“WE SHALL MEET AGAIN!”
Doctor Ludington, hurrying away from Fifth Avenue, would not take a cab
to the hospital. He preferred to walk the long distance in the nipping
cold of the December night, and thus cool the fever of unrest burning
in his veins.
He felt a passionate anger against Eva for her seeming coldness and
indifference, for so well had the poor girl worn her mask of pride that
it appeared to him quite genuine. He was full of angry resentment at
what seemed to him the cruelest inconstancy and forgetfulness.
How cool and calm she had been, while he was sure that he had betrayed
his own heart by his very endeavors to hide it. He wondered how she
could have transferred her love so quickly from him to the handsome
young New Yorker that rumor assigned as her betrothed.
He resolved angrily that she should never know how she had wounded him
by her heartlessness. She should not think he was wearing the willow
for her sake.
In the full tide of these resentful thoughts he rushed around a corner,
and bumped against another individual coming his way full tilt,
knocking him down flat on the pavement.
Thus brought to a full stop, Doctor Ludington bent over his victim,
exclaiming contritely:
“Beg pardon! I did not see you. Are you much hurt?”
The man lay still, groaning, and as he bent over him in the glare of
the electric light, he saw that he was a rough, country-looking fellow,
miserably seedy, with a cadaverous face, as from illness or pinching
hunger.
“Poor wretch!” he thought, and put out kindly hands to help him up.
With this aid the young fellow got on his feet again, groaning:
“It’s the lack of food that tipped me over so easy. For the love of
God, help me! I’ve not tasted food for three days. I’m down on my luck!”
“Poor chap! You certainly look it!” and Doctor Ludington gave him his
arm and conducted him to a quiet restaurant.
“A private room,” he said to the waiter, who quickly obeyed the order.
There was a comfortable sofa, and he advised his protégé to lie down
there and rest while the food was preparing.
The seedy young fellow obeyed, and so grateful was the rest and warmth
that before the appetizing meal was brought he fell asleep.
“Poor fellow!” thought the sympathizing young physician, stopping in
his excited tramp across the room, and scrutinizing more closely the
threadbare garb and cadaverous face.
He gave a violent start, and muttered:
“I have seen the fellow before--but where?”
He began to rack his memory in order to fit the poor wretch into his
proper niche.
The waiter entered with the supper before he had succeeded in his
effort.
“Come, wake up; here is food!” he said, shaking him until he shambled
up, and, scenting the food with the avidity of a starving hound, he
rushed to the table.
The sympathetic young physician exclaimed:
“Slowly now at first, or you may make yourself ill after so long a
fast.”
The hungry wretch with difficulty restrained himself from devouring the
food at a rate sufficient to choke himself, and gloated over it with a
sort of rapture that precluded even a glance at his benefactor.
But Doctor Ludington never took his eyes off of him, more and more
puzzled by the elusive likeness to one he had known somewhere in the
dim past.
It would have been easy enough to ask his name, but he would not
disturb him while he satisfied the ravenous cravings of nature. His
sympathies were too keen and alert.
He simply paced up and down the room, too excited to remain still, and
with only a languid interest in the fellow’s identity, after all, for
Eva remained upper-most in his thoughts through everything.
It was a long half hour that his hungry protégé remained at table,
satisfying the demands of hunger, but at last he pushed back his chair
with a sigh of content, saying hoarsely:
“Thankee, stranger, I feel like a new man, ready to begin the tussle
with life again. By gum, I b’lieve you have saved my life!”
“‘By gum!’ that sounds like the mountaineers of my own West Virginia.
Where did you pick it up, my man?” exclaimed the young doctor, bursting
into a sudden rollicking laugh.
At that laugh, that brought back echoes from somewhere in the long
halls of memory, the fellow started in surprise, and for the first time
looked squarely at the man who had befriended him.
What he saw was surely not enough to pale his cheek, reddened with the
generous warmth of the wine, or to bring that startled, furtive gleam
into the stealthy eyes beneath the thick overhanging brows.
He only saw one of nature’s noblemen in soul as well as form;
tall, erect, handsome, with a princely air that would have been as
conspicuous in poor attire as in his elegant evening suit, covered by
the long, fur-lined overcoat.
Yet one look startled the gazer, and the second made him get up and
hustle toward the door, muttering:
“I must get along now!”
“Wait. Tell me of yourself,” answered Doctor Ludington genially,
placing his back against the door while he continued:
“You said you had not tasted food for days, and your clothing is
tattered and threadbare so that it does not keep out the winter’s cold.
I cannot let you go like this without helping you further. Are you out
of work?”
The fellow turned his face aside into the shadow muttering gruffly:
“That’s it--out o’ work!”
“Are you a stranger in the city?”
“Been livin’ here all my life!”
“You don’t look like it. I should take you for a countryman in
distress.”
“But I ain’t, sir. Leastwise, I’m in distress; ’tain’t no use to deny
hit, starvin’ and freezin’, ’ithout a ruff to kiver my head. Yit I
ain’t no country jay, no, sir! I was borned and brung up in New York,”
protested his protégé, in a quavering voice of some intangible fear.
“Then I’m mistaken in fancying I had seen you somewhere before in my
own past. You were never in West Virginia, were you?”
“I nuver even heerd o’ sech a place. I better be goin’, sir, and not
takin’ up your time no longer.”
“I am not in any hurry, although I see that you are. Yet I don’t
understand why. You have no engagement with friends, have you?”
“Not a friend in the hull cussed place, darn hit! In that country
you’re talkin’ about, sir, that West Virginny, is hit, I bet thar don’t
nobuddy go starvin’ in the streets, does they?” wistfully.
“No, never, my man! There’s bread and work for all in my dear old
native State!” cried the young physician with the kindling pride of the
native born, and continuing:
“I could have almost sworn you were from my own State! You have the
Southern twang to your voice and some of the mountains idioms. Besides,
your face and voice are strangely familiar, and I almost seem to have
known you before. What is your name?”
“Hit’s--hit’s--plain Smith, stranger--John Smith.”
Doctor Ludington gave one of his genial laughs, and exclaimed:
“Your name is even more familiar than your face--perfectly familiar!
But as there are more John Smiths than one, I am still unable to place
you.”
“I sw’ar, stranger, you nuver seen me before this night!” John Smith
returned desperately, still with his eager eyes on the door through
which he could not escape, because his benefactor’s broad back leaned
carelessly against it.
“Have you ever seen me before?” continued the doctor carelessly.
“No--no, sir, nuver! Has you jist come to the city?” interrogated John
Smith weakly.
“No, I have been here some time, and will remain all the winter. So
if you ever want to see me again just look up Doctor Ludington at the
---- Hospital,” the young man answered, impelled by an inexplicable
goading within himself to give this information and even supplementing
it by putting his professional card into the other’s hand, reluctantly
extended, though on top of it the doctor placed a banknote, adding:
“Take this to buy you some clothing, and food, and lodging until you
find work. Now, good night, and good luck to you, John Smith.”
The fellow forgot to notice that the doctor had moved from the door, he
was so dazed by the sight of the crisp fifty-dollar note.
Heaven alone knew what wealth it seemed to the penniless, tattered,
hunger-goaded wretch who had just denied his birthright, his name, and
his home through abject fear.
What glowing visions danced before his eyes as he clutched the bit of
green paper that meant so much to him--food for his famished stomach,
clothing for his freezing body, shelter for his homeless head!
He gasped weakly:
“The Lord bless you, doctor. I’ll nuver fergit that, this is a fortune.”
“Poor fellow, if fifty dollars seems like a fortune, take it, and
welcome, and I am glad I can afford to make you happy at so small a
cost. And look you, John Smith, if I never see you again, remember this
night, and that the man that helped you told you it was the grandest
thing on earth to make others happy. If you are in trouble it will take
the sting out of your own pain.”
“The Lord bless you, doctor. I’ll nuver fergit that, shore, and, by
gum! if I ever git a chanst to make some one else happy as I am this
minit, I’ll try it on ’em, for your sake, that I will. So good night,
doc, good night,” and the fellow shambled out, trying to keep his face
in shadow to prevent an undesired recognition.
The young doctor, while waiting to settle his bill, soliloquized:
“Poor fellow! he was lying to me right along, but I wonder why. I’d
wager a hundred dollars he was born in West Virginia and hasn’t
been out of the rural districts a year. It must be that he feared
recognition. An outlaw, perhaps, from justice, skulking in the shadows,
fearing the sound of his own name. I felt sure he scarcely deserved my
charity, but I could not help being liberal with him, more than if he
had been an entire stranger; for he is not a stranger, I am sure. He is
identified somehow with my past; and something tells me we shall meet
again.”
Doctor Ludington was right in his suspicions.
The poor wretch he had befriended was indeed a West Virginian, exiled
from home by the wrath of his neighbors and the threats of a resident
physician whom he had made out a liar.
Old Doctor Binks was terrible in his cups, and he had sworn to have the
life of the chore boy of Gran’ther Groves, who had brought him the
message the night of the Hallowe’en tragedy and then flatly denied it,
putting the old physician into no end of a difficulty.
Although people had pretended to disbelieve the old man’s statement at
first, time had justified him, for the flight of Dan Ellis had in it
elements of such grave suspicion that by and by the neighbors began to
say to each other:
“The old man sticks so close to his story, it may be true. I never knew
him to make a mistake in prescribing even when he was drunk.”
Little by little, after the first excitement, the neighbors began to
regain confidence in Doctor Binks’ truth and Eva Somerville’s purity.
“There must have been some mistake behind the racket, and Dan Ellis was
at the bottom of it all. He told that story to Doctor Binks just for
a lark, and when he saw what awful trouble it caused he was afraid to
confess his share in it; he just lied out of it,” the postmaster said
to the merchant, who replied:
“I always set so much store by little Eva, I never could a-bear to
think as she done wrong and disgraced the family. And that there
Ludington, too; he was a right smart, likely feller, and I never heerd
a word hinted agin’ his character. By gum! I b’lieve they was both
innercent as babes unborn, little Eva and the doctor, and if Terry
Groves hadn’t a-been so all-fired jealous of his pretty cousin he might
have stopped to find out the truth before he began to shout so peart.
If Dan Ellis ever sneaks back into this neighborhood I’m in favor of
giving him some White-cap medicine!”
“Sech as a good tanning of his tough hide and a coat of tar and
feathers and a ride on a rail,” grimly added the blacksmith, who formed
one of the group waiting in the post office for the belated mail to
arrive per post boy from the distant station.
Public opinion having begun to set this way, it gathered fresh impetus
every day and hour.
And on Dan Ellis venturing back, hoping the excitement had blown over,
just prior to its revival by the arrest of Doctor Ludington at Weston,
he found himself figuratively in a hornets’ nest.
The “tanning of his hide” was performed so prematurely, before the tar
and feathers were ready, that he made good his escape without that
punishment, leaving the whole neighborhood in a state of chagrin that
he had missed his due.
Bruised and aching from the generous application of hickory withes, Dan
concluded his old neighborhood was no longer good for his health and
emigrated to the southern part of the State, whence by slow degrees
he worked into the sister State, Virginia, and gradually to the North
under any alias that presented itself to his mind at the moment.
But it is not to be supposed that the simple, ignorant mind of the
dull-witted youth found comfort in the change from the rude, healthy
toil of the farm, and its compensating pleasures, in the variety of
employments that presented the means of eking out existence.
A bitter homesickness preyed on him ceaselessly and made him curse
Patty and Lydia with savage fury for the catspaw they had made of him
for Eva’s undoing.
“Curse ’em both, the heartless pieces, for gettin’ me inter sech a
confounded scrape!” he would cry, with impotent rage. “By gum! I wish I
had stayed and owned the truth and faced the hull thing out. ’Twa’n’t
nothin’ but a joke in the beginnin’, and they was more to blame nor I
was, for they sent me to do hit, and I would a-ben tore to pieces befor
I’d done hit, if I’d knowed what would happen from hit. Lord knows I
loved the ground little Eva walked on, and I wouldn’t willingly done
her any harm. Seems to me I’ve been punished more than I deserved fer
the part I took,” half sobbed the poor exiled wretch in his despair.
Thus Doctor Ludington had stumbled on him unwittingly that night and
succored him with ready charity, building better than he knew, for the
seed he had sown was destined to spring up and bear rich fruit.
But the startled Dan, remembering the chastisement he received at home,
and fancying the doctor might have traced him to New York to supplement
it with another one, made good his escape into the cold streets,
thanking the lucky stars that had saved him from recognition by the man
he had so deeply injured.
He was deeply touched, it was true, by the doctor’s generosity, but as
he hugged the largess close to his heart, beneath his thin coat, he
muttered incredulously:
“Good thing he didn’t know ’twas me, or maybe I’d ha’ got a kick into
the gutter instid o’ a helpin’ hand, by gum! But he might ’a’ come to
know me any minit if I hadn’t come away so quick. He was gettin’ mighty
darn suspicious, and--hello!”
The last ejaculation came from an unexpected sight. As he shambled
along Broadway, where the people were coming out from the opera, he saw
two faces that made him cry out in that startled way.
They were Miss Tabitha Ruttencutter and Patty, getting into their
carriage to return to their hotel.
The door slammed to, and they were driven away before the exile got his
breath to ejaculate:
“Patty and the ole gal, sure’s I live and breathe! Well, if this here
night ain’t a stunnin’ one! Doc Ludington one minit and them the next!
S’pose hit will be little Eva next? Has the hull o’ West Virginny moved
inter New York?”