grown heavy between them.
A cab passed. The driver, an experienced nighthawker, drew up to them.
“Right this time,” said Gast. “This jag is going home imperially in a
cab. It’ll be about all I’ll be able to do to walk my own to my happy
home.”
The officer assisted in getting Ravant into the cab.
But suddenly his manner changed to savagery. They were under the direct
light of the corner electric.
“Which of you did this?” he demanded.
Blood slowly trickled from a wound in Ravant’s head.
Gast had a drunken inspiration.
“That gun!” he whispered.
The officer caught upon this.
“Where was it fired from?”
This none of them in the least knew.
The officer took McGill and Gast to the station-house, where they were
ignominiously searched. Ravant went to the hospital in a cab.
Presently, in a lucid interval, Ravant signed an affidavit setting forth
that it was neither McGill nor Gast who had fired the shot. Upon this
his two companions were released “under surveillance.”
And this was so odious to Gast that he swore to find out who it was had
fired the shot.
II
AN OUNCE OF WHISKEY OR AN OUNCE OF BRAINS
The moment Ravant awoke to sanity at the hospital he demanded a drink of
whiskey.
“The doctor has forbidden it,” said the nurse.
“Why?” shouted Ravant.
“Your head. He thinks it would take you much longer to get well—perhaps
prevent your recovery altogether.”
“Call him!” Still in Ravant’s terrible voice. “I guess it’s my own head.
And if I’d rather have an ounce of whiskey—more or less—than an ounce of
brains—more or less—it’s my business and none of his.”
The little, frightened nurse did what he asked, and Ravant said to the
doctor very much what he had said to the nurse. And the doctor answered
him precisely what the nurse had answered.
“But,” he laughed in addition, “your head is certainly your own, and you
are certainly sane enough to decide what you want done with it, though
it is rather contrary to Dunglison’s ethics to let you. It doesn’t
matter greatly either way, though. How much are you in the habit of
taking?”
“All I can buy,” snarled Ravant.
The doctor laughed again and wrote a prescription for an ounce of
whiskey.
“You don’t care whether I live or die, do you?” asked Ravant, odiously.
“Oh, quite as much as you do!” answered the doctor, with a certain jolly
contempt for such a man. Then, to the nurse:
“I don’t think it will be necessary for me to see your patient again.
Take care that he gets all he needs. My original instructions will do
till he is discharged.”
“You don’t care either,” challenged Ravant, when the doctor had gone.
“Yes—I care—very much,” said the brave little nurse.
Ravant stared, then said:
“Well—hurry that whiskey here!”
And, presently, she brought it. Ravant saw only the hand which offered
it to his famished soul. It trembled. As he took the glass he followed
the arm up to the nurse’s face. That was very pale. When she was certain
that he would drink it, she gasped and then choked down a bit of a sob.
“Now, what’s the matter with you?” cried Ravant, with brutal irritation.
“Noth—nothing,” faltered the nurse.
“You lie,” said Ravant. “I told you that it is my own head. Why don’t
you want me to drink it?”
“Drink it!” begged the nurse, now in terror of him. “Please do!”
“I won’t! You’re both too dam’ anxious!”
He flung the frail glass against the wall, where it was broken. Then he
turned his back upon the nurse, and, gripping the iron rods of his bed,
bent them until they doubled and parted. He slept a little
presently—breathing like a wounded beast. When he woke the little nurse
was wiping up the spilled liquor. The terrible fragrance infested his
very soul.
“Open the window!” Ravant shouted. “You are torturing me!”
The girl did this.
“Why did you make me smell the dam’ stuff?”
Then, a little more gently, before she could answer:
“Thank you. I can’t stand the smell of it—not the smell.”
The nurse laid a brave hand on his.
“I guess you’re the right sort,” he said hoarsely. “Put it there!”
He gripped the hand of the nurse as he would have done that of a man.
Afterward Ravant watched the girl as she “went about doing good” for
him—as he gibed it. She tried to keep out of his vision.
“What in the devil are you about?” he commanded. “I want to look at you!
It does me good—to look at you!”
She came, with a pink face, where he could see her.
“If it does you good—why, look at me!”
She tried to do it lightly—pose there—but her bosom heaved. Ravant saw
this.
[Illustration: “_‘I guess you’re the right sort,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Put
it there!’_”]
“Yes, I’ve stopped guessing. You _are_ the right sort—inside. And you’re
not half as ugly outside as I thought you at first. Or else you’ve grown
prettier. I think it’s that. I suppose they make it a point to hire only
ugly girls for nurses. Else the patients would marry ’em as fast as they
could gather ’em in, and there would never be any nurses. But you’ve
fooled ’em! Look in the glass!”
It was useless to resist what had now become affectionate brutality, and
she did this. It was true that there was a glow in her hollow cheeks.
“Thank you!”
“By the Lord, you nearly laughed!” said Ravant, with entire seriousness.
“Say—I’m going to like you. And I want you to try to like me. If I ever
ask for whiskey again, don’t you give it to me, no matter if I curse you
up hill and down dale. And I’ll try not to ask for it.”
The nurse stopped something which would have been a sob at maturity.
“But for God’s sake, don’t cry,” Ravant went on. “I hate women who cry.
And I’m not hating you—I see that already.”
“I will not cry!” pledged the nurse.
“I believe you,” said Ravant. “Put it there. I won’t drink!”
And for the second time they shook hands.
III
CALLING A MAN A PIG
“And yet,” mused Ravant, “I make you cry!”
There was an unwonted softness in his voice.
“I’m sorry I’m such a brute—I _am_ a good deal of a brute—ain’t I?”
When she did not answer he shouted at her suddenly:
“Ain’t I?”
“Yes,” said the frightened nurse.
“And I’m a pig, too. That’s what the doctor called me the other day when
he left, didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“I heard him. And he’s right, too—though not so bully as you, at saying
it.”
“The doctor is mistaken,” braved the girl. “I wouldn’t say it.”
Ravant gasped and sat up in bed.
“_What?_”
The girl repeated, without fear, what she had said.
And nothing had ever cowed Ravant as that did. It made him stop and
think. It seemed as if he had never thought before—so primitive were his
processes.
“I’ll just live up to that girl’s estimate of me—and fool her. I really
thought I was a pig. Heavens!” He laughed with himself as if he were
some one else. “It didn’t even offend me! But I’m glad I’m not a pig—to
her—and I’ll stop being a brute. Especially to women. What was it mother
used to say?”
Finally he remembered it:
“Always be gentle to all women. For some of them are mothers, and all of
them are daughters of mothers.”
He said to himself that he had better write that out in a plain hand and
paste it in his hat. Then he said he would go the hat one better—he
would write it out and paste it in his head.
And I think he did this in some fashion. For he often remembered it. And
at this time it was hard for him to remember things.
“Please!” she begged of him one day with her hands out to his, meaning
that he should intermit his ceaseless watching of her. “I feel like the
insect under the microscope.” She ended with that brief, halfway laugh.
“I won’t,” said Ravant. “It helps me. And that is what you are paid for
doing.”
“Yes,” said the girl, at once relapsing into her shell. “That is what I
am paid for!”
“The only thing you need to be a real beauty is a smile. Can’t you get
further than halfway? Try it. You won’t break anything. Smile for the
drunken pig one of those smiles that won’t come off.”
“Have _you_ ever smiled?” retorted the girl.
“I grin all day,” answered Ravant.
“Yes—you grin.”
Ravant caught the subtlety and was both amazed at his nurse and shocked
at himself. He remembered that it was very long since his face had known
the smile of gentleness.
“Let’s learn the art together,” he laughed. “By the Lord, you are good
for me!”
“Then I must admit that you are also good for me.”
“Smile!” commanded Ravant.
“I cannot,” laughed the girl.
Ravant laughed, and knew how splendid and strange this was to him.
“If you would do that more often, it would be good for you,” said Ravant
again.
“And you would be—good!”
“Yes—” agreed the invalid, “if you would smile so for me—”
“Oh, I meant _your_ own smile!” cried the blushing nurse.
Ravant looked upon this blush until it had much the effect that looking
upon the wine when it is red used to have upon him.
“Here!” he cried.
The girl came toward him. He caught her face between his hands and
rounded it there.
“I have taken all the lines away. You have no business to have them.”
“My life—” said the girl, simply. “Those lines are its history. They
belong there.”
“Then can you read my history in mine?” asked the man.
“Yes.”
“Do they say that I am a brute?”
“Yes.”
“Plainly?”
“Quite plainly.”
“My God! Why did not some one tell me that secret before? We go about
thinking our faces conceal the very things they shout aloud!”
He looked again at her face.
“Yes, yours speaks of sorrow—”
A silence then—
“What was it?”
“Others said what you have just said. That I was ugly. A woman has
nothing—is nothing—without beauty. That is her one source of power.”
Ravant laughed incredulously.
“Women like _me_,” added the nurse.
IV
HE DID NOT KNOW THAT IT WAS LOADED
One day the nurse told him—as he insisted—the mystery of his opulent
situation.
The person who had fired the shot had learned the effect of it from the
newspapers, and being rich and sorry, had put his fortune at the
disposal of the victim, and none of it was to be spared if it might help
in the least to make him perfectly well again. Every cent of the very
many the person had was at his disposal. And that his disposal of it
might be the more free from embarrassment, he preferred to remain
anonymous himself, and to make the hospital, or the nurse herself, if
the victim preferred that, his almoner.
“Preferred to remain anonymous!” laughed Ravant. “He preferred to keep
out of jail. I’d have him there in no time if I knew who he was!”
“It appears,” said the nurse, “that he did not know his pistol was
loaded.”
Ravant exploded again—first with mirth, then with vengeance.
“The infernal old sneak and liar! To shoot a man simply because he
happened to be drunk! Thank God a jag is not capital yet! It is no
excuse to say that he didn’t know it was loaded. When he took up that
pistol, it was with intent to kill. And, if I still remember any law,
that is enough to hang him—”
“But they don’t hang people,” gasped the little nurse, “for anything but
murder, do they?”
“I was going to say _if he had killed me_.”
“Oh!”
“Anyhow, we’ll make it the dearest lesson to the gentlemen who do not
know it is loaded that ever was taught! We will spend that last cent of
his. If not, we’ll throw it away! We are going to Europe at his expense.
I need that to complete my recovery. And even then I will always wear
this plate on my head in memory of him! And we’ll let the newspapers
have it. It may prevent some other drunkard from such happiness as I am
now enjoying, and teach the idiot with an empty gun to respect it as if
it were loaded. I’ll be a missionary to my drunken kind all the world
over! What do you say? By the way, what is your name?”
“Brown,” said the nurse.
“Whew!” said the invalid. “We can’t change that—can we?”
“No.”
“Marriage would do it.”
“Yes.”
“Ravant is better than Brown, eh?”
But then he laughed—he had frightened her!
“What’s your first name?”
“Rachel.”
“Heavens! But we might call you Ray. Ray Brown is not impossible. Did
you notice that when I spoke of going to Europe and spending the old
man’s money, I said _we_?”
“Yes,” said the girl.
“And it didn’t appeal to you?—make your little heart flutter—Ray?”
“No.”
“But you would help to try to ruin the old man?”
“I think it just for you to punish him in that way—but I am only a
nurse.”
“Well—you are going with me—and that is the end of it. I need you and
shall need you for a long time. In fact, I shall need you always. But,
since you won’t marry me, as a nurse you will go!”
“Impossible! Mr. Ravant!” gasped the girl.
“Which?” snarled Ravant, in the old manner.
“Going to Europe with you—as your nurse—alone—”
“Well, then, we’ll take a chaperon. The old man must pay for her too.”
The girl was silent.
“Look here. I noticed that you didn’t say that the other thing
was—impossible! Marrying me?”
“Yes—that is impossible, too,” said the girl.
“Oh!”
“What?”
For his tone was sinister.
“I’ll become a sot again.”
“The doctor says that with that wound in your head it will kill you!”
Ravant laughed—the brutal laugh once more.
“Well, let it. You can’t open the gate of paradise and let me get one
glimpse and then shut it in my face. I’ll go back to my own little
paradise.”
He was laughing. But she caught the note of hopelessness under it.
“Do you mean to say that if I marry you—”
“I will be good.”
“Understand that I do not love you! Not at all!”
“No one does. Marry me anyhow. Marry me to get rid of me. If you fall in
love with some one else, it is off.”
The girl sobbed. She was on her knees at his bed. He did not like this.
“Never mind—never mind—child. I only thought we could make it less
expensive to the old man in that way. I could then stop your wages, and
we would not need a chaperon. And I really fancied that this thing
inside of me which yearns for you—can’t wait till the night is over and
you and morning come—is love. But I don’t know what the thing is—I never
had the symptoms before—speak to the doctor about it—tell him I have
ceased to be a pig. But, perhaps _you_ know. Do you? Were you ever in
love?”
“No, sir,” answered the nurse.
“Stop crying!” thundered Ravant.
“Yes, sir,” said the little nurse.
V
A FOOL AND HIS MONEY
“Well, thank God,” Ravant said, later on, “that you didn’t refuse me
because you didn’t know me. I can’t fancy a better way of finding a man
out than being his nurse. But I may not always be a brute. So, remember
that I want to marry you, and, when you don’t think me too much of a
brute think sometimes about marrying me—you may get used to it!”
“Yes, sir,” said the nurse.
“How much money have I?”
“About four dollars, sir.”
“I don’t blame you now. I thought there was at least ten in my clothes.
Four dollars is mighty little to begin housekeeping upon. Keep it for
me, will you, until the last cent of the gentleman who did not know it
was loaded is gone.”
Later:
“You might as well come and help to spend the old man’s money. We will
travel in private cars. Two maids for you, two valets for me. Our
pictures in the newspapers. A retinue to smile welcome to us at each
city. Another to weep as we depart. We shall leave a trail of American
gold in our wake across Europe!”
He had caught her interest. Only he thought it was something which she
said it was not.
“Look here. You do like me a little. I have seen you watch me while I
pretended to sleep. And I’ll try to learn what love is and to make you
love me. I think I can.”
The girl looked down.
“Look here, I was a gentleman and a lawyer before I was a drunkard, and
I can be again, if any one cares to have me be. Please marry me!”
“I don’t love you,” said the girl again, with her head still down.
“I know. But I love you—I’m sure now that that is what it is. You see,
it’s one of two things for me—you or rum. That’s why I’m working at it
overtime. You won’t regret it—hanged if you do.”
VI
THE OLD MAN’S LAST CENT
Well, she did marry him, and she did not regret it—nor did he.
To me it is a wonder that she did not. For he had done the threatened
newspapering so well that already upon their arrival at the steamer all
the passengers were lined up to await them. And the smile they got there
followed them to Europe, and into the most remote corners of the globe
where they penetrated to escape it. It became at last a smile of
contempt. And he began to understand that it was for him alone and that
the world had exempted his wife from it.
“I’m glad for that,” he told her. “If I am to go about the world a cad
and a fool, to be laughed at—I am glad that you are—”
“To be _pitied_ as your victim?” laughed his happy wife. “No. I don’t
want anything that is not yours, and you shall have nothing that is not
mine.”
If they escaped it for a day, they never did for two. Always the
servants were in line where they arrived, with the expectation of them
in their banal faces. But always she was excepted.
“I wish I could rise with you,” sighed Ravant, whimsically. “I hate to
be separated from you. But they won’t have me, and they won’t do without
you. I suppose my claws still show somewhere.”
“Whither I go, you shall go,” his wife threatened. “I am too happy—that
is what the world sees. What care I—for anything but joy and you!”
She kissed Ravant.
But presently her “beauty” and her “magnetism” began to be paragraphic
with him in the newspapers—of which he said he was glad, and was not.
“Beloved,” he told her, “it is a pity you married me.”
“Why?—beloved also.”
“Because you might have had any one of the effete noblemen of Europe,
and escaped newspapering.”
“But I would only have been satisfied with a crowned head.”
“I suppose even that is possible to the ‘prevalent goddess’”—he was
reading from a newspaper.
“I have it!” laughed his wife, touching the plate which covered his
wound.
And then, I am almost sorry to say, yet not quite, that a little mist
came into the eyes of the Ravant who had once been a brute, and he
remembered all those hospital days.
“How splendid you have become,” he said.
“Thanks to you,” she whispered in his arms, where still he was the
savage Ravant and always would be.
“But all I am you have made of me!”
“But, too, all I am you have made of me!” she laughed.
“One thing I take credit for,” he joyed with her, “smiles _do_ become
your face.”
“And thought and care yours. The lines of which we once spoke—are gone!
From both our faces! Is not that wonderful?”
“Wonderful,” he agreed.
Suddenly she was serious.
“I think we belong together. I thank God always that we met. You were
what I needed—the man God meant to complete me. Before you came I was
worse than you were before I came. Thank God we met—no matter how!”
“Not forgetting to thank the loaded gun! For a long time I have been
sorry for the old man. It has not seemed long—but there are indications
that the last cent has been reached. I would pay him back if I could!”
“You never, never could!” laughed his wife.
“But how much do you suppose we have spent?”
“Don’t know! Don’t know,” she chanted. “That is the beauty of it. We
don’t have to! No accounts to keep! Money carefully ahead of us at each
stopping place! It is like a slot machine! You put in a nickel and get a
thousand dollars!”
“It’s wonderful how well he has done it. Hasn’t kicked or funked once!
Well, when I get back to America I mean to hunt him up and get down on
my knees and God bless him!” laughed Ravant.
“We’ll go together!” said his wife.
“Yes! And confess all! I’ll show him _you_! He’ll forgive us then and
won’t regret—”
“His poverty!” laughed Ravant’s happy wife.
“Yes. Hang it! That’s the horror of it. Once I thought it would be the
joy of it! And how he must have writhed under the newspapering! Such a
sensitive chap as he is! It has been torture to even me. But I deserve
that punishment.”
“You do!” cooed his wife.
“Let us go home,” said Ravant, “and live in a little house—alone!”
“Done!” cried his wife.
“We’ll change our names and the newspapers will not be able to find us!”
“Done!”
“But—there wasn’t any money here, you know” (it was Rouen).
“Perhaps in a day or two.”
So, at Rouen, they waited for the money to take them home to a new
happiness.
VII
HER BIG TRUMP
One day she got a big letter with the American postmark. She laughed,
made a certain mystery of it, and kept it from him.
“And this is my nurse!” he joyed.
“Yes!” she admitted.
He was opening a letter of his own which he was keeping from her.
“But there must be no secrets between chums.”
She tried to take the letter, but he withheld it.
“Ah, I must first confess? Well—how much do you love me?”
“As much as I can,” said her husband, seriously.
“I know that to be a great deal. How much can you forgive?”
Now she was in his arms.
“As much as I love,” said Ravant.
“Then I am quite safe.”
She crept a little deeper into his arms and opened her letter.
“Dearest, I married you under an assumed name.”
“Thank God!” laughed Ravant—“unless it is a worse one than Brown.”
“I could have been very happy as Mrs. Brown—as happy as I am as Mrs.
Ravant.”
She ignored the rest and withdrew the contents of the letter. They
appeared to be a deed.
“_Dearest, I have a house._ Are you angry that I am so rich? Part of an
inheritance. But now it must be sold. This is from my lawyer. He tells
me that I must sign the deed both with my proper maiden name and as your
wife”—she stooped there to kiss him, and repeated the word—“and you must
join in it as my husband. It is a bore to own a house, isn’t it,
dearest?”
But her lightness found him full of terror. She heard him breathe:
“What was your maiden name?”
“Ruth Fenton,” smiled his wife.
Again that exclamation.
“What is it?” she begged.
“No,” he said. “There must be no secret between chums. My punishment has
come. And it is greater than I could possibly have conceived. I must
read you this, and then if you wish—go away from you.”
“Not while I am here,” she laughed, beginning to understand. “Whither
thou goest, I will go. You can’t—cannot lose me—me, your lawful wife!”
Though she laughed with tremendous happiness, he read the letter through
with no abatement of his terror.
“As you know, I have been all these two years finding the person who
shot you. At last I have her—yes, _her_! It is a woman. Her name is
Ruth Fenton. Her large fortune has been exhausted by your
world-renowned extravagances, and she is now selling the last thing
she owns—her house. I hope you feel as mean as I do—for you!
GAST.”
“Yes, I am the old man,” laughed Ravant’s happy wife into her husband’s
face.
“Yes,” he said, and then again, “yes—you are—the—old—man! The old man!
You! Me!”
“_We!_” cooed his wife.
“All those things I said about him were about you! _To_ you!”
“_Yes!_ Wasn’t it funny?”
A long time they sat there, she looking up, he down—eye to eye. But she
never ceased to smile.
He tried to go.
“Not while I am here!” she laughed, and, slipping down, held him by the
knees.
“No, beloved, after this there shall be, indeed, no secrets between us.
I was so unhappy and alone that night that I meant to kill myself. No
one cared for me, and I _had_ to have some one care for me or die! My
hand must have slipped, or, perhaps, I grew afraid. But God himself
directed that bullet! You were mine and you were passing—going away from
me! If you had gone on, we would never have met. It was the only way to
stop you and give you to me, me to you. I went to the hospital and paid
to nurse you. They said you needed no nursing, only care and quiet. And
when they knew how important it was to me, for I told them all, they
broke their rules all to pieces, and let me do it. And, now, dear one,
you must keep what I have given you, what the good God has! You _shall_
keep it!” (as he tried to dislodge her) “and you shall keep _me_! For I
will _not_ go! There, I am a beggar!” She laughed gloriously. “But the
happiest beggar on earth, and you have got to support your happy beggar
wife forever hereafter. That is to be your punishment.”
“Happy punishment!” was the thought which flashed through Ravant.
But he grimly put it out, and for one more last moment the old, brutal
Ravant tried to come back. Alas! she was on the floor there before him,
her elbows on his knees, her face, halting between smiles and tears,
upraised to his, looking out of its glory of living hair, watching the
portents there.
And when they did not develop fast enough toward joy, she locked her
hands behind his neck suddenly and drew his head down, to the peril of a
dislocation.
“You _must_ stay to support your beggar wife; don’t you see?—_won’t_ you
understand?—and perhaps her beggar—_child_!”
“What!” cried Ravant, everything else out of his head in an instant.
“I always keep my biggest trump for the last, dearest. All women do,
don’t they? It’s so lovely to play it then—when every one thinks all is
lost. Oh, beloved! smile, laugh, shout with me! How _can_ you go away
now when you have a beggar wife to support, and a beggar—ch—! Ah! ha!
ha!”