Courcy's drunken brother, and she was very glad that "old Lowder" was
not so particular, for she shuddered to think how lonely she should be
were it not for the back flat to the right. Even the janitress, who
seemed so kind, was heartless to Miss De Courcy because she had a
drunken brother!
Druse began to find the world very, very cruel. The days went on, and
the two lives, so radically unlike, grew closer entwined. Druse lost
none of her stern, angular little ways. She did not learn to lounge, or
to desire fine clothing. If either changed, an observer, had there been
one, might have noticed that Miss De Courcy did not need as much
medicine as formerly, that the hard ring of her laugh was softened when
Druse went by, and that never an oath--and we have heard that ladies of
the highest rank have been known to swear under strong
provocation--escaped the full red lips in Druse's presence.
One morning Druse went about the household duties with aching limbs and
a dizzy head. For the first since she had acted as her uncle's
housekeeper, she looked hopelessly at the kitchen floor, and left it
unscrubbed: it was sweeping day, too, but the little rooms were left
unswept, and she lay all the morning in her dark bedroom, in increasing
dizziness and pain. For some days she had been languid and
indisposed, and now real illness overcame her; her head was burning, and
vague fears of sickness assaulted her, and a dread of the loneliness of
the black little room. She dragged herself down the hall. Miss De Courcy
opened the door. Her own eyes were red and swollen as with unshed tears.
She pulled Druse in impetuously.
"I'm so glad you're come. I--Why, child, what is the matter with you?
What ails you, Druse?"
She took Druse's hot little hand in her's and led her to the mirror.
Druse looked at herself with dull, sick eyes; her usually pallid face
was crimson, and beneath the skin, purplish angry discolorations
appeared in the flesh.
"I guess I'm goin' to be sick," she said, with a despairing cadence. "I
expect it's somethin' catchin'. I'll go home. Let me go home."
She started for the door, but her limbs suddenly gave way, and she
fell, a limp little heap on the floor.
Miss De Courcy looked at her a moment in silence. Her eyes wandered
about the room, and fell on a crumpled letter on the table. She paused a
moment, then she turned decisively, and let down the folding-bed that
stood in the corner by day. She lifted the half-conscious Druse in her
strong young arms, and laid her on the bed. It was only a few minutes'
work to remove the coarse garments, and wrap her in a perfumed, frilled
nightdress, that hung loosely on the spare little form. Miss De Courcy
surveyed the feverish face against the pillows anxiously. Druse half
opened her dull eyes and moaned feebly; she lifted her thin arms and
clasped them around Miss De Courcy's neck. "Ain't you good!" she said
thickly, drawing the cool cheek down against her hot brow.
"I'm going for the doctor, Druse," said Miss De Courcy, coaxingly. "Now,
you lay right still, and I'll be back in no time. Don't you move;
promise, Druse!"
And Druse gave an incoherent murmur that passed for a promise.
The doctor, who lived on the corner, a shabby, coarse little man, roused
her from a fevered dream. He asked a few questions perfunctorily, turned
the small face to the light a moment, and cynically shrugged his
shoulders.
"Small-pox," was his laconic remark, when he had followed Miss De Courcy
into the next room.
"Then she's going to stay right here," said that young woman firmly.
"Well, I guess _not_" replied the doctor, looking her over. "How about
your own complexion if you take it?" he added, planting a question he
expected to tell.
Miss De Courcy's remark was couched in such forcible terms that I think
I had better not repeat it. It ought to have convinced any doctor
living that her complexion was her own affair.
"Oh! that's all right," replied the man of science, unoffended, a tardy
recognition of her valor showing through his easy insolence. "But how
about the Board of Health, and how about me? She's better off in a
hospital, any way. You can't take care of her," with a scornful glance
at the draggled finery and striking hat. "What do you want to try it
for? I can't let the contagion spread all over the house, you know; how
would you get anything to eat? No, it's no use. She's got to go. I'm not
going to ruin my reputation as a doctor, and--"
Miss De Courcy smiled sweetly into the doctor's hard, common face. She
drew a purse from her pocket, and selected several bills from a roll
that made his small eyes light up greedily, and pressing the little
packet into his not too reluctant fingers, she remarked significantly,
as she sat down easily on the top of a low table:
"You're mistaken about what's the matter with her, doctor. She's got
the chicken-pox. You just look at her again as you go out, and you'll
see that I am right. But it's just as well to be careful. You might mail
a note for me when you go out, and my wash-woman will buy things for me,
and bring them up here to the door. I'll swear I won't go out till you
say I may, or till you take me to the hospital. And then, as you go
along, you can step into the front flat left, and tell her uncle she's
took bad with chicken-pox. He's got a lot of young ones, and he'll be
glad enough to let me do it, see? And of course, chicken-pox is quite
serious sometimes. I should expect to pay a doctor pretty well to bring
a patient out of it," she added, with a placid smile.
The doctor had turned, and was looking with deep interest at a chromo on
the wall.
"I'll take another look at her. I may have been mistaken, doctors
sometimes are--symptoms alike--and--m--m--you can get that letter ready
for me to mail."
Strange days and nights ensued. Druse had a dim knowledge of knocks at
the door at night, of curses and oaths muttered in the hall, of Miss De
Courcy's pleading whispers, of a final torrent of imprecations, and then
of a comparative lull; of days and nights so much alike in their fevered
dull monotony that one could not guess where one ended and another
began; of an occasional glimpse that melted into the general delirium,
of Miss De Courcy's face, white, with heavy, dark-ringed eyes, bending
over her, and of Miss De Courcy's voice, softened and changed, with
never a harsh note; of her hand always ready with cooling drink for the
blackened, dreadful mouth. Yes, in the first few days Druse was
conscious of this much, and of a vague knowledge that the rocking ship
on which she was sailing in scorching heat, that burnt the flesh from
the body, was Miss De Courcy's bed; and then complete darkness closed
in upon the dizzy little traveller, sailing on and on in the black,
burning night, further and further away from the world and from life.
How could she guess how many days and nights she sailed thus? The ship
stopped, that was all she knew; but still it was dark, so dark; and then
she was in a strange land where the air was fire, and everything one
touched was raging with heat, and her hands, why had they bandaged her
hands, so that she could not move them?
"I can't see," said Druse, in a faint, puzzled whisper. "Is it night?"
And Miss De Courcy, bending over the bed, haggard and wan, and years
older in the ghostly gray dawn, said soothingly:
"Yes, Druse, it's night," for she knew Druse would never see the light
again.
"Miss De Courcy!"
"Yes, Druse."
"I expect I've kept your brother out all this time. I hope he won't be
mad."
"No, no, Druse; be quiet and sleep."
"I can't sleep. I wish it would be morning. I want to see you, Miss De
Courcy. Well, never mind. Somehow, I guess I ain't goin' to get better.
If what I've had--ain't catchin'--I suppose you wouldn't want to--to
kiss me, would you?"
Without hesitation, the outcast bent her face, purified and celestial
with love and sacrifice; bent it over the dreadful Thing, loathsome and
decaying, beyond the semblance of human form or feature, on the
bed,--bent and kissed, as a mother would have kissed.
The gray dawn crept yet further into the room, the streets were growing
noisier, the Elevated trains rushed by the corner, the milkmen's carts
rumbled along the Avenue, the sparrows twittered loudly on the
neighboring roofs. And yet it seemed so solemnly silent in the room.
"Well, now!" said Druse, with pleased surprise, "I didn't expect you
would. What a long time it is gettin' light this mornin'. To think of
you, a-takin' care of _me_, like this! An' I ain't never done a thing
for you excep' the headaches and sweepin', an' even that was nicer for
me than for you. I knew you was awful good, but I never knew you was
religious before, Miss De Courcy. Nobody but folks that has religion
does such things, they say. I wish I could remember my prayers. Ain't it
strange, I've forgot them all? Couldn't you say one? Just a little one?"
And Miss De Courcy, her face buried in her hands, said, "Lord, have
mercy upon us," and said no more.
"Thank you," said Druse, more feebly, and quite satisfied. "We won't
forget each other, an' you'll promise to come by'm'by. Won't you? I'll
be so pleased when you come!"
"Yes, Druse," whispered Miss De Courcy, "I promise."
And then the terrible form that had been Druse sat up in bed with a
mighty effort, and turned its sightless eyes joyfully toward Miss De
Courcy's tear-stained face.
"It's morning! I can see you!" it said, and fell back into the faithful
arms and upon the faithful breast.
And so Druse, not having lived and died in vain, passed away forever
from the Vere De Vere.
A LAMENTABLE COMEDY.
I stood one July noon on the platform of the desolate station at
Wauchittic, the sole passenger waiting for the stage. The heat was
quivering in the air. I watched the departing train, whirling like a
little black ball down the narrow yellow road, cut between the green
fields, and was vaguely glad that I was not going to the end of the
Island on it. This was somewhere near the middle, and it was quite far
enough from civilization.
The village, like so many Long Island villages, was distant from the
railroad. Only one or two farm-houses were in sight. There was hardly a
sound in the hot noonday air, now that the train had gone, except the
whistling of a cheerful station agent, who sat in the window of the
little oven-like Queen Anne structure, in his shirt sleeves, looking out
at me with lively interest. I had sought for a quiet country place in
which to finish my novel, the book which would decide beyond doubt
whether I had a future as a writer, or whether I was doomed to sink to
the level of the ordinary literary hack, for into it I had put, I knew,
all that was my best.
As I looked absently down the track, I reviewed the past winter months,
the long days and evenings spent at my desk in the stuffy little
lodgings to which I was limited by my narrow income, interrupted
frequently by invasions on various pretexts of the ill-fed chambermaid,
who insisted on telling me her woes, or by my neighbor from the next
room, the good little spinster, who always knocked to ask if she might
heat a flat-iron at my grate when I was in the midst of a bit of minute
description. She would sit down, too, would poor withered Miss Jane, in
my little rocking-chair to wait while the iron heated, and she said she
often told the landlady she did not know how I could write, I had so
many interruptions.
I had come to a place now, I thought, trying to quell the sense of
loneliness that oppressed me, as I looked around at the expanse of
stunted wood and scrub-oaks, where I could be perfectly undisturbed. If
the farmer's family with whom I was to board, were noisy or intrusive,
one could take one's writing materials and go--well, somewhere--into the
woods, perhaps. I was only twenty-two, and I was sanguine.
I saw a cloud of white dust down the road--nothing more, but the
station-agent, with a certainty born of long experience, shouted
encouragingly: "Thar she comes!" and presently I found myself in a
large, sombre and warm conveyance, very like the wagon known to the New
York populace familiarly, if not fondly, as "the Black Maria."
The driver was a tow-headed lad of sixteen, so consumed with blushes
that, out of pity, I refrained from questions, and sat silently enduring
the heat behind the black curtains, while we traversed, it seemed to me,
miles of dusty, white road, bordered by ugly, flat fields, or dwarf
woods and undergrowth, before we stopped at a smart white farm-house.
The farmer's wife, hearing our approach, stood on the little porch to
welcome me. Mrs. Hopper gave a peculiar glance at my begrimed person and
face, and I followed her up the narrow stairs with an odd, homesick
sinking of the heart, seized by a momentary pang of that "nostalgia of
the pavement," felt oftener by the poor than rich dwellers of the city,
in exile. Perhaps I loved New York in an inverse ratio to what I had
suffered in it. All the miseries of hope deferred, unremitting labor,
and unnumbered petty cares attendant upon a straightened income, were
forgotten, and I yearned for its ugly, midsummer glare, even its
unsavory odors, and my stifling little chamber "_au troisième_" as I
surveyed the tiny bare room, with its blue and gray "cottage set," its
white-washed walls, hung with a solitary engraving of Lincoln and his
Cabinet. It was not a beautiful spot, truly, yet I thought dubiously, as
I drank in the silence, it might be a very good place in which to bring
to an end the sufferings of my heroine, who had agonized through several
hundred pages of manuscript.
"I expect you're tired," said Mrs. Hopper, sitting down carefully on the
edge of the feather-bed to which I was condemned. "It's a pretty quiet
place here--ain't much of a village, but then you said you wanted a
quiet place to write in. I guess you'll be s'prised--there's another
orther here. Maybe you know him, his name's Longworth, John Longworth?
Don't! Why, he lives to New York! No, he ain't right here in the house,
he's across the street to the Bangses', but you'll see him," she said,
encouragingly. "It'll be awful pleasant for you two orthers to get
acquainted. The Bangses don't keep cows, an' every night at milkin'
time, over he comes to get a glass o' warm milk; guess he likes to talk
to our men-folks. Old Bangs ain't much comp'ny for anybody, let alone a
writer. He's got a man with him to wait on him; a kind o' nurse, I
b'lieve. He was near dead before he came here, though he looks pretty
smart now--had a fever. Some of the folks here hev got it around he was
out of his head, a man so, a-settin' around out o' doors, writin' from
mornin' till night. Lord, how mad it made the Bangses!" Mrs. Hopper
indulged in an abrupt retrospective laugh of enjoyment. "They was so set
up, havin' a writer there, an' Mary Bangs was pretty well taken down
when I told her we was a-goin' to have one here. She acted as if she
didn't b'lieve there was more'n one orther to New York, an' that was Mr.
Longworth," continued Mrs. Hopper, regarding me with a proprietor's
pride, as I removed my hat and hung it on a nail driven in the wall. I
smiled as I reflected that I, too, should doubtless be looked on with
suspicion as a fit subject for a straight-jacket, if I, an able-bodied
young woman, should sit "out o' doors" with my writing, while my
presumable betters were working.
"Well, I guess I'll go down now," said Mrs. Hopper, after a brief pause,
in which she examined my gown. "I expect you want y'r dinner. We live a
good piece from the store, Miss Marriott an' any time if you should get
out of ink, don't make any bones of asking for it. We've got some right
here in the house, an' you're as welcome to it as if you was my own
daughter."
I was glad to find, at dinner, that the family consisted of Mr. and Mrs.
Hopper only, with the exception of a couple of farm-hands, whose
lumbering tread down the back-stairs wakened me each morning about four.
I found Mr. Hopper a tall, bent old man, with meek, faded blue eyes, and
a snowy frill of beard. He had an especially sweet and pathetic voice,
with a little quaver in it, like a bashful girl's.
He laid down his knife and fork, and looked at me with an air of gentle
inquiry, as I took my seat at the table. "Mrs. Hopper tells me you're a
literary," he said at length. I'm afraid I replied, "Yes?" with the
rising inflection of the village belle, nothing else occurring to me to
say.
"Well," said Mr. Hopper, softly, pushing back his chair, and rising to
leave the table, "it's in our fam'ly some too. And in Ma's. One o' my
uncles and one o' her brothers." He shuffled out of the room with a
placid smile, as Mrs. Hopper said, deprecatingly, but with conscious
pride, "La, pa, Jim never wrote more'n two or three pieces."
For a few days I took a vacation. I wandered about the "back lots," down
to the mill-dam, up and down the lonely, winding street where all the
prim houses--and they were very far apart--wore a desolate, closed
look, as though the inhabitants were away, or dead. I grew accustomed to
my environments; the little bedroom began to seem like home to me. On my
way to the post-office some one passed me on the sandy, yellow patch, a
man clothed after the manner of civilization, whose garments, cut by no
country tailor, were not covered by overalls. I knew it must be "the
other orther." None of the males in Wauchittic appeared in public,
except on Sunday, save in overalls. It would have been, I think,
considered unseemly, if not indecent.
The man was young, with a worn, delicate face, marked by ill-health, and
though I had studiously avoided the yard near "milkin' time," in spite
of Mrs. Hopper's transparent insistance each evening on my going out to
see the brindled heifer, I think my indifferent glance was assumed, for
though John Longworth, so far as I knew, had not his name inscribed on
the records of fame, and was probably a penny-a-liner on a third-rate
newspaper, I had the instinct of fellow-craft, that is, alas! strongest
in the unknown and ardent young writer. He walked feebly, and his
brilliant eyes were haggard and circled, as though by long illness. I
saw him drive by nearly every afternoon, accompanied by his nurse, a
good-humored young fellow, who helped him tenderly into the carriage,
and drove, while he lay back with the irritated expression that the
sense of enforced idleness and invalidism gives a man in the heyday of
youth. Mrs. Hopper, who was loquacious to a degree, told me long stories
of his parents' wealth, of the luxuries brought down with him, and of
the beautiful pieces of furniture he had had sent down for his room, for
his physician had recommended him to an absolutely quiet place for the
entire summer. She burned with an irrepressible desire to have me make
the acquaintance of this son of wealth and literature, either from the
feminine proclivity for match-making, or because, possibly, she thought,
having an intense reverence for writers, that our conversation would be
of an edifying and uncommon character. I fear she was disappointed, for
on the occasion of our first meeting,--I believe Mr. Longworth came to
see Mrs. Hopper on some trifling business, and I happened to be writing
on the front porch,--our remarks were certainly of the most commonplace
type, and I saw a shade of disappointment steal across her face, as she
stood by triumphantly, having accomplished her wish to "get us
acquainted."
Mr. Longworth overtook me the next day, as I was returning listlessly,
toward noon, from a long walk, my arms full of glowing St. John's wort,
the color of sunset. Back of me lay the long stretch of flat road, and
the fields on either side were scorched with the sun. The heat was
intolerable. Mr. Longworth would carry the flowers for me, and I
resigned them, knowing that nothing is more distasteful to a man than to
be treated like an invalid. And the bunch was really a heavy burden,--I
had gathered such an enormous armful, together with some tender creepers
of blackberry vine. We chatted of the place, of the people, and I found
that my companion had a keen sense of humor. As we neared the house,
after a moment's hesitancy, I asked him to come and rest on the little
porch, where a couple of splint rockers and a palm-leaf fan invited one
to comfort and coolness. He accepted the invitation with alacrity,
though he chose to sit on the wooden steps, while I tilted lazily back
and forth, overcome by the noonday lull and heat.
He looked so boyish when he took off his hat, with the dark little curls
falling over his forehead, that I thought he could not be older than I.
The walk had perhaps been more than he could bear, for he was so pale
that I could not help saying, "Pardon me, Mr. Longworth, but you look
so ill. Will you let me give you a glass of wine?" I had brought a
little with me. He looked slightly annoyed, but he answered gayly,
"I suppose Mrs. Hopper has been telling you I am a confirmed invalid.
Indeed I am almost well now, and I need Wilson about as much as I need a
perambulator, but I knew if I did not bring him, my mother would give up
Bar Harbor, and insist on burying herself with me, either here or at
some other doleful spot, stagnation having been prescribed for me. Oh,
well, I don't mind the quiet," he continued, leaning his broad shoulders
against the pillar, and pulling at a bit of the St. John's wort, for he
had thrown it down in a straggling heap on the floor of the porch. "I'm
at work on--on a book," he said with a boyish blush.
"Yes," I replied, smiling. "Mrs. Hopper told me that there was 'an
orther,' in Wauchittic."
"And that was what Mrs. Bangs told me the other day!" he declared
audaciously. And then we both laughed with the foolish gaiety of youth,
that rids itself thus of embarrassment.
"It is my first book," he confessed.
"And mine," I said.
Our eyes met a little wistfully, as if each were striving to read
whether the other had gone through the same burning enthuiasms for work,
the same loving belief in its success, the same despondent hours when it
seemed an utter failure, devoid of sense or interest, and then, somehow,
we felt suddenly a mutual confidence, a sense that we knew each other
well, the instant _camaraderie_ of two voyagers who find that they have
sailed the same seas, passed through the same dangers, and stopped at
the same ports.
I heard Mrs. Hopper open the hall-door, caught a glimpse of her looking
out at us with satisfaction on her face, warm from the kitchen fire,
and heard her close it, with much elaboration, and, tip-toe heavily
away.
"Yes, this is my first book," he went on, as though we had not paused.
"Of course I have had experience in writing before, magazine sketches,
and that sort of thing, and beside that, I once had a mania for
newspaper work, and much to my mother's horror, I was really a reporter
on one of the city papers--_The Earth_."
"Circulation guaranteed over 380,000," I continued, rather ashamed of my
flippancy, although he laughed.