled Lynde to seek the acquaintance of the two ladies. On the third
day a chance service rendered the elder--she had left a glove or a
handkerchief beside her plate at table, and Lynde had followed her with
it from the dining-room--placed him upon speaking terms. They were his
country-women, he was a gentleman, and the surface ice was easily
broken. Three days afterwards Lynde found himself oddly doubting his
first conviction. This was not that girl! The likeness was undeniable:
the same purple-black hair, the same long eyelashes, a very distinctive
feature. In voice and carriage, too, Miss Denham curiously recalled the
other; and that mark on Miss Denham's cheek--a birth-mark--was singular
enough. But there the analogies ended. Miss Denham was a young woman
who obviously had seen much of the world; she possessed accomplishments
which could have been acquired only by uninterrupted application; she
spoke French, German, and Italian with unusual purity. That intellect,
as strong and clear as crystal, could never have suffered even a
temporary blur. He was beginning to be amazed at the blunder he had
committed, when suddenly, one evening, a peculiar note in her voice,
accompanied by a certain lifting of the eyelashes--a movement he had
noticed for the first time, but which was familiar to him--threw Lynde
into great perplexity. It WAS that other girl! How useless for him to
try to blind himself to the truth! Besides, why should he wish to, and
why should the fact of the identity trouble him to such a degree? The
next day he was staggered by Miss Denham alluding incidentally to the
circumstance that she and her aunt had passed a part of the spring of
1872 in Florida. That was the date of Lynde's adventure, the spring of
1872. Here was almost positive proof that Miss Denham could not have
been in New England at the time. Lynde did not know what to think. Of
course he was mistaken; he must be mistaken--and yet! There were
moments when he could not look at Miss Denham without half expecting to
see the man Blaisdell flitting somewhere in the background. Then there
were days when it was impossible for Lynde to picture her as anything
different from what she now was. But whatever conclusion he came to, a
doubt directly insinuated itself.
While he was drifting from one uncertainty to another, a fortnight
elapsed in which his intimacy with the Denhams had daily increased.
They were in Geneva for an indefinite time, awaiting directions from
Mr. Denham. The few sights in the city had been exhausted; the places
of interest in the environs could not be visited by ladies without
escort; so it fell out that Lynde accompanied the Denhams on several
short excursions--to Petit and Grand Sacconnex, to the Villa Tronchin,
to Pregny and Mornex. These were days which Lynde marked with a red
letter. At the end of the month, however, he was in the same state of
distressing indecision relative to Miss Denham. On one point he
required no light--he was deeply interested in her, so deeply, indeed,
that it had become a question affecting all his future, whether or not
she was the person he had encountered on his horseback journey three
years before. If she was--
But Edward Lynde had put the question out of his thought that night as
he walked home from the cafe. His two bars of opera music lasted him to
the hotel steps. Though it was late--a great bell somewhere, striking
two, sent its rich reverberation across the lake while he was unlocking
his chamber door--Lynde seated himself at a table and wrote his note to
the Denhams.
Flemming had promised to come and take coffee with him early the next
morning, that is to say at nine o'clock. Before Flemming arrived,
Lynde's invitation had been despatched and accepted. He was re-reading
Miss Denham's few lines of acceptance when he heard his friend, at the
other end of the hall, approaching with great strides.
"The thousandth part of a minute late!" cried Flemming, throwing open
the door. "There's no excuse for me. When a man lives in a city where
they manufacture a hundred thousand watches a year--that's one watch
and a quarter every five minutes day and night--it's a moral duty to be
punctual. Ned, you look like a prize pink this morning."
"I have had such a sleep! Besides, I've just gone through the
excitement of laying out the menu for our dinner. Good heavens, I
forgot the flowers! We'll go and get them after breakfast. There's your
coffee. Cream, old man? I am in a tremor over this dinner, you know. It
is a maiden effort. By the way, Flemming, I wish you'd forget what I
said about Miss Denham, last evening. I was all wrong."
"I told you so; what has happened?"
"Nothing. Only I have reconsidered the matter, and I see I was wrong to
let it upset me."
"I saw that from the first."
"Some persons," said Lynde gayly, "always see everything from the
first. You belong to the I-told-you-so family, only you belong to the
cheerful branch."
"Thank the Lord for that! A wide-spreading, hopeful disposition is your
only true umbrella in this vale of tears."
"I shall have to borrow yours, then, if it rains heavily, for I've none
of my own."
"Take it, my boy; my name's on the handle!"
On finishing their coffee the young men lighted cigars and sallied
forth for a stroll along the bank of the river, which they followed to
the confluence of the Rhone with the Arve, stopping on the way to leave
an order at a florist's. Returning to the hotel some time after
mid-day, they found the flowers awaiting them in Lynde's parlor, where
a servant was already laying the cloth. There were bouquets for the
ladies' plates, an imposing centre-piece in the shape of a pyramid, and
a profusion of loose flowers.
"What shall we do with these?" asked Lynde, pointing to the latter.
"Set 'em around somewhere," said Flemming, with cheerful vagueness.
Lynde disposed the flowers around the room to the best of his judgment;
he hung some among the glass pendants of the chandelier, gave a nosegay
to each of the two gilt statuettes in the corners, and piled the
remainder about the base of a monumental clock on the mantelpiece.
"That's rather a pretty idea, isn't it?--wreathing Time in flowers,"
remarked Flemming, with honest envy of his friend's profounder depth of
poetic sentiment.
"I thought it rather neat," said Lynde, who had not thought of it at
all.
In the course of that dinner if two or three unexplained demure smiles
flitted over Miss Denham's face, they might, perhaps, have been
indirectly traced to these floral decorations, though they pleased her
more than if a woman's hand had been visible in them.
"Flemming," said Lynde, with a severe aesthetic air, "I don't think
that arrangement in the fireplace is quite up to the rest of the room."
"Nor I either," said Flemming, who had been silently admiring it for
the last ten minutes.
The fireplace in question was stuffed with a quantity of long,
delicately spiral shavings, sprinkled with silver spangles or flakes of
isinglass, and covered by a piece of pale blue illusion. This
device--peculiarly Genevese--was supposed to represent a waterfall.
"Take a match and touch it off," suggested Flemming.
"If we had some more flowers, now"--"Exactly. I am going to the hotel
to get myself up like a head-waiter, and I'll bring some when I come
back."
In an hour afterwards Flemming reappeared, followed by a youth bearing
an immense basket. Lynde removed the Alpine waterfall to an adjoining
chamber, and built up a huge fire of flame-colored flowers in the
grate. The two friends were standing in the middle of the room, gravely
contemplating the effect, when a servant opened the door and announced
Mrs. and Miss Denham. A rustle of drapery at the threshold was followed
by the entrance of the two ladies in ceremonious dinner toilets.
Lynde had never seen Miss Denham in any but a dark travelling-dress, or
in such unobtrusive costume as a modest girl may wear at a hotel table.
He stood motionless an instant, seeing her in a trailing robe of some
fleecy, maize-colored material, with a cluster of moss-roses at her
corsage and a cross of diamonds at her throat. She was without other
ornament. The shade of her dress made her hair and eyes and complexion
wonderful. Lynde was proud to have her look like that for Flemming,
though he was himself affected by a queer impression that this queenly
young person was not the simple, lovely girl he had known all along. He
was embarrassed by her unexpected elegance, but he covered his
embarrassment and his pleasure by presenting his friend to the ladies,
and ordering the servant to serve the dinner immediately.
Lynde's constraint was only momentary, and the others had experienced
none. Flemming, indeed, had a fleeting surprise at finding in the aunt
a woman of thirty-five or thirty-eight, in the Indian summer of her
beauty. Lynde had given him the idea of an elderly person with
spectacles. As to Miss Denham, she had not fallen short of the mental
picture Flemming had drawn of her--which ought to have surprised him.
No charms or graces in a woman, however, could much surprise Flemming;
he accepted them as matters of course; to him all women were charming
in various degrees. He had that general susceptibility which preserves
us the breed of bachelors. The constant victim of a series of minor
emotions, he was safe from any major passion. There was a certain
chivalrous air of camaraderie in his manner to women which made them
like him sooner or later; the Denhams liked him instantly. Even before
the potage was removed, Lynde saw that his dinner was a success. "The
cook may drop dead now, if he wants to," said Lynde to himself; "he
can't spoil anything."
"You are not entirely a stranger to us, Mr. Flemming," said Mrs.
Denham, looking at him from behind the floral pyramid, which had the
happy effect of isolating two guests who sat opposite each other.
"There is a person who goes about foreign lands with no other
ostensible mission than to sound your praise."
"You must set down a great deal to filial gratitude," returned
Flemming. "I have been almost a father to our young friend."
"He tells me that your being here is quite accidental."
"It was one of those fortunate things, madam, which sometimes befall
undeserving persons, as if to refute the theory of a special
providence."
"On the contrary, Mr. Flemming"--it was Miss Ruth who spoke--"it was
evidently arranged with the clearest foresight; for if you had been a
day later, perhaps you would not have found your friend in Geneva--that
is, if Mr. Lynde goes with us to Chamouni."
"You have heard from Mr. Denham, then?" said Lynde, turning to the aunt.
"We had letters this morning. Mr. Denham is in Paris, where he will
remain a week or ten days, to show the sights to an old American friend
of ours who is to join our party. I think I told you, Mr. Lynde?
Supposing us to be weary of Geneva by this time, Mr. Denham suggests
that we go on to Chamouni and wait there. I have left the matter to
Ruth, and she decides in favor of leaving to-morrow, if the weather is
fine."
"We are not tired of Geneva," said Miss Denham; "it would be
ingratitude to Mr. Lynde to admit that; but we are longing for a nearer
view of the Mont Blanc groups. One ought to know them pretty well after
six weeks' constant looking at them; but the changes in the atmosphere
make any certain intimacy impossible at this distance. New ranges loom
up and disappear, the lines alter almost every hour. Were you ever at
the Isles of Shoals, Mr. Flemming?"
Flemming started slightly. Since Miss Denham entered the room, he had
given scarcely a thought to Lynde's dismal suspicions. Once or twice
they had come into Flemming's mind, but he had promptly dismissed them.
The girl's inquiry concerning a locality in New Hampshire suddenly
recalled them, and recalled the motive with which Lynde had planned the
dinner. Flemming flushed with vexation to think he had lent himself to
the arrangement.
"I have spent parts of two summers at the Isles of Shoals," he said.
"Then you must have observed the singular changes that seem to take
place on the mainland, seen from Appledore. The mirage on the Rye and
Newcastle coasts--is it Newcastle?--sometimes does wonderful things.
Frequently you see great cities stretching along the beach, some of the
houses rising out of the water, as in Venice, only they are gloomy,
foggy cities, like London, and not like Venice. Another time you see
ships sailing by upside down; then it is a chain of hills, with peaks
and projections that melt away under your eyes, leaving only the flat
coast-line."
Flemming had seen all this, and seemed again to see it through the
clear medium of the young girl's words. He had witnessed similar
optical illusions in the deserts, also, which he described to her. Then
he remembered a curious trick of refracted light he had once seen in
the sunrise on Mount Washington, and suddenly he found himself asking
Miss Denham if she were acquainted with the interior of New Hampshire.
Flemming had put the interrogation without a shadow of design; he could
have bitten his tongue off an instant after.
Lynde, who had been discussing with Mrs. Denham the details of the next
day's journey, looked up quickly and sent Flemming a rapid scowl.
"I have never been inland," was Miss Denham's answer. "My acquaintance
with New Hampshire is limited to the Shoals and the beaches at Rye and
Hampton. In visiting the Alps first I have, I know, been very impolite
to the mountains and hills of my own land."
"Ruth, dear, Mr. Lynde and I have been speaking of the conveyance for
to-morrow; shall it be an open or a close carriage?"
"An open carriage, by all means, aunt."
"That would have its inconvenience in case of showers," said Lynde;
"when April takes her departure from the Alps, she is said to leave all
her capriciousness behind her. I suggest a partially closed vehicle;
you will find a covering comfortable in either rain or shine."
"Mr. Lynde thinks of everything," remarked Mrs. Denham. "He should not
allow himself to be dictated to by unforeseeing woman."
"In strict confidence, Mrs. Denham, I will confess that I have
arbitrarily taken this business in hand. For nearly a week, now, I have
had my eye on a vehicle that must have been built expressly for us; it
is driven by a tall, distinguished person, frosty of mustache and
affable of manner--evidently a French marquis in disguise."
"What an adroit fellow Ned is!" Flemming said to himself. "I wonder
that with all his cleverness he could have got such a foolish notion
into his head about this girl."
"We must have the French marquis at any cost," said Miss Denham.
"The truth is," remarked Lynde, "I have secured him."
"We are to start at eight, Ruth."
"Which means breakfast at seven. Is Mr. Lynde equal to a feat like
that, aunt?"
"As I intend to have watchers and sit up all night," said Lynde, "I
think I can promise to be on hand."
This matter decided, the conversation, which had been carried on mostly
in duets, became general. Flemming soon recovered from the remorse of
his inadvertent question, or rather from his annoyance at the thought
that possibly it had struck Lynde as having an ulterior motive.
As to Lynde, he was in the highest humor. Miss Denham had been
thoroughly charming to his friend, with her serious and candid
manner--a manner as far removed from reserve as from the thin vivacity
of the average young woman of the period. Her rare smile had been finer
than another's laugh. Flemming himself went as near to falling in love
with her and the aunt as his loyalty to Lynde and the supposed
existence of a Mr. Denham permitted.
After a while the window curtains were drawn, though it was scarcely
dusk without, and candles brought; then the ices were served, and then
the coffee; and then the clock on the mantelpiece, as if it took
malicious satisfaction in the fleetness with which Time (wreathed in
flowers) slips away from mortals, set up a silvery chime--it sounded
like the angelus rung from some cathedral in the distance--to tell
Flemming that his hour was come. He had still to return to the hotel to
change his dress-suit before taking the train. Mrs. Denham insisted on
Lynde accompanying his friend to the station, though Flemming had
begged that he might be allowed to withdraw without disturbing the
party, and even without saying farewell. "I don't recognize good-bys,"
said he; "there are too many sorrowful partings in the world already. I
never give them the slightest encouragement." But the ladies persisted
in considering the dinner at an end; then the two friends conducted the
Denhams to the door of their own parlor and there took leave of them.
"Well?" said Lynde as he seated himself beside Flemming in the
carriage. "What do you think of her?"
"An unusually agreeable woman," returned Flemming carelessly. "She is
thirty-eight, she looks twenty-six, and is as pleasant as nineteen."
"I mean Miss Denham!"
"Ned, I don't care to discuss Miss Denham. When I think of your
connecting that lovely lady with a crazy creature you met somewhere or
other, I am troubled touching your intellect."
"But I do not any longer connect her with that unfortunate girl. I told
you to put all that out of your mind."
"I don't find it easy to do, Ned; it is so monstrous. Was not this
dinner an arrangement for me to see Miss Denham and in some way judge
her?"
"No, Flemming; there was a moment yesterday evening when I had some
such wild idea. I had grown morbid by being alone all day and brooding
over a resemblance which I have not been able to prevent affecting me
disagreeably at intervals. This resemblance does not exist for you, and
you have not been subtile enough to put yourself in my place. However,
all that is past; it shall not disturb me in future. When I invited the
Denhams to this dinner it was solely that I might present you to the
woman I shall marry if she will have me."
"She is too good for you, Ned."
"I know it. That's one thing makes me love her. I admire superior
people; it is my single merit. I wouldn't stoop to marry my equal.
Flemming, what possessed you to question her about New Hampshire?"
"We were speaking of the White Hills, and the question asked itself. I
wasn't thinking of your puerilities; don't imagine it. I hope her reply
settled you. What are you going to do now?"
"I shall go with them to Chamouni."
"And afterwards?"
"My plan is to wait there until the uncle comes."
"That would be an excellent plan if you wanted to marry the uncle. If I
were you, Ned, I would go and speak with Miss Denham, and then with the
aunt, who will be worth a dozen uncles if you enlist her on your side.
She doesn't seem unfriendly to you."
"I will do that, Flemming," returned Lynde thoughtfully. "I am not sure
that Miss Denham would marry me. We are disposing of her as if she
could be had for the asking. I might lose everything by being
premature."
"Premature! I've a mind to stay over and fall in love with her myself.
I could do it in a day and a half, and you have been six weeks about
it."
"Six weeks! I sometimes think I have loved her all my life," said Lynde.
From the Schweizerhof the young men drove without speaking to the
railroad station, which they reached just in time for Flemming to catch
his train. With hurriedly exchanged promises to write each other, the
two parted on the platform. Then Lynde in a serenely happy frame of
mind caused himself to be driven to the Rue des Paquis, where he
stopped at the chateau of the French marquis, which looked remarkably
like a livery-stable, and arranged for a certain travelling-carriage to
be at the door of the hotel the next morning at eight.
VIII
FROM GENEVA TO CHAMOUNI
If there is in all the world as lovely a day's ride as that from Geneva
to Chamouni, it must be the ride from Chamouni to Geneva. Lynde would
not have made even this concession the next morning, as a heavy-wheeled
carriage, containing three travellers and drawn by four stout Savoy
horses, rolled through the Grande Place, and, amid a salvo of whip-lash
and a cloud of dust, took the road to Bonneville.
"I did not think I cared very much for Geneva," said Miss Denham,
leaning from the carriage side to look back at the little Swiss capital
set so prettily on the blue edge of Lake Leman; "I did not think I
cared for it at all; yet I leave it with a kind of home-leaving regret."
"That is because you found complete repose there, I imagine," said
Lynde. "Geneva is blessed among foreign cities in having no rich
picture-galleries, or famous cathedrals, or mouldy ruins covered all
over with moss and history. In other places, you know, one is
distracted by the things which it is one's imperative duty to see, and
by the feeling that a lifetime is too short properly to see them.
Coming from the great Italian cities to Geneva is like falling asleep
after some prolonged mental strain. I do not object to waking up and
leaving it, however. I should not mind leaving Eden, in pleasant
company, on such a morning as this."
"The company, and I dare say the morning, are not insensible to your
handsome compliment, Mr. Lynde."
The morning was without flaw, and the company, or at least that part of
it represented by Miss Ruth Denham, had more color in its cheeks than
usual, and its dark eyes looked very dark and melting under their long
fringes. Mrs. Denham was also of a high complexion, but, having a
practical turn of mind, she was wondering whether the trunks, which
rose like a monument from the footboard of the vehicle, were quite
secure. It was a lumbering, comfortable concern, with red and black
wheels, and a maroon body set upon complicated springs. The back seat,
occupied by the Denhams, was protected by a leather hood, leaving the
forward portion of the carriage open. The other seat was amicably
shared between Lynde and a pile of waterproofs and woollen wraps,
essentials in Switzerland, but which the ladies doubtless would have
provided themselves if they had been in the tropics. On the high box in
front sat the driver, speaking from time to time in low, confidential
tones to the four powerful black horses, whose harnesses were lavishly
hung with flaunting chamois-tails and made merry with innumerable
silver bells.
For the last two weeks Lynde had been impatiently looking forward to
this journey. The thought of having an entire day with Miss Denham, on
such terms of intimacy as tacitly establish themselves between persons
travelling together in the same carriage, had softened the prospect of
the final parting at Chamouni; though now he did not intend they should
separate there, unless she cruelly willed it. The nature of Miss
Denham's regard for him Lynde had not fathomed. She had been frank and
friendly with him, as she might have been with a cousin or a person
much older than herself. As he told Flemming, he had never had her a
minute alone. The aunt had always accompanied them on their brief walks
and excursions about Geneva; whenever she had been unable to do so, the
excursion or the walk had been abandoned. Lynde saw, among other
gracious things in this day's ride, a promising opportunity for a
tete-a-tete with Miss Denham. Here and there, along the winding
ascents, would be tempting foot-paths, short pine--shaded cuts across
the rocks, by which the carriage could be intercepted farther on. These
five or ten minutes' walks, always made enchanting by some unlooked-for
grove, or grotto, or cascade, were nearly certain to lure Miss Ruth to
her feet. Then he would have her to himself, for Mrs. Denham seldom
walked when she could avoid it. To make assurance doubly sure Lynde
could almost have wished her one of those distracting headaches from
which hitherto he had suffered so keenly.
For the first few miles the road lay through a succession of villas and
cultivated gardens; indeed, these gardens and villas extend all the way
to Chene, where a thin ribbon of a stream, the Foron, draws the
boundary line between the canton of Geneva and Savoy. At this point the
scenery begins, not too aggressively, to be picturesque; you catch some
neat views of the Voirons, and of the range of the Jura lying on your
right. Beyond is the village of Annemasse, and the Chateau of
Etrambiere, with its quartette of towers, rises from the foot of the
Petit-Saleve in the bluish-gray distance. You no longer see Mont Blanc,
except at intervals. Here and there a knot of hamlets clings to some
fir-dotted slope, or tries to hide itself away in the bosom of a
ravine. All these Alpine villages bear the same resemblance to one
another as so many button-moulds of different sizes. Each has its
quaint little church of stucco, surrounded by clusters of gray and
dingy-white head-stones and crosses--like a shepherd standing in the
midst of his flock; each has its bedrabbled main street, with a great
stone trough into which a stream of ice-cold water is forever flowing,
and where comely young women of substantial ankles, with their flaxen
hair braided down their backs, are forever washing linen; each has its
beggar, with a goitre or a wooden leg, lying in wait for you; and each,
in turn, with its purple and green and red tiled roofs, is charming to
approach and delightful to get away from.
After leaving Annemasse, the road runs up the valley of the Arve and
crosses a bridge over the Menoge. Then comes the village of Nangy, and
then Contamines, beyond which, on a bold height, stand the two
wrinkled, crumbling towers of the ancient castle of Faucigny, whence
the province takes its name. It was at Nangy that a pretty incident
befell our travellers. On the outskirts of the village they met fifty
or sixty school-children marching three abreast, the girls on one side
of the road and the boys on the other. The girls--each in a coarse blue
or yellow frock, with a snowy neckerchief pinned over her bosom and a
pig-tail of hair hanging down her shoulders--seemed for all the world
like little old women; and not one of the little men appeared to be
less than a hundred and five years old. They suggested a collection of
Shems and Japhets, with their wives, taken from a lot of toy Noah's
arks. As the carriage rolled between the two files, all the funny
little women bobbed a simultaneous courtesy, and all the little
old-fashioned men lifted their hats with the most irresistible gravity
conceivable. "Fancy such a thing happening in the United States!" said
Lynde. "If we were to meet such a crowd at home, half a dozen urchins
would immediately fasten themselves to the hind axle, and some of the
more playful spirits would probably favor us with a stone or two, or a
snowball, according to the season."
"There comes the curee, now," said Miss Denham. "It is some
Sunday-school fete."
As the curee, a florid, stout person, made an obeisance and passed on,
fanning himself leisurely with his shovel-hat, his simple round face
and white feathery hair put Lynde in mind of the hapless old gentleman
whom he mistook for the country parson that morning so long ago.
Instantly the whole scene rose before Lynde's vision. Perhaps the
character of the landscape through which they were passing helped to
make the recollection very vivid. There was not a cloud in the pale
arch; yonder were the far-reaching peaks with patches of snow on them,
and there stretched the same rugged, forlorn hills, covered with dwarf
bushes and sentinelled with phantom-like pines. An odd expression
drifted across Lynde's countenance.
"What are you smiling at, Mr. Lynde, in that supremely selfish manner?"
inquired Mrs. Denham, looking at him from under her tilted sun-umbrella.
"Was I smiling? It was at those droll little beggars. They bowed and
courtesied in an unconcerned, wooden way, as if they were moved by some
ingenious piece of Swiss clock-work. The stiff old curee, too, had an
air of having been wound up and set a-going. I could almost hear the
creak of his mainspring. I was smiling at that, perhaps, and thinking
how strongly the scenery of some portions of our own country resembles
this part of Switzerland."
"Do you think so? I had not remarked it."
"This is not the least like anything in the Adirondack region, for
example," observed Miss Ruth.
"It may be a mere fancy of mine," returned Lynde. "However, we have
similar geological formations in the mountainous sections of New
England; the same uncompromising Gothic sort of pines; the same wintry
bleakness that leaves its impress even on the midsummer. A body of
water tumbling through a gorge in New Hampshire must be much like a
body of water tumbling through a gorge anywhere else."
"Undoubtedly all mountain scenery has many features in common," Mrs.
Denham said; "but if I were dropped down on the White Hills, softly
from a balloon, let us say, I should know in a second I was not in
Switzerland."
"I should like to put you to the test in one spot I am familiar with,"
said Lynde.
"I should not like to be put to the test just at present," rejoined
Mrs. Denham. "I am very simple in my tastes, and I prefer the Alps."
"Where in New England will you see such a picture as that?" asked Miss
Ruth, pointing to a village which lay in the heart of the valley, shut
in on the right by the jagged limestone rocks of the Brezon and on the
left by the grassy slopes of the Mole.
"Our rural towns lack color and architecture," said Lynde. "They are
mostly collections of square or oblong boxes, painted white. I wish we
had just one village composed exclusively of rosy-tiled houses, with
staircases wantonly running up on the outside, and hooded windows, and
airy balconies hanging out here and there where you don't expect them.
I would almost overlook the total lack of drainage which seems to go
along with these carved eaves and gables, touched in with their blues
and browns and yellows. This must be Bonnevine we are coming to. We
change horses here."
In a few minutes they swept through an avenue of noble trees, and
stopped at the doorstep of an inn alive with passengers by the
diligence just arrived from Sallanches, on its way to Geneva.
Lynde was beginning to feel a trifle out of spirits. The journey thus
far had been very pleasant, but it had not wholly fulfilled his
expectations. The Denhams had occupied themselves with the scenery;
they had not been much inclined to talk; and Lynde had; found no
opportunity to make himself especially agreeable. They had spoken
several times of Flemming, in a vein of eulogy. Lynde loved Flemming;
but Flemming as a topic of conversation possessed no particular
advantage over landscape. Miss Denham had never looked so lovely to
Lynde as she did this day; he was glad to get her again in that closely
fitting drab travelling-dress, laced up to the shapely white throat. A
sense of great comfort had stolen over him the two or three times when
she had sunk back in the carriage cushions and let her eyes dwell upon
him contemplatively for a moment. He was beginning to hate Mrs. Denham,
and he thoroughly loathed Bonneville, where a polyglot crowd of
tourists came flocking into the small waiting-room just as Miss Ruth
was putting up her hair and unconsciously framing for Lynde a
never-to-be-forgotten picture in the little cracked inn-mirror.
Passengers by diligence usually dine at Bonneville, a fact which Lynde
had ascertained when he selected Cluses, nine miles beyond, as the
resting-place for his own party. They were soon on the road again, with
the black horses turned into roan, traversing the level meadow lands
between the Brezon and the Mole. With each mile, now, the landscape
took on new beauty and wildness. The superb mountains--some with cloudy
white turrets, some thrusting out huge snow-powdered prongs, and others
tapering to steely dagger-points--hemmed them in on every side.
Here they came more frequently on those sorrowful roadside cairns,
surmounted by a wooden cross with an obliterated inscription and a
shrivelled wreath, marking the spot where some peasant or mountaineer
had been crushed by a land-slide or smothered in the merciless winter
drift. As the carriage approached Cluses, the road crept along the lips
of precipices and was literally overhung by the dizzy walls of the
Brezon. Crossing the Arve--you are always crossing the Arve or some mad
torrent on your way from Geneva to Chamouni--the travellers entered the
town of Cluses and alighted at one of those small Swiss hotels which
continually astonish by their tidiness and excellence.
In spite of the intermittent breeze wandering down from the regions
above the snow-line, the latter part of the ride had been intensely
hot. The cool, shadowy room, with its table ready laid for dinner near
the latticed window, was a welcome change to the three dusty voyagers
as they were ushered into it by the German landlord, whose round head
thinly thatched with whitey-brown hair gave him the appearance of
having been left out over night in a hoar frost. It was a refreshment
in itself to look at him, so crisp and cool, with that blinding
afternoon glare lying on the heated mountain-slopes.
"I could be contented here a month," said Mrs. Denham, throwing off her
bonnet, and seating herself in the embrasure of the window.
"The marquis allows us only three quarters of an hour," Lynde observed.
"He says we cannot afford to lose much time if we want to reach
Chamouni before sundown."
"Chamouni will wait for us."
"But the sunset won't."
Lynde had a better reason than that for wishing to press on. It was
between there and Magland, or, rather, just beyond Magland, that he
proposed to invite Miss Denham to walk. The wonderful cascade of
Arpenaz, though it could be seen as well from the carriage, was to
serve as pretext. Of course he would be obliged to include Mrs. Denham
in his invitation, and he had sufficient faith in the inconsistency of
woman not to rely too confidently on her declining. "As she never
walks, she'll come along fast enough," was Lynde's grim reflection.
He had by no means resolved on what he should say to Miss Ruth, if he
got her alone. In the ten minutes' walk, which would be almost
equivalent to a first interview, he could not say much. He could tell
her how grieved he was at the thought of the approaching separation,
and tell her in such a manner as would leave her in no great doubt as
to the state of his feelings. But whether he went so far as that was a
problem which he intended to let chance solve for him.
Lynde was standing on the inn steps with his after-dinner cheroot,
meditatively blowing circles of smoke into the air, when the carriage
drove round from the stable and the Denhams appeared in the doorway.
The young woman gave Lynde an ungloved hand as he assisted her to the
seat. The slight pressure of her fingers and the touch of her rings
were possessions which he retained until long after the carriage had
passed that narrow defile near the stalactite cavern in the Balme,
where a couple of tiresome fellows insist on letting off a small cannon
for you, to awaken a very disobliging old Echo who refuses to repeat
anything more than twice. What a magic there is in hands--in some
hands! Lynde could have held Mrs. Denham's hand a fortnight without
getting anything so tangible as that fleeting touch of Miss Ruth's.
"Is the grotto worth seeing?" Mrs. Denham asked, with a speculative
glance up the mountain side.
"It is an hour's hard climb, and scarcely pays," replied Lynde,
appalled by this indication of Alpine enterprise. "I visited it the
first time I came over the road. You get a good look at the peaks of
Mont Douron on the other side of the valley, and that's all; the grotto
itself is not remarkable. But I think it will be worth while to halt a
moment when we come to the fall of Nant d'Arpenaz. That is really
marvellous. It is said to be nearly as fine as the Staubbach."
As Miss Ruth leaned back in the cushions, lazily fastening the third
button of her glove with a hair-pin, there was just the faintest
glimmer of humor in the eyes that looked up into the young man's face.
He was being read, and he knew it; his dark intentions in regard to
that waterfall were probably as legible to her as if they had been
printed in great-primer type on his forehead. On two or three occasions
at Geneva she had wrested his unworded thought from him with the same
effortless sorcery. Lynde evaded her look, and studied a spire-like
peak on his left. "I shall have an air of detected villainy now, when I
ask her," he mused. "That's the first shade of coquetry I ever saw in
her. If she accepts my invitation without the aunt, she means either to
flirt with me or give me the chance to speak to her seriously. Which is
it to be, Miss Ruth? I wonder if she is afraid of Mrs. Denham.
Sometimes it seems to me she would be a different girl if it were not
for the presence of the aunt."
By and by, at a bend of the road after passing Magland, the waterfall
became visible in the distance. The cascade of Nant d'Arpenaz is one of
the highest falls in Savoy, and if it is not the most beautiful, one
can still well afford, having seen that, not to see the others. It is
not a large volume of water, except when swollen by rains, as it
happened to be this day, but its plunge from the dizzy brown cliff is
the gracefulest thing in the world. The curiously stratified face of
the precipice is concave, and the water has a fall of several hundred
feet to reach the slope, which, indeed, it seems never to reach; for
before the stream has accomplished half the descent it is broken into
fine spray, and flaunts loosely in the wind like a veil of the most
delicate lace, or, when the sunlight drifts through it, a wondrously
wrought Persian scarf. There it appears to hang, miraculously suspended
in mid-air, while in fact it descends in imperceptible vapors to the
slope, where it re-forms and becomes a furious little torrent that
dashes across the road under a bridge and empties itself into the Arve.
The carriage-road skirts the base of the mountain and offers numberless
fine views of the cascade as you approach or leave it. It was directly
in front of the fall, half a mile distant, though it did not look so
far, that the driver, in obedience to previous instruction from Lynde,
drew up the horses and halted. At that instant the sunshine slanted
across the fall and dashed it with prismatic colors.
"It is almost too exquisite to look at," said Mrs. Denham. "It makes
one doubt one's own eyes."
"I saw it once," Lynde said, "when I thought the effect even finer. I
was induced by some pleasant English tourists to stop over night at
Magland, and we walked up here in the moonrise. You can't imagine
anything so lovely as that long strip of gossamer unfolding itself to
the moonlight. There was an English artist with us, who made a sketch
of the fall; but he said a prettier thing about it than his picture."
"What was that?" inquired Miss Ruth.
"He called it Penelope's web, because it is always being unravelled and
reknitted."
"That artist mistook his profession."
"Folks often do," said Lynde. "I know painters who ought to be poets,
and poets who ought to be bricklayers."
"Why bricklayers?"
"Because I fancy that bricklaying makes as slight drain on the
imagination as almost any pursuit in life. Speaking of poets and
waterfalls, do you remember Byron's daring simile in Manfred? He
compares a certain waterfall at the foot of the Jungfrau to the tail of
the pale horse ridden by Death in the Apocalypse. Mrs. Denham," said
Lynde abruptly, "the marquis tells me there's a delightful short cut,
through the rocks here, which strikes into the road a mile further on."
"Let us take it then," answered Mrs. Denham, settling herself
comfortably in the cushions.
"It is a foot-path," explained Lynde.
"Oh!"
"Our reputation as great American travellers will suffer, Mrs. Denham,
if we fail to do a bit of Switzerland on foot. Rather than have that
happen I would undertake the expedition alone. It would be mere
martyrdom, though, without company." As Lynde turned the handle of the
carriage door and planted his foot on the first step, he ventured a
glance at Miss Ruth, who was sitting there with a face as impenetrable
as that of the Memphian Sphinx.
"Certainly, if our reputation is at stake," exclaimed Mrs. Denham,
rising with alacrity. Lynde could not help his clouded countenance.
"No," she added, slowly sinking back into the seat, "I've no ambition
as an explorer. I really have not."
"And Miss Denham?" said Lynde, drawing a scarcely repressed breath of
relief.
"Oh, Ruth can go if she likes," replied Mrs. Denham, "provided it is
not too far."
"It is hardly an eighth of a mile across," said Lynde. "You will find
us waiting for you at the opposite end of the cut, unless you drive
rapidly. It is more than a mile by the road."
"Do you wish to go, Ruth?"
Miss Denham hesitated an instant, and then answered by rising
impulsively and giving her hand to Lynde. Evidently, her first
intention had been to refuse. In a moment more she was standing beside
him, and the carriage was lazily crawling up the hill with Mrs. Denham
looking back through her glass at the cascade.
A dozen rude steps, partly artificial and partly formed by the strata
of the limestone bank, led from the roadside up to the opening of the
foot-way. For thirty or forty yards the fern-fringed path was too
narrow to admit of two persons walking abreast. Miss Denham, with her
skirts gathered in one hand, went first, picking her way over the small
loose stones rendered slippery by the moss, and Lynde followed on in
silence, hardly able to realize the success of the ruse which had come
so near being a failure. His companion was equally preoccupied. Once
she stopped for Lynde to detach her dress from a grasping twig, and
once to pluck one of those pallid waxen flowers which sometimes
dauntlessly find a footing even among the snowdrifts of the higher
Alps. The air was full of the resinous breath of the pines, whose
boughs, meeting and interlacing overhead, formed an arabesqued roof,
through the openings of which the afternoon sunshine sifted, as if
through stained glass. With the slender stems of the trees rising on
each side in the semi-twilight, the grove was like the transept of a
cathedral. It seemed a profanation to speak in such a place. Lynde
could have wandered on forever in contented silence, with that tall,
pliant figure in its severely cut drapery moving before him. As he
watched the pure outline defining itself against the subdued light, he
was reminded of a colored bas-relief he had seen on a certain Egyptian
vase in the Museum at Naples. Presently the path widened, a brook
babbled somewhere ahead among the rocks, and the grove abruptly ended.
As Lynde stepped to Miss Denham's side he heaved a deep, involuntary
sigh.
"What a sigh, Mr. Lynde!" she cried, swiftly turning upon him with a
surprised smile. "It was scarcely complimentary."
"It was not exactly a compliment; it was an unpremeditated monody on
the death of this day, which has flown too soon."
"You are very ready with your monody; it yet lacks three or four hours
of sunset, when one might probably begin to lament. I am enjoying it
all too much to have a regret."
"Do you know, I thought you were not enjoying it--the journey, I mean?
You have not spoken a hundred words since we left Geneva."
"That was a proof of my perfect enjoyment, as you would know if you
knew me better. Fine scenery always affects me like music, and, with
Jessica, 'I am never merry when I hear sweet music.' Besides, Mr.
Lynde, I was forming a plan."
"A plan?"
"A dark conspiracy"--
"Is the spirit of Lucretia Borgia present?"
--"in which you are to be chief conspirator, Mr. Lynde."
"Miss Denham, the person is dead, either by steel or poison; it is all
one to me--I am equally familiar with both methods."
As the girl lifted up her eyes in a half-serious, half-amused way, and
gave him a look in which gentleness and a certain shadow of hauteur
were oddly blended, Lynde started in spite of himself. It was the very
look of the poor little Queen of Sheba.
"With your bowl and dagger and monody," said Miss Denham, breaking into
one of her rare laughs, "you are in full tragedy this afternoon. I am
afraid my innocent plot will seem very tame to you in the face of such
dreadful things."
"I promise beforehand to regard it as the one important matter in the
world. What is it?"
"Nothing more than this: I want you to insist that aunt Gertrude and I
ought to make the ascent of Montanvert and visit the Mer de
Glace--before uncle Denham arrives."
"Why, would he object?"
"I do not think anything would induce him to trust either of us on one
of those narrow mule-paths."
"But everybody goes up Montanvert as a matter of course. The bridle-way
is perfectly safe."
"Uncle Denham once witnessed a painful accident on the
Wetterhorn--indeed, he himself barely escaped death; and any suggestion
of mountain climbing that cannot be done on wheels always meets a
negative from him. I suspect my aunt will not strongly favor the
proposal, but when I make it I shall depend on you to sustain me."
"I shall surely do so, Miss Denham. I have had this same excursion in
my mind all along."
"I was wondering how I should get the chance to ask the favor of you,
when that special Providence, which your friend Mr. Flemming pretends
not to believe in, managed it for me."
"It wasn't I, then, but Providence, that invited you to walk?"
"It looks like it, Mr. Lynde."
"But at first you were disposed to reject the providential aid."
"I hesitated about leaving aunt Gertrude alone."
"If you had refused me, there would have been no end to my
disappointment. This walk, though it is sixty or seventy miles too
short, is the choicest thing in the whole journey."
"Come, Mr. Lynde, that is an improvement on your sigh."
"Does it occur to you that this is the first time we have chanced to be
alone together, in all these weeks?"
"Yes," said Miss Ruth simply, "it is the first time."
"I am a great admirer of Mrs. Denham"--
"I do not see how you can help being; she is charming, and she likes
you."
"But sometimes I have wished that--that Mr. Denham was here."
"Why?" asked Miss Ruth, regarding him full in the face.
"Because then, may be, she would have been less devoted to you."
Miss Denham did not reply for a moment.
"My aunt is very fond of me," she said gravely. "She never likes to
have me absent an hour from her side."
"I can understand that," said Lynde, with an innocent air.
The girl glanced at him quickly, and went on: "She adopted me when I
was only three years old; we have never been separated since. She lived
in Paris all the time I was at school there, though she did not like
Paris as a residence. She would make any sacrifice for me that a mother
would make for a daughter. She has been mother and sister to me. I
cannot overpay her devotion by any unselfishness of mine."
As she spoke, Lynde caught a hateful glimpse of the road through the
stubby pine-trees beyond. It appeared to him only two minutes ago that
he was assisting Miss Denham to mount the stone steps at the other
extremity of the foot-path; and now he was to lose her again. She was
with him alone for perhaps the last time.
"Miss Ruth!" said Lynde, with sudden earnestness in his voice. He had
never before addressed her as Miss Ruth. She raised her eyes furtively
to his face. "Miss Ruth"--
"Oh, there's the carriage, Mr. Lynde!" exclaimed Miss Denham, releasing
the arm she had accepted a few paces back, and hurrying down the path,
which here narrowed again as at the entrance to the grove. "And there
is aunt Gertrude," she added, half turning to Lynde, with a rich bloom
on her cheeks, "looking as distressed as if we had slipped over some
precipice. But we have not, have we, Mr. Lynde?"
"No, we haven't slipped over any precipices," answered Lynde, with a
curt laugh. "I wish we had," he muttered to himself. "She has dragged
me through that grove and over those stones, and, without preventing
me, has not permitted me to breathe the least word of love to her. I
don't know how she did it. That girl's the most consummate coquette I
ever saw. I am a child in her hands. I believe I'm beginning to be
afraid of her."
Miss Ruth was already in the carriage, pinning the Alpine flower to the
corsage of her aunt's dress, when Lynde reached the steps. Mrs.
Denham's features expressed no very deep anxiety that he could
discover. That was clearly a fiction of Miss Ruth's. Lynde resumed his
place on the front seat, and the horses started forward. He was amused
and vexed at the inconsequence of his interview with Miss Denham, and
did not know whether to be wholly vexed or wholly amused. He had, at
least, broken the ice, and it would be easier for him to speak when
another opportunity offered. She had understood, and had not repulsed
him; she had merely evaded him. Perhaps he had been guilty of a mismove
in attempting to take her at a disadvantage. He was too discreet to
dream of proposing any more walks. A short cut was plainly not the most
direct way to reach Miss Denham.
She was in livelier spirits now than she had been in at any time during
the day. "The exercise has done you good, Ruth," remarked Mrs. Denham;
"I am sorry I did not accept Mr. Lynde's invitation myself." Mr. Lynde
was also politely sorry, and Miss Ruth contributed her regrets with an
emphasis that struck Lynde as malicious and overdone.
Shortly before arriving at St. Martin, Miss Ruth broached her
Montanvert project, which, as she had prophesied, was coldly received
by the aunt. Lynde hastened to assure Mrs. Denham that the ascent was
neither dangerous nor difficult. Even guides were not necessary, though
it was convenient to have them to lead the animals. On the way up there
were excellent views of the Flegere and the Brevent. There was a
capital inn at the summit, where they could lunch, and from the cliff
behind the inn one could look directly down on the Mer de Glace. Then
Lynde fell back upon his Murray and Baedeker. It was here that
Professor Tyndall spent many weeks, at different times, investigating
the theory of glacier motion; and the Englishman's hut, which Goethe
mentions in his visit to the scene in 1779, was still standing. Miss
Ruth begged with both eyes; the aunt wavered, and finally yielded. As a
continuance of fine weather could not be depended on, it was agreed
that they should undertake the ascent the following morning immediately
after daybreak. Then the conversation drooped.
The magnificent scenery through which their route now wound began to
absorb them. Here they crossed a bridge, spanning a purple chasm whose
snake-like thread of water could be heard hissing among the sharp
flints a hundred feet below; now they rattled through the street of a
sleepy village that seemed to have no reason for being except its
picturesqueness; now they were creeping up a tortuous steep gloomed by
menacing crags; and now their way lingered for miles along a precipice,
over the edge of which they could see the spear-like tips of the tall
pines reaching up from the valley.
At the bridge between St. Martin and Sallanches the dazzling silver
peaks of Mont Blanc, rising above the green pasturage of the Forclaz,
abruptly revealed themselves to the travellers, who fancied for the
moment that they were close upon the mountain. It was twelve miles away
in a bee-line. From this point one never loses sight of those vast
cones and tapering aiguilles. A bloom as delicate as that of the
ungathered peach was gradually settling on all the fairy heights.
As the travellers drew nearer to the termination of their journey, they
were less and less inclined to converse. At every turn of the sinuous
road fresh splendors broke upon them. By slow degrees the glaciers
became visible: first those of Gria and Taconay; then the Glacier des
Boissons, thrusting a crook of steel-blue ice far into the valley; and
then--faintly discernible in the distance, and seemingly a hand's
breadth of snow framed by the sombre gorge--the Glacier des Bois, a
frozen estuary of the Mer de Glace.
The twilight was now falling. For the last hour or more the three
inmates of the carriage had scarcely spoken. They had unresistingly
given themselves over to the glamour of the time and place. Along the
ravines and in the lower gorges and chasms the gray dusk was gathering;
high overhead the domes and pinnacles were each instant taking deeper
tinges of rose and violet. It seemed as if a word loudly or carelessly
uttered would break the spell of the alpgluhen. It was all like a
dream, and it was in his quality of spectral figure in a dream that the
driver suddenly turned on the box, and, pointing over his shoulder with
the handle of his whip said--
"Chamouni!"
IX
MONTANVERT
The mist was still lingering in the valleys, though the remote peaks
had been kindled more than an hour by the touch of sunrise. As Lynde
paced up and down the trottoir in front of the Couronne hotel, he drew
out his watch from time to time and glanced expectantly towards the
hotel entrance. In the middle of the street stood a couple of guides,
idly holding the bridles of three mules, two of which were furnished
with side-saddles. It was nearly half an hour past the appointment, and
the Denhams, who had retired at eight o'clock the night before in order
to be fresh for an early start up the mountain, had made no sign. Lynde
himself had set the lark an example that morning by breakfasting by
candle-light. Here were thirty minutes lost. He quickened his pace up
and down in front of the hotel, as if his own rapidity of movement
would possibly exert some occult influence in hastening the loiterers;
but another quarter of an hour dragged on without bringing them.
Lynde was impatiently consulting his watch for the twentieth time when
Miss Denham's troubled face showed itself in the doorway.
"Isn't it too bad, Mr. Lynde? Aunt Gertrude can't go!"
"Can't go!" faltered Lynde.
"She has a headache from yesterday's ride. She got up, and dressed, but
was obliged to lie down again."
"Then that's the end of it, I suppose," said Lynde despondently. He
beckoned to one of the guides.
"I don't know," said Miss Denham, standing in an attitude of
irresolution on the upper step, with her curved eyebrows drawn together
like a couple of blackbirds touching bills. "I don't know what to
do...she insists on our going. I shall never forgive myself for letting
her see that I was disappointed. She added my concern for her illness
to my regret about the excursion, and thought me more disappointed than
I really was. Then she declared she would go in spite of her
headache... unless I went."
The gloom which had overspread Lynde's countenance vanished.
"It is not one of her severest turns," continued Miss Ruth, ceasing to
be a statue on a pedestal and slowly descending the hotel steps with
her waterproof trailing from her left arm, "and she is quite capable of
executing her threat. What shall we do, Mr. Lynde?"
"I think we had better try the mountain--for her sake," answered Lynde.
"We need not attempt the Mer de Glace, you know; that can be left for
another day. The ascent takes only two hours, the descent half an hour
less; we can easily be back in time for lunch."
"Then let us do that."
Lynde selected the more amiable-looking of the two mules with
side-saddles, dismissed one of the guides after a brief consultation,
and helped Miss Denham to mount. In attending to these preliminaries
Lynde had sufficient mastery over himself not to make any indecorous
betrayal of his intense satisfaction at the turn affairs had taken.
Fortune had given her into his hands for five hours! She should listen
this time to what he had to say, though the mountain should fall.
At a signal from Lynde the remaining guide led the way at a brisk pace
through the bustling town. In front of the various hotels were noisy
groups of tourists about to set forth on pilgrimages, some bound for
the neighboring glaciers and cascades, and others preparing for more
distant and more hardy enterprises. It was a perfect Babel of
voices--French, Scotch, German, Italian, and English; with notes of
every sort of patois--above which the strident bass of the mules soared
triumphantly at intervals. There are not many busier spots than
Chamouni at early morning in the height of the season.
Our friends soon left the tumult and confusion behind them, and were
skirting the pleasant meadows outside of the town. Passing by the way
of the English church, they crossed to the opposite bank of the Arve,
and in a few minutes gained the hamlet lying at the foot of Montanvert.
Then the guide took the bridle of Miss Ruth's mule and the ascent
began. The road stretches up the mountain in a succession of zigzags
with sharp turns. Here and there the path is quarried out of the
begrudging solid rock; in places the terrace is several yards wide and
well wooded, but for the most part it is a barren shelf with a shaggy
wall rising abruptly on one hand and a steep slope descending on the
other. Higher up, these slopes become quite respectable precipices. A
dozen turns, which were accomplished in unbroken silence, brought the
party to an altitude of several hundred feet above the level.
"I--I don't know that I wholly like it," said Miss Ruth, holding on to
the pommel of her saddle and looking down into the valley, checkered
with fields and criss-crossed with shining rivulets. "Why do the mules
persist in walking on the very edge?"
"That is a trick they get from carrying panniers. You are supposed to
be a pannier, and the careful animal doesn't want to brush you off
against the rocks. See this creature of mine; he has that hind hoof
slipping over the precipice all the while. But he'll not slip; he's as
sure-footed as a chamois, and has no more taste for tumbling off the
cliff than you have. These mules are wonderfully intelligent. Observe
how cautiously they will put foot on a loose stone, feeling all around
it."
"I wish they were intelligent enough to be led in the middle of the
path," said Miss Ruth, "but I suppose the guide knows."
"You may trust to him; he is a person of varied accomplishments, the
chief of which is he doesn't understand a word of English. So you can
scold, or say anything you like, without the least reserve. I picked
him out for that," added Lynde, with a bland smile. "His comrade was a
linguist."
"If I have anything disagreeable to say," replied Miss Ruth, with
another bland smile, "I shall say it in French."
The guide, who spoke four languages, including English, never changed a
muscle. Lynde, just before starting, had closely examined the two
guides on their lingual acquirements--and retained the wrong man.
"I trust you will have no occasion, Miss Denham, to be anything but
amiable, and that you will begin by granting me a favor. Will you?"
"Cela depend."
"There you go into French! I haven't offended you?"
"Oh, no. What is the favor?--in English."
"That you will let me call you Miss Ruth, instead of Miss Denham."
"I haven't the slightest objection, Mr. Lynde."
"And now I want you"--
"What, another favor?"
"Of course. Who ever heard of one favor?"
"To be sure! What is the second?"
"I want that you should be a little sorry when all this comes to an
end."
"You mean when we leave Chamouni?"
"Yes."
"I shall be sorry then," said Miss Ruth frankly, "but I am not going to
be sorry beforehand."
There was something very sweet to Lynde in her candor, but there was
also something that restrained him for the moment from being as
explicit as he had intended. He rode on awhile without speaking,
watching the girl as the mule now and then turned the sharp angle of
the path and began a new ascent. This movement always brought her face
to face with him a moment--she on the grade above, and he below. Miss
Ruth had grown accustomed to the novel situation, and no longer held on
by the pommel of the saddle. She sat with her hands folded in her lap,
pliantly lending herself to the awkward motion of the animal. Over her
usual travelling-habit she had thrown the long waterproof which reached
to her feet. As she sat there in a half-listless attitude, she was the
very picture of the Queen of Sheba seated upon Deacon Twombly's mare.
Lynde could not help seeing it; but he was schooling himself by degrees
to this fortuitous resemblance. It was painful, but it was inevitable,
and he would get used to it in time. "Perhaps," he mused, "if I had
never had that adventure with the poor insane girl, I might not have
looked twice at Miss Denham when we met--and loved her. It was the poor
little queen who shaped my destiny, and I oughtn't to be ungrateful."
He determined to tell the story to Miss Ruth some time when a fitting
occasion offered.
It was only when the likeness flashed upon Lynde suddenly, as it had
done in the grove the previous day, that it now had the power to
startle him. At the present moment it did not even seriously annoy him.
In an idle, pensive way he noted the coincidence of the man leading the
mule. The man was Morton and the mule was Mary! Lynde smiled to himself
at the reflection that Mary would probably not accept the analogy with
very good grace if she knew about it. This carried him to Rivermouth;
then he thought of Cinderella's slipper, packed away in the old
hair-trunk in the closet, and how perfectly the slipper would fit one
of those feet which a floating fold of the waterproof that instant
revealed to him--and he was in Switzerland again.
"Miss Ruth," he said, looking up quickly and urging his mule as closely
behind hers as was practicable, "what are your plans to be when your
uncle comes?"
"When my uncle comes we shall have no plans--aunt Gertrude and I. Uncle
Denham always plans for everybody."
"I don't imagine he will plan for me," said Lynde gloomily. "I wish he
would, for I shall not know what to do with myself."
"I thought you were going to St. Petersburg."
"I have given that up."
"It's to be Northern Germany, then?"
"No, I have dropped that idea, too. Will Mr. Denham remain here any
time?"
"Probably not long."
"What is to become of me after you are gone!" exclaimed Lynde. "When I
think of Mr. Denham sweeping down on Chamouni to carry you off, I am
tempted to drive this mule straight over the brink of one of these
precipices!"
The girl leaned forward, looking at the rocky wall of the Flegere
through an opening in the pines, and made no reply.
"Miss Ruth," said Lynde, "I must speak!"
"Do not speak," she said, turning upon him with a half-imperious,
half-appealing gesture, "I forbid you;" and then, more gently, "We have
four or five days, perhaps a week, to be together; we are true, frank
friends. Let us be just that to the end."
"Those are mercifully cruel words," returned the young man, with a dull
pain at his heart. "It is a sweet way of saying a bitter thing."
"It is a way of saying that your friendship is very dear to me, Mr.
Lynde," she replied, sitting erect in the saddle, with the brightness
and the blackness deepening in her eyes. "I wonder if I can make you
understand how I prize it. My life has not been quite like that of
other girls, partly because I have lived much abroad, and partly
because I have been very delicate ever since my childhood; I had a
serious lung trouble then, which has never left me. You would not think
it, to look at me. Perhaps it is the anxiety I have given aunt Gertrude
which has made her so tenacious of my affection that I have scarcely
been permitted to form even those intimacies which girls form among
themselves. I have never known any one--any gentleman--as intimately as
I have known you. She has let me have you for my friend."
"But Miss Ruth"--
"Mr. Lynde," she said, interrupting him, "it was solely to your
friendship that my aunt confided me to-day. I should be deceiving her
if I allowed you to speak as--as you were speaking."
Lynde saw his mistake. He should have addressed himself in the first
instance to the aunt. He had been lacking in proper regard for the
convenances, forgetting that Ruth's education had been different from
that of American girls. At home, if you love a girl you tell her so;
over here, you go and tell her grandmother. Lynde dropped his head and
remained silent, resolving to secure an interview with Mrs. Denham that
night if possible. After a moment or two he raised his face. "Miss
Ruth," said he, "if I had to choose, I would rather be your friend than
any other woman's lover."
"That is settled, then," she returned, with heightened color. "We will
not refer to this again;" and she brushed away a butterfly that was
fluttering about her conceitedly in its new golden corselet.
Meanwhile the guide marched on stolidly with Ruth's reins thrown
loosely over the crook of his elbow. In his summer courses up and down
the mountain, the man, with his four languages, had probably assisted
dumbly at much fugitive love-making and many a conjugal
passage-at-arms. He took slight note of the conversation between the
two young folks; he was clearly more interested in a strip of black
cloud that had come within the half hour and hung itself over the
Aiguille du Dru.
The foot-path and the bridle-road from Chamouni unite at the Caillet, a
spring of fresh water halfway up the mountain. There the riders
dismounted and rested five or six minutes at a rude hut perched like a
brown bird under the cliff.
"I've the fancy to go on foot the rest of the distance," Lynde
remarked, as he assisted Ruth into the saddle again.
"Then I'll let you lead the mule, if you will," said Ruth. "I'm not the
least afraid."
"That is an excellent idea! Why did you not think of it sooner? I shall
expect a buonamano, like a real guide, you know."
"I will give it you in advance," she said gayly, reaching forward and
pretending to hold a coin between her thumb and finger.
Lynde caught her hand and retained it an instant, but did not dare to
press it. He was in mortal fear of a thing which he could have crushed
like a flower in his palm.
The young man drew the reins over his arm and moved forward, glancing
behind him at intervals to assure himself that his charge was all
right. As they approached the summit of the mountain the path took
abrupter turns, and was crossed in numberless places by the channels of
winter avalanches, which had mown down great pines as if they had been
blades of grass. Here and there a dry water-course stretched like a
wrinkle along the scarred face of the hill.
"Look at that, Miss Ruth!" cried Lynde, checking the mule and pointing
to a slope far below them.
Nature, who loves to do a gentle thing even in her most savage moods,
had taken one of those empty water-courses and filled it from end to
end with forget-me-nots. As the wind ruffled the millions of petals,
this bed of flowers, only a few inches wide but nearly a quarter of a
mile in length, looked like a flashing stream of heavenly blue water
rushing down the mountain side.
By and by the faint kling-kling of a cowbell sounding far up the height
told the travellers that they were nearing the plateau. Occasionally
they descried a herdsman's chalet, pitched at an angle against the wind
on the edge of an arete, or clinging like a wasp's-nest to some jutting
cornice of rock. After making four or five short turns, the party
passed through a clump of scraggy, wind-swept pines, and suddenly found
themselves at the top of Montanvert.
A few paces brought them to the Pavilion, a small inn kept by the guide
Couttet. Here the mules were turned over to the hostler, and Miss Ruth
and Lynde took a quarter of an hour's rest, examining the collection of
crystals and moss-agates and horn-carvings which M. Couttet has for
show in the apartment that serves him as salon, cafe, and museum. Then
the two set out for the rocks overlooking the glacier.
The cliff rises precipitously two hundred and fifty feet above the
frozen sea, whose windings can be followed, for a distance of five
miles, to the walls of the Grandes and Petites Jorasses. Surveyed from
this height, the Mer de Glace presents the appearance of an immense
ploughed field covered by a fall of snow that has become dingy. The
peculiar corrugation of the surface is scarcely discernible, and one
sees nothing of the wonderful crevasses, those narrow and often
fathomless partings of the ice, to look into which is like looking into
a split sapphire. The first view from the cliff is disappointing, but
presently the marvel of it all assails and possesses one.
"I should like to go down on the ice," said Ruth, after regarding the
scene for several minutes in silence.
"We must defer that to another day," said Lynde. "The descent of the
moraine from this point is very arduous, and is seldom attempted by
ladies. Besides, if we do anything we ought to cross the glacier and go
home by the way of the Mauvais Pas. We will do that yet. Let us sit
upon this boulder and talk."
"What shall we talk about? I don't feel like talking."
"I'll talk to you. I don't know of what... I will tell you a story."
"A story, Mr. Lynde? I like stories as if I were only six years old.
But I don't like those stories which begin with 'Once there was a
little girl,' who always turns out to be the little girl that is
listening."
"Mine is not of that kind," replied Lynde, with a smile, steadying Miss
Ruth by the hand as she seated herself on the boulder; "and yet it
touches on you indirectly. It all happened long ago."
"It concerns me, and happened long ago? I am interested already. Begin!"
"It was in the summer of 1872. I was a clerk in a bank then, at
Rivermouth, and the directors had given me a vacation. I hired a crazy
old horse and started on a journey through New Hampshire. I didn't have
any destination; I merely purposed to ride on and on until I got tired,
and then ride home again. The weather was beautiful, and for the first
three or four days I never enjoyed myself better in my life. The
flowers were growing, the birds were singing--the robins in the
sunshine and the whippoorwills at dusk--and the hours were not long
enough for me. At night I slept in a tumble-down barn, or anywhere,
like a born tramp. I had a mountain brook for a wash-basin and the west
wind for a towel. Sometimes I invited myself to a meal at a farm-house
when there wasn't a tavern handy; and when there wasn't any farm-house,
and I was very hungry, I lay down under a tree and read in a book of
poems."
"Oh, that was just delightful!" said Ruth, knitting the fingers of both
hands over one knee and listening to him with a child-like abandon
which Lynde found bewitching.
"On the fourth day--there are some persons crossing on the ice," said
Lynde, interrupting himself.
"Never mind the persons on the ice!"
"On the fourth day I came to a wild locality among the Ragged
Mountains, where there was not a human being nor a house to be seen. I
had got up before breakfast was ready that morning, and I was quite
anxious to see the smoke curling up from some kitchen chimney. Here, as
I mounted a hill-side, the saddle-girth broke, and I jumped off to fix
it. Somehow, I don't know precisely how, the horse gave a plunge,
jerked the reins out of my hands, and started on a dead run for
Rivermouth."
"That wasn't very pleasant," suggested Ruth.
"Not a bit. I couldn't catch the animal, and I had the sense not to
try. I climbed to the brow of the hill and was not sorry to see a snug
village lying in the valley."
"What village was that?"
"I don't know to this day--with any certainty. I didn't find out then,
and afterwards I didn't care to learn. Well, I shouldered my traps and
started for the place to procure another horse, not being used to going
under the saddle myself. I had a hard time before I got through; but
that I shall not tell you about. On my way to the village I met a young
girl. This young girl is the interesting part of the business."
"She always is, you know."
"She was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen--up to that time.
She was dressed all in white, and looked like an angel. I expected she
would spread wing and vanish before I could admire her half enough; but
she did not. The moment she saw me she walked straight to the spot
where I stood, and looked me squarely in the face."
"Wasn't that rather rude--for an angel?"
"You wouldn't have thought so. She did it like a young goddess with the
supreme prerogative to flash herself that way on mortals by the
roadside."
"Oh, she was a young goddess as well as an angel."
"After she had looked me in the eye a second," continued Lynde, not
heeding the criticism, "she said--what do you suppose she said?"
"How can I imagine?"
"You could not, in a thousand years. Instead of saying, 'Good-morning,
sir,' and dropping me a courtesy, she made herself very tall and said,
with quite a grand air, 'I am the Queen of Sheba!' Just fancy it. Then
she turned on her heel and ran up the road."
"Oh, that was very rude. Is this a true story, Mr. Lynde?"
"That is the sad part of it, Miss Ruth. This poor child had lost her
reason, as I learned subsequently. She had wandered out of an asylum in
the neighborhood. After a while some men came and took her back
again--on my horse, which they had captured in the road."
"The poor, poor girl! I am sorry for her to the heart. Your story began
like a real romance; is that all of it! It is sad enough."
"That is all. Of course I never saw her afterwards."
"But you remembered her, and pitied her?"
"For a long time, Miss Ruth."
"I like you for that. But what has this to do with me? You said"--
"The story touched on you indirectly?"
"Yes."
"Well, so it does; I will tell you how. This poor girl was beautiful
enough in your own fashion to be your sister, and when I first saw
you"--
"Monsieur," said the guide, respectfully lifting a forefinger to his
hat as he approached, "I think it looks like rain."
The man had spoken in English. Ruth went crimson to the temples, and
Lynde's face assumed a comical expression of dismay.
"Looks like rain," he repeated mechanically. "I thought you told me you
did not understand English."
"Monsieur is mistaken. It is Jean Macquart that does not spik English."
"Very well," said Lynde; "if it is going to rain we had better be
moving. It would not be pleasant to get blockaded up here by a
storm--or rather it would! Are the animals ready?"
"They are waiting at the foot of the path, monsieur."
Lynde lost no time getting Ruth into the saddle, and the party began
their descent, the guide again in charge of the girl's mule. On the
downward journey they unavoidably faced the precipices, and the road
appeared to them much steeper than when they ascended.
"Is it wind or rain, do you think?" asked Lynde, looking at a wicked
black cloud that with angrily curled white edges was lowering itself
over the valley.
"I think it is both, monsieur."
"How soon?"
"I cannot know. Within an hour, surely."
"Perhaps we were wrong to attempt going down," said Lynde.
"Monsieur might be kept at Couttet's one, two--three days. But, if
monsieur wishes, I will go on and tell the friends of mademoiselle that
you are detained."
"Oh, no!" cried Ruth, filled with horror at the suggestion. "We MUST
return. I shall not mind the rain, if it comes."
As she spoke, a loose handful of large drops rustled through the
pine-boughs overhead, and softly dashed themselves against the rocks.
"It has come," said Lynde.
"I have my waterproof," returned the girl. "I shall do very well. But
you"--
The sentence was cut short by a flash of lightning, followed by a heavy
peal of thunder that rolled through the valley and reverberated for one
or two minutes among the hills. The guide grasped the reins close up to
the bits, and urged the mule forward at a brisk trot. The sky cleared,
and for a moment it looked as if the storm had drifted elsewhere; but
the party had not advanced twenty paces before there was a strange
rustling sound in the air, and the rain came down. The guide whipped
off a coarse woollen coat he wore, and threw it over the girl's
shoulders, tying it by the sleeves under her chin.
"Oh, you must not do that!" she cried, "you will catch your death!"
"Mademoiselle," he replied, laughing, as he gave another knot to the
sleeves, "for thirty-eight years, man and boy, I have been rained upon
and snowed upon--and voila!"
"You're a fine fellow, my friend, if you do speak English," cried
Lynde, "and I hope some honest girl has found it out before now."
"Monsieur," returned the man, signing himself with the cross, "she and
the little one are in heaven."
The rain came down in torrents; it pattered like shot against the
rocks; it beat the air of the valley into mist. Except the path
immediately before them, and the rocky perpendicular wall now on their
right and now on their left, the travellers could distinguish nothing
through the blinding rain. Shortly the wind began to blow, whistling in
the stiff pines as it whistles among the taut cordage of a ship in a
gale. At intervals it tore along the salient zigzags and threatened to
sweep the mules off their legs. The flashes of lightning now followed
one another in rapid succession, and the thunder crashed incessantly
through the gorges. It appeared as if the great cones and cromlechs
were tumbling pell-mell from every direction into the valley.
Though the situation of the three persons on the mountain side was
disagreeable to the last extent, they were exposed to only one especial
danger--that from a land-slide or a detached boulder. At every ten
steps the guide glanced up the dripping steep, and listened. Even the
mules were not without a prescience of this peril. The sharpest
lightning did not make them wince, but at the faintest sound of a
splinter of rock or a pebble rustling down the slope, their ears
instantly went forward at an acute angle. The footing soon became
difficult on account of the gullies formed by the rain. In spite of his
anxiety concerning Ruth, Lynde could not help admiring the skill with
which the sagacious animals felt their way. Each fore hoof as it
touched the earth seemed endowed with the sense of fingers.
Lynde had dismounted after the rain set in and was walking beside the
girl's mule. Once, as an unusually heavy clap of thunder burst over
their heads, she had impulsively stretched out her hand to him; he had
taken it, and still held it, covered by a fold of the waterproof,
steadying her so. He was wet to the skin, but Ruth's double wraps had
preserved her thus far from anything beyond the dampness.
"Are you cold?" he asked. Her hand was like ice.
"Not very," she replied in a voice rendered nearly inaudible by a peal
of thunder that shook the mountain. A ball of crimson fire hung for a
second in the murky sky and then shot into the valley. The guide
glanced at Lynde, as much as to say, "That struck."
They were rapidly leaving the wind above them; its decrease was
noticeable as they neared the Caillet. The rain also had lost its first
fury, and was falling steadily. Here and there bright green patches of
the level plain showed themselves through the broken vapors. Ruth
declined to halt at the Caillet; her aunt would be distracted about
her, and it was better to take advantage of the slight lull in the
storm, and push on. So they stopped at the hut only long enough for
Lynde to procure a glass of cognac, a part of which he induced the girl
to drink. Then they resumed their uncomfortable march.
When Lynde again looked at his companion he saw that her lips were
purple, and her teeth set. She confessed this time to being very cold.
The rain had at length penetrated the thick wrappings and thoroughly
chilled her. Lynde was in despair, and began bitterly to reproach
himself for having undertaken the excursion without Mrs. Denham. Her
presence could not have warded off the storm, but it would have
rendered it possible for the party to postpone their descent until
pleasant weather. Undoubtedly it had been his duty to leave Miss Ruth
at the inn and return alone to Chamouni. He had not thought of that
when the guide made his suggestion. There was now nothing to do but to
hurry.
The last part of the descent was accomplished at a gait which offered
the cautious mules no chance to pick their steps. Lynde's animal, left
to its own devices, was following on behind, nibbling the freshened
grass. But the road was not so rough, and the stretches protected by
the trees were in good condition. In less than three quarters of an
hour from the half-way hut, the party were at the foot of the mountain,
where they found a close carriage which Mrs. Denham had thoughtfully
sent to meet them. Benumbed with the cold and cramped by riding so long
in one position, the girl was unable to stand when she was lifted from
the saddle. Lynde carried her to the carriage and wrapped her in a
heavy afghan that lay on the seat. They rode to the hotel without
exchanging a word. Lynde was in too great trouble, and Ruth was too
exhausted to speak. She leaned back with her eyes partially closed, and
did not open them until the carriage stopped. Mrs. Denham stood at the
hall door.
"Mr. Lynde! Mr. Lynde!" she said, taking the girl in her arms.
The tone of reproach in her voice cut him to the quick.
"He was in no way to blame, aunt," said Ruth, trying to bring a smile
to her blanched face; "it was I who WOULD go." She reached back her
hand unperceived by Mrs. Denham and gave it to Lynde. He raised it
gratefully to his lips, but as he relinquished it and turned away he
experienced a sudden, inexplicable pang--as if he had said farewell to
her.
X
IN THE SHADOW OF MONT BLANC
By the time Lynde had changed his wet clothing, the rain had turned
into a dull drizzle, which folded itself like a curtain about the
valley. Mont Blanc, with its piled-up acres of desolation, loomed
through the mist, a shapeless, immeasurable cloud, within whose shadow
the little town was to live darkly, half blotted out, for the next four
days.
Lynde spent the afternoon between his own chamber and the reading-room
of the hotel, wandering restlessly from one to the other, and not
venturing to halt at Mrs. Denham's door to inquire after Ruth. Though
he held himself nearly guiltless in what had occurred, Mrs. Denham's
rebuking tone and gesture had been none the less intolerable. He was
impatient to learn Ruth's condition, and was growing every moment more
anxious as he reflected on her extreme delicacy and the severe exposure
she had undergone; but he could not bring himself just then to go to
Mrs. Denham for information. He concluded to wait until he met her at
dinner; but Mrs. Denham did not come down to the table d'hote.
The twilight fell earlier than usual, and the long evening set in.
Lynde smoked his cigar gloomily at an open window looking upon the
street. It was deserted and dismal. Even the shop across the way, where
they sold alpenstocks and wood-carvings and knick-knacks in polished
lapis, was empty; in pleasant weather the shop was always crowded with
curiosity-mongers. The raw wind spitefully blew the rain into Lynde's
face as he looked out. "Quel temps de loup!" sighed a polite little
French gentleman, making his unlighted cigarette an excuse for
addressing Lynde. The wretched little French gentleman was perishing
with a desire to say a thousand graceful things to somebody, but Lynde
was in no mood for epigrams. He gave his interlocutor a light, and
sheered off. In a corner of the reading-room was a tattered collection
of Tauchnitz novels; Lynde picked up one and tried to read, but the
slim types ran together and conveyed no meaning to him. It was becoming
plain that he was to have no communication with the Denhams that night
unless he assumed the initiative. He pencilled a line on the reverse of
a visiting card and sent it up to Mrs. Denham's parlor. The servant
returned with the card on his waiter. The ladies had retired. Then
Lynde took himself off to bed disconsolately.
It was nearly nine o'clock when he awoke the following morning. The
storm had not lifted; the colorless clouds were still letting down a
fine, vapory rain that blurred everything. As soon as he had
breakfasted, Lynde went to Mrs. Denham's rooms. She answered his knock
in person and invited him by a silent gesture to enter the parlor. He
saw by the drawn expression of her countenance that she had not slept.
"Ruth is ill," she said in a low voice, replying to Lynde's inquiry.
"You do not mean very ill?"
"I fear so. She has passed a dreadful night. I have had a doctor."
"Is it as serious as that? What does he say?"
"He says it is a severe cold, with symptoms of pneumonia; but I do not
think he knows," returned Mrs. Denham despairingly. "I must despatch a
courier to my husband; our old family physician is now with him at
Paris. I have just received a letter, and they are not coming this
week! They must come at once. I do not know how to telegraph them, as
they are about to change their hotel. Besides, I believe a telegram
cannot be sent from here; the nearest office is at Geneva. I must send
some messenger who will have intelligence enough to find Mr. Denham
wherever he is."
"I will go."
"You?"
"Why not? I shall waste less time than another. There should be no
mistake in the delivery of this message. A courier might get drunk, or
be stupid. I can do nothing here. If it had not been for me, possibly
this unfortunate thing would not have happened. I am determined to go,
whether you consent or not."
"I shall be grateful to you all my life, Mr. Lynde. I should not have
thought of asking such a favor. Ruth says I was rude to you yesterday.
I did not mean to be. I was distracted with anxiety at having her out
in such a storm. If there is any blame in the matter it is entirely
mine. You forgive me?"
"There is nothing to forgive, Mrs. Denham; blame rests on no one;
neither you nor I could foresee the rain. Write a line to Mr. Denham
while I pack my valise; I shall be ready in ten minutes. Who is his
banker at Paris?"
"I think he has none."
"How do you address your letters?"
"I have written but once since Mr. Denham's arrival, and then I
directed the letter to the Hotel Walther."
"He has probably left his new address there. However, I shall have no
difficulty in finding him. Mrs. Denham"--Lynde hesitated.
"Mr. Lynde?"
"Can I not see her a moment?"
"See Ruth?"
"My request appears strange to you, does it not? It would not appear
strange if you knew all."
"All? I don't understand you," replied Mrs. Denham, resting her hand on
the back of a chair and regarding him with slowly dilating pupils.
"If you knew how troubled I am--and how deeply I love her."
"You love Ruth!"
"More than I can tell you."
"Have you told HER?" Mrs. Denham demanded.
"Not in so many words."
Mrs. Denham slowly sank into the chair and for several seconds appeared
completely oblivious of the young man's presence; then, turning sharply
on Lynde, and half rising, she asked with a kind of fierceness, "Does
Ruth know it?"
"A woman always knows when she is loved, I fancy. Miss Denham probably
knew it before I did."
Mrs. Denham made an impatient gesture and subsided into the chair
again. She remained silent a while, staring at the pattern of the
carpet at her feet.
"Mr. Lynde," she said at length, "I was not prepared for this. The
possibility that you might grow interested in my niece naturally
occurred to me at first. I was pleased when I became convinced that the
acquaintance between you had resolved itself into merely a friendly
liking. I was thrown off my guard by your seemingly frank manner. I
trusted you. You have been alone with my niece but twice--once for only
ten minutes. I will do you the justice to say that you have made the
most of those two occasions."
"I made very little of those two occasions," said Lynde reflectively.
"I think you have been--treacherous!"
"I do not see what there can be of treachery in my admiring Miss
Denham," he replied, with a flush. "I entered into no compact not to
admire her."
"Mr. Lynde, Mr. Denham will not approve of this."
"Not at first, perhaps...but afterwards?"
"Neither now nor afterwards, Mr. Lynde."
"Why not?"
"He has other views for Ruth," said Mrs. Denham coldly.
"Other views!" repeated Lynde, paling. "I thought her free."
"She is not free in that sense."
The assertion Ruth had made to him the previous day on the mountain
side, to the effect that she had never known any gentleman as
intimately as she had known him, flashed across Lynde's memory. If Mr.
Denham had views for her, certainly Ruth was either ignorant of them or
opposed to them.
"Is Miss Ruth aware of Mr. Denham's intentions regarding her?"
"I must decline to answer you, Mr. Lynde," said Mrs. Denham, rising
with something like haughtiness in her manner.
"You are right. I was wrong to speak at present. I cannot conceive what
impelled me; it was neither the time nor the place. I beg you to
consider everything unsaid, if you can, and I especially beg you not to
mention this conversation in your note to Mr. Denham. The one important
thing now is to have proper medical attendance for your niece. The rest
will take care of itself."
Lynde bowed somewhat formally and was turning away, when Mrs. Denham
laid her fingers lightly on the sleeve of his coat. "I am sorry I have
pained you," she said, as if with a touch of remorse.
"I confess I am pained," he replied, with the faintest smile, "but I am
not discouraged, Mrs. Denham."
A quarter of an hour later Lynde was on the way to Geneva. Life and the
world had somehow darkened for him within the hour. It seemed to him
incredible that that was the same road over which he had passed so
joyously two days before. The swollen torrents now rushed vengefully
through the arches of the stone bridges; the low-hanging opaque clouds
pressed the vitality out of the atmosphere; in the melancholy gray
light the rain-soaked mountains wore a human aspect of dolor. He was
not sorry when the mist gathered like frost on the carriage windows and
shut the landscape from his sight.
The storm had been terrible in Geneva and in the neighborhood. It was a
scene of devastation all along the road approaching the town. Most of
the trees in the suburbs had been completely stripped of foliage by the
hailstones; the leaves which still clung to the bent twigs were slit as
if volleys of buckshot had been fired into them. But the saddest thing
to see was field after field of rich grain mown within a few inches of
the ground by those swift, keen sickles which no man's hand had held.
In the section of the city through which Lynde passed to the railroad
the streets were literally strewn with broken tiles and chimney-pots.
In some places the brown and purple fragments lay ankle-deep, like
leaves in autumn. Hundreds of houses had been unroofed and thousands of
acres laid waste in a single night. It will take the poor of the canton
fifty years to forget the summer storm of 1875.
By noon the next day Lynde was in Paris. As he stepped from the station
and stood under the blue sky in the sparkling Parisian atmosphere, the
gloom and desolation he had left behind at Geneva and Chamouni affected
him like the remembrance of a nightmare. For a brief space he forgot
his sorrowful errand; then it came back to him with its heaviness
redoubled by the contrast. He threw his valise on the seat of a fiacre
standing near the crossway, and drove to the office of Galignani in the
Rue de Rivoli--the morgue in which the names of all foreign travellers
are daily laid out for recognition. The third name Lynde fell upon was
that of William Denham, Hotel Meurice. The young man motioned to the
driver to follow him and halt at the hotel entrance, which was only a
few steps further in the arcade facing the gardens of the Tuileries.
Mr. Denham was at breakfast in the small salon opening on the paved
square formed by the four interior walls of the building; he had just
seated himself at the table, which was laid for two persons, when the
waiter brought him Mrs. Denham's note and Lynde's card. Mr. Denham
glanced from one to the other, and then broke the seal of the envelope
with a puzzled air which directly changed into a perturbed expression.
"Show the gentleman in here," he said, speaking over the top of the
note-sheet to the servant, "and set another cover."
It was a strongly featured person of fifty or fifty-five, slightly
bald, and closely shaven with the exception of a heavy iron-gray
mustache, who rose from the chair and stepped forward to meet Lynde as
he entered. Lynde's name was familiar to Mr. Denham, it having figured
rather prominently in his wife's correspondence during the latter part
of the sojourn at Geneva.
"You have placed us all under deep obligations to you, sir," said Mr.
Denham, with a smile in which the severity of his features melted.
"The obligations are on my side, sir," replied Lynde. "I owe Mrs.
Denham a great many kindnesses. I wish I could have found some happier
way than the present to express my sense of them."
"I sincerely hope she was not justified in allowing you to take this
long journey. I beg of you to tell me what has happened. Mrs. Denham
has been anything but explicit."
She had merely announced Ruth's illness, leaving it to Lynde to inform
Mr. Denham of the particulars. That gentleman wrinkled his brows
involuntarily as he listened to Lynde's account of his mountain
excursion alone with Ruth and the result. "I have not seen Miss Denham
since," said Lynde, concluding his statement, in which he had tripped
and stumbled woefully. "I trust that Mrs. Denham's anxiety has
exaggerated her niece's condition."
"Ruth is far from strong," replied Mr. Denham, "and my wife is almost
morbidly quick to take alarm about her. In fact, we both are. Do you
know how the trains run to Geneva? Is there anything earlier than the
evening express?"
Lynde did not know.
"We will ascertain after breakfast," continued Mr. Denham. "Of course
you have not breakfasted yet. You ought to be in appetite by this time.
I am unusually late myself, this morning, and my friend, the doctor, is
still later. We tired ourselves out yesterday in a jaunt to
Fontainebleau. The doctor's an incorrigible sightseer. Ah, there he is!
Mr. Lynde, my friend, Dr. Pendegrast."
Lynde did not start at hearing this unexpected name, though it pierced
his ear like a sharp-pointed arrow. He was paralyzed for an instant; a
blur came over his eyes, and he felt that his hands and feet were
turning into ice However, he made an effort to rise and salute the
elderly gentleman who stood at his side with a hand stretched out in
the cordial American fashion.
Evidently Dr. Pendegrast did not recognize Lynde, in whose personal
appearance three years had wrought many changes. The doctor himself had
altered in no essential; he was at that period of man's life--between
fifty and sixty--when ravaging time seems to give him a respite for a
couple of lustrums. As soon as Lynde could regain his self-possession
he examined Dr. Pendegrast with the forlorn hope that this was not HIS
Dr. Pendegrast; but it was he, with those round eyes like small
blue-faience saucers, and that slight, wiry figure. If any doubt had
lingered in the young man's mind, it would have vanished as the doctor
drew forth from his fob that same fat little gold watch, and turned it
over on its back in the palm of his hand, just as he had done the day
he invited Lynde to remain and dine with him at the asylum.
"Why, bless me, Denham!" he exclaimed, laying his ear to the crystal of
the time-piece as if he were sounding a doubtful lung, "my watch has
run down--a thing that hasn't happened these twenty years." As he stood
with his head inclined on one side, the doctor's cheery eyes
inadvertently rested upon Mr. Denham's face and detected its unwonted
disturbance.
"Mr. Lynde has just come from Chamouni," said Mr. Denham, answering the
doctor's mute interrogation. "It seems that Ruth is ill."
Dr. Pendegrast glanced at Lynde and turned to Mr. Denham again.
"I imagine it is only a cold," Mr. Denham continued. "She was caught in
a rain-storm on the mountain and got very wet. Mrs. Denham is of course
worried about her, and Mr. Lynde has been kind enough to come all the
way to Paris for us."
"That WAS very kind in him."
Dr. Pendegrast drew a chair up to the table and began questioning
Lynde. Beyond satisfying such of the doctor's inquiries as he could,
Lynde did not speak during the meal. He managed to swallow a cup of
black coffee, which revived him; but he was unable to eat a mouthful.
The intelligence he had brought so occupied his companions that the
young man's very noticeable agitation and constraint escaped them. In a
few minutes Mr. Denham rose from his seat and begged the two gentlemen
to finish their breakfast at leisure, while he went to consult the
time-table at the bureau of the hotel.
"The doctor can give you a genuine Havana," he remarked to Lynde. "I
will join you shortly in the smoking-room."
While Dr. Pendegrast silently drank his coffee, Lynde pieced his
scattered thoughts together. What course should he pursue? Should he
take the doctor into his confidence, or should he let himself drift?
How could the doctor help him in the circumstances? Ruth had been
insane. What could do away with that dreadful fact, the revelation of
which now appalled him as if he had never suspected it. Ruth, Ruth--the
very name was significant of calamity! Flemming's words rang in his
ears: "You would not marry her!" He had not replied to Flemming that
night when the case was merely supposititious. But now--it seemed to
Lynde that he had never loved Ruth until this moment. The knowledge of
her misfortune had added to his love that great pity of which he had
spoken to his friend. But could he marry her? He did not dare put the
question squarely, for he dared not confess to himself that he could
not give her up. This, then, was the key to Mrs. Denham's cold
rejection of his suit; it explained, also, Ruth's unwillingness to have
him speak to her of his love. How poignant must have been her anguish
that day on Montanvert if she cared for him! She loved him--how could
he doubt it?--but she had accepted the hopelessness of the position. In
his own mind he had accused her of coquetry in their walk at the
cascade of Nant d'Arpenaz. He saw through it all now; the scales had
fallen from his eyes. She was hiding her misery under a smooth face, as
women will. A sudden reflection sent a chill over Lynde; what if she
had recognized him that first day at dinner in Geneva and had been
playing a part all the while! Then she was the most subtile actress
that ever lived, and the leading lady of the Theatre Francais might
indeed go and take lessons of her, as Flemming had said. The thought
gave Lynde a shock. He would not like to have the woman he loved such
an actress as that. Had Ruth revealed everything to the aunt, and was
she too playing a part? In her several allusions to Dr. Pendegrast Mrs.
Denham had called him "the doctor" simply, or "an old friend of our
family," and never once pronounced his name. "Was that accidental or
intentional?" Lynde wondered. "It was inevitable that he and I should
meet sooner or later. Was she endeavoring to keep the knowledge of Dr.
Pendegrast from me as long as possible? The exigency has unmasked her!"
"Now, Mr. Lynde, I am at your service."
Lynde gave a start, as if the doctor had suddenly dropped down at his
side from out of the sky.
Dr. Pendegrast pushed back his chair and led the way across the
quadrangle, in which a number of persons were taking coffee at small
tables set here and there under oleander-trees in green-painted tubs.
The smoking-room was unoccupied. Lynde stood a moment undetermined in
the centre of the apartment, and then he laid his hand on the doctor's
shoulder.
"You don't remember me?"
"Ah, then I HAVE seen you before!" exclaimed Dr. Pendegrast, transfixed
in the act of drawing a cigar from his case. "Your name and your face
puzzled me, but I could not place you, so I didn't mention it. You must
pardon an old man's bad memory. I am confused. When and where have I
had the pleasure of seeing you?"
"It was scarcely a pleasure," said Lynde, with bitterness.
"Indeed! I cannot imagine that; it is a pleasure now," returned the
doctor courteously. "It was three years ago, at your asylum. As you
will recollect, I was brought there by mistake the day the patients"--
"Bless me!" exclaimed the doctor, dropping the ignited match. "How
could I forget you! I took such a great liking to you, too. I have
thought of that awkward affair a thousand times. But, really, coming
across you in this unexpected manner"--
"I suppose I have changed somewhat," Lynde broke in. "Dr. Pendegrast, I
am in a very strange position here. It is imperative you should be
perfectly frank with me. You will have to overlook my abruptness. Mr.
Denham may return any instant, and what I have to say cannot be said in
his presence. I know that Miss Denham has been under your charge as a
patient. I want to know more than that bare circumstance."
The doctor recoiled a step. "Of course," he said, recovering himself,
"you must have recognized her."
"I met your friends six or seven weeks ago at Geneva," continued Lynde.
"I recognized Miss Denham at once; but later I came to doubt and
finally to disbelieve that I had ever seen her elsewhere. I refused to
accept the testimony of my eyes and ears because--because so much of my
happiness depended on my rejecting it."
"Does Mrs. Denham know that you are in possession of the fact you
mention? Denham of course doesn't."
"No; it is my meeting with you that he turned my discarded doubt into a
certainty."
"Then, I beg of you," said Dr. Pendegrast throwing a glance across the
quadrangle, "not to breathe a syllable of this; do not even think of
it. It has been kept from every one--from even the most intimate
friends of the family; Ruth herself is not aware of her temporary
derangement."
"Miss Denham does not know it?"
"She has not the remotest suspicion of the misfortune which befell her
three years ago."
"Miss Denham does not know it?" repeated Lynde in a dazed way.
"That--that seems impossible! Pardon me. How did it happen, Dr.
Pendegrast?"
"I assume that you are not asking me through idle curiosity," said the
doctor, looking at him attentively.
"I have vital reasons for my question, Doctor."
"I do not see why I should not tell you, since you know so much. The
family were in Florida that spring. Ruth had not been well for several
months; they had gone South on her account. It was partly a pulmonary
difficulty. On their return North, Ruth was prostrated by a typhoid
fever. She recovered from that but with her mind strangely disordered.
The mental malady increased with her convalescence. Denham and I were
old friends; he had faith in my skill, and she was placed in my care.
She was brought to the asylum because I could not attend to her
anywhere else. I considered her case serious at first, even hopeless.
The human body is still a mystery, after science has said its last
word. The human mind is a deeper mystery. While I doubted of her
recovery, she recovered. At the first intimation of returning health,
she was taken home; when her wandering thought came back to her she was
in her own room. She remembered that she had been very ill, a long time
ill; she had a faint impression that I had attended her meanwhile; but
she remembered nothing more. The knowledge of her affliction was kept a
secret from her--unwisely, I think. They put it off and put it off,
until it became very awkward to tell her."
Lynde started as he recalled his conversation with Miss Denham on the
rocks overhanging the Mer de Glace. With unwitting cruelty he had told
Ruth her own pathetic story, and she had unconsciously pitied herself!
A lump came into his throat as he remembered it.
"That was a mistake," said Lynde, with an effort, "not to tell her."
"An absurd mistake. It has given my friends no end of trouble and
embarrassment."
"How long was she afflicted this way?"
"Something less than two months."
"It was the result of the fever?"
"That chiefly."
"It was not--hereditary?" Lynde lingered on the word.
"No."
"Then it is not likely to occur again?"
"I cannot think of anything more unlikely," returned the doctor,
"unless the same conditions conspire, which is scarcely supposable, as
I could easily prove to you. You can understand, Mr. Lynde, that this
has been a sore trial to Denham and his wife; they have had no
children, and their hearts are bound up in Ruth. The dread of a
recurrence of the trouble has haunted them night and day in spite of
all the arguments I could advance to reassure them. They have got what
our French friends call a fixed idea, which is generally an idea that
requires a great deal of fixing. The girl ought to marry--every woman
ought to marry, it is her one mission; but between their affections and
their apprehensions, my friends have allowed Ruth no opportunity to
form attachments."
"I'm glad of that," said Lynde quietly.
"Are you!" snapped the doctor. "I am not. I would like to see her
married some day. Meanwhile I would like to see a dozen lovers about
her. It is as natural for a young girl to coquet as it is for a canary
to peck at its seed or trim its bill on a bit of fishbone. It is had
for the girl and the canary when they are prevented."
"There is something human in this crisp old doctor," said Lynde to
himself, and then aloud: "So Mr. Denham has no matrimonial plans for
her?"
"None whatever. Since Ruth's recovery the family have been constantly
on the wing, either at home or abroad. Most of Ruth's life has been
passed over here. I trust to your discretion. You will perceive the
necessity of keeping all this to yourself."
"I do, and I now see that your travelling with the Denhams is a
circumstance in no way connected with the state of Miss Denham's
health."
"Not in the most distant manner, Mr. Lynde. I am with them because they
are my old friends. I was worn out with professional work, and I ran
across the sea to recuperate. It is fortunate I did, since Ruth chances
to need me."
Lynde pondered a moment, and then asked abruptly: "Does Mrs. Denham
know of my former meeting with her niece?"
"I never breathed a word to Mrs. Denham on the subject of Ruth's
escapade," replied the doctor. "It would have pained her without
mending matters. Besides, I was not proud of that transaction."
Mrs. Denham's suppression of the doctor's name, then, in speaking of
him to Lynde, had been purely accidental.
"Miss Ruth's strange hallucination, in her illness, as to personality,
her fancy about the Queen of Sheba--what was that traceable to?" asked
Lynde, after a pause.
"Heaven only knows. She was reading the Old Testament very much in
those days. I have sometimes accepted that as an explanation. It often
happens that a delusion takes its cue from something read, or thought,
or experienced in a rational state. In the case of the man Blaisdell,
for example--you remember him, with his marble ship? He was formerly an
enterprising ship-builder; during the Southern war he filled a contract
with government for a couple of ironclads, and made his fortune. The
depression in shipping afterwards ruined him--and he fell to
constructing marble vessels! He is dead, by the way. I wonder if his
reason has been given back to him--in that other world."
Lynde did not speak immediately, and the doctor relighted his cigar,
which had gone out.
"Dr. Pendegrast, you have lifted a crushing weight from me. I cannot
explain it to you now and here; but you shall know some day."
Dr. Pendegrast smiled. "I didn't recollect you at first, Mr. Lynde; my
memory for names and faces is shockingly derelict, but I have retained
most of my other faculties in tolerably good order. I have been
unreserved with you because I more than suspect"--
The doctor's sentence was cut short by Mr. Denham, who entered at the
instant. He had learned that there was no train for Geneva before the
night-express. Lynde lighted the cigar which he had been unconsciously
holding between his fingers all this while, and on the plea of cashing
a draft at a banker's left the two gentlemen together. He wandered
absently into the Place de la Concorde, crossed the crowded bridge
there, and plunged into the narrow streets of the Latin Quarter.
Finding his way back after an hour or so to the other bank of the
Seine, he seated himself on one of those little black iron chairs which
seem to have let themselves down like spiders from the lime-trees in
the Champs Elysees, and remained for a long time in a deep study.
The meeting with Dr. Pendegrast had been so severe a shock to Lynde
that he could not straightway recover his mental balance. The appalling
shadow which the doctor's presence had for the moment thrown across him
had left Lynde benumbed and chilled despite the reassuring sunshine of
the doctor's words. By degrees, however, Lynde warmed to life again;
his gloom slipped off and was lost in the restless tides of life which
surged about him. It was the hour when Paris sits at small green tables
in front of the cafes and sips its absinthe or cassis; when the
boulevards are thronged, and the rich equipages come and go. There was
not a cloud in the tender blue sky against which the reddish obelisk of
Luxor looked like a column of jet; the fountains were playing in the
Place de la Concorde, and in the Tuileries gardens beyond the breeze
dreamily stirred the foliage which hid from Lynde's view the gray
facade of the gutted palace, still standing there, calcined and cracked
by the fires of the Commune. Presently all this began to distract him,
and when he returned to the hotel he was in a humor that would have
been comparatively tranquil if so many tedious miles had not stretched
between Paris and Chamouni.
He found Mr. Denham and Dr. Pendegrast delaying dinner for him. After
dinner, seeing no prospect of renewing conversation in private with the
doctor, Lynde killed the time by writing a voluminous letter to
Flemming, whose name he had stumbled on in the passenger-list of a
steamer advertised to sail two days later from Liverpool.
As Lynde took his seat in the railroad carriage that night he had a
feeling that several centuries had elapsed since daybreak. Every moment
was a month to him until he could get back to Chamouni. The thought
that Ruth might be dangerously ill scarcely presented itself among his
reflections. She was free, he loved her, and there was no reason why he
should not try to win her, however strongly the Denhams might be
opposed to him. His mind was perfectly easy on that score; they had no
right to wreck the girl's future in their shallow fear. His two
travelling companions shortly dropped asleep, but Lynde did not close
his eyes during those ten weary hours to Macon. Thence to Geneva was
five hours more of impatience. At Geneva the party halted no longer
than was necessary to refresh themselves at a buffet near the station
and hire a conveyance to Chamouni, which they reached two or three
hours after sunset. The town still lay, as Lynde had left it, in the
portentous shadow of the mountain, with the sullen rain dropping from
the black sky.
Lynde drew an alarming augury from the circumstance that Mrs. Denham
did not come down to greet them. It dawned upon him then for the first
time with any distinctness that Ruth might be fatally ill. Mr. Denham,
accompanied by Dr. Pendegrast, hastened to his wife's apartments, and
Lynde stationed himself at the head of a staircase in the hall, where
he waited nearly an hour in intolerable suspense before the doctor
reappeared.
"What is it, Doctor?"
"Pneumonia. No," he added, divining Lynde's unspoken thought even
before it had fairly shaped itself in his brain, "it is not the other
business."
"You are hiding the truth from me," said Lynde, with a pang. "She is
dead!"
"No, but she is very low. The disease is approaching a crisis; a change
must take place by to-morrow. Frankly, I dread that change. I am hiding
nothing from you."
"Is there no hope? You do not mean that!"
"I am afraid I do. Perhaps it is because she is so dear to me that I
always anticipate the worst when she is concerned. The other physician
is more sanguine; but then he does not love Ruth as I do."
"You might have saved her!"
"Everything has been done that could be done. He is a person of
remarkable skill, this Paris physician. I could have advised no change
in his treatment of the case if I had been on the spot at first. That
is a great deal for one physician to say of another. You had better go
and get some rest," added Dr. Pendegrast in a changed voice, struck by
the young man's ghastly look. "Your two night-journeys have used you
up."
Lynde went mechanically to his room and threw himself upon the bed
without undressing. He had no inclination to sleep, but his fatigue,
bodily and mental, overcame him unawares as he lay listening to the
wind which swept through the mountain-gorges, and rose and fell
monotonously with a sound like the rote of the sea. It was a vision of
the sea that filled his unrestful slumber: Ruth was dead, she had died
in his arms, and he was standing woe-begone, like a ghost, on the deck
of a homeward bound ship, with the gray, illimitable waste of waters
stretching around him.
It appeared to Lynde to be in the middle of the night, though it was in
fact on the edge of daybreak, that he was awakened by some one knocking
softly at his door. He lighted a match, and by its momentary flicker
saw Mr. Denham standing on the threshold.
"Ruth wishes to see you," he said indistinctly and with an indecisive
air. "As nearly as we can gather, that is what she wants. Come quickly!"
Without waiting for a reply Mr. Denham turned and passed through the
hall. Lynde followed in silence. He was less surprised than agitated by
the summons; it was of a piece with the dream from which he had been
roused.
There were candles burning on the mantel-piece of the chamber, and the
dawn was whitening the window-panes. In that weird, blended light the
face of the sick girl shone like a fading star. Lynde was conscious of
no other presence, though Mrs. Denham and Dr. Pendegrast with a third
person were standing near the chimney-place. Ruth raised her eyes and
smiled upon Lynde as he came in; then her lids closed and did not open
again, but the smile stayed in a dim way on her features, and a flush
almost too faint to be perceived crept into her cheeks. Lynde stooped
by the bed and took one of Ruth's hands. She turned her head slightly
on the pillow, and after a moment her lips moved as if she were making
an effort to speak. Lynde remained immobile, fearing to draw breath
lest a word should escape his ear. But she did not speak. As he stood
there listening in the breathless stillness, the flame of the candles
burned fainter and fainter in the increasing daylight; a bird twittered
somewhere aloft; then the sunshine streamed through the windows, and
outside all the heights were touched with sudden gold.
[Illustration: But she did not speak]
Dr. Pendegrast approached Lynde and rested one finger on his arm. "You
had better go now," the doctor whispered hastily. "I will come to you
by and by."
Lynde was sitting on the side of the bed in his own room in the broad
daylight. He had been sitting motionless in one posture for an
hour--perhaps two hours, he could not tell how long--when Dr.
Pendegrast opened the door without pausing to knock. Lynde felt the
cold creeping about his heart.
"Doctor," he said desperately, "don't tell me!"
"Mr. Lynde," said Dr. Pendegrast, walking up to the bedside and
speaking very slowly, as if he were doubtful of his own words and found
it difficult to articulate them, "a change has taken place, but it is a
change for the better. I believe that Ruth will live."
"She will live!"
"We thought she was sinking; she thought so herself, the poor child.
You were worth a thousand doctors to her, that's my belief. Mrs. Denham
was afraid to tell her you had gone to Paris to fetch us, thinking it
would excite her. Ruth imagined that her aunt had offended you, and
thought you had gone not to return."
"Ah!"
"That troubled her, in the state she was in--troubled her mightily. She
has been able to take a few spoonfuls of nourishment," the doctor went
on irrelevantly; "her pulse is improved; if she has no drawback she
will get well."
Lynde looked around him bewilderedly for a moment; then he covered his
face with his hands. "I thought she was dying!" he said under his
breath.
That day and the next the girl's life hung by a thread; then the peril
passed, and her recovery became merely a question of careful nursing.
The days which immediately followed this certainty were the happiest
Lynde had ever experienced. Perhaps it was because his chamber was
directly over Ruth's that he sat there in the window-seat, reading from
morning until night. It was as near to her as he was permitted to
approach. He saw little of Mr. Denham and still less of Mrs. Denham
during that week; but the doctor spent an hour or two every evening
with Lynde, and did not find it tiresome to talk of nothing but his
patient. The details of her convalescence were listened to with an
interest that would have won Dr. Pendegrast if he had not already been
very well disposed towards the young fellow, several of whose New York
friends, as it transpired, were old acquaintances of the doctor's--Dr.
Dillon and his family, and the Delaneys. The conversation between Lynde
and Dr. Pendegrast at the Hotel Meurice had been hurried and
disjointed, and in that respect unsatisfactory; but the minute history
of Ruth's previous case, which the doctor related to Lynde in the
course of those long summer nights, set his mind completely at rest.
"I could never have given her up, anyway," said Lynde to himself. "I
have loved her for three years, though I didn't know it. That was my
wife's slipper after all," he added, thinking of the time when it used
to seem to be sitting up for him at night, on his writing-table at
Rivermouth, and how often it threw a gloom over him with its tragic
suggestion. "My wife's slipper!" He repeated the phrase softly to
himself. There was nothing tragic in it now.
By and by the hours began to drag with him. The invalid could not get
well fast enough to keep pace with his impatience. The day she was able
for the first time to sit up a while, in an armchair wheeled by the
bedside, was a fete day to the four Americans in the Couronne hotel. If
Lynde did not exhaust his entire inheritance in cut flowers on this
occasion, it was because Dr. Pendegrast objected to them in any
profusion in a sick-chamber.
"When am I to see her?" asked Lynde that evening, as the doctor dropped
into the room to make his usual report.
"Let me think. To-day is Tuesday--perhaps we shall let you see her by
Friday or Saturday."
"Good heavens! why don't you put it off thirty or forty years?"
"I haven't the time," returned Dr. Pendegrast, laughing. "Seriously,
she will not be strong enough until then to bear the least excitement.
I am not going to run any risks with Ruth, I can tell you. You are very
impatient, of course. I will give you a soothing draught."
"What is it?"
"A piece of information."
"I'll take it!"
"And a piece of advice."
"I'll take that, too; you can't frighten me."
"It is a betrayal of confidence on my part," said the doctor slowly,
and with an air of reconsidering his offer.
"No matter."
"Well, then, Ruth's asking for you, the other night, rather amazed
Denham when he came to think it over quietly, and Mrs. Denham judged it
best to inform him of the conversation which took place between you and
her the morning you set out for Paris. Denham was still more amazed.
She had attempted to cure him of one astonishment by giving him
another. Similia similibus curantur did not work that time. Then the
two came to me for consultation, and I told them I thought Ruth's case
required a doctor of divinity rather than a doctor of medicine."
"Did you say that!"
"Certainly I did. I strongly advised an operation, and designated the
English church here as a proper place in which to have it performed.
Moreover, as a change of air would be beneficial as soon as might be
afterwards, I suggested for the invalid a short trip to Geneva--with
not too much company. My dear fellow, you need not thank me; I am
looking exclusively to Ruth's happiness--yours can come in
incidentally, if it wants to. Mrs. Denham is YOUR ally."
"Is she, indeed? I thought differently. And Ruth"--
"Ruth," interposed the doctor, with a twinkle in his eyes, "Ruth is the
good little girl in the primer who doesn't speak until she's spoken to."
"By Jove, she doesn't speak even then! I have tried her twice: once she
evaded me, and once she refused to listen."
"The results of her false education," said the doctor sententiously.
Lynde laughed.
"To what view of the question does Mr. Denham incline?" he asked.
"Denham is not as unreasonable as he used to be; but he is somewhat
stunned by the unexpectedness of the thing."
"That's the information; and now for the advice, Doctor."
"I advise you to speak with Denham the first chance you get. You will
have an opportunity this evening. I took the liberty of asking him to
come up here and smoke a cigar with us as soon as he finishes his
coffee."
Lynde nodded his head approvingly, and the doctor went on--
"I shall leave you together after a while, and then you must manage it.
At present he is in no state to deny Ruth anything; he would give her a
lover just as he would buy her a pair of ear-rings. His joy over her
escape from death--it was a fearfully narrow escape, let me tell
you--has left him powerless. Moreover, her illness, in which there has
not been a symptom of the old trouble, has reassured him on a most
painful point. In short, everything is remarkably smooth for you. I
think that's Denham's step now in the hall," added Dr. Pendegrast
hurriedly. "You can say what you please to him of Ruth; but mind you,
my dear boy, not a word at this juncture about the Queen of
Sheba--she's dethroned, you know!"
XI
FROM CHAMOUNI TO GENEVA
One morning in September, a month after all this, three persons, a lady
and two gentlemen, stood on the upper step of the Couronne hotel,
waving farewell with their handkerchiefs to a carriage which had just
started from the door and was gayly taking the road to St.
Gervais-les-Bains, on the way to Geneva.
A cool purple light stretched along the valley and reached up the
mountain side to where the eternal snows begin. The crown of Mont
Blanc, muffled in its scarf of cloud, was invisible. The old monarch
was in that disdainful mood which sometimes lasts him for months
together. From those perilous heights came down a breath that chilled
the air and tempered the sunshine falling upon Chamouni, now silent and
deserted, for the season was well-nigh over. With the birds, their
brothers, the summer tourists had flown southward at the rustling of
the first autumnal leaf. Here and there a guide leaned idly against a
post in front of one of the empty hotels. There was no other indication
of life in the main street save the little group we have mentioned
watching the departing carriage.
This carriage, a maroon body set upon red and black wheels, was drawn
by four white horses and driven by the marquis. The doctor had
prescribed white horses, and he took great credit to himself that
morning as he stood on the hotel steps beside Mr. and Mrs. Denham, who
followed the retreating vehicle rather thoughtfully with their eyes
until it turned a corner of the narrow street and was lost to them.
As the horses slackened their speed at an ascending piece of ground
outside the town, Lynde took Ruth's hand. The color of health had
reasserted itself in her cheeks, but her eyes had not lost a certain
depth of lustre which they had learned during her illness. The happy
light in them illumined her face as she turned towards him.
"I don't believe a word of it!" cried Lynde. "It is just a dream, a
cheating page out of a fairy-book. These horses are simply four white
mice transformed. An hour ago, perhaps, this carriage was a pumpkin
lying on the hearth of the hotel kitchen. The coachman is a good fairy
in thin disguise of overcoat and false mustache. I am doubtful of even
you. The whole thing is a delusion. It won't last, it can't last!
Presently the wicked gnome that must needs dwell in a stalactite cavern
somewhere hereabouts will start up and break the enchantment."
"It will never be broken so long as you love me," said Ruth softly. She
smiled at Lynde's fancy, though his words had by no means badly
expressed her own sense of doubt in respect to the reality of it all.
Here the driver leaned forward, skilfully touching the ear of the
off-leader with the tip of his lash, and the carriage rolled away in
the blue September weather. And here our story ends--at the very point,
if we understand it, where life began for those two.
MY COUSIN THE COLONEL
I
Mrs. Wesley frequently embarrasses me by remarking in the presence of
other persons--our intimate friends, of course--"Wesley, you are not
brilliant, but you are good."
From Mrs. Wesley's outlook, which is that of a very high ideal, there
is nothing uncomplimentary in the remark, nothing so intended, but I
must confess that I have sometimes felt as if I were paying a rather
large price for character. Yet when I reflect on my cousin the colonel,
and my own action in the matter, I am ready with gratitude to accept
Mrs. Wesley's estimate of me, for if I am not good, I am not anything.
Perhaps it is an instance of my lack of brilliancy that I am willing to
relate certain facts which strongly tend to substantiate this. My
purpose, however, is not to prove either my goodness or my dulness, but
to leave some record, even if slight and imperfect, of my only
relative. When a family is reduced like ours to a single relative, it
is well to make the most of him. One should celebrate him annually, as
it were.
One morning in the latter part of May, a few weeks after the close of
the war of the rebellion, as I was hurrying down Sixth Avenue in
pursuit of a heedless horse-car, I ran against a young person whose
shabbiness of aspect was all that impressed itself upon me in the
instant of collision. At a second glance I saw that this person was
clad in the uniform of a Confederate soldier--an officer's uniform
originally, for there were signs that certain insignia of rank had been
removed from the cuffs and collar of the threadbare coat. He wore a
wide-brimmed felt hat of a military fashion, decorated with a tarnished
gilt cord, the two ends of which, terminating in acorns, hung down over
his nose. His butternut trousers were tucked into the tops of a pair of
high cavalry boots, of such primitive workmanship as to suggest the
possibility that the wearer had made them himself. In fact, his whole
appearance had an impromptu air about it. The young man eyed me
gloomily for half a minute; then a light came into his countenance.
"Wesley--Tom Wesley!" he exclaimed. "Dear old boy!"
To be sure I was Thomas Wesley, and, under conceivable circumstances,
dear old boy; but who on earth was he?
"You don't know me?" he said, laying a hand on each of my shoulders,
and leaning back as he contemplated me with a large smile in
anticipatory enjoyment of my surprise and pleasure when I should come
to know him. "I am George W. Flagg, and long may I wave!"
My cousin Flagg! It was no wonder that I did not recognize him.
When the Flagg family, consisting of father and son, removed to the
South, George was ten years old and I was thirteen. It was twenty years
since he and I had passed a few weeks together on grandfather Wesley's
farm in New Jersey. Our intimacy began and ended there, for it had not
ripened into letters; perhaps because we were too young when we parted.
Later I had had a hundred intermittent impulses to write to him, but
did not. Meanwhile separation and silence had clothed him in my mind
with something of the mistiness of a half-remembered dream. Yet the
instant Washington Flagg mentioned his name the boyish features began
rapidly to define themselves behind the maturer mask, until he stood
before me in the crude form in which my memory had slyly embalmed him.
Now my sense of kinship is particularly strong, for reasons which I
shall presently touch upon, and I straightway grasped my cousin's hand
with a warmth that would have seemed exaggerated to a bystander, if
there had been a bystander; but it was early in the day, and the avenue
had not yet awakened to life. As this bitter world goes, a sleek,
prosperous, well-dressed man does not usually throw much heartiness
into his manner when he is accosted on the street by so unpromising and
dismal an object as my cousin Washington Flagg was that morning. Not at
all in the way of sounding the trumpet of my own geniality, but simply
as the statement of a fact, I will say that I threw a great deal of
heartiness into my greeting. This man to me meant Family.
I stood curiously alone in the world. My father died before I was born,
and my mother shortly afterwards. I had neither brother nor sister.
Indeed, I never had any near relatives except a grandfather until my
sons came along. Mrs. Wesley, when I married her, was not merely an
only child, but an orphan. Fate denied me even a mother-in-law. I had
one uncle and one cousin. The former I do not remember ever to have
seen, and my association with the latter, as has been stated, was of a
most limited order. Perhaps I should have had less sentiment about
family ties if I had had more of them. As it was, Washington Flagg
occupied the position of sole kinsman, always excepting the little
Wesleys, and I was as glad to see him that May morning in his poverty
as if he had come to me loaded with the title-deeds of those vast
estates which our ancestors (I wonder that I was allowed any ancestors:
why wasn't I created at once out of some stray scrap of protoplasm?)
were supposed to have held in the colonial period. As I gazed upon
Washington Flagg I thrilled with the sense that I was gazing upon the
materialization in a concrete form of all the ghostly brothers and
sisters and nephews and nieces which I had never had.
"Dear old boy!" I exclaimed, in my turn, holding on to his hand as if I
were afraid that I was going to lose him again for another twenty
years. "Bless my stars! where did you come from?"
"From Dixie's Land," he said, with a laugh. "'Way down in Dixie."
In a few words, and with a picturesqueness of phrase in which I noted a
rich Southern flavor, he explained the phenomenon of his presence in
New York. After Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court-House, my cousin
had managed to reach Washington, where he was fortunate enough to get a
free pass to Baltimore. He had nearly starved to death in making his
way out of Virginia. To quote his words, "The wind that is supposed to
be tempered expressly for shorn lambs was not blowing very heavily
about that time." At Baltimore he fell in with a former Mobile
acquaintance, from whom he borrowed a sum sufficient to pay the fare to
New York--a humiliating necessity, as my cousin remarked, for a man who
had been a colonel in Stonewall Jackson's brigade. Flagg had reached
the city before daybreak, and had wandered for hours along the
water-front, waiting for some place to open, in order that he might
look up my address in the Directory, if I were still in the land of the
living. He had had what he described as an antediluvian sandwich the
previous day at two o'clock, since which banquet no food had passed his
lips.
"And I'll be hanged," he said, "if the first shop that took down its
shutters wasn't a restaurant, with a cursed rib of roast beef, flanked
with celery, and a ham in curl-papers staring at me through the
window-pane. A little tin sign, with 'Meals at All Hours' painted on
it--what did they want to go and do that for?--knocked the breath clean
out of me. I gave one look, and ploughed up the street, for if I had
stayed fifteen seconds longer in front of that plate-glass, I reckon I
would have burst it in. Well, I put distance between me and temptation,
and by and by I came to a newspaper office, where I cornered a
Directory. I was on the way to your house when we collided; and now,
Tom Wesley, for heaven's sake introduce me to something to eat. There
is no false pride about me; I'd shake hands with a bone."
The moisture was ready to gather in my eyes, and for a second or two I
was unable to manage my voice. Here was my only kinsman on the verge of
collapse--one miserable sandwich, like a thin plank, between him and
destruction. My own plenteous though hasty morning meal turned into
reproachful lead within me.
"Dear old boy!" I cried again. "Come along! I can see that you are
nearly famished."
"I've a right smart appetite, Thomas, there's no mistake about that. If
appetite were assets, I could invite a whole regiment to rations."
I had thrust my hand under his arm, and was dragging him towards a
small oyster shop, whose red balloon in a side street had caught my
eye, when I suddenly remembered that it was imperative on me to be at
the office at eight o'clock that morning, in order to prepare certain
papers wanted by the president of the board, previous to a meeting of
the directors. (I was at that time under-secretary of the Savonarola
Fire Insurance Company.) The recollection of the business which had
caused me to be on foot at this unusual hour brought me to a dead halt.
I dropped my cousin's arm, and stood looking at him helplessly. It
seemed so inhospitable, not to say cold-blooded, to send him off to get
his breakfast alone. Flagg misinterpreted my embarrassment.
"Of course," he said, with a touch of dignity which pierced me through
the bosom, "I do not wish to be taken to any place where I would
disgrace you. I know how impossible I am. Yet this suit of clothes cost
me twelve hundred dollars in Confederate scrip. These boots are not
much to look at, but they were made by a scion of one of the first
families of the South; I paid him two hundred dollars for them, and he
was right glad to get it. To such miserable straits have Southern
gentlemen been reduced by the vandals of the North. Perhaps you don't
like the Confederate gray?"
"Bother your boots and your clothes!" I cried. "Nobody will notice them
here." (Which was true enough, for in those days the land was strewed
with shreds and patches of the war. The drivers and conductors of
street cars wore overcoats made out of shoddy army blankets, and the
dustmen went about in cast-off infantry caps.) "What troubles me is
that I can't wait to start you on your breakfast."
"I reckon I don't need much starting."
I explained the situation to him, and suggested that instead of going
to the restaurant, he should go directly to my house, and be served by
Mrs. Wesley, to whom I would write a line on a leaf of my
memorandum-book. I did not suggest this step in the first instance
because the little oyster saloon, close at hand, had seemed to offer
the shortest cut to my cousin's relief.
"So you're married?" said he.
"Yes--and you?"
"I haven't taken any matrimony in mine."
"I've been married six years, and have two boys."
"No! How far is your house?" he inquired. "Will I have to take a caar?"
"A 'caar'? Ah, yes--that is to say, no. A car isn't worth while. You
see that bakery two blocks from here, at the right? That's on the
corner of Clinton Place. You turn down there. You'll notice in looking
over what I've written to Mrs. Wesley that she is to furnish you with
some clothes, such as are worn by--by vandals of the North in
comfortable circumstances."
"Tom Wesley, you are as good as a straight flush. If you ever come down
South, when this cruel war is over, our people will treat you like one
of the crowned heads--only a devilish sight better, for the crowned
heads rather went back on us. If England had recognized the Southern
Confederacy"--
"Never mind that; your tenderloin steak is cooling."
"Don't mention it! I go. But I say, Tom--Mrs. Wesley? Really, I am
hardly presentable. Are there other ladies around?"
"There's no one but Mrs. Wesley."
"Do you think I can count on her being glad to see me at such short
notice?"
"She will be a sister to you," I said warmly.
"Well, I reckon that you two are a pair of trumps. Au revoir! Be good
to yourself."
With this, my cousin strode off, tucking my note to Mrs. Wesley inside
the leather belt buckled tightly around his waist. I lingered a moment
on the curbstone, and looked after him with a sensation of mingled
pride, amusement, and curiosity. That was my Family; there it was, in
that broad back and those not ungraceful legs, striding up Sixth
Avenue, with its noble intellect intent on thoughts of breakfast. I was
thankful that it had not been written in the book of fate that this
limb of the closely pruned Wesley tree should be lopped off by the
sword of war. But as Washington Flagg turned into Clinton Place, I had
a misgiving. It was hardly to be expected that a person of his
temperament, fresh from a four years' desperate struggle and a
disastrous defeat, would refrain from expressing his views on the
subject. That those views would be somewhat lurid, I was convinced by
the phrases which he had dropped here and there in the course of our
conversation. He was, to all intents and purposes, a Southerner. He had
been a colonel in Stonewall Jackson's brigade. And Mrs. Wesley was such
an uncompromising patriot! It was in the blood. Her great-grandfather,
on the mother's side, had frozen to death at Valley Forge in the winter
of 1778, and her grandfather, on the paternal side, had had his head
taken off by a round-shot from his Majesty's sloop of war Porpoise in
1812. I believe that Mrs. Wesley would have applied for a divorce from
me if I had not served a year in the army at the beginning of the war.
I began bitterly to regret that I had been obliged to present my cousin
to her so abruptly. I wished it had occurred to me to give him a word
or two of caution, or that I had had sense enough to adhere to my first
plan of letting him feed himself at the little oyster establishment
round the corner. But wishes and regrets could not now mend the matter;
so I hailed an approaching horse-car, and comforted myself on the rear
platform with the reflection that perhaps the colonel would not wave
the palmetto leaf too vigorously, if he waved it at all, in the face of
Mrs. Wesley.
II
The awkwardness of the situation disturbed me more or less during the
forenoon; but fortunately it was a half-holiday, and I was able to
leave the office shortly after one o'clock.
I do not know how I came to work myself into such a state of mind on
the way up town, but as I stepped from the horse-car and turned into
Clinton Place I had a strong apprehension that I should find some
unpleasant change in the facial aspect of the little red brick building
I occupied--a scowl, for instance, on the brown-stone eyebrow over the
front door. I actually had a feeling of relief when I saw that the
facade presented its usual unaggressive appearance.
As I entered the hall, Mrs. Wesley, who had heard my pass-key grating
in the lock, was coming down-stairs.
"Is my cousin here, Clara?" I asked, in the act of reaching up to hang
my hat on the rack.
"No," said Mrs. Wesley. There was a tone in that monosyllable that
struck me. "But he has been here?"
"He has been here," replied Mrs. Wesley. "May be you noticed the
bell-knob hanging out one or two inches. Is Mr. Flagg in the habit of
stretching the bell-wire of the houses he visits, when the door is not
opened in a moment? Has he escaped from somewhere?"
"Escaped from somewhere!" I echoed. "I only asked; he behaved so
strangely."
"Good heavens, Clara! what has the man done? I hope that nothing
unpleasant has happened. Flagg is my only surviving relative--I may say
our only surviving relative--and I should be pained to have any
misunderstanding. I want you to like him."
"There was a slight misunderstanding at first," said Clara, and a smile
flitted across her face, softening the features which had worn an air
of unusual seriousness and preoccupation. "But it is all right now,
dear. He has eaten everything in the house--that bit of spring lamb I
saved expressly for you!--and has gone down town 'on a raid,' as he
called it, in your second-best suit--the checked tweed. I did all I
could for him."
"My dear, something has ruffled you. What is it?"
"Wesley," said my wife slowly, and in a perplexed way, "I have had so
few relatives that perhaps I don't know what to do with them, or what
to say to them."
"You always say and do what is just right."
"I began unfortunately with Mr. Flagg, then. Mary was washing the
dishes when he rang, and I went to the door. If he IS our cousin, I
must say that he cut a remarkable figure on the doorstep."
"I can imagine it, my dear, coming upon you so unexpectedly. There were
peculiarities in his costume."
"For an instant," Clara went on, "I took him for the ashman, though the
ashman always goes to the area door, and never comes on Tuesdays; and
then, before the creature had a chance to speak, I said, 'We don't want
any,' supposing he had something to sell. Instead of going away
quietly, as I expected he would do, the man made a motion to come in,
and I slammed the door on him."
"Dear! dear!"
"What else could I do, all alone in the hall? How was I to know that he
was one of the family?"
"What happened next?"
"Well, I saw that I had shut the lapel of his coat in the door-jamb,
and that the man couldn't go away if he wanted to ever so much. Wasn't
it dreadful? Of course I didn't dare to open the door, and there he
was! He began pounding on the panels and ringing the bell in a manner
to curdle one's blood. He rang the bell at least a hundred times in
succession. I stood there with my hand on the bolt, not daring to move
or breathe. I called to Mary to put on her things, steal out the lower
way, and bring the police. Suddenly everything was still outside, and
presently I saw a piece of paper slowly slipping in over the threshold,
oh, so slyly! I felt my hands and feet grow cold. I felt that the man
himself was about to follow that narrow strip of paper; that he was
bound to get in that way, or through the keyhole, or somehow. Then I
recognized your handwriting. My first thought was that you had been
killed in some horrible accident"--
"And had dropped you a line?"
"I didn't reason about it, Wesley; I was paralyzed. I picked up the
paper, and read it, and opened the door, and Mr. Flagg rushed in as if
he had been shot out of something. 'Don't want any?' he shouted. 'But I
do! I want some breakfast!' You should have heard him."
"He stated a fact, at any rate. To be sure he might have stated it less
vivaciously." I was beginning to be amused.
"After that he was quieter, and tried to make himself agreeable, and we
laughed a little together over my mistake--that is, HE laughed. Of
course I got breakfast for him--and such a breakfast!"
"He had been without anything to eat since yesterday."
"I should have imagined," said Clara, "that he had eaten nothing since
the war broke out."
"Did he say anything in particular about himself?" I asked, with a
recurrent touch of anxiety.
"He wasn't particular what he said about himself. Without in the least
seeing the horror of it, he positively boasted of having been in the
rebel army."
"Yes--a colonel."
"That makes it all the worse," replied Clara.
"But they had to have colonels, you know."
"Is Mr. Flagg a Virginian, or a Mississippian, or a Georgian?"
"No, my dear; he was born in the State of Maine; but he has lived so
long in the South that he's quite one of them for the present. We must
make allowances for him, Clara. Did he say anything else?"
"Oh, yes."
"What did he say?"
"He said he'd come back to supper."
It was clear that Clara was not favorably impressed by my cousin, and,
indeed, the circumstances attending his advent were not happy. It was
likewise clear that I had him on my hands, temporarily at least. I
almost reproach myself even now for saying "on my hands," in connection
with my own flesh and blood. The responsibility did not so define
itself at the time. It took the form of a novel and pleasing duty. Here
was my only kinsman, in a strange city, without friends, money, or
hopeful outlook. My course lay before me as straight as a turnpike. I
had a great deal of family pride, even if I did not have any family to
speak of, and I was resolved that what little I had should not perish
for want of proper sustenance.
Shortly before six o'clock Washington Flagg again presented himself at
our doorstep, and obtained admission to the house with fewer
difficulties than he had encountered earlier in the day.
I do not think I ever saw a man in destitute circumstances so entirely
cheerful as my cousin was. Neither the immediate past, which must have
been full of hardships, nor the immediate future, which was not lavish
of its promises, seemed to give him any but a momentary and impersonal
concern. At the supper-table he talked much and well, exceedingly well,
I thought, except when he touched on the war, which he was continually
doing, and then I was on tenter-hooks. His point of view was so opposed
to ours as to threaten in several instances to bring on an engagement
all along the line. This calamity was averted by my passing something
to him at the critical moment. Now I checked his advance by a slice of
cold tongue, and now I turned his flank with another cup of tea; but I
questioned my ability to preserve peace throughout the evening. Before
the meal was at an end there had crept into Clara's manner a polite
calmness which I never liked to see. What was I going to do with these
two after supper, when my cousin Flagg, with his mind undistracted by
relays of cream toast, could give his entire attention to the Lost
Cause?
As we were pushing the chairs back from the table, I was inspired with
the idea of taking our guest off to a cafe concert over in the
Bowery--a volksgarten very popular in those days. While my whispered
suggestion was meeting Clara's cordial approval, our friend Bleeker
dropped in. So the colonel and Bleeker and I passed the evening with
"lager-beer and Meyer-beer," as my lively kinsman put it; after which
he spent the night on the sofa in our sitting-room, for we had no spare
chamber to place at his disposal.
"I shall be very snug here," he said, smiling down my apologies. "I'm a
'possum for adapting myself to any odd hollow."
The next morning my cousin was early astir, possibly not having found
that narrow springless lounge all a 'possum could wish, and joined us
in discussing a plan which I had proposed overnight to Mrs. Wesley,
namely, that he should hire an apartment in a quiet street near by, and
take his meals--that was to say, his dinner--with us, until he could
make such arrangements as would allow him to live more conveniently. To
return South, where all the lines of his previous business connections
were presumably broken, was at present out of the question.
"The war has ruined our people," said the colonel. "I will have to put
up for a while with a place in a bank or an insurance office, or
something in that small way. The world owes me a living, North or
South."
His remark nettled me a little, though he was, of course, unaware of my
relations with the Savonarola Fire Insurance Company, and had meant no
slight.
"I don't quite see that," I observed.
"Don't see what?"
"How the world contrived to get so deeply into your debt--how all the
points of the compass managed it."
"Thomas, I didn't ask to be born, did I?"
"Probably not."
"But I was born, wasn't I?"
"To all appearances."
"Well, then!"
"But you cannot hold the world in general responsible for your birth.
The responsibility narrows itself down to your parents."
"Then I am euchred. By one of those laws of nature which make this
globe a sweet spot to live on, they were taken from me just when I
needed them most--my mother in my infancy, and my father in my
childhood."
"But your father left you something?"
"The old gentleman left me nothing, and I've been steadily increasing
the legacy ever since."
"What did you do before the war?" inquired Clara sympathetically. His
mention of his early losses had touched her.
"Oh, a number of things. I read law for a while. At one time I was
interested in a large concern for the manufacture of patent metallic
burial cases; but nobody seemed to die that year. Good health raged
like an epidemic all over the South. Latterly I dabbled a little in
stocks--and stocks dabbled in me."
"You were not successful, then?" I said.
"I was at first, but when the war fever broke out and the Southern
heart was fired, everything that didn't go down went up."
"And you couldn't meet your obligations?"
"That wasn't the trouble--I couldn't get away from them," replied the
colonel, with a winsome smile. "I met them at every corner."
The man had a fashion of turning his very misfortunes into
pleasantries. Surely prosperity would be wasted on a person so gifted
with optimism. I felt it to be kind and proper, however, to express the
hope that he had reached the end of his adversity, and to assure him
that I would do anything I could in the world to help him.
"Tom Wesley, I believe you would."
Before the close of that day Mrs. Wesley, who is a lady that does not
allow any species of vegetation to accumulate under her feet, had
secured a furnished room for our kinsman in a street branching off from
Clinton Place, and at a moderate additional expense contracted to have
him served with breakfast on the premises. Previous to this I had dined
down town, returning home in the evening to a rather heavy tea, which
was really my wife's dinner--Sheridan and Ulysses (such were the heroic
names under which the two little Wesleys were staggering) had their
principal meal at midday. It was, of course, not desirable that the
colonel should share this meal with them and Mrs. Wesley in my absence.
So we decided to have a six o'clock dinner; a temporary disarrangement
of our domestic machinery, for my cousin Flagg would doubtless find
some acceptable employment before long, and leave the household free to
slip back into its regular grooves.
An outline of the physical aspects of the exotic kinsman who had so
unexpectedly added himself to the figures at our happy fireside seems
not out of place here. The portrait, being the result of many sittings,
does not in some points convey the exact impression he made upon us in
the earlier moments of our intimacy; but that is not important.
Though Washington Flagg had first opened his eyes on the banks of the
Penobscot, he appeared to have been planned by nature to adorn the
banks of the Rappahannock. There was nothing of the New Englander about
him. The sallowness of his complexion and the blackness of his straight
hair, which he wore long, were those of the typical Southerner. He was
of medium height and loosely built, with a kind of elastic grace in his
disjointedness. When he smiled he was positively handsome; in repose
his features were nearly plain, the lips too indecisive, and the eyes
lacking in lustre. A sparse tuft of beard at his chin--he was otherwise
smoothly shaven--lengthened the face. There was, when he willed it,
something very ingratiating in his manner--even Clara admitted that--a
courteous and unconventional sort of ease. In all these surface
characteristics he was a geographical anomaly. In the cast of his mind
he was more Southern than the South, as a Northern convert is apt to
be. Even his speech, like the dyer's arm, had taken tints from his
environment. One might say that his pronunciation had literally been
colored by his long association with the colored race. He invariably
said flo' for floor, and djew for dew; but I do not anywhere attempt a
phonetic reproduction of his dialect; in its finer qualities it was too
elusive to be snared in a network of letters. In spite of his
displacements, for my cousin had lived all over the South in his
boyhood, he had contrived to pick up a very decent education. As to his
other attributes, he shall be left to reveal them himself.
III
Mrs. Wesley kindly assumed the charge of establishing Washington Flagg
in his headquarters, as he termed the snug hall bedroom in Macdougal
Street. There were numberless details to be looked to. His wardrobe,
among the rest, needed replenishing down to the most unconsidered
button, for Flagg had dropped into our little world with as few
impedimenta as if he had been a newly born infant. Though my condition,
like that desired by Agur, the son of Jakeh, was one of neither poverty
nor riches, greenbacks in those days were greenbacks. I mention the
fact in order to say that my satisfaction in coming to the rescue of my
kinsman would have been greatly lessened if it had involved no
self-denial whatever.
The day following his installation I was partly annoyed, partly amused,
to find that Flagg had purchased a rather expensive meerschaum pipe and
a pound or two of Latakia tobacco.
"I cannot afford to smoke cigars," he explained. "I must economize
until I get on my feet."
Perhaps it would have been wiser if I had personally attended to his
expenditures, minor as well as major, but it did not seem practicable
to leave him without a cent in his pocket. His pilgrimage down town
that forenoon had apparently had no purpose beyond this purchase,
though on the previous evening I had directed his notice to two or
three commercial advertisements which impressed me as worth looking
into. I hesitated to ask him if he had looked into them. A collateral
feeling of delicacy prevented me from breathing a word to Clara about
the pipe.
Our reconstructed household, with its unreconstructed member, now moved
forward on the lines laid down. Punctually at a quarter to six P. M. my
cousin appeared at the front door, hung his hat on the rack, and passed
into the sitting-room, sometimes humming in the hall a bar or two of
The Bonny Blue Flag that bears a Single Star, to the infinite distaste
of Mrs. Wesley, who was usually at that moment giving the finishing
touches to the dinner-table. After dinner, during which I was in a
state of unrelaxed anxiety lest the colonel should get himself on too
delicate ground, I took him into my small snuggery at the foot of the
hall, where coffee was served to us, Mrs. Wesley being left to her own
devices.
For several days matters went as smoothly as I could have hoped. I
found it so easy, when desirable, to switch the colonel on to one of my
carefully contrived side tracks that I began to be proud of my skill
and to enjoy the exercise of it. But one evening, just as we were in
the middle of the dessert, he suddenly broke out with, "We were
conquered by mere brute force, you know!"
"That is very true," I replied. "It is brute force that tells in war.
Wasn't it Napoleon who said that he had remarked that God was generally
on the side which had the heaviest artillery?"
"The North had that, fast enough, and crushed a free people with it."
"A free people with four millions of slaves?" observed Mrs. Wesley
quietly.
"Slavery was a patriarchal institution, my dear lady. But I reckon it
is exploded now. The Emancipation Proclamation was a dastardly war
measure."
"It did something more and better than free the blacks," said Mrs.
Wesley; "it freed the whites. Dear me!" she added, glancing at Sheridan
and Ulysses, who, in a brief reprieve from bed, were over in one corner
of the room dissecting a small wooden camel, "I cannot be thankful
enough that the children are too young to understand such sentiments."
The colonel, to my great relief, remained silent; but as soon as Clara
had closed the dining-room door behind her, he said, "Tom Wesley, I
reckon your wife doesn't wholly like me."
"She likes you immensely," I cried, inwardly begging to be forgiven.
"But she is a firm believer in the justice of the Northern cause."
"May be she lost a brother, or something."
"No; she never had a brother. If she had had one, he would have been
killed in the first battle of the war. She sent me to the front to be
killed, and I went willingly; but I wasn't good enough; the enemy
wouldn't have me at any price after a year's trial. Mrs. Wesley feels
very strongly on this subject, and I wish you would try, like a good
fellow, not to bring the question up at dinner-time. I am squarely
opposed to your views myself, but I don't mind what you say as she
does. So talk to me as much as you want to, but don't talk in Clara's
presence. When persons disagree as you two do, argument is useless.
Besides, the whole thing has been settled on the battlefield, and it
isn't worth while to fight it all over again on a table-cloth."
"I suppose it isn't," he assented good-naturedly. "But you people up at
the North here don't suspicion what we have been through. You caught
only the edge of the hurricane. The most of you, I take it, weren't in
it at all."
"Our dearest were in it."
"Well, we got whipped, Wesley, I acknowledge it; but we deserved to
win, if ever bravery deserved it."
"The South was brave, nobody contests that; but ''t is not enough to be
brave'--
"'The angry valor dashed
On the awful shield of God,'
as one of our poets says."
"Blast one of your poets! Our people were right, too."
"Come, now, Flagg, when you talk about your people, you ought to mean
Northerners, for you were born in the North."
"That was just the kind of luck that has followed me all my life. My
body belongs to Bangor, Maine, and my soul to Charleston, South
Carolina."
"You've got a problem there that ought to bother you."
"It does," said the colonel, with a laugh.
"Meanwhile, my dear boy, don't distress Mrs. Wesley with it. She is
ready to be very fond of you, if you will let her. It would be
altogether sad and shameful if a family so contracted as ours couldn't
get along without internal dissensions."
My cousin instantly professed the greatest regard for Mrs. Wesley, and
declared that both of us were good enough to be Southrons. He promised
that in future he would take all the care he could not to run against
her prejudices, which merely grew out of her confused conception of
State rights and the right of self-government. Women never understood
anything about political economy and government, anyhow.
Having accomplished thus much with the colonel, I turned my attention,
on his departure, to smoothing Clara. I reminded her that nearly
everybody North and South had kinsmen or friends in both armies. To be
sure, it was unfortunate that we, having only one kinsman, should have
had him on the wrong side. That was better than having no kinsman at
all. (Clara was inclined to demur at this.) It had not been practicable
for him to divide himself; if it had been, he would probably have done
it, and the two halves would doubtless have arrayed themselves against
each other. They would, in a manner, have been bound to do so. However,
the war was over, we were victorious, and could afford to be
magnanimous.
"But he doesn't seem to have discovered that the war is over," returned
Clara. "He 'still waves.'"
"It is likely that certain obstinate persons on both sides of Mason and
Dixon's line will be a long time making the discovery. Some will never
make it--so much the worse for them and the country."
Mrs. Wesley meditated and said nothing, but I saw that so far as she
and the colonel were concerned the war was not over.
IV
This slight breeze cleared the atmosphere for the time being. My cousin
Flagg took pains to avoid all but the most indirect allusions to the
war, except when we were alone, and in several small ways
endeavored--with not too dazzling success--to be agreeable to Clara.
The transparency of the effort was perhaps the partial cause of its
failure. And then, too, the nature of his little attentions was not
always carefully considered on his part. For example, Mrs. Wesley could
hardly be expected to lend herself with any grace at all to the
proposal he made one sultry June evening to "knock her up" a
mint-julep, "the most refreshing beverage on earth, madam, in hot
weather, I can assure you." Judge Ashburton Todhunter, of Fauquier
County, had taught him to prepare this pungent elixir from a private
receipt for which the judge had once refused the sum of fifty dollars,
offered to him by Colonel Stanley Bluegrass, of Chattanooga, and this
was at a moment, too, when the judge had been losing very heavily at
draw poker.
"All quiet along the Potomac," whispered the colonel, with a momentary
pride in the pacific relations he had established between himself and
Mrs. Wesley.
As the mint and one or two other necessary ingredients were lacking to
our family stores, the idea of julep was dismissed as a vain dream, and
its place supplied by iced Congress water, a liquid which my cousin
characterized, in a hasty aside to me, as being a drink fit only for
imbecile infants of a tender age.
Washington Flagg's frequent and familiar mention of governors, judges,
colonels, and majors clearly indicated that he had moved in
aristocratic latitudes in the South, and threw light on his
disinclination to consider any of the humbler employments which might
have been open to him. He had so far conceded to the exigency of the
case as to inquire if there were a possible chance for him in the
Savonarola Fire Insurance Company. He had learned of my secretaryship.
There was no vacancy in the office, and if there had been, I would have
taken no steps to fill it with my cousin. He knew nothing of the
business. Besides, however deeply I had his interests at heart, I
should have hesitated to risk my own situation by becoming sponsor for
so unmanageable an element as he appeared to be.
At odd times in my snuggery after dinner Flagg glanced over the "wants"
columns of the evening journal, but never found anything he wanted. He
found many amusing advertisements that served him as pegs on which to
hang witty comment, but nothing to be taken seriously. I ventured to
suggest that he should advertise. He received the idea with little
warmth.
"No, my dear boy, I can't join the long procession of scullions, cooks,
butlers, valets, and bottle-washers which seem to make up so large a
part of your population. I couldn't keep step with them. It is
altogether impossible for me to conduct myself in this matter like a
menial-of-all-work out of place. 'Wanted, a situation, by a respectable
young person of temperate habits; understands the care of horses; is
willing to go into the country and milk the cow with the crumpled
horn.' No; many thanks."
"State your own requirements, Flagg. I didn't propose that you should
offer yourself as coachman."
"It would amount to the same thing, Wesley. I should at once be
relegated to his level. Some large opportunity is dead sure to present
itself to me if I wait. I believe the office should seek the man."
"I have noticed that a man has to meet his opportunities more than
halfway, or he doesn't get acquainted with them. Mohammed was obliged
to go to the mountain, after waiting for the mountain to come to him."
"Mohammed's mistake was that he didn't wait long enough. He was too
impatient. But don't you fret. I have come to Yankeedom to make my
fortune. The despot's heel is on your shore, and it means to remain
there until he hears of something greatly to his advantage."
A few days following this conversation, Mr. Nelson, of Files & Nelson,
wholesale grocers on Front Street, mentioned to me casually that he was
looking for a shipping-clerk. Before the war the firm had done an
extensive Southern trade, which they purposed to build up again now
that the ports of the South were thrown open. The place in question
involved a great deal of outdoor work--the loading and unloading of
spicy cargoes, a life among the piers--all which seemed to me just
suited to my cousin's woodland nature. I could not picture him nailed
to a desk in a counting-room. The salary was not bewildering, but the
sum was to be elastic, if ability were shown. Here was an excellent
chance, a stepping-stone, at all events; perhaps the large opportunity
itself, artfully disguised as fifteen dollars a week. I spoke of Flagg
to Mr. Nelson, and arranged a meeting between them for the next day.
I said nothing of the matter at the dinner-table that evening; but an
encouraging thing always makes a lantern of me, and Clara saw the light
in my face. As soon as dinner was over I drew my cousin into the little
side room, and laid the affair before him.
"And I have made an appointment for you to meet Mr. Nelson to-morrow at
one o'clock," I said, in conclusion.
"My dear Wesley"--he had listened to me in silence, and now spoke
without enthusiasm--"I don't know what you were thinking of to do
anything of the sort. I will not keep the appointment with that person.
The only possible intercourse I could have with him would be to order
groceries at his shop. The idea of a man who has moved in the best
society of the South, who has been engaged in great if unsuccessful
enterprises, who has led the picked chivalry of his oppressed land
against the Northern hordes--the idea of a gentleman of this kidney
meekly simmering down into a factotum to a Yankee dealer in canned
goods! No, sir; I reckon I can do better than that."
The lantern went out.
I resolved that moment to let my cousin shape his own destiny--a task
which in no way appeared to trouble him. And, indeed, now that I look
back to it, why should he have troubled himself? He had a comfortable
if not luxurious apartment in Macdougal Street; a daily dinner that
asked only to be eaten; a wardrobe that was replenished when it needed
replenishing; a weekly allowance that made up for its modesty by its
punctuality. If ever a man was in a position patiently to await the
obsequious approach of large opportunities that man was Washington
Flagg. He was not insensible to the fact. He passed his time serenely.
He walked the streets--Flagg was a great walker--sometimes wandering
for hours in the Central Park. His Southern life, passed partly among
plantations, had given him a relish for trees and rocks and waters. He
was also a hungry reader of novels. When he had devoured our slender
store of fiction, which was soon done, he took books from a small
circulating library on Sixth Avenue. That he gave no thought whatever
to the future was clear. He simply drifted down the gentle stream of
the present. Sufficient to the day was the sunshine thereof.
In spite of his unforgivable inertia, and the egotism that enveloped
him like an atmosphere, there was a charm to the man that put my
impatience to sleep. I tried to think that this indifference and sunny
idleness were perhaps the natural reaction of that larger life of
emotion and activity from which he had just emerged. I reflected a
great deal on that life, and, though I lamented the fact that he had
drawn his sword on the wrong side, there was, down deep in my heart, an
involuntary sympathetic throb for the valor that had not availed. I
suppose the inexplicable ties of kinship had something to do with all
this.
Washington Flagg had now been with us five weeks. He usually lingered
awhile after dinner; sometimes spent the entire evening with the
family, or, rather, with me, for Mrs. Wesley preferred the sitting-room
to my den when I had company. Besides, there were Sheridan and Ulysses
to be looked to. Toward the close of the sixth week I noticed that
Flagg had fallen into a way of leaving immediately after dinner. He had
also fallen into another way not so open to pleasant criticism.
By degrees--by degrees so subtle as almost to escape measurement--he
had glided back to the forbidden and dangerous ground of the war. At
first it was an intangible reference to something that occurred on such
and such a date, the date in question being that of some sanguinary
battle; then a swift sarcasm, veiled and softly shod; then a sarcasm
that dropped its veil for an instant, and showed its sharp features. At
last his thought wore no disguise. Possibly the man could not help it;
possibly there was something in the atmosphere of the house that
impelled him to say things which he would have been unlikely to say
elsewhere. Whatever was the explanation, my cousin Flagg began to make
himself disagreeable again at meal-times.
He had never much regarded my disapproval, and now his early
ill-defined fear of Mrs. Wesley was evaporated. He no longer hesitated
to indulge in his war reminiscences, which necessarily brought his
personal exploits under a calcium-light. These exploits usually
emphasized his intimacy with some of the more dashing Southern leaders,
such as Stonewall Jackson and Jeb Stuart and Mosby. We found ourselves
practically conscripted in the Confederate army. We were taken on long
midnight rides through the passes of the Cumberland Mountains and
hurled on some Federal outpost; we were made--a mere handful as we
were--to assault and carry most formidable earthworks; we crossed
dangerous fords, and bivouacked under boughs hung with weird gonfalons
of gray moss, slit here and there by the edge of a star. Many a time we
crawled stealthily through tangled vines and shrubs to the skirt of a
wood, and across a fallen log sighted the Yankee picket whose bayonet
point glimmered now and then far off in the moonlight. We spent a great
many hours around the camp-fire counting our metaphorical scalps.
One evening the colonel was especially exasperating with anecdotes of
Stonewall Jackson, and details of what he said to the general and what
the general said to him.
"Stonewall Jackson often used to say to me, 'George'--he always called
me George, in just that off-hand way--'George, when we get to New York,
you shall have quarters in the Astor House, and pasture your mare
Spitfire in the Park."'
"That was very thoughtful of Stonewall Jackson," remarked Mrs. Wesley,
with the faintest little whiteness gathering at the lips. "I am sorry
that your late friend did not accompany you to the city, and personally
superintend your settlement here. He would have been able to surround
you with so many more comforts than you have in Macdougal Street."
The colonel smiled upon Clara, and made a deprecating gesture with his
left hand. Nothing seemed to pierce his ironclad composure. A moment
afterward he returned to the theme, and recited some verses called
"Stonewall Jackson's Way." He recited them very well. One stanza
lingers in my memory--
"We see him now--the old slouched hat
Cocked o'er his brow askew,
The shrewd, dry smile, the speech so pat,
So calm, so blunt, so true.
The Blue-light Elder knows 'em well.
Says he: 'That's Banks; he's fond of shell.
Lord save his soul! we'll give him'--Well,
That's Stonewall Jackson's way."
"His ways must have been far from agreeable," observed my wife, "if
that is a sample of them."
After the colonel had taken himself off, Mrs. Wesley, sinking wearily
upon the sofa, said, "I think I am getting rather tired of Stonewall
Jackson."
"We both are, my dear; and some of our corps commanders used to find
him rather tiresome now and then. He was really a great soldier, Clara;
perhaps the greatest on the other side."
"I suppose he was; but Flagg comes next--according to his own report.
Why, Tom, if your cousin had been in all the battles he says he has,
the man would have been killed ten times over. He'd have had at least
an arm or a leg shot off."
That Washington Flagg had all his limbs on was actually becoming a
grievance to Mrs. Wesley.
The situation filled me with anxiety. Between my cousin's deplorable
attitude and my wife's justifiable irritation, I was extremely
perplexed. If I had had a dozen cousins, the solution of the difficulty
would have been simple. But to close our door on our only kinsman was
an intolerable alternative.
If any word of mine has caused the impression that Clara was not gentle
and sympathetic and altogether feminine, I have wronged her. The
reserve which strangers mistook for coldness was a shell that melted at
the slightest kind touch, her masterful air the merest seeming. But
whatever latent antagonism lay in her nature the colonel had the
faculty of bringing to the surface. It must be conceded that the
circumstances in which she was placed were trying, and Clara was
without that strong, perhaps abnormal, sense of relationship which
sustained me in the ordeal. Later on, when matters grew more
complicated, I could but admire her resignation--if it were not
helpless despair. Sometimes, indeed, she was unable to obliterate
herself, and not only stood by her guns, but carried the war into the
enemy's country. I very frequently found myself between two fires, and
was glad to drag what small fragments were left of me from the scene of
action. In brief, the little house in Clinton Place was rapidly
transforming itself into a ghastly caricature of home.
Up to the present state of affairs the colonel had never once failed to
appear at dinner-time. We had become so accustomed to his ring at the
prescribed hour, and to hearing him outside in the hall softly humming
The Bonny Blue Flag, or I wish I was in Dixie's Land (a wish which he
did not wholly monopolize)--we had, I repeat, become so accustomed to
these details that one night when he absented himself we experienced a
kind of alarm. It was not until the clock struck ten that we gave over
expecting him. Then, fearing that possibly he was ill, I put on my hat
and stepped round to Macdougal Street. Mr. Flagg had gone out late in
the afternoon, and had not returned. No, he had left no word in case
any one called. What had happened? I smile to myself now, and I have
smiled a great many times, at the remembrance of how worried I was that
night as I walked slowly back to Clinton Place.
The next evening my cousin explained his absence. He had made the
acquaintance of some distinguished literary gentlemen, who had invited
him to dine with them at a certain German cafe, which at an earlier
date had been rather famous as the rendezvous of a group of young
journalists, wits, and unblossomed poets, known as "The Bohemians." The
war had caused sad havoc with these light--hearted Knights of the Long
Table, and it was only upon a scattered remnant of the goodly company
that the colonel had fallen. How it came about, I do not know. I know
that the acquaintance presently flowered into intimacy, and that at
frequent intervals after this we had a vacant chair at table. My cousin
did not give himself the pains to advise us of his engagements, so
these absences were not as pleasant as they would have been if we had
not expected him every minute.
Recently, too, our expectation of his coming was tinged with a dread
which neither I nor Mrs. Wesley had named to each other. A change was
gradually taking place in my cousin. Hitherto his amiability, even when
he was most unendurable, had been a part of him. Obviously he was
losing that lightness of spirit which we once disliked and now began to
regret. He was inclined to be excitable and sullen by turns, and often
of late I had been obliged to go to the bottom of my diplomacy in
preventing some painful scene. As I have said, neither my wife nor I
had spoken definitely of this alteration; but the cause and nature of
it could not long be ignored between us.
"How patient you are with him, dear!" said Mrs. Wesley, as I was
turning out the gas after one of our grim and grotesque little dinners:
the colonel had not dined with us before for a week. "I don't see how
you can be so patient with the man."
"Blood is thicker than water, Clara."
"But it isn't thicker than whiskey and water, is it?"
She had said it. The colonel was drinking. It was not a question of
that light elixir the precious receipt for which had been confided to
him by Judge Ashburton Todhunter, of Fauquier County; it was a question
of a heavier and more immediate poison. The fact that Flagg might in
some desperate state drop in on us at any moment stared us in the face.
That was a very serious contingency, and it was one I could not guard
against. I had no false ideas touching my influence over Washington
Flagg. I did not dream of attempting to influence him; I was powerless.
I could do nothing but wait, and wonder what would happen. There was
nothing the man might not be capable of in some insane moment.
In the meanwhile I was afraid to go out of an evening and leave Clara
alone. It was impossible for us to ask a friend to dinner, though,
indeed, we had not done that since my cousin dropped down on us. It was
no relief that his visits grew rarer and rarer; the apprehension
remained. It was no relief when they ceased altogether, for it came to
that at last.
A month had elapsed since he had called at the house. I had caught
sight of him once on Broadway as I was riding up town in an omnibus. He
was standing at the top of the steep flight of steps that led to Herr
Pfaff's saloon in the basement. It was probably Flagg's dinner hour.
Mrs. Morgan, the landlady in Macdougal Street, a melancholy little
soul, was now the only link between me and my kinsman. I had a weekly
interview with her. I learned that Mr. Flagg slept late, was seldom in
during the day, and usually returned after midnight. A person with this
eccentric scheme of life was not likely to be at home at such hours as
I might find it convenient to call. Nevertheless, from time to time I
knocked at the unresponsive door of his room. The two notes I had
written to him he left unanswered.
All this was very grievous. He had been a trouble to me when I had him,
and he was a trouble to me now I had lost him. My trouble had merely
changed its color. On what downward way were his footsteps? What was to
be the end of it? Sometimes I lay awake at night thinking of him. Of
course, if he went to the dogs, he had nobody to blame but himself. I
was not responsible for his wrong-going; nevertheless, I could not
throw off my anxiety in the matter. That Flagg was leading a wild life
in these days was presumable. Indeed, certain rumors to that effect
were indirectly blown to me from the caves of Gambrinus. Not that I
believe the bohemians demoralized him. He probably demoralized the
bohemians. I began to reflect whether fate had not behaved rather
handsomely, after all, in not giving me a great many relatives.
If I remember rightly, it was two months since I had laid eyes on my
cousin, when, on returning home one evening, I noticed that the front
door stood wide open, and had apparently been left to take care of
itself. As I mounted the steps, a little annoyed at Mary's
carelessness, I heard voices in the hall. Washington Flagg was standing
at the foot of the staircase, with his hand on the newel-post, and Mrs.
Wesley was halfway up the stairs, as if in the act of descending. I
learned later that she had occupied this position for about three
quarters of an hour. She was extremely pale and much agitated. Flagg's
flushed face and tilted hat told his part of the story. He was not in
one of his saturnine moods. He was amiably, and, if I may say it,
gracefully drunk, and evidently had all his wits about him.
"I've been telling Mrs. Wesley," he began at once, as if I had been
present all the while, and he was politely lifting me into the
conversation--"I've been telling Mrs. Wesley that I'm a Lost Cause."
"A lost soul," was Mrs. Wesley's amendment from the staircase. "Oh,
Tom, I am so glad you have come! I thought you never would! I let him
in an hour or two ago, and he has kept me here ever since."
"You were so entertaining," said my cousin, with a courteous sweep of
his disengaged hand, and speaking with that correctness of enunciation
which sometimes survives everything.
"Flagg," I said, stepping to his side, "you will oblige me by returning
to your lodgings."
"You think I'm not all right?"
"I am sure of it."
"And you don't want me here, dear old boy?"
"No, I don't want you here. The time has come for me to be frank with
you, Flagg, and I see that your mind is clear enough to enable you to
understand what I say."
"I reckon I can follow you, Thomas."
"My stock of romantic nonsense about kinship and family duties, and all
that, has given out, and will not be renewed."
"Won't do business any more at the old stand?"
"Exactly so. I have done everything I could to help you, and you have
done nothing whatever for yourself. You have not even done yourself the
scant justice of treating Clara and me decently. In future you will be
obliged to look after your own affairs, financial as well as social.
Your best plan now is to go to work. I shall no longer concern myself
with your comings and goings, except so far as to prevent you from
coming here and disturbing Clara. Have you put that down?"
"Wesley, my boy, I'll pay you for this."
"If you do, it will be the first thing you have paid for since you came
North."
My statement, however accurate, was not wholly delicate, and I
subsequently regretted it, but when a patient man loses his patience he
goes to extremes. Washington Flagg straightened himself for an instant,
and then smiled upon me in an amused, patronizing way quite
untranslatable.
"Thomas, that was neat, very neat--for you. When I see Judge Ashburton
Todhunter I'll tell him about it. It's the sort of mild joke he likes."
"I should be proud to have Judge Ashburton Todhunter's approval of any
remark of mine, but in the meanwhile it would be a greater pleasure to
me to have you return at once to Macdougal Street, where, no doubt,
Mrs. Morgan is delaying dinner for you."
"Say no more, Wesley. I'll never set foot in your house again, as sure
as my name is Flagg--and long may I wave o'er the land of the free and
the home of the brave."
"He is a kind of Flagg that I don't wish to have wave over MY home,"
said Mrs. Wesley, descending the stairs as my cousin with painful care
closed the door softly behind him.
So the end was come. It had come with less unpleasantness than I should
have predicted. The ties of kindred, too tightly stretched, had
snapped; but they had snapped very gently, so to speak.
V
Washington Flagg was as good as his word, which is perhaps not a strong
indorsement. He never again set foot in my house. A week afterward I
found that he had quitted Macdougal Street.
"He has gone South," said Mrs. Morgan.
"Did he leave no message for me?"
"He didn't leave a message for nobody."
"Did he happen to say to what part of the South he was bound?"
"He said he was going back to Dixie's Land, and didn't say no more."
That was all. His departure had been as abrupt and unlocked for as his
arrival. I wondered if he would turn up again at the end of another
twenty years, and I wondered how he had paid his travelling expenses to
the land of the magnolia and the persimmon. That mystery was solved a
few days subsequently when a draft (for so reasonable a sum as not to
be worth mentioning to Clara) was presented to me for payment at my
office.
Washington Flagg was gone, but his shadow was to linger for a while
longer on our household. It was difficult to realize that the weight
which had oppressed us had been removed. We were scarcely conscious of
how heavy it had been until it was lifted. I was now and then forced to
make an effort not to expect the colonel to dinner.
A month or two after his disappearance an incident occurred which
brought him back very vividly and in a somewhat sinister shape to our
imaginations. Quite late one night there was a sharp ring at the door.
Mary having gone to bed, I answered the bell. On the doorstep stood a
tall, pale girl, rather shabbily dressed, but with a kind of beauty
about her; it seemed to flash from her eyelashes, which I noticed were
very heavy. The hall light fell full upon this slight figure, standing
there wrapped in an insufficient shawl, against a dense background of
whirling snowflakes. She asked if I could give her Colonel Flagg's
address. On receiving my reply, the girl swiftly descended the steps,
and vanished into the darkness. There was a tantalizing point of
romance and mystery to all this. As I slowly closed the front door I
felt that perhaps I was closing it on a tragedy--one of those piteous,
unwritten tragedies of the great city. I have wondered a thousand times
who that girl was and what became of her.
Before the end of the year another incident--this time with a touch of
comedy--lighted up the past of my kinsman. Among the travelling agents
for the Savonarola Fire Insurance Company was a young man by the name
of Brett, Charles Brett, a new employee. His family had been ruined by
the war, and he had wandered North, as the son of many a Southern
gentleman had been obliged to do, to earn his living. We became
friends, and frequently lunched together when his business brought him
to the city. Brett had been in the Confederate army, and it occurred to
me one day to ask him if he had ever known my cousin the colonel. Brett
was acquainted with a George W. Flagg; had known him somewhat
intimately, in fact; but it was probably not the same man. We compared
notes, and my Flagg was his Flagg.
"But he wasn't a colonel," said Brett. "Why, Flagg wasn't in the war at
all. I don't fancy he heard a gun fired, unless it went off by accident
in some training-camp for recruits. He got himself exempt from service
in the field by working in the government saltworks. A heap of the boys
escaped conscription that way."
In the saltworks! That connected my cousin with the navy rather than
with the army!
I would have liked not to believe Brett's statement, but it was so
circumstantial and precise as not to be doubted. Brett was far from
suspecting how deeply his information had cut me. In spite of my
loyalty, the discovery that my kinsman had not been a full-blown rebel
was vastly humiliating. How that once curiously regarded flower of
chivalry had withered! What about those reckless moonlight raids? What
had become of Prince Rupert, at the head of his plumed cavaliers,
sweeping through the valley of the Shenandoah, and dealing merited
destruction to the boys in blue? In view of Brett's startling
revelation, my kinsman's personal anecdotes of Stonewall Jackson took
on an amusing quality which they had not possessed for us in the
original telling.
I was disappointed that Clara's astonishment was much more moderate
than mine.
"He was TOO brave, Tom, dear. He always seemed to be overdoing it just
a grain, don't you think?"
I didn't think so at the time; I was afraid he was telling the truth.
And now, by one of those contradictions inseparable from weak humanity,
I regretted that he was not. A hero had tumbled from the family
pedestal--a misguided hero, to be sure, but still a hero. My vanity,
which in this case was of a complex kind, had received a shock.
I did not recover from it for nearly three months, when I received a
second shock of a more serious nature. It came in the shape of a
letter, dated at Pensacola, Florida, and written by one Sylvester K.
Matthews, advising me that George Flagg had died of the yellow fever in
that city the previous month. I gathered from the letter that the
writer had been with my cousin through his illness, and was probably an
intimate friend; at all events the details of the funeral had fallen to
the charge of Mr. Matthews, who enclosed the receipted bills with the
remark that he had paid them, but supposed that I would prefer to do
so, leaving it, in a way, at my option.
The news of my cousin's death grieved me more than I should have
imagined beforehand. He had not appreciated my kindness; he had not
added to my happiness while I was endeavoring to secure his; he had
been flagrantly ungrateful, and in one or two minor matters had
deceived me. Yet, after all said and done, he was my cousin, my only
cousin--and he was dead. Let us criticise the living, but spare the
dead.
I put the memoranda back into the envelope; they consisted of a bill
for medical attendance, a board bill, the nurse's account, and an
undertaker's bill, with its pathetic and, to me, happily, unfamiliar
items. For the rest of the day I was unable to fix my attention on my
work, or to compose myself sufficiently to write to Mr. Matthews. I
quitted the office that evening an hour earlier than was my habit.
Whether Clara was deeply affected by what had happened, or whether she
disapproved of my taking upon myself expenses which, under the peculiar
circumstances, might properly be borne by Flagg's intimate friend and
comrade, was something I could not determine. She made no comments. If
she considered that I had already done all that my duty demanded of me
to do for my cousin, she was wise enough not to say so; for she must
have seen that I took a different and unalterable view of it. Clara has
her own way fifty-nine minutes out of the hour, but the sixtieth minute
is mine.
She was plainly not disposed to talk on the subject; but I wanted to
talk with some one on the subject; so, when dinner was through, I put
the Matthews papers into my pocket and went up to my friend Bleeker's,
in Seventeenth Street. Though a little cynical at times, he was a man
whose judgment I thought well of.
After reading the letter and glancing over the memoranda, Bleeker
turned to me and said, "You want to know how it strikes me--is that it?"
"Well--yes."
"The man is dead?"
"Yes."
"And buried?"
"Assuredly."
"And the bills are paid?"
"You see yourself they are receipted."
"Well, then," said Bleeker, "considering all things, I should let well
enough alone."
"You mean you would do nothing in the matter?"
"I should 'let the dead past bury its dead,' as Longfellow says."
Bleeker was always quoting Longfellow.
"But it isn't the dead past, it's the living present that has attended
to the business; and he has sent in his account with all the items. I
can't have this Matthews going about the country telling everybody that
I allowed him to pay my cousin's funeral expenses."
"Then pay them. You have come to me for advice after making up your
mind to follow your own course. That's just the way people do when they
really want to be advised. I've done it myself, Wesley--I've done it
myself."
The result was, I sent Mr. Matthews a check, after which I impulsively
threw those dreadful bills into the office grate. I had no right to do
it, for the vouchers really belonged to Mr. Matthews, and might be
wanted some day; but they had haunted me like so many ghosts until I
destroyed them. I fell asleep that night trying to recollect whether
the items included a head-stone for my cousin's grave. I couldn't for
the life of me remember, and it troubled me not a little. There were
enough nameless graves in the South, without his being added to the
number.
One day, a fortnight later, as Clara and I were finishing dinner, young
Brett called at the house. I had supposed him to be in Omaha. He had,
in effect, just come from there and elsewhere on one of his long
business tours, and had arrived in the city too late in the afternoon
to report himself at the office. He now dropped in merely for a moment,
but we persuaded him to remain and share the dessert with us. I
purposed to keep him until Clara left us to our cigars. I wished to
tell him of my cousin's death, which I did not care to do, while she
was at the table. We were talking of this and that, when Brett looked
up, and said rather abruptly--
"By the way, I saw Flagg on the street the other day in Mobile. He was
looking well."
The bit of melon I had in my mouth refused to be swallowed. I fancy
that my face was a study. A dead silence followed; and then my wife
reached across the table, and pressing my hand, said very gently--
"Wesley, you were not brilliant, but you were good."
All this was longer ago than I care to remember. I heard no more from
Mr. Matthews. Last week, oddly enough, while glancing over a file of
recent Southern newspapers, I came upon the announcement of the death
of George W. Flagg. It was yellow fever this time also. If later on I
receive any bills in connection with that event, I shall let my friend
Bleeker audit them.
"FOR BRAVERY ON THE FIELD OF BATTLE"
I
The recruiting-office at Rivermouth was in a small, unpainted,
weather-stained building on Anchor Street, not far from the
custom-house. The tumble-down shell had long remained tenantless, and
now, with its mouse-colored exterior, easily lent itself to its present
requirements as a little military mouse-trap. In former years it had
been occupied as a thread-and-needle and candy shop by one Dame
Trippew. All such petty shops in the town were always kept by old
women, and these old women were always styled dames. It is to be
lamented that they and their innocent traffic have vanished into the
unknown.
The interior of the building, consisting of one room and an attic
covered by a lean-to roof, had undergone no change beyond the removal
of Dame Trippew's pathetic stock at the time of her bankruptcy. The
narrow counter, painted pea-green and divided in the centre by a
swinging gate, still stretched from wall to wall at the farther end of
the room, and behind the counter rose a series of small wooden drawers,
which now held nothing but a fleeting and inaccurate memory of the
lavender, and pennyroyal, and the other sweet herbs that used to be
deposited in them. Even the tiny cow-bell, which once served to warn
Dame Trippew of the advent of a customer, still hung from a bit of
curved iron on the inner side of the street-door, and continued to give
out a petulant, spasmodic jingle whenever that door was opened, however
cautiously. If the good soul could have returned to the scene of her
terrestrial commerce, she might have resumed business at the old stand
without making any alterations whatever. Everything remained precisely
as she had left it at the instant of her exit. But a wide gulf
separated Dame Trippew from the present occupant of the premises. Dame
Trippew's slight figure, with its crisp, snowy cap and apron, and
steel-bowed spectacles, had been replaced by the stalwart personage of
a sergeant of artillery in the regular army, between whose overhanging
red mustache and the faint white down that had of late years come to
Dame Trippew's upper lip, it would have been impossible to establish a
parallel. The only things these two might have claimed in common were a
slackness of trade and a liking for the aromatic Virginia leaf, though
Dame Trippew had taken hers in a dainty idealistic powder, and the
sergeant took his in realistic plug through the medium of an aggressive
clay pipe.
In spite of the starry shield, supported by two crossed cannon cut out
of tin and surmounted by the national bird in the same material, which
hung proudly over the transom outside; in spite of the drummer-boy from
the fort, who broke the silence into slivers at intervals throughout
the day; in brief, in spite of his own martial bearing and smart
uniform, the sergeant found trade very slack. At Rivermouth the war
with Mexico was not a popular undertaking. If there were any heroic
blood left in the old town by the sea, it appeared to be in no hurry to
come forward and get itself shed. There were hours in which Sergeant
O'Neil despaired of his country. But by degrees the situation
brightened, recruits began to come in, and finally the town and the
outlying districts--chiefly the outlying districts--managed to furnish
a company for the State regiment. One or two prominent citizens had
been lured by commissions as officers; but neither of the two
Rivermouthians who went in as privates was of the slightest civic
importance. One of these men was named James Dutton.
Why on earth James Dutton wanted to go to the war was a puzzle to the
few townsfolk who had any intimate acquaintance with the young man.
Intimate acquaintance is perhaps too strong a term; for though Button
was born in the town and had always lived there, he was more or less a
stranger to those who knew him best. Comrades he had, of course, in a
manner: the boys with whom he had formerly gone to the public school,
and two or three maturer persons whose acquaintance he had contracted
later in the way of trade. But with these he could scarcely be said to
be intimate. James Dutton's rather isolated condition was not in
consequence of any morbid or uncouth streak in his mental make-up. He
was of a shy and gentle nature, and his sedentary occupation had simply
let the habit of solitude and unsociability form a shell about him.
Dutton was a shoemaker and cobbler, like his father before him, plying
his craft in the shabby cottage where he was born and had lived ever
since, at the foot of a narrow lane leading down to the river--a
lonely, doleful sort of place, enlivened with a bit of shelving sand
where an ancient fisherman occasionally came to boil lobsters.
In the open lots facing the unhinged gate was an old relinquished
tannery that still flavored the air with decayed hemlock and fir bark,
which lay here and there in dull-red patches, killing the grass. The
undulations of a colonial graveyard broke tamely against the western
base of the house. Head-stones and monuments--if there had ever been
any monuments--had melted away. Only tradition and those slowly
subsiding wave-like ridges of graves revealed the character of the
spot. Within the memory of man nobody had been dropped into that Dead
Sea. The Duttons, father and son, had dwelt here nearly twenty-four
years. They owned the shanty. The old man was now dead, having laid
down his awl and lapstone just a year before the rise of those
international complications which resulted in the appearance of
Sergeant O'Neil in Rivermouth, where he immediately tacked up the
blazoned aegis of the United States over the doorway of Dame Trippew's
little shop.
As has been indicated, the war with Mexico was not looked upon with
favor by the inhabitants of Rivermouth, who clearly perceived its
underlying motive--the extension of slave territory. The abolition
element in the town had instantly been blown to a white heat. Moreover,
war in itself, excepting as a defensive measure or on a point of honor,
seemed rather poor business to the thrifty Rivermouthians. They were
wholly of the opinion of Birdofredom Sawin, that
"Nimepunce a day fer killin' folks comes kind o' low fer murder."
That old Nehemiah Dutton's son should have any interest one way or the
other in the questions involved was inconceivable, and the morning he
presented himself at the recruiting-office a strong ripple of surprise
ran over the group of idlers that hung day after day around the door of
the crazy tenement, drawn thither by the drum-taps and a morbid sense
of gunpowder in the air. These idlers were too sharp or too unpatriotic
to enlist themselves, but they had unbounded enthusiasm for those who
did. After a moment's hesitation, they cheered Jemmy Dutton handsomely.
On the afternoon of his enlistment, he was met near the post-office by
Marcellus Palfrey, the sexton of the Old Brick Church.
"What are you up to, anyhow, Jemmy?" asked Palfrey. "What's your idee?"
"My idea is," replied Dutton, "that I've never been able to live freely
and respectably, as I've wanted to live; but I mean to die like a
gentleman, when it comes to that."
"What do you call a gentleman, Jemmy?"
"Well, a man who serves faithfully, and stands by to lay down his life
for his duty--he's a gentleman."
"That's so," said Palfrey. "He needn't have no silver-plated handles,
nor much outside finish, if he's got a satin linin'. He's one of God's
men."
What really sent James Dutton to the war? Had he some unformulated and
hitherto unsuspected dream of military glory, or did he have an eye to
supposable gold ingots piled up in the sub-basement of the halls of the
Montezumas? Was it a case of despised love, or was he simply tired of
re-heeling and re-soling the boots of Rivermouth folk; tired to death
of the river that twice a day crept up to lap the strip of sandy beach
at the foot of Nutter's Lane; tired to death of being alone, and poor,
and aimless? His motive is not positively to be known, only to be
guessed at. We shall not trouble ourselves about it. Neither shall the
war, which for a moment casts a lurid light on his figure, delay us
long. It was a tidy, comfortable little war, not without picturesque
aspects. Out of its flame and smoke leaped two or three fine names that
dazzled men's eyes awhile; and among the fortunate was a silent young
lieutenant of infantry--a taciturn, but not unamiable young
lieutenant--who was afterward destined to give the name of a great
general into the keeping of history forever. Wrapped up somewhere in
this Mexican war is the material for a brief American epic; but it is
not to be unrolled and recited here.
II
With the departure of Our Country's Gallant Defenders, as they were
loosely denominated by some--the Idiots, as they were compactly
described by others--monotony again settled down upon Rivermouth.
Sergeant O'Neil's heraldic emblems disappeared from Anchor Street, and
the quick rattle of the tenor drum at five o'clock in the morning no
longer disturbed the repose of peace-loving citizens. The tide of
battle rolled afar, and its echoes were not of a quality to startle the
drowsy old seaport. Indeed, it had little at stake. Only four men had
gone from the town proper. One, Captain Kittery, died before reaching
the seat of war; one deserted on the way; one, Lieutenant Bangs, was
sent home invalided; and only James Dutton was left to represent the
land force of his native town. He might as well have died or deserted,
for he was promptly forgotten.
From time to time accounts of battles and bombardments were given in
the columns of the Rivermouth Barnacle, on which occasions the Stars
and Stripes, held in the claws of a spread eagle, decorated the
editorial page--a cut which until then had been used only to celebrate
the bloodless victories of the ballot. The lists of dead, wounded, and
missing were always read with interest or anxiety, as might happen, for
one had friends and country acquaintances, if not fellow-townsmen, with
the army on the Rio Grande. Meanwhile nobody took the trouble to bestow
a thought on James Dutton. He was as remote and shadowy in men's
memories as if he had been killed at Thermopylae or Bunker's Hill. But
one day the name of James Dutton blazed forth in a despatch that
electrified the community. At the storming of Chapultepec, Private
James Dutton, Company K, Rivermouth, had done a very valorous deed. He
had crawled back to a plateau on the heights, from which the American
troops had been driven, and had brought off his captain, who had been
momentarily stunned by the wind of a round-shot. Not content with that,
Private Dutton had returned to the dangerous plateau, and, under a
heavy fire, had secured a small field-piece which was about to fall
into the hands of the enemy. Later in the day this little howitzer did
eminent service. After touching on one or two other minor matters, the
despatch remarked, incidentally, that Private James Dutton had had his
left leg blown off.
The name of James Dutton was instantly on every lip in town. Citizens
who had previously ignored his existence, or really had not been aware
of it, were proud of him. The Hon. Jedd Deane said that he had. long
regarded James Dutton as a young man of great promise, a--er--most
remarkable young person, in short; one of the kind with
much--er--latent ability. Postmaster Mugridge observed, with the strong
approval of those who heard him, that young Dutton was nobody's fool,
though what especial wisdom Dutton had evinced in having his leg blown
off was not clear. Captain Tewksberry, commanding the local militia
company, the Rivermouth Tigers, was convinced that no one who had not
carefully studied Scott's Tactics could have brought away that gun
under the circumstances. "Here, you will observe, was the exposed flank
of the heights; there, behind the chevaux-de-frise, lay the enemy,"
etc., etc. Dutton's former school-fellows began to remember that there
had always been something tough and gritty in Jim Dutton. The event was
one not to be passed over by Parson Wibird Hawkins, who made a most
direct reference to it in his Sunday's sermon--Job xxxix. 25: "He saith
among the trumpets, Ha, ha; and he smelleth the battle afar off, the
thunder of the captains, and the shouting."
After the first burst of local pride and enthusiasm had exhausted
itself over young Dutton's brilliant action, the grim fact connected
with young Dutton's left leg began to occupy the public mind. The
despatch had vaguely hinted at amputation, and had stopped there. If
his leg had been shot away, was it necessary that the rest of him
should be amputated? In the opinion of Schoolmaster Grimshaw, such
treatment seemed almost tautological. However, all was presumably over
by this time. Had poor Dutton died under the operation? Solicitude on
that point was widespread and genuine. Later official intelligence
relieved the stress of anxiety. Private Dutton had undergone the
operation successfully and with great fortitude; he was doing well, and
as soon as it was possible for him to bear transportation he was to be
sent home. He had been complimented in the commanding officer's report
of the action to headquarters, and General Winfield Scott had sent
Private Dutton a silver medal "for bravery on the field of battle." If
the Government had wanted one or two hundred volunteers from
Rivermouth, that week was the week to get them.
Then intervened a long silence touching James Dutton. This meant
feverish nights and weary days in hospital, and finally blissful
convalescence, when the scent of the orange and magnolia blossoms blown
in at the open window seemed to James Dutton a richer recompense than
he deserved for his martyrdom. At last he was in condition to be put on
board a transport for New Orleans. Thence a man-of-war was to convey
him to Rivermouth, where the ship was to be overhauled and have its own
wounds doctored.
When it was announced from the fort that the vessel bearing James
Dutton had been sighted off the coast and would soon be in the Narrows,
the town was thrown into such a glow of excitement as it had not
experienced since the day a breathless and bedraggled man on horseback
had dashed into Rivermouth with the news that the Sons of Liberty in
Boston had pitched the British tea overboard. The hero of
Chapultepec--the only hero Rivermouth had had since the colonial
period--was coming up the Narrows! It is odd that three fourths of
anything should be more estimable than the whole, supposing the whole
to be estimable. When James Dutton had all his limbs he was lightly
esteemed, and here was Rivermouth about to celebrate a fragment of him.
The normally quiet and unfrequented street leading down to the
boat-landing was presently thronged by Rivermouthians--men, women, and
children. The arrival of a United States vessel always stirred an
emotion in the town. Naval officers were prime favorites in
aristocratic circles, and there were few ships in the service that did
not count among their blue-jackets one or more men belonging to the
port. Thus all sea-worn mariners in Uncle Sam's employ were sure of
both patrician and democratic welcome at Rivermouth. But the present
ship contained an especially valuable cargo.
It was a patient and characteristically undemonstrative crowd that
assembled on the wharf, a crowd content to wait an hour or more without
a murmur after the ship had dropped anchor in midstream for the
captain's gig to be lowered from the davits. The shrill falsetto of the
boatswain's whistle suddenly informed those on shore of what was taking
place on the starboard side, and in a few minutes the gig came sweeping
across the blue water, with James Dutton seated in the stern-sheets and
looking very pale. He sat there, from time to time pulling his blond
mustache, evidently embarrassed. A cheer or two rose from the wharf
when the eight gleaming blades simultaneously stood upright in air, as
if the movement had been performed by some mechanism. The disembarkment
followed in dead silence, for the interest was too novel and too
intense to express itself noisily. Those nearest to James Dutton
pressed forward to shake hands with him, but this ceremony had to be
dispensed with as he hobbled on his crutches through the crowd, piloted
by Postmaster Mugridge to the hack which stood in waiting at the head
of the wharf.
Dutton was driven directly to his own little cottage in Nutter's Lane,
which had been put in order for his occupancy. The small grocery closet
had been filled with supplies, the fire had been lighted in the
diminutive kitchen stove, and the tea-kettle was twittering on top,
like a bird on a bough. The Twombly girls, Priscilla and Mehitabel, had
set some pansies and lilacs here and there in blue china mugs, and
decorated with greenery the faded daguerreotype of old Nehemiah Dutton,
which hung like a slowly dissolving ghost over his ancient shoemaker's
bench. As James Dutton hobbled into the contracted room where he had
spent the tedious years of his youth and manhood, he had to lift a hand
from one of the crutches to brush away the tears that blinded him. It
was so good to be at home again!
[Illustration with caption: Held an informal reception]
That afternoon, Dutton held an informal reception. There was a constant
coming and going of persons not in the habit of paying visits in so
unfashionable a neighborhood as Nutter's Lane. Now and then a townsman,
conscious that his unimportance did not warrant his unintroduced
presence inside, lounged carelessly by the door; and through the rest
of the day several small boys turned somersaults and skylarked under
the window, or sat in rows on the rail fence opposite the gate. Among
others came the Hon. Jedd Deane, with his most pronounced Websterian
air--he was always oscillating between the manner of Webster and that
of Rufus Choate--to pay his respects to James Dutton, which was
considered a great compliment indeed. A few days later, this statesman
invited Dutton to dine with him at the ancestral mansion in Mulberry
Avenue, in company with Parson Wibird Hawkins, Postmaster Mugridge, and
Silas Trefethen, the Collector of the Port. It was intimated that young
Dutton had handled himself under this ordeal with as much
self-possession and dignity as if he had always dined off colonial
china, and had always stirred his after-dinner coffee with a spoon
manufactured by Paul Revere.
A motion to give James Dutton a limited public banquet, at which the
politicians could have a chance to unfold their eloquence, was
discussed and approved by the Board of Selectmen, but subsequently laid
on the table, it being reported that Mr. Dutton had declared that he
would rather have his other leg blown off than make a speech. This
necessarily killed the project, for a reply from him to the chairman's
opening address was a sine qua non.
Life now opened up all sunshine to James Dutton. His personal
surroundings were of the humblest, but it was home, sweet, sweet home.
One may roam amid palaces--even amid the halls of the Montezumas--yet,
after all, one's own imperfect drain is the best. The very
leather-parings and bits of thread that had drifted from the work-bench
into the front yard, and seemed to have taken root there like some
strange exotic weed, were a delight to him. Dutton's inability to move
about as in former years sometimes irked him, but everything else was
pleasant. He resolved to make the best of this one misfortune, since
without it he would never have been treated with such kindness and
consideration. The constant employment he found at his trade helped him
to forget that he had not two legs. A man who is obliged to occupy a
cobbler's bench day after day has no special need of legs at all.
Everybody brought jobs to his door, and Dutton had as much work as he
could do. At times, indeed, he was forced to decline a commission. He
could hardly credit his senses when this occurred.
So life ran very smoothly with him. For the first time in his existence
he found himself humming or whistling an accompaniment to the
rat-tat-tat of his hammer on the sole-leather. No hour of the
twenty-four hung heavily on him. In the rear of the cottage was a bit
of ground, perhaps forty feet square, with an old elm in the centre,
under which Dutton liked to take his nooning. It was here he used to
play years ago, a quiet, dreamy lad, with no companions except the
squirrels. A family of them still inhabited the ancient boughs, and it
amused him to remember how he once believed that the nimble brown
creatures belonged to a tribe of dwarf Indians who might attempt to
scalp him with their little knives if they caught him out after dusk.
Though his childhood had not been happy, he had reached a bend in the
road where to pause and look back was to find the retrospect full of
fairy lights and coloring.
Almost every evening one or two old acquaintances, with whom he had not
been acquainted, dropped in to chat with him, mainly about the war. He
had shared in all the skirmishes and battles from Cerro Gordo and
Molino del Rey up to the capture of Chapultepec; and it was something
to hear of these matters from one who had been a part of what he saw.
It was considered a favor to be allowed to examine at short range that
medal "for bravery on the field of battle." It was a kind of honor
"just to heft it," as somebody said one night. There were visitors upon
whom the impression was strong that General Scott had made the medal
with his own hands.
James Dutton was ever modest in speaking of his single personal
exploit. He guessed he didn't know what he was doing at the moment when
he tumbled the howitzer into the ravine, from which the boys afterward
fished it out. "You see, things were anyway up on that plateau. The
copper bullets were flying like hailstones, so it didn't much matter
where a fellow went--he was sure to get peppered. Of course the captain
couldn't be left up there--we wanted him for morning parades. Then I
happened to see the little field-piece stranded among the chaparral. It
was a cursed nice little cannon. It would have been a blighting shame
to have lost it."
"I suppose you didn't leave your heart down there along with the
senoriteers, did you, Jemmy?" inquired a town Lovelace.
"No," said Dutton, always perfectly matter of fact; "I left my leg."
Ah, yes; life was very pleasant to him in those days!
Not only kindnesses, but honors were showered upon him. Parson Wibird
Hawkins, in the course of an address before the Rivermouth Historical
and Genealogical Society, that winter, paid an eloquent tribute to "the
glorious military career of our young townsman"--which was no more than
justice; for if a man who has had a limb shot off in battle has not had
a touch of glory, then war is an imposition. Whenever a distinguished
stranger visited the town, he was not let off without the question,
"Are you aware, sir, that we have among us one of the heroes of the
late Mexican war?" And then a stroll about town to the various points
of historic interest invariably ended at the unpretending doorstep of
Dutton's cottage.
At the celebration of the first Fourth of July following his return
from Mexico, James Dutton was pretty nearly, if not quite, the chief
feature of the procession, riding in an open barouche immediately
behind that of the Governor. The boys would have marched him all by
himself if it had been possible to form him into a hollow square. From
this day James Dutton, in his faded coat and battered artillery cap,
was held an indispensable adjunct to all turnouts of a warlike
complexion. Nor was his fame wholly local. Now and then, as time went
on, some old comrade of the Army of the Rio Grande, a member perhaps of
old Company K, would turn up in Rivermouth for no other apparent
purpose than to smoke a pipe or so with Button at his headquarters in
Nutter's Lane. If he sometimes chanced to furnish the caller with a
dollar or two of "the sinews of war," it was nobody's business. The
days on which these visits fell were red-letter days to James Dutton.
It was a proud moment when he found himself one afternoon sitting, at
Schoolmaster Grimshaw's invitation, on the platform in the
recitation-room of the Temple Grammar School--sitting on the very
platform with the green baize-covered table to which he had many a time
marched up sideways to take a feruling. Something of the old awe and
apprehension which Master Grimshaw used to inspire crept over him.
There were instants when Dutton would have abjectly held out his hand
if he had been told to do it. He had been invited to witness the
evolutions of the graduating class in history and oratory, and the
moisture gathered in his honest blue eyes when a panic-stricken urchin
faltered forth--
"We were not many, we who stood
Before the iron sleet that day."
Dutton listened to it all with unruffled gravity. There was never a
more gentle hero, or one with a slighter sense of humor, than the hero
of Chapultepec.
Dutton's lot was now so prosperous as to exclude any disturbing
thoughts concerning the future. The idea of applying for a pension
never entered his head until the subject was suggested to him by
Postmaster Mugridge, a more worldly man, an office-holder himself, with
a carefully peeled eye on Government patronage. Dutton then reflected
that perhaps a pension would be handy in his old age, when he could not
expect to work steadily at his trade, even if he were able to work at
all. He looked about him for somebody to manage the affair for him.
Lawyer Penhallow undertook the business with alacrity; but the alacrity
was all on his side, for there were thousands of yards of red tape to
be unrolled at Washington before anything in that sort could be done.
At that conservative stage of our national progress, it was not
possible for a man to obtain a pension simply because he happened to
know the brother of a man who knew another man that had intended to go
to the war, and didn't. Dutton's claims, too, were seriously
complicated by the fact that he had lost his discharge papers; so the
matter dragged, and was still dragging when it ceased to be of any
importance to anybody.
Whenever James Dutton glanced into the future, it was with a tranquil
mind. He pictured himself, should he not fall out of the ranks, a
white-haired, possibly a bald-headed old boy, sitting of summer
evenings on the doorstep of his shop, and telling stories to the
children--the children and grandchildren of his present associates and
friends. He would naturally have laid up something by that time;
besides, there was his pension. Meanwhile, though he moved in a humble
sphere, was not his lot an enviable one? There were long years of
pleasant existence to be passed through before he reached the period of
old age. Of course that would have its ailments and discomforts, but
its compensations, also. It seemed scarcely predictable that the years
to come held for him either great sorrows or great felicities: he would
never marry, and though he might have to grieve over a fallen comrade
here and there, his heart was not to be wrung by the possible death of
wife or child. With the tints of the present he painted his simple
future, and was content.
Sometimes the experiences of the last few years took on the semblance
of a haunting dream; those long marches through a land rich with
strange foliage and fruits, the enchanted Southern nights, the life in
camp, the roar of battle, and that one bewildering day on the heights
of Chapultepec--it all seemed phantasmagoric. But there was his
mutilation to assure him of the reality, and there on Anchor Street,
growing grayer and more wrinkled every season, stood the little
building where he had enlisted. To be sure, the shield was gone from
the transom, and the spiders had stretched their reticulated barricades
across the entrance; but whenever Dutton hobbled by the place, he could
almost see Sergeant O'Neil leaning in an insidious attitude against the
door-sill, and smoking his short clay pipe as of old. Yet as time
elapsed, this figure also grew indistinct and elusive, like the rest.
Possibly--but this is the merest conjecture, and has bearing only on a
later period--possibly it may have sometimes occurred to James Dutton,
in a vague way, that after all there had been something ironical and
sinister in his good fortune. The very circumstance that had lifted him
from his obscurity had shut him out from further usefulness in life;
his one success had defeated him; he was stranded, and could do no
more. If such a reflection ever came to him, no expression of it found
a way to his lips.
The weeks turned themselves into months, and the months into years.
Perhaps four years had passed by when clouds of a perceptible density
began to gather on James Dutton's bright horizon.
The wisest of poets has told us that custom dulls the edge of appetite.
One gets used to everything, even to heroes. James Dutton was beginning
to lose the bloom of his novelty. Indeed, he had already lost it. The
process had been so gradual, so subtile, in its working, that the final
result came upon him like something that had happened suddenly. But
this was not the fact. He might have seen it coming, if he had watched.
One by one his customers had drifted away from him; his shop was out of
the beaten track, and a fashionable boot and shoe establishment, newly
sprung up in the business part of the town, had quietly absorbed his
patrons. There was no conscious unkindness in this desertion.
Thoughtless neglect, all the more bitter by contrast, had followed
thoughtless admiration. Admiration and neglect are apt to hunt in
couples. Nearly all the customers left on Dutton's hands had resolved
themselves into two collateral classes, those who delayed and those who
forgot to pay. That unreached pension, which flitted like an ignis
fatuus the instant one got anywhere near it, would have been very handy
to have just then. The want of it had come long before old age. Dutton
was only twenty-nine. Yet he somehow seemed old. The indoor confinement
explained his pallor, but not the deepening lines that recently began
to spread themselves fan-like at the corners of his eyes.
Callers at Nutter's Lane had now become rare birds. The dwindling of
his visitors had at first scarcely attracted his notice; it had been so
gradual, like the rest. But at last Dutton found himself alone. The old
solitude of his youth had re-knitted its shell around him. Now that he
was unsustained by the likelihood of some one looking in on him, the
evenings, especially the winter evenings, were long to Dutton. Owing to
weak eyes, he was unable to read much, and then he was not naturally a
reader. He was too proud or too shy to seek the companionship which he
might have found at Meeks's drug-store. Moreover, the society there was
not of a kind that pleased him; it had not pleased him in the old days,
and now he saw how narrow and poor it was, having had a glimpse of the
broad world. The moonlight nights, when he could sit at the window, and
look out on the gleaming river and the objects on the farther shore,
were bearable. Something seemed always to be going on in the old
disused burying-ground; he was positive that on certain nights uncanny
figures flitted from dark to dark through a broad intervening belt of
silvery moonshine. A busy spot after all these years! But when it was
pitch-black outside, he had no resources. His work-bench with its
polished concave leather seat, the scanty furniture, and his father's
picture on the wall, grew hateful to him. At an hour when the social
life of the town was at its beginning, he would extinguish his
melancholy tallow-dip and go to bed, lying awake until long after all
the rest of the world slumbered. This lying awake soon became a habit.
The slightest sound broke his sleep--the gnawing of a mouse behind the
mopboard, or a change in the wind; and then insomnia seized upon him.
He lay there listening to the summer breeze among the elms, or to the
autumn winds that, sweeping up from the sea, teased his ear with
muffled accents of wrecked and drowning men.
The pay for the few jobs which came to him at this juncture was
insufficient to supply many of his simple wants. It was sometimes a
choice with him between food and fuel. When he was younger, he used to
get all the chips and kindling he wanted from Sherburn's shipyard,
three quarters of a mile away. But handicapped as he now was, it was
impossible for him to compass that distance over the slippery sidewalk
or through the drifted road-bed. During the particular winter here in
question, James Dutton was often cold, and oftener hungry--and nobody
suspected it.
A word in the ear of Parson Wibird Hawkins, or the Hon. Jedd Deane, or
any of the scores of kind-hearted townsfolk, would have changed the
situation. But to make known his distress, to appeal for charity, to
hold out his hand and be a pauper--that was not in him. From his point
of view, if he could have done that, he would not have been the man to
rescue his captain on the fiery plateau, and then go back through that
hell of musketry to get the mountain howitzer. He was secretly and
justly proud of saving his captain's life and of bringing off that
"cursed nice little cannon." He gloried over it many a time to himself,
and often of late took the medal of honor from its imitation-morocco
case, and read the inscription by the light of his flickering candle.
The embossed silver words seemed to spread a lambent glow over all the
squalid little cabin--seemed almost to set it on fire! More than once
some irrepressible small boy, prowling at night in the neighborhood and
drawn like a moth by the flame of Dutton's candle, had set his eye to a
crack in the door-panel and seen the shoemaker sitting on the edge of
his bed with the medal in his hand.
Until within a year or eighteen months, Dutton had regularly attended
the Sunday morning service at the Old Brick Church. One service was all
he could manage, for it was difficult for him to mount the steep
staircase leading to his seat in the gallery. That his attendance
slackened and finally ceased altogether, he tried, in his own mind, to
attribute to this difficulty, and not to the fact that his best suit
had become so threadbare as to make him ashamed; though the
congregation now seldom glanced up, as it used to do, at the organ-loft
where he sat separated from the choir by a low green curtain. Thus he
had on his hands the whole unemployed day, with no break in its
monotony; and it often seemed interminable. The Puritan Sabbath as it
then existed was not a thing to be trifled with. All temporal affairs
were sternly set aside; earth came to a standstill. Dutton, however,
conceived the plan of writing down in a little blank-book the events of
his life. The task would occupy and divert him, and be no flagrant sin.
But there had been no events in his life until the one great event; so
his autobiography resolved itself into a single line on the first page--
Sept. 13, 1847. Had my leg shot off.
What else was there to record, except a transient gleam of sunshine
immediately after his return home, and his present helplessness and
isolation?
It was one morning at the close of a particularly bitter December. The
river-shore was sheathed in thicker ice than had been known for twenty
years. The cold snap, with its freaks among water-pipes and
window-glass and straw-bedded roots in front gardens, was a thing that
was to be remembered and commented on for twenty years to come. All
natural phenomena have a curious attraction for persons who live in
small towns and villages. The weathercock on the spire and the
barometer on the back piazza are studied as they are not studied by
dwellers in cities. A habit of keen observation of trivial matters
becomes second nature in rural places. The provincial eye grows as
sharp as the woodsman's. Thus it happened that somebody passing
casually through Nutter's Lane that morning noticed--noticed it as a
thing of course, since it was so--that no smoke was coming out of
Dutton's chimney. The observer presently mentioned the fact at the
Brick Market up town, and some of the bystanders began wondering if
Dutton had overslept himself, or if he were under the weather. Nobody
recollected seeing him lately, and nobody recollected not seeing him; a
person so seldom in the street as Dutton is not soon missed. Dr. Meeks
concluded that he would look in at Nutter's Lane on the way home with
his marketing. The man who had remarked the absence of smoke had now a
blurred impression that the shutters of Dutton's shop-window had not
been taken down. It looked as if things were not quite right with him.
Two or three persons were going in Dr. Meeks's direction, so they
accompanied him, and turned into Nutter's Lane with the doctor.
The shop-shutters were still up, and no feather of smoke was curling
from the one chimney of Dutton's little house. Dr. Meeks rapped smartly
on the door without bringing a response. After waiting a moment he
knocked again, somewhat more heavily, but with like ill success. Then
he tried the latch. The door was bolted.
"I think the lad must be sick," said Dr. Meeks, glancing hurriedly over
his shoulder at his companions. "What shall we do?"
"I guess we'd better see if he is," said a man named Philbrick. "Let me
come there," and without further words Philbrick pressed his full
weight against the pine-wood panels. The rusty fastening gave way, and
the door flew open. Cold as it was without, a colder breath seemed to
issue from the interior. The door opened directly into the main
apartment, which was Dutton's shop and sleeping-place in one. It was a
lovely morning, and the sunshine, as if it had caught a glitter from
the floating points of ice on the river, poured in through a rear
window and flooded the room with gold. James Dutton was lying on his
pallet in the farther corner. He was dead. He must have been dead
several hours, perhaps two or three days. The medal lay on his breast,
from which his right hand had evidently slipped. The down-like frost on
the medal was so thick as to make it impossible to distinguish the
words--
"FOR BRAVERY ON THE FIELD OF BATTLE."
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