thoughtfulness; I am nearly famished, but I do not think I could eat a
mouthful here. Excuse me for saying it, but I should have to remain
here permanently if I were to stay another hour. I quite forgive Mr.
Morton and the others," Lynde went on, rising and giving the doctor his
hand; "and I forgive you also, since you insist upon being forgiven,
though I do not know for what. If my horse, and my traps, and my
hat--really, I don't see how they could have helped taking me for a
lunatic--can be brought together, I will go and dine at the tavern."
Half an hour afterward Edward Lynde dismounted at the steps of the
rustic hotel. The wooden shutters were down now, and the front door
stood hospitably open. A change had come over the entire village. There
were knots of persons at the street corners and at garden gates,
discussing the event of the day. There was also a knot of gossips in
the hotel barroom to whom the landlord, Mr. Zeno Dodge, was giving a
thrilling account of an attack made on the tavern by a maniac who had
fancied himself a horse!
"The critter," cried Mr. Dodge dramatically, "was on the p'int of
springin' up the piazzy, when Martha handed me the shot-gun."
Mr. Dodge was still in a heroic attitude, with one arm stretched out to
receive the weapon and his eye following every movement of a maniac
obligingly personated by the cuspidor between the windows, when Lynde
entered. Mr. Dodge's arm slowly descended to his side, his jaw fell,
and the narrative broke off short.
Lynde requested dinner in a private room, and Mr. Dodge deposed the
maid in order to bring in the dishes himself and scrutinize his
enigmatical guest. In serving the meal the landlord invented countless
pretexts to remain in the room. After a while Lynde began to feel it
uncomfortable to have those sharp green eyes continually boring into
the back of his head.
"Yes," he exclaimed wearily, "I am the man."
"I thought you was. Glad to see you, sir," said Mr. Dodge politely.
"This morning you took me for an escaped lunatic?"
"I did so--fust-off."
"A madman who imagined himself a horse?"
"That's what I done," said Mr. Dodge contritely, "an' no wonder, with
that there saddle. They're a very queer lot, them crazy chaps. There's
one on 'em up there who calls himself Abraham Lincoln, an' then there's
another who thinks he's a telegraph wire an' hes messages runnin' up
an' down him continally. These is new potatoes, sir--early rosers.
There's no end to their cussed kinks. When I see you prancin' round
under the winder with that there saddle, I says at once to Martha,
'Martha, here's a luny!'"
"A very natural conclusion," said Lynde meekly.
"Wasn't it now?"
"And if you had shot me to death," said Lynde, helping himself to
another chop, "I should have been very much obliged to you."
Mr. Dodge eyed the young man dubiously for a dozen seconds or so.
"Comin'! comin'!" cried Mr. Dodge, in response to a seemingly
vociferous call which had failed to reach Lynde's ear.
When Edward Lynde had finished dinner, Mary was brought to the door.
Under the supervision of a group of spectators assembled on the piazza,
Lynde mounted, and turned the mare's head directly for Rivermouth. He
had no heart to go any farther due north. The joyousness had dropped
out of the idle summer journey. He had gone in search of the
picturesque and the peculiar; he had found them--and he wished he had
not.
V
CINDERELLA'S SLIPPER
On the comb of the hill where his adventure had begun and
culminated--it seemed to him now like historic ground--Edward Lynde
reined in Mary, to take a parting look at the village nestled in the
plain below. Already the afternoon light was withdrawing from the
glossy chestnuts and drooping elms, and the twilight--it crept into the
valley earlier than elsewhere--was weaving its half invisible webs
under the eaves and about the gables of the houses. But the two red
towers of the asylum reached up into the mellow radiance of the waning
sun, and stood forth boldly. They were the last objects his gaze rested
upon, and to them alone his eyes sent a farewell.
"Poor little thing! poor little Queen of Sheba!" he said softly. Then
the ridge rose between him and the village, and shut him out forever.
Nearly a mile beyond the spot where Mary had escaped from him that
morning, Edward Lynde drew up the mare so sharply that she sunk back on
her haunches. He dismounted in haste, and stooping down, with the rein
thrown over one arm, picked up an object lying in the middle of the
road under the horse's very hoofs.
It was on a Tuesday morning that Lynde reentered Rivermouth, after an
absence of just eight days. He had started out fresh and crisp as a new
bank-note, and came back rumpled and soiled and tattered, like that
same note in a state to be withdrawn from circulation. The shutters
were up at all the shop-windows in the cobble-paved street, and had the
appearance of not having been taken down since he left. Everything was
unchanged, yet it seemed to Lynde that he had been gone a year.
On Wednesday morning when Mr. Bowlsby came down to the bank he was
slightly surprised at seeing the young cashier at his accustomed desk.
To Mr. Bowlsby's brief interrogations then, and to Miss Mildred
Bowlsby's more categorical questions in the evening, Lynde offered no
very lucid reason for curtailing his vacation. Travelling alone had not
been as pleasant as he anticipated; the horse was a nuisance to look
after; and then the country taverns were snuffy and unendurable. As to
where he had been and what he had seen--he must have seen something and
been somewhere in eight days--his answers were so evasive that Miss
Mildred was positive something distractingly romantic had befallen the
young man.
"If you must know," he said, one evening, "I will tell you where I
went."
"Tell me, then!"
"I went to Constantinople."
Miss Mildred found that nearly impertinent.
There was, too, an alteration in Lynde's manner which cruelly helped to
pique her curiosity. His frank, half satirical, but wholly amiable
way--an armor that had hitherto rendered him invulnerable to Miss
Mildred's coquettish shafts--was wanting; he was less ready to laugh
than formerly, and sometimes in the midst of company he fell into
absent-minded moods. Instead of being the instigator and leader of
picnics up the river, he frequently pleaded bank duties as an excuse
for not joining such parties. "He is not at all as nice as he used to
be," was Miss Mildred's mental summing up of Lynde a fortnight after
his return.
He was, in fact, unaccountably depressed by his adventure in the hill
country; he could not get it out of his mind. The recollection of
details which he had not especially remarked at the time came to him in
the midst of his work at the bank. Sometimes when he turned off the gas
at night, or just as he was falling asleep, the sharp, attenuated
figure of the ship-builder limned itself against the blackness of the
chamber, or the old gentleman's vacuous countenance in its frame of
silver hair peered in through the hangings of the bed. But more
frequently it was the young girl's face that haunted Lynde. He saw her
as she came up the sunny road, swinging the flower in her hand, and
looking like one of Fra Angelico's seraphs or some saint out of an
illuminated mediaeval missal; then he saw her seated on the horse,
helpless and piteous with the rude, staring men about her. If he
dreamed, it was of her drawing herself up haughtily and saying, "I am
the Queen of Sheba." On two or three nights, when he had not been
dreaming, he was startled out of his slumber by a voice whispering
close to his ear: "I know you, too, very well. You are my husband."
Mr. Bowlsby and his daughter were the only persons in Rivermouth to
whom Lynde could have told the story of his journey. He decided not to
confide it to either, since he felt it would be vain to attempt to
explain the sombre effect which the whole affair had had on him.
"I do not understand what makes me think of that poor girl all the
time," mused Lynde one day, as he stood by the writing-table in his
sitting-room. "It can't be this that keeps her in my mind."
He took up a slipper which was lying on the table in the midst of
carved pipes and paper-weights and odds and ends. It was a very small
slipper, nearly new, with high pointed heel and a square jet buckle at
the instep: evidently of foreign make, and cut after the arch pattern
of the slippers we see peeping from the flowered brocade skirts of Sir
Peter Lely's full-length ladies. It was such an absurd shoe, a toy
shoe, a child might have worn it!
"It cannot be this," said Lynde.
And yet it was that, more or less. Lynde had taken the slipper from his
valise the evening he got home, and set it on the corner of the desk,
where it straightway made itself into a cunning ornament. The next
morning he put it into one of the drawers; but the table looked so
barren and commonplace without it that presently the thing was back
again. There it had remained ever since.
It met his eye every morning when he opened the door of his bedroom; it
was there when he came home late at night, and seemed to be sitting up
for him, in the reproachful, feminine fashion. When he was writing his
letters, there it was, with a prim, furtive air of looking on. It was
not like a mere slipper; it had traits and an individuality of its own;
there were moments when the jet beads in the buckle sparkled with a
sort of intelligence. Sitting at night, reading under the drop-light,
Lynde often had an odd sensation as if the little shoe would presently
come tripping across the green table-cloth towards him. He had a
hundred fanciful humors growing out of that slipper. Sometimes he was
tempted to lock it up or throw it away. Sometimes he would say to
himself, half mockingly and half sadly, "That is your wife's slipper;"
then he would turn wholly sad, thinking how tragic that would be if it
were really so.
It was a part of the girl's self; it had borne her lovely weight; it
still held the impress of her foot; it would not let Lynde entirely
forget her while it was under his eyes.
The slipper had stood on the writing-table four or five months--an
object of consuming curiosity and speculation to the young woman who
dusted Lynde's chambers--when an incident occurred which finally led to
its banishment.
Lynde never had visitors; there were few men of his age in the town,
and none was sufficiently intimate with him to come to his rooms; but
it chanced one evening that a young man named Preston dropped in to
smoke a cigar with Lynde. Preston had recently returned from abroad,
where he had been an attache of the American Legation at London, and
was now generally regarded as the prospective proprietor of Miss
Mildred. He was an entertaining, mercurial young fellow, into whose
acquaintanceship Lynde had fallen at the Bowlsbys'.
"Ah, you rogue!" cried Preston gayly, picking up the slipper. "Did she
give it you?"
"Who?" asked Lynde, with a start.
"Devilish snug little foot! Was it a danseuse?"
"No," returned Lynde freezingly.
"An actress?"
"No," said Lynde, taking the slipper from Preston's hand and gently
setting it back on the writing-table. "It was not an actress; and yet
she played a role--in a blacker tragedy than any you ever saw on the
stage."
"Lynde, I beg your pardon. I spoke thoughtlessly, supposing it a light
matter, don't you see?"
"There was no offence," said Lynde, hiding his subtile hurt.
"It was stupid in me," said Preston the next night, relating the
incident to Miss Bowlsby. "I never once thought it might be a thing
connected with the memory of his mother or sister, don't you see? I
took it for a half sentimental souvenir of some flirtation."
"Mr. Lynde's mother died when he was a child, and he never had a
sister," said Miss Bowlsby thoughtfully. "I shouldn't wonder," she
added irrelevantly, after a pause.
"At what, Miss Mildred?"
"At anything!"
One of those womanly intuitions which set mere man-logic at defiance
was come to whisper in Miss Bowlsby's ear that that slipper had
performed some part in Edward Lynde's untold summer experience.
"He was laughing at you, Mr. Preston; he was grossly imposing on your
unsophisticated innocence."
"Really? Is he as deep as that?"
"He is very deep," said Miss Bowlsby solemnly.
On his way home from the bank, one afternoon in that same week, Lynde
overtook Miss Mildred walking, and accompanied her a piece down the
street.
"Mr. Lynde, shall you go on another horseback excursion next summer?"
she asked, without prelude.
"I haven't decided; but I think not."
"Of course you ought to go."
"Why of course, Miss Mildred?"
"Why? Because--because--don't ask me!"
"But I do ask you."
"You insist?"
"Positively."
"Well, then, how will you ever return Cinderella her slipper if you
don't go in search of her?"
Lynde bit his lip, and felt that the blackest criminals of antiquity
were as white as driven snow compared with Preston.
"The prince in the story, you know," continued Miss Bowlsby, with her
smile of ingenue, "hunted high and low until he found her again."
"That prince was a very energetic fellow," said Lynde, hastily putting
on his old light armor. "Possibly I should not have to travel so far
from home," he added, with a bow. "I know at least one lady in
Rivermouth who has a Cinderella foot."
"She has two of them, Mr. Lynde," responded Miss Mildred, dropping him
a courtesy.
The poor little slipper's doom was sealed. The edict for its banishment
had gone forth. If it were going to be the town's talk he could not
keep it on his writing-desk. As soon as Lynde got back to his chambers,
he locked up Cinderella's slipper in an old trunk in a closet seldom or
never opened.
The enchantment, whatever it was, was broken. Although he missed the
slipper from among the trifles scattered over his table, its absence
brought him a kind of relief. He less frequently caught himself falling
into brown studies. The details of his adventure daily grew more
indistinct; the picture was becoming a mere outline; it was fading
away. He might have been able in the course of time to set the whole
occurrence down as a grotesque dream, if he had not now and then beheld
Deacon Twombly driving by the bank with Mary attached to the battered
family carry-all. Mary was a fact not easily disposed of.
Insensibly Lynde lapsed into his old habits. The latter part of this
winter at Rivermouth was unusually gay; the series of evening parties
and lectures and private theatricals extended into the spring, whose
advent was signalized by the marriage of Miss Bowlsby and Preston. In
June Lynde ran on to New York for a week, where he had a clandestine
dinner with his uncle at Delmonico's, and bade good-by to Flemming, who
was on the eve of starting on a protracted tour through the East. "I
shall make it a point to visit the land of the Sabaeans," said
Flemming, with his great cheery laugh, "and discover, if possible, the
unknown site of the ancient capital of Sheba." Lynde had confided the
story to his friend one night, coming home from the theatre.
Once more at Rivermouth, Edward Lynde took up the golden threads of his
easy existence. But this life of ideal tranquillity and contentment was
not to be permitted him. One morning in the latter part of August he
received a letter advising him that his uncle had had an alarming
stroke of apoplexy. The letter was followed within the hour by a
telegram announcing the death of David Lynde.
VI
BEYOND THE SEA
In the early twilight of a July evening in the year 1875, two young
Americans, neither dreaming of the other's presence, came face to face
on the steps of a hotel on the Quai du Montblanc at Geneva. The two
men, one of whom was so bronzed by Eastern suns that his friend looked
pallid beside him, exchanged a long, incredulous stare; then their
hands met, and the elder cried out, "Of all men in the world!"
"Flemming!" exclaimed the other eagerly; "I thought you were in Egypt."
"So I was, a month ago. What are you doing over here, Ned?"
"I don't know, to tell the truth."
"You don't know!" laughed Flemming. "Enjoying yourself, I suppose."
"The supposition is a little rash," said Edward Lynde. "I have been
over nearly a year--quite a year, in fact. After uncle David's death"--
"Poor old fellow! I got the news at Smyrna."
"After he was gone, and the business of the estate was settled, I
turned restless at Rivermouth. It was cursedly lonesome. I hung on
there awhile, and then I came abroad."
"A rich man--my father wrote me. I have had no letter's from you. Your
uncle treated you generously, Ned."
"Did he not always treat me generously?" said Lynde, with a light
coming into his face and instantly dying out again. "Yes, he left me a
pile of money and a heart-ache. I can hardly bear to talk of it even
now, and it will be two years this August. But come up to my room. By
Jove, I am glad to see you! How is it you are in Geneva? I was thinking
about you yesterday, and wondering whether you were drifting down the
Nile in a dahabeeah, or crossing the desert on a dromedary. Of course
you have hunted tigers and elephants: did you kill anything?"
"I haven't killed anything but time. I was always a dead shot at that."
Lynde passed his arm through Flemming's, and the two friends mounted
the staircase of the hotel.
"How is it you are in Geneva?" repeated Lynde.
"By luck," answered Flemming. "I am going home--in a zigzag way. I've
been obliged to take a reef in my Eastern itinerary. The fact is, I
have had a letter from the old gentleman rather suggesting it. I
believe he has availed himself of my absence to fall into financial
difficulties."
"Why, I thought he was rolling in wealth."
"No, he is rolling in poverty, as nearly as I can make out. Well, not
so bad as that. Nothing is ever as bad as it pretends to be. But he has
met with heavy losses. I shall find letters in London and learn all
about it. He wrote me not to hurry, that a month or two would make no
difference. When I got to Munich I thought I would take a peep at
Switzerland while I had the opportunity. I have done a good piece--from
Lindau to Lucerne, from Lucerne to Martigny by way of the Furca;
through the Tete Noire Pass to Chamouni, and from Chamouni, here."
While Flemming was speaking, Lynde unlocked a door at the end of the
hall and ushered him into a sitting-room with three windows, each
opening upon a narrow balcony of its own.
"Sit there, old fellow," said Lynde, wheeling an easy-chair to the
middle window, "and look through my glass at the view before it takes
itself off. It is not often as fine as it is this evening."
In front of the hotel the blue waters of the Rhone swept under the
arches of the Pont des Bergues, to lose themselves in the turbid,
glacier-born Arve, a mile below the town. Between the Pont des Bergues
and the Pont du Montblanc lay the island of Jean Jacques Rousseau,
linked to the quay by a tiny chain bridge. Opposite, upon the right
bank of the Rhone, stretched the handsome facades of tile-roofed
buildings, giving one an idea of the ancient quarter which a closer
inspection dispels; for the streets are crooked and steep, and the
houses, except those lining the quays, squalid. It was not there,
however, that the eye would have lingered. Far away, seen an incredible
distance in the transparent evening atmosphere, Mont Blanc and its
massed group of snowy satellites lifted themselves into the clouds. All
those luminous battlements and turrets and pyramids--the Mole, the
Grandes Jorasses, the Aiguilles du Midi, the Dent du Geant, the
Aiguilles d'Argentiere--were now suffused with a glow so magically
delicate that the softest tint of the blush rose would have seemed
harsh and crude in comparison.
"You have to come away from Mont Blanc to see it," said Flemming,
lowering the glass. "When I had my nose against it at Chamouni I didn't
see it at all. It overhung me and smothered me. Old boy"--reaching up
his hand to Lynde who was leaning on the back of the chair--"who would
ever have thought that we two"--Flemming stopped short and looked
earnestly into his comrade's face. "Why, Ned, I didn't notice how thin
and pale you are. Are you ill?"
The color which had mantled Lynde's cheeks in the first surprise and
pleasure of meeting his friend had passed away, leaving, indeed, a
somewhat haggard expression on the young man's countenance.
"Ill? Not that I know."
"Is anything wrong?"
"There is nothing wrong," replied Lynde, with some constraint. "That is
to say, nothing very wrong. For a month or six weeks I have been
occupied with a matter that has rather unsettled me--more, perhaps,
than I ought to have allowed."
"What is that?"
"It doesn't signify. Don't let's speak of it."
"But it does signify. You are keeping something serious from me. Out
with it."
"Well, the truth is," said Lynde after a moment's hesitation, "it IS
something serious and nothing very positive: that's the perplexing part
of it."
"You are not making it clear to me."
"I don't know that I can, Flemming."
"Try, then."
Lynde reflected a few seconds, with his eyes fixed on the remote
mountain lines imperceptibly melting into the twilight. "Do you
remember our walk home from the theatre, one night, two or three days
before you sailed from New York?"
"Perfectly," replied Flemming.
"Do you recollect my telling you of a queer thing that happened to me
up in the New Hampshire hills?"
"Your encounter with the little lunatic? Perfectly."
"Don't!" said Lynde, shrinking as if some sharp instrument had pierced
him. "She is here!"
"Here!" exclaimed Flemming, half rising from the chair, and glancing
towards a draped door which connected the suite of apartments.
"Not in these rooms," said Lynde, with a short laugh, "but in
Geneva--in this hotel."
"You do not mean it."
"When I say it is she, I'm not sure of it."
"Of course it isn't."
"That's what I say, and the next moment I know it is."
"And is THIS your trouble?"
"Yes," answered Lynde, knitting his brows. "I felt that I shouldn't
make it clear to you."
"I am afraid you haven't, Ned. What earthly difference does it make to
you whether or not it's the same girl?"
"What difference!" cried Lynde impetuously; "what difference--when I
love the very ground she walks on!"
"Oh, you love her! Which one?"
"Don't laugh at me, Flemming."
"I am not laughing," said Flemming, looking puzzled and anxious. "It is
not possible, Ned, you have allowed yourself to go and get interested
in a--a person not right in her mind!"
"Miss Denham is as sane as you are."
"Then Miss--Denham, is it?--cannot be the girl you told me about."
"That's the point."
"I don't see why there should be any confusion on that point."
"Don't you?"
"Come, let us go to the bottom of this. You have fallen in with a woman
in Switzerland, and you suspect her of being a girl you met years ago
in New Hampshire under circumstances which render her appearance here
nearly an impossibility. As I am not a man of vivid imagination, that
floors me. What makes you think them identical?"
"A startling personal resemblance, age, inflection of voice, manner,
even a certain physical peculiarity--a scar."
"Then what makes you doubt?"
"Everything."
"Well, that's comprehensive, at all events."
"The very fact of her being here. The physician at the asylum said that
that girl's malady was hopeless. Miss Denham has one of the clearest
intellects I ever knew; she is a linguist, an accomplished musician,
and, what is more rare, a girl who has moved a great deal in society,
or, at least, has travelled a great deal, and has not ceased to be an
unaffected, fresh, candid girl."
"An American?"
"Of course; didn't I say so?"
"The other may have been a sister, then, or a cousin," suggested
Flemming. "That would account for the likeness, which possibly you
exaggerate. It was in 1872, wasn't it?"
"I have been all over that. Miss Denham is an only child; she never had
a cousin. To-day she is precisely what the other would have been, with
restored health and three years added to her seventeen or eighteen."
"Upon my word, Ned, this is one of the oddest things I ever heard. I
feel, though, that you have got yourself into an unnecessary snarl.
Where does Miss Denham come from? She is not travelling alone? How did
you meet her? Tell me the entire story."