EXEUNT OMNES
There is little left to tell. With the vanishing of the mysterious
Blenke, "the man of the mournful eyes," there came swift unfolding of
the pitiable scheme that, for a time, had set Minneconjou's nerves on
edge, bewildering almost every man from the colonel down, and bedeviling
most of the women. When one's own mother is ready to believe a man
guilty, small blame to the rest of her kind and to the man's best
friends that they should be of the same way of thinking. Moreover,
neither then nor thereafter did Sandy Ray consider himself an innocent
and injured person.
"If ever a fellow came within an ace of falling," said he to himself,
and later to his best friend, his father, "it was I; for I believed her
story--believed myself loved--believed she had been tricked into
throwing me over for Dwight, and that, now that he had thrown her over
because of it, and would have no more to do with her, she would soon be
free. Then our marriage could follow. A greater ass than I has never
lived, but I was sincere in my assininity."
Nor was Sandy Ray the ass he declared himself, for if ever that
exquisite, catlike creature, Inez, loved anybody besides herself, she
loved Sandy Ray, and was bent on winning him back, cost what it might.
She quickly saw that his love for her lay dormant, not dead. She reveled
in the joy of her probable power until, all on a sudden, one terrible
night there came to her the shock of seeing a face she believed long
since buried beneath the waves of the Pacific--that of the boy lover and
husband who wooed and won her inflammable heart nearly five years
earlier.
Blenke in a romantic epistle to Miss Sanford, Inez, through her lawyers,
and her latest dupe, Stanley Foster--whose resignation from the army
went eastward by the same train that bore him and that fair fugitive
from Minneconjou--and finally the impeccable Farrells, all gave versions
more or less veracious of that early marriage episode. But sifted down,
this much of truth was ascertained. The two were cousins, with the
vehement blood of the Antilles coursing in their veins. They loved, were
married by a Texan justice of the peace, and, after a brief honeymoon
across the Mexican line--a honeymoon of mingled bliss and battle--found
the old people relentless and themselves squabbling and stranded. The
elders swooped upon the girl-wife, bore her back to Texas and sent the
strolling player to South America, with the promise never to return or
bother them. They told her, and she refused to believe, that he speedily
met his death at the hands of a jealous husband in Valparaiso. They
later told her, and she fully believed, that, in defiance of his promise
and in desire for her, he had determined to reclaim her as they were
going to San Francisco, and was washed overboard from the _Colima_ by a
tidal wave. Inez, like a certain few of her sex, could believe anything
possible for love--of her, and Stanley Foster went far toward confirming
her views for as much as the month that followed their mad flight. Then,
with his commission gone--and his illusions--he found himself bound to a
woman whose fast-fading charms were no compensation for anything he had
lost. Much of their misery, and her own, was told in metropolitan
circles by Felicie, who applied unsuccessfully about this time to Mrs.
Gerald Stuyvesant for the position of nursery governess, or _bonne_.
Felicie had gone thither in hopes of extracting something from Foster's
people, as nothing could be gotten from the Farrells since nothing short
of extradition proceedings could induce their return to the States. It
was the same miserable old story, and Sandy Ray many a time thanked
Heaven, and Stone, and the senior surgeon, for the order that took him
to the agency and away from Inez Dwight. Would he have succumbed had he
stayed? Older and presumably wiser men have done worse, so why not
Sandy? Perhaps mother and Priscilla were not all wrong in their
forebodings.
But what a scene of love and repentance and rejoicing was that when
those two women, Aunt Marion and her niece, compared notes over the
episode of that night's vigil and Sandy's part therein. Then his story
of his coming was true, after all! Priscilla had seen him entering the
front gate; had heard him at the door; had heard him pass round to the
side of the house. Blenke it was who, counterfeiting even the painful
little limp that still hampered Sandy's movements, had caused so many to
believe it was Billy Ray's firstborn, in the dead of night, invading the
quarters of a brother-officer, to the scandal of the service. They saw
it all now, these good people who had dreamed so wildly, and some few
there were who went to Ray during the brief fortnight that followed her
final disappearance and said: "We knew you couldn't have been guilty of
such a thought," but Sandy did not thank them. In his downright
impulsiveness he had gone to Stone and told him the truth, and said he
_had_ been guilty of such a thought, and asked the commander what he
ought to say to Dwight; and Stone, after pondering over the matter,
replied in effect, though not in these precise words, that he'd be
d--elighted if he knew.
Time and Dwight solved that problem, as time solves others. The major
remained not long at Minneconjou, nor did the Rays. The former, with
little Jim ever at his side, went eastward for a while, whence letters
came occasionally from both father and son. The latter found divided
duties. An interesting event, an arrival extraordinary, called for the
presence of Mrs. Ray in distant Manhattan, and Priscilla looked her last
for many a day upon the fords of the Minneconjou and those hated
tenements on the hither shore, to whose permanence and prosperity her
own efforts had lent such unlooked-for aid. A wiser woman in many a way
was Priscilla Sanford when she turned her clear eyes eastward again.
Firm as before was her faith that she had a mission, but she had learned
a lesson still needed by many of her sect, and by many of both sexes.
She had a tale to unfold to most excellent theorists in the field that
taught a new gospel in the cause of man's uplifting. They were found by
Dwight and Jimmy at the seashore, late that summer, and Priscilla
strolled hand in hand with her boy friend along the shining sands, and
talked long and gravely with his sire as to the real way of reaching the
moral nature of the enlisted soldier. They were joined by Sandy for a
day or two in September--a rather grave-faced young gentleman, despite
recent promotion and longed-for orders to join his troop in far Luzon.
They were in no wise startled when a cable came from Colonel
Ray--"Grandfather Billy" in spite of his looks--suggesting that they,
too, come with Sandy. They were all at Manila in the late autumn, except
the Dwights, and long before Christmas Priscilla had found in Colonel
Blake, that old-time friend and comrade of Uncle Will, a most delighted
listener to her theories. "Legs" was forever stumping round to the
bungalow and starting Priscilla on her hobby, as he called it, and with
preternatural gravity "drawing her out" as to the chief end of man.
Somebody had told him of her Anti-Canteen and Soldiers' Aid Association
at Minneconjou--and of its disruption, but he never twitted her as to
that. It was the new scheme for the higher education and mental
development of the soldier to which her energies were now bending, and
as Blake was in town with little to do but nurse a wounded leg and serve
on some perennial court-martial, he found his fun in frequent
disquisitions with Priscilla, sometimes prolonging them until Mrs. Ray
lost patience and drove him homeward, and privately wrote her liege
lord, who was forever afield, running down _ladrones_, that he really
must repress that irrepressible wag. "He isn't trying to flirt with
Pris, is he?" asked Ray, inconsequently, on coming home, and was dull
enough not to catch the full force of his wife's reply. "Flirt? Gerald
Blake never knew how, and he's too much in love with his wife;
and--besides----"
Priscilla was far too serious to flirt with any man, much as she might
long to reform him. She did wish that the long, lank cavalryman could be
induced to take her views as seriously as she took them herself, and as
Major Dwight seemed to take them, for Dwight's letters were coming at
regular intervals, and to Miss Sanford now rather than to Marion Ray,
and for a time Priscilla read them aloud for the benefit of Blake, the
scoffer, and that of Aunt Marion and Uncle Will, the ever-indulgent. And
thus that warm, sunshiny Manila winter went its way and the summer rains
began to flood the streets, and people took to aquatics, and excursions
to Nagasaki and Yokohama; and thither flitted our friends, the elder
Rays, with Blake to see them off, and a promise to keep Miss 'Cilla's
library project moving. And the day the transport dropped them into
waiting sampan in Nagasaki's wondrous harbor two packages of home
letters were handed them by the resident quartermaster, just received by
rail from Yokohama and the Nippon Maru, and that evening, on the broad
white veranda of the old hotel, Priscilla Sanford's cheeks took on the
hue of the summer sunset, and still Uncle Billy saw--and Aunt Marion
said--nothing.
One afternoon, a few months later, the _Sheridan_ dropped anchor a mile
or more out in the shallow, land-locked bay of Manila, and the launches
and lighters brought the army passengers ashore, many of them for their
second visit to the Philippines; and just as the band at the _kiosk_ on
the Luneta began the daily concert, and carriages of every kind drew up
along the curb, and officers in spotless white went cap-doffing from
point to point, and fair women smiled and flirted their fans, Colonel
Stone, but recently arrived, began telling for the twentieth time, at
least, the story of the marvelous escapade by means of which the
renowned Blenke secured his final freedom:
"Caught in Chicago; shipped back to the guard-house; shammed crazy, sir,
till he fooled every surgeon in the Cheyenne Valley; got ordered to the
government hospital for the insane; got supply of Skidmore whisky,
properly doped; got the corporal drunk who went in charge of him, and,
by gad, sir, got the corporal's outfit and papers and turned _him_ over
at Washington as the insane man; got his receipt and vanished--the last
ever heard of him. What became of her? Oh, after her flare-up with that
poor devil Foster--you know the child didn't live--she got back to
Mexico somehow: women like her never die--but she'll never be able to
bother Dwight. That marriage, of course, wasn't legal. He'd simply been
tricked. No, old Dwight's a free man, and I reckon he'll think twice
before he tries it again."
Whereupon Stone was swiftly kicked in the shin by the long-legged
lieutenant-colonel of cavalry at his side, for, in his enthusiasm, the
colonel had turned and addressed his closing remarks to the two ladies
in the nearmost carriage, and one of them was reddening like the rose.
"Dwight's here, you owl," said Blake, in explanation, later. "Came in on
the _Sheridan_ this very afternoon, and he isn't so confounded free as
you were in your remarks. Why--hadn't you _heard_? May be another case
of 'out of the frying-pan into the fire'--a toss-up 'twixt 'Cilla and
Charybdis, but----"
"Good Lord!" cried Stone, "and what did I say? You don't mean she's
going to marry Dwight?"
"She can't help herself. He won't take no for an answer."
"Well--I'll--be--hanged," said Stone, reflectively, "and I ought to be.
It's just what my wife said--when the daily readings were going
on--would likely be the upshot of the whole business. She said more than
that--and she knows women, too--that Priscilla Sanford would make for
him the best kind of a wife."