MEETING AND PARTING
The Earl of Enderby and his sister, Mrs. Force, acting under the
directions of the earl’s doctor, now set out for Germany, and in due
time reached Baden-Baden. Their apartments, which had been secured by
telegram, were ready for them.
They had one night’s rest from the journey, and were waiting for their
breakfast to be served in their private parlor, when they were surprised
by the entrance of Mr. Force and all his party.
The family had been separated scarcely three months, yet to see them
meet a spectator might think they had been parted for three years.
They soon paired off.
Mr. Force and his wife sat down together on a corner sofa and began to
exchange confidences.
Leonidas and Odalite stood together at the window of the room, looking
out upon the busy scene on the street, or rather seeming to do so, for
they were really talking earnestly together on the subject of their
troubled present and uncertain future.
They had not been separated for one day during their travels; but they
were to say good-by to each other very soon.
“It might be for years, and it might be forever.”
And so they seized every opportunity for a _tête-à-tête_.
Wynnette and Elva hovered around their mother, in their delight at
seeing her again.
The invalid earl sat for a while alone and forgotten, until little
Rosemary Hedge, who was also overlooked in the family reunion, drew a
hassock to the side of his easy chair, sat down and laid her little,
curly black head on his knee. The action was full of pathos and
confiding tenderness. The earl laid his hand on the little head and ran
his thin, white fingers through the black curls. But neither spoke, or
needed to speak—so well the man and the child understood each other.
“Leonidas, my boy!” called Abel Force from his corner, “I wish you would
go and see if we can get rooms for us all here. This should have been
seen to sooner.”
“You need not stir, young sir,” said the earl; and turning to his
brother-in-law, he added: “Your apartments are secured, Force. As soon
as I received your telegram saying that you would join me here, I sent
off a dispatch to secure them for you. I hardly need to remind you that
you are all my guests while we are together. But you traveled by the
night express. You must have done so to reach this place so early in the
day; so you will want to go to your rooms. After you have refreshed
yourselves, join me here at breakfast.”
Le arose at the earl’s request, and pulled at the bell knob with a vigor
lent by his impatience at being called from the side of his beloved, and
which soon brought a servant to the room.
“Show these ladies and gentlemen to the apartments prepared for them,”
said the earl.
The man, with many bows, preceded the party from the room and conducted
them to a large family suit of rooms on the third floor, overlooking the
New Promenade.
The travelers remained some weeks at Baden-Baden. The baths were doing
the earl much good. Mr. Force also needed their healing powers.
Somewhere on his travels with the young people, not having his wife to
look after him, he had contracted rheumatism; he could not exactly tell
when or where or how, whether from exposure or rain and mist on the
mountains, or from fishing on the lakes, or from sleeping in damp
sheets, and drinking the sour wine of the country, or from all these
causes put together, he could not say, so gradually and insidiously had
the malady crept upon him, taking its chronic and least curable form. He
had not mentioned one word of this in any of his letters, nor had he
spoken of it on his arrival.
“Indeed,” as he afterward explained, “never having had any experience to
guide me, I did not recognize the malady at first, but merely took the
feeling of heaviness in all my frame for over-fatigue, and even when
that heaviness, being increased, became a general aching, I still
thought it to be the effect of excessive fatigue. I was slow to learn
and slower to confess that I had the special malady of age—rheumatism.
However, I thank Heaven it is not acute. It has never laid me up for a
day,” he added, laughing at his misfortune.
Indeed, his troubles seldom kept him from making up parties for
excursions to the various objects of interest in the town and its
environs.
Only when the days were both cold and wet, as is sometimes, not often,
the case in early autumn there, did Abel Force allow his young folks to
go forth alone under the care of their mother and the escort of
Leonidas, while he stayed within doors and played chess with the invalid
earl.
In this way the brothers-in-law became better acquainted and more
attached.
“I wish you were an Englishman, Force,” said the earl one day, when he
had just checkmated Abel and was resting on his laurels.
“Why?”
“Not because I do not admire and respect your nationality, but simply
for one reason.”
“What is that?”
“I will tell you. You know, of course, that your wife is my heiress, and
if she survives me, will be my successor. Now, if you were an Englishman
you might get the reversion of your wife’s title.”
“I do not want it. I would not ask for it, nor even accept it.”
“That is your republican pride. Perhaps you are right. The old earldom
has fallen to the distaff at length, and it will be likely to stay there
for some generations to come; for Elfrida, who will be a countess in her
own right, has only daughters, which is a pity. And yet I don’t know—I
don’t know. If those fellows at Exeter Hall, and elsewhere, get their
way, in another century from this there will not be an emperor or a
king, to say nothing of a little earl, to be found above ground on the
surface of this fourth planet of the solar system commonly called the
earth, and their bones will be as great a curiosity as those of the
behemoth or the megatherium. Shall we have another game?”
And they played another, and yet another, game, in perfect silence,
interrupted only by the monosyllable ejaculations of technicalities
connected with their play.
The earl arose the winner; he often—not always—did. And so he was in
high spirits to welcome the return of the excursionists to dinner.
Another sad day of separation was drawing near. Le was to leave them on
the eleventh of October, giving himself twenty days in which to travel
from Baden-Baden, in Germany, to Washington, in the United States.
This was according to his uncle’s advice.
“You might stay here until the fifteenth, or even until the seventeenth,
and then reach Washington by the thirty-first; but it would, under the
most favorable circumstances, be so close a shave as to be perilous to
risk. An officer, nay, a man, may risk anything else in the world, Le,
but he must not risk his honor. You must report for duty at headquarters
punctually on the first of November, at any cost of pain to yourself or
to others.”
“I know it, uncle—I know it, and I will do my duty. Never doubt me.”
“I never do, my boy. And listen, Le. If you are prompt, as you are sure
to be, you may be able to obtain orders for the Mediterranean, and then,
Le, we shall see you again on this side. We will go to any port where
your ship may be.”
“Thank you, uncle. I shall try for orders to the Mediterranean. And I
think I shall get them. You see, I have been to the west coast of
Africa, and I have been to the Pacific Coast, and I really think I may
be favored now with orders to the Mediterranean. However, an officer
must do his duty and obey, wherever he may be sent—if it were to
Behring’s Straits!” concluded Le, with a dreary attempt at laughter.
When the day of parting drew very near, and the depressed spirits of the
lovers were evident to all who observed them, Mr. Force suddenly
proposed that he and his Odalite should accompany Le to the steamer and
see him off.
This proposition was received by the two young people with grateful joy,
as a short but most welcome reprieve from speedy death, or—what seemed
the same thing to them—speedy separation. It gave them two or three more
days of precious life, or its equivalent—each other’s society.
They cheered up under it and looked more hopefully to the future. And in
a few weeks more, they decided, they should be sure to see Le again at
some of the ports of the Mediterranean.
When the day of parting came, Mr. Force, Leonidas and Odalite took leave
of the earl and the ladies of their party and left Baden-Baden for
Ostend.
There were not so many steamship lines or such facilities for rapid
transit as in these days.
Our three travelers went by rail to Ostend, thence by steamer to London,
where they rested for one night, and thence by rail to Liverpool, which
they reached just twelve hours before the sailing of the _Africa_ for
New York.
Mr. Force and Odalite took leave of Le on the deck of the steamer, and
left it only among the very last that crossed the gang plank to the
steam tender a moment before the farewell gun was fired and the _Africa_
steamed out to sea.
A crowd of people stood on the deck of the steamer, waving last
farewells to another crowd on the deck of the tender, who waved back in
response, and gazed until all distinct forms faded away in the distance.
Among those on the tender who stood and gazed and waved the longest were
Mr. Force and Odalite, who saw, or thought they saw, Le’s figure long
after everybody else had given up the attempt to distinguish their own
departing friends in a mingled and fading view.